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“Hey, Link,” a Zelda says, the very first one, heavy memories humans were never meant to comprehend making her head sink on its frail neck. Humans were never meant to comprehend, but she was. This was the entire point of it all, she understands, with blood on her lips. And she’s human now, so, she figures, what humans as a group were meant to comprehend doesn’t really matter now. How silly! How glorious! She’d laugh, was she not about to vomit.
“Hm?” Link turns to her, leaning down a bit to get a look at her face hidden behind long, golden curtains.
“I love you,” Zelda smiles, vibrant and glowing and a bit of snot coming out of her nose, because the human thing that’s most comparable to almost getting your soul sucked out is a really, really bad cold.
“I love you too!” Link grins back, without missing a beat, all teeth and sun kissed cheeks and sparkles flying around his closed eyes.
They stay in the moment like that, rainbows swirling around their faces, birds singing chirpy melodies and overall the whole universe giving them both a big, big thumbs up.
Then, Zelda does throw up.
Link holds those long, golden curtains for her then, and she feels falling in love all over again, and tastes a little bit of bile.
“Hey, Link,” Sheik says, coldly but not unkindly.
Link turns to him with her tired eyes not really glowing, but paying attention nonetheless.
There are countless cuts on her hands and blood in her hair, and dirt. Just a whole lot of dirt. Getting to a river to wash it all off was first on her list of priorities, but then Sheik showed up, and Sheik never really shows up but in small bursts that all have the weight of approximately one explosion of a supernova. So, the priorities changed. She feels terrible, muck sticking to her skin, and she’ll probably cry before she gets into the water just because of how horrible the sensation is, but Sheik showed up. So she’s putting it off.
“How have you been doing?” the boy asks, a little awkward, not like he usually is. He doesn’t even read off any fancy poetry he always does with that cute condescending pride of his! What a wonder.
‘Fine,’ Link signs, because a longer answer is too much for her right now. She killed all the things that needed to be dead in the temple she just left behind. She got all the fancy rocks and trinkets that needed to be collected from it. She’s fine.
“That’s good,” Sheik nods, like he’s an officer getting a weekly report. The two teens play army like this because they’re not really sure how else they’re supposed to interact. They know they’re no longer in a castle garden, and they know neither can break down crying in front of the other. So they resort to playing army.
Sheik shyly shuffles from one foot to another, which he never does, because he’s always keenly aware of the rats hiding in the grass. Be careful, Sheik! Your stance is not battle ready! Some critter is about to jump out of a bush and bite you in the ass!
“Do you want me to teach you a song?” he finally says, in a voice that is less cold, and no more unkind.
‘There are more songs to be taught?’ Link asks.
Which is a silly question, granted. There are always more songs to be taught. Always more shiny stones and trinkets to be collected. Always more things that need to be dead, and yet are still alive.
“It’s not a song that is… necessary,” Sheik begins, careful with his words. The harp is already in his hands, but it’s held timidly. Like any second now the owner will throw a smoke bomb and disappear.
‘And what’s the song?’ Link asks, reaching for her ocarina with a move that betrays a little more than sterile compliance.
“It’s a children’s song,” Sheik responds, staring somewhere into the distance and seemingly disconnecting from his body. “I thought you might want… some more tunes to play on the road. Ones that don’t really do anything.”
Sheik starts playing without waiting for more answers, eyes entirely on the strings and then entirely closed as he plucks out notes, waiting for a moment and then releasing a breath he didn’t know he was holding when Link starts following the lead.
The melody is simple, catchy, and almost entirely nonsensical. Link is lulled by the music seeping and spilling out of her ocarina, a lovely distraction from the blood still in her hair and the muck on her pants and the stupid trinkets heavy in her pockets.
When the song is over, they part without goodbyes. They less so part and more so Sheik disappears into thick smoke, and Link trudges to the river to get clean. There is a song, one that doesn’t mean anything and plays no part in any war.
And Link knows it.
“Hey, Link!” Zelda fucking screams, tears and blood streaming down her face, sticking to her hair which sticks to her forehead which sticks to her skull. She is wailing her lungs out, because Link had the fucking gall to fucking die. Hey, you’re not supposed to do that! You’re not supposed to die!
