Thanks for all the great feedback, my top dudes. Keep rocking it.
I know you care
I see it in the way that you stare
As if there was trouble ahead and you knew it
I'll be saving myself from the ruin
There was a book she read when we were younger, one with a picture hidden deep within the waves of pages of a house. It wasn't grand by any means, it was stout, and modest. The walls were painted white, with brown shutters beside the windows, and the door was painted a blue like the sky on the cold mornings in Skyloft. Zelda loved that picture, she copied it down, she left the book open on her desk to that page, she always told me she wanted to live in that house. She told me once that some day she would fly away to an empty island and build a house there, and that her door would be blue.
So it doesn't necessarily surprise me when she shows up with a bucket of blue paint at my house. All of my furniture is clean and new, patterns on the cupboards and pictures on the bookshelves. Painting has definitely become a hobby for her, something to pass the time, something to train her thoughts somewhere else.
The only place left for her is the door.
But she doesn't draw any attention to the bucket sitting just inside the door where she had set it down, instead she crosses the room towards the kitchen and starts making herself a lunch as I watch from the table. After what happened when she was taken from the house, I've become a paranoid mess whenever she leaves, especially if I don't know where she's gone. That's when she learned to leave notes for me, detailing where she is and how long she'll be. I haven't seen her since I fell asleep last night.
"Hey," I say, slightly confused by the fact that she hasn't said a word yet.
She turns to look at me over her shoulder. "Hey."
I raise an eyebrow at her nonchalance, her seeming lack of interest for anything. Standing up, I cross the room to see her, look at her eyes and see if something in them is wrong, if I need to worry. "How did you sleep?" I ask.
"Just fine, actually, and you?"
I scratch the back of my head, rubbing the irritated scratches on my arms. "I think I must have wandered away from the house after you left. Because I woke up under a bush," I explain. It had been somewhat of a blessing for me that we'd started locking down the house after sunset, it made it harder for me to sleep walk away. But when she'd left the door unlocked this morning, there must have been nothing to stop me.
"Are you alright?" she asks, turning those great big eyes right towards me.
Nothing, not the slightest glimpse of a secret fear, nothing to hide. Just Zelda, feeling comfortable enough to not acknowledge her absence, feeling no obligation to explain her whereabouts. "Yeah, I'm totally fine."
"Are you hungry?" she asks, gesturing to the food she's preparing for herself.
"No," I say, looking over her shoulder at the bread she's slicing and resting my palm on her lower back, "how was Skyloft?"
It was an assumption at best, but she continues on as if it was a well-known fact. "Good, Dad seemed less anxious today. It's colder up there though," she says, sucking the tomato juice off her thumb after she slices one. She gathers her hair together then, twisting it away from her face and off her neck briefly.
That's when I see it again, something I'd almost forgotten.
It's that odd birthmark, the one that looks like an upside-down triangle, a dot on either side.
"That's good," I mumble, raising my hand off her back to touch the mark. It isn't raised, it doesn't smudge, but it's smooth, like it's just a part of her skin. "Hey, did you ever figure out where this mark came from?"
"The birthmark?" she asks, running her fingers over where mine had been just before, she scoffs, "I'm assuming from birth."
"But I've never seen this on you before, I feel like I would have," I argue, folding my arms across my chest.
"What does it look like?" she asks me.
I bite my lip, scanning the counters and tables and cupboards quickly before coming up with a piece of paper and ink. I roughly sketch the symbol onto the paper, and push it across the table to where she now sits with her lunch. Her eyes narrow as she studies it, chewing thoughtfully on her food before saying, "I feel like I've seen this before."
"You have?"
She second-guesses herself, I can see it in the way her eyes drop, "I don't know. It's just a feeling. It's familiar."
"Something maybe Hylia...?" I suggest.
"No, it doesn't seem that old of a memory. But I'm not sure where it came from then," she murmurs, attention still locked on the paper, "it doesn't really look like something that would just show up randomly, does it?"
"No, it doesn't," I agree.
"I'll show it to my father later, he might have some idea of what it means, if anything," she continues.
"Good idea," I say. "So, what were you doing up there today? You didn't say where you were going in your note." The note that sits in my pocket, crumpled and warped with soft lines where I'd folded and unfolded it time and time again this morning.
