Chapter Text
Zelda has nightmares nearly every night: about darkness and thunder, and the boy with the fairy. About the man with the evil eyes, and her own terrible folly. The ocarina should never have left her hands. She should never have dragged that boy into this mess. If it hadn’t been for her, he would never have been able to open the Door of Time, and Ganondorf would never have been able to invade the Sacred Realm and take power.
In the early days, they are always on the run. Through Impa, she hears reports: that the Gerudo king has killed her father and taken the castle. That a brave company of soldiers resisted in the name of the King, and were slaughtered for their resistance in the Castle Town square. That Ganondorf’s spies are searching every corner of Hyrule, seeking out a princess in exile. In the early days, the people of Hyrule feared him less, and there were places enough to hide; but Impa never lets them stay longer than a few nights, and they never go to Kakariko.
Impa is there at her side one night when the dreams wake her again. Her expression is soft in the low light from their fire. The shadows dance behind her in the cavern near the lake where they’d taken shelter. Outside, Zelda can hear the soft patter of rain.
“Another nightmare?”
Zelda pushes herself upright, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Her clothes—boy’s clothes, of rough homespun linen and wool—feel scratchy, and dirty, nothing like the whisper-fine cottons and silks that were all she’d ever known. But she clamps her jaw shut over any complaint. This is her fault. It is her burden to bear.
Impa is waiting for an answer, and knows her too well to swallow a lie. She nods.
“One of my contacts just brought a report,” Impa says, and gestures to a large crow near the mouth of the cave. Speaking to birds is one of the many Sheikah magics Zelda has always envied. Impa had told her long ago that it was one of the oldest—that a princess of ancient days, long before her, had a special connection with birds, and the Sheikah magic had followed soon after.
“The boy hasn’t been seen anywhere in Hyrule,” Impa continues. “There’s been no sign of him at all, not even in the forest where he might be safe. But—” and she hesitates.
Zelda leans forward unconsciously. “But—?”
“Something else is missing, too,” Impa says. “The Master Sword is gone.”
Zelda frowns. “You said the evil king could never lay hands on it.”
“He cannot,” Impa says. “The boy—it must be him.”
The Ocarina of Time… the Door of Time… the Master Sword… Zelda puts a hand to her chest where she’d carried the precious instrument. Before she’d thrown it away. Before she’d thrown open the door, and evil had come through.
“Then he is the Hero, Impa. He must be. So—so where is he?”
Impa looks grave, her gaze turning away, outside the cavern. “No child can wield the power of that sword. It would overwhelm him if he tried.” She looks back to the princess. “I think, my dear, we may be waiting for him a long time.”
~
The first time she transforms is soon after. There is lore, Impa explains, in the libraries of Kakariko, lore she must consult—but the two of them would surely be recognized. Impa especially, in the village she is known for. But there is a Sheikah magic that will keep them safe, Impa explains. She demonstrates it on herself first, and Zelda watches as her guardian’s body changes. Still the body of a Sheikah—perhaps that is unchangeable, or perhaps Impa will not surrender that part of herself. But now she is taller, broader— male . The lines of her— his —face look familiar, but only barely.
“The desert king is looking for a princess,” Impa tells her, and gives her space to decide.
“Will I be able to change back?”
Impa nods.
“Will it hurt?”
A wry half-smile. “A little.”
Zelda thinks a little longer. “All right,” she says, and Impa transforms her.
It doesn’t hurt, not really, but it feels strange, the way her body subtly shifts. She squints, the light of day suddenly far too bright.
Impa sounds amused. “Maybe I should have expected something of the sort.”
Zelda shields her eyes with her hand, the other on her hip, ready to demand some kind of explanation. “Whatever do you mean?”
Impa gestures to the still surface of the lake. “See for yourself.”
She looks. Her reflection seems little different: still a delicate face, golden hair, but her eyes—she realizes with a start that her eyes are red.
“I’m… a Sheikah?” she asks, looking up at Impa.
Impa looks at her for a long time. If there is a gleam of wetness at his eyes, Zelda cannot be sure, so she says nothing.
