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punishandenslavesuckers · 6 years

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In which Zelda is the warrior daughter of queens and refuses a body guard unless they can defeat her in single combat. Link didn’t come all this way with a magical sword strapped to his ass just to be turned away at the gate. AKA: Link and Zelda throw down. based on THIS POST

“This is entirely your fault,” says the Queen.

Urbosa maintains her regal stoicism, staring straight forward, one hand resting at her hip, settled familiar on the hilt of her saber. The Chieftain of the Gerudo strikes an imposing figure – statuesque and dark, draped in deep reds and golds, her hair elaborately braided into a segmented crown of gold and amber. Amber, not diamonds, because they carry the protection of Din, so they say. Not that Urbosa ever needed more protecting, but it’s the thought.

She very purposely continues to ignore the woman standing beside her on the balcony. The thrones of Hyrule were set purposefully far back so a ruler would be forced to stand to speak with their people, lest they ever become complacent. Urbosa likes that. The Queen, personally, thinks someone carved the stone too far back and then didn’t want to admit it. She leans over slightly, speaking between her teeth as she smiles, incandescent and lovely.

“I told you not to encourage her and look where we are.”

She waves to the small assembled court, glittering and fine, royal guard and council, the summer sun laying golden lines across the central sanctum. An officiate is speaking to the crowd, blessing the proceedings.

Below the throne, on the ground level, Princess Zelda stands much like Urbosa. Fitted in lightly plated Sheikah armor, set with amber, a curved saber like-wise at her hip. Her long golden hair is bound up, braided against her scalp and looped up at the back of her head. The Queen cannot see it, but she knows the Princess is smiling that sweet summer smile she does right before it becomes a jackal grin.

Across from her: a stone-faced young man in a blue tunic stand square to her, boots set apart. His hands rest on the pommel of a naked blade, set point down on the floor, shining an eerie blue even in the sunlight. His dirty blond hair catches the sun more easily than the metal of his weapon. He’s both beautiful and expressionless as the ceremony proceeds.

Still under her breath, through her teeth, still smiling, the Queen says, “Our daughter is literally going to fight him.”

Urbosa clears her throat. “Dear –”

“She’s fighting him, Urbosa.”

“My love –”

“She’s sword fighting the Goddess’s Chosen Hero like it’s a bar brawl.”

“Honey, I think –”

“Gods above, it might be blasphemy for all I know. It’s not as though these voices from the spirit realm are especially clear on these matters, despite what I keep telling Zelda. No wonder she thinks she’ll never get the hang of it.”

“You’re hyperventilating, dear.”

“Hylia is going to strike me dead,” says the Queen of Hyrule.

Urbosa sighs.

“And then all of Hyrule will be plunged into eternal darkness, because our daughter is pig-headed and she punched the Hero of the realm.”

“If our daughter can punch out the Hero of the realm, he doesn’t deserve the title anyway.”

“That’s true, but I’m still mad at you.”

Urbosa jerks her chin toward the far side of the sanctum floor. “He looks mad.”

The Queen squints before remembering is un-queenly to squint at her subjects and straightening up. “How can you tell? I don’t think I’ve seen his face change since the day I met him. I think he has the same face when beset by moblins.”

“He also doesn’t talk, apparently, unless pressed.”

“Zelda will hate that.”

“Indeed, but I think he’s upset.”

“Well, he should be,” the Queen says, drawing her golden head up a little. “He’s got the blade that seals the darkness strapped to his back, the one destined to destroy the great Calamity, the one he’s used for years now to protect this kingdom… and we’re making him tussle with our daughter to prove he’s worthy of bodyguard duty.”

Urbosa is grinning.

“Oh, you bloody love it, don’t you?”

She laughs. “Yes. It’s very Gerudo.” She folds her arms, expression sobering a little. “And, frankly, Zelda’s resentment toward this boy is childish. I’m hoping they can work it out here with a bit of violence and get on with what they need to – Oh, damn, they’re coming to the end of it. You’re up, love.”

The officiate is gesturing toward the throne dais.

The Queen moves forward, raising on lily-white hand, her palm glowing in a single beam of sunlight through the high glass windows. The room falls into complete silence.

“We go to first blood… or yield. Understood?”

Link and Zelda nod.

“Link of Lanayru, knight of this realm, do you accept this challenge?”

He places one hand over his heart and kneels, head bowed, rather than answer aloud. She waits until he again rises to his feet.

“Zelda Bosphoramus Hyrule, princess of this realm, do you accept this challenge?”

“I do,” she says, voice ringing through the hall.

The Queen drops her hand. “Then begin!”

Zelda draws her sword.

Link takes his own into his hand.

Then closes his eyes for a moment, as if to get one last breath and… he vanishes. The room heaves simultaneously in surprise but – no! He’s there. He’s rushing his opponent. He’s cut across half the distance and in the instant between one blink of the eye and the next, he’s lunged into a vicious spinning swing. Zelda, startled, darts back, the clear ringing of metal signaling a first blow. Zelda leaps back and land, cat-like, her saber held in both hands. The weapon vibrates in her hand, singing with the impact, the sound holding strangely in the air.

Link raises the blade, one-handed, and circles to the right.

Zelda mirrors him.

Urbosa smiles, fingers laid against her lips, almost wondrous. “He’s not going to hold back,” she murmurs. “He’s going to really fight her.”

“Serves her right,” the Queen mutters, wringing her hands discretely in her gown.

They engage again.

Zelda attacks this time, darting right, coming in fast, feinting a cross-swing then reversing hard, suddenly, like a dancer’s spin on a precise queue, and cut’s a vicious line from shoulder to hip… that Link deftly blocks, parries and drives that strange blue blade directly through Zelda’s guard and just barely short of her heart before she twists, pivoting out of the stab, deflecting, and breaking away. She circles away. She keeps her blade up, wary now of the knight’s inhuman agility.

She cocks a brow… then brings two hands up across her chest, fingers forming a signal.

Then… she too vanishes, but in a puff of smoke. She shadow-steps like a Sheikah, a charm even she can manage (no divine intervention needed) and she rips back into space directly at Link’s back-left shoulders and swings. Linke ducks, pivots, the edge of her saber catching him across the bicep just barely… splitting open the fabric of his fine blue tunic and scraping scale-mail beneath.

Zelda immediately presses her advantage, shouting into every swing she rushes him – feint, stab, block, parry, step, parry, move, move, move never lose track of the footwork and again they are circling each other. Zelda lunges in again, engages him. Ten maneuvers later, they break apart. Again, she attacks. Again, they break apart and there are new hair-line tears in Link’s blue tunic. A shame – it’s supposed to signify his place as champion of the realm.

Link’s expression hasn’t changed an iota.

Cold blue eyes track Zelda’s gaze, seeking to divine her next move even as she does the same. Zelda feels a bile of heat rise in her chest, hot and suffusing her bones with temper and the desire – powerful and certain as the dawn – to see his composure bloodied. She feels the amber in her armor like the warmth of the sun, a thin skin of protection laced over the light leather in her gear. Link shadows her movement, mirrors them.

“You’re shorter than I thought you’d be,” Zelda says just softly enough onlookers might not hear.

Link doesn’t immediately react.

Then, startling her with a shockingly deep Lanayrian accent, Link says, “Likewise.”

And attacks her. He flash-steps again, but Zelda has some… sense of it. Some notion of his moving through some parallel but present part of the universe, some forth dimension of existence and like the eddy of water reveals it’s submerged riverbed… she knows it when he moves. She blocks, left, two-handed, the amber in the pommel of her blade humming hot as the sacred blade again makes violent contact with her saber. They locked out momentarily, blade to blade, and for an instant stand face-to-face.

Dangerously near, edged metal crossed between them.

Zelda thinks, through the ache in her arms, through the hum of her protections, that Link seems… angry. A flash of deep blue, like folded steel, eerie as the blade in his hand and he –

He fucking lets go of the sword with one hand, wrenching the blades so the cross-guards lock, torque right… and he punches Princess Zelda of Hyrule right in the nose. She yelps, stars erupting white then black in her skull and copper bursts hot and wet, pouring over her lips onto her tongue, dripping from her chin and soaking her palm. She immediately smashes the pommel of her sword into Link’s unguarded jaw, knocking him staggering back. She’s vindicated when he turns his head aside and spits blood on the sanctum floor.

It’s brief, however.

“First blood,” Chief Urbosa says, her deep voice booming through the hall. She points to Link. “The champion claims victory in this bout.”

Zelda, still bleeding profusely from the nose, lets it run freely down her face, dripping on her armor and the floor. She sheathes her blade with her bloody hand and stands, shoulders squared, glaring at the knight across from her. Still bleeding, she crosses the space between them, lifting her head and ignoring the throbbing, mind-numbing ache of what might be a broken nose. Link, to her very infinitesimal satisfaction, glances at her mouth as she speak, her teeth a carnage of blood, her tongue slick with red.

“Hero of Hyrule,” she says, “chosen by the sword that seal the darkness. You have shown unflinching bravery and skill in the face of darkness and adversity and have proven yourself worthy of the blessings of the Goddess Hylia.” She raises her chin just a little and raises her voice to match. “Whether skyward bound, adrift in time, or steeped in the glowing embers of twilight…”

She can hear the silence now, ringing in the hall, that the eyes of court are on her.

She lowers her voice and offers Link her bloody hand.

“The sacred blade ,” she says, “is forever bound to the soul of the Hero.”

Link glances at her hand, then looks her in the eye. He sheathes the sacred blade at his back. Then he kneels before her. Zelda, raising one hand, places her wet fingers at the back of his head. A kind of knighting. His hair feels soft against her fingertips, sticking to her blood-tacky skin. In seconds, the back of his head is blood-matted. She blinks.

“We pray for your protection and that… that the two of you will grow stronger as one.”

There is more to the speech, but in that moment, staring at the back of Link’s bloody head… something violent clenches in her chest, a dull knife-wound of horror and sorrow and her throat closes. She swallows. Her fingers flinch up slightly from Link’s hair and he must sense something is wrong because he looks up at her. Through his bangs, his eyes are overwhelmingly blue and clear. His expression: neutral tinged with a question.

The blood is her blood.

It’s not his blood. It’s not his blood. It’s not. Zelda tells herself, reminds herself, and the fear that comes next is dull and baffled because she does not know why she needs reminding of that. Needs comfort in that. She lowers her hand.

“Rise, Link,” she says finally. “Champion of Hyrule.”

He does. His lip is bloody.

Up on the throne dais, Urbosa shakes her head while applause breaks out slowly among the gathered few.

“That could have gone better,” she says.

But the Queen is smiling, her eyes shining, her hand pressed to the notch at the base of her breastbone.

“No,” she says, “I think that went well.”

#botw #legend of zelda #legend of zelda breath of the wild #breath of the wild #zelda #link #lozfic #alternate universe is way more gay #and full of punching #my writing #rae writes #raewrites

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punishandenslavesuckers · 7 years

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She has no throne. Girls without thrones should not have knights, but hers won’t go. Princess Zelda – the girl who killed Calamity – would love to fade into legend, but Link’s bought a house, he’s fighting off monsters, and he’s selling giant horses to strangely familiar Gerudo men. She’ll never have any peace now. (ao3)

(chapter one) (chapter two) (chapter three) (chapter four) (chapter five)

(chapter six) (chapter seven) (chapter eight) (chapter nine)

When Zelda wakes up, the sun is coming through holes in the roof, illuminating the otherwise dark interior of what was once a cottage. The stone work has held up, but the wooden panels rotted out, leaving only the support beams choked with creeping plants and hanging vines. The floor is packed earth carpeted in moss. Wildflowers grow riotous in the corners. Perhaps, she thinks, the flowers weren’t there last night but this is just what happens when Link stays in one place for too long – an involuntary resurgence of the wild.

He’s asleep presently.

Lying on his side, facing her, his head resting on her arm – Zelda should be used to this. To seeing Link unaware in the mornings. She should be bored of how he pulls near to her, annoyed by the fact her arm is numb or that his hair is damp and he obviously didn’t dry it out properly before getting back in bed. (He woke early to bathe in the lake.) She should not care that his skin smells a little like mint bar soap. She should not catalogue the small involuntary way his lips part when he breathes. His features smoothed by sleep should be familiar (one hundred years familiar). It should not be so impossibly hard to resist touching him.

Zelda flexes her fingers experimentally, pins and needles roving down the limb. Link’s breathing evenly against her shoulder. Laying like this, her fingers can just barely reach the empty section of bedding where Draga laid last night. It’s empty now. Cool with the absence of its right occupant. She wiggles her fingers. Feels a stab of numbness.

She is loath to move, but does, slowly sliding her arm from under Link’s head and rolling onto her stomach.

When she does, she finds Link awake and looking up at her.

“Hello,” she says.

He mouths something that might be a ‘morning’ but it’s too early for speech.

She pushes his hair gently from his brow. “Where’s Draga?”

Link doesn’t raise his head, but he signs, one handed, ‘Scouting. Mountain.’

“Will that take a while?”

Link nods closes his eyes.

Zelda is struck – though not for the first time, nor the last – by the impression Link looks… not odd exactly. Rather, in moments, in passing, from certain angles between one breath and the next, he looks out of place. Like she’s seen his face in another context -- on ancient coins or the carvings of lost civilizations. He’s anachronistic. A fixed point.

Led by impulse, she traces his features with one finger.

Link, for his part, lets her do it. His eyelids twitch a little, like he’s very consciously keeping them closed. Zelda monitors this with a small corner of her brain, while the rest of her attention follows her fingers on his skin. Like a blind woman reads braille, Zelda runs her fingertips over Link’s mouth, resting there to catch the heat off his breath. Then she draws her thumb with some modicum of pressure – like touch-testing a tea mug – against his lower lip. He opens his eyes and looks up at her.

For a moment, neither of them move or say a word.

Link just studies the way Zelda looks at him.

Then – gently, with the ease of long practice, iterated in a history she still has no notion of – Link takes her thumb between his teeth and closes his mouth around it. She stops breathing. Her thumbprint is hot against his tongue, a coiled press of heat in his mouth. Then he licks an obscene path from her thumb to her forefinger and she just –

Zelda loses track of things then.

She’s aware in broken instances -- her fingers tangled in his hair. His weight on top of her. That she’s kissing him, mouth-to-mouth and clumsy, her lips prickling with pressure. She closes her fists at the back of his skull. When she does, Link makes this low animal sound in his throat. She pulls his hair and he moans , eyelids fluttering for a second. Intoxicated by this, Zelda pushes Link’s head down against her throat and he kisses her there. She guides him lower, guides his mouth against her body and he kisses her wherever she takes him – a slow path from her breast to her belly.

He only moves on his own when his mouth finds the waistband of her panties and he uses his teeth, then his right hand, to draw it down her leg.

The sight of him – her unreadable knight escort, bowed, eyes closed, his face between her legs – is manifest every sweat-sticky fantasy Zelda’s ever known. Formless teenage notions long before it was okay to think such a thing about him. Ignored and pushed down until now where it asserts itself as a compound rush of want and guilt. It’s so intense she almost stops him, but before she can speak, he looks up at her. In no fantasy of hers did she imagine that expression – arresting her where she lies.

He smiles just a little. It makes her entire heart hurt. Then he lowers his head and kisses her, gently, at the soft V of her legs. She very much forgets to feel guilty then. Link touches her, fingertips first, exploring, pushing gently but insistently in. When he has her writhing, he draws his tongue against her labia and circles her clit. Then he does it again.

Zelda moans.

When his tongue slides into her, she’s shaking. When he licks her open, she’s arching her hips to meet him. Rising and falling slowly. She cries out but the sound melts into a moan, her body pulsing in time to the rhythm Link laves into her. She’s breathless. The orgasm is in her toes and her fingertips, sparking blue behind her teeth. Zelda comes when Link is knuckle-deep inside her, two fingers coaxing her to obscenity. He closes his mouth over her clit and swirls his tongue over and over in agonizing little circles until she’s gasping, toes curling, spine bent, riding out her climax against Link’s mouth until the lightning recedes from her blood. Then she’s slack beneath him. Her heartbeat throbbing in every nerve.

Her fist aches where it’s closed against the back of Link’s head. Retroactively, she realizes she must have been yanking discourteously hard for the last ten seconds or so.

“Oh, my goodness!” She lets go. “I’m sorry . Did I hurt you?”

Link sits up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He still doesn’t say a word. He just shakes his head. His eyes search her face – looking for direction she thinks. So, Zelda sits up and pulls her shirt off entirely. He doesn’t move. Just… looks at her like he’d be fine just sitting there and getting to look. So, she slides her fingers into his hair with two hands and closes them tight. Tugs, gently, until he draws a shaky breath and she rolls sideways, pulling him down on top of her.

He’s still fully clothed.

He’s got one knee between her legs and his mouth pressed along her jaw. She draws one knee up, setting her heel into his lower back, making sure he feels her do it. She is fairly certain where things are supposed to go next. Link’s breathing fast and unsteady. He turns into her touch, time and again. She pushes his tunic up so she can hook her fingers into the waistband of his pants but when she does it, his breathing hitches too hard.

She stops and lies back, smoothing her hands against his hips beneath the tunic.

He looks at her. His hair’s in his eyes.

“We don’t have to,” she whispers.

Link keeps watching her.

“We have all the time in the world now, you know.”

When she says that, Link leans down and kisses along her jaw to her ear. His voice comes, finally, a little rough, a little hot against her skin when he says, “I feel crazy when I look at you.” And when she shivers, he buries his face against her neck and says, “I don’t know what to do.” She can hear his smile. “You make me nervous.”

She laughs. “You don’t seem like you’re nervous. You seem like you know exactly what you’re doing.”

“I’m shaking,” he whispers.

His eyes are closed against her neck. She can feel his heart racing where his chest is flush to hers. He’s not wrong, now that she’s paying attention. There’s a tremble in Link’s shoulders, in his hands. Like pre-battle nerves. She hadn’t noticed when he was moving and… being distracting but now – laying on top of her, his weight braced against his hands and knees – she can see the shiver in the lines of his body. So profound it’s almost in his breathing, on his tongue.

She slides one hand into his hair, holding the back of his head. “Why are you nervous?” she murmurs. “It’s just us.”

He mumbles something against her collarbone.

“What?”

“That’s why I’m nervous.”

She laughs. “Well, what do you like to do? If it wasn’t me?”

She can feel him blushing without even seeing it. He raises a hand to cover his eyes. “Not helping…”

“You’re embarrassed?”

He nods.

“You know you don’t have to be, right?”

He peeks at her through his fingers.

“I would be… curious to know what you like. I, ah, am not very, you know… experienced, but I’d like to…” She clears her throat. “Be warned, I might not know enough Sign for this kind of conversation.”

Link laughs and that’s the same moment that Draga – back from his scouting mission and having heard conversational voices from the cottage – steps through the open doorway with a pack over his shoulder. Zelda is too surprised to react. She just sits there totally naked with her former knight escort lying on top of her. Draga blinks at them, a little surprised. Not the appropriate amount of surprised. Just a little surprised. Like you’re surprised to find a stack of laundry not the way you left it. Then, he shoulders his pack, rolls his eyes, and walks right back out the door.

“Sorry,” he calls, waving over his shoulder.

Link, dumbfounded, looks to her.

