Author's Note: After careful consideration, I have decided to raise the rating of this story to M. It is with great pain that I announce this news, but as I feel some responsibility for the no doubt irreparable psychic damage I have already submitted the *innocent* youths of this site to via the vulgarity and violence of the previous chapters, and given that the following chapter includes scenes involving strong hints of their favorite three-letter word: secks (after that is juul, or so I hear), it is high time, or perhaps even past time, to tighten the spigot of corruption so that only those over the age of consent (or anyone else with fingers and the will for it) can access this particularly awful bit of offal.
Chapter 4: The Second Coming, Heart of Darkness, Blemmyes/The Second Going
He lay on his back in the shade of their stone overhang, chewing absentmindedly on a stalk of tabantha wheat, with his hands intertwined behind his head, and his shirt off. The wheat was a leftover ingredient from the wildberry crepes he had whipped up earlier that morning, a torturous experience, given her inability to eat them. Now though, the wheat punctuated a studly peasant farmboy aesthetic, which she certainly did not mind.
They had spent the morning in comfortable quietude, communicating through gentle touches, shared smiles, and whispers. The codependence at the core of their newfound calm was also evident by yardage: the distal end of his furthest phalange was at no point further than ten feet from her own, and most of the morning theirs were locked together. She acted tough, but even losing sight of him was a prospect she didn't really want to deal with the thought of. She was pretty sure he felt the same way.
She had explained to him that rather than another century, the resurrection crèche had spat Link back out in a mere six months. It probably had something to do with the fact that Link had been just barely dead this time, whereas he had been little more than a bloodless cadaver by the time the Sheikah tribesman had managed to install him in the device the first time, but she kept those grisly details to herself. Link's relief at the relatively short passage of time, and her ongoing presence, was palpable. He strode around their little campground loosely all morning, even whistling to himself at one point.
However, in the last few minutes, a darkness had come over his features, and he had begun to grind the stalk of wheat between his teeth, working his jaw nervously. It was making her anxious. She was about to ask what the hell was wrong with him when he spoke.
"How...how can we touch?" Link asked apprehensively, as if this was something fragile enough that knowing the how's and why's would destroy it, and she would up and vanish into thin air.
"No clue." Zelda let the mystery linger, before continuing. She sat by his prone form, one arm out to support herself, the other gesturing lazily.
"I think Fi might've done something, changed the rules or something. When I saved you, I used her."
"Used her?"
"Yeah, she said grab her, told her I couldn't, but your lips were literally blue, so I figured eh, what the hell. And it worked." Zelda galloped through the explanation, keeping her thoughts focused on Link's abdominals rather than the memory of his near-drowning, with some, but not too much, effort.
Link raised his eyebrows, either at her terseness, or her semi-abashed staring. His brow got the cute little wrinkles symptomatic of something Daruk had once called the "cons" : confusion, consternation, concentration, or constipation. Zelda giggled out loud at the memory, and the lines in Link's forehead deepened as he looked at her for another explanation.
"Nothing," She said nonsensically, waving her hand back and forth, as if to clear the air. She had a tendency to speak in incomplete clauses when her mind got going. "Never mind. But anyways, Fi was the first physical interaction I'd had in a century, hell of a rush." She looked down at him meaningfully. At that, Link smiled, a big bold thing that, coupled with the heavy-lidded look that had come into his eyes, let her know he had picked up on her flirtatiousness.
"Speaking of physical interactions and hell of a rushes-" Link pulled her down as he spoke and rolled her lightly on to her back, while rolling on top himself.
He leaned down to kiss her. She threw her arms around his well-muscled back and latched on to his lower body with her legs, until she was hanging off of him from below like a baby sloth. Zelda play wrestled with him for a while from there, shaking back and forth trying to tip him over, sneaking in guerrilla kisses here and there. Link was, as expected, rock solid, and her efforts were for naught.
The whole thing was one of the weirdest bits of foreplay Zelda had ever engaged in with him, and soon the two of them found themselves on the ground laughing at their own antics. She was inordinately relieved that the distance and time that had separated them wasn't impeding their intimacy. Of course, this was due in no small part to her own efforts.
