Work Text:
It's raining again.
Link draws his legs up to his chest and tucks his head into his arms, ignoring the way rainwater is dripping in his hair. There's shelter here in the forest, shelter he had taken before - lingering at the edge of the Great Deku Tree's meadow when the rain had caught him, he had made a break for it.
And he had found that it was a shelter suitable only for a child.
This is how he finds himself now, huddled beneath a tree, water dripping off his bangs and soaking his thin clothes. The damp leggings cling uncomfortably, and he tugs at the white fabric fitfully.
He has never worn clothes like this. But then, he's never had a body like this, legs long and ungainly, his sense of balance off, a child trying to manipulate an adult's body and not quite hitting the mark. It's already granted him a slash across the arm from one of those skeleton things in the Forest Temple - he had miscalculated the distance needed to avoid a blow, and he had paid in blood.
If he is to live to see the next temple, he will need to learn to adapt.
His limbs move straight and true, and his footsteps do not falter. This adult body feels like his own now, like his mind has truly become an adult, like it is no longer a frightened child staring out of his eyes.
After all he has seen, he will not ever be a child again. How could he be?
He's running now, dodging the remains of the dead in what was once a bustling town, feet pounding against the cobblestone. There is only one destination in mind, now - an abomination of a castle rising from where there was once greenery and peacefulness, and inside...
Inside, he will meet his greatest nemesis. Inside, his princess - his guide - two in one, their lives so intertwined he doesn't know where Sheik ends and Zelda begins - is waiting for him. And he needs to adapt to his older body, to master it as his own, if he's to succeed.
Adapt or perish. Adapt or Zelda dies. Link sets his jaw, and he runs.
It isn't his new-old smaller body that feels like an ill-fitting suit this time, this is not the only curse that being a man in a child's body can produce.
Link feels dizzy, his hands too small and his reach too short. A child that has become an adult is time sped up, but an adult that has become a child again is diminished, cut down to something too small to remain himself for very much longer.
The worst part is the way they look at him - like he is something small and fragile, something to be disregarded and ignored. They do not ask a child for help.
He returns to Zelda's side and finds that she recalls nothing save a distant dream of someone else's life. And although his heart sinks, they are able to change history - prevent the world that he holds in his mind now, dogging his footsteps, creeping back around the edges as sleep approaches.
But a castle is not a home, and he flees again, stopping by the ranch to reclaim Epona. He has never saved her from Ganondorf in this time, but Malon cannot deny that Epona is curiously attached to him. They ride away together, and she is small and fragile herself beneath him, a young filly that is not yet the powerful mare he remembers leaping over canyons with.
He leaves to find his friends again, to find the fairy that stuck by him small and big, to be heroic and to help.
He finds no one. There is no cheery greeting or hurried warning ringing in his ears as danger approaches. He finds people to save and finds that they have no cause for a little boy with a knife to come to their aid.
A little boy's round face gazes up at him from the pond, and he shatters the reflection with both hands.
When Termina swallows him whole, he's almost relieved.
When the Skull Kid's curse - where had Skull Kid learnt curses like that? - hits him, Link feels himself dissolve into water.
This isn't him, his limbs are wrong bad so wrong and his body is small and stubby and solid and hard, his perspective has shifted dizzyingly, and a scream bubbles up through his throat through a mouth with no lips, echoing in his wooden chest and reverberating like the slap of a hand against a drum, and he'd keep screaming if it wasn't for the fact that Skull Kid took his horse.
It's fear and fury and adrenaline that pushes him forward, keeps him biting back the panic that would otherwise overwhelm him, because he has to stop him before the world ends. He has to find himself again or he may never recover, trapped in a body that is not his and never will be, his only companion a fairy that hates him and the great big moon looming overhead.
In three days, in five minutes, he will be himself again, and he almost wants to sob in relief, pinching and slapping at his limbs, needing to know that he's himself again.
Well - no, not himself. It's still the child people see, not the man who saved Hyrule. But a child is still human, and a child is still capable of heroics, and there are only days until the moonfall.
He presses on.
It's the second day, the second day of his stay in Termina that he's seen more times than he can count, and it's raining again.
That morning, he had awakened the last of the giants. And now it's a waiting game - wait for the moon to fall, wait for the moment to call them, wait to defeat Skull Kid - Majora - whoever he is, now.
He's so tired.
Beneath the stormy sky, his body feels insubstantial, like it could trickle away with the rest of the rain. His head is pounding. He feels phantom tugs against his hands and feet, limbs that have been webbed and stone and wood. And now, he feels tiny, a grain of sand on a beach compared to the form he had taken to defeat Twinmold.
When he raises a hand before his face, he does not know what he will see. And he does not know who Link is, not any more.
Termina is fine, and so is Hyrule. There's a duality of sorts here - Hyrule's seven years of war, Termina's three days of terror, they exist only in his memories now.
To the world, he's a child. But he holds memories close - he recalls being an adult as well, and a Deku, a Goron, a Zora. He remembers being a giant and he remembers being a god, and muscle memory pushes and pulls at the limbs he has in a discordant and unharmonious melody.
He is nine years old when he saves Hyrule, and ten when he steps foot in Termina. He spends his eleventh year wandering, and in his twelfth, he returns to Hyrule.
