rottenappleheart's imagination junkyard

[rottenappleheart]

another 700 words about young oot!ganondorf

Kind of a continuation of my earlier thing. Inspired by gender role defying Ganondorf, by Ganondorf as a failed ‘ally’ to the Gerudo, and by selahexanimo.

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He has always grown his hair long, like his sisters do. It makes a thick mane, a heavy weight of scarlet across his brown shoulders. If he were to brush it out straight, it would reach almost to his waist. From his earliest days, his sisters have taught him to comb and braid and oil it; to tame it with ivory clasps; to string it with stone beads and topaz and tin. In the unmapped depths of his heart, he takes pride in its richness. Like all Gerudo, he trusts wealth he can carry on his person more than than treasure locked up in chests.

His hair serves as consolation as well. He has so little in common with his sisters now. The days when he could pull a veil over his face and pass for one of them are long gone. He towers over even the tallest of them; their callused hands turn childlike against his broad palm. His deep voice cuts through their laughter like the growl of a coming storm. The sisters who used to tease and trip him now step nimbly out of his path. But his hair is still as bright and as long as theirs, and at night they take turns combing out the day’s troubles.

His sisters tell him that Hylian men are never caught with tears in their eyes, so he sits grim as a statue on the day that they cut off his hair.

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[rottenappleheart]

Since I’ve done one general/timeless ZelGan, one WW!ZelGan-minus-Zel, one TP!ZelGan-minus-Gan, let’s do an OoT-specific ZelGan!

***

[shuffle prompt 4/5 - “nothing’s impossible” by depeche mode (lyrics)]

For the sake of her kingdom, she flees and hides from him.

For her sake, he does not try as hard to catch her as he might.

Each leaves the other messages. They leave no permanent mark on the world, nothing which could be traced or held against them by indignant allies. Nothing that any other eye could interpret. But he knows whose fingers braid his black steed’s mane while his stablehand snores off an extra-potent jug of wine, just as she knows why her dead mother’s ring now adorns his pierced ear .

When he spears the severed head of a certain sly-fingered courtier to the gate of her conquered city, her people take it for a threat. She knows it to be a gift. On the morning his youngest daughter recovers from the fever that everyone thought would stop her breath, he finds a half-drunk cup of an old, rare remedy beside her cradle.

This time, she has written her love letter on the upturned face of a flattish stone, dipping her finger in water instead of ink. Already the hot sun has nearly erased it. In a few minutes more, it will have baked into invisibility.

She hopes it will last long enough.

She has tarried too long writing it, and nearly missed her chance to hide. As his approaching footsteps echo through the canyon, she throws herself deep into the shadow of a heap of fallen stones. She burrows into the gritty red earth like a tortoise. Her hooded cloak is stained and no particular color and hides her well. She keeps her hand over her face, peering through the narrowest crack between her fingers to keep the light from reflecting off her eyes and giving her away. She breathes shallowly. She cannot stop her heart from beating. It seems so very loud.

He almost overlooks her message, striding along the path, and her heart gives a painful skip as he sets his foot on the stone she chose. Look, look, look! she begs. (Such prayers are always so much more heartfelt than any she has offered to the goddesses.)

Perhaps he hears her prayer, or her thudding heart. He pauses midstride and steps backward, uncovering the stone. He crouches down to look closer.

She wrote no words. In an hour, only five parallel scratches will remain, such as might be made by a beast’s claw or a hob-nailed boot. Only he will know that she laid her wet fingerprint here and there, spotting the stone, turning it into notes on a musical staff. Only he will know the song she left for him. She has not forgotten the days when they played in harmony.

He hums it softly to himself. The faintest smile pulls the corner of his mouth back.

Watching him from her hiding place, she smiles back, gravel on her lips. They have not been so close since the day he killed her hated father, and saluted her with a blood-drenched sword before her soldiers came to her defense.

He glances up and around, as she knew he would, but never looks down. He offers a bow—in quite the wrong direction, if he only knew it—and sets off again, shouting a jibe over his shoulder for his warriors lagging behind him. The song on the stone dries up and disappears.

[rottenappleheart]

[shuffle prompt 3/5 - "the lonely" by christina perri (lyrics)]

She knows he will come to her soon. She knows the signs, just as the gilding of autumn leaves herald the approach of winter. The shadows grow long; children suffer nightmares they cannot describe; a heavy sense of death descends. No one in her kingdom has yet breathed his name, but she knows.