“Survivor of the Sheikah,” Impa says, and turns away. “So the prophecies come to pass.”
Zelda isn’t sure what Impa means, but she returns to the water, staring at her reflection. When night falls, she realizes the shadows no longer look so deep. In the darkness, they can see without being seen.
“Come,” Impa says, making ready to leave. “We must get to Kakariko.”
~
There is lore in Kakariko, but it makes little enough sense to a ten-year-old. Impa studies the books, welcomed as a stranger into the village, and Zelda learns to be Sheik, a Sheikah boy.
There is a giddy, mad sort of glee in it. Partly because she is still alive, partly because she is hidden so well she cannot be found, but the joy comes from other quarters as well. Hylian princes get to be soldiers, warriors—they get to fight, and get dirty, to brawl with the other boys in the mud and only look a little abashed when called to order.
But princesses—every Hylian princess carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. A princess is meant to be soft, refined, educated, spiritual—she is meant to become an envoy of the Goddesses. Zelda has always done her best to uphold that standard. And none of it had ever felt wrong to her, before.
But how had she—how had he —never know there was another half missing?
~
They leave Kakariko after less than a year. Soldiers of the Gerudo king are seen too frequently near the village, and Impa decides it’s not worth the risk. Sheik begs not to leave his newfound friends, and the nightmares come back with a vengeance. He thinks of the boy from the forest every day, the name Link on the edge of his tongue. He wonders when they will see each other again—if they ever will.
Impa brings him to Zora’s Domain, where they take refuge with the Zora king. Moved by some urge inside him, Sheik asks Impa to transform him back, just before he meets the Zora princess. Ruto recognizes her—they’d met, years ago, and now they embrace, clinging to each other and sobbing for Hyrule’s lost peace. When it all dies down, they trade stories of Link, but there is no news.
Impa teaches both of them the lore she’d uncovered, and then by night teaches them the art of fighting. Zelda expects King Zora to object, but he only shakes his head and sighs.
“She will fight whether I will her to or not,” he says. “Better she be prepared.”
The Zora harbor the two fugitives for a time, but one day Ganondorf arrives to bully King Zora into submission, and Impa gathers Zelda in her arms and flees before they can be found. Zelda can’t so much as say goodbye, and it hurts.
“Change me back,” she demands of Impa in fury, when they settle near the forest for the night. Anything would be better than being the princess, fleeing for her life again and again. Fleeing the consequences of her own failures.
Impa seems weary, but instead of doing the magic herself, she shows Zelda how it is done. Zelda’s eyes cross with concentration, and it hurts a little more than the first time, but she manages the transformation three times that night and goes to sleep Sheik.
~
When Sheik is twelve, the mountain erupts, and the sky fills with black ash. A week is enough to carry the ash to the furthest corners of Hyrule, choking anyone who breathes it in. After a month or so, the mountain seems to settle, but only for a little while. The violent eruptions begin to come, one after another, and there are whispers of an ancient dread: a dragon, once thought extinct. The Gorons survive, the birds tell Impa, but they are uneasy, and little come above ground anymore.
When Zelda is thirteen, she stands at the edge of Zora’s Fountain with Ruto, watching the first snowflakes in a hundred years begin to fall. It looks so beautiful, and together they catch flakes on their tongues and laugh. But the Zoras’ guardian god does not seem well, and deep down Zelda thinks something’s wrong again.
Six months later, the snow is still falling, and a Zora egg dies in the shell from the cold. Zelda and Ruto escape the King’s grief and go to the Fountain, both of them stricken by the loss—the first of many.
They find it empty. The guardian god is nowhere to be found.
And Link has still not returned.
~
When Sheik is fourteen, the Forest Sage, the Kokiri girl with the green hair, goes into the temple and does not return.
He knows Saria only a little. They had once spoken on the bridge at the edge of the forest, some time ago. She had made him kneel down to her own height, and pressed her hand against his chest. There had been a soft light, and she had told him he would be protected, if he ever entered the forest. Sheik has heard tales of what happens to those who wander into the woods, and is not so sure.
