The Man with the Crystal Wii-mote
Part I: Awakening
October 31, 2012…
A brown-haired, blue-eyed young man in glasses stood in a large throne room. On the ground in front of him was a crimson-haired, yellow-eyed teenage boy. In the young man's hand was a golden-bladed, black-hilted sword.
"Sam Carlson… For everything you've done… You must pay… I cannot let this go unpunished…" CJ, the brown-haired young man said. With that, he plunged his sword into Sam's chest, ending his life. Suddenly, Sam's lifeless corpse began to glow with dark energy. CJ gasped at the being that took shape before him. It was a dark-skinned muscular man with crimson hair and crimson eyes.
"We meet again, boy…" The man, known as Ganondorf, said.
"No. This… will… not happen…" CJ said. He held his hand up and watched as it gave off an ethereal glow, bearing the mark of three golden triangles, standing point-to-point forming another larger triangle.
"Ah… the Triforce… A feeble attempt… If I knock you away and touch it first, my wish will be granted…" Ganondorf said, turning his back to CJ . "I will make my wish to control Hyrule and finish you…" Ganondorf laughed with malice.
"Always laughing about your plan and never paying attention to what's going on around you, huh?" CJ said with a smirk. Ganondorf looked at him and saw that he was touching the Triforce.
"Impossible!" Ganondorf exclaimed.
"Great golden goddess of Hyrule!" CJ exclaimed. "Hear my cry! Heal the pain of my friends, family and subjects who have been hurt by Ganondorf! Make the suffering go away! Bring it to an end! Reverse the curse of Ganondorf that has been laid on me and those I care about!" Ganondorf rushed toward CJ, eager to stop him, but turned to dust as a bright white light filled the room…
May 17, 2014…
CJ wearily opened his eyes and stared up at a white ceiling. A rhythmic beeping could be heard throughout the room. CJ groggily turned his head to the side and saw a familiar blond-haired, blue-eyed young woman sitting next to him.
"S-Stacey?" He mumbled.
"You're awake…" Stacey said. It was then that Stacey's mom and her sister Janelle walked in. Her mom had dirty blonde, almost brown hair that was a little longer than shoulder length, and glasses. Janelle had brown eyes and very short brown hair.
"Where am I?" CJ asked.
"The hospital." Stacey said. "You've been in a coma for the past 4 months."
"Wait… what's the date?" CJ asked.
"May 17." Stacey said.
"2013?" CJ asked.
"No… 2014." Stacey said.
"Wait what?" CJ asked.
"That car accident must have really knocked you for a loop…" Stacey said.
"Car accident?" CJ asked. "The last thing I remember is…" Stacey cut him off.
"You were driving to school and a city bus ran a red light." Stacey said. "I was afraid I lost you. The doctors said it was a miracle the crash didn't kill you."
"School?" CJ asked. He thought for a moment.
CJ walked to the front door, backpack slung over his shoulder. Stacey walked over to him and smiled.
"Last semester of college… Finally…" CJ said, breathing a sigh of relief.
"You'll do great." Stacey said. "I know it."
CJ kissed Stacey and smiled. "I love you, hun."
"Love you too." Stacey said. "Have a good day." CJ then walked out the door and climbed into a waiting white Chevy. He smiled and waved to Stacey before pulling out of the driveway and heading off.
"I… was supposed to graduate from college this semester…" CJ realized.
"Are you ok, hun?" Stacey asked. "You seem confused…"
"Amnesia's not uncommon after coming out of a coma." The doctor said, walking into the room.
"This… doesn't make sense…" CJ said. "I… I remember fighting Sam… He was trying to take over Hyrule… I remember wishing on the Triforce…"
"Hyrule? Triforce?" The doctor asked.
"From the Legend of Zelda… CJ's favorite video game." Stacey said. "Doc, do people dream when they're in a coma?"
"It's not exactly common, but we also don't have any medical or scientific evidence that it's impossible." The doctor said.
"CJ… You were dreaming…" Stacey said.
"But… I remember fighting Ganondorf…" CJ said. "I remember avenging my dad's murder…"
"Hun… Your dad passed away in 2011…" Stacey said. She paused for a moment, knowing she was about to dig up painful memories. "…He called you on the first day of school, five minutes before class started. He asked to go to the emergency room. You rushed home and rushed him to the hospital. He told you everything was fine, but you knew better. The next day, he was flown…"
"…to a different hospital." CJ said, his eyes beginning to water. "To be placed in the intensive care unit… on life support. And…" A memory flashed in his mind.
CJ stood in a hospital room with Stacey. Lying in a hospital bed in front of them was a man with dark brown, almost black hair. He was hooked up to various medical devices: ventilator, heart monitor, catheter, and other devices that were essentially sustaining his life.
The nurse walked in and CJ looked at her.
