We're halfway there...
The Legend of Link:
The Bastard Prince
10. Gerudo Desert
"Zoelda!" Alarink called once more to the girl running away from them into the storming night. He'd noticed something different about her since he'd woke her up that morning, something that wasn't noticeable to the eye, or even in her manor of speech. But it had been there, lurking in the far reaches of her mind and waiting for the best time to strike…
Ganondorf had damn near killed him because he'd let him grab a hold of Zoelda's mind while she'd been disoriented from the lift into his territory. And Alarink had simply thought it was motion sickness.
"Fuck you, Ganon!" He shouted into the desert, the Princess and 'Link' stood a little hesitantly behind him, not knowing what they should be doing.
"Did that make you feel better?" The Princess shouted over the storm, a hand shading her eyes. Silently, he glared at her, though his anger was more directed at himself than anyone else - he'd been the one to travel with Zoelda, he should have noticed that Ganondorf was manipulating her. Shaking the sand out of his hair, a truly pointless act, he reached down to pick up Zoelda's bag of provisions and the cloak that 'Link' had draped over her, looking at it critically as he avoided looking at the hand holding it.
"Why did you use this cloak?" Asked Alarink, his face a mask of disgust as he pulled Zoelda's bag over his shoulder.
"We didn't bring any other cloaks with us," said the Princess, who was looking out into the storm, struggling to see more than a few feet in front of her. "You were there when we made that decision."
"In future, it's better to say we have no cloaks than to give Zoelda this one." The brunet grumbled angrily, stuffing the cloak into his bag and wondering to the south edge of the desert.
"She's going to find out who you are tomorrow, Alarink," the Princess pointed out, her tone matter of fact as she followed behind him. "You worry too much."
"I'd rather not have her know any sooner than necessary."
"You don't want to ruin the relationship you've cultivated with her by telling her the truth?" Asked the Princess pointedly as she stopped behind him. Before them, only scarcely visible thanks to the storm, was a crudely constructed stable that consisted of three walls and a slopping roof to provide shelter for any Bullbos in the area. Due to the fact that it was storming and early night, there were several Bullbos huddled together in the shelter of the stable, so Alarink selected two of the more docile looking ones and led them out.
"Is that so bad?" He asked the Princess in response to her question, watching as her face turned to disgust as she looked at the creatures. Any other time, he would have loved seeing her like that, then he was too angry at himself to enjoy it, too worried about Zoelda to bother dodging the Princess questions.
"No," she responded surprisingly softly, "just pointless to keep up much longer."
"This will all be a moot point if we don't find her tonight." He mumbled as he looked over the Bullbos, checking for any nicks or signs that they could pull up lame after a few minutes hard riding.
"We're going to ride those… things to look for her?" The Princess looked the boar like creature over before shuddering and declaring, "I'd rather wade through the sand on foot."
"You can do that if you want, Princess," Alarink responded without any hint of his usual teasing as he mounted one of them, patting it gently as he did. "But it'll take you until tomorrow night to reach Arbiters that way, let alone look for Zoelda successfully."
Muttering to herself as she did, the Princess mounted the Bullbo first with 'Link' getting on behind her, reading a bow and arrow as he settled himself.
"They ride like a horse, just don't nudge them into a gallop or canter, you won't be able to control them if you do." Shading his eyes as he got his bearings - not an easy feat at night or during a storm, so he trusted his gut on the matter rather than the surroundings - Alarink finally turned to face north, pointing in front of him as he did. "Head in that general direction and by the middle of the night you should reach Arbiter's Grounds. Set up a camp just inside the entry way, but don't go in. Don't waste time looking for Zoelda on the way, you'll get yourself all turned around and lost if you do and that won't do anyone any good. If, by sunset tomorrow, I haven't caught up with you, turn around and go back to the lift and to the Castle - pretend this never happened, if it comes to that."
"You're going to look for her on your own?" Asked the Princess, not questioning his orders for once - she knew he knew the desert better than anyone in the Kingdom and they all knew what it would mean if they couldn't find Zoelda. If she turned up dead, then the entire timeline would be rendered pointless and Ganondorf would be free to rise and rain havoc on the next hero and Princess.
