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Link takes Zelda back to Hateno Village, after everything. It doesn’t matter that she insists she’s fine, that she swears to him that she has more than enough energy to throw herself back into the rebuilding efforts—he knows her. If he doesn’t force her to rest, she’s going to run herself ragged, and he’s absolutely terrified of what might happen if she drives herself to complete exhaustion. Besides, they both need a little bit of time. Link’s right arm—Sheikah technology, now, after losing Rauru’s ghostly loan—is unreliable at best as Purah works out the details . Zelda, too, seems to be suffering some side effects from her transformation, although she won’t admit it to Link out loud. But her scientific mind is too curious not to record her experience with incredible detail, and, well, if she didn’t want Link reading her diary she shouldn’t have left it open on the desk two feet away from his bed.
…well. It’s her bed now, really. After that first week back home, of being absolutely inseparable, Link is suddenly seized with the desperate need to be alone again. Zelda, of course, understands. She just makes sure his Purah Pad is stored with enough food to last him during the entire on-foot journey to Tarrey Town, and makes him promise to send her a message when he arrives, and that is that.
It’s a lot like it was after the Calamity, honestly. He and Zelda have Good Days, and they have Bad Days. It’s… strange, to say the least, to be navigating this a second time.
The journey is… difficult. He’s still adjusting to the new arm, still trying to work out the fastest way to get it moving again whenever something like a jarring blow or moving it too fast or too much moisture or not enough moisture makes the finicky joints lock up. Over a century exposed to the elements as part of a guardian stalker, and now that he actually wants it to be functional it gives up on him halfway through even the simplest of tasks whenever he least expects it. Even a monster as low-level as a blue Moblin can now pose a threat again. Now, he’s having to fear for his life as he stealths past the (admittedly dwindling) monster camps he passes as he travels yet again. Zelda would probably say something about trials coming in threes, but Zelda’s not here, so he just has to deal with it on his own.
He reaches his house just after midnight, and everything is quiet. Everything is too quiet, and so his brain takes it upon itself to fill in the gaps, providing him with memories of the screeching of the Gloom Hands, the voice of Ganondorf taunting him as he fell to his knees, arm burning, the sound of Zelda’s startled scream as she plummeted towards the Depths, fingers slipping from his grasp. He tries for much longer than he’d like to admit to activate a Zonai fan next to his bed as he futilely attempts to sleep, just to have some sort of background noise that doesn’t remind him of pain, but he’s lost the ability to manipulate the old technology when he’d lost Rauru’s arm. The prosthetic Purah is working on for him is a pretty poor replacement for this, too. In the end, he just lights a fire right there on the floor, and prays to the empty air that he won’t burn his entire house down as he sleeps. At least he’d gone for an open-air sort of arrangement the last time he’d adjusted his house; now, with the loss of Ultrahand, it’s probably going to have to stay as-is forever.
“Link,” says the puppet Zelda in his dream. Her limbs are all disproportionate and wrong. The smile that twists across her face doesn’t belong on his friend. “Come to me.”
“Link,” the dilapidated corpse of Ganondorf hisses. “You thought you could defeat me? A pathetic knight like you cannot escape me for long.”
“Link,” says the ghost of Rauru. “The kingdom of Hyrule relies on you.”
“Link,” say the ghosts of the Champions. “How can you save any of them if you couldn’t save us?”
“Link,” says Zelda—the real one, this time. “Link. Open your eyes.”
Link wakes up.