She was the one who had pointed out how hot he looked in the noon sun doing his sword exercises with his new blade, and recommended he come lay next to her. Then she had chosen her words describing her interface with Fi very carefully, to inspire exactly this sort of behavior. Zelda let out an evil little giggle at her diabolical success. Then she felt the bulge straining against the seams of his trousers and protuding well into the folds of her dress between her legs, and her little giggles turned into full-fledged snorting guffaws in a moment of dumb hilarity.
Distracted, Link looked up from her neck, which he had been working his way down with kisses. She was snort-laughing so hard her face must've been tomato red and she was breathing in short gasps, truly at the height of her attractiveness. He stared at her with another case of the cons.
"Dicktion." She let out breathlessly, by way of crappy explanation. He just rolled his eyes, still smiling, and continued kissing his way down towards her chest and beyond.
The seal containing the princess and the calamity hung low off the ceiling of the throne room, sheathed in and suspended by toxic black ooze. It was shaped like a colossal heart; as in the cardiac organ, not the ideogram; the actual people juice pumper, aorta and ventricles and all that, not the numeral 3 rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise and stacked on top of the lowercase v. Yes, the great sac in which the avatars of power and wisdom had struggled and slept, slept and struggled, for the last century plus looked like a human heart, at least, if a human heart was swollen with spider eggs, and the spiders were ready and rearin' to hatch.
It bubbled and wriggled intermittently on most days, but in recent months the intensity of the tumble and churn beneath the skin of the jumbo heart-sac had amplified. In even recenter days it had begun to writhe and convulse so frequently and with such energy that it had eschewed its resemblances to both the aforementioned human organ and the cache of unborn insects, and now hewed more closely to a gargantuan belly distended to the point of grotesquerie, which was perpetually being, from the inside, kicked, punched, and otherwise beat by all manner of unidentifiable monstrous limbs for which there exist no devoted verbs to denote a battering by. It was a swollen cell on the verge of cytolysis, or the hot core of a star about to go supernova.
There was a packed menagerie of whys, wherefores, and becauses for the enhanced activities of that misshapen lump of darkness, but the primary reasons were two in number. Reason the first: the centennial anniversary of its sealing had also been the approximate half-centenary of its magical sealant's expiration date. It had really only contained Ganon this long because of the blood, sweat, spit, and tears of the sleeping beauty also encapsulated somewhere in that broiling orb. As time had now marched on a few years past the century mark, and the hero was still playing truant, things were getting more than a little dicey in Hyrule Castle.
Reason two: In the last several months, the soul of the princess had willfully vacated her body with both increasing frequency and greater duration. In the expiration of the seal, her consciousness had been recovering, though glacially, from the hazy stasis of the last century. As she came more and more to, she had been spending more and more time projecting herself to the hero's side, for the sake of both of their sanities. In the last few days, her mind had not returned to her skull even once. Whilst the correct decision in terms of mental health (and physical health, at least for one ideating and intentioned hero), this had left her actual body, and the seal containing the calamity, decaying at a rate far faster than normal.
Her bodily abandonment did enable an increasingly stronger manifestation of her projection, which, along with the meddling of administrative unit Fi, gave her astral shape a solidity verging on that of her actual one. But the clock was ticking, and the tighter bound the bits holding her soul's shape got, the looser the bonds between the atoms of her body would be, until it fell to dust and her mind had no place to return to.
So there they were, beauty and the expressly evil beast, their prison beating like a broken heart mid-marathon at the center of Hyrule. Then, for just one moment, the black heart stood still. And, once again, from its lumpy form shot a beam of blue light, a great bestial limb, and a stone-shaking roar.
