You’re literally the gordon ramsey of zelink fics, could u pls possibly do one of a jealous zelda hehe
—Gentlemen and Herbivores—
The world was eerily silent with Ganon gone. She had heard nothing but the awful, metal-on-metal screams of his malice for 100 years. Then she was suddenly temporal, and earthbound, and it took three days for the ringing in her ears to fade.
Link coaxed her gently back towards corporeality, towards a normal life. He reintroduced hot meals and warm baths, soft blankets and softer moonlight, and the calm, swaying pace of a midsummer day in Hateno was the reassuring metronome by which she measured her progress.
Some nights, sitting with him under the apple tree overlooking town, afraid of sleep, fighting it, she would find herself nestled against his shoulder, and his arm would circle her waist. And in those fleeting moments before she dreamed, she would feel warm, and safe, and weightless, and sleep wouldn’t seem so frightening anymore.
The feeling rising up in her now was none of those things. This was hot and prickling, clenching in her stomach and her jaw, pounding and hazy and violent. He smiled, and they laughed, and they touched his arm when they thanked him, and her vision turned redder.
This… was not pleasant.
That night she braved falling asleep on her own, rejecting the idea of the peaceful weightlessness under the apple tree for reasons that were completely beyond her. She woke up screaming near midnight, and ended up crying herself to sleep in his arms anyway.
Zelda learned to hate running errands in town. There was always someone stopping him eager to thank him or praise his work ethic or his uncommon helpfulness or tell him again how generally wonderful he was. Usually someone young, and attractive, and handsy.
And the simple solution would have been to just avoid running errands in town, except the errands wouldn’t run themselves, and if she stayed behind and let him go alone, some unaccountable logic insisted that would somehow make things worse.
He took a breath to speak one evening over supper (which they had taken at the inn, in town, because logic and wisdom were evidently not bedfellows), and then his teeth met and he took another bite instead, as though to reset his approach. He chewed without meeting her eyes, and then cleared his throat, and the sentence was taking so long to come to fruition that she had to fight the urge to wring her hands. He tried again.
“Are you angry with me?”
She blinked at him. His voice was low so as not to disturb the other diners, or perhaps so as not to draw attention. She tried to mirror it.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s just—you seemed upset—”
“I’m not upset.”
She shoved another spoonful of stew in her mouth, feeling the heat of the gravy in her cheeks and of the blood rushing there and praying that one was easily mistaken for the other. But she could feel her brow screwing in on itself the more she tried to keep it smooth, and knew she was failing at indifference. His spoonful hovered a full five seconds before it went back into the bowl, untouched.
“Zelda—”
“It’s really nothing.”
The barmaid wandered over to refill his tankard, lingering too long as she tried to catch his eye, and Zelda nearly bit through her spoon when he finally offered her a terse, polite smile. The room was throbbing red again and spinning like a top. The trickle of the liquid tumbling from the pitcher was counting down the limit of her patience, or her sanity.
She clambered to her feet before the pouring stopped and fled.
She made it as far as the lean-to beside the inn and pressed her back against the post, breathing, letting the cool evening wind whisk heat from off her cheeks and the back of her neck. The horizon leveled and the colors drained pale again. She was losing her mind. Which was a shame, since that was really all she had going for her these days.
Voices rustled quietly out of the tavern as two serving girls sauntered out to tend the animals and she froze, held her breath, melted to the wood and willed herself invisible.
“How did it go?”
“How do you think?” she sneered.
The other gave a verbal shrug. “I thought maybe you had a chance.”
“Wouldn’t give me the time of day,” she sighed, hefting the feed bucket into the trough with unnecessary force. “Said he was involved.”
“With someone?”
“Didn’t say. Just fished Rupees out of his pocket and said thanks for the food.”
“Well. You know what that means.”
“I don’t get it. She’s thin as a rake and never looks up from her shoes.”
“Maybe he’s into that kind of thing.”
She made a sound in her nose, part disagreement, part disgust. “I had him pegged as a man who would appreciate having something to hold onto.”
“You know they say she lives with him.”
“Well, that’s just sinful.”