He rolls over in bed and onto the floor, gasping for air as though his lungs are filled with the glowing blue Sheikah liquid again, hands clutching so tightly at the blanket that he can no longer feel his fingers. …no, hand, singular. The arm Purah built for him lies across the room, unmoving, and yet he can still feel his flesh arm, pricking and burning from the gloom damage. Why can he—
He looks, and is met with empty space. Because of course he is. His arm is still gone; has been ever since Rauru’s ghost fully vanished; and nothing is going to change that. Zelda refers to their shared experience of feeling limbs that are no longer there as phantom sensation, a phrase that makes sense, but is also perhaps the poorest choice of words she could possibly have made. She has watched him instinctively reach for something with an arm that no longer exists almost as many times as he has seen her frown in confusion when she stumbles into a table or a wall, body no longer remotely resembling the shape or size it has been for countless millennia. She ducks under doorways far taller than they need to be to actually accommodate her, blinks, and whispers that she had expected to hit the top of the frame with her horns. Link… tries to swat a fly with nothing, and sometimes wakes up screaming because he swears he can feel his arm being ground apart by a Moblin. Neither of them are at home in their own bodies anymore.
It makes him angry. It seems like almost everything does, these days. He forces a few deep breaths, but quickly realizes that’s not going to be enough. He needs to get out. His house in Tarrey Town is fine, but after a dream like that, the blocky interior is far too constraining. He needs to be out in the Wild. He needs to be moving. He needs to feel the rush of a fight again, no matter what Purah says about taking it easy until the port she’s installed in his shoulder has had enough time to fully heal. He needs to remember that he’s alive.
The sun rises. He reattaches the Sheikah arm, grabs the Master Sword, and paraglides off of his balcony to go pick a fight with a Lynel.
…it’s not going to be a Good Day.
~~~
Link, Zelda, and the four remaining sages meet up in Lookout Landing once a month, to discuss plans for rebuilding and each region’s needs and definitely not the fact that none of them have fully recovered from everything the fight against Ganondorf has left them with. Link warps straight to the Central Hyrule tower when he’s finished butchering the Lynel for its parts, fully over the fact that he’s probably going to get many stares upon arrival. Let them. He’s well past the point of caring.
Usually, he’s the first one to arrive. Not this time around. Riju has apparently come on horseback, in order to gain more experience riding should she ever need to travel across more of Hyrule, and so has already gotten to Lookout Landing before Purah left with her own Purah Pad to go collect each of the others. Link offers a little wave as he walks down the stairs, and gets a very incredulous look in response.
“...Link,” Riju says, far more casually than makes sense for the expression on her face. “You’re covered in blood.”
Link raises his hands, and—
He can’t sign to her like this. The pincers at the end of his right arm aren’t built for it. Either they both need to relearn how to silently communicate, or he needs to speak out loud. He hates it. Some days, he almost feels like he hates just about everything.
“Lynel,” he says with a shrug, forcing himself to glare at the ground, and not at her. She doesn’t deserve this. Besides, she doesn’t need much more elaboration than that—he knows it’s not that big a deal. She’s definitely seen him go through worse through the eyes of her avatar. She doesn't need to know he nearly died.
…she doesn’t seem satisfied, though. “Why?”
“Why not?” he counters.
“Do not tell me you managed to run out of Lynel parts that quickly.”
Well, no. He probably still has several dozen, collectively, stored in his Purah Pad. He’d gone on a bit of a hunting spree shortly before storming the Depths below the castle so as to upgrade his gear, and hadn’t ended up using even half of what he’d collected.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Because of course it was. It’s frankly uncanny how well Riju is able to read him. “So. There has to be a reason you’d go out and fight a Lynel when your arm is still so unreliable. There are such things as unnecessary risks.”
Link sighs. Lying to her is pointless. “Bad dream,” he says. “Woke up, felt really sad, that made me really mad, so I went out and walked around until I found the most dangerous thing I could think of to fight and then I killed it. One less monster for travelers to worry about.”
She looks… unimpressed, maybe, but in the forced kind of way. He gets the feeling that, even if she might not admit it, she understands.
~~~
He changes before the meeting, dirty tunic and trousers stored in his Purah Pad where nobody will have to see them or smell the blood. Purah tinkers with his elbow for a while as they wait for the others to arrive. The prosthetic limb is decidedly not very arm-like, but she’s done her best to disguise the fact that it’s built primarily of old guardian parts, which has at least helped a little when it comes to Link spotting the metallic gleam out of the corner of his eye and instinctually reaching for his sword. Riju, sitting across the room from them, spends most of the time carefully polishing her blades and staring blankly into space.
