Whee, this one is fun.

I know it's a little late, but I have had one of the worst workdays today... Blegh.

See you down at the bottom.

TERMINA

"Be backstage near the end of the intermission," Marilla said to her mirror, her mouth slightly gaping as she applied a third coat of mascara. Her theatre face paint was already so thick it narrowed her otherwise ingénue gaze into eyes better suited to the role of Queen of the Light Realm.

Or, so Link thought, that was the general idea. He'd managed to grab a program off one of the entrance tables, but had barely glimpsed the synopsis.

There was no intimacy in the actors' suite, but nobody paid either of them any heed, especially not the occasional harried stagehands too busy with lighting and costumes to care a whit about Link's unwarranted presence. Certainly, a few of the dancers had eyed him appreciatively, but Marilla Rosa had glared at them and they'd left them alone, miffed. Spring had begun in Termina, and he'd brought no overcoat, which displayed his finely tailored clothes and made him look all the more handsome. Being handsome could be useful. Link had always known he could look good, but the attention he got when he actually tried was flattering, to say the least.

"Here?" He asked, casually. He was dressed to the nines and leaned against a prop, some sort of abstract representation of defeat or depression or sadness, it was hard to tell. He had his hands in his slack pockets, if only to lend himself the presence of someone who belonged. Blending in had always been one of his greatest skills.

Marilla, for her part, was dressed in a slinky white number with white sequins, clearly an artist's rendering of what a Queen of Light should wear, and perhaps more appropriate for a showgirl than for one of the world's greatest opera houses. She snapped her fingers at a passing costumer: "Excuse me," she said, imperiously. "My aura! Where is my aura?"

Her aura, as it happened, was only a thick piece of painted cardboard affixed to the back of her dress. The final effect looked silly in the glare of the bright backstage lights, but Link imagined she would have more flair under stage projectors. Probably.

"Yes," Marilla then answered him, absently, gathering up her long white gloves and slipping them on as familiarly as Link put on his boots. "The key you want is made of brass, and I'll forget my set on my desk of drawers. I always do."

"How inconvenient for you," Link said with false sympathy.

Marilla shot him an irritated glare. "Leave the terrible acting to my sister. And remember, you owe me." She rose theatrically from her vanity and posed. "How do I look?"

"Stunning," Link lied, and she preened.

"I love it when you're honest," she purred, running a finger down his chest.

"I know," Link said, offering her his arm. It had been surprisingly easy to convince the Rosa sisters to pretend he and Dark were their beaux, allowing them to come and go through the backstage of the Opera House with relative freedom for a week now. Even Aryll had agreed it would be best to let it happen. She had instead decided to stay home, working on their next objective. "I'll have the envelope ready for you afterwards."

Marilla paused and turned halfway to examine him. Her eyes ran slowly from his smartly shined leather shoes to the perfect turn of his collar, and she said, with a glitter in her eyes that Link recognized in his gut, "I think I know exactly how I want you to deliver it, too."

"Really?" Link asked, to humour her. "How?"

It had been easy, yes, to convince them to play along. It was becoming a lot more difficult, however, to convince them not to push it. But Link talked himself into being patient.

Tonight was the night. After this, he would never have to put up with her uncomfortable advances again.

Marilla leaned forward and a wave of light, cheap perfume wafted over him. From beneath her lashes and through an impish smile that looked anything but regal, she said, "I think the envelope should be between your teeth, and you should be naked."

"I'll keep the suggestion in mind," Link mildly said, and Marilla backed away, stung. She rolled her eyes, and set her bright red lips into a pout.

"You could at least pretend you'll play along. Now we both know it won't happen."

"I'm told I should leave all acting attempts to your sister," Link said, blandly.

"Skies, yes," Marilla said, back to her regular haughtiness. She frowned, then, and said, "I wish you would, though. I can be fun. After all, your brother has been having my sister as often as he can, and he even asked me to join in." She leaned forward, all face paint and debatable costume. "Are you sure I can't convince you?"

With barely a hum of acknowledgement, Link shot her a faint smile, which visibly annoyed her.

"Fine then," she said, huffing and pulling away. "That envelope better be thick, since I clearly won't be having the mystery brother for lunch." She grumbled about how she'd have been better off choosing Dark, which Link cheerfully ignored.

They reached stage right.

"I will see you in the morning," Link lied again, as a courtesy. He wouldn't be there in the morning, but explaining that would be a pain.

"I look forward to it," Marilla Rosa said, in her best attempt at behaving like a lady of the world.

Link bowed politely, which delighted her and made a few of the dancers look on with envy, but he did not kiss her: he could smell the sourness of the stage makeup from where he was. Somewhere in stage left, he knew, Judo Rosa and Dark were also about to part ways, and he suspected that Dark was being a bit more demonstrative with his goodbye.

