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There was time enough for things to return to how they always were. There'd always been time, really, except for that one brief period in his life where the world turned sideways. It was strange to think about. All the wondrous and the bizarre, the occult and the terrifying, had only occurred over the span of a few short months.
Link's life stretched out, time hazy like roads in the summer. Hot stones warped the air, mirages making the distance glitter like an oasis in the desert.
Enough heat made the world look wet. Maybe just a trick of the eye to give the body some relief.
Enough monotony made the familiar feel crushing. Maybe just his instincts itching for another fight, any other fight, to kickstart his heart again.
The future yawned out before him, uncertain and vague. There was time enough for everything he ever wanted to do.
But his heart was humble, and mainly...
...He wanted some goats.
So Zelda bought him a few. She liked the idea, too.
Every other month she came and spent a few weeks with him. Of course he visited her too. Day trips to the castle with saddlebags full of gifts. Fresh fruit from the trees. Bottles of wine, his first few attempts. Young wine, some of it painfully sweet. The citron trees on his property made some pretty delicious dry, pale yellow draughts, though. The kids insisted on writing letters to the princess, and of course Link carried them all.
And Link whittled a lot. He captured scenes from his daily life. At first it had been something to pass the time. He did not intend to give them to Zelda. He figured a princess could get finer carvings from anyone in the kingdom. But Zelda gasped in delight the first time she saw what he was working on in his idle hours. She demanded he finish, and he produced a jagged little bear, off-shape and poorly proportioned.
Zelda had a shelf next to her bed and lined it with small animals, from his first crude attempts to the current ones. When he realized Zelda intended to keep all of them, Link doubled down on his attempts to make them prettier.
He motioned her closer, a flutter of fingertips. His hands stained black with ink because he'd been helping her with paperwork all day. It reminded him of those days in the dirt, paws sinking into black earth, or hands covered in the black pitch of monster guts.
"Please throw that away," he rasped, the first words he'd said in at least sixteen months, and Zelda's laughter sounded like bells pealing.
The woefully misshapen little bear remained on her shelves. A point of pride, she said. His greatest mistake, he lamented, in notes and signs.
She offered to keep him in her palace guard. Her hero for all of time. Constant training. Fine armor. Respect. Recognition. A job. Good prospects if he wanted a spouse.
He said no. She asked why. He didn't answer, not just because he couldn't, but because he didn't want to.
Money? Treasures? What did he want?
Link rolled his eyes and showed her something else:
Once he had been out at night, seeking something akin to the days when he wore a wolf skin. The darkness was oppressive and the scents didn't tell any stories. Walking as a human when not even the moon hung in the sky was like trying to navigate with a cloth sack over your head. He tripped and fell and stumbled, literally, through rotting boards and clinging vines and knocked his head right against a thick wooden chest.
He cracked it open with his sword and reached inside and found old silk clothes, paper that had shredded to nothing, and a dim medallion. Taking it home, he polished it until it shone brightly. He tried to give it to her; she refused.
Treasure, he could find anywhere. He didn't need the princess for that.
Then what did he need her for?
In the castle they had more paper than they knew what to do with, and so much ink a man could drown in it. So they wrote letters to each other, though they were only a room apart. Letters every night, exchanging words and thoughts and feelings.
Very few words were spoken aloud between them unless they were out on Link's farm. She wore simple cotton dresses and a wide-brimmed hat to protect her skin. Old habits. Grandmother had always been after her for sitting out in the sun too long. She sketched the plants and herbs and took notes and scientific observation. On the edge of the lake, she spread her skirts and settled down while he waded in calf-deep and started fishing for dinner.
"If you can't catch anything I am perfectly content with the vegetables you roasted," she called out after him.
His broad shoulders went a little straighter. No words were needed; he solidly ignored her and cast another line, letting her know that he would catch dinner or die trying.
He'd left his knife with her. It rested on her lap along with a block of solid wood. Earlier in the morning he'd given her a quick lesson. His hands had curved over hers, showing her the grain and where to follow. If she looked closely enough she could see the shape hiding within the wood, aching to be released. A wolf, if her hands were nimble enough.
The shavings piled up around her as her clumsy first attempts resulted in a stiff-legged monstrosity. Link returned to shore with a grimly smug expression and three fat trouts. He beat his chest with one fist. I return with sustenance! I provide! I am hunter! Hear me howl!
