It’s been on his mind for a while. Usually, he suppresses the thought with something else and for some time, it works. Yet that night, it badgers and badgers until Link thinks he might burst. The words fall from his lips before he can think to stop them,
“Do you prefer the old me?”
Zelda’s fingers still in his hair. Whatever absentminded braid she’d been working on falls short in the absense of her work. There’s quiet, like she’s thinking of what to say, and then,
“What?” Her voice sounds as confused as he imagines her face. He guesses he wasn’t very clear with his question.
“I mean, the me from before…before the Calamity,” he clarifies. He can’t remember much of what he was like, but sometimes he wonders. Sometimes, Zelda weeps at night, and no matter how tightly he holds her, he knows there are pieces of her he cannot put back together again—in the same way that pieces of himself have been lost to her, too. They are two shattered persons trying to make one whole, symphonic picture that could not fit the frame it once sat in. He wants to know where she stands.
“No,” she says, like it’s the easiest answer in the world. Her hands slip from his hair and find his shoulders instead, her featherlight touch dancing over the rough skin of his scars.
“You…prefer me now?” he asks, brows furrowed.
“No,” Zelda repeats. Now he’s confused, but before he can open his mouth, her hands are ghosting his sides in the way she knows makes him jump. He knows what’s coming, but he’s powerless to stop the poke to his sides that makes him squirm. She does it again, and again, until he’s doubled over with laughter.
A soldier, ticklish. How utterly humiliating.
Except, when he turns onto his back so that he can try to use his hands as a line of defense, Zelda’s grin makes it hard to hold to that embarrassment.
“No need to compare,” she says. “I like you. I like Link. But I especially like a laughing you.”
She pokes again. His hands grasp blindly for hers as he gasps for breath.
“I like a smiling you,” Zelda continues, and when she’s poking him, it’s hard to gain control of the situation. It’s a good thing Calamity Ganon never learned of a ticklish hero.
His hands catch hers at last, but she already has them over his head, pressing down into the bedsheets. She leans in close, her nose brushing his just enough to make him dizzier than the tickle fit had, and his face burns. He knows it’s flustered from all of the laughter, but Zelda makes it no better. He can’t catch his breath; not when she’s so close to kissing him.
“…and I love you most like this. Happy, flustered, looking at me like I’ve given you the world.”
“You have,” he replies without missing a beat. Without her, he would not have had a world to return to.
Zelda smiles, and when she finally grants him a taste of it, he decides whatever distinctions lay between the old and current him make no differences in how deeply he loves her, and how far he is willing to go to prove it.
