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When Zelda goes to one of the sacred springs, she is always accompanied by a small group of royal guardsmen. The exact number fluctuates, but it never goes below six. The faces change, sometimes, but as far as she can tell they’re from a certain sect of the guard, and there’s roughly eighteen of them that rotate through protecting her. There is one exception to this rule, and that is when her Sheikah accompanying her. When Zelda goes out with her Sheikah guard, it is just the two of them. It makes her feel both vulnerable and free at the same time. The guard - Impa - has been guarding her since she was five. From what she’s gleaned the girl has been trained to do exactly that since she was born, and training her whole life to protect Zelda. It is her duty. Just as the travels to the sacred springs is Zelda’s. She’s three years older than her, with sharp eyes that seem even older than that, with the way she watched the woods when they travel, flicking towards any noise or out of place rustle.
Zelda brings it up once, to one of her regular guards. Why her father thinks a girl only a few years older than herself is as safe as a squad of royal guards. The man - Brison - nods slowly, mulling over the question. She knows he must have some kind of idea. Impa spends time during the week training, occasionally with the Hylian knights, he must have seen her at work.
“Impa,” He says. “...is a one woman army.” He does not explain beyond that. Two months later, Zelda learns what that means for herself.
She is journeying towards the Spring of Courage in the wet months - what she’s learned is the most dangerous season there, with the lizalfoes bolder and more likely to invade the common paths. Impa walks side by side by Zelda, as per usual. She never seems comfortable letting the princess out of her sights, but letting Zelda lead opens her up to take the brunt of a surprise attack. It is a compromise, but she sees the way that Impa is constantly swiveling her attention and knows that is not enough for the sheikah.
Impa senses the lizalfoes a second before they burst from the brush, and leaps in front of Zelda. She can just manage to make out Impa’s hands, with lightning fast movements, forming symbols that mean nothing to Zelda’s eyes but she knows the moment she returns to the palace she will disappear deep into the library searching for the answers.
Blue lights bleeds out of Impa, swirling into the air around Zelda. It looking almost like water, the way it drips from the air, and rises from the grass, and it coallesces in the air, a set of familiar figures. Zelda looking around and realizes that suddenly she is surrounded, protected, by not only Impa, but six identical copies of the sheikah, all facing outwards, knives bared. As one unit, they all leap outwards towards the lizalfoes, and Zelda thinks that she knows what Brison meant.
She asks Impa, in a moment of peace between the two of them, what it’s like. They are on Zelda’s balcony, with Zelda leaning forward against the railing, looking out at the world outside, and Impa precariously standing on the other side, leaning back, arms folded and sharp eyes surveying the landscape. While Zelda looks out to dream of venturing to such places, unguarded and free, Impa glares at the landscape as if expecting an enemy to leap out at any moment.
‘A fractured consciousness.’ That’s how Impa puts it. She can’t keep it up forever, and it can be taxing on her mind the longer she has to keep all six of the replicates up, and the more individualized they have to move. Impa sees through all of their eyes at once, and it is a sensation that is impossible to properly convey to someone with only one set of eyes, but she tries. Impa has never been quite as eloquent or well spoken as her sister or Robbie, but for Zelda she tries.
“When they’re hit… do you feel it?”
“Most attacks go right through them.” Impa says, and it isn’t an answer. “For an enemy to dispel one of my replicates, it requires immense amount of power.” Zelda shifts her attention from the woods to look at her companion, and catches the way that Impa unconsciously raises a hand to her neck, gently rubbing an imaginary line there, and Zelda thinks she gets her answer anyway.
Months pass, and Impa starts to replace her usual guard more and more, the sheikah knitting herself into Zelda’s life until it only feels right for her to be there.
“You must stay here, princess.” It’s the first time one of the replicates has ever talked to her. It feels like Impa’s voice is talking to her through layers of water. Zelda is where Impa had harshly shoved her before running off to distract the Moblins and the terrifying Lynel that had tracked them through the woods. She can’t take her eyes off of the dead body of one of her appointed knights that is lying in the grass, blood sluggishly still leaking from his body, but with no life force behind it. Not anymore. Not ever again. Through the slats of his helmet she can just make out the face of Brison.
Blue luminance blocks her field of vision.
There is a beat, where Zelda numbly looks up at the replicate, who gazes back at her. And then the replicate sheaths her kodachi and crouches down, wrapping her arms around Zelda.
