AN: My very dear friend Silk loves Link and Zelda, and after I finished my recent playthrough of TotK, I knew I wanted to write something for her. (Mostly in gratitude for her endless patience with the absolutely boneheaded way I played that game, but also because she's just wonderful and deserves it.) Little did I know she was working on something truly beautiful for me at the same time (see "All Colors In One" on AO3), and while she finished hers first, I'm still here to complete our little Fics of the Magi tradeoff.
My deepest thanks as always go to Jade for the beta. Thanks for understanding what I was trying to say, even when I didn't know myself.
Recommended listening: Happiness Does Not Wait (2021 version), by Olafur Arnalds.
I had withdrawn in forest, and my song
Was swallowed up in leaves that blew away;
And to the forest edge you came one day
(this was my dream) and looked and pondered long,
But did not enter, though the wish was strong:
You shook your pensive head as who should say,
"I dare not—too far in his footsteps stray—
He must seek me would he undo the wrong."
—A Dream Pang, Robert Frost
—
Some days, she wakes with a dragon in her eyes.
The color never changes. Link checks the first time, and the second and the third—but no, still green, green as Rauru's light, green as the paddock behind the house where the horses graze amid unchecked wildflowers. The color doesn't change, but that doesn't change his certainty that a dragon looks out from Zelda's eyes, from Zelda's face.
The right green, but not her eyes. Not her voice. No smile for him or anyone else, even when the neighborhood children come to visit. She sits at the nearest window quietly, placidly, her hands folded in her lap, and her green eyes turn up to the skies and stay there. Hours pass, sometimes, without the slightest shift; he looks over now and then to watch her watching the Akkala clouds, now dipped in the clear gold of a morning sun; now cast grey and shivering with a sudden thunderstorm, tumbling over themselves into greater and greater heights. The shadows pass over her face and vanish again, and again, and again.
The first time it happens, Link panics. He's not used to panic. His father had put a blade in his hand the moment he could walk; even before he'd finished his training, kings and priests had watched him, studied him, pulled him alone into the light. The greatest sword ever forged has chosen him among all others, even if sometimes he's not sure why.
Panic is death to a soldier. Even now his instinct in an uncertain situation is to fling himself either at the enemy or off the nearest sheer cliff, whichever might be nearer. That does him no good at all when he wakes that first autumn morning to see Zelda sitting upright in their bed, her face towards the window and ten thousand years of alien loneliness in her eyes.
She doesn't answer to her name. She doesn't return the squeeze of his hands, though she rises when he tugs and doesn't resist when he pulls a quilt around her shoulders, when he takes her downstairs and tries to coax her to eat with her favorite breakfast. No tears. No reaction to the smell of toast, to the bowl of cinnamon apples, to the lemon-drop tea that smells so strongly it overpowers the lavender and rosemary in the window-box.
He sits with her at the table and silently panics. He doesn't know what else to do. This is an enemy he cannot best with sword or shield—not the first time Zelda has created exactly this problem for him—but in the past she has always been the gale dragging him onward, catching him up in her wake like a leaf as he tries desperately not to be buffeted out of existence, as she throws herself into her destiny and he follows after.
She'd been larger than life, then. An endless store of energy for her research, for the school, for every restoration project she'd set her hand to. She'd filled the room and brimmed over every sill.
Not this time. Now she is here and not here, as she was the first time he met her in the skies and knew who she was, even if she didn't. He'd crouched between her eyes, touching the place where she'd kept his sword for him, just as she'd broken through some bank of heavy rose-pink clouds above Breman Peak, racing towards the sunset's fire. Her slender body had stretched out behind them like a ribbon, rippling with strength and grace, her scales catching the sunlight in broad refracting flashes. He'd said her name then, too.
Here and not here. The tea grows cold, untouched. He makes another cup at lunch, takes away her plate and brings her a new one, laden with steamed fish and glazed vegetables, which she doesn't eat. The sunlight grows long and hot with the afternoon. Link draws the curtains closed, comes to kneel beside her where she sits, and takes her hands again. Her fingers are very cold.
