Chapter Text
The stale air of the abandoned base burned Lotor's lungs as he made his way through the debris of what was once the Galra Empire's most secret research center. Each step echoed in the empty corridors, creating ghostly echoes that seemed to whisper secrets from the past.
He shouldn't be here. If Zarkon knew he had disobeyed his direct orders to stay away from "obsolete facilities," his punishment would be... considerable. But there were things more important than his father's wrath. There always had been.
The flickering light of the few systems still functioning cast dancing shadows on the metal walls. Every surface was covered by a layer of dust so thick that his footsteps left perfect prints, as if he were the first living being to walk these corridors in decacycles.
*Perhaps he was.*
Lotor stopped in front of a half-destroyed terminal, his fingers sliding over the controls with the familiarity of someone who had memorized every detail of these blueprints. It had taken years to gain access to the classified files, more years to decipher the coordinates, and even more to find the perfect moment to escape his father's constant surveillance.
All for a hunch. A whisper in the empire's deepest archives. A margin note in a report from ten thousand years ago that mentioned a "Special Project" under direct supervision of Haggar.
A project that had disappeared from all official records.
"Where are you?" he murmured, his voice barely audible in the oppressive silence.
The answer came in the form of a corridor that didn't appear on any official blueprint. Narrow, dark, as if it had been designed to be forgotten. To others it would have been a warning. To Lotor, it was a promise.
His steps became more cautious as he ventured into the darkness. The corridor descended gradually, taking him deeper into the bowels of the installation. The walls here were different: thicker, more reinforced. Designed to contain something.
Or someone.
A massive door blocked the end of the corridor. The metal was so rusted it seemed it would crumble at the slightest touch, but Lotor knew Galra engineering well enough to know it was an illusion. This door had been made to withstand time.
He placed both hands on the cold surface and pushed. The mechanism protested with a metallic groan that reverberated through the entire corridor, but finally yielded. A cloud of ancient dust swirled around him, making him cough.
When the cloud settled, Lotor found himself at the threshold of a breathtaking chamber.
The room was circular, with a domed ceiling that disappeared into the shadows. Research equipment he hadn't seen in years filled the walls: vital sign monitors, biological analysis computers, empty sample containers. But it wasn't the equipment that made his heart stop.
It was the capsule in the center.
Lotor advanced as if walking in a dream. His eyes traced the quintessence tubes extending from side containers toward the central structure, pulsing with a weak but constant golden light. The life support system had been running for ten thousand years.
Keeping something alive.
His hands trembled as he cleaned the dust layer from the control panel. The numbers on the screen confirmed it: stable vital signs, suspended development, brain function... active.
"It can't be," he whispered.
But even before cleaning the capsule's crystal, he already knew what he would find. It was as if a part of him had always known, as if all the nightmares and fragmented memories were finally making sense.
The dust fell like ancient snow, first revealing a flash of pale skin, then the outline of a face, until finally...
His sword fell to the ground with a crash that seemed to split the air in two.
There, suspended in preservative fluid, was the person he had searched for in every corner of the known universe. The same face that visited him in dreams he thought were false, the same serene expression he remembered from when they were children and she would fall asleep curled against him after nightmares.
His younger sister. His Andragora.
But she wasn't the child from his memories. The body in the capsule was that of a young adult, perhaps his same apparent age. The experiments hadn't just kept her alive; they had made her grow, develop, mature in this prison of crystal and quintessence.
Lotor collapsed to his knees, the weight of ten thousand years of guilt and despair finally crushing him. The tears he had held back for millennia began to fall freely, each one burning his cheeks like acid.
"I looked for you," he whispered, his voice broken. "For so long... I thought you were dead. I thought I had failed."
The memories hit him like an avalanche: the day she disappeared, how he had run through the entire castle screaming her name, how Zarkon had told him she had been "relocated for the good of the empire." How he had believed that lie for years until the inconsistencies in the official stories began to accumulate.
How he had spent centuries searching for clues, following rumors, infiltrating abandoned bases, all to find some trace of the girl he had promised to protect and whom he had failed in the most absolute way possible.
His fingers slid over the crystal, tracing the outline of her face. Andragora seemed to be dreaming, her features relaxed, almost at peace. But Lotor could see the small scars marking her skin, evidence of the procedures she had endured. The price of his mother's experiments.
"What did they do to you?" he murmured, his voice barely a breath. "What did *she* do to you?"
The royal insignia on her chest confirmed what he already knew: his sister had been classified as high-value royalty, worthy of the most extreme experiments. The same ones that had created Haggar had been refined, perfected, applied to a young and malleable mind.
Lotor slowly stood up, wiping away his tears. For the first time in millennia, he felt something like hope. But also terror. What kind of person had Andragora become after all this time? Would she still be his sister, or would the experiments have created something completely different?
His eyes fell on the main control panel. A button blinked in red: AWAKENING SEQUENCE AVAILABLE.
All he had to do was press it. After ten thousand years, he could see his sister's eyes again, hear her voice, perhaps even receive her forgiveness for having failed to protect her.
But it would also mean facing what she might have become. And the questions she would undoubtedly ask about why it had taken him so long to find her.
Lotor's hand rose toward the button, stopping inches from the surface. In this moment, between hope and reality, he could still imagine that everything would work out. That his sister would wake up, forgive him, and finally they could be a family again.
Once he pressed that button, there would be no going back.
The quintessence tubes pulsed more forcefully, as if the system had detected his presence and was anticipating a decision.
Lotor closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and finally let his hand move forward.
The button illuminated under his touch.
And in the depths of the capsule, after ten thousand years of forced sleep, Andragora's eyelids began to move.