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Chapter Text

It took only moments for Link to realize something was wrong with Princess Zelda.

It began as she swayed in Hyrule Field, hands clasped earnestly over her chest. Do you really remember me? 

His answer came in the hesitation, and she nodded. Once, pause, twice, short. She turned towards the castle, hands fluttering to her sides.

An interesting thing happens to the landscape in a hundred years of disuse. Kept unchecked by the tender ministrations of stomping feet and grazing animals, the fields lose their gentle grasses and clovers to mightier foes. Link had taken to wrapping his horses’ legs to protect from thistles and thorn bushes and sword grass. Benign at first sight, the blades could cut through skin.

Zelda began to walk through the thigh-high grass before Link could cry out.

By the time he lunged forward to drag her back, the princess had cuts all up and down her bare legs. She seemed utterly unconcerned as he sat her down to tend to her wounds.

He wrapped the end of the bandage securely around her ankle, and she let out an abstracted, airy laugh at nothing. He looked up into her face, but she wasn’t looking at him. She smiled dreamily at the distant ramparts, and then laughed again.

His blood chilled.

⋯

She refused food, and only took a patient little sip of water when Link insisted. He supposed that would have to do for now. Her stomach didn’t sound, and he couldn’t sense any weakness in her movements. But the skin on her knuckle tented to a fold when he pinched. Zelda didn’t react. She gazed at her hand as if it were a mildly fascinating creature.

Link had been planning to go to Hateno, but that would not happen now.

She said she would walk all the way to Kakariko. Link looked down at her sandals.

“I have a horse,” he told her. Rohan snorted and tossed his head, as if corroborating this statement. He’d taken to the princess quickly. Link wasn’t sure if that was because of his supposed bloodline, or if it was simply her.

Once again, she relented to the horse only on Link’s insistence. And so they set off. A largely silent journey.

Except.

Except when Zelda would laugh at nothing. Except when she would utter phrases aloud, and then refuse to elaborate upon his request. Except when her eyes fixed to some point in the middle distance and Link had to call her name four times to catch her gaze.

He had to coerce more water into her every time they paused to rest.

Throughout his mad dash around Hyrule, freeing ghosts from mechanical prisons and swords from the ground, Link often worried over his reunion with Zelda. While he had the broad strokes, the finer lines of his memory were missing. The shading would never fill in. She would awake from a hundred-year battle to a man who couldn’t tell her what her favorite color was. She would find only a shadow of a country and a shadow of himself.

Now, he had other worries. Were his memories so warped that she had always been like this, and he couldn’t recall it? Was this a side effect of the sealing power? Had a century of siege worn the boundaries of her mind the same way it wore his memory? Link led Rohan on and chewed on his lip, and his brain buzzed likewise, waspish and roiling.

In the evening, Link finally managed to convince Zelda to eat. She did so distractedly but voraciously, as if her hands were feeding her mouth of their own volition. He was pleased.

She soiled herself an hour later.

Link was utterly ashamed at his relief when this seemed to rouse Zelda from her trance, even just to the embarrassment she felt. He provided a change of clothes and she washed herself at the nearby river. When she returned her prayer dress was gone, and he did not ask about it.

Zelda sat at the fire to dry her hair, cheeks flushed and eyes rimmed in red.

“It’s okay,” Link said, sitting beside her. He longed to place a hand on her arm but didn't know how. “The first time I ate, I threw up. And the second time. And the third, too.”

She looked at him and her gaze was clear and focused. “Link.” It was as if she was seeing him for the first time since Hyrule Field. “It’s you.”

“Yeah,” Link replied, in place of any better answer. “It’s me.”

Her eyes darted over his face, almost feverish. There was a worried crease in her brow. “Link,” she said again in naked relief, and his knees nearly buckled. “Where… where am I?”

Link explained for the better part of the night, and she nodded along the whole time, her eyes never leaving his own. He pitched the tent and she collected river water to douse the fire. They arranged their bedrolls side by side and she curled towards him as she slept. The sleeves of his shirt gathered over her hands. He felt like his chest was slowly filling with balloons.

In the morning, she woke up after him and walked to the river. When she came back, she was carrying a full conversation with the air. Link placed breakfast in her hands and she fed herself between sentences, never missing a beat.

Then Zelda laughed and said “Urbosa”, and Link’s hope shriveled into the coffin of his ribs.

⋯

Link waited outside Impa’s home while she spoke to Zelda.

As soon as she left, arm in arm with Paya (a good choice on Impa’s part, he noted: the only person in Hyrule who could hold an entirely one-sided conversation), he dashed up the stairs.

Impa had her hands folded under her chin, her forehead creased into pie dough.

“Was she always like this,” Link asked, downturned at the end.

“No,” Impa replied bluntly, giving the slightest shake of her head. “No, she was not. Something has happened to her in her fight with Calamity Ganon.” She paused to take a long sip of tea, and Link momentarily wanted to throttle her. “If I could hazard a guess, it would be that she communed with the goddess for so long, with only other spirits for company, that she forgot how to have a body again.”

Link’s lips felt numb. “She was speaking to… or she thought she was speaking to Urbosa on the way here.”

The old woman nodded again. “I do not know if she is speaking to the spirits or if she only believes she is. It is within her power, if her mother and grandmother are any guide.” She looked up at Link and read the despair on his face. “Even in the short conversation she had with me, there were moments of lucidity, Link. I think I would take her somewhere quiet. Somewhere she can learn to be a person again.”

Afterwards, Link stepped onto the porch in the quiet morning sun and fished for anything but blankness inside of him. He had been expecting nothing but to be the broken thread. He had been expecting her face to crumple with disappointment at his naivete, his blindness to their past. Not for a million rupees could he have predicted this.

Below him in the street, Zelda chattered like a bird while Paya’s eyes widened in worry.

He was not the person for this job. Had Zelda been haunted by vengeful specters or pig-like monsters, he would be firmly within his own territory. But his tongue had only recently been loosened by a century-long nap. He was no counselor, no sage.

He could give her somewhere quiet, though.

⋯

There is a house in a town tucked away behind a bridge. In front of this house is a sign. Link hammered it into the ground himself, pleased to be an object who could put his name on other objects. He put his favorite weapons on racks and stocked wood for the fireplace. Occasionally he imagined their homecoming, after.

