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Chapter Text

Lance sat at the head of a crashing plane with a nervous Hunk in the back seat vomiting his lunch into the gearbox and Pidge snapping at her, insubordinate and stubborn, and thinks there really isn’t any way this day could get worse.

They fail the simulation, because of course they do.

Lance had been posturing and overconfident as she tried to hide the way the simulator controls made her skin itch and jaw tense. Always so stiff and feeling wrong, wrong, wrong. But excellent simulation scores were necessary for fighter class pilots, regardless of how good she might be in an actual plane.

(Regardless of how every instructor at this school has seen her fly a real plane perfectly well, damn her simulation scores. But telling them that the simulator feels off and not at all like a real plane only ever got her scrubbing the mess hall floors. So eventually, she learns to shut her mouth and bear it with a grin.)

The trio exit the simulator, all lined up and waiting for the firing squad that was Iverson’s very public verbal undressing. He picked apart their individual flaws, then tore their teamwork to shreds. He even asked the other cadets what they did wrong, let their vicious peers get a good strike at them too.

Lance stood there, eyes forward and standing at parade rest as they’re supposed to as he berated her leadership skills. Yelled and mocked and did his level best to make her feel like a failure.

It wasn’t quite personal. Iverson did it to every cadet that failed or stepped out of line.

That didn’t make anything that he was saying easier to hear though.

“The Galaxy Garrison exists to turn young cadets like you into the next generation of elite astro explorers,” Iverson’s gravelly baritone reprimanded them, something like disappointment and frustration in his voice. “But your arrogance and foolishness are leading you down a path of failure. If you don’t shape up quick, you’ll find yourself making the same mistakes that took the lives of the men on the Kerberos Mission."

Pidge stiffens at her side and Lance has a second to curse every deity she knows for burdening her with a teammate who doesn’t know when to keep his damn mouth shut before said mouth is open and practically snarling at Iverson.

“That’s a lie!”

Lance is breaking out of formation and slapping her hand over his mouth before Iverson even has the opportunity to turn around.

“Care to repeat that cadet?” he says, voice low and hard and nope. No. Nuh-uh. That is a very bad idea. Do not repeat that. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars, thank you very much.

“No! No, definitely not, sir,” Lance hastily replies, even as Pidge struggles in her hold, spitting rage and scowling. Lance looks at Hunk out of the corner of her eye but knows she won’t be getting any help from her best friend in this particular disaster.

Hunk is terrified of Iverson.

“He must’ve hit is head when he fell in the simulator. And he’s been staying up too late trying to get his grades in tip-top shape. He’s just overtired is all,” she finishes with a weak smile. “We all heard you loud and clear—and with the utmost respect—sir.”

Iverson glares down at the pair of them, before bending slightly so he can get right up in Lance’s face. Pidge immediately stops struggling, finally reading the room.

“Then I’m glad you know your place, cadet. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how close you are to losing your spot as a fighter pilot, or how you only got it because the best pilot in your class dropped out.”

Lance stares up at Iverson wide-eyed and heart in her throat. The circumstances of her elevation were a sore spot everyone and their mother knew about. One that Iverson always loved to exploit.

Lance bites her tongue so hard it stung in order to keep herself from saying something. She will not let him win. Will not give him the satisfaction.

He stands there a second longer, staring at her before turning his back on all three of them.

“It’d be a shame if you were to follow in his footsteps, Martinez. Class dismissed.”

***

After the call for lights out, Lance goads Hunk into sneaking out with her and finding Pidge for a night on the town. She’s using ‘team bonding’ as an excuse but they both know it was her magical kicked puppy eyes that made him agree.

It’s always her puppy eyes that make him agree, though he’ll deny it until he’s blue in the face.

They’re dressed in their civvies, seeing as the whole point was to blend in and not get caught. But, as usual, Hunk didn’t get the memo.

Her dear friend was trussed up in enough yellow to be mistaken for the sun. It looked good on him, she wasn’t going to lie about that, but it hardly made him inconspicuous. Any guard that happened upon them wouldn’t even need a flashlight, Hunk practically glowed in the dim shadows.

Lance, well used to sneaking out of the Garrison, was dressed more practically. Blue and dark greys, colours to blend with shadows. She had her signature combat boots, worn-in leather jacket from Mace, and hair pulled up out of her face and piled atop her head. She’d done her makeup like she always does when she can get away with it. Her own version of warpaint, she tells Hunk whenever he asks.

An attitude she’d no doubt picked up from Francisca the same way he’d picked up fingerless gloves from Mace. Her sisters were such horrible influences.

“This is such a bad idea,” Hunk worries at her side. “We’re going to get caught and then we’ll be in so much trouble and then both of us are going to get expelled. Auwe! Koʻu makuahine ua hele e pepehi mai iaʻu-”

“Hunk!” Lance whisper-yells at him as she peeks around a corner, checking if it was clear. “You are really killing my vibe, honeybee. Your mom’s not gonna kill you because she’s not gonna find out. Tranquilízate.”

“Sorry,” Hunk has the decency to look sheepish and lower his voice. “I’m just saying, for the record, that this is a bad idea.”

