Um. Hi. p̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶a̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶. As per my usual, here is my announcement that I am not dead: I am not dead. I'm kinda nervous to post because it's been so long since I have. 8 months. I'd love to give you guys the excuse that I was just sooo busy, living life to the max and doing cool shit, but reality is I was just dead inside, so.
Recap: Vanna and Link were in Snowpeak when Mr. Rider and Zi showed up and kidnapped her, Mr. Rider almost killed her but Zi came in at the last minute and got Ooccoo to warp her and her dog Rade back to Hyrule, Link 'defeated' Blizzeta, and the gang went back to Ordon to recoup.
Link's treehouse, dusty and littered with cobwebs from the months it'd spent vacant, became the host to perhaps the strangest sleepover in history when we got back to it. A Chihuahua, a humanoid chicken and her son, and an imp were all laying in blankets thrown over the floor; the werewolf and the sentient robot had some business to attend to before we could join them and make the scene that much more absurd.
I was sitting down in a chair next to Link's table, wishing I had clothes on so I could take off the thick quilt that was making me uncomfortably warm now that I was no longer in Snowpeak's subzero weather, watching him as he retrieved something he wanted to get from his loft before stitching up my chest. One of the first things he'd done upon entering his comparatively hot house was strip out everything but his pants—and despite the relative darkness of his house lit only by his hearth, I could easily see how his skin was littered with giant splotches of fresh, reddish bruises. I wanted to ask what had happened to him...
But I couldn't speak, and the chicken-woman that was bafflingly good at reading my lips had fallen asleep practically the second her head hit a pillow, so I couldn't ask. My hand instinctively went up to my chest under the quilt where I usually would have found the swirling stones of the Zora's necklace, longing for its soothing effect, but I only came across the opening in my skin.
Link came back down wearing one of the sleeveless V-neck tunics favored by Ordonians, holding a shoddy wooden pencil and a leatherbound notebook. The notebook was the one I'd presumed to be Link's diary when I first saw it months ago—I'd forgotten all about it. Knowing him much better than I had back then, I was even more intrigued now by the idea of whatever he had written in there.
Not that I could ask.
"For you to write in until you get your voice back," he explained, placing the pencil and the book's front side on the table and sitting next to me.
...Or I could now, apparently. It wasn't my ideal form of communication, having never really practiced writing in Hylian script, but it would be better than having to rely on Ooccoo or playing charades every time I wanted to say something.
He grabbed everything he'd need to stitch my chest out of his pouch. "It's, uh, probably easier to do this with you in that than in a shirt you can't pull open. I'll get you some actual clothes to wear once I'm done. You ready?"
I nodded, grabbing from the inside of the quilt where it crossed over my chest. Like before, I spread it carefully, enough for him to see the cut and nothing else. He scooted a little closer and leaned forward, right hand reaching out to gently touch the center of the cut just above my heart. I wondered if he could feel it beating.
"Can I...?" his request trailed off, and he made eye contact with me.
For a split second, I thought he was asking permission for something else. I didn't know how to feel when I realized that was just wishful thinking.
He wanted to look inside my cut, inside my chest.
After contemplating it, I nodded. It was for the best that he saw. Maybe it would help him finally grasp how far from human I was, since he still didn't seem to fully get it.
Slowly, Link moved his fingers apart, opening the cut with them. When he reached a point where he couldn't spread it further with just those two fingers, he raised his pointer finger on his other hand to take over the place of one of them. His face glowed with wonder. Disconcerting wonder.
I tilted my head down and looked for myself. It was hard to see all that much from my angle, but what could be seen was clearly less than human. A translucent material covered metallic ribs and everything behind them. The light pink lungs might have looked more human were it not for the shiny honeycomb mesh that wrapped around them. Wires and a thick tube snaked down between them, only slightly visible from my point of view because of my metal sternum and the neon green mass against it. The unusually shaped green object was offset slightly to my left, and it rocked back and forth in a fast rhythm.
Link touched the clear material over it. It moved even faster in response, and he looked up into my eyes.
'My ... heart,' I mouthed.
"Your heart," he murmured, gaze falling back to it.
