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Zelda is on her feet the second she sees the doorhandle start to turn. She clasps her hands to her chest to hide their shaking and bites her lip to stop herself from babbling every question running through her mind before the doctor’s had a chance to step out of the sickroom.
“Highness.” The doctor greets her with a bow that almost has her screaming in impatience, but she forces herself into protocol and acknowledges him as gracefully as she can. The doctor must be good at the softer parts of his job because he wastes no time after in giving her the information she desperately needs.
“He is stable,” he says and Zelda almost buckles onto the floor in relief. Her ears ring and she loses the thread of the conversation for moment as all she can do is breathe and thank the Goddess. When she comes back to herself the doctor is still talking.
“- quite severe. He is, however, exceptionally strong and is bearing up well, all things considered.”
“Thank you,” she says with such intensity the doctor blinks at her in surprise. “Please, tell me. What are his wounds?”
The doctor frowns, obviously thinking it inappropriate information for a princess. But then the fact she’s the princess means he can’t deny her. The list is enough to make her dizzy: broken collarbone, six ribs fractured or broken, three breaks in his arm and wrist. Severe bruising to most of his right side. Superficial cuts. One cut on his hip that’s deep enough to need stitches. Resultant blood loss. Shock.
“But he will be fine? Until Princess Mipha can come?” She asks weakly and the doctor nods.
“Yes your highness. He has an unusually strong constitution and all the breaks were clean and easy to set. He will of course require rest and pain management, but I would not be surprised if he makes great strides to recovery on his own before the princess arrives.”
Zelda allows herself enough weakness to bow her head and press her clasped hands to her mouth while her vision blurs. The doctor steps back respectfully but doesn’t comment. He can’t, she knows, not when it’s her, but she appreciates the space regardless while she pulls her decorum back together. A few breaths help, but she can’t keep a minute shake from her voice when she does speak.
“Can I see him?”
“We have given him a strong elixir to induce sleep and reduce pain,” the doctor replies, “but yes, you can sit with him if you are quiet and let him rest.”
She thanks him again, as best she can without stepping into impropriety. He bows to her in response and something about that hurts deep in her chest. She doesn’t feel worthy of honour right now.
“You can talk to him, your highness,” the doctor adds as he steps aside to let Zelda by. “Even with the elixir he might hear you, it happens sometimes.”
She nods absently, already stepping forward and reaching for the doorhandle. The uncertainty of what’s waiting for her behind it churns in her stomach and shakes in her hands and makes her want to turn and run, so she stamps down on it, opens the door with a decisive shove and marches into the room.
Link’s in the bed.
She closes the door behind her, mouth dry. They’ve stripped off his armour and clothes and laid him out with just a thin wool blanket to protect him. She hadn’t thought he could ever look vulnerable, but the peek of one bare shoulder above the blanket and the boneless way he’s sprawled hammer home how exposed and defenceless he is in this moment.
She’s never seen him so still before. When he’s not moving there’s always been an air of imminent action about him, a coiled potentiality so intense it’s electricity in the air. She’s rarely caught him sleeping, only once when they’d been staying at a stable and she stepped out of her room late at night into the private living space they'd rented to find him dozing with his head on his arms at the dining table, and even then he’d seemed tensed to spring, hand resting on his unsheathed sword and alert enough to wake at nothing but her presence in the doorway.
He’s so still now she isn’t sure he’s breathing.
She’s across the room with her hand on his chest in seconds. It’s a tense second or two of nothing, but then she feels the slight, slow rise of his ribs and she sags, relieved and embarrassed all at once.
She sinks into the chair by the bed and takes a moment to look him over. With the blanket up to his shoulders she can’t see much, but she does note how pale he’s turned, how tight his eyes are at the corners even unconscious, even with the elixirs for the pain. There are the beginnings of a bruise and swelling on what’s visible of his collarbone and the outline of his injured arm under the blanket is bulky with strapping and bandages. She’s intensely glad the doctor left that arm lying over his stomach. If it were by his side, he’d look all too much like a corpse laid out for viewing.
She looks back up at his face just as his mouth twitches slightly. His head turns the tiniest amount, tilting towards her.
“Link?” She whispers. He doesn’t respond or move, but the pained tightness around his eyes loosens and she wonders with a spark of hope if he can tell she’s there.
She realises suddenly that her hand is still resting on his chest and snatches it back, flushing. At least she closed the door behind her so no one could see that slip into impropriety. She folds her hands in her lap instead and suppresses the urge find his hand under the blanket and hold it.
