Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Day 32: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 22:03

Planet XC54 "Ba'Speraq." --Stronghold (floating)

Well, shit.

Pidge groans quietly, dragging a hand—the one that against all odds is still in possession of it's glove—over her eyes while the other moves to fiddle with the torn remains of her dress. In the distance, a small flock of space-cuccos squawk bloody murder, a faint, familiar song plays on loop over the blaring of emergency sirens, and a steadily approaching rush of footsteps grows ever closer as the gunshot wound in her thigh spurts blood under the hasty bandage—a strip of her dress she’d torn off an hour ago.

In hindsight, perhaps rushing onto an unfamiliar planet with not much in the way of a plan and no backup hadn’t exactly been the best idea.

And quiznack, she really wishes she had her Bayard at the moment.

Well, no use dwelling on the past, right? Not like she can really do much about past decisions at the moment.

Her eyes dart around the small, unfortunately windowless tower room she’d been cornered in, looking for something, anything, to work with.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothi—

Oh. Wait a second.

That. That just might work.

A small, dangerous smirk finds its way onto her lips as the footsteps grow ever closer.

"Embrace The Chaos"--that's what she's been saying for the past week, after all.

Day 25: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 11:17

Planet 0755 "Anala" — Temporary camp.

“You can’t be serious.” Pidge deadpans, raising one eyebrow at the utterly evil being in front of her. Keith gives her a tiny smile, as if that would actually help the feelings of complete and utter betrayal currently narrowing her eyes.

Spoiler alert, it doesn’t

“Pidge—“'

“Yes?”

“It’s just not a good idea.“

“Since when do you care about ‘good ideas?’”

“Since I became the Black Paladin.”

“Oh, really? Well then. Shiro!” She doesn’t break eye contact with the traitor. “Your decision making skills have ruined my life!” Shiro looks up with a small smile from where he’s watching Hunk try and start a decent fire with the tiny amount of kindling they somehow managed to scrape together out of the lint from their Lions.

“First, ouch. Second, Keith’s right. You really shouldn’t—“

“Traitor!” She shouts at him, still not looking away from Keith as Shiro snorts out a tiny bit of laughter. It’s a nice sound to hear. Everyone’s been a lot more than a little quiet since the whole thing with Ezor and Zethrid a few days ago. It’s—frankly—infuriating. She’s fine. Those two hadn’t managed to get that many hits on her, and the stab wounds and broken rib had healed up nicely after just a couple hours in the remaining cryopod.

Keith frowns at her, and of course it’s at that moment that the worst happens, because she’s beginning to heavily suspect that someone has some sort of superpower that allows him to detect every single time a certain other someone has anything worse than typical brooding on his face.

“Now Pidgey,” The worst coos, moving to lean on Keith’s shoulder (Pidge doesn’t miss how Keith’s cheeks flush the colour of a flamingo) with an incredibly infuriating grin. “You know I literally despise, like loathe, abhor even—“

“Lance.”

“—Saying these words, but Keith… is…right.” He hacks out the last word as though it were a particularly displeasing chunk of phlegm. Keith tosses him a disgruntled look, but doesn’t interject.

Pidge actually raises her eyebrows at that. Lance may be desperately in love with Keith (even if he is in a truly shocking amount of denial) but some things haven't changed. Lance would still rather give up his moisturizer for the rest of his life then admit Keith had actually made a point.

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Horrible words. Truly astonished by myself. But Pidge—“

Something softens in his eyes at that, something that just seems so familiar and she hates it and she loves it and she wants it to go away and she wants it to stay forever and Matt— (She cuts her train of thought off at that, just in time to tune back into the real world)

“—It’s a really, really bad idea. And you hardly ever have those so just, maybe, let this one go?” She knows this tone. She knows all about the pleading look and the compliments.

She knows it always, always works on Hunk.

She knows it’s never once worked on her before.

“Nope.” She says brightly. "It's literally the furthest thing from a bad idea, actually."

Keith sighs again. He does that a lot these days.

“Pidge, just let me go. Or Allura, or Hunk, or quiznak, even Lance.”

“Rude!”

Hunk makes his way over just as the two lovebirds have fallen into a full-on scuffle, Pidge watching with a faint snort.

“You know,” He begins, and Pidge turns, just slightly, towards him. “It’s not that we think you can’t handle yourself." It's exactly like that. "It’s just…” He takes a breath, twiddles his thumbs. “Can you really blame us?”

“I’m fine.” Pidge says. She doesn’t answer the question.

“It was bad. You… weren’t in good shape.”

A long appendage wrapped around her throat, squeezing the air from her lungs.

“I know.” She says, rubbing at one of her temples. “And I’m really, really sorry I scared you, but I’m ok. Honest.”

Hunk looks at her for a moment.

“Twelve hours, Pidge. You were in there for twelve hours.”

“Hence why I need to go, because god forbid if we need that pod again and we're not near a convenient source." She pinches her nose. This should not be such a damn argument. "I used up the last of the sap. It’s only logical.”

Hunk looks at her like he very much doubts that conclusion.

A thread of concern and displacement slips into her mind, and she whips her head around to glare at Green.

“Ok will everyone please just shut up!” She shrieks, and Hunk jumps a little while Allura, just returned from a water supply run, nearly drops her cargo—and the mice along with it. Keith and Lance freeze where they are, Lance in the process of giving Keith a noogie. Shiro’s head whips up from the pot of soup Hunk clearly left him in charge over, a small dollop falling off the spoon with a tragic splat onto the mossy ground. Coran doesn’t even blink, probably too focused on checking Black’s booster jets, while Krolia simply keeps on sharpening her knife and Romelle doesn’t even twitch in her slumber, her snores still echoing throughout the small forest glade.

Green sends a tiny twinge of amusement, and Pidge bats it away with a growl before taking a deep breath, steepling her fingers in front of her.

“As I’ve said,” she begins calmly. “I am fine. I am perfectly capable of walking a few hundred meters into this perfectly safe, very well lit forest to find a perfectly docile tree—with Green acting as a very helpful GPS.” Keith opens his mouth as if to speak, so she sends a sharp look his way before continuing. “So, if you will all please just let me do this incredibly simple and perfectly safe task, we can quite easily be on our way by tomorrow. Can we all agree?”

She grins one of her favourite grins, the ever-so-slightly unhinged one that's crooked corners and sharp edges, and a stray beam of sunlight glints off her glasses.

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Keith gets to his feet, brushing off the grey dust clinging to his jacket before crossing his arms. “You’re going even if I say no, aren’t you?” He asks, the voice uncannily similar to Shiro’s ‘dad voice.’ Like they needed two of him.

“Yep.” Pidge says cheerfully, and Keith sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“Fine.” He says. “But—“ He cuts off, turning to Shiro, who quite gleefully picks up the sentence.

“We have ground rules.” He continues. “No sidetracking. No putting yourself in unnecessary danger. No field studies—”

“Really just gonna take the fun out of everything, huh?”

“—Bring your comms. Come back once you’re done. And listen to Green.” He sits back. “Deal?”

Pidge huffs out a breath.

“Ok, fine. Deal.”

***

Turns out, sap collecting, even from a relatively soggy tree, is a way more labour intensive process than she’d thought.

Pidge comes to this conclusion after struggling for fifteen minutes to attach the tap to the right sap vein, spending another fifteen trying to figure out how the filter Coran had given her even worked, getting sprayed in the face four times, losing a crap ton of the stuff after the vial apparently hadn’t been fully secured even though the light was green, she swears, and finally getting sprayed one last time as she’s disassembling the setup after what was probably, all in, four hours. (She’s not counting the extra hour spent studying that weird lichen. Don’t blame her, it was neon pink and smelled like chocolate she had to)

Green snickers in her mind after the last on that list, nudging her consciousness affectionately. Pidge happily reciprocates, having gotten used to that whole feeling months (years?) ago.

Har-Har. She shoots back. Green gives her the mental equivalent of a lick on the head.

She starts on the long, slow process of packing up. The tap has to be nestled ever so carefully into the space-foam casing. The filters have to be laid perfectly on top of one another and sealed in that airtight glass box. The sap itself has to be delicately positioned in the climate controlled holsters.

Pidge might take a little longer than she specifically needs to. Green quite helpfully reminds her of this.

I’m just being careful.

Green doesn’t buy it. Pidge snickers under her breath just the slightest bit. Sue her, the boys hadn’t given her a second without one of them hovering over her for the past week.

Never mind the fact that she’s saved their asses like fifteen times by now. Never mind the fact that she’s been fighting in a literal space war for over a year. No, Pidge gets beat up one time, and we’re just gonna completely forget about all of that.

It wasn’t even that bad! She only got three stab wounds and one broken ankle and a couple mildly fractured ribs! Keith’s had triple that and they all fussed over him way less! (She has to admit that may have been out of a justified fear of being bitten if they tried to mother him. It didn’t stop Shiro, of course. She still has the blackmail pics)

She’s still griping to herself about this when it hits her. ‘It’ is a spear, a crossbow bolt, a lightning strike of Green’s consciousness ramming into her cerebral cortex. ‘It’ is absolutely dripping in urgency and pain and fear. ‘It’ seems to be very conflicted about whether to tell her to run as far away as possible or get her ass back to base right damn now.

Because this is Pidge we’re talking about, and because her admitted mild impulsiveness when it comes to family tends to win out over literally any other mental processes, Pidge immediately starts hauling ass back to camp like she’s being chased by a cougar in the mountains. By Green’s grace, the verdant forest doesn’t impede her at all as she darts through the foliage. Snaking vines sink a little lower in the ground to remove the threat of tripping, the moss becomes almost bouncy under her feet.

It’s one of those small, absolutely incredibly useful things their Lions do for them—Blue’s manipulation of the currents was one of the only reasons Lance was able to catch that quintessence shipment three months ago. (she guesses it’s three years ago now, which, weird)

Pidge has never been more grateful for it.

Green is still screaming in her mind, all danger-danger-run-other cubs-danger-hurry-loss. She still spares a moment to chastise her for nearly stumbling over a log. That’s her lion for you.

Pidge manages a breathy laugh through the bond, but she can tell it’s forced. Green’s presence is… fading. It's slipping from it's well established crook in her mind like space goo. She knows all the things that could mean. She doesn’t want to think about a single one of them, not when the extended paladin bond is fading and slipping just the same. Not when Green had specifically mentioned them in her warning.

Instead of letting her thoughts run wild like they very desperately want to, instead of letting herself cry at the fading grip she has on Green’s celadon-emerald-chartreuse presence, she focuses whatever of herself she can spare on sending love-be there soon-safe back through the stretching threads of their bond.

This is weird, for them. She knows they both know it. Green’s usually the one soothing Pidge’s frayed nerves. Green’s the one who coralls her thoughts and purrs comfort into her mind when they spiral out of control. Pidge isn’t the one who usually does the comforting.

For fuck’s sake, she left for five hours to get sap.

It was supposed to be a simple mission.

The thread, frayed and stretched to the brink, snaps the second she bursts into the clearing, Green’s last message of love and trust arcing like thunder down the frayed end. Pidge frantically chases after it, grasping and reaching as the thread (and Green) drifts further away.

She realizes why the second she’s gathered enough to be able to look around.

Because their camp is completely and utterly destroyed, and there's not a soul left.

What’s left of her critical thinking—the part not currently screaming into the void for that flicker of sage and mint and rosemary—clocks the scuff-marks on the ground, the still-boiling soup Shiro had been guarding all morning. The heavy imprints where five sets of paws had laid not three hours ago. The haphazard scatter of burn marks from blaster fire and slashes etched into the trees and ground by a sword, or two. The clear landing marks of Galra spacecraft.

