#aching softness

The Garden Doesn’t Know She’s Gone Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Fanfic by MythboundCal

Zelda’s garden doesn’t know she’s gone.

It still blooms like she’ll be back any second—like the sunflowers haven’t noticed she stopped humming to them, like the lavender didn’t watch her vanish into light.

Link stands at the gate. The wood is soft with age, half-swallowed by ivy. The watering can rests exactly where she left it in Hateno. Rusting. Waiting.

He doesn’t touch it.

Not out of neglect.

Just… fear.

That if he waters the garden, it might forget her—that its roots will stop searching for her footsteps, its blossoms will stop blooming in her colors.

So he lets it grow wild.

The basil climbs the wrong wall. The squash vines curl over the porch. The chimes still sing when the wind hits just right, a song no one ever wrote down.

And her gloves still hang on a bent nail by the shed. One turned inside out. He doesn’t fix it.

Somewhere beneath the soil are seeds she never named. He won’t dig for them. If they bloom, they bloom. If they don’t… he’ll wait with them.

Today, he sits. The Master Sword leans nearby, but he doesn’t reach for it.

The porch creaks under his weight. He watches the marigolds twitch in the breeze, reaching for hands that never come.

The villagers don’t ask anymore. He’s glad.

Because how do you explain a wound that grows flowers?

Even now, he hears her voice on the air—light, scolding, fond. “Don’t overwater the rosemary, Link. It hates being fussed over.”

He doesn’t answer.

Just lets the wind rustle the leaves. Lets the garden carry the silence.

And when a white lily opens—out of season, out of place—he doesn’t wonder how.

The garden remembers.