When Saria had taken her hand from his chest, she had looked at him and known his entire self—both ways of it. Who he seemed to be, and who he was disguising. But she had only smiled, and said nothing.
When Sheik hears she has gone to the temple, the news is too devastating to bear. The sages are Hyrule’s only remaining way to fight back against the demon king. And she had been Link’s friend.
He can’t stand to imagine that girl, trapped, alone.
He steals Impa’s sword in the night and runs. Rain nearly washes him out as he reaches the woods, and despite Saria’s protection, he gets lost more than once before he finds the Forest Temple.
The rain is still pouring as he staggers out in defeat, barely able to lift the bloodied sword. He stumbles and falls when he reaches the meadow. Pain and weariness war with terror—he needs to escape, to get as far from that cursed place as possible. He collapses on the stone where the sacred triangles lay, loathing himself, his own stupid bravado.
Zelda was supposed to be the failure, the coward. Not him. How could he run away now, and render himself a failure twice over?
He was supposed to help the Hero of Time. He was supposed to save Hyrule.
As the rain fades into mist, Sheik wipes blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and pushes himself to his feet.
It’s no wonder, he thinks, why Link hasn’t returned yet. After all, Sheik isn’t ready for his part. Link won’t be ready for his.
It goes both ways.
~
The year she turns fifteen, Zelda spends with the Gerudo. There are enough of them disloyal to Ganondorf to make it safe—especially after Nabooru’s suspicious disappearance five years ago. She regrets that she has to spend all her time as Zelda, but the desert women would never accept her, otherwise.
Impa teaches her more of the lore, and she begins to understand what she must do when Link returns. She begins to understand that there will be no fight, no real fight, against the demon king, until he does.
The Gerudo teach her weapons and warfare, and she learns to fight anyway.
There is a young woman, near her own age, in the spear training they attend every day. She catches Zelda’s eye and smiles. Zelda blushes, feeling more exposed than ever in the unfamiliar Gerudo clothing. Her hair is bound in red cloth, for concealment, but the bangled short top and loose trousers feel as though they reveal more than they hide.
Still, the next time the young woman catches her eye, she smiles back.
Her name is Vaya, and Zelda begins to feel butterflies every time they look at each other. She doesn’t entirely understand it at first, but Vaya makes her feel warm and happy, and the two of them find themselves spending more and more time together.
Zelda tries to hide it from Impa at first, with an instinct that has the countenance of shame. That lasts until Impa walks in on the two of them, deep in conversation, both of Vaya’s hands holding one of Zelda’s. Zelda leaps back at the intrusion, but Impa only looks at the two of them a moment, sighs, and shakes her head.
“It’s getting late.”
Vaya leaves soon after, and Zelda ventures into the front room, unable to dispel the feeling she’d done something wrong.
“Wrong?” Impa says when she asks. “By the Goddesses, no. How do you suppose the Gerudo women have any children, after all? It’s their own kind of magic. Too many outsider men would dilute the blood.”
Zelda isn’t entirely sure what children have to do with anything, though she does know that most Gerudo, especially of the older generation, have two mothers.
(It has never before occurred to her how many of the younger generation must have been his . Sickening to think about—but Vaya isn’t one of them, and Zelda sends up a silent prayer in gratitude.)
Impa rises and goes to the window, where a curtain shields the moonlight. “I just don’t want you to break your heart,” she murmurs.
~
Zelda and Vaya spend the next day practicing horseback archery, and afterward they collapse, exhausted and giggling, on Zelda’s bed. Impa has gone out for the day, and the house is quiet. Zelda shows Vaya her lyre, and plucks a few meaningless, magicless tunes on it. Then Vaya’s hands close on her own, and she leans over and kisses Zelda, soft and uncertain.
She pulls back, a question in her eyes, and Zelda—breathless with her own daring—leans forward and kisses her back.
