Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s a miserable night to be on a high rise.

There’s a dull thud back inside the building. But Ganondorf left it not long ago, following the cramped stairs from the balcony up to the fenced off rooftop. No one else is up here right now, something he’s mildly surprised by. Only mildly.

There’s no pool on this terrace, you see. The one below, the one he left to get up here, has a pool. One of those stupid, skinny ones that they like to add to these types of places that make the nouveau riche and young millionaires excited about living in the city. They associate in ground pools with the height of luxury still. But you don’t often get those to yourself here. Hard to do without a yard.

Once they get all moved in and live in the place a little while, they realize the things barely a pool worth writing home about and that they’re going to spend more time then they want maintaining it. Or having some random guy in their house babying it when they just want to be alone.

But it’s a pool.

And naturally all the wasted people at the party are elated to have an excuse to strip out of their overly expensive garbage and get wet.

Ganondorf doesn’t even know who’s party this is.

He’s sure Zant told him. But he doesn’t remember. It doesn’t matter.

It’s some sort of after party for someone's recent album launch or something like that. Zant told him, practically begged him to come because ‘it’ll look good’.

Plus, Zant said, the host wanted to meet him.

Ganondorf, however, think’s they’re both too old for this sort of bullshit and has really no idea how it’d ‘look good’. Surely, he doesn’t need to schmooze with the wasted twenty somethings. None of the socializing with people his own age really had to happen here either.

But…something nagged at him and so he showed up. He met with some familiar faces from his generation. Producers, other washed up guys, managers, that sort of thing. Vultures out on the hunt, intent to make some good impressions and stay relevant. Because, sure, you can work off the backs of old's recommending you and guys who know a guy. But digging some talons into the fresh meat, making sure you are the guy they know when someone asks, is equally important if you want to be important yourself. You want to be the one they call when they leave their current team or need some help with something.

Bullshit.

Always bullshit.

They get to pretend, to, that it’s ‘the good old days’ by watching kids living through their good old days. Like they need to remind those kids they exist, they to are trying to remember they exist. If you can remind yourself and everyone else of that…it might get you through another week and into some album sessions or the writers room or a new client or whatever. That sort of thing.

That’s the part Ganondorf cares a bit more about. He does need to do that. Get into studios, write songs he won’t sing, play guitar in the privacy of a sound proof room.

This part, though, is tiring. Tiring, stupid, that’s what it is.

This used to be fun. Now, he can’t even make it an hour through a sea of bad company without seeking somewhere quiet and alone with plenty of breathing room.

He lights a cigarette, looking to the other buildings leaking light from their windows, listening to the honk of traffic far, far below him. Maybe he should just go home.

The shrill sound of high heels interrupts his cities worth of white noise, causing him to straighten his back as they approach from behind. He does not turn, does not look, but his ears tune into the sound. That little click, click, click. Until it stops a few feet behind him.

“Can I have one?” A startlingly clear, young voice asks and he goes to pull the carton back out from his jacket pocket, holding it out without a single word.

She slides up behind him, smelling like lavender and sweat.

Her slender fingers take a cigarette.

Only then does he turn to see her, offering a light. His gaze settles on her as she leans close to catch her cigarette in the flame.

A slender, young, pale, blonde thing. Much shorter then him even in her heels. Hylian, with those long ears pointed back. Her hair is long to, straight and caught in the luxurious fur wrap that nestles into her elbows. The things comical in size, perfectly white, and horribly ornate with sparkling diamonds and dangling tails. Underneath is something tight and pink, though he’s unsure what from this angle, in this light, with all that fur around her. And her fingers, those delicate, slender fingers are topped with perfect, long, almond shaped nails.

Holding her cigarette between pink, glossy lips, she inhales and straightens away from his lighter. Her eyes are shut, dark lashes brushing against her cheeks as she holds for a moment, then lets out a long, long exhale.

She’s too young to be this tired.

But she looks out to the windows across and the street below much like he does, one hand folded into the crux of her arm as her cigarette smolders and smokes.

“You’re Ganondorf Dragmire,” she says, not even offering him a glance.

