Prompt No. 12
Word count: ~3540
Universe: Twilight Princess; prequel to "No. 17 — Dirty Secret"
Pairings: Zelink
Rating: T
Themes: Whippings, imprisonment, light poisoning

Broken Down

Welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Don't be shy, now! Step right up, step right up, and see wonders and horrors from all corners of the world! Be stupefied, terrified, alacrified, and rigidified, right here at the STAR tent!

The carnival barker's spiel was a bit repetitious if you stood and listened long enough, but his enthusiasm never tapered. The circus tent was on southwestern street, near enough to the rest of the marketplace that his booming voice carried down every alley and corridor, luring unsuspecting townspeople toting full coin purses with the promise of mystery and intrigue. It was hardly the sort of place for a respectable young woman, much less the heir apparent. But she couldn't rule the people if she didn't know the people, and she couldn't know them if she spent her entire life in a box.

But try explaining that to her widowed, aging father, whose only concern seemed to be keeping her protected and undefiled until she could produce more well-bred successors of her own.

Zelda slipped into the crowd funneling towards the circus tent, ducking a little further into her hood as she purchased her ticket. Just beyond the booth, a performer breathed a whorl of fire above her head, eliciting delighted screams from the crowd. A pair of Zora swallowed swords in mesmerizing tandem. A Sheikah shaman made shapes in smoke, sparks, and shadows. Circles of onlookers clapped and gasped and shrieked, startled and enraptured. Children begged their parents for treats, magicians charmed the unwary out of a few extra coins, and young ladies clung to their beaus as they wandered trepidatiously into the poorly lit ring of smaller tents outside the big top, huddled together beneath the looming sign that read Freak Show.

It wasn't until the performers began disappearing with a flourish and the flaps of the big top spread open like a menacing, toothless smile that the crush snapped out of their collective, hypnotized amazement, drawn towards the massive tent like moths to a flame. Zelda found herself shrinking away from the rush; she wasn't used to being closed in like that, and the idea of such a large group cramming into a confined space was making her feel short of breath. She turned aimlessly, wandering towards the quiet, poorly lit section beneath the looming sign.

A few stragglers came out to join the crowd as she passed under the giant letters, screaming and laughing as they held each other, still reeling from what they had seen. She kept walking, wondering why they liked to be frightened. Wondering why what was odd need be frightening at all.

The tents were arranged in a semicircle, with a slightly larger, more ominous tent at the head, presumably housing the most freakish specimen. But where the others pulsed with the warm glow of firelight, illuminating every bizarre detail of the exhibits within, the largest tent was dim, and quiet, and that was enough to draw her towards it as the crowd shrieked and crowed behind her.

She slipped into the tent. It blotted out most of the noise from outside, and was only lit by a single torch affixed to the center pole. She took a moment to breathe. It was a nice respite from all the excitement. Peaceful, even, besides the forbidding, wheeled cage on its far side.

The figure within was hunched in on itself—a shadow within a shadow. She was only there to catch her breath, and the idea of staring at something caged just to satisfy her own curiosity felt inherently distasteful. But then the creature lifted its eyes, two red orbs ensconced in the same soft gold of twilight, and she moved, breathless.

Firelight splashed quiveringly over its shape as she wandered closer. It passed over a tangled mess of golden hair, swathes of dusk and pale blue skin, and a luminescent, geometric spiral emanating from his side. She trotted closer, eyes wide, and as she did he scurried away, startling until his back was pressed to the bars. The irony wasn't lost on her: that in this house of horrors, it was she who was frightening him.

"You're Twili, aren't you?" she breathed, closing her fingers gently around the bars. His breath was quick and shallow, his bare chest pulsing like a rabbit's. She frowned; he wasn't just startled. He was terrified. She whispered, "You don't have to be afraid."

He shrunk deeper into the shadow of his cage. But his eyes, still fixed warily on her, glowed with their own light. He was neither a creature of light nor of darkness, but something in between: trapped in perpetual twilight.

"I've read about your people," she said, carefully tugging off her hood in a meager attempt to allay his fears. "But they say the mirror that was the way into your world was shattered by its ruler long ago. How did you get here?"

