Work Text:
He wraps the harness around his waist. “Are you sure this is going to work?” He stares at the Sheikah scientist with blue eyes full of suspicion.
“Quick release,” says Purah in answer, taking his hand and placing it on the mechanism. “Squeeze twice. Can’t be too weak about it, or it won’t take. Make sure your feet are on the platform… yep. Good.”
“Doesn’t really answer my question.”
“Only one way to find out,” says Purah as her fist smashes into the activation button.
They’re on horseback, racing down a gentle slope, the wind rushing through their hair. The floppy green hat flies off his head, and he doubles back to go pick it up. She’s laughing, and today, her smile is reaching her eyes, and it makes his heart sing.
She turns back and trots up to him. “Where did you even find that thing?” she asks.
“Down in the depths,” he says. “One of the old Zonai mines.”
“It looks like a lumpy windsock.”
“Your face looks like a lumpy windsock.”
She giggle-snorts and hops down from her horse. She takes the hat from him and places it snug onto his head, while he watches her with his unblinking gaze. “Never took you for liking the color green.” She bites her lip in embarrassment when she notices him staring, meeting his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he says, “I’ve always had a thing for green.”
They’re running, hand in hand, footsteps crashing into the dirt, the cold rain falling around them like a million arrows of ice. She looks back over her shoulder, and there’s a blinding flash of light, and the crack of thunder follows almost instantly, and she slips, stumbling to the ground. Her hands drop and press against the muddy ground, and her head hangs low. He looks back in alarm and runs back to her, sheathing the Master Sword.
“How…” she says. “How did it come to this?”
He kneels down.
“The Divine Beasts… The Guardians… They’ve all turned against us…”
He listens, waiting, wishing he had the courage to speak, to say anything at all.
“It was Calamity Ganon. It turned them all against us.”
Her head lifts up, her eyes still focused on somewhere far past them.
“And everyone–Mipha, Urbosa, Revail, and Daruk… They’re all trapped inside those things.”
Her gaze lifts up and meets his.
“It’s all my fault!” she cries, burying her face in her hands. He wants to reach out to her and hold her.
It’s not your fault, is what he wants to say, if he only had the courage to speak.
“Our only hope for defeating Ganon is lost all because I couldn’t harness this accursed power!” He isn’t sure what is rain and what are tears, but he wishes he could wipe them away all the same, even in the downpour.
“Everything–everything I’ve done up until now… it was all for nothing.” She looks up to him again. “So I really am just a failure!”
No, you’re not, is what he wants to say, if he only had the courage to speak.
“All my friends… the entire kingdom… my father most of all… I tried, and I failed them all.”
His eyes never leave hers. His presence is the only thing he can offer.
“I’ve left them… all to die.” She looks down, and the despair is on her face, and she’s sobbing, and then she falls forward, into his arms.
He’s never held her before, and he doesn’t know what the next day will bring, the next hour, the next minute, but what he does know is that he’ll never forget this moment, and he’ll never, ever let her be alone again.
“And you really don’t remember anything?” he asks her.
“Not of my time as the Light Dragon,” she says. “The legends said that to become an immortal dragon is to lose oneself, and I suppose I really did. I remember falling, and then I remember waking up in your arms. And that’s really it.”
He nods, an irrepressible smile coming to his lips. They’ve had this conversation before, but he’ll never get tired of the way she speaks when she’s passionate about something.
It takes her a moment to realize he’s staring at her. “What is it?” she asks.
“You remember waking up in my arms.”
She flushes instantly. “Of–of course I do!” she says, smacking him in the arm. “It… it was a moment of heightened adrenaline. And there’s a significant body of scientific literature on the effects of adrenaline and memory, which is why we tend to remember significant moments of heightened negative emotion, like rejection or, in my case, falling, which as you might recall–”
He silences her with a kiss. He loves hearing her talk, but he loves this just as much.
She silences him with a withering stare. He already felt nervous around her, but he thought that they could get closer, now that the King had named her his protector.
“I don’t care,” she says, “that you have that sword, that my father has chosen to name you as my protector. I consider your appointment to be strictly ceremonial, and our relationship, such that it is, to be the same. When we are not attending public functions, you are to relieve yourself of my presence.”
He frowns.
“I don’t care what my father told you, you are to do as I command!”
His face sets into a hardened look of determination, stopping her rant. The contour of his lips have such a distinctive shape.
“Which is not something I care about!” she says, cheeks burning, turning away and storming off, leaving him quite confused as to what she purportedly does not care about.