They’d spent two days in Kakariko before setting off. Impa spent hours speaking to her every day, before passing her off to Link each night. He sat on a chair inside her room at the inn and watched her breath fill and leave. She was loath to lie down, but fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Zelda had conversed alone for two hours on horseback. Link noted that her hands steered and urged her mount on without pause, as if disconnected from her mouth. This seemed both good and bad. Good that she hadn’t forgotten. Bad that she couldn’t remember knowing.

One of the first things they had learned was that when she communed or invented or whatever it was that she did, she was lost to the queries of others. Link listened and struggled with context clues for half an hour until he realized this time, it was her mother.

His heart went plop into the acid of his chest. The horses’ hooves went clop on the bridge.

He opened his mouth as she pulled Rohan to a stop beside him but kept prattling away. He closed his mouth again, clamped down on his newfound words. Will this be forever. Are you lost to me. Is this my punishment for not saving you. Is this your punishment for not saving me. “We’re here, Zelda.”

And unexpectedly, her eyes went to his.

“Link,” she said. “What is the sword saying?”

A hundred years ago, she had asked him something similar, and his answer was silence that spoke too much.

“I told you I can’t hear it, a long time ago,” he answered her.

She slipped off Rohan’s back, smooth and naive as water, and moved towards him. She walked him up against the house and continued pressing in, until her face was flush with his shoulder, nose to the hilt of the Master Sword.

Link held and held his breath.

Zelda hummed. “I see.” She didn’t elaborate, but turned to the east, and then turned back so suddenly her hair whipped his face. “Is this your house? Let’s go in and see!” Her face was every inch alive and seventeen.

By the evening, she had drifted back to the world that he was not privy to, but as he tucked her under the blankets in his bed, he seared the memory of her face in his memory.

Link went downstairs and stood in the kitchen, tracking the flowers on the table. She had leaned in to smell them. Her profile burned in embers inside his head. Eyes lamplit and curious, lips quirked at the corners. Too tight in the cheeks to be sanctified. Too bright in the smile to be something holy.

⋯

The sun washed over the shingles every morning, and they settled into a routine quicker than he thought. They ate breakfast. He brought her to the bathhouse to wash. He knocked on the door once he knew the water was going cold. They went on a walk through the Midla Woods. They ate lunch. He left her at the house while he ran errands in the village. They ate dinner.

On the best days she danced in the kitchen, and they wandered around Necluda until their feet were sore. He demonstrated his newfound voice to her, and she was delighted by everything.

On the worst days he spoon-fed her broth. Her eyes blinked: one, two, three. That was her only concession to living. She was carved from marble, angelic and cold, and he didn’t know what to do.

Hero, now nursemaid. Others might resent it. Link could only worry. He purchased books for her to read, and left his remaining Guardian parts scattered conspicuously over the table. They didn’t seem to hold any sway. He wished they would. He wished he could.

The days blurred into each other. She talked to her mother and the champions in turn. He put bowls in front of her and pinched the skin over her knuckles, and he didn’t know what to do.

He prayed and cursed, alternating. He found her often with the Master Sword cradled in her hands, chatting as if to an old friend. She got cuts on her palms that he anointed and bandaged. He went so far as to ask the Sword, and the Sword’s reply still went unheard. 

Sometimes in the night he heard his name, and he was up from his pallet by the fire in an instant, pulling himself over the railing instead of taking the stairs. She sat up in bed and made eye contact, her irises reflecting cat-like in the moon. They talked there, in the checkerboard of the window, and the timber walls took on a stone-like quality. Her elegant phrases, the silent princesses pressed in her notebooks. Burning the midnight oil in her study again.

Other times, she was still fast asleep, and mumbled his name in tumbling beads. He went up like flashpaper.

Soon he was watching her dead to the world every night, her hair draped over her neck like a scarf. People in the village had seen glimpses of blond. They were starting to talk, and he didn't know what to do.

One morning she spoke to people whose names Link didn’t recognize.

They walked to the lab on top of the hill, and Purah’s face was too young to hold that much accusation. Symin was minding Zelda outside, and Link’s tongue had been unraveled at some point in the water. 

When he slumped back, emptied of words, she only tilted her head.

“I have a bit of experience with being in a body I wasn’t used to anymore,” she told him, blunt and edged. “And so do you.”

He shrugged, watching Zelda through the window. She sat on a boulder, staring into the sky. She would’ve gasped and raved over the guidance stone. It would’ve been impossible to drag her away.

“Linky,” Purah said sharply. “Look at me.”

Link did. She crossed stick arms over her chest. Her eyes were child-big and narrowed to adult slants. The three of them, one hundred and seventeen each. Six and sick and sacred, them. 

“You’ll count every good day until there are none left.”

He reared back, struck. “I’m trying to help her.”

“You’re pining for a girl you only half-remember. I know you care for her better than anyone else could.” His mind turned it over, ran the words ragged. She didn’t mean it like that. “But do you speak to her, Link, when she doesn’t speak to you? Do you even try? Do you think she’d be doing the same with you? Kid gloves and silence?”

He had expected to be the missing joint. She was the one who was supposed to be disappointed . But Link wasn’t disappointed. He wasn’t. In a wave of habit, his face wiped itself. His voice balled in his chest, limping in his throat. They traded diatribes back and forth until they both stood from their chairs.

Purah battered on, uncaring. She clenched her fists and shoved her glasses up her nose. “Yes, she’s not the same. You’re not the same either! Why did you expect her to be exactly as she was?”

There was a hammer under Link’s ribs, and it rang on the anvil of his liver. “I died of my own volition. Hylia took her. For a hundred years. If she refuses to give her back, she’s nothing but cruel.”

The child climbed on the table, as she did whenever she wanted the upper hand. “You brought her back! She’s standing in front of you now! And I know it’s not good for her to be so in her head. But you’re so greedy for her best moments you’re throwing away the rest.”

They stared at each other, breathing hard. His face wanted to form a mask, but he forced himself to break it. “Then what do I do?”

“Link, can’t you see? Better to live in her own world than in this one alone.”