She feels so useless sitting here. The doctor said she could talk, but she really has no clue what to say. She owes him multiple apologies, but she wants him to be awake for those, they’re too important. She can’t very well prattle about her research while he’s only lying here because of it. Anything else feels too frivolous, or in the case of the other champions’ practice with their Divine Beasts too serious to burden him with while he’s recovering. Instead she lifts her eyes and casts around the room for anything she can do to help.
There’s half-empty elixir bottles and salve pots on the bedside table, but she knows better than to interfere with his medicine. They’ve cleaned his wounds and his face but not his hair, so loosed from its usual tie it sprawls across the pillow in matted tangles of blood and honey-gold, but there’s no water and she daren’t lift his head in case she hurts him.
The sword is on the sideboard. It’s still unsheathed, the scabbard lying off to one side with mud and blood splattered across it. He’ll hate that, she knows. She also knows no one will be brave enough to touch it for cleaning. She’s not sure she’s brave enough herself, now that the pounding adrenaline of crisis has seeped out of her, even if she knew how.
Most of his clothes and his boots are gone, presumably taken for laundry and mending, but someone has laid his blue tunic over the back of the single chair she’s in, recognising its importance. It’s muddy and spattered with drying blood up the right side and there’s a rent at the hip where the blood is thickest. This, at least, she can do something about.
She folds the soiled tunic and tucks it into her bag, but despite the letter she has to write and the repairs she has to make she doesn’t want to leave yet. She doesn’t want to leave at all. So she sits and worries her hands in her lap, and watches Link sleep as the sun moves across the sky and the afternoon wears away until evening. The doctor stops by regularly, making checks and leaving again so quietly she barely registers him. Link’s head turns more and more as the hours pass, dropping by degrees until his whole body seems to be tilting towards her. She understood him following her everywhere awake, little as she liked it and wished he would stop. She doesn’t understand why he still turns to her unconscious, as though she’s the centre of his existence, like she’s where he’ll land every time he lets go and falls.
When a nurse finally comes around to light the lamps she forces herself to get up.
“I’ll come back,” she promises Link, touching her fingertips to his cheek. “As soon as I’ve mended this I’ll come back.”
But of course when she gets back to the castle alone it immediately attracts attention and they descend on her. The gate guards, her maids, eventually her father. There have to be explanations – she shows them the sullied tunic and her father’s brow creases in a thunderous frown. She expects him to berate her for being reckless and distracted from her duty and being the reason their champion is wounded when they need him to fight the Calamity. He doesn’t, though she can feel the words pent up behind his teeth. All he gives is a stern injunction to stay in the castle and not return to the clinic until the morning, when they can spare a guard from the watch to escort her.
Her heart sinks but she nods obediently, and flees to her rooms before anyone can see the tears shining in her eyes.
Zelda frets the night away wakefully. She has plenty to do at first, writing a letter to Mipha and summoning a messenger to ride for Zora’s Domain, laundering the tunic with the help of a washing elixir cajoled out of her lady’s maid until even the tiniest stain is defeated, and darning the rip with the most delicate stitches she can make, so that the repair can’t be seen unless someone knows it’s been torn and mended. It’s late enough to be early by the time she’s finished and her eyes itch with tiredness. Still, she can’t bring herself to sleep. She knows that if she closes her eyes the day will play out again on the inside of her eyelids and she can’t face the thought of living it again until she’s seen Link awake. It’s bad enough thinking back on it, her memories sharply defined by her own horror.
She changes into her softest clothes and curls up on her window seat instead. From here she can see the very edge of the clinic’s roof, so she keeps her eyes on that and tries to think of nothing at all as the sunrise slowly stains the sky red as blood.
***
Something about Link is particularly grating today. Granted, she never likes him trailing after her, but this morning his unending silence is especially unbearable, an itch at the back of her neck that she’ll never be able to scratch. She’s been trying to be better about him since the Yiga attack but it’s hard when he still doesn’t say anything unless she forces him to with a question.
Little as she wants to admit it, she knows it’s because they shouldn’t be out here at all. Her father instructed her to spend the morning in prayer in the temple, but instead she’d told Link to fetch the horses and escort her to the North Hyrule plains where they’d received report of ancient artifacts in the remains of a recent landslip. He hadn’t said anything or looked at her with anything other than his usual neutral expression, but she’d felt judged anyway. Perhaps it’s her own guilt writing meaning onto his face that isn’t there. Regardless, it makes the sight of him watching her in her peripheral vision profoundly uncomfortable.
