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He’s been in the studio maybe an hour now.
Maybe more.
Which he normally wouldn’t complain about. It’s nice to be alone in the studio to fuck around. Except for the fact Zelda was supposed to get here when he got here and there is still no Zelda. He’s tried to call and text, but all of that has been ignored outside of her first ‘sorry, be there soon xoxo’ which is very her and another set of worms he’s not going to touch right now.
No, the pressing dilemma is the fact Zelda is not here and Ganondorf can only play around with the guitar melodies they’ve been trying to work out by himself for so long. Because it’s her album. Her say, her final word, he’s just a sessions player with some bonus creative input.
He plucks at his guitar strings a bit more out of boredom, occasionally looking up to the doors.
The sound guy left after about…fifteen minutes. Said something over the mic about how he’d be back soon, he just was going to work on other stuff while Ganondorf waits.
If he’s actually working or not, Ganondorf doesn’t really care.
What he does care about, as he pulls out his phone for the umpteenth time, is having his time wasted. Sure, he’s being well paid for and all but its the principal. It’s the respect.
Nabooru comes into the back of his mind, ghost chuckling in his ear and telling him how he was just the same. Making them all wait at recording sessions.
He frowns.
Not a welcome voice.
The door finally creaks and it lets in the sound of her. The pop princess. Not Zelda.
He leans to his mic, glancing through the recording studio window. The red lights still on, the booth can hear him.
“You’re late,” he says, loud enough that she can hear him speaking through the headphones laying on the command center. She flicks her gaze to him, then picks up the head set.
She presses one finger with its fresh, nice nails on the button so she can talk.
“I told you I’d be late,” she tells him, leaning towards her mic on the other end. He gives her a look. Her pretty fingers dig into the headset. “I’m not that late.”
“It’s been an hour,” he says.
“And I said I was going to be late.”
He thinks that ‘sorry, be there soon, xoxo’ is not a particular indication of nearly an hour of tardiness.
“Where were you?”
“Not your business.” He continues to frown and she gives him a similar scowl back before she’s taking off the headset and setting down her things. The fluffy jacket, her bag, so on and so forth. She fishes out what she actually needs and he tries not to watch too carefully.
But it’s hard not to, sometimes.
She’s a pretty little thing. Her hair is pulled back and up in two buns and two long, perfectly disheveled braids. The make up is impeccable and he’s sure will not be moved by a typhoon. The wardrobe is up to date on current trends and very Zelda. Meaning tight, expensive, and flaunting. Tight body suit that sits very high on her so you can see the skin of her hips before it dips into her low rise, whale tail, pants. She is a cruelly pretty thing of gemstones and shimmer.
The most out of place thing is the flannel she’s kept on from under her fluffy jacket. It’s far too big and falls into the crooks of her elbows, pooling like water and flowing around her.
He does not see the heels until she’s opened the door of his half of the studio.
It dawns on him how nothing of this outfit is for comfort and he cannot imagine how miserable it’d be to wear something like this for hours of recording. He wonders, then, if she means to be here for hours of recording. Or if it was perhaps the unfortunate trade off for whatever made her late. Or…if she still was afraid to peel back all her layers.
He can’t blame her for the last one.
He is a tool at the end of the day, not her friend. And he’s not even sure her friends get her without make up.
There’s more she needs to do before she settles down, though. Zelda can be quite anal about recording sessions, he’s found. All business once she enters the booth. She has a little hand held recorder that she always sets up. The first recording session, he’d questioned her on it, but her explanation was ‘I don’t want to miss anything later’.
He’d continued to be skeptical, especially given how often she would pull out her phone and request him to play back certain things she liked to record for later. That is, until their next working session and she pulled up an audio file of a guitar riff he was positive she didn’t catch with the phone, clearly harvested and cleaned up from the hand held device.
Since then, he’s accepted the recorder.
“Ok, I’m here,” she says, clacking her way over to the stool beside him. She perches, like a little bird, and pushes her hair back over her shoulder.
She hasn’t bleached her roots yet.
Usually, she’s quite on top of it. Part of her image, her brand. But today he can see a bit of them, dark and brown.
