Coin-Operated

22.0

Everything is Different the Second Time Around

It was almost enough to drive him crazy the way she screamed, so the newfound silence in the room is a very welcome reprieve. The dark claret and the bright cherry reds are splattered everywhere in the bathroom. He clucks his tongue. The white porcelain tub will probably never be the same. They might even have to get a new one. Oh well. He'll just charge it to his account and let the taxpayers take care of it. If there is one perk to this job, it's that he can basically get away with anything so long as it doesn't interfere with the president's designs.

Smoke curls up from the fag hanging between his fingers. He lifts it to his lips and breathes in the dry taste of the tobacco.

He snorts a little to himself when he thinks about it. So much for "democracy", he sniggers silently.

One limp appendage hangs out of the tub. Malladus cocks his head to one side slightly, and he takes a few steps to the right to get a different angle. "Oh!" he gasps, snapping his fingers and speaking to no one but himself. "That's what it is!" He nods a little, and he takes another drag off the fag. "La Mort de Auru," he concludes, pointing a finger and the fag at the dead woman in the tub. "That's what you look like." With her head falling to the side and one lazy arm nearly to the floor as she leans over the side of the tub, she looks like a replication of a famous painting from the days following the Twilight Invasion when a horde of great beasts seized control of Hyrule. Although, Malladus has to consider that Auru, a Resistance leader during the era, merely got off easy with a stab wound near the collar.

Ah, Malladus reminisces. Those – yes, those! – were the golden days of painting. When painters took on projects spanning temple ceilings to create everlasting frescos of the gods. When paint brought to life new worlds that one could almost step into. None of this queer surrealist and cubism bullshit. Honestly, how hard is it to paint a bunch of shapes that kind of – sort of – look like something else? There's nothing particularly stimulating about melting clocks either. Oyama, Malladus swears, killed the Hyrulean renaissance.

Malladus strides over to the tub. The water is a deep ruby and completely still around the body. "If you didn't struggle so much, maybe you could have died pretty," he tells the woman, putting out the fag on the side of her face. The butt drops from his fingers and tumbles into the bloodied water.

He peers curiously into the tub when butt disrupts the surface. It bobs on the surface. The strange thing, though, is the way the blood disperses from around the butt. Like scared spiders, the blood sweeps itself away from the butt, leaving crystal clear water surrounding it.

Malladus licks his lips. Curious, indeed. It's a sign, he's sure, but of what? So he asks, "What say you?" to the dead woman.

She doesn't answer.

…

Ever since Zelda started him up again, Link can't help but feel like he's moving through some lucid dream. He stares off into the distance, dazed, as she chats at his side. Her eyes flick over a map she'd acquired – from where he can't say. If he is being honest, he's not even sure where he's at right now. Clearly, they'd made it somehow to the Gerudo Desert, but Link isn't aware of much more than that. His gaze drifts over the crowd around them. It's a bustling market place where vendors are bartering ware under the warm sun, but Link stops when he spies something interesting: a newsstand.

"- Go to there, maybe we can- Hey!" Zelda calls, scrambling after Link. She stumbles a little in her heels as she swipes up their duffel to rush after him. "Link!"

He comes to a stop before the stand, staring at the day's paper. He reaches for one.

"Jack?"

Link stops. He looks up at the vendor leaning over the stand. A ciggy hangs from his mouth, and he puffs the smoke into Link's face. He blinks and asks, "Excuse me?"

"You got jack or what?"

It clicks.

Zelda appears at his side, adjusting the duffel on her shoulder. "Why'd you take off like that?" she huffs at him when he taps her arm.

"Pay the guy," Link tells her. "He needs a fiver."

She digs out a coin purse from her dress pocket and passes the needed change to the man. The vendor gives them a curt nod, and Link snatches up a paper.

A few blocks over, the pair finds a spot to settle down for a bit and peruse the paper. "Anything?" Link asks, trying to look over Zelda shoulder.

"You're looking for Malladus," she deadpans, but Link swears there's just a slight hint of an accusation in there. Opening the paper up, she suggests, "If you want to get to him, shouldn't you try to get his attention some way?"

"What about Ghirahim?" Link asks, but the question that pesters him more is whether Malladus would even remember him. It's a bit insulting to even think, but the thought still comes to him.

"You don't have history with Ghirahim," Zelda reminds him. "It has to be something only Malladus would get. Something that won't completely give us away."

"So what? An ad in the penny saver? My own book burning?" he asks with cynicism, scoffing at the idea in a show of dismissal. However, Zelda can see the gears turning.

…

Lost again.

He isn't sure when it started or how exactly. It was, all of a sudden one day, just there, Link recalls. Link glances over at Zelda, who sits on an abandoned crate as she reads the paper and chews on her lunch. With her, it hit him like stormy waves gobbling up a dingy the very moment he saw her so long ago at the carnival.

The woeful wailing of his accordion attracts the attention of passerby, intrigued by the instrument. It's an unusual item for this part of Hyrule. As the bellows sigh, Link casts a quick glance at Zelda by his side. She shoots him a bright smile that makes his soul shudder.

He closes his eyes against the bright desert sunlight.

It was miserable. For weeks and weeks it had rained, turning the grounds to sloshy mud that sucked up your boots. Epona was especially agitated being unable to stretch her legs and was an absolute monster to the poor stablehands. Link had been growing frustrated by the day as well. He was itching to leave the castle, to see the open fields and feel the wind in his hair, but at this rate, his knight master would turn him into a desk knight – the very last thing he wanted when the calling of adventure coursed through his veins. He'd felt lucky that the princess was in a similar predicament, and his friend shared his suffering.

She'd snuck up on him. A spider with a fly, she'd ensnared him, and he never saw it coming.

