Sun was up and dressed with daybreak. She wore the paired down version of the leather and furs that she found in the cavern, and packed everything she owned in a single bag. When she made her way down to the courtyard, she found Ganondorf and the chieftain already there, instructing servants on packing up a sturdy carriage for the journey ahead of them. She handed her bag off and approached Ganondorf, who was dressed in light travelling leathers and looking at her with interest, scanning her body. Flushing, she looked away, but he took her arm and examined it.

"These are mine," he said, frowning and tapping the long gloves.

"What?"

"I mean… they were mine."

"They were what was left in the cavern when I woke up."

"Ah," he sighed, releasing her wrist. "I remember now. I left most of my possessions with you. I wasn't going to need them and well, given where they had come from… it seemed like bad luck to keep them. They suit you."

"You must have been smaller then," she met his eyes and smiled, "for these to fit me."

"A lot of things have changed since then."

"My lord," a porter called from the carriage. "We're ready for you, if you wish to depart. The stables send word that your horse is saddled and we'll be bringing him to you presently."

Ganondorf nodded his approval and turned back to Sun. "Will you ride with me this time?"

She nodded. She wanted to be close to him, but not for the sake of companionship or flirtation. On the back of his horse, there would be nothing but the long road ahead and the hours of the day, and they could talk about the past without being overheard. Furthermore, he wouldn't be able to walk away or occupy himself with some other pursuit.

Tilaq was lead forward and Ganondorf mounted, offering his hand to her. She was glad she was no longer wearing a dress, but even so, once she was settled behind him in the saddle, she realised she had underestimated how tight the space was. Her knees rested against his thighs and she could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. But when the horse started to move, her embarrassment fell away, to be replaced with the thrill of a journey started and she patted Tilaq's strong flank, smoothing down his bristly coat. They followed the carriage - drawn by a team of four other horses, Princess Riju only a shadow inside, hidden by semi-sheer curtains – through the castle gates and across the bridge. Their party was made of the carriage, a Hylian driver, two Gerudo warriors who walked on either side, Tilaq and his two riders, and a single guardswoman bringing up the rear.

The morning was chilly, but between the horse and Ganondorf, it was impossible to feel cold, so Sun simply enjoyed the breeze as it teased the strands of her hair and admired the way that the rising sun dyed everything pastel colours.

After enough time had passed, and they were leaving Hyrule Town for Hyrule Field, she gathered together all her nerve and said, "You told me you would help me recover my past."

"Where should I begin?"

"Just… start."

He sighed, and she could sense his hesitation. She remembered how he had stood at the gates of Gerudo Town what must have been eighteen years ago. He had been thin and frightened, but as soon as she had spoken to him, he had responded to her friendship with a warmth and eagerness that she only now understood was not the result of a happy childhood. He had eaten up her company and their games like a starving creature and while their partings at the end of the summer had been mournful for her, it had been devastating for him. She decided to take the weight of talking from his hands, and made a start of her own.

"We met for the first time when we were children, didn't we? You had to disguise yourself to get inside Gerudo Town, and you and your mother stayed with me and mine. We stayed up all night, talking…" she went on, not concerned with whether or not he was listening, but with gathering up every errant anecdote and memory, threading them through each other like a braid until she was weaving a rope. It was as if, by speaking it aloud, she made it solid finally. All the fragments that she had already remembers were ordered, and by doing so, she was able to fill in the blanks. Like walking down a flight of stairs in the dark, she put a mental foot forward and found firm ground beneath her, and then another and another. She was talking softly, and just like she had planned, no one else was able to hear her above the sound of Tilaq's hooves.

"And then… Mama said you had gotten too old. You were becoming a man, and that we couldn't risk bringing you into the town every year any more… and…" The words dried up. There was nothing but abyss under her foot.

It was then that he finally spoke, picking up her thread. "But you were becoming a woman. You could leave Gerudo Town for longer and longer stretches without supervision. So we would meet in the desert at night. Everyone just assumed you had a Hylian boyfriend hidden in the barrens."

"And then when I was even older, I would visit you in the Hebra Mountains."

"That's right."

"But things get… fuzzy after that. My mother allowed me to go to the mountains so long as I came home before autumn. You had Tilaq by that point, but I don't remember how you got him… We met at the lake…" She stopped, coming up against a psychological wall.

"It's because you're forgetting a few people. We were not alone in the mountains. But if we're going to talk about that part, there are things that you must know about me, things that happened when you weren't there."

