Prompt No.25
Word count: ~2440
Universe: Majora's Mask, sequel to "No.18 — Muffled Scream"
Pairings: None? (Is that just code for Zelink now?)
Rating: K
Themes: Addiction, shame, drowning

Humiliation

She remembered his hands ripping the mask off, and the falling sensation before the world went dark. When she woke the next morning, she was alone on the cabin floor. She sat up with a gasp, trying to piece together the night before and how she had ended up back in the warm nest of pelts. The fire was stoked, and her feet were bandaged, and there was some food laid out on the table.

Link was nowhere to be found.

The storm had abated during the night, leaving the house surrounded by pristine swathes of snow. She looked for him out the front door, and out the back. She checked every nook and cranny of the house, and the tiny loft. She darted to the gold chest, wincing as her feet smacked against the floorboards, but it was locked.

Her first instinct was to run. But she couldn't leave him here. Not like this. Not without answers. Finally, she resigned herself to waiting for him, and helped herself to the food he left out.

He didn't come back all morning. She pried the front door open again near noon and sat at the threshold, watching the sun angle a slow arc over the snow. There were tiny, near imperceptible indents among the sparkling perfection she hadn't noticed before, like tracks of some animal missing all of its toes.

She felt she might go mad for lack of something to do, but she was afraid of venturing out and leaving tracks for him to step in, thinking he might try to come back and somehow escape again without her noticing. She tried to busy her mind with other things. She made his bed and piled her pelts on top. She tended the fire. She packed snow from the back door to soothe her feet. She messaged aching muscles. She studied his strange pile of weapons—a sword forged with gold dust and a sword etched with black roses, and halberds and bows and a quiver laced in beautiful silver carvings—treasures from all around the world. She familiarized himself with his cupboard and steeped herself a cup of tea that she barely touched.

There was finally a sound at the door near sunset, and in spite of waiting anxiously for him all day the thought of seeing him suddenly made her heart rate spike. The door swung open, and she held still at the hearth, and after he took in the sight of her for a moment he frowned. Two masks hung off his belt: the white face from the night before, and a tiny, miserable wooden face, with a gaping hole for a snout where a nose and mouth ought to have been.

"I was hoping you would have gone by now," he murmured, and let the door slap closed while he took off his cloak and boots. He hung his hood on a peg at the front and amended, "I should have known better than to hope your good sense would kick in if I just left you alone."

She folded her arms and turned back to the flames. "How could I leave when you've hardly told me anything?"

"What happened last night didn't tell you enough?"

She shuddered at the memory, subconsciously kneading at sore muscles in her arm. She didn't think she could bring herself to dance ever again. She felt him moving around the room behind her like a storm, looming, silent, ominous, and finally managed, quietly, "It left me with more questions than I had when I arrived."

"Is that what it's going to take to get rid of you?" he demanded levelly. "Satisfying your goddess-forsaken curiosity?"

She glared at him, stung. "It might help."

"I could always force you to leave," he challenged, but her stare didn't waver.

"You could. But only if you're willing to hurt me."

She saw the flicker of regret in his eyes, bursting through in a flash brief as a lightning strike, and the reflexive glance down at her feet. Then he turned, his mouth tugging down, and angled two chairs at each other in front of the fireplace and gestured. She sat as demurely as she could, her pulse pounding hot in her throat and her vision starting to swim. He took the other chair, his ice blue eyes cutting through the dim orange light of the room like poe's fire.

He seemed like a poe to her then: ethereal, always hunting, never resting, itching to set the world aflame so it would match his intensity.

"What do you want to know?"

"I want to know why you never came home," she said, failing to keep the tremor out of her voice.

"The masks," he murmured, eyes darkening with memory. "They were too dangerous to bring back to Hyrule."

"I always thought…" she began when she finally found her voice, and then stopped, addled. "It wasn't because you hated me?"

He hesitated, his mouth twitching in a movement that mirrored the earlier lightning in his eyes. "No, Zelda. I never hated you."

She swallowed tears. She had carried that fear, that remorse, that guilt with her for years, and he swept it away as easily as autumn winds carried away brittle leaves. It made her chest ache. But there was so much tumbling into the wake of that relief to take its place, an onslaught of questions she didn't know how to answer, despair she didn't know how to quench, and it was making her head spin.

Finally, at a loss for anything else, she asked, "Where did the masks come from?"

"Termina," he remembered softly. "A world on the other side of this one I found when I was a child. Like an illusion, or a dream, only it was real."

"And you've kept them all this time?"

She thought she saw him flinch, but he turned to face the flames, his thumb moving to rest on his mouth, and it was hard to say for certain. He murmured again, "They were dangerous."

"Then get rid of them," she urged him, leaning closer, seeing a thousand solutions flash before her eyes at once. "Bury them in the ground, throw them in the Crater, it doesn't matter!"

"I can't."

"Yes, you can."

He wouldn't meet her eyes. Desperate, she reached for the masks hanging from his belt, determined to make him see, but he thrust his hand out to keep her at bay, standing so quickly he knocked his chair over. His hand was trembling and his eyes were alight. She sat back, slowly, studying him.

"Do you do that to keep the masks from hurting me," she asked, "or to keep me from taking them away from you?"

He loosed a bitter breath, scowling at her disapprovingly, and moved to stand over the fire without righting his chair. He muttered, "Both."

The tears she had swallowed down before came bubbling back to the surface and spilled over. He seemed so close, and it hurt to finally grasp that the obstacle between him and Hyrule, between them, could have been so easily remedied.

She whispered, the tears streaking silently down her cheeks, "I don't understand."

"I don't expect you to."

"Last night," she whispered, trembling at the memory, "I heard you screaming."