He’s surprised.

“Yes,” he says. She nods and that’s when she turns her head to him, hip turning slightly his way.

“Zelda Harkinian,” she says.

He knows that name.

20 something pop star. Released a sleeper hit album about a year and a half ago. She’s been plaguing the radio waves for almost as long. It’s catchy music. Not his taste, however.

Daughter of Daphnes Harkinian, record label CEO. She’s on his label.

She should be on top of the world, down in that party, out of her mind on whatever designer shit is being passed around in that shiny penthouse.

Not up here with him.

Yet…here she is. Taking another drag from one of his cigarettes.

“I’m a big fan,” she tells him. He nearly laughs.

“Are you?” He asks, the disbelief clear and she nods.

“I listened to your albums religiously in high school,” she says.

Pop princess listening to heavy, alternative, metal and punk from decades ago. Of course.

Maybe he should expect this kind of thing.

He’s met plenty of fans who don’t look like how he expects his fans to look. By now he should have learned how to reserve judgment. Regardless of how strange it feels to have Zelda Harkinian telling him she’s heard him before. Being a high school phase, though…that’s so typical. Expected. He’s often painted as something to grow out of. Who knows what she looked like in high school anyway-

“I still listen to them now,” she says. “Big fan.”

Oh.

Well.

“I wouldn’t have assumed,” he says, glancing her way and she hums. Then she gives him a deeply unimpressed look.

“Well, our tastes don’t always represent our market, do they?” She asks. “I always put you on during a rough day. It’s cathartic, having someone else so pissed off in the room. Keeps me from smashing shit.”

That does get him to chuckle a little, tapping excess ash from his cigarette. Zelda turns, leaning back on the rooftop railing. Eyes fixed on him. Gaze still dead as it moves to the dark concrete before her.

She takes a long, long drag of her cigarette.

“I’d pay you a similar compliment,” he tells her, “but I haven’t properly listened to your album.”

“I never expected you to,” she says, head lulling back his way. “Honestly, I’m surprised you even came tonight.”

“You’re surprised?”

“Yeah, I’m the one who asked for you to be invited.”

The lines connect for him in that moment.

Zelda Harkinian. Pop princess. Just released a new album, her sophomore, and it immediately shot to the top of the charts. Multiple top 100 singles leading to it. This is her party to celebrate a successful album launch. She’s probably been with the suits all morning. Probably had a polite dinner with her father. And his investors. And whoever else he wanted to show her off to. Then she planned to come back here. Invited everyone she knew who told everyone they knew, intending to celebrate properly. Maybe make new friends, new connections.

Work never stops at these things, after all.

She had personally invited him.

She had wanted him here. Through the weeks, she went through her contacts to find someone who knew him and who could make him come tonight. Which got her to Zant.

Which got Ganondorf here.

Funny. She’s not new to money. She shouldn’t have one of those stupid lap pools on her terrace.

“You never come to these types of things,” Zelda says. “I’ve been trying to find you at an event for months now.”

“You made sure I’d get dragged to this one.”

Sad and dazzling, she flashes him a smile then gestures to herself, saying, “it’s my album. Practically like a birthday party. The album girl gets what she wants for her album release, doesn’t she?”

That’s not exactly how this works.

And the misery painting each word makes it clear that she knows that to.

He’d argue with her on that but…then he thinks to the ragers of his 20s, back when he was releasing albums frequently and he decides he really can’t. When he was young and his albums mattered, people did whatever he asked to. Might as well have been king.

That was something he’d been happier about, though. Unlike Zelda’s melancholy. Being under her fathers thumb must not be very freeing.

He can feel the party under his feet, hear the thump of it behind him in tandem to the noise from the street. The sort of song that makes you feel apart from the world as you linger in your own silence.

Zelda is finishing another, long drag before she taps ash from the tip of her cigarette. Her ears move slightly, attracted to the noise behind her and she turns her head. Eyes on the cars.

He asks, “why were you trying to find me?”

“Well, you were always my favorite member of the band,” she says. “Hardest to track down though.”