“For someone in a space exploration program, you don’t have much sense of adventure,” Lance quips.

Hunk huffs as they crawl beneath the window to the Teachers' Lounge.

The amount of security in this place is just lazy. It’s like they actually expect a bunch of teenagers to be well behaved and not sneak out regularly.

Idiots.

“You’re the one who told me to join.”

Lance grins back at him, smile wide at the reminder. It always gave her the warm and fuzzies, him saying that. It wasn’t just her, of course. That would be stupid on both their parts. But luckily, the Garrison’s engineering program was one of the best in the country with more funding than you could shake a stick at.

Of course, he could have easily gone to the one in Europe, the one that was more focused on cutting edge technology rather than military training and piloting, but here he stood.

It meant more to Lance than she would ever know how to express.

“Also,” he says, continuing his thought as they sneak along the wall towards Pidge’s room, “all your little ‘adventures’ end up with us in the principal’s office. I don’t call that not fun!”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she teases, “We don’t always end up in the Principal's office.”

“That is so not the point.”

Lance opens her mouth to retort when Pidge suddenly steps out of his room, backpack fit to burst, and runs off down the hallway away from them. Lance and Hunk blink at each other.

“Where do you think he’s goin’?”

She starts off after him, Hunk groaning behind her but following along anyway.

***

They follow Pidge to the roof.

The boy’s sat in front of some sort of mess of equipment and beeping doohickies that Lance isn’t even going to try and guess the names of. Years of being friends with Hunk have taught her that she’s utterly incompetent with advanced technology.

Hunk is staring at it all with interest, rather than concern, so she figures Pidge isn’t constructing a bomb a least.

She steps farther onto the roof when Pidge shows no signs of knowing that they’re there. He doesn’t so much as twitch when she stands directly behind him, too engrossed in whatever’s playing in his headphones.

She rolls her eyes at his obliviousness, and bends herself over the boy, slapping her hands on his shoulders and putting her face upside down in front of his.

“What’cha listening to? She asks as Pidge squeals in alarm. Lance has to bite back a laugh at the sound. It reminds her of a kitten, all high pitched and cute.

It takes a second, but the younger boy eventually pushes her off when he realizes who she is.  “Lance, Hunk…” He fiddles with his glasses anxiously. A nervous tick. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Lance narrows her eyes at the skittish routine Pidge is doing. Does he think they’ll report him or something? They were sneaking out too. Pidge would normally pick up on that, the little brainiac he is.

Lance crosses her arms and cocks her hip, eyebrow raised questioningly. “Mhmm,” she hums like her Mamá always did when she was in trouble. It’s that type of sound that explains exactly how much you’re being believed at the moment. “And why are you up here, exactly?”

“No reason,” he says too quickly and winces. Then, slower and with forced ease, “Just… looking at the stars.”

Hunk, who she guesses deemed it safe enough to try crawling over to the technology gold mine in front of Pidge, slowly reaches out to touch the small satellite lazily spinning on its base. He doesn’t get very far at all before Pidge slaps his hand away without ever taking his eyes off Lance.

“Stop it.”

Hunk lets out a startled whine and backpedals wildly. Lance doesn’t even bat an eye at him. He’ll do it again in a second, she knows. Her best friend is too curious for his own good.

It’s why he actually agrees to so many of her ideas.

Lance pointedly looks to the tech Hunk was circling around. “What’s that then? A telescope?” she asks, sarcastic. “There’s no way it’s Garrison.”

“Nope,” Pidges says, popping the ‘p’ and looking very smug. “I built it.”

Lance looks at him impressed but not surprised. She figured it was something like that. You’d have to be deaf and blind to not realize Pidge is a genius. No way the classes they take are enough to keep him interested.

“Okay, but what does it do?”

“Well,” he says proudly. “With this, I can scan all the way to the edge of the solar system. Every frequency and message.”

Lance looks at him, practically preening he was. All fluffed up with pride. Hunk was staring at him, something like awe in the twist of his mouth, so it’s likely the pipsqueak deserves to gloat. Must be an achievement of some sort she’d not quite grasping.

“And you built something like that?” he asks, hand reaching out to tap at the keyboard despite his earlier warning.

“Knock it off, Hunk.” Pidge slaps his hand away again and Hunk groans in frustration.

Poor baby, she thinks. She can practically feel his need to take apart the computer and see how it ticks.

“Edge of the solar system, huh?” she says, purposefully casual. “All the way to, say… Kerberos?”

In the blink of an eye, Pidge goes from prideful to pouting, like a switch was flipped. He draws in on himself like a turtle, an unreadable expression on his face. Something like frustration. Sadness, maybe.

It’s so different from the fiery anger he normally directs at the people who bring up Pluto’s moon. Lance isn’t sure if that's a good or bad thing.

“Okay. What’s the deal? You go ballistic anytime it’s brought up!” Pidge just curls further inwards and Lance softens. “We’re a team, okay? You can trust us. You don’t need to keep whatever this is to yourself.”

Pidge gives him a look that tells Lance just how much he believes that, but he sighs and starts talking anyway.

