i’m getting on my inbox requests soon i promise but here’s one quick thing before i leave you all for the weekend
indelible scars, pivotal marks (blue as the life he fled)
tags: trans link, selective mute link, intimate wound cleaning
when link attempts to protect zelda from bandits on a research journey, he’s injured. zelda cleans him up.
The day was a hot one, but clouds still skated through the sky, casting a shady marine layer across the area and blanketing them in thick humidity. It was not one of the days where the sun glowed so white-hot that it nearly shone straight through the long stalks of grass that could reach almost to one’s fingertips, but nevertheless, it beamed down on them.
Zelda’s hair, gold like the aforementioned sun itself, came down now to just below her chin, a job Link had done himself and was very proud of. She leaned forward in wonder, extending a hand towards the bark of a tree, standing solitary and further from the rest in the grove.
“These are wonderful!,” she exclaimed, eyes glimmering. “It seems there are still incredible creatures I’ve yet to see.”
Currently, her focus was mainly on the very small, purple insects flitting through the air like kites with iridescent wings, dragonflies that Zelda had seen in her encyclopedias but never in real life. Link strode forward, squinting to better see them against the overcast.
Largely, Hyrule was a safe place for them. Apart from the occasional common crime, like theft, they had nothing to fear. They traveled to and from with ease and without error, at last able to wander the great green depths of the kingdom at their own will.
This, though, made them very stupid, Link thought. Most of this thought he boiled down to an over-caution, a bad case of what Purah had called a trauma response. Still, he took utmost care of watching their surroundings at all times.
Zelda continued to gush over the vibrant insects, stopping occasionally to write something down in her notebook. Link allowed his head to swivel, checking for anything that could possibly interrupt her negatively, eyes wandering as close as a few feet away from themselves and Epona (who stood true and dutiful by Zelda’s side) and as far as well beyond the tree line far off.
Zelda had given him the option to step down over a year ago, reasoning that he worked technically for her father and was thus freed from his responsibilities. He declined, however. Who else would he spend his days with? He couldn’t even imagine who he would be without her.
His left ear, as sad as it made him, was nearly deaf when a sound made wasn’t loud enough, having become hard of hearing in some sort of explosion at some point. That’s how he reasoned it, anyways— he couldn’t think of an exact moment where his hearing took a dip. His right ear, though, was thankfully as heathy as ever, and so he didn’t second guess his own instincts when the unmistakable crunch of twigs and clattering of hooves drifted towards him, sounds that should have been familiar but now put him ill at ease.
Zelda, too, jolted away from her focus as Link’s hand drifted instinctively to the smooth hilt of his sword.
There, far off but not so far that he couldn’t see clearly, stood two horses, one chestnut and one black. Two men sat on the back of the chestnut horse, while another sat on the black horse. Their faces all were obscured by some sort of head covering, and Link furrowed his brow as he drew his sword. They, quite honestly, looked like the type that would raid villages back during the initial Calamity, coming in the night when everyone was already in chaos so that they wouldn’t notice in time to defend themselves.
“Hello?,” Zelda called towards them. Link’s breath caught in his throat. As incredibly intelligent she was, that was an ill move if the intentions of the men were as foul as they seemed.
The men did not reply, instead coming forward towards them at a half-canter half-gallop.
Link turned, familiar anxiety rolling in the bottom of his stomach like a marble, but he had no chance to instruct Zelda to step back before the men were upon them too quickly for reaction.
The man on the black horse swung his arm out at an alarming speed, reaching for Zelda by the strap of her shoulder bag. She turned with a shriek of surprise, punting him in the eye with the knuckle of her two front fingers. He cried out, cursing and releasing his grip on her. Zelda ran to their own horse, wasting no time in lifting herself onto Epona’s back and crying out for Link to hurry.
The men on the chestnut horse wielded a hefty medium sized dagger, swinging it at Link’s head as they circled him but missing by about five inches too high. Careful not to strike the horse and punish it for innocence, he swung at the front man, nicking his shoulder. He made a dash for Epona, reaching out to Zelda with one arm and still gripping his sword hard with the other. The chestnut horse flashed in his peripheral vision for barely a second, but it was enough, and a searing pain splintered Link’s side just along his ribs. He felt the man’s blade drag through the sinew of his skin and it popped apart easily, like the weaved colorful threads on a tapestry.
He hissed, reeling his arms back to swing at his next attacker, barely missing by a hair. He was close enough now to let Zelda pull him up onto the front of Epona and grip her reins, sending them charging off weaving around and out of the trees with adrenaline flowing through their veins like a drug.
The men’s howls and shouts behind them oscillated between louder and quieter— they seemed to lose the men only to be pursued closely again just as fast— until they finally broke the tree line and heard nothing but silence and crickets chirping softly in the pale grass.
The men were out of sight, now. He and Zelda must have ridden east for at least another hour, making it to the edge of the marshes, not in sight of the stables but not so far that they wouldn’t be able to stop there if need be. The searing pain continued fiercely, blurring his focus from the task at hand more and more as time went on. His adrenaline faded once and for all as the marshes came into clearer view, and the pain began to overwhelm him.
He hadn’t looked down in a while, but once he did, he couldn’t ignore the unmistakable crimson bloom fettering his side. Epona’s hair drifted around in the slight breeze that had picked up, brushing against his wrists and forearms softly.
As if he were an outsider watching his body, he felt and saw his grip on the reins loosen until it was completely null. He pitched to the side like a child’s cloth doll, watching the world spin dully until he slid down the side of his horse and landed on the ground with a thud and an aching in his spine. His head seemed to bounce off of the ground below as he landed hard, sending another holy of lightning pain down his atlas vertebrae. Nausea pooled in the base of his throat, and he pushed it down enough to take a deep breath.
