The princess was not herself. She hadn't been for quite some time.
A child, a victim, a runaway, a ruler in exile, a coward. Broken by circumstance, nearly cast into the clutches of darkness if not for her guardian pulling her away in time. She remembered the escape, the storm, the chase, nothing more clear than that night so engraved into her mind. Her father killed, her people abandoned.
It was darkness she would retreat to.
There were nothing but tears on the journey to some place elsewhere, far away from the destruction. Tears mixing with the rain spilling down her face. Nothing but confusion and grief and the ever persistent question of why? What had gone wrong?
She didn't understand then. She wouldn't understand until much later.
The princess was not whole, but a collection of fragments, shattered by the weight of everything placed upon her. She would gather the pieces and pull herself back together because even underneath the guilt and the cowardice she felt in fleeing she was still Hyrule's rightful monarch. But she knew she couldn't stay around much longer, not now that she was a target.
It had seemed so simple. She remembered the transformation, the Sheikah magic washing over her, changing her form. Her cerulean eyes turning to crimson, her fair skin darkening, bangs falling over her eyes. Gone were other physical attributes that wouldn't be prominent until later years.
To become a boy, as she had requested of her guardian. She supposed she was now.
It wasn't weird so much as it was different, or perhaps not as different as she initially thought. A body that was not her own and yet it was, though with time she grew accustomed to it. She grew lean, she grew agile, she grew swift, soundless as a breeze. It was like a second skin - no - it was her skin.
But there was more - so much more.
She hadn't minded dresses, and yet she'd also liked playing pretend with swords, sneaking away from the guards to run barefoot in the meadows behind the castle, climbing trees until she was found and scolded. She'd heard the term "unladylike" before, but it didn't make sense to her. It was just an activity, how could it have been unladylike if she was doing it and she was a lady?
She was a girl, wasn't she?
Nothing else had existed. It was always prim and proper, head held high and chin up. It was flowers and gowns of gentle colours and "my little girl" and she'd gone through the motions. A princess must be a princess, soon to be a queen, she'd been told.
And now she saw, hidden within a Sheikah guise, how wrong all of it had felt, and despite everything, how much more at ease she was to simply exist outside of such expectations, even for only a time. They called him a boy, a shadow, a he, and it didn't sound foreign in his ears; it sounded right, it sounded just. It couldn't last forever, he knew, because Hyrule would need its leader back eventually, to set things right, to banish evil once and for all.
But it was a freedom the princess had never known, and one that clicked into place like a long lost piece of a puzzle.
Because the princess was not Zelda anymore, he was Sheik.
R&R