"Why?"

"Because when you remember the reason why you were sealed away, you'll be remembering a falsehood."

He talked and she listened. Together they pieced together the events. As they went through it, she remembered parts that he had forgotten, and would expand or correct him when necessary. Sometimes he would tell her things that she was sure he had never told her before, as if it those things had only gained significance in hindsight. They would stop to eat and rest occasionally, stretch their legs and separate in order to collect themselves, treating the pauses in distance as pauses in time, before resuming once more.

By the time that night had fallen, and the story was complete, Sun was so exhausted that all she could feel was numbness. Her mind treated each revelation dispassionately, as if it were separate from herself. She knew that if she accepted everything he said, the emotional toll it would take to hold the past in her heart would have hollowed her out like a dead thing. Instead, she held it outside herself, letting sleep sweep her away and cataloguing in unconsciousness what her conscious mind rejected.

When she woke, she knew that it was all true.

And she was going to kill him.

xxx

Before.

He felt as if his heart was going to expand until it suffocated him, but he wouldn't cry. He might later, in the dead of night when they were all asleep and couldn't hear him, but he would be damned if any of them followed him outside and saw him in tears. He panted as if he had been running, bearing the hot anger inside him like it was molten iron in his stomach, searing and unbearable. The wind and snow didn't help. Inside it was an oven of tension and suppressed hatred, and out here it was unforgiving and barren. Goddess, how he longed to feel the warm sand beneath his feet, not this awful carpet of freezing snow.

"Gan…"

It was his mother. He rounded on her. "Why does she have to talk about Sun like that? It's horrible!"

A thin woman, whose height only emphasised the sharp angles of her hips and shoulders; even then she was sickly. The northern climate suited her even less than it did him, and he always felt guilty for complaining when he looked at her wasting away, shivering by the fire. But she, at least, had chosen to bring them here and he couldn't help but throw his resentment at her feet. To her credit, she always had the strength to pick it up and hand it back to him with loving eyes. This isn't mine. If you take it back, I can make it easier for a little while. It was hard for both of them, he knew, but when he didn't have the strength to keep going, she would lend him plenty to spare, as if the love for her son was bottomless. He just wished he was strong enough to protect her, to give back every meal that she had skipped so that he could eat, every friend she had lost, and every possession she had sold. He felt the threat of tears again and turned away, hiding his face in his gloves.

"I know…" she said, coming up to him and pulling him close. "I know it's difficult when they talk about your future. It's such a heavy weight for you to carry when you're still so young…"

"I don't want any of it!" he cried. "Sun's my friend! She's the only friend I have, and they keep going on about her like she's some sort of livestock. 'Too skinny,' they say, 'not good for child bearing'. Who cares!?" his voice had become shrill. "I don't want to marry her!"

His mother was regarding him with that infinitely patient look that made him feel ashamed. "You might feel different when you're older…" she offered. "She won't be skinny forever… and feelings deepen over time."

Every breath cut into his chest like a knife. "Was that the only reason you took me home? To find a wife?"

Alma was silent for a moment, and for the first time, she was unable to meet his eyes. "It was the reason they suggested it. They wanted you to find a wife so that, when you take your place on the throne of Hyrule, you could establish a dynasty."

"If I take the throne of Hyrule," He snarled.

"But," she went on, as if he hadn't spoken, "it wasn't the reason I wanted to take you there. I wanted you to see your people, walk among them and feel the heat of the desert sun and… I just wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to know what a pomegranate tasted like. I wanted you to play with children your own age. I can't stand to see you lonely."

He let her embrace him then, feeling her fingers in his hair and burying his face in her furs. He couldn't stop the tears coming now and by the time they parted and she was wiping his face with her thumb, they had frozen on his cheeks.

"I hate this," he moaned. "I hate the snow."

"It doesn't have to be so bad," she said, smiling. "Sand is nice and all, but it doesn't stick together like snow…" She knelt in front of him and took a handful of snow. "If you take this," she had packed the snow into a ball and handed it to him, parts of it still clinging to her gloves, "you can press it together and make almost anything. There were legends of people who lived long ago who would make their houses of out snow…"

He could still feel the tightness in his chest, but the pain was slowly fading and he managed a weak smile. "That's just another story…" he mumbled.

