I would like to note beforehand that I have written this with the assumption that Link literally only has the memories that we see him regain in the game, and as such is still extremely confused and conflicted with his identity. It's like he has two personalities fighting it out in his head; the one he woke up with and developed through his experiences in the game, and the one that he slowly began to remember from beforehand, and he is torn between both of them. Or that's how I see it, anyway.
Ramblings aside, and onwards we go!
.&.
He found her sitting at the top of the stairs outside the Inn, and finally allowed the final dregs of the blind panic that had overtaken him when he had awoken to find her bed empty to dissipate into the cool night air. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, basking in a wave of melancholy, her body bathed in the ethereal glow of the moonlight shining down upon Kakariko Village. For a brief moment, he allowed himself to simply stand there and observe her, enjoying the relief that had flooded through him at the knowledge of her safety - it seemed that he could never truly forget his need to protect the Princess of Hyrule - before he broke the silence with a soft, "Princess."
No response.
"Princess," he said again, and then, "Zelda."
She remained frozen, painfully oblivious to his attempts to reach her in her sombre trance.
"Zelda," he repeated once more, a little forcefully this time. "Zelda." A pause. "What are you going out here?"
Finally she stirred, shifting in her seat slightly and not quite looking back at him. "Everything is different," she began absently, quietly, with the practiced neutrality that he recognised all to well. There was a dazed hint to her voice that worried him slightly, and he strained his ears to listen even closer. "The land, the forests, the roads, the buildings, the people. This village is still in the same place, but the buildings are too new, and Impa is one of the only people I still recognise, and she is so... old." A pause, and then she added, whispering, "I don't like it."
Link winced, despite himself, but Zelda continued as if she was almost unaware of his presence. "The stars are still the same though," she observed faintly. "It's nice. Did you notice?"
Wordlessly, Link shook his head. He hadn't, of course, probably because of his lack of memories of Before for him to compare the twinkling sky to. Everything had that odd sense of déjà vu to it, as if he were roaming aimlessly through some half-remembered dream, and he had never really taken the time to consider the sky above his head, and how it might not have changed. He supposed it made sense logically; it would take far more than one hundred years for the stars in the sky to shift.
Then again, he had been asleep (dead?) for the past century, wheras she had been locked in an eternal battle with Calamity Ganon, experiencing each and every second like it was a lifetime, and he supposed that that made all the difference.
"It's cold out here," he said eventually. "You should come inside."
Zelda practically shuddered at the suggestion. "You go," she murmured, almost inaudibly. "I'll be fine."
Link snorted to himself. Memories or not, there was no chance he was leaving her alone out here.
It appeared that one hundred years ago he had been able to read her very well, for bits and pieces of information reguarding her body language and posture kept popping into her head. Her knees, for example, she was hugging them tightly to her chest as if to shield herself, a sure sign that she was nervous. She was knawing on her lip - something she only did when lost in a deep, worried trance of thought, and she hadn't looked at him once, which said to him that she was trying to hide the fact that she had been crying.
And her voice, it was so quiet, so soft, and her words were too few and far between. His princess could - and frequently would - talk so much that she would actually go faint from a lack of air. For him, her silences were far more telling than any words could ever be.
To him, it seemed that all their lives it had been as if there was some invisible wall between them, a wall of properity and respect and social status, and Link could clearly remember that, once, he had been content to let it be, been content to remain a few feet behind, to follow, to stand like a lifeless statue and listen, never speak. It had been his duty to guard the Princess, and he had embraced it wholeheartedly, along with all the restrictions that it had brought.
Now however, he felt as if he was at a window, watching helplessly as his Zelda slowly tore herself to pieces. She couldn't hear him, no matter how hard he shouted and screamed and banged on the glass, and Link's throat was beginning to go raw from overuse.
"Zelda, what's the matter?"
"Can you hear me?"
"Zelda?"
"..."
"Zelda, please answer me."
"Zelda."
It occurred to him, then, the irony of him trying to coax her to speak, and he could have laughed had the situation been any different. He could not remember this himself yet, but he knew that Zelda had once spent weeks upon end slowly encouraging him to speak with her; he had read about it when rifling through her diary.
A hundred years ago, he thought that he would have stood silently behind her, leaning his weight nonchalantly upon his sword and giving her the farce considered to be her privacy whilst his restless eyes scouted the area for danger. Now he supposed that he should do the same, only she looked so small, so pathetically helpless huddled by herself that he almost could not bear the thought of standing there, futily pretending not to notice her struggles.
Something was clearly the matter, and had been for some time. Link's personal hypothesis had been that she was drowning in a sort of survivor's guilt. If he had learnt anything at all about Zelda from few memories that he had regained, it was that she held herself up to the high standards set by those around her, and no doubt blamed solely herself for not getting access to her powers soon enough to prevent Calamity Ganon from returning. Impa had brought this up however, as had the spirit of Urbosa, and yet - despite their best efforts to make her realise that all this was not her fault - it seemed that Zelda's mental state was getting worse, not better.
He himself had always skirted around the edge of the matter as if it were some bottemless pit waiting to engulf him whole, and yet all of a sudden he suddenly couldn't stand the idea of simply looking in on her any longer.
His long internal debate ended, Link seated himself down on the steps beside her with a renewed determination coursing through his blood. "Zelda," he tried once more, speaking with a gentle, coaxing softness. "What is it that is troubling you?"
"It's nothing," the girl stammered in response, finally allowing her tears to enter her voice. "I'm being stupid, I- I don't want to keep you up."
"It's clearly not nothing," he replied, allowing his concern to show in his voice. "C'mon, you can tell me." He shuffled closer to her, angling himself so that he caught a glimpse of her tear stained face before she could jolt her head away, pursing her lips with a grieving determination, the stars sparkling beautifully in her water-logged eyes. Link felt an odd desperation upon seeing just how distraught she really was, and he tried once more.