They’re gone, everyone. It doesn’t take anything much to discern that. And yet for Pidge, it only sinks in once she catches sight of the blade.

It’s Keith’s.

Not his Bayard, that particular weapon is one he’s lost before for a second or two in the heat of battle. No, this is his Marmora dagger, the dagger that for most of his life had been the only thing left of his mother.

The dagger that Keith fought a base full of Galra in order to keep.

The dagger that he would never, never leave behind.

Not if he had any sort of choice.

Pidge doesn’t look up. She doesn’t scan the sky for any trace of the fuckwads who stole her family. She knows they’ve jumped by now, no chance torturing herself if it won’t bring her family back.

What Pidge does do is pick up the dagger like it’s made of gossamer and diamonds. She packs it securely and gently in the satchel that's still, somehow, hanging around her shoulder, cradling the sap that's the only reason she's not vanished too.

She serves herself a bowl of soup.

And then she sits down and starts planning.

Because the black holes will fucking disappear before Pidge lets this slide.

Because there is going to be absolute hell to pay.

Chapter Text

Day 26: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 08:14

Planet 0755 "Anala" — Airbase X-Theta-8

Pidge is the tree. She is the leaf. She is not wearing a neon-accented shining white only partially green set of very distinctive Paladin armour. She is the tree.

So, admittedly, part one of plan: codename “Fuck the Galra” is not off too a perfect start. She can admit it. The circumstances as they pertain to this particular mission are vastly different from her other solo missions.

Mostly, speficially, the fact that she usually has some idea of a mission objective. Or even a reasonable place to start. Or even something to go on other than a luxite blade that’s currently digging into her side and a threadbare sack containing what meagre bits of stuff she’d managed to find back at base.

This time, she’s winging it.

Which, thankfully, is one of her strengths. Chopping off all her hair and creating a fake identity hadn’t been… thought out, exactly. Neither had been committing what was technically treason and fleeing on a very overcrowded bike through the California desert before promptly finding an inter-dimensionally originating space cat and ending up one of the key players in a ten-thousand year long intergalactic war.

So she’s going with the flow for this one. It’s worked to varying degrees before.

But this tree is nowhere near as comfortable as the one she’d camped out in last night. Maybe that wouldn’t be the case if she’d tossed the armour in with the rest of her shit, but she hadn’t the slightest clue what the climate at the transport hub currently looming in front of her was, and lugging a bag full of armour was too cumbersome when this entire portion of her constantly evolving plan relied solely on speed.

So armour (and a rather precarious cloak as a ‘disguise’) it was.

She grumbles to herself under her breath as the two sentries keep blabbering on about gambling or something. Just her luck she got here right after a shift change. At this point she’s debating just trying to walk right by them and fade into the crowd. She doesn’t think they’d notice.

Eventually—because her patience is razor-thin—that’s exactly what she does, swinging on her Bayard to another tree behind them and dropping lightly from the branches, silently moving past the two and hurrying along the bridge that crosses over the canyon and leads right to the near-fortress that this planet apparently claims as it’s main interplanetary transport hub.

She was right, the guards don’t even flinch.

***

Part two of phase one of “Fuck the Galra” is very simple.

1. Find a ship.

2. Get the fuck off this planet.

Very simple. Very easy to mess up.

Because the Universe apparently hates it’s defenders, someone recognizes her right as she’s minding her own business and buying some space-plums for on-the-road provisions.

“Hey!” They say excitedly. “Aren’t you the Green Paladin? Parsimonious Pidge or something?”

She’s going to murder Coran for this. She's going to murder Bee-Bo-Bee for this. She’d murder that damn parasite again too, if she could.

But for now she just hightails it out of the food court, short legs going as fast as they possibly can. Predictably, the Galra soldiers (because while this planet may not have been occupied three years ago, that’s obviously very much changed) currently enjoying their nice little lunch break sprint after her, leaving their sandwiches in the dust.

Pidge launches her grappling hook, rocketing herself up onto the rooftops of the stalls and dashing across the beams holding up the canvas. A soldier tries to make a grab at her as she’s nearing the exit, but electricity is sparking along his armour before he’s got a chance in hell.

She reacquaints herself with the ground in front of the entrance with a well-practiced flip, and because she can, sends a jaunty salute to the guards still half a food court away from her.

“PALADIN!” one of them bellows angrily, and Pidge snorts, because seriously? Rage-filled scream? So overdramatic. She’s seen way better.

Then she turns. And, oh. Turns out it was more of a rallying cry.

Pidge stares at what’s labeled as Landing Gate F. The Entirety Of Landing Gate F, all dozen people plus seven Galra soldiers, stares back.

Fuck, she thinks. Then, for good measure, she says it out loud too.

She drops her bag neatly in a corner.

The Entirety Of Landing Gate F starts moving all at once, because now that she thinks about it, there’s definitely some kind of bounty for the lot of them out there, and because it’s just her luck The Entirety Of Landing Gate F seems to know about it.

She’s moving by the next tick, the rope of her Bayard, glowing poison green, cracking at her side.

She launches off with the remaining juice in her jetpack, boosting off a nearby support pillar and arcing over the first knot of people. Her Bayard’s cord whips after her, and she flicks it into a neat curve that knocks several off their feet even without the added voltage. She sidesteps an approaching alien—eight-limbed, blood red eyes—and summons her shield just in time to catch a blow that would have taken her arm off from one of the galra soldiers.

A Korg-looking rock guy lunges at her from the side, a chair wielded as a semi-weapon. She grips one of the legs hurtling towards her and uses it to flip upwards and land on his back, launching from there onto the shoulders of one of the Galra soldiers and swinging the cord of her Bayard around his feet as she does so. He goes down like—well, like a pile of rocks.

The Galra falls with a well placed stun-strength shock to the back of the neck, and no sooner than that she’s twisting to block the sword of someone who looks kinda like Bee-bo-bee, if Bee-Bo-Bee was legitimately evil instead of merely very annoying. Green sparks burst from where their weapons connect and with a push of her willpower they converge, sparking up the blade and down the alien’s metal armour. He topples to the ground, but she’s too late to dodge the blaster fire that shoots fire-hot nails of pain into her shoulder, and she grips it with a hiss as her armour immediately tightens around the wound to stop the blood flow.

Her efforts—and the general chaos—have thinned the crowd to a degree, but she doesn’t get to sit her ass down quite yet. Her Bayard is still glowing green at her side as she faces the five left in front of her. Her bangs are sticking to her forehead.

She charges, they charge, and one is quickly taken down with a charged-up lash to the chest while she drops to the floor and slides under the attack of another, blade notched into a fold in his wooden plate armour and charged with all she’s got. A third, in a strange bout of luck, trips over the two already downed and knocks his head on one of their hard helmets. She squares off against the two Galra left staring daggers at her, and tosses one of her disarmingly chaotic smirks at them before dashing, Bayard wrapping around one of their arms and swiftly leveraged, thanks to the element of surprise—to slam him into the other one, who goes down hard with a hit to the skull.

The last one snarls bloody murder at her, and Pidge hacks a loogie onto the floor in response. Her Bayard is still wrapped around his arm, and with a scream she lets all the emotion coursing through her stream into her Bayard and crackle down the cord. He’s down in moments.

Pidge just stands there for a second, breathing heavy puffs of air that cloud the cold, dry air that’s a fixture on Anala and wincing as a stabbing pain reminds her oh-so-helpfully of the blast that hit her shoulder. She steps over to the bag she stowed away, wipes Matt’s glasses on the cloth, and slings it back over her non-injured shoulder. The unconscious and dozing bodies of bounty hunters and soldiers are spread across the smooth grey-blue floor, and the aquamarine lighting casts neon over the landing gate.

Distantly, she can hear a couple alarms ringing. That checks out. She is a presumed-dead paladin after all.

That being said, she should probably hightail it off this planet and onto somewhere she might be able to get some answers. She did debate downloading whatever logs were on the systems here, but something tells her the Galra aren’t exactly going to be using commercial landing space to track where they keep high-priority captives.

So, off-world it is.

She’s twisted her ankle, that much is clear the second she takes a step, but a couple taps on her suit’s interface cause a neat compression of her armour boot that works well enough as a splint. Because she never really had the time to find schematics, she’s forced to hobble her way over to one of those maps that hang around at malls and airports and apparently space landing terminals.

She browses over the options, before shrugging and turning right, past a heavily armoured door that is surprisingly easy to take out with a shock to it’s control panel.

***

The landing terminal, basic as would be expected for a planet of this population, does indeed have a few things she does want. The ship she’s currently attempting to hot-wire is one of them. It’s a beautiful thing, sleek and astoundingly aerodynamic with a liftoff functionality that’s one of the better she’s ever seen and glowing purple accents. It’s a feat of engineering. As such, it is also not Galra, but she’s ok with that.

Keeping a low profile is not that important as long as it means she gets to fly this beauty. Keith and Lance and Shiro may be the pilots among them, but Pidge has never, and she means never, passed up an opportunity to fly something as beautifully mathematically functional. (And yeah, she does kind of love flying Green. Even the barrel rolls. Especially the barrel rolls)

That said, such stunning design does come with the annoying fact of being a little more difficult to hack.

The door was easy enough, because apparently analog locks do still exist in space and Pidge has a little bit (a lot) of experience in lock-picking, because the older buildings of the Garrison—where they kept the archival records—were built in the ‘70s and like hell was she going to let mechanical locks of all things stand in her way.

So the real hard part was the controls. Namely because they had to be connected to a nearby signal with the precise encoded frequency in order to do their job and, you know, control shit.

And fuck if that isn’t a complicated signal to pull the requirements for out of the databanks. Every bit of it was linked to a different region of function in the programming, so she had to dig through five separate sections of coding in order to just get the wavelength. The encoding was an entirely different matter, and eventually Pidge had given up on subtlety all-together and just reverse-engineered the entire thing because yeah, it might theoretically take longer, but digging through mountains of system update logs to get one little fluctuation rate would take a whole heck of a lot longer.

She’s just finalizing entering the signal into her armour’s com emitters when she hears thumping at the door.

Her eyes immediately go to the chair and broom she used to barricade the one entrance to the hangar. Not her best idea, in hindsight, but she was in a rush, ok?

She starts typing quicker, fingers swiping across emitter settings and broadcast range and a whole lot of other useless shit she doesn’t need to deal with right now before finally, finally, she’s able to swipe up and the code disappears seamlessly into her armour’s matrix.

A big, golden button appears on the central console. It almost looks like a keyless car ignition.

She slams her hand down on top of it right as the doors burst and fifteen Galra soldiers, armed to the teeth and armoured up to their ears, spill into the windswept space. A ripple of gold pulses out from the button and down the ship as it thrums to life beneath her feet, systems engaging and prepping for takeoff.

She spares half a second to note how the jets could really be more efficient even without damaging the perfect balance of the wing ratio, but she’s quickly snapped back to reality by someone’s ugly mug pressed flush to the glass radiation shield in front of her. She jolts, a yelp and a curse slipping from her lips, and starts frantically smacking buttons and pulling levers in some vain hope to find the windshield wipers before she remembers that this is space, and windshield wipers aren’t exactly a necessity on spaceships.

That said, she does manage to find some sort of glitter cannon that blasts the dude enough the get him to lose his grip, and she does find the speakers, which is a welcome relief.

