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Link wakes up to an empty room.
He’s still not used to feeling cold like this, like half of his body has been ripped away. The blanket slips from his shoulders, and he sits up. It’s funny; the bed feels so big these days. He’d argued about it with Zelda before—he wanted to get a bigger one, but she’d refused. I like being close to you, she’d said, her head bowed just enough for him to see her cheeks go red. And that was that.
Zelda.
His eyes drift to his sword propped up against the wall, and he stands, suddenly numb. The blade is smooth, pulses sometimes with desire; he knows why it hasn’t gone quiet. He pulled it from her head, after all. It was splitting her in two, housed right between those great glowing eyes. And Link knows she’d wanted him to find her and wrench it out, but once he had, he’d laid down and just cried, his fingers tangling in her hair. She made the wind kinder, did not buck him off or do much of anything, really. He wondered if she remembered him. And then he’d thought of the Calamity and the field Zelda had found him in, her dress full and white again. She’d smiled at him. He hadn’t trusted himself to speak.
May I ask, she’d said, her voice suddenly uncertain, do you really remember me?
It was easier to be the one who forgot, he thinks angrily. Is this how Zelda felt all those years, trapped immovably in Ganon’s embrace? He is guilty and angry and ashamed. He’s still himself, new memories overlapping with Zelda’s meticulous records, and she’s—well. He doesn’t know how much she remembers, but her hands have turned to claws and her skin to scales. She has the same hair, though. She smells like the wind.
He doesn’t know how long he’d stayed on her back, but when he stood up, she’d roared. Her gums were black and blue.
“You’re still Zelda,” he’d whispered, pressing his hand to her forehead. He’d squeezed his eyes shut, willing the pain in the back of his throat to disappear. “And I’ll bring you home, okay?”
She said nothing. The empty, gaping wound of her skull stared up at him; he held the Master Sword tighter.
“I love you,” he’d said, just for himself. “And I hope you remember me when this is all over.”
And then he’d fallen through the sky in a haze, the sword strapped tightly to his back.
“That’s the Light Dragon,” Purah tells him. Her legs are crossed at the knee; she’s on her third cup of coffee. “I don’t know what to make of her. Never have.”
“It’s Zelda,” Link says dumbly, again and again. When he closes his eyes, he can still feel the ripple of her hair through his fingertips. His sword sits on the table—Purah’s been examining it since he got back. She’s most herself when she’s working, he thinks. Not so different from Zelda.
“No trace of decay,” Purah announces, sounding unsurprised. “Link, you realize this is insane, don’t you? Every manmade weapon in this world is pretty much useless. Except for this one.”
“It’s Zelda,” he whispers again, grief sharp and hot on the back of his tongue.
Purah eyes him for a long moment, then stands up, knocking her chair back. “I’ll get you dinner,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. Where else would he go? To Hateno, with its gaping chasm of a bed, the photos on the walls a reminder of everything Zelda loves? The table is still set for two. The flower on their nightstand has wilted and dried in its vase—she would kill him if she knew, but she’s a world away now.
Purah brings him dinner. He thinks she must have mixed sundelions in, but the chill that has settled over him is not so easily dispersed. He wants to lie down right there, cry again like he had into Zelda’s hair, but he has to bring her back, so he sits quietly and eats his food. He’d heard her, after all. You must come find me. And he had, but where had that gotten him? All he has is his sword back. He’d easily trade the sword for the girl—he would in every timeline, every universe.
“She did all of this just to get the sword to me,” he whispers. His voice is rough. “All of this for a blade. I saw her eyes, Purah, and they were—” He breaks off, wiping his eyes roughly with his unfamiliar hand. “They were beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. But it wasn’t her, not the way I wanted her to be.”
“Link,” Purah says, and it’s just his name—no stupid nicknames, no trace of levity. “We’ll find her, okay? We’ll bring her back.”
“But I did find her,” he breathes, and tears roll down his cheeks, hot and slow. “She did this all for me, and now she’s—she’s in the sky.” He wipes furiously at his face. “Her scales are beautiful, Purah. It’s so awful. I told her I’d bring her home, and so I have to, don’t I?”