“Okay, fine.” He takes a deep breath, “The world as you know it is about to change. The Kerberos mission didn’t go down due to pilot error or crew mistake-”

Pidge abruptly cuts himself off and turns to glare at Hunk who was fiddling with one of the wire panels on Pidge’s monitor. Pidge’s six sense with this technology stuff is actually getting kind of scary.

“Stop touching my equipment!” he shouts.

Hunk pouts, falling onto his side like a lame dog.

Lance nudges him with her boot sympathetically. “Well, yeah,” she says before Pidge can speak again. “The people on that mission were top of the class. Best of the best. They wouldn’t have just gone down.”

Lance never liked the official story on the lost Kerberos Vessel. And neither did most news stories on it and gossip magazines. It stunk of a cover-up of some sort.

Shirogane was her piloting hero. Was almost everyone’s. A story of him going down because he couldn’t keep control of his ship? No one was going to take that quietly. And according to Hunk, the Holts were practically legends in the scientific community.

There are plenty of theories flying around in the newspapers about the Garrison’s equipment being faulty. Of an engineering error so bad that the Garrison had reason to hide it beneath this farce of a story in order to stay at the top of the space exploration game.

Lance said that, in fewer words. Her distaste for the story and its illogicality.

Pidge is staring at her, surprised until the end. Then he starts shaking his head. “No, no, no. See, that’s where they’re losing it. The ship didn’t crash at all.”

“What?” Lance furrows her brow. “So they just lost it? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Exactly!” Pidge exclaims snapping his fingers at her. “It doesn’t make any sense. Contact lost with a lunar vessel is, well. It’s certainly not good, but it isn’t enough to cover it up with a crash landing story like that. So why would they? I wanted to find out, so I’ve been digging through their files-”

“Wha? That’s illegal!” Hunk sits up abruptly, a part of the conversation again.

Pidge ignores him. “-and scanning the system looking for the lost ship. Any S.O.S. frequencies or strange radiation readings. Instead of finding either of those things, I’ve been picking up alien radio chatter.”

Hunk gets even more panicky. “Aliens? What do you mean aliens?”

Lance frowns. The idea of aliens has been widely accepted in scientific communities for years now. Plenty of universe out there beyond their solar system, and plenty of perfectly habitable planets in the parts they can reach for their scanners and telescopes, nevermind farther.

It’d be stupidly arrogant to believe they were the only planet with life on it.

But aliens near Earth? Sentient, advanced species coming after them and, what? Attacking their ships? Is that what Pidge is implying?

That’s insane.

She tells him so.

He scowls at her. “I’m serious,” he snaps, grabbing a notepad and shoving it in her face.

Most of the page was covered in colourful doodles of random things, but there were a couple of spaces in the margins that looked like he was trying to figure out the spelling of random words. Some bits were crossed out and rewritten over and over again. In the middle, there’s a large word circled in red a few times.

“Most of its complete gibberish. Noises and words that aren’t apart of any known language on Earth; I’ve cross-referenced all of them. But they keep repeating certain words, one of them being ‘Voltron’,” he taps the circled word for emphasis. “Another being ‘Earth’.

“But tonight,” he gestures to the monitor where Lance can see the sound frequencies on the screen. They’re moving erratically as if someone really is talking on the other side. A lot of someones. “The radio is going crazier than I’ve ever seen. I think they're looking for something. And they’re looking here.”

As if from some divine dramatic cue, the Garrison alarm chooses that moment to blare high and loud. All three of them jump in surprise as Iverson warns all students to stay in their barracks until further notice. That this is not a drill.

“Zulu-niner?” Lance repeats, thinking back to the book of codes she was handed during her first term at the Garrison. “That’s an unrecognized object in our airspace.”

All three of them look to the sky at the same time but its Hunk who spots the… thing rocketing toward them first. It looks like it’s on fire, ripping through the atmosphere at unreasonable speeds and seemingly heading straight for them.

Lance’s heart leaps into her throat. “What the hell is that?!”

Pidge whips out binoculars before she even turns around, the boy focused intently on the object. “It’s a ship!”

“What?” Lance grabs the binoculars, dragging Pidge with them when he doesn’t let go. It doesn’t matter that Pidge told her it was a ship; when she sees it actually flying towards them her brain short circuits. “¡Dios mío! ¡No puedo creerlo!” Lance exclaims, eyes wide. “That is not one of ours!”

The trio gazes up at the sky in wonder and fear.

“No. It’s one of theirs.”

Pidge’s eyes are practically sparkling as they watch the ship crash into the rocks a mere mile away. The ground shakes with the force of it hitting the ground.

Pidge scrambles away like a bat out of hell, quickly and precisely shoving all of his equipment into his backpack.

“Wait. so like, aliens are real? That’s a thing that’s definitely happening now?” Hunk asks, wringing his hands and shifting his weight from foot to foot.

Lance gives him a wry grin as she turns back to Pidge. The younger boy is pulling his backpack over his shoulder and looks up at her, excitement dancing behind his eyes. He’s practically vibrating in place, hopping from foot to foot like Hunk as if it physically impossible for him to stay still right now.

