Fic Prompts: Wind Waker Wednesday
Theres a Wind Waker au in my head and it won't leave. So here's the context before the snippet.
Basically, when Hyrule floods, Impa and several other Sheikah fight a losing battle to save as many people as they can. In a controversial move, Impa warps to the desert to try to save the Gerudo. For her, it's a penance for the crimes her ancestors committed against the Gerudo in the Shadow Temple.
Hyrule floods, and thousands of species and records and treasures are lost forever. Ganondorf rises and is determined to bring it all back, no matter the cost. He believes he is the sole surviving Gerudo, and it's taken a massive toll on his overall mental and emotional health even without Demise whispering in the back of his mind.
Aryll, being the sweetheart she is, actually manages to get it out of him that his whole family drowned. Being like, eight, she jumps to the conclusion that his bird is kidnapping Hylian girls because its master misses his daughters and its just trying to help. Ganondorf finds her naivete somewhat endearing, and allows her to wander the fortress when she wants to.
Meanwhile the Gerudo are not extinct. They've become a sort of integrated culture with the surviving Sheikah, in seven tribes -- each descended from one of Ganondorf's daughters who survived the flood -- in floating cities. A son from the Laroba tribe married Zelda's great-great-granddaughter, making Tetra a Sheik-Gerudo and Hylian Royal by blood. She usually only sees her cousins during reunions, but they occasionally cross paths on the open ocean.
Tetra calls on some of her Aunts and cousins to help her when Link needs to save Aryll. Gerudo kids Ganno, Imp, Nabi, and Zumi arrive with Aunt Karsh, Grandmother Ramella, Aunt Aveil, and Ancient Grandmother Impa, and Ganondorf gets the shock of his life.
Ultimately he's given the choice to leave his fortress and be part of a community again. To be a grandfather and great-grandfather, respected for his memory of the Before times and loved just for being one of them.
Link, who is 12 and much too young to be a warrior, keeps dropping hints with the subtlety of a freight train that if Ganondorf does this, he won't have to fight him anymore
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"Voba'ba! Is it true that Gerudo used to live on a beach so big you couldn't even see the ocean?"
"Voba'ba, I can stand on my head, look!"
"Voba'ba, all we have are the legends passed down by our foremothers. Were sons really so rare before the flood?"
"Voba'ba, what's a horse?"
Ganondorf could not have answered every question if he'd tried. His vision blurred, blending the children's faces into a sea of browns and oranges and reds. The Gerudo lived. He wasn't alone!
His long years of nightmares, waking in the small hours with images of his people choking on the waves, and now he knew that some of them had lived. He mourned the five daughters and countless sisters and mothers and cousins he had lost. But seven- seven of his daughters had lived to create tribes of their own. These ships full of vai -- and even voe -- these journeyers had come from him! They harnessed that very wind he had so coveted, and used it to go wherever they wished, without borders to stop them.
Ganondorf laughed, and did not brush the tears from his face.