“I don’t want most people finding me.”

With a look, a smirk in her eye, she huffs and says, “I doubt that. You were always a showboat. Even now, I see you chasing it.”

“Fame?” He asks.

“The attention,” she corrects.

It feels like Zelda is trying to poise him under a microscope and that is not what he agreed to.

“You haven’t answered,” he says.

She pouts, scans from him back to the concrete, shifting her weight against the railing. Then takes another nice, long drag.

“Maybe I just want you to sit in and play session for me,” she says. “I’d like a new guitarist for my next record.”

“If that was it, you didn’t need to come to me personally,” he says. “You could have talked to my team. They’d have handled it.”

“Sure. And you would have said no,” she says.

He doesn’t reply.

He would have.

“I thought I might be more persuasive,” she says.

“What’s wrong with your old guitarist?” He asks.

“Who says something’s wrong?”

“You want a new one.”

“That’s not unusual, having different sessions players for different albums.”

Yes. But how she said it…she’s staring at him again, eyes an unnerving blue that glows with the night life around her. Crystal. Not a microscope. Chess. She’s playing chess with him, he can tell it in that gaze. And she doesn’t really care if she wins or not, she just seems to want to observe how he plays. If he’s any good at it.

Fine.

He can do that.

“Your father is Daphnes Harkinian,” he says and she hums. “You’re on his label.”

The Harkinian dynasty has been in the industry since there was an industry. And Zelda’s father, of course, is yet another ruthless branch on that same tree. Ganondorf was never on his label, but he remembers Daphnes. From papers, from rare meetings between labels, from industry events. The two…never quite got along. Ganondorf prefers it that way.

Harkinian is a man with a head for business and an innate understanding of how to use the tools around him to further that. Should his tools play nice, of course.

“What of it?” She asks.

“Are you sick of his sessions players? I doubt he’s letting you pick them yourself. The producer he picked for you is probably doing it.”

Lips a thin line, she pushes from the railing and turns to face the street again. That’s a yes.

“I might be leaving,” Zelda says to him. “He’s not going to like my idea for a next album. And I’m not going to like his.”

“Not going to be pop, then,” he assumes.

“Not going to be pop enough, at least,” she replies. “I like your work, I like how you play, I like your lyrics. I thought you’d be a good fit and a good place to start.”

Her father is not much of a risk taker, like his fathers before him.

The label’s been mostly pop, very few artists stray. And an artist like Zelda…Ganondorf presumes she’s something home grown. Something crafted and kneaded. Not quite a plant but…the shoe fits, doesn’t it?

“So, you’re just sick of it all, then,” he observes.

“I’ve been sick of it for a while,” she replies. “But you know how it is, don’t you?”

He doesn’t reply.

Curious, though.

He thinks about what he’s known of her music, those small slivers. She seems talented. There’s a complexity there that he’s sure comes from Zelda, not the team assembled for her by her father. It indicates a good ear. It’s good music. Even though it’s not his taste. And he thinks about seeing her photo shoots floating around, photos of her on red carpets, concert clips, and he thinks she seems happy there. Like this is what she’s always wanted and would always like to do.

Our tastes do not always represent our market…

He asks, “what would you rather do, then? Without the labels?”

“Without the labels?”

“Yeah.”

“And I can still support myself?”

“Yes.”

“Classical,” she says. He lowers his cigarette. “I’d be a harpist. Maybe I’d be in an orchestra. Maybe playing in the pit of musicals and ballets and operas.”

He expected her to say punk rocker, given she’s tracked him down.

Though…he can see her there. She has the fingers for it, long and thin, moving with the delicate grace of waves on a shore or perhaps the dainty way a spider weaves a web. He wonders if the music would have been better, sweeter, with more joy inside of it. What one likes is not always what they’re best at but…still…he can nearly hear it, the harp. Her playing.

He believes her. That part of her wants to be in a pit, playing harp.

“What about you?” She asks.

He hums.

“Pipe organ,” he says and she laughs.

“Pipe organ?”