The others arrive, one by one. Zelda’s taking copious notes on just about everything that anyone says. Sidon and Tulin discuss plans for a complex fish and seafood trading route that will encompass Lurelin Village as well. Yunobo and Purah have a brief exchange about expanding YunoboCo’s mining operation into the Depths, to aid in the collection of Zonaite for the rebuilding effort. Link… just sits there, and listens. He’s not entirely sure what he can contribute to these sorts of things that would actually be of any value. He’s mostly just good for gathering materials, and sometimes people. With each meeting he sits through, he’s more and more convinced that they only invite him because they think he’d feel left out if they didn’t.
Still, it comes to an end eventually, and it’s time to disperse—though from now on, it seems that at least communication is going to be a little bit easier than before. The Purah Pad Minis are officially cleared for use now, which means that now all of Link’s friends will have the ability to teleport around Hyrule at will. The old Zonai shrines are technically available as an option, but nobody’s quite inclined to fully trust them, so Robbie’s been working on more of his travel medallions. For now, there’s one in each major settlement, which combined with the map towers still makes for a pretty decent travel network. Link and Zelda return to Hateno together, and they try to be okay, and they can almost pretend that it works.
The Purah Pads are also all equipped with the same simple text communication function Link and Zelda already use, since everyone has agreed that the secret stones are far too dangerous to carry around in times of peace simply for the purpose of speaking short and simple messages to one another. This way, Link can also be involved in the group communication channel, which will definitely be an advantage once he starts adventuring again. The individual communications are also sure to be very useful among the different leaders, to discuss trade routes and other alliance matters. Or for Link to ask Zelda, Did you eat today, and get a Yes in response a solid twenty minutes later, which is the average amount of time it takes for her to cook and eat an omelet. Not that he’s judging. He’ll remind her to look after herself every day, if she needs it.
It’s also, as he discovers a few days after the meeting concludes and everyone warps back home, extremely useful for when his friends aren’t willing to let him escape a conversation as easily as he would like to.
Riju: Test?
Link: Message received
Riju: Great! So, you know that room in the Lightning Temple where we defeated the Gibdo Queen?
Link: Yes
Riju: Meet me there in two days’ time to fight.
Link: What
Link: No
Link: What?
Riju: Better than a Lynel
Link: Are you actually serious
Riju: I guess there’s only one way for you to find out!
~~~
The room at the top of the Lightning Temple is smaller than he remembers it. Something about fighting for his life against the biggest insect to have ever existed had made the room seem positively cavernous, with nowhere safe to hide or escape. Now, it’s almost comically narrow. He can see across the entire thing the moment he finishes climbing the stairs, struggling to squint past the beams of almost blinding sunlight to find Riju waiting for him on the pedestal she’d claimed her secret stone from.
“Hey, Link!” she calls out cheerily, waving him over as though there’s any possibility he hasn’t seen her yet. In a pile at her feet are several practice weapons; wooden swords and blunted spears laid out over a pair of oversized shields. But… there’s nothing else in the room; no humanoid dummies or targets or even any guards to watch. He can already tell this isn’t some sort of training setup. This is meant for them to fight.
Why? he doesn’t say in response, because two days was just long enough for him to really think about it. To think about the look on her face when he’d confessed to going out to fight a Lynel alone despite still functionally missing an arm, when he’d told her of the crushing sadness that more often than not just turns to rage. To think about the fact that the power she’s inherited from her ancestor had been known as Urbosa’s Fury for a reason. He thinks about the release he’d felt after the rush of the battle, and how he’d felt pretty good for maybe a few hours afterwards, but it was never going to last. He thinks about Riju’s duties as the Gerudo chief, and how the redoubling of the rebuilding effort must leave her with even less free time than she’d had before, which had already been so little. Thinks of himself at her age, and the wanderlust that even spending his entire life out in the Wild seeking after the Divine Beasts almost hadn’t been enough to quell. She must be angry too. She must be so bored.
“Hi,” he says instead.