“Wait. Draga!” Zelda flails, grabbing her tunic. She yanks it over her head and dashes out the door, tugging her hair out of the collar. It’s inside out. Wonderful. It’s long enough it covers… most of her thighs. Whatever. It will have to do. She scrambles down the overgrown garden path, chasing Draga toward the lake. “ Wait . Hold on.”

Draga’s halfway to the beach, down the path from what was once a fence now rotted to a series of posts stuck up from a choke of wildflowers. He, unlike Link, looks a little out of place in the untamed greenery. He turns to watch her race barefoot out of the cottage to stand in the grass in front of him, panting a little, her hair going every which direction. He waits. Which is unfortunate because she ran out the door in such a hurry, she hadn’t fully formulated what she was going to say to him and now she’s not wearing any underwear and standing in wet grass and it’s terribly undignified. Draga, sensing she might be at a loss, glances very particularly down at her toes sunk in the moss and then levels a look at her, eyebrows arched.

“Yes?” he says.

“Um,” she says, the picture of trained diplomacy and royal upbringing. “Sorry.”

He gives her an owlish look of genuine confusion. “For what?”

“For… that.”

He blinks at her. Birds chirp in the canopy.

“Well,” he says slowly, still looking a little puzzled, “you might warn me next time so I don’t walk in, but otherwise you have nothing to apologize for.” He tilts his head. “Unless you think you do?”

“Oh, um…” She should honestly be better at this. Except that’s not true because you don’t practice for a division of need in twin directions and how to articulate that. She blows air between her lips. “I don’t know. We never talked about this kind of thing so, given that I didn’t set any ground rules – which is entirely my fault – I’m asking if I have something to apologize for. I… I suppose. Yes. I’m asking.”

Draga sets on hand on his hip and gives her a lopsided look to match his smirk. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. Don’t make fun. I’m new at this.”

She feels Link walking down the path behind her, moving to stand near the gate to the garden, listening. Draga glances at him, then at her.

“I thought I made it clear I don’t have any expectations.” He slings his pack to the ground, leaving it there to face them properly, arms folded over his chest. “You don’t have to tell me everything. I’m not unclear on this; you two have been partners a long time. You deserve to have this – whatever it is – without complications.” He shrugs. “If you would like to complicate things, that’s your choice. I do not care either way.” He pauses when, in review, that sounds a little harsh in Hylian and swaps to Gerudo. “I mean that I value our relationship, I just mean you’re not obligated to include me in everything. You’re not committed to me. I don’t harbor resentments on that front.”

Zelda processes this.

“Well, just so you know, I think we feel fairly committed to you.” She glances at Link to confirm and gets a nod. “Yes. So, we are comfortable complicating things.”

Draga frowns. “Do not rush into this.”

“I’m one hundred years late to everything,” Zelda says blandly. “I physically cannot possibly rush anything I do.”

Draga looks a little appalled. “You know what I mean.”

“I do. I’m pointing out that I don’t feel that I’m rushing into anything.” And when he looks skeptical, she says, “Okay, admittedly if we’re talking strictly physical things—” Draga’s brows arch a bit— “then I will need to go slow because I do not know what I’m doing, but in all other matters I feel very confident.” She tries to not be aware of the fact she’s wearing an inside out tunic and has terrific bedhead. “I meant what I said back in Tabantha, you know. I still do.”

Draga shakes his head. “I know you do. I’m just saying that you’re under no obligation.”

“Have I ever told you… what it was like fighting Ganon for one-hundred years?”

The neutral green of his eyes disappears. “No,” he says. His eyes are very wide. He looks over her shoulder to Link then back at her. “You’ve never told me that. Why does that apply to what we’re talking about right now? Not that I do not want to hear about it, but…”

“Yes, it relates. I promise.”

She’s suddenly happy for her bare feet in the grass, the feeling of the morning air on her skin in new and intimate places. She feels Link move to stand at her side and after a moment he takes her hand in his, threading his fingers through hers. It’s unreal how such a simple thing makes her heart swell. She smiles at him. His eyes seem bluer than the sky in that moment.

“I haven’t really told him either,” she explains, looking back to Draga.

“You don’t have to tell either of us,” Draga says quietly.

“I think I need to tell you.”

He and Link exchange a look. “Then tell us. We’re listening.”

She begins.

“It wasn’t linear exactly. It’s not like I was aware for one-hundred years straight in that castle, in that… room. That’s not how it worked. There was magic. So much of it I was barely myself sometimes.” Zelda tightens her grip on Link’s hand. “I slept when I made Ganon sleep. I woke whenever he woke. I was not aware of the time between unless I…” She shivers. “There’s part of me that was aware of time you see, but I just keep that part separate. I couldn’t stand it if I remembered. What I remember is it was like waking from a nightmare over and over except it was the nightmare you were waking up to.”

Draga’s looking at her in a way she’s not sure she knows. Link’s hand in hers is tight.

“I fought for so long. So many times, I woke and I… it was like smothering someone.” She’s breathing too fast. “The binding magic I mean, it was like holding someone’s head underwater over and over. I would wake up and kill him again and it was so…” Violent. Intimate. Necessary. ( But , says part of her, didn’t it feel good to put the bastard down ?) She swallows. “I don’t know if I could do that again.”

There’s a quiet.

In the silence Draga says, “Him?”

She blinks.

His eyes seem iridescent. She’s not sure how. The color of someone’s eyes is not usually so notable. He inclines his head. “You said ‘him’. The Calamity… was a person? I don’t understand.”

Link’s looking at her too.

She wipes her eyes.

“Once. Maybe. Eons ago. Human and something else. You can’t seal a human soul for ten thousand years. A conscious being. It rots like a carcass. Goes insane. Becomes . That’s what happened to him and what I started to think it would happen to me.” She tries to smile, but her mouth won’t do as she asks. “I fought him so many times I’ve lost count. I woke, I fought. I woke, I fought. Over and over. I never remembered the sleep so it was like… like a hundred battles in an unbroken string. Like fighting a war but never sleeping. As a whole… it wasn’t that long really. But it was relentless. After a while, I stopped feeling anything.”

Draga is closer now, close enough to touch. “That’s a very human reaction to an impossible thing, Zelda.”

“I’m not always human though.”

His expression crinkles. “Don’t say that.”

“Sorry. I just… I didn’t feel human when I was fighting Calamity. I didn’t feel human again until Link woke up.” She laughs, but it’s a cracked sound. “You two make me feel human again and you should know that because I just don’t feel about things like I used to. I just don’t give a shit about too fast. Or proper or right. There is no ‘too fast’ for me and it scares me because I know other people don’t think like that. And you’re not obligated to think like that, but you should know it’s how I feel. I just love being awake, finally. Does that make sense?” She scrubs her face with her hand. “Am I making any sense? I can’t –”

Link catches her chin in his fingers. When she turns, he kisses her. Her tears wet his tongue, but he just keeps kissing her until her shaking recedes and her breathing slows, until she’s grounded. He pulls back then and Draga touches her cheek so she looks at him. He’s bent a little at the waist so he’s closer to eye-level with her, his face close enough that she feels the pull to kiss him too, but she holds still.

“You make sense,” he says. He lowers his hand. “Thank you for telling us.”

“I didn’t mean to start crying. Goodness. I’m always crying.”

“Zelda, of all people, you owe no apologies to anyone.” Draga holds her gaze. “You defy explanation. The fact you still think you owe anyone any explanations…” He shrugs. “The both of you are better people than me in that way.”

“You’re a good person,” she says, a little defensive on his behalf.

He gives her a lopsided smile. “I’m better when I’m around you two and I’m not fishing for reassurances. You deserve to be happy.”

Link looks at Draga.

“So do you,” he says, out loud, quietly.

Draga reaches for his travel pack. “I’ll try to remember that,” he says, grabbing the strap. “Are we going to hike out of here or –?”

Zelda catches the front of his tunic so she can kiss him. He holds still for her while she does it. When she pulls back, he gives her a carefully calm sort of look. Business-like. He picks up the pack like she hadn’t done anything.

“Okay. Are we getting a late start then?”

Link grabs him by the collar and pulls him down, mouth to mouth, grinning. Zelda yanks the pack from his hands and Draga laughs – muffled – when she grabs him at the waist and starts pulling him back up the path toward the cottage, but pulling with comic over-enthusiasm so he threatens to over balance. He fights to keep his feet, saying loudly, “We really need to get on the road,” and “I appreciate this, but if we leave any later we’re not going to reach the shrine until sun down,” and finally, “We really, really don’t have time for this.”

Which is when Link hooks a leg behind Draga’s heel and torques hard to the right, yanking the taller man over with a “ Goddammit , Link!” and all three of them end up sprawled in a patch of wild flowers. Zelda, who was not expecting that, spits her hair and a bit of heather out of her mouth and glares at her knight escort who doesn’t look even a little sorry. Draga’s laughing, lying on his back with one hand over his face. Link uses the opportunity to climb on top of Draga, swinging one leg over his hips to take a seat on top of him. Zelda uses the opportunity to grab his wrists and pin them in the moss over his head.

He rolls his eyes.

“You’ve got me,” Draga says sarcastically. “We’re on a timetable.”

“No, we’re not,” she says, bending down to press her nose against his, scrunching up her face.

He scowls for dramatic effect. She just kisses him a bunch, all over his face, until he makes a sound of disgust.

“We have –” she keeps kissing him – “all the time –” she does it some more – “in the world.” She threads her fingers into his, leaning her weight against his palms and bending down over him so her hair falls over her shoulders, framing his face. She leans down to kiss his mouth, feels him go a little slack under her. “But I’m always in a rush.”

She hears the sound, unmistakably, of Link pulling Draga’s belt open and the Gerudo draws a breath through his teeth.

“Are you serious?” he demands, annoyed.

Link shrugs. “I can make it quick,” he says in a tone that sends a zip of heat down Zelda’s spine.

Draga looks unimpressed. “That’s what you think.”

Zelda leans down to speak in Draga’s ear, “Do you want us to stop? For real?”

He thinks about it. Then, “No, but I’m serious about not wanting to hike in the dark.”

Link and Zelda exchange a look. Link shrugs.

“Fine,” Zelda says brightly. “Like I said: All the time in the world.”

“Great.”

There’s a beat.

“Are you going to let me up?”

Zelda leans back, tilting her head like she’s admiring the view. “In a moment.”

He glares. “You’re making us late.”

“Mmhmm.”

Draga mutters, “Fucking Hylians…”

Climbing a mountain is not the hardest thing Zelda’s ever done, but it certainly won’t be easy. The pale stone cliffs of the Gerudo Highlands stand as monstrous vertical walls jutting upwardly over the steep incline of the foothills and disappearing into the clouds. There is a narrow path, barely more than a mountain goat’s migration route, that is known to both Link and Draga. Leading from Lake Alumeni, along the cliffs at base of the highlands, to an ancient lava flow known now as Hamaar’s Descent. This is how they will reach the Statue of the Eighth Heroine.

“Properly this time,” Draga says, side-eyeing Link, as they prepare to go.

Link, who at this point is no longer sorry for paragliding into an ancient temple, shrugs.

“See,” Draga says, tugging his rucksack shut, “he’s not actually sorry he did it.”

Link signs, ‘I have climbed into hundreds of ancient shrines and temples. It was literally my job.’

Draga does not even bother trying to read his sign. “Whatever he just said, I’ll bet it wasn’t an apology.”

Link makes a face and they set off for the mountain.

They leave Epona and Arbiter to fend for themselves at Lake Alumeni, penning them under four large apple trees and shaking down said apple trees for fruit. Arbiter, it’s known, will do as he pleases but seems content to wait for Draga in whatever situation the Gerudo man leaves him. Link admits that the same horse would, in his own travels, often run off in the middle of the night then return days later.

“Arbiter comes from a wild lineage,” Draga says, navigating a windy switchback. “I told you before that my people came from the Deep Desert. Before there were sand seals, they bred giant horses specifically for traveling through the wastes. They were the best for the task, but wild in temperament. They would reject all riders except the largest and strongest in a tribe. So, take it as a compliment he let you ride him at all.”

“How do you… know all this?” Zelda pants a little, following close behind the larger man.

“I read about them when I was younger,” he says, turning to give her a hand up into a narrow chute of stone, pushing her gently up the steep incline. “It’s odd what survives in recorded history. I can read five volumes of ancient animal husbandry, but we’re still not entirely clear what the hierarchy of chieftains has been in the transition from the Deep Desert to Hyrule. There are gaps in the line of succession. There is much, in my opinion, that has been purposely omitted, particularly around the arrival of the Gerudo in this country and it frustrates me.”

Zelda laughs, pulling herself up over a bit of a ledge. “Draga, if you hadn’t told us your intention to be swordhand to your people, I would assume you wanted to be a historian.”

“Swordhand isn’t the right word,” he says, grunting as he pulls Link up onto the ledge with them. “It doesn’t quite translate in Hylian, my declaration.”

“What’s an approximation?”

Link and Draga dust themselves off while he thinks about it.

“I’m not sure. It’s like a knight and a witch I suppose. Urbosa was, technically, of this profession if she hadn’t been chieftain.”

She frowns. “What’s the word?”

“ Ko’tame .”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s a very specific role,” Draga says, moving past her. “Not common either. Urbosa’s duty as Chief supersedes being ko’tame.” He surveys the wide ledge snaking along the foot of the cliff. “Hmm, there are coyotes up the way. Keep a look out. I expect they’ll run when they see us, but it’s hard to say.”

Link slings his bow from the strap on his back, stringing it deftly.

Zelda tilts her head. “Do the Gerudo keep much record of magic-use in their culture?”

Draga shrugs. “Some do. The tribes from the Highlands keep close record because ko’tame are more common among us. Like a fishing village keeps record of good and poor fishing seasons and practices, but would not keep close, say, methods of blacksmithing. Most Gerudo culture does without serious magic. The most common magicians are stone workers – those who can draw out the nature of certain gems. Link has a few such pieces. The craft is very specific to old Gerudo magic.”

“I didn’t know that,” Link says.

“Why would you?” he says, a little bluntly. “The Gerudo hardly recollect it: that stone speaks to the People. History is not a priority to them.” He shakes his head. “When the Yiga started to kill my clan in Karusa Valley, capitalizing on an opportunity as we weakened, they told us to abandon the Naboorian ruins. Our temples and archives. They said the ancient fortress was not worth fighting for even though those are the very walls from which we took all our recorded history.”

“You grew up there?”

“For a time. But we had to leave it to Kohga and his mad clan because the rest of the tribes didn’t care.”

Link shivers.

Draga glances at him. “What?”

“Link killed Kohga,” Zelda says. “Did you know that?”

Draga frowns. “I heard he was dead. I didn’t know it was Link who did it.” He studies the smaller man, picking his way along the trail behind them. “Who in Hyrule haven’t you killed?”

Link looks stricken.

Realizing that he misjudged the severity of that phrase in Hylian, he amends, “I apologize. That came out wrong. Kohga was a monster. I don’t care who killed the fanatic.”

“He killed himself anyway,” Link says under his breath.

“Then he got off easy,” Draga says. “If he were still alive and his clan occupying that fortress, I would have gone there myself.”

“To drive them off?” Zelda says.

“No. To wipe them out. Every single one of them.” And when that earns him a pair of surprised looks, he frowns. “You don’t have context here. They killed members of my tribe when they besieged the fortress and they put their filthy fucking banners in all our shrines. There is a temple to the Eight Heroines there where I studied as a child and they filled with their symbols for abomination. I have no pity for them. They’re just like the beasts the Calamity set upon the land.”

“They are people ,” Zelda points. “I don’t disagree that they forfeit their lives when they sided with the Calamity. But they aren’t beasts.”

“They are to me,” Draga says calmly. “They are worse than beasts. They chose a demon and abandoned their humanity. They tried to kill you. To kill Link. To kill my people and end this world. Someone like that?” He shakes his head. “I kill them. That’s it.”

Zelda studies the back of his head. “You would have really killed them all?”

“I didn’t learn how to fight to then hesitate in defending what I care about.” He glances over his shoulder at her. “If they appeared, right now, and tried to kill Link before your eyes, don’t tell me you wouldn’t incinerate them.”

“I probably would,” she admits evenly, “I’m just saying, they’re still people even if I’m deciding to kill them.”

“Being a monster and being a person are not mutually exclusive things,” Draga says under his breath.

“Very true,” she says. “Which is why I would not lose too much sleep over it.”

He looks at her again. “Surprisingly cold-blooded.”

“I say that, but I would probably cry,” she says. “I cry very easily. Not while things are happenings of course, but later when I think it over. So temporarily cold-blooded. Maybe. I’ve never needed to kill anyone with magic or otherwise and I would like to think that I never will have to do that, so for now I’ll simply say that I have no idea how I’d really behave in that situation.”

“I laughed when Kohga killed himself,” Link says.

She and Draga both stare. Link shrugs, readjusting his shoulder strap.

He says under his breath, “It was funny at the time…”

They take a break.

For twenty minutes, they lay on a warm flat of stone and stare at the sky. Link lies between them as Zelda argues with Draga about the historical non-value of the Hylian record archives as they stand while Draga vehemently argues the opposite. He’s chops his hands through the air, angrily framing his points while she flails her arms pointing out the holes in his neatly boxed up ideas. Link, bored, watches them wordlessly until they’re basically shouting at each other. They sit up to do it properly.

“In a land like Hyrule,” Draga snaps, “I just don’t understand how you can be this careless with history.”

Zelda tosses her hands. “I’m not being careless. I’m saying I read most of those records and they were twaddle. We lost everything important already.”

“So just give up? That’s better.”

Zelda tosses up her hands. “This kind of thing really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” he says, looking sharply at her. “You of all people know about repeating history.”

“Yes,” she says a little quietly. “I do know about that. I just didn’t realize it upset you this much.”

For a time, he doesn’t answer. Then:

“The Gerudo come from an ancient line of thieves and bandits.” He shakes his head. “You need to understand: We weren’t always a refugee race and we certainly are not one now. But we don’t even remember what brought us here, what disaster broke us or why we even came back to Hyrule in the first place. It’s not clear – in some texts, we came back because we sought the ‘heart of the world’. In others… we were just starving. But no matter why we came, the fact is my people have lost all account of it and I think there’s something there. Something important.”

“What makes you think that?” Zelda says.

“I don’t know. A feeling I’ve always had. I trust my instincts.”

Zelda smiles. “As I said, you sound like a historian.”

Draga snorts. “Maybe in another life.”

“Still think you’re wrong.”

“You are infuriating –!”

Link signs , interrupting, ‘You’re both pretty attractive when you’re yelling.’

Zelda, who caught most of his comment, sputters.

“What?” Draga says. “What did he say?”

“I’m not translating,” Zelda huffs.

“You’re hot,” Link says, ditching Sign.

Zelda immediately blushes red. Not because of what he said exactly but rather the fact it is the first time Link’s said anything like that out loud. He yawns, stretching like sun-warm cat, and lies back again. Draga glares. Zelda gets the impression that, were they not on the road to a site of extreme cultural and historical import for his people, Draga would be a little more receptive to the multiple advances.