"I'm the only one who knows their way around here, and taking anyone with me will just slow me down." Alarink watched the sand swirling around him with contempt, wondering if he could find his way around the desert in these conditions. "If I don't turn up by the end of play tomorrow, tell Shad what happened here, he'll know how to search for me if needs be." He squared his shoulders as he turned to face the direction Zoelda had ran, looking back once at the Princess and 'Link' and noting the worry on their faces through the sand.
"Good luck." Said the Princess with a nod, knowing this was perhaps the most important search mission in all the realms now and knowing better than to annoy him over it.
"Keep her safe, 'Link', Ganondorf will come after her next." Alarink said, nodding sharply once as a way of saying goodbye before they spurred their Bullbos into action in different directions, the storm whipping their hair about them and coating them in sand as they ran.
Alarink tried to keep his thoughts simple as he ran, trying not to think of anything more than keeping the sand out of his eyes with his right arm, and keeping the Bullbo in control with his left. If he let them wonder for more than a second, he started envisioning all kinds of horrible scenarios that Zoelda could have ended up in thanks to him. If they strayed for even a moment they saw her stood opposite him, her swords raised in her hands to kill him. They lingered on the way he would have let her stab him rather than have him nick her with his own sword a bit to break her from Ganondorf's control.
Inevitably, his thoughts always came back to the pride he had in her for thinking of a way to break his control on her, before settling on irritation at the way she had run head first into a land she knew even less than Hyrule's main body.
The knowledge that Zoelda was the product of the Twin line had struck Alarink like a brick when he had first seen her Triforce. The fact that he had only learnt of the Twin line that day had made him very sceptical that it even existed, though he supposed that Impax had seen his scepticism during their first meeting that day and taken an effort to get rid of it and start him on the track to be ready when the time to fight Ganondorf came.
Really, Alarink had been ready for his part in it all for much longer, but the intricacies in preparing his body to accept the power of the Master Sword were things he hadn't even considered before meeting Impax. Having to present himself to the Spirits of the Springs and ask for them to purify his body were acts he hadn't thought necessary and were therefore things he was having to do on the go - though he only had two Springs left to visit now, and he was certain he could do that before they took the Sword to the Sacred Grove to reawaken it.
Quite suddenly, as he searched the two feet in every direction he could see thanks to the sandstorm, he realised how they would have to back track to the Grove after they got the Sword, a matter he hadn't thought of and one that made him slightly nervous. The whole time they were back tracking, Ganondorf would be scheming and wondering the halls of the Castle. On the other hand, the Castle was empty of people - the Princess had already seen to that - and it would give him the time he needed to run back to the treehouse and change into his armour.
It was while he was lost in thought that Alarink heard a shifting sound to his left. Half readying his sword, he turned slowly to the direction of the sound and noticed that he was by the inlet he had suspected to be camping in for the night. Walking the Bullbo towards the inlet, he noticed the shuffling sound getting louder, a sign that it likely wasn't the sound of the sand settling around him.
"Zoelda?" He called both loudly and gently into the inlet. "Zo, are you there? It's Alarink."
"A-Alarink..?" A small voice sniffled from the inlet as a figure started to emerge through the swirling sand. He dismounted and walked closer to the figure half-lying on the platform in the centre of the inlet where a chest had once stood. Keeping his hand on his sword as a precaution, Alarink slowly approached the figure, watching as he got close enough that the sand didn't obscure her anymore and Zoelda appeared before him.
Tear tracks stood plainly on her sand cover cheeks and there was a cut on her shin - in the place that her heeled boots had once covered but her Docs didn't. Pain caused her eyes to water and her lip to quiver, but relief stood plain on her face as she saw Alarink approach her. Relief stood just as plainly on his features as he approached, smiling that smile of his as he did, knowing it would put her more at ease while he internally fretted that that cut on her leg was far worse than it seemed.
"Hey there," Alarink smiled as he sat down next to her, watching her shift uncomfortably on her leg as he did. "I thought I should come and let you know you dropped your bag back there."
She took her bag of supplies back hesitantly, watching Alarink with confused, wide eyes. "Thank you." She said as she opened the bag and began looking through it for some bandages for her leg.
"Let me," he said, cutting a length of bandage off with the blunt dagger he always carried. As he started to clean her wound with the alcohol they'd brought with them, he offered her some food. "Eat, it's getting late and we hardly had any lunch anyway."