"It's what he would want…" CJ said, struggling to fight back tears. "He's said… on more than one occasion… that this isn't how…" He stopped for a moment and wiped his eyes. "How he would want to live." Stacey wrapped her arm around CJ as he began to cry.
"February 3, 2011…" CJ said. "I made the choice to take Dad off of life support…" Stacey could see that he was about to cry.
"I'm sorry hun… I… I didn't mean to bring it up…" She said.
"No…" CJ said, sniffling a bit. "It's okay. I can't even begin to recall how many times he told me it wasn't how he wanted to live…"
CJ sat in the living room with his dad, watching TV.
"We now go to Steve Boylston with the weather…" The news had just finished covering a story about a local woman who was in a tragic accident and left brain dead on life support in a nearby hospital.
"I don't ever want to be like that…" CJ's dad said. "If I'm ever in the hospital, with a machine keeping me alive, that's not how I want to live. It's not fair to anyone."
CJ paused for a moment. "I know." He said.
"I hated when he'd say that, though…" CJ said. "It wasn't something I wanted to think about. At all. Maybe… maybe part of me knew. Even that long ago. Maybe that's what it hurt so much to hear him say that. Maybe there was something deep inside of me that knew I was losing him. And the more that I think about, the more I get the feeling that he knew too… Maybe that's why he always brought it up. Maybe he knew that he didn't have much longer and he wanted me to be ready…"
"You never told him that it bothered you when he said that?" Stacey asked.
"I didn't want to…" CJ said. "I didn't want to hurt him… Besides, there were a lot of things I never said to him. Including things I wish I had said…"
CJ stood beside the hospital bed with Stacey and the nurse. Some of CJ's other family members were there as well, including CJ's cousin Jeremy, who was more like an older brother to him.
"Is there anything you want to say to him?" Jeremy asked. "He can still hear you…" CJ looked down at his dad, tears in his eyes, constantly trying to fight it.
"I love you, Dad… I'm sorry I never said it more often… I'm sorry it took me until now to realize it… I'm sorry, Dad… And I love you…"
A few moments later, the nurse turned to CJ, and with a solemn look on her face, said:
"He's gone." CJ buried his face in Stacey's shoulder and began to sob.
"Hun… he knew you loved him…" Stacey said.
CJ paused for a moment. "No offense, hun… But no matter how much you say it… No matter how much I say it to myself, I'm always gonna struggle with it…" He said. "I'm always gonna regret not saying it more…" Stacey grabbed CJ's glasses from the table next to the bed and handed them to him.
"Are you… going to be okay?" Stacey asked.
CJ shook his head and sighed. "I'm not really sure. That dream… or maybe dreams… Was so vivid. I don't know what was real and what was a dream… How long have we been together?"
"Four years this July…" Stacey said. "We've been dating since July 23, 2010."
"Have we ever broken up?" CJ asked.
"No." Stacey asked.
"Can Stacey and I talk privately please?" CJ asked.
"Of course." The doctor said, before leading Stacey's mom and Janelle out of the room and closing the door.
"How many ex-girlfriends do I have?" CJ asked.
"Maybe 2 or 3, but you really don't count them as relationships since the longest one was only about a week…" Stacey said. "As far as you're concerned, I'm your first real girlfriend."
"And you?" CJ asked.
"You're my second, but the first wasn't exactly a very good boyfriend…" Stacey said. "And he wasn't exactly…" CJ stopped her when a memory hit him.
"The best of friends to me." CJ said. "Mat… Yeah, I remember now…"
"Seriously, dude?! Why didn't you tell me that you and Stacey are dating!?" CJ stood there, listening to a young man shout.
"We've been together less than a week, and it's not exactly your business who I date." CJ said.
"That's my ex! That's against the guy code!" The young man, CJ's 'best friend' Mat, shouted.
"There's no such thing as the 'guy code'!" CJ said. "Besides, YOU dumped her, not the other way around! Don't get mad at me for going out with a girl that you didn't want to be with!"
"Who said I didn't want to be with her?" Mat asked.
"I don't know… Maybe it was the daily phone calls you made to me asking me whether or not you should stay with Stacey, or break up with her and go out with Kate, who by the way, you've been with for the last like 6 months anyway…" CJ said.
"Yeah, and you told me to dump Stacey and go out with Kate… Probably so you could snatch Stacey up for yourself!" Mat said.
"Get the damn potatoes out of your ears!" CJ snapped. "I told you that either one was a great choice and to follow your heart! But given the recent Facebook messages I got from Kate saying I'm apparently a horrible friend to you, I think I was wrong."
"You are a horrible friend!" Mat said. "You're dating my EX and you told her that Kate's pregnant!"
"A few problems with that…" CJ said. "One… Again, YOU dumped Stacey. Two: I didn't say anything to Stacey about Kate being pregnant. And three: It's kinda hard for me to be a horrible friend to you when we're not friends!"
