Fairy Tales
Pam t3h Spam
Malon speaks in fairy tales.
Since that day that now sits small, dark, and faraway like the distant end of a closed tunnel, when her mother no longer had the breath to tell them, Malon has kept her language alive. Each night, as her father snores in his bed and cuccoos cluck softly beneath her windowsill, Malon brings down the old book of once upon a time and happily ever after. The battered volume has shrunk smaller and thinner in hands that have grown larger and more calloused, but when she leafs through the yellowed pages, it is as if she turns back space and pushes a little harder against the yoke of time itself.
Candlelight flickering behind her, each night she reads. Eyes blurred as she follows the lines at a dizzying pace, her nose presses closer, ever closer to the pages until she can see nothing but those ancient words, breathe nothing but the musty scent of those ancient pages, live nothing but that ancient tale. Once upon a time. She reads and quietly, magically, the princess within her emerges: tanned skin pales to a lovely ivory, work-roughened calluses fade from slender hands, clarity returns to a wind-torn and sun-parched voice that is suddenly as pure and sweet as that of the ten-year-old girl who sang her prince down from the moon all those years ago.
Malon still sings, sometimes, that wistful, lilting melody that her mother passed down to her as she passed down red hair and a love for stories and a gentle touch for horses. She sings when she is preoccupied, engrossed in shoveling hay or tamping dirt and stops as soon as she realizes what she's doing. Holds a hand to her unruly throat and presses, hard. Epona whinnies as the girl doubles and chokes, her wide brown eyes worried in clearest, loving way of a good horse. Malon drinks water laced with mint and honey afterwards and puts herself to bed early begging exhaustion and stress. She is a practical girl, see, sensible and good with business—but illogical as this is, she can't shake the bitter feeling that her voice is the cause of all her problems.
She spoke in fairy tales the first time she met him, caught mid-song by her shining prince, both of them bathed in meaningful moonlight, but neither she nor he understood the language. She was tricked by the disguise that royalty always wears in the old stories: little-boy face under dirt-smudged cheeks, and her prince, failing to be recognized, disappeared in a flash of dust and great wings. She had seven years in between to sing and read and dream and grow—applecheeked and featherhaired but also wide-hipped and strong-legged like a country girl—so that when next she spoke to him in fairy tales, she knew enough to understood the answer. Not in words—he's always been the strong, silent type—but in the warmth of his arms as he lifted her up and out of danger, in the nervous new rhythm of her heart.
Too late it took her to piece together the language herself, because he's already become someone else's dashing knight. Oh, she thinks and Malon, straw-covered, dusty, red-headed, plain old horse-shit-shoveling Malon draws back, moves on.
But—later that night, when she reaches for the last stub of candle to light her storybook's pages, something rekindles within her. She reads
and somehow
her eyes still open
she dreams. The princess that she has been for the better part of seventeen years cannot accept something so frail as fact and on sleepless nights Malon stands as she hasn't stood in years, as she stood the first time her prince came down from the all-seeing moon, and sings the silvery-gold song inherited from a mother whose voice might have been a queen's. The Malon of daytime and sunlight strong on stable stalls, the metallic stink of horse piss rising from sweet hay, argues the voice of reason: It can't be her; didn't Snow White have a voice lovely enough to call birds from the trees, the Little Mermaid a song rising hauntingly from the depths of the ocean; Briar Rose a voice "like a nightingale"? The people of Castle Town whispered, as Malon lugged sweating milk jugs through the alleys, that their princess had a voice like a lark in spring when she played ball in her father's gardens. Yet Malon sings insistent snatches of her mother's song with the rough-edged tones of a farmer girl's voice, one that has, over the years, breathed raw winter air and swallowed summer sand and strained over the thunder of clopping hooves, and tries, and fails night after night.
She stops speaking in fairy tales during the day. Yet on sleepless nights, Malon cannot help trying to sing in them, and perhaps there is a fragment of magic still left in the wordless notes. He comes to her in the shadowy half-dark of twilight, meets her mid-song at her gate, and her book is forgotten in a rush of tangled limbs and damp hair and a new language of soft-throated sounds that are less than words but feel like something more than them, too. Afterwards, curled beside him in her cramped bed, she turns and softly, ever so softly, mouths her favorite fairy tales against the warmth of his sleeping back until she talks herself to sleep.
But the clock strikes—not midnight, but three or four in the morning, and the enchantment is broken. He wakes her as he fumbles in the pre-dawn darkness for his scattered clothes—not purposefully, because he is nothing if not kind, but blindly; his eyes are far-seeing, past the girl in the bed to the brighter one shining from the faraway castle. Malon does not blame him; Link is, after all, simply acting his part in a story in which her own role is inconsequential. She is a sentence at the margin, a plain sort of word, no calligraphy to adorn her name. Her prince dashes off to a princess of the kind that does not disappear in the daylight, and the hours between the time that the sun rises and chores begin to stretch out, cold and empty.
So Malon lights a candle and picks up her storybook.
In the mornings, she milks and chops and shovels and hoes. In the afternoons, she barters and carries and cooks. In the evenings, she cleans and mends and naps. In the nights, she stands alone in an empty field and sings. Her husky farmer's voice snags on the crescendos, swoops flat over the high notes, but there is something breathcatching about the simple melody she repeats over and over, something almost—magical. Malon sings, and the notes thread their way through the night as if she spins a net, one full of holes and imperfections and unraveling ends that waver as she runs out of breath—
But occasionally, her raggedy song brings him galloping through the gate. And those are the only times that matter.
This is not a tale of once upon a time.
There is no once, only now, and today, and tomorrow the same as today.
Malon knows the book cover to cover and her story is not in it. Nothing changes.
She is still Malon, simply Malon, by day. On certain nights, for those few hours when Link holds her in his arms, she is a princess. She never despairs, never complains,
simply waits
for the magical moonlit nights when her prince comes to break her lonely enchantment—just like a fairy tale.
Darker than I planned or expected.
I love and respect and admire Zelda—who doesn't?—but when I really think about it, Malon is the one that all of us fangirls should truly identify with. She's simple and unassuming and absolutely normal; imagine if Link came one day into your life, swept you off your feet, and left you with no way to compete against the divine beauty and majesty of a princess. Who's simply not hateable because she is also powerful and intelligent.
I don't mean for Malon to be read as weak in this fic; I'm also not encouraging anyone to follow her example. I simply believe that it takes a different kind of strength to look reality in the face and still refuse to let it get you down, to find your own truth in it.
Inspired by a lovely Malon-drabble by Chaotic Serenity (part of the "The World in Brief" collection).
Disclaimer: Zelda (c) Nintendo