“You are to do as I command!” she crows. She picks up the piece and moves it in a zig-zagging pattern across the board just before knocking over his crown. “For I am now Queen of all Eternia!”
“And that means… you win?”
“I win!” she beams.
“I still don’t understand this game,” he says. “How did you just… pull that move off?”
“Oh, it’s quite simple,” she says. She takes the pieces and resets them back several turns. “So, we start by looking at the board state. You’ve captured the crown of Eternia, but in order to do so, you’ve exposed your left flank. I’m not sure if you noticed that fact, or if you were hoping that I hadn’t, but I did design the game, Link. Leaving the crown open was a bait, and you took it. So, I moved at you with a feinting attack on your right front, causing you to respond with your skeleton troops. That was the only logical choice from your perspective, but that led to the further weakening of your left position, which served as an effective strategic checkmate, with the final crown take coming in three moves.”
He nods. “That all makes sense–” It didn’t. “–but how did you get me to want to take the crown in the first place?"
“Oh, it’s quite simple,” she says, resetting the board state further, and taking him through all of her strategic insights and tactical maneuvers. He only follows about half of it, but it doesn’t matter to him because she’s so animated. He spends the rest of the night asking more and more questions about the game and her strategy, and when she finally realizes what he’s doing, she tackles him to the floor and pulls her shirt off right there in front of the fireplace.
He’s quite glad for the rug.
“I miss research,” she says.
He doesn’t say anything. He’s still not sure when she wants him to respond and when she wants him to be silent, but it’s usually the latter, so it’s a safe default.
Besides, he’s certainly not going to stop her if she feels comfortable with confiding in him.
“Father thinks it’s a waste of time. A distraction. I’ve tried to impress on him the importance of the research into the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, but he… he just doesn’t understand. Or maybe he thinks I’m not good enough to aid the Sheikah. It’s so terribly frustrating. If my mother–” She stops herself. He still remains silent, even though the silence is unbearable, and he can’t think of anything to say to break it.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” she asks, barely loud enough for him to hear.
The question startles him, and before he can answer her, she turns away and walks off. “Forget I said anything,” she says.
“Wait!” he rushes forward and snatches her hand to stop her. She spins on the spot, ripping her hand from his and glaring furiously at him for the touch.
“How dare you–”
“We’re spending days on the road to get to the shrine,” he starts before he loses the courage to continue, “and it’s just the two of us, so there isn’t any reason you can’t take some time to do research.”
“Research on what? My work is here, Link, with the Guardians and the Sheikah tech.”
“Not everything you do has to be about Calamity,” he says, the words coming easier as his suppressed irritation begins to seep through. “You’ll just wear yourself out.”
“And I repeat, research on what?”
“You like flowers,” he says.
“And what makes you say that?” she snaps, even though he’s right.
“Because you’re always drawing them,” he says. “I mean, when you’re not sketching the Sheikah tech, or frogs, or rocks, or… yeah.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, and so she settles for her best Princess-y ‘harumph’ and stalks off in another direction.
“I miss flying,” she says.
He looks back at her from over his shoulder. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with her notes and research spread out around her. There’s a stack of books leaning up against one of the table legs.
“So let’s go skysailing tomorrow,” he says. “I’ve got a new sail cloth I want to try on the paraglider, anyway.”
“No, not skysailing,” she says. “Flying… like when I was…” Her voice trails off, and she sets her pencil down.
“Oh,” he says. “I thought you didn’t remember anything.” He laddles up his bowl of stew and leaves hers near the pot. It’s better right away, but she’s in the middle of her work, and he knows better than to interrupt her with thoughts of ‘food’ and ‘sustenance’.
And besides, this is the first time she’s mentioned anything at all about her time in the sky. He walks over towards the table to take his seat next to her.
“I don’t,” she says. She reaches up as he walks by and takes the bowl from him with a nod of thanks. He smiles to himself and turns back to get a second bowl.
“But?”
“We know that the spell cast–Recall, as I believe it is so named in the Purah Pad–forcibly reverses the spell target through the flow of time while simultaneously isolating it from the surrounding structural temporal state.”
“Which means no memories.”
“Exactly! I should have no memories of any of my time as the Light Dragon!”
“But, you do?” he asks. He slowly sips on spoonfuls while listening to her.
“Not exactly,” she says. “Just more… feelings. Being in the rain. The wind. The sun.” She crosses her arms around her waist, staring off and out of the window. “It’s hard to explain.”
“You don’t have to.” He reaches over and touches her elbow. Her arm slacks, and she turns to him, slipping her hand into his.