“I think I can see something halfway up,” she says, more to break the silence than because she wants him to know. He glances up, eyes roving across the cliff face above them, but doesn’t respond more than that until she goes to climb the closest fallen rock and he stops her with an arm across her path.
“The rocks are loose,” he says with a slight frown, the most expression he’s shown all day.
Of course he’ll only speak to coddle her, she thinks with an internal roll of her eyes.
“I’m not going to climb the cliff, I just want to get higher to try and take a picture.”
He still frowns but he doesn’t say anything else to stop her. He hangs back as she scrambles onto the rock, watching not her but the cliff above them. At least he can credit her with the ability not to fall off a metre tall rock, she supposes.
She stretches up on her tip toes, holding the sheikah slate above her head to try and get a good angle of whatever’s embedded in the cliff face. She’s so absorbed in trying to see what it is that she doesn’t register anything else. The first she knows of something happening is Link’s sudden shout.
“Zelda!”
She jerks, astonished at the sound of her name when he’s never used it before and looks up just in time to see a boulder detach itself from the cliff face above and start falling towards her.
She barely has time to suck in a startled gasp before Link is on the rock beside her. He grabs her by the waist and practically throws her over his shoulder to jump back to the ground. She looks up again and sees more rocks knocked loose in the fall, tumbling towards them, knows they don’t have time to run. Link knows it too – he grabs her again and pushes her down behind the boulder she’d stood on, snaps at her to curl up small. Then he’s leaning over her, crouched in as close as he can get and shield up over as much of them as he can cover.
He barely has his arm up before the rocks are falling around them. She can tell some hit him from the way he jerks above her, but if he makes a sound she can’t hear him over the noise of the rockfall that never seems to end. She puts her hands to her face and prays for everything to stop, please please, stop.
When it does and silence finally falls Link doesn’t move for a minute. She thinks he’s listening to make sure they’re entirely safe, but when he leans back she knows it’s not just that. From the set of his face she can tell there’s something very wrong, and when she drops her eyes to his arm her stomach drops too. His wrist is definitely not right and he clearly can’t move his fingers properly. He goes to put the shield down and his fingers won’t uncurl until he pushes them back with his other hand.
“Are you all right?” He asks her as the shield drops from his arm.
He’s looking at her so seriously, eyes wide and worried, that she feels almost hysterical. Is she all right? He’s asking her that when she’s sitting here with barely a bruise and his arm is clearly broken. She doesn’t know what to say to him. This is her fault, her choice to come here, her insistence on climbing on the rock. And, of course, she’s the one unharmed while he’s hurt.
“I’m fine,” she manages. “You’re not.”
“It’s noth-” he starts but she cuts him off.
“How bad is it?” She pushes herself to her knees and passes her fingers up his arm. She’s no medic but even she can tell it’s swollen and hot in more places than one under his clothes, and when she reaches his shoulder and touches his collarbone he doesn’t precisely wince, but his face does spasm minutely.
“This is very much not nothing, Link,” she berates him. He just blinks at her but doesn’t stop her continuing her examination. Nausea rises in her throat as she feels what she thinks are broken ribs through the side of his tunic and notes the redness of swelling starting to show over the neckline of his undershirt. She swallows it down and forces herself to focus.
“We need to get back to Castle Town,” she says. “There’s a clinic off the main square.”
Link nods and moves his arm as though he’s going for his sword, immediately stops, shaking his head and tucking his arm in close to his body instead. He looks around them, frown etching deeper into his brow as he scans the cliffs and the road back to town. Zelda’s about to ask him what he’s looking for when he abruptly turns to her.
“Draw my sword.”
She jumps, eyes flicking to the sword's hilt over Link's shoulder. The sword that seals the darkness. The sword that carries ten thousand years of legend. The sword that already, definitively, chose its holder.
"But I can't, only the sword's chosen-"
“You’re Hylia’s chosen.”
From anyone else it would be mocking, Hylia’s chosen one without a power to her name, the greatest joke of the kingdom. He looks at her with his mouth a tense line, pain that should be vandalising his features showing only in the barest touch of tightness in the corner of his eyes, and it’s a flat fact.
She hesitates, still, eyes flickering between the sword and Link’s face, the cut on his cheekbone and the wounded way he’s clutching his arm to his chest.