As it stands he stops looking disdainful and with the same lazy disinterest, he rolls over, swinging one leg over Link’s so his knee is between the other man’s thighs, not touching him but Draga levers himself up on one arm so he’s looking down at Link from a sudden and somewhat suggestive position on top of him. It’s suddenly very apparent how much bigger Draga is. Link stares. Draga’s expression is still bored. He leans down, puts his mouth by Link’s ear, still not touching him but close enough Zelda can see his breath disturb Link’s hair when he speaks.

In Gerudo he says, “ Every time you talk, I imagine what you’ll sound like screaming.”

In Gerudo, ‘screaming’ can conjugate to very specific meanings. He means a very particular kind of scream. And Zelda, who knows that, covers her mouth to stifle a noise somewhere between a gasp and a laugh.

Draga rolls over and lies back again. “Anyway, Zelda, you’re wrong.”

“I am not!”

Link, red in the face, doesn’t seem like he’s going to interrupt them again.

They reach the foot of Hamaar’s Descent by sunset. From here, looking up, Zelda cannot see the statue. Just a long climb to an unseen trailhead. The ancient lava flow is a ripple of stone descending like steps to the ridge where they stand, walled on either side by high vertical cliffs, like the flow cut a fissure into the mountains. The air is colder here. Nearer to the snowy climes at the top of the mountain. There is a peripheral hum – a pressure along the sides of her eyes. Her hands feel scratchy when she looks up. Her heart’s racing.

“There’s old magic here,” Draga warns her. “That’s what you’re feeling.”

She nods.

They make the climb in silence.

Draga doesn’t look back at them while he leads their climb. They follow him until the sun is gone and Draga has to strike a spark into a torch from Link’s pack, the flame throwing shadows against the canyon walls. Eventually, the ground levels out and Zelda finds herself at the literal foot of a massive stone figure, ten stories tall and ancient – a carved Gerudo woman in robes, her hands extended before her and resting on the missing pommel of some great sword.

Draga stops at the top of the incline, torch in hand, and Zelda feels him tense.

“What is it?”

Eventually, Draga says, “My sisters were the last ones to come here.”

Zelda and Link stay where they are while Draga moves toward the foot of the statue. There are massive oval disks carved on the top of the statue’s feet, smooth and blank when he approaches. Zelda smells the familiar metal scent of magic and Draga runs a hand over the first tablet, like he’s wiping sand from the surface, and when his fingers pass over the stone, lines begin to push up like veins in an arm, snaking words into the rock and in that way, line by line, he starts to read. He is quiet long enough that Zelda supposes he’s immediately lost himself in translating what’s there.

“Draga, can you read it?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Draga, can you read it?” she repeats.

He still doesn’t answer.

“ Draga .”

“My name is here,” he says softly.

Zelda stares. “What?”

“My name is written here.” He sounds baffled.

“I don’t understand. Your family put your name here…?”

“No. My tribe died before I took this name. This record is over ten-thousand years old. My chosen name was written here.”

Zelda feels a prickle down her spine. “I don’t understand.” Zelda’s heart is racing. She can’t say why, where this panic is coming from, real as the fear before a fight. “What does it say?”

Draga doesn’t respond.

Her nails are biting her palms. Link’s restless suddenly at her side. He keeps looking around, like he hears something, but she can’t care about that because her entire being is knotted up, the fine musculature in her heart and in her fingers clenching. She doesn’t know why though. She can’t figure out why. Like the panic in a premonition, this feels like deja vu, her soul recollecting some terrible pain and anticipating it again.

“I don’t understand this,” Draga is saying. “This isn’t a full historical account. It’s a single record of the Chief who led Nabooru and the First People out of the desert. These are Nabooru’s own words.” And then, after a while, he whispers, “This can’t be right…”

And Link draws the Master Sword.

When he does – the blade burns silver in his hand.

Holy light lies now across the clearing, across Draga’s back. In the sudden illumination, Zelda can see what it is that Link was reacting to. There is a shadow. There. On the wall opposite Draga. But this shadow, unlike every other shadow cast against the stone, does not move when the light flickers. It’s opaque. Fixed. The shade – vaguely human in shape, grotesquely bulked, and impossibly tall – is so dark eats the light and smokes like a fire pit around the edges. Like the darkness is toxic and burning. Then, as Zelda looks on, fixed there by her horror, something writhes in the shadow and two red slits roll open. Two eyes roll open, inflamed and burning, draconic and unblinking, and fix on Draga.

Then…

The shadow steps forward.

Out of the wall, through the door (because, after all, it was always open) and it grabs Draga’s arm.

The effect is immediate. The entire mountain heaves. A tectonic uproar screams through the core of the earth the air sours , rots, turns chemical on Zelda’s tongue and the canyon goes black around them. All the light in the entire world goes out except the blazing star-shine burning in Link’s sword. It’s the only source of light to show them the scene: Black flames, oily and toxic, are burning from the demon’s flesh. It’s a pillar of smoke and ember. The hand is so huge it circles Draga’s entire forearm and when he – too shocked, too paralyzed by the impossible totality of every nightmare coming true – fails to move, it uses its other hand to touch his face. This opens same wound along his cheek that it put there in the Rito Village and his blood runs down his jaw and drips in the sand. The air stinks like copper and corpses.

It says, “You know your nature now.”

And vanishes.

Draga wrenches back from the stone alter and falls, a ragged cry caught in his throat. His shadow is thin and empty again. The crushing darkness is gone and in the aftermath, Draga just lies there, panting, shaking so hard she can see it where she’s standing. Link’s faster than her, so he beats her to Draga’s side, grabbing his shoulder to steady him. The sword in his other hand has begun to dim, the light receding as the evil withdraws but Draga just keeps shaking, breathing too hard, too fast. Even when Zelda kneels beside him, a halo of golden light in her skin, and touches him – he just keeps shaking, body racked with adrenaline.

“Draga. You’re okay. It’s gone. We’re with you.”

He whispers, “Calamity started with us.”

Zelda shakes her head. “No, listen to me: demons lie. Right? You told me that. You can’t –”

“It started with us.” Draga’s face is blank. “The Demon King was born Gerudo. The People were dying in the desert as he tried to lead them from the wastes. The demons came to him. The abomination began in him. The lord of monsters came to him in the desert and offered him the heart of the world.” Draga’s voice is steady, like he’s reciting and Zelda realizes he’s reading back the text on the tablet. His expression is blank, but in the dim light Zelda can see his cheeks are wet. If he knows he’s crying, he gives no sign. “He took it.” His voice buckles then. “He traded us for the Tri-Force. Every generation down the line.”

He makes a sound, almost a sob, but like the kind you make when someone wrenches a dagger from a wound, like he’s bleeding out. Like he’s wounded.

“Gods… I picked this name.”

“Draga. Please, this is a trick.” She gathers his face in her hands, shaking her head. “It’s just trying to trick you.”

“No, it’s what’s written. This was his name.”

“What are you talking about?” Link says, afraid.

“The man that became Calamity. His name was Drag’mire. That’s… my name, just older.” He turns his head away, pulling from her hands, and there’s blood and salt on her fingers. “You don’t understand. You don’t see how it works. I see it. I can see it now – the structure of the curse, it’s so fucking obvious now.” He’s breathing so fast, so ragged. “Zelda, I can’t…”

“Calm down,” Zelda whispers, horrified by his helplessness, afraid to her core. “Please, just tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’m next,” he says.

“What?”

“I’m the next Calamity,” he says.

He looks at her when she says nothing.

“That’s why we were drawn together. You’re supposed to kill me.”

And Zelda, too startled to stop herself, says, “He gave up on reincarnation… he… he gave up… I didn’t… This… can’t be what he meant.”

Link drops his sword. He shakes his head and stands up, backing away.

“No,” he says, totally calm. “That’s not it.”

Draga breathes out, shakily, and looks at him. “You know it is.”

“No,” Link says. His face is bedrock. “You’re wrong.”

“You can feel it.”

“Fuck this,” Link says, startling them. He starts to sign, “Fuck this. Fuck that thing. Fuck this endless bullshit.” He steps forward, puts his boot on the hilt of the sacred sword and kicks it away, spinning into the sand where it lies shining and perfect in the moonlight. He moves forward, kneeling close so he can fit his hands along Draga’s jaw and look him in the eyes. He fights to keep his voice, “It’s not happening. We’re done. Zelda and I, we’re done with all of that. It’s over. No incarnation has ever had to do it twice.”

“It killed my whole family,” Draga says, “just so I’d be alone when it came.”

Link pulls Draga forward, kisses him, a little frantically, a little too deeply. He swallows, afraid, and pulls back. He says, “You’re not alone. You’re with us.” Like that’s enough to protect them. “Do you believe me?”

He obviously does not.

But Draga says, “I believe you.”

And it’s that lie that sustains them until the sunrise.

go to chapter 11...

#botw #legend of zelda breath of the wild #legend of zelda #zelda #ganondorf #link #interim #interim update #lozfic #in which the cycles begins again #and it sucks #rae writes #raewrites

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punishandenslavesuckers · 7 years

Photo

There’s only one bed in the house at Hateno and the first night there, he tries to give it to her.

It’s very normal of him. Like she’s a visitor. Like she’s just stopping by. Link shows her where she can hang her cloak (his cloak) and stow her shoes (by the door) and where the extra blankets are (in the closet). Zelda isn’t sure how to explain without embarrassing him that she already knows the layout – has ghosted these simple hallways, kept vigil on the blood moons. She knows this modest kitchen, knows the creak in the third step up. She knows the stains in whorls of the table top, which ones are wine and which are blood.

Link smells like clean cotton and grass, which seems strange.

She thought he’d smell of black powder, resins, metal – the hard scent of battle and the road. Strange that it doesn’t stick to him, or maybe he took a special effort to scrub it off before coming back into the house. His hair’s damp. He left his boots by the door. The window’s open and distant thunder almost hides the sound of his breathing. When she listens close, his breath sounds loud in her ears, a disharmonizing with the thump of his heart. If he was uncomfortable with her request to sleep next to him, it never reached his face.

Not that much does. Even at the end of things, a century past, she had trouble reading him when he didn’t try to be read.

Link sleeps for a full two days. On the third, he wakes in a panic. She must pry his fingers from the grip of a broadsword and, for ten minutes straight, convince him that the battle is over. He sleeps for another two days. She gardens, straightens up the house, sweeps, sits in the grass outside and rolls around in the wild flowers. Does laundry. Rolls in the grass again. Does more laundry. She borrows a pair of trousers and a shirt that (to her chagrin) are a little too small for her.

The man at the general store is curious about her.

“So, you came in with Link last week. That so?”

Zelda looks up from the grains in the basket, finger worrying the braid in a single head of wheat. “Oh, yes. I’m from… out of town.”

“Well that’s nice,” he says, thoughtfully stroking the brush of his moustache. “Good to see new faces. When he bought the Bolson house across the bridge, we were wondering if he intended to bring family out here.”

Zelda hesitates, not sure if that means she is family or just that the town, generally, assumed that was why Link might buy a house.

“Nice guy,” continues to shopkeep. “The shepherds on the hill pay him to keep Bobokin off the beaches and grazing lands. You also a swordhand or…?”

She’s flattered he might estimate her a co-worker of Link’s, but also not sure she should start lying without his consult. She says she’s a friend. Link is helping her with a survey she’s conducting. (That is true. They talked about that.) The shopkeeper nods.

“Ah, yeah, that makes sense. Would you do me a favor? Nothing big, I have something for Link.”

“Of course.”

The man ducks behind the counter and stands up with a basket heavy with vegetables and grain. He looks at the basket, then back at her. “Sorry. This might be a bit big for you…”

Zelda loops two arms around the basket, the weave-work creaking as she hefts it up onto her hip. “No. It’s fine. Thank you.”

“You sure?” The shopkeeper appraises her biceps for the task. “Meant to send it along the week before last, but he didn’t come by.”

Zelda pauses. “He was… busy.”

Blood on the atrium floor, ozone and fire, the blue light banked silver in the blade. There’s a window in her head that she can look through and he’s still there in that tomb: armored in ancient metal, breathing magic like heat from a kiln, lightning behind his teeth. He’s also where she left him this morning: snoring gently with terrific bedhead and a quilt tangled in his legs.

This is where she finds him when she returns to the house. She leaves the basket on the table in the living area and pads back up the steps to the loft. She avoids the creak in the third stair. A warm square of sunshine is making its way lazily across the comforter onto Link’s lower back; it sets a glow to his cotton shirt, puts sections of gold in his hair. For a moment looking down at him, Zelda is overwhelmed by a paralyzing weight behind her breast bone, sudden and vicious, taking hold of her so tight the muscles in her throat clench and burn. Then the moment passes and she clears her throat.

“Link,” she whispers, hovering near the bed.

Nothing.

“Link,” she says at regular tones.

Snores.

“Link,” she says rather loudly.

He wrinkles his nose and rolls over, taking the edge of the blankets with him and thus cocooning himself in quilts. It’s… probably the most childish thing she’s ever seen him do in their travels together and she stands there, nonplussed, for a moment.

“Well then,” she says, “I will… just make a proper breakfast without your input.”

It’s ten minutes later as she’s well into burning a trio of speckled eggs that Link – very much awake now – jumps the loft bannister to rush her and snag the smoking skillet from her hands. He gives her a look.

“I tried to wake you up,” she says.

He takes the billowing pan to the door and hucks the contents into the yard.

“I was going to fix it.”

He turns and shows her the charred bottom of the pan and gestures to it with his other hand.

“Okay. Perhaps not.”

Zelda stews over a small mug of tea (provided for her when Link became alarmed by her use of the kettle somehow) and acknowledges that food, of course, was the thing to break Hyrule’s light out of his post-battle catatonia. Obviously. Link scraps the burnt food off the cast iron and sets about making a real breakfast. The small house immediately smells of… burnt egg and aroma of grilling ham, eggs, onion, and mushrooms. The hot scent of spices from a handful of glass bottles. He drops a perfect omelet on a plate in front of her a few minutes later and, yes, there it is, gives her another look.

“I thought I had it,” she says.

He takes a seat, shaking his head.

“Oh. Hush,” she says, picking a mushroom from her plate and flicking it at him.

He eats the mushroom off the back of his knuckles where it landed and Zelda rejoices (silently) the tiny boring familiarity of it. Link dedicates the rest of his attention to eating breakfast.

“I sealed Ganon you know.”

Link looks her straight in the eyes, then rolls them.

“Hush!”

She cleans the dishes. Link goes outside to wash up. When he’s done, she listens to the faint sound of her housemate changing clothes upstairs, glances up to catch him pulling his hair into a fresh knot at the back of his neck, studying the small ritual of muscle memory as he combs his fingers from his forehead and temples and pulls back a few times, gathering it where he can tie it. Link is, according to the housewives of Hantero, ‘So pretty you don’t even want to take him home. That kind of pretty.’ Zelda isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean or why it sounded a little like an insult. He finishes with his hair, then notices her watching and tilts his head at her.

She waves his concern away. “It’s nothing.”

He leans against the banister, looking down at her, one brow arched.

“Honestly. It’s nothing. I’m glad you’re up, is all.”

His expression crinkles a little, apologetic.

“You know,” she says, giving her attention to the dishes, “for one hundred years I didn’t have to eat anything. Or sleep. Its… so strange sitting down to a meal now.” She says this directly to the dish she’s drying. “I didn’t realize I missed it. Can you miss things retroactively? I didn’t think you could, but now it’s as though… I remember all those times I didn’t have breakfast and it makes me sad. How silly!” She stacks the plates. “Ignore me. I’m just… I don’t know…it’s not as though time was linear for me when I was… I don’t know why I’m even talking about it.”

She senses Link’s coming down the stairs to stand near her elbow, like a shadow with weight. She looks over her shoulder.

“There should be a word for that look,” she says.

Link takes the plates from the counter puts them away in a cabinet.

She has no throne.

It goes without saying, but Zelda’s still not sure how to say it. Link saddles a horse for her at the Dueling Peaks Stable – a pure white mare so like her old horse that she momentarily believes her to be that every mount. But it’s a trick of the tableau. Somehow, against all odds, Link has recovered the purple and gold riding accoutrements of her house and a wild horse from Castle Town bloodlines. He outfits the horse for her, murmuring softly to it, and she doesn’t know how to tell him to re-tackle her mount in lesser gear. To take off the colors of Royalty. His gesture is too great. The gift too impossible to refuse.

He smiles, patting the mare’s velvety nose while she gingerly feeds it a sugar cube.

Link’s own steed, a mare as well, is a stocky animal with dark coloring and mottled hide. It snorts and stomps impatiently in her stall. There are chunks missing in the spotted coat of her hind quarters. A Bokokin branding. Link explains, later, that he prefers her for travel because she won’t spook at the scent of Bokokin and is already trained for bridle-less combat. Zelda knows, only because Link told her a century ago, when they were first mounting up for travel, that he only rides horses he can break to take guidance from his knees, not the bridal.

At the time, this had only annoyed her and so… “They don’t teach that in the Guard.”

Link hesitated.

Looking back, she can see now that was a symptom of mutism, not uncertainty, but his silence irked her back then, so she’d raised her voice a little. “Why don’t you ride a stallion? You’re a knight now. They’re bigger. Better for mounted combat. Do you mean to protect me or not?” And at another hesitation, she added, “Never mind. I don’t require an escort for this outing. You should report back to the Guard.”

And then she left him in the stable.

Zelda lies awake thinking of this conversation, one hundred years in the past and still clear as the day it happened. Link dozes by the embers of their fire and the soft nickering of his mare, Epona, keeps off the quiet. She shakes her head. Tries to throw off the memory, the condescension, the slights. Petty moments she knows Link has forgotten but she cannot, even in after the war’s been won. Later, she re-saddles her horse with a sizable saddle blanket and bags. This mostly hides the house colors. If Link notices, he doesn’t comment.

The first trouble arises in Hebra.

They’re settling in for the night at the stable in Tabintha where the locals report six killings this season – the dismembered parts of travelers found by search parties. Consumed by wildlife but killed by much worse. Lizalfos most likely. The arctic air hides their unique method of killing – a nitrogenous breath that freezes the flesh on contact, causing limbs to crack off and shatter. Too tough to be eaten by anything but the biggest mountain wolves.

“I’ve a cantrip for that,” Zelda is saying. “It will stop them even freezing your thermal wear.”

Link, doing an inventory of his combustible arrow-heads by lamp light, nods, chewing a stick of jerky while sorting through the small arsenal on the table. It’s a soothing, kind of meditative routine for him so she can tell he’s only partially listening to her. He hums a little while he does it.

“Give me your hand, I’ll put it on your sword arm.”

He stretches out his arm, absently, then whips it back when he feels her start to push his sleeve up. He gives her a suspicious eye.

“It’s not going to hurt, you big baby.”

He continues to eye her, a long blue glare.

“That was one time and it’s not my fault you didn’t listen when I told you it would sting.”

She’s about to really dig into why, honestly, it won’t even tickle this time when a largish sort of man in a heavy doublet and snow gear moves toward their table. Zelda, facing him, notes that three other men hang back but seem to be with him nonetheless, watching. Link, for his part, gives no sign that he hears the man other than to place one hand in his lap. His lap where his sword rests across his knees. He looks over his shoulder only when the man is close enough to be un-ignorable.

“Hello,” Zelda says.