Kisses—alternately snowflake-light and deep, yearning—occupy them for the night, and in every stolen moment over the next few weeks. The novelty, the electricity in every touch delights Zelda, but leaves her hungering for more. Vaya seems to feel the same, and more finds them in Vaya’s bedroom late at night, the two girls already close together to fend off the desert chill.
Zelda lets Vaya take the lead at first, as Vaya’s fingertips gently explore the sensitive places of Zelda’s body, but she can’t resist returning the favor when she discovers how she can make Vaya gasp and moan. She leaves Vaya trembling, eyes fluttering shut, and they sleep dreamlessly together until dawn.
“It’s good, you know?” Vaya says to Zelda as they curry their horses dry after a long ride. “Better than I thought it would be, even.”
Zelda uses her fingers to comb through the tangles in her horse’s mane, thoughtful. “ Different than I thought it would be, though.”
Vaya seizes on that. “So that’s the thing, isn’t it? It would be different, with a—with, you know, a man.”
Zelda doesn’t remember who told her, long ago, that her wedding night would be bloody, that it would hurt. “A lot different, probably,” she says.
“They won’t say it,” Vaya goes on, oblivious to the turn of Zelda’s thoughts, “but half or more of the women here would kill to try it with a man.”
“They’d also kill for a heavily-laden merchant wagon, so I don’t know if that’s saying much,” Zelda points out.
Vaya waves a hand unconcernedly. “Only if the merchants are stupid enough to fight back.”
“A lot of the women here had their chance, though, didn’t they?” Zelda says pointedly, meaning Ganondorf. “They didn’t learn their lesson?”
Vaya laughs. “Don’t be such a killjoy. I was just saying .”
They fall into silence, and Zelda thinks for a while.
“So… you would want to try it… that way?” she asks softly.
Vaya mistakes her meaning. “Oh, Zelda, no, I didn’t mean you were bad or anything, I just—”
Zelda feels something rising inside her, a part of her she’d repressed yet again. She can’t stop it this time, and it’s Sheik who turns and smirks at Vaya from behind Zelda’s eyes. “That wasn’t what I meant,” he says, with just a touch of a growl.
Vaya can’t see any difference, but she senses it anyway, and her eyes glitter with mischief. “What did you mean, then?”
“Come on,” he says, and turns away to lead his horse back to the herd. “You’ll see.”
But when they reach Zelda’s bedroom, dark with the curtains drawn to block out the sun, she feels very much the princess again, for a moment.
“I have a secret,” she tells Vaya, “and you can never tell anyone. If he finds me—” they both know who— “he’ll kill me… if I’m lucky. You have to promise.”
Vaya grabs her hand and clutches it tightly. “I’ll never sell you out to him, Zelda. I would die first.” And there is an earnestness in her eyes that allows Zelda to believe her.
Zelda takes a deep breath. “All right then,” she says, closing her eyes and trying not to brace into the transformation. “Watch.”
Vaya will only see a bright light, but Zelda/Sheik needs her to know it’s no trickery. The light fades, and Vaya blinks away stars from her eyes. Sheik takes her hand and holds it, and waits.
A sharp intake of breath. “But—”
He waits for her to understand.
“Z-Zelda? Is that you?”
The name doesn’t fit anymore, but he understands what Vaya means. “It’s me,” he says, his voice deeper than he last remembered it. “It’s… a disguise. Sort of.” Disguise sounds so impersonal, like a mask—not like another part of himself. “I can change back if you like,” he says, although it’s been so long since he’d been like this that he’s not sure he could give it up so quickly.
But Vaya is looking him up and down now, and wetting her lips. “No,” she says. “Don’t.” She tilts her head. “Is it… real?”
Sheik moves closer, close enough to feel her body heat. “Want to find out?” he murmurs, and she does .
Her body becomes incredible in an entirely new way, and so does his. He is slow, careful not to hurt her, and she is fast and impatient. It’s for the best, really, because he can’t last very long like this, and he ends up finishing Vaya off in the old way after all.
“You know what I think?” Vaya says as they lie close together, their sweat drying in the desert air. He hasn’t changed back yet, though he knows he can’t risk being Sheik for much longer. “I think you need more practice.”