He wonders why she doesn’t just leave it. It’s not like anyone particularly cares how blonde she is. But…he supposes it’s that princess part of pop princess. Something so old in Hyrules history that he thinks Hylians seldom question it. Like what breeding went into her ears. Centuries upon centuries of people marrying people with longer and longer ears because they thought it meant they were closer to the Goddesses. A genetic line all leading to the woman before him now with hair the wrong color and ears long enough to have her declared a prophetess.
“Did you write anything?” He asks.
She frowns.
“You didn’t write anything,” he presumes.
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s on your face.”
She continues to frown and pulls out her phone. If he didn’t know better, he might find her rude, but she’s digging through her notes app before facing her phone to him and sliding it his way.
There’s some recordings here, some scribbled phrases and commentary. She did something. If it’s writing he supposes that’s to be seen.
Then she pulls out her notebook.
Where she actually writes.
It’s neat in it’s chaos. The make of notebook expensive beyond it’s purpose, the pens she uses overly garish and indicating some youthful attachment from earlier in her career. The outside is nice. The inside is full of colored ink and scratched out words and scribbles and doodles and notes to herself and everyone else, highlighter marks and complaints. She even tapes in things. Words she’s written elsewhere, pictures she likes and wants to use, quotes from other things, references, all the sort.
The personality safe and contained.
She flips through the pages until she reaches one that looks a little familiar to him.
The general shape of the page, at least. She’s crossed out words, written notes and new lines in different colors. That’s when she hesitates, her eyes on the page, her fingers trembling slightly in their stillness before she sits up straight and clears her throat.
“I was working through this one again,” she tells him before passing the notebook over his way before grabbing her phone again. “I took some of your notes and ignored other ones. But I liked the cord progression you were playing last time. Let me…let me find it-here, this one.”
She plays precisely the one she means.
It, for the record, was not originally recorded on her phone.
“The more I think about it, the more I think it fits really nicely with the bridge here,” she says, pointing to the corresponding lines on her notebook with her pen. “Don’t you think?”
He thinks it might. He studies the words a moment, adjusts his guitar as he sits up slightly. Then he strums out the progression she’s talking about, Zelda quick to start humming along.
“Might be good,” he agrees.
“Lets try it then.”
“Warm up first,” he insists. She looks at him, frustrated.
“You were just complaining I was late. That’ll waste more of your time.”
With her it’s not about wasting his time, it’s about respect, he thinks. It’s about worthiness. The dull thought rises and he thinks that he wants to know that she’s excited to be working with him. That she’s the same bare and raw girl on that rooftop who’d been seeking him out for month.
And that girl seems like she’d be eager to be on time, not to waste a second rather then stringing him through an hour waiting because she knows he has nothing better to do.
Or perhaps he just wants the pretty young thing next to him to like him.
A quite selfish, sad, and frustrating thought he doesn’t want to humor.
“You need to warm up if you want to be singing,” he insists instead. “Take it from me, take it from everyone my age I know, it’s going to bite you in the ass. Warm up.”
She groans.
But doesn’t argue any further.
She takes a swig of her water, clears her throat, and starts to go through her scales. All singers have different warm ups. Zelda, clearly quite practiced and clearly benefiting from the cream of the vocal coaching crop, has discovered a variety Ganondorf did not know existed.
In the few times they’ve met, she’s cycled through different ones. Seemingly each tailored to something she found lacking in the last.
He, naturally, didn’t do any sort of fancy shit. He, a musician with no classical training what so ever and no Internet to tell him different, didn’t even really know what a warm up was. What he did he’d referred to as ‘shaking off the rust’ and mostly just involved making weird sounds that’d let him growl and scream and drone better.
Eventually one of their producers explained the idea to him.
But his voice isn’t pretty or cute, it works as well damaged and unpracticed as it does after he’s woken up his muscles.
Zelda’s does not. She needs to learn how to baby it or she’ll lose it.
He plucks a bit at his strings, waiting for her to be done, but…she see’s distracted today. Pausing every so often.
She keeps glancing to her phone with each buzz. Eager, searching.
“Are you waiting for someone?” He asks. She looks at him, confused. “You look like you’re waiting for a call.”
The look she gives him is similar to the one she always gives when she’s arbitrarily decided something is not his business. And he supposes it’s not, he’s not sure how personal or private this is. It might not be. But, see, the look melts away and she sighs, quick to take her phone from his line of vision and flip through the messages, expectant and impatient.
