Dogging his steps was a shadow not his own. His ragged boots scraped against the cobblestone, but the noise didn't linger. Darkness kissed his lips, devoured him, swallowed his hoarse lungfuls of breath. He nearly stumbled as his feet snagged upended concrete. A hiss whistled through his teeth as his palm passed over jagged masonry.
Ignoring the sting, he frantically vaulted the gate in front of him. Stones, scarred with moss, loomed into view as the clutch of darkness seeped away with proximity. A graveyard.
The cut on his hand now bled freely. Unsteady drips of blood, stained black by the night, matched the thrum of his heartbeat.
Head slumped momentarily against the nearest tombstone. Electric cobalt peering listlessly at the dirt up around his knees, grasping at whatever momentary respite he believed he's finally come across.
Stygian tendrils proved him wrong as they crept almost lovingly along his sides, wrapping languidly around his throat. He cursed as he brandished a dagger. Silver glinted in what little unclouded moonlight remained.
He severed his bonds and stumbled over the stone, distancing himself as much as possible. Behind him erupted a hand – orange and molten and comically large – from the ocean of soil.
Even as his knees buckled under the weight of exhaustion, he ducked its swipe. Shadows indistinguishable from the dead of midnight clasped at his ankles.
Somehow floundering his way out of their implacable grip, he found his back against a coarse surface. The branches of the tree were splayed, as if in open gesture, as if mockingly beckoning him to the depths of the forest.
Before he could consider escape, the hand was upon him. The only source of light in the enclosure, it reminded him of day's end: bloody froth where the dying sun met with the horizon.
The giant fingers closed around him. A whisper meant for him, as he struggled for breath. It might well have been death speaking in his ear.
"I've finally caught you."
Dilapidated roofs wore thin shadows that stretched their fingers deep into the horizon as Hyrule Castle Town rose with the sun.
"Step aside."
Voice laced with both impatience and triumph at the same moment, Captain Midna brusquely shouldered her way past the startled guards and into the throne room.
Muttering royals immediately stopped their conversations as they witnessed her barge in unannounced, dragging a man – battered, bruised, clothes in utter disarray – in by the very cuffs that restrained him.
The princess gazed, bewildered, at the spectacle before her.
"Midna, what are…you…"
"I've got him, Your Highness."
Midna's soft tone belied her relish.
"You've got who?" But Zelda's eyes widened. "Surely not-"
"Who else?" She breathed, lips trembling with manic satisfaction. She peered beneath her, ill-concealed glee etched across her features.
A glare, buried beneath soot and grime and dislocated wisps of blonde. Tunic frayed, hands cuffed together by unyielding metal, her captive fixed the members of nobility with deafening silence.
"Charming, isn't he?" Midna snorted. Her captain's garb, fitted with sinews of metal between the cloth, glinted in the light spilled from the chandelier overhead. She swiveled and kneeled so she was level with her prisoner, lips half-curved in a grin, eyes gleaming with the reflection of his.
"Behave, doggy," she whispered. "Or I'll have you put down early."
Zelda's voice, soft and lilting, was amplified by the hollowed infrastructure of the throne room as she slowly rose to her feet.
"Am I to understand," she carefully ventured. "That you have apprehended the criminal responsible for killing my father, Captain Midna?"
"No two ways," Midna's teeth flashed, so jagged was her smirk. "He's all yours."
"Then there is no time to delay," Zelda gestured to their captive. "We'll convene for his trial immediately. I will personally oversee his sentence."
Gone was Midna's smile and swagger.
"Trial?" she uttered, incredulous. "You can't be serious. This is the lowlife who murdered your old man. The king."
"Everyone deserves a fair trial. It's my duty as princess regent not to let personal quandaries cloud my judgement. Turn him over to the palace guards, Midna."
"Zel, if you just hear me out, I gotta insist – "
"I value your counsel, Midna," Zelda sighed, wearily pressing her palm to her forehead. "I do. You're my dearest friend. But on this matter, I will not budge. Turn him over."
Teeth pressed against teeth, seething silently, face sour, Midna relinquished him.
"You're making a mistake," she grumbled.
"Duly noted," Zelda punctuated with a slight raise of brow.
She then called to the room.
"The trial shall not be a spectacle," her gaze meandered from official to official. "It will be resolved starkly, with no noise, with no clamoring audience."
Her eyes drew a bead onto the prisoner, ruthless yet discerning.
"I want nothing more from this than the truth."
Her words were iron clasps, rooting him by his spine, reverberating across the vaulted ceiling, pervading the premises until it wasn't a throne room but a glacier.
He glared back, even as the disgruntled captain unceremoniously tugged him to his feet by the scruff of his ragged collar.
He had been relocated to the courtroom. In less than forty minutes, his surroundings had died down to a much quieter affair. To his immediate right was the captain, arms folded, finger tapping an impatient tattoo on the plate of her gauntlet.
Aside from what he could tell were a number of important advisors, no one else was in the room except for the princess herself.