Lance grins, she’s not much better off.

“We have to see that ship.”

Lance couldn’t agree more. Real-life aliens? That’s a piece of history she's definitely not missing. She grabs Hunk’s hand and drags him off after Pidge.

“Come on, darling. The adventure isn’t over yet!”

Lance laughs when Hunk just groans in response.

“Worst team-building exercise ever.”

***

Fifteen minutes later, the three of them are set up on an outcropping above and away from a military tent set up around the crash. The Garrison had gotten there way before them with the land rovers and set up everything with scary efficiency.

Pidge has been fiddling with his equipment, hacking into something by the looks of the raw code dancing across his screen. Lance laid herself out on the ground sniper-style not long after they’d arrived, Pidge’s high tech binoculars put to good use as she surveys the area, reporting it all to a beyond nervous Hunk.

She’s sure he hadn’t heard anything she’s been saying, too busy muttering to himself and shuffling his feet. He hasn’t even sat down yet, too skittish.

She’s focused on the ship that crash-landed, surprisingly intact for something that hit a giant rock at a thousand miles an hour. It’s nothing she’d ever seen before. All sleek angles and dark metal. Lance’s fingers itch to run across the hull, to curl around the controls and see how she flies.

She moves to scan more of the area and maybe, kinda, gets a little distracted by a commanding officer coming out of the tent.

“Who is she?” she asks no one, voice silky smooth. Pidge hits the back of her head hard enough to make her yelp. Lance rips the binoculars from her face to glare at the boy. “What the hell, Pidge?”

He just gives her an unimpressed look before turning back to the screen. Lance huffs, going back to surveillance. It’s not Lance’s fault she was pretty. Can’t she appreciate pretty things?

“So,” she says, loud enough to be heard over Hunk, “good news is that the Garrison finally stepped up their security. The bad news is that they got their shit together when it was inconvenient to us. I don’t think there’s a way for us to get inside, not without risking bodily harm. And I prefer my body unharmed, so…”

Hunk, unsurprisingly, suggests just heading back to the barracks and forgetting about the whole endeavour entirely. Saying that they should raid the barrack’s kitchen for food as a bonding experience instead of spying on the military and alien spaceships. He even spins around to start back down the hill before Pidge speaks up.

“Hold up. There’s a camera in there. Look!”

Pidge has somehow acquired the feed of whatever camera set-up there was in the room. Lance doesn’t even ask how. It’d probably hurt her brain.

The feed is a bit fuzzy but clear enough to see a circular medical room with personnel roaming about dressed in hazmat suits. Equipment and tests were being set up by the busy little med techs, all of them furiously writing on their clipboards.

But what really caught her eye was the fact that in the middle of the room, there was a human person strapped to the table like a goddamn science experiment. He looked strange, weird rags for clothes, all torn and filthy, and looking in need of a good meal or ten despite his obvious strength.

The straps holding him down strained as he struggled against them, yelling and pleading with the med techs around him. His words fell on deaf ears by the way they were acting.

He looked scared. Frantic and so terrified that it took Lance a full five seconds before she realized who she was looking at.

The man on that table was Takashi Shirogane.

The pilot of the Kerberos Mission.

Her hero.

He’s alive. Roughed up and half-starved, with new scars and white hair and a robot arm—but alive.

It’s a goddamn miracle and the people in there are acting like he’s nothing but an interesting test subject. Anger rises in the back of her throat, hot and acidic and she stops herself from sneering.

She tells the other two who he is as Shirogane talks on the screen. She can’t hear what he’s saying because Pidge has the headphones, but he is freaking out. And still, none of the scientists even bat an eye at him. They aren’t even listening to him.

Pidge looks at the screen with a mixture of curiosity and something darker she can’t categorize. Something more desperate. “Where’s the rest of the crew?” he asks impatiently, under his breath. After a moment he informs Lance and Hunk that Shirogane’s talking about ‘Voltron.’ That they need to find it somehow.

The three of them watch as Shirogane is examined and then put to sleep, still struggling. It makes Lance’s blood boil. How dare they?

“They didn’t even ask about the rest of the crew!” Pidge protests angrily.

“What are they doing down there?” Lance snarls. “This cannot be regulation.”

Pidge looks up determinedly, “We need to get him out of there.”

Lance opens her mouth to agree when Hunk suddenly stands up. “Mhmm, okay. Hate to be the voice of reason, always,” he shoots a look at Lance that she returns with a feral grin. “But weren’t we just watching on the screen because there’s no way past the guards?”

He uses wide gestures, sweeping hands and fast motions like he does when he’s making a point.

“Well, buddy, that was before we were properly motivated.” She tilts her head questioningly at Pidge. “Maybe we could tunnel in?”

“Or we grab some hazmat suits and sneak in like med techs,” he offers.

“Or, hear me out, or, we dress like cooks, sneak into the commissary… have a little late-night snack?” Hunk tries weakly.

Both Lance and Pidge give him unimpressed stares.

She taps her knuckle against her jaw, face scrunched up in thought. “No, what we need is a distraction.”

