Chapter Text
It took only moments for Link to realize something was wrong with Princess Zelda.
It began as she swayed in Hyrule Field, hands clasped earnestly over her chest. Do you really remember me?
His answer came in the hesitation, and she nodded. Once, pause, twice, short. She turned towards the castle, hands fluttering to her sides.
An interesting thing happens to the landscape in a hundred years of disuse. Kept unchecked by the tender ministrations of stomping feet and grazing animals, the fields lose their gentle grasses and clovers to mightier foes. Link had taken to wrapping his horses’ legs to protect from thistles and thorn bushes and sword grass. Benign at first sight, the blades could cut through skin.
Zelda began to walk through the thigh-high grass before Link could cry out.
By the time he lunged forward to drag her back, the princess had cuts all up and down her bare legs. She seemed utterly unconcerned as he sat her down to tend to her wounds.
He wrapped the end of the bandage securely around her ankle, and she let out an abstracted, airy laugh at nothing. He looked up into her face, but she wasn’t looking at him. She smiled dreamily at the distant ramparts, and then laughed again.
His blood chilled.
⋯
She refused food, and only took a patient little sip of water when Link insisted. He supposed that would have to do for now. Her stomach didn’t sound, and he couldn’t sense any weakness in her movements. But the skin on her knuckle tented to a fold when he pinched. Zelda didn’t react. She gazed at her hand as if it were a mildly fascinating creature.
Link had been planning to go to Hateno, but that would not happen now.
She said she would walk all the way to Kakariko. Link looked down at her sandals.
“I have a horse,” he told her. Rohan snorted and tossed his head, as if corroborating this statement. He’d taken to the princess quickly. Link wasn’t sure if that was because of his supposed bloodline, or if it was simply her.
Once again, she relented to the horse only on Link’s insistence. And so they set off. A largely silent journey.
Except.
Except when Zelda would laugh at nothing. Except when she would utter phrases aloud, and then refuse to elaborate upon his request. Except when her eyes fixed to some point in the middle distance and Link had to call her name four times to catch her gaze.
He had to coerce more water into her every time they paused to rest.
Throughout his mad dash around Hyrule, freeing ghosts from mechanical prisons and swords from the ground, Link often worried over his reunion with Zelda. While he had the broad strokes, the finer lines of his memory were missing. The shading would never fill in. She would awake from a hundred-year battle to a man who couldn’t tell her what her favorite color was. She would find only a shadow of a country and a shadow of himself.
Now, he had other worries. Were his memories so warped that she had always been like this, and he couldn’t recall it? Was this a side effect of the sealing power? Had a century of siege worn the boundaries of her mind the same way it wore his memory? Link led Rohan on and chewed on his lip, and his brain buzzed likewise, waspish and roiling.
In the evening, Link finally managed to convince Zelda to eat. She did so distractedly but voraciously, as if her hands were feeding her mouth of their own volition. He was pleased.
She soiled herself an hour later.
Link was utterly ashamed at his relief when this seemed to rouse Zelda from her trance, even just to the embarrassment she felt. He provided a change of clothes and she washed herself at the nearby river. When she returned her prayer dress was gone, and he did not ask about it.
Zelda sat at the fire to dry her hair, cheeks flushed and eyes rimmed in red.
“It’s okay,” Link said, sitting beside her. He longed to place a hand on her arm but didn't know how. “The first time I ate, I threw up. And the second time. And the third, too.”
She looked at him and her gaze was clear and focused. “Link.” It was as if she was seeing him for the first time since Hyrule Field. “It’s you.”
“Yeah,” Link replied, in place of any better answer. “It’s me.”
Her eyes darted over his face, almost feverish. There was a worried crease in her brow. “Link,” she said again in naked relief, and his knees nearly buckled. “Where… where am I?”
Link explained for the better part of the night, and she nodded along the whole time, her eyes never leaving his own. He pitched the tent and she collected river water to douse the fire. They arranged their bedrolls side by side and she curled towards him as she slept. The sleeves of his shirt gathered over her hands. He felt like his chest was slowly filling with balloons.
In the morning, she woke up after him and walked to the river. When she came back, she was carrying a full conversation with the air. Link placed breakfast in her hands and she fed herself between sentences, never missing a beat.
Then Zelda laughed and said “Urbosa”, and Link’s hope shriveled into the coffin of his ribs.
⋯
Link waited outside Impa’s home while she spoke to Zelda.
As soon as she left, arm in arm with Paya (a good choice on Impa’s part, he noted: the only person in Hyrule who could hold an entirely one-sided conversation), he dashed up the stairs.
Impa had her hands folded under her chin, her forehead creased into pie dough.
