Chapter Text
In the interest of being completely honest, Link had seen the crowd gathered in front of Cece’s shop and ducked off the road immediately.
The residents of Hateno were long since used to him by now. If anyone was watching him take shortcuts between the houses, stride across the dock, and walk straight up to a tree and scale it without hesitation, it was nothing they hadn’t seen before. If they could even see him when he hopped over and swung up onto a rooftop, he doubted they’d question him about it.
He stood motionless for a moment on a rooftop, hair billowing in the warm evening wind. The air carried smells laced with memories, bright and fierce. Farmland and pumpkin and chimneysmoke, thatch and river and stone.
From his perch, he caught a glimpse of the hillside on the way to Firly Pond. Fireflies floated about in the dusk of twilight, glimmering green, blinking out the way stars do before dawn.
Longing and regret tried to punch him in the stomach again. He tried not to think about it.
There were perks to having been the Hero of Hyrule. He could count on one hand—his one hand—how many people seemed to mind him leaping across their roofs. (He liked to think he was decent at reading people, too. Having someone who fought the Calamity on their roof apparently was fine with them.)
He jumped neatly, used his paraglider when needed, and landed on light feet when he could. It wasn’t long before he leapt down to the path and crossed the bridge, forcing his chest to rise and fall as if nothing was wrong.
The house stood there, draped in the shadows of oncoming night, but picturesque as ever. There were apples to be harvested on the tree. The drapes were still half-open, and nothing was lit inside.
Hopefully the food hadn’t gone bad. He’d just bought butter and carrots before they’d left.
Link swallowed and felt it in his ears.
He reached the door and unlatched it. It creaked open to announce his presence—a simple security measure Zelda had asked him to leave. If an intruder entered, they couldn’t do so quietly.
The room seemed to open up around him as he stepped inside. Blue shadows bathed the many pictures on the walls—trees, homes, flowers, animals. Even in the near-darkness, everything seemed exactly how Zelda had left it. Tidy, but well-used, every available space with its purpose.
I’m home, his throat held the air to call up toward the loft.
The loft, of course, was empty. The house had been closed up for long enough that the air in it was stifling.
Link let out that breath and closed his eyes so tightly he saw stars.
—
The butter was spoiled.
How long had it been? Since they’d left for those tunnels; since he’d seen her? (Since he'd failed to catch her?) Long enough for people to worry, for food to go bad. For the entire town to be decorated with giant mushrooms for some reason.
He’d definitely have to go talk to the people in the village tomorrow.
With every item of rotting food he put in the bin for compost, with every cold candle he lit, with every glance at the chilling emptiness of the loft and her desk—his mind brought him another thing for his to-do list. Harvest the apples. Check the leak in the woodshed. Buy ingredients. Make sure her research is staying dry in the well.
...Good grief, he hadn’t been to the school yet. He would need to find Symin first thing in the morning. He would need to figure out what to tell the kids.
His head swam with lists of responsibilities, and he rubbed his brow, tempted to forgo doing any of them in favor of going back out there to search.
By the time his eyelids dragged down and his mind stopped letting him focus, it was well past midnight. The fireflies had returned to their hiding places. The frogs had gone to bed.
He set his half-finished pumpkin soup on the counter, appetite very starkly gone.
When he climbed the stairs to the loft and looked across the little room, he half expected to see Zelda sitting on the floor there, using the bedside lamp to see as she jotted down the events of today in her journal.
The room was empty of life or princesses or the color gold, and it all felt like such a bad dream.
—
His eyes burned from being open for so long, but his mind refused to sleep. His entire body refused to sleep. He could feel everything acutely—a lump he'd pushed in the bedsheets from tossing, the blanket that was too warm to have on but not warm enough to to have off, the coolish night breeze from the open window. His grafted arm ached. When he lay still like this, he could swear he could feel the residual gloom sifting in his veins.
He flipped to his other side to face the window and the wall. He still slept almost pressed up against it—out of a choice made from too many flights of paranoia imagining a Yiga creeping through the window when Zelda slept closest to it, and now, out of habit.
They had finally, finally gotten past the stage of needing to be so close to each other to sleep—him taking the cot under the stairs hadn’t cut it when Zelda woke suddenly from nightmares of him dying in her arms in the rain, and he couldn’t sleep for fear he’d miss a noise of something coming to harm her, or her nightmares making her cry out again.
