continued from ☀ || @viciousvalor
✧ ☀ ☾✧ Nabooru narrowed her eyes, arms folded over her chest as she regarded his display with marked disbelief. She had witnessed his acting skills first hand on more than one occasion, how he wooed Hyrule’s King and court to trust the man from the desert. That he bore none but the best intentions, hoped to strengthen their alliance with his people, and uphold the treaty signed at the end of the war. A silver tongue with the feigned demeanor and body language to match. Slippery and dangerous when he wanted something...
A click of her tongue and she marched across the room. “ Cut the theatrics, Ganondorf, ” she snapped, slapping her hand none-too-lightly on the center of his muscled chest, “ you’ve been caught. You can dr-- ”
Victorious smirk dissipated, hand withdrawn and palm clean of the makeup she expected to stain it. Her lips tightened to a thin line and her brows dipped inward. She swallowed the rest of her chiding as her gaze lifted to him--his forehead, his eyes, back down to his chest--down to her palm, and back to the mark she had tested.
Quicker than one would expect in her state of shock and trepidation, her hand shot back to his chest. Fingertips grazed over the scar, the real scar, the impossible scar. She could deny her eyes, claim it a falsity forged by clever makeup artistry, but could she discount touch? The roughened texture against otherwise smooth flesh? He could us magic, she supposed but...
Fingers retreated and curled into her palm as though an electric shock danced from the site of the scar through her hand. She stepped back, and her hip struck the corner of an object she failed to note despite the pain and clatter of articles jostled from the force. Her wide eyes remained fixed on the Gerudo King, her mind a whir of information and possibilities and fears.
While she failed to understand any of it, his tales of woe and suffering apparently in a future life, of some cyclical punishment, of death...
Reaching behind her she found the edge of the bed and perched herself on it, her legs too weak to support her weight. She steeled her mind as it tried to make sense of what she could not know--what he should not know--to make sense of what she did know. What that meant for the here and now, not millennia beyond the moment they occupied.
From his vague descriptions, the ones she wrote off as haunting nightmares, waking or otherwise, she could surmise he had gone through with his plans and Hyrule and, if his current predicament suggested anything, its goddesses retaliated. More than once. She shoved away the how and the sick irony of his continued punishment in that moment, a tidbit of clarity in the whorl of uncertainty stamped at the forefront of her mind:
She failed--would fail--to convince him to abandon his crusade for the Triforce. For that failing, he would suffer eons of torment. An even worse fate than she imagined for him should he continue on the path he struck. Her heart ripped itself in twain, caught between ideals of justice and her admiration of the man. Taunts of “ I told you so ” and “ I was right all along ” danced on her tongue but the cold, harsh truth of what he suffered turned brief celebration bitter and kept such comments swallowed and embedded in her throat. Salt to gaping wounds not worth worsening.
Her body shuddered with a sigh, her fingers gripping the edge of the mattress beneath her. She felt small. Helpless in the face of a dark future barreling toward them with a thousand questions she was afraid to ask.
“ What...What do you plan to do, then? ” Her fingers worried the sheets. “ Will you...try again? ”
