A/N: Surprise! An anon requested a conclusion to the Muffled Scream/Humiliation story arc, so here we are. Enjoy no. 32!

Word count: ~1980
Universe: Majora's Mask, sequel to "No.25 — Humiliation"
Pairings: Zelink
Rating: K
Themes: Catharsis

—

"Yours," she whispered, mirroring his touch, tracing porcelain lips as her mind plunged towards dangerous places. As she threw caution to the wind. Because she couldn't have come all this way only to lose him to this now. "I'll wear this one."

He tilted his head gently, eyes receding in thought.

"An intriguing idea," he admitted. "It's been so long since…"

Her heart pounded in her throat as he toyed with the thought, as he let himself consider it. He came back to himself, smirked at her.

"You're very clever, Princess."

She swallowed, trembling as he drifted closer. His hands found her neck and his eyes locked with hers, so full of intent she couldn't look away. And then his mouth pulled into a fleeting, hungry smile, and he dove for her, pressing unyielding lips to hers, sealing against them in a kiss that wasn't a kiss at all.

She gasped as the cold, smooth alabaster of his lips folded against hers, over hers, until his were the ones giving. The sensation of it coated her teeth, the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat. It grew from where they touched, sucking against the skin on her jaw and up the planes of her face to her cheekbones, sloughing off him in pieces that cracked and snapped into place, leaving him behind so it could devour her. It melted against the bridge of her nose, against her eye sockets, until she was seeing through a white film, until she could feel him gasping against her mouth and clawing at the ridge of her jaw where the edge of a mask should have been.

"No, no, no," he begged, panic-stricken, digging at the bone beneath her ear for a hold that didn't exist. He dropped his forehead against hers as her eyes closed, as the mask sank in and took hold. "Please, no. Just let her go. Please."

"Don't like sharing?"

He met her eyes: stark white, set in ivory skin that was nearly as fair as her real face. It made his stomach drop, and then rise back up into his throat. She gently bit at her lip, masking a smile.

"If you want it back, you're going to have to kiss me again."

He rolled back and out of her arms, getting to his feet, turning on her to stare at the flames in the hearth, to grasp for answers where her empty eyes weren't. She followed, wrapping his arm in her hands and pressing her face into his shoulder, shaking with silent laughter.

"It was just a joke," she whispered, and hearing that thing's words in her voice made his blood boil in a way it hadn't in years.

"It wasn't funny."

She pouted. "Don't be cross. Isn't this better? Isn't this what you've always wanted?"

He scowled at her, at the unfair insights she now possessed, and she turned him around, melting closer and sliding hands up his shoulders.

"I understand magic, and its consequences. I could stay. Haven't you always wanted someone to share this burden with you?" And then, as her hands found his neck, as she drifted ever closer and her eyes flickered to his mouth, "Haven't you always wanted me?"

"Stop it, Zelda," he growled, taking her by the wrists and forcing her back two steps. "This isn't you."

She glared, her pretty features turning down into a perfect, cream-colored scowl as he rejected her.

"What do you know of who I am? You disappear for years, abandon Hyrule, abandon me, and for what?" She tore across the room, shouldering past him, and yanked the chest out hurled it to its side, sending the masks within spilling all over the floor. "For these? For a power that you were too weak to master?"

The Deku mask stared up at him, its hollow snout and orange eyes angled in perpetual sorrow. The first one. The mask that cursed him to undertake that journey so long ago. His eyes darted to the Mask of Scents, to the Stone Mask, to the Gibdo Mask, tracing the twisting path his past had taken and all the regrets he had gotten tangled up in along the way. Then he stared at her, wearing the last one. The mask that had ultimately sealed his fate.

"Not that it matters," she scoffed. "Even if you had come back, you never could have controlled this. You never would have found the strength to destroy them. And I never could have loved you."

"Then leave the mask and go," he snapped, not quite able to hide the way her words made him flinch. "It's my burden to bear."

"Strangely enough," she murmured, smiling a little, running her hands up her scalp and through her hair as she luxuriated in it, "I rather like wearing it. And I think the mask likes me better, too. Maybe I'll keep it. Wouldn't that be more fitting? For the mask to stay with me, a queen, instead of with you? A broken, forgotten goatherd?"

"I won't let you do this. I won't let you drag her into it."

She rolled her eyes. "There's nothing you can do. If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it."

He lurched forward, livid, wishing he could pull the veil off her face and crush it in his bare hands, and she met him, eyes sparkling as she flash him two rows of perfect teeth.

"Poor hero. Have I struck a nerve?"

"Just tell me what you want," he growled, so very tired of this constant game, of this curse he brought upon himself, and dreading whatever bargain it would demand.