He didn't answer. But he seemed to shift in the darkness, just a little, to get a better look at her face in the torchlight. She tried to make herself unassuming, tilting her forehead against the bars and her profile to the fire and offering him a small smile.

"My name is Zelda," she said, and he blinked, a slow, owlish sort of blink.

He unfurled himself from the corner of the cage slowly, cautiously, taking a single, calculated step out of shadow, as though testing her. She pulled away from the bars, giving him breathing room. His glowing eyes swept the tent, scanning for danger, and then he padded over, crouching so they were nearly eye level. He was breathtaking this close. Eyes and skin and strands of hair—everything about him seemed to glow, like he was cut from ice and obsidian and gemstones. She quashed the urge to reach out and trace his skin, to see if it felt as sharp and angled as she imagined, guessing he wouldn't take kindly to that.

She asked instead, "What's your name?"

His eyes flickered up to hers and back down again, his tongue darting out to lick his lips in thought. Then he closed his fingers slowly around the bars, meeting her eyes again—boring deeply, intensely, desperately—and gave them a gentle shake. Let me out.

She tore her eyes away long enough to find the gate. It was wrapped shut with a thick chain and a formidable-looking padlock. She tugging it once, frowning. She needed the key.

"Careful!"

All at once the peace was broken, a burly man from the circus sweeping the torch from its sconce and jamming it towards the cage as he pulled her back by the elbow. The Twili reared back against the far bars, coiled to strike and teeth bared, and loosed a taut, threatening hiss.

"You stay back, Beast!" the man bellowed, and then turned to admonish the girl he had rescued. "You need to be more careful, miss. This creature is dangerous."

"He wasn't going to hurt me—" she began, but then his eyes narrowed, flickering with recognition, and she remembered who she was, and where she was, and that she couldn't be seen, ducking her head to hide her face from the light. "I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to cause trouble."

"Just be more careful," he grunted, shrugging off the strange similarities. Because a Princess of Hyrule visiting a freak show in the dead of night was a ridiculous notion indeed. "The show has nearly started, miss."

She nodded, letting herself be led away, looking back once into the darkness of the tent to meet the swirling, bloodred eyes staring after her, set in twilight gold.

The show was already beginning as she took her seat on the rickety stands. It was all more of the same that had enchanted the crowds outside: jugglers handling flaming torches and knives, sword swallowers, fire breathers, and people of all shapes and sizes performing athletic feats and magic tricks. Girls did handstands on horseback, acrobats performed on the trapeze, lions jumped through flaming hoops, and a man with an umbrella walked a highwire.

For the finale of the show, they took away half of the torches with a flourish, cutting the light, and dropped a cage over the center ring. A fearsome-looking trainer put himself inside, covered in scars and brandishing whips, and stumbling after him, hands bound and face covered, was a figure she was sure she knew.

The Twili.

"And now prepare yourselves for something truly horrifying, something scandalizing. A stunt so bold, so dangerous, that you won't find one like it anywhere but within this very ring…"

Women shrieked as they pulled the bag off his head and cut his hands free, scrambling back outside the cage and slamming the gate closed. Children buried into their mother's breast, and men leaned forward to get a closer look.

"Watch and be amazed as our fearless hunter tames the Beast!"

Zelda gripped her seat too tightly as the hunter snapped his whip in the air just beside the Twili's face, driving him back to the edge of the cage. She wanted to put an end to it, to show herself and demand that they release him at once. But she could see how that would end: with her father locking her up tighter than he already was, and then compensating the ringmaster for his trouble and making sure his property was returned just to punish her. If she was going to help him, she would have to do so without using her royal status as leverage. So she bit her tongue and waited.

The Twili was agile and lithe, avoiding the hair-raising snaps of the hunter's whips with every curl of his body, every deft leap between the rungs as he climbed the bars of their cage, and turned when there was enough distance between them to bare his teeth and hiss again. Only now, lit by more fires and circling his opponent, could she see the half-healed stripes down his back glistening in the torchlight, see the cuts on his face and arms where he had been too slow to avoid the whips before.

Even if they had known what he was—and Zelda doubted very much that they did, since the royal family had done their best to erase any mention of the interlopers long ago—they didn't care. They treated him like an animal, and the crowd loved it. They gasped and tittered when the Twili lunged for him and was driven back, squealed with delight when the whip caught him around the ankle and dragged him back to the ground. It was barbaric, and awful. And she couldn't look away.