Later, Zelda sat at the kitchen table and smiled down at her hands. Link sat across from her. He ran through all of the moments in the past few weeks, the ones where she’d seemed most like herself. The glow of her face, the dimples in her cheeks. Present and grounded and undoubtedly there.

But just in the corners, a touch of strain. An artificiality to the earthiness. A girl too naive for the things she had seen. Maybe it was just another pretending. 

Another communing with the spirit of him.

“Maybe I was desperate,” he said, even as her eyes didn’t lift. “Maybe Purah’s right. I just wanted to have you back so badly. But I’m not trying to mourn you while you’re right here.”

He looked at the table, eyes tracing knife marks. “In the memories, you just seemed so sure. Even when others doubted you and you doubted yourself, you still had that iron inside. Courage, wisdom, right? I’m an arm for the sword, you’re a heart for your mind. But I guess that’s not fair.”

“I just feel like you’re still stuck in the castle. But maybe for now that’s all you can do. You woke up like me, in this Hyrule where everyone died. But at least I didn’t remember that. Maybe it’s a bit easier that way, going slowly. I can understand. The way I didn’t go after the Lynel on the Great Plateau, even though it had a really nice bow. I guess not like that, that sounds a bit stupid. I don’t know. You knew what you were doing, going to Ganon to swallow him whole. I have to trust that you’re on your way back.”

When he glanced up, Zelda’s eyes were on him. She wasn’t smiling and she didn’t reply. Her voice didn’t bubble like champagne in the air. But she listened and unfolded her hands. They pressed flat on the wood of the table, palms up.

Link smiled at her. Her fingers twitched.

⋯

He approached it like he would track a deer through the forest. Persistent, never aggressive. He’d found and freed her once. He could do it again.

When he’d woken from a century of water and soft blue light, he spoke only because he’d forgotten he wasn’t supposed to. Even still, the muscle memory clenched at his throat, clipping his sentences to short, practical things, or elsewise running his train of thought off nonsensical cliffs.

Now he sorely missed that practice. He set bowls before her and tried to tell her stories of his journey. They walked through the Midla Woods and he pointed out the landmarks on the horizon. His tongue tripped over itself and spilled into tangents. Link feared that even if she was listening, it would all be incomprehensible. But once in a while, as soon as he became immersed in his own storytelling, he looked over to see her gaze set towards him. Head tilted, forehead creased in question. Sometimes even a touch of a smile.

She trailed behind him as he did his shopping in the village. He handed her apples and she stared at them in her hands. At first, the townspeople glanced from the corners of their eyes, but it only took a week before they greeted Zelda like anyone else, even as she conversed with the dirt.

During those moments Zelda came to life and brought him back in time, he didn’t hold on too tight. He craved the sparkle in her eyes, but over the days and nights, he started to come to miss her patient observation. The best times were when she just watched him and listened. Not holding herself back, but sinking into the world like a pond, toe by toe.

He had never known how to apply only half of himself to a problem, and soon he was going to bed hoarse every night. He had to hold himself back from sharing every little observation with the shopkeepers in Hateno. He cracked the spines of the books he had bought and read to her as she ate dinner.

The hardest moments to bear were her conversations with spirits. After some unsuccessful attempts at distraction, Link settled on a relatively simple process. He did the mental calculus of who the spirit was as fast as possible, and then inserted himself into the conversation. Often, she just talked over him, but sometimes he said something surprising enough that she jerked back and met his eyes.

This, of course, came with the issue of having to speak to people long dead. Link’s voice only failed once, as Zelda happily chatted to Mipha. He sat alone under the apple tree that night, listening to the wind ruffle against Firly Pond. The second time, he felt the lump, but it didn’t break.

As Link interjected more and more, she rose from her trance sooner and sooner, and her lips parted as she turned to him.

The moon eased through its phases, and at some point, she began replying.

⋯

The thing about time is that looking back, it passes in furloughs. But as it creeps through the body and across the sun and sky, it washes at change like a stream picks at its banks. Soon, a gorge. For now, only a trickle.

Their routine settled into a groove, like a wagon track carved in the road. Every morning she did her share of communing, and either included him by facing him or asked for privacy by facing away. In the afternoon she followed him as he ran errands and fixed up the house. She handed him ingredients as he cooked. She called for him less in the night.

Time pressed the stones into canyons, and the days dripped like hammers.

And so Link looked up one morning and Zelda stood before him, right there.

⋯

“I watched over you on your journey,” she said, staring into Firly Pond. That morning she had spoken to her father, and her eyes were still red. Link hadn’t realized it was possible to argue from the grave.

He paused from where he was tinkering with the water pump. “You told me, right after we defeated Ganon.”

“I… stop talking to me,” she said angrily, looking up at the treetops. “You had enough of my time. I want,” she breathed. Closed her eyes. “I want this now.”

Link froze his body in place, and waited.

“They’re,” she paused, shaking her head, “greedy, is what they are. They’re lonely. They want someone to speak to, and they’ll claw at you to do it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I was just happy for the company, back in the castle. But this… this is different.”

She tilted her face towards the sky. “I saw your worry. Every time you remembered something, the fear you wouldn’t get anything else. I don’t think I realized it before. But now I feel it. That fear, that every conversation will be my last. I’ll look up and they’ll have dragged me into the spirit realm. But they’re so lonely, and I miss them.”

“That’s okay,” Link said. “That’s what I learned, eventually. That the memories won’t stop, it’s up to me to find them. So you’ll stay here, too. I know it.”

Zelda ran a hand through the pond water. “All the stories you tell me, about your travels, the places you’ve been. I recognize them, from watching over you. It’s a different perspective, to hear about them from your eyes. And I want to see them too, with my own eyes. I want to see everything.”

Link couldn’t stop himself. He grabbed her hand, wet and suntanned. She’d been so pale as she floated down from the sky, and now her nails were edged in mud. Her hair caught the breeze, too spun-gold to be natural, but she batted away the strands that floated in her face. Her eyes shone unworldly green but crinkled at the corners. Neither angelic nor earthy, just right there.

“Let’s do it,” he said, and her smile broke wide, sharp as sword grass.

Chapter Text

The second time was easier and harder too.

They sat beside the still-rippling pond, hair dripping on the grass. Her chest heaved in the memory of breathing, her lungs stolen by the fall. She blinked and looked around herself with eyes shot through by marble luminosity. She grinned, wide and fearfully bright, baring all her teeth.

