Title: Delayed post
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 800 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Post-canon, Ascot&Zazu
Summary: In the end, he missed the ship’s arrival entirely. He was down in the basements below the barracks, his friends helping hold the building up after a training accident did a fair bit of damage to the foundations.

oOo

It had been almost a year since the NSX had visited Cephiro. Ascot knew they were back now because the healers thought Eagle was about ready to wake up, but he found himself keeping an eye on the skies during the days leading up to the arrival, though he wasn’t sure Zazu was even on the ship any more. Last time he’d been here, he’d mentioned something about possibly going back to some school or something, ticking off all the qualifications he needed to design ships instead of just ‘tinkering with them’. He hadn’t heard anything since.

He’d tried not to feel too bad about that, but… it wasn’t like he had that many friends, even counting all the ones who weren’t human. He’d thought Zazu was one, but a year without a single ‘hi’ tucked into the messages sent from the NSX? Sometimes he’d thought about asking if there was any news – but if Zazu was there, and fine, and just not interested in talking anymore, in spite of promising to keep in touch-

In the end, he missed the ship’s arrival entirely. He was down in the basements below the barracks, his friends helping hold the building up after a training accident did a fair bit of damage to the foundations and Lantis and Presea were working out how best to fix it. (The Guru was banned from helping as, to quote Lantis, ‘they wanted the place to stay up without just using magic to hold it together’. Clef had laughingly agreed he didn’t have the first idea how foundations were meant to work and left them all to it once he’d diverted the shields away so they could fix the building up.) The first he knew of it was when he arrived back in his rooms in the small hours of the morning, yawning widely, to find a stack of cards and papers in the middle of his bed.

“What-“ he said, blinking, only for the light to flick on in the main room behind him, Caldina wandering across the room.

“You’re back, then.”

“You didn’t have to wait up,” he said, flushing as she patted him on the shoulder.

“What, when you were down in the depths of the earth? I wasn’t going to sleep. Anyway, that kid from Autozam dropped those off for you. He’ll be stuck on ship for the next couple of days, apparently, but said something about these already being horribly late.” She patted him on the sholder once more, and yawned widely. “Well, I’m off to bed. Glad the building didn’t fall on you.”

Ascot stared after her, then at the pile of notes on the bed. He walked over hesitantly, feeling oddly nervous – why, he didn’t know. This was clearly just a pile of paper, it couldn’t be that dangerous.

In fact, it was letters – he picked up the top one, frowned at it until he worked out the date – a few days ago – and looked at the pile, then dug down to the bottom and found one dated probably only a week after the NSX had left.

His reading wasn’t… great. Ascot hadn’t exactly been in school all the years he was meant to be learning literacy, and though he’d had a lot more practise in recent years and some tutoring to help him along, he was tired, and Zazu had the handwriting of someone who was used to thinking words into a machine and having the text appear without his hands having anything to do with it.

…So why had he written?

The first page, as he worked his way through it, started to give some answers – a project Zazu was being sent to work on, apparently important, setting up some new area of Autozam that had no power, no facilities…

“With the Cephiran mages they reckon we can make a new dome that actually restores the area inside, if we can get a whole new way of powering things up and running – I guess someone sent my last experiments back to HQ because they’re sending me off, we’re going to have to do things the old way, though, no connecting to the main power systems, no using our normal devices, so I thought of Cephiro and I grabbed one of those pens Geo keeps buying as souvenirs and a bunch of paper. Guess I can send this back when I’m on leave and can get in touch with him, this will probably take a few months before they’re done with me. I hope it’s not too long, anyway, my wrist’s going to fall off if I have to keep writing with this thing!”

That… hadn’t happened.

Presumably, at least given the pile of letters, Zazu had been working on this project for a while. (And his wrist had held out.) He must have run out of paper sometimes; some of the notes were on bits of card that looked like they’d been salvaged from packaging.

Chest feeling warm like it did when he reached for his magic, Ascot persevered, curled up on the bed, so tired his eyes kept closing in spite of his determination as he read a whole year’s worth of unsent messages that Zazu had written, and saved, and brought with him.