“Was she always like this,” Link asked, downturned at the end.
“No,” Impa replied bluntly, giving the slightest shake of her head. “No, she was not. Something has happened to her in her fight with Calamity Ganon.” She paused to take a long sip of tea, and Link momentarily wanted to throttle her. “If I could hazard a guess, it would be that she communed with the goddess for so long, with only other spirits for company, that she forgot how to have a body again.”
Link’s lips felt numb. “She was speaking to… or she thought she was speaking to Urbosa on the way here.”
The old woman nodded again. “I do not know if she is speaking to the spirits or if she only believes she is. It is within her power, if her mother and grandmother are any guide.” She looked up at Link and read the despair on his face. “Even in the short conversation she had with me, there were moments of lucidity, Link. I think I would take her somewhere quiet. Somewhere she can learn to be a person again.”
Afterwards, Link stepped onto the porch in the quiet morning sun and fished for anything but blankness inside of him. He had been expecting nothing but to be the broken thread. He had been expecting her face to crumple with disappointment at his naivete, his blindness to their past. Not for a million rupees could he have predicted this.
Below him in the street, Zelda chattered like a bird while Paya’s eyes widened in worry.
He was not the person for this job. Had Zelda been haunted by vengeful specters or pig-like monsters, he would be firmly within his own territory. But his tongue had only recently been loosened by a century-long nap. He was no counselor, no sage.
He could give her somewhere quiet, though.
⋯
There is a house in a town tucked away behind a bridge. In front of this house is a sign. Link hammered it into the ground himself, pleased to be an object who could put his name on other objects. He put his favorite weapons on racks and stocked wood for the fireplace. Occasionally he imagined their homecoming, after.
They’d spent two days in Kakariko before setting off. Impa spent hours speaking to her every day, before passing her off to Link each night. He sat on a chair inside her room at the inn and watched her breath fill and leave. She was loath to lie down, but fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.
Zelda had conversed alone for two hours on horseback. Link noted that her hands steered and urged her mount on without pause, as if disconnected from her mouth. This seemed both good and bad. Good that she hadn’t forgotten. Bad that she couldn’t remember knowing.
One of the first things they had learned was that when she communed or invented or whatever it was that she did, she was lost to the queries of others. Link listened and struggled with context clues for half an hour until he realized this time, it was her mother.
His heart went plop into the acid of his chest. The horses’ hooves went clop on the bridge.
He opened his mouth as she pulled Rohan to a stop beside him but kept prattling away. He closed his mouth again, clamped down on his newfound words. Will this be forever. Are you lost to me. Is this my punishment for not saving you. Is this your punishment for not saving me. “We’re here, Zelda.”
And unexpectedly, her eyes went to his.
“Link,” she said. “What is the sword saying?”
A hundred years ago, she had asked him something similar, and his answer was silence that spoke too much.
“I told you I can’t hear it, a long time ago,” he answered her.
She slipped off Rohan’s back, smooth and naive as water, and moved towards him. She walked him up against the house and continued pressing in, until her face was flush with his shoulder, nose to the hilt of the Master Sword.
Link held and held his breath.
Zelda hummed. “I see.” She didn’t elaborate, but turned to the east, and then turned back so suddenly her hair whipped his face. “Is this your house? Let’s go in and see!” Her face was every inch alive and seventeen.
By the evening, she had drifted back to the world that he was not privy to, but as he tucked her under the blankets in his bed, he seared the memory of her face in his memory.
Link went downstairs and stood in the kitchen, tracking the flowers on the table. She had leaned in to smell them. Her profile burned in embers inside his head. Eyes lamplit and curious, lips quirked at the corners. Too tight in the cheeks to be sanctified. Too bright in the smile to be something holy.
⋯
The sun washed over the shingles every morning, and they settled into a routine quicker than he thought. They ate breakfast. He brought her to the bathhouse to wash. He knocked on the door once he knew the water was going cold. They went on a walk through the Midla Woods. They ate lunch. He left her at the house while he ran errands in the village. They ate dinner.
On the best days she danced in the kitchen, and they wandered around Necluda until their feet were sore. He demonstrated his newfound voice to her, and she was delighted by everything.
On the worst days he spoon-fed her broth. Her eyes blinked: one, two, three. That was her only concession to living. She was carved from marble, angelic and cold, and he didn’t know what to do.
Hero, now nursemaid. Others might resent it. Link could only worry. He purchased books for her to read, and left his remaining Guardian parts scattered conspicuously over the table. They didn’t seem to hold any sway. He wished they would. He wished he could.
The days blurred into each other. She talked to her mother and the champions in turn. He put bowls in front of her and pinched the skin over her knuckles, and he didn’t know what to do.
