Prompt No. 10
Word count: ~1080
Universe: Breath of the Wild
Pairings: None
Rating: T
Themes: Puncture wound, hidden injury
Trail of Blood
"And stop following me!"
Zelda rolled onto her shoulder with a huff, gripping the edge of the bedroll too tight. She couldn't get her outburst out of her head—the way she had foolishly let her anger get the better of her, the way she had let him see how out of control she felt…
The look on his face when she had shouted, all piercing blue eyes and confusion.
She would rather he had shouted right back, or rolled his eyes at her tantrum. But instead he just… stood there and took it, looking lost. Like a dog being scolded by its master.
She had wanted it to feel good. She had wanted him to feel a fraction of the sting his existence made her feel, and then revel in his discomfort. And now that she had done it, all she felt was guilty. Curse him.
The truth was, he hadn't deserved it. Her problems with her power, her father, and her kingdom were her own, and on a purely intellectual level she knew that making her feel worse about her failings with his many accomplishments was probably unintentional. He was doing his job, and no amount of shouting or reason from her was going to make him any less able to defy the king.
She rolled over again to the flat of her back, glaring at the stars. She wasn't going to get any sleep like this.
She chanced a look across the murmuring fire to his bedroll. He wasn't there—he had slipped away, and she might have thought he had been fooled into thinking she was asleep if not for her constant tossing and turning. He had been gone a while, which was unlike him. She propped herself up onto her arms, looking beyond the ring of the fire for signs of him, but he was nowhere in sight. That was unlike him, too.
One of the horses snorted in the dark. She frowned, moving to feed the fire some more with the pile of logs he had gathered. The wood flared and crackled as it met the embers, lighting the circle a bit more, and she stared at where he had been a little harder, color seeping back into the world. There was a spot of blood on his bedroll.
She thought back to the moblins she had inadvertently alerted to their presence while she was stomping around in a fury that afternoon, to the way he had snatched her out of danger in the nick of time and motioned for her to stay put while he took care of them. She had seen the streak of red on the side of his tunic then, welling up where he had been grazed pushing her out of harm's way. Just a scratch, he had said in that low, rare murmur of a voice. And then he had dispatched them with his usual efficiency and wandered back to where she was waiting, arms crossed and a pout on her face, with moblin blood smeared on his cheek.
But scratches didn't keep bleeding hours later. She snatched a torch out of the saddlebag propped between their bedrolls, fully intending to storm after him and shout at him again for downplaying his own injury when, had she known about it, she could have been less difficult and insistent on finishing her research and made sure they made it back to the castle before nightfall so he could get medical attention. Because the last thing she needed was another reason to feel guilty on his account!
The fire caught on the torch and she lifted it in the direction he had snuck off. She was expecting bootprints or quashed undergrowth.
She wasn't expecting another smear of blood on the grass, even larger than the first.
She frowned at it, her anger momentarily forgotten, and followed it to another splash of red on the brush, and then another. Following a trail of blood farther and farther from their camp. When she spotted him, moonlit and kneeling at the water's edge, she smothered her torch in the dirt. Suddenly realizing she might be caught. Suddenly realizing he might not want her here.
She crept closer, peering at him from behind the trunk of a tree. She watched him, heart racing, as his fist twisted where his tunic was pulled up to his ribs; as he braced himself, teeth clenched, breath quickening; as he wrenched something barbed and hideous from his side with a strangled cry and dropped it, glistening and dripping, into the water. It glinted in the moonlight as it plunged from his hand to the surface. A dragonbone arrowhead.
He twisted and the wound caught light, all dark and wet and colorless under the moon, and she had to look away as he washed it out, face tipped back and strained as it touched the current, as he hissed and panted his way through beginning to dress it.
She planted her back against the tree trunk, on the brink of tears. Why would he do that? Why hadn't he said something? Why had he let her…?
She grabbed the torch and ran, stumbling through the brush towards the distant light of their campfire, and dove back into her bedroll, gasping. She wiped her stupid, stupid tears from off her cheeks. Now she really wouldn't get any sleep.
Writing. Writing her thoughts down helped her get them in order. And sometimes helped her make sense of them.
She grabbed her journal from her saddlebag, staring at the page for a long time.
I said something awful to him today…
She wrote down their encounter at the shrine, and the tangle of bitterness and guilt that had come afterwards. She fidgeted, pen poised to put down more. But then she closed the book.
No. Perhaps… not everything was meant to be put down on paper.
She tucked her journal away and curled back up under her blanket, and when he wandered back to the camp later, she pretended not to hear him. She pretended not to hear his shallow, uneven breaths as he settled beside the fire. She pretended not to hear her own vitriolic rebuke from earlier in the day, even more biting and ungrateful than she remembered.
She sniffled, and, attentive as ever, he didn't pretend not to notice.
"Princess?"
"Go to sleep, Link," she hissed.
He didn't speak to her again. She pretended that was what she wanted.