Work Text:
Link Dekuson was a hero of the realm. And as such, the people of Hyrule had expected him to do the only logical thing. Accept a knighthood from the king and marry Princess Zelda, start a family and settle down to a quiet life of royalty and privilege.
Instead a messenger had been sent from the Zora Realm to Hyrule castle to inform the court that Link Dekuson had been engaged to Prince Ruto, the heir to the Zoran kingdom for eight years.
The court had erupted at the scandal, Zelda had seemed both amused and relieved that she wouldn’t be expected to marry just yet, and Link couldn’t say he was overly surprised at the news. He’d seen Ruto in the water temple six months before Ganondorf’s defeat, and though the man hadn’t openly spoken of their childhood engagement, Link had gotten the impression that Ruto had simply been biding his time.
So Link had gone to the Zoran Realm, a place he’d seen in both beauty and chaos, a place he’d managed to restore after the defeat of the evil King, a place he’d always felt at peace in. He’d never been used to having a home, not since he’d been given a fairy and tasked with saving Hyrule when he’d been a boy of ten. So when he’d been given a room of his own, and been expected to fill it with his belongings, he’d been lost. For the last year, everything he’d needed had been carried on him.
It was a change for the Hero of Time. Settling down instead of waiting for the next battle to fall into his lap. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Link had expected Ruto to have the wedding ceremony ready as soon as he’d stepped into the realm. What he hadn’t expected was to be wooed. Ruto had started giving him gifts, small things that wouldn’t mean much to anyone else, but to Link they showed a great deal of care and thought.
Ruto had grown from the spoiled prince he’d been into a thoughtful young Zora. He’d stopped thinking only of himself and started thinking not only of his people, but of Hyrule as a whole. It hadn’t only been his realm that had been destroyed by Ganondorf, the entire countryside had been touched by the blackness.
And only one man had stood between Hyrule and the dark King.
Ruto would admit to a sort of pettiness of knowing that Link had chosen him over the human princess. He could have blown off the claim of engagement, explained to the humans that he’d agreed to it only to obtain one of the Spiritual Stones that had allowed him to open the door of time. Instead he’d honored his promise, and six months after he’d returned to the Zora realm, he stood beside Ruto and repeated the time honored phrase in both Zoran and Hyrulian.
Pledging his life to Ruto and the people of the realm. Promising to always be there for Ruto, especially when he was needed most. The words seemed shallow after all they’d been through, but Link’s eyes stayed on Ruto’s throughout the ceremony, the bright blue of shallow water.
The ceremony had been anything but small. It was held on the banks of Lake Hyrule, the entire Zoran realm in attendance. The Goron king and his people stood on the bank, next to the Kokori people who had been Link's family first.
Not to be upstaged, the entire Hyrulian court had shown up in all their finery. Even the Gerudo people had come, the entire realm present to show their fealty and respect to the man who had saved them all.
It wasn't until after the ceremony that Zelda started to wonder if she should have fought harder to keep Link by her side. She'd been his guiding star in the quest to defeat Ganondorf, and she'd been almost certain that if she'd asked him, he would have denied his engagement to the Zoran prince and stayed with her.
Instead she'd been too afraid, marriage and all the trappings that came with it had been so far from her mind that when the possibility of finding a husband had reared it's head, she'd panicked and pushed away the only man who she'd ever imagined at her side.
It was strange to see him next to Ruto, now King of the Zoran realm. He looked happy, and that was even stranger. It wasn't that she didn't want him to be happy, it was more that every single time she'd seen him in the past he'd looked as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders, which she supposed, it had been.
For a moment she wished she'd stopped, wished she'd been selfish and greedy and kept Link for herself instead of letting him leave her side. But it was far too late for wishes, far too late to wonder and imagine about what might have happened. Link belong to another now, and by the looks of things the Zoran king was about to let him go any time soon.