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He wonders if he can weather this, this 100-year burden, for the first time once he sees her face.
She is golden haired, a shining ray, the sun itself and he, Link, standing there, 100 years younger and impassivity on his strong lined face is nothing in comparison to her. And yet she is the one falling. Zelda sits underneath the canopy of the strong oak tree, her delicate hands twisting, her left one drifting to her empty right absently. Her sunlight hair falls in front of her face and her emerald eyes look down at the grass below her feet before she looks up at him with that imploring look.
She asks him if he would have chosen this path, had his father not instilled in him the desire to. He wonders if he was a strong man, back then. He decides he must not have been, because he does not answer her question. He still stands there, raindrops falling from his soaked blue tunic like crystals, the Sword that Seals the Darkness still at attention, at his side. Link does not hear himself speak. He hears her speak, though, and knows instantly that the lock in his heart has found its key.
He is brought back to the present with a jolt, the grass beneath his feet as dry as wheatgrass and the old tree older than ever, the wrinkles in the trunk demonstrating the stalwart ferocity of the oak. The two idols underneath the rock canopy mock him with their passive expressions.
Who you once were was a warrior, and now you have a hollow core.
———
He doubts his strength for the second time when he watches himself kneel passively in front of the king while his princess bears her war. He genuflects, his eyes cast down in solemn countenance while her father berates her, calls her everything short of a bastard and then condemns her to a fate of his doing. He watches as the Princess, her sun-colored hair and dark green eyes shining in the Hyrulean summer, straightens her back and clenches her fist in her lapis-spun skirts and says nothing more as her father walks away. She is so strong, stronger than he, and she has never looked more beautiful.
Link watches himself watch her back once more as she strides into her study and notes the look on his face. His eyes--both sets of them, it must be--display reverence, respect and admiration. He wonders if this was the first time when it stopped being duty for him. He wonders if this, this low moment, is when he realized.
When he comes to again he stares to the ruined doors of Zelda’s study, the purple and black mingling unpleasantly with the small blue flower growing resolutely in the dirt. He looks up at the tallest tower in the castle, where he knows that every time the moon stains red she is there, working, working so he may live. He wonders, again, if he protected her out of mere duty. He was strong.
And then the angry beeping of the stalker comes to break his reverie. He barely manages to dive off the edge of the walkway before he hears the laser blast into the rubble supporting the arch below her rooms. He looks past his fear and into the eye of the beast again. He is not strong enough.
He knows the king told him who he was. But, after all, he finds he cannot trust the king’s judgement much any longer.
———
Paya kisses him when he says he’ll stay by her side for the whole day. It was for the relic, it was for protection, because he is strong, but apparently not strong enough because he doesn’t push her away.
She is tending to the small pumpkin blossoms in Olkin’s patch, and he is kneeling beside her, watching her deft hands work (like he did before, but with a different person, who worked in a different way, different hands, different expressions). Then suddenly, as if hit by Farore herself with a stroke of lightning, she turns to him and takes his face in her hands.
He lets her soft lips press against his, and he must close his eyes to bear it. A mistake, he finds, for when he closes his eyes he imagines how he saw Her the other day at the grounds, her gold and green mixing with the white and blue in front of him. He remembers her face, hard and cold with hatred and disappointment. He remembers that he was not sure if it was towards him anymore. He saw himself, eyes closed and hair blowing in the soft breeze as she held her hand with nothing on it out to his head and claimed him a savior. He saw his fellow champions standing off to the side, questioning his validity. Questioning if their princess had any at all. He shriveled.
When he snaps back Paya is staring at him, they are both knee deep in soil amongst the pumpkins, and Link has to tell Paya down gently, that he’s very sorry, but he is content just protecting her. She brings her fingertips up to her lips, her face turning a cherry red, and Link feels guilty, very guilty.
It’s only after he stumbles into the forest later that his gut begins to churn and he feels the familiar depth of yearning. For he wanted to kiss Paya back, and he feels a twinge of something when the women at the stables turn to him and eye him in awe, and for moments afterwards he wants to follow through with it.
But it is always eclipsed by her, the way her skirts billowed out into neat pleats, the delicate slope of her neck and the curve of her wrists, and the determination in her steely eyes. He dreams more of her than he dreams of the women in the present, that is certain. He wonders if he could die again, just from this.
———
It is truly cemented, the truth of his strength, when he watches her break down at the Spring of Power. Her hair is soaked with dewdrops and rain, her white dress drenched to the fibers of the cloth with holy water, the petals in the basin drawing towards her wrinkled feet. Her face is contorted with frustration, rage, anger, guilt, sorrow, every dreadful human emotion known, and yet she has never been more beautiful.
He watches as she shouts at the uncaring, silent effigy, while he does not turn, does not falter in the guarding of his princess. He watches, and a frown pulls his 100 year old face up in a grimace when he sees himself turn only after she must sob out a horrid question.
“Please tell me. What is wrong with me!?”