“If I have to pick something else,” he says. “I’m not interested in anything besides what I do but if I have to pick something else, I pick pipe organ. Maybe I’d be one of those people who goes around playing the ones in museums so they don’t rot and they can fund raise for upkeep.”

“What a flighty little dream,” she teases.

“Like being a pop star, maybe,” he replies. She frowns.

Her skin’s too young and smooth to properly wrinkle when she frowns, he’s noticing. Just small dents, a small dent in the brow. The media training radiates off her. Like the beautiful smiles, like her whole career. Show something, but not too much. Never too much. Perfect control, only seeing what she wants to be seen.

He didn’t have that.

But no one cares what a metal or a punk band does in that way, really. They want him angry, they want him violent, they want him feeling.

She says, “a lot less eyes on you in your little dream. Would that make you happy?”

He doesn’t answer.

But he wonders anyway. Would it?

“Is that what keeps you in it, then?” He asks her. “The eyes on you?”

She, in turn, doesn’t answer either. Just takes a long drag, eyes on the cars, the other buildings, on the little lives within each window.

So many people out there know who she is. An odd feeling to have. Knowing that there’s millions and millions who have heard you, who have seen you, but you’ll never have that in return. You cannot know them. You cannot see them. Lonely in one way. Invigorating in another.

Perhaps it’s how the goddesses feel from time to time.

He misses it sometimes, he’ll admit.

He has dreams of old shows. Especially of the festivals. When he stood on that stage, at the mic with a sea of bodies in front of him. Flesh and scale and feather and stone. What a rare feeling. To command a crowd like that. To scream into a microphone and have them screaming back. To see them ebb and flow and sway and sing, all at your beck and call. All faces he would never know, people who’s names he will never hear.

They’d all known him, though.

They were there for him.

Waiting at baited breath for his every word.

You tell yourself it’s for the music, it’s for the art, to just rid yourself of it and put it onto someone else. Because what is art with no audience, no choir, no subjects.

But it’s often to see and be seen. By as many eyes as will look.

To have the comfort of millions who felt what you felt and for a moment, a small, delicate moment, to not feel alone.

It’s a high to chase like any other.

Zelda says, instead, “I’m not quite sure if anyone really sees me. They see her, but not me. Not the same one you’re seeing. They see some thing they make up in their heads. And she…she is so…she’s something painted by a label and a manager and a PR team and a social media team and a stylist. She is a myth. But that wasn’t how it was for you, was it?”

He taps some ash from his cigarette.

“No, it wasn’t,” he says. “He was more myself then I ever have been.”

Back in his dreams, Ganondorf is always in his 20s. He’s always back there, back in that body, back in that mind. A reckless, wild man screaming on his stage. Drenched in lights and sweat. Black and leather and spikes,. His head pounds, his throat hurts, his body is sore. And the smile on his face hurts his cheeks more then it all because it will not fade. The crowd stretches before him like it did then and they scream and scream and scream.

He ran into trouble, of course. Like everyone else. Bad press. Ruined hotel rooms. Public fights. Public feuds. His label considered him a problem child.

None of it was careful and all of it was him.

Something he’ll own, for better or worse, until his death.

“So, you want a new guitarist,” he says. She nods. “You said lyrics to, you want a writing partner?”

“I want people to bounce off of,” she says.

“Do you write your own lyrics now?”

“That’s…complicated,” she says.

He’ll take it.

“Do you have any other ideas for the album team, then?” He asks.

“I’m not going to ask the rest of your band to show up, if that’s what you mean,” she replies, cutting straight through him. It’s not a difficult fault like to guess that he has. But despite the decades, it still doesn’t become easier to think about. “Do you still talk to them?” She asks, infecting his silence. “Any of them.”

“The band?”

“Yes, the band.”

“No,” he replies firmly.

He misses them sometimes, though. Namely Nabooru. She was the first to leave, then the rest followed.

She’d grown tired of him, he supposed. The rage, the chaos, the tabloids, the recklessness. She’d left during a tour, blowing up the whole thing after a particularly long fight the night prior. He still remembers her there, standing outside the bus. Jacket and scarf on because it was fall and she’d never gotten used to the weather outside of the desert.

