#i have Emotions shut up leave me alone its 130am. imma queue this for later

[foccaccia]

god, i just - can you imagine what zelda went through on her seventeenth birthday?

this is her last chance to awaken her powers. she’s spent her whole life begging to her goddess, the one whose blood runs through her veins, to help her, and she’s had nothing but silence. all of hyrule, all its peoples, are relying on her, watching her, and all she can do is disappoint them. she knows what she’s good at, what she excels at - zelda is a scientist, a researcher, a genius, and she knows this ancient technology will save them. it has done so before. but the world isn’t looking for another scientist. the sheikah are awash with those. they need the princess of legend, and this sixteen year old child is failing them, and she doesn’t know how to fix it.

so this is her last chance. finally allowed at the spring of wisdom. you know, when you climb mount lanayru as link, if you aren’t wearing proper, thick clothing, you die within an hour. zelda sits in the freezing waters for hours, in only a thin white sleeveless dress, and begs to a goddess who does not answer. this is her spring, naydra is her dragon, wisdom is her triforce. nothing. her best friend, her loyal knight, stands behind her, silent as always, and he is not disappointing the world. he wields the sword that seals the darkness, and he is a master of his craft. there too are her other friends, champions of their people.

and zelda is pulled away, shivering, because hylia isn’t answering her. she’s failed, again, and it weighs unbearably heavy on this child’s mind. she’s supposed to be the next in the line of chosen princesses, a rich history of powerful and grand women who wielded magic as easy as they breathe, and this zelda is powerless. those talents she does have she clings to her chest, and her father the king bats them down with a sneer.

and then ganon wakes up.

they should be prepared, zelda or no zelda - link has the master sword, ready to defend his people. the champions have the divine beasts, huge and powerful machines that could each tear down an army on their own. hyrule has gathered to it guardians, weapons, towers, and it will stand strong as it did ten thousand years ago - zelda knows this, zelda helped rebuild this army. this is what she has given to her people.

what zelda has given to her people turns against them. no help comes from the champions, spread across hyrule, as the grandest warriors hyrule has to offer are torn to shreds in the places they thought safest. armies of unstoppable machines tear through villages like wet paper, rendering so much of hyrule a wasteland. zelda fixed those machines, tuned those gears, led the sheikah to repair them. demise is screaming over zelda’s home, and zelda knows it is her fault. she did not only fail to wake her powers - powers that could stop ganon - but she aided him in his destruction of her home. link has to tear her away. she has to run.

it is her seventeenth birthday, and in a field surrounded by an impossible amount of guardians, she watches her best friend die saving her life.

of course, this is when her powers wake up. too late, of course, for the champions, for link, for hyrule. all she can do is entrust her best friend’s body to purah and robbie (they’re all but children too, all of them, these teenaged heroes tasked by fate with the weight of so many lives) and pray that the chamber of resurrection will save him someday (because her prayers have done her so much good so far).

she follows the voice of a sword in her head - no sword meant for her. this is the sword that will kill ganon, and she cannot use it. the one who can is dead. it’s her fault it’s broken and burned, and all she can do is lay it at the feet of the great deku tree, older than time counted, and promise it that link - memories or no memories, she has to believe he will come back.

and then she turns around.

zelda has been seventeen for so short a time and it has cost her everything, those few things she could claim were both hers and good. and she turns around and heads to her shattered home - the broken castle already crawling with demons and monsters, with malice and poison and glowing eyes creeping through the once warm halls, and an immortal evil clouding around it. zelda cannot kill ganon. the sword is broken, the hero dead, and the chance of either coming back are slim, and still zelda marches up to her home and she raises her hand.

it is zelda’s seventeenth birthday for a century. time is nothing in her eternal locked battle with ganon, just barely enough to keep him tethered to the castle. even still, he can reach out - the blood moons keep the hordes of monsters alive, keep the guardians and the divine beasts possessed, keep naydra (her dragon) poisoned.

what must it have been like, that century of seventeenth birthdays? zelda’s own magic keeping them locked in the cycle (though haven’t they been locked in this cycle throughout all their lives), eternally fighting? do you think she ever faltered in her faith in link? a hundred years is a long time to hope a dead man will wake up.

and even then. even knowing link woke up, then, able to stretch just far enough to see him, unable to help beyond a watchful eye... link doesn’t remember her. at all. eventually, flashes, seconds of recollections, but he never remembers fully. and it takes time to reach her, to gather his strength again. longer still that zelda has to wait, eternally just barely seventeen years old, watching the boy who was once her best friend age by the day, gather new scars, remember the feel of a weapon in his hands, rescue the spirits of her dead friends.

link was always a better hero.

god. and then he comes to save her, and in a century, all she could do was hold him back. link draws his sword, charges, and ganon is defeated so soon after. oh, she can give him a weapon, can pick up the remains of ganon and seal it away, but link does in the course of a few hours what zelda would never have been able to.

and then what? then it’s over? not really. the sun is setting on her seventeenth birthday, and zelda is over a century old, and her once best friend turned feral wild warrior is looking up at her, and zelda has to decide how to rebuild a kingdom. what to do next.

im just saying. the poor girl had probably the worst birthday ever.