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“Of course,” Zelda says tightly. “I'll get right on that.”
“Oh, oh thank you!” The man in front of them grins, not seeming to notice her tension. “You are truly as wonderful as they say!”
“Who even told them?” Zelda mutters darkly under her breath as he walks away.
“Told them what?” Link asks.
“Nothing,” she says, a dark look in her eyes– one that he hadn't seen before she recovered her memories, but is becoming frequent. “Don't worry about it, Link. I'll make it stop.”
He sideyes her, and that grim expression doesn't fade, but he reluctantly lets the matter drop.
It doesn't stop. The conversations keep happening, more and more often, people asking Zelda how to or to do things, telling her their fears about the future; it happens even more than he sees, because she comes up to him, or Groose, or Gaepora, with that dark expression.
…
She's sitting now on the normally unreachable roof of the Skyview Temple (Link has his clawshots, but he's not sure how she got up there), back facing away from where the statue of the goddess can be seen in the distance and a stormy expression on her face. More unusually, she's without the sword she usually carries.
“What's the matter?” He asks, sitting down next to her.
Zelda scoffs. “What isn't the matter? The crops aren't producing, the baby's colicky, the axes aren't sharp enough–”
“And?”
“And everyone wants me to do something about it! Maybe the corn would stop dying if you just moved down here permanently sooner, like I said to! But somehow it got out that I'm Hylia, and ‘ooh–’” she waves her hands and says mockingly, “‘–Hylia knows everything, we should ask Hylia, even though Hylia has never picked up a hoe in her entire goddamned life–’”
“Not even once?”
“No. Any suggestion otherwise is a load of bull, and unfortunately–” she jerks a thumb towards the goddess statue behind them. “That's not the biggest one around.”
(Link sometimes wonders if her crassness is Zelda bleeding into Hylia, or Hylia bleeding into Zelda. Or, possibly, both of them are like that.)
“Why not just tell them that?” says Link, who has no qualms about bluntness and once implied to someone without blinking that their beloved elder was dead.
“You think I haven't tried that?” says Zelda, who also has no qualms about bluntness or rudeness and tells people off with ease. “They nod politely and stay away for a few days, but it doesn't last.”
“Just ignore them, then,” he suggests.
She groans, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her forehead on them. “I can't, Link. I swore to watch over them.”
“Probably easier when they were only bothering you with threats and not dying corn, though, right?” He nudges her gently, trying to bring her spirits back up.
“It was,” she agrees, slightly muffled. “They just don't listen to me–”
She groans in frustration, lifting up her head and holding out her hand. A slight glow flickers in her palm, before a spark of fire flits briefly into existence. “This is still all I can do! And everyone keeps wanting more, blessings and wisdom and– I can't be Hylia again!” She growls. “Even if I wanted to– I can't! I'm different now, we both are! And I was never their– their precious White Goddess.”
“I don't want you to–”
“Well, what we want doesn't matter, does it? Because all everyone sees is those stupid statues, and–” her voice cracks, and her anger seeps away as quick as it had come. “I'm not like that, Link. I never was; Zelda never was. I just– I hate all of this. I can't take it anymore.”
It's not just the requests that have been wearing on her, he realizes. It's everything. She never got a break after it all, while he, by necessity, had, bedridden from the fight as he was. She had just gotten thrust back into a life she was two years absent from, and was the one who had had to explain everything, the one who encouraged the move to the Surface, the one who was, is, their god–
And had she ever gotten a chance to process anything? To sort through the thousands of years of memories she had gained? The limitations of a mortal form? The long-awaited triumph over the enemy that had killed her?
Is there even anything he can do to comfort her?
“It wasn't so bad, before everyone started to move down here,” she says quietly. “They were up there, and I was down here. Not many chances for requests. I was happy, I thought I could get used to this new life.”
She had been. It seems like she never is, now.
He pulls out the little knife he uses for whittling, and presses it into her hands.
“What…?”
“I know it's not a sword, but– can ‘of the Blade’ mean any blade?”
One corner of her mouth quirks up slightly. “...You remembered.”
“It would be pretty lousy of me to forget your name,” he agrees.
Her fingers wrap tight around the hilt, and she says, voice filled with an emotion he can't quite identify, “It would.”
“Where's your sword at?” He asks, still lingering on that odd detail; after rediscovering it, the sword she had used as Hylia, she was usually inseparable from it.
“Left it behind,” she says bitterly. “You know how people look at me. Hylia's not supposed to have weapons. One of the old retired knights actually came up to me last week and said I should put it away, a nice young lady like me shouldn't be messing around with weapons she didn't understand, not when all the knights could take care of it.” She snorts derisively. “Like I couldn't have beaten him in less than a second. Like I wasn't top of the class at the academy! They should know that, at least!”
“Want to fight me?”
She blinks. “Huh?”
“It would be a hard fight. Everyone who sees it would know that you won fair and square.” Because Link isn't arrogant enough to assume that he's the more likely victor, even with all his skill; killing Demise was due to more than a few outside and extenuating circumstances.
(And, well, Zelda's bladework is beautiful. He (and Groose) have gotten distracted by it before. In a lower stakes spar…)
“Or–” he rolls his shoulders, half a shrug and half an uncomfortable movement. “Maybe Ghirahim is still alive, and we could go drag him out of whatever cave he's hiding in. I'm sure he would want to fight you.”
A smile pulls at the corners of her mouth. “In a cave, huh? Ruling over the lizards with an iron fist?”
“He does literally have iron fists,” he agrees.
She barks out a loud, surprised laugh. “C– Could you imagine? Tiny little lizards fanning him while he lounges on a rock?”
“Watching them fight each other with sticks.”
“Crawling on his face to feed him grapes.”
They look at each other, both struggling to keep a straight face, and then burst into laughter. Every time one of them get close to stopping, the other comes up with another absurd hypothetical, until minutes have passed and Link's lungs are aching with breathlessness.
Zelda wipes at the corners of her eyes. “I– I needed that, thank you.”
“Anytime,” he says, and means it with all that he has. “Ready to go?”
“Ready to kick your ass,” she agrees.
“Uh-huh. Sure.”