Golly gee, this sure is depressing. I've been wanting to do a Zelda/Sheik cameo thing for awhile, so here it is. It bounces around a lot, and I warn you, it is not happy in the slightest, but I like it.
Reality is being worked on, I promise. It'll most likely be done soon
So read it, and hopefully enjoy it! Please review to tell me what you think. If you catch errors, tell me, I'm tired and it's late.
~Leila
Shaggy blonde hair, choppily cut, constantly falling into my face.
A pale gaunt, angular face.
Tired crimson eyes, too old, sad, and intense for my age; no one can look me in the eye for too long before looking at the ground uncomfortably.
Ragged nails, bit to stubs.
Cracked, chapped lips.
Scars running in lines of multiple lengths and thicknesses.
That is me. Underfed, overworked, constantly on the move.
Nowhere is safe. Everywhere I turn to is a new nightmare. I know no home, know no warmth, know no love. Darkness pervades my waking hours and seeps into my dreams. No one is there; I am alone. I am afraid.
"And I am a princess."
My voice is cracked and conflicted, somewhere between the soft soprano I used to know and the low tenor I wish to be. Everything in my life is complicated.
I am a mess.
I am an actress, probably the best you will ever meet. From sun-up to sun-down, I am not me. Slipping into an alternate persona, I am a boy. Taciturn, mysterious, shady. Sometimes I forget who I am- I am a princess- and find myself fighting between myself and the role I've played so well for seven years.
Who am I?
I am a princess.
But am I?
When I sleep, I sleep in barns, nestled in a bed of straw in the hayloft, or on the dusty floors of taverns, or sometimes simply on the hard grassy earth. I eat whatever I can catch. On good nights, I might have a malnourished rabbit. On bad nights, I'm gnawing at bark or sucking snake eggs raw from the shells.
I bear no gilded crown upon my head. I wear no fancy silken dresses.
"But I am a princess."
Looking into a mirror and simply reminding myself of that helps me cling to the threads of a life I previously led. Just saying it out loud helps ease my mind in the slightest of ways.
But the face staring back at me from a cracked looking glass or a dirty puddle is not that of a regal ruler. It is a face of a sad, lonely traveller.
A weak link who has been cast down from power and discarded like a broken doll.
I have no purpose now.
I am a princess.
No longer can I be a figurehead of power to my people. No longer can I reassure them that it will all be okay, because all is not okay. I live as a rouge mercenary, like a starving dirty street rat.
Nothing hurts worse than to see the suffering that my mistake has caused them. Walking through the streets, I see horrible things, terrible things things I will never forget. All things I caused.
I see piles of pale corpses arranged in neat pyramids, spears displaying baby heads protruding from the top. My feet kick up ashes of burnt homes, dust of crushed bones. Crude wooden graves, adorned with limp wildflowers, are not an uncommon sight on the road. I see bloody, infected children, crying deliriously for me to help them, yet way beyond the point of help. I watch the innocent sell themselves to make a pretty Rupee. I watch helplessly as I arrive too late to stop a monster from ripping the limbs off an old man.
Sometimes I cry.
I cry for hours upon hours, huddled in the blackened skeleton of a decimated home, tearing at my hair, scratching my face until I bleed. No one can console me. No one is there.
Drinking is my newest dirty habit. After slaughtering a legion of monsters at a burning village, salvaging all that I can, rescuing whoever is left, I find that the bitter taste of alcohol numbs my pain and soothes my emotions. I can drift into a calm sea of indifference, my troubles on a dark island far away.
A drink for the dead. A drink for the dying. A drink for my lost self. A drink for the Hero.
Impa would scold me. My father would have a conniption.
Yet Impa is gone and my father is dead.
There is only me. Sheik and Zelda, though I cannot tell who is real and who is the fleeting mirage, the illusion, a hallucination.
I am a princess.
My only contact with any other human, besides a random civilian I pull from a burning wreckage, is the Hero of Time, the golden boy, Link.
I suppose he is what keeps me struggling to hold on to the threads of my sanity. I could have let the strings drop long ago, could have simply given into the dark callings of my mind.
He intrigues me. He has seen what I have seen. Maybe more. Yet he smiles. And that smile is what keeps me thinking at night.
How can he?
I have forgotten how. No matter how I try, I cannot break my grim mask and twist my features into a smile like he so often does.
Perhaps he has something to hold on to. His childhood friend, Saria. The spunky farm girl, Malon. Or maybe he thinks of the lost Princess Zelda who does not know who she is or what she is doing.
She is a princess.
Can a princess be this lost?
When I was younger, I dreamed of running away, escaping the gray castle walls and traversing on wild adventures. Every child, boys and girls alike, have wove tales of the quests they will embark on when they are older.
I refused to be the princess waiting idly in her tower.
Now I wonder if that would be better.
Adventure is not all great and glorious. Thinking back on my childish dreams, I realize how romanticized they really were.
Adventure is grim, dark, twisted, scary, unpredictable. Confusing, stressful, tiring, tragic, and nothing like the storybooks. Once upon a times don't always lead to happily ever afters.
I am a princess.
A princess. Huh. Once, after another night of drinking away hopelessness, I wove a chain of daises. My callused fingers trembled as I deftly crafted a braided circlet of the delicate wildflower.
Placing it on my head, I looked once again in a the nearest available mirror. A creek with barely enough water to cover the ground, trickling silently through the night.
Never had something looked so wrong.
The crown was crooked and looked misplaced on my scraggly boyish hair. The daises were wilted and beginning to shrivel up. My eyes were fierce and guarded, looking nothing like a confident ruler's should. My skin was pale like the daises' petals, contrasting with the blood dripping from a cut on my cheek.
I looked like what I am
A Princess of Death.
Never again have I put on a crown, even one made from daisy chains. I'm scared to see what I look like. I'm scared of the Princess of Death, even though I'm starting to see that's who I really am.
Fields of daisies have now been razed, burned in wild fires, trampled beneath boots. People are slaughtered day by day. My kingdom is in ashes, the people do not hope.
There is no Zelda. There is no Sheik. Sheik never existed, and Zelda has been long forgotten. I am but a listless shadow, flitting through dark days and darker nights.
All I know is death.
And I am a princess.