He spared her an unimpressed scowl. "And?"

"And?" she echoed, incredulous. "How could I possibly leave you to spend the rest of your life guarding this power by yourself?"

He scoffed quietly. "I never expected anyone to come here to talk me out of this. I should have known you would try."

She stood with a sigh, carefully putting her chair back where it belonged and then righting his. She gripped the back of it, thinking. The wood under her fingers was full of imperfections, wild like the mountain and hand-carved. It was more beautiful than anything the royal house could have had commissioned. It reminded her of him.

"You make it sound like it's a bad thing," she murmured, and when he didn't answer she had the gall to raise her voice. "If you hated me that much—"

"It wasn't hatred—!"

He checked, realizing he had matched her volume and then doubled it. She dithered in the rigid silence that followed, then joined him beside the fire, using its warmth to drown out the chill his rare display of temper had sparked in her.

She finally whispered, "Then why are you so angry?"

She heard him sigh. Then he turned, his eyes still fixed on flames or darkness, and braced his arm against the hearthstones, leaning closer, as though someone might overhear.

"If there was anyone—" he checked again, trying to taper his intensity, but there was no filtering it out. His voice tremored with it. "I'm not who I used to be, Zelda. I'm a slave to these—these things, too afraid to risk bringing them home and not strong enough to destroy them. And the one person I didn't want to see me like this was you."

She shook her head slowly, silently, hopelessly, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks, and turned to stare at the empty cabin. She suddenly couldn't bring herself to face him.

"You gave me the Ocarina," he murmured. "You said the Goddess of Time would protect me. But she trapped me in Termina until I could change its fate. Forced me to relive the same three days until I could find a way out. If it wasn't for the masks, I would have never…" He huffed a sigh, gesturing uselessly. "I should have known that kind of power would have a price."

"What was it," she whispered, turning to meet his eyes over her shoulder, "the price?"

His lips twitched sideways. "Are you staying another night?"

She glanced out the window. The sun had all but disappeared under the horizon. "Am I invited?"

He loosed a breath of dry humor, his mouth splitting into a smile.

"Yes, Zelda," he breathed. "You're invited."

He moved, placing the masks back inside the chest and locking it again. He gathered up the pelts from his bed and dropped them all back in front of the hearth in a massive pile. He reached for her hand, put the key to the chest in her palm, and closed her fist over it.

"Then you'll see what's become of me," he sighed, still smiling bitterly, and lowered himself to the floor, "and my humiliation will be complete."

He stared up at her, his face lit by the flames, and her stomach fluttered. He was so unguarded, so familiar. She sniffled, wiping at her eyes with her wrist, and joined him on the floor. She held out the key.

"You don't have to give me this."

He pushed it gently back into her hand.

"I'll ask you for it," he warned her, lips parting as his mouth tugged halfway out of its smile. "But don't give it to me. I've gone without before. I'll be all right."

Her brow puckered. "Link—"

"Promise me," he said. "I don't want to risk hurting you again."

She nodded, finally, words lodged in her throat, and held the key close to her ribs, and he laid back in the pelts, pacified. He tucked an arm beneath his head and stared into the fire. He looked more peaceful than he ever had since she arrived.

He said, "Tell me about Hyrule."

She settled beside him in the furs and told him everything. There was prosperity. There was peace. The tribes had never been so connected. The economy was flourishing. They hadn't had a bad harvest in recent memory. Even the children who lived in the forests to the south, who some said were not children at all, had been seen smiling from just beyond the treeline, impish eyes and innocent smiles cutting through the placid emerald haze of those magical groves like tiny stars.

She rested her head on his shoulder as it got late, and he put his arm around her back, and then, the horror of the masks and his self exile nearly forgotten, she closed her eyes and nodded off.

When she started awake in the middle of the night, he was shuddering so violently beside her that her adrenaline spiked. She threw fuel haphazardly onto the fire so she could see something, taking his face in her hands. His body jerked and convulsed with every halting sound he made, his spine was arched, and his head was snapped back, exposing his bobbing throat. She brushed his hair back from his brow, meeting his eyes, and the fear there dropped a stone to the pit of her stomach.

Then she realized he wasn't breathing.

She whimpered his name, desperate to find him relief. His teeth clenched tight and his hands clutched at her arms. He was drowning. And he said he had gone without before. He said he would be all right. But he was drowning, and he kept drowning, and after five grueling minutes she couldn't stand it anymore.

She left him in a dizzy rush and fumbled with the key, turning it furiously in its lock. She grabbed the white mask sitting on top of the others and slid to her knees beside him, gingerly lowering the mask over his face.

His hand grabbed her wrist, eyes wide and watery as he held the mask at bay mere inches from his face. A last ditch effort to hold her to her promise, to protect her from himself. Then, terrified tears spilling from his eyes as they widened with hunger, he dragged her arm close and gasped a full, horrible breath as the mask met his skin.

His transformation was quick, hair shocking white from root to tip and eyes and flesh fading colorless. War paint seeped out of him like blood, thick and shiny as the shell became his face.

He sat up, panting, still holding her by the wrist, and pressed his forehead against hers.

Her breath shuddered out of her, half relief, half dread. Because he was alive, and he was here. But she didn't know who he was when he was like this.

"Princess," he greeted her quietly, breathing deep against her skin. His lips grazed her cheekbone before he pulled away.

Then he tipped her face up with warm fingers beneath her chin, meeting her glassy blue eyes with his colorless ones.

"You're beautiful when you cry," he whispered, watching her tears fall for an unnervingly long time, and then thumbed at her mouth, his lips pulling back into a wolfish grin. "Now, which mask will you wear for me tonight?"