In an empty room, she awaits her lover.

The gods are cruel. Their pawns must dance the same fated waltz as they have shared a thousand times before. He will come to her soon, but never soon enough. He will break her kingdom with a touch, as he has always done, as he must always do. In turn, she will always break him.

A thousand such waltzes, and never time for them to be in love. There is little margin for improvisation when one moves to the music of destiny.

But she has learned to borrow from time. She steals moments with him whenever she can. Even if he is not truly with her yet, as the world would understand it.

While her kingdom shudders in the grip of uneasy dreams, she frees her dark hair from its pins and braids and windings. She sheds her cloak like a ghost stepping out of its shroud, leaving it crumpled on the flagstones. The air is chill, but she remembers the desert-dry heat within his skin and is warmed.

She circles the room, blowing out the candles one by one. Now the only dim light comes from the fire, burning orange and low in the hearth. The room fills with shadows. The darkness is nearly tangible.

She holds out her arms to embrace that darkness. Humming a melody of her own, she begins to move in the steps of a different dance. The shadows waltz with her in perfect time. As the fire settles lower, she can almost feel his presence.

All alone, in the arms of darkness, she dances with her wayward lover.

[rottenappleheart]

[shuffle prompt 2/5 - “there is only one of us” by bike for three (lyrics)]

He has been cast upon the dead shores of an empty world.

He cannot say with any confidence how much time has passed, or tally up all that has changed. Sometimes he questions whether this cold ocean is Hyrule at all. Whether this is a prank of the gods who hate him. Whether this is yet another eddying nightmare of his long imprisonment, this time one of sunlight and false hope. The sense of abandonment and betrayal is the same, after all.

(At these times, there is nothing for it but to stare down and down into the waves.)

What he does know for sure is that she is gone, and that he is alone here.

He is certain of this, although when he closes his eyes, he can almost smell the jasmine perfume of her hair. When he sleeps, he jolts awake, convinced he has heard her light tread on the threshold.

But he knows the fence between wishful thinking and madness. The sundered Triforce makes a pale scar on the back of his hand. Incomplete, isolated, it holds no spark of life. Its dullness mocks him: marked for power, yet powerless. And alone.

He almost wishes he could cross that fence again, and take solace in hallucination. The gods withhold that small mercy from him. He faces this bleak world of doubts and solitude utterly sane.

He searches for her with magic, with ships, with polite queries and furious demands. He sends hunters to find her and bring her back to him.

They do not know whom they seek; there are no princesses above these waves. (The only ones lie drowned beneath them, with coral fingers tracing their ribs and sandy kisses filling up their mouths.)

Nor can he describe her to them. He has always known her, has never failed to know her, though she has worn a hundred guises in their time: golden-haired and dark, priestess and warrior, child and queen, tall and short and sunburnt and alabaster. The qualities he remembers as constant are the ones which he cannot impart to his dull-minded, indifferent servants. The scent of her hair, the rueful smile she has always saved for him alone. And is even he certain of that, anymore? She exists only in the vault of his mind. Perhaps he has lost the key.

All he can tell them is that she will be Hylian, that she will be the essence of Hyrule itself.

That name means nothing to them.

He sighs, and tells them to search for women with long, pointed ears.

Regardless, they do not find her, and the years go on.

[rottenappleheart]

[shuffle prompt 1/5 - “only hope” by switchfoot]

When the wizard broke his bonds, the crowd that had been screaming for his blood began screaming in panic instead. Those who had been pushing close, eager to watch the executioner’s blade swing, now struggled against the press to get out of the way.

He spat a curse at the executioner, who fell heavily, magic swarming around him like a flock of evil crows. The royal guards fumbled bolts into their crossbows but hesitated to fire into the mass of innocents. In their uncertainty, the wizard ran—not for the gates and freedom, but for the dais, where the princess waited to witness her enemy’s end.

Those in the back of the square saw only his broad shape rising like a mountain, erasing the princess from their view.

If you had been there, jostled and straining on tiptoe to see, the clamor would have deafened you. Instead of slaying her where she sat, the wizard threw himself on his knees before her.

If you has been much closer, you might have heard the distant-thunder rumble of his voice.

But only the princess herself heard his actual words.

He bowed his head until his forehead rested in her lap. Just for a moment, she laid her white-gloved hand on his head.

