More cute mental-issues Link/Sheik fanfic.

Infinity Times Two (2061 words) by bladespark
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Link/Sheik (Legend of Zelda), Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Characters: Link (Legend of Zelda), Sheik (Legend of Zelda), Zelda (Legend of Zelda), Zelda | Sheik
Additional Tags: Gender Issues, Gender Identity, Romance, Love, Implied Sexual Content
Series: Part 3 of Hylian Mathematics
Summary:

Link has recalled all of his past lives, and the way he always loved Zelda in them. Sheik, though, is uncertain if he wants to remember. How can he continue to do what he must, to be Sheik, if he remembers a thousand years of being Zelda? And how can he bear remembering a thousand years of loving Link when he has a new, masculine body that he's certain Link could never love?

I *think* that's me done with the Hylian Mathematics story, it makes a tidy little trilogy. Though if I'm every really bored and want to write a very loving genderplay sex scene, I may write out the boot-scene one from this. I'm sure it would be sweet. But good gods I've been writing SO MUCH SEX lately.

I need a hero.

My sexual and interpersonal development was extremely stunted, I did not "date" until I was 19, and those first dates very much resembled the terrible awkwardness and stupidity of most people's middle school crushes. Except that it was adult men on the other end, which made everything even more awkward.

At least I have always been blessed with a strong sense of boundaries, even if I had zero grace in enforcing them. I was never taken advantage of, but I was just...late discovering men, and sometimes things were very weird.

Link was my first fictional crush. When Ocarina of Time came out I played it obsessively. I was twenty at the time, and I vividly remember seeing the adult Link from the game and going "Wow, he looks really good. Like. Really. Good." It was a funny feeling I didn't know what to do with. I had never had the usual teenage celebrity crushes. I'd had odd teenage fascinations, but they'd fixated on characters like Leto II from Children of Dune. (I was a weird kid, okay?) Never on somebody who just looked hot. But damn, Link was hot, even in the blocky version the game presented me with.

I write stories about Link more than any other single character, I think. (Actually the real most often is probably Twilight Sparkle, but that's only because she's a very convenient storytelling medium, so often the stories aren't "about" her, she just fits as a vehicle for what they're really about. Anyway.) He is my favorite character to write, and the one whose stories always have to have pornographic codas at the end even if they're not stories about sex, because damn he is hot.

More than the purely physical, though, I tend to write Link as very close to perfect. SO MANY of the stories I write about Link center on somebody else near him struggling, worrying, fighting with deep issues, and Link just being there, being supportive, being perfectly understanding about all these issues, always doing the right thing and saying the right thing. My Link is awfully damn perfect.

He's that way in the story I just posted, perfectly supporting Sheik through his struggles with remembering Zelda, and trying to figure out how to be Sheik again, and his fears about love now that he's male. Link is just perfect through all of that, saying exactly the right thing, doing exactly the right thing.

It's because the other character is always me, you see. And Link is always my SO. They don't look anything alike (the SO is more of a tall hobbit or maybe a dwarf, given the beard and hair combo he tends to rock) but the way Link acts in these times is very much based on the way that somehow my SO always says the perfect thing, always knows just how to be supportive, and how to make me feel better.

I don't think he's literally perfect. In fact the first Hylian Mathematics story, Less Than, is kinda based on some conversations we've had, about how inadequate he sometimes feels, and how inadequate I feel, and how stupid it is that we're both sitting around feeling the other one is the better one.

At its worst, that sort of thing is soul-destroyingly toxic. Feeling lesser is a horrible thing. Nobody should feel like they lack worth.

Yet at its best I feel it's how a relationship should be. One should fee like one has gotten a bit of a catch. "They're a little out of my league, I'm so lucky they love me" is good so long as it's not paired with "them" ever putting you down in any way. (One's SO should absolutely never belittle one. Honest conversation about flaws, yes, but always with support. If you come away from talking about your deepest insecurities feeling even less secure, something is not right there. You should feel supported, cared for, and uplifted by a life partner.) I think it's very healthy to feel really lucky to be with the person you're with.

I'm lucky to have a practically perfect hero, and I'll keep writing him into my Zelda fics for as long as I'm writing them, probably.