title: mail-shirt
fandom: legend of zelda: breath of the wild
rating: g
pairing: mipha/link
summary: mipha crafts the zora armor.


This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like. The crafting, all but ritual after hundreds of years. It wasn’t supposed to begin with shooing one’s younger brother out of one’s room, with shutting out the people who carried on about how no barn-born Hylian could stand beside a Zora princess.

The pinpricks in her fingers weren’t supposed to be there, either. Mipha stared at them, veins clotting with frustration, asking any divinity, any exalted ancestor why sewing couldn’t come to her as easily as spearmanship, as healing.

Their silence reminded her that she ought not go to pieces. That she should sit down, breathe away the tiny punctures in her fingertips. Focus once more on the fabric, on the glinting metal and shining blue scales.

Her focus found her staring through the eye of her needle, the wrongness of it still not shaken.

Even as the trivialities fell away, it was... fractured. The rite. Unskilled hands would build a proposal too flimsy for a man who never stayed. Who spent his time at the back of another girl.

Who had been half-cracked, silenced by the weight of destiny.

Mipha dropped her hands, sighed so heavily. She thought, though, that it wasn’t a splinter of what he had to bear.

She couldn’t impose on him, couldn’t wedge herself into that life. Couldn’t throw him her mail-shirt made of wedding rings, expect him to wear it when he stood against calamity.

But perhaps... perhaps she could run support. Could protect him, could redeem her treading on his life.

She, herself, could be his armor.