I'm sure she can hear the subtle tone of anxiety in my voice. Yes, I had been worried when she hadn't said where she was or what she was doing. I was worried that something was wrong and that she didn't have time to explain further. Afraid that maybe Hylia was making her do something stupid. "Sorry," she says, returning to her lunch, "I just thought you'd assume that I was in Skyloft."
"Well, I did," I interject quickly, "but you didn't say what you were doing either."
"I was picking up dye," she explains around a mouthful of bread, "blue dye for the paint."
"For the door?" I ask.
She nods, as if just remembering the task she was determined to get to and stuffing the rest of the food in her mouth. This is the Zelda very few people get to see, the one that doesn't care about manners or maturity, the one that is comfortable with acting like a child. "I think I found the perfect color when I was mixing it this morning. It's almost exactly like the picture."
"The one from the book," I say.
"Mhmm," she murmurs, "did you ever read it?"
I shake my head, slightly embarrassed. She'd tried to get me to pick up the thing multiple times throughout the years. Sometimes she would bribe me, or leave it on my pillow, or even sit and watch me begin, but I never made it far past the first chapter. Zelda picked up books like they were gold, tore through them like they were food, talked about them like they were old friends. I personally always liked to hear the stories she heard from her mouth, they always seemed to come to life when she told them.
She rolls her eyes and stands up, clearing her dishes to wash later—there are obviously more pressing matters at hand than washing dishes—and wipes her hands on her skirt. "I can't believe after all this time, you still haven't read it. I thought I forced you to that one time."
"You did," I remind her, a pathetic grin on my face.
"How far did you read then?" she asks, sitting back down.
"Hmm... I remember the part about a river, one that never froze, even in the winter time because it was so fast," I attempt to offer. It was a long time ago that I read it, and to be honest, I was paying more attention to how hot the room felt when I was trying to read with Zelda's unfailing, steady gaze on me the entire time.
"And...?" she prods.
"And... that's it," I respond sheepishly.
She raises a quirked brow in amusement, "Link, that was the prologue."
I swallow back a laugh, so I hadn't even gotten as far as I'd imagined. "Well, maybe you should explain it to me. I have a much better attention span when I'm listening to you."
She smirks, trying to hide a smile as she picks up her feet off the floor and crosses her legs on the chair. "I won't do it as much justice as the book."
"Then tell me about the house. Tell me about the house in the book, why it's so important," I say.
Her eyes fall slightly then, her fingers tracing patterns on the table as she tries to find the right words. "The little girl in the book," she begins quietly, "her father painted the door of their house blue, so if she ever got lost, ever wandered too far from home, she would know which house was theirs by the blue door. She could ask anyone to point her towards the house with the blue door, and she'd find her home again."
"Did she get lost?" I ask, the room falling to silence under the mystery of the story.
"She spends most of the book lost," Zelda answers, "I just always thought it was a nice idea, for there to be something that could guide you back home."
"That would be helpful," I say gently, "because I have a bad habit of wandering away from home."
A smile graces her pink lips, "We should get started then if you don't have other things to do."
"Things to do, who do you think I am?" I ask her with a laugh, "the last time I had something incredibly important to do was..."
"Defeating Demise?" she suggests.
"Okay, okay, maybe not that far back."
"The point is, you're free to paint now, right?" she asks, getting up from her chair and crossing the room to the bucket of paint she'd brought in earlier.
"Exactly," I say, joining her in standing.
She tucks her hair behind her ear as she bends over to pick up the bucket. "Link, could you grab the paintbrushes from on top of the book shelf?"
"No problem," I tell her, reaching up past my head to search for the paintbrushes we'd stored there. I sweep my hand along the smooth wooden surface, seeking out the handle, when suddenly something pricks my palm, and I pull it back quickly in shock. When I look down, there's a small scratch, just beginning to turn red from the rising blood in the center of my hand.
"You okay?" Zelda asks, judging by my gasp that something's wrong.
"Yeah, I just cut my hand on something," I mumble, dragging a chair from the table over the shelf to stand on, not wanting to blindly hurt myself again. When I climb up, I find the paintbrushes I'd been looking for, but there's something else; the object that cut me, no doubt.