That was the first thing he saw the change in. Her smile, once half a laugh every time, now teetered towards a snarl. Ancient and animalistic, hinting at memories of snapping at aerocuda and keese.

This time she spoke to him and followed conversations. This was welcome. In his second mad dash around Hyrule, Link had worried and worried and worried. He was confident she wasn’t dead. He saw her in strange clothing, in visions and on mountains and abutting castle ramparts. The Yiga played a mean trick and he ate them from the inside out. Ganon played a mean trick and he slaughtered him for it. All in a day’s work.

Sometimes he wondered if her dissolution into gold hadn’t been some gently arcane magic and instead reduced her body to glitter, flinging only her soul into the past. He did not think about this often.

Instead he worried. When he brought her back, would it be the same as last time? Was this once again communion, but for millenia instead of a mere century? Would her time in history turn the present to ashes on her tongue?

When he learned about the secret stone, he dragged himself to the cliffs at the edge of Tabantha and stood there for an age.

And so there it was: the luckiness of having a last time and this time. He was too grateful to be very resentful about the repetition. At least it had been the work of Sonia and Rauru this time. If he’d had to add yet another footnote to his prayers to Hylia he would’ve been cross for sure.

He was a little cross as it was.

On the first night, he pulled some leftover pumpkin stew from his pack, and she only looked suspiciously into her bowl.

“Are you not hungry?” he asked, and she sunk her chin onto her hand.

“Not for… this.”

A heron later met an unfortunate end.

Link had always wondered what the dragons ate, anyway. They seemed to subsist on air and sunlight alone. Zelda informed him this was only half-false, and that they were simply energy efficient. Though she didn’t know if it was true for all of them: they tended to avoid each other for fear of being knocked out of the sky by another’s jetstream.

“A rather embarrassing thing for a dragon, as you can imagine,” she mused, sucking a bone clean. Tossing it with the others in the fire, her hands automatically curled into claws, held at her sides like a lizalfos. In the coming months, he’d point it out to tease.

If Link had been the reflecting type, he would have reflected that this time, in many ways, seemed the opposite of the last. Zelda’s mind seemed mercifully intact, as ready to read and ponder and tinker as ever. Her hand wandered too close to the campfire and she flinched, causing Link undue relief. No, the change this time was in the grace of her body, honed to perfect muscle memory. The way she led her movements with her nose, relying on a sense of smell no longer there. Her arms curled in, fingers loose and drifting.

And the whole walking issue.

Soaking wet in the field, he’d stood to offer her his hand, and was momentarily distracted by the presence, or lack thereof, of his right arm. No longer dark gray skin ringed with gold: in fact, from the elbow down, there was nothing at all. A distraction that blinded him from Zelda heaving herself to her feet, taking a wobbling step, and immediately falling forward.

She smashed into his chest and sent them both toppling backwards into the water.

So as they exited the pond for the second time, their clothes fully drenched again, Link carried Zelda piggyback across the grass, and they agreed to make camp for the night until they figured out what to do.

Cue the next morning.

“This is fully humiliating,” Zelda complained as her leg jerked into another step. Link raised her hands a little higher so she could see her feet and glanced behind him for obstacles. Her left-hand fingers gripped his white. Her right-hand fingers curled a little too gingerly around the rounded end of his arm. It made their weight lopsided.

He grimaced, knowing any reassurance would only make her feel worse. “We’re nearly to the road, and then I can build us a cart that’ll take us at least to the nearest stable,” he said, gesturing to the string of batteries on his hip. He’d checked that morning, quickly and discreetly, that he still had access to Sonia and Rauru’s powers. It was a little odd that he still did, given that he now lacked the requisite arm, but they seemed a part of him now. Maybe the couple thought it would soften the sting.

Zelda’s heel slammed into the dirt with too much force and they both winced. “Let’s please have a rest,” she said, and they both gratefully sunk to the ground.

She turned her face upwards, constantly seeking the sun, the air. Her breaths were a little too heavy for the exertion. “You know what occurred to me, just now?”

He tilted his head in question.

Heaving her ungainly shins into an elegant seated position, she raised her chin primly. “If it turns out there’s a third incarnation of Ganon hiding out there somewhere, I might just go find Hylia and beat her up.”

Link blinked. For all the vitriol the princess had aimed at herself for failing the goddess, scattered throughout their many, many past lives, he’d certainly never heard a threat of godly violence from her lips.

All in jest, of course. But a tiny flare there too, of rebellion, of spite. Maybe even a hint of ego. Equality.

Naydra’s shards of sparkling ice. Dinraal’s billowing flames. Farosh’ crackling strands of light flashing luminescent in Zelda’s eyes. Power and pride were all the creatures had.

Had to spend ten thousand years as an all-powerful being, he thought, to gain some self-esteem.

His next words were a first for him too. A jest, a fist. “I’ll hold her down for you.”

Their laughter made shapes in the air.

⋯

Link was now the proud owner of two houses. Well, one and a half. Well.

More like one.

After shaking off the mob that immediately engulfed her once she took her first wobbling steps into Hateno, Zelda frowned. “Why are they all acting like you don’t live here?”

Purah had once said something similar, one of the times she had come up to the research lab. He hadn’t known how to articulate the answer then, and he certainly hadn’t figured it out by now. He knew when he dug out the signpost in front of the house, all those months ago, that there had been a shift. How no one else had managed to notice was the real mystery.

He would’ve put it at the moment she rode into town, except even he was not so generous as to believe Zelda was in her best state then. He couldn’t put it at the morning Zelda introduced herself to Senna, who was too polite to mention they had met about a dozen times before. But the next morning when she remembered the introduction for the first time, the morning sun caught on her hair and turned it into corn silk streaming from the husk, and her eyes were green like the inverse of a sunset, and her cheeks glowed as if stained by the ripest wildberry plucked fresh from the dewy fields.

And then the next morning she remembered meeting Manny, and her laugh was like the shimmer Link had heard when he stuck his head under the water at the Spring of Wisdom. In the afternoon she continued yesterday’s conversation with Nikki and Amira, and her hands sketched gestures like swans and bomb flowers in the air, fingertips dipping like milk.

