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When I think of how you move—
when you enter a room, how the room
enters you; when you step out
into the night, how the night sky
falls into your hair—
when I think of how you stand
as if with nothing in your hands
and I have nothing to offer you now
save my own wild emptiness—
when I think of how you leave
the air untouched and how you came
into the world my grief had wrecked
and made it shine again by simply
walking slowly through the dark
toward me—love, I think
the body is a miracle, that animal
whose graceful shadow
lies between us, calmed.
After falling out of the sky and stumbling through the undergrowth for a few days, he finally finds his way back to Hateno. Hyrule has changed again. Things that aren't him keep falling out of the sky even after he's rolled into a bush and licked all his wounds: rocks, plants, slabs of stone as tall as a church. It's a terrible safety hazard, and he makes several detours to save small children and animals to whom it doesn't occur to look up.
In the months after the calamity, they had built a school. What will all the teachers do now? Wait? Again? A hundred years? What about him? Wait, or run?
He runs. He follows the voices in his head, a regular occurrence now that does not frighten him. Every night he eats berries and steamed fish by the glow of a small fire and pretends that this is everything he has ever known, and fails.
When Zelda comes back they'll sit in the house in Hateno and eat omelettes. When Zelda comes back they'll wrestle in the grass like children and chase each other up hills. She'll read books twice the size of her head and he'll make apple sauce using the apples they picked from the tree in the yard. They'll eat apple jam on toast, then wildberry, juniper, apricot, every kind of fruit under the sun. They'll reopen the school in Hateno, and children will play under the leaves.
But right now Link is just Link is just Link with a broken sword and a broken arm and a big broken heart. He's not helpless when he's alone, he just doesn't like it. It feels too much like when he woke up in the blue water and all he could see above was a deep brown sky. And his body wasn't his body yet. And his soul was stuck in the ceiling. All he knew was someone had called to him, and that their voice had swept into his bloodstream and crossed the great blood-brain barrier to the space right behind his eyes.
There, the ghost of his princess curled up with her head tucked against her knees, and began to cry.
::
The worst part is that this has happened before. He cannot say that he was caught off guard and he cannot say that he did not know any better. He replays the events of the day over and over in his head, hunting deer in West Necluda, riding a wild horse into a stable at the foot of Eldin Canyon, trying to smash two planks of wood together in a way that will make them float.
They had been warned by everything with a pulse that the pit underneath the castle was dangerous. But Zelda was curious, so curious, and who was he to say no? The castle wasn't even being used, they hadn't gotten that far. Purah, Paya, and Beedle offered to come with differing amounts of conviction and Zelda told them all to not worry, it was a preliminary expedition and nothing would happen. It both pleased and frightened him that she trusted him so much. She wore the Hylian cape with a hood, the one that he had bought the first time he went to Kakariko village because he thought it should remind him of home. Of course, after the war was over, they bought another. But she liked to wear the old one. She said it smelled like him.
The path underneath the castle was dark and wet and shimmered where the light fell upon its crevices. How old? Zelda wondered. He stared at the back of her neck. Maybe he should have insisted on holding her hand. It was unbecoming of a princess to be tethered to her knight and she hated being tied down. Which he understood. It was a conversation they had had many times. But this place made him feel sick, like when he'd spent too long screaming his head off while riding around on a bear and gravity started to do uncanny things to his stomach. This place was very, very bad.
He didn't talk. He still wasn't very good at it, even though he understood on some vague intellectual level that he was a person now and therefore could say things to people or objects if the impulse struck him. It rarely did. He found he liked the quiet. Zelda was perfectly happy to talk for the two of them and asked him all manner of questions on their journeys and walks, smiling when he replied with his words and smiling still when he lifted a shoulder or an eyebrow or gestured with his hands.
This did not stop Zelda from finding out that he loved her. Much to his initial chagrin.
But that day he didn't talk, and because he didn't talk Zelda didn't know that Link thought she was going to disappear into a crack in the ground, and then the mummy exhaled and the floor split open just like he thought it would and Zelda was falling away from him. Surprise swept across her face, then panic, then bleak, quiet resignation. But never fear.