“I can’t draw it left-handed when it’s on my back. And if something happens I’ll need it.” It’s more than he’s ever said in one breath, more than he’s said in a whole week before, words clipped and focused but still enough to shake her with the strangeness of so much of his voice.
“Okay.” She pushes herself up and Link drops his head to give her easier access to the hilt. “Okay.”
When she lays a timid hand on the pommel she still mostly expects it to burn her. Throw her aside. Whatever it does to those it deems unworthy before it chooses its wielder. All it does is vibrate against her palm. Later she’s not sure whether she imagined it or not, but as she grasps and pulls it free with both hands for a moment she feels as though it's urging her on, just as worried and hurried about Link as she is.
It’s heavy in her hands and she fumbles to hold it, clumsy for a scant second, then his hand is over hers and he has it. Steady in his grip, just as practised and sure with his off hand as with his right. He goes to stand and she hovers about him, hands fluttering at his shoulder, his elbow, anywhere he might need to lean on her, but he gets to his feet with no assistance and the barest clench of his jaw.
Thinking back days after she has no clue how he mounted his horse while holding a sword in his one functioning hand and with Hylia knew then how much damage under his tunic, but he did it somehow. Even the Hylian Champion can’t rise to a trot or sit a canter with broken bones though, so they’re restricted to a walk the whole journey home. It’s a blessed good fortune that they hadn’t come far - only over the Carok Bridge and a little way into the Breach. That doesn’t stop it feeling endless.
And then there’s the moblin.
Link stops them with a silent jerk of his sword as they’re passing the last foothills of Mount Gustaf. The moblin is crouching on a rock a little way ahead, back to them and head dropped as if it’s dozing. Link is off his horse and halfway across the distance before Zelda has time to say they’ll backtrack and go up past the quarry instead.
She’d expected him to fight differently, to protect himself and his wounds, but he doesn’t. He charges silently, catches the moblin off guard and throws himself into the offensive with a ferocity that's almost feral. The creature can clearly tell he's injured and it comes at him viciously, swiping constantly at his right side with a disgusting slavering eagerness. Link dances around it on contemptuous feet and batters it down relentlessly, but Zelda can tell it's hard on him. In one moment that has Zelda's heart in her throat the creature's claws snag a gap in his defence and one rakes across his hip. Blood blooms on blue. Even then nothing of the pain breaks through Link's snarling focus to show on his face and a spin to the side has him bringing the sword down hard on his enemy's neck.
It’s only when the moblin is down and he stops, feet square on the mud and sword at his side, that something slips through. He doesn’t look back at her the instant he’s sure she’s safe, the way he always has every time he’s defended her before. Instead he stands and holds the sword in a grip so tight she can see the white of his knuckles and the tension pulling his spine up like a puppet on a string from all these metres away, and does nothing but breathe. Zelda watches him, sees the hitch in his breath that’s only betrayed in a quake of his shoulder so tiny she’s barely sure she saw it at all, and feels sick, sick, sick.
By the time they make it back to the castle stables he's grey in the face, hair sticking to his forehead with sweat. He doesn't make a single sound of complaint. He still swings himself down from his horse and makes to hold her horse's bridle while she dismounts - another of his protective habits she's always found irritating and now stabs at her heart as he lays the sword down and lifts his left hand, right still cradled against his sternum.
"Take the horses, quickly!" She calls to the nearest stablehand, and jumps down before Link can reach her, running to him instead. "Come on Link, the clinic is this way."
She puts her hand on his sound arm to pull him with her and finds him shaking so imperceptibly she only knows it through her fingertips. He draws back from her initial pull, but before she can open her mouth to chide him he tilts his head at the sword lying in the dust.
"Please."
He whispers it, the first thing he's spoken since the moblin, yet she can still hear the strain in that single word. She swipes the sword up and hands it back to him, then immediately steers Link along as fast as she dares make him move. He goes unresisting now, so compliant that Zelda glances at him repeatedly in ever-heightening concern. Within a few steps his eyes start to glaze, and it dawns on her that reaching safety has relaxed him enough for the pain to finally overcome his stubborn drive. As they mount the steps to the clinic he stumbles and catches himself on Zelda's arm with a wounded hiss between his teeth. Link's always been sure on his feet, so graceful he sometimes makes Zelda feel like a galumphing beast. Watching him trip and stagger frightens her as much as anything she's ever seen.
She calls for help even before she's inside the clinic door. The doctor who appears runs his gaze over Link once, head to foot, and his mouth sets in a grim line.
