Chapter Text
There’s half a skull with protruding horns on his head, and bones and teeth and leathers and swathes of fur and warpaint over the rest of him, but it isn’t his savage-looking armor that’s causing the thrill hammering in her ribcage.
It isn’t even the way their bodies are quashed together in the insufferable Faronian heat, chests heaving, as he presses her into the tree bark, shielding her as best he can from the onslaught of wild animals rushing past them in an absolute fury.
It’s the look he’s giving her out of the corner of his cutting blue eyes, half-feral, half-incredulous, as if to ask, How is it that you keep getting yourself into so much trouble, and I’m always having to drop everything to come and save you?
~:o•O•o:~
The jungle is absolutely sweltering, the high collar of her blouse chafing against her neck as they trek through bracken and overgrowth. He keeps stopping to hold heavy vines aside, to wait for her as she crosses slabs of deadwood, to give her a moment to catch her breath, like he knows she’s helpless. It’s a little embarrassing, but she just tries to be grateful. He’s leading her back to camp, after all, and she would be lost without him.
He knows the way. Which is also embarrassing.
They stop at a watering hole, where he kneels to drink. She goes to her knees, too, splashing her neck until the fabric there is sopping. It’s going to chafe even worse, but she’s too hot to care.
He grunts at her, making a slow, deliberate gesture when she looks over, hand to mouth. But she can’t exactly communicate that she shouldn’t, that the water is probably teeming with parasites and unfit for consumption, never mind to come in contact with any mucous membranes. So she smiles and says, “No, thank you,” even though she knows that’s somewhat pointless.
He frowns but doesn’t push.
In the unobtrusive silence that follows, listening to chattering birds and the gentle rush of water, watching him lower his guard for just a moment, she reaches absently for her sketchbook.
She etches a rough impression of him onto the page. He’s lean and well-muscled, no doubt a direct result of living in this demanding wilderness. She adds details to his headdress—horns and a woven mane, a row of maxillary teeth, the incisors that jut down beside his eyes—and the bone bracer on his right arm, the tufts of locked wool at his shoulders and his shins and the medallions and buckles on his leather armor. She sketches the warpaint last, not quite able to recall if the patterns are the same as the first time she met him—not quite able to keep the heat from her face as she colors in the mark on his abdomen, reaching up like a handprint between his hips.
He catches her, eyes going sharp as he puts together the fleeting glances over the page at him with the quick movements of her wrist, and prowls closer. She’s not sure whether or not she should feel abashed; he’s done much worse to her, after all, grabbing her without even an attempt to acquire her permission and swinging her through the trees the first time they met.
(In her heart she knows the Lizalfos that were in hot pursuit more than excuse him. Throwing blame at him just makes her feel better about her own indiscretions.)
He curls a finger over the top of the page and tips the book down so he can look. He examines her work upside down, and then tilts his head to orient it sideways. Slowly, a smile works its way over his mouth.
“Sorry,” she breathes, her earlier inclination to justify herself forgotten in the face of his untroubled response. “I suppose I should’ve asked first. But I’ve tried sketching you from memory and it never looks right. I hope you don’t—”
He peels the book from her hands before she can go on, scouring the drawing again right side up, and then points to himself with a question in his eyes. She can’t help but return his smile.
“Yes, it’s you.”
He seems inordinately pleased with himself. Maybe it’s just the novelty of it. Or maybe he’s pleased that she thinks his likeness is worth capturing, and then she’s blushing again. She distracts herself with another feeble attempt at communication.
She gestures at his markings on the page, and then at the arrows sticking up beneath his throat when he doesn’t seem to follow. “What are these markings? Do they mean anything? Do they serve a purpose?”
He tilts his head.
She gently takes the book from him, setting it aside, and points more deliberately—at the marks on his arm, his thigh, at his ribs. His smile widens a little more, and then he’s off, sprinting towards the jungle before she can stop him. A few minutes later he’s back, a hollowed palm fruit in his hand filled with a paste made from she knows not what, and he kneels before her and dips his finger in it.
“Oh, oh dear, that’s really not—”
But he’s already snatched her wrist, painting a long, cool line up her forearm and a circle around her bicep. He frowns at her sleeve when it gets in his way, but works around it, wriggling his finger under the fabric to draw a row of lines like another armband. He moves on to her other arm, painting the same line up her wrist, and then a careful set of spots near her shoulder that make a diamond.
She’s frozen under his meticulous touch, afraid to move lest she ruin his work, or shatter the strange and wonderful spell of being allowed into this ritual. But then he frowns at her throat, and in one fell swoop snatches the sodden fabric there and pulls, popping free the strip of buttons, and she’s thawed again.
She yelps. “Stop that! What on earth are you—?!”
