Recap: The story transitions to the first POV. At first unknown to the readers, Zelda is revealed to be resigned to her fate to the asylum/prison of HARK as she does not fight her imprisonment and expects complete isolation. However, she meets an eye on the wall of her prison, assumed to be another prisoner and consistently changes colors from red to blue, who questions why she is imprisoned. Outside of her prison, she meets Ghirahim, the second person to question her sentence as she is Hylian. There, Zelda experiences her first hallucination involving fire and the eye. When she comes to, she's back in her prison and accuses the eye of lying of its absence/ torture. She breaks down when the eye lets her realize that her constant reasoning comes from her amnesia - a completely empty memory of herself. She is comforted when she now knows her appearance.

A/N: Small changes like italicizing and stuff. You can ask me questions for more clarification if you're still confused with anything, but I urge you guys to look at the little details before I do so, because they are important and will gut you when you least expect it. Zelda, as you see, thinks a lot. Look at the themes and guess why I chose them.

Have fun ;D

Chapter 2: The Voice that Cries

Insecurity is the only feeling that destroys. Anger only consumes. Envy blinds. Sadness is just a cloud that shadows over you like the plague. However the feeling of insecurity heightens these emotions. It's like reaching towards the sky and thinking that one day you can actually touch it. It achieves a point of no return, a place that one would forever be captivated within, a cage that no prisoner should ever desire because once the rose-colored glasses are off, the reality is something that you don't want to wake up to. It darkens one's perspective. The person who is destroyed by such a feeling could never become the person they were before even if they tried.

To think that they can is just false security, ironically.

Talking to relieve would only resurface emotions. It would make positive ones, the ones that were dead, decompose and become one with the ground. The negative ones personify into the people who assemble today: people who wouldn't accept world views, rebels who try to cancel out the orders of society, workers who have no morals to follow, and then there are those who only seek destruction and chaos, feeding on the anarchy they cause like a blood-sucking leech.

They're nearly similar to the rebels; however, they do not have a purpose or a deeper meaning to their actions. It's shallow and overly simplistic. Somewhere, maybe a small part of their mind, there lies a voice that tells them what they don't want to hear, it misinterprets what they see and what they think. It invades the translation, the real one, and turns it into something ugly, something deformed and grotesque, into a nemesis that turns one's casual life into a game of kill or be killed.

Naturally, the person listens. The voice, in turn, materializes into a haven. From now on, it's a refuge, a safety blanket, another person who now understands the fear and paranoia. It's an instructor of danger and how to get through it without any burns. And in order to feed it, in order to keep it alive, it must feel the satisfaction of crushing the monster under your boot.

They never realize that there is no monster.

Insecurity.

What a way to birth a new demon.

"I want you to breathe in and breathe out. Relax. There's no need to be nervous or shy. We're all in the same boat here. Miss Ashley, why don't you go first?"

Ashley was, perhaps, the youngest prisoner in the institution. With her pigtails and white dress, one would expect she was just the typical spoiled brat. She never cooperated. She never listened. She always interrupted others. She always wore a scowl in her face. A few times she has shown a smirk towards crude displays, but there was never an outright smile on her face, nor were there any bad intentions exhuming out of her person.

It was especially in these classes, that her dissatisfaction was made obvious. When the guidance counselor asked for her participation, she frowned. Her black eyes warily looked us over, a circle of violent criminals taking in the words of twelve-year-old girl.

She didn't breathe in, "I lost my partner during the war." She didn't acknowledge the snickers of her peers, rather finding it her goal to glare at the counselor with an intensity of the summer sun. She rubbed her arms fiercely, leaving a red trail on her pale skin as her wrists went up and down, up and down. "People think I'm crazy because they think he doesn't exist."

The counselor shook her head in disappointment, neatly folding her hands on her lap as she looked at the girl with the utmost patience. "Miss Ashley, you didn't breathe in and out. I need you to–"

"People like you are the reason I'm here." Ashley spat. I looked at her carefully. Her eyes were narrowed, glancing subtly around the room trying to find something, something that would probably eat her alive, eyes that shadowed the dark circles tucked underneath.

