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It took only a couple of hours after Link was asked ‘who’s your friend?’ and Impa scolded the poor Sheikah for daring not recognise her to tears for Zelda to decide to never set foot in Kakariko again. She’d had a complicated view of her old friend as it was– the disregard Impa showed Link and his safety, how she left him homeless and alone with nothing but an order to save her to his name, how she dared not care for the boy she once called “as good as a brother” before he died trying to do the job he was forced into by men and gods alike– but after that? The single scrap of warmth Zelda had still held for Impa is near impossible to see behind the frustration and hurt and fury that has eclipsed it. She is no princess. This country needs no ruler. This country is surviving, is thriving, all on its own. To scold someone who never met her before, to turn on Link as she did, to dare assume that Zelda would want to be back in the role she knew she had loathed beyond little else… no. Zelda doesn't want to return to the past. For Impa to think she would feels like a betrayal.
This world has moved on, is still moving on, and it is not their job to drag it back. Their job, hers and Link’s, is to catch up. To move on themselves.
That doesn't mean it's easy.
Somehow, now the job is done too late to save too many, she is plagued by the abilities she had begged for, for so many years. Not only are they both unable to sleep without nightmares, or wander the lands of their youth without seeing what should be – or remembering what should be, rather, in the case of her friend – they now are beset by raging light that burns all that is tainted whenever her emotions get too high.
Poetic, really. She suffocated beneath the pressures of her expectations and not a wisp of light was seen. Here she is, emotional and broken open in the aftermath of one hundred and odd years of an endless wait (of battling a wounded boar of a once-man; of seeing the tragedy of his past; of seeing the horrors of everyone who came before; of mourning everyone she’d ever loved; of wishing for rest; of pleading for it all to end), and she can’t damn well keep it off.
Link, bless him, is insistent that her newfound ability with holy fire is worth exploring, that it needs to be explored to be able to control it, that if she doesn’t she could hurt herself; but after seeing the burnt ground and singed bed-sheets in the morning light—
Everything around them is drenched in malice; they drink the water that cycles through it, eat the food grown in it; they are tainted by mere fact of the air they breathe. If sheets and grass were scorched, if Link was burned and his healed scars from corrupted guardians lasers nastily inflamed, what would it do to a child born in this new world?
— she refuses to touch it. Damn the Goddess and her so-called gifts. She’s too late to make a single bit of difference now.
If she could, Zelda would carve out the part of her that carries that light and let it moulder in the darkest depths she could find. If she could, Zelda would let that blessing die. If she could, Zelda thinks, she’d break the cycle and see what came without it. She is no Princess, just a relic of the past. The Goddess has had no hand in her people’s fate bar perpetuating the ouroboros’ gluttonous, self-destructive feast upon itself and leaving them alone in the darkness of its maw.
If she could, Zelda knows, she’d put this cycle out of its misery and let Hyrule continue to find their own light; stables and waypoints, in markets and hand-me-downs, in bickering and kindness and compassion and favours – everything that is good has been built by resilient, beautiful, mortal souls more inspiring and intimidating than any deity she has heard of.
Her people are amazing. Her people frighten her. Her people, Zelda thinks, have no need nor space for her at all.
She can tell she’s falling into old habits, old habits she’d broken months before the Calamity rose, in the aftermath of Impa spitting out a title she thought she had at last been able to shed. She’s snapping at Link, saying things she doesn’t entirely mean, picking at tiny things that aren’t a big deal and correcting what needn’t be corrected– and she knows she’s being mean. She’s watching Link shrink and screaming at herself to stop, but she doesn’t. She can’t. She can’t stop it, just like she can’t stop the fires, just like she couldn’t stop the Calamity, just like she couldn’t find success when it mattered most, just like they can't stop this repeating repeating repeating repeating repeating–!
(She thinks endlessly of that moment of peace, where the once-man spoke falteringly of a forest child, one too small to fill a grave but slaughtered on battlefield neither had wanted to tread just the same, and had wept until the dark fiery madness had taken him once more. Zelda had wanted to comfort him in those endless moments of sanity splintered only by grief. She doesn’t think she’ll ever forgive herself for letting him cry alone.)
Link, Link is falling into old habits too. Expression is fading from him, his voice vanishing. She’s noticed that he’s anxious, his lip raw from where he gnaws on it when he thinks she isn’t watching, body stilling when she speaks. It’s infuriating. It isn’t his fault, Zelda has always been the problem (always the failure), but she can’t bring herself to tell him that. Instead the guilt is building her irritation and oh, her poor Link has always been an easy target. An easy target who has never deserved this. She wants to beg for forgiveness. Instead she finds herself continuing to be cruel. And Link…
Her Link just takes it.
Over lunchtime preparations a week and two days after Impa drove her from Kakariko forever, Zelda lashes out once more. Only this time, she says something unforgivable.
Only this time, Link doesn't stay.