“I’m waiting to hear back from a drummer,” she says. “Link got me the contact info.”
“Who’s the drummer?”
“Girl named Malon. She’s in some all girl group, Lost Woods. You know Lost Woods?” He does. They’re a punk trio, following in the steps of 90s alternative. The drummers good. She’s fast, hits hard. He actually thinks she might be too intense for what Zelda wants, but the girl has range.
And she seems eager to play.
“He knows her?” He asks. Zelda nods, tapping rapidly on her phone to someone.
“He knows a weird amount of everyone,” Zelda says. “He mentioned a few months ago that Lost Woods was going to be ending a tour and was going on a break to recoup between albums. Something about Ruto and Saria needing time to write. Malon doesn’t write. I thought it was perfect timing.”
This little bit of her, always arranging everyone she knows like little foot soldiers, reminds him she is Zelda Harkinian. Just like her father, arranging toys and playing the long game.
“I want Malon, but I haven’t heard back all week,” Zelda continues. “I’m trying to figure out if Link knows anything but half of the time trying to text him is about as effective as finding a random pigeon and hoping it’ll get to him. Which is why I try to get back to him immediately.”
“Sounds like herding cats.”
“My life is herding cats.”
She stares at her phone a moment. Taps some more. And her shoulder’s don’t relax as she stares. Zelda takes a breath, sets down her phone, and looks up at him with a steeled gaze.
“A lot’s riding on this for you, isn’t it?” Ganondorf asks. She sighs.
“You know the answer to that already,” she tells him.
Her phone buzzes and she doesn’t resist, snatching it up quickly to check if it’s Link. It, apparently, is not because she frowns.
Annoyance is the expression which wrinkles her face the most. Mostly in her brow.
He kind of likes it.
He likes that it’s real. That it breaks the perfection of her skin for even just a moment. A tiny little moment.
“Do you have a deadline?” He asks.
“I’m willing to make this thing under my dads nose for however long it takes. But to make it, I need people. And to get people, I need to know their schedules. You’re an open book, people like Malon are not,” she says.
Well…he wouldn’t say open book, would he.
It feels a bit like a sting.
Unwanted, troublesome. He presses his lips together, eyes flicking to Zeldas phone before he looks back at his guitar. Settling back in his stool, he straightens, shifts how it sits on his knee.
“You do know I have other shit to do, right?” He asks.
He doesn’t though, does he? Not anything major that’d distract him too much from this. Not like someone like Malon, he supposes, with her own band.
Zelda doesn’t look up from her phone.
“Do you?” She asks.
“I do a lot of session work.”
“Yeah, which I can schedule around,” she says. The tapping of her fingers stops. He can’t argue that as much as he wants to. And he feels Zeldas eyes on him, that creeping feeling of being an insect slowly being pinned to a board crawling up his skin.
She says, “you know I didn’t pick you because I thought you were free, right? I went for you first because you’re the first person I wanted to work with.”
“I don’t need the ego boost,” he says, turning his head to her. “Are you done with the phone?”
“Give Link like…five minutes,” she answers.
She doesn’t look from him, though. Eyes on his, back straight, hands folded politely over the far too expensive phone and case now placed on her lap.
“Go back to your scales while we wait, then. Five minutes is plenty of warm up time,” he says.
“Don’t you need to warm up?”
“You were an hour late, remember? My guitar was tuned fifty five minutes ago. Scales.”
She sighs. But takes a nice, long drink of water and returns to her warm ups. Not her scales, of course, needing to be defiant, but back to warm ups which is really all that matters. He doesn’t exactly care what type of warm up it is.
He didn’t really expect her to have such a nicely trained voice, you know.
Ganondorf should have, probably.
She had all the opportunity for the right vocal coaches and training all her life. Natural talent is nothing compared to all of that and Zelda clearly knows exactly what she’s doing when it comes to her voice, even if she seems to do that thing every young person does where she takes it for granted.
Her phone buzzes again, though, before her five minutes are up and quickly she picks it up.
Her ears perk back. Must be Link.
And then she frowns, the ears drooping.
Must not be the news she wanted.
“What now?” She asks.
“He’s just talking about fucking Termina,” she says.