(For although he was the outsider, he would beat his fists against the window until they were bloody if it meant he would get her attention.)
"Zelda," he repeated, his tone having taken on a pleading edge, "Please."
She shook her head, shying away from him, and he sighed defeatedly, running his hands through his hair. "Look," he began, "I want to help you, Zelda, more than anything else in the world, but I can only do that if you-"
"I'm sorry I let you die," Zelda blurted out suddenly, interruoting him, her voice barely more than a broken whisper, and the confession resonated in the air between them like an echo, bouncing around an empty canyon long after the cry had finished.
Oh, thought Link, understanding finally dawning upon him as a pit formed in the base of his stomach. Oh. Beside him, Zelda shuddered painfully, her quiet sobs shattering the cloak of silence that Kakariko Village wore so well.
He swallowed thickly and took a deep breath before raising his hand and - with the petrified caution of a rabbit creeping past a snoring bear - extending it towards the shaking form of the Princess. He could feel the sharp edges piercing his flesh as he forced his hand through the window - breaking the trapping glass through the sheer might of his determination - and he swallowed again, brow furrowing as he pushed himself onwards.
The barrier between them was gone, he told himself firmly, desolate and crumbling like the charred remains of Castle Town. It had been gone for some time now - one hundred years, to be precise - yet another of the many things torn down by Calamity Ganon.
With a deep breath, Link placed a gentle hand upon her shoulder and slowly urged her to turn around and face him. She resisted him at first, but quickly gave in, and tilted her body so that they sat facing each other, legs touching. He gazed piercingly at her, and she averted her eyes in response, staring determinedly at the steps below them.
Link trailed his hand up from her shoulder until his fingers rested gently upon her chin, and he tilted her head up gently, so that their eyes met, her emotions laid bare before him. Using his thumb, Link stroked the stray tears from her face, before smiling sadly at her.
"Oh, Zelda," he breathed, his chest aching. "You have nothing to be sorry for."
And then, like a puppet whose strings had just been cut, Zelda slumped forward, burying her face into his chest and releasing these horrible, painful, choking sobs that made his heart wrench in agony. Her hands clenched his tunic tightly, with an almost feral desperation, as if she was afraid that he might blow away in the wind.
Link pressed his face against her crown and sighed, slowly breathing her in. After a moment he wrapped his arms around her, allowing his hands to run through her smooth hair and rub soothing, aimless patterns across her back and arms.
Once upon a time, he knew he would have cringed at the thought of touching her unnecessarily, lest his dirty hands - black and brown and red with dirt and filth and so much blood, far too much than should ever have been allowed - had marked her perfection.
(But that was Before, when her once pure, white gown had not been stained with just as much blood and mud as his skin was.)
Now however, he simply closed his eyes, and for a moment all the gore and the dirt and the grime vanished, and they were simply two people, taking comfort from one another, just Link and Zelda.
As her shuddering subsided to the occasional whimper he tightened his hold around her slim frame and scooped her into his arms, cradling her to his chest as he shuffled backwards until his back was resting against the wall of the Inn. He set her down sideways in his lap, so that she was leaning against him, her face still hidden in his tunic.
He waited until her breathing had stilled before he spoke, whispering soft words of assurance against her shimmering hair.
"No, Zelda," he murmured gently, his hands still stroking up and down her back and arms, "you didn't let me die. Quite the opposite in fact. I was more than ready to sacrifice myself for your sake, yet it is only because you clung on to me and wouldn't let go that I am still here. You may fault yourself for your timing, but if you had been even a second later then I might not have lived."
She was shaking her head, clearly already forming an objecting argument in her head, but Link shushed her. Softly, he reached out and tilted her chin upwards, so that her red-rimmed emerald eyes met his own sapphire ones. "I owe you my life, Zelda," he told her firmly. "Certainly not the opposite."
Hesitantly, she nodded, before once again returning her head to its resting place against his heart, shifting herself in his lap to lean further into him. Link in turn tightened his arms around her waist, and they fell into a silence for a while.
"I apologise for using your tunic as a towel," Zelda said eventually, a hint of strength beginning to find its way back into her voice,
Link shrugged slightly. "It's alright," he replied nonchalantly. "It needed a wash anyway."
A small noise, more like a hiccup than a laugh, escaped Zelda's mouth, and Link felt yet another wave of relief wash over him in response.
They settled back into a comfortable silence, both content to merely be in each other's presence. Link couldn't help but notice how nice it felt - how right - to hold her and comfort her the way he had screamed at his hundred-year-ago self to do when reliving so many of his lost memories. He couldn't comprehend how he had once stood by and watched her suffer, looking on like an uncaring stranger as she tore herself down time and time again for something far beyond her control.
He shook himself slightly, tilting his head back to rest it against the smooth wood of the Inn behind him, his restless eyes searching the sky above for something to take his mind off this troubling train of thought.
Now that she had said it, Link thought that he could feel an odd sense of familiarity when looking upwards at the sky. "You were right about the stars," he said aloud, his eyes wide with a newfound joy as he took in the glittering lights in the distance. "They are the same."
No reply.
He looked down, and found that Zelda had fallen asleep, a small, peaceful expression etched on her face as she snuggled comfortably against him.
Link smiled softly, eyes never leaving her face, basking in the quiet beauty of her content slumber. Above them, the stars twinkled, gazing down upon the two entwined Hylians the same way as the occasional Sheikah passerby did: Like outsiders, looking in.
-end-
AN: I swear to G-, er, Hylia that when I planned this it was nowhere near as emotionally rambling as it turned out. You just gotta go with the flow, man.