The man ignores her, staring down at her companion. “You Link?” says the man.

“Yiga?” says Link. The jerky stick is still between his teeth so it’s not with any kind of… fear that he says that.

Zelda tenses, but the man just looks confused, the wind-red skin around his eyes crinkling.

“What?”

“Never mind.” Link does not take his hand from his lap.

“You Link or not?”

Link shrugs. Its kinds of infuriating from an outside perspective.

Zelda pipes up. “Sorry, sir. But what business do you have?”

“None, unless one of you is Link.” His lip curls. “Now that I’m up close, I can’t rightly tell which of you is the woman.”

“Thanks,” says Link, ripping the jerky in half between his teeth and chewing. Zelda gives him a look of her own.

“Okay, smartass, I think you’re Link.”

He shrugs again. It makes her want to laugh. It should not. There is a large person with a threatening demeanor hovering over her partner and he appears to have a large ax strapped to his back. To her younger self, this would be cause for alarm, but to this new version of herself, this situation seems exactly as laughable to her as it must to Link who has the divine blade in his lap and no interest in tavern cock fighting. The man’s friends are beginning to make their way across the room now though. Zelda sighs.

“Sir, you’ve found your man. What is it you want?”

“You always speak for him, girl?”

“No. Just right now. What’s your business?”

“My employer needs to speak with him.”

“We’re here on a task of some importance,” Zelda explains, careful with her tone. “There’s been violence and death in the region. We’re here to remedy that. If there is some specific need your employer has of him, then relay it, and we can make our own way there when our tasks are at a close.” Zelda is on her feet now, hands on the table in front of her. Link, sitting still facing her, is looking up at her through his bangs. His eyebrows are up. Zelda ignores him. “So, sir, what is your business and how does it supersede the needs of the good people here?”

It’s only then the man seems to notice the rest of the room watching. The stable hands and inn keeps and small groups of local trappers and traders all eyeing the confrontation with the idle readiness of people with a stake in the outcome. There are swords now, staves, and casual weaponry suddenly visible, on table tops, by hand where they were previously packed away.

The man hesitates then, appraises her. Link, in his seat – Zelda watches his calm blue stare rove toward the man, a dangerous stillness in his stature. The man doesn’t notice.

“What’s your name, little miss?”

“Unless you tell me your business, I see no reason to tell you.”

The man points a finger. “You’re her.” He takes a step forward. “You the one calling herself Zelda, aren’t you?”

Link hits the man. Zelda doesn’t see him do it. He’s too fast. It’s just the follow through, the aftermath – a man twice Link’s size, flying staggering backward, clutching his gut and Link on his feet. The blade is out. The naked metal one hand, the sheath in the other. He doesn’t move to raise it, only stands there, feet apart, shoulders set, directly between her and the four men sent to find them. The blade doesn’t glow. No. It only does that in the presence of evil. But the light catches in the metal, give it a purposeful shine.

“Leave,” says Link.

He barely says it above a whisper, but into the dead silence it drops like a coin into a pan.

Zelda grabs his shoulder. He glances at her. He does not relax even slightly.

“Tell us who sent you,” she says to the men. “You might as well.”

The man holds up two hands. “No trouble, little miss,” he starts to say, but one of his man blurts, “I’d be careful using that name!”

“It’s my name,” she snaps, but the men are gone into the snow outside.

Later, she will tell Link she wishes he hadn’t done that and he will just shrug. This time, it’s infuriating.

They have a nightmare.

Zelda knows it’s ‘they’ not ‘she’ when the scream cuts out of her and, in the same instant, Link lunges up from his cot and buries a broadsword halfway through a tree. Epona, nearby, just looks up from a small bag of oats, snorts, and goes back to eating. The humans present stare at each other for a very long moment. Link is first to move. He wrenches the blade free, bracing one boot against the trunk and yanking. A sigh. He takes a seat, cross-legged next to her and plants the blade point down in the grass by her sleeping cot. He rubs two hands over his face. Then he just looks, tiredly, into her eyes with a question there.

“I dreamed that we lost,” she says. “I mean… that we lost again.”

Link shudders.

“You too?”

He nods, then kind of absently presses his palm to his throat, cupping the crushable curve of his windpipe like a ghost pain still plagues him. Zelda, watching, feels a cold prickle run up her spine and down her arms, raising the fine hairs all the way down to her aching hands. She stops clenching her fists.

“Calamity killed you in front of me.”

Link stops touching his throat, hand hovering uncertainly for a moment before he drops it in his lap. She can see him working up to saying something. He always mouths a word once or twice before pushing his voice behind it.

“It’s okay,” she says quickly. “It wasn’t real.” She pulls her hair back from her face, re-doing the band “Maybe… maybe it was me. I had a nightmare and I, perhaps, shared it to you. That’s possible. I maintained a certain level of… awareness of you all through my time interned with the Calamity. Those paths are still open to some degree. I apologize –”

He makes a cutting motion, interrupting her. Then he raises two hands and, in terse but fluid hand motions, signs, ‘Maybe it was my nightmare.’

She blinks. If he’s signing, he must be shaken. He hasn’t done that in a while.

He shrugs and goes on, ‘I have nightmares. It was probably mine.’

“Oh… I… I suppose, but I don’t think…”

He shrugs again. She’s not sure how each shrug has a specific meaning but it does.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not prophetic, I would tell you if it was.”

He nods.

“Link, we’re safe.”

He looks at her. The moonlight through the trees lays lines of silver across his forehead, misses his eyes.

“I swear it,” she says. This small panic rising… she doesn’t know it’s source but she continues, “I would tell you if we were in danger.”

His eyes widen and, after a moment, he says, “I know that.”

Link’s voice always startles her, even when Zelda has ample time to watch him work up to using it. It’s always both softer and deeper than she expects, usually rough with disuse, faintly kinked with an accent she’s only recently identified as a hybrid of eastern Lanaryian and, interestingly, the grammatical pacing in most Zora-learned Hylian. She’s not sure why, but hearing his voice now does damage to something inside her.

“You’ve done more than enough. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to fight anymore.” She shakes her head. “You know that, right?”

His expression smooths out, softens a little. He stands. Zelda watches him calmly pull the sword from the grass, wipe it on his trousers, then pick up the sheath from his sleeping cot and put it away. Then he comes back to her side, close enough to touch and he touches her shoulder, three fingertips pressed against the fabric for long enough that warmth bleeds through and sets gold lines to the roots of her. Fine wires of heat and regret.

Then, he says, very quietly, “I’m staying.”

She can’t say why that makes her want to hit him. Instead she says, “Thank you.”

When they reach Highland Stable, the inn keep says a Gerudo woman came looking for Link. Not Link specifically, but “the owner of the red and black stallion out back”. The innkeep also mentions, somewhat warily, that they will need to charge extra in boarding fee for an animal of his size and temperament and they would greatly appreciate it if Link would ‘settle him’ before taking off again. Link agrees, pays the fee, and heads back to the stalls.

Zelda, previously unaware of this animal, is stupefied by the size of the beast Link returns with, leading it to the large corral near the front of the inn with nothing but a hand on its massive flank. She can’t say what breed it is. The towering stallion stands a monolith stature beside Link, pure black save for the impossible red of its mane and tail. Broad as a Lynel. The middle of its back so high that Link must take a short running leap to mount. Once seated, the beast is comically too large for him.

The horse tolerates Link’s presence, snorting and stomping, massive hooves cutting deep furrows in the grass.

Zelda comes forward only when Link waves her the all clear. “What’s his name?”

Link just huffs and shrugs.

She lets the huge horse nose her palms. “No name? Are you thinking about turning him loose?”

“He’ll leave if he wants,” Link says, taking a handful of deep red mane.

He clicks his tongue, taps his heels and the great black monster trots out into the corral with the air of an animal that planned to do so all along. Zelda retreats to the fence, ducking outside of the ring so she can climb onto the first horizontal bar and lean against the top most support, watching Link take the giant horse through increasingly aggressive maneuvers around the yard. It’s not a fast animal. But its every move becomes a juggernauting force, unstoppable and uncaring. In motion, Link no longer seems too small for his mount.

“A beautiful animal,” someone murmurs.

Zelda jolts a little, startled because there is a very, very tall person in a traveling cloak and hood standing beside her. She didn’t hear them approach. From this angle, she can’t make out their face beneath the hood, only a sharp line of jaw, dark skin. The road-worn cloak and trousers are patterned in interlocking red and blue right angles along the hem. Gerudo Town make. Zelda re-assesses the person standing beside her – at least seven feet tall, biceps (very visible), broad shouldered, but leaned out by their height, large hands (rough with callouses), one forearm strapped with an archer’s guard. Zelda very carefully leans back a little, still searching…

There’s a scimitar-style sword on their hip.

“Sav’otta,” Zelda says.

The Gerudo standing next to her seems surprised. Then, in very deep Gerudo-tongue, says, “Do you speak the language?”

Zelda hesitates. “I’m a little rusty.”

“You are clear enough and well met, little sister. I am Draga.”

Zelda notes, puzzled, that Draga is using slight variant in conjugation she’s not heard before. “Nice to meet you. I am Zelda. I apologize if my Gerudo is antiquated. I’m out of practice.”

Draga nods, then reaches up and pulls the hood down. Zelda blinks. In the split second between the blink and the shock, Zelda knows it’s too late to hide her surprise. Annoyed with herself, Zelda says firmly, “I love your hair. I’ve thought about cutting it short like that, but I’m too set in my ways, big brother.”

Draga smiles at her.

Zelda realizes now what it was in Draga’s grammar that confused her – not linguistic drift, but male modifiers. She’d learned it, but never heard it used in conversation; before now, she had never met a Gerudo man. Draga’s hair, red as old copper, is short for a Gerudo, braided down against his scalp and clipped with intricate gold rings. Dark complexioned even for a Gerudo, high dramatic features. Now that the hood is off Zelda can see the start of very carefully shaved sideburns only just growing along the sharp line of his jaw, deep cheekbones, a heavy brow. He’s so tall and so broad in shoulder, that he reminds her a bit of Urbosa. His eyes are the same green.

In the distance, Link shouts something and the stallion rears up, then dives back down, hooves slamming into the ground so hard the impact vibrates in the earth. Then horse and rider bolt full speed around the edge of the corral, Link’s body ducked low along the beast’s spine.

“You can speak Hylian. I understand it fine. My accent is the trouble do you know the rider?”

“Yes, we’re friends and he’s the owner, actually.”

“Then I’d like to speak with him. I’d like to propose a sale, if possible.”

“I can flag him down.”

“I am in no rush.”

Across the corral, Link pulls the stallion out of its gallop and into a slowdown rotation. Afterward, he dismounts, patting the giant horse in a congratulatory manner and saying something to him. Zelda wonders what he says. He is always saying things, specifically just to horses. The black giant flicks its ears forward, then bends its head down to forcefully but affectionately push its gigantic head into Link’s chest, knocking him back a few steps.

“Link!” Zelda puts her fingers in her mouth and whistles, a high ribbon of sound. “Can you come here?”

Link leaves the horse to its own devices and jogs over. The giant horse trots close behind, like the biggest dog in existence and loiters intimidatingly behind him. There’s horse hair in Link’s clothes, his bangs are stuck to his forehead, mud splattered on his pants. He wipes his hands on his tunic, eyeing the stranger

“Link. This is Draga. He’s interested in the stallion.”

Link blinks. The giant horse noses the side of his head. He looks doll-sized beside it.

“Zelda, would you mind translating?” Draga says. “I want to be clear.”

“Of course!”

Link, hesitating, taps her arm. When he has her attention, he signs, “I don’t speak Gerudo. Can you…?”

“I was just saying that. I can translate. Of course.”

Draga frowns. “He doesn’t speak?”

“He does, but it’s troublesome for him.” Then in Hylian. “You wanted to ask if the horse is for sale, right?”

Draga nods, looking at Link as he does so.

Link thinks about it, then says, aloud, “Maybe.” He signs, “I’d have to see him ride and how Asshole likes him. He’s a bastard.”

Zelda paraphrases. “Link wants to see you ride and determine how the horse likes you. It’s a very temperamental animal.”

“This is acceptable,” Draga says in warm but carefully enunciated Hylian. He unclasps his cloak from his neck. “I would prefer….” He gestures, says in Gerudo. “No point in wasting sunlight.” Then in Hylian. “Now?”

Link shrugs. “Okay.”

Draga braces one hand against the top of the corral fence and vaults it in a single slow but easy motion. The whole fence groans under the brief weight. He lands heavily, straightening to his improbable height and without the hood, Zelda can see his outfit isn’t Gerudo-made. The leather work – bracer, light armor, and gloves – are Rito despite tooling in Gerudo script. The tunic and under-shirt – Faron Highlands. A series of short blades strapped to his thigh glint Eldin-mined amber, a Goron-styled finish.

Zelda extrapolates from this the gear he left Gerudo town with no longer suits him and he’s been on the road a very long time.

The black stallion snorts at his approach. Draga seems unperturbed. He offers one giant hand for the beast’s inspection. The stallion snorts again, shaking it massive head back and forth. Link seems relaxed, but Zelda can tell he’s primed to jump back in if the monster horse goes berserk. Draga just huffs, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Hello, great king,” he murmurs. Draga’s tone is familiar. “Whoa, whoa.”

The horse eyes him.

“You know me,” he says, for some reason.

Zelda’s nose itches as he says this, her fingers too.

“Settle down. There you go.”

The giant horse picks a cautious path forward, like its navigating unsteady terrain. After another moment, it pushes its nose into Draga’s palm, lipping at his fingers like it does indeed know him. Draga runs his other hand along the beast’s jaw. His face is close enough to the stallion’s nose, that its nostrils flare a little. Zelda thinks he’s still speaking, but she can’t understand the words. Rather, she feels she almost knows the words. Like she’s just forgotten them and is left with just… impressions of what he says.

She thinks, however, he said something like, “You know your nature now.”

Draga climbs onto the stallion’s back and, once seated, looks at his audience. Then he very casually digs his heels slightly into the beast’s flanks and it trots a tight, easy circle in front of them. Then, just for good measure, he takes two handfuls of the beast’s mane and the horse rockets forward at a clip at least twice the speed Link had it moving. Link laughs out loud, startling Zelda who looks at him with wonder.

“This,” Draga says, bringing the horse back around at a trot, “is a Gerudo horse. Certainly.”

Zelda claps. “Astonishing!”

Link gestures in that animated way that means he’s probably mouthing words, illustrating his amazement.

Draga brings the horse to a stop facing them. “If this is satisfactory, should we discuss price?”

Zelda taps Link on the shoulder. “He wants to know if he passes and if you have a price, Link?”

Link shakes his head. “No sale. He’s yours.”

Draga blinks, frowning. “I think I misheard him.”

Zelda laughs. “I don’t think you did. Link, are you sure?”

Link signs in big hyperbolic sweeps, grinning. “It’s his horse. Obviously. Right? Looks like destiny, doesn’t it?”

“He says the horse is obviously yours, Draga. He can’t sell what is not his.”

“I cannot possibly accept,” Draga says. “He should name a fair price.” He looks directly at Link and, in much louder commanding Hylian, says, “You should give a price.” He looks at Zelda. “Does he understand what this horse is worth?”

Zelda smiles. “Yes. He knows what the horse is worth. He just doesn’t care. If you’re concerned about our financial well-being, you needn’t be. And honestly, if you take the horse then we no longer need to worry for his board and care. Knowing he’s found proper ownership is more than enough.” She glances at Link who’s giving her the thumbs up. “Yes. That’s right. He insists.”

“Your friend is mad.”

“Link, he says you’re mad.”

Link laughs. It’s infectious, sending jolts of warmth through her face.

Draga, exasperated, says, “If he will not allow me to pay him for the price of the horse, then will he allow me to buy the both of you a meal tonight?”

“Oh, he will certainly tell you do that. I feel your wallet may regret it, however.”

Later, having watched Link eat an entire pot of stew, a loaf of bread, a bowl of fruit, and a whole mutton, Draga tells Zelda that he sees now where the tiny Hylian might get his impossible energy from. He says this despite the fact Link has folded his arms on their low table, laid his head down on them, and gone fast to sleep. Zelda is taking the opportunity to balance a small loaf of bread on the top of the Hero’s head, placing it painstakingly until she is certain of its stability. Then she reaches for a dinner roll.

“He is either impossibly productive or dead to the world,” Zelda assures Draga, carefully stacking the dinner roll on top of the loaf. “I catch up when he’s unconscious.”

Draga watches her finish her tower of baked goods, then says, “Forgive me, but how old are you, little sister?”

She’s practiced this one. “I’m eighteen now.” She folds her arms on the table top. “I’m not entirely certain about Link. He grew up around Zora and they don’t value annual celebrations of birth so he always forgets.”

His brows arch. “The Zora?” He enunciates it Hylian. “That is… unusual.” And in Gerudo: “You two are… business partners?”

“Yes, but we’re friends. We’ve worked together a long time.”

“What is the nature of your commerce together?”

“We protect each other. Link does most of the jobs to do with hunting and security and I’ve taken up as a healer. Between us, we can relieve all manner of suffering and people pay for that.” She hesitates, then adds in Gerudo. “Link has a wide-spread reputation and people all over this realm trust him implicitly to accomplish what others cannot. We are on our way to handle such a task in the next few days.” She shrugs, picks up cup and pours herself some water. “You’ve caught us in an interim period.”

Draga sits forward. He’s so large, that his doing so blots out a significant part of light from across the room. In Hylian, he asks, “Do you require additional hands in this endeavor?”

Zelda thinks his accent is really not that strong.

“Link and I should be fine. It’s quite straightforward. There’s a Lynel we’re bringing down east of here.”

Draga tilts his head. “You are Lynel-hunting?” He gestures between her and Link. “You two?

“Looks are deceptive, Draga.”

Link, still asleep on the table, mutters and shoves his face deeper into the crook of his elbow. This disturbs the dinner roll which slides off his head, bouncing on his shoulder. The bread loaf just wobbles, then settles. Draga, observing this, looks back at Zelda with some incredulity.

“A dozen Lynels he’s brought down.” Zelda sips her drink. “A dozen.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Draga says in blunt, skeptical Hylian.

“Link exists to defy expectations.”

Draga narrows his eyes slightly and Zelda is, again, struck by the likeness to Urbosa. “Then if I were simply curious how a Hylian the size of my arm brings down Lynels? Would that be reason enough that you might allow me to accompany you?”

Zelda frowns. “You don’t know us well, Draga. I feel I should be up-front about a few aspects of what we do. The jobs we take on are usually quite dangerous and even the missions that are not martial can be unusual. Our methods are somewhat unorthodox…”

“You have Hylia’s Gift,” Draga interrupts.

Zelda frowns. “Hylia’s Gift?”

He frowns back. “Do you not say that in Hylian?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Magic,” Draga says, in Gerudo this time and Zelda can see how that might translate literally, into Hylian. “You worry I will be offended or suspicious of it. I am not. My mothers were all versed in some aspect of spellcasting, rune-craft, or ward-work. It’s not unusual to me.” He jerks his head toward Link. “Even that one, I sense it. A breath of the wild.”

“Breath of the wild?”

Draga sighs. “Do you not say that in Hylian either?”

