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Chapter 6: Midnight Madness
The forest was, most of the time at least, a fairly peaceful place. The shadows grew in silence as the sun dipped closer and closer towards the unseen horizon. Night was coming, and all was silence and serenity.
...Except for the part about two Hyrulians barreling through the forest, screaming at the tops of their lungs... That part was...well...not peaceful in any way. Finally, the two well-worn travelers came to a place where there were no longer trees. Link practically fell over, his hands on his knees, panting.
"I...think..." He gasped out. "...We...Lost the Wolfoe...thingy..."
"Wolfoe...is not..." Zelda panted in reply. "...A thingy...stop using that...stupid...word..."
Link opened his mouth to reply, but Zelda heard not the voice of a semi-bumpkin hero, but the sharp whinny of a very annoyed horse.
"That's... Pretty good...You sound just like...that horse of yours." She gasped, her breathing almost back to normal.
"Epona!" Link cried out, joyfully.
"Yeah," Zelda agreed, standing up. "That's the one."
"No, it's Epona! She's here!"
"...Didn't you leave her tied to a tree?" Zelda asked, one eyebrow lifted.
Epona whinnied again, and shook her head. There, tied to her reigns was a thick, and rather hefty-looking, piece of wood that might once have been a branch...before it was dragged through a forested wilderness by a very powerful horse. The whole scene just screamed 'pissed-off horse who's going to make you bleed'.
"Eh...Sorry about that, girl..." Link smiled, trying to get on Epona's good side. "I'll never do it again! I swear!"
Epona snorted and gave him a long, equine glare, but allowed him to get rid of the branch and mount up again. Once there, he looked down at the suddenly very short-seeming Zelda.
"Uh...crap." He said, intelligently.
"Yeah," Zelda glared at him sarcastically. "Remember me, the princesses! The important princess who's horse is now dead!"
"Oh, no! I may be an idiot, but you can't blame me for that!"
"We walk." Zelda gritted, trying to keep her temple. "And, I don't blame you for her death, I blame you for being an insensitive idiot."
"I'm a guy! I can't help it!" Protested Link.
"Shut up."
...Thus it came to be that Link and Zelda found themselves camped out in the middle of a seemingly deserted Hyrule Field, sitting around a small campfire as night fell, rather than warm and safe in Karkariku village like they might have been. Link sighed, staring into the embers, and poked it with a stick.
"I'm going to bed. You take first watch." Link told Zelda woodenly, totally unhappy with the entire situation.
"What?" Zelda asked him in a sugar-sweet, fake-surprised tone. "No stupid questions? No weird country bumpkin-ness? To what do I owe this pleasure?"
"Fine, be that way," Link told her. "I'll take the first watch, and you go to sleep until you're less of a priss."
"I," Zelda cried, outraged. Her teeth gritted, and she practically growled her words out when next she spoke. "I, Never! I'll show you who's a priss! I'll take the first watch, and I wont fall asleep like some pathetic watch-guards I might mention!" Zelda glared pointedly at Link, then stomped off to sit just at the edge of where the fire's glow touched the grass.
"Spoken like a true priss," Link mumbled to himself and rolled over into sleep.
...It would be several hours later, in the darkest time of the night, that Link would wake to the soft sound of music, filtering through the night. He raised his head, muzzily, and tried to blink the sleep out of his eyes. For a minute the hero considered putting his head back down and going back to sleep, but he discarded that thought as the music floated on. It was...intriguing, mysterious, and very, very interesting, so he pulled himself to his feet, pulled on a semi-clean tunic and headed out into the dark. He was only a few steps from the ring of light cast by the campfire before he came upon a large stone that he hadn't noticed before. It wasn't that big, really, but it had a flat top, and looked like it might be good to sit on.
...Except that there already was someone sitting there. It was Zelda, though she seemed so different now, so relaxed in the moonlight, that he could do nothing but stare for a minute. Her hair was loose, and the moon's reflected light caught it and made it shine like spun silver, her skin seemed pale and ethereal, and her face, lost in the concentrated passion of the soft, alluring melody she was playing on her ocarina...