Impa has never held Zelda. Impa has grabbed Zelda’s wrist to run from danger, she has shoved her out of danger, or carried her to safety. But Impa has never hugged her. It would be wrong for her two, a servant of Hylia’s light to act so casual around her charge. Here in the middle of the woods, there is no one here to see the action.
The replicate doesn’t feel at all like a real person. There is no skin or cloth. Instead it is mildly cool to the touch, the surface feeling almost like water, and indeed the form ripples under her as Zelda returns the hug, her hands almost desperately clutching onto Impa’s shirt.
And then the replicates chest softly vibrates. For a moment Zelda is afraid that this means that it will vanish, as she has seen them do before, and will leave her alone. But then her senses seem to come back online and recognize it as the vibrations of the chest caused by sound. Humming, specifically.A lullaby.
She knows this song. Zelda has no idea where Impa learned it, but Zelda knows it deep in her bones even older than her earliest memories. It is not just a lullaby. It is her lullaby. The one that her mother would sing to her, and then after that Urbosa.
Zelda holds the replicate all the harder, and lets herself cry into its shoulder.
Impa never brings the moment up, even when the replicate eventually disperses as she emerges from the woods. She is badly wounded, a hand firmly clutching her side as blood slips between her fingers. It is clear that the battle had not been as easy one. Most probably one that had required Impa’s full attention. And yet she had spared effort into the one replicate she had left with Zelda to comfort her.
Zelda reaches out and grabs Impa’s empty hand, rules be damned.
The last conversation Zelda has with Impa is through one of her replicates.
“Zelda! Zelda come back!” It is Impa’s voice through water that cries out to her, the blue of blue that Zelda sees when she turns her head back behind her. Everything feels so distant. It does whenever she is actively using the golden power within her. Link has been taken care of. The Masterword put away. Her bare feet feet the grass of hyrule field beneath them as she does not pause in her journey to the castle. She flicks her wrist and a Lynel is sent flying away from her.
“Impa,” And her voice is the opposite of that of the construct. Zelda’s voice now is quiet yet loud. It comes from everywhere. It has no boundary. “...it is nice to see your face one last time.” She feels bad for secretly wishing that this replicate had not made it. She had known that once word got to Impa she would chase after Zelda, and had seen the sheikah get cut off on her route to Zelda by three giant Hinox’s. Yet one replicate had slipped through the battle to chase after her.
It will make this harder than it already is.
“There’s another way, I know there is!” Impa cries, running at full speed towards her charge. Zelda turns her head away from her. Those eyes, so desperate… Zelda fears if she looks at those eyes for too long her resolve will crumble.
“Impa, I am fulfilling my duty.”
“And I’m fulfilling mine!” Impa shouts. “My duty is to keep you safe. I promised the goddesses, your father-” and Zelda feels her breath hitch. “-I promised myself. I can’t let you do this!”
The cool hand of the construct wrapped around Zelda’s wrist and held tight. It stopped her in her tracks. A league of corrupted Guardians were nothing to Zelda, not when she was like this. But that one hand - cold and rippling - it stilled her feet. Turning her head seemed to take a thousand years, and she drank in Impas face. It was desperate and scared in a way that she had never seen Impa look before. Impa who was strong and silent and leapt into danger without a moments thought all for Zelda’s sake.
She knew, in a moment, that Impa would never let her do this. Never let her go and face what may be her death.
Zelda shifted her hand to gently hold Impa’s with the sheikah’s knuckles up towards the sky. She bent down and brushed her lips against them, offering a small kiss. The replicate was still through it all. She looked up into Impa’s desperate, pleading eyes.
“...I’m sorry.” With her free hand Zelda flicked her wrist and the construct exploded into light, blue shards coming off of it and dissipating into the air. Zelda turned and walked into the belly of the beasts.
A field away Impa fell to the forest floor, gasping for breath, her replicates around her all shattering into nothingness. One of her hands clutched as her chest, still feeling the phantom pains of being blasted into a million pieces from the inside out. Several of her sheikah companions rushed to pick up her slack, and a Zora medic picked her up and rushed off to take her to safety. From her vantage point Impa watched as the bright golden light on Hyrule Field glowed brighter and brighter and brighter until, in one final blast, it extinguished to nothing.
And Impa cried.