Disclaimer and Notes: Nintendo owns the Legend of Zelda. I am seeking no profit.

This was inspired by a conversation I had with ArkNorth. We have bizarre conversations all the time. We also live next to a cemetery and I think it's affecting our minds. The game settings are in no particular order. I only have the two scenarios so far and welcome suggestions for scenarios to other game settings. Although primarily humor, what I've written seems to have a strong undercurrent of melancholy, as well.

Twilight Princess Scenario

1-Experiment

Link lay dead upon a rocky outcrop. He'd lain there for close to a week. Midna had avenged him, destroying the beasts that had killed him. Afterwards, she severed herself from his shadow to seek help. She needed to find a new Hero to help her, or at least to figure out a way to inform his friends without scaring them with her appearance and getting herself killed.

She first headed toward Hyrule Castle to speak with Princess Zelda. She got distracted on the way by a small, shiny metal object she found out later was called a nickel.

Link was facedown, so the crows did not take his eyes and the general decay was at a level that, save for the graying skin and the dark blood that gathered at his wounds, his mouth and his tear ducts, he looked fairly fresh – the weather had been cool.

Whether it was the wind, a small tremor in the earth, or just something regarding his decay process, a rock beneath him shifted. With it shifted other rocks. A small landslide ensued and the corpse tumbled down, off the rocky outcrop to land face-up in a quiet pool.

There were fairies there. They flitted above this new curiosity.

"Oh, disgusting!" one of them shrilly complained. "A fairy-spring is supposed to be pure! How do we get this carcass out of here?"

Another flitted by the unfortunate's face. "Aw, such a noble kind of face… I bet this Hylian was really handsome when he was alive."

"His rotting fluids are polluting our water!"

The eldest fairy in the spring cleared his throat. He may have been pink…and sparkly… but he was as male as fairies got. In fact, he had a long white beard behind his fairy-glow. "I see the opportunity for an experiment," he said.

"An experiment?" one of the youngest ones asked, "What kind of experiment?"

"We are medical fairies," the elder said, "sworn to help all creatures of goodwill within Hyrule and we are very good at it. We've all found opportunity to bring people and animals back from the dead."

"But Elder!" someone whined, "We can only do that with something that's just died! Still warm! We can only start a heart that has just ceased beating!"

A strong fairy poked one of the biceps of the corpse. "He not only got stiffed-up, he's actually starting to loosen."

"Ewww…"

"What better way to stretch our powers!" The elder declared. "We've all been wondering just how long after death we can bring something back. I'd say this one's about a week gone? We've nothing to lose from trying."

All of the fairies of the little hidden spring concentrated their energies and spun around the late Hero. After a moment, he grunted, blinked and sat up.

"Wasn't I just swimming with Queen Rutella in Nayru's infinite waters?" he mentally asked himself. He'd been pretty sure he'd taken a wound to the gut and that he'd ascended a great stairway to the waiting arms of the Goddesses who'd told him that the fate of Hyrule was something that wasn't on his shoulders any longer. He'd been concerned for the land, but pretty happy…

"At peace…" he groaned. Now he was stiff, itchy and wet. Also, there was this horrible smell.

Shrill voices sounded all around him.

"Yay! Hooray! We did it!"

The Hero blinked, looking at all the fairies surrounding him. He scratched at his head and found hair and bits of skin coming off in his palm in clumps.

"What happened?" He asked sluggishly.

"You were dead," the fairy elder explained to him, "but we pooled our powers and brought you back. Our experiment worked!"

"Experiment?"

"You just fell into our pool," a little female fairy said.

"A fairy spring," Link sighed. He smiled, knowing them well. Why was he finding his speech so slow? He felt like he had to fight to make words, like his tongue was made of cold leather. Then, he saw his reflection in the spring's waters.

"Aaaaah!"

"I'm afraid… we aren't used to bringing life to one as far gone as you," the elder confessed. "You seem to have been dead for quite some time…But this is so cool! It will go down in the Fairy Medical Handbook!"

"Can't you do anything more?" Link pleaded. "Kinda still a corpse here!"

It was then that a shadow darted over to him, giggling in a familiar way.

Midna.

"What? You're alive? How did this happen? I left you here almost a week ago to try to get help!"

"Fairies," Link replied, looking at his hands and arms. He absent-mindedly picked the skin off the index finger of his right hand until it was bone.

"You were pretty dead when I left you. I guess fools don't know when to stay dead."

"I think I'd like to go back," Link confessed, holding his hand up to get a look at the gray skin and the de-fleshed finger, which bled black ichor. "To tell you the truth, I was kinda happy where I was."

"So, what are you going to do now, Hero? Ugh, you smell like a ReDead."

Link sniffed. "I'm…. really hungry. I need something fatty, fleshy…"

"Don't look at me like that!"

"Brains. I need brains, Midna."

"Well, that's for sure."

Link rose to his feet and let the water from the fairy spring drip off him. "Apparently, Hyrule still needs me. I wonder if I can die again after this is all over."

"I wonder if you can still use the wolf form like this, zombie-boy." With that, Midna took out the shadow crystal which enabled Link's lupine transformation. The results were…. Not pretty.

A skinless growling abomination stood before her. Save for a few clumps of fur, its frame was made of tight, half-rotten muscle. The wound in Link's abdomen, while quite serious (fatal) in his human form, but fairly neat, opened up in the wolf-form allowing loops of intestine to trail out.

"Those will get caught on something," Midna muttered before changing him back.

Link made his way to Telma's Bar in Castle Town. He wore a cloak so as to try to conceal his appearance. Luckily, the menu included a dish of pork brains in gravy, lightly fried and drizzled in a reduction.

As he went on, finishing the tasks of his heroic quest, Link's speech and thought processes became slower and simpler, as if the body was rejecting the spirit, or the inner spirit could not keep up with the decay of the brain. His new state did make him pretty much invincible as he felt no pain. Any broken bone he just snapped back into place. He was immune to poisoning and no wound was fatal on a body that was already technically dead.

He kept going back to Telma's for the pork brain dish often.

By the time he fought Ganondorf, he was not fighting for Hyrule. Link faced down the sorcerer's giant pig form in anticipation of eating its gigantic pig brain. His zombie-hunger gave him the strength he needed to crack open the dark swine Ganon's skull with his mighty sword.

Midna and Zelda could only watch the bloody feast in disgust.

No one knew what happened to Link after that. Some say that he quietly dug his own grave and laid himself down in it to die again in peace. Some say that he joined a troupe of dancing ReDeads. Some say he opened up his own brain-themed restaurant.

Hyrule would forever after have a place of honor in its history books for their Undead Hero.