She pushes the thruster slider up to a hundred and slams the button that orients them downward before pulling the landing gear up with a flick of her hand on a holographic interface.

She pulls hard on what looks kind of like a Tesla steering wheel and suddenly she’s shooting off and out of the hanger at a speed that’s mildly comparable to that one time she was on a bullet train, but, like, fifty times faster.

Not that she can control that speed, mind you. Keith and Lance and Shiro are the pilots, she’s only good with Green because, well, she’s a magic robot lion who can literally read her mind. One of those three would be able to fly this thing no problem, no questions. Hell, Lance or Keith would probably end up preforming a mini airshow just for shits and giggles.

Pidge? She’s just trying not to crash into the building she just shot out of at mach 50.

It’s harder than it looks. This damn ship is almost too aerodynamic—she can hardly slow it down enough to control the fucking thing.

So… She doesn’t. She just kind of, lets it do it’s thing. If she smashes into a few trees along the way and scares the shit out of a flock of space-birds, then—well, it’s for a good cause.

Thankfully, even though Pidge is by no means a fancy-shmancy pilot, she can still reasonably drive a spaceship, and even though the controls on this one are needlessly complicated and full of completely illogical user interface choices that are a blight on the stunning engineering, she’s able to pull the craft up into a sharp spiral ascension, just like the manoeuvre in Piloting 101. That course was sadly mandatory.

Damn, she was right. Despite the speed control difficulties, this ship is a fucking dream to fly. It’s so efficient, so wonderfully engineered, and the coding of the systems is unparalleled to almost anything she’d ever seen.

Quiznak, she misses Green so damn much. Her lion would have mentally chastised her at least seven times in the last hour, but she’d be there, that charteuse-emerald-forest comfort at the edges of her thoughts. She’s lived with her there for one (four) years now. There’s a gap, a hole, now, where she should be, and the fact that she isn’t there feels more wrong than just about anything Pidge has ever experienced.

But that’s going to be fixed, soon, she thinks, and grins to herself, flicking on autopilot, as the orange sky of Anala fades into the pitch black void of star-speckled purple-streaked space. She’s seen this sight, and a thousand other variations, a trillion times. Yet it never ceases to make her breath catch, to set her heart beating a little faster, to get her eyes to widen so she can take it all in. It’s things like this that remind her science was once called magic.

“You see those, Katie? Each of those stars is another sun, and each of those suns have their own planets, and every single planet looks out onto the same tapestry. The same sky, even if it looks a little different, and even if they can see things we can’t from Earth. It’s all one universe, and I’d bet my bottom dollar you’re going to get to see it all one day.”

Her Dad’s voice slips into her thoughts unbidden, and. Pidge recoils less than half a second after. She stops. Breathes. Pushes the storm that’s been swirling in her gut since Ezor and Zethrid (three years) back into the pit of her stomach where it belongs. Wipes the moisture from her eyes.

She looks up, again. Back to the big wide universe, the empty void cradling it’s stars. The same tapestry anyone on Earth could see. The same tapestry her—

She grimaces. Pushes it back down and adds a few more chains to keep it there.

She can take her well-deserved time to freak out once she’s got her family back and they’re safe on Earth.

Pidge puffs out a last deep breath through tight lungs before setting her coordinates for the nearest heavily populated planet. She doesn’t really think too hard about switching the radio settings to interstellar, she just knows a little music would do her good at the moment. The cacophony that emanates from the speakers is about the closest thing to good old Metallica she’s heard since leaving earth.

It’s a damn balm for the soul.

She opens the little holographic notepad on her armour and checks off the header labeled “phase one.”

Then, begrudgingly but well aware of the hisses she's involuntarily releasing every time she moves her arm, she goes looking for a med kit as Space Metallica blares in the background.

Day 25 1/2: “Voltron’s super-fantastic not-so-great-so-far intergalactic road trip.” 08:14

Interstellar space(?)— Unknown cruiser.

The Universe must have it out for it’s defenders. That’s really the only explanation Lance can think of that would explain why not even four weeks into their little year-long jaunt back to earth they’d already been captured… twice? It was twice, right? Honestly he can’t even remember. He thinks it’s twice, now, though. Probably. He’s 87% sure.

The Galra—lovely fellows, very sweet—drop all seven—no, eight—no…. (Lance curses, does the math in his head for a second.) Nine, yeah. They drop all nine of them on the ground in front of some fancy-ass command chair. There’s a stern looking, pompous-aura-radiating Galra on it. Some things don’t ever change.

Mr. Frowny-Face starts his big old speech. Routine stuff; “don’t even attempt to escape,” and “you will tell us everything or we’ll torture you,” and “I am Frowny-Face, powerful asshole who is totally going to do something I think is very impressive because I'm overcompensating for something.” They all blur into one after the fifteenth or so.

Lance scoffs (under his breath, because while he is a smart-ass he doesn’t feel like getting electrocuted any sooner than necessary) and turns to Pidge to share their customary ‘can you believe this guy’ eye-roll.

Except—

Pidge isn’t there.

A spark of panic flares to life in Lance’s chest, and his sharpshooter’s eyes quickly scan the rest of their little group.

Pidge isn’t there.

Pidge isn’t there.

And—and she’d been out collecting sap. For the pods. Yeah.

Fuck. Fuck, he’d completely forgotten. Granted, he had been pretty solidly knocked out by a blast meant for Keith (the jerk hadn’t stopped staring at him worriedly since, so Lance had hardly stopped blushing since) but HOLY SHIT!

“Where’s Pidge?” He blurts out, not thinking, as soon as the reality sets in that Pidge isn’t there. He doesn’t notice the shockwaves that ripple through their little space-family at his words. He’s too focused on the question of Where The Fuck Is Pidge. Did they get her? Did something in the forest get her? Is she hurt did his little sister die—

There’s suddenly a hand on his. Keith.

Lance looks up, and for as worried as Keith looks now that the reality has settled on him too, the contact helps. Lance, though he will only admit this under pain of death, interlaces their fingers.

Frowny-Face—Admiral Portin, his brain supplies, but that’s boring—stares down at them. Somethings clicks behind his eyes.

“We have the paladin.” He says smoothly, languidly. “He’s in… alternate accommodations, at the moment.”

Lance’s stomach is a chunk of neutron star, one of the heaviest substances in the universe. It’s—this is too fucking similar to what had happened on that ship, what had happened to Pidge because none of them could protect her, because he couldn’t protect her—

That’s all he really thinks about on the way to their cell, even though Pidge would punch him for thinking she couldn't take care of herself, even as Keith screeches and Hunk pleads and Shiro demands to be told that she’s safe.

All he can think about is the very real possibility that Pidge is going through that (he can’t even bring himself to remember it) all over again, without them there to, at the very least, let her know they were there at all.

And all because they let her go out for fucking sap.

***

“What do you mean, you forgot one?” Admiral Portin snarls as he paces the wall of his office, purple claws dragging at the metal.

The two officers in front of him gulp simultaneously. He doesn’t stare at them. He just waits.

“You, um…” One of them starts, and his yellow eyes snap towards the poor unfortunate soul. Said officer falls silent. He doesn’t remove his gaze.

“Go on,” he purrs. “Or I’ll send you both to our resident druid.”

That spurs him to action.

“With all respect, Admiral Portin, Sir. You directed us to secure all five paladins, plus anyone they may be travelling with”

“That I did, Sergeant. Now tell me how this is relevant.”

“Yes, well, um…” He stutters off again. Portin has half a mind to put him out of his misery. “There are. Five, I mean. Out there.”

Now that makes him stop his pacing.

“I’m sorry?”

“What Sergeant Weft is trying to say, Admiral Portin, sir, is that there are five life-forms wearing Paladin armour out there,” the other one—Portin really can’t remember his name—cuts in.

Portin cocks his head.

“Regis,” he begins, not turning to look at where his secretary is waiting. “Do pull up the camera footage, will you?”

“Certainly, Sir.” A hologram jolts to life between him and the two officers. It’s timestamp is from an hour ago. Displayed are all eight prisoners retrieved from planet oh-seven-fifty-five, and to his surprise, his lackeys are, for once, right. There are five sets of paladin armour in that cell.

He narrows his eyes.

Black, Red, Blue, Yellow, Pink—

Pink?

Pink.

Portin growls, slashes through the hologram in one quick motion, then strides over to punch the wall. He stands there, not removing his fist from it’s dent, and breathes heavily for a second before straightening, smoothing out his fur. He turns his head—only his head—towards the two officers.

“Tell me, is there a pink lion?”

The two officers look at each other.

“No?” The one that No-Name called Weft says.

“And tell me, has the Galra empire seen the Red Paladin recently?”

“I, uh—“

“—No, we haven’t. Do you know why?” He doesn’t give them a chance to answer. “Because the paladins preformed a quiznaking lion swap when the black one was presumed dead. Pink took over for Blue, Blue for Red, Red for Black until he took up the mantle again. Yellow and Green didn’t change.” He turns to them, glares daggers. “Tell me, then. You have his lion, but where is the Green Paladin?”

The two officers freeze.

“That’s what I thought.” He hisses.

“But, Admiral Portin, sir, do you not have Voltron? If—if you will permit me to ask, why do we need the green one?”

Portin stares at them for a good moment.

“Oh Daibazzall, you’re jocks, aren’t you,” he mutters under his breath. “Because, officers, of two reasons. The first is that the Voltron Lions don’t do shit unless their Paladins are with them. Anyone who passed their basic history courses should know that.”

The two officers shoot each other looks. Predictable.

“The second, is because of a simple principle all factions of the Galra Empire have followed since the Paladins first took on one of our ships.”

He pauses, for dramatic effect.

“And that is, sir?” No-Name eventually asks.

“If you capture even one paladin, you had better have captured them all.” He thinks for a moment. “Or... be willing to resort to… other methods to keep the rest in line.”

A cruel smirk snakes its way along his face.

He sends both officers to the druid, in the end.

Chapter Text

Day 27: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 05:23

Interstellar Space— Cruiser Charlie-Niner-Tango ShipName: Verdigris

Pidge doesn’t sleep a wink.

She does take a shower in the little on-board bathroom, she does patch up the blaster wound with some only slightly wobbly sutures, she does scrub her armour clean within an inch of it’s molecular integrity, she does eat a little dinner and some space-plums, she does spend an hour combing the ship for any semblance of reading material—to a truly deplorable amount of avail—she does wire the GAC stored on-system to her own personal servers, she does spend an hour or two re-wiring the fuel converters so the blasters can pick up speed a little.

To be honest, the only thing she doesn’t do is sleep.

This, she knows, is not a good idea. She also knows that she doesn’t care. She furthermore knows that she sounds like Keith when she thinks that, but she even furthermore knows that she doesn’t care.

The ship’s quarters are perfectly nice, but they’re not the castle. They’re not Green.

Quiznak, I miss her. I miss them.

“I miss talking to people in general,” she says out loud about five hours into the flight, then plunks her forehead on the table once Green’s predictable but still unexpected silence registers.

She’s gotten way too comfortable talking to herself.

Eventually, she runs out of productive things to do, and tragically, the ship’s Galactic Positioning System still clocks fifteen more hours until arrival at B-52.

So she ends up recalibrating her bayard.

Twice.

And then spends two hours bemoaning the fact that she can’t even get a start on planning her magnificent rescue because she doesn’t even know where the fuck they are or what the fuck she’s gonna have to go through in order to get them out.

And then she spends a few hours going through the ship’s logs, hoping someone interesting might have owned it, but nooooo, it just had to be someone boring, didn’t it universe? Just some completely benign corrupt Galra merchant with more money than sense, as proved by the fact that he didn’t even have a basic password lock on his GAC accounts—which are now bled dry, of course.