She tries to shove him away, but he smacks at her hands and carries on, prying the cloth open and drawing lines from either side of her neck to meet beneath her collarbone, and then down her sternum, and paints curves over the swell of each breast. He’s done before she can feel properly assaulted, the finished product not unlike a waterfall spilling down her neck and crashing into a basin. He seems to decide, mercifully, that it’s too much trouble to get to her torso or legs and moves on to her face.
“This is completely inappropriate,” she scolds him as he sweeps a line across her cheekbone, and when she doesn’t turn her face the way he wants he frowns again and snatches her by the chin.
He guides her aside and she complies with a huff, cheeks pinkening at his razor-sharp focus, at the great care he takes to make tiny pinprick marks beside her eyes. He paints a curve down her jaw, and then turns her so she faces him squarely and marks a V-shape on her forehead. Last of all he paints a line with his thumb down the center of her lip.
He hesitates, his expression changing. She can’t quite read it, the sudden softness in his eyes, the way his brow smooths, the way his fingers beneath her chin are suddenly, simply there, and not holding her aloft. The way his lips part and a redness rises across the bridge of his nose.
He’s on his feet the moment next, chucking the palm fruit and remaining paste unceremoniously into the jungle, apparently finished. She puffs a sigh, still a bit rattled, skin stiff under the drying paint, and he gestures for her to follow without looking back, heading back into the trees.
She snatches her journal, unaccountably flustered, and gets up to follow.
Well, explaining this once she gets back to camp is going to be a chore. How does she keep getting herself into these ridiculous situations, anyway? How does she keep running into him? In a jungle this size, what are the odds of him always being nearby to pull her out of trouble at the last second? Unless—
He’s paused on the path to hold aside a tangle of vines, his eyes trained on his feet, his jaw clenched much too tight. If she didn’t know any better, she would say he looked sheepish.
She glares suspiciously at the side of his head as she wanders by, and he pretends not to notice.
Had he been following her?
~:o•O•o:~
He sees her safely back to camp, and then he’s gone.
Explaining the paint all over her arms and chest after she stumbles out of the jungle, looking an absolute mess, is about as much fun as she imagined it would be. She has to clutch her blouse closed at the throat where the buttons had popped loose, which impresses no one. Her father wants to assign a member of the expedition to her as a guard, and everyone else just wants her to stay put and keep out of trouble. Assuring them she hadn’t been in any danger is an exercise in futility.
How safe could she possibly have been keeping company with a barbarian?
To placate everyone, she promises not to wander. At least for a couple days.
And it’s not all bad. She has more samples than she knows what to do with, botanicals to categorize, and a research journal full to bursting with notes and sketches that she should really compile. It keeps her busy, even if it is a little more plodding than exploring the jungle.
She pointedly stays away from the last marked-up page in her sketchbook, where those cutting eyes have been captured in a way she hadn’t managed in any of her other attempts. Which she also stays away from.
By the third day, she is really and truly bored. Not that the work itself isn’t satisfying. If she’d been back in Castletown with so many brimming vials and specimens to analyze, she would hardly have been able to contain her excitement.
But here, in this wild place, with the promise of discovery lying just beyond the milky tent canvas, her rudimentary laboratory feels like a cage.
She tosses and turns that night, listening to the whooping calls of nocturnal birds and the chatter of a thousand bugs, and something on the roof of her hut, pattering with four delicate feet.
Maybe, if she promises to be on her best behavior, she can get her father to let her out in the morning. Or if he won’t be swayed, she can yield and agree to take along a bodyguard (miserable a compromise as that would be; they have no respect for science or any of the necessary patience for fieldwork). But exploring the jungle with baggage in tow is better than not exploring at all.
But then the thatched roof bows with a peculiar groan, and before she can so much as shrink out from under it the culm gives, a man crashing through it and onto her bed as she barrels aside with a yelp.
They sit in a mess of broken reeds and ruined white sheets, dust settling around them, and when he flashes her a crooked smile from beneath his lopsided helm it’s all she can do not to throttle him.
“You!” she hisses. “What on earth are you doing here?! Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve—?”
He tilts his head and she cuts her tirade short, not only because it’s pointless, but because, truthfully, it was her own clumsiness that had gotten her into so much trouble, and she very probably owes him her life. It feels wrong to hurl blame at him, even if he can’t understand her.
He hops off her bed, landing silently on his toes, and offers his hand, drifting imperceptibly towards the door.
She sighs. “I can’t go with you. I’m supposed to stay here.”
He tilts his head again, brow creased and hand unwavering. He doesn’t get it. And… well, neither does she, if she’s honest. Even if everyone else supposes a wild man living in Faron some kind of a threat, he’s certainly never made her feel threatened. And who better to see her safely through the jungle than someone who actually resides in it?