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Not a second after she finishes speaking, four loud booms in rapid succession sound off behind her. The ground shakes, forcing Hunk to the ground and rattling Lance and Pidge enough to shake their teeth.

“What the hell?!” Lance exclaims, whipping around towards the explosions. She can see the land rovers already speeding off towards them.

“Are they here? Oh god, are- The- Is that the aliens? They got here really quickly!” Hunk panics behind her as Lance snatches up the binoculars she set to the side.

Pidge, who was the first to recover, squints off the side of the cliff and points in the distance. “No, those were a distraction! For him!”

Lance zooms in with the binoculars and the moving dot turns into a person riding a red hoverbike. The bike is getting steadily closer to the tent and Shirogane. Whoever it is doesn’t even wait for the bike to fully stop before he’s jumping off and running for the entrance.

She can just make out a red jacket and black hair in the dim light and Lance feel indignation rise up in her throat. She’s completely missed what Pidge had been saying.

“¡Hijo de puta!” Lance swears, shoving the binoculars into Pidge’s hands and running for the cliffside. “If he thinks he’s going to beat me in this too he has another thing coming! ¡El nervio de este cabrón!”

“What?” Pidge asks, confused from both her anger and her Spanish. She’d forgotten he didn’t speak Spanish for a moment, most people do these days. “Who are you talking about?”

“Keith!”

“Who?” Pidge asks, even more confused now. But Hunk, bless him, understands immediately.

“What? Are you sure?”

“I’d know that mullet anywhere!” she calls, already halfway down the cliff.

Pidge stands at the top for a second longer, asking again in a tone that sounded more like a whine, “Who’s Keith?” before following behind.

Lance sprints across the clearing and past knocked out guards until she charges into the main room, breathing heavily. When she gets there, the technicians are all on the ground and Keith is already lifting Shirogane off the table. Hunk and Pidge arrive, breathless behind her.

“Nope. No, you don’t- no, no, no, no.” Lance shoves the stupid metal table out of the way to come upon his other side to help bare Shirogane’s weight. “I’m saving Shirogane.”

Keith looks at her in confusion and suspicion. “Who are you?”

“Who am I? The name’s Lance Martinez,” Lance pauses but no recognition appears on Keith’s face. Anger sparks in her gut.

She knew Keith wouldn’t remember her. After all, she didn’t matter to the star pupil. Wasn’t a threat. But she can’t help but push it farther, force him to know her now. Being forgotten, being unimportant terrifies Lance and it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t even like Keith. She wants him to know her. She doesn’t want to be insignificant.

“We were in the same class at the Garrison,” she reminds through clenched teeth, as she forces herself to look away from Keith and towards the door. She starts moving because they need to get out of here, and she recognizes that even as anger burns inhumanly bright in her.

“Were you an engineer?” he asks, face blank, as if it wasn’t the most insulting thing said to Lance in the last year. No offence to Hunk.

“No! I’m a pilot,” she throws out the title like it means something—because it does. It means everything to Lance.

“Oh!” He finally remembers, eyebrows furrowed as he thinks back, “I remember you. You’re the cargo pilot.”

Lance can’t stop herself from snapping, “Fighter pilot, now. Thanks to you washing out.”

Hunk gives her a sharp look. She’s never willingly brought it up before. To be second best, the second pick for something that dominated her dreams for so many years… Lance is actually surprised at herself for bringing it up.

They make it to the rock that Keith had hidden his hoverbike behind.

“Congratulations,” Keith remarks flatly.

Lance fights the urge to punch him in his stupid, arrogant face and reminds herself that she’s holding up Shirogane. She couldn’t punch Keith without letting him fall.

Hunk comes up behind them from where he and Pidge had been watching the progress of the returning military. “Hey, uh, mind if we catch a ride with you? It’s just that they do not look happy.” He’s jumping from foot to foot again.

They must be on their way back. The five of them clamber on the bike hurriedly.

Lance is settling Shirogane on the bike when it abruptly jerks back onto its tailfin. She just barely grabs Shirogane’s head away from the bit of metal that would have slammed into it, probably giving him a concussion or brain damage.

She turns to glare at Hunk who gives only a sheepish smile in return.

He starts babbling about weight-bearing and available seating areas so Lance lets his voice fall to the background. She’s more concerned about making sure Shiro won’t fall off the second they start moving. With Pidge’s help, she manages it a second before Keith fishtails them in a circle and speeds off in the other direction.

Lance practically throws Shirogane into his arms so she can grab onto something before she falls off, hers being the most precarious position on the bike.

Once she gets situated—and it’s almost like wind-surfing, actually—she turns around to find the Rovers eating up the distance between them easily.

“Uh, can’t this thing go any faster?” she asks because going to jail wasn’t on her list of things to do today, and she’d rather it stay that way. A sentiment shared by everyone present, most likely.

Keith doesn’t look back when he answers. “We could toss off some nonessential weight.”

She actually looks around the bike before she realizes. Her expression sours like she bit into a lemon when it hits her.

“Oh, haha. That’s an insult. Funny,” Lance replies in the same tone dull tone he used.