Eventually, she’s completely out of ideas. Flummoxed for things to do.

And then the thinking starts. That particular type of thinking. Exactly what she was trying to avoid.

Look. Ever since she was even tinier then she is now, Pidge has had a little, tiny bit of a tendency towards getting stuck in her head, snared in the circling thoughts she just can’t get rid of. This is just something she knows about herself.

It only became a real issue—beyond checking that the doors were locked at least twice a night—after Matt and her Dad went missing. In the two months that followed the day her and her mom had clung, sobbing, on the floor with an abandoned cell phone on the groud beside them, Pidge hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.

It started the Sunday after the funeral, were they scared? Intruding into her head as she tried (and failed) to make breakfast for her mom that morning. Pidge—Katie, then—grit her teeth, shook her head, turned back to the eggs sizzling on the pan. Then barely thirty seconds later it was back, forcing images of how they might have screamed, cried, closed their eyes in the face of inevitability, directly into her frontal lobe.

She’d shook her head, tried deep breaths like she’d always been told, but it just kept coming back. Worse and worse every time, and it wouldn’t stop.

The eggs were burnt by the time she’d regained a modicum of sense. She’d let out a strangled cry as she hurled them into the disposal unit and collapsed to the floor in sobs.

It continued, only got worse and harder to get rid of, harder to hide from her mom—she wouldn’t give her something else to deal with, not now—and harder to live with.

If I’d been there, I would have saved them.

Did they think of us?

Was it quick, at least?

Did they suffer? Did they bleed out slowly did they burn alive were they forced to watch each other die—

When that one showed up for the first time, when Katie was lying in bed at 3am without a stitch of exhaustion to her name, she hadn’t even thought about it. She’d just gotten up, walked smoothly to her desk, and let the blue light of her computer illuminate her face.

Barely an hour later (the Garrison might be good, but she was better) the evidence had been staring her in the face.

They were alive. They had to be. The garrison had classified every single one of the mission files, encrypted so tight she’d have to be in the building itself to get at it. There was no other explanation. Even if there was an error with the machinery instead of the pilot—as they’d claimed—there wouldn’t be this much encryption, and it certainly wouldn’t be centralized. Nowadays those sorts of catastrophes required the ability to work on them remotely.

This was not that. This was something she’d never seen. This wasn’t something they were working on, this was something they didn’t even want to touch. This was something they’d decided could never, ever be seen by the world.

And that, to Katie’s mind, could only mean one thing.

And that was how she figured out a coping mechanism. As long as she was working, as long as she was doing something, as long as she tired herself out enough to fall asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, the thoughts kept their distance—they’d changed, though, when they did show up. The death and suffering replaced with bleeding, scared faces tortured at the hands of… someone. Their faces shifted. Sometimes it was the Garrison themselves, sometimes it was nothing but shadow.

Was it healthy? Probably not.

But only three months later Pidge Gunderson had a fake ID and an admission letter from the Galaxy Garrison.

She didn’t tell her mom. To her mom’s knowledge, Katherine Marie Holt had been accepted to a prestigious coding academy on the East Coast, not to the program where she lost her husband and son.

(Pidge never did forgive herself for that. What did they even tell her? They must have known at some point, must have figured out her ruse. What did her mother even think of her?)

The Garrison was both a blessing and a curse. The structure did wonders, but added to the cycle were fears of being caught, sent home to her livid mom, and knowing the truth but never being able to get to the bottom of… everything.

Hunk and Lance started to make appearances, too. Crashing, burning, the whole shebang to the point that most days she just wanted to grab them by the collars of their jackets and scream at them to leave before they died too. Just like dad. Just like Matt.

The shadows torturing her family gained faces, twisted and snarling and cruel, when she picked up the first scattered words of alien chatter.

And then Shirogane Takashi himself crash-landed out of the sky, and her, the two idiots who basically asked for gruesome death, the loner one of said idiots had a very unwanted crush on, and the pilot who’d been on the Kerberos mission—still alive—found a magic blue robot lion.

And the thoughts changed again. The shadows had very definitive faces now, and with every mission, every cruelty witnessed and ended, the selection of tortures her family could be going through only grew. They were joined by vivid images of her team, her new weird little space family, dead and buried because she, the shield of Voltron, couldn’t protect them.

(And by thoughts of her mom, left alone to believe her entire family was dead. Those are some of the worst, the non-stop thinking about just how completely devastated her mom must be)

But Pidge is nothing if not stubborn. The thoughts were quickly dispatched 97.2% of the time thanks to all-nighters, high-stakes missions, and non-stop coding.

After Olkarion, when Green made herself a comfortable spot in her mindscape, she helped too. Pidge liked to think of it as her batting the thoughts away, pouncing on them with eyes bright and tail lashing like it was a fun game.

But she doesn’t have that anymore. Green’s not there to chase the thoughts away.

And right now, all that Pidge can think about is how she left them—

You know what? Nope.

Nope. Nope she’s not doing this she’s not thinking about what could be happening to them in the hands of the Galra she’s not thinking about how she might be losing another family right this moment she’s not thinking about the fact that it’s been three fucking years she’s not thinking about how she’s the one who did it this time—

She’s not fucking doing it.

She legitimately can’t. She doesn’t have the luxury at the moment. If she starts spiraling, she’s gonna shut down and curl up into a little ball and she won’t be any help to anyone.

Healthy frame of mind? Absolutely not. Pidge is self-aware enough to admit that.

The only thing that’ll clear her head and get the thoughts to stop, based on prior experience?

Yep. Pretty much.

Pidge ends up attempting to recreate google’s dinosaur no-internet game on the very, very simplistic cockpit interface.

It keeps her mind occupied.

She doesn’t have anything more helpful to do anyway.

Day 27: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 21:07

Planet B-52 "Delrig" —

She lands on a field just outside the city, the blasters emitting waves into the grass, and disembarks in the same approximation-of-a-disguise that she got on Anala. Not like she has anything better to wear at the moment, anyway.

She’s been here once before, in the earlier days when Lance was still in Blue, Keith was still in Red, and Shiro’s hair only had a little white shock amongst the black. The planet had been under Galra rule for at least a dozen deca-phoebes, but they’d managed to return control to the Delrians after a week or two. Pretty typical timeline for them.

It’s a perfectly nice planet, characterised by wind-battered moors and deep ravines. Nowadays, Pidge tends towards forested places, but she really did like it here. Delrig had been all too happy to join the coalition once they got it really up and running, but they’d thankfully never been called in to defend against more incursions.

Evidently, though, that transmission must have been made at some point—to no response—because it frankly looks like they’d never been here at all.

The Galra flag—with the addition of a bloody sword speared through the emblem—flies high over the senate chambers of the capital, and smokestacks rise from brutalist factories interspersed among the dirty marble buildings. The once pure, fresh-mown-grass scented air is now thick with haze, the contents of which she really doesn’t want to know. Gone is the soft music that used to echo through the marvelously acoustically engineered city, the once neon-green grass is dull and faded, and the moors themselves are screaming, echoing pain and suffering and death into the ambient background of quintessence, so loud she nearly has to cover her ears.

(That’s something that developed after Olkarion. It’s a long story. She’ll get to that later.)

It’s a nightmare. It’s her fault.

She’s the Green Paladin. Guardian of nature. It’s her damn job, ordained by the fucking universe itself, to make sure this doesn’t happen.

This shit shouldn’t happen. It just shouldn’t. They’ve been fighting for a year, more than a year, if she’s being honest. And yeah, that’s barely a drop in the bucket of a ten-thousand year war. But in that year they’d freed dozens of planets, brokered peace across countless systems, even taken out Zarkon himself.

Was that—is it—has it all been undone? Everything they fought for, everything they sacrificed for, everything Shiro fucking died for, everything that Lance and Keith nearly followed in his damn footsteps for—did it just…

Did none of it matter?

Was she able to do anything at all that had meaning?

(three years)

(Three years you failed you’re the one who did it to them this time three fucking years Katie—)

Pidge shakes her head with a growl. She closes her eyes, takes a shaky breath.

Fuck, the spiraling hasn’t been this bad since before she found Matt, but that doesn’t even matter anymore does it—

Nope.

Not the time. Not the time not the time notthetimenotthetimenotthetime.

Her hands are clenched tight enough to form diamonds at her sides, but it’s only when her eyelids crack open again that the hitch threatening her lungs finally cracks through.

There’s a flower at her feet.

It’s familiar in the way a waterlogged photo album is; like a certainly recognizable, yet warped and twisted memory.

She remembers these well. Remembers how they looked like a clear sky on earth, blue splotched with white and edged in golden sunlight. The bloom at her feet barely resembles the flowers from her memories—it’s been leeched of it’s colour, coated in greyscale that only allows the faintest tint of the once bright cerulean to peek through. It’s not dead, but it’s dying.

Pidge picks it up with careful fingers, making sure not to break any of the paper-thin roots that barely borrow at all into the dry, barren-spotted ground.

She cups it in the palm of her hands. It droops as she does so, the dry soil flaking off on to her gloves. It’s as though it’s given up, as though it sees no more point in trying anymore.

That’s what cracks the damn.

Tears are tricking down her cheeks before she even notices they’re there, choked sobs barely restrained behind a furiously clenched jaw. She cradles the flower against her chest, reaching a freed hand up to rub furiously at her eyes as she tries vainly to settle her breathing. The thinking is poking at her, wailing to be let in, screaming that she deserves this, that she doesn’t deserve to cry, because it’s her fault her fault her fault.

She’s trembling as she tucks the dying blossom in a pocket of her satchel that she stole from the ship, and plants her feet in the grass.

She takes a breath.

In.

Focus on what’s in front of you.

Out.

It’s on you. Their lives are probably in your hands right now.

Inhale.

Clear head. Rationality. Organized chaos.

Exhale.

Just go in. Get the data. Get out.

Then just go from there.

Don’t let yourself overthink. You don’t get that luxury right now.

Breathe.

***

Pidge likes to think she’s gotten a whole lot better at combat since the lot of them got to space, but she’s never been one for fighting. Not her thing. She’ll leave it to the other four; that’s their purview.

Besides; Pidge’s thing is infiltration. Turns out years of learning how to break into government facilities is even more useful that anyone would think.

Which is a really good thing, because Pidge is currently staring down what’s gotta be the largest Galra communications tower in the sector. It’s the first tiny, miniscule bit of luck that she’s managed to snare in a while.

Seriously, she’d come here to get her hands on supplies, maybe a faster ship, maybe something to go off of, because she still has no fucking idea where her family is. Instead she finds the damn end of a rainbow. A beautiful antennae that connects the various branches of whatever Galra emperor-wannabe controls this region, a region that just so happens to contain a very certain planet. A tower that most certainly got some form of transmission that has something—even if they got snatched by a rival faction she finds it hard to believe there wouldn’t be any report of an incursion.

It’s a damn miracle.

Thank you universe, for once in your thirteen-point-four billion years of existence you actually decided to cut us a break.

She scales the side of the tower just like she’s done a hundred times before, on a hundred different towers. Latch onto the wedges in the hexagon bricks. Launch. Gravity lock on the boots. Repeat.

She supposes it’s probably another small mercy that this is an old tower. The new ones, the Galra-built ones, usually didn’t have any bricks—and subsequently anything easy to hook into, which would be an issue considering her lack of backup and supplies—but this one clearly dated from before the occupation.