Zelda grins. “No.”

“Wild magic.” He ponders this. “In Gerudo teachings, magic draws on three elemental kinds – breath, blood, and bone. Your semblance is blood. His is breath. Breath is rawer stuff. Harder to harness, instinctive.” In Hylian he says, “Wilder.”

Zelda considers this. “In… Hylian teachings, the abilities gifted from the Goddess are of three elemental kinds, but we cite wind, water, and earth. All simply being… attitudes of magical practice all under the same divine source. Air is the most rare and volatile. I… supposed I did not categorize Link’s talents that way.”

Draga is tearing a piece of bread in half. He looks at her. “Why not?”

She frowns at her drink. “I don’t know. I guess… I always saw him differently than a… sorcerer.”

“I am surprised you did not see it. You both seem very alike.”

“We’re not related.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Draga uses the bread to wipe stew from the inside of the bowl. “I do not think there is a proper word for it. You seem both like parts of a larger thing.” He shrugs and eats the bread. “I do not know how to explain it. When I look at you with truth, that is how you seem.”

“Do you have Hylia’s Gift, Draga?”

“Yes.” He looks at her, picking an orange from the bowl. “Does that trouble you?”

She begins to say ‘no’, then pauses.

“Why are you trusting me?”

When he doesn’t answer, just peels the fruit in his hand, she elaborates.

“In Gerudo culture, magic is… there are rules about who can use it.” She keeps her tone soft. Concerned, not accusatory. She doesn’t specify in what way he is outside their parameters. She just stares up at him, this giant man who reminds her of Urbosa in ways she can’t quite quantify, who Link gifted a priceless horse for no reason than he felt it was natural. “Why are you so sure I am a friend? If the current Chief, Riju, heard word of it, she would be compelled to act.”

Draga studies her face for a moment. “Do you think Riju should act?”

Zelda lowers her voice. “No, I don’t… but I also just met you.”

Draga’s mouth pulls a little, almost a smile, then he goes back to peeling his orange. In Gerudo, he says, “You should not fret, little sister. The Gerudo are wary of magic, but Urbosa herself commanded thunder and much more besides. I am not outside Law if I return within the year and declare myself.” He levels a very calm look at Zelda. “Hylians don’t regulate that, do they?”

“Magic doesn’t regulate every well. But there were licenses you could obtain like any other business and penalties for practicing without proper credentials.” She pauses. “But that was one hundred years ago. It’s… died off somewhat.”

Draga concedes that with a tilt of his head. “And what kind of craft do you practice, Zelda?”

She thinks of rain.

Hot and impossibly heavy, the mud sucking her sandals under. She thinks of her fingers knotted in Link’s bloody tunic. The fucking sword in his hand. Glowing, but not bright enough to stop ancient machinery running them down, racing across the country to cleave their bones from their bodies. She thinks of her prayer – Goddess, take me instead. Leave the one of us worth anything alive. – and then how the Guardians, in that exact moment, found them.

She thinks of tithing. Alters burnt with fruit and grain. Her family, her kingdom, her champions, her own knight: The blood sacrifice Hylia required. She thinks how it hurt. How hot, how infinite, how indifferent the power that screamed through her skin and how none of it hurt as much as that moment when Link stopped breathing. Her nightmares look like this: The sword never speaks. She kneels there in that field until Calamity comes to crush her from existence.

“Healing and protection,” she says. Zelda reaches across the table for Draga’s wine.

“You’re not old enough for that,” he says conversationally.

“I am,” she says and drinks directly from the bottle.

go to part 2

#botw #legend of zelda #breath of the wild #legend of zelda breath of the wild #loz #lozfic #post game fic where the cycle starts all over again #and ganon just wants to buy that giant horse off link #basically #platonic until its not #the triforce always comes together #interim #rae writes #raewrites

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punishandenslavesuckers · 7 years

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(chapter one) (chapter two) (chapter three) (chapter four) (chapter five)

(chapter six) (chapter seven) (chapter eight)

“I can do that.”

Zelda – presently in a meditative state, fingers looping rhythmically through her hair, twin hair clips between her teeth – blinks up at Draga. The sun is high in the boughs of the trees, thin beams of yellow laying down mottled light on the grass by the road. They’d stopped briefly along the road east from Tabantha Stable to eat and re-organize their things a bit – Link having gotten distracted during the morning and made a haphazard job of a few saddle bags. Draga, who is responsible for most of the distracting, kneels beside her, slinging his rucksack to the ground. He nods to her hands halfway through the beginnings of a single golden braid.

“Oh, no I’ve got it,” she says, smiling. “It’s just a braid.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Hylian isn’t my first language, but I think you understood me.”

Link, tacking the horses by the road, snorts audibly. Zelda glares at him but try as she might – his smile lopsided and newly familiar – she can’t maintain her glare. So, she glares at Draga. He looks impatient, like she should just smack him or let do it already. So, she hands him her clips and hair band and turns so she’s facing away from him. He immediately draws a finger through the braid she’s managed thus far and unravels the lot.

“Not up to your standard?” she chimes.

“No.”

For that, she does smack him.

“If I had a mirror…” Zelda mutters.

“It would still look like a Hylian did the job,” Draga says calmly, around the clips between his teeth.

“You are trying to pick a fight? Or are you just missing having enough hair to do anything with?”

Draga, already parting her front-right region of hair into workable sections, says, “Rude.”

“You’re rude. Don’t make fun of my hair.”

Draga ignores her. Focused on the task at hand. He moves carefully along the side of her head, starting with three parts and twining them deftly down, adding consecutive segments of hair as he goes (very quickly she must admit) around the back of her head. She fiddles with a wrinkle in her pant leg.

“So you’re sure about this? You don’t mind? I mean, I know we discussed this at length over the last few days and… and I know we all agreed it’s the most logical course of action and I know you said that you don’t mind, but I feel like you should know that at any time you may change your mind and we can find some other method. I could refocus my efforts on lost Sheikah knowledge. There may be vast magi-tech archives yet untapped in the shrines. Or the Beasts even. You saw Medoh at the Rito Village. We could go back there if you –”

“Hold this,” he says, taking her hand and pinching her fingers around the middle of a finished braid. Then he starts on the other half of her hair and… Zelda’s isn’t quite sure what he’s doing exactly. She can feel that he’s leaving some sections loose, then gathering them up again later with a sequential foresight that she does not really apply to hair styles.

“So?”

“I said that I’m fine with it.”

“But it’s forbidden for you… right?”

“No, I said only elders were permitted on the mountain.” Draga removes a clip from between his teeth and applies it to a part of her hair. “For generations, my family has guarded the Statue of the Eighth Heroine and preserved it from everyone. Foreigners and Gerudo alike. This mandate was passed down to my tribe, supposedly, by Nabooru herself. It is the oldest undisturbed archive of written Gerudo history dating back to the Naboorian Age. It will pre-date the Twilit Calamity and the Bandit Age.” She can feel him shake his head. “I don’t believe we will find a better place to begin our search.”

“You’re sure you’re okay with it?”

“Zelda, there are no elders left in my tribe, so it would fall to me anyway.” He finishes off another braid. “Besides, you’re the maiden-form Goddess. Who else could be worthier to tread sacred ground?” A beat. “Also, Link already paraglided down the mountain and took pictures of the exterior. So, it’s hardly that unbroachable.”

From the road, Link calls, “I said I’m sorry!”

“You’re a godless heathen.”

“I’m the Goddess’s chosen Hero?”

“A regular sort of heathen then.”

“I didn’t know!”

Draga coils the finished ropes of Zelda’s hair in a neat whorl at the top right-hand side of head, giving the mirrored spiraled braids an asymmetric weight. Draga pins the coils in place with practiced engineering and Zelda touches the finished work, admiring the complicated craftsmanship, fingers picking out the soft track and curve of her braids like a road coiling inward. She turns.

“Thank you, Draga.”

He’s still kneeling there, one arm braced against his knee. Even though she’s seated on a stump, he’s taller than her while kneeling, looking down into her face with an expression just short of worried.

“It could have nothing about the Goddess Mark. It may be a waste of time.”

“That would be fine. I like history for the sake of it.”

“You’re certain Hyrule Castle is of no use?”

Zelda nods. “Yes. Even before the Calamity, most records were lost in the fall of the Magi-Technical Golden Age.” Zelda gestures helplessly. “Our oldest texts only barely describe the events of the Twilit Calamity and before that, there are anecdotal accounts of an ancient hero who moved through Time itself. No record of his actions exist because, it’s said, he existed in a non-linear state. Stopping Ganon before his rise and after.”

Link says nothing. Reacts not at all to the descriptions of his previous lives.

“Prior to that, there’s only… myth and fairytale. So there is nothing in those catacombs worth returning for. Not if our aim is to know more about why the Goddess Mark has appeared now. Why it’s expanded its touch to you.”

“What do you know of it?”

“Theology and historical theory. We know the Goddess Mark is tied to Hylia and the creation myth of Hyrule – the Golden Goddesses who left the world in the hands of Hylia. But that’s it. Scholars of the age have only said that the Mark symbolizes the godhead, three in one – Din, Farore, and Nayru. The heart of the world. The balance that maintains existence. It appears in most Hyrulian symbolism. Hardly compelling factual account. Not like Naboorian hieroglyphs.” She sighs, almost romantically. “Such a record would be so… unromantic in its chronicle of the past. Vital. I have to admit, I’m selfishly curious to know what’s on that mountain for my own sake.”

Draga gives her a crooked smile. “Well, thank the hero Nabooru. It was she who mandated a record of Gerudo history be made written.”

“Why did she do that?”

“Hard to say. Nabooru was an ancient figure to my people, I have a theory. When the Great Chieftains brought the Gerudo out from the Sea of Sand and laid us at the shores of Hyrule… that was the moment our oral traditions began to die. Such things do not survive when you must change to survive a new world. She knew it then and committed great efforts to laying down physical records of our history. This is how we know we were different before we found Hyrule.”

Zelda smiles. “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad your people did find Hyrule. We would be poorer for it had they not come.”

“Yes, I guess history would look very different.”

Link catches the tail end of the conversation then, walking up to tap her shoulder.

He signs, ‘We should go. I want to be past the Scab Lands before nightfall.’

“Okay,” she says.

And she kisses him on the cheek. She does it carefully, catches his chin with two fingers so he doesn’t move and fits her lips against the warm plane oh his cheekbone. There. Proud of herself – and feeling very giddy – she stands up and heads toward the road. She isn’t aware that anything extraordinary has transpired until Draga says, “For fuck’s sake,” and kicks her knight escort in the ankle to break him out of the trance. She smiles all the way back to the road.

When they reach the Scab Lands, there are three Gerudo on the road

Two of them, carrying twin travel packs and matching jackets, are dressed for the road heading north into Tabantha, bundled prolifically in an excess of scarves. One of them is capped in an adorable wool-knit hat, a grandmotherly kind with a pom-pom stuck to the top. This would seem a bit much, if Zelda hadn’t seen Draga stuff himself into excessive layers back in the Rito Village and his subsequent almost primal hate for the snow. He is, in fact, still wearing a scarf presently.

The two girls are talking to a third Gerudo woman on horseback. Her violently red hair is pulled back in a heavy tail – from it, hundreds of sparkling beads catch the light when she turns her head. She’s wearing a veil. Blue fabric pinned at her temples by elaborate gold clasps. The scimitar at her hip is sheathed in a mother of pearl scabbard. Zelda notes that, upon seeing them, Draga sits up a little straighter and nudges Arbiter into a faster trot.

“Greetings!” says the girl in the cap as they draw near. Her accent is very strong. She waves while her companion – a little older, sharing enough of her bone structure and contempt to be a sister – rolls her eyes and gently pushes her arm down.

“Good evening,” says the older girl in carefully done Hylian. Then in Gerudo, to Draga, “That’s quite a horse. I’ve never seen one more beautiful.”

Draga also in Gerudo, says, “Now you’ve done it. It’ll all go to his head now.”

Arbiter, as if on cue, tosses his massive head and nickers, stomping a hoof in the dirt and blowing air at the nearest girl who startles, almost losing her cap. The older girl laughs loudly. Draga smiles a little – just a suggestion of it but so specifically gentle Zelda finds herself studying the shape of it. Cataloging it. Hoping to commit it to memory so she can identify it again in the future – like the flight patterns of birds or the phenotypes of a rare plant species.

“Are you two headed north?” he asks.

“Yeah. Meeting a family friend. He says he has work for us,” says pom-pom girl.

“That’s good,” Draga says. “Lots of young Gerudo leave town without a single part of a plan. You’re doing better than I did.”

“Didn’t plan well for the cold though,” says the older girl. “I’m not looking forward to freezing my tits off on some gods forsaken snowfield.”

“I am!” enthuses pom-pom. “There will be snow. I’ve never seen snow.”

“Say that again when you run into a snow rhino,” says Draga, amused.

The older girl stares in horror. “What the fuck is a snow rhino? Don’t say there are snow rhinos.”

“There are snow rhinos. They’re ornery. I’ve seen them.”

Zelda notes that Draga leans harder on the male-conjugation than he does when speaking Gerudo with her. The older girl gives no sign she notices – possibly because she is distracted by the snow rhino and the fact earmuffs will not protect her from getting gored by one. The younger Gerudo girl though… as the conversation goes on, visibly frowns and Zelda can tell she’s trying to figure out Draga’s understandable but slightly canted take on her own language. It occurs to Zelda that the occasion for personal male modifiers in Gerudo might be uncommon enough that not everyone might have bothered to learn them.

About sixty seconds into the conversation, the younger girl confirms Zelda’s suspicions by blurting, “Oh! You’re a voe!”

Delighted. Like she just figured out a difficult riddle. Draga and her sister, bent over a map and reviewing their likely path north for safety and friendly rest stops, stare blankly at her. Draga, still in his saddle, glances at the older girl who balls a hand over her face in humiliation. This signals to the younger girl that she’s made an error and she wilts.

“Oh, uh, I mean…” She switches to her mother tongue. “Sorry. That’s rude right?”

“Yes, Rima. That’s rude,” says her sister, exasperated. “Goddess, you’re embarrassing.”

“But both the blonde ones are women, right, Taz?”

“No, you idiot. The short one is a man.”

“Really?” She stares openly at Link who tilts his head. “Are you sure?”

“You need to get better at this, I can’t tell you who is man and woman every time.” She looks directly at Draga. “I am so sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Draga says, visibly trying not to laugh.

“Are you two on Pilgrimage?” Zelda says in Gerudo.

“Oh! Your accent is so pretty!” Rima exclaims, clutching her hands to her chin. “You know Gerudo? That’s so amazing. No one knows our language! I’m so bad in Hylian. I say the wrong things.”

“You say the wrong things in every language,” Taz snaps.

Zelda makes introductions and accepts compliments on her hair and, through the corner of her eye, watches Draga dismount and start going through his saddle bag. He pulls out a small wood box she’s never seen and what looks like a snowquill doublet and overcoat with a couple ridiculous hats. The hats are also snowquill, but twice as thick as normal with ear flaps that make her immediately regret not seeing him wear it. Draga inspects these items with a calm appraisal, then turns and holds them out to the older girl.

“You two should take these,” he says.

Rima bounces a little at her sister’s shoulder, peering as she takes the coats and opens the little wood box. “Oh. Pretty. What are they?”

“Are these warming stones?” says Taz, her eyes big.

Draga nods.

She looks up. “We can’t take these.”

“Sure, you can.”

“These are too valuable!”

“They aren’t worth a thing.”

“You’re lying!”

Draga looks mock hurt. “I’m sorry. We just met and you’re calling me a liar?”

Taz loses some of her cool worldliness to alarmed sputtering but Rima is already pulling on the snowquill doublet, and then the overcoat, patting it with warm brown hands and smoothing the thick material down. She admires its fit (a bit too large honestly, even with the doublet beneath) and spins around so the longer part flaps out around her. She can’t quite lower her arms to her sides on account of the layers.

“So warm!” she says, beaming from the gap in her scarf and hat.

“It’s standard gear, but high quality,” Draga says. “Don’t let anyone try to trade you for it. The doublet and warming stone should be enough to keep even Tabantha cold out. Don’t go without full gear once you hit the snowfield. The temperatures there are deadly if you’re not ready. Besides, I’ll hardly have use for it back in the desert.”

Link signs, onehanded to Zelda, ‘That gear is worth near its weight in gold.’

Zelda blinks, then signs, ‘What?’

‘Rito can only make so many snowquill pieces a year since they use molting feathers. And warming stones are usually ruby. That equipment is no joke.’

The girl with earmuffs is already pulling the warming stone from the box – an adjustable leather wrist-cuff into which a single small red stone is filigreed in with silver wire. The stone has to be flush to skin to transfer its effect, Zelda knows. Draga tells her so and shows her how to tie the bracer to ensure it can’t come off. Then he says earmuffs are inadequate against Tabantha cold and places the ridiculous hat on her head. Rima squeals in delight. Taz tolerates this new development like she knew it was coming.

Draga pulls the flaps of the hat down around her ears and frowns down at it with a kind of judicious pragmatism and vague fraternal concern that makes Zelda aware, suddenly, of herself and the fact she’s sitting on her horse watching her giant friend vaguely mother people on the road. Makes her aware of Link kind of grinning besides her and as Draga finishes tying the stupid hat on his fellow Gerudo, Zelda acknowledges her desire (familiar and strange simultaneously) to put her hand on one of them. Not in any way specifically, just to be in contact.

The woman on horseback, who up until now has said nothing, waits until the sisters have departed with elaborate promises of returning the favor one day that Draga clearly appreciates, but expects nothing of. The woman’s horse is shockingly beautiful, golden in color, perfectly groomed, and stands at disciplined attention until she, gently, taps her heels into the beast’s flanks. The sun catches on the painted kohl and red that lines her eyes. She smells faintly of jasmine and when she smiles, Zelda can see it in the way her eyes crinkle and she says…

“You can’t buy the love of the People, you know.”

Zelda, stunned, just stares.

Draga, however, seems unmoved, He sneers, actually, his lips curling back like a dog bares its teeth. “I wouldn’t pay shit for your affection.”

She smiles. Her voice is almost gentle, musical, even in Hylian. “Come now, isn’t it a difficult life to choose?”

“You don’t choose,” he says.

“Of course, you do,” she says, almost gently, almost affectionately. “I’ll show you if you like. It’s easy. Here tell me: What is your real name?”

Draga’s expression changes then – a scorching burn of rage like a flash-fire on clay, baking in a color. He gets darker, if possible, with the intensity, the totality, of his anger in that single moment but even through that heat, Zelda catches it – an undercurrent. A brief but violent glow of hurt. Then he speaks through his teeth.

“You should ride on.”

She’s still smiling behind the veil.

The woman kicks her horse forward a little, so the beautiful gold animal circles to his left. “But don’t you want wisdom from a sister?” she asks, continuing to circle when Draga holds his ground. “I gave it to those girls, I’ll give it you. As if you were like them. The courtesy due your mothers at the least. Here’s my wisdom: Stay out here. Don’t go back. You’ll do much better where they don’t know shit about the People.” Here, she looks directly at Zelda. “Riju isn’t a little girl on the road with no jacket. She knows a shorthair heretic when she sees one.”

“Excuse me?” Zelda says in Hylian.