"Wait here," he orders her abruptly, and then he's hustling Link away to a side room, shouting for assistance and supplies and things she's never heard of before. Link looks back at her once, eyes glassy but still somehow bereft, and then a door closes between them.
The click of the lock heralds all the stress and tension that had been driving her forward leaving her body in a flood. She flumps down onto the nearest bench as if her strings have been cut, slumping against the wall. She stares at the door as the minutes tick by and feels the shocked shakes start to rise and does her utmost not to cry.
***
Another guard from the castle barracks accompanies Zelda to the clinic as early the next morning as she can escape from breakfast. She hadn’t wanted to eat but her father had summoned her to join him, apparently trying to show some kind of parental concern for the shock she must’ve had but also finding the time in the twenty minutes they’re together to point out that Link wouldn’t have been hurt if she’d gone to the temple to pray as he’d asked her to. As if she doesn’t know that.
The guard is taciturn, to her relief, and makes no protest when she orders him to wait outside the clinic when they arrive. She wants to sit with Link alone without some hulking armoured presence in the background. This guard has unsettled her enough just on the walk over simply by being so much taller than her. She’d grown so accustomed to Link at her back that she’d forgotten he’s comparatively small.
There’s no one in the clinic reception, but Zelda feels this is one circumstance where it’s acceptable to take advantage of her position. No one is going to berate the Princess of Hyrule for breaking the rules – well, no one except her father – so she bypasses the front desk and heads for Link’s door. As she’d expected for this early hour it’s still closed. What she doesn’t expect is for it to open as she approaches, and what has her stopping dead in her tracks is that it’s Link who opens it.
"Princess," he says with a respectful dip of his head.
She barely hears him. His arm is strapped up, neatly splinted and tucked into a sling. The bandages rise right to his shoulder and there’s tape across his clavicle, holding that break secure. There’s a bloodstained dressing at his hip where she knows that moblin sliced to the bone. But his ribs are bare, no bandages or bindings, his bruises open to the world. He’s angry red and purple from hip to shoulder, bruising creeping across his abdomen, mottling his stomach. Sickening as they are to see, her eyes can’t help but slide straight past them.
She’d known Link was strong. She’s seen him take down a lynel without breathing harder than he does on a fast walk; she’s watched him climb what looked like a sheer cliff, hand over hand as if he were climbing a ladder, just to fetch down a flower she’d fancied looked worth studying. Hylia be blessed, she’s felt him lift her to examine a guardian with one arm and less than half his attention because he was watching for bokoblins in the woods, easy as if she weighs nothing at all. She hadn’t given it a first thought let alone a second at the time.
She hasn’t thought about how that would equate to his actual body. He’s seventeen years old, just a touch older than Zelda herself. Seventeen-year-old boys are gawky, gangly scarecrows, growing too fast to fit their own skin, all skinny uncoordinated limbs. Link looks like a marble statue of chiselled perfection animated into life. Standing there barefoot in the sick room doorway with a roughspun wool blanket around his shoulders and blood matting his hair and no clothes above the waist.
She should probably have expected it. A man with three breaks in his arm, a cracked collarbone and six split ribs can’t pull a shirt over his head.
It still strikes her utterly dumb.
Link clearly immediately cottons onto her shock and steps back, ducking his head this time in obvious embarrassment.
“Sorry,” Link says quietly. “I can’t…” He shrugs, immediately obviously regrets it.
“No, it’s not you, I’m sorry,” Zelda manages in an almost even voice. “I... simply wasn’t expecting you to be up already.”
It’s a not a lie, but it’s certainly not the whole truth.
As the shock wears off, she registers that his fresh wounds aren't the only mars to his skin. She hasn't even seen his bare hands before, though she's noticed calluses and scars across his fingers from his bowstring when he hands things to her, peeking out from under his ever-present gloves. Now she can see tiny white scars peppered across his hands, surely nicks from a lifetime of dedicated swordplay, larger lines here and there up his arms, across his torso. One on his shoulder, new enough to still be slightly raw and pink, she thinks she knows the source of - an arrow from a silver lynel that he chose to let graze him in order to line up the perfect killing blow. Now she's focusing on them she even registers a faint scar along his jawline and chastises herself internally for never bothering to look at him closely enough to see it before. Patterned across his flawless frame, it's as though the artist that crafted him in perfection decided to shift him a mere fraction closer to human normalcy. It doesn't work - if anything the scars only make him more astonishing, proof that all that strength and power isn't just for show.