Setting the cot at the top of the stairs had almost worked. For about a week. But it was in the way, and her nightmares and his sleeplessness barely lessened. He’d sat with her to lend a comforting shoulder once. They’d fallen into an exhausted sleep, only waking ten hours later in a tangled mess of limbs and hair and beating hearts and slow, steady breathing.
They gave up after that. The cot was still in the back of the woodshed somewhere.
Neither of them had had nightmares, as far as he was aware—and he was pretty aware—for over a year now. (Barring every night since the tunnels, at least.) They still hadn’t talked about changing the arrangement.
Link clenched his jaw and shoved an arm over his eyes, turning onto his back again. Rauru’s arm was heavy, however, and often subject to Link forgetting how uncomfortable some things were with it—the golden rings and braceleting Link still wasn’t sure he should ever remove dug into his forehead. With a silent but heavy sigh, he pushed the arm up over the top of his head to lay it on the pillow.
He stared out the open window for a while, body too alert for sleep and mind too tired for thoughts. Somewhere above the roof, the moon was half-full, and the light of it washed the thin clouds pale.
He wasn’t sure how long it’d been when a dark line crept across the sky.
Link squinted, frustrated when his vision blurred, and blinked until he could see it better. It was a dragon—the ribbonlike silhouette was unmistakable, small from here, but so high up it had to be huge. It undulated in slow motion, highlighted by the wisps of silver clouds around it.
It had to be the Light Dragon. None of the others had a circuit like it did—flying a slow loop of the entire kingdom, so high up it seemed unreachable.
Not wholly unreachable, though. Some of the sky islands were higher.
—
Link lay there restlessly for ten more minutes until he gave up once again.
—
When his feet touched down on silvery-white scales, Link had to drop to a stumbling crouch to keep his balance on the creature's back. Ris—ing. Fall—ing. The dragons were always weaving through the air like thread through a tapestry of sky.
The movement was slower than any living thing Link had ever met. It was as if time slowed for dragons—or perhaps, the rest of the world moved faster than them.
Maybe it did.
They were somewhere above the east coast of Hyrule, so far above the ground Link could barely make out washes of moonlight suggesting the features of the surface. Vast forests looked like tiny patches of moss. Villages looked like odd clusters of pebbles. Rivers looked like blue nightshade roots. (Much like rivers, those glinted dim blue in the dark.) Away to the east, the ocean stretched out like a vast, dark blanket.
Ris—ING.
Beneath his feet, Link felt the strange shift of scales expanding. A faint rush of air.
FALL—ing.
Whether dragons needed to breathe was probably a subject he could get Purah and Josha discussing for an hour. They would go over every known detail about the creatures at great length, before ultimately turning to him and asking him to check it out. He would, of course—first because they were his friends, second because they were both dear to Zelda, third because he really did like doing these wild things to gather information for people. It was fun, much of the time. Now, it was a nice distraction.
Link placed one hand on a huge blue spike jutting from the dragon’s back, using it to keep his balance as he walked carefully by. He’d landed halfway down its long back, in a spot where he could see its feet rising and stretching, enormous claws seeming to grip the air and push forward to climb through it.
Every step on the Light Dragon felt... odd. Warm, but cool in a way, like a damp rag on inflamed skin. He always felt better up here. Even the twinge of wrongness in his arm and his lack-of-sleep headache’s throbbing dulled to where he didn’t notice either unless he felt for it.
Eventually he reached the massive golden mane. Two antler-horns jutted up in branches, each tine taller than he was (not an unusual trait for something to have, admittedly), as crystal-blue as the gemlike ridges on its back.The Master Sword stood stuck in the dragon's forehead, ominous as ever. There was no sign of whether the blade was truly embedded in the dragon's head or if it was only wrapped in the fur that vined up around it. The thin blue and gold aura trailing from the blade wafted above them both, mixing overhead with the stars.
The dragon's roar and thrashing still echoed in his head from the last time he'd tried to remove it. The pain evident in the sound had shaken him even more than being thrown off.
Link held his breath and walked as carefully as possible onto the bridge of the dragon’s nose. He knelt down and looked over the edge, into one of its eyes.
