I thought ‘Voltron AU!’ and then wrote 1000 words of Cody alone in the castleship, waiting for the Princess to wake up.
Oops?
This is entirely @midoromi‘s fault (I love you).
Cody wakes up alone.
It takes him a moment to get his bearings, because the castle is dark and still, so different from what he last remembers of it, the fighting and his mentor’s voice, soft but firm.
“The Queen needs me, Codillan.” His voice cuts through the laser fire. Cody clutches his tablet to his chest. He’s been spending as much time as he can on the bridge, writing down all he can bear, because he won’t get the chance to be the Princess’s advisor, probably won’t live more than a few more quitant, but he was a scribe first, and if he writes it down maybe someone will hear of what happened here. Understand why they had to send the Lions away, scattering Voltron to keep it out of Zarkon’s hands, understand that they still fought to the last.
“But the Princess-” He hasn’t said her name, not since she went into stass, almost a movement ago. He’s felt adrift ever since. He hadn’t gotten to say goodbye.
“Yes, she’ll need someone, won’t she.” And he puts his hand on Cody’s shoulder.
He freezes.
“Me?” There’s panic in his chest, threatening to choke him. “I couldn’t, I didn’t finish my training, and I’m no steward-”
“You can learn, my boy. You’re clever, and you care for her. That will be the most important thing. She’ll need someone she can trust. She’ll need someone to champion for her.” His grip tightens, until it’s almost painful. “Everything else can be learned, but loyalty… Well, we’ve seen how important that is, haven’t we.”
Cody remembers watching them lock the Black Lion away, how she struggled, torn between the call of her paladin and her fear of having to fight the other Lions.
“Yes, sir.” He sounds so young, even to himself.
His mentor smiles, and leads him over towards the stasis pods. There’s no time, no time to run down and say one last goodbye. The friends he still has left, the ones that haven’t already, are fighting.
“Wait!” he says, right before his mentor closes the glass. “Set… set it for a century?”
There’s confusion on the older man’s face. “You don’t want to wake up with the Princess?”
“No, I… I do.” He tries to explain, his thoughts going in a thousand directions. “But… the castle will need to be checked on. If I wake up with her before then, that will be fine, but if it takes longer, the castle will need to have diagnostics run. I can wake up, run them, and then go back in.”
He humors him, in the end, and the last thing Cody remembers seeing is his mentor’s form, held in a salut suited for someone much more important than just a scribe, an advisor in training because the three in front of him had been lost, a child in over his head.
In the end, running away feels like falling asleep.
When he wakes up, Cody cries. He lets himself cry for a varga, and then he checks on the Princess. The Lions still must be without Paladins, because she still sleeps.
One hundred deca-phoebs.
There are diagnostics to run, checklists to run through. He has to make sure this castle is still strong, so that when the Lions return and his Princess awakes it is ready for them. There are also video logs, recordings of last stands, but he can’t bare to watch those now. Not alone. Not like this.
He starts the scans to figure out where in the universe they are, and then he busies himself with all that needs doing.
It takes him a movement, the first time. As the centuries pass, he gets it down to a quitant or two. He watches a world grow around them, and does not think of the world that they lost. He spends the time between one test and another exploring every crevice of the castle, because that’s his responsibility now, every inch of the empty halls.
Not everything escaped unscathed, of course. And there are some places he cannot access - the royal wing refuses to open for him, as do most of the private quarters and the military towers and the Lions bays. He should have access to it all, but something must not have been passed down quite right. The Princess can fix that, when… when it’s time.
He sleeps in the room with the stasis pods anyway. He doesn’t dare let himself get comfortable. He keeps busy, sometimes doing everything without sleeping at all, because he’s worried if he lets himself think too much he’ll get too lonely, he’ll do something stupid.
(he tries, the eighth time he wakes up, but he cannot override the Princess’s slumber. He thinks of ancient stories about sleeping princesses and laughs without humor so hard that his ribs still ache when he gets back into his pod, still hurt when he wakes up for time number nine. She still sleeps)
Once or twice, his anger gets the better of him, and he sets the ticker for 200, 300 deca-phoebs, instead of 100. All it gets him is more to do, when he wakes up.
When he wakes up to voices, he thinks perhaps he’s finally lost his mind. But he opens his eyes, and she’s there, staring at him with nothing short of wonder.
“Cody?” she says, because she was never one for formalities, not when it came to their friendship. “What happened? Where is everyone?”
Cody has waited for this for a spanse of time that feels impossible, too large for his mind to wrap around. And the first thing he does is break his Princess’s heart.
“They’re gone,” he says, and he manages to keep the mourning out of his voice, so old and yet made fresh again by the fact that she doesn’t know. “Everyone is gone, Princess, I’m so sorry.”
He holds her, knows that he must look cold to the strangers here with them, as he tells her what happened between her sleep beginning and his own.
He doesn’t tell her about all the time in between. He knows she’ll feel guilty, and he cannot protect her from the universe but he can protect her from this.
It’s the least he can do.