"Should you be up already?" She asks before her mouth can betray her and she says something humiliating and idiotic about his body.
He shoots her a look that doesn’t quite meet her eyes and moves aside to let her in without answering. Which is, in itself, an answer.
“Has the doctor seen you today at least?” She asks as she steps into the room. She almost regrets saying it – she sounds so hectoring to her own ears, not concerned and contrite as she actually feels. Link doesn’t seem to mind. He nods, closing the door behind her.
Being in a closed room alone with him awake is immediately different to with him asleep. Wounded as he is he’s still regained some of that crackling intensity he was missing when unconscious, and it fills the space and makes her feel wrong-footed just with him standing by the door doing nothing but watch her and wait for her to speak. Zelda hadn’t expected to have to talk to him so soon. She’d expected him to still be sleeping so she could sit by him for a while and run through the apology speeches she thought up overnight to get them word perfect. Now, with him watching her with that inscrutable lack of expression that’s always irritated her more than she can explain, all her carefully crafted words abandon her. The only thing she can think to do is fumble in her bag to pull out his tunic and hold it out like an offering to the Goddess.
“Here, I mended this for you.”
He takes it from her without a word and smiles, soft and wide enough to crinkle the corners of his eyes. She hadn’t thought it meant much to him to have it. He wasn’t like the other champions when she presented it - varying mixtures of pride and nerves – he’d been stoic and steadfast as he always had been, bowing his head and taking it with steady hands. But now she watches him place it carefully on the side table with his bracers and the sword, sheathed now but still in need of cleaning, watches him rest his hand on it for a moment and close his eyes. His hand shakes, the finest of shivers, and she sees with a sudden startling clarity the reverence in that touch.
She takes this moment with his back turned to look him over properly. He’s standing and walking, yes, but yesterday taught her that Link would most likely take a mortal wound and not mention it till he dropped dead. He’s steady on his feet when he turns back to her, but he does it slowly, every movement careful. He takes the two steps back to the bed unaided but rests his hand on the bedpost when he gets there, not precisely leaning but still finding the support a relief.
His hair is still loose and still no one’s come to help him clean up. It feels strange to see him with it down, stranger yet for it to be such a disastrous mess when he’s usually so rigorously tidy. It has to be bothering him – she can smell a faint tinge of coppery blood from metres away.
“Link, your hair…” She lifts a hand, quails before she can point, tucks it back to twist with the other against her middle.
Link nods, sighs and lifts his good hand to touch the worst of the mess, scowling a little with distaste.
“Maybe a maid can...” she trails off. He doesn’t look the slightest bit keen, yet Zelda still can’t help a bitter hit of acid-burn jealousy in her throat even as she says the words. The thought of one of the maids seeing Link half-dressed, of them touching him…
“No, I’ll do it,” she says firmly, before her higher brain functions have time to consider if that’s in any way actually a good idea.
Link startles enough to knock words out of him.
“Your… highness?” He asks, eyes widening almost comically.
“Only if you want me to,” she hurriedly appends. He looks so surprised it’s verging on horrified and Zelda feels a mortified blush begin to creep up her neck. He still doesn’t respond, lack of words this time clearly not his choice as he mouths a couple of soundless syllables.
Zelda stiffens her resolve again.
“Link, I’ve been horrible to you for weeks-”
“Princess-” he blurts, but she raises her voice and keeps talking over him.
“I shouted at you and tried my best to get away from you and made your job miserable, and then you saved me from the Yiga. And now you’ve been hurt protecting me. Worse, not even by an enemy, just my own curiosity putting me in a stupidly dangerous situation. You have been far more loyal and honourable than my behaviour warrants. Please, let me help you recover as an apology.”
By the end of her little speech Link’s flushing, tinge of pink to the tips of his ears, but his eyes have softened and warmed to the brightest summer sky blue. He still doesn’t speak. Instead in a flash of boldness that takes Zelda by surprise he steps toward her and takes her hand. He can’t bow or kneel as he did when he pledged himself to her service, but he lowers his head and touches the lightest kiss to her knuckles.
Now it’s Zelda’s turn to blush to the tips of her ears.
***
It’s a relief to find the clinic bathhouse empty. Zelda has no idea how she’d explain the Princess of Hyrule washing the hair of a half-naked knight, even if he is her personal champion. Better to let the whole thing pass unseen.