"Miss Ashley," the counselor continued, "There's a reason why I asked of you to calm your breathing."

Her black eye twitched. "A little girl lost her partner, and you're asking her to breathe?"

"It clears the mind. Right now, no one is going to listen–"

She stood up, clattering the chair to the floor in an instant. The still guards immediately left their positions in order to point their assigned weapons consisting of a Taser, a needle, and the familiar sweater vest in white.

I didn't need to be a therapist to see that this counseling session was not going as it was intended to be. Ashley, with her trembling hands, didn't know whether to be frustrated or terrified out of her mind. Little sweat droplets fell from her forehead but she didn't look at us in the eye nor pay heed to the guards that can take away her freedom without a second thought. She walked towards the counselor and yelled in her face, "Why would I want them to listen to me? Why would I want these crazy people to listen to me?!"

I already knew what the counselor was going to say, "Please, Miss Ashley, refrain yourself from calling your peers such a term."

The girl gave her an incredulous look; her shoulders slumped in defeat when the guard forcefully pulled her out of the room. Then when the giggles from a certain albino grew louder in volume, she turned to look at us one by one, finding this realization a hard thing to grasp. That people in an asylum were not in fact 'crazy,' just fretfully misunderstood in the terms of society as implied by the women in a coat.

She looked at us in these mixed emotions, all ranging from unconcealed fear to accusing anger. She was sad, yes, but she couldn't have the right simply for the reason that she was deemed insane by the authority. She didn't have time to grieve, didn't have time to cry and properly send off a dead friend because she was dragged into a group like us where we laugh and dismiss a death of a so called comrade, where we demean those with pitiable emotions and beat them into a stage of indifference.

She looked like she wanted to cry with those glimmering miserable eyes. But when she looked at me, she stared. The wrinkles between her eyebrows slowly eased away as did the fire in those dark eyes. With a blank face copying mine, she was resolute to stare me down until I was out of her sight. She slowly lost her grip, her frown rising to a flat line, and with a final glance around the room, she turned, arms tightly crossed behind her back and needle grazing her skin.

It was silent when the doors closed.

But the satisfied sigh from the albino made that silence fall behind the curtain. "Oh dear, dear, dear. That was marvelously entertaining. Yes, that was rightfully exhilarating. What an attitude so filled with sparkling salt and sugar."

"Mister Ghirahim," The woman called, seemingly unfazed by the outburst. "Why don't you tell us your story?"

His dark eyes crinkled in joy. Without any struggle from his restrained arms, he sat up from his seat and hummed in contemplation. "Miss, that is an extreme blur of miscalculation, yes? I do not know what you ask of me, see? There are stories of my divine leadership, my legendary revolution of hell on Earth, and then there is the story of my adventures in fences. Which one would you gather?"

"Any of them," The woman replied encouragingly, clicking her pen and waving a blank page for all to see. "From now on this is your own journal. I'm only here to listen and write."

He grinned. "I'm afraid that's classified information."

Laughter resonated in the room, but the counselor did not look the least bit amused. "Mister Ghirahim, please don't make this any harder. Now, take a deep breath and let it all out. Calm your nerves and tell us a story. There's no need to feel insecure."

"It's 'lord,' you obscene human." He hissed, leaning forward with a sneer. "'Mister' is for the petty species of yours. Do not associate that repulsive term to the demon lord such as I!"

"Yes, yes," She dismissed, as if nodding to the words of a child. "But demons can't be much different to the human mind. It's simple and similar to the decisions and thinking of our own. We can predict if we study. Your quirks are something short of picky and, pardon my diction, self-centered." She glanced at the others to stop their snickering, forcing them to submission with a chiding look. I looked at her square in the eye when she passed me, momentarily making her pause before she turned to the frowning man in white.