There was a smirk on her voice. “That you could have such sin.”
“Oh, shut up,” she breathed, and then it caught in her throat and she hissed, “look!”
Zelda ducked away as she heard approaching footsteps, thinking herself caught, thinking herself seen, but as she rounded the corner it was Link whose hand closed on her arm. She puffed a sigh of relief, blinking languidly at her own clumsiness, and then remembered the scene she had made at the table and promptly felt her heart winding itself up again.
“I’m sorry about—” she fumbled, teeth and spine clenching too tight. “Can you take me home? Please?”
“Yeah,” he sighed, looking a little relieved himself. “Let’s go home.”
The walk back towards the house was quiet, and uphill, and generally unpleasant. He would swerve closer now and again, brows drawn and eyes glued to their feet like he meant to say something, but he would invariably swerve back the way he had come and the trudge would continue in tightly wound monotony.
She could see the house and the pond and the apple tree, rising and swelling in the twilight as they walked. She wanted to dive behind the door and bolt it shut, cocoon herself in the anonymity of those walls, and maybe forget about the way her vision had taken to changing color at the drop of a hat recently and just curl up beside the hearth until he forgot about it, too. They were nearly at the bridge. So close. So close she could almost smell the wood in the fireplace and the apple blossom wafting down from the loft.
Then his fingers snagged in hers, bringing her up short, and her disappointment was immeasurable. He took a breath and she deflated.
“We need to talk—”
“I would really rather not—”
“I know. You’ve been dodging every attempt I’ve made at this conversation for days.”
Her teeth met with a click and she wrapped her arms around herself, trying very hard not to be petulant. She couldn’t meet his eyes. How did that tavern girl put it? She couldn’t look up from her shoes?
“That’s not fair to you,” she admitted finally, carefully, plucking at words that seemed the least awkward, or the least incriminating. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not looking for an apology, Zel,” he sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I just… hate seeing you miserable.”
Her shoulders slumped. Oh, but the house was so close, with its fireplace and apple tree and walls that blotted out the world. She wasn’t really looking at him. Her eyes were drifting, tugging towards her shoulder, towards the looming, inviting silhouette of the leaning roof and the chimney. He waited, and waited, and she fidgeted without offering anything, and the silence was swelling so big she wouldn’t have been surprised if it swallowed up all of Firly Pond. But she didn’t know where to begin, and she was desperate for the silence not to devour the house, too, so she blurted the first thing that came to mind.
“Do you think I’m thin as a rake?”
He blinked at her. “Do I—what?”
Her lips screwed sideways. She hadn’t been eating much since… well, since she started eating again. It felt strange, like the muscles in her throat had forgotten how to swallow properly over the last 100 years and her stomach had shrunk to nothing. She wasn’t exactly sure what constituted a healthy appetite, and she could hardly use Link’s as a reference (he ate like a horse). It hadn’t occurred to her until tonight that she might be wasting away to nothing. But that was dramatic. He wouldn’t let that happen, surely. But she was probably looking less and less attractive for it, especially when there was ample opportunity to compare her to more ideal figures.
Not that he’d… given any indication he found her attractive in the first place.
She dared to glance at his expression. It was all concern and eyes the color of luminous stone. It was so different, and so familiar, and her vision was swaying and swimming and dancing towards it. Towards another time, towards yet another something her memory insisted must be so that hadn’t survived the Age of Burning Fields.
She swallowed a thousand things she wanted to tell him instead and announced, spinning to retreat, “I’m just—I’m just tired. I’m going to bed.”
But where she had expected him to watch her go in quiet frustration, or maybe call after her if he was feeling especially bold, he caught her wrist instead, the recoil so firm and unexpected she nearly stumbled into his arms.
“I won’t let you walk away from this without an answer.”
There was an edge to his voice she hadn’t anticipated, an anger in his hold on her wrist that she hadn’t bargained for. And where she would have expected herself to cower or acquiesce in the face of that much resistance, she was coiling, and flushing, and absolutely outraged.
“What are you—?!” She tugged, and he didn’t budge. “Let go!”
“I can’t fix what I’m doing wrong if you won’t tell me what it is!”