In the hour before twilight, he saddles his horse and prepares two packs. Zelda does not resist when he coaxes her into her riding clothes and boots; she follows the pull of his hand quietly as he guides her outside and helps her mount. He mounts behind her—while the saddle is not really meant for two, they're both small enough to manage—and clicks his tongue. The Zora are only a two-day ride, and Yona will know what to do. Yona will know, surely. If she doesn't—well. He'll worry about that when it happens.
She's cold in his arms. She doesn't grip the saddle, doesn't shift with the horse's gait; once they must jump a log fallen across a narrow trailhead, and only Link's arm around her waist keeps her upright. He thinks abruptly of the final moments above Hyrule Castle, when the black dragon that had been Ganondorf had writhed in its death throes, flinging Link into the vastness of an empty dawn sky. The wind had torn at his face, clawing tears from his eyes and nearly ripping his sword from his hand; and then from the smearing horizon had burst a streak of white and gold, like lightning, as Zelda—here and not here—had raced to catch him.
Ten thousand years of silence. Ten thousand years of sacred restoration for a blade she'd never wielded, would never wield, not because she knew Link could defeat Ganondorf but because she believed he would try, and for her they were nearly the same thing. Ten thousand years—and even if she'd known nothing else, she'd known him enough, then, to try to save him. Her unshakeable faith had shaken him to his core.
The sun sets. A handful of stars emerge slowly behind a thin cloud-cover; a quarter-moon begins to rise above the southern mountains. Link turns off the road to search for the night's shelter—there's a cave near here he remembers to be clean and dry, without too many keese—but as he tugs the reins, Zelda stirs against him.
Link freezes, unsure if it's real. His horse blows out an exasperated breath and takes two sidling steps before coming to a stop—and then Zelda shifts again, rolling her head on her neck as if it's stiff, lifting one hand to rub her eyes. The sword at his back gives an encouraging, welcoming chirp.
"What in the world?" she says into the dark, confused but not afraid, and then she twists in the saddle to look at him in the moonlight. Her voice rasps with a day's disuse. "Link? Where are we?"
The relief is almost unbearable. It crashes over him in waves, each stronger than the one before, knocking his breath from him over and over. He can't find the words; he grips her arm instead, just above her elbow, and shuts his eyes.
"Link?" she says again, more quietly, and he drops his head to rest on her shoulder. Her free hand curls around his thigh where it presses against hers. "What's wrong? Tell me, please."
He does, with halting words and a voice that still shakes, as they make camp for the night in his shallow cave. Only a few hours from the house, but he's in no condition to ride now and Zelda hasn't eaten all day. He can't muster an appetite himself, but watching her tear ravenously—if neatly—into the jerky and dried fruits is enough to thaw the ice that's been lodged in his chest since dawn. She finishes both her portion and his and makes good headway on the next day's lunch before she finally pushes the rest aside.
"I see," she says as he finishes the explanation, and her eyes are her eyes, green and bright, no dragon in them at all. "Link, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to frighten you."
He shakes his head, but she knows him better than he knows himself sometimes, and she circles their little campfire to tuck herself against his side. The weight of her head against his shoulder is another blow of relief, and Link tightens his arm around her waist. It's almost certainly too tight, but she doesn't protest, and he can't bring himself to loosen his hold. Not tonight.
There's a little silence broken only by the crackling twigs. Then, more to the fire than to him, Zelda says, "I thought I was dreaming. Maybe I was."
"Dreaming?"
"Yes." She laces her fingers through his and rests them on her lap. "I told you I didn't…I didn't know myself. When I was her. You can't know yourself, really. Not for that long. Mineru told me I'd lose my mind, and I think it was a good thing I did. You have to dream your way through the world, because to try to hold on through it would drive you mad… I'm sorry. This isn't making any sense."
It does. More than anything else today, really. He presses his mouth to the crown of her head.