He prayed and cursed, alternating. He found her often with the Master Sword cradled in her hands, chatting as if to an old friend. She got cuts on her palms that he anointed and bandaged. He went so far as to ask the Sword, and the Sword’s reply still went unheard.
Sometimes in the night he heard his name, and he was up from his pallet by the fire in an instant, pulling himself over the railing instead of taking the stairs. She sat up in bed and made eye contact, her irises reflecting cat-like in the moon. They talked there, in the checkerboard of the window, and the timber walls took on a stone-like quality. Her elegant phrases, the silent princesses pressed in her notebooks. Burning the midnight oil in her study again.
Other times, she was still fast asleep, and mumbled his name in tumbling beads. He went up like flashpaper.
Soon he was watching her dead to the world every night, her hair draped over her neck like a scarf. People in the village had seen glimpses of blond. They were starting to talk, and he didn't know what to do.
One morning she spoke to people whose names Link didn’t recognize.
They walked to the lab on top of the hill, and Purah’s face was too young to hold that much accusation. Symin was minding Zelda outside, and Link’s tongue had been unraveled at some point in the water.
When he slumped back, emptied of words, she only tilted her head.
“I have a bit of experience with being in a body I wasn’t used to anymore,” she told him, blunt and edged. “And so do you.”
He shrugged, watching Zelda through the window. She sat on a boulder, staring into the sky. She would’ve gasped and raved over the guidance stone. It would’ve been impossible to drag her away.
“Linky,” Purah said sharply. “Look at me.”
Link did. She crossed stick arms over her chest. Her eyes were child-big and narrowed to adult slants. The three of them, one hundred and seventeen each. Six and sick and sacred, them.
“You’ll count every good day until there are none left.”
He reared back, struck. “I’m trying to help her.”
“You’re pining for a girl you only half-remember. I know you care for her better than anyone else could.” His mind turned it over, ran the words ragged. She didn’t mean it like that. “But do you speak to her, Link, when she doesn’t speak to you? Do you even try? Do you think she’d be doing the same with you? Kid gloves and silence?”
He had expected to be the missing joint. She was the one who was supposed to be disappointed . But Link wasn’t disappointed. He wasn’t. In a wave of habit, his face wiped itself. His voice balled in his chest, limping in his throat. They traded diatribes back and forth until they both stood from their chairs.
Purah battered on, uncaring. She clenched her fists and shoved her glasses up her nose. “Yes, she’s not the same. You’re not the same either! Why did you expect her to be exactly as she was?”
There was a hammer under Link’s ribs, and it rang on the anvil of his liver. “I died of my own volition. Hylia took her. For a hundred years. If she refuses to give her back, she’s nothing but cruel.”
The child climbed on the table, as she did whenever she wanted the upper hand. “You brought her back! She’s standing in front of you now! And I know it’s not good for her to be so in her head. But you’re so greedy for her best moments you’re throwing away the rest.”
They stared at each other, breathing hard. His face wanted to form a mask, but he forced himself to break it. “Then what do I do?”
“Link, can’t you see? Better to live in her own world than in this one alone.”
Later, Zelda sat at the kitchen table and smiled down at her hands. Link sat across from her. He ran through all of the moments in the past few weeks, the ones where she’d seemed most like herself. The glow of her face, the dimples in her cheeks. Present and grounded and undoubtedly there.
But just in the corners, a touch of strain. An artificiality to the earthiness. A girl too naive for the things she had seen. Maybe it was just another pretending.
Another communing with the spirit of him.
“Maybe I was desperate,” he said, even as her eyes didn’t lift. “Maybe Purah’s right. I just wanted to have you back so badly. But I’m not trying to mourn you while you’re right here.”
He looked at the table, eyes tracing knife marks. “In the memories, you just seemed so sure. Even when others doubted you and you doubted yourself, you still had that iron inside. Courage, wisdom, right? I’m an arm for the sword, you’re a heart for your mind. But I guess that’s not fair.”
“I just feel like you’re still stuck in the castle. But maybe for now that’s all you can do. You woke up like me, in this Hyrule where everyone died. But at least I didn’t remember that. Maybe it’s a bit easier that way, going slowly. I can understand. The way I didn’t go after the Lynel on the Great Plateau, even though it had a really nice bow. I guess not like that, that sounds a bit stupid. I don’t know. You knew what you were doing, going to Ganon to swallow him whole. I have to trust that you’re on your way back.”
When he glanced up, Zelda’s eyes were on him. She wasn’t smiling and she didn’t reply. Her voice didn’t bubble like champagne in the air. But she listened and unfolded her hands. They pressed flat on the wood of the table, palms up.
