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Zelda can’t sleep.
It’s been so long since she got to rest that she’s not sure she’s even capable now. A hundred years—suspended and stretchy as time had been for those hundred years—is a long time to fight, after all, and it certainly takes a lot out of a person, but exhausted as she is, she’s also restless. There’s a tension in her body, an urge to move now that she’s more aware of its existence in space. Not to mention the images that keep popping up against her eyelids when she closes them for a second too long.
She rolls over. It does nothing. She’s still lying on her back on the ground, rocks digging into her back and legs in an awkward position as she stares, unblinking, at the stretch of stars above her. They’re beautiful, but the sight is getting a little old after all the sleepless nights she’s spent gazing up at it. Shooting stars can capture her attention every now and then, giving her an opportunity to track the location on the Sheikah Slate so they can trek there to find any fallen pieces come morning, but they’re rare enough that she doesn’t expect them often. The sky tonight is predictably devoid of movement.
Frustrated, Zelda turns her head to the side. Across from her, sat by the fire and resting in the dirt and grass without so much as lying down all the way, Link is having the opposite problem. He’s fast asleep, snoring gently. His head lolls forward, long bangs dropping across his face and hiding all but his parted mouth.
Hair. That was one thing that had caught Zelda’s attention when they’d reunited: Link had always had long hair, but now it’s unkempt and almost shaggy, falling to his shoulders when undone as it is now. It must be heavy, Zelda thinks with a frown. Hers is.
That’s another thing she has to get used to. Being more aware of her body than ever means being aware of her hair. She doesn’t like the weight, she’s found, nor the feeling of it scraping her neck when she moves a certain way. It hasn’t gotten quite as messy as Link’s tends to, but it’s still tangled enough that she winces running her hands through it as she’s prone to do. And now, it being under her is just as unsettling as all the grass and dirt.
An idea forms at the back of her mind, a logical solution to some—if far from all—of her problems. Link is still asleep, however, and she wouldn’t want to carry out this solution without his input, nor would she want to wake him. One needs rest, after all.
Zelda’s eyes close. She does not sleep.
The morning light hits her before she’s ready for it, sunlight burning into her eyelids. A groan slips out. She can already hear Link rustling about, picking up the rocks with which he’d made their fire and the cooking pot he places atop the fire every night as he whistles under his breath, a tune Zelda feels like she should recognize. It clicks in her head after a moment—an old lullaby.
Once Link’s whistling has ended, Zelda drags herself to her feet, fatigue weighing her bones down. But they must keep moving, regardless of her sleep troubles or her concerns, and so she does. She goes through the day of travel without speaking much; not something odd to Link, even from her, but something that makes her give her confused looks nonetheless.
Her hands are shaking when she speaks up that night.
“Link,” she says, gentle but loud in the quiet clearing, the only other sound the soft fizzling of whatever is cooking in the pot in front of her. She doesn’t know what Link has tossed in, but it smells wonderful. He lifts his head in wordless curiosity. “Would you… would you mind lending me your sword?”
And she looks directly at his face, the way she doesn’t do often, to see the questioning quirk of his brow. The tilt of his head expresses why better than any words could. Zelda huffs out a laugh despite herself; she takes a moment to compose her own words, as her sign language has gotten rusty and she isn’t as concise with her body language as Link seems to have become.
…Had he always been that way? Her mouth twists at the reminder that her memories, while not as far gone as the majority of Link’s, are far from unscathed. A hundred years is a long time.
She sweeps away the mournful doubt at the corner of her thoughts like cobwebs, instead leaning forward and focusing on the logical feeling of the words she’d already weighed in her mind. Sentimentality can be brought into consideration later. For now, all she has to do is lay out the facts.
“I’d like to cut my hair. And I—” She cuts herself off with a small click in her throat. As much as shame and class are an afterthought now, she can’t fight her upbringing, and admitting to her lack of knowledge even in one area in front of Link—her best friend before all else but her knight nonetheless—is a thought that makes her recoil. It might be all the more foolish because he’s seen her fail over and over again; but then again, he’s also seen and even helped her pull through those failures. She swallows, determined, and grits the words through her teeth: “I never learned how to, nor did I ever pay too much attention when I had my hair trimmed as a child.”
She can’t remember the last time she had her hair cut, in fact. It seems preposterous now that she’s allowed her hair to be this long through most of her life—it’s heavy and it itches and she just wants to get rid of it all, so she can’t understand things being any different. But they must have been, she muses as she twirls a lock around her finger.