Dark had been obnoxiously happy about meeting the Rosa sisters. Not contortionists, admittedly, but twins, which was close enough. He'd spent the better part of the week trying to get both of them at once, and had been disappointed at every turn. Marilla, it appeared, was determined to get Link.

So much for that. Link left the backstage and slipped through narrow corridors, out into the serving staff's spaces, then into the main lobby of the opera house. The night's event was dramatically called "Night", but really it was just a retelling of a classic legend opposing the Queen of the Light Realm, played by Marilla, and the Queen of the Dark Realm, played by her twin sister.

It looked like it would be absolutely intolerable to listen to.

Rather than seek out his seat, he headed upstairs, into the private lounge. The crush of people was noticeably less up here, and it was here that the real object of his interest lay.

As he walked into the room, a doorman extended a hand and asked for his ticket, which he pulled out of his inner jacket pocket absently. The opera house of Clock Town was old, very old, and had required many renovations. The private lounge was one of the oldest remaining untouched rooms.

As the doorman handed his ticket back to him with a tight smile, Link stepped in and took a moment to look at the ceiling. It was painted to fool the eye into thinking the room stretched all the way to the heavens. Fairies and satyrs shared the space with soft smiles, and vines and flowers grew in an eternal spring that would have smelled sickly sweet.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Link snapped out of his contemplation and turned. The question had come from a woman, and she seemed to be speaking to the Opera House's curator.

Link was not used to seeing women that beautiful, which was why he actually froze on sight. She was stunning, dressed in peach and gold, which only seemed to highlight the soft paleness of her skin and the blonde colour of her hair. She had delicate features, aristocratic and charming all at once, and deep blue eyes that lit up when she smiled. And there would be no mention of her other assets, which her dress tantalizingly enhanced.

"It's a shame the conservation efforts couldn't be made for the whole building," she was saying. "But I'm glad we could at least fund the safekeeping of this room."

Link averted his eyes, his heartbeat loud in his ears. She had funded the room's restoration. A rich girl. Unattainable. Instead of focusing on her, he shook it off and got to work.

He started touring the room. The walls were covered in gold leaf and elaborate wood carvings. Even the plasterwork was impeccable. But Link wasn't there for the décor. The room housed the exhibition for many very old masks.

Every mask was displayed in glass cases around the room, under muted lighting to preserve their vibrant colours. He slowly bypassed masks depicting hares and eagles, ignored the terrifying faces and the mournful ones, and came to stop before the central exhibit. The trek around the room had been slow and arduous, if only to hide his disinterest in anything but this one artifact.

Ganondorf Dragmire wanted Majora's Mask. Now that he saw it, Link was absolutely puzzled. It was a horrible thing to look upon, spiky and cracked, with big yellow eyes that seemed to stare into your soul. It was poor taste, really, and Link had trouble understanding what would compel Dragmire to seek out this one mask, when the ones on each side of it were far more elegant, and probably worth a great deal more. One was covered in pearls and silver thread. It had a beautiful full-moon shape, called the Couples' Mask, so that it could cover a person's entire face, and the other was a Sheikah design, a sharply outlined eye, which was titled the Mask of Truth.

"Choosing your curse?" A voice asked in his ear. It sent a shiver down his spine unlike any he'd ever felt, and when he turned he came face to face with the woman from the entrance, her dress having made almost no noise as she'd approached him.

From up close, her lips looked ripe and soft, so when Link dragged his gaze back to her bright blue eyes, he found himself incapable of mustering the cool detachment he'd used only moments ago with Marilla.

"I'm sorry. My curse?" He echoed, recovering.

"Each one of these masks is cursed," she said with glittering amusement that spoke of her personal opinion on the legend. "This one," she said, nodding to the Mask of Truth, "makes the wearer confront what others actually think of them."

"That can't be so bad," Link said, trying not to let her infectious smile spread to his face. He was here on a job and she was distracting him. And he loved her for it.

"Only if everyone likes you," she said. "But nobody is ever that universally loved."

"Maybe I can be the exception," Link joked.

The corners of her eyes crinkled with contained laughter, her pink lips stretching into an actual smile. Skies, she was pretty.

Link cleared his throat and turned to Majora's Mask. "What about this one?"

"Death and torment," she said, dismissively. Link fought the urge to roll his eyes. It figured. "There's always at least one thing cursed for death and torment," she added. "Boring. But this one," she continued, steering him back to the Couples' Mask, "is far more interesting."

"How so?"

"It's said that whoever wears this one at midnight on a full moon will see the love of their life." When she smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkled in just that way that said her smile was genuine.

Link struggled to stay focused. "That doesn't sound like a curse."