"No! No, I'll show you." She piled snow up in front of her. The wind had gone down, and the sky was clear, the snow around them thick and undisturbed. It was one of those rare days when he felt that the mountain had let off trying to actively smother them. Using her hands to shape and mould, she succeeded in creating a brick shape, the heat of her hands under the gloves causing the snow to melt and form a hard shell of ice. "They would make their houses out of bricks like this, and it would trap heat inside. They could light fires inside without it melting, and everything."

"I don't believe you," he said, but his smile was natural now, and he was distracted.

"Come on, let's make warriors out of the snow."

"What?"

"Like this," she instructed him to take the snowball she had given him and roll it into the snow so that it formed a boulder just a little higher than his hip, and then another and another, so they could be stacked one on top of the other. The use the branches of dead trees to make arms and spears, and soon he was fetching tools from the cabin, giving them helmets made out of pots and shields made out of basket lids.

This, of course, drew the attention of the individuals who had driven Ganondorf out into the snow in the first place. A pair of sister witches, stooped and leathery, with large shrewd eyes that made him shiver. When he had reached for a cooking pot, one of them, Koume, snatched his wrist in long spidery fingers and held him in a vice like grip. He froze, resisting the urge to struggle.

It was worse when he struggled.

"What are you doing?"

"Mama and I are making snow warriors…" he flushed under her derisive glare.

"Aren't you a little old to be playing in the snow?"

"I'm eleven," he said, but under his breath. It was better not to openly contradict them.

"Shouldn't you be training?" This was the wizened creature known as Kotake by the fire, warming her arthritic hands which clicked like little pebbles.

"I trained all morning," he mumbled. It was true. His arms and legs still ached from it.

"Go then." Koume let him go, scowling.

He breathed, and selected a pot as far away from her as possible before dashing outside before she could stop him. To his annoyance, they followed him outside, shuffling in the tracks he had left in his wake. Trying to ignore them, he continued building with his mother, enjoying the expressions he could draw on them with his fingers. It was difficult. Though they didn't interfere, the day had lost some of its vibrancy under their cold eyes.

Finished, they stepped back to admire their handiwork. Two stoic snow warriors stood to attention before them and, though he felt a little silly, he couldn't help but glow a little inside. It was so rare that he could simply do something for the sake of itself. It was something that Sun would have suggested they do, and he felt a pang of regret that she wasn't here to enjoy this. But it was a good pang. They would simply have to make their own someday when she came to visit him here.

"Very sweet," Koume crowed, and he glared at her.

"Indeed," Kotake agreed, raising her hand. "I think this would make for an excellent learning opportunity, don't you sister?"

"Absolutely." There was a hideous gleam in their eyes, and he felt his heart sink like a stone.

His mother stepped towards them. "There's no need to –"

"There's every need, now be silent Alma."

She shut her mouth and sagged. He couldn't blame her for her compliance. He had done no different in all the times before. She would only make it worse in the end if she tried to stand up to them. He waited, trying to pretend that he wasn't afraid.

It was Kotake who did it, raising her gnarled hands towards the snowmen. They began to twitch and stir, stretching out their wooden limbs with eerie creaking sounds. The exertion of building them combined with the stamina training he had done that morning left him with little energy, and though he managed to drive out of the way of the first wild swipe of the snowman's arm, he was struck by the second one, the stick breaking across his face. Luckily, his skin was numb because of the cold, and so he didn't feel it as the sharp bits of the stick left little cuts on his forehead, but inside he felt like something had died.

Couldn't they just let him have this?

Crudely, he dismantled the stubborn snow warriors and snapped their spears over his knee.

"Again," Koume ordered, and her sister obliged.

They formed a second time, like creatures climbing out of a bog, the arms first, this time made entirely of snow and ice, pulling themselves out of the ground. These were different, not the clumsy round things that he and his mother had made, but tall hulking monsters without faces, advancing on him, twice his height and three times as wide. He knew what they wanted him to do, but he had no strength left to call on the magic inside him.

He could hear his mother pleading.

"Please stop this!"

"You know how it has to be," they said in unison, and their voices were like nails on the inside of his skull. "Suffering and rage are the mother and father of power and resilience. Scarred flesh is harder to cut, broken bones are tougher to break again, and a mind that has been tested will not succumb to fear and compassion."

As he reached for one of the cooking pots, hoping to wield it like a club, he couldn't help thinking; if that's true, then why am I so weak?

xxx

A/N - the rest of this fan fic will be dedicated to UncannyPrincess - one of those absolute angels that comments on every post. You're amazing XD!