Prompt No.31
Word count: ~1620
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No.30 — Recovery"
Pairings: Zelink
Rating: T
Themes: Trauma, suppressed anger, blood, venom
Embrace
A week later, despite Zelda's reservations, they brought Link to the pedestal in the forest. The sword slipped from the stone as easily as venom slipped from the vial. He could barely hold it aloft, but the moment he touched it he knew it was meant to be his.
He learned quickly. They trained him with wooden wasters, but the Master Sword felt better despite its extra weight and length, as though it were a part of him. Sometimes, sparring in that arena, he forgot to look for her. As his skill increased, so would the difficulty, and soon lapses were resulting in a stab or a strike instead of a verbal correction. It brought out latent anger he didn't know had been festering in him and didn't know how to begin to address.
Some days he felt drunk on the sensation of fighting back.
There were other sensations, just as heady, far more sweet, that he was becoming acquainted with as well: the dazzling spangles and glitter of green eyes; the warmth of the light pulsing between them when their fingers slipped effortlessly together; and, just now, the delicate taste of her bare lips, giving beneath his without the cloying sweetness of frosting.
He froze, brow furrowed, when she told him to stop, when he realized that in his haste and his want he had trapped her between him and the wall. Her eyes were watery. He took a quick, deliberate step back. A retreat, the captain would have called it.
His voice was little more than a rough whisper, pulling out of some dark, untapped place flooded with her light. "Sorry."
Her chest rose and fell in alluring synchrony with his, tempting him closer again, but he kept his feet planted, watching her wipe at downcast eyes with her wrist.
"It's just—" she started, but then a noise lodged in her throat, and it was several seconds before she breathed again. "It's not right."
He dithered, wondering if it would be wrong to ask why. To him, it had seemed very, very right.
"Which part?"
"All of it," she bubbled, a little hysteric. "You're healing and vulnerable and—broken."
He thought on that for a moment, still not sure he understood the problem. He whispered, "I don't feel broken when I'm with you."
And apparently he had made things much worse, because she covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
"This isn't good for either of us," she warbled through her tears, imploring him, red-eyed, "don't you see?"
"No," he told her, because he didn't.
"It's complicated."
"You say that about a lot of things."
"Because they are, Link. I just…" She sighed, reaching for reason and coming back with fistfuls of air. Her reason had fled the moment he kissed her. "My lips don't even have frosting on them."
He drifted closer, remembering, and dared to taste the corner of her mouth again.
"I like the way you taste better without it."
She crumbled like a sandcastle in the surf. In short order he had her back up against the wall, her fingers threaded in his hair, and when he pulled at the hem of her tunic without understanding why, just knowing he didn't want this, want anything, between them, she planted a hand on his chest and told him firmly that that was definitely out of the question. Then she pulled him back in by the collar and coaxed his mouth open again.
Weeks flew by in a blur of swordplay and sparring by day, and breathless, stolen kisses at night, where he seemed to spend all his time trying to figure out a way to make shifting her tunic out from between them less offensive somehow, and making very little progress—though he had dropped to his knees once and dragged the material up with his nose, laying hot, open-mouthed kisses along her belly and hip, and the sound she had made before she could object had set his spine on fire.
Then word came from the desert that the Yiga were on the move, and strange, rainless storms raged across Hyrule like a plague.
The sword hummed in his hands, glowing with a sacred luster as it whispered warnings into the otherworldly places where they were connected, and they left the relatively safe confines of the castle to meet the enemy at the chokepoint where the desert canyons met the dunes.
He touched her hand, as they camped in the shadow of the Highlands, setting off a reassuring glow, but she wouldn't meet his eyes. He knew, despite the weight and muscle he had put on and the grueling training regimen, that she was still worried he wasn't ready. He knew that she was wrong. And he knew that she was right.
He tore through the desert like a force of nature. The sword was less of a weapon in his hands and more of a storm, hewing footsoldiers in two with a sound like thunder and shattering Windcleavers and bones in the strength of his blows. And then, as they drove the Yiga back into the Karusa Valley, a monstrosity of flame and malice burst out of the rock, renting the cliffs asunder and sending the earth quaking beneath their feet. It lacked true form, spewing sinewy limbs across the sand as it slithered between canyon walls and dunes, and the ancient hate fueling it awakened a dormant power in Zelda.
Between the wrathful blaze of Link's blade and the blinding pulse of her power, the desert was brighter in that swathe of twilight than it ever had been in the glare of day. The Calamity absorbed the carnage left in the Hero's wake, turning broken swords and armor and bone into joints and burning spines, growing and swelling until it seemed it might swallow the world whole. But as it made to devour him, Link drove the blade deep into its gaping maw, and in one fell swoop it was engulfed in Zelda's light.
And the battle was over.
The silence after so much chaos made his ears ring. He turned and met her eyes, still aglow with power, from across the sprawl of desert. They were asking him a question he didn't want to answer. Burned, bleeding, run through in so many places, Link turned his back on his army and the battlefield, and marched, dragging his blade through the sand, towards the Hideout.
It was vacant. Whatever Yiga he hadn't felled on the battlefield were swallowed by the monster as it grappled its way toward power. He found the corridor where he had spent most of his life, found the dark cell sitting innocuously in the stone. He found the offshoots where they kept their implements of torture, their blades and their scourges, their branding irons and ropes and devices he had no name for, and vials and vials and vials, spread across an abandoned workspace where the Yiga went through the painstaking process of extracting and purifying it.
He scoured the Hideout for something more. There were no other cells. No other prisoners. No greater purpose other than to break him, keep him hanging on to life by a thread while dousing his desire to live. And then, standing again amidst the sickles and the venom, the rage and misery came pouring out of him all at once.
He flung his sword into a rack of weapons with a cry, sweeping the table with his arms and tearing fabric and flesh across the vials. The glass shattered and the venom turned his bloody hands numb, and after that he didn't feel anything. He splintered tables and his own knuckles, he shredded leather from barbs and his skin from his palms. He knocked hooks and claws from the walls, and didn't notice the way the mark mended itself shut again and again.
When there was nothing left to destroy, either in the room or on his arms, he turned, panting, and met the watery eyes of his princess.
He wanted to tell her how angry he was, put words to the fury and the shame that was turning his vision red, but he couldn't make the sounds form, his throat bobbing uselessly as he tried to force a shout, and he backed to the wall and slid to his haunches, coming face to face with the blood all over himself as he went to dip his head into his mangled hands. Zelda lumbered to him, weak from exertion and sorrow, and collapsed.
"It's over," she told him, sobbing, taking his face, spattered with blood and malice and grime, in trembling hands. "You can be free. You can pursue your own happiness, chase it to the farthest reaches and never look back. No one can keep you from that now. Not the king, or the captain, or—or me."
His expression flickered, brow furrowing deep and eyes boring inflexibly into hers. He wanted to touch her face, draw her in so she couldn't look away, but his hands were ripped apart and oozing. He leaned into her slowly instead, kissing her eyes closed and drawing his lips over her cheekbone, tasting her, breathing her, like a calming incense after the storm of combat.
"You are my happiness," he murmured against her skin, eyes falling shut as he trailed down towards her mouth. "And if enduring this destiny was the price for having you, then so be it."
He savored her tear-stained lips for as long as she would let him, and then she buried herself in his neck and wrapped him tight in her arms, and they stayed in that embrace, exhausted and aching and wanting for nothing else, for a long time.