"I think I dreamed I was back there, last night. Back up there, so high I could barely see the earth through the clouds." Her voice has taken on a drowsy quality that would worry him, except her thumb traces back and forth over his knuckles in deliberate reassurance. "I wish I could tell you what it was like. There was an infinite silence. It was so peaceful, and so sad…"
He can imagine, in the way an ant can imagine a tree. Each century passing into the next like a droplet of honey, stretching and sticky at first, and then flowing smooth as an age. Sunrise after sunrise after sunrise, and a night sky full of endless, spinning stars. She'd said the constellations had changed, once, right after the final battle, right after they'd come home at last. She'd drawn him pictures he hadn't really understood, sketches which had mapped out the difference between their stars and King Rauru's. A sharp shock for her the first time, she'd said, to look up and see the Archer in the wrong part of the sky. And then she'd changed herself, given up her mind and her heart, had carved out her own path in the skies instead. She'd watched the stars drift back to their familiar places over generations upon generations, slow as the earth itself.
"But you're awake now," he says. Doubt curls upwards with the words, like the little thread of smoke from their fire.
"Yes," she says, no doubt at all, and her hand seizes tight around his. "I'm awake. I'm right here with you, Link. I'm here."
"You'll dream again."
"Yes," she says, and she twists up to her knees and takes his face in both hands. Her eyes (her eyes, no dragon's eyes in that spring green) blaze so hot the ice in his chest shatters completely. "I'll come back every time. I promise you, Link. No matter where I go—even if the dream follows me a little too long, some days—I'll always come back." Her thumbs stroke over his cheekbones. "Please believe me."
He does.
That, at least, hasn't changed. His faith in her is written deep in the marrow of his bones, as immutable a truth as the turn of the seasons or the way the tide pulls at the shore. The mountain will weather the storm. The moon will wane to nothing and then return. Zelda will come back to him.
"I'll wait for you," Link says.
Zelda smiles, her eyes crinkling at the corners. One hand slides into his hair as his own slips beneath her dove-grey cloak, and she kisses him, very gently.
No dragon's eyes. No dragon's tears, not this time. She's here with him, and she knows him.
Link closes his eyes, focuses on nothing but the press of her lips and the weight of her in his arms. Ten thousand years, and this is the only moment that matters.
For her, he'll make sure it's not the last of them.
In the end, she keeps her word. He'd known she would. Some days she wakes with a dragon's eyes, but they're always gone by twilight, and eventually the days where she leaves stretch farther and farther between. He doesn't mind. After all, she's spent lifetimes waiting for him to wake, to remember her, to find her again and again. He can't begin to repay the gift of her patience; the only thing he can do is scrape together a paltry offering of his own, shabby in the comparison and yet all he has to give.
He can't be the one to pull her back into himself. He isn't strong enough for that, he knows; his hands can only hold decades, and the distance between them sometimes stretches into millennia. But he can be the patient earth for her if nothing else; he can wait here to catch her, both boots on solid ground, while she wheels and dances with the stars. He can be the place where she learns to lay down her golden head and rest.
I will protect you.
So. He waits.
She comes home to him every time.
—
Some days, Link reaches for her with a king's arm.
He covers it well, Zelda thinks, mostly because he doesn't want her to worry, but every now and then he'll touch her and his hand will—slip. As if he'd expected his fingers to be just a little longer, his nails a little sharper; as if the texture of his own grip had surprised him. An instant of uncertainty from a man born to destiny, who's known his purpose since before he could lift a sword. A flash of doubt, brief as lightning, and no thunder at all rolling afterwards aside from her own concern.
Goddess, how unfair it all is. What Link has survived—what he's been forced through, time and time again, as if the first time he'd struck down the greatest evil Hyrule had ever known hadn't been enough. A lifetime of memories stripped from him in a second and then returned in slow, painful drips over weeks, like a Gerudo cactus desperate for any drop of rain; and then, just when she thought they'd finally gotten their feet under them, just as they'd begun to learn the taste of real peace…
She dreams of it, sometimes. The choking miasma of gloom deep beneath the palace, the suffocating wind that tore out her breath, the long fall back into the dark. A frozen image surges in her mind: Link diving towards her, his arm blackened and burnt, his outstretched hand just out of her reach, his face a mask of determination and—she thinks—terror—
Zelda shakes her head sharply. The world falls back into place with obedient alacrity, the Akkala afternoon outside their kitchen window a study in tranquil autumn. The morning had been cool even for the season, faint glints of frost tipping the riot of red and gold leaves surrounding them, but the ice has yielded to the rising sun and a shimmering blue sky, and all that's left now is a few ice-burnt leaf-edges and her own breath steaming the moment she steps out of doors.