I watched his face intently, searching for emotions he had to be hiding, but there was nothing except awe. It was one thing, before, when he'd reacted calmly to the glimpse he'd got at the inside of my leg... But he was looking at where my heart should be. He had never seen part of me that was so blatantly nonhuman before.
And the very cut that allowed Link to see my heart was only there because Mr. Rider was going to tear it out.
Watching helplessly, hopelessly, through tear-filled eyes as the scalpel closed the distance to my chest; being strapped down and knowing—not thinking, but knowing, because there had not been a doubt in my mind—knowing, that I was about to die... The painfully sharp images that took over my mind brought with them the same soul-crushing despair I'd felt as everything was happening.
So close. I'd been so close to dying. So close to becoming nothing.
But then I was in Link's arms, unsure of when I got there, my face wet with new tears I hadn't realized I'd been shedding. He was whispering that it was over, that I was safe, that he was here and so was Midna and Ooccoo and that it would never happen again.
I slowly lifted my head from his neck, wiping my tears away on my shoulders and trying to stifle my silent sobs, cheeks tingling with embarrassment at how pathetic I was acting.
"It's okay," he said, voice soft, as he reached up to tuck my dampened hair behind my ears.
I took over his mantra in my head. It was over, I was safe, he was here, it would never happen again. It was over. I was safe. Even if it didn't feel like it.
After sniffling for what I hoped to be the final time, I took in a deep breath and released it steadily. 'I'm sorry,' I mouthed.
"You're ... sorry?" he said, unsure.
I nodded, wiping my eyes again.
"For...? For what, crying?" He breathed out a humorless laugh, and after a moment cupped my face in his hands and stared seriously into my eyes. "Vanna. You don't have to apologize for being upset that—well, I was gonna say upset that someone nearly killed you, 'cause I'd honestly be worried if you weren't upset over that—but you don't have to apologize to me for anything you feel. I'd offer you a shoulder no matter what, all right?"
I nodded, and he gave me an easy smile. It was impossible not to smile back, just as impossible as it was to ignore the way my heart swelled tenderly. Fresh tears pricked at my eyes.
Link's brows drew together in a show of sympathy, and I knew he misunderstood. He must have thought his reassurance made me feel okay to return to crying over what had happened; he didn't realize it was his reassurance in itself that I was crying over. These were happy tears—because he was so resolutely accepting and understanding and supportive and kind, and it filled me with so, so much pure joy that my body couldn't possibly contain it all inside me.
Overcome with the need to share what I was feeling in a way that he could easily comprehend, I rearranged myself on his lap to get a hand out of the blanket, opened up the back cover of the notebook to the final page, and grabbed the pencil. I carefully thought through my words to make sure they accurately encapsulated what was on my mind while staying firmly platonic. It was hard to decide exactly what to write when I could have written an essay about how much he meant to me, but I settled on getting right to the crux.
I'm so glad I have you.
His smiling response made my heart swell impossibly further. "I'm glad I have you, too."
Having slept through a good chunk of the previous day, I wasn't able to sleep. I got tired of tossing and turning eventually, and so I found Link's pouch and quietly slipped outside. A chill ran down my spine. Link had given me a pair of baggy pants that went halfway down my calves and the undershirt he wore with his tunic—it was the only shirt he owned with a neckline that would keep my cut fully covered—and neither were particularly warm. Before Snowpeak, I would have been affronted by this temperature, but I found it refreshing now. I breathed in through my nose, savoring the feeling of the cold traveling down to fill my lungs.
I retrieved the axe and spear Link had taken for me from Yeto and Yeta's armory and set out to practice on the training dummy outside his house. I started with the spear, lunging and striking the dummy quickly and then backstepping and dodging imaginary attacks. Even having yet to try my hand at the axe, I knew the spear was certainly less unwieldy, and I decided that this would be my weapon of choice as long as I didn't have my bow. I wondered if the Hero's Shade would be upset with me for losing both it and his shield, and whether or not Zi would think to grab my stuff when he would come back for me...
My arm fell mid-lunge at the thought, and I swallowed heavily. Surely he couldn't have missed his dad's comment about my backup battery running low—he wouldn't have just had Ooccoo send me away to die here. He had to have followed us back after letting his dad ream him out. I couldn't accept the idea that he hadn't come back.
I tried my hardest not to think about how long I might have left if he didn't, and I got back to practicing with the dummy.
