The chapter is easily the corniest thing ever written and I didn't dare upload it for like two months, but the need to post a link to the best cosplay ever outweighed the need to avoid the worst chapter ever.
Oh, darn. doesn't allow links. And rightly so. But darn anyway. It was probably the most adorably display of Link cosplaying evar.
sigh
Anyway, on with the corrnball.
This was wrong. Very wrong. Now was not an apt time for things to be wrong!
The Temple of Light wasn't there. As far as Link could tell, nothing was there. Or here, rather, as she plummetted through the place where the Temple of Light wasn't.
If you could even call it plummeting. There wasn't a down to plummet towards. It was void. All that existed was Sheik, held so tightly against Link that she was terrified she was hurting him. But she didn't dare let up her grip on him for a second, because the void was closing in. She could feel it. The darkness knew they were there and it was growing closer, desiring to tear them away from each other. It feared and despised them.
Ugly red light coursed around them and tore into them, like thousands of frozen, serrated claws and hot, fanged mouths,
"Goddess damn it," Link whispered, her face pressed tightly into Sheik's wet, matted hair. "After all we did they send us to the Dark World."
"Mebbe. . . 'f you stop. . . blasphem'n'. . . all the time. . . " Sheik said weakly, through a grin and a grimace.
She wanted to laugh but she couldn't. The pain was terrible, but she could handle it. What hurt most was knowing that Sheik was nearly gone, and there was nothing she could do. Anything she could do would only make him worse. She wanted to hold him as tight as her (considerable) strength would allow, to feel close to him, and safe, but she knew that would likely tear him in two. She felt a weird compulsion to kiss his bloodied lips before he died, but:
a) he was struggling to breathe already, and
b) that was gross
She would have to settle for words.
"I love you."
The release was something beautiful. The pain was gone. The blackened evil fell away, repulsed, sent screaming back to the void, which was now considerably less voidy. Wrapped tightly together in a prism of blue energy, they floated through the dwindling emptiness, as platforms of light began to blink on in the darkness, spilling over already with the same blue energy. Their little cacoon bound them too tightly to see, but beneath her breast she could feel his heart beating strongly. The scorched skin up his neck and face was now smooth and unbroken.
He wasn't going to die.
Slowly, he opened his eyes, smiled, and said, "your arm is better."
She would have hit him if there had been room. "Never mind my arm!"
He smiled again. The blood around his mouth had gone too. She guessed it wouldn't be as gross to kiss him now, even if he was a guy. Unfortunately, his mouth was being used right now to make words.
"I love you too."
Their little cacoon alighted gently on a large, circular platform of blue, and dissipated. There was room now. She hit him.
Rauru watched the two of them fight (or rather, Link fight and scream and claim that she'd been meaning to say 'I love yoghurt', whilst Sheik accepted it unconditionally). He would have smiled or praised Link for her display of a perfect Nayru's Love, but, for the time being, he was immaterial, too weak even to assume a physical form. Ganondorf's attack on the Temple of Light had been devestating. Every defence had been compromised, the walls breached. The Sorcerer's evil had filled the very heart of the Sacred Realm and the Ancient Sage had been powerless to stop it.
The first vestiges of power began to arrive in from the Temple of Water. A dozen or so particles, the first of many that would go on to become the new corporeal form of old Rauru, were tugged together through the air. They aligned themselves, like a constellation of stars, into the faint outline of a man. Three of the particles rearranged themselves into what might have been a smile.
As cornball as it sounded, there was a power in the world greater than anything he or Ganondorf or the sages combined wielded. He knew little of love, sometimes wishing he had spent his time as a man on Hyrule learning more of it, but he had always, secretly, held the greatest respect for Nayru.
And he did know that they wouldn't win this battle without love.
Of course, two Master Sword's helped too. . .
Link had just landed a particularly satisfying right hook on Sheik. Rauru almost felt sorry for her, as she raged so futilely against her own destiny. They were fated to love each, the Goddesses' would see to that, even if it meant a bizarre and improbable series of events.
Still, time waits for no man (though it does occasionally go seven years backwards and forwards). He would need to rebuild the dimensional defenses before Ganondorf struck again. And they - he gestured with a pseudohand, and a ring of blue light appeared around them to whisk them back to Hyrule - had a considerable amount of adventuring still to do.
They had a quiet moment in the Temple of Time.