It all fell on deaf ears. She was too preoccupied with her rubbish wolf.
"It's awful," she said, covering her face with both hands and burning up.
Solidly, he disagreed, and pocketed the little carving. When they went back to his house he set it on a shelf by his bed, looking over his shoulder and smiling at her.
What did he need her for?
In Zelda's castle they spoke through art and ink again. There was so much she wanted to share with him, and now, now finally there was time. Time and no danger. The blues and greens spoke to him. As she suspected, an artist's heart shone through the steel and grease and animal fat.
"How abstract," she said, and then taught him about chiaroscuro.
Link's eyes went ablaze with determination, fiery and powerful, and everything about the paintings and the carvings radically shifted. Ink and charcoal bilious and slick, covering him to the wrists and smudged on his cheek in an idle moment of concentration.
He showed her the places they only visited in dreams.
The other side of the coin.
The flipside of the mirror.
Presenting it to her, he always accepted commentary with grace. Of course she loved everything he did, but as he developed, he started asking for her to cut him with real criticism. That prompted her to ask why he assumed that she knew better than him. Art was deeply personal, after all.
"I can't tell you if it's good," she said. "It doesn't matter what I think."
"I don't care if it's good," he wrote back. "I want to know if you like it. That's more important to me."
Zelda took another look at the painting. Black, white, gray. Link moved away from the pastoral, perfectly detailed renditions of his home town. He had started straying into the things that really dwelled in his heart.
He drew a shape as seen from the corner of one eye. A glinting smile and red hair. Two vivid sundrops of color, toxic yellow pupils with burning irises.
"She's beautiful," Zelda said. "It's all beautiful."
Sometimes it was. Other times it was grotesque. But it was always a relief, the way a lanced boil lessens all that tight, hot pain and pressure.
One evening she kissed his cheek goodnight, stopping only when he grabbed her hand and yanked her a little closer. He frowned as he kissed the back of her palm. It blazed a path up every inch of her veins, sparking up the side of her neck and tingling all over her scalp. She went to bed wondering if she could ignore it or if maybe it was time to stop pretending she didn't desperately want to know why he needed her. Because she definitely knew why she wanted him.
In his cottage on the farm there was less room for decency and more room on his bed, though the first time she fell asleep there had been an accident. They had been talking and the next thing she knew she was listening to his heart, wound tightly in his arms, protected.
"Why do you desire my company?" she asked once, not out of insecurity but because she needed to know his intentions.
"I can't just like being around you?" he responded, before tickling her nose with the end of his quill. No one else would have dared. "You're my friend."
Then his throat tightened, bobbing with strain.
"You're the only one who remembers her," he said.
The rest was clear enough in everything he made. Midna was always there in his shadows, in every step he took. Zelda did remember. She felt Midna's presence in everything. In the length of her silhouette. In the sharp points the sun cast on the ground, when it hit the tip of her crown.
Zelda laced their fingers together.
The lake rested, placid, buzzing with insects. Soon the leaves would change and the real darkness take hold. Longer nights and shorter mornings. Soon there'd be one more year between them and that brief stretch of time when the worlds could have fused together, but they didn't.
The sun was at their backs, slowly sinking down over the mountains. The winds would whip them down to their bones soon, if they stayed outside. But they waited until their shadows stretched long and thin as smoke in the sky. Then the night swallowed them entire.
"She's always here, Link," Zelda assured him. One nail carved a path up the veins on his arm, up to his heart. "She'll always be with us."
"Sometimes... I can't... remember... her voice," he admitted, haltingly, in shame, his voice rusted from disuse. "Her face."
"Then let's go look at her," she suggested, fingers twisting at the lamp they'd brought out with them. A flame burned, and she led him into his cottage. There hung one of the paintings they'd worked on together. Each of them worked to fill the gaps where the other faltered. Both of them affixed the image of the twilight queen, immortalized her somewhere memory couldn't fade.
He sat with his head on her shoulder, eyes fixed to the painting, to the carvings on the shelves. They took their time contemplating it, in silence. They had all the time in the world, now.
She dared a little more illumination, brightening the room.
After all, you couldn't see your shadow in the dark.