It's a jagged, thin piece of metal, and as I take it delicately into my hand, I can tell it's not only weathered and old, but charred like it has been through a fire. "Hey, what do you think this is?" I ask her.
"I'm not sure," she says, giving up on the bucket she'd been holding and drawing closer to me, "I found it under your bed when I was cleaning your room one day."
"Huh, I wonder if it's another one of my sleepwalking treasures..." I muse aloud.
"You know what it kind of looks like to me?" she asks, taking it carefully from my hand, putting it against the wall and pretending to turn it, "A door handle."
I watch her face as it turns from interest, to puzzlement, to near distress. She closes her index finger and thumb around the bridge of her nose, eyes squeezed shut. In a panic, I step closer to her, taking her arm as she battles something within her own mind. This look has become all too familiar.
Though it only seems to last a moment, and the moment I touch her, she pulls her way back to me. "Are you alright?" I ask in a low voice.
She swallows, a shaky breath hissing from her lips as she puts the piece of metal down on a lower shelf, her hand trembling. "Yeah, I'm sorry. I don't know what happened."
It's what she says whenever she has an episode like this. I try not to linger on it though, I know it only makes things worse for her. "Well then, we should get painting, shouldn't we?"
Her smiles begins to form again, unsteady at first, but she nods in agreement.
We paint in silence for the first while. I know she's still pondering on what happened to her, to be honest I can't get over it easily either. It scares me every time. It scares me that she's going to drift off into that state where she can't hear or see me and that she's not going to come back. She won't be able to say my name again, and it won't ever hurt the way it does when she says it.
"I'm sorry," she finally says to break the silence. I incline my head towards her slightly, just to guage her expression, expecting that she's apologizing for earlier.
But when she glances up at me like she's about to laugh, and before I can comprehend what she'd doing, she flicks paint in my face. It startles me only briefly before I can retaliate, flicking my brush towards her so that some of it gets on her clothes and in her hair as she turns away in preparation for my attack. Laughter is all I can hear as she bends over, dipping her hand into the bucket of paint and then lunging towards me before I can escape, smearing the blue paint wherever she can reach.
For a moment we're children again, and for a moment we're playing in the mud on the banks of the river in Skyloft. For a moment nothing matters except getting her back.
By the time the assault has finished, there is blue paint covering both of our hands, our clothes are spotted with it, flecks of it dotting our faces and strands of it in our hair. There's probably more paint on the both of us than there is on the door. We're both laughing so hard that neither of us are capable of an intelligent statement, except for when she finally tells me she gives up.
Smiling, I take a step closer to her, trying to wipe away some of the paint that's on her eyelid so that it won't get into her eye, but all I do is spread it, more of the paint from my hand getting on her face.
And slowly, my eyes gravitate to hers. They're watching me intently, a light in them, her cheeks pink from laughing.
So quickly, I'm not even sure it happens, she presses her lips to the corner of my mouth, reaching up on her tip-toes and lingering there though our faces have parted. She searches my face, searching for approval or recognition, I can't be exactly sure, because in my mind are a million thoughts clamoring for attention. But they don't matter, just her face, flecked with blue, looking up at me so earnestly, pleading with me for honesty.
And so I decide to be as honest as possible. I cup her face in my blue hands, and bring her lips to mine.
Everything in that moment is flying around us, she's the only thing that's stationary. The next moment everything is moving so slow, and my hammering heart is racing past it all. She doesn't seem to care that my fingers tracing through her hair are covered in paint, and I don't mind that it's covering my clothes as she rests her palms on my chest. Everything is beautiful.
She pulls back once, but doesn't wait long before slipping her lips between mine again, they're softer than I thought. More dangerous than in my dream. "Link," she whispers against them a moment later.
There's that trace of panic in my chest when she says that, just like there always is when she says my name so softly. "What?" I murmur back.
She hesitates, just gazing at me as I gaze back. "Nothing," she says, her teeth glimmering as she smiles. I smile back, her face, despite now having blue hand prints on her cheeks and neck, is more beautiful than ever. I'm grateful for this moment, for a moment so pure that can remind me how beautiful the world is. That's all I need.
There, you guys happy now? Haha so many people were just like that rage face pushing their faces together and saying "NOW KISS" so you better be pleased. We cool?