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The Triforce of Wisdom has given her the burden of always being certain.
She had known that they would be saved by the blue-eyed beast, that Ganondorf would return and take her castle. She had known the trials in her past lives while Link was raised unknowing, and had known that it will come to pass again and again. She had known that it was the proper decision to give the rest of her life to Midna, for certainly the imp would pay her in return.
This cross leaves her with solid confidence and forgettable fear. Her human instincts trembled at the rise of Zant and the sight of the ragged wolf, but the divinity of the goddesses whispered that all would regulate itself in time. This, too...what she feels in this moment, it will be fixed, too. All will be all right, someday.
Because of this blessing, longing was not in her vocabulary. Too many untouchable wishes come with that sentiment.
Until now.
Midna has her true form back and she revels in it, every one of her steps lyrical, every flutter of her fingers the silent beats between breaths of the violin that Zelda finds herself becoming: regal and splintered, bright in her fear, quiet in her wariness.
Midna, she knows, cannot stay.
Her logic believes this (light and dark cannot mix, hadn't she recited?), and so does the deep entrenchment of her all-seeing all-consuming knowing. It tells her it will all be over. Every inch she touches and observes and imagines poems about will be gone. And unlike Link or the darkest, purest evil, Midna will not resurrect and fall at her side again.
So she tries to kiss her harder and keep the world frozen in time between them.
There are things that can only be learnt whilst being someone's shadow - Midna knows this in a literal sense, and Zelda in one that tugs at her misshapen and fraying soul. The suffering the princess endured. The slow morph Midna had bled through, from impulsive and hating to headstrong and wanting to protect all worlds she had the misfortune of touching, had changed something vital in Zelda. Something that bred trepidation and wishing and wanting, while time counted down to when the goddesses said it would all be over.
Midna does not fit here. Zelda would remember a feeling quite like this if it had happened in another life.
She lets tumble from her lips, "You're going to have to leave."
Midna slides back. On her face is very real apology, immediate and potent, even before any type of annoyance that Zelda had to end things this way. This is not romantic. This is in the back of Telma’s bar while Link snores a wall away. This is the end and it is not romantic, it is slaughtering.
Zelda says, voice sounding chiselled, "You're going to leave and never return. None of you will return. Your world cannot be another chapter of another story."
"Well, you don't have to be such a cynic," Midna mumbles in jest, and cups Zelda's jaw with both hands. She drifts in. Zelda lets her kiss her once. Her heart is stammering. Instead of this impossible woman she maybe loves, suddenly she sees a static-slathered flipbook of her future and her past and what can and what is and none of this feeling survives in it.
Zelda will never again be this scared. She will never again be this complete.
"You will not exist for me anymore."
Midna sighs. The sound shivers. She pulls back and stares stares stares until Zelda sees her with the eyes of a young woman godless and alone and then she says, "I won't. Not for every other person you become, if you believe in that stuff. I won't exist."
Her heart flickers-stammers-stops. Zelda is just a girl for half an instant, and she feels, beyond the crushing weight of knowing, the petal of laughable hope.
"But you will remember me. For all my time, and yours - not any other Princess Zelda's, but this one." Her fingers slide in between Zelda's and pulse. The hope blooms into its offspring, affection, and makes Zelda almost forget and smile, but this life is so short when she looks at the eras in which her soul has been yanked and forgotten and without Midna.
Zelda brings their joined hands to her chest. She whispers, "You come without asking and bring me agony and loneliness. You really are a part of the night."
And Midna smiles bitterly, tilting up Zelda's head to captivate her with another careful kiss, her teeth sliding across Zelda's lip with intention; the embrace is impassioned and honest and so firmly fixed on earth. That feeling - that love, it opens the eager coil of its leaves in her chest, but she feels storm clouds, tar-like and thick, pour across the sky.
She will cycle and die and relive, but Midna will vanish into the distant hum of the galaxies, and in her next life, (she knows she knows
she knows)
Zelda will not care to listen.