Part VI

All I want is nothing more
To hear you knocking at my door
'Cause if I could see your face once more
I could die a happy man I'm sure

But If you loved me
Why'd you leave me?
Take my body
Take my body
All I want is,
And all I need is
To find somebody.
I'll find somebody like you.

-"All I want" by Kodaline

Twenty-Second December
City Park
7:32 a.m.
New Hyrule City, Lanayru Province
New Hyrule

Ganondorf doesn't realize he's fallen asleep on a park bench until suddenly he's waking up. A red sun is breaking over the tops of the skyscrapers, and he drags himself into a sitting position. Someone's lain a newspaper across his chest as some sort of sick blanket, and he peels it away from his coat.

Breaking News, it reads, and proceeds to tell a meaningless story about a singer nobody really cares for. Her engagement. Something.

He'd fret about having been robbed, but the last of his money is gone. He only really has one possession which he cares a trifle for, and besides, nobody's about to steal that.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bench, he withdraws his sketchbook from his pocket. The black leather is a lot more frayed than when he first bought it for Princess Zelda a thousand years ago…

He flips to the first page.

This diary is the property of Princess Zelda II, gifted unto her by the Gerudo Lord Ganondorf…

The next few pages are short poems and a small sketch of her friend Ganondorf. The pages after that belong to the pirate princess, who's drawn the ocean. There are several pages for the black-haired princess, who wrote heartbreaking poetry in her final hours before illness took her.

Then there are long pages in the slanted writing of the red-haired queen. The pages are devoted to Ganondorf- long letters addressed to him, and passages of introspection. The queen's own confusion is apparent in her words.

He's walking as he reads, and he glances up from the book for a second to cross the street and lands in the blue shadow of a great skyscraper. Goron-shaped mannequins in lumpy snowflake sweaters peer at him from a shop window, but he ignores them. He passes a rich-smelling bakery and returns gradually to his book.

The next pages belong to the golden-haired youth, who really was a writer- a writer of scandalous novellas, at least. Her passages are short, intense, and graphic. She always was a ticking time bomb… nobody that vibrant ever can last.

Chapters follow from Zeldas who, even now, remain obscure to him. Then there are two pages' worth of writings by the last Zelda he ever met, the one who died in his arms that day on the factory rooftop… In the dead of night, he had snuck into her chambers to salvage the diary. He knew in those moments that she would be the last Zelda. No longer was there a Triforce to draw Hylia back to earth. If Hylia were ever to take another vessel, it would have to be for something just as spiritually powerful as the Triforce...

He rounds a street corner and reads her words at the same time.

I have a feeling, the passage goes, that I have known Ganondorf for all of my life even though we met only yesterday. I believe all that they say about reincarnation, and of course I believe in soul-mates-

"Ouch!"

The book falls to the cement and the irritable Ganondorf growls in response.

"Watch it," he mumbles, a curtain of gold crossing his vision as the woman he's bumped into reaches down to pry the book from the cement.

"I'm so sorry," she gasps, brushing off the book's surface with perfectly manicured nails before returning the volume to its owner. Ganondorf barely spares a glance for the woman, noticing apathetically her snow-white skin and lavender peacoat before marching haughtily on.

"Yeah, whatever," he grumbles, and notices that the woman is slow in leaving.

"Are you quite all right?" her voice sounds, drifting over the sidewalk and colliding with him.

That's when he stops. Turns.

Her crimson smile is fleeting as she turns away, long golden hair tumbling and twirling in the wintry gale.

"Fine- thank you-"

He's stumbling over his words again, and he catches the outline of her smile as she gives him one last look.

"Good- I'm glad."

Those eyes.

"Take care!" she adds, and twirls about on her heel. She turns the corner with poise, shoulders back, chin held aloft-

"Impossible," he breathes, and shakes his head. It's been two hundred years, he reminds himself. Two hundred…

He catches his own eye in a shop window. Is he the man he remembers? He eyes his own dark skin, long, shaggy red hair, skin transformed by time, tattooed and covered in layers of leather…

...And yet he's lasted all this time…

Hylia would never come back, he insists, but his reflection doesn't look quite so certain. Demise said it himself- Zelda's human memories were always too petty to remain with Hylia; only protecting the Triforce mattered to the goddess. But if there is no Triforce now, then what is left of the human world that's profound enough, important enough, that Hylia would be unwilling to let it go…?

But even as he ponders those final words, a taxi cab screeches to a halt nearby and Ganondorf is reflected in the rearview mirror.

And then it hits him.

Oh.

His heart thunders in his chest and he turns. Runs. Shouts.

"ZELDA! ZELDA!"

Her heels slow to a stop.

The city holds its breath.

"With my ninth mind I resurrect my first
and dance slow to the music of my soul made new."

-Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black

END

Thanks so much to anyone who read/reviewed/etc. I truly hope that you enjoyed this piece at least a little bit. Writing it has definitely made me look at the world of Zelda with a slightly new perspective, and I hope reading it has done the same for you!

-Ctj