“I’m glad you came.”
He almost didn’t, he considers telling her, but that would be a lie. He wants nothing less than to hurt her, but thinks they both know that he would not have been able to refuse the invitation for long.
“Zelda doesn’t know,” he says instead, and Riju grins conspiratorially.
“Far be it from me to be the one to tell her, then,” she says. “So! How about some ground rules?”
Link nods. This, at least, is familiar from his time as a soldier. “No headshots,” he says.
Riju offers a thumbs-up at that. He hadn’t expected her to disagree, but it’s still nice to see. “And if one of us taps out, that’s it,” she adds. “No need to fully collapse if you want to stop.”
That’s fair. That feels like enough. It kind of feels like it should be everything, but also, he really doesn’t want to hurt her, so. “No Flurry Rush,” he adds.
She tilts her head slightly to the side. “Reasonable. Though I am curious to see what defending against one would be like. Maybe next time?”
…she expects there to be a next time? It’s certainly not going to stay their secret forever, then. He can’t quite imagine trying to explain this to the others once they inevitably find out. He’s not sure that Zelda would take too kindly to, “Yeah, sometimes Riju and I meet up at the top of the temple where we both almost died to just absolutely whale on each other with sticks.” He doesn’t even want to think about how Buliara might react.
Well, he’s sure he’ll figure something out. He already suspects that this will, in fact, be happening again.
“Next time,” he agrees, hoping he won’t regret it later. He can always pull his punches, after all. He’s sure she’ll be able to tell, considering just how often she had seen him use the technique against the Demon King’s army, but also she can’t really expect him to actually try to land any dangerous blows on her.
“In that case, no lightning from my part today either,” she says, and, okay, Link hadn’t even considered that. But now that the anticipation is kicking in, he’s almost looking forward to their next bout already. He wonders whether she’ll allow shock-resistant food. Or if her lightning is powerful enough for his stormy-weather-attack-up armor to make any difference. Maybe they could experiment?
…he’s turning into Zelda, isn’t he.
“Okay,” he says. “And we both have to carry a fairy.” And if Riju needs to use hers, then he’s never going to agree to this again.
…okay, maybe that’s a little unfair to her. He’s seen her fight. He knows she can hold her own. And yet he’s still terrified, because she’s like Tulin in the sense that he sees them as little siblings, and if he ever did anything to hurt either of them, he’d never forgive himself. Facing off against a possessed Yunobo had been bad enough; whenever Link thinks of Riju, his core memory of her is of the way she’d looked so small as she’d tried to properly don the Thunder Helm before joining him to face Vah Naboris. He can’t let anything happen to her.
“We’ll both carry a fairy, then,” Riju agrees. She stands, stretching out her shoulders, then folds over to press her palms against the sandy floor. “Anything else?”
Link drops into a stretch of his own as he considers. “No stomping on my feet with your fancy heels.”
Riju laughs. “Fair enough.”
It’s a good set of rules, he thinks. They go over a couple more things, discussing a time limit and whether or not they should restrict the perimeter, but eventually there is no reason to put it off any longer. Riju offers him a handshake to start the fight, and the last of Link’s reluctance disappears when she suddenly drops her entire weight in order to absolutely fling him over her shoulder.
Link lands hard, and rolls, and grabs one of the staves off the ground as he rises to face her. As the smile slowly spreads across his face, he swears he can hear the Master Sword on his back chime in a way that almost sounds like laughter.
~~~
Half a year later, Link and Riju have met up like this nine more times. They go to the top of the Lightning Temple, set the rules for that particular day, and then just absolutely go to town with whatever weapons they’ve seen fit to bring. They bruise and they bleed and it hurts but it’s a good kind of pain; the kind that feels like progress. It’s the best Link has felt in… goddess knows how long. Since he’d caught Zelda as they both fell from the sky. Since before the Upheaval. Since before he’d first woken up on the Great Plateau.
