The Legend of Zelda: The King's Sword

Part Nine: Claderia

A. N. Welcome to the third season of The Legend of Zelda: The King's Sword-- Summer. I used to try to limit myself to 10,000 words per chapter, but I'm tired of limiting myself. I'm just gonna go until I finish telling my story, and if you don't like long chapters, then so be it. 

Three years later update: I split the chapters so they would be shorter. Ten thousand words for one chapter is simply too long. 

Fans of Twilight Princess, this chapter is for you.

Zelda's POV:

    The front door quietly opens, then I hear, "I'm home," in a rather sheepish voice, I sit up and watch him step inside.
    I haven't seen him since this morning. He swings his arms slightly as he walks into the living room and smiles, "How was your day?" Links drops himself onto the couch beside me.
    "It was just fine," I reply as he kisses my cheek. "I just started missing you, just a bit."
    "Good, just enough alone time for you," he looks around the room. "I see you did a lot of housework. It looks good as new!"
    "Thanks. I cleaned up everything, washed the bedsheets, did the laundry with the help of the kikwis, swept the floor, scrubbed dusted, and I even picked some vegetables."
    "Wow. You worked your tail feathers off, huh?" he rubs my tense shoulder. "You picked potatoes?"
    "But of course."
    "I was thinking I'd go make those for dinner," he says rather eagerly.
    "You can go do that, I can't stop you." I watch him swing up his legs to get off the couch, and almost immediately grunt and fall over, almost right onto the tea table.
    "You okay?" I ask, hesitant to laugh.
    He responds with a shaky sigh.
    "Link?" I lean to join him on the floor.
    He has hunched over to hide his squeezed eyes, and his brows contorted with something that looks like pain, his hands somewhere between his thighs. He shudders, and, a soft cry comes from his lips when he opens bloodshot eyes.
    "Link," I reach forward to stroke the side of his face with the back of my hand when he hangs his head even lower. His skin feels hot and damp. "How about you go freshen up before dinner?"
    I grab hold of his shoulders and bring him up, and he hurries into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He seems to be hiding something.
    No matter, I need to finish making dinner by the time Link comes out of the bath, however long that may take. I roll my shoulders and hear them crackle as I walk into the kitchen, and pull out three baskets of vegetables from under the cabinet. I might not even need to hurry while making dinner this night, Link seems in need of a long relaxing bath.
    What could he be thinking of?
    Stop that, Zelda! Don't think about bad things! But, they can't be that bad, can they?
    I use flint and steel to light the stove. I pull down from the cabinet my soup pot, open the sink spout to add water to it and pour my vial of seasoned broth into it. The pot simmers lightly when I place it on the hot stove. I gather up potatoes and peel the skin with a knife and cut them into quarters, and the same with carrots. The pot has begun to steam. I use my knife to help peel the cabbage leaves. It's time for my favorite part of making soup: adding all my vegetables to my boiling pot.

    It's been a long time stirring, and a long time since Link went to take a bath. I can't blame him for being tired, though. I might as well serve up bowls, and set them beside each other on the dining table. There is enough soup left for about two more meals.
    The soup smells good. I turn my head to the right to find Link coming around the corner from the hallway.
    "Hey," he says, tiredly to the food.
    "Hey," I smile to him. "let's eat now, and you can tell me all about your extremely eventful day."
    "Sure," Link sits at the end of the table by the living room, I on the side of the table closest to the wall. He takes a spoonful of soup and potato and fixes his smile to a real one as he licks his lips.
    "That's nice," he whispers. The poor, tired man loves my cooking, but not as much as I love him.
    I take a savory spoonful of carrot, one after the other, playing with my cabbage until I get bored enough to slurp it up, waiting for Link to speak.
    "Well...?" I say, bursting the short silence.
    Was he...sleeping with soup in his mouth? "Oh," he swallows loudly. "I just ran my usual rounds, fly over desert, mountain, forest," he pauses to eat two spoonfuls of soup. "I didn't spot anything to worry about except some rupees lying around."
    "Oh, well," I stuff my face full of soup in hopes that he finds my silence as an opportunity to keep talking. "Go on, there must have been something else aside from the heat that made you so jaded when you came home."
    "Well, I didn't want to mention this, but as I was sailing across the Sand Sea, I found a Moldarach just swimming calmly in the distance, and I hoped he wouldn't see me, but as fate would have it, he spotted me and began to charge," he eats some more, "This is good you know," he interrupts himself.
    "Thank you." I just realized how quickly I'm eating my own soup.
    "Anyway, he barely missed my boat, and when he did," he uses a clawed hand to mime the Moldarach, and a flat hand as his boat. "he surfaced and stood on top of the sand, then he glared at me as I sped away. Ask Skipper and he'll tell you that it snarled really loudly, and dug back into the sea."
    "He didn't bother you anymore?"
    "He just went back to minding his own business of wallowing in the sand."
    "Moldarach's life," I finish my last potato.
    Link eats another carrot and waits until swallowing to resume, "After that, I came to Skipper's home up high, and guess who lives there now?"
    "Who?"
    "Gondo! The Gear Shop manager? Toward the end of my journey, I had taken him a robot and an Ancient Flower to fix it, thus rebirthing my overbearing friend Scrapper, and he had become so intrigued by him that he came down to Lanayru to fix all the robots."
    "How many has he fixed so far?"
    "Oh," he drinks up his last bit of soup. "Three. There were more broken messes inside the retreat he lives in now, so he's built up his own workshop up there, and he brings a new robot up every week or so to fix and he has Skipper go back and forth to deliver ruined robots or bring them back home."
    "That's really nice that he's bringing back their little community," I only have broth left.
    "He told me his mother was glad to finally have the noise of tinkering out of her house."
    "That's good," I giggle.
    Link leans his head against his fist with his elbow on the table, "After visiting with him, it was only late afternoon, hardly close to sundown, and I wasn't about to break my promise to you," he fishes in his empty bowl, but finding it devoid to any food, he runs his fingers through his thick brown hair.