Disclaimers: See Chapter 1.


Thank Yous: Dragon Girl, phantwo. Your support is appreciated!


I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts...
- Julius Caesar, Act 3.

. . .

She was still alive.


Terrible and ashamed and ugly in her darkness, Zelda pulled at her clothing, her cruel and frozen fingers worshipping the silk fanatically and working feverishly at the commonplace ribbons, the buttons, the clasps. She pulled at the familiar lacings of her corset until they loosened and she pulled it free from her body reverently. And she looked down at her body, flushed and sweaty, wondering if she was looked upon and not caring. And she rubbed until her flesh felt raw, but still her skin felt rough. And she wept.


He had been abased before her, no longer was there a Champion for the fair maid, and yet still she remained alive.


She already knew why.

. . .

Time went on and on without her, and she knew herself for helpless after witnessing a man -- a man whose knees once bent only in zealous worship of his goddess Farore -- taken as a bride. Things went on, she knew they were going very fast, and when she was allowed sight, Lord Ganondorf was rarely in bed. Yet she saw him -- involved in menial tasks, fetching chain mail for the Lord's skeleton guards (why were they in his bedchamber?), getting the warlord water when he came to stay, rinsing out his chamber-pot. She didn't know how she stayed sane in the twilight days that followed what she'd witnessed. How did the world stay sane? Sometimes the Lullaby would come back to her memory and she hummed it until the notes became confused and were lost to her throat. Then there was her darkness, and no one came.


But then...


Sometime, in the dark she judged as night, he came to her.

. . .

"Princess."


Zelda opened her eyes in the black at the feeling of feather-light touches against her skin, and immediately thought herself free -- but blind. She realized despondently, but with no surprise, that she was where she had been when she fell into one of her short periods of darkness...but what of this feeling? There was no one with her and it felt as though there were ants crawling over her flesh. Her darkness cleared, gradually, and she found herself looking down at the face of her Champion, whose hands were pressed against the crystal wonderingly.


She could feel--


I come not...


--her heart breaking.


"Princess?" Concern. Not for her.


"Go away," she replied tonelessly. The stiff fabric of her corset felt rough against her skin. She wanted to hide. She wanted to cry.


"Princess, I--" He looked as if he wanted to continue, but in the end thought better of it. She noticed, barely, he was wearing the same robes, that his capless head was topped by blond hair that fell lank and unwashed to his shoulders. His head bobbed out of sight for a moment and there was nothing in her fuzzy, pink view, but once it returned...oh. She was faintly amused that she could still make him blush. "I thought I'd lost you."


"None but him can remove his spell of darkness. Has he taught you his secret ways of sorcery already?" she whispered in anger.


He looked quite helpless. "Princess, don't--"


"Don't what?" she raged. "Don't hate the man who has destroyed Hyrule's lands at a whim? Don't--"


"Don't be like this! Lord--"


"--hate a man who has turned my most powerful ally against me?"


"--Ganondorf wants what we all want: power. Will you hold that against him?" His Aryan, blue gaze, heavy upon her, expectant. "Will you, really?"


"He has me...in a crystal." She couldn't hold onto her anger. It seemed to melt in proportion to the time she spent looking down into his white, upturned face. "I don't know what you're trying to accomplish here."


"Lord Ganondorf is not the enemy you take him for, Princess. He...he does want what the rest of us want."


Sweet Din! Is he really calling him by his title aloud? Oh, gods, praising him? By the Three!


"I doubt it," the Princess said flatly. She thought she'd go insane if he didn't take his hands from the crystal, when it felt as though his hands were all over her, draining away her anger, her will to fight. "I want Hyrule as it's supposed to be."


"Hyrule is as it's supposed to be," her Champion protested, and she noticed that his hands were naked. They say, she remembered saying to him once, that he wears golden gauntlets. She remembered his laughter. She dismissed the thought quickly.


"Yes. Yes."


He smiled up at her and she saw no sign of the shuttered eyes she'd seen at their last meeting in the Temple of Time, the eyes of a man who has seen much bloodletting, and far too soon. "Princess I--I'd like it if you'd do me a...a boon."


"What, Link?" -- softly.


"Might you talk to me? I'm...it's unbearable, when he's not here."


Not: Will you help me kill him? Not: Will you teach me to contact the Sages as you cannot in your prison, so they can help us escape? Not: It hurts. Make him stop.


She hid her revulsion behind a heartbroken smile.


"Yes," she said. "I would like that."


Then, she traced across the outline of an ungauntleted hand with her own fingers, delicate and still frozen but terribly precise despite their desire to tremble.


It was the black-moon night, the night she had left her father to die at his advisor's hands, all over again. Now, as then, she followed after another so that she might live -- and what a terrible destiny she went on to! Now, as then, she could only hope she made the right decision. Now, as then, she continued to see her Champion as he had been at their first meeting, a boy with her father's eyes.


Now, as then, she did not permit herself to weep, because she knew her duty, and she knew the Sages needed her courage.