[appleheartwrites]

what with all the young!OoT!Zelda going around

She paid little thought to him at their first meeting. She was eight years old and deeply unimpressed with adults at the time. They had such potential, and they squandered it. She expected him to be the same as all the rest of her father’s courtiers and officials, allies and supplicants--just bigger and darker. Her thought was that he was ugly, terribly so, and the sight of his round deformed ears made her stomach churn. After their meeting, she felt the divinely pointed tips of her own ears and thanked the gods she had been born to hear them.

He knelt to her father, but he only bowed to her--very low, from the waist, but still he towered over her. She didn’t like that. One day she would be Queen, and the desert man would be sure to kneel then.

She liked his guards better. Twelve of them, bronze-skinned and fiery-haired, with quick hands and bright steel and grins they hid behind modest veils. She knew her attendant could best them, but she liked the graceful flashing dance of their swordplay as they practiced in the hall outside the ambassadorial quarters. It was a show meant to impress her father, not her, but she sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched them with greedy eyes.

He came out and was kissed by the winner of the round, then saw her. In that voice all adults used when speaking to children, he asked, "And how do you like my warriors, Princess?"

She ignored both the question and the condescension with stately poise. "How young do they start training?" she asked instead. She gestured to one of his guards. "She is my age, or nearly."

"They start when they can walk a ridgetop and hold a javelin without dropping it."

"Then I must practice hard to catch up."

He laughed (the first time she would make him laugh, a sudden lion’s roar and a flash of bright pointed teeth in his dark ugly face!) He said, "I did not realize you were training to join my guard, Princess. Should I put my life in those little hands of yours?"

She smiled back, thin-lipped, reserved. "Likely not," she said.

She had his attention then, for a minute at least. He regarded her threat with good humor, stroking his jaw. One of his guards came over to him. She thought it was the same one who won the sparring round, but they were all so foreign to her eyes that she could not be certain. The desert man made a place for his companion on his knee, as she drew the saber from her belt and offered the hilt to the princess. She wrapped both of her hands around the sweat-stained, smooth-worn leather. It was too heavy for her to lift. Her eyes narrowed.

"I must have my attendant arrange more time for exercises," she murmured.

"Would you like to train with my warriors, Princess? I could make that a condition of the treaty--to have the training of you."

He did not particularly care about the physical education of a foreign child, she knew. It would promise good things for his future, though, to have his liege lord’s successor be kindly disposed towards him.

But she knew her father too well, and said as much. "You could ask for a thousand years and never have me."

"We’ll see," he said.

[rottenappleheart]

Duende (Zelgan, plz?)

[Duende - Unusual power to attract or charm.]

Everyone always spoke of the Princess’s grace, her poise, her stately carriage. Bred like a good horse (though they did not use that particular metaphor) for dignity and delicacy.

In truth, he had never found her to be particularly graceful. It must be one of those things people said to be polite. When the Gerudo were effusive in their praise of a sister’s looks, it often meant that she was also a hopeless archer, burned the porridge, or sat a horse like a jouncing sack of potatoes.

Not that he believed the Hylian princess could ride, cook, or shoot, either. He did not know what her gift was. (He presumed she had one.)

But it was certainly not grace.

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[rottenappleheart]

Anagapesis and zelda (of course)

[Anagapesis - The feeling when one no longer loves someone they once did.]

Her father’s laughter is a bellowing that stops conversations and turns heads. It is a surprising and joyless eruption of sound, like an animal’s roar. One must see the grin on his sweating face to recognize that it is a signal of mirth and not of violence.

The princess thinks she is the only one who hears the note of panic at the trailing end of his laugh. She wonders if anyone sees the fear in his darting eyes.

He has executed another of his nobles today. She can no longer keep track of the reasons he gives: treason, embezzlement, lack of proper courtesy. Perhaps he no longer bothers to offer reasons. Under the supper table, she feels the long, flat line of the knife bound to her arm, hidden by the satin of her gloves.

Once upon a time—so long ago that it feels to her like a fairy tale, one told about a little girl not so different from you, my darling—her father’s laugh had preceded him like thunder before a storm, his voice rumbling through the castle halls. Once upon a time, a little girl had burst out of lessons, escaped nannies and nursemaids, to pursue that wild sound. When he caught sight of her, the king would scoop her up like a lion cub in its parent’s jaws. He would throw her into the air and carry her on his shoulders, so high above the ground that her head would swim and she would clutch his neck in a panic of fear and delight.