He’s getting better with the new arm. It helps that Purah is continuing to improve it, of course, but he’s also learning not to rely on it quite so much. Riju already dual-wields, so she is able to give him advice as he begins experimenting with using weapons in his left hand. In return, he dons the knockoff Thunder Helm he’d claimed from the Yiga Hideout (and what a story that had been to tell) and gives her a moving target to practice throwing her lightning strikes at.
They’re both improving as fighters. Battle instincts that he must have forgotten a century ago are now returning more clearly than he ever would have expected. Riju’s movements are so fast and graceful now that he can barely keep up with them, sometimes even when he draws his bow and slows time. (The rubber arrows Tulin has procured for him have absolutely changed the game. He and Riju will have to discuss inviting him along, one of these days, but maybe they’ll have to do it somewhere else. Something about this particular room has become just theirs.) Buliara even commented to Link how skilled Riju has become, the last time he properly visited Gerudo Town, and fixed him with a knowing look.
So. They fight until one or both of them cannot fight anymore, and then Link makes a campfire to bake some apples while they drink their absolutely rancid-tasting hearty elixirs, and they just… sit. Sometimes Riju talks, sometimes she doesn’t. Link’s prosthetic arm has a few more finger-like appendages at its end, now, which has vastly improved his ability to sign again, but half the time there isn’t much to say anyways.
The tenth time, though, Riju softly clears her throat, and begins to speak.
“...I was so angry when my mother died,” she tells him, voice practically a whisper. “I was too young to really understand what had happened to her; just that it wasn’t fair. I do not think I would be nearly as happy or as kind of a person if Buliara hadn’t stepped in, and looked after me, and taught me how to fight.”
Link considers this. Riju certainly doesn’t act angry all the time, even though she would have every right to. Her mother, and everything about the Yiga, and then the stolen Thunder Helm and Vah Naboris and the Gibdo attacks and the sand shroud and the way she’d tried to saddle the entire responsibility for all of it on herself. Out of all of Link and Zelda’s friends, she’s quite possibly been through the most.
…it hurts to acknowledge that, because she’s the same age now that Link and Zelda had been when the Calamity took everything from them the first time around, and if he thinks about that too hard he has to acknowledge the fact that the world has been almost nothing but cruel to him, too. It’s so much easier just to not admit any of it.
“I think I might be angry, too,” Link signs.
“And there’s nothing wrong with that,” Riju tells him. “We just need to learn how to cope with it. One day at a time. Buliara taught me one method. I’m glad that it works for you, as well.”
It does. He doesn’t think it would work for Zelda, whose anger at everything sometimes leads her to shut herself away for weeks at a time, but what does seem to work for her is tending to the plants in her garden, and helping the Gorons at Lookout Landing absolutely pulverize the Zonaite brought up from the Depths so as to process it into energy cores, and, on one particularly notable occasion, burning the white dress that she had been wearing before spending tens of thousands of years as a dragon. Her fury at the injustice of everything also has the potential to be destructive, he realizes, but she chooses to channel it into something that will do good for others. Maybe Link can do the same.
“One day at a time,” Link repeats. He thinks he can probably handle that.
“So!” Riju says, pushing herself to her feet and carefully testing her weight on the ankle she’d rolled slightly towards the start of their fight. “What’s next for you?”
“I think I might go clear out all the monsters in the Depths,” he signs. “Make it safer for miners. I think I can handle it now.” He’d finished clearing the surface less than a month ago, and with no more Blood Moons he can only hope it’ll stay cleared this time around, but the gloom monsters in the Depths had been a little intimidating. Not after this last fight, though. Not now that he’s proven to himself just how much better he’s gotten.
Riju’s eyes widen at that. “May I join you?” she asks. “It has been far too long since I’ve tested my skills on a real battlefield. I cannot have the Gerudo thinking their leader has gone soft.”
“They could never,” Link assures her. “But, sure. You can come. Maybe we even invite the others; make it a whole event.”
“Perfect!” she says. “It will be a chance to have some fun together without all the politics. Perhaps even Zelda would want to join us, to conduct research.”