At thirteen, his body is different again, an awkward in-between stage after childhood and before adulthood, and growing pains remind him far too much of the agony of every cell turning to stone or wood. The letters start when he's fourteen, addressed to him in a neat hand on royal stationary, and he burns them without seeing them.
At fifteen, he runs from Hyrule again, losing himself in swordsmanship and whatever minor heroics can be found in a peaceful kingdom. When he turns sixteen, he is once again the man who saved Hyrule, but even now his body feels foreign to him.
He's been far too many people to ever feel like his limbs were his own.
It takes another handful of years before he finally opens the letter, scribbling a short response in his messy handwriting and sending it off at the next town. And then he continues on his way, ignoring the nicks and scrapes of living on the road, ignoring the way his hair grows long and unkempt.
He no longer gives his name out, hasn't for a long time - to the people he saves from monsters, he's just a wanderer. All through it, through being a child and an adult, a Kokiri and a Hylian, a Deku, a Zora, and a Goron, being a giant and being tiny, being mortal and being a god, isn't that what he is at his core? There is no place he can call home, no tribe that is his own.
One night, in a nondescript forest in a nondescript land, it rains, and with the rains, she comes.
"Link."
He's almost forgotten the sound of his own name.
Raising disbelieving eyes, for a moment, he does not understand. How can she be here, rainwater beading off her cloak, dressed in blue and white traveller's clothes that remind him not of the little princess in the courtyard but of the Sheikah? He doesn't move as she approaches, reaching out with a hand shaking from the cold to rest on his arm.
He gazes at it for a short moment, white gloves on white sleeves, then shakes his head. He has shelter, he tells her, his voice rough. She need not stay out in the cold.
Zelda sets a hand in his, and silently, they depart.
It's a curious thing, Zelda tells him from the other side of the fire, not knowing who you are.
He's silent as he listens to her speak of the contents of his brief letter. That there was no longer a Link, that the hero was just another role he had had to assume, that he had yet to find a place to belong to. Its his own thoughts put into words, his feelings articulated in a way he had never heard before.
It hurts. It hurts, as she defines and describes and explains this alien otherness that is himself.
And then she is not on the other side of the fire but before him, slipping her arms around his neck.
He freezes. It has been a very long time since he has been touched like that.
"Link," she whispers patiently, and asks him whatever made him think he was alone.
It's a curious thing, Zelda tells him, a warm presence at his side, not knowing who you are.
The speech is eloquent, not about him but someone else. A princess turned guide, two identities warring beneath skin. Is it the Hylian girl or the Sheikah boy he's seeing now? Is the person beside him meant to have red eyes or blue?
How appropriate it is, he thinks, for Nayru's chosen to speak of feeling like water; to feel like Zelda and Sheik are mixed so thoroughly together that they may never be separated, memories of a life never lived returned in full and a duality that must somehow be integrated into the one.
There's a soft hand in his, and he gazes at it with unfocused eyes. Pale fingers enclosed in crisp silk; short-nailed fingers wrapped in bandages. Does it matter whose hand it is, now?
But it should matter, shouldn't it? He knows all too well what it feels like to lose his identity, to be unsure of what lies beneath his skin. Shouldn't it matter to both of them?
His voice is a quiet rasp as he asks the Princess turned Sheikah what he should do, what he should say.
Silence, and then a hand reaches for his own. "Zelda," she says, and a faint smile curves on her lips. She's still Zelda, she says, and she always will be. And yet Sheik still lives beneath her skin as well, and she cannot - will not - loosen her grip on that part of her identity.
And what of himself? Zelda falls silent when he asks, then asks him who he wants to be.
He's been a child and an adult, a Kokiri and a Hylian, a Deku, a Zora, and a Goron, been a giant and been tiny, been mortal and been a god, and all he's ever wanted to be is himself.
Then be yourself, Zelda tells him, and kisses whispered words to his skin. Be Link.
They find each other outside in the rain. Link wants to know her, learn the taste of her mouth and the smell of her skin, the touch of her fingers, the sound of her breath catching in her throat. He traces the contours of curves and muscles, and wonders at the hint of Sheik he can find under Zelda's skin as well.
She is a marvellous duality, and she might believe herself to be water, but beneath the rain she's his rock.
And there's a hint of Sheik in blue eyes as she explores his body. A kiss on his shoulder, and he feels it acutely, the faintest press of lips sudden and immediate and there. A stroke of fingers down his side, and he feels it throughout his chest, a deep and painfully clear ache.
His limbs haven't felt like his own for a very long time. But as Zelda learns his body, he finds his world shrinking down to just it, just them. Her hands and her lips and her body are his universe, water to soothe his parched throat like rain in a desert.
And he finds her and himself with it.
They go no further than touch alone - Zelda is unmarried, and he is no longer nine years old and knows of the consequences if things were to progress. But he is content to lie with her in the cool after the rain, dampness clinging to her skin and her smile content as well as she gazes up at the sky.
And he feels alive again, his pulse thrumming through his body, breath filling his lungs again. He does not feel numbed, his limbs are undoubtedly his own. This is not a child's body, nor a youth's. It is not a Deku's, nor a Zora's, nor a Goron's. He is not a giant and he is not tiny, although under the sky, everyone is small. He is not a god, but this moment will last an eternity, for he has found himself again.
She asks him to come back to Hyrule, where she will offer him a home and a place to belong.
Home is with the one who makes him himself. He realises that now.
This time, nothing stops him from saying yes.