Chapter Text
The clock turned 11:57. A hissing, fizzling sound echoed between the cyan-detailed white walls of the healing pod chamber in the Castle of Lions. The noise spiked louder before it slowly faded, the echoes in the room seeming to close in on the healing pods arranged in a circle around the edges.
Lotor could feel the cold floor even through the gloves and kneepads of his suit. A tangle of white hair obscured his vision, but what he could see of the floor was dark, with only static, sparse refractions of the cyan light emanating from the walls of the chamber.
Was I knocked unconscious? Who did I fight most recently? Must have been some random alien ship, his brain decided to fill in. Lotor pushed himself upright. His joints felt stiff, like he’d been floating upright for weeks. He closed his eyes and tried to discern where he was. He had to stay calm. In a slightly more comfortable position, with his eyes shut, Lotor was free to notice a sharp burning sensation in his left arm. Shouldn’t the healing pod have taken care of this injury? …Whatever it was?
He touched his injured left arm, possibilities of where he’d been hurt so badly racing through his mind one by one. Why hadn’t the healing pod done its job for this wound?
The dark doors at the other end of the chamber were still, but Lotor heard muted thuds getting louder behind them. He hadn’t considered the possibility of additional rooms outside of this one. He couldn’t concentrate on where he was, couldn’t concentrate on figuring out what was going on. In a haze, frusturated, Lotor decided he should get up off the floor, in case there was a fight ahead of him. His heart pounded in rythm with the sounds from outside the room.
Light flooded the area, stark light blue and hitting every surface of the healing room. Lotor staggered to his feet, shifting into a defensive position, as the doors opened fully across the room. About three people skidded to a stop in the doorway, and Lotor squinted to adjust his vision so he could make out their appearances.
“Oh, didn’t think you’d be ejected this early,” a teenaged boy in white-and-yellow armor said. Actually, they were all wearing white armor. The boy in yellow and a girl in pink were supporting an unconscious boy in blue.
“Who are you?” Lotor asked.
“People who are being sieged by the Galra right now,” the girl said, her voice high, her thin eyebrows twisting nervously. The teenagers started to walk again, hastily dragging the boy in blue towards a healing pod on Lotor’s left. Lotor’s head seemed to dizzily tilt, his vision filling with white clouds that twinkled in and out of his sight. It really seemed like he hadn’t been healing for long. Despite the neutral attitude of the teenagers, and the fact that Lotor could barely stand, he kept his defensive position. The pink and yellow armored people shoved the blue guy into the pod, pressed a few buttons, and took off towards the door.
The guy in yellow was about to exit Lotor’s line of vision when he said, “Follow us to the bridge. I’ll get Coran to check your vitals later, but you could probably be some use right now.” The teenager took off down what Lotor assumed was another marble-lined, cyan-decorated corridor. This structure seemed big, and the architecture was foreign, even a little hostile to Lotor. The cavernous ceiling in the healing room was too blank. And was this giant structure really a ship? The boy had mentioned a bridge. Lotor realized he was stumbling towards the door already. No matter. He wasn’t going to stay in this room forever. If this was a ship like the ones he’d been on before - what kind of ship had he been on before? Lotor had no clear memory of this - he’d reach the bridge from anywhere in the ship in a few minutes.
The air in the corridors was warmer, less still. Lotor kept his right hand on the wall, his injured arm hanging by his side, as he made his way in the direction the strangers had gone. Nervous, he glanced behind him, and couldn’t see the door he’d left from. Not for lack of light, but the hallways seemed to go on for miles.
The first door Lotor saw, he turned into, and was met with stars.
A dome that filled his entire vision like a sky around a planet arced above a circular floor with white workstations. Cyan lights ran along the seams of the architecture, and glowing screens popped up above even the workstations that weren’t manned. Explosions close up and far from the ship blasted, seeming to shake the entire floor. Behind the explosions were enemy ships, sleek grey lit up with purple, and behind those were endless fields of stars.
Lotor had never looked at a sky this way. He’d spent his whole life either looking up at the sky from a building’s roof - which buildings? He didn’t quite recall - or from diminutive viewports with metal closing in on his view of other ships and an HUD filled with alerts.
Oh, and then there were the strangers. The boy in yellow was at his desk, and the girl in pink was standing on a platform in the center of the room, surrounded by screens and flashing red alerts. The only person not in armor was far away from Lotor, so far that all he could make out from the doorway Lotor was standing in were a snazzy blue suit and orange hair.
“Allura, Hunk! Why did you come to the bridge?” the non-armored person yelled.
‘Allura’ and ‘Hunk’ didn’t say anything for a moment.
“We thought that was where you wanted us to go,” the boy in yellow exclaimed.
“No! The reactors are destabilized, and one of us Alteans has to activate it personally!”
“Coran, why did you ever set the reactor security protocol up this way?!” the girl in pink exclaimed in frustration, furiously swiping at alerts to get them out of her display.
“Security reasons!” Coran yelled. “And I cannot stop giving the others directions, so it has to be you who goes!”
“That may not work! Who will maintain my workstation?”
Lotor had no idea how to operate the rectangular cyan screens floating and spinning around this girl. But he had to have walked to the bridge for a reason.
“I’ll take over,” he said, stepping further into the room. His arm flared like fire, the burning seeming to spread further like he’d fanned flames. He ignored it and held his arm in a forced relaxed position like he was unhurt.
The two armored strangers turned around.
“Do you think you can manage it for ten doboshes?” the girl asked. The teenaged boy glanced at Lotor a tick more, then turned around.
“Yes,” Lotor said, pretending like he believed it. He had no training with a ship like this, yet he didn’t want it to blow up with him in it. All he wanted to do was support whoever of this crew who couldn’t fill their position. He walked up to the platform, focusing his eyes forward to ignore his dizzy head, and stepped up on the elevated surface.
The girl nodded at him, her sparkly earrings bobbing, then took off with a running leap toward the door. Lotor took a deep breath, then stepped inside the circle of screens and alerts.
Thankfully, he could understand the language. Altean, his fuzzy mind supplied. Two red errors popped up in front of him as he was processing the text on the biggest of the screens. He swiped them away, not bothering to read them. An illustration of a ship shaped almost like a castle filled the center of the big cyan screen, with vitals constantly updating. A part was flashing red, and he checked the label, expecting it to be the reactor that the girl had gone to stabilize. Instead, it read “Particle barrier backup”.
“You, back there!” Coran yelled. “Where are all the cruisers converging?”
Lotor blinked. Who? Who was Coran addressing? Then he came back to his senses. Lotor swiped at the increasing layers of cyan screens. He tapped one that read “area around castle”, and it unfolded into nearly a 360-degree loop around him. Turning around, scanning the diagram with all the markers of Galra ships pointed towards the Castle, Lotor unthinkingly raised his left arm to resize the screen while he was scrolling on it with his right hand.
The pain flared up again, seeming to spread into his shoulder. Lotor stifled an exclamation and relaxed his arm again. The left side of his head seemed to get even dizzier. Focus. Focus.
“They’re converging slightly to port, around the space clear of asteroids,” Lotor said. Coran looked up, tilted his head left, and kept tapping at his controls. Lotor directed his eyes back at the cyan screens. They were so bright. He couldn’t focus. He tried to move his left arm again, and felt his entire body nearly immobilize before everything went black.