.:.:. Roman Holiday .:.:.

Disclaimer: The following contains characters and concepts not owned by the author, but are the property of Nintendo and their associates. Hence, fanfic, :)

General Warnings: This collection of stories contain mild language, brawlin’ violence, unconventional pairings, and possible slash/shounen ai (I love mismatching languages, don't you? o:). May contain, in later stories/chapters, mature themes and sexual innuendo.

Fact 1: Pizza Trumps Silver - Preserving the family silver is nothing compared to having pizza for dinner. Zelda tries to convince Ganondorf of this truth. Ganondorf remains a stubborn disbeliever. Part 1 of 2.

Author's Note: "G" (as in 10G) stands for "gilts", the most referred to currency in this fic.

“So. Ganondorf. We have twenty extra gilts in food allowance,” Zelda said one day from beneath the bed, as she shoved a cardboard box into the open. “Do you want pizza for dinner?”

Ganondorf Dragmire had not expected this.

He had expected ingratitude (Zelda, glaring at him from under the bed: “Decided to shift your lazy ass and help me clear out your inheritance, hmm?”), had hoped for thanks (Zelda, smiling at him from under the bed: “Oh—are you going to help me catalogue everything your inherited from your grandmothers? Thank you ever so much; honey, I know it’s been hard—”). He had expected anything, in a word, besides the question of “pizza”.

“Pizza?” he said, stepping from the doorway toward the bed.

“Why not? We can order from that place in the Diamond District; you know, the one Peach was saying people should support, because it’s family friendly, farm fresh, something like that? Mona Pizza, I think? Local over restaurant chains?”

“I’d much rather finish last night’s leftovers and hold on to what extra coin we’ve got,” Ganondorf retorted, slipping a foot around the box, prodding it to the center of the bedroom. He had to hop a little, for he was not pushing with any great conviction; the box was heavy, and its contents clanked dully, solidly; he wondered if these were candlesticks, stolen by his grandmother Koume off Hylian missionaries when she was but a girl and already more quick-fingered than the captain of the guards herself. He smiled to himself, as he knelt to see if he could catch a glimpse of Zelda; he patted the box, absently, as a man pats a dog that has been good, though the man has not really noticed its good behaviour. “That the last?” he called.

“You hold on to everything,” she mumbled. He pretended he did not hear her.

He listened, for a moment, to her wallowing about, the swish of her fingers over the cardboard boxes. He wiped the back of his hand along the sweat coating his neck, caught a drop dribbling towards the collar of his undershirt. Despite the battery-powered fan whirring away on the dresser, the air was stuffy, heavy like a blanket, and through the bedroom window, light spilled and crept across the floor. He leaned away from it into what remained of the bedroom shadows.

A crackling roar sounded from the front room; he titled his head back, toward the din of a TV audience, the voice of a commentator gabbling through the hiss of static.

“That tennis?” came Zelda’s voice, muffled and close to the wall against which the headboard was pressed.

“Table tennis, yeah,” he said, glancing lazily at the bed, back again toward the doorway.

“It isn’t Waluigi versus Amy Rose again, is it?”

Ganondorf considered. “Must be,” he said at last. “Commentator’s nagging like a bitch.”

“Didn’t they show that yesterday?” Zelda’s voice drifted out like summer haze vanishing; he barely heard it above the TV, the croon of Lulu Zora singing “Lullaby For My Stolen” on the radio Zelda had balanced on a heap of laundry that bridged the space between the bed and an overcrowded bedside table.

“’Course they showed it yesterday.” He stretched his arms over his head. “What else do you expect from channel three? Zelda, is that the last?”

She answered with a thump—fist on cardboard, he thought, and oh could he guess the contents of the box she was punching—and called, “That’s why you’re in here helping me with these boxes, isn’t it? They keep showing reruns of the Olympics?”

He shrugged. “If you want to believe that, sure. I mean, surely your Ganondorf has never been capable of altruism, hmm?”

She snickered, said, “I’ve never known him to be, yes,” then paused. “Farore be good.” She gave a whooping sigh. “I am cooking down here. Close the window, would you? The light is making an oven of this room.”

“Try stripping,” Ganondorf said, and moved to obey. She laughed.

The window overlooked the vista of a city trembling with the heat: a city squat and gray, its buildings flattened into the gunmetal-gray streets, outlined in the sketchy, gray-green lines of traffic islands. Very little of the city stood level with Ganondorf and Zelda’s apartment, and they liked to tell themselves and anyone who asked that they had chosen this room solely for the view.

And a fine view it was, if one was of a character to ignore the vast and terrible head of a raccoon looming with all the solemnity of a father god in the center of it.