Link hears her coming—she sees his head turn just for an instant—but his focus on his work is single-minded, as it is in all things, and he doesn't look up until he's finished driving in the last set of nails on the stable's roof. Zelda pulls the quilt more tightly around her shoulders, tucks her nose beneath the edge of her scarf, and waits.
He'd built the stable in summer. She'd still been—away, and he'd been recuperating from a Gleeok fight in the Tabantha wastes. And because he was Link, who could neither rest idly nor plan ahead more than a few hours without being forced, he'd spent an afternoon setting up the most beautiful little stable she's ever seen, with horseheads carved in the lintels and no shelter at all from the knifing Akkala winters. Rauru's power had made it easy, he'd said at her outrage, as if that might matter.
So now: walls. And reinforced roofing of wood and steel beneath the thatch, and great sliding doors to cut out the worst of the winds. Their horses stand close together in the field nearby, the white flank tucked alongside gold, their heads nestled close together in the spreading wildflowers. Link stands up on the half-finished roof, stretches out his back, and looks down at her.
"It's time for a break," Zelda says, and holds out the steaming mug of tea she's brought him. "You've been working since dawn. Before dawn, I'd guess. Come down and sit with me."
Indecision wars on his face. He despises abandoning a job before it's done, even for such a short time as this; at the same time, she's asked something of him directly, and to disobey her goes against every instinct he has. A power she doesn't take lightly, even after all this time. Even when it's for his own good.
Finally he sighs, and Zelda smiles as he hops lightly from the roof where any sane man would have used a ladder. No coat, either, even in this whistling wind. Not even a scarf. His cheeks and ears are red and cold-bitten, and when he sits on the step beside her she hears his teeth chatter, just for a second or two.
He takes the mug from her gratefully and cups it in both hands, inhaling the sweet steam. Zelda opens the quilt just long enough to wrap one arm around his shoulders, enfolding him in shared warmth. He's stiff at first, as he always is, and then he leans into her with an uncertain affection that still makes her heart jolt even now.
"You've made so much progress since you started," she says, tipping back her head. "It looks wonderful."
He takes a long drink, longer than he needs, and looks down at the mug in his hands. "Do you like it?"
"Link, it's positively beautiful. The craftsmanship is extraordinary." She sneaks one hand out from the blanket to run her fingers over the step they sit on. A lovely bluestone granite, donated by Hudson Construction after the final battle, elegant in its own right. Then he'd sanded it down to a perfect edge, straight as an arrow from side to side, and on the top he'd chiseled a faint triangular pattern across the surface, both for grip and because he could, because even here he is incapable of doing a thing by halves. "I've never seen anything like it."
He smiles into his cup, a faint flush rising to his cheeks. He knows exactly what she means; she's told him a dozen times. She'd been raised in a palace, surrounded by every luxury that could be bought and many more that couldn't. Everything she'd touched had been the finest of its kind—velvet softer than water, jewels large as eggs strung from golden chains, the greatest swordsman in an age made her personal appointed knight—but there'd been no love in any of it. Not then. Not in a real way, not in a way she could feel. Not even from her father.
(A tragedy, that she hadn't once felt his affection in life. That it had taken a dusty, cracking journal whose pages tore when she turned them for her to realize he'd cared for her at all, that behind the iron fist had been a grieving heart.)
(A tragedy, that for all the dead words she'd studied and brought back to life over the years, those had stayed nothing but ink on the page.)
So this: a small stable, a small home, a small hill overlooking the sea—this is what she'll take from Link when he offers. She knows he wonders, sometimes, if it's enough. Someday, he'll believe her when she tells him the love is all that matters.
One of the horses nickers to the other. Zelda lets Link go and clasps her hands over knees. "Well, is there anything I can do? Shall I help you hang the doors?"
Link snorts, and Zelda laughs. If there's anything Link likes less than having his work interrupted, it's having her help him with it. Once Link has a plan, he's eager to implement it as quickly as possible, and more than once Zelda has derailed some project of his with a hundred ideas for different improvements, forcing him to sit still and wait while she draws up new diagrams and blueprints for features he hadn't wanted in the first place. He shakes his head anyway, as if it's in question, and gives her those drawn-down eyebrows that usually are only turned on his enemies.
