((I took screencaps in the hopes that finally I could sensibly reply to comments and then life got overwhelming and I promptly forgot))
ahhhhhhhhhhh @kixboxer I’m so glad that you got a chance to see and enjoy this fic!!!!! I had so much fun writing it but part of me was dramatic-single-tear-regret like “superman probably would have liked this too and yet I took until she may have left tumblr to write it whyyy”
Also, your comments always fill me with such joy!
From top to bottom:
I WILL ALWAYS DARE
1 2 3 4 you declared that fic war so many years ago and I will never let it die
You are correct you are 100% correct about Mido cat. He is the butt. I love this about him. I love the amount of time and attention and energy and cunning (?) he devotes to making sure Link knows how much Mido-cat doesn’t care for him (except it’s not working. Link does not know the depths of Mido-cat’s Not Caring.)
ahhhhaha actually I did not see what I did there but now I will remember you pointing this out every time I reread it.
I did not spare a single feeling
That is a TP thing, right, that Sera names her cat Link just to be like “I’m not talking about you I’m talking about my cat”? I decided that still happened. Unless I’m remembering the game wrong. In which case it’s now one of the Sacred Grove cats and it was named so that now Navi-cat and Link-the-cat are together along with Mido-cat and Saria-cat and EVERYONE ELSE.
i'm no longer confident i'll ever get a fic out of this
and I would like to purge the papers/I don’t think I’ve put this on tumblr yet. I generally think of the concept as “Three Days Later” despite every version I've found having Link pass out for less than 3 days, and based on my notes it’s kind of a jumble of ponderings following the end of A Link to the Past.
Roughly, the idea is that after touching the Triforce and setting all to rights, Link goes immediately home and passes out in bed for maybe a couple of days, then wakes up to a letter from Princess Zelda who wants him to come to the castle to actually chat, which is awkward because she knows so much more about Link (having been watching him for most of the game) than Link knows about her. And then a little Twilight Princess callback, as a treat.
In the intro a feeling I really wanted to capture is one of those things drawn from life. Having lived in the same house with the same bed in the same position for 20 years, waking up in my new bedroom after moving out for probably the first half-year was occasionally very surreal. In the very brief window between waking and awake, the moment before my eyes opened, I would have a very vivid sense of where I was located in my bedroom and which walls I would see when I opened my eyes, and often simultaneously a very disorienting sense of not being sure I knew which room I was actually in. The weirdness would clear up immediately after I opened my eyes and saw where I was, but that didn’t make the moment any less intense every time it happened.
I just think it would be a very likely sensation for a Link to have, having spent an entire game not-sleeping or passing out wherever and very rarely stopping in at home to sleep. Being convinced that when you open your eyes you’ll be in your childhood bedroom, knowing that you actually have no clue where you went to sleep at, and then realizing upon opening your eyes that you are actually home. Emphasis on home because Link’s uncle is alive again! It’s not waking up to an empty house, it’s waking up to the sounds and smells of someone who loves you cooking a meal.
The letter from Princess Zelda is probably something very official, nice heavy stationery and royal seal and polite wishes for Link to be recovering well from his ordeal. The crown would surely like to give him some sort of commendation or boon as thanks for his services.
Link is a bit bemused by that part as he did, after all, lay his hand on the Triforce and have it look into his heart and mind and grant all his wishes. He’s not entirely sure what he wished for because he was really tired at the time but he’s pretty sure it was fine and he doesn’t have any desires left unfulfilled. The Dark World was supposed to have dissolved with Ganon’s defeat, Princess Zelda and the sages are safe, the King of Hyrule is alive again and so is his uncle–it seems the Triforce did a bang-up job of interpreting Link’s brain fog and sincere desire for the world to just be right again.
He supposes he’ll go to the castle anyway because it would be rude not to after Princess Zelda specifically asked.
And then, per my usual, I wanted to end with some feelings of pre-Zelink. While Link and Princess Zelda may have gotten in some Friends Bonded By Trauma during the flight to the sanctuary, I think it just wasn’t that conducive overall to becoming close friends. And I don’t think Link was technically an official Knight of Hyrule yet, so he probably didn’t even have a business relationship established with her yet? Plus I feel there’s some inherent awkwardness to Princess Zelda feeling like she knows Link very personally–having witnessed all his trials ~as if in a dream~ while prism’d–while Link knows very little about her and didn’t get to choose to reveal everything she saw about him.
So I wanted to have Princess Zelda acknowledge that and try to convey her desire to start becoming friends going forward, on an equal footing, using their words and not sage powers.
Because I’m me, I also thought: yes, this should touch on Twilight Princess.
So I pictured Princess Zelda getting up and standing away from him, giving him the decency of not being stared at or feeling scrutinized for reactions while she gives a little speech. And telling him that when she first learned that the Dark World had transformed him into a rabbit, she thought it was a mistake.
How could the hero she depended on, the young man who’d answered her plea on that horrible night and fought their way to the Sanctuary, have the heart of a hapless and helpless bunny? She thought it would be more fitting for a hero to be reflected as something like a wolf, a beast that would drive out Agahnim and Ganon, beasts themselves with their jaws around Hyrule’s throat.
But as she came to know him better, she realized that what Agahnim needed to fear most about him wasn’t the bite of his sword, but the staunchness of his kind heart.
I’m reminded again that I failed to write this up properly because I still don’t have a clue how to pace it such that the above line really has a punch since it is kind of the core of the thing to be conveyed. Instead it is just dangling there, not sure it’s impactful at all, no clue how to let it sit with you and breathe, and then it would just be like “that’s the kind of person I’d like to know better as a friend” so good talk pls come back to the castle again soon
but hey now I can recycle those papers and not keep shuffling them around in the clutter!
trying to clean up my salvaged WIPs and put them onna ~cloud~ before the next inevitable computer death
anyway I will never write this age'd Spirit Tracks Pushing Daisies AU but I would like to preserve, for myself, the only part I care about, with edits for clarity and IM typos corrected:
what if Old Niko has been hanging around so dang long because Link brought him back to life and they just haven't touched bare skin again whoops
and what if Zelda was the victim of a successful coup by Cole
and Link just happened to happen upon her and her ghost (he can see her because he is special and she is special)
so in the course of a royal pie delivery, Link gets invited into the princess' chambers and finds Zelda face-down in a plate of pie. Chancellor Cole had come in to gloat and stabbed Zelda in the back, but he cleverly (?) covered it up (?) by putting some poison in the pie to frame the pie maker for murdering the princess. Look I have seen the quality of the castle guards in these games.
anyway Zelda is pissed about the coup and Link is like "no wait I can fix this" and touches her
and she's like "that's pretty damn excellent"
they're plotting how to expose Cole for murder and keep Link from getting framed, except that exactly a minute into it they hear "OH MY GOD THE CHANCELLOR JUST DROPPED DEAD"
and Link's really guilty like "whoops"
and Zelda is like "..................holy crap you are BRILLIANT"
and then grabs him to smooch his cheek enthusiastically as you do
and uh
well
that ends
as it does
and she is "what did you do why didn't you tell me this would happen link I AM GOING TO HAUNT YOU FOREVER"
on the bright side Cole didn't get the throne??? so yay for what that's worth!
anyway Link sneaks out of the castle to go home and bake some pies before he gets arrested for murder and treason and etc, and Zelda comes with him because what else do you do when you're a lingering ghost whose life was saved and then promptly revoked by a humble piemaker from Aboda. Also he's the only one who can see her so he is the only option for hijinks.