And then there was Medda, crouching at his garden as he watched Aster play, his brow wrinkled in worry as he confessed how worried he was about her education, now that her mother was gone. Zelda came back the next day with rolls and rolls of drafting paper in her arms and announced she was building a school.

No, Link didn’t understand how no one else had managed to notice.

Maybe one of the villagers had wondered to themselves: wasn’t the swordsman standing behind the princess so chatty just a few months ago, back when the princess was still acting strange? But, perhaps contrary to others’ assumptions, Link did not need to clamp his tongue behind his teeth these days. He was too busy following the sun in its wake.

Regardless, he couldn’t tell Zelda that as she walked unsteadily across the Firly Pond bridge, clutching a branch Link had carved into a makeshift cane. He’d find a better substitute in the forest soon. Zelda over-rotated her hip and grimaced.

“Well, you were the one who went missing. I also had Bolson build a house in Tarrey Town, so I haven’t been around as much lately,” he said instead, absentmindedly, as he adjusted his grip on her arm. Her head whipped towards him with unerring, reptilian precision and he internally groaned. Truth be told, he was out of practice with talking.

“Oh,” she said, short, and her eyes drooped at the corners, a little pathetically. “I suppose that makes sense. It’s quieter. Good hunting. And Hylia knows I have books on every surface at… at home. And the well. Goodness.” Her eyes flicked to the side and back and to the side again. “It makes sense.”

Nearly choking with haste, Link cleared the brambles from his tongue. “I built you a study in the new house.”

Her eyes snapped front, alligator-like. So green it was a little unsettling now. Her mouth dropped open slightly. She blinked. “Oh.”

Zelda’s cane tapped on the wood of the bridge and then thumped, muffled, against the dirt.

“Well,” she said, placing a hand on her hip, “I’ve kind of always wanted a vacation home.”

⋯

After a few weeks, Zelda began to grow fatigued.

“I hate to say it, but it’s definitely your diet,” Purah said, neatly perching her goggles back atop her head. Link still had no idea what those things were actually for. “Textbook symptoms of scurvy. Have you touched a vegetable since you came back?”

Zelda rested her head against her own shoulder. There were little thumbprints of bruises on her shins and arms. They made Link sick to his stomach. “I’ve tried, but they’re just so… unappetizing.”

“Believe me, I am aware. I was six years old,” she replied. “But you could get extremely sick if you don’t start eating more variety. You’re telling me our master chef here can’t make anything that might tempt you?”

The chef in question glanced sidelong at Zelda. Three days into their residency at Hateno, she had come down from the loft for breakfast, her feet thumping unevenly on the stairs, and she heaved herself into her chair with unusual vigor. Link had glanced at her then too, and her forehead was pressed into two firm lines.

He made the mistake of asking what was wrong.

“Three days we’ve been here,” she began, “three days since I came back and you lost your entire forearm, and yet you’ve carried on as if nothing has changed at all.” Her cheeks heated to a lustrous red and her eyes veritably sparkled. It would’ve been a gorgeous sight if not for the spittle flying from her lips.

“I’ve waited for you to ask for help, out of respect for your independence, and yet you have not, even if it takes you three times as long to complete a task as it should, and I know very well that we are on the last haunch of the deer you have in the cellar but I have no idea how you expect to hunt once it’s gone, and you know what? Ludicrously, I am starting to feel bad about not offering help, even though I was specifically waiting,” she knocked emphasis on the word, “for you to just ask first, and now I am wondering how long it would take you before you even acknowledge that anything has changed, much less, Hylia forbid, acknowledge that you needed assistance.”

Link leaned back on the counter, watching her rage with a sort of amazed curiosity. As with the majority of issues in his life, it had never occurred to him to request help. He did things and got them done. Things turned out the way they did and took the amount of time they were intended to take. He had gotten her back, and so there were no possibilities. He clutched the present with all his hands.

But as with the majority of issues in his life, it had never occurred to him that his independence would be perceived as pride or superiority. Zelda knew him too well to assume it was ego, but it seemed she was perturbed by it nonetheless.

His heart floated somewhere between an octo balloon and a chunk of flint.

And there was another change: where the Zelda of the past had been an expert into stuffing her emotions into the crevices of her throat, she now flared with quick and easy temper, proverbially snapping her jaws at the air and then retreating gracefully, satisfied.

After discussion, it was decided that Zelda would take on the cooking and hunting, and various other activities requiring two hands for efficiency (to be determined). She swept up from the table with all the pomp of royalty and draconic ease, and took his place at the cutting board. Her cheeks had cooled but were still stained like wildberries, and they almost ached to be kissed.

Link turned away.

Back in the present, he looked back at Purah. “Zelda’s been cooking, actually,” he told her, waving his shortened arm. “So she’s going to have to be a little self-motivated.”

Zelda glared at him and Purah blinked, as if surprised. It was a common reaction these days, like Link was too accomplished for his current state. It drove Zelda mad. Fortunately, she didn’t notice this time, being too busy glaring at him.

Later, Link cobbled together an absolute abomination of a Zonai machine: a bladed fan set inside a container to catch the inevitable flying drippings when one dropped a vegetable inside. He chopped a tomato, a carrot, a stambulb, and some mushrooms into an indistinct reddish mush and added it to the meat stew Zelda was simmering. She wrinkled her nose, but when it came time to eat, she took a bite and chewed thoughtfully.

“Not a bad idea,” she said eventually, and Link preened.

⋯

Zelda held the bowstring to her cheek for a heartbeat, exhaling, and it snapped forward just as the buck danced away. Thus, the arrow caught it in the neck rather than the head, and Link jumped out of the bushes to finish dispatching it with a knife.

“Good job,” he said, and she veritably beamed. Link flicked his eyes away, a little too quickly, and busied himself with bleeding the carcass. He suppressed a flinch as she came to kneel next to him.

One significant drawback to teaching Zelda to hunt: the image of her drawing the arrow back, lips pressed into a line. Hair braided back into a short tail to keep it out of her eyes, which were lustrous and sharp. It was a scene almost painful in its sheer beauty. It made Link’s instruction less helpful than it could be.

“Can I ask you something?” Zelda asked, and Link sat to face her, arranging his legs very carefully.

He nodded.