Link pictures Zelda riding a Stalhorse, taking photograph after photograph with the Purah Pad, gleefully shouting requests for specific fight moves or for Link to try throwing different items just to see what happens. He can’t help but chuckle at the image.
“And surely I will be able to learn some new techniques as well!” Riju continues. “Not that I do not enjoy fighting you, but neither of us have exactly worked on any especially dangerous skills, lately. Unless we want that to change? Surely we could attempt a more traditional training session one of these days.”
“Want to learn how to shield parry? Purah keeps offering to put a cannon in my arm.”
Riju positively cackles, a gleeful sound not too dissimilar from Urbosa’s own laugh. “Yes, please.”
~~~
They spend a full week in the Depths. Luckily, the Lightroots that Link activated during his initial journey belowground hadn’t dissipated after the Demon Dragon’s defeat, but seeing the sun again after such a long time spent wiping out gloom monsters is very welcomed nonetheless.
Sidon’s skill with the Lightscale Trident has also improved since the last time they’d fought side-by-side. Yunobo’s own battle technique still leans very heavily into support, but it was comforting to know that somebody was willing to stick close to Zelda while the others were distracted fighting, and the fact that he also mines several hundred more Zonaite deposits to bring back to the surface is sure to make Purah very happy.
Riju’s command of lightning has improved so much that she can now keep up with the speed of Tulin’s arrows with ease, and the two of them are an absolutely deadly combination for just about everything they come across. Link is more than happy to stick to the sidelines and just watch them work for a while. The cannon is too much fun not to use at every available opportunity, anyways, so he just keeps his distance for a while and fires on anything that looks like it might be getting any ideas of moving too close to Zelda and Yunobo.
They decide to all spend one more night together at a stable before each warping to their respective homes, messages sent off to each one reassuring their loved ones that everything went well and they will be safely back soon. Zelda will be heading back to Lookout Landing in the morning, and Link will go with her, but for now Sidon and Tulin are eagerly looking over her shoulder as she scrolls through the dozens upon dozens of photos she’d taken in the last few days, and Yunobo is off to the side lifting a few very gleeful Hylian children over his head to allow them to reach the apples on the high branches of a tree, and Link and Riju are alone at the cookpot, watching over dinner as it simmers.
“...I don’t think I’m as angry anymore, now,” Link signs when he’s pretty sure nobody but her is looking. “So. Thanks. For getting it. For everything.”
Riju’s smile is distant, but not cold. It’s hard to be uncomfortable in her presence. He hadn’t quite realized it at first, but all of the sages are family, now. “I’m glad.”
“Are you? Still angry?”
She doesn’t answer him right away; just takes the ladle from his hand and gives everything in the pot a stir. In the distance Sidon lets out an uproarious laugh, and Zelda and Tulin fall into each other, giggling too.
“...no,” Riju says, finally. “Not like I used to be.”
“Do you still want to fight?”
She shrugs. “Sometimes? I certainly was not nearly as good of a warrior before I began fighting you. But I think there are other places where we can direct our skills, now.”
“Like helping Purah test her arm-cannons.”
She snorts. “Definitely like helping Purah test her arm-cannons. Does she have any more plans for you, now that we have seen just how well her latest addition works?”
“Rocket,” Link signs, and decides that it’s much funnier not to elaborate.
“...oh, goddess,” Riju says, laughing. “I’m sure Zelda will be absolutely thrilled.”
…Zelda probably will be thrilled. She’s less angry now too, as far as Link can tell. They’ve all been healing, in their own ways. So has the entirety of Hyrule.
Link may still fear that the fight isn’t yet over. He may still dream of the Calamity rising again, or of Ganondorf’s mummified corpse showing up at his doorstep, or of some third crisis that will separate him from Zelda and throw what remains of the kingdom into turmoil yet again, but he also knows that he won’t have to face it alone. Not anymore.
“...one day at a time,” he signs, and trusts that she will understand what he means by that.
Riju nods. Sitting by the fire, surrounded by his friends on all sides, Link has never felt more content.
“One day at a time,” she agrees, and leaves the conversation at that.