The next three minutes of her life were spent in heart-stopping fear and begrudging wonderment. Unsurprisingly, fleeing from the military on a hoverbike with four other people, one of whom was officially dead an hour ago, was not how she foresaw her day going.

But the worst part was how beautifully reckless Keith was when he drove.

Lance wanted to hate him for it, but the thing was, he was good. Amazing, even. He took turns without thinking because he knew he would make it instinctively. He took out Rovers by outmanoeuvring them in ways Lance could only dream of doing. And he did it even with the extra weight on the bike depleting his steering and speed, directing Hunk to lean one way or another in order to make up for the deficiency.

It was breathtaking piloting skills and if it had been anyone else Lance would be worshipping the ground at their feet.

But it wasn’t anyone else.

It was Keith.

And Lance would sooner dump grape juice on Francisca’s favourite white lace dress before she admits to being impressed by Keith in any way.

(Even if the pilot in her longs to pepper him with a thousand questions on manoeuvres and tricks.)

***

They end up in front of some sort of shack in the middle of the desert, the sun just coming over the horizon when Keith finally stops driving. The five of them hurry inside, Hunk carrying Shirogane and placing him on a couch that looks like it should have been tossed three years ago.

It takes him two hours to wake up.

In the time waiting for him to wake up, Lance had been wandering around the shack, poking at this and that and generally being nosy.

Sue her. She was curious as to what the other pilot had been doing for the last year.

It also kept her from focusing too intently on the strange tugging sensation in her chest. Not painful, and it wasn’t even really a feeling if that made sense. Which it probably didn’t.

It felt almost like someone was calling her. Tugging on her sleeve for her to follow off to places unknown. Only, instead of her sleeve, it was a pressure behind her sternum. A strange force that ebbed and flowed like waves on sand.

It was… familiar in a way. Like a memory she couldn’t quite reach, something she couldn’t quite remember.

Shiro wakes up and she shoves all her thoughts about it away. They have more important things to worry about at the moment.

Keith stalks right up to a covered wall right after both he and Shiro come back inside from whatever brotherly talk they had outside. She’s sure it was suitably emotional and caring and filled with heartfelt ‘I’m glad you’re back’s. Heaven knows that’s how it would go with her and her family.

He pulls the sheet away, revealing a bulletin filled with… something. Shiro is the first to speak.

“What have you been working on?”

“I, I don’t know. I was lost after you-” Keith stops hard as if he bit his tongue. He starts again, “After the Garrison. I was drawn out here.” Keith points to a place on the map circled over and over again labelled ‘energy source.’ “It was like some feeling in my chest-” Lance breaths in a sharp breath, hand flying back to her own chest at the reminder of its existence. It almost surges, more forceful like it knows she’s thinking about it. “-was telling me to search.”

“For what?” Lance croaks out a second before Shiro can, their voices overlapping.

Everyone turns to look at her and Keith seems almost annoyed. But he must see something on her face because he answers instead of snapping at her or something. It’s more than Lance would have done for him.

“I didn't really know… until I stumbled across this area. It's an outcropping of giant boulders with caves covered in these, ancient markings. Each tells a slightly different story about a blue lion, but they all share clues leading to some event, some arrival happening last night.” Keith looks to Shiro, eyes wide and vulnerable. “Then you showed up," he says in a voice so quiet, Lance almost doesn’t hear it.

The room is silent. The ‘you could hear a pin drop’ kind of silence.

Lance isn’t one for believing in gods or mythical beings, but there’s something going on here. Too many coincidences for it to not be on purpose.

***

It’s kinda creepy that the graph Hunk made of Voltron’s emission spectrum looks exactly like the outcropping of rock Keith found the cave systems near them.

The feeling of absolute certainty in Lance’s chest that that is the place they're looking for is far worse.

***

“Okay… this. This is officially freaky,” Lance announces as they make the trek out to the rocks, Hunk’s gizmo going haywire over the alien element signatures… or something.

The party of five carefully picked their way down cliff faces and through ravines, following the sound of beeping. It was hot in the midday sun and Lance had taken her jacket off and redone her hair into a more sturdy bun to keep it out of her face.

The entire time, her hand barely left her chest, the pressure growing stronger and stronger the farther they walked.

No one wanted to talk much, and that left Lance to bounce around in her own mind.

She focused on the pressure in her chest, studying it as well as she could. She wasn’t sure why, but the more they walked, the stronger the feeling got. More insistent and real.

The longer it went on, the easier it was for Lance to describe it. It felt like the pressure build-up in the air right before a thunderstorm, static dancing along your skin as you wait for the rain to break. That weightless feeling right before the wave crests and you haven’t yet caught the tide of it with your board but you know you will.

It feels like anticipation. Like suspense. Like a promise for things to come.

It sets her on edge. She can be patient when she wants, but it feels like her rope has gone beyond the point of fraying. Just jittery with the feel of it, her fingers tapping patterns and tracing shapes over her heart over and over again.

By the time Hunk leads them into the cave systems, Lance doesn’t think she could stand still even if she wanted to, she’s humming with so much energy.

Their merry band of misfits get only a few steps into the cave before they’re stopping in amazement.

