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manxden · 2 years

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Almost Caught (Part 1)

Someone made a fun ask when I posted looking for writing prompts. I’ll post the parts when it comes time to answer the ask, but for now, here’s part one. ^^

Note: In this story snippet Link and Zelda are between 11-13 years old and meeting for the first time(s). This is my take on a (mostly) mute Link, how he came to loose his voice, and a slightly more lively Zelda taking interest in the boy who pulled the sword.

Before being appointed as her knight, Link had the roam of the castle. At least, most of the castle, both as a knight in training, a student in the tutor’s rooms adjacent to the great Library and in everything but an official capacity, a permanent guest of the royal family.

At first the adjustment had been a steep learning curve, set into motion by stumbling, bleeding and drained of color and voice from the Lost Woods and back to his father’s side at the training camp. He had been told not to stray too far away from the camp and the road during their stay for his father’s survey, but beyond nightmarish glimpses of dark forest, fog, and a sudden rush of teeth, Link had never regained those memories.

The king’s advisors had naturally informed him that very selfsame day of the events likely to happen, if the boy who pulled the Master Sword from its centuries-long sumber survived. Link was fated to be the chosen hero, Hylia’s champion against the coming calamity, so King Rhoam made arrangements with the boy’s family to rehome them to castletown, and house Link himself in the castle for his recovery and training.

One of the awkward benefits (or drawbacks, depending upon the mood of the day) of living in the bustling community of high-ranking nobility, officials, and servants in the castle was that Link became an object of study for the youngest in the royal family. Princess Zelda was on her father’s heels on the first day that Link was stable enough on his feet to accompany his father to King Rhoam’s study, and they had stared at each other with round, curious eyes over the large oak conference table where the Master Sword had been laid, as if on display.

The Princess had shown up in the hospital wing of the barracks the next day, her long ears perked and bright green eyes full of curiosity and bluster. She made up for her young stature with a tall vocabulary and a long stare, especially for Link’s attending nurse. She had walked in on the morning re-dressing of the thick bandages and ointments that were being used for the majority of his treatment. Despite several sharp words from the matron, Zelda stationed herself against the wall opposite Link’s bed and stared, taking in every bit of a number of details that made up the beginning of his new life.

Link’s hair had been cut short to keep it up and away from the ragged gash that had all but severed his vocal cords and some just shy of his jugular vein. The full-sized master sword was slung by its carrying-belt over the headboard of the simple frame of his bed, the gesture failing to keep the tip of its sheath from resting on the floor. The enameled, royal purple with inlays of gold and gems were the brightest, most colorful objects in the otherwise utilitarian room, save a mirror, dresser, sink, bucket, and Link’s bright, intensely sky-blue eyes.

When the nurse began to wrap cotton loosely around the freshly-applied dressings, the young princess started to pelt her with questions. Why hasn’t he healed yet? Will he be able to talk? What’s in that ointment? When will he come to classes? Have you seen the sword? I’ve seen the sword. It’s incredible, but it doesn’t glow like it says in the stories.

Link was quietly amazed that the princess had managed to belt out quite so many coherent sentences without going in the least bit blue in the face. It was a small relief to have something other than the dour-faced nurse filling the room with her astringent quiet. The matron was a woman over her forties and she cast several exasperated looks to a guard standing just outside of Link’s door, where he could see flashes of royal blue and crimson. Zelda received small answers from the nurse, which he had heard himself several times already; It’s an antiseptic ointment to prevent infection. It has to heal on its own, red potion can’t mend everything immediately. No, I haven’t seen the sword.

At the long end the nurse had a limit to her patience, and sent a long glance to the guard just outside the door before addressing his charge. “I’ll send a page to bring you news when he is well enough for visitors, Princess. The boy should rest again soon, but please tell his Highness that he is doing well, will you?”

A shadow of distaste crossed Zelda’s golden-framed face with being subtly told to buzz off, and she drew a deep breath, ready to protest. Her guard’s gloved fingers came to rest at the back of her shoulder, and she was genteely escorted out.

Link wanted to ask his own questions, giving the nurse several intensely meaningful looks - but to no advantage. He’d been distinctly silent for the days since he’d woken up from a drugged slumber in the hospital wing, and even thinking about moving his head left or right, or moving his gullet, was painful. Meals had been an ordeal until the fifth day, when a stronger pain-relieving cream had been applied and his menu could include stronger foods than clear soups.