"It can be, if you're already married," she replied, and for a moment her hair caught the light and seemed made of spun gold, and a long golden chain around her neck caught his eye, where it disappeared into her low collar line, in between the hint of two perfect breasts.

Link's throat was dry. "Good thing I'm not married, then," he said, instantly hating himself.

She laughed, which soothed him somewhat. "It's not like anyone is likely to ever wear them again, anyway." She looked almost sad at that, but recovered quickly, and her gaze landed on his face. She seemed to scrutinize him, then, and it made him thoroughly uncomfortable.

Could she see the criminal inside? Did it matter? If Link was honest with himself, his concern with her gaze was less about self-preservation and more about holding on to the magical way she smiled at him.

But her examination didn't seem to turn up anything she disliked, because she said, with a warm smile, "I'm Zelda, by the way. My father paid for the restoration of this room." She paused. "Well, I convinced him to." She shrugged, and under the chandelier, her pale shoulder looked so very soft.

He clenched his fist to keep himself from finding out whether it really was, and forced his attention back on her face. "We have much to thank you for, then."

"I think I'm just a romantic," Zelda said. He liked the sound of her name. It suited her. "And besides," she continued, oblivious to his musings, "the opera house kept bugging Papa for donations. We simply had to concede."

"I'm glad you did," Link said. Ganondorf Dragmire weighed on his mind heavily. He wanted to confess. He wanted to scream he was guilty before it was too late. Instead, he added, "Some of these masks are a pleasure to see."

"Not all of them," Zelda said, wryly.

She was about to say more when three thumps sounded in the room. Link turned to look at the doorman. Already? The play was about to start. And it was unfortunately time to go.

"If you'll excuse me," he said, reluctantly, "I should regain my seat for the curtain rise." He hesitated, feeling absolutely no desire to leave her. "It was a pleasure meeting you," he finally added.

"No, please. The pleasure was all mine," Zelda said with a sweet smile that made his insides melt. "I should go, too." She shot him a look that was all consideration and reached into his ego. "Perhaps I will see you after the show?" Her brow was raised, and Link was sure she was flirting.

He nodded, mouth dry. He watched her walk away, then followed a minute later, his stomach filled with lead. He had to force himself to remember that he wouldn't stick around long enough to see the end of the show, and he'd never see her again. In that moment, he hated everything about his life. Ganondorf Dragmire, Majora's Mask, his shiny shoes.

The orchestra had just finished winding down from tuning when he found Dark in one of their seats.

"Dark."

"There you are," Dark said, softly. "I was looking all over for you."

"I was upstairs," Link explained. "Meeting one of the donators to the Opera. She was really kind."

Dark shot him a wary look. "I know how you feel, but we can't have a conscience crisis at this stage." He leaned in, and hissed, "This is our lives we're talking about. We can't back down now."

"I know," Link said, irritated. "I'm not a child."

"So," Dark asked, relaxing as the lights dimmed. "Any rich heiresses?"

He had no idea. "I thought you hadn't moved on from the twins yet," Link wryly said.

"Sure, but it's not like I'm married to them."

That makes two of us, Link thought morosely. For a moment he could see Zelda's bright smile in his mind's eye and he hated how awestruck he'd sounded. Skies, he'd told her he wasn't married a minute into their conversation. Like an amateur.

And still, she'd flirted with him at the end. He was sure of it.

Slouching in his seat, he leaned his head against the back and let out a pained groan.

"What?" Dark asked.

"I need to get myself a woman," Link said.

He ignored the scandalized look of his neighbour, an elderly woman dressed in far too many feathers for this century.

"Well, you should have had Marilla while you had the chance," Dark reminded him. For a moment Link considered picking Marilla up on her offer after all. She was no Zelda, but she had flair, and style, and legs that she was only too eager to spread.

"I guess," he said, distracted, as the music began with great bombast.

"Now don't cry too hard," Dark said, under his breath. "I hear this one's a tearjerker."

They exchanged a look and snickered, once again eliciting a venomous look from Link's feather-adorned neighbour.

The first act was an elaborate adaptation of the Twilight Legend. Both Rosa sisters appeared a few times, to their great amusement, in dramatic white and black, to torment the obnoxiously muscular male lead with their shrill voices. There were a few confusing bits where the lead would sing his parts with too much style to be comprehensible, and overall, the music sounded ridiculously loud. The lighting, the music and the acting were all highly excessive, which Link assumed was par for the course when you paid a fortune for a seat, but he wasn't sure what any of it did to improve the story.

To distract himself, he started furtively looking around the audience, looking for Zelda. He found her a few minutes later, in one of the boxes. She was primly seated and was watching the play with rapt attention, her lips forming the words of each song.

Link ended up watching her far more than the play. She was absurdly pretty, and her eyes crinkled with delight when one of the Rosa sisters ― either Marilla or Judo, he wasn't listening closely― hit the high note in just the right way.