Inside, the whole cave is covered in carvings. Lions and people and battles from long ago, all painstakingly carved into every square inch of the rock walls around them.

Lance leans in to study the markings, memories of Sabre ranting about different art styles and impressions of different ancient civilizations tickling the back of her mind. When she’d come back from her studies in India, it had been all she talked about for months. The old carvings and what they could mean and how you could tell them apart, Lance had never seen her sister so animated before.

She was far from an expert—that was her parents and Sabre’s area, not hers—but even she could tell there were quite a few styles lining the walls. Some were flowy while others were jagged and harsh, some plain while others look like they might’ve been colourfully painted once upon a time.

It was odd to see so many styles in one place. Too many tribes here. Too many overlaid styles. It didn’t make much sense to her but maybe Sabre could figure it out. The second she’s able, she’s dragging Sabre back from Africa so she can study these immediately before anyone gets to them.

Her sister is going to have kittens when she sees the cave, Lance can already imagine her face.

Lance reaches out to trace a carving of a lion lunging with the tip of her finger, the lines sleek and fluid like water. She barely grazes the rock, but it feels like lighting zapping through her hand, arcing up her arm into her chest, into the very core of her

 The carving glows a brilliant blue, starting from where her fingers had brushed against it and flowing outwards like a ripple in a giant pond.

Within seconds the whole cave is lit up, every carving glowing bright and serene and electric blue.

“They’ve never done that before,” Keith feels the need to interject and yeah, Lance had kind of assumed. Glowing cave drawings seem like something someone would mention.

She doesn’t get the chance to say that out loud because a second later the floor crumbles beneath their feet and they’re falling through the air.

She screams though she can’t hear it over the roaring in her ears. Terror crushes her heart, strangling it in its grip as she falls before finally splashing into a body of freezing water.

It shocks her and she snaps her mouth shut. Her lungs burn for air—all of it expelled when she screamed—and so she kicks upward quickly. She breaks the surface, coughing and discovers the roaring wasn’t her ears, but the giant waterfall on the far side of the cave. It echoes around her, bouncing off walls and reverberating back tenfold, drowning out all other sounds.

The others pop up around her before she can get concerned. They’re all coughing and gasping for air, though she can’t actually hear them doing either.

“Where the hell are we?” Keith calls over the waterfall.

He doesn’t look happy as he slowly swims over to where she, Hunk and Pidge are treading water. His hair is hanging in his face and a scowl is set firmly on his face.

Lance looks around the cavern. There’s no sunlight, but she can see perfectly fine. More carvings line the walls in here, glowing bright enough to light the whole space. Which is an accomplishment, seeing as wherever they are was about the size of a football stadium.

It had to be huge she supposed. What with the island in the middle of the vast pool of water, where something giant and blue and glowing sat, serene and patient.

The Blue Lion, something whispers to her.

She’s climbing from the pool before she’d even made a conscious decision to do so, drawing to the island by some invisible force.

She was breathtaking.

She towered over them proudly from behind her force field, chin raised elegantly as she waited for them to arrive. A mountain of gleaming metal, sleek and graceful from her snout to the tip of her wickedly sharp tail.

Bright, ocean blue curved gracefully over her head to move down the length of her back, spilling across her chest as it went. Her muzzle was a powerful, black and white interlocking pattern reminiscent of teeth and lions’ lips. The white of her snout continues up the line of her jaw after the black stops, curling beneath endlessly blue eyes and sweeping up into the sharply pointed ears.

She was the epitome of sleek ferocity. Danger curled into a gorgeously lethal body.

A deep rumbling fills her chest as she stands before her. It vibrates so hard she feels like she might shake apart with the force of it.

Lance steps forward, that same invisible force still pushing her forward. She looks up into those blue eyes, deep and dark as the ocean and just as terrifyingly alluring.

“Is this it? Is this the Voltron?” Pidge asks into the silence.

“No,” Lance answers without thinking, her voice sure. “Not all of it.”

“What? How do you know?” Keith asks, tone suspicious.

As if like an answer, the cave falls away and Lance is suddenly somewhere else.

Places and visions and people appear and disappear rapidly. Surfacing and falling away faster than Lance can keep track of.

Five Lions standing in front of her, roaring as one as they charge into battle.

A giant warrior standing in front of a planet, shielding it from harm. Hundreds of battles fought thousands of years ago.

Planets she'd never seen before but knew somehow.

People she doesn’t know but who spoke with familiarity.

Flying through the stars.

Warriors. Dozens of them dressed for battle and standing beside their Lions. Grim-faced or laughing or snarling.

The feeling of belonging, of being One, of becoming more than just herself, of-

Of being shoved back into a body too small and too lonely and too weak. Lance gasps and almost falls to the floor with the weight of her loss, with the deep, broken longing calling for her. Her blood roars in her ears louder than the waterfall as she tries to reorient herself.

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god-”

“This is what they’re looking for.”

“Incredible.”

They’re all talking over themselves, awe-filled voices swirling together into indistinct chatter. Lance stumbles for the barrier, legs wobbly and hands shaking with the force of things to come. In the back of her mind, something whispers too quietly for her to make out any words.