"You dare relate us to the same spectrum." Ghirahim curled his spine even more. "I'll tell you a story, a story so funny, so humorous that it will make you spit out colors of the roses and thorns. Listen well, mere mortal, of the story of a girl who killed the Hyrulian army with nothing but needles and her bare hands, of a hunter who killed the mighty dragon of the planet and accidently killed a general with a flick of her finger, of a mercenary who killed the very people who raised him purely as a whim! Mercy, dear!" He giggled, snorting with disgusting vigor. "You know nothing of mercy when placed in a building filled with vermin!"

"Restrain him."

In seconds, Ghirahim was once again trapped in the white uniform, skin decorated with needles and patches that gave out static of electricity with a single button. Throughout the whole process, he didn't let out the breath of relief, the one usually found at the end of laughter.

When the door closed, the counselor looked at me, smiling at me with the gentleness of a tired babysitter who didn't even like kids. I didn't express any sign of discomfort, adapting her stare into one of my own. But she kept on staring at me, tapping away at her clipboard and not letting any of the others have the benefit of her attention. Eventually, she grew tired of the wait. She leaned forward and spoke with a reassuring tone.

"Take a deep breath for five seconds, hold it in, and let it all out. Slowly, with no hurry. Find a rhythm in your own breathing."

Silence.

She waited. A shadow rushed past her shoulder. That was when I found the grinning red eye in the other side of the wall.

It tilted. Slanted pupils veering the opening of the bars as if trying to squeeze through. It couldn't though, because it kept growing, floating closer and closer, the caged window being too small forced it to ingrain itself into the metal, popping the eyeball out until it was nothing short of a gory scene. One touch and it would pop like a balloon only instead of air blowing out like a fuse, it would be blood and the strings of the retina instead.

I couldn't look away. The only attention swerved into my senses where I could feel the skin on my arms fumble from the inside as if there were bugs trying to escape by tearing my skin apart. I felt stale, unsweet. The organs inside me did not exist, only filling my body with all the vile things in the world. Finally the red eye spouted a name, taking glee in my discomfort.

"Miss Zelda." It sung. "Miss Zelda." It hummed, testing the taste of my name in its invisible tongue.

Someone snapped their manicured fingers in front of me.

I blinked at the empty room. The light chairs were missing people, all of them circling me as if it was a kid's game instead of a therapy session. The brunette counselor looked at me cautiously. When I turned around, the guards were still there with the same tension and caution as before.

She brought my chin towards her direction. "Miss Zelda, session is over."I only nodded, dazed in a way that still felt like a dream. She let go and stepped back slowly. "It was over three hours ago."I didn't bring myself to care.

The counselor tightened her lips, breathing in before she spoke in a softer voice. "It was possibly better to speak to you alone. I assumed you would speak in front of the others. I'm sorry I didn't take into consideration of your discomfort." She sat next to me, this time without her pen and clipboard, and exhaled a small smile. "Do you want to talk?"

I glanced at the opposite wall and found nothing staring back at me. When I looked back at her, I tried to smile, but it only came out as a grimace more than anything. "Okay."

This time, her smile was more confident, "I wish that I can hope you're enjoying your stay in the institution, but we both know that there is no such thing. So I'm going to ask instead if you remember anything before you came here. Are you recalling anything recently? Dreams count as well."I shook my head."What about any faint memories of how you came here?"

This time I thought about it. It wasn't faint at all. I could remember everything. The only problem was the fact that everything was hazy. I remember the impossibility of breathing, needles sticking under my skin, tubes making my insides churn by either sucking something out or forcing something in. The straps that trapped me into a wall, straps wrapped everywhere, sparing me no mercy. They were around my wrists, around my arms, around my knees and ankles, around my waist, around my neck.

"I was in a hospital." I whispered. She nodded to assure me that she could hear.

There was a beeping sound in the room, and each time I twitched it went faster, pitch higher. With the beep, there was a surge of pain that echoed its pitch and translated it into the screeches of my veins, into something that strangled me into suffocation.

"I think I was in a coma," I looked down at my covered arms, wondering if it was as pale as it was before.