The sun gleamed fuzzily white on the latex of the balloon, white on the cords that tethered it to the flat roof of Tom Nook’s Sundries and Grocery. From this height, there was nothing to be seen of Tom Nook's store outside the blasphemous behemoth of a balloon marking its location. Down below, however, the sidewalks within a twelve-mile radius were lined with advertisement posters: Nook and his everyday low prices; Nook and his fresh produce and fine meats; Nook and his warehouse of baubles, knicknacks, household items, and collectibles. Nook and his willingness to take anything and everything off your hands for a fair price.

Ganondorf had once visited Tom Nook's Sundries and Grocery a year ago, not too long after the balloon had gone up, and brochures depicting a raccoon in a blue apron, standing at attention beneath the florescent lights of a grocery store, his paw delicately balanced upon the corner of a fruit stand, smirking into the camera as though giving his potential customers the once-over and deriding them from the throne of his picture frame, had started flooding the mail. Ganondorf had noted what passed for "baubles", for "sundries", for pretty, petty, household items in Nook's store: gold Kinstones to hang on the walls, fairies' tears in a bottle, a caged Luma, a bona fide Bowser doll (though the product display had stressed that it was not "a" but "the" bona fide Bowser doll).

The whole display had been gruesomely fascinating, a kind of morbid farce. These were things that had meant something to someone once upon a time, he had thought, going for an everyday low price of 19.99G.

He pulled the window blind shut, hard enough to knock the slats against the glass.

"If you still insist on keeping these ridiculous boxes of armour, then everything we need to work with is on the floor right now," Zelda mumbled, when Ganondorf returned to the bed.

“I do insist.” He knelt, flicking aside an overhanging bedsheet to catch a glimpse of her. It was only nine in the morning and her face was already bright with sweat, flushed across the forehead and nose. Wisps of hair were plastered to her temples, the side of her mouth. He reached out and grasped her beneath the elbows, feeling the slickness of her skin, the squelch of his fingers on her arms.

“I don’t throw out your books and Ocarina, you don’t throw out my armour and sword, remember?” he said, and dragged her from beneath the bed.

She scrambled to her feet, clenching Ganondorf’s arms in a grip that was unnecessarily tight. “I still read my books,” she said, releasing him, and clawing back damp tendrils of hair. “I haven’t seen you in that armour or wearing that sword since we moved here.”

“To hell with that, woman; I wear the armour when I’m brawlin’.”

She twisted her mouth at him. “Scheduled brawlin’. Which doesn’t come around too often now does it?”

He thought to argue, only to recall that his body knew too well the pain of a bellyful of Dedede King’s wooden mallet, unrelieved by any armour whatsoever. It was an agony taken too often and too spontaneously in the most mundane settings this apartment complex had to offer: in the hallways, in the parking lot, twice on the stairs, once inside the bistro where Kirby worked, just when Kirby was coaxing free meals for himself and his friends from the manager. The manager was dimpled and smirking, attempting to play the coquette, and Kirby—sporting hair he’d stolen from Ike earlier that day, and spouting flattery in a voice that made him sound like a five-year-old imitating Meta Knight—played Don Juan. The whole scene had been embarrassing, in a sickeningly cute way; Ganondorf, ashamed to be called Kirby’s “friend” by any stretch of the imagination, had attempted to slip out the door and away. But Dedede King had caught him in his attempt and made a scene (redundant, really, as Dedede himself was a scene just waiting to happen). Ganondorf had snapped. He began what he knew better than to have ever begun with a flying backhand and several colourful exclamations, and Dedede had ended it, several seconds later, with a mallet to the stomach and knees, shouting, “Hey hey hey, hang on now! There ain’t no need to fight, Ganondorf, my friend, ain’t no need to fight!”

And though Ganondorf himself had never forgotten the feel of a mallet squarely striking his kneecap, he liked to suppress the memory for reasons of sanity.

“And anyway,” Zelda was saying, settling herself on the bed and pulling loose the twist ties of a trash bag, “no one’s throwing anything out; we’re selling this stuff.”

“It isn’t stuff,” he said.

She rolled her eyes at him. “Your armour would fetch a good price at Tom Nook’s, I bet.”

He flinched. She giggled, smothered it, and looked apologetic.

“Didn’t mean to laugh, honey,” she said, and opened her eyes wide with waif-like innocence.

“Don’t lay it on too thick,” he retorted. She had the grace to look momentarily ashamed.

“Your books would fetch three times any price Nook offered me, anyway,” Ganondorf continued—gods knew he was not to be outdone by her giggling. He turned from the suddenly sly look she was giving him and seating himself on a campstool, pried open the lid of a cardboard box beside his foot. “Hell, they're the history of Hyrule, real time, in six volumes. Diary form. Written in the hand of a godsdamned sage.” He peered back at her, and made a face. “You wanna sell those, by any chance?”

