Prompt No.7
Word count: ~1465
Universe: Majora's Mask
Pairings: Slightly Zelink
Rating: T
Themes: Sensory deprivation, touch deprivation, whipping/scourging
Isolation
It was like being in a cocoon.
After the trauma of the scourging it was a relief: no sight, no sounds, no smells, no tastes. Even his sense of touch had been numbed, making it near impossible to tell if he was on his feet, or hanging from his wrists, or flat on his back. It was soothing, in a way. It was peaceful.
He had reveled in it at first. But his sanctuary quickly became his prison.
There was never light. He never heard a cell door, or voices, or his own breath. They never fed him and the air was tasteless. It was blindness, and deafness, and numbness, and impairments he didn't even have words for. It was a mind trapped in a shell, starving for input—and, left without recourse, eventually feeding on itself.
Sometimes he thought he might be dead, condemned to float in some endless void for eternity, never seeing, never feeling, never hearing. But then things would change. A glimmer of light through the haze on his eyes, a murmur through the ocean bearing down on his ears, a throbbing tug on his wrists and a shuffling of where his feet ought to have been—the veil, lifting so gently, so that when the whip came cracking down on his back again, he could feel it.
Even though he couldn't hear it, he was absolutely sure he screamed the first time. He felt the vibrations of it in his chest, thrumming in time with the lashes tearing his flesh apart until he thought his throat must be bleeding. And then, when he was sure his skin had melted off from the fire lit on his back, the veil would fall back into place, shutting his eyes, stopping his ears, dousing the fire and every other sense he had, and he was back in the cocoon again.
But everything became less clear after that. Was the light he saw from torchlight, or was it light from his mind, from the searing pain of the whip? Was he screaming, or did he simply wish he could? When they left him long enough, he would long for those questions, for those moments of uncertainty, where every scrap of feeling was precious, where every moment of pain was pleasure. The bindings holding him taut by the wrists were cold. The air tasted stale. Sometimes the wind whistled before the lash met his skin.
If he wasn't dead, it was certainly some foreign magic. They hadn't gauged his eyes out, to the best of his knowledge, or taken his hands or his feet or his nose. And his skin was still there, if the burn of the whip was any indication. And how could he survive for so long without food or water? He knew of a place with such strange wonders. He remembered being there. He just couldn't remember if they were the ones holding him captive now.
Then, one day, light and color burst horrifying through his eyes again, showing him a vengeful goddess and her wrathful enemy, deteriorating in the brilliance of her light, and he heard the weak, hoarse cry that pulled from his own throat.
He could have wept at the familiarity of his own voice.
He shuffled back as fast as his sudden corporeality would allow, only stopping when his back, riddled now with so many scars, touched a wall. He kept his eyes pinched shut, afraid to open them, afraid of the searing pain of the light. He listened to himself pant, to the extraordinary sound of his own breath, of his heartbeat pulsing like a river through his ears. He felt the stirring of the air, suddenly so fresh, tasting of grass and wildflowers, as something, someone, came near.
Her voice was barely a whisper, as though she knew that the full force of it might well tear him apart.
"Link?"
His throat closed and his teeth ground on themselves until he thought they might crack, his mind reeling at the sound, at the word, at the name.
"Link," came the voice again, so soft and beautiful it could have been an angel's. A goddess's. "You need to take that mask off."
Then it came, like the gentlest bolt of lightning: a soothing touch, caressing his jaw, so softly, feeling along the subtle ridge that ran beneath his chin.
His mouth fell open with a gasp and his whole body rolled into the sensation, arching off the floor to be closer to it. Her other hand joined the first, encouraged by his reaction, or perhaps frightened by it, and he groaned as the feeling of simply being touched rippled through every nerve. Every hair on his body stood on end, electrified by the contact. Who was she, that she could make him feel this way? How long had it been, that he had forgotten the simple, unadulterated pleasure of being touched?
Gently, she peeled the second layer off his face, and he felt himself change—not jarringly, not drastically. Just a drain of magic, a sudden chill as his clothes disappeared, a warmth as blood flooded his face. Her hands closed tentatively on his neck, drawing him closer, and he hesitantly obeyed—still flailing, still lolling. She brought his face to her neck and the sound that left him was something between a gasp and a sob. He inhaled the honeyed scent of her skin, pressed his eyes into its softness, reached blindly to thread his fingers in her silken hair. She ran her fingers down his arm and a frisson spread like carnival fireworks over every inch of him.
"Link," she whispered, that sweet, angelic sound, and drifted gently away. "Open your eyes."
He was scared of the light, of the burning pain of a few moments ago when the veil that had shielded his eyes for so long was sudden ripped away. But he didn't want to disobey. Didn't want to risk going back to the way things were.
He peeled them open, blinking once, twice, until the woman he had mistaken for a goddess before came back into view. She looked different; her eyes weren't glowing with that ancient fury, or her skin radiating that molten light. But she was familiar.
She smiled encouragingly at him, but her eyes were unmistakably sad. "Do you know who I am?"
He went back in time—and not the way he used to, either, with sacred swords and ocarina songs. Simply through memory. Before the world went dark. Before he had forgotten what it meant to have a body.
She was more beautiful than he remembered, more mature. Her eyes were wiser, her lips fuller, her simple but radiant garb more elegant. But there was no mistaking her fair features. He whispered, "Princess."
She nodded brokenly, her eyes brimming with sudden tears. "Zelda."
"Zelda," he agreed hoarsely, enjoying the fleeting sensation of her name on his tongue.
Then her face crumpled, and she took his face carefully in her hands—like she knew it was almost more than he could handle, like she expected the harsh draw of breath that followed and the ragged exhale.
"I'm so sorry. I looked for you. I wanted to know if you were safe. And then I found this place and—and they said the moon had been hanging over them for seven years, and I just—" she gulped air, tears streaming down her face. He mustered the courage to touch her face, eyes widening and lips parting at the sensation of the moisture on his fingertips. She watched, trembling, wide-eyed, as he shakily brought his fingers back to his mouth and tasted the salt, and then closed his eyes like that flavor was the epitome of decadence. Her face crumpled again. "I'm so sorry."
He wouldn't have taken his eyes off her, mesmerized by her beauty and by the mere fact that she had saved him from whatever that nightmare had been, but her eyes fixed on the floor, and he followed their lead. A pale mask framed in silver hair and tribal markings stared up at them. A Deity, forged to battle a Demon.
"Is…" his throat felt so swollen and unpracticed, it took him several more tries to form the words, but she waited, hanging on every word. "Is it over? Did you…?"
"Yes," she promised fervently, touching his mouth, and his body lolled again. It was such a near-painful rush he could barely keep his eyes open. But it only made her cry harder.
She linked her hands with his under the tree in the middle of the field, in the middle of a dream, of a playground from a child's imagination, and painfully slowly, gingerly, she coaxed a starved hero off the surface of the Moon.