She chews her lip.
“Well, maybe just a little while won’t hurt,” she rationalizes, reaching for him, but then snatches her hand back. “But I need to be back before sunrise. Do you understand? Sunrise? When the—”
She gestures, marking the horizon, and an orb coming over it. Tries to convey the moon setting when that doesn’t work.
He tilts his head.
“Oh, never mind,” she sighs, and takes his hand.
He rushes her out into the dark, hardly making a sound, and she shuffles behind him, trying to stay low. The bone on his head is ashen in the moonlight, but he keeps to the shadows, darting between tents and outside blooms of firelight with ease. He pauses near the small tower where the guards are stationed to make sure they’ll go unseen, and then slips by with her in tow.
She frowns. Clearly, the men her father hired to protect the camp are useless.
They disappear into the trees, but just as it seems he wants to go faster she needs to slow down, because in the senseless adrenaline of being whisked out of her bed by a wild man in the dead of night she neglected to put on any shoes. He watches her stumble and hiss for a few steps before he decides this isn’t going to work.
He latches onto the nearest tree and climbs, pulling her along at regular intervals, and then moving out onto a limb when he thinks they’ve gone high enough. They’ve actually gone much too high in her estimation, and the vertigo is setting in just as he gestures her over. She’s only halfway through telling him all the reasons why she won’t when he waltzes back over like it’s nothing and takes her by the hand again, steadying her as she leaves the safety of the trunk and sidles out onto the massive branch.
The limb reaches out towards another, attached to an entirely different tree, and there’s a sizeable gap between them. He hops over the nothing and her heart seizes. But he lands easily, his feet planted firmly as the rest of him leans over the gap so he can keep hold of her hand. As loathe as she is to go forward, she’s not in any position to go back.
She pinches her eyes shut and leaps, and he pulls her along, seeing her safely across. She clutches at him when she lands, burrowing into his throat, and he shakes with silent laughter while she recovers.
“It’s not funny,” she growls, even though she has yet to pry her eyes open.
A few minutes later they’re doing it again, and again, and again, weaving through the jungle in the canopy, and soon the death-defying leap across the gaping maw isn’t quite so heart-stopping. She can’t help but muse that the way he draws her across, the way he bears her weight on his arms and brings her to alight on her feet just so beside him, is almost like a dance.
She’s almost used to it when they come to the end of a bough and there’s no bridging bough to meet it. He backs them up a few paces, reaching into the treetops and dislodging a twist of vine. He wraps it around his forearm once, twice, and takes her firmly by the waist with his other arm by the time she realizes what he’s doing.
“Oh no,” she breathes as he pulls her into his chest. “Oh no oh no oh no—”
He jumps, and Zelda’s scream eclipses every birdcall and bug song for half a mile.
~:o•O•o:~
Mercifully, a short while later they’re back on the ground.
The trees have thinned out, the earth turning more swampy, and while it isn’t exactly pleasant between her toes, she can manage. She’s lost all sense of where they are. The landmarks are unfamiliar, and she’s not even sure in which direction the campsite is anymore. He links his fingers in hers, tugging her along with frequent, bright glances over his shoulder.
If she didn’t know any better, she’d say he was excited.
The underbrush and boulders give way to a river flanked by moss and swathes of cut stone. She tries to stop to inspect it, but he’s insistent that they keep going. There’s more the deeper they go: toppled blocks, fallen pillars, a chiseled bit of what might have been an idol, with a cracked, glaring eye and a wrinkled snout baring chipped teeth.
Ruins. Signs of an actual, ancient civilization, with masonry and roads and—oh no. What if it’s all been buried over thousands of years? What if it’s all been lost to time and erosion? The jungle had likely eaten away at what remained with moss and root and rain, leaving behind nothing but glimmers of what was. The empty pull of missed opportunity makes her heart plummet.
Their path narrows, channeling them into a gully. And then it spills open. There’s a lake reflecting blooms of firelight, surrounded on all sides by a towering colonnade and snarling carvings, and a massive dragon head looming over the waterway with a staircase leading up into its open maw.
He’s led her straight into the heart of ancient Faron. And all her questions about what sort of people would build such fearsome monuments for themselves only multiply, because they’re still here.
She can’t help but shrink closer to him as they’re swarmed, as men and women painted like he is, dressed like he is, fearless and curious like he is, swing down from pillars and splash through the water towards them, inspecting her under the torchlight. They barrage him with questions.
“Shehsa? Maa, uwyana!”
“Yanluna. Gepah luumna.”
“Shehsa talim?”
“Fehyu,” he says, and they laugh.
“Shehru roh?”
He stops, looks at her then. They all do. And now there’s nowhere to shrink.
He takes a step closer, hand on his chest, and tells her, “Link.”