Termina. Music festival. Named for an old fairy tale, one of the fucked up kinds you tell to scare kids where a city was doomed to have the moon crash into it in three days time. And it would happen again. And again. And again. Some variants have a hero save the day. Some, Termina is perpetually doomed, perhaps even to this day in some other realm no one can reach, cursed to die again and again and again. In others, perhaps the most hopeful, the people of Termina independent of a hero save themselves in all kinds of ways.
The festival got the name because it was three days long to, and doomed to repeat every year. Great imagery for a bunch of stoned kids in the middle of summer. Between the moon thing and the environments described in the various legends, the excessive use of masks and strange happenings within the various telling's. It made for a good theme, something odd and fun to trip to while listening to alternative rock. Something you could mythologize upon, creating a lot of staying power in the festivals various traditions that have been built over the past twenty years.
A rush hits him like a fucking spring breeze, though, and Ganondorf tries not to let his whole face brighten up like someone's just called him pretty and offered him a drink.
“Oh, that was a fucking fun one,” he says.
Zelda glances up at him, brows knit.
“Do you frequently go to music festivals?”
He meets her with equal confusion.
“I was at the first Termina.”
It’s cute when you catch her off guard.
Zelda seems to know everything about everything so when you stump her, it makes her blush, flustered and annoyed she forgot something. Because as soon as he says that, she seems to recall. Likely now filtering through old archive photos of him in his prime with the band and all that.
He’s thinking about that to, of course.
Except he doesn’t need to remember photos, he just feels the muggy, hot, stagnant summer air that felt a lot like noon at home. The sun all over his skin because he’d long ditched his shirt before his set. The fucking vibrant crowd, screaming all at once when he came on stage-
“You were, yeah,” Zelda says, breaking up his thoughts as she looks back to her phone. “That was probably a fucking nightmare.”
“It wasn’t a nightmare, it was fun as hell.”
She raises a brow.
Right.
She doesn’t know how festivals used to be.
He’s not really sure which has changed, him or the festivals. Probably both.
“Weren’t they all absolute fucking nightmares?” She asks, looking at him with brows knit, phone so gingerly in her hands he feels he could slap it out of them.
“Not all of them,” he replies. “Not even most of them. Everyone just talks about the shit shows the most.”
“But you were on stage the whole time, how can you even make that judgment call?” She asks. “You were probably high off your ass anyhow.”
She’s back to texting before he can argue.
He was a little buzzed at best. A little.
Zelda’s ears perk up.
“Oh, ok. He’s trying to tell me Malon is playing Termina,” she says, half delighted and half defeated.
“Little late for that, isn’t it?” He asks. “The festivals not far out.”
“Someone else dropped out on the second stage, sounds like Ruto pulled strings to get them in,” Zelda says, eyes not leaving her phone as she types rapidly.
He’s sort of jealous of how fast her goddamn thumbs move. He’s never really thought himself to be slow at using his own until he saw Zelda text.
“Guess that puts a little bump into your plans?”
“I was hoping to get her in studio sooner, yeah,” she replies. “Now she’s not going to want to come up here and record until after she’s done with Termina. And because it’s Termina, she’s probably busy with costuming and figuring out a set and all that shit.”
Her face is scrunched a bit as she frowns, thumbs still moving, nails tapping against the screen now that she’s less careful about them not touching.
“We just winged it,” he admits. Zelda stops, glances up to him without moving her head.
“You winged it?”
“It was the first one, yeah,” he says. “We just got off a tour, we just did that set again and we never did costuming.” She raises a brow, then goes back to her phone.
“That was also before they added second and third stage, though,” Zelda says. “You just had one stage, the one everyone wanted to be at anyway. They need to stand out, do all their promotion stuff, be impeccable.”
Sometimes it doesn’t dawn on him how much things have changed.
But then he realizes how tightly not only Zelda, but everyone in her circle curated their entire image to this…unreality almost…he thinks, often, Zelda and this younger crowd are in the business of creating a fantasy as much as they are in creating music. More so, even.
“Right,” he says, glancing away and to his mic in the studio.
Zelda grumbles a bit and eventually sets down her phone. Taking a breath, he feels her lighten beside him and the creak of her notebook as it opens. Her pages flipping.
“Alright, back to this,” she says, though her voice is a bit distant now. Brain working on too many cylinders.
He doesn’t argue, he silently holds his guitar.
“Scales,” he repeats. She groans. “You didn’t finish.”