Because I remembered it being the same color as the skin of a dead person.

"Yes," She whispered carefully, wondering that if she raised her voice, I wouldn't speak anymore.

"I sat up…" The colors of red, yellow, and orange waving at me in the white halls. The burnt remains that it shed behind. I remembered strangers touching me and screaming in hysteria. I remembered the constant thoughts of 'look away, look away,' walking into path after path without a care in the world. "And every time someone touched me, I screamed."

"Why did you scream?" The counselor asked me with a firm voice, stronger than the whisper from before. "Did the nurses not treat you well? Did they treat you with aggression?"

There were sirens blaring into my ears. I kept falling, and even though I was skinned by the floor and trembling, I walked. I walked as if I was being hunted down.

I remember stopping, trying to breathe in real air, trying to at least make a sound come out, but there was only a gurgle. Then I was being smothered. I was gasping, choking, desperate, because I realized that I was deprived of solidarity between my lungs and my brain. I remembered hands clumsily reaching towards my neck, trying and failing to make it all better; as if they thought wrapping around my throat with pale icy fingers would somehow make it open and free to breathe.

"No." I swallowed hard, throat dry from saliva. I averted her intense gaze and looked towards the sound of a thump outside the room. One of the guards opened the door to check.

It was nothing.

Another hand reached me instead, one that was warmer and bigger than mine, stopping my act of self-satisfaction. I remember them shaking me, clenching my shoulders and making me stumble back and forth, back and forth, surprising myself by my lack of response. I remember my thoughts. The thoughts that terrified me, the ones that convinced me that I shouldn't be scared, that I shouldn't be wary of a stranger bringing me harm.

That I didn't have to react.

"What are you doing? Why are you here? Answer me!"

"No, I don't think so." I remember him digging his fingers into my skin.

"Then why did you scream?"

"No...Stop! Stop it! I just want to help you!"

I remember his arms turning into a layer of charcoal, bones appearing as if just waiting to get out, teeth gritting and reveling in the new spotlight as his lips turned darker and darker until they weren't lips anymore. I remember him closing his eyes, the clear patch of his eyelids instantly turning black and flaky just like the rest of him, his body exploding into nothing but dust falling near my feet.

I remember not looking away.

"Miss Zelda?"

I grunted when I felt a stinging sensation on my shoulders, seeing just in time to see the counselor scrunch her nose in slight fear as she held up her hand in confusion. I tilted up my head in question, quickly getting her out of her stupor.

"Miss Zelda, why did you scream?"

"Control.""You – You can't just do this!""Where is she going?! Why is no one…oh my God.""I don't know what to do!""Control!""She killed so many people…""Why won't she let me go?!" I clutched my head in pain.

"Miss Zelda?" The counselor moved to steady me, but instead of touching my forearm, it met the padded arms of the guard. He silently asked her to step back, standing next to me with the needles ready to fire. She shot him a slightly annoyed, slightly grateful look, craning her neck to the side to look at me. "Miss Zelda, what's wrong? Is it your memories? Am I asking too much for you?"

I pulled my hair, looking over their shoulders. "I–I don't know." The red eye crinkled between the bars of the cage, taking glee in my discomfort.

The woman noticed this, turned around and gave me a confused but worried look, "What happened? Did you see something?"

I curled my fingers deeper until I scratched my skull in satisfaction. But I was never satisfied, and I could never be satisfied, because the red eye stared down at me, wishing through the glow of its color, that it could be the one doing that instead.

"Miss Zelda?"

Then something injected itself into my brain, something big, something slimy,

Something dark.

There was a time where I believed that there was no difference between dreams and hallucinations.

They both weren't real. They can cure you or break you until you can't sleep anymore. They both trick you into believing there's another world where it's better or where it's worse. And even if you think you can control it, even if others think that you can actually make up those dreams and illusions, that you are the one ultimately making it up, it's an impossibility.