"Oh, fine," she says, still smiling, and leans forward just enough to glance at the sun's position beyond the roof. "Do you think you'll finish today?"
A ripple runs through him, gone as soon as it comes. Zelda looks over, surprised, but his face is studiously blank.
"Not today," he says, his voice just as level. "Tomorrow, maybe."
"All right," she says, uncertain, and it's only because she knows him so very well—and because they're sitting so very close—that she sees his mouth tense for an instant at the corners.
Goddess. He sees her notice, of course, and he winces—and apparently before he can stop himself, his eyes dart down to his hands cupping the nearly empty mug. Two hands, Hylian hands, wrapped tight around the blue ceramic. All his knuckles split, as always, every nail chipped to the quick. His fingers are white from the pressure.
"Your hand hurts," Zelda says in a wave of icy understanding. "Of course. Oh, Link."
He grimaces. "It's all right."
"It isn't. Let me see."
He does with little resistance, that itself a mark of how sore his arm must be. He must reach across himself—she sits on his left side, always, to leave his sword-arm free—and she tugs the quilt more securely over his shoulders before taking his right hand in both of hers.
Ah, Link. All his calluses have broken open, bled, and scabbed shut again. The skin of his palm is red and raw, the first two fingertips bruised from where he's been holding nails. His thumbnail has a blood blister beneath it where he must have struck it at some point, though she'd wager he doesn't even remember it happening. She runs her fingertips lightly over his palm, and his fingers twitch. "Is it only this, I wonder? Or is the hurt—more?"
He looks away, face still, to the place where the horses graze. A flock of crows bursts from the nearby treeline, black streaks against scarlet trees, and the golden mare takes a few nervous steps back before settling again with a toss of her head.
"Please, Link."
"It…aches, sometimes." As if the words themselves are agony.
"How often?"
"Not often."
"Once a week? Once a month?" Zelda's heart lodges in her throat like a stone. "Once an hour?"
"No," he says hurriedly, his eyes coming back to hers at her fear. Of course that's what would drag out the truth from him; of course even his own wellbeing could only be assured by her worrying for it. "A few times a week, maybe. Not very often."
She begins to rub his hand. Carefully, so carefully, her touch only as firm as his raw skin permits. She flexes his fingers forwards and backwards, finds the tendons in his wrist and stretches them gently. "And King Rauru's? Did his hand hurt you too?"
"No. Yes." He drags in a breath and struggles onward. "It was hollow. It wasn't mine. But…" He trails off helplessly, then draws his hand from her grasp. She watches him stretch his arm out in front of him, as if reaching for something, and then his fingers close around empty air. "He lent me his strength. And now…"
"And now it's gone."
"Yes."
"And now it's only you."
"Yes," he says, looking back at her, and she sees herself mirrored in that stern blue gaze. No dragon's scales; no horned crown made of sacred light; no endless flight beneath the dancing stars. Just a ground-bound girl with worn boots and a patchwork quilt and the boy who loves her.
She takes his hand again and holds it. "Can I tell you something?"
"Always."
"When I was—when I was the dragon, nothing mattered, you know. Everything became so small. A day was like a blink to me. I flew so high that no storm could reach me; even the highest peaks of Hebra were like nothing at all. Even the most beautiful sunrise, even the clearest stars—after the thousandth time, even they couldn't wake me any longer."
Link's gone stiff, the way he always does when she talks about this, and she can't blame him; even she can hear the dreaminess in her own voice. She forges onward anyway. "But I heard you. When you came to me, that day when you took the sword…I heard your voice. The only voice I'd heard in three hundred generations."
He's looking at her the way he does when his sword speaks to him, with a focus almost frightening in its intensity. The entire stable could crash down around their ears, and she's not sure he'd even notice. "I knew you," Zelda says, her voice catching. "Even if I couldn't speak, even if I didn't know your name or what we'd been to each other—I knew you mattered desperately. You alone, in an eternity where nothing else ever had. I knew I had to save you."
"Princess."
