a zephyran timetable
@docvelaw
the first thing endymion notices when he opens his eyes is the dripping sound, the slow, draining plopping noise that his logical brain understands is a quiet inconvenience, but his immediate reactive brain hates with a vengeance, like a needle pricking him over and over and over. it’s bright enough that he winces as he opens his eyes and for a unrefined moment, he thinks he might still be on zephyr, laying in his mother’s garden, out on the lawn, the sun in the sky, the shine of it shifting the world into a blinding white, and he welcomes it, embraces that feeling because it means that none of them are dead and the palaces weren’t attacked and his people aren’t being slaughtered somewhere while he floats out into space with strangers.
the truth however, of course, settles in on him at the same time, his eyes focusing, his fingers twitching, tensing, curling, his limbs coming back to remember themselves, coming back to reassert themselves, begging to stretch and twist, as though he’s been unconscious for years. he shuts his eyes again and sees saito, harsh and unrelenting, his teeth showing as he shouts at endymion to get in the fucking pod, his fist slamming into the young prince’s face hard enough to make him queasy, to make him compliant, to kill the fight in him long enough to shove him inside the enclosed space and lock him in. he shuts his eyes and sees his soldiers, his guard, screaming and fighting as their ship is overtaken, as the walls shutter and crack, the larger warhammer vessel swallowing the front window like the mouth of a great sea monster.
he jolts himself out of it and looks around, notices that he’s not alone, not by a long shot, a mummy-looking man standing over by the cabinets, a small robot making beeping noises, and the body of another male, stretched across a mirrored gurney a few feet away from him. as soon as the doctor moves, endymion recognizes the unconscious man’s face. “galiad,” he murmurs, his throat dry and scratchy, sounding like bending wood, his tongue a ball of cotton in his mouth. the air tastes too sterile in here, thin and sticky, and he has to gulp several times just to say it again, to call him again. “galiad.”
but galiad doesn’t move, doesn’t wake up, doesn’t even twitch in endymion’s direction, completely oblivious to him, completely unaware. endymion has never seen galiad, one of the unbroken brothers, asleep before and something in him whispers that he shouldn’t be looking at him now, that it’s forbidden, that it’s unrighteous, unholy, sacrilegious. the order of monks swear off humanistic things, such as over-sleeping and over-eating, which is why galiad also looks quite thin, even by zephyran standards, which admittedly are quite high given the planet’s struggle with food shortages in recent years.
endymion tries to reach for him before realizing that the dripping that had woken him up before was an iv attached to his own arm, the needle very real inside his vein, the hookup connecting him to a bag hanging to his left. he doesn’t wish to damage anything but the urge to get out of this place, out of this room, is a strong one, and it takes every ounce of self-control his training has prepared him for, to keep himself as still as possible. “doctor,” he addresses the masked figure. “where are we? what happened?” he remembers the rough bit of his first waking, the vallurian saito had told him about, the message on the drive stick, the lies about his family being dead, but it’s all very messy and disorganized inside his head. he needs something clearer.