They weave into your mind like spiders. There are thousands of cobwebs in the depths of your brain, tangling more and more until it's a network mimicking your nerve system. You react whether it's you talking in your sleep, whimpering in imaginary pain, or falling off because of a false sense of gravity, you react and you don't remember reacting unless you wake up.

"But what if you don't wake up?"

"Then you've already lost." I responded without a moment's hesitation, looking up at the same red eye I've been seeing since day one.

It moved side to side, taking its time before saying, "Why is that?"

I pondered at the question. Losing could mean a lot of things. It could mean that something is damaged, like pride or dignity, maybe denial. It could mean failing a test of wills. It doesn't necessarily mean losing as in gain or loss, but it could also mean that it does, just not things that you could adapt to. Losing can range from losing the simple things in the same level as trinkets, yet it could be in the highest value like a human being, a special someone.I shifted, rubbing my ankles together to relieve the tension, "It can mean you can't get something back."

"Something like what?"

My eye twitched unconsciously, body shivering in response, "Something like your mind."

"That's a pretty big something."

I grimaced, tilting my head in fond remembrance, "It's why I'm here."

The eye squinted without malice. The sky darkened behind it, metal bars of the window losing its shadow. It made the ruby color stick out like the full moon of a cloudy night sky. "Aren't you curious in why I can hear your thoughts?"

"No," I automatically answered, smiling in a rueful manner, "I stopped wondering about things like that." I looked away from the red eye, turning only to see the same wall instead of my prison door. It was pitch black. The only way I could detect any light is from the glow seeping through the eye's pupil. "Besides, you don't exist." I let out a cold fog of breath in the lonely space beyond my feet. I turned to the caged window on the wall, but it wasn't there anymore. There was nothing to see now, nothing to do but to hear the voice that echoed around me like an unwanted embrace. Then there was a laugh so chilling and malicious, it made the darkness seem smaller. As if it was closing in on me.

"I don't exist," The eye agreed, "But I am alive." The ground trembled as its voice bounced from one ear to another. The moment where one ear went deaf, I inhaled sharply, scared that I wouldn't hear at all. Then it spoke again, casual and almost playful as it circled me like a predator. "I'm just like you."

I shook my head, trying to shrug off the feeling building up from under my skin. I looked from left to right, but the lone red eye kept following me, invading my vision with its smiling twinkle of mischief.

"Have you ever wondered why you keep referring to yourself as 'I'?" There was a flash, blinding me. I couldn't see. I couldn't hear. Then the flash disappeared and I couldn't help but to claw my eyes to shield me from the reflection. "It's because you want to believe that you are alive, that you exist, that this is your face."

"No," I denied with a shake of my head, arms bent to cover my face. I forced myself to open my eyes and could only whimper at the sight. It was mocking me, giving me an expression full of scorn. I didn't need this mirror. I didn't need it to lie! I threw it away, cringing at the screams replacing the sound of glass. "These features are mine and mine alone!" I screeched, eyes squeezing shut and hands clamping down near my ears. I bent down and felt for the ground. It almost sounded like feet were running towards my direction, surrounding every side. There were screams. There were laughs. There was the sound of flesh meeting metal, the smell of rusting iron lingering in the air, the touch of a gooey substance falling through my fingers. I didn't know what it was.

I didn't know what it was.

"Are they really?"

It met my knees, soaked my uniform until it was drenched. The buildup was overwhelming, I couldn't hear anymore. It slithered and made squelching noises as it crawled over my skin and clothes, going between my legs, my ears, worming on my tongue and into my throat. It forced me to look, to stare at the broken mirror where I saw nothing but burnt flesh, dead eyes, and blood seeping through like a broken pipe.

"This is you." The eye whispered, smiling through the eyes of the mirror, "This is you."

I gurgled and sat up catching my breath.

"Morning, princess."

I quickly turned my head and saw a blue eye through the bars of the window. Half-lidded, eyelashes curling up, lower half lifting up into a humorless smile.

"Did you have a nice dream?"

A/N: Next chapter will come soon~

Quest. of the Chap: Why do you think Zelda was imprisoned to HARK?