She towered over him and his paltry podium from her raised bench, solemnly peering beneath to where he stood, still confined by his cuffs.
It was so appallingly dim he could hardly make out her features. It left him unsettled, left him floating in a murky purgatory, left his vision swimming in smoke.
He saw in breaths. His thoughts were steam.
Until, of course, the captain's sharp growl at his ear tore him back to reality.
"No funny business. You hear me? I'm watching."
She afforded him clarity when it slipped from him. He almost felt gratitude. To her, he offered his first words since arriving.
"Wouldn't dream of it." His voice, thick with exhaustion. Tinged with cheek.
"Enough," the princess said it quietly, but it carried through the space with authority and compelled him to listen far more than any bellow he had ever heard.
"We begin," her head tilted imperceptibly. "With the accusation at hand. Captain Midna?"
Midna swaggered herself to the podium, shoving him brusquely aside. He toppled gracelessly to the floor.
"If you want the full story," she folded her elbows onto the surface facing her. "It starts more than a year ago. This waste of human breath-"
She gestured carelessly towards the man still struggling to rise with his wrists locked behind his back.
"Was no more than a thief. A petty one, at that," her smirk was venomous. Intended to hurt and belittle.
A snarl of indignation from below her, but she ignored him.
"Still, the snake was slippery. He had a lot of hideaways, holes, dirty corners, and seedy friends to fall back on. He managed the longest anyone's ever eluded me, since I caught him only yesterday."
By this point, she had forcibly hauled him standing by his collar, knuckles painfully scraping against the back of his neck.
"You could say we were quite the pair," her laugh was sharp, her teeth biting the air with every heave of motion. "I chased him for so long, I know him better than he knows himself."
From him, nothing further but a single-minded, callous glare that spoke of hatred, of scorching blaze that burned high across vast reaches of resentment.
"He's stolen artifacts, profited from disrupting the business ventures of reputable, hard-working citizens, eventually even pilfered from the royal storage room itself, as I'm sure you've all heard about. It's already enough to lock him in the dungeons for life."
Her brash, affected arrogance stopped here. Her face twisted solemn, twined itself into a scathing semblance that rivaled his own.
"But two weeks ago," her eyes were quiet pools of fire. "He did the unthinkable. You all know what. The King. Our King. Your father."
Her eyes roved towards the princess.
"Dead because of him. He'll deny it, when it comes time for his defense. He'll spin some crap tearjerker about how he's poor and his family's poor and the orphaned kids wouldn't survive without him and puh-lease," her tongue clicked languidly.
"There is no excuse," she continued. "Make no mistake, he is scum no more fit to lick your boots clean in apology than a sewer rat, Your Highness. He deserves no less than death row."
She walked back to her spot previous, still hunched in careful observation of the captive.
"The accused will now step to the podium," Zelda's lilting speech seemed otherworldly when magnified by the acoustics of the room. "And tell us his side of the story."
He trundled begrudgingly towards the front, and stopped where Midna had.
"Your captain's right," he scoffed. "She does know me well."
"Accused, kindly refrain from diverting from the issue at ha-"
"I have a name," he told her quietly. "Your captain even knows what it is. But that would go against her policy of treating me like I'm anything above toenail residue. It's Link, by the way."
Zelda remained unmoving, as if she was a likeness of herself, carved from marble.
"…Link, then. Please continue with your testimony."
Still not so much as a twitch of the brow. It was, Link noted, rather unnerving.
"As I said, she knows me well. It's for the kids in my village that I steal. They'd starve if I don't."
A derisive snort to his right, from above crossed arms coated with metal.
"They would," he insisted. "Everything I do, I do for them. I'm given no choice."
"Oh, 'cause you're always such the victim, aren't you?!" Midna exploded, unable to help herself. "Just a mongrel never able to see to his own scraps, you miserable – "
"Captain Midna," for the first time, Zelda's expression slanted vehemently from its impeccable composure. "You will restrain yourself, or I'll do it for you."
Teeth still bared, breath still blunt and heavy, Midna nonetheless shrunk from the reprimand.
"Sorry," she muttered. "Won't happen again."
"See that it doesn't. Now," Zelda let her gaze drift back towards Link. "You deny having murdered my father?"
"Of course I deny it, because I didn't do it."
"Our captain says differently. She claims to have borne witness to the very moment of the attack. You were covered in my father's blood. After she arrived on the scene, you fled."
"Yeah, because I'm a wanted criminal," Link spoke slowly, as if to a child. "Who would take my word over hers?"
"Nobody!" Midna screeched, slamming a boot into the side of his podium. "Nobody, because that's what happened! Nobody, because you're a two-bit, lying scrap who murders when it suits you!"
Zelda's patience had finally surpassed its breaking point.
"Captain," Zelda coldly omitted her name. "You will wait outside."
"Zel, I'm sorry – " Apprehension softened Midna's plea; the sudden knowledge that she had gone too far brimmed her lungs.
