The Legend of Zelda: Link's Desperation

Chapter 13: Acceptance

Zelda was the one that wanted to get up bright and early that morning as she had said the night before to go to Castle Town, but when Link woke up it was obvious she was not going to do the same anytime soon. The dim morning light only showed enough for Link to make that observation. It also only provided enough for him to grab a piece of paper and write in the most traditional Hylian he knew:

Gone to Castle Town. Eat breakfast without me. Don't go anywhere!

The last section of the note was the most vital part to him. He didn't want her to go wandering off. Who knows what could show up in an abandoned village?

He grabbed an apple from the kitchen and walked out the door quietly. He jumped on a waiting Epona, and urged her forward, but only at a slow trot as he ate the apple. When he finished, he was near Hyrule Field, so he threw it aside and made the horse speed up. He knew it would be a matter of minutes before he had fully traversed the field.

He seemed to have fought off the memories of the night before until now. They came rushing back to him, and he tried to focus on the rough bouncing of the horse, but it didn't work. He forced himself to think about what had occurred.

He didn't feel anything towards Zelda anymore, and if he had, then it wan't something he could name or relate to a common feeling. He definitely didn't care for her romantically, and he understood that she had kissed him last night because she needed to know if he did. What feelings he had felt were pity and sadness, and not actually liking her romantically.

He was mostly surprised at the fact that he felt no awkwardness. It was as if they just needed to know what was true, and that kiss showed them with no hard feelings that it wasn't meant to be.

The realizations and recollections he was having were rattled when the greatest one of all came back; the evil that had surfaced between them. He thought of what Zelda had said, "Queen Zelda is completely capable of evil on her own, and she loves it."

Did she really mean what she had said? That being evil made her happy? Even though Link was trying to accept his new, darker self, it didn't mean he enjoyed it in any way. He felt that whatever happens is fated by the Goddess-- wait, that wasn't right. This was the Twilight Era of Hyrule, he knew, and understood that this would go down in Hyrule's bloody history. But he recalled that the Goddesses told both Link and Zelda that everything was fated by Hylia, destined to occur as long as evil forces don't interfere. So this wasn't fated by the angelic entity that was reborn into his new companion, but it was what Ganondorf inadvertently made happen.

Link told himself that he was okay with that.

~~~

Zelda slowly rose awake, and at the first deep breath of the allergenic, cat hair-thick air of the house, the memories of the night before came rushing back to her. Link kissed her to serve Ilia with revenge, and later she had kissed him to see if he had feelings for her. She knew that Link couldn't hide his feelings behind a kiss. This wasn't what was bothering her; it was what she had said when she realized his guilt for making her do some dark deeds: "Queen Zelda is completely capable of evil on her own, and she loves it."

She began to panic at the thought of the sentence she had spoken when she was drunk with victory in being correct of her suspicions about Link. It was by no means true. She was not glad that she had 'become' darker than she had been before the twilight, before captivity, before everything. But she wasn't opposed to it either. She was coming to accept what her destiny had in store for her.

That wasn't right, though. Her destiny had been rewritten when the evil of shadow had terrorized Hyrule, like the Goddesses had explained. It was Ganondorf's evil intentions that turned her into this. Unbeknownst to her, she felt the same as Link in this situation.