"Thank you," Zoelda winced as he cleaned her cut, eating gratefully as she watched him wrap the bandage around her leg and secure it in place.
"There you go, you should be able to walk on that by morning," he muttered as he lent back from her leg, grabbing some of the food as he did. "How'd you get that anyway?"
"Oh," she gently touched her shin as she spoke, probing it slightly with her fingers. "After I ran a few metres, I stopped and a Moldorm caught me off guard and bit me. I killed it and limped over to the wall, only to find there was shelter in the wall."
"I see you're back to normal now then, aside from being injured and hungry." Alarink grinned as he sliced an apple up for them to share, already having eaten much of the food he'd set aside for them. The storm had started to settle down as soon as he'd found Zoelda, a fact that made him suspect it might have been of Ganonical origins. A brisk breeze still blew through the desert, bringing with it a light coating of sand and a slightly obscured night sky.
"Yes, I feel much more myself now," she replied as she reached for one of the apple slices. "I'm sorry I scared you, and tried to kill you. That wasn't me, it was-"
"Ganon, I know, don't worry about it," Alarink smiled at her surprise, lounging back on his elbows slightly as he ate the last of the apple. "I don't hold it against you at all, Zo."
"Does anything faze you?" Asked she, both in genuine curiosity and slight irritation.
"Hum," Alarink pondered the question from where he lounged, watching the sky as he did. Ultimately, he decided to wait until tomorrow to show her what fazed him more than anything, but he knew he couldn't leave the question hanging until then. "Yes, there are a few things that faze me, and seeing you under Ganondorf's control was one of those things. But there's no point dwelling on it now, is there?"
"I guess not…" Zoelda muttered, looking up at the sky herself and noticing for the first time that the sandstorm had stopped. "The storm's stopped."
"Yeah, I think Ganon must have brewed it himself." He reached into his bag and pulled out a blanket. "But, since it's stopped, we might as well get some sleep. Busy day tomorrow."
"What about the others?" She asked as Alarink draped the blanket over her.
"They're going to meet us at Arbiters tomorrow morning, don't worry about them, they'll be fine."
After a few moments of attempting to make herself comfortable with her injured leg, Zoelda threw up her arms in anger. "I can't sleep like this!"
"Here," Alarink sat up and took her in his arms and pulled her close to him, arranging her legs so they were out in front of her and she lay half upright with her head against his chest. A part of her seemed happy to be in a comfortable position while most of her seemed to be wildly uncomfortable at being in such close proximity to him. Sighing a little, he asked her outright, "Why are you unhappy?"
"I'm fine," she replied, pulling up the blanket to her chest and making a face that suggested she was anything but fine.
"No, you're not," said he bluntly, moving his arms behind him so he wasn't holding her up anymore. "What's wrong? Worried I might try something on you in the middle of the night?"
"...A little…" She muttered.
"Well, worry not!" Alarink exclaimed, smiling down at her worried face. "I might be a philanderer, flirt and may have been compared to a male prostitute from time to time, but I'm not a rapist and I won't do anything to you if you don't want me to."
A sort of awkward silence descended on them then as Alarink desperately tried to see Zoelda's expression, but she kept her face deliberately turned away from him as she seemed to think.
Finally, she asked, "Why are you like that?"
"Like what?" He asked in response, a little confused and more than a little bit worried about the kind of question she was asking him. The girl seemed to have a habit of seeing through him and asking the kind of questions no one else would think to.
"Why are you like that?" She repeated, looking up at him with hard, slightly angry eyes. "Why are you a debaucherous philanderer, what made you that way?"
"Why would anything make me that way?" Alarink asked, a harsh note in his voice at the way she seemed to suggest it was a bad thing. "My father was unfaithful to his wife, surely that should explain why I can be with no one person myself."
"No," Zoelda said harshly, looking into his eyes and almost through him, seeing everything he had tried to hide from everyone in the Kingdom in one almost black-blue glance. "I won't pretend to know Link better than you, but I suspect that he was forced into a marriage with Ilia, despite the fact he was in love with someone else. He might have been in love with her once, but someone else came along and he loved her more. I suspect it was someone special, someone strong willed enough to make him consider being unfaithful. You're doing something else, and I'd hazard to guess it's partly the Princess' fault."