Her brow puckers. “I don’t understand—”
He waves his hand too close to her face and she gets the distinct impression she’s being shushed. He taps his chest again, takes her hand and puts it there, and says again, “Link.”
They’re all waiting, eyes sparkling and expectant.
“Link,” she echoes hesitantly, trying it on for size, and a lot of them break into grins or laugh, but all she can see is the massive smile that blooms over his face, that makes his eyes crinkle.
He pushes her hand back towards her own chest, pats it there a couple times, and tilts his head in that eternal question that… is making her heart do funny things.
“Zelda,” she tells him, and the whole crowd erupts in noise.
“Zelda,” they parrot, rolling their tongues where the L and D so unceremoniously meet, and laugh and chant and shove at each other like it’s the most ridiculous thing they’ve ever heard, “Zelda, Zelda!”
But Link hasn’t taken his eyes off her, and they’ve softened just a little, and it makes her chest feel cracked open when he says, so quietly it’s just between them, “Zelda.”
And then some of the women are prying her away, still laughing, pulling her onto the causeway towards the dragon’s mouth, and she lets herself be pulled when Link lets her go with a smirk. Instead of going inside they climb, dragging her atop the dragon and then up the carvings. They sit her down, fawning over her golden hair and clucking at her bare face, and a few minutes later she’s being painted again.
The women are better at it than Link was, their details more elaborate, their fingers more deft, and as they braid her hair and dapple designs over her face and chest she feels like a doll. They make dotted lines up from her toes to her ankles, and then swirl patterns up her legs.
It’s only then that it occurs to her that she’s been traipsing through the jungle in what she went to sleep in—a long linen tunic that barely brushed her thighs and underthings. And that should be absolutely mortifying, except the women with her are arguably wearing even less: belts around their hips holding up leathers and cloths not unlike the ones Link wears, and armor around their chest that leaves their shoulders and middle exposed. What she’s wearing seems modest by comparison.
But then they’re inspecting the buttons, fiddling with them, and in spite of her efforts to keep them at bay they unfasten them up to her ribs so they can paint her belly and her hip bones.
She’s not looking forward to taking it off later. It took hours of scrubbing the last time.
When they’re finished with her they lead her back to the dragon’s mouth. There are roaring fires and roasting meats, music and laughter and dancing that’s sending the water splashing around their ankles. Link is under the swaying torches with friends, whom he immediately abandons when he catches sight of her. The women hand her off with a collective roll of their eyes.
It’s hard to tell with the fires and reflections turning everything orange, but she thinks she spies that splash of heat across the bridge of his nose again when he takes her hand.
He leads her to the fire and they parade strange food in front of her—sweet fruits with strange textures, and unfamiliar meats and fish wrapped in leaves. She tries everything, with Link demonstrating how to get to the best parts, and they both laugh until they cry with how inept she is. She eats until she can’t anymore, and watches the dancers until they all get sick of it, and then the whole crowd moves in strange, hypnotic tandem up into the colonnade.
The columns in the cliffs shield small caverns that are just a few feet deep, just enough to protect them from inclement weather if they moved toward the back. Nets hang here, there, and everywhere, and Link weaves through them easily as people tumble inside. There’s still a lot of chatter, a lot of hands reaching up to point out stars, a lot of quieter laughter.
He drops into one overlooking the dragon head, and the hammock sways, and it looks unfairly soothing, and comfortable, and fun, but when he reaches for her to join him, a stubborn shred of propriety wiggles its way to the surface.
“No,” she tells him, stepping back, and when he smirks and reaches again, she says more firmly, “No.”
He arches a tired eyebrow at her. “Zelda,” he says, hand still reaching.
She frowns, dithering. Defenses crumbling.
“What if it rains?” she argues, and when he tilts his head at her, she takes a handful of water from nearby pitcher and throws it in the air, not flinching when it mostly comes back down on her head. She’s making a point. “Rain?”
He looks up—the sky is pristinely clear—and then laughs at her.
“No rain, Zelda,” he promises, and she frowns.
She really shouldn’t have told him her name.
She reluctantly lets him tangle their fingers together, and he pulls her easily alongside him, and she tries not to smile too widely as they sway.
“This is not appropriate,” she murmurs as he slips arms around her waist, as the roll of the hammock inevitably brings them together, her bare stomach pressing against his exposed ribs.
But he isn’t bothered, pointing up into the night sky until she follows with her eyes, and then he speaks. She listens to the nonsense, the gentle roll and hum of his language, as he points to this star, and then that one. He’s telling her a story. She can’t understand a word of it. She curls her face into his shoulder and listens anyway, lulled beyond reason.
For all the strangeness and beauty in the world, she thinks just then there must be nothing in it so soothing as the sound of his voice.