He waits, watching the horizon, his back pressed up against one of her horns. He ought to be cold at this altitude, with the wind rushing against him, but all he can feel is her warmth.
“I’m going to fight Ganon today,” he says. “I know where he is now, and I’ve spent a lot of time preparing, and I’m ready.”
He gives her a moment to respond, imagining what she would say if she could speak to him. The top of the sun peeks over the horizon, and the golden warmth hits them both, and he feels her whole body shudder.
“I know this isn’t the first time I’ve fought him, but I still don’t know what I’m up against. And any battle is… well, you never know. And I just… I just wanted to feel that one more time. Just in case.” He stands up and opens up the paraglider, catching the air and launching himself up. He glides forward and down, hovering close by one of her eyes. She stares back at him, watching the way he moves side to side in the air current.
“I’ll come back to you. When this is all over,” he says. She blinks.
He snaps open the paraglider once more and lands on top of her head, right next to the Master Sword. He places his hands on the hilt and pulls.
She wakes up slowly, stretching her limbs out, and turning to snuggle further into him, only to find that he’s not there. “Link?” she asks. She sits up, holding the blanket to her body. They slept on the floor last night, too exhausted to climb up to the loft, but now she is paying for it with an awful pain in her neck, and he is nowhere to be found.
She stands up and walks to the kitchen, finding a small note next to a bowl of fruit.
It reads: I’ll be back this afternoon. She flips it over, half-expecting to find more, and finding nothing. It’s cryptic enough to leave her terribly curious, and she has to fight the urge to run out and find out what he’s up to. She loves surprises when she doesn’t know they’re coming and hates them when she does.
He groans as his eyes open. He can feel the wind rushing past him as the dragon’s jaws tighten around his body. The dragon’s breath is hot and acrid, and he fights back the rising bile in his throat at the smell. He tries to push himself out, but the dragon’s hold is firm, and he can feel the pressure on his back squeezing tight, his ribs beginning to crack.
But then he looks up.
And there she is, shooting down from the sky, as beautiful as she has ever been, flying straight towards them. The Dark Dragon roars, and he takes the moment to push himself out. He falls, tumbling through the air, but he can hear the rushing of air as she dodges out of the way of his jaws, and then she’s there. He lands in the cushion of soft blonde dragon hair, gripping tightly while she races back up into the sky.
The Dark Dragon flies past the pair and turns, facing them head on, and roars. The sound is almost painful. He pushes himself up and draws his sword.
“Together.”
She busies herself with her research, with diagrams, with a detailed write up of her Conquests of Eternia victory, with formulas and calculations involved with the Recall spell, with notes on upgrades to the Purah Pad, with potential agenda items for the next Council session, with a lesson plan for the next three weeks, and then the door opens, and she stands up, completely forgetting everything she had used to distract herself.
“Where have you been?” she asks. She tries not to sound too eager or accusatory, but his note was so secretive this morning, and she can’t help but be curious.
“Talking with Purah,” he says.
“About what?”
He smiles and hands her the paraglider. “Let me show you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says.
“It’s fun!” she says, shoving the paraglider into his hands.
“It’s insane,” he says, shoving it right back.
“No, it’s fun! And easy. It’s ancient Sheikah technology, and it’s splendid. My mother showed it to me when I was young. It’s something we’d do as a family together. My father had these black cloaks made–for traveling incognito–and we would leap off the side of Hyrule Castle and skysail down to Castle Town. It would infuriate the Castle Guard. We’ll start simple, just a small glide from a nearby hill. It’ll be perfectly safe.”
“And… you trust this thing? How does it not just rip your arms off?”
“There’s flexibility built into the design. I could share the calculations with you if you were interested. Besides, are you telling me that the Legendary Hero is too scared to try?” she says, giving him a teasing grin.
His eyes narrow. “... Bring it on, Princess.”
She races up the hill and climbs up onto a large rock, and he’s briefly worried about her balance up there on top. She pulls out her paraglider, waiting for him to climb up with him.
He climbs up after her. “Are you sure this is going to work?” he asks, staring at the paraglider with suspicion.
“Only one way to find out, ‘Hero’,” she says. And then she takes a running start and leaps off the hill. The paraglider snaps open and catches the wind, and he watches in awe as she starts sailing into the distance.
He wraps the harness around her waist. She looks at him with wild green eyes, full of excitement and trepidation, clutching her father’s paraglider in both hands. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
He smiles and kisses her cheek.
“Only one way to find out.”