It wasn't much later when a faint but piercing sound reached my ears. A baby crying, from down in the main part of the village. It was comforting when I realized that it must have been Uli and Rusl's baby, at least a month old by now. During our time in Kakariko Village, Link had voiced nervousness multiple times that he had yet to receive a letter announcing the birth, and I'd become nervous too when I remembered how little medical technology existed here. Maternal mortality was not uncommon throughout Ordon's history. It was pure luck that of the current generation, only Fado's mother had died in childbirth. With the village having been down on its luck in recent days, it had been too easy to picture yet another tragedy.
As if in response to the distant cry, I heard commotion in Link's house, including him calling my name. I tried to yell that I was outside, and then tried to groan when no noise came out, and then rolled my eyes when no noise came out for that, either. I dropped the spear and went to go back in and see what was going on, but the door opened before I got to the ladder.
It was Link. He sighed and ran a hand through his tousled hair. "What in Hylia's name are you doin' out here?" he rasped.
I grabbed the spear again and poked his dummy with it. 'Practice,' I mouthed up at him.
He blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes. "Could'a left a note. I thought..." He sighed again, shaking his head. "Hold on."
He disappeared back inside his house, only to return with his boots on and the notebook and pencil in hand. He handed me them after coming down the ladder.
Flipping to the back, I quickly wrote down my explanation. I couldn't sleep so I figured I'd get in some practice, that's all. Once he read that, I added more. Why are you up? You usually sleep like the dead.
The right corner of his lips raised slightly as he read the last sentence. "Weird dream woke me up. I might've gone right back to sleep ... but then I heard a baby crying, and when I looked around I realized you were gone."
I was surprised he'd been able to hear the baby from inside when it was already so faint from outside his house.
Sorry, I wrote. You can go back to sleep. I'm okay on my own. Promise.
His eyes trailed to the path to the village after he read my message. The baby was still crying. "Actually... I wanna see if Uli and Rusl need help. Wanna come with?"
I nodded, and he threw an arm over my shoulders to walk with me to Rusl and Uli's. Without all the trees blocking the sky in the main part of the village, I could see hints of the sun starting to rise to the east already, making me feel better about us randomly showing up to their house despite being sure that they wouldn't mind even if Link showed up in the middle of the night. As we got nearer and the sound of the crying got louder, Link woke up more, moving less sleepily and eyes becoming alert. Their door pulled open while Link was still in the middle of knocking on it.
It was Rusl who opened it, standing there with dark circles under his eyes and blood-soaked bandages around his head and arms. The agitated set of his face was quickly overshadowed by shock as he realized who it was, and then he smiled.
"Link," he said breathlessly. "You're home. And you—"
Whatever he was going to say about me was cut off as Uli spoke from inside, her voice as much a relief as the baby's had been. "Come in," she urged. "Don't let the cold in. The baby..."
Rusl moved out of the way to let us in and nudged the door shut with his foot behind us. Uli was over on the couch, brows furrowed, sleepy eyes marked with dark rings like her husband, wailing baby in her arms. It was strange to see her without a baby bump under her shirt, and even stranger to see her look so ... troubled. In those early days we'd spent together, I'd come to think of her as perpetually serene. It seemed like everything was starting to take its toll on her.
Uli smiled, but it didn't look totally genuine. "Sorry for the bad timing. The baby's ... a fussy little one."
"Can I try...?" Link trailed off, holding his arms out to Uli.
Uli carefully placed the baby in his arms, and his face lit up. Rusl slowly settled onto the couch beside Uli as Link sat on the rocking chair, shooshing the baby and smiling down at it. Uli patted a stool next to the couch, beckoning me to sit, and I did.
Almost immediately, the baby's cries started to give way to little whimpers. Uli sighed and smiled over at Link, and this time it looked relieved, fully genuine. "You've always been so good with little ones."
Link lifted his head to return her smile, then looked back down at the baby. "It's 'cause I speak baby," he said in a soft voice, higher than his usual.
A little fist managed to escape the blanket the baby was swaddled in. Link resituated the baby to hold it in one arm and brought his other up to the baby's, placing his pointer in its palm. The baby's tiny hand grabbed his finger tightly. Link's smile widened at the reflex.