She goes wide on her last swing, clearing the overhang from the roof without any issues and arcing into a smooth landing on the tiles. A little push of the fear she reluctantly admits is swirling in her gut sends electricity coursing through the blade, and with a couple swipes the roof collapses beneath her.

A single Galra nearly has a heart attack thanks to her falling through the roof, but a light shock to the back of their neck puts them out cold within two seconds of her arrival.

Jackpot.

The top of the tower is stuffed with tech, holographic displays float on nearly every surface and there’s star charts and lists of radio frequencies and live footage of the entire capital just there. Someone even left the space-version of a flash drive on the table, just for her.

And it’s colour coded.

She’s nearly drooling, fingers twitching at the mere thought of dissasembling every ounce of code because damn that is some seamless programming.

But alas.

She shakes the stars from her eyes, but she allows herself a single longing glance at the encryption program running on her left before heading to the communications log stationed right in the centre.

Holy shit, it’s so organized.

It would prove to be their downfall, of course, but you don’t find that kind of dedication anywhere. She’d know. Her room may be—have been—the wreckage left behind by a solar flare but her bookmarks and filing systems have always been immaculate.

It takes her barely thirty seconds to find what she’s looking for. Click on the high-priority subcategory, filter for the ones sent to high command, set time parameters to messages sent in the last two quintants, and bada-boom. There it is.

FORWARD TO THE ADMIRAL

Receptor: Communications Tower 1A (B-52)
Broadcast: Fleet J-A-G (Captain Jagrek)

Admiral Portin, sir.

In order to not mince words; we have apprehended Voltron, sir. Please advise your current coordinates for delivery, in service of your glory.

Verepit Sa, sir

Captain Jagrek

“Admiral Portin,” Pidge mutters under her breath. “So that’s his name.”

She clocks the excessive use of ‘sir,’ the extreme formality—to a point beyond the usual, so he’s definitely a self styled emperor with an ego complex—and clocks it for later.

That, and the fucker’s name, are gonna be useful, but she’s got a forwarded reply to read first.

Forward to Jagrek

Receptor: Communications Tower 1A (B-52)
Broadcast: Command Ship; Imperial Fleet

Jagrek.

The Imperial Fleet is moored 65° 5’ 43” and 34 clicks from Terga. Do be quick, will you?

The Exalted Admiral Portin.

Yeah, definitely an asshole.

She knows Terga, though. That’s the brightest star in one of Delrig’s constellations.

Ok, so she knows where they were. She knows who has them.

Just one last thing.

She swipes the flashdrive from the table, loads the comm records onto it, then makes her way to the positioning chart on the screen to her right. It looks a little like her Galra tracker from the castle, a detailed record of the current positons of every fleet connected by the tower. The search bar blinks at her, almost inviting.

She thinks about typing Portin’s name in, but for all she knows that won’t turn up anything. He might be logged in here as “Supreme Galactic Conquerer Admiral Portin” or “Zarkon’s Sugar Baby Admiral Portin” for all she knows—she could be here all day if she just tries to land on the right one.

So she enters “Imperial Fleet” instead. Sure enough, that gets a result.

“Planet XC54, Ba’Speraq,“ she mumbles to herself.

It’s a lead. It's a lead. Finally, finally, she has a lead.

She looks it up on the main console. Three-ish quintants of travel away—it would be way less, but the ship’s damn warp drive was out for repairs when she stole it, so the old-fashioned way it is.

Pretty standard in terms of occupation, it seems. Two deca-phoebes under Galra rule—the ‘anniversary’ is in three quintants—A quasi-gas giant, which is kinda neat. The settlements are on floating islands, which is really neat.

It looks like Portin made it his ‘capital.’

There’s a little note under the planetary stats, a wide-broadcast comm from a movement ago—so whatever the comm is would have been broadcasted to everything connected to the tower, or all the towers, actually.

Pidge shrugs a little, clicking on it.

And once again, by some miracle, she hits the fucking jackpot.

Second Anniversary Gala

Receptor: Communications Tower[s] {all}
Broadcast: Command Ship; Imperial Fleet

Greetings to my fleets and my conquests both.

It is my genuine pleasure to extend all of high society a formal invitation to this deca-phoebe’s gala to celebrate the second anniversary of the establishment of my glorious reign.

As per usual, the event shall be held on Ba’Speraq, at the Imperial Stronghold, in thirteen quintants.

Attendance is mandatory of course.

The Exalted Admiral Portin.

This. This will do nicely.

Chapter Text

Day 28: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 04:23

Planet B-52 "Delrig"

Pidge leaves through the same gaping chasm, leaps off the roof, and breaks her fall with a short burst from her jetpack. It’s gotta be running low on juice by now, but it’s not really like she’s got much of a better option, so running on fumes it is. The hard drive from the communications center, loaded with all the necessary protocols and intel in case she needs to hack back in on the go, is gripped tightly in one hand. The morning binary suns are just starting to cast the sky in peach, even if she can’t see them yet.

She makes her way through the labyrinth of streets on light feet, because in some miracle of cosmic intervention, she’s got a plan.

Or something vaguely resembling a plan.

Something that will be a plan once she spends a little time working with it.

If the invite to Portin’s ‘gala’ was sent a movement ago, that means it’s around four standard quintants from now. Based on the way he talked in the letters, cross-referenced with phoebes of experience accompanying Allura to diplomatic dinners, it’s safe to say the guy’s an egotistical wingnut.

Egotistical wingnuts are notoriously paranoid. Egotistical wingnuts love showing off their power.

Thus, it’s decently reasonable to assume her space family is being kept in Portin’s HQ.

So he’ll probably be distracted by the gala, but… How’s she gonna even get into the damn stronghold in the first place? They’ve all been captured before—hell, her jaw is still sore from that little chat she had with Ezor and Zethrid a couple weeks ago—so being recognized isn’t unlikely.

Not to mention, she doesn’t have the damn blueprints that would be necessary for a successful break-in. She’d hoped maybe the communications tower mught have a backup, maybe from a labour request, but of course it was all on a local server.

And sneaking in via the main gate before or after the fact is completely impossible. She won’t have any useful distraction for the guards.

Maybe a bomb threat?

No, he’d just put them under extra security. Special prisoners and all.

She’s completely lost in thought when she walks right into a big, furry wall.

“What the fuck was that for?” She snarls, because Pidge got negative three hours of sleep last night and is on her last fucking nerve and she doesn’t even care if she just cursed out a very pissy looking Galra—

Oh.

There’s a single beat of silence where her brain goes through about thirteen hundred different possibilities on how to get herself out of this situation. None of them are… practical.

The Galra looks like he’s debating the merits of ripping her arms off.

So, she goes for the oldie but goodie. He looks old. A boomer is a boomer is a boomer.

“Oh! I’m… so sorry sir!” She says cheerily, slyly slipping her touchscreen from her cloak’s pocket and displaying it to the Galra like it had been there all along. Thank fuck she’s still got space-candy crush loaded. “Just, um, stupid level cheated on me.” She smiles brightly. “Us teenagers and our phones, am I right?”

There’s a brief moment of silence, yellow eyes boring into her own, and Pidge has the distinct sense of dangling over a volcano. Her Bayard’s presence is already thrumming at her hip.

“Vrepit Sa?” She tries to say, even if it comes out like a question.

Another terrifying moment, but after fixing her with one more glare the Galra simply huffs and turns away, the rolled papers under his arm nearly taking her eye out.

God, the relief’s like coming back from zero-g.

Because she’s a sleep deprived gremlin, she flips him off as he walks away—even if it does make her still-sore shoulder ache in protest—and she’s just getting ready to keep going herself when something on the wall directly to her right catches her eye.

It’s a poster. The space-glue is still wet—that’s probably what he was doing—but that’s not nearly close to what really caught her attention.

That’s her on the poster. It’s a really shitty artistic impression probably compiled from blurry surveillance footage, but there’s a giant, blocky “WANTED: GREEN PALADIN” stamped across the front, so she’s reasonably sure it’s her.

Well. Fiddlesticks. Portin must have noticed she wasn’t there.

Pidge blows one of her bangs away from her eyes with a sigh and takes a couple steps closer. May as well see what her bounty is: Keith made it to 150 000 GAC once after blowing up an official’s star-cruiser and he hasn’t shut up about it since. If she can take him down a peg while saving his ass? Well, that’s just efficiency.

By order of The Exalted Admiral Portin, all loyal citizens are required to be on the look out for the Green Paladin of Voltron.

He is Terran, very short with light hair. He was last seen on planet Bidaiea three quintants ago.

Proceed with caution; he is not martially skilled but does employ weaponry.

Faliure to comply will be met with extreme prejudice.

REWARD REWARD REWARD: 1500 GAC

Pidge blinks.

She blinks again.

Where the fuck does she even start with this.

First, she’s not that short, ok? Like seriously it’s not her fault she hangs around beanpoles and space warriors.

Second, not martially skilled?! Oh she’s gonna enjoy proving that peice of bantha-shit wrong when she kicks his ass to the nearest black hole. Hope you enjoy spaghettification, fucker.

Third, fifteen-hundred???

That’s IT?

Pidge has never, and she means never, been so insulted in her entire damn life. Even Iverson and all his stupid patronizing doesn’t measure up. This is horrid. This is a travesty. She is worth far more than fifteen-hundred GAC. Portin is a cheapskate. Portin is a horrible scumbag.

And fourth, Portin thinks she’s a guy.

Portin thinks she’s a guy.

And that, right there, is the cornerstone of a plan.

And a pretty good one, she’d wager.

***

Day 28: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 21:23

Satellite Structure O-3 “Space-Mall" —

Things start falling into place quite nicely after that—the skies are clear as Pidge takes off from Delrig and sets her course. The Space Mall’s a good sixteen hours out of the way, but she’s done the math and she’s just got the time to make it work.

This time, she does sleep. It’s not much, four—maybe five—hours, but it’s something. The extra hours even give her enough of a boost to rig together a slightly better disguise; a scraped together toga-thing out of some drapes Mr. Tax Evasion kept in his private bedroom (which she did not use—she did not trust the sheets) and a face mask eerily reminiscent of history’s last big pandemic.

It’s shabby—not a lot of sewing materials in Galra ships—but it works. Pidge hardly draws a single eye as she slinks past the storefronts, but she does still keep to the shadows cast by the night-backed skylights. She quickly glances at a map before sweeping up the escalator and ducking into the couture store at the edge of the second floor hallway.

By Alfor, Pidge hasn’t done anything like this in years, since before Matt and her Dad got taken, but the tiny child in her who loved nothing more than sparkles and ruffles still screeches in delight at the sight of rows and rows of tulle and space-silk hanging from the walls.

Quiznak, how she wishes she wasn’t in a rush. There’s at least five chiffon numbers she’d love to try on—but none of them would work for what she needs.

She bemoans the loss for a moment before hurrying towards another section of the store and rifling through the darker dresses there in earth-like fabrics, rows of satin and velvet, embroidered skirts and lace-overlays, suede jackets and cashmere shawls and even some chain-mail here or there.

Sweet quiznak, she wants that dress with the geometric skirt and spiked shoulders that look like they could cut glass, but no way would she be able to run in that skirt—the angles alone are a tripping hazard. And god, that jacket.

No, Pidge. Focus.

She shakes her head a little before turning to the slightly more… sedate dresses, though that’s not saying much when it comes to this store. A few dresses in shades of black and navy blue with necklines varying from sweetheart to something a lot more unique, and a dress in plum with fluffy sleeves falls on top quickly after. Lime and forest green and even something in hot pink though that colour makes her eyes hurt. Pidge heads to the fitting rooms with a heaping pile of dresses and accessories that she can barely keep hold of—it’s a testament to Paladin training that she doesn’t drop anything.

