@rymykuvis for Galra mini exchange, you requested a Gen fic with either Haggar or Zarkon so I included both! There is past Zargar but it’s ultimately Gen. Special shout out to @eatyourgrapes for her help on this.
He opens his eyes, no thought comes to his mind other than her. Rising from the cold table he rested upon, he turns his head with a falling away of funeral sheets.
Empty operation table meeting his luminescent gaze. She is there, shivering… cold…scared… but alive.
That is all that matters.
The second thought that occurs to him is home—he must take her back— praying she will be safe again.
A brief venture beyond their guarded room reveals there is no home. She is still shivering when he returns.
Kneeling with only the soft scuff of ceremonial armor, he caresses her face (so small in his great hands) and eases her ever so gently to face him. Her golden eyes are afraid, confused.
“Where am I?” she asks, her voice hushed—so weak, unlike her confident and gentle tone from the dim memories that glittered in his mind like broken glass. Cracked was more like it, the full picture still within his sight.
“We are aboard my ship,” he growls—not that he intends the harshness—but the loss of his home is turning his stomach, and he has never been one to restrain when pushed too far.
She pulls her face away from his hand slowly, and wraps her arms around herself further, her eyes turning cold, narrowing at him. Zarkon says nothing once again, his only offering an open palm.
“Come.” My love… The words crumble upon reaching his tongue, leaving a taste like ash in his dry mouth. “Let us leave this place… There is revenge to be exacted.”
Violet-rimmed eyes narrow beneath her cowl, her frame finally ceasing its feverish shake.
“…. Against whom?”
She is still the same then—just a bit. Even seemingly lost as she was, Zarkon knew he could always anticipate questions, his offer still held.
“The man who did this to us, Honerva… Our ire is kindled against the armies of Altea, and their traitorous king…”
The witch says nothing, answer given in the slight rise of her shoulders. Hands pulling from where they clenched into soft fabric, she slowly reaches out to the open palm.
“I know not this Honerva… But I will serve you, my emperor.”
The words are jagged—though he knows she does not realize it—and Zarkon dips his head, taking comfort in their linked hands.
“Let us go. Work is to be done.” ~~~
“This sight is truly one to behold, sire.” Standing hunched, yet with an odd aura of pride in her stance, the witch’s words are coarse and rasping. Not by any particular intent, but a permanent change wrought by the harsh grace of quintessence.
“… Yes.. That it is.” Looming beside the frail woman, Zarkon’s eyes are not fixed upon the source of light that wreaths them in the collapsing light of Altea.
He feels nothing for that world, why waste the memory on such a thing when his own world hovered beside him, just out of reach? Eyes resting only on her illuminated features, a low and rattling series of clicks gathers in his throat with old emotion.
“Is something the matter, Sire?” Attention brought from the dying planet to her emperor, the witch Haggar regards him with flat eyes of simmering yellow, their rim of violet faded away since their initial awakening.
For a moment—just a single, fleeting moment—confession pushes at his pursed lips, yanking and vying for breath to be heard with tangling roots that cause his lungs to seize, hearts freezing in their beat for what should have killed him, where they not already dead.
“It is nothing…” His massive hand resting upon her shoulder is the only action he allows himself otherwise. “I merely contemplate how far we have come. All from the cradle of that miraculous mind you harbor.” He watches her for any reaction, any sign of familiarity glimmering there, though pupiless eyes hide his watching well.
“We still have much further to go, Sire.”
Sire.
The title from her lips is still something sharp… Unsettling even, as the blankness in her eyes. In their shared state of undeath, he questions if either of them will truly taste joy again, or if it is merely best to settle for dull echoes of the feeling.
“That we do.” ~~~
Work is easy to lose themselves in.
Ticks become dobashes and dobashes dribble into vargas and vargas into quintants. Soon even decafebes feel no longer than a blink.
Galaxy after galaxy fall before Imperial might, and with every planet and star that falls into their grasp, Zarkon watches. Waits for anything to spark in those void and clever eyes of hers.
He does not remember when the name Haggar stopped feeling like lead coating his tongue.
But it did, nonetheless.
When he lost his hands, that same, hopeful part of him yearned to see it as an opportunity for truth.
When she did not question the unified sigil of Galra and Altean names he wished to have etched into the backs of his new limbs, surprise did not take him.