My heart swelled again with an overpowering surge of fondness.
"Boy or girl?" he asked.
Rusl and Uli answered together, both wearing proud smiles. "A girl."
"A baby girl," Link whispered, not taking his eyes off the baby. "It's been too long since we've had one. Beth'll be so happy to have another little girl to play with when she finally comes home. I bet Vanna and Ilia are tired of her forcing 'em to play dolls with her." He looked up and shot a grin at me with his half-joke of an assumption.
I grinned back and shook my head. I didn't mind playing dolls with her at all. It was better than the embarrassment that came from roughhousing with Talo when a nine-year-old boy managed to tackle me to the ground.
"What's her name?" Link asked, peering back down at her.
Rusl and Uli shared a long look. He answered alone this time. "Elli."
Link's rocking slowed for a moment, face becoming oddly grave. He nodded solemnly.
There must have been some significance to the name that I was out of the loop on.
"One last way to honor him," Uli whispered. Her eyes glassy, she smiled again—not fake, but watery and wistful.
Him was Colin, I inferred. Maybe that was what they would have named him if he'd been a girl. Whatever connection he had to this name, it obviously made it bittersweet for them. I felt very much like an outsider, sitting in on what should have been a moment of privately shared grief between those who'd known him.
The memory of his ghost, timid and heartbroken as he begged me to tell his parents he loved them, played in my mind. That was one piece of the promise I gave him that I'd never truly fulfilled; I'd opted to ask Link to tell them how much he loved them, not doing so myself. I would have to do it one day, to come clean and finally let them know that he'd appeared to me, so concerned with making sure they knew he loved them that he couldn't pass on until he knew they'd be told so one last time.
All went quiet with the exception of Elli's lessening snivels. It was Rusl who finally broke the silence by clearing his throat.
"So," he started, "how've you two been?"
Link glanced at me before answering. "We've ... seen better days."
"I can tell that much by all those bruises. You need to be more careful," Uli said. She gave him a disapproving, motherly tsk, and turned her attention to me. "Any luck finding a way home, yet?"
I shook my head and went to add more to my response verbally, but as should have been anticipated, nothing came out. I wondered if I would ever get used to it.
"She's lost her voice," Link said.
Uli's brows furrowed again. "You aren't ill, are you?" she asked.
I shook my head, and her features softened. Flipping open the notebook, I jotted down that I never would have come over here with the baby if I were sick. If I could've, I would've mentioned that it was impossible for me to get and spread an illness.
"Of course, of course," she said after reading it. "Just being overly-cautious. Hard not to be anymore."
As much as she was trying to mask it, she couldn't entirely hide the pain in her voice.
"What about the kids and Ilia?" Rusl asked. "Has Ilia...?"
"They're doin' great. They like Kakariko a lot. But Ilia... She still don't remember a thing," Link said, frowning. "They were all real excited to get news about the baby, y'know. Even Malo."
"I told you we should've sent a letter," Uli chided her husband under her breath.
"Can't stand talking to that mailman, guy gives me the creeps," Rusl mumbled to her.
"Pity to hear about Ilia, though," Uli said. "Is she handling it well, at least?"
After telling more about how Ilia was handling her amnesia, Link gave them a more thorough rundown of how each kid was doing. I mostly just sat back, since writing things down and then waiting for everyone to read it got annoying really fast.
At some point, Rusl mentioned something about intruders in the village and I started listening more, but it turned out he was just talking about monsters, not people, which I probably would have realized much sooner if the Riders hadn't been at the forefront of my mind. That was the cause of his injuries—the monster population had boomed in Faron, leading to increasing occurrences of them breaking their way into the village. With Bulblins having a cruel penchant for kidnapping, they were fearful for Elli, and since Rusl was the only swordsman left in the village, he'd been taking it upon himself to ward them off as much as he could.
We had breakfast with them, then left for the ranch when the baby needed to be fed. Rusl gave Link back his pictograph box that he'd borrowed to take pictures of the baby, which I ended up holding while Link went to grab Rade so he could run around in the enclosure. As Rade took off like a rocket, Epona trotted up to Link from where she'd been grazing, and she nuzzled up to him while nickering contentedly.
I snapped a picture of their heartwarming reunion. Link laughed at the shuttering sound.