And the beautiful woman switches to Hylian just to clarify, “If you want to fuck a Gerudo, you should fuck a real one, girl.”

Link puts his fingers in his mouth and whistles.

He splits the air with that whistle, cracks it open with that sound. A piercing almost painful zipline of air, high and aggravating – cut with an impossible vibrato and quite without warning the beautiful woman’s horse throws its head, issues an equine scream, and bolts. The woman, clearly not expecting that, shrieks and flails forward, snatching the reins and hanging on as the mare gallops full speed, breakneck fast down the road. By the time she recovers she and her horse are a quarter mile away.

Link drops his hand. Zelda stares. Draga glares. Link just shrugs.

“How’d you do that?” Draga says, patting Arbiter on the nose. The massive stallion acts rather like it didn’t hear a thing.

Link nudges Epona off the road. “We’re behind schedule. We should go.”

Zelda looks at Draga. “Are you alright?”

He mounts up. “Of course.”

“Why would she say something like that?”

Draga looks at her. His expression so neutral it makes a momentary statue of him. “Link’s right. We should try to gain ground before it gets much darker. This area isn’t safe at night.”

Zelda thinks about the flight pattern of birds, the mating habits of poisonous frogs, the sexual dimorphism between the male and female of a certain species of lizard, and the precise balance of the smile that touched Draga’s mouth when he tied that stupid hat on Taz’s head. She nods and follows her companions off the beaten path and they head into the wilds at the foot of the mountain range beyond, toward the uneven ridges that mark Draga’s homeland.

“That’s too much salt.”

“You said add more salt.”

“Not that much.”

“I can’t un-salt something, Link.”

There’s a silence.

“No. I’m not taking cooking critique where you spell things for me in Sign.”

“Add a little more of everything.”

“How about you give better instructions and we won’t have this problem?”

“How about you don’t dump too much salt in my salmon risotto and we won’t have this problem?”

“Never mind. Go back to not speaking.”

Zelda looks up from the bow in her lap – recurve composite, Gerudo make, one of Link’s spares dug from the vast and confusing depths of his enchanted travel pack. It feels warm and familiar in her hands. The wood curved like the dip of a hipbone. She watches her compatriots. Link is hovering and peering over his shoulder with a kind of bland anxiety that’s specific to food. Draga is glaring at him for it. She goes back to what she was doing because she explicitly warned Draga not to try and help Link cook. He gets weird about it. So, this his bed to lie in.

She smooths her fingers up and down the shape of the bow, fitting her fingers to the leather grip at the center, feeling again and again a vague sensation of reflex. Of want. It’s one of the lightest in Link’s arsenal at a thirty-five-pound draw – just enough pull to down an opponent if she puts some intention to it. The bowstring lays coiled in her lap, tacky, wrapped in wax paper.

“Could you back up?” Draga says.

Link does not do that.

“I need you to back up.”

Link kind of makes a face and Draga picks up the entire plate of spare ingredients from the grass and shoves it into his arms. “That’s it. I’m done You are like…” He says something in Gerudo that Zelda thinks is slang, but translates like ‘a jackal in heat’ or something to that effect. “I hate fish anyway.”

Link looks offended.

Draga leaves him there looking offended and comes to join Zelda. “You going to string that?”

“I’m trying to remember how.”

“I can show you.”

“No. I’m trying to remember.”

He frowns, then realizes. “Oh.” He crouches down in front of her, inspecting the weapon in her hands with a thoughtful reconsideration. “What is that like? Trying to remember something that didn’t happen in this life?”

“Like I’m remembering something I did in a dream,” Zelda says, carefully unspooling the bowstring from the wax paper. “I can ignore it if I want. What I remember in a dream does not confuse me. I am never uncertain about what I have done and what has been done by my predecessors.” She hooks the top of the string into the notch at the bottom of the bow. “Often, it’s not memory at all. Just a feeling. Indistinct.” She stops here to stand up, bracing the bottom of the bow against the ground just outside her right boot with the curve hooked up hugging the back of her left thigh, set diagonally between her legs. “It’s nothing specific. Just…”

Draga waits. “Want a hint?”

“No… I know this. I…” She grips the top curve of the bow and pushes it down like a lever forward, the body of bow bending against her leg. This gives her just enough time to hook the string into the top notch. She releases the tension and the line goes taut. “Ha!” She steps her leg out of the freshly strung bow and presents it to Draga. “It’s like muscle memory!”

Draga tilts his head. “Well, if it’s muscle memory, Princess, maybe we should try some target practice.”

She falters a moment. “Oh… well I could try.”

Draga fetches his own quiver from their equipment, taking long enough that she begins to regret her decision. She fully regrets it by the time he hands her the first arrow. He waits. Clearly not intending to help her figure it out whatsoever.

Nervous now, Zelda readjusts her grip on the bow in her left hand, awkwardly sliding her hand down the arrow from the middle of its length to the feather-fletched end. The feel of it sends a vague blush of familiarity through her. She closes her eyes. She imagines… fitting the bolt to the string, drawing it back. A compound movement, pushing the bow away and drawing the line back, high at first, then lining up. Mathematical. Precise. Her line of sight focuses and – she opens her eyes.

Draga is peering down at her, waiting and curious.

She shoves the arrow back at him, a sick well suddenly in the back of her throat.

“Never mind. I don’t want to practice this.”

Draga blinks a little owlishly. “Why not?”

“I just don’t want to. The draw weight is too heavy for me anyway.”

“How would you know unless you tried?” Draga says, his brow rising slightly.

“I… I just would rather not.”

He takes the arrow.

“Is this because you said you thought about killing me?” And when Zelda goes ramrod stiff, petrified, he scratches his chin and says, “Your dream-mind notwithstanding, if you think you can kill me, it’s going to take more than an arrow, Princess.”

She sputters, horrified. “I would never –!”

“Then there’s no reason not to learn this,” Draga interrupts.

He offers her the arrow again. When she does not immediately take it back and, instead, stands there frozen, he says, quietly, “It would be useful if you learned this.” A beat. “Relearn it.” Another beat. “Whichever it is. I barely follow you two when you talk about these things.”

“Draga…”

He steps forward and with an old archer’s ease, he fits three fingers beneath her left elbow and lifts her bow arm to a proper height. He nocks the arrow to the string for her, his fingers momentarily fitting hers to the line.

“Just draw,” he says.

Eventually, after a long moment, she draws.

It’s like taking a breath.

“Hm,” he says.

“What’s ‘hm’?”

“You have a long pull.” He moves out of her line of sight, behind her. “You draw all the way past your ear.”

“This feels right. Is that bad?” she asks, maintaining her stance, aiming indistinctly at the trees.

“Not necessarily,” he says. She can feel the shrug. “Your footwork is good. How does it feel?”

“Familiar.”

“It should.” His mouth is suddenly very close to her ear. “I saw you shoot at that dragon.”

A shiver runs down her spine and coils in Zelda’s stomach. A murmur enters her heart, but before she can react, he loops his quiver belt around her hips, drawing it tight. He’s kneeling behind her to do this, his hands occasionally bracing against her hip as he fits it. He’s not gentle exactly, tugging at the strap with a utilitarian strength she might expect if he were tacking Arbiter for the road. It forces her to brace. She looks over her shoulder to glare at him, but when she turns her head, he looks calmly up at her from where he’s kneeling. The fire light illuminates one side of his face, painting a gold heat into the high plane of his cheekbone and –

She immediately faces forward again, suddenly very aware of his hands against her hip.

He finishes adjusting the quiver and stands up.

“There’s a knot in that oak. Think you can hit it?”

She squints down the shaft, the bowstring digging into her fingers as she holds the tension and… she relaxes. She lowers the bow with the arrow still nocked to the string and turns at the hips to look up at Draga.

“Why did that woman speak to you like that on the road today?”

Draga blinks. “This is an obvious delaying tactic.”

“It’s an honest question.”

Draga thinks about it. “When you were learning Gerudo, you were taught the importance of gendered conjugation in our language, yes? That our pronouns delineate Gerudo as its own gender category. Then non-Gerudo women and men.” When he gets a small nod from her, he goes on. “Naboorian dialects are the only Gerudo dialects that allow for Gerudo-specific male modifiers at all and that dialect is not widely spoken. So, in effect, my own language does not properly allow for my existence.”

Zelda’s brows lift in surprise. “The dialect you speak… it’s an offshoot?”

“A slight variant. But yes. My family spoke it, but not many outside the Highlands do.”

She hesitates, then admits, “I honestly thought that Gerudo-specific conjugation was gender indifferent until I met you.”

He shrugs. “Our most common conjugation structures evolved without distinction. Hardly unnatural, but it’s also why that woman said what she said. If I have used any modifiers other than Naboorian – then she wouldn’t, perhaps, have spoken up.” He pauses a moment, thinking. “I have had more fights with Gerudo over my dialect than any other moral disagreement.”

“Why?”

“It’s very hard for the narrow-minded to ignore me when I speak Naboorian Gerudo.” He smiles a little, but it’s a brittle baring of teeth. “It’s subtle. Outside of my own dialect, if I wanted to specifically delineate myself as a man… I would have to linguistically separate myself from being a Gerudo.”

Zelda shakes her head. “Why don’t I know this?”

“You’re Hylian,” he says, shrugging. “Also, you were fighting Calamity Ganon so I hardly fault you for not being finely aware of the societal riffs among my people. Now, are you going to shoot that bow or do you want a grammar lesson?”

“Well…”

Draga waits.

“Oh, very well. I will try.”

Draga smiles.

Zelda turns back to her target. After a moment’s consideration, she draws a second arrow, hooking the feathered end into the loop of her pinkie finger while she sets the first arrow to the line – both shots held ready now in her right hand. She breathes. She thinks – not of the desert. No. Not the desert. Something else. Like… like standing in a long yard. She imagines her hair shorn short for battle, her fingers callused and scarred. Zelda draws. Aims. Releases the shot. Flips the next bolt over her knuckles and sets it to the line. Pulls. Fires.

When she lowers the bow, two arrows stand quivering from the mouth of the hollow, clustered at the head.

“Huh,” says Draga.

“That’s a Sheikah’s draw,” says Link.

Zelda blinks, her heart-pounding elation -- alien and effervescent, like she’s stealing it from another world entirely – subverted by the frank certainty the statement. Link is no longer cooking by the fire. He’s standing with Draga, watching, arms folded. The campsite smells of salmon risotto. Link’s hair catches bits of gold in the fire light, Draga beside him lit in copper. She blinks again at the peculiar mirror they make of one another, both peering at her with identical looks of intrigue.

Link points. “The way you bring it up, pull past your ear, and sight. The reload method. It’s Sheikah.” He shrugs, then signs, ‘I don’t know how to shoot like that. It’s one of the most challenging styles I know of.’

“Oh…” Zelda looks uncertainly to Draga, who just shrugs, then back to Link. “Really?”

He nods and she feels a strange dissociation, staring at her own fingers.

She shakes it off. “Okay, so I use a Sheikah draw? Is that bad? What style do you use, Link?”

Draga interrupts immediately, at volume, “Link shoots with his wrist out and some bizarre pinch and draw I’ve never seen and it’s appalling. Do not do what he does or ask for his advice.”

Link shrugs. “It a Zora draw.”

“It’s what?”

“I trained with Zora when I was younger,” he says blandly. “They shoot that way to keep their fins out of the line. I didn’t know that when I was a child.”

Draga stares. “So you shoot weird because you’re too lazy to retrain yourself?”

Link shrugs again.

“You’re unbelievable.”

Link says, “Dinner’s ready,” and walks back to the fire. Rather like nothing of great surprise occurred, leaving Zelda and Draga to stare after him.

Zelda shoulders the bow for a moment. “Draga… thank you for telling me all that.”

“You both deserve to know before I take you into it.”

“Can I ask one more thing?”

“Of course.”

“Why did she ask for your ‘real name’?”

He looks at her, a little surprised, then says, “Only demons have many names.”

Zelda blinks. “What?”

“Do you not say that in Hylian?”

She shakes her head.

“Oh.” He ponders this, rubbing his neck like there’s a knot there, his other arm folded across his stomach. “I’m not sure how to say it in Hylian, Names have power in the desert. Saying I have the wrong name...”

Zelda lays a hand on his arm, drawing his hand down. He looks at her.

“You know that we prefer you as you are, right?”

He stares at her. A strange expression. Like he hadn’t seen her properly or the dark made odd shadows in her face. “Thank you, Zelda.”

“Always.”

Zelda wakes to Link’s hand on her arm.

It’s still dark. She can hear crickets in the forest. Even the embers of their fire are dark.

Link’s face is just barely discernable in the moonlight, the blanket having fallen off his shoulder when he rolled over to wake her. He says nothing, but she knows what’s wrong. She crawls carefully over her knight, bare feet sinking into gap between their sleeping pads, fingers bracing against the mess of bedding. She can feel dew on the fur Link pulls over the top, strictly to keep the dampness off the wool.

Draga, lying next to Link, is breathing too fast. Keeps jerking involuntarily. Half-formed words escaping him in quiet suppressed bursts, like someone has a hand on his throat. He’s on his side, spine curled slightly forward, arms drawn close to his chest, like he’s cold… or like he’s trying to clutch his throat in his sleep and can’t. Zelda lays a hand over his brow and a faint gold light wells gently in her fingers. Link’s eyes – suddenly visible, blue, holding the glow in a way that defies what she knows about illumination – meet hers.

Eventually, the tension leaves Draga’s limbs. His hands unclench and the faint, pained tension in his features smooths away to unconscious neutrality. For another minute she sits there, her hand against his head and Link’s chin against her shoulder. She listens to them breathing until, vaguely, she realizes they’re breathing together and Link’s fallen asleep against her. They won’t mention it in the morning.

A reminder: Link doesn’t look dangerous until he is.

Lake Alumeni lies shining at the foot of the Gerudo Highlands. An icy wellspring of water wreathed by a copse of apple and evergreen trees, knotted with heather and long grass. The grass gives way to a sandy slope of shore before the lake’s edge and it’s there, under the dying sunlight, Link does as Draga asked of him. Namely: be very dangerous for a while.

He’s crouched, waiting, sword in hand.

He says, calmly, ““You won’t beat me without magic.”

Draga, knotting anther bandage around his forearm, snarls, “I know, you tiny bastard.”

Link doesn’t smile.

The lackadaisical courtesy of previous sparring sessions has gone, replaced with mercenary indifference – the blank, blue-eyed battle stare that is precursor, Zelda knows, to terrible violence. That’s the face he wears now. Apathetic as physics when he puts an impossible bend in the universe and uses it to smash his friend to the ground. Repeatedly. Viciously. Trying to draw out an response. Even the blunt edge of the sparring sword does the job – laying a ragged road of bruises and shallow cuts down Draga’s arms. Leaving him panting, laved in sweat and sticky with blood. IT’s been hours.

The air stinks with like live current. Link’s breath like the air before a lightning strike. There’s a storm in his eyes when he’s like this. Zelda almost forgot.

“Ready?” he says.

Draga thinks about it. Then nods.

Link hits him instantly. The blade sings with the blow and Draga lunges back. He swings a massive blow at Link’s flank, but he just pivots, ducks the side slash, and smashes his elbow into Draga’s back as he goes past. Draga hits the ground rolling and comes up instantly. Draga attacks. Fast. He’s still so fast, even now, but Link is always that much faster. He deflects the blow, pivots, and comes up slashing, sword ringing when it slams into Draga’s. It puts a terrible vibrato into the metal, driving the bigger man back but Link does not stop. Doesn’t slow an iota.

He presses the exchange with a merciless speed, the entire time saying, “No,” and “C’mon!” and “I’m going to kill you, if you don’t get this!”

(Zelda tells herself he doesn’t mean that. It’s a tactic. It’s just talk.) But he doesn’t stop.

Draga’s breathing hard. He tries to catch his balance. Link keeps coming. Link gets past his guard, strikes a glancing blow to his head. Draga keeps his feet, but only just and Link lays open another bleeding line against wrist, his thigh, his hip – Draga flinches and that’s when the lake shore shivers. Draga is already swinging when it happens. He brings the blade down and the impact is Lynel-like, buckling Links arm and spinning him around.

This time, the metal does not howl. It eats the impact and the air around him becomes heat-smeared, mirage-like. When he steps forward, small pebbles on the ground begin to shiver and jump as if caught in the gravity of a localized star. The surfaces of the lake ripples, a barometric shiver in the air displacing the mirror shine.

But Draga’s thrown his sword down.

He stands there, stock still, his hands clenched in front of him. Eyes closed. Breathing too fast.

Link, seeing this, steps back and lowers his blade.

“Control it,” Link says loudly. “Focus!”

“What the hell… do you think… I’m doing?”

His eyes take on a shine – glowing internally, red – usually a controlled burn, steady as the embers in a blacksmith’s forge. Now, she can see the erratic pulse of it, like someone is inexpertly pumping bellows into the forge, throwing sparks and heating the interior too fast, too much. He shakes his head. He breathes too fast.

Zelda steps in.

She’s got her hands around Draga’s wrists, then around the back of his neck. It’s like grabbing a burning skillet from a flame. She can feel the heat hissing against the thin golden shell that paints her skin, like heat crackling in water. She pulls his forehead down to hers and pushes that golden light through her palms into the muscles in the back of his neck where it travels like water down a wall, dousing his skin where it touches.

He's gasping. “I can’t breathe…”

“You can breathe. Breathe when I breathe.”

Draga’s breath is hot against her face, but it’s cooling. She feels the resistance start to give, like trying to dam water with your hands then letting it go. He lets her pour out light, running over his skin, into his skin and evaporating on contact. And in the same breath she can feel the… depth he was talking about, like a house that’s bigger on the inside, the vast space into which she is pouring herself with no hope of filling. The void that dragons opened inside him. But even so, Draga’s skin feels human again. When he breathes, there’s gold in it.

She pushes, carefully, another dose of sunlight against his skin and he twitches, shivering.

“It’s like a ocean moving around you,” she murmurs. “Like a river. You can direct part of the flow, but you can’t control it. Do you feel it?” She breathes slowly, speaks calmly. “You have to let go or you’ll drown. Every time.”

“It’s like you have your hand in my chest,” he says, surprising her.

“I won’t hurt you.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s okay. You’re not losing control.”

“That’s not what I meant, either.”

She blinks. “Oh.”

Zelda doesn’t recognize the way he’s looking at her. But at the same time, she knows it exactly. There’s gold on her tongue when she kisses him. There it is again – that dirty copper taste, like swallowing a coin. Like warming a spoon with her mouth. Her fingers close in his hair, her nails dragging on his scalp and when she finally pulls away, the air is calm around them. No longer boiling where they touch. Nevertheless, she feels hot. Her fingers against his neck pulsing, her heartbeat in her hands and in her stomach and she feels dizzy, like her head is filled with vapor.

She pulls away.

Draga shivers. “Thank you.” He looks at Link. “Both of you.”

Link joins them. The alien battle blank edge resolved into a kind of wry concern. He wipes sweat from his face with his sleeve, managing a small smile and a shrug that says, without sign or sound, ‘Whatever it takes.’

“Honestly,” Draga says again. “This would be much harder on my own. I’m glad I’m not this time.”

