NO LONGER
by an awesome blossom
Wish I was there.
Alternate-universe implied Zelda/Ilia written just to use an inadvertently poignant line I stumbled across from someone I didn't know in a chat I didn't know why I was in. Written while drinking a bit too much of holiday eggnog (and you do know the kind I mean, right?). The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is property of Nintendo and co.
She is no longer. No longer an attractive woman with ample curves and an inviting smile but a thing of comparative glory except separate and nonexistent. She is higher than her, up in the clouds maybe, but probably not that far. Whatever, it isn't important. What matters is that she is here no longer.
But Ilia? She is here. Zelda may not be, but she is. And she IS, get it? Where Zelda roams in the top tiers of intellectual masturbation and the pretension of pretending You Got It Right, Ilia is here in the moment in the instant of a step in time and so on and so forth. It doesn't matter because she's in the place where Zelda is not which is the place where she is (not).
She misses her, you know - Ilia misses Zelda, that is. The crazy fast-slow, fast-fast-slow days of collegiate life, but gone they are into thin air like a puff from their smoker friends. And isn't it funny like that? They used to spend so much of their time together, and now it's as gone, gone, gone, gone, gone as the mind of a drunk psychic waxing deliriously about the love she will never have (and what is she saying, really?). But the point is not that but this: she used to be but no longer is she.
And the thought wears Ilia out at night. That bed she has, it was really meant for two people, but it only has one occupant. Out of everything in the crazy world, it is the most twisted for sure. Hey Zelda, make that a law! - full-plus beds come with someone to share it with.
It is no matter, though. She is no longer the Zelda in Ilia's Life, but she still writes on occasion. In stark contrast to the incoherent rambling of the bills she writes and helps pass, her letters to Ilia are quite simple and clear. No one can tell for sure if that's in jest at Ilia's expense since she is not an esteemed resident of the Higher Tier, but she cherishes them just the same.
They'll never reach the "public" but cut-out highlights on the refrigerator sometimes do just fine. Zelda's precious words are for her and her alone, sure, but Ilia is not a private woman and Zelda knows this (God she has to know this for as many years as they spent together). Their close personal friends can attest for that after forcing her to consult Google when bombarded by invoices demanding advice on a possible vaginal yeast infection, but they love her just fine; and if Zelda ever comes back, comes back to Ilia, she hopes she'll understand and love her anyway when she sees "Sometimes I spill Kool-Aid all over the floor just to pretend I'm at your place again" tacked lovingly to the refrigerator door.