Even in the dark, the Light Dragon’s eyes looked unearthly. They seemed to glow with or without moonlight, all jewel-toned blues and greens and purples trimmed with lashes of gold.
Tonight, as always, they stared emptily out into the vast expanse of sky.
"Hey," Link said, louder and more awkwardly than he liked. "I'm here."
He waited for a moment, watching with a knot in his throat to see if the dragon might so much as blink. After a minute that stretched into two or five—he was tired, his mind blurred when he held still like this—ivory eyelids slid down to cover the strange irises from view.
They closed, and after a long moment, began to open again. It took a good half a minute for the whole process to complete.
At no point did the eye ever so much as flicker toward Link.
Not surprised—but so, so bone-deeply weary—Link gave up his post on the dragon’s snout. With a sucked-in breath that threatened to hitch, he stood and straightened his back for a moment, then returned to the broad space on its forehead.
He crouched, then sat, and before he was really aware of it, he was lying on his back near the spot where the sword was embedded. His head was cushioned in the thick tresses of gold that flared out like a Lynel mane.
Except not like a Lynel mane. Lynels never looked so... immaculate.
The Light Dragon's head moved under him, its course never changing. Ris—ing. Fall—ing. In—and—slow—ly—out. His head bobbed very gradually with the motion.
Link turned his face and buried it in the golden hair. It smelled fresh and clean and light and yet very, very ancient. Like untouched caverns beneath the earth, or the sun-baked stone of the ruins in the sky. Like the ocean and the snow in Hebra that never melted. Old. Inhuman.
Like the faintest scent of something floral, if he closed his eyes so tight his head swam and he focused hard enough.
“Please...” he finally managed to whisper, his voice low and rough after days of very little use. With his face already and half-buried in gold, he turned onto his side, weaving his good hand through the thick strands of hair to anchor himself.
There was definitely a scent of flowers. He wished there wasn’t. It made his stomach knot up and his head pound.
Somehow, he forced more words from his dry throat.
“...Please tell me you didn’t... do... what I think you might've.”
He didn’t notice how his tear ducts burned until his throat had a lump in it to go with. He opened his mouth again, and a pitiful huff of breath reentered his lungs.
The sky overhead was a deep dark blue, studded with stars.
All he could see was the blue of clear water, a puddle glinting with ripples as it gathered itself and rewound.
To swallow a secret stone is to become an immortal dragon, the strange Zonai’s voice rang out as clear as a bell. To become an immortal dragon is to lose oneself.
His cheeks were damp and cold in the skyward wind. When had he started crying?
If he’d let tears escape while he was this tired anywhere else—which he had, more than once—he would wake the next morning with a headache like a Lynel crusher in his skull. Here, touching the Light Dragon and absorbing some of its healing power, all he felt was a cool numbness easing the pain behind his eyes.
The dragon didn’t respond. It wove forward, head rising just a bit, then bobbing down the same amount.
A cycle that never stops. All the dragons seemed to be stuck in their flight patterns that way.
The princess and hero seemed to be stuck existing that way. Life, and loss. Over and over again.
“...Zelda,” he croaked. His voice failed him after that.
How long could he hold onto hope that she wasn’t here? That somehow, this wasn’t her?
With every impossibly long, silent breath, the dragon’s nostrils let out a faint puff of steam. Clouds of it wafted upward and over his head, periodically joining the glow from the sword in casting veils of thin linen over the myriad stars.
I can’t sleep, he said in his head, because dragons didn’t seem to hear words, so maybe they heard things said in spirit. The warmth of the fur and the coolness of the night air radiated around him, a blanket and a breeze. His head grew heavy, his mind slow as their pace through the stars. I... can’t. Not without...
The gentle flow of movement lulled his body beyond what his will could withstand.
Surely he couldn't sleep. Not soundly, not again, not until they were back in the too-small space in his loft so tangled with each other they could hear one another’s heartbeats and the rhythms of their breathing, slow and even.
Beneath him, beneath the stars, the Light Dragon climbed onward. Always moving. Never stopping. Traversing time the long way, the only way most people could.
Round and round, longing and regret circled him, uncertainties and fears biting one another's tails and refusing to let go.
Sleep overtook him with almost as much strength.