"Like we don't have enough pictographs of us together. We'll have to get one with you and her, won't we?" he said, and I wasn't sure which one of us he was talking to. He backed away and patted her. "Make sure you don't accidentally step on the little doggy, okay?"
Definitely her, then. As if she could understand him perfectly.
That got me thinking; she could understand him—when he was a wolf, at least. And he'd also conversed with a cat, and a monkey, and a squirrel...
Holding the box under my arm, I held out the notebook and jotted down, Do you think you could talk to Rade? Dog-to-dog?
"I'm sure I could. I'll have to have Midna transform me later when we're back at my house with her, if she's feeling up to it." He looked around then, and his eyes brightened when he found something. He walked over to a tall piece of horseshoe-shaped grass and plucked it from the ground. "Have I ever played the grass for you?"
Things seemed to be looking up in Ordon for everyone.
Link loved to be back home, and he especially loved getting to spend time with Elli. Rade loved being with me again, loved the freedom of running around in a large outdoor space, loved Jaggle and Pergie's female dog perhaps a bit too much, and his joy was apparently all he wanted to talk about with Link. Midna, who had gotten sick without my noticing in Snowpeak, started to get better, and she started to feel less guilty that her illness had caused her not to have been with me to warp me away. Ooccoo and her son would leave during the day to search for something in the nearby woods, and they'd always come back at night with stories to tell. Rusl, Link, and Fado barricaded the gates to Ordon well enough that the surge of monsters from Faron had no chance of getting back in.
But then there was me.
Every day that Zi didn't show up in the village, my hopes of him having come back withered a little bit more. I knew that I really should have told someone about my potentially impending death—because what if there was no sign when I got near, and my battery would just die and nobody would have a clue what had happened?—but I couldn't bring myself to destroy the peace everyone else was in, so I kept it to myself as long as I could.
Link and I were sitting atop the large hill to the back of the ranch at sunset, overlooking the land to the south where rolling fields eased into the stretch of Ordon's forest. Much farther away than we could see was the end of the continent, and Link said he wanted to go down there with me one day, because he wanted to see the ocean before he died.
I'm dying.
I wrote it on a whim, and Link had read it before I had the chance to cross it out in regret.
He sighed in a way that showed me he didn't understand. "Everything's going to be okay, Vanna. It's already been a week of us hiding out in the open and we haven't seen Rider or Zi once."
That's the problem, I wrote. I'm going to die if Zi doesn't come back. I'm almost out of battery and I don't have a way to charge it here.
"How? I mean, how do you 'charge' it? How will it kill you if you don't give it charge? I don't... It—it can't be hopeless, right? Zi doesn't have to be your only option. There has to be a way for you to get whatever you need here. There has to. You can't..." He took in a shuddering breath. "You can't."
My batteries are like a heart and the charge is like blood. It wasn't a great analogy, I quickly realized, but I went with it anyway. Except the batteries don't recycle charge like hearts recycle blood. Once the batteries are out of charge, they're dead, unless they get more from a charger. There's no such thing as a charger in this universe. Zi is the only person who can bring one to me.
I couldn't look at him, but I knew in his silence that he was trying to think of a solution through his extremely limited technical knowledge.
His voice was quiet when he finally spoke. "...He has to be here looking for you, doesn't he?"
I hope he is, but—I didn't finish writing my thoughts. 'If it's been a week and he hasn't shown up in the most obvious place for me to be, he probably isn't here.'
"How long do you think, if he doesn't...?"
Though he trailed off, I knew what he was trying to ask. I'd mulled over it more than enough. Assuming I'd been fully charged the day I left three and a half months ago, assuming both my batteries had the same life, assuming my backup wasn't really running all that low—even in the most generous scenario, I couldn't see it being much more than another month.
Not very long, was the answer I wrote. That was better than saying a month. Giving it a measurable timeframe made it feel too real.
There was another moment of silence, and then Link was on his feet, pulling me up. "We ain't sitting around and waiting for you to die. He has to be out there somewhere. We're gonna find him, and we're gonna get you all the charge you need, and you're gonna live. Okay?"
It was hard to be pessimistic in the face of his confidence. 'Okay,' I mouthed through a small grin.
Link's returning smile was mischievous. "It's our turn to stalk him."