Work Text:
Naydra Snowfield is just as beautifully bleak as Zelda remembered.
She looks around them, at the trees dimly visible just beyond the scope of the light, at the snowbanks and the snowflakes melting in midair in the fire’s heat. Back at Link who’s pushed his hood down and is tensioning a guyline he’s secured with a rock, rubies glinting in his hair and tongue stuck out as he concentrates. The place is the same. He’s not. She remembers him helping with the tents last time too, face neutral as it always was when he was around anyone but her. Now she gets to see his frown of concentration, his pleased smile at getting things exactly right that widens into a cheerful grin when he looks up and catches her watching.
It’s been two weeks since their victory. Since she’d asked Link if he remembered her and he’d thrown aside his bow and caught her up in an embrace so tight it had stolen her breath and lifted her off her feet. Two weeks since he sank to his knees on the grass of Hyrule Field with her in his arms and they’d clung together, crying and laughing into each other’s hair, neither quite believing the other was real. Two weeks of resting in his house in Hateno with Link bringing her everything she could think to want while she recuperated from her hundred years of struggle, of him giving her his bed and clothes and cooking her food and helping her wash and comb her hair and writing down the messages she dictates to send off to their friends. Of friends visiting, tears and reminiscence, of gradually recovering the strength to get up and discover the town, leaning on his arm and walking slowly. Of him holding her hand, holding her up when she stumbles, but sleeping on the floor by the bed.
Two weeks, and there’s still no sign he remembers the most important thing.
So, here they are, camped on Naydra Snowfield, ostensibly on the way to the Spring of Wisdom to thank the Goddess for their deliverance now that Zelda has the stamina for the journey. Only Zelda knows it’s not just that.
She’d thought of leaving him a reminder, as she did with so much else. In the end it had been too personal, cutting too close to the bone to use so dispassionate a means as the Sheikah slate. And in some ways it had also felt too manipulative, imposing something on him when she should be asking. So she brought him here in the nebulous hope that if he doesn’t remember, then the place and the circumstance will remind him. She’s even found what she thinks is the same spot to camp, though she can only go off the view of the mountain above them. One hundred years and of course the trees and the scrub have changed beyond all recognition.
There’s a touch to her elbow and Zelda returns to herself from her wander off into her own head. Link’s smiling at her still, hand on her arm and all of him glowing in the red-amber-gold of the firelight and the lowering sunset.
“Dinner?” He asks hopefully. “I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving,” she laughs. That’s one thing about him that hasn’t changed.
“True,” he agrees, unperturbed, “but that lynel on the way up really worked up my appetite.”
Link’s a much better a campfire cook than Zelda, but she does her best to help. They brought pre-prepared rice balls and roasted vegetables in waxed wrappers that mostly only need reheating, so she takes care of those in their tiny travel pan while Link cleans and slices the fish they caught fishing off the promenade, propping it on skewers at the fireside.
They eat straight out of the pan and off the skewers, trading their one fork between them. At one point Link reaches out and wipes a smear of rice cake spice from the side of Zelda’s mouth with his thumb and her heart stutters and stumbles over itself helplessly.
After they’ve finished and tidied up, Zelda sits and watches the fire while Link unstraps the sword and lays it over his knees to clean. She sees him in the corner of her eye, practised hands using polish and cloths, and the similarity to before is almost too much to bear.
The sun is down by the time he’s finished, darkness hanging in the trees around them as he straps the sword back on. He stretches easily before he sits down again, arms above his head and spine curving like a bow, and Zelda thinks about those arms around her, the cold of the night and the heat of his breath on her cheek.
There’s no point in wasting any more time.
“When we were here last,” she says, so quietly she’s not sure Link will hear her over the crackle of the fire. He does, of course. She thinks he can hear her thoughts sometimes. “It was the night before my seventeenth birthday. We camped here, before we went to the spring. Everyone else went to sleep but I was too afraid to close my eyes, so you sat up with me at the campfire.”
Link’s watching her, she knows. She doesn’t look up at him yet, but she can imagine the play of firelight across his skin, the amber of it catching the ember of stubborn courage that burns in his heart and setting a wildfire alight in his eyes. She should just ask him. There’s no real point in painting the picture, either he remembers or he doesn’t. She still can barely bring herself to speak the words. One hundred years of fighting a calamity locked alone in the ruins of all she’d ever loved, and in this she’s still a coward.
