Prompt No. 2
Word count: ~500
Universe: Breath of the Wild
Pairings: None (but deep down we know he's thinking about Zelda amirite)
Rating: T for some blood
Themes: Injury, flash blindness, tinnitus
Explosion
When most people imagined an explosion they pictured heat and fire and debris. They imagined burns and searing pain and lacerations. Most people had no idea what an explosion felt like.
An explosion was all concussive force and lightning. It was bruised bones and and blunt trauma and temporary blindness. It was bleeding ears and earthquakes that tore through his body that never seemed to end.
Link dragged himself deeper into the shadow of the wall, gasping for breath as the ringing and the starbursts ran their course. He could feel the telltale thumping of the Guardian's spindly approach through his hands, instinctively pressed to the dirt, still gathering intel while the rest of him lolled. Then he heard it, layered oddly on top of the high note screaming in his head, like raindrops pattering on a shield: the soft song of the targeting mechanism readying another shot.
He was in the middle of Hyrule Field, and he had inadvertently attracted the attention of two sentinels at once. There was no cover and he was bleeding out, and his last shield had been wasted by a clumsy parry. No, making a run for it was out of the question. He was lucky to have made it as far as these ruins. He would have to wait it out.
His eyes unfocused and his breath sped, the two toned song quickening, burned so deep in his brain that his vision turned red with the glare of a light he couldn't see. Waiting it out meant holding very still. Waiting it out meant not screaming when the blast felt like it punched a hole through his body. Waiting it out wasn't much of a strategy.
It just meant enduring the torture long enough to survive.
He clapped his hands over his ears and curled into himself, back pressed to the wall, and turned his face into the earth as the song crescendoed in sickening rhythm with his pulse.
He let himself scream the first time, as the blast rippled through him and showered him with brick and mortar, shattering him with the blunt force of a mallet dropped on his backbone. A second blast quickly followed, and a third, tearing the earth apart and shunting parts of him together that didn't belong that way. He was blind and deaf for the rest of the onslaught, counting the explosions as they drummed through his body, vibrating it like a string pulled taut over the neck of an instrument. He could feel the blood trickling through his fingers, through his teeth, and in his mind the drops made sounds as they slipped off him onto the dirt. The high note rang unendingly in his skull, and sometimes the rainpatter tones of the red light staccatoed over it when his vision flashed with color. An intricate, gruesome symphony.
When most people imagined an explosion they picture heat and fire and debris.
Most people had no idea what an explosion felt like.