She feels quite clear-headed now, even though her father’s violent laughter opens dizzying pits throughout the court.

Perhaps tonight, she thinks. Her country needs a monarch, not a tyrant. She has lived like an orphan for so many years already. It cannot be so different to orphan herself in truth.

[rottenappleheart]

To match the glorious drabble you already posted: gymnaphoria for ZelGan :3

[Gymnophoria - The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you.]

Juuuust gonna go ahead and make this a direct match.

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[rottenappleheart]

Apodyopis for Zelgan!

[Apodyopis - The act of mentally undressing someone.]

Anon, this is probably the raciest I’m ever gonna get with my drabbles. Enjoy it while you can.

***

It started as harmless speculation. With the council session stretching into its fifth hour, even the most well-behaved mind was given to wander. And in such appalling heat, the Queen of Hyrule couldn’t muster up much concern for good behavior—at least in the privacy of her own thoughts.

The chamberlain’s voice buzzed in her ear like a particularly tiresome bumblebee. Most of the councilors he was attempting to persuade had long since lapsed into semiconsciousness. One by one, they sank lower in their chairs. The Queen held herself stiffly upright, knowing that the moment her chin rested on her hand, she was lost. She surveyed the council chamber, searching for something to keep herself awake, if not attentive.

In the sea of pasty faces, glazed with sweat, the sole dark one drew her eye. The Gerudo chieftain—or king, as they styled him, though a king who swore all his oaths to her crown—was still awake, though he did not trouble to hide his boredom with the chamberlain’s speech. He yawned openly from time to time.

She envied him.

The late King had always opined that the desert was too poor to be of much interest to Hyrule. Now that she was Queen, she considered it too vast a region to ignore. One of her first acts after her coronation had been to grant the Gerudo king the place in court that he had petitioned her father for (repeatedly and unsuccessfully.) She found that his heretical beliefs and views on Hylian policies provided a refreshing counterpoint to the councilors she had inherited from her father. It staved off complacency. 

Besides, Ganondorf was a sorcerer, and in the long silence of the gods, a little magic went a long way. Even if she did not understand it fully.

Silent and motionless, he still stood out from the Hylian councilors that surrounded him. If he had not been slouched down in his chair, he would have loomed over them all, even seated. He was as broad across the chest as any two of them. Her eye was drawn to the visual juxtaposition, not even seeing the person, only an aberration of color and form.

That was when the thought drifted across her mind, aimless and innocent.

I wonder what he looks like without his armor on.

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[rottenappleheart]

Prompt: Druxy - Zelgan.

[Druxy - Something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside.]

The plums piled on the copper platter glowed like frosted rubies in the torchlight, swollen with a promised succulence that made her mouth water to look at them. The dry, gritty air of the desert always left her parched. She had not expected such luxuries here. But when she cut into one, it fell apart, spongy and brown, wriggling with worms.

She set down her knife with a click and wiped her fingers on a napkin. “Is this the fabled hospitality of your people, my lord?” she said icily, as though she were not a prisoner here.

The desert king reclined against a mound of cushions with an ease she had never been able to emulate. He watched her from under half-lidded eyes like a drowsy tiger. “Is this the generosity of yours, princess?” he replied.

She did not understand until he gestured toward the end of the hall, where produce crates stamped with the Hylian seal were being dismantled by Gerudo workers. A swarm of flies rose buzzing, disturbed from their feast.

"Such is the aid we were promised under your father’s treaty," he said. "Spoiled fruit and sawdust in the flour. Eat, princess; enjoy yourself. Tell me again that I am a thieving ingrate for taking you instead."

[rottenappleheart]

Midna, agelast.

[Agelast - A person who never laughs]

Zant’s mouth was never more than a thin dark line. He barely opened his lips wide enough to speak his mind. “Stop mumbling!” Midna would say, jabbing him in the side with her long fingernails. She did so even when he took pains to enunciate, usually because he was saying something unpleasant about the governance of the Twilight Realm and it entertained her to pretend she hadn’t understood him.

The other Twili who served on her council would laugh with her. Zant never would. No matter how she teased, how she mimicked his stiff carriage and smothered speech, plucking jokes out of his heavy speeches that he had never intended, she could never draw so much as a smile from him. He would only blink slowly, owlishly at her, then continue what he was saying. 