She tilted her face to catch the light filtering between the trees. Always seeking the light now. “You are still as proficient as ever in regard to swordplay and battle, not that we encounter monsters often now. But the loss of your arm has robbed you of cooking and hunting, and making improvements around the houses. And I feel as though those were some of the only things you actually liked to do.” She pursed her lips. “Do you feel the loss?”

A poor habit was the ease with which he clasped her hand with his remaining one.

“Not really,” he replied, and it was true. He’d give six arms to have her back.

She didn’t look wholly convinced, so he forged on. “I liked them as well as I like anything else. I am still satisfied. With every part of my life.”

That part wasn’t so true. Because as Zelda turned the words over in her head, the clouds shifted and that fuzzy tiara of baby hairs lit up with sunlight. Her eyebrows creased and she unconsciously bit her plush bottom lip, and the only feeling Link could summon to his chest was an utter lack of satisfaction.

He wanted to smooth her hair back to kiss the crown of her head. He wanted to kiss the crease between her brows until it disappeared. And more than anything he wanted to lean toward her and watch her lips part. He wanted expectancy, surprise. He wanted the feral smile.

Instead, he waited, breathing shallow and slow, until she nodded and stood, reaching for the cane she’d left propped in the bushes. He stood, too, heaving the deer carcass over one shoulder.

Zelda paused and turned back to watch him. Her eyes traced over his arms and skipped across his torso, a flat stone skimming over a pond. Link might have imagined the shine in her eyes. Calculating? Even predatory?

Hylia knew he could only hope so.

⋯

As gracious and flippant as he could be in the daytime, Link found himself troubled in the evening.

He carried the deer home from the Ukuku Plains and dressed it, bracing the hide against his torso as his knife slid wet and silver. Zelda came out of the house to take over the butchery, and he laid the hide along the scraping rack to prepare and bring to Granté the next morning. He moved along to the woodpile to split kindling, tracing a wide circle over his shoulder with the axe in one hand.

Shreds of wood flew across his boots.

The tree stump they used for a splitting block was crisscrossed with scars. Link’s, on the other hand, was smooth and unmarked by gloom or malice. The ghost of his hand didn’t stir or itch or burn, as he knew it could for others. Perhaps another salve from Sonia and Rauru. Another placation.

He didn’t feel the lack, truly. Regardless of Zelda’s disbelieving expression, he knew there was no other way to see it. He recognized the loss for what it was. A trade.

A sacrifice.

The sun crested and dipped into the horizon, casting the wood red and orange. Fire-like, Ganon-like. And he began to feel the lack.

An emptiness borne not from resentment or grief, but all too simply, the loss of use. The chip in the blade, unable to smooth by whetstone. Gifted as he was, he could wield any weapon left-handed. Of course Hylia would leave him his main purpose, and he would be terrible and grateful for it. But the sight of the princess with a bow or a butcher’s cleaver was beautiful and it was awful. The glow of her eyes and the competence of her hands, and the wrongness of both.

He heard her quiet steps behind him. Syncopated feet, wooden thump.

“I meant what I said. I am satisfied,” he said to the air. The floating motes of wood dust, cast in goldenrod and burning embers.

“I know,” she said. “But you ought to know I like to be useful, too.”

Link looked at the dirt. “I don’t mean to make you into porcelain.”

“I know,” she said again. “To overwork that metaphor, I worry I make you too much into bricks and clay. Or that the world does.”

He never knew how to explain it. It was something they had discussed before the chasms, the spilling of evil from below the earth. “I used to believe I was just an arm for the sword. I believe a little differently now. But it doesn’t change the fact that I was put on this land for a purpose. Just like you, just like Ganondorf. And we did our purpose, and he did his. Sometimes in history, we receive our just rewards, and sometimes we don’t. We did.”

Zelda stepped forward and reached for him. She knew better than to be ginger now, but she was still gentle as she clasped the end of his arm in her hands. There were new calluses forming on her fingers. “What reward was this?” The rage, the pride. The claws and teeth.

And then things were easy again, but harder in other ways. The duality stretched at him like a bad rash. “You gave ten thousand years of your life to be a vessel for the sword,” he said, and her eyes flared luminous, radioactive. “To get you back, I had to give something too. Another kind of vessel, I guess.”

“Your arm for the sword,” she echoed, her lips turning down at the corners. Chapped and begging.

He smiled and shook his head. “No,” he replied. “My belief in it.”

⋯

If age was the progenitor of wisdom, then Nayru ought to have made Impa her chosen.

As it was, the old woman was entirely too perceptive. When Link and Zelda set out for Kakariko a month or so later, Link was already dreading whatever her eyes would see.

It was a little uncanny, the shift of the earth under Link’s feet. Since that night at the woodshed, the very air tasted of salt and expectation. The sunlight and rain had grown just a little sharper, the subtlest angle to his axis of revolution. They had split their time between Hateno, Tarrey Town, and Lookout Landing, closing up house and making their “hello-yes-we-survived-yes-we’re-glad-about-it-too” rotations. Now it was Impa’s turn, and after that, they agreed, they would make a grand tour of Hyrule’s four corners, to thank each of the sages. And perhaps also to clear up Ganon’s attempt at identity theft.

The planning was easy and canny. The afterwards was not. It scraped and pulled at the edge of Link’s thoughts, and he ignored it resolutely.

Impa, having just completed a grand tour of the world herself, was back in stately residence on the top floor of her home. Her eyes were freshly satisfied from drawings in the dirt, and would be on the hunt for something else to meddle in. Perhaps boredom was just the price of leadership. Purah and Robbie and Josha were busy enough with their work that they didn’t catch the way Link’s hand drifted towards Zelda’s skin, a magnet for alabaster. They didn’t see the way Zelda’s teeth caught in her bottom lip.

It was harder to remember now that he was not built for speculation. The future itched at him, novel and roiling, lurking just beyond his peripheral vision. His lungs sucked in as if he was breathing for the first time, and took in only water.

When she was gone it had all been worries. Now it was stupid, crushing hope, and it flattened sour and unfamiliar against his tongue.

Impa made exclamations about Zelda’s health and Link looked at the wall.

“And now,” Impa said, turning, and Link’s insides were washed in a vinegar rinse. “How fares the mighty hero of Hyrule? I see you forgot to bring a little something back from your quest.”

