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It’s the smallest things that break him here in the dark.
The feeling of his hair, slick with sweat and grime, stuck to his face and neck. It stays no matter how he tries to toss his head to fling it away, and he sometimes wonders if he’d be able to track the time better if he’d paid attention to how quickly his hair grew, before he’d been discarded. Of course, nutrition and health probably have an effect on growth rate, so it’s a useless idea, but still. He yearns for some way to count the days— the years.
Sometimes that feeling, the sensation of just his own hair, ever-present, inescapable, makes him want to scream.
Sometimes he’s not sure he hasn’t started screaming anyway.
There are days sometimes when he wonders if he hasn’t gone completely blind. Other days he thinks he’s simply gone insane. Wasn’t there sunlight, at some point? Light that came down into his dingy cell, something he could watch to see the time pass— a little patch that moved across the wall opposite him and vanished, creeping slower than he could see, until he’d watched enough times that he could see it, could count the grains in the stone that it crossed over as it made its patient way in mirror of its father in the sky.
When had it vanished? He thinks it was after one of his fevers. He was sick and delirious for days, probably, and somehow when he came out of it his little light had gone. He still imagines it gets brighter and darker, sometimes, but he’s not sure if that’s real or simply his mind playing tricks.
He’d very much like it to be real.
The food is dry and hard, the water brackish that they force between his teeth every once in a while. He’s not sure why they still refuse to release his hands. He’s surely atrophied so much by now that he can’t pose any real danger, yet still they insist on leaving him bound and at the mercy of whoever they’ve sent to dominate sustenance into him.
The hands are usually rough. He’s given up on speaking to them, asking them why, pleading for answers, for any response at all; he never gets one.
He’s not sure why they feed him, either, come to think of it. Why do they want him alive? What purpose do they imagine to make him serve, destroyed as he is? Is his life some kind of political toy, some piece to be passed from hand to hand as a bargaining chip? Or do they imagine somehow that they will find some new way for him to be of service after years of decomposing with breath still in his lungs? At some point he tried starving himself just to avoid that potential future, but the rough hands forced him to eat in one way or another and he’s given up on that too. What purpose can a shattered tool serve in those mad machinations going on somewhere above him? Perhaps its just as well that he’ll never know.
He chews and the stale bread and swallows the black water, regardless. No point in fighting against living at this point.
Sometimes he hums to himself, or imagines that he does. It’s difficult to be sure whether any sound is actually escaping his mind through his throat; he can’t be certain of anything anymore. But he likes to imagine that he’s humming, or at the very least that the beats pounding in his mind are coming out in some way. He thinks they smashed his drum, back when they brough him in, but that doesn’t mean that the sound of the music ever left his soul.
When it’s especially hard to think, he likes to imagine that he can still see the man-eater dancing before him. He misses the feeling of hide beneath his hands, the sensation of the pounding of his heart and his head and Majora’s feet and the world all beating in tune together.
You made time move, he tells the monster in his head, watching his feet lift and pound and press and leap to the rhythm of existence. In that world beyond time, you made it move. Can you make it move for me?
Majora does not answer him, only keeps dancing. Keeps on dancing as his heart pounds with exertion, as his eyes sting from sweat, as his hands go numb from beating, beating, beating away, and still he keeps playing so the monster will have something to dance to.
Is it because he went to the man-eater? Or is it because he left the armor in that place between life and death where a world had ended? Is that why they cast him away when he returned? Perhaps they wanted the mask for themselves. It might certainly explain a few things— greed is the source of many follies, after all. It’s certainly what sent so many to die to Majora before him.
He’ll probably never know, anyway. No, he’ll stick to the freedom of his imaginings, keep pretending that the numbness in his hands is from playing so long and not from the way they hang above him, weak and blood-starved. He’ll keep imagining, and perhaps he’ll forget the walls and the darkness entirely and go back to playing for a lonely monster in a dying world between life and death.
He can smell the torches when they come to feed him, which is interesting, because he can no longer smell himself. It’s interesting to watch the reaction of whoever has been sent to deal with him; their faces are covered, but there’s so very much in a reaction that goes beyond what can be seen in a face. Sometimes they’ll freeze, surprised and alarmed at the stench as they open the cell door. Other times there will be a whole-body jerk that used to almost get a laugh out of him. Now he simply watches, disinterested as he is in everything else as those who have come before brace themselves before approaching while the uninitiated act out some alarm or disgust or other. It’s all become very routine by now.
He can’t deny a little curiosity. What does a man smell like who has been held captive and helpless for however long he has? Horrendous, clearly, but what does that mean?
The most he can conjure is mild distaste for his own state anymore. For anything really, and even that is a stretch. He’s lost all sense of propriety, it seems— or perhaps merely the ability to care.
After all, when you find yourself lost to the world you once knew, betrayed by all you thought your friends and all but forgotten in a stinking hole in the ground, unable to tell a day from a year, what is there left to find reason to care about?
He can’t think of anything.
He ought to be disturbed by that, he thinks— he who had compassion to spare for a monster who had eaten its entire world to desertion— but honestly, trying to feel anything at all is quite beyond him at this point, and he thinks he’s probably better off for it.