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At first, it was easy to ignore. Just a little tingle in his leg that happened sometimes when Link was in the kitchen. No big deal. It seemed to stop if he moved more often, so he started dancing a little while he hummed and cooked. It made Zelda smile every time she caught him at it, so moving didn’t even seem like a downside.
But sometimes it went from “a little tingle” to “walking on fire.” Like his leg had been asleep too long and he was just now standing up. A curse of tiny stabbing points when something brushed the wrong part of his leg. The kitchen space in their house in Hateno wasn’t that big, so it was only a matter of time before Zelda managed to brush his leg in exactly the wrong spot as she was reaching past him for a taste of something. Link was long out of practice of hiding his reactions, and he long ago made a careful, conscious choice not to hide things from Zelda, but he still felt his stomach sink when she turned to him and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Link resisted the urge to slink away like a wounded animal. “It’s my leg. It… feels funny?”
“Funny how?”
“Kind of tingles sometimes.”
Zelda threw him a suspicious look. “Tingles sometimes. How long has this been going on?”
Link looked guilty. “A few months.”
“Link! And you didn’t think to mention it?”
“It didn’t seem like a big deal. It goes away if I move. Usually. Or it used to.”
Zelda looked sidelong at him without saying anything for a long moment, then stretched her fingers towards his leg. “May I?”
At Link’s nod, she gently touched her fingertips where she’d brushed then moved her hand up and down his leg, mapping out where he reacted. After a moment, Link made a face. “I think it’s worse when you’re touching it lightly, maybe try more pressure?”
She hummed at him and pushed her palm more firmly against him. “Did you injure it?”
“Not recently, but.. probably?”
Zelda smirked at him, “Must have been that time the Eldin Ostrich knocked you right off that cliff in front of me.”
Link laughed, nearly forgetting his sore leg in the face of the much greater embarrassment of the memory.
Zelda dragged Link over to a chair and carefully manipulated his leg with firm pressure and asked endless questions: When did it hurt most? When he had been standing a while. Did food have any effect on it? Link wasn’t sure since he sat down to eat and sitting down definitely did have an effect. Did he feel any weakness? No. Did ever cause issues fighting or riding? Not that he had noticed.
As the questions started to slow, Link interjected, “It’s kind of reassuring how you treat this like your research. If you can fix divine beasts, maybe you can fix me.”
“Pretty sure your leg assembly isn’t anything like Vah Naoboris,” Zelda laughed, carefully examining the way his calf muscle moved as she adjusted his foot, “Also I really hope your problem doesn’t include the wind blowing sand into your joints. Although I suppose maybe Hylian nerve impulses aren’t that different from the electrical and hydraulic systems inside guardian legs... But before you let me try engineering on your leg, are you sure you don’t want to see a healer?”
Link shook his head. “I’d rather it be you, if you don’t mind? We already know that I don’t quite heal like a normal person.”
Zelda made a “so-so” gesture. “You’re probably closer to a person than a divine beast, but point taken.”
And thus, the experiments began. Link wasn’t sad when the first ones were at the hot springs, then mildly alarmed when Zelda said she wanted to know what would heal him most thoroughly “just in case.” Many of the elixirs she made were awful, and while they definitely had effects, none of them was “make the pain go away forever.” The weird experiments where she ran electrical current through his leg weren’t the most comfortable, but the day at the spa with Riju to recover afterwards definitely was. The various stretches they tried together were fun, as was the couple of days at the beach checking the effects of swimming.
They found lots of things that helped short-term, but nothing that made the pain stop coming back. At best guess, it was an old injury that was putting pressure on the nerve if he stood still too long. Link laughed when Zelda explained it.
“Oh no, I can never stand motionless at your door for hours again.” he deadpanned at her.
She smacked him with a smile, “I didn’t want you to do it then either. I really hope standing guard wasn’t the cause. Since it seems like it’s the most annoying in the kitchen, how do you feel about trying to do food prep setting at the table instead of standing?”
Link agreed to try, and Zelda cleared her books off the table to make space. But she wasn’t the best at remembering, so it wasn’t long before she returned from the lab to find Link carefully decorating a cake while clearly rocking back and forth to try to get his leg to stop hurting.
“Link! I’m so sorry I forgot to clear my books, but you know you can just move them, right? Don’t hurt yourself.”
“It’s not that…” Link started. Then stopped.
Zelda waited a moment but he didn’t continue, so she asked, “Then what is it?”
“Well, I don’t love the sitting angle for putting the icing on, but if I’m honest with myself it’s not really that either.” Link dragged his hand down his face. “I don't know if it's worth telling. It's stupid.”
Zelda rolled her eyes at him. “Stupid like stasis launching yourself across the fields on a log as if somehow chopping down a whole tree, hitting it bunch of times, then paragliding off the projectile you made was somehow less work than walking?”
The well-worn argument had the intended effect, and Link laughed and gave his usual reply. “Look, my arms are just very strong.”
She reached out to squeeze his bicep and make appreciative noises. “Yes yes, they're very nice arms. I'm just saying that you have extremely questionable ideas all the time and none of them have changed my opinion of you. It's okay to talk about the ones that are serious too.”
Link sighed. “Okay, but… look, I know in my brain that it's not true. But this pain makes me feel like maybe when the shrine fixed my body, it only rebuilt what was needed to move, to fight. That I was granted a second chance to be a weapon, not to be messing around in the kitchen. That I'm not supposed to be resting and soft and domestic. That this body was never meant to last this long.”
“So you're torturing yourself because you think it's the goddesses’ will that deviation from your destiny should hurt?” Zelda answered. “That somehow with suffering you're going to… do what exactly? Maybe you'd like to go stand in freezing cold springs praying to the goddesses to fix you?”
“What? No, Zelda, I…” stammered Link, but Zelda held up her hand.
“That wasn't meant to be a rhetorical trap, Link,” she sighed. “I'm trying to tell you I understand. But also torturing ourselves didn't help then and it's probably not going to help now. I know you can't help your feelings, but I need you to use the darned chair. It's an accessibility device, not a malice-ridden sleeping hinox you need to skirt around.”
“I know, I know, I just feel like I shouldn’t need it.”
“And in a fair world you never would. You deserve rest, and you deserve to not be in pain. But I don’t trust the goddess to grant you that and that means you and I have to find a way to make it happen ourselves.”
The next week, when Link returned home from foraging, there was a new stool sitting at the kitchenette.
Zelda came down from the loft to greet him, book in hand. “I had Karson make a stool for you. I thought it might be more comfortable.” She mimed chopping veggies. “And, uh, that’s not all. It’s a bit of a metaphor…”
Link looked at the stool and realized he recognized part of it: the top of the stool had been made from a shield they’d found during a vacation in Lurelin, now polished and sealed. Zelda had been giving him a hard time about picking up every random thing he found and so when she found the fish-emblazoned shield by the beach she’d declared it a perfect souvenir.
Link started laughing. “You commissioned a shield to protect my leg.”
Zelda reached him and wrapped her arms around him and said, “You don’t have to use it, but I thought it might be easier to use if it was more… silly.”
Link returned the hug. “It’s ridiculous and I love it.” Then he hopped up on the stool and leaned over to kiss the top of her head, now in reach. “I love you. And you’re right, having it be a bit silly does help.”
Zelda leaned against him. “And if this doesn’t work, we’ll try something else, okay? Together?”
Link leaned back and hummed assent, “We’ll keep trying. Together.”