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“I don't think you should go,” Zelda says, breaking the silence. She pulls her knees up to her chest and hugs them. The castle roof tiles are rough beneath her bare feet.
Link’s reply is simple. She remembers when he couldn't even speak the Hylian language, but now he knows the spoken and the signed versions of Hylian, Sheikah, and probably several others. Last she knew, he'd been working on Gerudo.
“It's what I do,” he says.
“Impa Shana doesn't think you should go, either,” Zelda protests. “I heard her talking about it.”
Link looks up at the stars. He's changed a lot, physically and mentally, since she met him. Instead of thick fur and little wings, he has the slightly freckled skin of a young Hylian teenager, though his face isn't quite right. He's aging too slowly, too. Maybe one day, she’ll be older than he is.
His tail is disappearing, too, getting thinner and weaker every day. But it's still here tonight, and like he has so many times, Link wraps the end around Zelda’s ankle. He told her once that to him, it means I'm here with you.
She wonders if that's what it meant to his people before he crash-landed here on New Hyrule.
“I'm going,” he says eventually. “If I don't stop Majora, who will?”
Zelda opens her mouth to answer, but he shakes his head and cuts her off.
“Bad question. You know there isn't really anyone else. I… I don't want there to be anyone else.” Link hugs himself, too. He wears sleeves over his markings, now, but Zelda knows what they mean.
She sighs through her nose and inches a little closer to him. “Impa Shana says she'll take me to Kakariko to be trained, for real this time. When you get back, maybe you can come, too.”
The extended trip is honestly more than just a way for Zelda to learn more than diplomacy and swordfighting. It's a way to break from her father’s stern rules, a way to become who she wants to be: a true princess, the kind that champions her people and fights evil.
Her father does neither.
“I'd like that,” Link says.
Several years later, when Zelda meets Link again, he's lost his tail and the rest of his fur. He's sadder. She knows he defeated Majora, but she’d sneaked peeks at the footage. She never knew that a body so small could hold that much strength.
The adults keep whispering about him, and though she begs, they insist on sending him to Kakariko. She never actually went there, but she knows what the Sheikah do there. She knows that the adults are sending him so he will learn to obey them.
They're scared of him.
That just makes her hold his hand tighter on the shuttle ride. It's small in hers. She whispers a promise to him, and he apologizes back.