Every Shard of My Heart Belongs to You: Sorrow and Uncertainty
It was several days after Link's homecoming, and the beginning of the week that was designated for Zelda to honor the life of her mother. She placed a reverent wreath of roses on the grave and lit a candle at its center. Her eyes would have welcomed tears of sadness but her mind would not allow her heart to mourn for an absent memory. She never knew her mother. She was told that she died when she was less than two weeks old of complications during her birth. Essentially living her entire life without her, it was hard for Zelda to imagine her mother as anything but a name that existed solely on an elaborate epitaph.
Grayness filled the entirety of the horizon, it consumed her breadth of vision and it eroded away the edges of her heart. Gray— summed up in the form of an inanimate stone. She felt as lifeless as the grave and the body beneath it. She ran her fingers along the fissures of the engraved letters as if touching for the first time.
"'Silvanna Harkinian,'" a deep voice read aloud. It was Iain, never-too-far-away Iain. It was always him. "She was a noble women, a loving wife, I've heard. Though I being too young, remember only her beauty."
"Iain...?" she whispered, wiping the tears from her eyes.
"I'm sorry, milady, if I am intruding."
She sniffed in her sorrow. "We have no secrets, Iain. There's nothing sacred or profound buried under your feet."
"Well, I know milady does not cry over anything trivial." He traced a circle in the loose dirt with his foot. "Is it that you miss having a mother?"
"Miss having her...?" the princess repeated thoughtfully, "Oh Iain, how can I miss her? You see these—these tears. I am not weeping because I miss her, not because of the pain or loss I feel, but because every time I see this grave, every time I read that name... I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I don't feel anything." She cried into the mail between the steel plates of his shoulder and draped her arms around his neck. "It's so hard, Iain... to live in her shadow. It's suffocating me, trying to measure up to something I've never known. The court expects me to be this... this Zelda Harkinian that I'm not."
He submitted to her embrace and sheltered her in his arms. "Shh... Don't cry, Princess. Don't dwell too much on what you hear. Forgive them that they can't yet understand you. Just be yourself, and they will grow to love their princess as you are." he whispered next to her ear, inhaling the sweet fragrance of her hair. He would have given anything to see her gentle smile again, to hear her soft laughter; but as much as he wanted to, he could not assuage her broken heart. He could offer no empathy to console her.
Link wore a blank expression, but within him his mind was raging a war against threatening tears, or the closest thing to tears his indifferent façade could muster. He stared intensely into the courtyard below, clinging to the stone of his window.
There is a simple place below consciousness where truth and truth alone reside, untainted and unsullied by the muddy ties of social constraint. It was from this core of honesty that Link knew, not yet consciously, that he loved her. He loved her against reason, against possibility, and perhaps against his own will.
He saw her standing in the hold of man, a man that wasn't him. Could he call it envy? The circumstance had thrust an unknown anger into his hands, anger that as of yet, he could not define.
He sighed a sigh of utter hopelessness. He wished that he had never left. His situation might have been better. Wishing was useless, however, because there is no appropriate place in the present for "might have." Zelda had said that just the other day. He had been not quite awake and not quite asleep when she had come to see him, but he didn't feel the need to spoil her frankness by revealing that he was semi-aware of her presence. She had spoken such kind words to him, touched him so tenderly, giving him the impression that she had feelings for him, but now his thoughts were confounded by his current glimpse of her and Iain's entanglement. Had he misinterpreted her words? Perhaps Zelda had moved on. Zelda... She was not the little girl he knew before. She had matured both mentally and physically. The way her flaxen tresses cascaded over delicate shoulders... How could she be so strong on the inside, yet her hands so gentle...
He had always found her lovely. From their first meeting he developed a childish infatuation with her. But it was not her beauty that had first captured him; it was her tenderness and innocence. It was her heart, her sympathy that radiated beauty. His fixation had manifested through their close friendship, but they were no longer children. His feelings for her were more than of a loyal subject, more than of friendship, more than an immature infatuation. In battle he was dauntless, but these feelings, so new to his heart, frightened him. It was simple to be a child, to not feel such things. Now it was so complex. There were so many questions. And for the first time in his recollection, he needed someone. He felt so weak.
"Oh, Zelda... What have you done to this pathetic soul of a man?" he whispered.
He returned to his bed. Pulling the covers over his head, he wished to shield himself from reality. As he closed his eyes the image of their embrace remained burned in the back of his eyelids. He clenched them tightly and tried to shake the thought loose from his mind, but to no avail. He thus surrendered his consciousness to the bringer of sleep, drifting into a hypnagogic state of anxiety and dread. His subconscious conjured dreams of past misfortunes and misery and flashes of battles lost.