Link smiled in surprise. “Well, it was on loan.”

“Hmm,” Impa replied dispassionately. “Princess Zelda, dear, why don’t you find Paya and catch up a little? She was made chief in your absence: a rather sudden process, that had been,” she said, as if she had not been the instigator of said process. Zelda flashed Link a quick glance, a burst of green, and then nodded and rose to her feet. Her hands curled up by her sides before she found her cane.

The vinegar rinse again. Link swallowed.

Adjusting her posture primly atop her cushion, Impa fixed him with a stare. “So?”

He shifted his weight and crossed his arms across his chest as best as he could. “So?” he responded, trying his best for naivete.

“Don’t you pull that wide-eyed innocence with me, Link,” Impa retorted, and he knew he’d failed. He was a terrible actor of any emotion but blankness.

She reached over to grab her teacup from the table, and Link waited. He vowed he wouldn’t give her an ounce of satisfaction.

“A century gone by and you think you still have time to dawdle with an old woman?” Impa asked blithely, inclining her chin toward the door. Link started towards it, glad for an out from the conversation, and then he halted mid-step.

He turned back to find Impa smirking. Somehow he’d failed again, walked into a trap.

And not a very well-laid trap at that.

“How much did you wager with Purah?” he asked.

Impa shrugged and took another sip of tea. “Enough.”

⋯

The first pebble loosened, the rockslide soon began.

“You know, I think if meeting Yona has taught me anything, it is that love must be striven for, grasped wholeheartedly,” Sidon reflected as he watched his wife and Zelda at the pools, watching a demonstration of healing. Zelda’s hands drifted in the water as if she itched for her powers. The cleansing light had dimmed and sputtered after the Calamity, the spirit voices winking away one by one. While Sonia had left Link the intuitive imprint of her grasp over time, Zelda’s hard-earned abilities had faded from memory the last ten thousand years.

There was her lack, her ragged-edge hole. Link had worried over it, knowing Zelda’s history with powerlessness, but she assured him she was better for it. And he could understand that relief, void of the vessel where Hylia poured only blood.

“It must be worked for, hard-earned,” Sidon continued, and Link exhaled slowly out of his nose.

“Does getting married turn everyone into busybodies?” he snapped, and Sidon threw his head back to laugh.

Yunobo was thankfully too… childlike to notice the difference in the air. (Link had a few other choice words he could assign the Goron, but he chose to be charitable). Even so, after exclaiming like all the others over Link and Zelda’s miraculous reappearance and good health, he began to swivel his head slowly back and forth between them, the closest thing to pensive that he could muster.

If it was really that obvious, Link could only despair.

There was a long stretch of desolate badlands and tundra spanning Death Mountain to Tabantha. Link let himself linger a little too long as he helped Zelda and her cane over rocks and boulders. Their hands brushed and jerked away next to campfires. She closed her eyes to savor a piece of meat and Link had to avert his eyes.

Before the air could get bitingly cold, they stopped at a cave to change into winter clothes. Link checked inside for like-likes and then stood guard outside, hand over the Master Sword’s pommel, a parody of their old routine at the springs.

The click of buttons wafted out, amplified by the cave walls. Link swallowed. He shifted his belt bag to a more flattering position.

Zelda emerged looking a little too warm for the weather. “Don’t worry, it’ll get much colder as soon as we start our ascent,” he assured her rosy cheeks. And then, because he was an idiot, he reached out to straighten her little capelet.

She startled and her cheeks reddened to the shade of radishes. His hand froze midair, as if in confirmation of a guilt, a slight. It dropped as soon as he could order it to.

“Wait here and call for help if anything comes up,” he said, and had just turned before he heard Zelda snort.

“What, you’ll just charge out here in a state of undress?” she mocked, then halted.

They were really getting too good at freezing and jumping away.

Something curious took over Link’s body then. Call it an infusion of courage, a shock to the heart. Or the belt bag’s quarry talking. Or maybe the culmination of those absurd Voe and You classes he had taken.

“Well, that would depend, princess,” an old name, a dead name, shaped into something entirely new, “on whether you call.”

And he turned and walked down the slope of the cave like a normal person, rather than throwing himself headlong inside.

⋯

Rito Village should have been a welcome respite. Link was desperate for someone to treat them normally. Even the Deku Tree had managed to slip in a sly comment. But like Yunobo, Tulin was a little too innocent to grasp the intricacies of their current situation.

However, Teba was not.

After enduring dozens of expertly-crafted innuendos, Link jumped on the opportunity to go out with Tulin to the flight range. Harth had crafted Link a new bow, inspired by old schematics and his own wing injury. It was designed to be held sideways, with only one hand, and released with a trigger.

“I’m calling it a crossbow, because you hold it sort of… across,” Harth said, rotating his wing and trailing off lamely. “Well, I’m no Penn when it comes to fancy words. And horizontal-bow is a bit of a mouthful.”

“How innovative,” Teba said. “So much potential in doing things horizontally.” Zelda did not appear to hear this, being immersed in the spring mechanism of the crossbow, so Link had been free to turn and fix Teba with his best glare.

Link peppered each target with arrows before whipping his glider out to catch his fall. Purah had made adjustments so he could open it and hold on with one hand now. He briefly debated asking Marth for some kind of strap and pulley system, so he could shoot the crossbow in mid-flight rather than free fall.

Tulin was waiting for him on the cliffside, preening his feathers. As soon as he touched down, the little Rito remarked, “I hadn’t really noticed until she came back, but Princess Zelda sure is pretty, isn’t she?”

Link nearly fell off the cliff, and Tulin smirked.

It was another long trek between Tabantha and the Gerudo desert. Rather than risk Zelda’s limited mobility on the highlands, they opted to detour back to Lookout Landing instead. Link supposed they could have just used it as a base and traveled via Purah Pad, but Zelda wanted to see the land at ground level again.

He cornered Purah in her lab one afternoon. “How big’s the bet?”

She didn’t even blink, adjusting her goggles as she titrated a concerningly red liquid into a flask. “Well, since all five of us went in, it’s a decently large pool.”

“All five of you?”