He look a lash to the back and to his temple before he managed to dance out of reach again, panting, and clambered up the cage wall to its tapered ceiling. He scanned the cage as the hunter stalked closer, planning his route—and met her eyes through the bars. His face changed when he spied her, morphing into something less fearsome, less fearful, and she clutched at her seat like she wanted to clutch at the bars of his cage.

The whip came again, wrapping up his arm. But when the hunter pulled, he weaved himself in the bars, closed his hand on the braided leather, and pulled back. The force hoisted the hunter several feet in the air, bellowing, before his wrist slipped free of the loop and he crashed back to the arena floor. The Twili slid down after him, brandishing his newly acquired weapon, and the tent devolved into chaos. Women screamed. Children cried. Men tried to get their families to safety. And the ringmaster and his crew dove for the ring to subdue him.

He kept fighting them as the crowds looked on, mortified. Zelda couldn't help a small smile, even as they eventually overpowered him, even as they forced him to his knees, bound him, and covered his face again. She would find a way to free him before the sun came up. And once word got out that the STAR circus had nearly loosed one of its horrible beasts on the audience, the rest of them would be performing for a near-empty tent.

She let herself be ushered out with the rest of the evacuating crowd, slipping off into the shadows before she could be driven beyond the ticket booth to the street, and settled in a dark corner. Her plan was oversimplistic, perhaps, but it was formulated: find the person responsible for the keys to his cage, wait for everyone to go to sleep, and then snatch them. She just needed the opportunity to enact it.

The problem was, circus people never seemed to sleep.

She found the animal keeper slipping out the rear of the tent amidst the clamor and followed him around as he put away the horses and lions, fed them, watered them, and cleaned the stalls. He had a keyring, but there weren't many keys on it, and he never made for the circle of tents under the looming sign. The rest of the performers were busy cleaning up the stands and resetting the arena for the next show, tidying the yard, checking and polishing equipment, and then the acrobats went back to practicing for an hour or two. She had been hiding all night, and hadn't really made any progress.

The only people she hadn't seen, she realized, were the ringmaster and the Twili.

She hurried to his cage, struck with a horrible feeling in her gut. But it was empty. She clapped a hand over her mouth, swallowing a scream or something like it. She had been so fixated on finding the keys…

"Sun'll be up soon," came a voice from outside his tent, startlingly close. A splash of torchlight cast two silhouettes on the canvas, one sparking something to smoke between his teeth, and the other with his arm in a sling. "You gonna go watch the freak burn?"

"After the stunt he pulled tonight?" he growled, rolling his shoulder with a hiss. "I wouldn't miss it."

Zelda squared her shoulders and slipped out of the tent after them as they drifted towards the road. She shadowed them as they made for the square and then went east, slinking to the edge of town and then beyond, crossing the bridge and heading out into the fields. She glanced back at the castle spires, watching her condemningly from behind the city walls. She was definitely not going to make it back before she was missed. But she would deal with the consequences later.

They walked on a while—well out of earshot of the city—until they came upon a few parked circus wagons, and she sidled up behind them as the men went around to the other side. The sky was turning pale, saturating the fields with just enough light so that she could make out the scene between the wheel spokes.

The Twili had his wrists bound to a whipping post, his back dripping long, angry lines that glistened, wet and dark, against his two-toned skin. He was on his knees and hunched over, his face pressed miserably into the post, like he hoped he might slip into darkness. The ringmaster was reclined in a chair tipped onto its back legs, watching him bleed.

"Evening boys," the ringmaster said, though his eyes scanned the horizon, watching the time for such a greeting drain away. "Should be quite the sunrise."

"Come on, Beastie," the hunter said, sauntering over to pick up a water pail beside the post and hurl it into his downcast face. The Twili lurched, sputtering, as he tossed the bucket aside and then reached over to take a fistful of his hair and twist him up and around so he was facing east. "Wouldn't want you to miss it."

"After everything I've done for you," the ringmaster growled, watching the sky brighten. Watching the Twili's breath quicken as he was forced to watch the molten tip of the sun peek over the horizon. "You're ungrateful is what you are."