"If you grow weary of such impish tricks, my princess, we must discuss the waning of the Twilight," he told her once.

Midna threw herself back into her chair like she had been stabbed. “If I didn’t tease, I would die of boredom,” she announced. “I am waning, right now, before your eyes, with every word you say.” And, as he drew breath to continue, she crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue in parody of death.

She was fond of her adviser, in point of fact. She did not mean to be cruel, even at her most biting. She found Zant funny in spite of his lack of humor, found his gracelessness strangely charming. None of  the other Twili were half so much fun to tease. No one took such pains to defy her—not with Zant’s excruciatingly polite, deferential patience.

The others said that Zant was impossible to amuse, incapable of smiling. Midna believed that nothing was impossible. Nor did she believe that he did not—in his heart—cherish her teasing, just as every one of the Twili cherished their quick-witted, sharp-tongued princess.

When at last she began to find him smiling to himself in remote corners of her court, eyes crinkled shut in private mirth, or heard a strange laugh like a gasp come from him when no one was around, she thought she had gotten through to him. Her long campaign of devilry had broken his facade at last.

But it was a different sort of demon that had gotten to him.

[rottenappleheart]

2K words of young oot!ganondorf just erupted out of my keyboard

Have some messy unedited fic about sisters and greenhouses and the Hylian Queen. There’s some ZelGan foreshadowing if you tilt your head and squint.

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His sisters are full of wisdom and laughter. They have stored up a century’s worth of knowledge for him: the secrets of sand and water, the ways of wild beasts and the hunt, things of gods and magic. Every word from their grinning mouths is a warning, if he is clever enough to hear it.

Most of their words are about survival. They tell him how to shake out his clothes and bedding for scorpions, where to shelter from a storm. They tell him not to eat the food that trade caravans let fall in their wake when they see bandits on the horizon, which is poisoned nine times out of ten. They tell him not to offend the gods. They tell him not to trust Hylian women.

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[rottenappleheart]

a zelgan blurb for a tuesday night

The problem with Wisdom, she thinks, is that it is not terribly moral. It is also quite mutable, depending on what one’s priorities are. If one wishes to live a long a healthy life, for instance, if one wishes to be thought well of by posterity, or if one simply wishes for an end to war in one’s lifetime—none of these things are achieved by the same kind of counsel.

She has to choose what her priorities are—and to choose wisely, to choose something achievable, for Wisdom puts little faith in miracles (that’s what Courage is for). So when the usurper comes to her cell with blood drying on the hem of his cloak and tells her that a certain boy’s body has been nailed to the castle gates, a warning against further acts of terrorism her people might contemplate, she chooses a path that seems wise enough and makes him a new proposal.

[rottenappleheart]

There are a hundred times and a hundred ways for him to fall in love with her. For her, there is only ever one.

He falls in love with her the first time she beats him in a game, though it is only of boards and pegs, not of countries and men. He falls in love with her the day she tames her wild, shining hair with braids and silver knots, and he sees the Queen she will be inside the softness of a Princess. He falls in love with her when he learns about the second, secret smile she has—not the smooth practiced doll’s smile she presents to the world, but the smothered laugh, the head ducked aside, when true pleasure finds her. He falls in love with her for the glide of her fingertips across the harp strings and for the whiteness of her knuckles as she grips a rapier hilt. He falls in love with her on green fields strewn with flowers, and he falls in love with her in dreams where the desert is everything, and she is the goddess of his desolation.

The only moment when she ever falls in love with him is the moment when the executioner’s blade gleams like a ruby. His eyes are always on her, and in that moment, she always knows.

[appleheartwrites]

THIS IS AN INTRO POST

Hey, this is rottenappleheart, making another sideblog LIKE A BOSS.

Since some of you asked where all my awful fanfic was stashed--and since I myself am tired of paging through my main blog trying to find my drabbles--they'll be collected here in the future for ease of finding.

I don't write a lot anymore, and based on the prompts I HAVE gotten, it's just gonna be ZelGan as far as the eye can see.

I'll still post ficlets and take prompts on the main blog as well as here,  but they'll all end up here in the end--so if y'all just like my occasional fictional forays and don't want to wade through my personal stuff/other fandoms, this is the blog to follow.

Thanks!

-appleheart