And lo and behold, she finds something perfect.

A few somethings.

***

Day 29: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 23:32

Deep Space—Orbit of Star SB-71 “Kira B”—

Pidge sets the bags down on the co-pilot seat with another ache of her shoulder and ticks off a box on her mental list with a grin. The space-Metallica queues up and she takes off from the space mall without incident—miraculously.

The universe decided to give her another break, it seems.

She stops the craft somewhere in deep space, just in range of a comms-satellite orbiting around the red supergiant Kier’s binary partner, one of the only sentient-made objects in an otherwise desolate system. It’s one of the ones that was installed about five centuries ago, part of a network that stretches to the far reaches of the galaxy and enables rapid communication through an incredible, almost teleportation-like mechanism.

When they were installed, CommSpace apparently promised the encryption on their channels was completely airtight, their system un-breakable.

They’d clearly never met her before. Cipher-based encryption is tough, but Pidge had mastered that by her Dad’s second mission off-planet. The coding language is admittedly out of date, and thus actually harder to crack in one or two regards considering it’s based on archaic protocols she just isn’t familiar with, but CommSpace had installed these half a millennium ago, and thus their protections against destructive viruses are very low compared to the universal standard today. Plus she’s got excellent interfaces to work with thanks to the ship’s fancy built-in systems, even if she did have to retrofit them a little.

Pidge is in within a half-hour.

(It’s not fun like it normally is, though. Pidge doesn’t really like kill-viruses ever since the… Shiro—Shiro’s clone—thing.)

Once she’s in, it’s decently easy to get herself access to a satellite on the other side of the galaxy, the one closest to Arus. She sets up a transmission frequency, quickly encrypts her end so it should be untraceable, and does her best to fiddle with the code so that it looks like it came from the outpost in the far reaches of the system. She’s not working to her usual standard—most of her well-built protocols are on her laptop currently still in Green and she’s tragically short on time, so none of her code is as elegant or tight as she’d like—but it’s a decent enough job, and if she plays this right hopefully Portin’s gonna be way too distracted to look too deep into it.

The cursor flashes up at her from the screen in a rhythmic tick.

beep.

beep.

beep.

Pidge thinks on it for a second.

beep.

It’s gotta be scary.

beep.

beep.

It’s gotta throw him off her actual plan.

beep.

He definitely knows she’s coming. What she needs to do is cover how she’s actually going to go about the rescue. Make him think it’ll be about brute force, rather than stealth.

beep.

And hopefully make him divert his guards. That too.

beep.

beep.

Oh.

Oh, that’s risky. That’s really, really, stupidly fucking risky. She’s never actually interacted with this guy before, she doesn’t know how he responds to threats.

But this is just about the least-close to her plan thing she can think of. It’s the opposite of what she’s planning. It’s anti-covert. It’s brash.

It might work.

And she doesn’t have a lot of time, so this is gonna have to do.

Her throat twinges, just a little. A leftover from Ezor and Zethrid. The pod heals most things, but you’ve gotta let the remnants heal on their own, no matter how long it takes.

beep.

Pidge’s keyboard echos throughout the Verdigris.

***

Day 29: “Voltron’s super-fantastic not-so-great-so-far intergalactic road trip.” 23:14

Unknown Planet “???”

“Jesus, Keith. How long have you been up?”

Hunk’s voice is bleary, Keith can see him yawning out of the corner of his eyes.

“Three or four hours,” Keith replies bluntly, never breaking his endless pacing.

“Yikes,” Hunk says under his breath.

“You’re going to have to sleep at some point,” Allura chimes in, blinking with worried eyes.

“I’ll sleep when we get out of here.”

“He’s gonna collapse,” Hunk mutters.

“I can hear you.” Keith stops for a second, turns his glare towards the soldier positioned on the other end of the laser bars. “Hey, asshole. Wanna tell us where Pidge is?”

“No.”

“Fucker.” Keith goes right back to pacing.

“She’s probably fine, you know,” Lance pipes up. The glare swivels to him, and Lance scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. “Just trying to stay optimistic.”

“When was the last time optimism actually worked in our favour?” Hunk asks.

“First time for everything.”

“Ok, so I have another idea, “ Romelle’s voice suddenly says. “What if we reverse-psychology-ed the admiral?”

“Oh like that could ever—“

Oh god. this is Romelle’s fourth hair-brained idea so far Keith can’t take it anymore. He likes her quite a lot, she's proven to be reliable and easy to talk to, but Alfor.

“If only we could just, like… melt the keypad. Short circuit it.” Hunk muses, and like clockwork everyone turns to Lance, who is still very much slouched against the wall. He blinks like a startled deer at the sudden attention.

“Well, don’t look at me!” He retorts. “Red is way too far away for me to even sense her, let alone melt shit.”

“Fair enough.” Shiro shrugs.

“He might be bluffing,” Allura says after a moment’s silence. “He might not have her.”

“Or he’s using her as a hostage,” Krolia says. “Hard to break out when the enemy has collateral.”

Keith picks up speed, practically bouncing off the walls until he snaps, fist flying out and striking the metal with a shattering clang.

It leaves a dent, he notes with satisfaction.

“Wow,” Lance drawls. “How very helpful. So very inspired.”

“Well it’s better than sitting here and doing nothing!” Keith bites back. His hand is predictably sore, but he doesn’t give a flying fuck. “But please, oh Lance, if you have a better idea—“

“Guys!” Hunk interjects right in the nick of time, and Keith simmers down almost instantly once they’ve been taken off the heat. “Not the time.”

He’s right. He gives Lance a tiny nod, a little declaration of truce, and he will definitely never admit that Lance’s tiny smile back makes a little heat rush to his cheeks.

It’s right then that the energy field dissipates with a soft fizzing, and the Galra standing there fixes them all with a harsh look.

Predictably, he drags them off in the same direction they came from, and Portin is waiting on his big-man chair with a smug little sneer on his face.

“Settling in nicely, I hope?”

God, Keith hates this guy.

“I just wanted to let you all know that we’ll be landing shortly, and that I do so hope you’ll be… cooperative.”

“Sure.” Lance says blandly. “This totally wasn’t just to lord over us. Totally.”

“Might I remind you, blue one, that I hold… collateral.” He says the last word with relish, and Portin smirks with the air of someone holding all the cards. Lance immediately closes his mouth against whatever one-liner he had prepared.

Portin chuckles. “There we go. Know your place.”

Lance was right. Reminding them who’s in charge is exactly why he brought them here.

But Keith doesn’t ponder that. Keith sees red.

“Know your place.”

That fucker.

Shiro gives him The Look, so Keith’s next move must be painfully obvious. Not the best idea. More likely to do more harm than good.

Does he care? Not a bit.

Keith spits in his face. A big, gooey, hacked-up Texan loogie like his Pa taught him when he was a kid. He’d always said that skill would come in handy someday.

He was right.

Allura, on reflex, tries to facepalm, even if she can’t thanks to the handcuffs. Coran looks proud. Hunk and Lance both look disappointing but not exactly surprised. Shiro looks like he’s regretting many of his life decisions. It’s a very Shiro look. He’s forgotten how much he missed that

His Mom just huffs out a laugh. They’re definitely related.

The douchebag stands there for a second. A clawed hand reaches up to pick the loogie off his cheek, and he holds it delicately between two talons. It’s almost like he’s studying it.

He flicks it off to the side as a snarl blooms on his face. Keith meets his glare without a second of hesitation.

“Well,” He hisses. “If uncivilized is the way you’d like to play it, I think I can more than accommodate that. You!—” He pivots, whipping around to jab a finger at an officer standing nearby. “—Put them in with the other one!”

And, yeah. Keith knows that is probably not a good sign and that he should probably have swallowed that loogie down, but he’s not thinking of that as they’re shoved to their feet and led down marble hallways lit by mauve florescence.

No, the only thing Keith’s thinking about is what the jackass had said.

"Put them in with the other one."

He turns to his team, catches their eyes. A year (four? he’s still so confused about how the time shift worked) of the paladin bond makes what they’re all thinking clear as day.

Pidge.

He wasn’t bluffing. He has her.

FuckfuckfuckfuckingFUCK.

Hunk bites his lip and Allura’s stony defence cracks the smallest amount.

The hallway slopes steeply after a few minutes, and they’re led down into the depths of the mountain as the light shifts to a burnt orange.

Shiro moves to his side, hair ginger in the light, and nudges him with his shoulder. It’s a familiar gesture, yet another Shiro Thing that Keith has missed so, so much. The clone never did anything even close to it.

It’s going to be ok, Shiro says without words.

Keith doesn’t believe him

They pass a string of doorways barred with translucent force fields, occupied by aliens in regal garb—the former council, Keith supposes. They look with horror at their armour. Voltron, the universe’s vanished last hope, finally returned only to be imprisoned.

Their escort stops at the last door down the hallway. this one has a row of good-old-fashioned metal bars slotted down in between a dual layer of forcefields, electrical sparks crackling through the layers, because of course they’d drop them in the highest security cell.

Coran makes an impressed noise.

“Would you look at that? A five-layer electric-interfaced prisoner containment area. Extremely secure. Haven’t seen one of those since—“

Romelle elbows him after Hunk starts sweating and Lance starts drooping. Keith silently thanks her. He doesn’t want to think about what’s in there. Who’s in there. The state she’s going to be in.

(He can’t get the sight of her, bloodied and bruised with a rib nearly sticking out of her side and a dagger in her gut, out of his head)

“Enjoy your stay,” the officer says with a sneer. “You all have a lot in common after all.”

The gates drop one by one.

The cell, as Portin said, isn’t empty. Kieth clocks a mop of honey coloured hair and slightly darker eyes before his stomach drops.

Then he takes a closer look.

His stomach drops in a completely different way.

The man inside is ruffled, wearing something that looks like a rebel uniform, but streamlined. Updated. Modernized over the past three years.

He’s got a scar on his cheek and a face insanely close to one they all know by heart. So close that, once upon a time, they mistook that face for his.

He turns to look at them, and immediately freezes, eyes widening at the sight of them, growing wet and watery. He gets to his trembling feet slowly as he looks at them like they’ve just returned from the dead.

To him, Keith supposes, they have.

Beside him, Shiro tenses, takes a shuddering breath. He has the same look in his own eyes. That same look of seeing someone you long thought dead.

His voice is barely a whisper, shuddering like an earthquake.

“Matt?”

“The Great Admiral Portin’s Personal Logs.” 00:28

Imperial Flagship, Communications.

Vorak is really regretting ninety percent of his life choices at the moment. At the bottom of the list; the seafood he’d chosen at lunch. It always ended up making him gassy.

` Midway up the list, volunteering for comms duty in the first place.

Slightly lower is choosing to major in comms technology at Daibazaal Memorial University in the first place.

And at the very tippy-top of the list, deciding to work for his current boss.

Zarkon’s Blade, he should have taken General Oberan up on her offer.

Said current boss is currently stalking around Vorak’s little office like he has beef with the floor. To be fair, if anyone could have beef with the floor, it would be Portin, so it’s not completely impossible.

The man has been stalking around for fifteen minuets. Vorak’s arms are getting tired from Standard Position.

“Where did it come from,” the Admiral hisses.

“Triangulation of the signal leads to the CommSpace Gen Three satellite currently positioned around the sun of planet Arus,” Vorak says in neat, clipped words, before hastily adding, “Admiral Portin, sir.”