The rain pounded against the windows once again that day. They'd spent the afternoon together trying to hone their magic. Of course, the princess was far more adept at it than him, and try as she might to coach him, Link just never could get the hang of it like her. Finally, he looked up and saw that mist clung to the castle grounds, and the two squires were called away from their free time.

Just as unhappy about not getting her exercise, Epona complained the whole way about the mud. "Oh come off it, girl," Link muttered to the mare. She snorted back at him. The princess would look back his way, and a giggle escaped her lips, when his horse acted up.

By the time they'd arrived at their destination, Link was damp through from the mist and drizzle. The shivers that ran down his skin could have been from the cold or the sight before him. They were at Hangman's Alley in Hyrule Field – just outside the city walls. Link spurred Epona forward as his master dismounted. "Why did you bring us here?" he asked, putting little effort to hide the whine in his voice.

His master nodded at a sprawling tree before them, hiding in the mist. "To see the results of your work in the town." The squires exchanged questioning glances, but hurried off their horses and after their masters. "You two keep griping about patrol," his master said, "but you are what defends the town from what's outside the walls - and within."

"Besides," called the princess' master, "if you can't stomach this, what good will you be on the field?"

"You want to be in the field, right Link?"

"Yes, sir," replied Link eagerly.

"Your Highness?"

The princess didn't respond. She kept her chin high and her expression determined, but Link noted that her face was becoming noticeably paler.

As they approached, Link's boots squishing with each step in the soft field, the mist dissipated from the tree, and Link could see clearly the men lined up under the tree. "Oi!" called one. "You're late!"

Link's master waved it off. "Not quite sundown yet. We've got time."

The other guardsmen and their masters chatted idly while Link and the princess eyed the others. Five stood on a makeshift platform, nooses around their necks and their hands and feet bound. They weren't the ones to catch these men while on patrol, but Link wondered vaguely if he pushed any of their papers along that placed them here.

For a moment, Link believed it to be some sort of sick joke. Soon his master would laugh in his face, call him prissy. The five would be pardoned, the nooses removed from round their necks, and they could all go home to dinner. Hopefully to dry clothes and a warm fire as well. Link shivered again under his sodden tunic. Of course, none of that was to happen. There would be no pardon, no joking; this was quite the serious matter, and it made Link's stomach churn. Even the princess was completely white now, much like stiff linen.

Raindrops pecked at his cheeks.

Eventually, they called out that it was time. Last words were offered, but only two of the five took the opportunity. Casually, two of the knights walked on either side of the plank holding the men up and kicked it swiftly out from under them. Link stood frozen as their bodies plummeted. A couple of them were lucky and broke their necks. The others struggled. Their limbs fought against their bindings like beetles caught on their backs as they slowly suffocated.

The smell of tobacco hit Link's nostrils, sharp and pungent, and he finally turned to see one of the knights just beyond the wide-eyed princess lighting a pipe, hardly casting a glance a the spectacle.

The minutes dragged until the last one stopped fidgeting. The ropes creaked as the bodies swayed.

Link jumped when his master slapped his shoulder. "Lets go, boy."

Without another word, the knights and the two squires all departed, leaving the five men swaying in the tree.

"Are you alright?" Link asked the princess once they were finally left alone in the castle halls. Their footsteps echoed and bounced off the stone, hollow and acutely loud.

When she turned to him, he was surprised to see what glinted in her eyes. It was that harried look of horror that hung over her, haunting her, that sent another wave of goose flesh over his skin. The twilight that shone through the great windows spattered with rain casted them in a soft, blue hue, but her eyes struck him bright and cold. The crackling torch against the wall, hidden behind her head, left an orange halo glowing.

Even now, Link isn't quite sure what had possessed him at that moment. In retrospect, his actions seem grossly inappropriate.

He remembers the feeling of his heart hammering against his ribs, the pounding in his ears. The nervous shake that twitched his fingers. How he could scarcely breathe.

The accordion pauses.

He'd kissed her for the first time that day, when the rain spat at the earth and men faced judgement on the other side.

Maybe she didn't realize it at first that she'd returned the kiss, but she abruptly pulled away, quickly wiping her lips with the back of her hand. Stuttering, she excused herself before she whipped around on one foot and then took off running.

And he stood there, staring after her like some dumb git.

She'd snuck up on him.

Zelda thanks some of the folk that decide to drop a bit of cash in the open case at their feet. Some wait for Link to start a new song, but none reaches his fingertips and the bellows remain silent amongst the chattering street. Eventually, those that had stopped to hear him play disperse, and Zelda asks, "What's wrong? They loved it."

"Zelda," says Link with a pregnant pause following his utterance, and her head whips round to face him. "Zelda," he says again, and he removes the accordion from his shoulders and chest, "always said she'd liked us best when we were drinking." At this, she realizes he is speaking of the queen, and that unnatural glassiness of his fake eyes returns. It makes him look like an imposter, something inhuman. Zelda fists her hands, her skirt wrinkling between them, when she thinks how long it's been since Link last appeared so synthetic. So distant. "I didn't think much of it," Link continues. "She probably felt that way, because it was the only time she could loosen up and be herself. She wasn't out to impress me or anyone else, and if she made a fool of herself, her actions could be blamed on too much drink.

"That's one of the magical things about intoxication: she could say what she wanted, and it was passed off as the mindless babble of a drunkard," Link muses. "She could share secrets, and no one would bat an eye."

He turns to Zelda, the former hello girl, and asks, "Do you ever feel that?"

"I'm not sure I follow what you mean."

He shakes his head. "That you could like us better," he says with insistence, "if I wasn't… me."

"Us".

It feels strange. "Us" had always been him and Zelda, the queen.

Zelda stares at him, eyes wide, not sure how to respond to such a peculiar statement.