The next day Zelda showed up in the frame of Link’s door, grasping the edge and peering in with care. She was a bright-eyed young woman without a speck of dirt on her heart-shaped face, and when she slid into the room and pulled the door closed to just a crack, he could see she was dressed slightly more informally in riding pants, a linen blouse with belled sleeves, and a delicately-embroidered cropped jacket over her shoulders and chest. Her hair had been braided into an intricate style that swept her bangs and long tresses up and away from her face, in a style that Link’s mother and younger sister could only daydream of lingering a long morning over; the Princess clearly had a small army of personal assistants and maids to help her dress and get readied for the day.

Despite her significantly unique appearance, Zelda held her finger over her lips to signal the boy in the bed to stay silent - she was trying to sneak into his room, a pair of books and a slate under her arm. Even though the nurse-on-duty yesterday had heavily suggested to Zelda that she should stay away until she was signalled for, the Princess had chosen to visit him again at a later hour, and come prepared this time.

Link couldn’t see if there was a royal guard again at the door out in the hallway, but he suspected that was the case, even as Zelda hopped up onto the foot of his bed on her knees and made herself comfortable. His eyes widened and he sat up straighter against the pile of pillows he had been armed with. His eyes were dilated because of the pain relievers and they tried to narrow down into a better focus on her, but the best he got was a soft-focus picture of the golden-haired goddess-descendant. She was crossing her legs over the covers just at the limit of his toes and giving him a lengthy stare.

He wasn’t sure what the contest of eyes was about, but he felt like he was being consciously evaluated, like some sort of specimen and he tried several different expressions on her as the minute stretched on. When his brows had furrowed into a pitiful failure of a disapproving frown, Zelda reached out and touched her finger to the point of his nose. Link jerked a degree on his bed in surprise and jolted backwards, surprised by the bold contact; the motion tugged at the muscles of his throat, and Zelda’s bemusement quickly became dismay when a shock of pain crossed his face.

“Oh! I’m sorry-”

Link kept back from her by an inch or two, out of the reach of the hand that she had pulled back to her lap. He knew he could make a ruckus by knocking the sheath of his sword against the bedframe or the wall if necessary, but he was just as curious about the persistence of the princess as she was eager to learn more about him. He wanted to shake his head, or nod, or something along those lines, but chose instead to try and play with the hair at the back of his head. Even that option had been cut short, so he gave her an overexaggerated ‘ok’ through his silent lips, and folded his legs under the covers. He was dressed in a long linen nightshift, his trousers underneath scruffy and threadbare, but alright for the time being.

The princess perked up when he gestured with his lips, her dipped ears perking again, and she thumbed through the objects in her lap, pulling out a flat, slate-grey rectangle with a piece of metal attached to it by a string. “Do you know what this is..?” She held it up for him to view, and he could just make out old lines that had been polished out of readability on it. After a moment, she added, “Hold up your thumb for yes, and point it down for no.”

Link’s expression slid into a near-laugh with that suggestion, and he held up two thumbs in front of his chest, coming a little more to life. He had communicated plenty with the nursing staff and the doctor who had explained the details of the damage to his throat with different hand signals, but the princesses’ nonchalant approach was a breath of fresh air.

Across from him Zelda offered him the slate, holding it up at length until he took the object and turned it, surprisingly, right side up. “That is a writing tablet,” She explained, “You can write on it with the metal nail.”

At first Link simply held the piece of interestingly heavy rock, evaluating it with his hands and eyeing the faded marks on the surface.

“You do know how to write, don’t you?”

For a moment Link forgot who was speaking to him, and he passed a mildly sarcastic look over the top of the writing instrument. He grasped the nail-pen with his left hand, turning the rope-attached end towards his chest- “No, wait-” and proceeded to scratch a message to her with an intense focus, despite her momentary protest.

Zelda chose not to interrupt after catching her tongue, and her manners. Impa’s mother had reprimanded the princess once for giggling about the difficulties a fellow student had while playing table tennis with their left hand, and had learned a valuable lesson about ‘the unique gifts of the goddess, scattered among us to keep us humble’. When Link turned the writing tablet around to show her his message, the letters were neat and slightly blocky, with an unusual lean to one side.

