Warm
@the-delta-42 wanted a Gerudo!Link AU where Link’s parents are the Gerudo chief and a Hylian knight and I figured since I’m doing BOTW fics it would make sense for Urbosa to be his mother, considering the prompt I was given (also i LIVE for Gerudo!Link and i desperately hope they put him in the next game)
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She won’t tell her father the knight he’s appointed to her is somewhat pleasurable company.
He’s quiet, though she does not yet know why, and he seems to be in great reverence of not only her but other women, which is respectable. It makes sense considering he’s half Gerudo.
It is odd, though. He’s Urbosa’s son and she’s so proud of him and so uncharacteristically soft around him and being in the same room with both of them makes Zelda feel like an intruder. Alone with Urbosa, she lets herself relax and finds comfort in her strength.
Alone with Link, she dares herself to let her mind wander over his striking blue eyes and dark warm skin and angry red hair. He’d arrived in the common garb, as if expecting Central Hyrule to be just as hot as Gerudo. Or maybe he had not any clothes for cooler weather at all. Whatever the case, Urbosa presented him to the king, her breast puffed with pride, and he stood, looking a little uncomfortable, a little cold, wearing nothing more than the sword on his back and the shoes on his feet and the pants on his legs.
Zelda won’t tell anyone she admires the evidence of Link’s strength. She’s still mad at him, she reminds herself. But his arms are so strong and he’s got muscles just like his mother’s (she’s worked him, no doubt) and when she lets the naive mind of a teenage girl take over she gets lost in want.
He is like what she imagines a dragon to be. Stoic and infallible and constant, watching and waiting for what Zelda cannot try to guess at. He reminds her of fire and life and wind combined into something powerful and indescribable. He makes her feverish because he’s so warm and the air around her is so cool and she doesn’t know whether she wants to burn alive or let the night bring colder air to freeze her.
Every now and then he speaks. It’s low and soft and accented in the way of the Gerudo and humid on her neck and close, dangerously close, to her ear. To warn her of danger–“Get behind me”–or perhaps to tell her to watch her words carefully. Sometimes it ghosts her ears from three paces behind and she thinks she imagines it but then he speaks again and he asks her how she’s doing. He asks her about her day. He does not always expect a reply and often that is all he says, preferring to listen rather than converse.
There is one morning, long after Zelda is done being mad at him, where he digs hungrily and shamelessly into a hydromelon, juice shining on his cheeks and nose. His hair sticks to his face and every now and then he reaches for a piece of meat for protein. Zelda watches, amused. This is a common ritual.
She eats her food in silence, daintily. He inhales his noisily. Like a barbarian. Even her father eats like this without an audience. But Link just seems to be perpetually starving and in need of food.
To keep him from choking, she touches his arm. “Why don’t you speak?”
He stops, and sets his food down, and looks her in the eyes. Then he shakes his head: I do not want to say.
“Please? I’ve never once conversed with you.” She gives him a hopeful look, knowing deep down he’ll relent to her.
He stays still another moment, then shifts and sighs. When he does speak it’s stronger than she would have imagined under the circumstances, and even so he moves his hands as he speaks like he’s signing along with his words, and she realizes he is, and suddenly now she wonders why.
“Being the only boy in the town made me displaced,” he reveals. “It’s not that I was outcast, I just didn’t fit in with the rest of the tribe. I stayed mute till I was eight, and then spoke very little, and at that point everyone was used to me signing my words as opposed to speaking them, so I began to combine the two. I’ve recently taken on that silence again as…with so many eyes on me and so much at stake, I feel it is best to bear my burdens quietly and discreetly.”
Something about that pulls at Zelda’s heart. It’s a sentiment she shares quietly, a conflict she and him hold onto tightly and internally and resolutely despite what could be done to help. Despite what assistance they could ask for.
It’s a stubborn thing, and Zelda is not surprised to realize it in herself. But to realize it in Link, to have him actually open up and tell her something she was too busy dealing with on her own to see it in him, is another thing entirely. After knowing him the better part of a year it makes sense, considering Link’s unshakeable will, but to know someone else understands what Zelda herself is going through gives her a swift reality check.
She touches his arm again. “Then you and I are more alike than I initially believed,” she says gently.
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, looking down at her hand on his skin. Then he raises those wild, hard blue eyes to hers and they soften upon landing on her face and they’re bright and warm and he’s smiling, he’s smiling, albeit lightly, but he’s smiling, a real, genuine smile that sends Zelda’s heart fluttering in her chest. He absently puts his other hand over hers, just for a moment, and then he laughs like a dog laughs: his smile wide and only the slightest of sounds escaping his lips and his eyes closed happily, crinkled upwards by his smile.