Sheik makes a soft noise as she cuddles closer to him, and he wraps an arm around her protectively. “With pleasure.”
~
Impa thinks it will be six years before the Hero returns. Zelda turns sixteen, and Impa grows restless.
“Six… it should be six,” she mutters to herself, pacing back and forth across the length of their small house. “I had thought perhaps five… but they say there is a sage of light. Six sages, six years. It must be.”
She drills Zelda harder than ever, and every month or so she rides to Kakariko, uneasy about the temple of shadow nearby.
Six years to the day approaches, and for once Zelda has the chance to say goodbye.
“I’ll see you again,” she whispers into Vaya’s ear as they embrace each other tightly. “I promise. When things are better.”
Zelda is terrified as she and Impa leave the desert to make for the ruins of Castle Town, and not just at the prospect of Castle Town itself. What if she fails again? What if she can’t help the Hero enough? What if he can’t defeat this darkness?
What if he never comes back?
She becomes Sheik as they travel out of the desert. The disguise feels hollow now. Sheik will have no choice but to lie to Link, if he ever does return, for Zelda’s safety. Some help that will be.
Impa accompanies Sheik through Castle Town, but sends him into the Temple of Time alone. The prophecies are clear: this is his role now, and his alone.
He waits in the darkness of the Temple for seven days and nights, and Link does not come.
~
“I don’t understand,” Impa says, again and and again from their new hideout in Kakariko. “It should have been six years. I don’t know what’s gone wrong.”
“You’ve gone wrong,” Sheik says savagely, sharpening Impa’s sword in the corner of the room. “You’ve been deluding yourself this whole time. He isn’t coming back!”
Impa’s eyes go hard, but Sheik can tell he’s struck home. Impa, too, harbors doubt. “He’ll come back.”
“You don’t know that,” Sheik snarls. “We’ve waited all these years for nothing . Waiting to make a hero out of a child . Don’t you see? Ganondorf must have stolen the Master Sword and—” he stumbles over the words, but forces them out— “and killed Link, and we’ve just been sitting here all this time when we could have been marshaling a resistance!”
He climbs to his feet and throws the sword against the wall. “And now look how bad things have gotten! The demon king has his claws in everything , now. Are we going to keep sitting here doing nothing? Are you going to tell me that learning a few songs —” he gestures violently at the lyre— “will turn the tide?”
Impa looks stricken, and can’t seem to summon a response. She wears her true, female form just then, and seems shadowed when Sheik looks at her, the blur of his rage already fading. For the first time he sees her not as an all-knowing guardian, but as an ordinary person: a weary adult making decisions in the dark, hoping they turn out to be the right ones.
He never hears Impa’s answer. The ground shudders beneath their feet, almost heaving them to the floor.
Not like an earthquake. Like a monster.
Impa seizes the sword and throws open the door. Sheik makes to follow her, but she shoves him back into the house.
“Stay here!” she shouts, over the terrible noise outside. “You can’t risk it! You have your own part to play!”
And Sheik doesn’t know why, but he obeys, hiding in the house as Impa runs into danger, hating himself all over again.
Eventually the shuddering stops, and the screams subside, and when Sheik emerges, Impa is gone.
~
He leaves Kakariko and lives on the run again. Everything of Zelda, he locks away tightly inside him. She can only hinder him now.
He goes to Zora’s Domain and finds Ruto encased in ice. The last freeze must have come on quickly. Her eyes are closed, as if she sleeps… please, Goddesses, let her be sleeping . He hacks away at the ice through hot tears, but it doesn’t yield. He curses Link’s name aloud, and it echoes on the ice before falling dead. He doesn’t do so again. He knows it’s his own fault instead.
When the seventh year comes to an end, he goes back to the Temple of Time. A useless, superstitious vigil. Small comfort that there won’t be many more years of this left. Before long, the demon king will control all of Hyrule.
Despair fills him. He falls asleep in the darkened chamber, and awakens blinded by light.