He leaped, of course he did. But because he wasn't holding Zelda's hand when the world broke in half she fell left of the center and he pitched right, and so it came to be that Link would never be able to save Zelda the first time anything happened.
He woke up, alone, in the dark.
::
Someone once told him, your suffering is beautiful because you are so selfless. Apparently he had been a real party rocker in his youth. By the time he was five he had beaten all the older kids in sword fighting twice over, though he still hadn't spoken a word. This unsettled his father so much that he was sent straight to the castle and told not to come back. There, he spent the rest of his childhood sharpening a knife. He met Zelda somewhere in that ambiguous, misshapen childhood, upon which he was finally identified as the Hero who wields the Sword that Seals the Darkness, and was made to swear fealty to her. He was twelve.
For the longest time he thought he might have been born with a sword in his chest like a big beacon calling out to the elders of Hyrule, saying this is him! The hero! Let's tie him to a stake like a dog! After all, until he met Zelda there was no one to tell him otherwise. Everyone wanted him to know what he'd done in his previous life of which he had little or no memory. But they wouldn't tell him what he was like. In the broader scheme of things he supposed it didn't matter— it just made him feel a little off balance, like he was a carriage they'd loaded up front-heavy, liable to tip over at the slightest provocation.
Zelda seemed hesitant to talk about the old world at first. Which he understood. He wasn't a talker himself. But after a few months, after visiting all the new leaders and praying at their friends' graves, and Uma's passing, a string of parties which he had known about but never attended, being too busy getting killed in all the worst places, but which Zelda loved like nothing she had ever seen, she yielded. Stopped holding her shoulders like weights. Smiled at him for longer than five seconds, until he found a way to smile back.
"You were totally, utterly perfect," she said once, folding towels at the table while he watched the pot boil. "It frustrated me terribly, because I wasn't."
He inclined his head. Really?
Zelda picked up the stack of towels. "No, you were weird and shy and clearly had not been socialized as a child." She went up the stairs to the loft, put the towels away in the cabinet. When she came back down, she continued: "You were proud of your sword. You didn't have much else."
"Once, a horde of bokoblins passed by while I was praying. You were standing guard at my back, and leapt to your feet to give chase." Zelda reached for the condiment tower and picked out a few spices. "I expected you would be back in ten minutes, fifteen at most. But you were gone two whole hours! You had followed the bokoblins back to their cave and wiped out the whole colony." She leaned over his shoulder and pinched cardamom, pepper, Goron spice into the pot. "You were worried they would come back, now that they had seen me. That's why you ran so fast."
He didn't remember much of that previous life, but he remembered feeling very afraid for her constantly. It was a dangerous time to be alive after all, with the calamity looming and monsters drawing closer to the settlements with each passing day, as if they knew. Even the castle scared them no longer, in the end days. It devastated him that he couldn't protect her with the kind of Newtonian confidence he had sworn to have at her father's feet. It killed him, a little.
She said he would never look her in the face when she was patching him up. Sometimes she would sneak a glance at him in the middle of cutting gauze, and see that his eyes were red.
Because I was in pain?
"No, because you were upset."
He liked to imagine what he would do as he were now, if he would choose any differently. Sometimes the answer was yes. Mostly the answer was no. But the times when the answer was yes were significant. He held them close to his heart, like tiny stars.
::
It takes him far too long to get anything done in the new world. He keeps working on part of the problem that he'll surely never solve and then returning to Hateno in the middle of the day to stand in the kitchen like an idiot. It feels like he will never remove the sludge from the waters of Zora's Domain or discover the secret of the glowing rocks. Every time he pulls out his Sheikah Slate, Yunobo or Sidon or whoever stares at him with huge, dopey eyes and asks him if he's really going to leave in the middle of this important mission, and what about Princess Zelda? He goes anyway. He glides down the hill into town and unbolts the door to the house he lives in. On the walls are Zelda's photos, at the desk are Zelda's notes. Wildflowers he picked for her the last time he left to kill monsters sit in a vase on the table. He stands in the kitchen and breathes it all in.
