#02. legendarylullaby

[balladetto]

cont. from here / @legendarylullaby

     The first time he understands touch as a language stolen from him is not the first time it burns him.

     It's around the eighth, or the tenth, or some other approximate number he doesn't actually want to remember. Kakariko's well had been the last straw — or maybe just the biggest, in the sense that it was one of the biggest explosions of a loss he would feel before Navi.

     This is a wound that likes to reopen itself. Scar tissue pulling apart every time he's faced with the threat of a hand, no matter how gentle. He's come to tend to it himself over the years: stitching it closed with old threads and accepting it as some interminable hurt. Link can't erase it any more than he can perfectly speak.

     But he can go further than merely surviving it, and with someone like Zelda—

     There must be a word for the way her hand fits in his.

     Without the separation of gloves nor gauntlets, her warmth is felt in its almost heady entirety. If he focuses hard enough, he might be able to count the beats of her pulse against his palm, imagined as a match to the drum his own heart makes of itself in the wake of her skimming fingers. As she goes up, a river of sensation — soft and shivery and filling — cascades down. He squeezes: her hand on one side, his fist over his knee on the other. Her voice is such a sweet thing in the silence.

     In this unremarkable space of another campsite for another night, Link is remarkably loved.

     He holds onto this as she brushes along his hair. This, the weight of her care and all its reassurances: guiding his breaths past tight and quiet, gently smoothing over the stinging in his scalp, pulling him back from the edge of awful memories. His head dips an inch in relief, and when Zelda's hand trails down to hold the line of his jaw — fingers a tingling warmth — he has to laugh again. A little incredulous, a little shy, maybe even a little watery. Above all though, fond.

     So very, very fond.

     Words still lost to the intensity of everything he's feeling, he hums in reply. A nod follows, as sincere as the smile pushing at his cheeks, then he's opening his eyes to catch her gaze. Link lifts his free hand to rest it over the one cupping his jaw. Slowly, he traces the path her wrist makes to her elbow. To her shoulder. With how far they've now come, pushing and trusting and redefining the boundaries set on them by wills not their own, it's near impossible to look away.

     He strokes the back of curled fingers down her cheek, light and careful. When he turns his hand over, it's in a question that hovers a hair's breadth away from her cheek; a touch he wants to return. Can he...? Can I?

#legendarylullaby #02. legendarylullaby #( the pain of gi issues works hard but my love for these two works fuckening harder #thank you for your patience as always!! a line or two will probably be familiar but everything else...hehe #please don't mind the length!! just getting back into the hang of writing <3 ) #* lionheart / ic. #* ic / para. #* legendarylullaby & link / saying hello (let's see the sunrise together). #* v / to make a home of this body. #long post cw