“I never said you were doing anything wrong!”
“You didn’t have to say it,” he growled. “Whenever you get like this you won’t so much as look at me. And I’m driving myself insane trying to figure out how to get back in your good graces because I can’t stand it.”
He was too earnest and too wounded, eyes glittering and wild and boring into places she thought they couldn’t reach anymore, and it was making her head spin and her flush deepen.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she repeated, a little too desperately, a little too loudly, aching to escape, aching to rush back into the house and bolt the door.
His fingers kneaded where he held her, betraying a moment’s hesitation.
“You’re really going to shut me out?” he demanded.
“I’m not trying to shut you out—”
“Then why won’t you tell me what the problem is?”
“I’m the problem!” she shouted, wrenching her wrist loose, because there was no way around it, and if it was driving him half as mad as it was driving her, he deserved an explanation. “All right? I’m jealous! I’m jealous of the girls in town who—who laugh with you and touch you and flirt with you and throw themselves at your feet! And I know I’ve no right to be. I know it’s selfish, and petty, and unfair, but every time I see you with them it’s just a stinging reminder that everything has changed—even you—”
She held her breath, raked her hair back and held it for a crushing moment on the back of her neck and wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t look up and meet the confusion and pity and revulsion she was sure was waiting for her. It was too humiliating.
“When I asked you on the field if you remembered me, I didn’t mean if you remembered my face, or who I was, or being my knight. I was asking if you remembered—remembered—” she choked on something wet and thick that made her vision blur, gasping and tremoring.
And he closed the gap, running a warm hand up under her ear and harnessing her eyes. It was so unexpected she nearly stilled.
He finished for her, “If I remembered loving you.”
The tears she hadn’t realized she’d been holding back broke loose, tumbling down her face in streams that caught moonlight. He pulled her closer when she couldn’t answer, wide-eyed as a Hateno cow in the sights of a honeyvore and trembling down to her toes, and tipped his forehead to hers.
“I tried not to be selfish,” he murmured, thumbing at her tears. “I tried to remind myself that I fall asleep with my arms around you every night, and that you’re here with me, and you’re safe, and that I should be grateful. I tried to let you adjust to all of this. I didn’t realize you might not have understood what question I was answering when I said yes.”
Her lip trembled and her hands fisted in the front of his shirt, her mind racing in a dozen directions and threatening to rip them apart with one errant thought. “But—”
She ducked her head, trying to swallow a sob, and he pulled her in. Her arms dragged up his shoulders, around his neck, and she breathed—it was the same smell, and the same warmth banishing the twilight when his arms encircled her and he pressed a kiss to her hair. She could feel the smile on his lips.
“When those girls throw themselves at my feet, do you ever see me stoop to pick them up?”
“I thought you were being a gentleman,” she murmured, muffled against his throat.
“It doesn’t feel gentlemanly stepping over them to chase after you,” he smirked. He held her tighter, breathing soft words into her ear, and it was even more weightless than their nights under the apple tree. “How could you doubt, even when I couldn’t remember who you were, that I would never stop loving you?”
She withdrew enough to meet his eyes. They were glinting in the moonlight, touched by the wry smirk sitting on his mouth. Since when was his smile so roguish?
She would get used to it.
She moved first—or he did?—meeting him halfway in a kiss that was soaring and windswept and sagging with relief. It was catharsis, and magic, and it glowed like starlight. She held his face in her hands as she pressed closer, melting and sighing and falling headlong into old habits. It was as easy as falling into his arms under the apple tree.
“Don’t do that again,” he murmured, lips thrumming invitingly against hers, when she stopped to breathe, stopped to admire that glint in his eyes that was still slightly unfamiliar.
“Do what?”
“Let yourself imagine for even a second that there’s a woman anywhere in Hyrule that could turn my head when it’s full of thoughts of you.”
She nodded, throat too full to speak, and pressed another sweet, lingering kiss to his lips. They turned up against hers, daring to taste, exploring a little more, and soon she was breathless again.
“Apple tree?” he whispered.
“Apple tree,” she said, and it had nothing to do with fear.