Link smiled at her. Her fingers twitched.
⋯
He approached it like he would track a deer through the forest. Persistent, never aggressive. He’d found and freed her once. He could do it again.
When he’d woken from a century of water and soft blue light, he spoke only because he’d forgotten he wasn’t supposed to. Even still, the muscle memory clenched at his throat, clipping his sentences to short, practical things, or elsewise running his train of thought off nonsensical cliffs.
Now he sorely missed that practice. He set bowls before her and tried to tell her stories of his journey. They walked through the Midla Woods and he pointed out the landmarks on the horizon. His tongue tripped over itself and spilled into tangents. Link feared that even if she was listening, it would all be incomprehensible. But once in a while, as soon as he became immersed in his own storytelling, he looked over to see her gaze set towards him. Head tilted, forehead creased in question. Sometimes even a touch of a smile.
She trailed behind him as he did his shopping in the village. He handed her apples and she stared at them in her hands. At first, the townspeople glanced from the corners of their eyes, but it only took a week before they greeted Zelda like anyone else, even as she conversed with the dirt.
During those moments Zelda came to life and brought him back in time, he didn’t hold on too tight. He craved the sparkle in her eyes, but over the days and nights, he started to come to miss her patient observation. The best times were when she just watched him and listened. Not holding herself back, but sinking into the world like a pond, toe by toe.
He had never known how to apply only half of himself to a problem, and soon he was going to bed hoarse every night. He had to hold himself back from sharing every little observation with the shopkeepers in Hateno. He cracked the spines of the books he had bought and read to her as she ate dinner.
The hardest moments to bear were her conversations with spirits. After some unsuccessful attempts at distraction, Link settled on a relatively simple process. He did the mental calculus of who the spirit was as fast as possible, and then inserted himself into the conversation. Often, she just talked over him, but sometimes he said something surprising enough that she jerked back and met his eyes.
This, of course, came with the issue of having to speak to people long dead. Link’s voice only failed once, as Zelda happily chatted to Mipha. He sat alone under the apple tree that night, listening to the wind ruffle against Firly Pond. The second time, he felt the lump, but it didn’t break.
As Link interjected more and more, she rose from her trance sooner and sooner, and her lips parted as she turned to him.
The moon eased through its phases, and at some point, she began replying.
⋯
The thing about time is that looking back, it passes in furloughs. But as it creeps through the body and across the sun and sky, it washes at change like a stream picks at its banks. Soon, a gorge. For now, only a trickle.
Their routine settled into a groove, like a wagon track carved in the road. Every morning she did her share of communing, and either included him by facing him or asked for privacy by facing away. In the afternoon she followed him as he ran errands and fixed up the house. She handed him ingredients as he cooked. She called for him less in the night.
Time pressed the stones into canyons, and the days dripped like hammers.
And so Link looked up one morning and Zelda stood before him, right there.
⋯
“I watched over you on your journey,” she said, staring into Firly Pond. That morning she had spoken to her father, and her eyes were still red. Link hadn’t realized it was possible to argue from the grave.
He paused from where he was tinkering with the water pump. “You told me, right after we defeated Ganon.”
“I… stop talking to me,” she said angrily, looking up at the treetops. “You had enough of my time. I want,” she breathed. Closed her eyes. “I want this now.”
Link froze his body in place, and waited.
“They’re,” she paused, shaking her head, “greedy, is what they are. They’re lonely. They want someone to speak to, and they’ll claw at you to do it.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I was just happy for the company, back in the castle. But this… this is different.”
She tilted her face towards the sky. “I saw your worry. Every time you remembered something, the fear you wouldn’t get anything else. I don’t think I realized it before. But now I feel it. That fear, that every conversation will be my last. I’ll look up and they’ll have dragged me into the spirit realm. But they’re so lonely, and I miss them.”
“That’s okay,” Link said. “That’s what I learned, eventually. That the memories won’t stop, it’s up to me to find them. So you’ll stay here, too. I know it.”
Zelda ran a hand through the pond water. “All the stories you tell me, about your travels, the places you’ve been. I recognize them, from watching over you. It’s a different perspective, to hear about them from your eyes. And I want to see them too, with my own eyes. I want to see everything.”
Link couldn’t stop himself. He grabbed her hand, wet and suntanned. She’d been so pale as she floated down from the sky, and now her nails were edged in mud. Her hair caught the breeze, too spun-gold to be natural, but she batted away the strands that floated in her face. Her eyes shone unworldly green but crinkled at the corners. Neither angelic nor earthy, just right there.
“Let’s do it,” he said, and her smile broke wide, sharp as sword grass.