Link lay contentedly, even in the blind, magisterial light of dawn, next to his heroine, guardian, rescuer, love. Zelda. He continued to lollygag his way through all manner of favorable descriptors for her (fae queen, court jester, warrior princess) while carnal flashes of the prior day and night shot through his mind, accompanied by spikes of endorphins and dumb grins. Such imagery was obtrusive, but not unwelcome: the curve of her ass pressed up against the base of him; the arch of her strong skinny back; her long hair, now more lucent than translucent, splayed across his chest as she rode atop him. He worried for a moment that he was reducing her to a bundle of anatomical parts rather than a human being, but as he beheld her still-sleeping form, there was a fullness in his heart and wetness in his eyes that dismissed all doubt.
He was wrapped around her sleeping form beneath a thin blanket that, in concert with the remains of last night's fire, had quite effectively staved off the gentle chill of midsummer night. Now, however, in the dew evaporating light of the quickly rising sun, the blanket was beginning to get oppressive, and Link could feel the sweat beading on his chest and arms.
His left arm especially was radiating heat, but as it was beneath Zelda's head, serving as a pillow substitute, and entirely asleep, it was proving difficult to extricate. After ten or fifteen seconds of strategizing, Link prepared to slide his arm along the cleanest vector to freedom, pins and needles be damned. Then Zelda shivered, and smushed herself farther into his chest.
"..."
In the stubborn glow of the few remaining embers and the burgeoning dawn light, Link grabbed the bottom of the blanket with his feet and awkwardly shuffled and pulled at it until it covered the entirety of her bare feet. Then he ducked his head under it and tucked the edges in beneath the two of them until they were properly swaddled, the thin blanket like a sweltering cotton cocoon.
Some minutes later, Link felt a strange itch in his sternum, as if the bone itself needed scratching. He crooked his neck until his chin touched his throat and he could see down at his chest, then arched his eyebrows at what he found. The tip of Zelda's nose was inside his chest. The cartilage only just barely dipped into his sternum, but nonetheless it was both visually and tactually obvious what was going on. He shifted backwards slightly until her nose was just brushing up against his pectorals.
Sleeping Zelda apparently didn't like this. She groaned, and with her eyes still closed, pushed her head forward until not just her nose, but her entire face was submerged below the skin of his chest. If she opened her eyes, she probably would've been staring directly at his beating heart.
Her transition to solidity had been so sudden that it raised some alarms in Link's head, so he was almost relieved to see some signs of ghostliness. However, he wasn't about to let her face into his chest cavity. They were close, probably about as close as two people can get given all they'd been through together, but not that close. He gently grabbed her by the shoulders, and relocated her to an intimate, rather than literally suffocating, distance.
Then she grabbed his arms, and headbutted his ribs, or rather she would've, if she didn't pass right through them and out the other side. After a moment of shock, Link rolled his eyes.
"I had thought you were awake." He said accusingly.
The only answer was a muffled giggle rising up out of his own throat, probably one of the strangest bits of ventriloquy Hyrule had ever seen. He was having a hard time telling which one of them was supposed to be the crazy one these days.
Link had the very uncanny feeling of having something large removed from his torso, but without any pain, and glanced down to see Zelda's innocently smiling face staring up at him.
"Morning babe." Her tone was nonchalant. "Wait, why is your face so red?" She sounded half-concerned, half-amused.
"Uh, it was hot."
"Really, that's weird, I'm pretty cold."
"I know."
She looked up at him suspiciously, and then noticed the blanket still enveloping them and his sweat-soaked undergarments. She got a miffed look on her face, blushed a little, and looked away.
"Idiot."
He just smiled at her.
Zelda looked at him again, gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek, and threw the blanket off the two of them. She leapt up, wrapped it around herself like a cape, pointed at the risen sun, and shouted:
"Onwards, ho!"
The effect of this proclamation was amplified by her complete nudity, and Link found himself simultaneously laughing and doing his best to imprint the glorious image permanently in his mind.
Then, there was a great purple glow, overwhelming the morning light. It was followed seconds later by a deafening bass hum, and then another, and another, and another. Massive beams of light shot from the four corners of Hyrule towards the epicenter of its depravity. Link recognized these beams, mouth agape in a look of horror. He started hyperventilating. His head rotated slowly, almost unwillingly, towards Zelda, like an old wind-up toy. Next to him, the blanket cape fluttered to the ground, empty.