He waited for her to snort, “Oh course not.” But she never did, rather, contemplated the trash bag, head titled to the side, a small smile curling her mouth. It disturbed him that she said nothing, and so he glanced away and down at the box he has opened.

It contained candlesticks, just as he had thought, big, silver ones in which Ganondorf’s face dulled to a shadow. He gently took one from its bedding of newspaper, turned it around and around searching for dents, tarnish, warpings in the design. He expected to find none, and indeed, there was nothing to be found. But one could expect nothing less from the possessions of a Dragmire. His mother had never once settled for anything less; neither had his grandmothers. They had taken for themselves only that which would last into eternity, these women. They had given to their children—the queens among their daughters, the consort among their sons—only that which eternity had proved, and would prove time and time again.

And now he was to repay them with insults. Sell their treasure—their eternity—to a godsdamned raccoon in a blue apron. His fist convulsed about the candlestick.

Zelda said, “Ganondorf, how much do you think those history books would fetch?”

He flinched again. “I thought you said we were keeping some things,” he said, not looking at her.

“Humour me. How much?”

He didn’t want to humour her, not about this. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Sixty gilts, ten gilts per book?”

“I’d clobber the man who gave you ten gilts for one of your books,” he said, pointing the candlestick at her.

She laughed. “Ah, see, you do have some idea. Tell me.” She smirked at him, in that smoldering way he found fascinating and disturbing, her eyes hooded and the mischief in her glance almost tangible.

He shrugged, uncomfortable, and busied himself again with the candlestick. “One book would fetch a gold rupee or five in Hyrule, if anyone’d dare buy it from you,” he muttered, and breathed on the silver, ran a finger over the mist. He left a line a sweat where he massaged.

She plunged her hands into the trash bag and pulled out a heavy square of linen. He recognized it as a window drape, a gift from his mother; he turned away and glowered at the candlesticks. “Someone wouldd dare buy it,” Zelda said, chuckling. “There’s always someone willing to violate the sacred, and there’s nothing sacred in this city anyway. Five gold rupees in Hyrule, you think?”

“I should hope so.” He spat the word “hope”.

She glanced at him, an eyebrow raised, took a slight breath as though she meant to speak. But then she paused, shrugged, and glanced away. “Nook deals only in bells, doesn’t he?” Her voice was cool, determinedly casual, as if she had not heard his emphasis. “I wonder what five gold translates to in bell—oh, Ganondorf, that was what I meant to ask you. What’s the exchange rate from bells to gilts?” She smiled, this time, when she glanced up, a smile bright and clear, as if she were forgiving him for the tone of voice he was taken with her.

It was a shame to disappoint that smile. He shrugged. “Wouldn’t know.”

Her hands faltered on the sheet; she turned her head fully in his direction, the smile sliding from her face. “I asked you to look that up yesterday,” she said.

“Well I didn’t; Marth had the damn computer tied up all day yesterday.”

“You could’ve asked Dedede. He’s got Wi—”

Ganondorf snorted. “Dedede King. Oh really, Zelda, really.”

Her mouth pinched; he saw this before she ducked her head back over the linen. “If you can’t handle Dedede, you could’ve gone to the library,” she muttered. And in the softness of her voice, there was a terrible precision and clarity to the clip of her words. The sting of her meaning.

“It was a hundred and five outside.” He rounded on her suddenly, useless frustration lancing through his body. “It was a hundred and five yesterday and it’s a hundred and seven today and the bus costs six friggin’ gilts round trip and Din’s blood, you were downstairs all day; why didn’t you just ask Link or somebody? Or just damn call?”

Her hands stilled. She didn’t turn around.

“And you can’t buy a pack of gum in this city with ten gilts,” he continued. “Why the hell would you let Tom Nook buy your books—your Hylian history —for only that much?”

She twisted around, and there was a flicker of disdain—maybe disgust or maybe pity or maybe guilt—in her eyes. “I wouldn’t,” she snapped, and there was something too quick, too insincere, in her voice. He settled for guilt.

“Then why—?”

“Humour me,” she said loudly, turning back to the trash bag. “We’re not selling my books, we’re not selling your amour, we’re selling the stuff in these boxes and I was just—just wondering. Just wondering about exchange rates and how much we can get for this stuff and why we even have to damn sell it off to begin with and just—” She gestured, one-handed, at nothing in particular. “Just just just.” She dropped her hand, slumped a little. He felt her frustration thrumming through the room.

Her agitation bothered him, humiliated him, and he didn’t speak right away; he listened for a moment to the fan whirring on the dresser, the whisper of the radio, the strains of a commercial in the front room.

“I… I’m just looking forward to finishing this,” he said, gesturing at the boxes and bags, and hoped his words were concession enough.

She didn’t look at him for a moment, but then, slowly, she relented; she glanced at him, gave him a lopsided smile. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Me… too.

Part two coming soon. Comments are loved, :3