He didn't want to panic. Panicking would be bad. He shouldn't panic. But it was hard not to. There was so much blood there. It was everywhere in fact. How could it have gotten everywhere? Could there really have been that much of it? How was that even possible?
And there she was in the middle of it all. She was just sitting there. She looked like such a child. A child sitting patiently waiting for instructions. Or she would have if she weren't covered in blood. Maybe she still did. Maybe it was just a sinister child instead of an innocent one.
Link came closer to her. He knelt down in front of her and took her hands in his. "Zelda, what happened here?"
She blinked. It looked like she was confused as to why he was there. Why was he interrupting her thoughts? "What do you mean?"
"Zelda, there's blood everywhere. What's happened here?"
She looked to the right. She looked to the scene he had turned away from. There laid a dead body dressed in pink.
"There was a fight." She said. "We got into a fight."
Fighting outside of tournaments was a very serious local crime. If you were caught the punishment would be severe. It could be as small as a few fights you weren't allowed to participate in, or you could be disqualified altogether. It depended on the mood of the person who had caught you that day. But this situation might be a bit worse than just a simple call for disqualification.
"Is she alive?" He didn't want to go over there and check. If she wasn't breathing there was no point in touching a corpse. "You need to tell me if she's still alive."
She shook her head. "I don't think so. I used all three of our country's gifts. I don't think she would have survived. She wasn't very well prepared after all. This wasn't planned, you understand..."
He stopped listening. He was too preoccupied with thinking about the sheer horror of what he had heard. Din's Fire, Nayru's Love, and Farore's Wind. They were all very serious attacks on their own. They were enough to cause more than enough damage on the battlefields. All together at full strength? Not one but Ganondorf would have been able to fend off death by their hands.
"Why did you do this?" Zelda was no murderer. She did go around killing people at random. This wasn't the way the love of his life usually acted.
She merely frowned. "She started it."
"How did she start it? What did she do? What did she say?" What was the reason she had to die?
Zelda's once soothing blue eyes narrowed. "I'm no damsel."
That same argument again? It was old, tiresome, and just plain ridiculous. People talked of course. People always talked about the fighters in the tournaments. They were somewhat like celebrities on that joint world. Naturally rumors got around. This one was gay, those two were in a relationship, that one was up to no good. That sort of thing. One of the favorite things to discuss was who was the weakest among them.
The heroes were usually knocked off rather quickly. As were the tough tear your throat out kind of fighters. But the princess and children were normally harshly critiqued. After all, couldn't have a damsel in distress fighting among better qualified fighters.
"I know you're not." He assured her. "You know I've never thought you were." She was many things, now including slightly less than sane, but weak was not one of them.
She hugged him in thanks for his kind words. He was always kind to her. No matter what she had done. He would always love his wise princess. It was a victory she never had to fight for more than once. "I just had to prove myself." To her, to him, and to them.
He would say it again. This was bad. If anyone found out about this...
"I need to fix this. Now." He took her into his arms and held her tightly. "I need to clean this up, and you need to hide somewhere."
"Where?"
"Anywhere. The sitting room, one of the training grounds, outside in the gardens. Just somewhere where people can see you. Do not, under any circumstance, come back to this room. Understand?"
"Why?"
Why did she have to sound so innocent? She was just making this harder.
"Don't argue with me. I need to fix this the best way I can." He also needed her to have an alibi if he were to miss anything in his cleanup. Even if things were put on him she would be safe in the end.
She didn't stand right away. He supposed she was trying to see if he was really going to let her get away with it. What did she think? He wasn't about to turn her in. She may have been insane but she was still his girlfriend. She was still the woman he had been in love with since he was a child. Nothing was ever going to change that.
She eventually did what he asked and walked out of the room in a daze. Link was left alone with the body. For a long while he simply stood there. Half of him wanted to cry. The other half wanted to throw up. At long last, he brokenly whispered,
"Who's the damsel now?"
I've been having an off day(read month)and decided to cheer myself up with some ZelLink. Don't ask me where the hell this came from, but I guess something is better than nothing.