Dedicated to my dear muse and beta, Anime Animal, who is willing to listen to any crazy thing I spew, maybe because it's partially her fault. ;)
Disclaimer: This little scene takes place years after Spirit Tracks, after the characters are well and solidly of age. Nonetheless, if the thought of those implications bothers you, better turn back while you can.
Zelda has never been ashamed of her scars. She considers them a badge of honor when she examines herself before a bath, a reminder that like the notable ancestors before her, she did not—and will not—stand idly by while her hero battled for her land. All her rewards were earned and won with her own two hands, and considering the circumstances, "own two hands" was a sufficiently praiseworthy condition on its own. She loved her adventures and loved life, and loved her brave engineer-turned-royal-guard best of all.
But on their long-awaited wedding night, when smoldering kisses at last blaze into exploratory touches and daring hands, she shies away from him for the first time. "Something wrong?" Link asks, unsure what to make of a princess-now-wife who does not immediately smother him with ebullient love and make his whole world dizzy.
"I," she starts to say, not knowing exactly what there is to explain, "my..." But Zelda, proud granddaughter of Tetra I the Pirate Queen, has never been one to have patience for princessy things like meekness or ambiguity or shame, so she steels herself and pushes the silk from her shoulders, lets the nightdress fall and challenges herself to keep his gaze all the while.
His eyes widen and his cheeks flush just as much as years of teasing and flirting and adoring tells her he would (and rightfully should), but it lasts only the briefest of moments before his eyes trace the blue-black mark over her heart where Malladus spewed from her body, the criss-cross of imprints across her torso where the dark bonds lashed her as carelessly as some puppet plaything, the jagged, puckered scar at her solar plexus where the Light Arrow had pierced and burned the darkness out of her. His face falls with the same candor that has always been his weakness (and hers, too), and he draws a breath through his teeth.
"Don't say you're sorry," she warns him, and his mouth halts so abruptly she could hear the screech of the brakes. "I don't need you to worry."
Link reaches out a tentative hand, traces a route through the vulgar map of scorched lines over her ribs, and she shivers from heart to soul. His hands are always warm with hidden fire, and they are broad enough, heavy enough to penetrate her thin defenses. "Did you think I wouldn't want you?" he asks, sounding just a little offended, as though she had blamed him personally for failing to defend her from the rain of fireballs. "Because you're—"
"Come on, love, give me a little credit." She gives him a well-practiced wink, "I know well enough you find me irresistible." He surrenders a resigned grin, and his hand shifts just far enough north to prove her point. "...I didn't want to remind you," she admits with less bravado, clutching his hand both to keep him there and for support, and hates Cole and his slimy smirk for still having the power to make her voice tremble five years after the fact. "That bastard had no right to use me... to-to touch me before you..."
Link scoots closer and wraps his arms around her, and she thinks it better and more impermeable than any suit of Phantom armor. "There's plenty of things he could never touch about you," he tells her hair and the nape of her neck. "Because the most beautiful parts of you were with me, the whole time."
She giggles shyly, because he is quite capable of making her dizzy too. "I'm so glad," she says, and doesn't need to elaborate.
.
He spreads her haphazardly across the bed and lays tracks with kisses over her skin, and though she wants him to hit certain landmarks, he traverses the scars first to erase their claim on her body. He spends extra time paying silent tribute at the shiny, shallow crater above her navel, because it was he who fired the arrow with shaking fingers, knowing she would rather be destroyed than enslaved by darkness, praying desperately for neither. "Does it still hurt?" he murmurs as an apology, being able to take back neither the arrow nor the intention.
Not with you, she wants to gasp, never with you, but the words hitch in her throat. She intertwines her fingers with his and it is enough.
Link completes the first leg of his pilgrimage, and looks up with eyes full of unspoken intention. "You're still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," he says. "Since the first day I laid eyes on you." And he dips his head again.
She thought she would never defy gravity again, but she was wrong.
.
When he finally enters her it burns with friction and brings a touch of tears to her eyes, but the act is so perfectly wonderful that a small laugh bubbles out of her instead of the gasp or cry it was meant to elicit. Link pauses in his tracks and looks at her, perplexed. "Are you... supposed to be laughing at me?"
She manages to keep from bursting into giggles again. "Nothing can steal my body ever again," she says, barely suppressing the smile escaping from the edges of her mouth. "It belongs to you now."
He grins that adorable grin and kisses her more wholeheartedly than ever, then drives full steam ahead.