She clears her throat, drinks more of her water, then goes back to the warm ups she had been doing.
He’ll be honest with himself about one thing.
She has a beautiful voice. A real voice. She hasn’t trained it to sound different then is natural to her. She isn’t heavily edited in post. They don’t cherry pick the perfect performances from the booth. She has the talent, born to her or trained.
He likes to hear it. He shuts his eyes a little, feigning interest in his guitar, and lets it sink into his ears a little. Just a little.
He’ll allow himself that indulgence.
At least until the sound guy comes back.
When she leaves the recording studio, Ganondorf is still standing outside. It’s one of those in between days of spring and summer where the mornings and nights are cold but at noon it gets nice and warm.
He’s in a light jacket now, lighting a cigarette by the door, guitar case strapped to his back. As he cups his hand, long lashes nearly brushing his cheeks as he glances down gingerly to the lighter in his hand, Zelda thinks he looks almost serene.
There’s something beautiful about him. About his rich, warm skin. The curl and waves in his hair. It’s down today, those red tresses. She hasn’t spotted a single gray in her time with him (and trust her, she’s looked). She’s not sure how he’s managed. If it’s a box dye or what.
She supposes being in your 40s isn’t prime graying time for everyone.
But she’s sure she’ll be fucking white as snow up there by 25, so, she’s been a bit baffled all the same.
He’s chosen to wear a t-shirt that’s a bit too tight for him for a tiny band that broke up decades ago. And black jeans that cup his ass just right with holes in the knees.
Part of her wants to ask for a cigarette. To lean in towards him with her eyes all pretty like his, half lidded and seductive, and have him offer her a light. But, honestly, she doesn’t really smoke. She did when she met him, but it was more an excuse to talk to him then anything. To keep him talking to her, to.
If it was a blunt, maybe she’d consider more heavily.
But right now doesn’t seem like the time for a social smoke.
“Who’s producing this thing?” He asks her and Zelda’s heart nearly leaps out of her at the sudden reminder that she is real, and he is real, and he’s probably been aware of her this whole goddamn time. Just staring at him.
When he goes to look at her, Zelda makes quick work to look at her phone. To look busy. Like that’s why she said nothing.
Evade.
“I am, obviously,” she replies, glancing up from her pretend, fascinating, text message. Ganondorf raises a brow. She raises one back. “What? I found you for sessions. I booked the studio. I set up the times. I’m working on the song mixes, I picked the sound guy. I found my drumme-I’m doing all the producing shit.”
Ganondorf hums, blows some smoke in the air.
“By yourself?” He asks.
“I’ve been watching people produce since I was in diapers. I know how to produce an album,” she replies, crossing her arms. “If I need help, I have friends I can ask. But I’m producing.”
He remains unconvinced, but seemingly satisfied enough that he doesn’t want to argue. Good.
When he looks away, she lets out a long, quiet, nerve nullifying breath.
“Do you need a ride?” He asks.
She considers for a moment. Two. Then shakes her head.
“No, my driver should be coming up any minute now,” she says. Ganondorf nods, taps some ash from his cigarette.
“I’ll wait with you until he comes, then.”
The notion is sweet. And Zelda doesn’t want to fight it. She shifts her weight to her other hip, sliding her phone away.
“You did good today,” she tells him. He grunts, taking another drag.
“You did better. You might have something special on your hands,” he tells her. Then drags his eyes to her, saying, “with the right producer.”
She frowns.
“I have the right producer,” she replies simply, turning her head and lifting her chin. He chuckles a little bit beside her.
“I’m joking with you, Zelda,” he says. She does not laugh. “I’m sure you’ll do great. You’re doing good so far.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course.”
Her driver arrives exactly on time, as Zelda herself is usually exactly on time. The car blocks both of them from the street as he parks and exits to open Zelda’s backdoor. The interior is black, all leather, and it’s already playing one of her favorite playlists. She turns to Ganondorf, though, not yet entering.
“Do you need a ride?” She has no idea how he got here, after all. He shakes his head. “Then I’ll see you soon.”
“I’m sure you will.”
With a few steps, she’s wordlessly entering her car and falling back into that leather. Thinking that she hopes she’s enough. And that Ganondorf doesn’t try to force a new producer on her.
She has enough of those, she thinks.
And she does not need more stress.