Prompt No. 15
Word count: ~1530
Universe: Breath of the Wild; sequel to "No. 6 — 'Stop, please'"
Pairings: Zelink
Rating: T
Themes: Experimentation/test subject, torture
Science Gone Wrong
Link dragged himself to his bed and collapsed on it, exhausted. When he finally woke again, the world outside the window was dark, and Zelda was scribbling notes at her table. There was a bowl of stew on the floor beside his cot that looked suspiciously normal. He stared from across the room, watching her slight frown flicker in the firelight. She never looked up.
He shifted a little, testing his body. He still felt like he'd been hit in the chest by a boulder.
"What in Hylia's name did you do to me?" he finally growled, trying to ignore the startling weakness he felt in every muscle as he rolled onto his side, the way his hands shook as he scooped the bowl off the floor.
She sighed. "I don't know."
He took a bite. Meat, potatoes, carrots, wild onions. It was just food. He would almost rather it had been an experiment. He murmured, "I was certain you were going to kill me."
"I promised I wouldn't," she said, finally looking up to scowl at him.
They glared at each other for a while, waiting at opposite ends of something impassible for the other to make a move. And then she did the unthinkable and looked away first. He nearly dropped his spoon for shock. He studied her a moment longer, processing.
He finally decided, "It frightens you."
She frowned deeper, scribbled a little faster. "I don't like anything I can't explain."
He looked down at his bowl, pushed around some chunks of meat and vegetables. Ate a little of it.
"Did it help?"
"Did what help?"
"The experiment. Did you learn anything?"
She twirled her quill, thinking, and then thought so hard she forgot to twirl it. "Maybe. I don't know."
He bit into a potato, chewing and swallowing and trying to enjoy the normalness of it. But he couldn't shake the feeling that it symbolized something unpleasant, that it was a symbol of some kind of change.
"That's quite the burden," he finally murmured, and she glanced at him, her frown morphing into something less heated, something that almost resembled a smile, but that was no less somber.
"Why do you think I live in the remotest place on earth?"
There was nothing he could say to that. He went back to his bowl, and she to her book. When he finished, he set his dirty dish on the floor and rolled over again on his cot, still aching and exhausted. He watched her out of one eye, buried in his pillow. In spite of everything she had done to him, he didn't hate her quite as much as he should have. The feeling welling up in him now, watching her pore over her data, wasn't close to hate at all. It felt suspiciously like pity.
He murmured, as he brain began to cloud in earnest, "Sometimes I don't know what to think of you."
And then he was gone.
She didn't run a single experiment on him the next day. She came and went, gathering herbs and mushrooms and harvesting monster parts, taking the little egg with her. But he was too tired to think of escape. Not while there was a storm brewing on the horizon, anyway.
Maybe tomorrow.
He fell asleep that night before sunset, before Zelda had come home. When he woke, it was to the little egg, buzzing and whirring, poking him all over with its claws.
"Go away," he murmured, still half asleep.
It only clamped onto the cot and shook it, nearly bouncing him to the floor.
"Hey! What's the matter with you?" he swatted at him. "Zelda, tell your soft boiled little—"
But she was nowhere to be seen. The little egg beeped and whined, its eye pulsing too bright and its legs fidgeting and squirming. He'd never seen it so antsy. He looked out the window, black with night and shuddering with the blizzard outside. She must have been in trouble.
Link growled at his own, stupid decency, swiping a handful of elixirs, and followed the squealing egg out into the storm.
Between the buffeting winds and the ice pelting his face, he was all but blind. But the guardian was a beacon, always just a step ahead, its pulsating blue eye lighting up the blizzard like a portable moonbeam. The mountain was heaped with fresh snow and treacherous, always trying to blow him off a cliff or suck him into a crevasse. But he tucked his hands into his arms, shivering, and kept on. The elixir staved off frostbite, but a blizzard in Hebra was cold no matter who you were or what potions you'd taken. As much as he hated to admit it, he was worried. He wouldn't put it past the mountain to end her, even if she could get struck by lightning and live.
Finally, the moon led him to the sun.
The blizzard around her churned and whipped, drawn by her and repelled at once. She undulated with molten light, rippling out of her like tendrils of smoke. She was on her knees, arms closed on herself as she withstood the storm under nothing but her own power. The little egg screamed towards her, tiny legs whirring, and she turned. Light leaked from the corners of her eyes like tears.
"I told you to go home!" she shouted, but the guardian only bounced and swiveled, shining its moonbeam on Link as he stumbled after it, and she sagged. "You shouldn't be here."
"Yeah, I know," he panted, stopping just out of arm's reach. "The egg was worried about you."
Her jaw clenched and her head bowed. The wind had wrested her hair out of its pins, tangling it everywhere. And in spite of everything, in spite of the unholy light seeping out of her body and the way the storm seemed drawn to her like a magnet, he thought he had never seen her looking so small. Light dropped from her downcast face into the snow.
"I can't make it stop," she finally admitted, her voice quavering as she raised it over the storm. "A lizalfos ambushed me and I just—I killed it. But now I can't—"
She swallowed down the rest, trembling, and he cautiously moved closer. Her fingertips looked too stiff to bend.
"You can figure this out," he coaxed her. "You're the scientist. Just tell me what you need me to do."
She looked up at him again, and her expression was defeated. He hated it. She whispered, her words nearly eaten by the wind, "This isn't science."
"Anything that can be observed and measured is science."
"I don't know how to measure this."
He licked chapped, dry lips, watching her crackle with light, and knelt in the snow. He was fairly confident this was a terrible idea, and if there had been any lingering effects from the hearty meal she had made him, the spicy elixir he had downed had certainly canceled them out. But she was too frightened of herself to be coerced into coming home, he couldn't stand the thought of leaving her.
He said, "Maybe we just need to run an experiment on you."
And then he touched her, reaching with both hands to hold her shoulders. It was nothing like the experiment she had run on him, when she had pressed her palm to his chest and crushed his heart while it was still beating. It was worse.
Lightning tore through him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, bursting every blood vessel as it went and blowing his heart open. His lungs shattered. His bones bent back the wrong way like fingernails. His skin melted off. He was already dead. He could feel it. It was just a few borrowed moments, lent to him so he could scream, so he could feel the gruesome sensation of his heart still beating even though it had nearly turned inside out.
He could feel her, too. He could feel her icy fingers on his neck, feel her face burrowed in his throat, feel her glowing, chilly tears slipping down his collar. Feel her gasping and sobbing between his hands as he roared in agony. Feel her lips on his skin, whispering brokenly. Please, Hyila, please.
Then the light snapped out, and all at once he was whole.
He collapsed into her, gasping, boneless, his vision spotting in the sudden dark. They buried in each other, covered in the snow, grasping at cloth and hair and the promise of warmth. He fumbled weakly in his pocket, offering her a vial in his shaking hand before burrowing his eyes back into the curve of her neck, still out of breath.
"Let's not do this again," he panted hoarsely, his throat too sore for words, and she threaded her fingers through his hair, held him closer as he sagged.
"Idiot," she breathed.
"Witch."
The egg whirred between them, poking and prodding and lifting until they were stumbling back up the mountain, and its moonbeam eye lit the way as they dragged each other, slowly, clumsily, haltingly, back to the house.