“Link!,” Zelda cried, dismounting much more gracefully than he had and rushing to his aid. He grunted, attempting to sit up, then slowly relinquished with a stumble and fall. He allowed Zelda to slightly incline him upwards by his mid-back, once she finally reached him, green eyes wide moon saucers.
With her free hand, she took the bottom hem of his tunic. He felt more lightheaded than ever before in recent years, fuzzy.
“May I take this off? You’ve must have lost a lot of blood,” she explained, facial expression not calming down for a moment.
He nodded faintly, and she lifted his shirt up about halfway, peeling the rust-red stickied fabric away from his skin, before pausing. At first, he thought the damage might have been much worse than he initially believed and she was only having trouble processing it, when he traced the path of her eyes until he realized where they had landed— the twin scars running tangent to his middle ribs on his chest.
With one finger, as if without thinking, she ran it over the scar nearest to her, on his right side.
“When did..,” she faltered, eyes scanning him for answers. “This looks slightly recent. What’s happened?”
He made no move to answer. She seemed to expect it, as she had come to after the litany of years together, instead pausing again to read his expression.
“You did this yourself,” she reasoned. Her velvet-on-ice voice never faltered for a moment, but he could tell that she was trying hard not to let it. He gave one small nod, feeling vaguely ashamed but feeling the sting of the blade too much still to care.
He had done it himself, something he didn’t remember until embarrassingly recently.
“I haven’t seen something like this in real life,” she continued, pulling his tunic the rest of the way over his head carefully and discarding it gently beside her. She had a habit of academic rambling when trying not to panic somebody. An explanation as an anchor to hold onto instead of their searing pain.
“Of course, I’ve read of this sort. You can read about just about anything. You never told me, Link,” she said, “that you weren’t born the man you are today.”
Once again the memory flashed into his mind, faint and brief but strong enough to remember the emotions from the day. A sword, a grimy mirror, and a secluded stone room. A morbidly brutal operation, a river of scarlet, and stitches. Then, relief.
She didn’t linger on her words, instead digging in her bag for any scrap of fabric she could muster and producing a headscarf usually used to keep the sand out of her eyes on especially windy days spent near the simmering desert far west. She folded it, waiting for his small nod of confirmation before pressing it to the marred wound carefully but firmly.
“Of course, that changes nothing any measurable amount,” she added, seeming to realize her bluntness. “That isn’t my focus right now, anyways.”
He let out a small hiss of pain, her words spiraling in his head like churned water. Though he didn’t mind so much the fact of her finding out, it wasn’t exactly something he had intention to reveal to her, either. He supposed that it was likely anyways, with their now close living quarters, but their current setup hadn’t really provided a chance for him to be caught unclothed.
Zelda had been, in recent months, sleeping in the larger bed on the loft, while Link was content with the smaller floor mat under the stair nook. He was not a claustrophobic person— quite the opposite— although he’s sure Zelda wouldn’t have minded if he wanted to stay on the loft as well.
The bleeding finally slowed, and Zelda gently peeled back the thin fabric from his side. He took the chance to finally get a good look at it; sure enough, the man’s sword had cut clean through his skin as easily as the flesh of an animal or even something easier, like target practice on low hanging apples in an orchard back in Hateno.
“Can you sit up?,” Zelda asked him. He pushed off of the ground with flat palms, furrowing his brows at the subsequent flaming pain. Zelda reached out to steady him as he rose to his feet carefully, wrapping an arm around his bare shoulder. Offhandedly, he worried about bloodying her nice white tunic.
“You’re covered in dirt, and it’s a bit too dark to get home at this rate. Let’s get you closer to the stream.”
He allowed her to guide him to the water, feeling the chill deep into his bones as if he himself was porous as he sunk into the clear cold of it. The water came only shin high on his short frame, but it came to about his knees after sitting. This section of the stream fed directly into the marsh, and far off, he could see fat lily pads and Bald Cypress trees poking up out of the water like sentries.
Zelda cupped water in her hands and poured it down his roughened shoulders, using her hands to wipe away the worst of the day’s grime. Then she carefully pulled the blue hairband out of his hair, untangling his pale scruff to the best of her ability with only fingertips.
“We really do get ourselves into the worst of situations,” she remarked. Something hard, cold, and small began pattering on his scalp, and he wrinkled his nose. “I think it’s started raining. It would do us well to stay with Paya tonight, should we make it before full nighttime breaks.”
“Hm,” he responded, just a noise. His hair clung to his cheeks and ears in wet clumps. Zelda’s hands worked from his back to his ribs, being extremely careful not to roughly abrase his cut or the surrounding reddened skin. Once again, her fingers trailed across his scars softly, as if in wonder. She didn’t ask him any more questions about it, seeming to answer them in her own head. The intimacy of it shocked him to a degree— his weak state, her healing hands and calm demeanor surrounding the whole matter.
He felt that familiar knot in his chest that formed when he tried to speak, a sort of rope looped around and through his ribs and all tied up in the middle. He parted his lips slightly, wanting to brute force it, but the knot tugged.
He let out a short exhale through his nose, willing it and letting his hands fall down into the water at his sides with a small splash.
“Thank you,” he said, quietly. “For..”
He could feel the wet fabric of her sleeves trailing against his skin as he spoke. She hated getting her sleeves wet.
“Anything for you,” she replied earnestly.
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