Link has been leaning on her arm – she thinks more out of her anxiety than his necessity – but now he steps away to lay down the master sword on a bench. She’d been a little amused that he brought it at first, though not surprised. It’s rarely out of his reach, never out of his sight. He’s put it on the table while they eat before, until she glared him into laying it on the bench beside him instead. She’d always assumed it was a comfort thing, or if she were feeling particularly uncharitable a pride one. The mightiest weapon in Hyrule, and he’s the only one able to touch it – it has to give a man quite the ego.
As she watches him lay it carefully down, she wonders if perhaps it’s neither of those things. If he might possibly see it as a burden, a constant reminder of an incalculable, dreadful destiny he had no choice in and cannot escape. Only he can defeat the calamity alongside her. Only him, and he’s proven all too conclusively that he can bleed and break like anyone else. An inescapable sign. The way he is for her.
She has resolved to know and treat him better, and this is as good a place as any to start. So she asks him.
He doesn’t answer, only tilts his head and looks at her, but from the surprised consideration in his eyes she knows he will. He’s just thinking. She kneels and sets about drawing hot water into a tub while he does, for the sake of getting on with things but also so she doesn’t have to watch him watch her.
“It’s comforting sometimes,” he tells her eventually and she glances back up at him. He’s looking at her still, expression something she’s never seen on him before but knows the feel of all too intimately on her own face.
“The weapon that will win the war,” he says, quoting her father in a tone that betrays a lack of certainty on his own part she’d never thought he would reveal. “Most of the time it’s…”
He gestures helplessly with his good hand.
“Terrifying,” she finishes softly, meeting his gaze. “I know.”
There’s a silence. Link seems to be thinking again, weighing up whether to say something else so Zelda waits. It should be awkward, the silence, but the warmth in his eyes and the flicker of understanding between them makes it all right.
Finally he sighs and smiles a little, sad and resigned. “It’s why I don’t talk.”
It takes Zelda a moment to comprehend, but when she does her heart feels like it might crack and turn to dust in her chest. All this time she’s thought him arrogant, annoyed with her, silent because he managed to be the perfect paragon of a hero who claimed his birthright at twelve, saddled with guarding a princess so inept she can’t unlock a single blessing from the Goddess. Instead…
“I’m sorry.” She’s never meant anything more in her whole life. “Can we… start again?” She asks, standing up and stepping close enough to touch her fingers to his. “Do things right this time?”
Link smiles at her and she feels him curl one finger around hers, gentle and daring where no one can see them. She smiles back with the lightest heart she’s had in months.
Zelda turns back to her preparations, but Link keeps watching her. She watches him in turn from the corner of her eye as she gathers supplies and towels. It catches her off guard, the way he stares at her when he doesn’t think she’s paying attention. He’s not looking at her with any kind of resentment or as if she’s a burdensome duty. She thinks now he never has and she simply didn’t have the eyes to see it. He’s looking at her like she’s starlight, like she dazzles him but still he can’t imagine ever looking away. She doesn’t know how he can do that when she’s been nothing but unkind to him, but with her resentment cast aside she’s glad for it. Even if she doesn’t know what to do with it, other than to hope one day he might look at her like that when he does know she’s watching.
When she’s ready she pulls a stool over to the tub and pats it.
“Sit down, please.”
Link leans on her shoulder to help lower himself stiffly onto the seat. He can’t lean back much, only tip his head, so Zelda wraps a towel around him to keep his bandages dry and pours a little water over his ears to test.
“Is it a good temperature?”
He makes a vague affirmative noise. His eyes are already closed.
“Let me know if it gets too cold,” she orders, and gets to soaking and scrubbing. She’d known there was blood to wash out but she finds herself contending with mud too, dirt and blood caked together into a matted mess that resists every attempt to remove it. She attacks it as carefully as she can, checking on Link’s face regularly to make sure she’s not hurting him. She doesn’t trust him to tell her – not when he didn’t tell her half his ribcage was cracked and he could barely breathe - but he’s been unusually open with his emotions this morning and she thinks she’d see it on his face. Still, no matter how aggressively she scrubs he never shows a sign of discomfort. At one point when she’s pouring water to rinse and pulls her fingers across his scalp to clear out the lather he even sighs, soft and content.
His hair is unexpectedly wild when it’s loose and clean. It makes him look something like a lynel, all unrestrainable volume. She tells him this while she rubs a towel over his head and he flexes his good arm, puffing his chest out and miming a growl. The undignified snort that bursts out of her is entirely unexpected and utterly uncontrollable. Her perfect paladin has a sense of humour, it seems, and she can’t help but laugh.
