Nanny watched the desperation on Keith's face as he sat with his head in his hands. He hadn't moved for almost three hours, she realized, ever since Allura had disappeared behind the silvery metal walls of the Operating Room.
As still as a statue, as quiet as death. What was he thinking, she wondered, noting the desperation on his face. It was impossible to tell. He needed to conserve his strength and rest but she doubted that he would allow himself the luxury of an escape into sleep.
She ignored the creaking of her joints as she got up, stretched her legs and shook her skirts out. She approached Keith cautiously. Coran had tried speaking to him earlier, but if Keith had heard, he hadn't responded. Perhaps the Prince Regent would listen to her.
"Come, Your Highness," Nanny ordered him gruffly, urging him up onto his feet with gentle hands. "We must get those ... stains... off your clothes. Your appearance would surely alarm the Princess were she to see you as you are now."
"Use this to wipe your face and your hands," she directed, scolding him lightly as she pressed a clean towel dampened with hydrogen peroxide into his hands. "Please, Your Highness," Nanny repeated once again, a little louder this time, when Keith did not respond.
"Why are you doing this, Nanny?" Keith asked, in a voice that sounded as though it came from the grave. "Shouldn't you be locking me into the dungeon or something? After all, if it hadn't been for me, Allura —-"
"Allura would have been dead," Nanny said crisply, cutting him off before he lapsed into a spasm of guilt. Taking the towel from his hands, she went up on tiptoe and wiped away the bloodstains herself, treating him as though he were a child in her care.
"What you did was difficult, but it was necessary," she explained, her tone matter-of-fact and businesslike. "Here," she instructed him handing him another towel and directing him to take a seat in front of her. "You must clean your hands or your wounds will become infected."
Busying herself with the simple task of folding the bloodied towel and setting it aside, Nanny continued speaking. "Orla would not have asked it of you otherwise. When Allura's body died, Haggar died along with it."
Clucking with disapproval at the scratches and wounds on Keith's face, Nanny called out to a passing nurse to bring cotton and antiseptic. "But Allura held on because of you. When you asked her to stay, you were invoking the power of the bond that tied her to you and to Arus."
"I don't think it was the bond," Keith muttered, a tentative smile ghosting across his face. "My guess is that it was more like plain stubborn bullheadedness. You know how Ally is... When she makes up her mind to do something, nothing we can say or do will ever change it..."
"Like flying the Blue Lion?" Nanny asked, shaking her head with at the memory. She continued dabbing at the scratches on Keith's face with a cotton ball drenched in an antiseptic solution. "In retrospect, I do not know why we were surprised."
"I should have expected her to do something like that... Allura was always a handful, even as a little girl. If your children will be like anything like her, I am sure that my hair will be white in no time at all." Pausing a moment, Nanny saw that her chatter was helping the Prince Regent relax.
"Oh, the stories I could tell you!" Nanny exclaimed. "For instance, did anyone ever tell you how the Princess was the despair of her tutors? If I remember correctly, she went through nine of them, before she turned six years old."
"Why?" Keith asked curiously. "I doubt it's because of a lack of intelligence. I mean, look at the way Allura picks up things! How many alien languages does she speak? She may not act it at times - she's impulsive and all - but she's smarter and sharper than most of the people I know."
"Hold still!" Nanny reproached Keith when he jerked away, wincing at the pain from the cool, sharp sting. Holding his chin between her forefinger and her thumb, she continued dabbing medicine onto his wounds. "Precisely. Just ask Coran – her tutors found it... disconcerting, to say the very least... to lose intellectual debates to a six-year old and..."
Her voice broke and betrayed her artificially cheerful front, but Nanny recovered quickly, mopping at her eyes and steadying her voice. "Keith, we all love her, you know. And I know how worried you are, how worried we all are, but... it's so much harder to wait alone."
"Nanny..." Keith said, swallowing down the wad of emotion that lodged in his throat. He didn't have the words to express how he felt, so he simply leaned against her and let himself be held in a maternal embrace.
"It will be all right, Keith," she comforted him in a soft whisper, stroking his dark hair with a gentle hand. "Everything will be all right, you will see..."Her voice trailed off into silence as she saw the door to the Operating Room open.
Sensing the sudden tension in Nanny's frame, Keith lifted his head, just as Dr. Gorma stepped out of the sterile suite, still clothed in surgical scrubs. Getting to his feet, he drew himself up to his full height,
"The Princess is out of surgery, Your Highness. The nurses have already gotten her settled into a room. Barring any complications, her chances are good," Gorma reported, his voice brisk and businesslike.
"I... Thank you," Keith whispered. He looked around at the occupants of the room, Nanny, Coran, the other members of the Voltron Force and Allura's pet space mice. "And I think that we all share the same sentiment."
Gorma acknowledged Keith's gratitude with a tired smile. "I administered a general anesthetic to induce sedation for the surgery and to manage the pain afterwards. So, do not expect her to wake just yet, Right now, she needs to rest until her body recovers. We will reduce the anesthetic once we are satisfied with her progress,"
"You saved her life," Keith breathed, his voice trembling with the intensity of his emotions.
"I only did what I had the power to do," Gorma shook his head dismissively. "But I wouldn't have been able to do it without you, Your Highness. For all intents and purposes, when I got there, the princess was gone. She wasn't breathing and her heart wasn't beating. But she rallied when she heard your voice."
Bowing his head, Keith closed his eyes and sighed heavily, but when he looked up again, everyone in the room noted the drastic change in his demeanor. A load seemed to lift from the Keith's shoulders and he looked years younger.
"Can I see her?" Keith asked.
"Of course." Gorma nodded. "But first, let me explain something. Although the Princess is still unconscious, I believe, that she can sense the emotions of the people around her. Highness, she needs you to be strong now. Your courage and confidence will give her the strength she needs to get well."
Despite his promise to Gorma, Keith's determined stride faltered as he entered Allura's room. The room was still despite the beeping of her heart monitor and the faint hiss of the oxygen tank set up around the bed.
He approached her bed slowly, dreading what he would see there. There were tubes everywhere, but he could see her face clearly. Although she was still pale, the horrifying translucency he had seen on earlier was gone. Her hair was spread over the pillow, framing her face.
He lowered himself to a chair next to her bed as his eyes ranged over her. Without thinking, he moved to smooth the hair back from her face. His fingers brushed against the intrusive plastic tubing that filled her lungs with oxygen before resting against her cheek.
Save for the rise and fall of her chest, Allura was absolutely still. Motionless. Her sooty lashes, the tiny fans that danced and fluttered with life, hid everything now, aflicker with neither nightmares, laughter nor dreams.
"Hey Sunshine," Keith greeted her as he reached for Allura's left hand and cradled it tenderly between his own. "Gorma says that you're doing great and that you should wake up by this time tomorrow... I know it's selfish of me, but I wish you could wake up sooner."
His questing fingers traced the outline of the wedding ring he had given her. "There are so many things that I want to tell you, things that I NEED to tell you, but I want you to be awake when I tell them to you."
He groped for things to say, his sleep-starved emotions raw and ravaged. He told her about how the harvest was going to be a bountiful one and how the villagers were making plans on how to preserve what they could for times of need.
But, remembering how Allura had shone most brightly when she was needed, he also told her about how the last attack had leveled homes in some villages and how many more children had become orphans because of Zarkon and Haggar.
"I need you, Al," Keith admitted. "I know I'm trained to lead, but this is something I can't handle on my own. I'm a soldier, not an economist nor a diplomat. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to increase the GDP or the per capita income, or which industries to give economic incentives to... You've got to wake up and come back to me. I can't do this without you."