Watching as the door closes behind him (it’d hurt less if he slammed it but he’s always been so quiet, or he was and is once more with mere weeks of a beautiful difference in between) Zelda slowly sinks to the floor in the sudden, deafening silence. There’s a ringing in her ears, a tightness to her throat and chest both that feels as though it’s strangling her. Link left. He turned around and he walked away and oh but she deserves it, doesn’t she? She deserves to be left.
Huddled against the counter, a distant stinging sensation coming from her arms, she can barely breathe past the weight of her actions. Her throat hurts and she’s cold and she doesn’t know what to do. Can she fix it? Somewhat frantically, Zelda tries to work out how it got to this point. How she managed to drive away the one person who’s always stayed. The one person she needs more than she does air. The one person who makes sense, the one person who gets it, the one person who gets her. The one person who’s safe.
There’s an awful noise coming from somewhere but she can’t focus on that. Her minds going too fast, thoughts too disjointed and misaligned to make sense of. There’s still ingredients across the counter, bread waiting to be sliced. Link hasn’t eaten yet, and that’s her fault too. He’s going to be hungry. They were just making lunch! What drove her to say that? She doesn’t want him to be silent, to be invisible, to return to how he was in those shadowed days. She wants him to talk, to laugh, to– to be him, to be happy, to be beside her and she, she still said that? Why did she say that?! She told him they were right!
She regretted it immediately, she promises Link even though he can't hear. She couldn’t bring herself to say so when he could. It’s why he isn't here.
It’s why he left.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry–”
The look on his face before he turned kills her to remember. Not once has he ever seemed so wounded… or perhaps this was the first time he was able to show it. Did she hurt him so bad every time? Was she always such a monster? The spectre of Rhoam stands over her, crown heavy on his brow and clothed in red like a shroud. Zelda had promised herself, had promised herself a thousand times over, that she’d never be like him. Had she broken it in the Before without realising? Has she broken it in the Now? Does she haunt Link like Rhoam does her?
The noise hasn’t stopped. If anything it’s louder. She wants it to stop, she wants her chest to stop hurting, she wants Link, Link always makes it better but the cold says he’s gone. Her memory says he left her. He won’t make it better because he left her, Hylia please he left her he left her he—
Pulling at her hair but unable to feel a thing, she realises he had the right to. Link deserves better than her. Better than Rhoam’s daughter, better than the person who guided him to the grave and then denied him his rest and summoned him to continue the fight he could have escaped if not for her selfish cries.
“Too much yet not enough,” was how Link once described his memories, tracing a finger over the faded photo of a little girl in her big brother’s arms.
(He doesn’t even know her name.)
Zelda’s choices destroyed the person he was.
“I'm sorry–!”
Hot tears falling down her cheeks (the only warmth she has because he left), her mind spins. Goddesses, her chest hurts so badly but why would They care? They have never cared. That’s something that never changes. For Ages upon Ages, Era after Era, Link-and-Zelda-and-Ganon after Link-and-Zelda-and-Ganon, after countless lives lost and redemptions unseen, time after time after time, They have never cared.
(The monster was once a man, and the man was once a boy, and he’d never had a choice at all.)
They simple mortals have always been on their own.
Somehow, the thought helps. The ice in her bones is now shrouded by a blanket of calm. The one irrefutable truth of this world is that the Goddesses have not cared for much longer than they ever did. There hasn’t been a sign of them since the Great Flood some six centuries and a timeline past. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of Zelda. That is fact. But they are also dead because Hylia and the Three never answered their pleas. Through famines and wars and a brewing Calamity laid upon the shoulders of a young princess and a child knight, They stayed silent. Through the destruction of a Kingdom and the slaughter of civilisations, They stayed silent. Aloof. Absent.
Hands in her hair, staring blankly at her knees, Zelda realises this is how it is meant to be. Her alone (alone in a kitchen no longer hers because she won’t take his space alongside his life, this is his and she has taken enough) in a land bereft of the divine.
They were never meant for better, her and her Link. Her and the brave, resilient, mournful survivors of her people.
This was always going to be their terrible fate.
“Princess?”
“Not a princess,” Zelda croaks without thinking.
She doesn’t look up. Light footsteps across the floorboards herald someone coming to sit in front of her. The sun has shifted through the window to throw tiny dust into the spotlight of dancing rays. She wonders who what they once were.
Can it still feel the sun?
“Oh Zelly,” Purah murmurs, “a bad day huh?”
Purah being kind draws fresh heat to her eyes. She doesn’t deserve it. Embarrassingly she can feel her chin wobbling like a child. Gritting her teeth she claws back that icy calm she used to exist in. It rests around her like a worn blanket. She hates it. It’s hers.
“Why are you here?”
The fragile calm shatters with the answer she’s given.
“Link sent me.”
Watching through gritty eyes as Purah tidies up, Zelda tries to make sense of it. It doesn’t make sense. She was cruel and vile and Link left… but he hasn’t left-left. He left to get air, to not lash out at her like she was him, but he still went to get Purah first because she shouldn’t be alone. He will be back. She just has to… wait.
“I don’t get it.” She admits quietly. “I was cruel.”