“It was so late and so cold you made me get up and walk around the fire to try and warm up. And when we paused under the trees I, I asked you-”
“You asked me,” he says, as quietly as she spoke, and she looks up at him with fragile hope rising like an early sunrise, “what I would do if we won.”
***
Everyone else has been asleep for hours. Or in their tents at least. Zelda wonders if anyone else is as apprehensive and wakeful as her, lying in their bedroll and counting the minutes until sunrise. Probably not. No one else is here with the weight of the kingdom on their shoulders. No one else will be newly seventeen when the sun rises, newly seventeen and the only hope of defeating a calamity. Whatever comes tomorrow she’s facing it alone.
Almost alone.
“What time is it?” She asks.
Link looks up from running a cloth across the master sword. They’d run into ice monsters on the way up the snowfield and he’s just as meticulous about keeping his weapons clean as he was about taking the creatures down. Focused, precise, not a flaw to be found.
“Around one I think,” he says, with a glance skyward at the moon. “Definitely after midnight.”
Still so much time to wait. Zelda tucks her gloved hands into her sleeves and watches the fire.
The night creeps on. Link doesn’t ask her to go to her tent and try to sleep. He doesn’t wake another guard to take watch so he can rest. He stays with her silently, keeping himself busy with tending the fire, cleaning his weapons and replacing the worn string of his bow. He always seems to know what she needs, she reflects, as she watches him restring his bow with no sign of effort. She can’t bear the thought of talking right now - he doesn’t talk. Anyone looking at her makes her skin feel like it’s going to burn off and he doesn’t look at her, only at his occupied hands, raising his head regularly to scan the treeline. She knows if she asked him to sit by her silent and unmoving for the rest of the night he would, and without a word of complaint.
A particularly bitter wind rustles the treetops and blusters a dusting of snow across them and their fire. Zelda shivers.
“You should get up and move.”
Zelda looks up. Link has strapped his bow in its customary place on his back and is stoking the fire.
“You’ve been sitting still for three hours,” Link adds, glancing at her with no judgement or pity, just quiet understanding. “Warming elixirs only do so much. Your toes will thank you when you don’t get frostbite.”
He’s right, as he usually is. She sighs and stands, noticing the stiffness in her legs and the cold in her extremities for the first time, and starts walking. Link rises with her. He puts himself on her right, keeping his body between her and the darkness. Always between her and danger, she thinks, and it throbs in her chest like a wound.
They walk in circles and Zelda thinks of those two days they spent in the Castle Town clinic, weeks ago now. Her memories of them are strange, saturated golden and more peaceful than she can remember being since she was a tiny child. She thinks of Link and how he’d let himself touch her in that small bubble of time where he didn’t have to be anyone’s champion - how he’d let his defences open to her, just a little. His shoulder against her chest as she towelled his hair. His fingers curling a lock of hers, daring for a moment when no one could see. Her fingers twined with his, pressed against his cheek.
She has to ask him. There won’t be another chance.
Something rustles in the trees beyond the firelight and Link moves closer to her, hand hovering at the hilt of his sword as he scans the dark. He’s so close she can feel the heat of his breath in the air. A bird flits from a tree and away into the sky and Link relaxes, hand falling back to his side.
Before he can step away she turns and drops her head onto his shoulder, curling her fingers into his padded jacket and holding on. He jerks in surprise and staggers back a pace, but she hangs onto him and after few hanging seconds he exhales a shaky sigh. His arms come up around her, one hand resting at the small of her back and the other on her head, fingers sliding through her hair. She feels his thumb soothe gently across her spine.
He smells like horse this close. Horse and a long day’s travel, sweat from his sword practice after dinner, leather polish and something herbal and fiery from the elixir they both drank against the cold. She would probably find it disgusting, if it didn’t smell like home and the only hope she has left.
“Link?” She whispers. He hums in response, thumb pausing its soft sweep over her back.
“If it goes well in the morning, at the spring…” her voice wavers and she swallows hard, forces herself to continue. “If it goes well and we win, what will you do after?”