He’s gotta get a handle on his inner disrespect. Daibazaal knows what happened to poor Weft and Clirk without even a stitch of it.

“When did it come in.”

“About three minuets ago, Admiral Portin, sir.”

“And what,” growls the purple tyrant. “Is this.” He stabs his finger towards the words on the screen that Vorak has already read three times.

to mr. admiral man.
i don't know who you are. i don't know what you want. if you are looking for ransom, i can tell you i don't have money. But what i do have are a very particular set of skills, skills i have acquired over a very long career. skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. if you let my team go now, that'll be the end of it. i will not look for you, i will not pursue you. But if you don't, i will look for you, i will find you, and i will kill you.
—>^..^< ;)
p.s. enjoy your little ‘ball.’

“It appears to be a transmission, Admiral Portin, sir. Word-choice analysis and contextual reasoning would point to it’s origin being the Green Paladin of Voltron, Admiral sir.”

“The lack of capitalization. The lack of respect.”

Daibazaal, get a life, Vorak thinks without thinking, and immediately starts trying to do the mental equivalent of shutting his stars-damned mouth, just in case the Admiral could read minds.

“This.” His boss snarls. “This is a declaration.” He pauses, long enough that Vorak nearly rolls his eyes at the dramatics. “Of war.” Portin whirls around and storms out the door pausing just a moment , calling over his shoulder as he goes. “Alert the citadel security. Have them reinforce every window, every side door, station guards everywhere someone could possibly slip through a crack. And no one gets in without an invitation.”

Zarkon’s Blade, Vorak hates his job.

Day 30: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 00:29

Deep Space—Orbit of Star SB-71 “Kira B”—

Pidge, in only a couple seconds, downloads a perfect, slightly altered duplicate of the invitation onto her personal device from the little flashdrive she took from the Delrig tower. It was almost tragically easy to edit, not even a stitch of a authenticity marker to worry about.

Honestly, it’s like he isn’t even trying.

Chapter Text

Day 1761: “The Holt-Sanctioned Galactic Records, Presented by Matt Holt” 11:20

Unknown—But definitely prison.

Yeah, Matt’s got nothing.

Standing at the entrance of the cell he’s been stuck in for a week are a bunch of ghosts.

Matt’s not ashamed to say that for the first five seconds he’s pretty convinced he finally lost it. Seeing hallucinations of people who are very definitely dead is not exactly a great indicator as to his sanity.

And then—

“Matt?”

It’s Shiro who said it, and—why the fuck is his hair white? Where’s his arm? And what the hell happened to Keith’s face? Why does he have cheekbones and a 5 o’clock shadow now? And who the hell is the other Altean? And who the hell is that Galra lady? And—

You know what? Highly unlikely he’d be able to make this shit up.

That being said, his mouth is still open, a resounding shout of “what the fuck” still on his tongue, when a black and white blur throws itself at him and Matt finds himself with an arm-full of sobbing Takashi Shirogane.

Now, Matt is obviously an excellent best friend, and frankly he needs it too, so he squeezes back just as tight, resting his chin on Shiro’s shoulder padding and looking across it to catch Keith—and seriously what. Matt thought he’d been declared MIA a few months before… The News.—and slowly opening and closing his mouth like a startled mudskipper.

“Hey Allura,” Shiro starts, voice still choked up. “Am I right to assume you all might have forgotten to mention something to me?”

Allura blanches. “Oh quiznak,” she murmurs into a fist, before glancing up sheepishly. “oops?”

Shiro finally pulls back, still keeping hold of Matt by the shoulders, and peers closely at his face.

“Damn, Holt,” he starts, almost teasingly. “I thought we had a deal about who got to be the buff one.”

Matt may or may not still be gawking at the sight of six complete ghosts and two complete strangers suddenly popping into his lonely little prison vacation.

That said, he manages to gather enough sanity to stare deeply into Shiro’s eyes and smirk.

Weird. Shiro's... acting like Shiro again. The... spark in his eyes is back. Huh. Matt shoves it aside for later analysis.

“You snooze, you loose,” Matt says with trademark Holt snark, and Shiro, if at all possible, tears up even more.

That said—and this probably makes him a horrible friend but right now he doesn’t really have much self control, very reasonably—now that his eyesight is no longer partially to fully obscured by the door, not a window that is Shiro, Matt’s eyesight immediately moves at the speed of light to survey the rest of the cell’s new occupants, searching desperately for the one face he most desperately wants to see, the face he thought he’d never ever never get a chance to see again.

She’s.

Not there.

She’s Not There.

And without even taking a second to re-catch the breath that wooshed out of his lungs at that observation, he asks in a raspy voice.

“Where’s Katie?”

He doesn’t even use her nickname. That’s how she always knew it was serious.

It’s like he shot someone. The entire tiny cell freezes, and Shiro looks like he took the bullet.

In the two seconds of silence, Matt almost drops completely into the same pit of grief he lost himself in for four months after he got the news, a pit that sucked him completely into it’s dark depths, repeating the same thing over and over again in his head:

"I’m sorry Matthew. Our reports state Voltron was caught in a massive blast of quintessimal force. There’s no way they survived."

And he waits for it again, waits for those two small words, the moment his little sister dies for the second time after a tiny glimmer of hope.

“she’s dead"

“We don’t know.”

It’s Lance who says it, and it’s Lance’s face Matt sees as he falls onto his ass while the words hit him.

“We don’t know.” It wouldn’t be a comfort in any other situation, but in these circumstances it feels like a miracle. He’d cry, he’s actually surprised he isn’t already, but the shock and sheer relief is enough to postpone all but a few tears sliding down his cheeks.

“She’s—“ he swallows as the words stick in his parchment-dry mouth. “She’s alive?” the words waver in the air.

“Yeah,” Shiro’s the one who speaks, crouching beside him to pull him into another hug. “Yeah, Matt. But she got separated from us when we got captured. Portin says he has her, whether he’s bluffing or not is anyone’s guess.” Shiro never honey-coats the truth when someone needs to hear it. Matt appreciates that beyond words.

Katie potentially being held as leverage by a crazy alien is. Not ideal. But she’s not dead.

She’s not dead.

His little sister isn’t dead.

Matt bursts into tears.

The Paladins & co. graciously let him have his little breakdown in peace as he clings to Shiro for what has to be fifteen minuets at least, tears ebbing and flowing as the stages of she’s alive. They’re all alive, hit him in waves.

“it’s been three years,” Matt chokes out finally, rubbing frantically at his eyes to try and stop the tsunamis. He finally looks up, resolutely ignoring the sympathetic expressions on eight faces. “Y’all, the universe has gone to shit.”

There’s a brief, awkward moment of silence before Lance breaks it with a small snort. that snort quickly turns into a giggle, which turns into a chortle, and in the space of a few ticks he’s clutching his gut and cackling like a madman.

The rest of them, especially Hunk, stare in growing concern for his clearly fragile psyche.

Eventually, Lance manages to get control of himself long enough to look up and blink at the deeply concerned expressions that meet him.

“What?” He says defensively. “It’s true!”

“I hate that you’re right,” mumbles Allura.

“Yeah, I do too, but dios we’ve gotta laugh about it at some point right?” He turns to Hunk and Keith, both still looking around like there’s some psyche-mending glue just waiting to be splattered all over Lance’s brain. “I mean, like a month ago Keith was still missing and two years younger, Lotor and Allura were still all smoochy-poo—“ Allura grimaces at the reminder of something Matt is deeply surprised to learn about. “—And of course, Shiro over here was still dead.”

“Gee, thank you for the reminder Lance.”

“You’re welcome retired fearless leader.”

—Ok hold on just a fucking second.

Did Lance just say—

“WHAT.”

Five faces look the appropriate amount of sheepish, the as of yet un-named Altean has a long suffering deadness in her eyes, and the Galra with the oddly familliar hair is leaning against the doorway, laughing to herself.

Shiro, the bastard, does at least have the decency to look guilty as shit.

“Who wants to tell him?” Coran stage whispers.

Everyone looks to Hunk. That’s probably a good idea; he is the most emotionally intelligent.

Hunk, based on his expression, does not agree with this logic.

Matt, though, is not in the mood for mercy. His finger taps on his crossed arms like a ticking time bomb.

Thankfully for all of them, Hunk accepts his fate.

“Ok. So.” He starts, then stops. Presses his hands together and brings them up to his mouth.

“Pidge told you about the mission where Shiro disappeared, right?”

Matt nods. She’d brought it up when telling him what had happened to Zarkon, and wow, had learning that been a shock.

“And how he was missing for a bit but somehow made it back?”

Another nod.

“Well, like… a month ago—or three years, I guess—Lotor and Allura had just accessed the quintessence field, because, you know, him and Allura had a thing and he said he wanted to use it to, like, help people. So we’re doing that when, who pops up on coms? Keith!” At that, Lance flourishes around Keith like a presenter on The Price is Right. Kieth doesn’t even protest. “And so he lands this, like, super old Altean shuttle and pops out and he’s two years older.”

Wait. What?

Actually, yeah, now that he’s looking for it, the cheekbones and impression of a beard do make Keith look a lot older that he’d been last time Matt saw him.

“But he’s also got these two other people with him, because turns out Keith found his mom—“ Matt immediately turns towards the unfamilliar Galra, who he’s just realizing has a very familliar mullet. She waves awkwardly. That’s familliar too. “—a.k.a. Krolia, and a living, breathing Altean—this is Romelle by the way—and then without even giving the rest of us a second to process he’s letting us know that Lotor is currently using sentient beings as batteries.”

“Shit,” Matt hisses.

“That’s about how we took it, yeah. So once he and Allura get back we throw Lotor into the ship-jail—“

“Brig,” Lance corrects.

“—into the brig, and turns out that’s the reason he wanted into the quintessence field, because apparently draining Alteans wasn’t enough anymore. He wanted the big kahuna. We’re trying to figure out what the hell to do with him when Shiro goes absolutely bonkers, breaks Lotor out of his cell, steals a ship, and plants a virus into the ship to boot—but Pidge took care of that pretty quickly—“

WHAT?

“—and we all hop into the Lions--plus Keith again--to try and catch him, but that creepy witch lady opens her own wormhole and we have to de-merge to shoot Keith through in Black. So a bit later, Lotor pops back up, has his own weird Voltron thing but it’s only a couple ships, and we have to like fight him obviously and we’re definitely losing but then Keith figures out how to freaking teleport with the Black Lion and makes it back, and we form Voltron, fight in the quintessence field, nearly die from overexposure to the stuff, take Lotor down, and pop back out only to realize we kinda broke the universe?”

“We definitely broke the universe,” Coran says brightly.

“And it’s all kinda gonna implode in like an hour unless we do some fancy physics thing to stabilize the reality break, and to do that we have to send the Teladuv into the break which means sending the entire castle. So we do that, the castle is compressed into a tiny little diamond, and we land on this planet when Keith drops the absolute bombshell that the Shiro that came back was…” He trails off, looking to Shiro like he’s checking it won’t send him into a spiral.

“You can say it, Hunk,” Shiro says with a smile.

“…A clone. Our Shiro, this Shiro, kinda, maybe, sort-of died during the attack on Zarkon, and his conscious was in the Black Lion ever since.” There’s a brief bit of silence, wherein Shiro just has a perfectly content, almost amused smile on his stupid fucking face and Matt has another mental breakdown. “But turns out Allura was able to transfer our Shiro’s consciousness to Clone Shiro’s dead body so she did that and Shiro’s alive again! And then we started heading to Earth in the lions, found out something caused all of us to glitch three years into the future, and…” Hunk shrugs. “Here we are.”