"Just like that?" Mat asked.
"Yes. Just like that." With that, CJ walked away from Mat, got in his car and drove away.
CJ chuckled. "I'm glad he brought up that whole pregnancy thing. After half the crap he did to me when we were actually friends, pretending I didn't tell you about him knocking up Kate and acting like I was mad at him for falsely accusing me of something I didn't do was a great excuse to stop being friends with him… Though I do feel a little bad about it. I should've been brutally honest about it. Told him that yeah, I did tell you he knocked up the girl he had been cheating on you with. And no, I didn't care. He deserved it. With the way he treated his so-called 'friends', he got what was coming to him. He needed something to straighten him out and force him to mature even just a little bit."
"Yeah… I don't know what I saw in him…" Stacey said.
"Let's just… forget about it." CJ said.
"Starting to discern what's real and what was a dream?" Stacey asked.
"Yeah… for the most part." CJ said. He looked over at the table nearby and saw a deck of playing cards. He quickly noticed the crimson backs with the black oval in the center. "My Yu-Gi-Oh cards…"
"You remember Yu-Gi-Oh?" Stacey asked.
"The anime characters were in my dream…" CJ said. "My first thought just now seeing those cards was that they were Duel Monsters cards, but I quickly realized that if Hyrule was just a dream, Yugi and his friends must have been too…" Stacey handed the cards to CJ and he began looking through them.
"Glad you're piecing things together…" Stacey said.
"You said I've never really had any other girlfriends…" CJ said. "Did I ever have a neighbor named Shaylene?"
"Yeah, you did." Stacey said. "According to you, she was practically a little sister to you. Anytime you hung out with her and her sister Jennette, Shaylene practically stuck to you like glue. You guys still even hang out. For a while, I was jealous of Jennette. I thought you had a thing for her…"
That explains why Shaylene and I had a relationship… CJ thought, as the memory returned to him. I know she looked at me like an older brother, but being young, and having struggled with going through middle school and high school being single, I took her friendship as something more… I fooled myself into thinking she liked me, and over time, developed a crush on her… I guess that dream was my way of living it out… in a way… After that dream, I'm glad I never let that truth slip out in front of Shaylene… I wonder how she's doing. Last time I saw her was around Christmas…
"Are you okay?" Stacey asked, noticing that CJ was deep in thought.
"Yeah. Sorry, just wondering how Shaylene and Jennette are doing." CJ said, breaking himself out of his train of thought. He picked up his Yu-Gi-Oh cards again and began looking at them again. He stopped at a blue card bearing a picture of Ganondorf, a character from the Legend of Zelda video game series. "What's up with this card? The King of Evil? It was in my dream…"
"You made that card." Stacey said. "You found a website that lets you design and print your own Yu-Gi-Oh cards. You first got the idea for the card from a story you read once a fanfiction site you like to check out once in a while."
"Legend of Zelda 3000: Hero of Cards…" CJ said. "It's a Zelda/Yu-Gi-Oh crossover…" A thought struck him. "It's where I got Ryan and Saria from… It inspired me to write my own Zelda fanfiction."
"The Legend of Zelda: Duel in Hyrule." Stacey said. "Along with a sequel: Dawn of Darkness, and a few other stories… The Amazing Race: Nintendo Edition…"
"The Amazing Race: Paper Mario Edition, The Amazing Race: Legend of Zelda Edition, The Amazing Race: Nintendo Edition 2 and HCIS: Hyrule Criminal Investigative Service." CJ said.
"HCIS was your last story." Stacey said. "You lost interest in writing after you and I started dating. You ended HCIS with the character you based on yourself nearly being killed by Ganondorf…"
"And being put into a coma." CJ said. "That happened in my dream too… Not the writing part, but… all the adventures that my character had in those stories… I can recall it from the dream… It's like I dreamed about it all happening… and continuing…"
"That must have been a really vivid dream…" Stacey said.
"It wasn't like a regular dream, where the events jump around and it only accounts for like a day or even only a couple of hours of events… I dreamed up about 10 years of events… All in a chronological order… As if I was living them…" CJ said.
"Damn… No wonder you're having trouble distinguishing the dream from reality…" Stacey said.
"No… I have most of it down… It's the people now…" CJ said. "So, I know that I dreamed up the Floyds and the Dragmires … And I know who all the fictional characters are… And I know who some of the real people are who slipped into the dream… So that just leaves a small handful: Mike, Sarah, Alex, Dayan, Danielle, Aubrey, Becky and Layla…"
"All real." Stacey said. "All friends of ours… Well, except Becky. She's…"
"Your cousin?" CJ asked.
"You do remember…" Stacey said.
"Yeah…" CJ said. "That didn't change in my dream either…"
"So… You think you have everything sorted out now?" Stacey asked.
"Yeah… I… I think I do." CJ said.