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Laughter echoed through his mind as he began, yet again, grasping at a memory.
“You look stupid.”
He heard the voice. Her voice. The same voice, every time. He could never put a face to it, though.
“There is no way that anyone will believe this!”
“Just stay close, she doesn’t know a thing. You’ll fit right in.”
The second voice, deeper, smooth and lazy like red wine on a summer night, he knew. That was Lady Urbosa, tall, dark, intimidating, and his friend. She was also the most dangerous thing he had ever crossed blades with, but that was beside the point. He desperately wanted to put a face to the second voice, but he couldn’t. It spoke with an unsure cadence at times in his memory, quivering, and other times it was more relaxed, rougher around the edges. He knew the voice was the same, but at times it felt so distant, and then at others it felt so very close.
“There’s just no way they’re going to believe he’s a girl- vai,” said the voice.
“They will. Come now, dear, must you always dress like that? You’ll burn up. At least your knight will be comfortable.” Urbosa’s motherly tone seemed to get to the voice, and a reluctant reply left the memory fading. He re-centered himself and tried again.
“You look stupid. There is no way that anyone will believe this!”
“Just stay close, she doesn’t know a thing. You’ll fit right in.”
“There’s just no way they’re going to believe he’s a girl- vai.”
“They will. Come now, dear, must you always dress like that? You’ll burn up. At least your knight will be comfortable.”
It faded, as though only a certain point could be reached. He exhaled harshly, and felt slender arms wrap around his shoulders, hands clasping. He bowed his head and opened his eyes, watching the delicate fingers as they twisted a golden ring back and forth gently. Long blonde hair cascaded in front of his face, and he pushed some of it from tickling his ear.
“Any progress?”
Link shook his head almost imperceptibly, before shifting over to give his wife room on the bench next to him. “Sometimes, I can connect it. There’s some sort of block near the desert, though. It’s never quite the same. It feels distant– you're not the you that I know. Not until the oasis, when you were almost taken by the Yiga. That’s when it shifts.”
Zelda sat down next to him, rubbing his back gently as she took his hand in hers. “You’ll get there. I promise.”
She was probably wrong. He had thought long and hard about it, and had realized he hadn’t known her until that moment. She was a different person in his memories than she was now, and the woman he knew, the woman he had married, only seemed to exist after that moment in the Gerudo Desert. He hadn’t known the girl before, and he only barely knew the girl in the other memories. One hundred years of battling a demon in the Spirit realm changed a person, and the woman he knew was not a seventeen year old girl. She was only eighteen now, but she was one hundred years older in mind. He himself, trapped in hibernation for a century, had not had the same battle. Instead, he had spent four long years traveling across Hyrule, to each different region, rediscovering himself and who he was. He had fallen in love with the wild, with the brightness of a silent princess at night, with the smell of meat cooking over an open fire, with the thrill of crashing down a slope in Hebra on a shield that wasn’t meant for anything of the sort. But the wild had taught him many things, about the world, and about himself. Link was a traveler. He had bought a house, fixed it, finished it, and never came back; he had kept a photo of the champions in his satchel because hanging it up was as good as losing it. Long ago had he taken the bows from his walls, and now a thick layer of dust filled the building. Twenty-one years old now, Link was a man beyond his years, a man who had learned and relearned everything he knew, who had, in some way, become a more social person through his isolation.
“You can stop trying, love.” Zelda squeezed his hand. “You’ll find them if they decide to come. Let’s make new memories, not search for old ones.”
She had adopted that motto a while ago, and he knew that it must be so hard for her. She remembered everything about their lives before. She would sit and tell him stories late into the night when he asked her to, stories of how she had hated him at first, because her father had chosen him for her, of how they finally began to bond when he accompanied her on research missions, of how he would forget proper customs in court and twice narrowly escaped expulsion for “misconduct”... and then she would tell him about her favorite memories of him, things he couldn’t ever remember. That hurt him the most, but he wanted it– no, he needed it. All he could touch was feelings, and those feelings left a void in him. So she would fill it, fill his mind with her words, her feeble attempts to put into words the things that created those great wells of feeling. She told him about how she had been the one to make the first move, how on a summer afternoon after a long day of horseback riding, she had leaned against him beside a fire, and how he had simply frozen there for hours while she slept. She told him about the times when he would hold her for long hours after prayers amounted to nothing, about how she had tended to wounds he would otherwise have let fester. She told him about his rivalry with the sheikah shades that followed them on more dangerous missions. She told him about their first kiss. She tried to fill those voids in his mind, to give experiences to feelings, but she could never quite understand that their kiss in his mind had been in Tabantha, sitting at the edge of the flight range. She didn’t understand that the girl he had fallen in love with was her , and not her from a century ago. He had told her, and she nodded along, but until a person lost every memory, they wouldn’t be able to grasp that emptiness. Sometimes, he worried that she loved him from a century ago, and that the him that existed now was different, but she would never admit it if it was true. She told him that the boy he had been was different, but the man he was now was better. It was sweet, but it felt untrue. The man he was now had seen things. Done things. The boy he had been was innocent, a monster hunter who wanted something bigger. The man he was now had stood over a creature that had been burned alive and felt nothing, just kicked a second corpse onto the flames and stood next to it for warmth. The boy had defended from a few monsters, a few rebels. The man had slain legions, had starved for weeks, had drank nothing but river water and his own blood and had spent months covered in dirt and grime before he reached civilization again. The boy was lovable. He was kind, if stony. The man was a broken mess with a shattered mind and all five forms of PTSD.
But she was right, no matter who he was or she was, no matter what he thought about himself. Forward is better than backwards, and new memories meant things to remember that wouldn’t be broken.