‘Hello Princess,’ he had written, ‘You have pretty eyes.’ He was grinning cheekily over the top of the slate while he waited for her to read all the way through, and wanted to chuckle when her eyebrows lifted. Her green pupils were the one thing that her maids could not primp or preen, and they darted up to meet his expression with surprised amusement.

“Well, thank goodness that part of you still works.” Zelda crossed her arms, now a neatly-folded statue on his bed with the books in her lap. Her quip got him to frown again, though he had perhaps earned the comment, and he grabbed the corner of his sheets to dip into a glass of water at his bedside to wipe the writing slate clean. “I want to know all about the Lost Woods, and where you found the sword, and was there a Great Deku tree like the stories say?”

At first Link sat a little dumbfounded, thinking over her questions and trying to decide if he actually wanted to open that can of worms just after his recent trauma. Princess Zelda was there in the flesh sitting on his bed and asking him questions of all things, but he felt a cold shiver run over his shoulders.

The quiet must have lasted a little long, and the casually-clad princess lowered her hands into her lap, fiddling with the worn cover of one of the books. If she was going to learn anything from the new boy she would have to be patient, and she couldn’t tell if her incessant penchant for curiosity was making him uncomfortable.

At length, Link finally decided to grasp the writing-nail again and started scratching a fresh message for her.

‘My memory is very blurry. The doctor said I had a koncussyon.’ Zelda’s eyebrows furrowed while she read the last word, sounding it out to herself with pink lips working through the syllables, until she realized what he was trying to spell. “Oh! Concussion!”

Link nodded, wiped down the slate, and continued to write, the retelling becoming easier as he settled into the task.

‘I went hunting mushrooms on the trail, and I remember there being bigger and bigger trees, and a cold fog. I don’t remember more about the forest. Something.. Something big and with teeth, I remember a little, but after that, nothing. I feel like I slept a long time, and then I was here.’

Link had to wipe down and continue writing several times to finish the whole message to the Princess, and in the end her lips were pulled into a thin line of disappointment. It wasn’t directly Link’s fault that he had lost the continuity of his memories of those days, but he was quietly disturbed for the first time that he couldn’t remember more details. Her eyes were on the slate as if daring it to conjure up more words, her face as plain to read as any hateno boy or zora girl. Link subconsciously hugged the writing tools to his chest - her stare broke off in the end, and she found the handle of his sheathed sword with her green eyes instead.

“That.. That there though.. that’s real.” The triforce at the middle of the angled sheath held her gaze, and Zelda’s voice had dropped several degrees in volume.

Link knew that she wanted him to tell her that all the stories of the Goddess and the Hero were true, and that he had seen the great Deku tree and learned the secrets of the Lost Woods, but he was plainly lost for words and the details that could answer her questions. The writing slate was solid under his fingers though, and he decided to angle it on his blanket-covered thighs again, to scratch out a new message.

‘Thank you for the slate. You are smarter than all the nurses put together.’

Zelda laughed when she read his letters, and then covered her mouth in alarm when footsteps sounded through the crack in the door from the hallway. Link’s eyes darted about, and he quickly wiped out the message to write again, this time in something more resembling cuccoo scratch.

‘What are those books in your hands?’

This time the princess waited at length before she answered, one ear perked to the now-fading footsteps. She didn’t want her meeting to end before she was quite ready for it to end, and she was now quite satisfied that without her, much of the servants and staff of the castle would muck up Link’s first few days here something awful. To begin with they hadn’t even thought of giving him something to pass his time with.

“Some books from the library,” she chose to whisper now that the footsteps had receeded, though very likely she felt like she was sharing some precious secrets. “But don’t tell on me or they’ll deny me access for a whole month!”

Link bit his lip, the corners of his mouth threatening to curl up deviously. The princess had gone out of her way, at risk of punishment, to bring him, a nobody, some books and a writing instrument. Maybe the whole ordeal with the pain in his neck was worth it. He caught himself just in time to shake his hands in a clear gesture of ‘no’ instead of trying to do the same with his head, and he scribbled quickly, ‘I won’t!’ on the slate.