Nothing. There is nothing but the way he stands in silence, nothing wrong with her but everything with him as he does nothing to ease her pain, seemingly nothing to calm her aching heart. He wants to run up and throttle himself, wants to kick him right in the groin and break his sword arm, so that maybe he will consider not using it again.
(He does not get to see himself tread the waters of the spring to her sobbing body and delicately touch her shoulder, lift her off her frozen feet and carry her to the fire, but if he had, would it have changed anything now?)
When he snaps back he channels the frustration towards himself towards his goddess. He is not silent now , he thinks, and he screams and kicks at the water, watching the unchanging face of Hylia, her splendeur and valor paling in comparison to the goddess that once stood beneath her feet, asking her why she was not allowed her grace.
(In the end, though, he understands that the anger he feels towards the goddess who was supposed to protect him is merely a projection of the anger he harbors towards himself. For he was a child of a goddess once, too).
———
When he returns from Gerudo Town, the last of the Beasts conquered and his former comrades trained on the castle, he goes back to Impa’s hut. Dutifully avoiding eye contact with her granddaughter, he sits and has the tea she’s made for him. It’s cool chamomile, with a hint of Hyrule Herb.
He tells her that he’s done it, that all his old friends are free and waiting for his command. He does not say that he barely can call them friends, for he only remembers them in fractions, the pieces scattered in the wind of his empty mind. He does not say that he’s broken down more than once, that his back has bent and his tears scattered on various surfaces: desert cement, fiery rock, oceans of shallow and his own tunic too. He does not say all he wants to about this, but somehow Impa knows.
He says he heard Her. That she told him she was proud of him. He does not say that he felt a swell of pride at it, that his face must have broken out into a gleeful smile unbefitting of the carnage visible on it. That he remembered, when he got to the Bazaar, the way she looked at him when he threw herself in front of her, the only thought in him to protect her legs from harm, so she may continue to walk with steps certain of victory. He does not say that he—
It seems he doesn’t need to. Impa knows. Link wonders about what she is not saying in the silence filled with long sips of the tea and the scraping of wood outside, where Paya is dutifully and absently shining the deck until even the wood is worn.
When she gets up with a great effort off of her mountain of pillows and shows him the picture shrouded in a curtain of dust and the dregs of the past, he makes no movement at first. But he does not reveal that inside, his heart is a war. For he feels the pressing discomfort of deja vu, of knowing instinctively that seeing the place so beautifully rendered in the photograph would hurt like hell.
So he resolves to put it off. He thanks Impa for the tea and leaves the cup empty on the floor beside the pillow embroidered with the Sheikah eye.
———
She turns to him with that sad, sad smile and the sun blazing in red and orange behind her and he breaks. He runs towards a version of him that would never know what had hit him and brings his ghostly hands around his neck. His hands never touch him, or they phase right through. He can’t tell.
He’s berating himself, screaming, “Say something! By all the goddesses, say something! Can you not see, young fool? The hurt, the pain? Say some thing, anything- “
He is thrown back to the vision of Mount Lanayru, the Bokoblin riders on their horses in the valley below, and the view of a castle with a golden light shining through the haze of purple. The sky is clear, unlike his mind, which is filled with swirls of blood orange and canary. Blinding, blazing heat and a smile that offset it all.
He is a fool, though once he was a warrior too.
———
He watches himself fall at Fort Hateno. He watches her achieve her destiny, he watches her succeed. He watches how she cradled his head, tenderly like it were her prized Sheikah orbs, and whispered frantically to him. It’s going to be ok, Link. You’re fine, I’m fine, you're so wonderful, Link-thank you, please.
If he hears an I love you , he does not waver.
He comes to, and for once he knows exactly what he needs to do.
———
When Link lays eyes on Calamity Ganon for the first time, he is immediately struck with how simple it feels.
He should be fearful. He had been fearful of so much, on this journey. When the bokoblins began to change colors, and bring mightier weapons to their grubby hands, he was afraid. When he walked into Vah Ruta and saw the flooded cobble, he was afraid. When he saw the mountains of guardians at the Forgotten Temple, he was afraid. When he first saw Her, his first memory of her, her back to him and walking resolutely forward, he felt the tendrils of fear grip his heart, though that time he did not know what for.
But he was not. Because one look at the fabled and infamous Calamity and he knew that he could beat him. That he was ten times as powerful as he, that he was more calm and collected and sure than this snarling, toothy amalgamation of limbs and body parts. That there was a warrior in his breast once, and that there still is now.
And that he had her, her support and her grace to get him by. That she was there in the belly of the beast when he cut him open. That she fought alongside him as his equal. That they were finally equals.
That they were whole.
———
The final time he doubts himself is when she looks back at him, her dusty and bloody knight, the sun shining in her sun colored hair. She’s real, she’s real. Not a ghost. Not a fake. Whole. Real.
She blooms like the flowers behind her, like the swift winds that lift the grasses of Hyrule towards the heavens. She beams a smile that would kill and asks of him the question he was never sure of up until this very moment.
“Do you really remember me?”
What can he say? She, his Zelda, was-
“The one thing I wanted to remember.”
He is stronger than he knows. There it is, the warrior in his breast, born anew.