Purah just stares at him for a long moment, tears building in the corners of her eyes.
“I have to,” Link repeats, and his head falls to his hands. “Purah, you know her—she’s strong. Stronger than anyone I know. She’ll be okay, won’t she?”
“I think she will be,” Purah says softly. Her hand falls to the table, her finger tracing slowly over the wood grain. “The two of you must be the strongest people in this world. You’ll find each other again. You always do.”
His breath catches in his throat. He runs his hands over his eyes again, knowing his face must be red and blotchy, and he stands up.
“I should go,” he chokes out. She’s kind, but he doesn’t want her to be there for the fallout. “I’ll stop by again soon. Thank you for dinner.”
“Thank you for coming,” Purah says. And then, softer: “You’ll always have a bed here.”
“I know,” he says.
But he goes back to Hateno, because somewhere along the long, slow road, he’d started calling it home. Home, with all the pans hung up on the wall, his weapon mounts shoved under the stairs so that Zelda could hang framed pictures around the house. Home with a tiny bed that suddenly feels like his worst possible fate. Home with flowers in the front yard and a single tomato plant behind the shed.
He sees Zelda in his dreams. She’s wearing a different dress and soft earrings, looking every inch a princess. He sees her and Rauru and Sonia, and when he calls out to Zelda, Rauru’s hand flies off his arm and chokes him until he wakes up, gasping. It shakes him, but doesn’t surprise him much; he never seems to stay asleep for long, these days. He and Zelda had both had nightmares, but it had never been as bad when she was in this bed with him, her arms around his stomach, pulling him close. It’s hard to do a lot without her. He’d gotten so used to being alone, and then he’d killed every incarnation of Ganon and pulled her out of the ring of destiny and taken her to this little house, and she’d been—she’d been happy. He’d cut her hair with a pair of kitchen scissors. She’d held his hand under the table.
He wakes for the last time screaming her name. He looks down at his arm, and it’s not corrupted, not anymore, but he curses it anyway. If he’d had Rauru’s arm sooner, with its smooth almost-skin and brittle nails, could he have caught her? She’d fallen again, in his dream, and he’d had to watch. He wonders if it’ll always be like this: her slipping away for the rest of his life, him unable to do anything but watch, recall, remember too late.
He makes himself breakfast. He has things to do and people to talk to, but he makes himself an omelet and it feels like a monumental task. He eats it slowly, tasting nothing, trying to swallow around the lump in his throat when he looks across the table at Zelda’s empty chair.
He starts writing a letter to Purah: I’m going to find Ganondorf and kill him. And then I’m going to turn Zelda back. And then he rips it up and throws it away, because it sounds childish and idealistic, and Zelda turned herself into a fucking dragon for him, and the world is still spinning like nothing happened.
He goes to the store instead. Buys some rice and arrows and a jug of milk.
“I haven’t seen the princess around,” Pruce, the shopkeeper, tells him. He hands Link the arrows in a neat bundle. “But I’ll let you know if I do.”
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
“Seems like the whole world’s in disarray after the Upheaval,” Pruce says. “I’m sure she’s out there.”
“She is,” Link says. “I’ll find her.”
“That’s the spirit,” Pruce laughs. “It’s no wonder you’re so eager to bring her home. I’d be furious if that was my girl.”
Zelda is nobody’s girl, Link wants to say. Zelda has been fighting a war the townspeople can barely fathom, and she belongs to no one—not her father, not Ganon, not him. Most of the people in this town weren’t alive before the Calamity; they never knew Zelda as anything more than a sad story until Link showed up a hundred years in the future and took her home.
He takes his food back to the house, and then he goes straight to Purah.
“I’m going to find Ganondorf,” he says, “and I’m going to kill him. And then I’m going to bring Zelda home.”
Purah looks up from her notebook. Her desk is as messy as ever, notes strewn over each other and pinned hastily to the walls. “This kingdom will never deserve you,” she says. “But Zelda does. You’re wonderful, Link.”