Purah tapped her pipette on the edge of the glass. “Me, Impa, Robbie, Symin,” she said, trailing off as she transferred the liquid into another beaker. Link waited. “Oh, and Paya. Josha wanted to but she’s too young to gamble.”

Link promptly walked out of the lab.

He found Zelda inspecting the lookout tower. “Do not press that button,” he said by way of introduction, pointing at the console.

She jumped a little, and his heart twinged involuntarily. He noticed a neglected plate of fruitcake propped on top of her journals.

“You should eat this before it starts attracting flies,” he said. A desperate attempt, really, to smooth over the friction that had only intensified since that blasted cave.

Zelda took the plate, avoiding his eyes. His heart swelled in stupid angst, begging to rip out of his ribs. He kept his eyes fixed on hers even as she looked at her fork. He just couldn’t get over it, that penetrating green, almost spotlight-esque. Like she illuminated anything she deigned gaze upon.

“If you’re ready, we can start heading to Gerudo Town tomorrow morning,” he said, unable to leave and unwilling to stand in silence. She nodded. There was that conversation extinguished. He sighed, slow and imperceptible, out through his nose.

And then Zelda took a bite of cake, and her eyes fluttered briefly closed. It was a little too convenient that her aversion to the non-carnivorous did not extend to sweets. She hummed in satisfaction.

Link was not quite sure why he was still standing there.

Her eyes flickered to him, an onslaught of perfect, luminescent green. He was awash in light. She raised her fork, and her tongue darted out to lick whipped cream off the tines. So dainty. A flash of her seed pearl teeth. So feral.

It was only when her eyes began to crinkle at the corners that Link realized he’d been had.

This was deliberate.

Only a few months before, he’d struck the phantom of Ganondorf down in the castle sanctum like swatting a fly. He’d ignored the illusion of Zelda the demon king had dangled in front of him, taunting and promising all at once. But it seemed both of them had simply been lacking in imagination at the time.

He forced the old mask of blankness over his face, tugging a little tight. He pressed his mouth flat, and crossed his arms as best as he could. This new knowledge was biting and soothing all at once, but he still had his little wellspring of pride. He would not bend to it, even as his heart beat a furious staccato. You’re on a fine line , he tried to say with his eyes.

The resulting smile was ferocious, and she popped another bite into her mouth. Then she set her cake back down on its stool, bending just so.

Link knew an entreaty when he saw one, and a dismissal. A hiatus, for now. Well.

If that was the way she wanted to play it.

And thus began the oddest of battles he’d ever partaken in.

Four days later, Riju raised a manicured red eyebrow at him as he watched Zelda knock back another Noble Pursuit, clean and precise as a cobra rearing back to strike. The alcohol made her gait more unsteady than usual, clutching heavily at her cane. She could still match any of the guards shot for shot.

“What,” he ground out after he couldn’t take the chief’s knowing eye anymore.

She held her hands up. “I didn’t say anything.”

Link’s strategy thus far had been one of attrition. He retreated to the passive shell that drove Zelda crazy, only tilting his head or raising an eyebrow in acknowledgement of her scheme. He wasn’t sure how well it was working; he felt besieged.

He couldn’t wait to get home.

As if she could read his mind, Riju said casually, “Seems like it’s been a long trip for you two.”

He nodded. The Gerudo were now engaging in a drunken demonstration of a traditional dance. Zelda was leaning her elbow on her cane as she clapped out the rhythm. “We’ll be headed home the day after tomorrow, after we discuss the impact of… recent events.”

“Make it tomorrow, then,” Riju said, and shrugged when he cut his eyes towards her. “With the disappearance of the gibdo, we’re doing just fine. From what we’ve heard from the other races, I’d wager we’ve made it out the least scathed.” Link glanced at the piles of sand shoveled to the edges of the square, and Riju rolled her eyes. “Really, Link, it’s not as though we weren’t covered in sand to begin with.”

Link pursed his lips and waited, but Riju stood firm. “You cut the evil from the root. We have nothing but time now.”

“That’s what we said last time,” Link muttered under his breath, but Riju just laughed.

“I am feeling my youth tonight,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “And besides, we had a whole six months of peace. I bet we can get at least a year this time. Go, tell her,” and thrust her chin towards Zelda as she turned on her heel. “Goodnight,” she called out, ending any possibility of disagreement.

He sidled up behind Zelda, and enjoyed the little startle when he placed his hand on her shoulder. “Riju is insisting we go home tomorrow morning.” She turned, her eyes even more lustrous under the moonlight. They glowed, a little uncanny, and Link’s breath caught. It was easy, sometimes, to see her girlhood and her chapped lips and her chapped hands, and forget the goddess, the stasis, the dragon.

And then she sagged, and she was every second of seventeen again. “Oh,” she signed. “I shouldn’t say it, but…”

“I’m glad too,” he replied, and she gazed at him a little sleepily. Her eyes drifted downwards to where his vai disguise left his torso bare. He’d gained de facto access to Gerudo Town during the aftermath of the crisis, but of course as soon as things stabilized Riju had banned him again.

Unconsciously, Zelda sunk a canine into her bottom lip, and the hand not holding her cane came to rest on his waist, as if by accident. Link made himself statue-like.

“Can we go by Purah Pad?” Zelda asked in a small voice.

He nodded, not trusting his heart to not come jumping out of his throat. “Hateno or Tarrey?” he managed, after what seemed like an eternity.

“Hateno,” she whispered.

⋯

She found him, shortly after their return. He was sitting under the apple tree, running an oilcloth over the blade of the Master Sword.

“We’re a little old for this dance, aren’t we?” she asked, gazing skyward. The apple blossoms were just starting to come out. Spring again, addressed the one hundred eighteen to the over ten thousand.

In response, Link got to his feet, resting the Master Sword against the trunk. He breathed deep, and summoned every shred of courage in his bones, and held out his hand.

Hers lifted in return, fingers curled into claws. She splayed them, flexing slightly in habit, before placing her palm against his. Her other hand came to curl around the end of his arm.

Nothing but time .

The avatar of the world-maker grounded in flesh, but the woman was the bigger miracle. Her hair choppy and steeped in sunlight, her capable hands. The nuclear emeralds in her eyes. Lips chapped but parted, ever so soft.

He opened his eyes and Zelda smiled, feral. Sharp as tooth and claw.