The first act concluded on a dramatic confrontation between the two sisters. It wasn't clear why, but Link had honestly stopped paying attention almost entirely, so his failing comprehension was probably his own fault. At any rate, the shouting hero character dragged Marilla's unconscious form off the stage, and the curtain closed for intermission, thank the skies.

"I have to wait until after the intermission to get the key."

"I will get the car," Dark said, softly. He stood and walked out with the many other men who were eager for a smoke in one of the salons.

Link, for his part, had ten minutes to go. With a nod to his neighbour, he stood and left the row of seats. It would be less suspicious to leave now than to leave right as the curtain opened again. He walked at a leisurely pace, pretending to stretch his legs. On the way out into the lobby he saw Zelda chatting animatedly with men who appeared to be her father's friends, but he ducked out of sight before she could notice him.

Heart beating, he slipped through the crowd and towards the service hallway. He wasn't sure why his heartbeat was so swift. This wouldn't be a difficult theft. He had done much worse and with far less support.

In the crystal of the chandeliers and the glow of the lobby, Zelda had looked beautiful. Her dress gathered on her hips and fell in a waterfall of silk, exposing just enough of her back to make him want…

Link paused in the hallway, adjusting to the dimmer lights. Enough. Enough, dammit. Fixing his white tie, he continued on his way.

The key was exactly where Marilla had said it would be, easily exchanged for an envelope. And the service doors he'd tested earlier in the week were all unlocked, as usual, or easy to unlock. When all was said and done, as the show was about to resume, he stood before Majora's Mask's glass case, in the empty lounge. The music began to trumpet again in the theater below, warning that the intermission was over. He slid the pane open. The greased hinges never made a peep.

From within his jacket, he unfolded a carry bag and slipped Majora's Mask in, carefully. There. Now all he had to do was get out.

"What are you doing?"

The voice of an usher stunned Link. He hadn't heard anyone―

Behind him, an usher was rushing forward, demanding that he identify himself. Instinctively, Link grabbed the Couples' Mask and slipped it on, so that it covered his entire face.

"Hey!"

Instinct took over. With a single movement, Link turned around and kicked the usher behind the knees just as he was reaching for his jacket. The man crumpled to the ground and Link punched him in the temple. His assailant fell to the carpet with a painful groan, and Link darted. He wouldn't get more than a few seconds of reprieve.

He ran, out onto the balcony and down the flights of stairs, shoving past bemused socialites and pushing his way out of the opera house, just as the entire building was being alerted to his presence.

"Wait!"

Zelda's voice broke through his urgency with the force of an explosion. He almost turned, instinctively―

No! She would recognize him! She would recognize his tie, his suit, his hair… She would know. He stopped himself, getting barely a glimpse of her confused expression, made sure the Couples' Mask was securely placed on his face, and ran out the great front doors.

Behind him, half a dozen ushers sprinted to catch him, but he made it to Dark's unmarked car before they could ever hope to reach him. The car's wheels squealed as it drove off, hiccuping on the cobblestones, and the staff stood cursing on the curb, helpless.

Over their shoulders, in the massive doorway of the Clock Town Opera House, backlit by crystal chandeliers, Zelda's evening dress swayed with every step she took, her lips parted breathlessly, her hair a perfect wave of motion. Dark swerved to catch a turn, and she was out of sight. Link, breathless in the Couple's Mask, wanted to scream at the unfairness of it.

Somewhere in the city, midnight tolled. Link removed the mask to better catch his breath and watched how the full moon reflected on the Clock Town Canal.

"Close call, huh?" Dark said. "We'll have to do better, next time."

"Yeah," Link said, looking down at the Couples' Mask with a strange feeling in his heart.

He was a monster and a thief and a killjoy, and somehow, he'd still managed to feel thunderstruck.

By the time the opera house management had called the constables, Link and Dark were already on their way back to Hyrule, leaving behind Clock Town, Termina, and a beautiful woman Link would kick himself about for months, if not years, to come.

YES. Gosh, I love doing this stuff. Did you catch it? Did you? I was completely not subtle about it.

Anyway. I imagine you've started noticing that I'm bouncing around a lot in various locations. Every chapter (except prologue and epilogue) will be happening in a different province/country, which is my way of celebrating all the locations we've visited in the franchise so far. Yes, from chapter to chapter, it might be a bit whiplash-y. I'm trying to flesh out every region in the background of the main story. It might not work as a final result, which is exactly why I usually wait until my stories are complete before I begin to post: so I can go back and remove gimmicks that don't work. But for now, you'll have to see things unfold as they will, and forgive me for literally posting as I write.

Tomorrow's chapter takes us to Twilight. In the meantime, let me know what you think.