Link considers her for another beat, face unreadable, and then he smiles. It’s a bright, careless smile, one that had made Zelda’s heart ache the first time she saw it, because she had never seen it before it; it’s a smile he’d only picked up since waking up in the Resurrection Shrine, free of all the expectations that had been pushed onto him since childhood. Zelda wishes, not for the first time, she’d been able to wake up the same way.
Would it have been worth it, though, for all the hardships he’s had to endure? Would it have been an acceptable exchange? Zelda shakes her head to herself, only remembering she’s in the middle of a conversation when the metallic sound of Link unsheathing his sword rings through the air.
He doesn’t seem to have noticed her movement, instead pausing for a moment to consider the Master Sword. Sheepishly, he looks up and points to the pot in front of them, then shakes his head.
“Oh!” says Zelda. “Yes, I—I hadn’t considered that. After we eat, then.”
Link nods, grinning again. Contagious as it is, the soft smile that crosses Zelda’s own face is tenser. She deflects from the excited bundle of nerves forming in her stomach by gesturing at the pot with a quiet, “Is it ready yet?”
Link’s eyes are glinting as he dishes them up. They eat in silence save for the clicking of wooden spoons against wooden bowls, a sound that makes Link wince but doesn’t affect Zelda. She avoids making it whenever she can. Link has made a soupy mushroom-and-seafood dish with a warm, watery taste that reminds Zelda of Zora’s Domain.
Once their bowls are licked clean—in Link’s case, literally (it’s taken Zelda some time to get used to his… unrefined eating habits, but she supposes it’s not that surprising when she considers how long he’s been on his own)—Zelda’s eyes stray again to the sword at Link’s side. It reflects the sparks from the flame, making it appear to glow in the low lighting. Link follows her gaze with a more serious smile.
He doesn’t snuff out the fire or even remove the cooking pot before he reaches down and takes the sword with both hands, spreading it horizontally across his palms. Zelda’s shoulders rise even as she reaches across, numb, to take it.
The Master Sword weighs heavy in her hands, but it accepts her grip without a modicum of hesitance. The immediate power that settles into Zelda’s chest makes her suck in a breath. Her hands aren’t shaking any longer; the rest of her body is, but the tremors end at her arms, which swell with strength and energy. Zelda’s heart pounds against her chest, the sound like drumming as it beats in her ears.
Even as the sword’s power flows into her, so too does a wave of self-disgust. This is the almighty sword that has guided many a legendary hero through countless a battle. The sword resting in her palms now, Zelda is aware, is quite possibly worth more (both in gold and significance) than everything that had once been in her castle put together. It’s a relic, an artifact. It might better belong in a museum than strapped to Link’s back, even if it does belong to him.
And she—a reincarnated legend in her own right, but not the hero sitting before her—is going to use it to cut her hair.
A nervous laugh bubbles up through her chest. Across from her, Link’s expression takes on a distinctly worried edge, and Zelda lifts a hand to ease him. The ghost of her father’s scoff at the back of her mind (disappointed but as helpless to stop her as it had been in life) and visions of both her and Link’s ancestors shaking their heads in disapproval be damned. Princess Zelda of Hyrule is going to take this massive sword imbued with divine power and use it for a selfish purpose, draining some of its energy to carry out a task that could be handled well enough by most of the other sharp objects in Link’s possession (of which there are many).
She sweeps her hair over one shoulder and gathers it into a loose, makeshift ponytail with one hand, about halfway down. The rough texture against her fingers is enough to make her cringe; perhaps she should consider brushing it later as well, or at least sticking her head underwater for a couple of seconds to rid herself of most of the grime. But she takes in a breath, and she lets it go.
Link’s watchful eyes on her, Zelda bends and holds her hair to the side, far enough away from her face that the inelegant cutting style won’t go awry. She grabs the Master Sword with her free hand. Inhale. Exhale. Her eyes flutter shut, and her lip is trembling the slightest bit, but her hand is steady.
She swings. This is the Sword of Legend—
A clump of hair comes out in Zelda’s hand. It’s been choppily torn from the rest of the hair she’s holding out, and it’s not all of the section she’s still holding with all her might, but it’s something. Zelda’s stomach jumps at the sight. She lets the shorn locks of hair, blonde and glittering under the lights of the moon and the fire, drop to the ground as she shifts her grip up, gathering more hair into her hand and clinging to it. Her swing this time is cleaner, more confident.