"My," muttered he through clenched teeth as he looked at the night sky as the storm finally blew itself out, revealing the stars and an almost full moon. "A little judgemental, aren't we?"
"Avoiding talking about the fact that I've hit the nail on the head, aren't we?" She smiled a twisted little smile up at him and he couldn't help but smile a sad, genuine one in return. The girl had somehow wrapped him around her finger without her knowing, had seen to the core of his actions in a way that Colin and Shad never had, despite knowing him so much longer.
"Very well, I might as well tell you some of the truth," Alarink sighed and looked away from her as he spoke earnestly for the first time to someone other than his mother. "You're right about my father, but it's easier for the Kingdom to simply believe he wasn't as good a man as they had once thought. After I moved here, my connection to him made many believe that I was just like him, that I would enjoy corrupting many and never settling down. After a few years of settling in and accepting who I was here - the bastard son of a Hero and someone the Kingdom would never respect - and of coming to terms with the fact that my father wasn't the man I thought he was, and loving him despite that, I began to enjoy my celebrity status. Sure, I'm not respected, and certainly not loved by anyone here in Hyrule, but I'd barely come out of puberty by the time I realised that many people preferred that in a man.
"Being the son of a Hero is a high enough status that, even if you're the Kingdom's scapegoat, everyone still wants to have the opportunity to say they've spent the night with you. An outcast status made me highly desirable to anyone who likes a 'bad-boy', which - it turns out - is most women and a fair number of men. And, damn it, if I'm going to be hated and shunned everytime I walk in a populated area, I'm certainly going to have my fun in the more unpopulated areas of life! ...Though I've not been known to say no to a bed populated by more than me and another…"
"You're disgusting," Zoelda muttered, her voice filled with contempt as she looked up at him, watching the way he looked off into the distance until she spoke. After that, he looked down at her, his face hardened and sad, willing her to understand what he was saying.
"No, I just did what I had to to survive in Hyrule," Alarink said with conviction, trying to make her see that his flirtatious nature, was, at the end of the day, an elaborate act to allow him some form of escape in a world that had always been hers to escape to. "I was determined to survive here, and if that means sharing a bed with a new stranger every night since I was 15, so be it."
"You've never loved any of the people you've slept with?"
"Love?" Alarink barked out a laugh as he looked out at the entrance to the inlet, the spires of Arbiter's Ground becoming more and more visible as the night cleared up. "Goddess, most of the time I don't even care for them, I know they certainly don't care for me."
Zoelda's face was troubled after he said that, her eyes uncertain and her features set in a small frown. "Huh…"
A thought came to him then as he watched her think through what he had said, one that would explain why she couldn't seem to wrap her head around his way of thinking. "You've never had sex, have you?"
"W-What!" Stammered she, her face flaming and her eyes wide. "Why-*Ahem*-would you think that?"
"Well, aside from your reaction just now practically confirming it," Alarink smiled, a sweet true smile he rarely showed as she flamed from where she leant against his chest. "You seem to have very little tolerance for the way I talk about it, and more often than not, you get embarrassed by any form of contact with me, innocent as it may be. Naryu, you didn't even sleep in my bed on the first night here, you were so uncomfortable by it!"
"You can't prove I didn't sleep in your bed!"
"Zelda, the floor at the foot of the bed was still warm when I got in and the bed was exactly the same as I left it the day before." He grinned openly and honestly at her as she shied away from him, her entire face red, no thanks to the cold of the desert. "Zelda, my dear, you're a virgin, aren't you?"
"No need to rub it in my face," she muttered, turning her face away and seeming to will her blush to die.
"No, I'd assume no one's done that to you," Alarink couldn't help but say, his grin growing still before she slapped him across the cheek for teasing her. "OW!"
"Stop it!" Zoelda snapped at him as he rubbed his stinging cheek, feeling the first sprouts of stubble growing again as he did. "You're embarrassing me…"
"Hey, Zo, it's nothing to be ashamed of," said he in a gentler tone, trying to turn her back to face him. "I'm sorry if I struck a nerve or upset you."
"It's fine," she turned back to him, her cheeks still red, but a small smile on her lips. "I really shouldn't be this sensitive about it... And I'm sorry I slapped you."
"Hey, I've deserved to be slapped by many people many times when I wasn't, I'm glad to see you don't shy away from slapping people."