'She's...beautiful,' Link thought, his mind gone blank with the shock of it. '...I never thought that a girl like her could be that way, but...there she is. Maybe she's not so bad, after all.'
For a while, Link just stood there, watching her play in her simple sleeping gown, wondering at the strange transformation that had somehow snuck up on him so suddenly. Then, not wanting to interrupt the hauntingly beautiful scene, he tried to quietly back away, This didn't go so well, as Link tripped before he had gotten more than two steps.
"Oof-Fuck!" He grunted, as he went down onto his back, ankles splayed over the seat portion of his inconveniently placed saddle. Instantly, a painfully sour note struck out across the cool night air, high and shrill enough to wake the dead.
"L-link! What the heck are you doing?" She stuttered, face red with mind-bendingly powerful embarrassment. "I-I mean...uh..."
"Ow," Link told her. "I'm just wandering around in the dark, trying to kill myself and make it look like an accident."
Zelda knew it was supposed to be a joke. She did, really, it's just that she couldn't believe that sarcasm of that level of sophistication could come out of Link's mouth. She recovered quickly. "Seriously, what are you doing? I'll tell you when it's your watch."
"I know," Link said, suddenly reluctant to tell her about his real reason for waking. He shook it off, and continued. "I...woke up because I heard something...some music."
"You did?" Zelda squeaked, now an even brighter shade of red than before. "I...uh...I didn't hear anything! I swear!"
"Don't lie, I heard you," Link told her, gently. "I liked it, you're pretty good, actually. Why didn't you just say that you could play ocarina?"
"...It's not exactly the kind of thing a princess is supposed to do..."
"Bullshit. Tell me the real reason."
"I...I'm not very good, okay!" Zelda blurted out, frustrated. "I don't like it when people hear me sounding like crap, so just...drop it!"
For a moment, Link just stared at her. "You're an idiot," He finally said, sounding as if he almost couldn't believe it. "I can't believe you actually believe that crap. You're good, real good. I should know."
"You play?" Zelda asked, surprised.
"Uh..." Link stuttered, thinking of Zelda's beautiful blue lacquered ocarina, and his own shabby off-green one. "I...uh...yeah. I'm not as good as you, and I haven't got anything near as nice as that," Link pointed vaguely at Zelda's ocarina. "...But, I know how to play some things." He blushed.
Zelda looked at him for a minute, a tad bit confused about this weird new Link that talked kindly more than he cussed, and actually cared about something outside being an idiot. "Play something, then. Please?"
"I...Uh..." Link stuttered, stalling for time. "You don't want to hear me. I suck."
Zelda glare. He had heard her play, and now she wanted revenge. "Play! C'mon, you heard me!"
"Yeah...but," Link began. "No, I see where this is going! I'm not gonna do it!"
Zelda hopped off the rock and walked right up to him. "Play the song, Link," She said, pointing at him as if to poke his chest.
"Your talking all...not you-like..."
"Stop changing the subject. Please, play?" And Link was suddenly reminded of how she had looked not five minutes ago, framed by the silvery glory of the moonlight, and he felt his breath catch in his throat. She was so close that, had Link felt the need to die a horribly painful death, he might have kissed her. Slowly, he licked his lips, and opened his mouth to agree to play the stupid song, when his little reverie was interrupted by a frantic message from...Guess who? Navi!
"Uh, hey!...please! LISTEN!" The tiny fairy chimed desperately.
"Huh?" Said Link, intelligently, turning from Zelda.
"HEEEEEELP!" Cried the tiny fire-bug, too scared to even make an attempt at jingling. And well she might be, for the annoying little spark-ball was being dragged into the ground by the protruding skeletal arm of one of the nightly stalchilds.
"Holy Fuck!" Cried Link taking a shocked step back from Zelda, staring at the bony arm. All around them, more hands, shoulders and gruesome heads were rising from the laomy soil. "When did this creepy stuff show up!"