“Of course,” Zelda says emphatically. “I said you could rely on us and I mean it. I do. We’re going to figure this out together. We’re going to figure out the nature of this new magic. We’re going to go with you back to the Gerudo. We’re going to move forward.” She smiles. She doesn’t’ know why – overwhelmed suddenly by an excess of happiness. Or hope. She hadn’t been aware she lacked that before. “I have every confidence. I really do.”

Link taps her shoulder.

“Hmm?”

He cups her jaw and draws her into a kiss, tilting her head and his tongue is salt and milk in her mouth. Her heart races. A dizzy delight rising in her throat and she giggles a little. For some reason, Link seems to like that, and the way he’s kissing her becomes a little feral, his fingers knotting in her hair, his teeth just barely catching against her lip and rather without meaning too, a small moan rises in her throat. High and broken and Link immediately pulls back. Red in the face.

“Sorry,” he says, stepping back.

“What for?” says Draga, arms folded, looking a little disappointed.

Link blushes harder. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Why not?” Zelda says, a little punch drunk.

Draga laughs. “You’re allowed, you know.”

Link hesitates. Then, rather like he’s repeating a question, he moves toward them again. He looks between them. She can tell he’s trying to figure out the best tactical execution here. Draga just rolls his eyes, bends down, and lays a hand against Link’s jaw.

“For someone who clearly knows what they’re doing,” he says, “you embarrass easy.”

Link gets redder. “Got to hell,” he says, but in the wrong tone of voice.

Draga smiles.

Zelda notices the back of his left hand is brushing her bare wrist.

“Maybe later,” he says.

go to chapter 10...

#botw #legend of zelda #legend of zelda breath of the wild #loz #zelda #link #ganondorf #lozfic #in which the cycle starts over immediately #and no one told link or zelda #you can actually #run into the next triforce holder on the fucking road #and he might be kinda chill #tagging for #polyamory

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punishandenslavesuckers · 7 years

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(chapter one) (chapter two) (chapter three) (chapter four) (chapter five)

(chapter six) (chapter seven)

She catches up with Link at Tabantha Bridge.

It’s a little surprising he’d come out here, given the events of last night, but she finds him sitting cross-legged at the halfway point of the bridge, arms draped over one of the lower barrier ropes, chin resting on his forearms. Before and below him: Tanagar Canyon, empty now of dragons but hazy with morning mist. And as the sun begins to rise, she gets the impression this is where Link once came to watch Dinraal pass. She longs for a world where she might stand here on this bridge and never cross it. Where she could stand invisible and watch his silhouette, framed there, looking away until the sun burns the mist away.

But that time is over and the Calamity is dead, so she crosses the bridge and takes a seat next to him. He glances at her. Eyes tracking her sidelong and neutrally as she dusts off her pant legs and watches the horizon. Eventually, he stops watching her and turns his pale gaze to the sky as well.

“Did I do that wrong?” Zelda says quietly, after a while. “With Draga I mean.”

Link immediately looks back at her, eyes a little wide. Then the look softens and he shakes his head. A bit of a smile touches his mouth and that brush of reassurance… she feels a tension unwind like a wire in her breast, threaded through her jaw and her shoulders. She nods and sits forward. Her feet dangle over the edge of the old wood planks.

“Thank goodness. I wasn’t sure.”

Link turns forward again, the lower half of his face hidden behind his folded arms.

“Can you talk to me?”

He raises a hand, signs one-handed, ‘More or less.’

“It’s okay. I’m not in a rush to talk about it really. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I don’t really like discussing the things that are most important. It’s much, much easier to talk about pumpkin soup, or the next destination to which we’re headed and why the Divine Beasts might wake again. That sort of thing.” She folds her hands in her lap. “That sort of thing is very easy to talk about. I like talking about that.” She thumbs a bit of fabric on her knee. “I think it’s my fault we’ve been together so long and still are strangers in some ways.”

Link looks at her without raising his chin from his arms, expression… almost blank.

“I don’t know you very well, do I?”

He doesn’t react exactly. His gaze flickers, just for a second.

“It’s strange isn’t it? I feel like I’m supposed to know you.” She folds and refold her hands in her lap. “Then at the same time I feel like I’m guessing about absolute everything, but that can’t be right. We killed Calamity together. Surely, our bond must be innate. Of course, we know each other. We’d know each other across time and space. I would recognize you through eternity. In every dimension and reality, I would know your face and find you.” She smirks, a little bitter. “Because that’s how this Chosen One horseshit works right?”

Link doesn’t laugh, but he smiles and kind of breathes out a bit too fast.

She smiles too, but only for a moment.

“But that’s not how it works, is it?”

They look out over the canyon again, where the sun is beginning to rise in the east.

“I don’t know what’s going on with you. Draga had to bait you before you admitted that you think, and have thought for years, that you’re going crazy? You’ll fight gods and demons with me but you won’t tell me when something scares you? Even if it could kill you? Is that where we are after all this time?” Her nails are digging into her knee. “It makes me feel like we haven’t moved an inch since I met you, like a century was nothing. Everything up until now was for… I hate that feeling.”

Link says nothing. His eyes are averted.

Zelda swallows.

“Link tell me right now: Are you here because you want to be or because you feel obligated to be?”

He looks at her. Eyes wide.

“I need to know.”

He signs, ‘I want to be.’

“Why?”

He stares. Confused.

“Why do you want to be here? Because it’s your duty? Because I’m the only one left? Because you’re trapped by the facts of our history. What is it?” And when he doesn’t speak or sign, she adds, “You know I love you, right?”

Link stops. He’s not being expressive right now. But even so, what he’s feeling must be powerful because she detects it – there and gone – a look of fear. Not wonder or relief. Just… fear.

It’s like a knife wound, of course, but she presses on. Calmly. Like she hadn’t seen that exact thing in her nightmares.

“Don’t misunderstand. I’m not demanding anything of you.”

Link’s face is unreadable again. She wrings her hands in her lap, maintains her even speaking.

“Please, honestly, that’s the last thing I want to do, but you should know. And I know it’s not fair to do that and I… I haven’t said it because what kind of person, princess or not, thinks that about someone who can’t…?” Who can’t say no to you, selfish girl. About a subordinate. Why not order him to stay? You know he would… “About someone pledged to her by others? Someone bound to you by circumstance and… terrible things shared? That’s no basis for anything. You don’t owe me anything. I want to be very clear about that: You don’t owe me. I would hate that.”

Zelda doesn’t know she’s supposed to go on. She closes her eyes.

“So, now that I’ve been selfish, tell me what you think. Please. Tell me ‘no’. Tell me you don’t feel that way and I’ll know and we can just go on. Or you could walk away, you know, if you wanted. Go live in your house at Hateno. Go put the sword back in its pedestal. Throw it into the sea. Whatever is enough.” Her voice hitches, just a little. “I don’t want you play a role for me anymore I just want you to do what you want. I don’t want to be the reason you’re out here. I want to see you – oh.”

Link’s hands cup her head, fingers dug into her scalp where her braids are starting to come undone. His mouth against hers is warm but insistent, a little clumsy with the urgency that drove him to interrupt her. He smells a little like camp smoke and a little like dragon fire and the pepper powder he cut into the soup. Hearth stone, battle, and heat. He draws her in a little further, gently, tilting his head so they fit more easily. His thumb smooths a warm path from her jaw to her ear and he breathes in, slowly, against her mouth. Then he pulls back just enough so he can look her in the eyes.

She’s surprised to find, he still looks terrified.

“I’m in love with you,” he says.

So softly she almost doesn’t hear it.

She can’t bring her words over a whisper. “You are?”

He nods.

“For how long?”

“Since you burned breakfast.”

She almost cries hearing that.

“Really?”

He nods and she kisses him.

“I’ve loved you for a hundred years,” she says, pulse rabbiting in her breast. “I love you so much. Do you really love me too?”

He laughs. “Yeah.”

She hooks two hands beneath his jaw and feels him smiling against her lips. So she kisses him harder, then again, even harder than before – enamored with her freedom to do so. Until her lips ache from kissing him, feel bruised from the effort but she doesn’t care at all because, if she could drink the way he tastes, she’d swallow a sea. But here, sitting on a bridge in Tabantha, she has to catch her breath. So they sit for a moment, so close she can feel him breathing. She can feel a shiver in his shoulders and a tremor on his tongue, transmitting electric when she, in a thoughtless instinct, brushes his lips with the pad of her thumb.

Link looks up at her.

He’s breathless. Not with violence (Has she ever seen him breathless in any other context?), eyes unfocused and dark and if she does not stop him right now then he’ll do whatever she wants and she can’t explain the twofold fear and longing that arouses in her. So, she carefully frames his face with both hands and dips her forehead against his.

She breathes slowly until he does too.

“Should we tell Draga to leave?”

He doesn’t pull away from her. He doesn’t even tense at the question, content to sit here breathing with her and knowing.

She shivers. “We’re so dangerous, Link. I didn’t want to think it, but we are. Can we let him stay?”

She opens her eyes, finds him looking at her.

“Do you want him to go?” she asks.

He hesitates. Then shakes his head.

“Are you okay with what he did?”

He turns a little red, then, signs, ‘Sort of.’

“Sort of?” Zelda says, worried.

‘I hate it when people try to touch me when I’m arguing with them.’

She blinks. “I didn’t know that.”

Link shrugs and signs ‘You never try to touch me when I’m mad.’ He grins. It’s not a nice grin exactly. ‘I’m pretty angry with him, actually.’

Zelda laughs. “Are you going to fight him when we get back?”

‘Maybe.’ He eyes her, then aloud, he says, “Do you want him to go?”

“No,” she says. “But I’m scared of why. I’m scared… all the time. Like I’m scared of you, Link, the way I think about you. It feels like a trick sometimes. Like it’s just a spell and I’m acting out the pieces of it.” She swallows. “It feels like that with Draga sometimes. I’m terrified I’ll wake up and the spell will be broken and it was never real at all.”

“I think it’s real,” Link murmurs.

“That doesn’t bother you? The possibility all of this is some… pre-determined alignment? The gods, or – or –”

“No.” He’s utterly flat. “And it doesn’t bother Draga either.”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked him, Zelda.”

“Oh.” She studies the way his eyebrows tick up. “What else have you asked him about?”

He tilts his head. “You make him nervous, you know.”

She scoffs. “What?”

“Draga. You make him nervous. He asked me not to tell you, but I’m cross with him, so I will.”

“Why wouldn’t he tell me that?” Zelda demands, annoyed.

“Because he likes you, stupid.”

“Oh.”

Link’s giving her the flattest look she’s ever seen before going on. “He can sense how powerful you are, all the time, and it actually drives him crazy, but he never says so because, I think, he knows it would make you self-conscious. Draga doesn’t care what we are. He doesn’t care about danger. He doesn’t care about magic or destiny. He’s been fighting a losing battle since he was a kid so the odds don’t faze him, Zelda. If we let him, I think he’ll stay with us forever.”

A shiver runs across her body when he says that – a formless excitement and dread.

“What do you think of that?”

“I –” He hesitates. “Is this too quick?”

“Draga nearly died last night fighting dragons for us, I think we need to figure this out.”

“Not that.” He touches her cheek, gently. “This. And Draga.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he wants. What do you want?”

Link turns a little red and looks away. “I… I don’t know.”

The longer Link talks, the more apparent his accent becomes – that rare cross of Lanayrian hit sideways by grammar learned in reverse – and Zelda thinks, quietly, that same inflection might be dead now one-hundred years later – linguistic drift making his voice an anachronism. A piece of history so minute it’s barely there but she gets to hear it and the notion, for some reason, fills her with a warm affection. Not precisely for him in this moment, but for the idea of him growing up reckless and a little strange somewhere in the mountains around Zora’s Domain.

Zelda leans forward and kisses him.

She says, “We don’t have to decide anything right now.”

Link closes his eyes, turning his face against the palm of her hand so her fingers slide into his hair. Part of her, still in awe that she can do this now, warms again. Joy is strange and incandescent, behind her cheeks and in her fingers, glowing in her belly and breast. She can’t stop looking at his eyes, at his mouth. Like she’s never seen them before somehow, not properly. He lets her kiss him again, carefully, easing her lips open against, his tongue warm and bitter in her mouth as his breathing quickens and a faint, shaky breath catches in the back of his throat.

She pulls away and he looks drunk, looking at her. He says something, but his voice isn’t behind it.

“What?”

“Please…”

An immediate clench of heat knots slick in her belly. Her breath hitches.

“Please what?”

He leans forward, one hand sliding up along her ribs, just below her breast. “Can I touch you?”

Zelda shivers. “Where?”

His hand slides down her ribs, her belly, lower, his fingers pressing a slow line of pressure against her skin through her clothes until she’s leaning back a little, easing her knees apart, until his hand is between her legs and his mouth against her ear when he says, “Here?”

And drags the pad of his index finger up from beneath her body, along the aching seam of her, pressing a slow circle until her hips flinch a little and her breath catches high in her throat. He cups her neck in his other hand and she leans back a little, so she can see when he removes the hand between her legs, brings his knuckles to his mouth, and uses his teeth to pull the worn leather glove from his hand. His eyes never leave hers as he does it.

Before he’s even finished she’s saying, “Yes.”

Link uses one hand to pull her belt open and unfasten the clasp on her pants. She lets him. She slides her legs apart, drawing one knee up a little, her other leg still hanging off the edge of the bridge. She lies back, hands running restless along the wood over her head, into her hair as Link slide his hand down the front of her pants.

Like he’s done this a hundred times. A thousand times, moving blind on muscle memory alone and something about that – the notion that he’s looking at her like a battlefield, like there are a hundred moves in mind – it makes her ache. His fingers slide south, exploratory, slow. Finding her where she’s hot, where she’s wet, where she whimpers when he touches her. Zelda breathes fast, shaky, a little anxious. Link goes slow. A single finger easing her open, touching her where she parts at the pressure, sliding slowly in. He minds her small breathy noises, how her walls tighten and clench at the penetration and she moans a little and says, “Keep going.”

Link doesn’t try for more. Just rocks into her, lazily, to the knuckle, then out. Over and over, until her body is rolling into the slow friction, hips canting forward against his hand, the first notch of his knuckle at the top of his palm where it slides against her clit. And when she does that, suddenly, his fingers – wet now with her own arousal – press a slow circle around that aching notch in her. She jerks, gasping, hips bucking up and a bloom of sensation spreads warm, painful lines of pleasure through her belly, coiling in her guts like a hand closing inside her.

She says, “Like that. Right there. Oh, goddess, harder…”

And he does it.

She tilts her hips up. Her hand finds his neck. “Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t.

And Zelda is panting, shaky, saying, “Like that, just like that, Link… I… oh.” She runs her hand along the back of his head, closes her fist in his hair. “Oh.” She sighs. She loses her voice, her body curling as the orgasm runs its path from her clit to the top of her spine, slaving every nerve briefly, mindlessly, to the pleasure and her toes go numb. Her nails dig into her knight’s scalp until she’s shivery and glowing, and smiling breathless, her mouth against his ear. “Well done.”

She feels Link shiver when she says it.

“Do it again?”

The sun is visible over the horizon by the time they get back.

The stable owners wave as they come in. The ranch hands are cooking breakfast. Soft, morning chatter rising in the little establishment. Link stops at the water pump outside to wash his hands, but then the two would-be-heroes of Hyrule just go straight upstairs. Link keeps paying for the two-bed suites at every stable they sleep at. Zelda knows it’s expensive but she also knows Link’s been too long on the road doing impossible things to mind. A week ago, she caught him remove a ruby the size of a fist from his travel pack.

Killing talus on Death Mountain, he’d informed her, is extremely lucrative.

The room smells faintly of smoke and burnt leather when they open the door. Draga’s travel gear is on the floor against the wall where it’s clear he started scrubbing dragon ash from the light armor, gave it up as a bad job, and left it. Draga is asleep. He’s lying belly-down on the bed at the far side of room, one arm hanging off the mattress, face buried in the crook of his opposite elbow. As usual, he has to sleep diagonally on it because it’s not long enough for a Gerudo to sleep in normally, much less one of his size. He didn’t finish undressing so it looks rather like he just fell into bed and didn’t get up.

When Zelda closes the door behind them they find three large glass bottles on the table near the door. Link picks one up, snorts. Hands it to her. It takes her a minute to realize he bottled all the soup they left behind in their sudden departure. Zelda uncorks one and the smell is mouthwatering and still just a little warm. A slight tingle in her palm suggests there’s a small enchantment in the glass, insulating it.

“That’s a good idea,” she says, sipping the bottled soup. “We could give up on heroics and sell bottled soup, you know.”

Link isn’t listening through.

He’s looking at the Master Sword, laying on their bed.

He left it with Zelda when he ran off and Zelda in turn left it with Draga. She’s not sure what he’s thinking, why there’s a faint edge in his expression. Then he moves to crouch by Draga’s bed. He does so casually, but without a single sound which suggest to Zelda he’s moving with some intention. He kneels and carefully take’s Draga’s hand, the one hanging off the bed, and turns it over to examine his bare palm, carefully unfurling his fingers so he can see.

“I didn’t know it had teeth,” Draga murmurs.

Link, not surprised that Draga is awake apparently, says, “I should have warned you.”

Draga’s hand is blistered, badly. Dark red wounds raised along his fingers and the creases of his palm. And not just blistered but… blackened along the capillaries and veins. The wound feels hot to Zelda, aching with sorcery. It takes Zelda a moment to realize what happened. Draga must have grabbed the sword by the hilt. Perhaps to pull it from the scabbard and look at it, or test its weight, or just to move it from where Link abandoned it by the cookfire. Link examines the injury with a practiced eye, not saying anything for a while. Draga watches him, waiting.

“It’s bound to me,” Link murmurs.

“Aggressively so,” Draga says, a little quieter than usual.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Link clarifies. “That it burned you, I mean. It did the same to me when I found it again.”

“I thought it was bound to you.”

“I wasn’t myself.”

Draga turns his hand over. “And this? What does this mean?”

Link runs two careful fingertips across the strange three-sided mark, just dark enough to stand out in Draga’s skin and even with his face half-tucked behind the crook of his arm, Zelda can tell he’s had enough time alone to think to think up some fears. His pale green stare is carefully neutral, trained on the mark burned into him by nothing less than some form of dragon fire, and she has a sense that his heart is racing, that his calm is manufactured, that he’s much closer now – Link holding his hand in a quiet room – to panic than he was fighting a demi-god the night before.

Link looks up at Draga, meeting his gaze. “It’s the mark of the ancient gods for the heart of the world. It has many meanings but I don’t know what it means for us.”

Draga’s face in unreadable when he rejoins, “I feel different.”

“How so?”

“It’s hard to explain. It’s like the borders that define me are much farther away now. Does that make sense?”

“I’m not sure.”

Draga breathes out, slowly. “This mark. You’ve seen it in your past lives.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“On my own hand. On Zelda’s hand. On the hand of a third person.”

“Your enemies.”

Link’s expression is serene, utterly matter of fact. He says, “My enemy is dead.”