"Powerless again," she droned, brushing the back of a lithe finger around his ear, down his jaw, and he only had the patience to tolerate it a fraction of a second before he closed his hand around her wrist, stilling her. She smirked. "And yet, it never gets old."

"I'm waiting."

She tucked her smile away, but it still danced in the pale circles of her eyes. "You know why I came. I wanted to know why you never came home."

He steeled himself with a breath, grasping after courage. It seemed so far away. He turned away from her again, setting another log on the grate. He didn't suppose this would be over quickly.

"Everything is a game to you," he whispered, and she scoffed again.

"Life is a game, Link."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Use that voice. Say that name."

She folded her arms with a huff. "Well I can hardly help it."

"Stop pretending to be her!" he whirled, furious, and she met him, eyes wild and ferocious.

"I am her!"

"What do you want from me?" he seethed, taking her shoulders in his hands too roughly. But the smile in her eyes never left. "I told you why I couldn't come back!"

"Then maybe I'm asking the wrong question," she mused, a little breathless. "Maybe I should be asking why you left in the first place."

His fingers bit into her arms. But he was the one who was paralyzed.

"You know why."

"Because you were chasing after a fairy?" she intoned, arching a slender brow. "We both know that isn't true."

He swallowed and it burned. Burned like the ashen light in her eyes.

"Go on," she cooed, reaching through his iron grip to cup his face with one hand, and he was weak enough to lean into it. "Admit that you lied. Confess your secrets. Tell me what a coward you were."

He was cornered. Surrounded by his secrets, by his regrets, littered in hollow faces all over the floor. And his two greatest regrets were now merged into one, demanding his surrender. Demanding an answer. Demanding the truth he had kept locked in his soul so long he had to cut himself open to let it lose.

"I left because I was alone," he whispered, dropping his face so he wouldn't have to meet the vacant eyes she had taken for him. "I had no friends, no past, no destiny. I was used up, and useless, and trapped in a body that wasn't mine anymore."

Heat sizzled around him, flickering up out of nothing and then dying out again. He smelled burning hair and singed leaves and burned out wood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw seafoam flames, and followed it in time to watch a Deku child burn away into oblivion, and a spill of ivy-spangled pink hair, and the angry snout of a pig.

Zelda tried to pull out of his arms, but he held fast, daring to meet her eyes again. Drinking courage from the fear in them to undo what he had held onto for so long.

"I left because I had no where to go. Because I didn't belong. Because I couldn't bear the thought of starting over, of planting the tiny, fragile seeds of friendship in old soil and watching people I didn't recognize sprout up out of them."

More licks of flame ate at his masks. The crown of a frog, a eyes of a bird, the ears of a rabbit, the sharp angles of a fox. A Zora, a Goron, a cow. A face of stone.

"Stop," she hissed, struggling, but he latched onto her, pulled her close, made her watch as hot, thick tears streamed down his face. "Stop it!"

"I left because I was angry. Because I was afraid of a future I couldn't know. Because when you stripped away my title and my fate and my heroics, I was no one."

More of them melted, faces of men and bones and symbols of love and responsibility and torture and death, and powers not meant for the world. They burned around him with his regrets, until only the greatest of all, the one he held in his arms, was left.

"I left because I loved you," he choked out, staring through blurred eyes as the flames burst to life over half her face, eating the mask off of one eye. "I loved you, and I never told you. I just let you send me back to a time where you didn't even know me. And once it was over I realized my mistake, and I wanted to tell you, I wanted so badly to tell you. But we were children—"

She gasped, half herself, half a monster, the mask still covering a swathe of her face and her mouth, but melting, burning, bleeding away in great dripping pieces that fizzled to nothing before they touched the floor. Her legs gave out and he caught her, cradling her as she trembled with short, desperate breaths.

"I hope now you know," she gasped, her body rolling with the mask's death throes, "Regrets are the fiercest god of all."

He reached up to the burning alabaster edge, decaying at the bridge of her nose, and ripped the mask off her face and sent it skittering across the floor. She collapsed in his arms as she fell back into herself, sobbing, and the face of the white warrior writhed in a scatter of flame and disappeared.

"I'm sorry," he breathed, clutching her to him as she burrowed into his throat. "It's gone. It's over. I'm so sorry."

But she clawed at his arms, at his neck, pulling at him like she couldn't be close enough. It made him warm, warmer than he could remember being in ages. It made him cry harder.

"Please come home, Link," she wept into his neck. "Please."

"Home," he whispered, testing the bounds of the word, the foreign taste of it.

And he realized, like a bolt of lightning rippling down his spine and tearing him asunder, that he felt more at home there in her arms than he had in any lifetime before.