He hasn't called her that in months. "You called to me in the final battle," she says. "I came for you. Not to fight Ganondorf at last, not to save the kingdom. Do you understand? I couldn't hear them. Not after all that time, not after so long in the skies. Even when Hyrule cried out in terror, there was nothing left of me—of Princess Zelda—to hear it. But I could hear you."
His eyes are huge, his jaw jumping with how hard he's clenching his teeth. Her throat has gone tight again, each word stumbling over itself like a rock-choked streambed. "You see it, don't you? I couldn't have saved them, no matter how much they needed me. But you, Link—I could save you. I knew if I could protect you, if I could keep you safe from him long enough, then everything good and right would fall into place after. If I could save you, I knew you would save everyone else."
He clenches his eyes shut; his face drops away from her gaze, as if he can't bear the weight of it. He leaves his hand in hers.
"Everything I was—everything that was left of me—had faith in you, Link. It was the only thing I knew to be true. It still is." How easy it is to say all this at last, the two of them here in this cold autumn morning, the frosty sunlight dancing across every word. She brings his hand to her lips. "And that was the you I knew before King Rauru's hand, before King Rauru's power. The you with this hand. The you with this strength."
He sucks in a sharp breath but doesn't move. Zelda presses a kiss to the split knuckles, then one to every callused fingertip. Links allows it, though his face is white by the time he looks up at her again, and she thinks—can't be sure, but she thinks—his hand is trembling.
"I love you," she says plainly, and the shock jumps across his face as it always does. "I do, Link. I think I always will. And that includes your wonderful, bruised hand, whether it's Zonai or Hylian." She runs her thumbs over his knuckles, turns them over to see the familiar creased palm. "If I've learned nothing else, I've learned a king's strength comes from what he chooses to build with his hands, not from the power he wields with them. And you—you have always chosen to protect. You have always chosen to serve. To defend those too weak to defend themselves, and to defend me."
She brings his hand to her cheek and shuts her eyes. "Link, these are the only king's hands I need."
He gasps as if she's stabbed him, and then both hands are tangling in her hair and he's pulling her forward into a kiss. A hard kiss, almost frantic—Link doesn't begin their kisses often, and he's never kissed her like this—and then she doesn't think anything at all, because it's Link and she loves him and under the familiar taste of his lips there is salt, too.
A few moments pass, or a lifetime. Zelda can't keep track and doesn't particularly care. The quilt has slipped from her shoulders and the air is bitingly cold and she can't feel even an inch of it. Her heart is on fire, and she's so glad to burn.
Eventually, eventually, Link's horse startles at a passing deer. Link breaks away to look over—even here, he can't help but watch over them—but she's gratified to see he's breathing as hard as if he's just climbed Ploymus in one go, and his cheeks are a brilliant red. Not that she's much better, Zelda knows, but Goddess. The Hero of Hyrule and the crown princess sitting under a half-finished stable, smiling at each other like fools. She's never been so happy in all her life.
"I'll let you get back to work, then, I suppose," Zelda says at last, pushing to her feet. While Link doesn't stop her, he holds his grip on her hands until the last moment, and then he lets her go.
His eyes are shining. He says, "I'll make lunch."
"I'll make lunch. You have work to do."
"You'll burn it."
"I won't," she says, both of them perfectly aware she will, and she pulls the scarf from her shoulders and wraps it twice around his neck. "You must be very careful not to fall off the roof."
He gives a short, self-effacing laugh that tells her he already has at least once today, and then he stands as well. He touches her cheek (his right hand, his sword-hand, the motion sure and strong), and then steps backwards, grips the doorjamb, and swings himself in one improbable motion back onto the roof.
Zelda gathers up the quilt and empty mug in her arms and turns back towards the house, smiling. Her golden horse falls in with her a few steps, seeking an apple, then snorts at her empty hands and trots back to her companion. The sound of hammering fills the crisp air, startling another small flock of starlings from the trees nearby.
A good day. The first of many, stretching out before them in a line so long she can't begin to guess where it might end, like a ribbon in the sky. A gift from the Goddess, she thinks, something she'd never dared to hope they'd have: the chance for a future.
They'll build it here, together, with their own two hands.
—
end.