The sound of it lights his face up like the sun.
Even clean Link’s hair is still knotted in a hideous tangle. She pulls most of it up with a hairband and starts combing it in layers, beginning with the shorter part at the back of his neck.
“It talks to me sometimes,” Link says as Zelda’s attacking a particularly recalcitrant knot with the comb. “The sword. Well, not so much talks. Shows me things I suppose.”
Zelda pauses her assault to look at his face.
“Really?”
He nods and she pokes him lightly.
“You can’t say something like that then not explain, Link.”
He laughs a tiny bit, under his breath. Zelda’s never heard him laugh before and the sound of it makes her feel warm and tingly in a way she’s never experienced.
“Little things,” he explains. “Sometimes I’ll be on guard duty and it nudges me that I missed something on the horizon. Or I’ll be drawing for a fight and see how to take things down. It did that when we were coming home, with that moblin.”
The mention of the moblin reminds Zelda of that feeling she’d had when she drew the sword for him. That urgency that felt like it was flowing into her hands, the undercurrent of worry that matched her own fear. She tells him about it and he nods as if this thing Zelda found so strange is the least surprising thing that could have happened.
“She does that,” he says. He sounds like he’s smiling though it doesn’t show on his face.
“She?” Zelda asks, casting a curious glance at the sword.
“Mmhm.”
Link doesn’t elaborate and Zelda supposes she’ll have to leave that for another time.
He’s flagging now. She’s nearly done with teasing tangles from his hair and he’s nearly done with waking. He’s leaning into her more and more, shoulder resting against her chest. It should feel scandalous to have him so close. It just feels comfortable.
He rouses a little when she finally declares him presentable. He gets to his feet without her help while she’s putting things away and dropping the towels into the laundry basket, but he asks her to carry the sword and he really does need to lean on her to walk back to his room. Getting him into bed is an extended process. He sits down and pulls his feet up without too much trouble – it’s the actual lying down that trips him up. He’s tired enough that his one good arm isn’t enough to support him without hurting himself, so she ends up putting her arms around his back and lowering him down. It’s impossible not to blush this time, not with his face so close to hers and his breath on her exposed throat, and especially not when her hair slips over her shoulder to brush his and he twists some of it in his fingers until she lets him go.
The doctor stops in just when Zelda’s got Link as comfortable as he can be with an extra blanket around his shoulders and another pillow to cushion his broken arm. She stands to one side while the doctor examines him and doses him with something that must taste disgusting based on Link’s sleepy scowl and the clumsy hand he rubs across his mouth. It’s strange to see him so expressive, though a good strange that buzzes warmly behind her sternum.
The doctor pronounces himself pleased with Link’s progress and tells Zelda that he’s healing faster than expected – he may even be able to go back to the castle and his own room in a day or two, to wait for Mipha to arrive. Zelda smiles and thanks him and makes sure he closes the door when he leaves.
She thinks Link is asleep already when she sits down next to him. To her surprise he cracks his eyes open at the sound of her pulling the chair closer and turns his good hand over, palm up on the blanket. It’s an offer Zelda doesn’t expect and she accepts it in a heady mixture of shy pleasure. Link slips his fingers between hers, squeezes gently once, and then his hand relaxes in her grip as he really does drop off to sleep.
She sits and holds his hand as he sleeps. His eyelashes flutter now and then, dreams chasing across his face. She hopes they’re good dreams, no moblins or monsters or broken bones. Even looking at him bruised and bandaged and sleeping she feels lighter. As if their hands pressed together atop the blanket are a new weapon against the inevitable future that gives her strength and courage. Spurred on by something inexplicable she leans down and touches the lightest kiss to his forehead. He sighs, shifting in his sleep and pulling their joined hands up to rest against his cheek.
Zelda knows that they can’t mention this again. This sickroom is a frozen moment in time, a bubble outside the pressures and inevitabilities of destiny where they can be only themselves. When Mipha has healed him and they’re the Princess and Champion of Hyrule again he won’t be able to touch her, let alone hold her hand or sleep with their fingers intertwined. Destiny is still waiting for them, out there beyond these four walls, but right now she can keep him, sit by his side and listen to him breathe. The Calamity is coming and soon enough they’ll have to become figureheads again instead of people. For the moment she’ll stay here and hold him while he mends.