“I’m just her—” Knight, he almost says, but that’s not entirely true, not anymore. He’s wearing clothes he bought in Rito Village because he doesn’t run hot these days. He has no idea where the blue tunic he wore so often has disappeared off to, and he keeps Zelda’s clothes in a box under the stairs because even though he could ask Hudson to build him a closet, he hasn’t spoken to him at all. Link’s house is Zelda’s house, and he spent every minute by her side until that fall under the castle—what does that make him?
“—I don’t know,” he finishes lamely. “But I care about her, and I don’t think anyone else would be able to do this.”
Purah smiles. “Not a single soul.”
He smiles tentatively back. It’s the lightest he’s felt in days.
“I do hope it all works out,” she says. “You were so happy when she came back. I’d never seen you like that—certainly not before the Calamity, and not when you were trying to find her. I really do think you’ll be able to find her again, Link. It’s what you two do, isn’t it?”
It’s what they do. Over and over and over. Every timeline, every universe. He knows he’d settle for nothing less, and neither would she. And so he will go beneath the castle, and he will fish her out of the open maw of fate, and when it’s all over, he’ll take her back to Hateno.
“Thank you,” he tells Purah. He doesn’t know how to tell her, but he loves her, and he hopes she knows. “I’ll be back when this is all over.”
“I know you will,” she whispers, and she stands up and pulls him into a hug. “Stay safe, Link.”
“I will,” he says. He doesn’t know how to do much else.
He realizes how much he loves Zelda when he hears Sidon talk about Yona. Sidon says she is wonderful and motivational and a handful of other words that go by too quickly for him to catch. She is what makes him want to be better, he says, both for himself and for the kingdom.
“And she’s beautiful,” he sighs, smiling at Link. “I’ll be glad to call her my queen.”
Link hadn’t even known he was engaged.
“I hope you find someone like this,” Sidon tells him. “You deserve it.”
“Maybe,” Link says.
Sidon’s mouth twists a little. He must be thinking about Mipha, about how she loved Link with so much of herself. If she’d loved him a little less, she might still be—no. It’s foolish to think like that. She was a Champion, too. Link just happened to be the one who survived.
“You deserve someone who will light up every room they’re in,” Sidon says, the slope of his mouth no longer complicated. “Yona is wonderful like that. I’m very lucky.”
Zelda already does that, Link thinks to himself. And everyone loves her. The children flock around her both in and out of school, and everyone she talks to seems to walk away happier. And sometimes Link will wake up before her and just watch her breathe, letting himself fall into the same rhythm. He’ll let his hands fall to her hair, combing gently through until she wakes up and smiles sleepily at him. And it’s so easy, her head on his chest and her arms around him. He’s never asked for anything more. It felt dangerous to think about, even more so now that she’s gone.
“I’m sure everything will fall into place one day,” Sidon says, clapping Link on the shoulder.
Link tells himself that he will deserve bright rooms if he can bring Zelda back down to the earth. He’s not stupid; he knows what it means to be in a relationship, how couples act with each other. And they’re tied together by something, he and Zelda: fate, or her father’s memory, or maybe just love. He loves her; how could he not? But even after they’d spent weeks standing together in front of the stove, his arm sleepily around her waist, he’d tried to avoid thinking about the full extent of what she meant to him. They were both relearning how to live, and they both knew whatever was between them would have to be excruciatingly slow.
Of course he’s in love with her. Does it make much of a difference? He supposes he can figure it all out when she’s home. Thinking about it now makes him feel too raw, too vulnerable.
Sidon invites him to their wedding. Link promises he will go.
“Bring Princess Zelda,” Sidon says gently, his voice low. “We’ll wait for you, okay?”
Link almost starts crying. He nods, letting Sidon shake his hand firmly. Sidon pledges himself to Link, and then he leaves to find Yona. And Link is alone again, though not for very long.
He’s talked to four sages now, every one of them willing to do whatever it takes to save Zelda. And so he makes his way to the castle, the sword she saved held tight in his hand. It glows, and he listens hard, though she was always better at understanding it than he was. But he thinks he gets it, today—she’s close by.
And then he sees her up in the sky, her hair long and lovely, her eyes every color under the sun.
I will bring you home, he thinks, and he plunges downward.