"Outside."
No raise in volume. No hoarse fury, blatantly casting aspirations on her conduct. But the quiet, simmering anger was far worse. Marked by disappointment, it shackled Midna more thoroughly than mere manacles of metal ever could.
A lump in her throat, the captain slunk silently towards the doors.
As they creaked to a close, Zelda sighed.
"She means well," the princess murmured quietly. Link wasn't sure who she was addressing.
"Now," she drew herself, once more, to standing height. "You have an explanation, then, for why you were covered in my father's blood? Why you were the only one found at the scene?"
"Not a good one," he mumbled, his eyes darting furtively towards where his captor had just exited. "But it's the truth. It was pitch black where the body was originally. I could hardly see my own hands in front of me. I heard rustling, and then someone passed me by in a hurry, so I called out. Whoever it was didn't answer. From where the person came from, I could barely make out an oddly shaped lump. I started to drag it out to the clearing so I could at least make out what it was, but before I could, your captain caught up to me."
He sucked in a harsh lungful of breath, hyper aware that every pair of eyes in the hollow room were raptly trained on his quivering posture.
"She's a Twili, so she could see exactly what was going on. I heard her pause for a second, probably because she couldn't believe what was in front of her. Then she called me a murderer. And a few other choice words I don't really need to repeat. I panicked and ran. It wasn't until much after that I even realized the lump was a body and that my clothes were drenched in red. And I didn't know it was the king until the next day, when people were talking about how his corpse was found."
Still, the undivided attention. Still, the tension, acrid and black in his mouth, in their stares, heavy on his clothes, soaking him through his shirt, his bones, his heart and matching the thrum of its palpitations as sweat beaded on his brow, and from the princess to him coursed a silent blizzard and why were they all looking at him, he became no more to them than a flea, than vermin under the grit of their white, silken sleeves –
"You realize, of course," The princess spoke softly, not unkindly. "That I don't need Midna to tell me that your tale sounds woven from a demon's silver tongue. She'd laugh if she were still here."
"I..." he swallowed, fingers wringing air, wrists twisting against blistering steel. His cuffs strained against the chain in between, pulling it taut.
"I confess, I myself find it not just a bit far-fetched," Zelda said.
"I swear," he licked dry, cracked lips. "It's what happened."
Her eyes drew a solemn line; they were twin waterfalls, and he a prisoner of their currents, retching and floundering as they ceaselessly bore him down, down under unperceivable depths.
"I steal, yeah, but I can't – I don't…kill."
His tongue stumbled over his words.
"I don't. You have to know that."
Silence pervaded the room to the tempo of his own heartbeat. His clothes felt heavy, as if with his own blood and not the king's.
"Thereafter, you avoided capture up until yesterday, is that correct?"
"Y-Yes. Yeah, for half a month."
The silence repeated itself, became a shadow of the previous, became deadlier, became poised to kill.
"Alright," Zelda nodded briefly. "Very well."
The sweat dripped into his mouth and he tasted salt.
"Al…right? Alright what?" his breath felt short.
"I will accept your word, provided you take me to the scene."
"I take you…to the…"
"Of course, I will not be without precaution. Captain Midna shall accompany us, as your makeshift warden and my bodyguard in one."
He stared.
"You're…serious."
"Deadly so."
She had already swept gracefully from the bench and gathered her cloak, among varying mutterings and protests amidst her sudden decision.
"Come along," she crooked her finger without so much as glancing at him. "There is much ground to cover."
Link, finally processing her intentions, followed warily.
The double doors slid smoothly open at her touch. The sun's glare – bleeding blue from the filter of stained glass – felt foreign against his cheeks as he emerged from the dimmed room.
"But…" he hurried so as to trail immediately behind her. "I'm off the hook? Just like that?"
"Heavens, no," Zelda hummed, smiling a bit at the look of disbelief worn by her dear captain, approaching them quickly from the far side. "Prove to me what manner of man you are, Link. I'll reserve my judgment for after."
"For now," she breathed in deeply, as if she hadn't come by breath for the entirety of the trial. "I intend to arrive at the truth no matter the means. You will help me."
It was beyond question. No matter the disdain he held for the rich, for the powerful, Link found it impossible to deny that Princess Zelda was a force of nature.
Author's Note:
I know, I know, starting another story when I'm already so backlogged with unfinished fics. It's been a hefty while since I've posted or updated, and though it's partly due to being busy with life like how it usually is, it's also because I somehow felt so uninspired for the rest of my stories. I didn't have the first clue what direction to take for a single one of them, and I thought a change of pace might help stagger something into motion. That saiiiid, starting a new fic is just as daunting, but I hope (I really reallllly hope) to finish this one up in only a few chapters. It shouldn't be too long unless I'm an idiot and get carried away. I am an idiot, so there's that. ALSO I'M SO RUSTY. Can you feel the rust. Ogod I'm so out of practice.
Review, please? Your feedback is super appreciated. And conducive!