Then he takes Draga’s wrist carefully in his hand because his palm is too burned to touch. Burned by the Master Sword. Branded by dragons. Afflicted in all sides by unfathomable things and Zelda thinks, perhaps, the persistent and relentless cycle of strange events is finally catching up to him. It may say something about Draga’s indominable and peculiar nature that nothing – not dragons, not ancient weaponry, not monsters, demons, or battle – frightened him like losing the limits of himself in a moment of solitude.

Zelda moves forward. “Let me see that,” she says, kneeling so she can see his hand. His palm smells like mint and fairy tonic. He must have tried to heal it, but the wounds seem impervious to medicinal affects. She sucks air between her teeth. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” He flexes his fingers to demonstrate. “It feels dead.”

Gingerly, Zelda touches the middle of Draga’s palm with her fingers, leaving a ripple of cool gold light like water droplets diffusing into the surface of a pond. She goes slowly. Running two fingers tipped in light from his wrist to the end of his middle and index fingers. She does this once, then twice, sets a pace. Red skin smooths where the gold radiates out, dead flesh laying back down, blood-flow returning to blistered layers and gradually the black necrosis left by the blade begins to recede. Eventually, there’s no sign of the burn. Just warm skin, slightly hot to the touch, and slick still with the now pointless healing ointment.

“How’s that?” she murmurs.

Draga flexes his hand, furling and unfurling long fingers. “Good. A bit raw.”

“Sensitive?” she asks.

“Yes. But thank you. I –”

Zelda cups the knuckles of his hand in hers and bends down to kiss his palm. She feels Draga freeze, hears him draw then hold a breath. Her lips leave a warm luminous moue in the creases of his hand when she breaks contact. Her lips taste like mint, tingle a little with fairy dust. Link’s still holding Draga’s wrist, not with any pressure, but his fingers around the Gerudo’s arm could be iron by the way he stills. So Zelda uses her fingers, guides his hand open so she can kiss the base of his thumb, his fingertips, her lips counting out the bend of his knuckles. And when she looks up, finally, his skin pressed with fading gold marks, Draga seems to finally let go the breath he first held.

He says, “What are you doing?”

Zelda leans up and fits her hand to the back of his neck.

When she pulls away, her tongue tastes like mint and the strange slightly bitter flavor of another person’s mouth. Draga stares, lips faintly wet with tonic and smelling of peppermint and something about that make her smile.

At least at first. A yawn follows shortly after. Draga blinks.

“I’m really tired,” she admits, climbing onto the mattress, kicking her boots off as she clambers over his legs.

Draga watches her do this, confused, while Link gets up and crosses the room. He closes the windows, pulling off his gloves, then unbuckles his belt, drawing it off and coiling it around his knuckles. Zelda picks clips from her hair, pulling elastic from her braids and unraveling them with her fingers as Link puts his things on the table, then pragmatically pushes the empty bed across the room. He stops when it’s flush against the bed they’re occupying. Then he grabs the Master Sword by the scabbard and slings it over the bed post, hanging by the baldric.

Draga eyes him warily, then Zelda, who is shaking her hair out, kinked with the braiding.

“What’s happening?” he says, finally.

“We’re going to sleep,” she says.

“What?”

Link takes a seat on the edge of the mattress. He pulls his tunic over his head, kicks his boots off and rolls over, grabbing a pillow.

“Move,” Zelda says, pushing Draga’s shoulder. “You’re too tall. We have to sleep across.”

He stares at her for a moment longer, then slowly rolls over to lay across the middle of both beds, Link on one side, Zelda on the other. Both have claimed a pillow each while he was distracted. Link gestures, indicating he’ll give his to Draga but Draga, baffled still, shakes his head. Link shrugs. He tucks his arm under it and promptly lies down and gets comfortable. He sleeps on his stomach when there’s a bed, but usually kicks over onto his back in the night so Zelda doesn’t envy Draga the thrashing.

“No. What is happening?” Draga demands after laying on his back, staring at the ceiling for about twenty seconds.

“Sleeping, if you’ll be quiet,” Zelda murmurs.

“Don’t be obtuse.”

“We don’t feel like making any decisions right now.”

Draga gestures at the ceiling. “You can’t just –”

Link punches Draga in the shoulder without opening his eyes.

Zelda says, “Shh.”

Draga fumes silently. It’s about two minutes of this, just as Draga’s starting to settle, that Link sits up suddenly. Like he just remembered something. He levers himself up on one arm so he can lean over and stare directly down into Draga’s frowning face.

“Don’t,” he says, “try to kiss me when I’m angry. I hate that.”

Draga blinks, eyes a little wide. “I… won’t.”

“I’m serious,” Link says quietly.

“I swear it then.”

“Good.” Then the Hero of Hyrule bends down and kisses him, easily. Casually. Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Then he pulls back, wipes the peppermint from his mouth with the back of his hand. He lies back down. “Night,” he says.

Zelda hears Draga say, softly, “Oh…”

She just smiles and closes her eyes.

She’s standing on a beach.

The tide rushes in over her feet, then pulls out, sucking the sand from around her heels before rolling back in, foaming gently around her ankles. The smell of the sea is like home as she lifts her arms and runs her fingers through her hair, shaking rain water from pale gold layers. Drops of shimmering light fall into the waves, floating, suspended like oil in water, before dissolving like dye. The waves keep rolling in, faster, impossibly so, until the water is around her knees, then her thighs, and the sea around her shimmers from contact with her. Her skin bleeding light into the waves.

She hears someone speaking behind her.

She turns.

Draga is standing on the beach.

The beach, she realizes, lies at the edge of a vast desert. Draga faces this desert, his back to her, and in the barren expanses beyond the shore she can see rolling dunes interrupted by broken spires. The skeletons of ancient cities. Vast monoliths, crumbling like sand castles in the distance as the desert rolls like the sea – uncovering the wreckage of what she knows to be mass graves, ten thousand-year-old battlefields fused by heat and pressure into a twisted foundation of steel and rotted iron. Then the sands roll in again. A tidal wave, ten stories tall. It slides over the horrific cenotaph, filling it in until the sands lay flat beneath the sickle moon.

Draga is speaking with what looks like a shrine statue.

It’s hard to say because it’s wreathed in shadow. Darkness so thick, she can only just make out the shape of the thing beneath the smoking blackness – a golem carved in stone. It stands a head and shoulders taller than Draga who stands a familiar figure to her. She knows his clothes. Leathers, Highland linen, the dark travel cloak she met him in. The outfit she always imagines when she’s thinking of Draga as a concept in passing – in her mind, he will always be like that day in Highland Stable: looking sidelong at her, his hood half-way down, a little surprised with her.

The tide is drawing her from the shore.

Zelda fights it, wading back toward the shallows. She tries to call out, but her voice is lost on the hot, stinking wind that blows from the desert. Draga can’t hear her and continues to speak to the statue. Or maybe he’s praying? No. He’s not. He’s rebuking it. Cursing dark shrine with the same reverence that someone would pay tithe at the foot of the Goddess. Zelda can see from the path in the sand behind the statue: that it was not always here on her beach. It walked here from the desert. It’s footprints smoking obsidian and glassy behind it.

The water is at her waist. She’s no longer making progress to the shore.

She has to reach the shore.

She’s saying Draga’s name, but it feels strange on her lips. The wrong shape.

Draga seems to hear her because he turns, looks over his shoulder toward her, and even from this great distance she has a sense of his face – surprised, looking at her, like the moment when she greeted him in his mother tongue on the side of the corral. He recognizes her. Starts to move toward her and when he does the waters recede from her breast, the pull of the tide losing its power and she knows. She knows it will be okay. She smiles. It will be –

The golem moves.

It snaps forward. There. Then suddenly directly at Draga’s back. It grabs him by his right arm. Draga staggers, surprised, yanked around by the reversed momentum. And then he’s facing the beast with its fist closed around elbow, a hand so massive it nearly engulfs his whole forearm. Slowly, the golem’s head turns to look down at him. Eyes burning within the darkness. Draga withstands its ancient gaze for just a second before he draws his sword and brings it down on the golem’s skull with a mighty one-handed swing.

The sword shatters instantly.

When Draga slams the broken stump of metal into its belly, the steel turns aside. Only then does he start thrashing. He bucks and throws his body back, but the thing is stone again. Black granite around his arm. He pries at it, pulling and twisting. He can’t get out of it. He can’t come to her. He can’t –

The golem moves again.

It jerks back two meters, like a chess piece sliding back two squares on a board, taking Draga with it. Indifferent to the way he panics, digging his heels in and wrenching like a trapped animal in a snare until she’s sure he’s dislocated his right arm, that his elbow is broken in the three places, that he’s still fighting despite that. He’d cut off his arm from the elbow down if that would get him loose. He slams his boot over and over into the pillar of shadow that composes the golem’s body but it doesn’t relent.

He keeps looking, panicked, past the golem.

To the desert.

To the dunes which are now yawning wide again behind them, a heat-rippled valley opening in the sands to that road paved in bone and melted armor, bristling with the spears and banners of dead civilizations – Gerudo, Sheikah, Twilit, and older. Much older. Primordial corpses twisted toward a dark core. Draga sees it and moans. A low primal noise of fear. Of denial. Ragged with terror. He tries to pull free again, but the golem drags him another agonizing step forward, inch by relentless inch, until Draga is slamming his fist bloody against the grip on his arm, until he’s broken every bone in his hand. And still… the golem pulls him toward the desert.

Draga’s looking at her now.

The bow is in her hands.

She has a clear shot. She draws the string to her cheek and looses the –

Zelda wrenches awake.

Her body is pressed against the twin headboards, her skin laved in sea water – no, stop, it’s over – in sweat. She sobs, once, panting, panicked, into her clenched fists and for a moment lives childishly in her head saying over and over: It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. So effectively does she do this that she briefly misses it: That someone is moving beside her. She rolls over, rubbing her face, vaguely occupied with the notion she’s disturbed her bedmates.

It takes her a moment to register what she’s looking at.

Link is still asleep, rolled over to the far side of the beds.

But Draga is having a nightmare. Not violently. Quietly. His spine curls up but falls back – like something is pinning his body down. Like he’d be thrashing if he could get free, but instead lies panting, eyes closed, head thrown back, arms digging into the mattress beneath him. In Gerudo, he’s saying something, but she can’t make it out – half done conjugations broken by hyperventilation. He can’t seem to come out of it. He… Zelda stops. There’s blood on the bedsheets. Draga’s right cheek is split, high along the zygomatic arch beneath his eyes.

(Exactly where the demon split it open that night in the Rito Village.)

When Draga groans and twists onto his side, she loops an arm around his flank, lays her other hand against the side of his head and says, “Wake up. Draga.” She keeps her voice warm and calm. “Hey. Wake up, okay?”

He opens his eyes.

Zelda feels him register her hands on him. Feels him tense instinctively but stop. He lies there, breathing hard. He says nothing to her. Draga gets up, swinging long legs to the floor, disturbing Link in his haste to stand up and go to the windows, throwing them open in rapid succession. He puts daylight into the room. Like something is going to be in there with them, sitting in the corners where the shadows are too deep to see through. He’s hot with magic. Immediate. Defensive and dirty with the smell of iron. It burns in his skin so thick her eyes water.

Link, who woke groggy, rouses fast at Draga’s magic – a smell linked irrevocably now to a fight. He grabs the Master Sword from the bed post and pulls the steel half way from the scabbard.

The blade is burning silver.

Link watches, expressionless, eyes reflecting the light, as the glow fades from the metal. Once it’s dark, he sheathes it and looks at Draga.

“Was it here?”

Draga doesn’t say anything. He keeps his back to the window, to the sunshine coming through it, laying warm yellow light over his back and shoulders. Making him impervious, surely, to the approach of shadowy things, crawling on their bellies through black deserts. Surely. He uses his sleeve to staunch the flow of blood from his bleeding cheek. Casual. Like the wound signifies nothing at all. Like he’s done this before.

“This happens after a bad fight sometimes.”

Link sets the sword aside. “Are you alright?”

“I’ll be fine. I had to reset my old wards. I just missed a few so it… tried me.”

His hands are shaking. Zelda knows Link sees it, but he’s pretending not to. She catches his eye, briefly, as he stands up and crosses the room, stretching a little and rotating his wrist in one hand. Draga watches his approach with a wary, feigned disinterest. Like their morning might go on as normal. Like you can recover the day from such a thing. Link pats himself in front of Draga and stares unabashedly up at him, like he’s searching his face for something past the scowl.

Eventually, he says, “Dinraal changed something, didn’t she?”

Draga says nothing for a moment, then, “How can you possibly know that?”

Link shrugs.

“Yes, but I’ll be fine. I’ll adapt.”

“Adapt to what?” Zelda says warily. And when no one answers, she repeats, “Adapt to what, Draga?”

He hisses in frustration. “Remember when I told you that I had long since reached the limits of my power?”

“Yes.”

“Since the dragon came… I’ve lost those limits. They’re gone. There’s just... an eternal void where those boundaries once were. Like building your house on a plot of land, then waking up in a labyrinth.” He shakes his head, a tense, barely controlled movement. “I was not prepared for that. It’s like guarding a house, Zelda. If I know the layout, then I see when something is trying to break in. If the house is too big, I cannot guard all the doors and things get in.” He never looks away from her. There’s sun on his neck, putting threads of bright copper in his hair, warm tones in the dark of his skin. He says, “There is at least one in me that is always left open.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Draga looks away.

Zelda feels Link’s tense, feels her own heart stutter in her chest and without thinking or even means to ensure it, she says, “You’re safe with us though.” She crosses the space between them, reaching up to touch his arm. “Draga, listen to me. I think you’re Goddess-touched. The way you described your magic just now…… is how I’ve felt since my power awakened one-hundred years ago… like an ocean had opened up within me. Too big to comprehend, but a part of me.”

“This isn’t part of me,” Draga murmurs.

“No, but you can learn to handle it. I know you can. Just… don’t let scare you.” She squeezes his arm gently. “I can help.”

He pulls away. “Stop trying to do that.”

“What?”

“Stop trying to protect me. You can’t.”

She stops, bewildered, a little hurt. “We did once before.”

“I was only in danger because I put myself there. For you.”

“Then let us do the same.”

The look he gives her is colder than any he’s ever offered before. “I was fine protecting myself until I met you two.”

Which is, of course, a terrible thing to say. Something you say either when you mean it or you want to hurt someone for the sake of driving them off and Zelda cannot say with any confidence that she knows which way Draga might feel in this moment. He looks more afraid than she can remember him ever being. She’s not sure what he’s like when he’s afraid with no enemy to fight. Nothing physical to react against. She gives him a full five seconds to really listen to what he just said to her before she asks, softly, genuinely:

“Do you really believe that?”

She sees the regret cross Draga’s face before he can hide it. A strain of desperation.

He starts to say something. To tell her that is exactly what he believes. That none of this would have happened if they’d just gone their separate ways. That they’re all too dangerous for one another. That he made a mistake.

But Link's too close and he's fast. He moves – that dangerous speed, never there until the killing blow – closing the space between then and hooking two hands in Draga’s collar. Then, with more force than would seem possible, he holds him there. Yanking him back. Draga grabs his shoulders and pushes him, but Link is (as always) infinitely more solid than he looks. He just braces his weight back, stubbornly, glaring at the bigger swordsman, yanking a little to maintain their present distance. He refuses to let go.

"Don't," Draga says quietly.

Zelda can smell copper, taste it, like a coin on her tongue. Defensive and warm.

“Don’t what?” Link says.

“I don’t want your heroics.”

Link maintains his neutral tone. “You fought a dragon for us.”

“I don’t care.”

“Bullshit,” Link says, fingers tightening, lines in his wrists visible from the force of it.

"If you don’t let go of me, Hero, I’m going to –”

Zelda interrupts him by reaching up and hooking her fingers into the front of Draga’s shirt and in tandem with Link – with more force than would seem possible or even necessary – she yanks the larger man down to her. And in the same moment, Zelda moves to fit her mouth against the split in Draga’s cheekbone. Gold in her lips. Light on her tongue. It diffuses gently into the wound and it’s gone when she withdraws. She draws her fingers gently across the new skin, leaving her hand pressed against his cheek. He’s looking at her – a terrible look – hopeful and horrified.

“Let us protect you,” she says.

Draga shivers and conductive static rushes across her palm.

“Let us protect you,” Zelda says again. She moves her hand across his cheek, smoothing her thumb alone the high curve of his cheekbone – a gesture she’s never shared with him, but natural as if she’s done it a hundred times. “Please. If you want. If you’re with us…?”

He breathes out, shakily. She sees it before he says it.

“This feels like…”

“We’re not a fucking spell,” Zelda whispers, cutting her teeth on the words. She slides her hand back beyond his temple into his hair – red as rust between her fingers, sticking up where it’s too short. “We’re not a shadow on a wall. We’re the ones who killed the Calamity. What do you want, Draga?”

He starts to say, “I want –” but she pulls him down to her.

He shivers again when she does it, the vibration on her tongue.

“Stay with us,” she says. “Stay with us, okay?”

He’s shaking and that’s remarkable, like reaching her fingers into the roots of the world and causing mountain ranges to tremble and the thought puts an indescribable knot of desperation in her. A mad notion that translates ineffectively to yet another kiss, a series of kisses, each one a poor translation for the desire in her – not to just be with him, but be part of him, to inhabit the same space as him simultaneously, impossibly – and Draga seems to bend. Like metal drawn into an impossible magnetism, breaking under every touch.

“I can’t rely on you,” he says raggedly.

“Yes, you can.”

His breath is shallow, mouth drawn as if in pain. “You can’t say that, Zelda. You won’t always be here.”

“We’ll be here as long as you need us.”

“I don’t want you to stay with me “– he struggles to admit it “—just because you think I’m in danger.”

And Zelda laughs. But her eyes sting as she does it.

“You’re confused. You’ll always be in danger with us, Draga.” She bites her lip, shakes her head, fingers running a restless path through his hair. “I’m so sorry. If I was acting because out of nobility, I would tell you to run from us. To go back to the road and never look back because I think you’re strong enough to bear your curse without us. I do. I know it. But I’m selfish and I’m so tired of losing things and I want you. I want you to stay.” She laughs again, shrugging, helpless. “Maybe we’ll get you killed. Maybe we can protect you. I don’t know, Draga, I really don’t know but I know things feel right when you’re with us. I know that it… hurts when I think about walking away and if you feel the same then –”

He lays his fingers over her mouth.

His eyes study hers, so near she can make out every detail in their composition.

“Stop explaining,” he says gently.

He looks at Link.

Link doesn’t say anything.

He loops a hand around the nape of Draga’s neck and pulls him down too. Until he’s not pulling Draga in anymore. The second time around, they fit together more easily despite Zelda caught between them (or maybe, because of Zelda caught between them). Nothing changes. Dragons don’t pull the sky open. No golden violence befalls them. Nothing moves in the shadows. They’re just standing there, the three of them in a band of sunshine coming through the window. Skin warming in the light. Listening closely, finally, to the strange racing in their blood and the machinery of their hearts.

After a while, Draga says, “I’ll stay.”

go to chapter 9

#legend of zelda #breath of the wild #loz #botw #legend of zelda breath of the wild #zelda #link #ganondorf #lozfic #interim #interim chapter #in which the cycle starts over immediately #and no one told link and zelda #that your destined enemy #was probably just a dude at some point #and he might try to guy a giant horse off you #rae writes #raewrites

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