He cleans the house meticulously in between missions, washing the sheets until the fabric pills and threatens to rip. His own clothes tear and waste away. The green tunic, the one that wraps around half of his torso, develops new tatters.
Beedle finds him one day in a stable, or outside of it, he's not sure and doesn't super care either way.
"Beetles, beetles! Are you taking care of yourself?"
It's been sixty nine years since he heard that name. He stops, mid-nothing, to look.
"Oh, you poor thing!" Beedle invites himself to sit. "What happened to you? Hyrule's a mess! And your arm looks like a wind turbine!"
He supposes it does. He says as much.
Beedle presses a string of preserved beetles into his hands. "On the house! You look like you need strength and speed and love, so much love!" He fishes another strand out of his pack. "They say a beetle a day… I'm not super sure what it does! But it sure as sunshine made me!" He cranes his neck back and begins mechanically inserting the beetles into his mouth.
If he doesn't focus too hard the beetles start to look like shiny orbs, with how they reflect the warm glow of the inn's lamps. Like the light flowers… the ones he's never seen before, which have come from out of seemingly nowhere…
"Link?" Beedle has stopped swallowing and is pulling the beetles one at a time out of his gaping, fish-like maw. "Linky link? Link?"
But Link isn't listening. Link has fallen asleep with the beetles still in his lap, writhing and writhing and writhing in their superb deadness.
::
He realized he loved the princess when he was sixteen. She was praying at the Spring, one of them, as she often did. He doesn't remember which one. But he remembers the air was cold and the water was colder, and as he kept watch under the stone arch in his bulky knight's gear, narrowing his eyes against the wind, his princess stood waist-deep in the water and prayed. She did not shake and she did not move. She was barely breathing with how hard she was trying, and she must have been trying very hard. He remembers a shadow moving against the wall and looking over his shoulder to see Zelda at the far end of the water, her ceremonial dress blue in the dark, her hair billowing around her like the moon. It occurred to him then that there was nothing keeping him tied to this world, except her.
Then he died, and in a way so did she. When he came back he wasn't quite himself anymore, though he had been allowed to keep the sharp knife. As he stood under the gates to Mount Lanayru, holding a thousand year old piece of technology and carrying his hundred year old heart, he saw her golden hair, her forest-shaped eyes, and the feeling came back to him all at once.
I have to find her, he realized. And if I still love her, then I will probably love her forever.
::
Beedle must have ten thousand legs like a real beetle which carried him halfway across Hyrule to Kakariko in the span of one evening because Link wakes up in the spare room in Impa's residence with no sign that Beedle had ever come to pass except that he has stuffed Link's pouch with enough beetles to fell a man. At the door Paya gives him a cool nod and then turns to leave. She comes back after a moment and leads him to the main chambers. There, Impa sits upon a cushioned dais and regards him.
"You, my child—"
I am not a child, Link thinks.
"—have been living in memory."
This is true. Link will even acknowledge it with a nod.
"Princess Zelda needs you." Yes, he thinks, and so do I. "You must go to her." He tells Impa he is trying. "You must eat food and go to sleep at night." He tells Impa he is trying, sort of. "You are the Knight that wields the Sword that Seals the Darkness, you are Courage." Yes, he is aware. "The fate of Hyrule rests in your hands."
"Yes," says Link, who has decided for the first time in all of his lives to be an advocate for his own happiness. "And do you know how hard it is so move around when you need to build a ten wheeled flying car with self-powered batteries to go anywhere? Every time I want to do something to fix this mess I have to learn to drive a new contraption which I also have to build using materials I must scavenge myself from some hole in the ground. And the Sheikah Slate, has Purah told you? It has new powers and all the old ones are gone and I am useless, Impa, I am nothing!" He takes a deep breath before he passes out from exertion, then repeats himself for emphasis. "I am nothing."