She shakes his shoulders and she thinks she might be just trembling so hard even touching him shakes him to the very core. To the core that is no longer beating. To the core that is dead.
You’re not supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to die, but if you do, you’re supposed to do it with me, so some other children in some other times can fix our messes. What am I supposed to do without you? Clean my mess?
At this point she just cries out, and at this point her throat is bleeding out too, just like Link, and at this point a sword talks to her and some people run in and quickly take away the corpse so she’ll stop prodding at it like a brand new fidget toy.
“He’ll survive?” she says, dumbly.
Correction! He won’t. He will die. He already died. He will be reborn, reanimated, started anew. You will not. You will not, ever.
“Oh,” she blinks. “Okay.”
Now, what you have to do is go and play house with the apocalypse. Not the apocalypse, even, the primordial manifestation of malice and hatred and kicking puppies. Things a human brain is not meant to comprehend.
“With that,” she points to the purple burging out of the sky.
Yes. With that. Now, the question is, can you do it?
“Link. He’ll survive?”
No. He will not. Can you do it?
“But I’ll get to see him again.”
You’ll get to see a boy who will probably be named Link and will probably be blond. You will get to do that in a hundred years. He will be reborn. Can you do it?
“So, I’ll get to see him,” nods Zelda, to herself. “Yes. Yes, I can do it, then.”
The girl sets off to the castle, through mud and muck and dirt, through bushes and through trees, through fields and through fresh ruins. She does it, because if you die, you’re supposed to do it together.
When the first ever Zelda stops being delirious, and her head stops being dizzy with knowledge of every existing creature’s date of birth and death across all time, ever, she starts telling Link she loves him a lot.
They’ll be picking mushrooms and she’d stand up suddenly and loudly announce ‘I love you!’ and Link, of course, shouts ‘I love you!’ right back because he’s wonderful like that, and then he’s washing dishes while she reads a book and she’d scream ‘I love you!’ and he shrieks it right back, and then it’ll be late at night and she still doesn’t whisper it, she hollers it out still and it wakes him up and he says it back immediately too.
And she got scared that maybe, with the abundance of the phrase its significance began to dull, and so she asks Link one day if he truly means it all the time, and he says:
“Of course I do! Why would I not? Why would I stop loving you?”
And then she rejoiced and slapped herself on the forehead as she spun, because of course! Love doesn’t run out, silly! Love bursts from a cornucopia, and love is not a liquid, so why would it run dry? Love is endless, no matter how you slice it and which bread you put it on!
And the two of them already welded a sword that is eternally sharp, so why would they carve out words that aren’t? Silly, silly first ever Zelda to walk this earth! Love is not a resource. Love is something that you feel and do, because you like it.
So she started telling Link she loves him even more, and he started saying it back with twice as much rigor, and they started having barking matches that consisted of endless feedback loops of the phrase, like a true pair of dogs, and their neighbor said that’s not what puppy love is supposed to mean, and Zelda told him the exact day on which he’ll die.
Then, Zelda turned back to Link to kiss him, and she said ‘I love you’ after because that’s what you’re supposed to do after kisses.
And Link said it right back, because he’s wonderful like that.
Neither teens are prepared when the world all short of explodes, as their mission is almost done and their legs burn with ache and there are still way, way too many things to still be done. The war is not yet over. The battle is not yet won.
And Sheik is wearing a dress in which you can’t tell if he’s in a battle stance or not, and Link is referred to as hero, and not heroine, which would be slightly less inappropriate, and not hero (gender neutral), which would be tacky but fairly accurate, but what the hell? When Link reaches out, she calls the name ‘Sheik’, and when Sheik looks back with wide eyes, he grabs that hand and holds onto it like there is no tomorrow. And there might not be. But the possibility that the sun will rise in the morning is still there, so they both hold onto that, as well.
And there is no telling what will happen to either of them, what they’ll wear and what they’ll be referred to as. There is no telling which one of them gets to be the girl, which one gets to be a child, or which one gets to not worry about a critter jumping out of the bush and biting them in the ass.