“I guess we are,” he agrees, picking up another hydromelon slice and raising it in her direction as if toasting to her.
He does not speak to her after that, but he doesn’t need to. The silence this time is friendly and content and Zelda does not feel burdened to mend any old wounds she may have inflicted.
When the Calamity arrives and Vah Naboris falls, Link does not show his pain. Zelda knows it’s there–it’s thick and heavy in the air and every move he makes is sharper than normal–but he does not cry, he does not scream out in anguish and curse the gods for letting this happen.
He’s not even angry with Zelda, and he has every right to be. It is her fault, after all.
When she relays the death of Urbosa, of the Gerudo chief and Champion and mother, to Link and tells him fervently that she is sorry, he only swallows and looks up at her with eyes hard as obsidian and just as glassy, and he murmurs, “It is my duty to keep the princess safe,” and he doesn’t speak another word as he takes her hand and pulls her along through the woods to safety.
Zelda can feel their pain and hears their spirits crying out as each one falls. She’s covered in mud and scrapes and with every step her legs feel heavier and then her hand slips from Link’s and she falls to her knees, letting the rain freeze her to her bones.
Link returns to her silently, kneeling in front of her, waiting for her to talk. She chokes back a sob and tells him it’s her fault and throws herself into his arms, bawling, and after a moment she can feel him shaking against her chest.
He’s crying. Oh, goddesses, he’s crying, and he’s whispering that it’s not her fault, that she tried and she did her best and that it’s going to be okay, but his voice is trembling and he’s hurting so bad inside and for once Zelda cannot bring herself to heed his words.
He dies in her arms. There’s too much blood but there’s enough time to save him if she gives him to the Sheikah warriors who find her in the woods. She’d finally awakened her powers, but the others were already dead.
She’d failed Urbosa, and in doing so failed Link, and he’d bled out in her arms as a result.
Zelda hates herself. She hates the world. She’s a failure, she messed up, she’s flawed and–
Zelda watches the Sheikah carry Link away and the Master Sword gleams at her and suddenly she realizes she can’t keep doing this anymore. She makes up her mind in an instant.
She has to bring the sword to the Great Deku Tree. She has to kill her feelings and hold Ganon back till Link wakes up. Till his fierce Gerudo heart brings him back to her.
When she lays eyes on him again he’s clad in blue and he looks a little older, a little tougher, a little more worn than before. His emotions show more clearly now, ire and determination as plain on his face as the sun in the sky. He’s riding an equally battle-ready dun horse, encouraging it gently to keep running circles around the pig-demon Ganon, and he’s wielding the Bow of Light like he’d been born with it in his hands.
That Gerudo fire is blazing in his heart. He is unstoppable now, and Zelda calls out to him, urging him on.
He hears it and he smiles and he lands the final blow and Zelda lands in the grass, calm and collected and powerful.
And then Ganon is gone.
Everything is suddenly quiet, peaceful. After a hundred years, Zelda’s dress is still stained with mud. After a hundred years, Link still looks at her like she’s the most important thing in the world to him.
He remembers her.
He tells Zelda later that not remembering his own mother did a number on his psyche. He recounts his journey to Gerudo Town and how as soon as he entered the village, clad in feminine clothing (that he happens to enjoy, mind you), everyone stopped and saw and knew. Maybe they didn’t know who exactly he was but they knew he was important and he himself did not know why.
Seeing Urbosa’s spirit in her Divine Beast broke him, he tells her. He’d remembered her by that point and she’d told him she loved him and granted him her power and he’d cried right then and there because it was her.
Zelda hurts for him and sympathizes, her own father lost to something she could not control. She and Link only find consolation in knowing their parents’ souls are at peace.
He also tells of his father, a knight, whom he never really knew till Urbosa brought him, at around ten years of age, to the castle to train. He says that his father was a good man, if a bit distracted and a little too proud of his son for being the princess’ personal guard and her chosen Champion.
Link remembers other, more vague details as time goes on after the battle. He presents them to Zelda as they appear, and he appears excited about such occurrences. It is to be expected.
He takes her to Gerudo Town more than once. He’s the only man Zelda’s seen waltz straight through the city gates without being attacked by the guards, and it’s almost humorous.
She can’t tell if he’s happier in the desert or Central Hyrule. She works up the nerve to ask, and he tells her that the desert will always be where he feels the most comfortable. She doesn’t blame him, he grew up there.
But then he looks her in the eye and smiles, and he tells her softly, “I am, however, happiest with you.”
It’s an intimate thing, a gentle confession found on his breath and in her ears but lost to the world around them and she smiles back at him and it’s at this time that she realizes he reminds her of the sun.