He lets out a puff of breath, a little surprised, but it doesn’t take him long to answer.
“I’ll still be a knight, my oaths to the King won’t go away. Whether you’ll still need an appointed knight though…”
He trails off. Zelda feels his reluctance to follow that train of thought in a tightening of his fingers in her hair, almost to the point of pain. Zelda savours it. She’s never been sure – she thought, but Link is so closed off even to her, how could she possibly truly know. Here’s another piece of evidence to support her theory and it gives her the strength to keep talking. She still bites her lip and sucks in a deep breath before she does.
“What if I asked you to be more than just my knight?” She says. It’s finally out there in the night air and the relief of speaking it aloud is just as intense as the anxiety at what he will respond. “What if I wanted you to be mine?”
Link goes very, very still. For a long moment it doesn’t feel like he’s breathing. Zelda thinks again of the clinic, the dazzle in his eyes when he looked at her when he thought she wasn't watching, the way he’d tilted towards her even sleeping, helpless to resist the pull, and is almost certain, as close as she can be to certain, that he wants what she does. It’s still an agony to wait for him to answer.
When he does finally speak his voice is hoarse, barely audible even in the silence.
“What about… I’m not noble, your father won’t…”
“I don’t care.” She presses herself closer, puts her hands to his chest and feels his heart, his stubborn, relentless, wonderful heart, feels it through the barrier of fabric and Rito down padding. The beat picks up at her touch, hammering harder the nearer she pulls him.
“I don’t care,” she repeats. “I want something for myself. After all this I deserve something for myself.”
Link lets out a sound that might be a sob. His arms tighten around her, a bare fraction of his strength but enough to squeeze her breath from her lungs. She feels him press his face to her hair and breathe her in.
“If we save the world we should be rewarded,” she insists, though in her heart she’s just as afraid of her father’s reaction as Link sounds. “I don’t want honours or trophies or statues of us, I just want-”
Her voice cracks and she can’t get the last word out. Link understands her, she knows. He always does.
“Of course I want that too,” he mumbles, muffled in her hair and choked in a mirror of how her own throat feels. “Always have, from the second I first saw you.”
Zelda’s read enough love stories to know that hearing she was right should make her deliriously happy. She’s too cold and afraid for anything but bitter gladness that she’s not alone.
They stand for a while in the flicker of the firelight, Link’s hand rubbing softly up and down her back, her hands still pressed hard against his heartbeat. Much as they want to, they both know they can’t stay that way forever. Someone will wake and catch them eventually. In a moment of unspoken understanding, they lift their heads to meet each other’s eyes at the same time. Link’s are a little puffy and red, the sparkle in the blue more tears than bedazzlement this time. Zelda supposes hers are the same.
Neither of them dares speak the final confirmation aloud. Three short words, but there’s no space for them here. Not at the foot of the sacred mountain in the early hours with all the day portends still before them, not with the calamity looming all around them in the darkness beyond the firelight. Link just takes her face between his palms and runs his thumbs across her cheekbones. Zelda puts her hands over his and leans forward until their foreheads touch.
“Promise me, Link,” she whispers into the scant centimetres between their mouths.
Link brushes a teardrop from her cheek.
“Zelda,” he says, only the second time he’s ever used her name, and she feels the ache in it deep into her bones. “I promise.”
***
Zelda’s mouth is dry, her heart pounding in her ears.
“We took the hardest way,” she says, and somehow her voice doesn’t shake, “but we won.”
Link stands up, takes the two steps between them, sinks to his knees in front of her. Takes her face between his palms.
“Link,” she whispers. She touches her fingertips to his cheek in wonderment. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get used to having him again, of the electric thrill of him so close, the warmth of his skin even in this biting cold. He leans forward, touching his forehead to hers. She closes her eyes at the echo of before, all that bitter fear of then refashioned into honey sweetness now.
“Zelda,” he says, breath clouding in the air and hot on her cheek, eyes fiercely alight, “I’ve always been yours.”