The Sword That Seals the Darkness—
The darkness inside her own mind might as well qualify, she thinks, wry. The slick sound of the blade through her hair hadn’t registered the first time, her focus more on the blood rushing in her ears, but now Zelda hears it clearer than anything. It’s a sound she won’t be soon to forget.
When she pulls the sword away, the majority of the hair she’d been holding away has fallen, forming one big pile in the grass beside her. Her heart stutters at the sheer amount. Then it skips again at how light her head feels when she twists it—there’s no rustling of the mass of hair she’d had before, no unpleasant scratching sensation from it on the back of her neck, only a slight brush against her cheek. She twists her head around a few more times to get used to it. She loves the way shorter hair moves, she decides.
She chances a glance at Link, who’s openly staring, mouth parted and eyes wide. “What?” she says, toying with a choppy strand hanging around her chin. It’s no less grimy or rough, but something about the texture is just so much better than it had been before. “How does it look?”
Link gives her a thumbs-up.
Zelda can’t help but laugh. “Thank you, but I think I’ll see for myself,” she says, shifting the Master Sword to rest across her palms as she leans closer to the fire.
The sword hums beneath her grip. It seems a bit weaker now, not as responsive, but the confidence and strength it had unlocked in her still fill her veins. Under the darkness, she can’t make out her reflection as she might be able to any other time—the fact that she can at all, she thinks, has something to do with how much Link polishes the thing—but she can see herself enough to realize that, while far from perfect, the cut looks nice.
Her smile only widens. She sets the Master Sword back on the ground and says, “Hand me the Sheikah Slate, please?”
It’s being passed into her hand a beat later, not even with a confused look from Link; she looks over just to make sure, finding his face almost blank. Zelda thumbs at the controls and turns on the camera rune. She’s used to doing this with landscapes, but there’s a mode to take pictures of the user as well, as the abundance of pictures of Link with cute dogs in the album would speak to.
“You do know there’s a limit on the number of pictures you can take with this, right?” she asks, raising her eyebrow at Link. He whistles innocently and looks the other way. Zelda rolls her eyes, undeniable fondness as strong as the exasperation. “Oh well. How do I—?”
Link leans over her shoulder, tapping a few buttons to make her face—their faces, really, though Link’s is faded into the background—appear in the screen. She nods and scoots closer to the fire. The lighting still is far from ideal, but it captures enough of her to make her grin at the sight of her messy but perfect (in her mind if not reality) chin-length hair, hands twitching before she remembers that she’s holding something and shouldn’t flap them. She settles for wiggling her fingers against the Sheikah Slate instead.
She doesn’t take a picture; she or, more likely, Link can take plenty in the morning, when she’ll show up better. She does, for a moment, tilt the camera skyward, catching a glimpse of a shooting star as she does, a streak of gold across the otherwise still night sky that makes her gasp and turn to better follow it. She’s quick to stick a pin on the place she thought she’d seen it fall.
When she hands the Sheikah Slate back over to Link, his smile is more serious again, but it’s also gentle and kind. This one, she’s seen plenty of times. Zelda returns the smile in a heartbeat.
“Thank you,” she tells the Master Sword, still lying on its side by the fire. At Link’s affronted noise, she turns back to him and repeats, “Thank you.”
Link makes an OK symbol with his hand. Zelda rolls her eyes again and heads over to her half of the makeshift camp, settling herself in the dirt. While she’d been right about this not being the solution to all of her problems—there are still worries hovering at the back of her head, and she doubts she’ll ever get rid of the images, both real and imagined, she sometimes sees when her eyes are shut—she does feel less restless now, the exhaustion in her body finally weighing her eyes down and keeping them down. She struggles to hold them open for another moment.
“Are you going to stay up?” she asks, already starting to lie down. Link pulls out one of his bows, readies a quiver, and gestures to a pack of cooking materials Zelda knows is draining with their travels. Zelda huffs at the delighted glint in his eyes and flops onto her back. Her hair is still a bit itchy under her—more due to the messy ends than anything else, she suspects—but it’s not nearly as uncomfortable as it had been. “All right. Be careful.”
Link rolls his eyes but nods. He’s humming as he walks away. Zelda shuts her eyes and lets the old lullaby wash over her, lulling her to the most peaceful sleep she’s been able to get in weeks.
As she drifts off, she’s smiling.