The first glorious rays of the sun spilled over the hillside, casting light and shadow over Zelda's hiding place. But she couldn't move to get more cover. She could hardly breathe. Because everywhere the sun touched him he glowed, his skin reacting to the light, and he whimpered, his face screwed with pain.

"I should throw him back in the dunes where I found him."

"I'd love to see what the desert sun would do to you, Beastie."

"He wouldn't last five minutes. Bet he'd shrivel up like a grape."

"You think so? Wouldn't he just light up like tinder?"

The orb climbed higher, a burning semicircle kissing the ground with heat. The dusk of his skin was turning ashen, miserable, half-swallowed cries sounding deep in his throat as it climbed. The shadows gave way as the sun rose in earnest, a perfect ring hanging low in the morning sky, and he let his head fall back and screamed. His body smoldered like an ember, sizzling and steaming as the sun burned him alive. And just as Zelda, horrified tears streaming down her face, made to burst out of her hiding place, the ringmaster stood.

"He's had enough," he sighed, and the other two cut him loose and tossed a cloak over his head, blinding him and concealing him at once.

They dragged him to the back of the wagon Zelda hid behind, throwing him under the canvas and swinging the cage door shut with a clang, and she slid under, ducking between the wheels, watching their feet as they rounded the wagon and climbed into the driver's seat. Her eyes snagged on the keyring hanging from the ringmaster's belt.

"How many times are we going to have to do this song and dance?"

"Maybe he's too stupid a beast."

"He's not stupid. He's stubborn," the ringmaster breathed, gathering up the reins. "I'll break him yet."

He urged the horse on, and Zelda laid perfectly still as the wagon pulled away, exposing her to the early light. But they didn't look back. She got to her knees as they rocked out of view, and then to her feet, wiping tears from her face as she ducked her head and followed.

Castletown was stirring to life as she wandered back through the streets, shops opening yawningly and guards quietly rotating out. The call hadn't gone out from the castle yet that she was missing, so a cloaked, lonely figure meandering across the square and down to southwestern street drew no one's attention. And as the rest of the world eased awake, the circus finally drifted towards somber, desolate sleep. Even the big top seemed less grand in the morning, its colors more dull in the sun than they had been in the firelight and the tentcloths seeming to sag. The circus wagon was already emptied, parked haphazardly near the Freak Show sign.

Zelda spied the ringmaster. He seemed different in the sunlight, too: fatter, older. Like his wanton cruelty that morning had aged him prematurely. He trudged through the backstage area toward the tents where most of the other performers had already crashed to doze away the morning. He hung his keyring on a post jutting up between the big top and the animal cages and dragged himself toward the tents.

She didn't follow to make sure he went to bed. She just snatched the keys and ran.

She was breathless and trembling by the time she made it back to the Twili's tent. He was still glowing, his body rippling with dusty, mist-colored radiance. The only darkness left on him was the bloodstains on his back. She crossed the tent and gripped the padlock, unfurling the ring of keys, and pressed the first toothy shape into the keyhole. When she tugged, it wouldn't budge, and she gingerly moved on to the next.

Seven keys later, the lock slipped open.

She lowered the gate slowly, quietly, wary of disturbing the sleepy quiet of the circus with the groan of the cage hinges. But when she climbed inside and reached to touch him he lurched away, half-delirious, and hit the bars so hard the cage rattled like a gong.

"It's me," she quavered, desperate to keep him quiet, wrenching back her hood so he could see her face. "It's only me."

His eyes darted to the open gate before they finally found hers, drawing sluggishly into focus. He was harried and pitiful, tears streaming down his face and trembling all over like a rabbit. He sagged when he recognized her, head bowing and crimson eyes closing in exhaustion. Neither of them moved. They just sat on their knees a while, listening to the dull patter of the teardrops slipping from his chin to drum on the wooden floorboards. It was like listening to rain fall off an awning: too slow, and too loud, drowning out the storm behind it.

Her hand found his mouth, his jaw, the cradle of his neck, moving so gradually neither of them seemed to be aware of it. He wasn't sharp at all. He was soft and perfect. But then he was leaning into it, into her, and when she drew him closer he collapsed into her arms, like he didn't have the strength left to resist even the smallest drop of kindness. And as she held him to her breast, she thought maybe the ringmaster had been right.

Maybe he had broken him.