“This book has a lot of stories about the sword,” Zelda started to explain, handing him the rough-edged, dog-eared book from her lap. It was clearly the bigger and the older of the two she had snuck with her into the medical wing, and it smelled oddly of old leather. “So soon you’ll know everything I know about it, and a little more.”

The corners of Link’s lips quirked up, and he turned the book over to inspect it. The font was artistically turned at the edges, and a glance inside revealed colorful illustrations in the margins of the heavy vellum. When he met Zelda’s eyes again he was beaming nearly from ear to ear, knowing he was holding something perhaps more precious than his entire family’s old homestead in Hateno.

“And this is a book about hand-signs.” Zelda was quicker to offer up the crisper, newer book, printed on a much rougher and plainer paper that had been drawn on with a thick ink for the letters and illustrations in black and white. Even the covers were a simple white, scattered about with dots and dashes where the edges of plain block-type had made contact with the pages - but the content brought his eyes widening even further. The first few pages were a simple explanation of different hand-signals which would spell out the hylian alphabet, with the corresponding shekiah symbols noted underneath them in smaller text.

It was very clear for the next few minutes why Link was silent, but even Zelda was leaning forwards to eyeball the contents of the pages, quietly trying to make amateurish imitations of the signs she could read upside-down while he browsed. There was a section with illustrations and explanations of motions for food, animals, plants, household objects and more. Link stared and stared, just barely able to absorb what the little handbook would mean- and his eyes started to tear up.

Zelda intervened before he got lost in the moment and made waterstains on the pages. She shoved at his shoulder with her hand, just enough to startle him and get Link to look up, and he quickly wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. He was feeling very much not quite himself with scruffy-short hair, borrowed nightclothes, and stuck in the medical wing of some stranger’s buildings. The princess had the good manners not to mention his upwelling of emotion, and instead plucked at her puffy sleeves.

“I have a copy of the same book from my friend,” Zelda filled up the quiet while Link cleared up his face, letting the books and the writing tablet rest together in his lap. “And she said she can give us lessons when you are doing better.” Zelda had pestered the resident shekiah advisors with no end until she had devised a plan for how to get her questions answered - and secretly she was overjoyed that someone (besides her royal highness herself,) was bringing the stories of her childhood to life.

She shouldn’t be smiling while the boy in front of her, wrapped in odd bandages and voiceless because of some nameless terror, was weeping. She really, really shouldn’t, but pity and excitement and commiseration was wrapping up into a weird warm bundle in her chest, and she wanted to hug him. For once she was in a situation where she could make a difference for somebody, and he was on her home turf. She thought better of the urge to make such an impromptu gesture as a hug, given that just moving his neck had been painful, but she caught his eye to continue offering her smile. He was close to really crying, shoulders jerking a bit, but he mimicked her expression with a watery grin and she backed off of his bed to stand up and stretch.

“Remember,” She spoke to him in a stage whisper, cupping her hands around her mouth to add warm humor, “Don’t tell!”

Link grinned right to the edge of a painful grimace, his expressions all mixed up - he held up his hands, pointing his thumbs upwards and he could care less about the warm tears that fell down to stain the bandages against his neck.

With that Zelda snuck out of Link’s room and scarpered down the hallway, quietly beaming with her successful mission and sans a few items from her arms. Link stowed the gifts carefully at first under his pillow, taking out the book of stories often to gaze in wonder at the gilded illustrations and pore over the stories at length. The only object the nurses and doctors ever caught him holding was the plain-paper booklet of sign language, which he studied hungrily during the daylight hours when they were likely to come around, but there was never an attempt to confiscate the contraband.

The only comment was from his matronly nurse after she took a moment to read the title.

“Hmf. Maybe the youth these days have a little common sense to them.” He was handed back the book with a “Carry on, then.”, and given no more trouble for the rest of the month, until it was time for him to relocate to the new recruits’ wing of the barracks.

#breath of the wild #botw #zelink #fanfiction #legend of zelda #Link and Zelda are young beans in this story section #Happy and Sad beans #Zelda can’t let him be #Curiosity is a vice #Link cries #Link always cries in my fics #Zelda is a GOAT #Respect your nurses #Impa is a treasure #Learn sign language #I L U

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