Her bass was packed and she held onto it’s case tightly.

She’d wished him luck self destructing.

He’s pretty sure he told her to fuck off.

That was that.

“Are you interested, then?” Zelda asks. “I’d love to have you.”

Her cigarettes burning low. So is his but…he thinks maybe she should be stomping it out. Before it gets too close to those pale little fingers. His hands are rough and hers look about as smooth as they had to be when she was born.

“I’ll think about it,” he tells her.

“That’s it? You’ll think on it?”

“I’ll think on it, yeah,” he repeats.

She swallows. Nods.

“Well, it was nice talking to you,” she says, dropping her cigarette and crushing it under the toe of her high heels. “I need to get back though. Before Midna sends a search party.”

She turns, facing him fully.

Something seems stuck on her tongue as she gazes him over, toe to head. Where’s that nerve she’s had this whole time? Unlike her, to hold back. He waits for her to get it back as she holds his gaze. But she never does.

She just clears her throat.

“Let me give you my number,” she says to him, holding out one of those long hands.

Without a word, he obliges. Unlocks it with one hand then holds it out to her with his contacts page open. Like a hawk, he keeps his eye on her fingers as she types in her name. Even opens up the camera and turns it to herself.

For a moment, it turns on.

He see’s the pop star emerge as she pulls a fake smile. Shimmering and full of dazzle. The sadness fades from her eyes, her free hand caressing her cheek as she angles and aims. Once satisfied, she spends a moment more in his phone typing something before handing it back.

“I sent myself a message so you can’t leave me waiting forever,” she teases. “Call me, I’d love to have you as a sessions player.”

Her fingers look small on his phone. Even smaller when he goes to take it from her, both thumbs lingering on the now locked screen.

“If I don’t, I suppose you will,” he says and she flashes a smile. A real one. A smug one.

“Won’t have you hiding from me again,” she jokes. “It was hard enough tracking you down this time.”

He nods and she finally lets go so he can pocket the phone.

“Enjoy your party, Zelda,” he says.

He means it.

She does not seem to like the notion but she smiles anyway before she leaves him to the rooftop, to the night sky, to the street.

He leaves, eventually, and heads back through the party. Once more he spots her, sitting around an orange haired Twili girl and a pink haired Hylian boy in a beanie. He’s just grateful her dissecting eyes aren’t on him as he says goodbye to the few people he knows and slips out into the night.

Zelda wakes up a little past noon, make up uncomfortably caked on her face and still in her clothes from the night before. Link and Midna are beside her on the mattress, just as dressed but far more asleep. Lucky bastards.

Body like lead, Zelda drags herself out of bed. At least she’s barefoot.

She stumbles, dropping her wrap and pattering her way to the bathroom as she squints through the horrible fucking sun. She hates the fucking sun.

When she gets to her pretty, white bathroom she’s glad there’s not more carnage there. Most of the party stayed out of her locked bedroom, so, the bathroom looks fine.

Her dress falls to the floor and she pulls off her pasties, grimacing as she does. It doesn’t hurt badly but they’re…uncomfortably wet from sweat. She wants to get in the shower. But she wants this shit off her face more and she wants it off now. So she tries to get some of it off with water, knowing it won’t be much help but maybe it’ll placate her mind enough that she can get into the shower.

Maybe she should have gotten something to drink first. Her throats dry as hell, tongue sticking uncomfortably all over the place.

Then she hears a buzz and stands still, ears perking as she tries to locate the sound.

It doesn’t come again, but she glances around to find her phone on the counter.

When’d she come into the bathroom before bed?

A flash comes to mind of her in here, giggling as she stumbles back out with her shoes off before falling into bed with her friends and a movie.

Right. She’d left it in here after she’d pissed.

She flicks the water off her hands and goes to grab it from the counter. That bright screen greets her with a sea of notifications. She skims through them. Most are unimportant to her but one makes her thumb still.

Ganondorf Dragmire.

8AM.

He’s asking to meet her to talk more about the album.

She smiles.