"Well, okay then," she crossed her arms over her chest and snuggled back down. "Since we've pretty much exhausted this line of conversation, why don't we go to sleep?"
"One moment," Alarink settled himself a little more comfortably before he asked, "This morning, when you said I reminded you of someone who wished he was your boyfriend, was that a bad thing?"
"Why do you ask?" Zoelda's voice was drowsy. It was clear that everything that had happened to them during the day had finally caught up to her. It was probably best to let her sleep now so they'd be prepared for the day tomorrow - if this had exhausted her, she would be in for an even more exhausting day tomorrow.
"... No reason."
"... It was a momentary lapse where I got homesick and reminded of someone I'd rather forget. You're nothing like him. Especially since I actually like and respect you as a human being, unlike him."
"A little harsh, but very well," Alarink smiled down at her one last time, watching as she smiled impishly up at him before turning back to face a more comfortable direction and close her eyes. "Goodnight, Zelda."
"Goodnight, Link."
Sleep eluded him for an hour or so more as he thought about everything that had happened since they had arrived in the desert. This was barely the first leg of their desert trip, and if this was getting to her, the chances of her managing the rest of it was rather slim. Finally, he came to a decision that he had been debating ever since she had appeared:
When going to get the Twili blessing, he would take her with him.
It wasn't, strictly speaking, necessary, but it certainly would help prove his cause to them. And if she saw Midna alive, it would provide more evidence to the Princess that she didn't die in the Pestilence. But, his reasoning for taking her with him was more than those facts, it was more than he would tell himself it was, but he knew she had to go with him wherever he went.
To protect her, of course, that was the reason.
He couldn't leave her behind in the Princess' and 'Link's' care, he couldn't be sure she would be safe there. If she was always with him, he could be certain that she wouldn't wind up dead somewhere and ruin the chance she had created for them in this timeline.
Alarink stared up at the sky, and started a little as he realised that it was a very similar shade of dark blue to Zoelda's eyes. Indeed, he thought the sky and the stary expanse of galaxy he could see in it was similar to the depths of her eyes, sprinkled over with a glittering mischief that always seemed to see to the heart of him.
Tearing himself away from the sky, he looked down at her and watched the way the moon played against her skin, washing it pale and tracing almost imperceptible shadows along her to dance on a perfect stage. Her breathing was level and her eyelids flickered with dreams, ones that he couldn't help but hope contained him.
His last trains of thoughts pulled him up short. They were the kind of thoughts he'd never had before, ones he'd never wanted to have before. Since his father had died, it had always been him against the worlds, there had been no one else for him to think about, to look out for - at least in Hyrule.
It had just been him and what he wanted.
Now, he was thinking about someone else, what she might want and what she meant to him. He was thinking about what might happen if she was to go back to her world and leave him behind. Or worse, and more likely, what it would mean to her when he died, how would she react, how would it break her?
Suddenly, the meaning of what he felt for her hit him quite completely, though his mind couldn't possibly accept it as a fact.
So, he turned his attention back to the sky, watching as the clouds obscured some of the stars, feeling as far away as they did as his thoughts overwhelmed him once more…
AN:
So, after chapter 8's impressive 40 views, we fell back to nine last week. And it's to you nine people that I say thank you. You are the people that have stuck with me the whole way through, and I really do appreciate all of you continuing to read this with each chapter. And hey, we're halfway through now, only 10 more chapters to go.
With regards these last ten chapters, you'll probably notice a change in writing style, perhaps a little more flow through them. This is because I wrote all of these last chapters (apart from 13) in one day each - i.e. this chapter was written in one day in the middle of September last year. I really got in the zone with these ten chapters because I knew exactly where I was going with them and what I wanted to say. That's not to say that some parts of my chapters didn't come out of the blue in the moment of writing - chapter 12 has a 2000 word monologue that I certainly didn't plan. But it's these last chapters that really represent what my writing style is and who these characters I've created are. And it's in these chapters where the characters and my writing style develop and change the most.
And with regards to who these characters are, you'll find out who Alarink's mother is next chapter if you haven't already guessed. (I was both more and less subtle with implying who she was in these previous chapters than I wanted to be.)
So, thanks for your continued reading, we're halfway through now and I hope you'll stick with me for these last ten chapters, trust me when I say they're much better than the first ten.
Have a nice week.
~WWQ