Impa raises her eyebrows so high up they disappear into her hat.
"No, my child. You are Link, and you will succeed."
But it's scary, he wants to say. I'm scared and I'm confused, all the time. I thought that once we sent Ganon back to Ganonworld Zelda and I would be able to solve everything that came after together. Knights are to wield their sword only when the cause is just and there is something they must protect. I am nothing without her.
Instead, he says: Zelda could build everything I've made until now in a day.
"I know," Impa says.
I miss her, he says quietly.
"I know," Impa says, her eyebrows plummeting back into view. "We all do."
::
Despite his best protests they send someone to wash his clothes and dump him, naked and maligned, in the river. Since he is here he may as well rinse himself off. He scrubs weeks of grime out of his skin, dumps gloop and gore and sweat and blood into the water. He washes the spot behind his ears where dead skin tends to build up and cleans his fingernails and finds, begrudgingly, that he feels better. Link. His name is Link. He holds onto that singular truth as he steps out of the river and shakes himself off, doglike.
Link doesn't like this story. But then and again, he's never liked any of the stories. When he woke up in the new dead Hyrule his body only remembered two things. The first was how to swing his sword and the second was fear. The stench of it, the way it caught in his throat.
After Zelda came back, she taught him the rest. Like how to tell the difference between sugar and salt without tasting it, and how to catch a frog without splashing through the water and getting your clothes all wet. And how to build a monument to someone without killing yourself. That one was important. He held it close to his heart, too.
When he is nice and dry he teleports to the front door of Hyrule castle. Through a series of increasingly ridiculous maneuvers that he will never be able to replicate, he clears a path to the throne room. There, he lights two fires, and a panel behind the throne slides open.
"You lowkey could have died," Purah comments, much later, when she is fixing up the Slate and the rest of him. Link sits in a pile of crumpled papers, picking dried blood and guts from his tunic.
He shrugs. I wanted her blessing. So I went and got it.
::
When Zelda comes back they'll sit in the house in Hateno and peel fruit together. They'll go swimming in the pond out back and chase each other around the dining table like children. They'll build new things in Hebra, Eldin, Lanayru, Gerudo, set up a market in Castle Town where fruit sellers will yell about fruit and antique owners will talk about the days of yore, fix the citadel, furnish all the traveler's cabins, turn Fort Hateno into an open air museum. The tears of the kingdom will fall like rain, all across the land. Then they will stop.
They will stop because Zelda will come back and she will be standing in the kitchen, putting spices that aren't in the recipe into the pot that Link is supposed to be watching. But this will not faze him. Instead, he might frown at her until she laughs that bright, bell-like laugh that makes him feel all giddy inside.
You love me, she will say, still smiling. I do, he will reply. Then he will kiss her soft mouth, and it will taste wild and sweet and perfect. It will be everything he's ever wanted, and he will ask for nothing more for the rest of his life.
But right now he has to close that door and lock it. It will be terrible and frustrating. He will die a hundred times trying to launch a glider off a cliff without a plan to make it fly. He will build machines that drive him into the wall and spend hours at the top of trees and demolished buildings, teaching the Koroks about love. He will cleanse the rot from this land, and it will forgive him for everything.
Zelda once said that people find themselves drawn to his heart without knowing why. It had nothing to do with his suffering and it had nothing to do with his death. It was his bare-faced, boyish kindness which he carried around on his forehead like a big glowing sign saying it's me! The guy from the story! Let's run around in the woods together! It softened people to him, she said. It made them want to live in the world too.
"It's not a very nice world," she said with a wryness that comes only from grief. "But it is ours."
"So let's keep working on it. No matter the darkness that sweeps through you, no matter which ghosts you meet in the open field." Zelda took his face in her hands. "No matter how lonely, and how afraid." He closed his eyes. "No matter the weight of the world on your shoulders."
And what will I do if you are not here?
Zelda smiled. "Then look for me."
Again?
"Again."
Okay, said Link. I think I can do that.