“You were,” Purah nods, “and you owe him an apology because he was quite upset. But–”
“Exactly! I–”
“But.” Tiny Purah, so much younger than Zelda ever seen her be until some months ago, turns to look at her firmly. “That doesn’t mean he’s going to walk away and give up on you Zelly. You can’t treat him like this, he isn’t something to vent your emotions on, but he isn’t going to walk away because of a bad day.”
“I know I can’t, so he should leave!”
“Zelda. Zelly. My darling fellow genius.”
Purah sits, hands steepled in front of her face before they drop to point at her. Zelda can’t help but think the serious expression looks absurd on that chubby childish face. At least she’s no longer stood on the counter.
“You and Link have been through hell. Said hell finished not even two months ago. You set fire to the blankets and then the grass from a nightmare less than a week ago after being treated how you used to be. Robbie got stabbed when he woke Linky up from a nightmare after my oh-so-lovely sister sent him to remember dying. In my– admittedly less than stellar– efforts not to leave Linky to wake up alone and us not have a way to rescue you, I managed to turn myself into a six year old. Shit happens when shit goes down. The question is, are you going to find a way to process it or are you going to keep being mean to our Linky? Because as much as I wish to say he’d learn to walk away, he won’t. He’s unreasonably loyal to his people. He’ll take it and take it because he loves you.” Purah falters, stern expression falling toward something approaching heartbroken. “I, I think that’s the saddest thing about it. For all he now knows he deserves better, he won’t leave the people he cares about when they’re hurting… even when it hurts him to stay. There’s a reason he still visits Impa. She hasn’t moved on, she still clings to what used to be, and it destroys her. She broke him anew with that final memory. He still won’t leave her lonely.”
Staring at the one-hundred and thirty-odd year old tiny child sat on the kitchen counter, Zelda realises she may have a point. Her father was hurting and he didn’t stop to think maybe he was hurting her too. When she was upset he just threw words like fists and tightened demands like shackles. She hates him for all she understands it. More often than not she had wanted to run away, to abandon them to their fates, but she, she couldn’t. She loved him, loved her people, for all she resented them and what they demanded of her. Link could have, early on (before the Sword, before the eyes multiplied until he suffocated under thousands of bladed lashes) at least. He could have run, but he didn’t. He stayed with her until his last breath. She can’t have that happen again. She can’t lose him.
“You don’t need to be perfect Zelly.” A gentle voice breaks through the growing fog. “You just need to be you.”
“I don’t know who that is.” Her eyes grow hot when she quietly finds the bravery to admit something she’s refused to so much as think before. “I don’t know how to let go.”
For a moment they sit there, looking at each other, and hear nothing but the empty silence of a once-thriving town Link had held close to his heart. She wonders, absently, if he knows why he was drawn here yet. She hasn’t dared ask.
“Well,” Purah says forcefully as she turns to scrape the wilting lettuce into the food waste basket. “What better time to find out?”
Their job is to move on.
“Speaking of setting the grass on fire,” Purah begins a little while later. “Mind explaining how you did that?”
“I have no idea. I woke up in the back garden surrounded by burnt grass and smoke. Link said next time he’d put us in the pond instead of torching the greenery.”
Purah snorts, a line scouring across the notes on the ancient blades that she’s walking Zelda through. “Sounds like Linky. You going to learn how to do it without a night terror?”
“…Link wants me to.”
“Reasonable.” Purah nods, then pauses for a moment. “But I’m getting the feeling you don’t think so.”
“Can you blame me?” She snaps, then winces. Purah doesn't blink.
“No. I think only Link would be happy about fire powers… and thank everything that he doesn’t.”
The vaguely horrified tone pulls a smile to Zelda’s lips. The thought of Link, Link who she watched develop a track record of (occasionally) inadvertent destruction with those unlimited bombs, being able to set fires with his mind is quite worrisome. Shuddering dramatically, Purah continues.
“But think of it like this. These swords,” she raps on the pages they were just discussing, “are incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. More so than any other blade we’ve got. If you don’t know how to use them you could kill a man with a graze. Death in an instant. Most people won’t touch them, call me mad for making them… among other things. But if I hadn’t? The Guardians would have been even harder to take out. Linky went through three of these swords and multiple arrows taking twelve guardians to save a bunch of moronic outsiders who thought a shortcut through Central Hyrule was a good idea. He admitted that if he’d taken any longer getting through the guardians he might not have been able to save them at all. They promptly left, by the way. Never seen anyone else like ‘em so I can only assume they told everyone else to stay out. You’d think they’d have learnt years ago but no–”
Zelda coughs, and Purah jumps, scratching another line across the new mathematical equations she’d been jotting across the top of the page. Spectacle-shrouded eyes blink at her, then drift to the page smearing ink across the side of her hand. A little dip appears beneath that bottom lip. For all her youth, Purah suddenly looks to be wearing all the years she has witnessed but no longer physically bears.
“These swords are terrifying, Zelly. They are, and I know it. That doesn’t mean they can’t save a life if you know how to use them right.”
Zelda rather hates her right now. Unfortunately, Purah makes sense.
Seems she owes Link another apology.