Neither of them know what hell or heaven is, and they’ve only ever come close to the former, but the latter is a thing neither of them would ever desire. Because sometimes, a sword fucks with your perception of time, and sometimes you get to be a boy for seven years. And on times like those, battles don’t really end when the war is over. Battles keep happening, and things still explode. And you kind of disregard all of that, because when you reach out, you call a name you know, and when you are called by the name you chose, you hold on for dear life. Battles never really end, but some would argue that getting out of bed is a battle, and when you’re sixteen and held blood coated knives before, you laugh at that kind of notion, but when you’re seventeen and those knives are in your nightmares, you think the people who argue such things are the wisest and have the most courage to say it.
And so, Sheik is wearing a dress, and he is once more the holy girl, and he has to bear that the same way he beared ends of large spears thrown his way. But he doesn’t care about any of that, because Sheik is the name Link calls for, and he knows she will call him that until that’s the letters that are carved into his grave.
And so, Link is the hero, and he is once more the fairy boy, and he has to silently not clarify that because clarifying may be even more tiring than fighting monsters. But she doesn’t care about that, because Sheik’s grip is really, really tight, and she knows he’ll call her hero (gender neutral) no matter how tacky that is.
Neither of them said ‘I love you’, but both of them called each other ‘friend’ in conversations that did not involve the other. And Sheik thinks he might just start taking Link clothes shopping, because she’s never worn anything but those stupid tunics, and she’s really missing out, so Sheik really needs to survive this. And Link thinks she almost got the perfect idea for Sheik’s name in sign, one that will mean more than ‘ninja boy’ or just fingerspelling, so she really doesn’t want to die.
Zelda never yells at Link, except for when he’s in grave danger or she’s in the middle of a very one sided but nonetheless heated argument, or when it’s funny to do. Link never yells at Zelda. He just puts mud in her shoes.
“Did you at least check there’s no shit in it this time?” she sighs as she stubbornly trudges in her soggy, wet, pathetic boots up the hill where Link supposedly saw a magnificently bountiful apple tree.
Link shrugs, and Zelda doesn’t know if it’s worse to interpret it as a non-answer or an actual response to her question, so she doesn’t interpret it at all.
He takes out a pair of closed pies and passes one to her.
“Thank you,” she says, because that’s what you’re supposed to say after someone gives you food.
You’re supposed to say I love you after kisses.
You’re supposed to hold on like there’s no tomorrow when a hand is reached out.
And if you die, you’re not supposed to die at all, because dying right now would be a rather large shame. It won’t fit in your pocket, and where are you going to put it then?
Zelda loudly chews on her pie not to fill up the silence of their walk, but to augment the melody of the chirping birds and the universe’s chopped off hands rotting on the floor, unable to give any more thumbs up. Or thumbs down, for that matter.
Link is walking first, while Zelda’s sloppy shoes trail behind, and they both squint a bit because it’s a cold, six a.m. morning, and no matter how much she pulls the sleeves of her sweater to cover her hands, she still needs to hold the pie she’s eating between her fingers, which are nibbled at by the air’s frost. She stares at the back of Link’s head with a boredom of a high schooler skipping history.
She never really tells Link she loves him, and Link rarely has anything to say back, but all the stable girls think they’re siblings and all the stable boys think they’re dating, so there must be some sort of gesture when Zelda starts the fire and Link gets to chopping vegetables.
Link hands Zelda hot milk when she’s sick, and she hands him fairies when he throws up blood. Zelda watches the stars with Link when he can’t sleep, and he presses ice to her head when a Lynel hits her too hard. And when they die, they don’t, because they don’t like it, at all.
Link stops atop the tall grass reaching to his waist. Zelda catches up grumpily, but catches up nonetheless, and when she ascends the view that meets her is magnificent. The entire country is on the palm of her hand, mountains and fields and trees and bushes and mud and dirt and muck. Snow somewhere, sand there, way too many grasshoppers here. One of them jumps right at her, landing on her boot. She stares at him for a bit. She stares back at the entire universe.
“Uh, so where’s the tree?”
‘Must be on a different hill. Oops.’
Zelda punches Link in the shoulder so hard he loses balance and sways.