"When you were trying to get lucky with princess notices-a-lot, here!" Navi cried. "NOW, SAVE ME!"
"I was not!" Link snarled at her. "And maybe I shouldn't save you after a comment like that!"
It was at this point that Zelda decided that they were both idiots, and blasted the hand into bone shards with a quick burst of magic.
"Fighting now, being stupid later, kay?" She told them, almost cheerfully.
"...Kay," Link told her, sounding almost frightened at her creepy-happy tone of voice. He reached for his sword, then remembered that he had left it back at the now stalchild-infested camp. "Oh, crap!"
"You left the sword!" Zelda shouted as she blasted another stalchild in an incandescent ball of mage-fire. "Idiot!"
"I was a little distracted!" Link protested, but by that time, he had crushed half-a-dozen stalchild skulls with vicious kicks as he tried to get to his precious sword as quickly as possible. As he bent to retrieve it, one of the boney monsters loomed over him, but was quickly blasted away by a particularly forceful shot from Zelda.
"It's not my fault you think with your crotch!" She told him.
"Look," Link shouted at her, his voice far louder than he intended it to be and filled with a righteous sort of annoyance. "Just because I thought you were beautiful doesn't mean that I wanted to do you, okay!"
For a moment Zelda thought she'd been hearing things. Her arms dropped to her sides and she stopped fighting, all ability to remember her foes driven out of her mind by Link's angry statement.
"You though I was what?" She asked, incredulously.
"Move it!" Link shouted, pushing her aside and bringing his sword down onto the domed head of a stalchild behind her. Zelda blinked and raised fists glowing with magical power. she decided that she's just have to kill him later.
...It seemed that they would fight forever, until the sunrise came. With the first gray lightening of the eastern sky the stalchilds suddenly began to fight harder, more reverently, as if they knew their time was coming with the rising sun. Link and Zelda knew nothing of this, they had been fighting too hard for too long to notice something as subtle as the rising sun. The sun rose, without them noticing, and as soon as it had truly risen half-way into the sky, the stalchilds that were left screamed in terror and agony and burrowed back into the netherworld from which they had come. Link collapsed unceremoniously into the ground where he had stood, Zelda beside him.
"Uh...fighting...bad..." Link moaned.
"Bastard..." Zelda agreed, hair skewed frizzily over the left side of her face..
After a nice, long interval, the both summoned up the energy to sit up strait, and Zelda started laughing.
"'S'funny?" Link asked, not even bothering to make entire words in his exhaustion.
"You!...You look like a bear ate you, and lived through it!" She giggled, hysterically.
"...'s'not f'nny. Y's'funny. You's lookin' like..." Link spent a moment to apply his tired brain to this description. "...poo..."
Zelda made a half-hearted slap at his arm, but missed and fell over onto the grass. Unfortunatly, Navi had been hovering quite near, and so the little fairy was buried under one hundred twenty-seven pounds of giggling, sleep-deprived princess.
"Okay, that's it!" the angry fairy jingled. "I hardly ever do this, but you two are in dire need, seriously." with that, Navi sent a painfully sharp burst of magical force through the bodies of both the giggling idiots. Link and Zelda both sat up, ramrod strait, and while they were still exhausted, they were now totally sober.
"Ow." Said Link, calmly.
"Yes," Agreed Zelda, just as calmly. Then, she remembered something Link had said amidst all the fighting. "What exactly did you mean...that you thought I was...beautiful?"
"I...was...uh...tired! That's it!" Link told her, blushing.
"It was at the beginning." She deadpanned.
"Uh...Well...You see...Hey! It's morning! Look at that!" Link said, pointing into the sunrise. "It's time to go find that one town...place...y'know...with the name...thingy!"
Zelda glared at him, tired, frustrated, and in serious need of a shower. "It's Karkariko Village, you moron...and it is not a thingy!"
----------To Be Continued------------