Matt is slowly losing the remaining shreds of sanity he’d clung to.

“So,” he starts with remarkable calm, turning to Shiro and clasping his hands in front of his mouth. “You died.”

“…Yeah.”

“The you I met was a clone.”

“Yep.”

“So I haven’t actually seen you since the fucking arena.”

Shiro actually pales at that. “Oh shit… yeah.”

“And your soul hung out in the Black Lion for literal months.”

“Pretty much.”

“And now you’re alive again.”

“That’s about the long and short of it.”

Matt takes a minute. Takes a couple deep breaths.

Then he socks Shiro in the arm. He has the gall to look betrayed.

“The heck—“

“That’s for being a complete dumbass you little shit,” Matt says smugly. “Apparently I never got to properly punch you for that.”

Shiro just nods at that.

“Fair.”

That’s what really hammers it home for Matt. The… clone, he guesses, had acted weird, now that he thinks about it. Matt had just thought it was trauma, which would have made perfect sense even if Shiro wasn’t a clone, but now that he’s looking back there were some signs. Clone Shiro, for one, hadn’t been a snarky little shit. Dad friend he may be, but Takashi Shirogane is an agent of chaos when he wants to be. Matt still hasn’t forgotten that Vegas trip. He'll never forget that Vegas trip.

“Quiznak, I missed you,” Matt says before he’s even comprehended the words coming out of his mouth. Shiro’s face softens as Matt pulls him into another tight hug.

Day 31: “Voltron’s super-fantastic intergalactic road trip.” 02:34

Planet XC54 ‘Ba’Speraq’—0.4km outside of Imperial Stronghold

Pidge finally gets the sleep she regretfully needs on the flight to the stronghold.

By that, she means that she tried.

By that, she means that she got about three hours and part of that was thanks to some of the tea she found in the tiny galley on board her illegally acquired vessel. It’s fine though! Totally fine! She’s gonna sleep for a week after this because she’ll finally be able to without running the risk of getting everyone she knows and loves killed again because she was too late, but for now she’s got space-coffee, the vague essence of the sleep required to be a functional human being, and a finely honed reservoir of trademark Holt stubbornness!

The planet Portin’s stronghold is on thankfully hangs out around the same schedule as Galactic Standard Time, albeit with a slightly longer night and shorter day due to some gravitational fuckery in the solar system that makes it spin slower for a couple hours, so it’s comfortably dark out when she lands the ship on one of the abandoned floating islands that holds not much more than a junkyard.

The Paladins had never needed to go to Ba’Speraq, but Pidge had seen photos when Allura debriefed them for a mission to a neighboring system back in the earlier days. She still has no idea how in the hell the environment formed or currently functions—that’s a running theme among the weird-ass planets they’ve come across, and besides, Hunk would be way better at answering those questions—but the planet had been gourgeous on holo, a gas giant covered in motes of floating earth.

It’s nothing like that now.

The beautiful clouds that had shone pink on the photo are grey with smog and soot, the grass dead or close to it, and the trees have been replaced with factories and junkyards like the one she’s landed on.

It makes the part of her soul that Green likes to hang out around squirm with something that makes her nauseous, makes the rest of her want to scream.

Just another thing that went to shit because she dissapeared for three years.

Nope. Not now.

She doesn’t have time for this.

Pidge disembarks on silent feet, finds an abandoned speeder among the junk that probably belonged to whoever used to run the place, and makes her way through the smoke to where the lights of Portin’s stronghold gleam magenta through the thick cover, the only thing that can make it through the dark.

Once she gets within viewing distance, disembarking at the edge of one of the bigger islands that makes up the little city in front of it, she can tell that the stronghold’s a little different than the rectangle of metal she expected. She probably should have expected that. It’s clearly been there since well before Portin took over, a curving, sprawling structure like a web of interconnected clouds broken through with spires and bridges. Those, though, are joined by smokestacks that plunge like daggers into the structure, releasing smog into the air like blood from a wound. The dark, faintly purple metal continues all over the building, bursting from splintering white walls in a rather pathetic attempt at armour and battlements. There’s a hangar jutting out from the outer wall, which sits suspended in the air a few hundred meters from the fortress proper. It’s empty of any familiar colour.

But there’s still trees, sprouting from the surprisingly green surroundings and courtyard, sentinels against the people coming in from the bridge. It’s the first nature she’s seen on the planet that wasn’t dead or poisoned.

Pidge doesn’t pay much attention to said bridge—she’s pretty confident in her entrance plan, it’s just the post-part she’s gotta work out—and instead jumps back on her speeder, flying slow and low under the majority of the island and landing out back. There’s a surprising lack of security, just a couple security drones that are pretty easy to evade and an electromagnetic tech jammer that she deactivates quickly after finding the source. That’s probably gonna change pretty soon, but Pidge isn’t planning to sneak in through the back door, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

She lands softly beside one of the trees, hopping off as her cloak wafts behind her. She’s got her armour on this time, but the lights are dimmed and the colour is decently hidden under the black fabric. Her bayard shifts and her grapple latches quietly onto one of the railings lining the exterior wall, and she lands onto the pale surface with none of her usual flourish.

She makes her way onto the tower from there, only pausing a moment to avoid a galra on patrol, and finds a perch in a dip among the curved, spiraling roof. She’s got a decent view from here, able to see most of the main courtyard and the windows of the main hall, along with the entrances to most of the other wings of the stronghold. There’s no signage, unfortunately, which makes getting a port into the security systems difficult. She was hoping to get that done today, but she’d probably be able to get it during the party if she needs to. The central courtyard is pretty big, probably able to fit at least three of the Lions. The lions that are still very much MIA.

Pidge has been reaching out to Green once every five minutes since she got close to the planet, but there hasn’t even been a whisper. She still tries again, stretching the thrumming, bright parts of her consciousness as far as she can and hoping against hope that this time, something reaches back.

Nothing does.

Pidge is at least 91% sure all the paladins and company are somewhere in the fortress right now, even though there’s only the same echoing, lonely void when she tries to tap the Paladin Bond. Portin’s arrogance and grandstanding, and the convenient venue his little anniversary party provides, make it almost certain he’s gonna ‘display’ them to consolidate and prove his power. She’s only about 73% sure where they’re gonna be during said party. Most likely, the Paladins themselves (plus Shiro, if she had to guess) are going to be in the main hall, while everyone else will be in the dungeons. Whether they’re split up or not is a toss-up.

But as to where the Lions are? That’s 50/50. She has absolutely no clue. Portin might be keeping them here as additional trophies, or he might have played the smarter card and moved them to other planets to keep Voltron trapped even more thoroughly.

Pidge really fucking hopes they’re here.

She keeps moving around the fortress like a wraith, over the white roof of the tower and the seam of galra-purple metal that looks like it’s patching a massive crack. She’s scanning whatever she can find to shove together as much of a map as she can get and making note of what artillery has been grafted onto the once beautiful building and hoping against all hope that—

Wait. There.

A second hangar.

Unlike the first, which was clearly Galran in architecture, this hangar meshes naturally with the original foundations of the citadel. It’s maybe half the size of the first, and is covered by a glass roof.

It’s conspicuously shaded in translucent purple. Galra shield. Probably a magically re-enforced one.

Heart beating a percussion in her throat, Pidge crosses the hundred meters or so to where the hangar roof merges with the inner wall, and creeps to a higher vantage point.

And through the glass ceiling, she’s met with a view of strong red, sunshine yellow, deep blue, darkest black.

And vibrant, familiar, loving Green.

Pidge flings a hand to her mouth to muffle the choked sob that springs from her at the sight of her Lion, pristine as ever, and there. They’re separated by only a little, flimsy shield, but clearly there's more to it than that, because no matter how much her soul strains and cries for Green, she’s silent as ever.

And the sun has started to rise. And thus, Pidge has to go.

And even though Pidge wants nothing more than to fling herself at the barrier and anyone who dares keep her from her family right this second—human, alien, and robot alike—waiting grants her a higher chance of success.

So she turns from her perch and the hangar roof and makes her way back to her speeder.

But the Lions are here, and somehow that makes a difference, makes her heart a little lighter.

***

The brush is soft as she dusts the opalescent powder against her cheekbones, and Pidge tilts her head to check the reflection in the mirror. It works, providing dimension to the silver painted-on markings to alter her all-too-human face, and Pidge mentally thanks QuantumDude43 for his service to both her and SpaceTube as a whole.

She blinks mascara onto her eyelashes over the blue eyeshadow, and swipes a layer of shimmering teal onto her lips.

Huh. Hot damn.

She looks good. Cosplay skills haven’t left her entirely, it would seem.

She brushes a wrinkle out of her ensemble and adjusts the brooches securing her cape to her shoulders, and checks once more that her gauntlet doesn’t show through black gloves. It’s weird in a bad way, not having the majority of her armour for a mission, and despite the thin layer of reinforced material she’s tucked over where her organs are, she feels horribly vulnerable.

But it’s the best plan she’s got.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Pidge walks over to her stolen ship’s comms, steps clicking on the floor panels, and presses a single button.

“This is cruiser Tango-Niner-Foxtrot hailing the Ba’Speraq Landing strip.”

There’s a slight pause of static, then—

“Copy, Tango-Niner-Foxtrot. Greetings, and welcome to the Exalted Admiral Portin’s Anniversary Gala.”

Chapter Text

So, uh.

Hello, dear readers.

Look i’m not even gonna try to explain myself ok. It’s been a weird, WEIRD year and a half.

But hey! Unsurprising-in-retrospect Autism Diagnosis goes brrr, so there is that to be grateful for!

Anyway, this is not a real chapter. I truly am so very sorry about that—and about the extremely long impromptu hiatus. This ‘update’ basically came about because i was reading through my inbox (i do read every comment, and will get back to replying shortly i promise) and just?? The love this fic gets even after it hasn’t gotten an update in a year and a half is AMAZING to me.

Y’all are the sweetest, most AMAZING folks. Like seriously.

And so, realizing that somehow people are still waiting for this fic (and others) to continue, i figured i’d post a little update on some of the fics that i’ve left in limbo, now that I’m finally catching the writing bug again.

So, enough preamble! here’s the update:

THIS FIC IS NOT DEAD. IT’S GOING TO BE FINISHED THIS I SWEAR.

That being said, expect a few changes to come before a proper update.

See, thing is, i’m not super happy with some bits of the writing in earlier chapters. I started writing this fic literal years ago, and i’d like to think i’ve gotten at least a little better at my craft since then. As such, before I finally write the real next chapter i’m probably going to take some time to do some edits and maybe even some additions to previous chapters. If you really like the current style, it might be worth downloading the fic in it’s original state ASAP.

Because of Reasons i’ve elected to do my NaNoWriMo in February, so while i can’t make any promises as to when the edits (or next chapter) will be posted, there’s a pretty big chance it’ll be some time next month.

I’ve got a big, exciting life change coming up in September, so i’ve made it my new years resolution to try and finish all my old projects before that time comes. Thus, even if not in February, i can nearly guarantee that there will be something before that time comes to pass—maybe even the entire rest of the fic.

You all have my most sincere gratitude for your lovely comments and immense patience. I love you all so very much. Thanks for sticking around—although it’s not a real update, i hope this serves as something of a ‘thank you’ from me!

I hope to see you soon!

~Inky <3

P.S. i’ll be posting similar messages on all my old fics!!