Relief and joy rise in her with the force of a rip tide. It sends her sliding from her seat, falling into Link’s lap, hands grabbing onto him and pulling herself close. He falls back on his heels, catching her in his arms and taking her in, as tight together as he can pull them. It’s like Hyrule Field all over again, clinging to each other and not knowing whether to cry or laugh so doing both at once, messy and undignified and utterly beautiful. But this time when she presses her face into the space behind his ear she knows, so she can do what she wanted then and kiss his neck and his ear and the turn of his jaw.
Link breathes out at the touch of her lips, shaky and exhilarated, and kisses her in turn on her knuckles, her palm, then pushes her up so he can kiss her forehead, her cheek. He hesitates then, gaze flicking from her eyes to her mouth and back. There’s no fear there, only a question. Zelda answers him with action. She tugs her hand free, holds him by the short hair at the back of his neck, and pulls his mouth to hers.
It’s chaste and a little clumsy – neither of them have the first idea what to do – but it still lights Zelda up inside bright as the Goddess’ power. She finally understands why writers talk of sparks and fireworks and spin metaphors that never made much sense to her. There are no words for this that could ever adequately describe it.
They break apart and Link blinks at her, pupils blown wide and expression dazed. He can’t seem to take his eyes off her mouth.
“I love you.” The words tumble out of him as if he can’t help it.
Zelda laughs in delight and pulls him in again. “I love you,” she says back in between breathless kisses, “I love you, I love you.”
It’s only when a log falls and the fire sputters that they fully pull apart and realise they’re kneeling on snow and frozen rock. Zelda’s legs are going numb and Link shudders with a scowl.
“My knees are freezing,” he complains, and she laughs again at the absurdity of them both until he scoops her into his arms and staggers upright on unsteady legs.
She’s still giggling helplessly as Link deposits her back in her seat on a fallen log and hurriedly adds more wood to the fire, rearranging how it burns with practised ease until it’s leaping brightly again. He’s back beside her in less than a minute, arm around her back pulling her snugly into his side. She drops her head to his shoulder and wonders why it feels like she fits into him as if she were designed to be nowhere else.
Now that the first heady rush of joy is settling to a glow in her heart, she remembers she has another question to ask.
“Why did you say anything?” She shoves him lightly in the chest. “Two weeks, Link. I thought you didn’t remember.”
He shifts a bit, something guilty and uncomfortable passing over his face.
“Sorry. I thought.” His hand on her back shakes and she feels him tense beside her. “I had a lot of dreams. Not all of them turned out to be real. After I remembered you and what we promised, I thought…”
Zelda has been through many heartbreaks this past century. This is a kind of grief she can’t even imagine. Too much hope and too much fear all at once.
“You could’ve asked me,” she whispers.
He swallows and shakes his head.
“It wasn’t just that, I-, I knew my feelings for you hadn’t changed, but I wasn’t sure about yours for me.”
That’s so absurd it takes Zelda a moment to process what he said. When she does, she has to lift her head from his shoulder to look at his face, his cheeks flushed pink in the cold and his eyes a little worried in the corners, and wonder how someone can be so courageous and clever and so terminally stupid at the same time.
“Link, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I don’t know if I’m still the same person,” Link mutters, flushing harder with embarrassment and ducking his head. “I remember who I was now, mostly anyway, and I don’t feel like... I know he’s me, but he doesn’t feel like me sometimes. So bottled up and proper.”
Put like that, Zelda understands his fear. It’s still absurd, but it does make sense.
“And you worried that I loved you then, so I might not still love you now,” she smiles, “with your hare-brained schemes and truly terrible puns about seals.”
He huffs and jogs her with his shoulder, but he does smile too, even if not enough to smooth the anxiety from his eyes.
“You’re still him,” she reassures him. She rests her head back on his shoulder and takes his hand, lacing their fingers together and pressing them to her lips. “Just him when he’s allowed to be happy.”
He finally relaxes then, body softening into her and hand squeezing hers gently.
“I missed you,” he tells her as he runs his free hand through her hair. “I missed you even before I remembered you, you know that?”
It’s a bittersweet thing to learn, that Link loves her so faithfully it never left him, even when almost everything else did. She thinks back on watching him with divine eyes in his first days out of the chamber, fretting about how weak and confused he was, pushed alone into a cruel world with nothing but the Sheikah slate and muscle memory of how to fight. It shakes her in her core to know that loving her is so deeply ingrained in him that it’s muscle memory too.
“You did?” She asks, instead of telling him any of this. This moment is too golden to taint with even a memory of sadness.
Link nods and kisses her again, the lightest brush on her hair.
“I woke up found out I was supposed to save the world, and for a while I didn’t even know what that meant. The only reason I kept moving was I … I knew I needed to find something. I didn’t even know it was a person for the longest time. I just had a tether pulling at my heart and I kept running after it.”
Zelda runs her fingertips along a new scar on the side of his neck; one she doesn’t remember from before the Calamity.
“Wherever it took you,” she says with a smile that aches so sweetly she feels drunk with it. Link laughs and she closes her eyes to savour the sound.
“It took me a lot of unexpected places,” he admits. “You know that I suppose. You saw most of it.”
“Yes,” she nods mock-seriously. “Remind me again why you thought it was a good idea to try taking all your clothes off on a shrine pedestal in the middle of a blood moon?”
He groans and covers his eyes with his hand, but he’s grinning even if it’s embarrassed.
“That worked though.”
Zelda has to concede that. Besides, she wasn’t lying when she said his mad schemes are something she loves about him. It will never stop being a profound delight to her that she gets to see all of his personality now, no walls or decorum in the way.
They sit for a while, heads together and hands twined, whispering and laughing under their breath as if they aren’t entirely alone on a mountainside, no one to hear them any closer than Kakariko. Eventually the cold worms its way through even the stoutest of Rito down and the heat of the fire and Zelda shivers. Link pulls her furred hood up around her face and kisses her once, soft and brief, before pulling her to her feet and sending her to make the tent ready while he banks the fire for the night.
Zelda takes both their bedrolls and ducks into the tent. It’s a tiny space, just big enough for their bedrolls side by side and their packs around them for extra insulation. She unfurls both rolls, looks at them for a second, then makes an abrupt decision. It’s quick work to rearrange the waterproof outers and the thick padding, so by the time Link joins her she’s long since got their two beds merged into one and is sitting cross-legged, worrying at her fingernails and hoping it was the right choice. She needn’t have worried. Link crawls through the flap, takes one look around, and smiles at her like she hung the stars.
It’s too cold to even take off their boots but Link does unstrap his weapons and lay them by the entrance. He digs into his pack and pulls out another elixir, extra strong this time to last them the night. It tastes of nothing but heat, scalding enough to make her scowl and cough and down gulps of water to drown it out. Link still kisses her, his own kind of burning heat on her tongue.
When they lie down Zelda hesitates, suddenly self-conscious, hands that want to touch tucked instead against her chest. Link has no such reservations. He pulls the coverings over them both and tugs her in, enclosing her in his arms and hooking his knee over hers, pulling her closer still. It runs a thrill through her, feeling so much of him pressed so close, even through all of their padded clothes and thick gloves and winter boots. She thinks of his house in Hateno, his bed that they’ll surely share when they return this time, where she’s been sleeping in just Link’s thin cotton clothes, and flushes so deeply in shy anticipation she has to tuck her head under his chin to hide.
“I love you,” she says to his chest. It’s been at least ten minutes since she said it. Far too long.
He sighs in response, running a hand up her back from hip to shoulder, leaving tingles in his wake through all her layers of clothing.
“I’m never going to get tired of hearing that.”
She can tell from the way he says it that he’s smiling.
“Love you,” he adds around a yawn big enough that Zelda feels it in his whole body, feels his breathing slowing and lengthening as he settles towards sleep. She closes her eyes and matches her breathing to his and sleepily wonders if she’s ever been this comfortable and happy in her whole life. When she was small perhaps. Before her mother died.
She’s just starting to doze when Link suddenly stirs.
“Was the trip to give thanks to the Goddess at the spring entirely an excuse?” He sounds amused, teasing, and she grins to herself, hidden against his jacket.
“Partly,” she admits, unrepentant. “I could’ve asked you if you remembered anywhere, I suppose, but it felt right to come here. Keep our promises where we made them.”
His arms squeeze her a little tighter in wordless agreement.
“We’ll go to the spring in the morning anyway of course,” she adds, smiling again. “We have even more to thank Her for now.”