She slams into the barrier and the second she touches it, electricity courses through her veins. It zaps across her skin, jumping across the space between her fingers like miniaturized lightning.

The wall falls.

The voice is loud, crystal clear in her mind.

Paladin. Paladin. Paladin. Paladin-

It chants to her, reverent and euphoric.

It is not as unsettling as it should be.

The Lion moves with a muted mechanical whirl, tail swishing behind her from where it had been neatly resting across her paws as she climbs to her feet, regal and elegant and an otherworldly kind of graceful. Pidge squeals behind her and grabs her arm, latching onto it with a death-like grip.

Lowering her head, the Lion lets out a ground-shaking roar, the previously still cave air whipping around them with the deafening force of it. It echoes around them, a dozen answering calls back that Lance has the hysterical desire to join in on. To add her voice to the wave of sound.

It wraps around her, fills her up fit to burst.

The others yell at the sudden movement and noise, scared and confused, but Lance revels in it.

Pidge tries to haul her back when the Lion delicately lowers herself to her level, but she stands firm. The Lion bows before her and opens her gaping maw, the interlocking design parts, the black ‘teeth’ lining the top like gleaming stalagmites.

The irony of literally walking into the belly of the beast is not lost on her. She just doesn’t care.

She runs inside without a second thought, without even a look back at the others. Her grin is wide enough to split her face when, at the end of the short path, she finds the most incredible cockpit she’s ever seen.

Hunk’s standing in the doorway before she’s even sat down, expression pinched with worry.

She doesn’t expect the seat to move and squeals at the suddenness of it before laughing, loud and carefree. There’s an answering chuckle in the back of her mind. A soft vibration edging down her neck, cool and light.

The screen in front of her lights up, glowing a soft blue like everything else as it displays the cave—like she’s looking through the Lion’s eyes. She runs her hands along the controls and buttons, everything perfectly within reach, like it’d been tailored to her specifically. 

Her hands just barely brush the grips but it’s the same electricity from before, intensified. Like pure energy flowing through her, as if she’d downed three cups of coffee in as many minutes. Her chest buzzes and it’s as if she can feel all the stars in the sky and every atom of water in the universe.

Her laugh turns breathless. Unbelieving.

“Hey, baby girl,” Lance breathes, voice no louder than a whisper as she runs her hand along the control panel. “You’re a beauty, aren’t you?”

The Lion purrs in the back of her mind, a deep rumbling that sounds like waves crashing over themselves. “I am much older than you, my dearest paladin.” An all-encompassing affection swathes her psyche. “Thousands of years, in fact. Older than even your oldest civilizations.”

Lance’s mouth goes dry at that. The sheer power and wisdom within this great beast utterly terrifying. And it’s talking to her as if she’s special. As if she is the most important thing in the universe. Her hands shake so she tightens her hold on the grips.

She doesn’t know how to respond to that, so she does what she always does when unsure of a path. Pulls confidence over her like a well-worn coat and fakes it.

“Well,” she practically purrs at the Lion. “You don’t look a day over two thousand.” 

“Lance?” Hunk interrupts, voice weary and tired as the others crowd inside.

She turns to him slowly, blinking at him with bright blue eyes and an unabashed grin. “Yes, popsicle?” she drawls sedately.

Hunk wrinkles his nose slightly. “Are you flirting with the giant robot cat?”

She raises an elegant eyebrow at him. She knows it’s elegant because she practised it in the mirror for hours after she’d seen Francisca do it and send a boy falling over his own feet in response. “Do you really need to ask?”

“Sometimes I just hope you know?” He tells her tiredly. Lance laughs at him and his face falls further.

The Lion recaptures her attention with a sensation not unlike a cat rubbing up against your leg. Only instead of her leg, it’s her mind.

It catches her off guard and she jumps in her seat.

“Come, my paladin. It’s been too long since I’ve seen the sky. Show me how you fly,” she challenges. It’s playful and such a very human thing to say that Lance can’t help but laugh out loud.

She follows the gentle prods and pokes as the Lion guides her hands over the controls. She instructs with a gentle crooning that reminds her of starlight and murmuring creek beds. After a few seconds, Lance grabs the controls in a confidently firm hold.

She’s never flown an alien spaceship before. But, hey! There’s a first time for everything.

“Okay, let’s do… this,” was the only warning she gave the others before thrusting the controls forward and sending the Lion through the wall so quickly Lance hit the back of her seat. Pidge and Hunk squealed while Shiro and Keith made much more dignified grunts of surprise.

She barely registers the damage she must’ve done to the cave walls and carvings because she’s suddenly in the open air and can feel the elation the Lion has coursing through her at the simple joy of the sun on her back. Can feel how she revels in it, and through her, Lance revels too.

Flying the Lion is exhilarating. It’s everything the simulator isn’t, everything the fastest planes on earth aren’t. It’s freedom and happiness. It’s the joy she gets every time she flew as a kid but multiplied. She spins and twirls, backflips and does figure eights all while whooping and hollering with such bright joy in her chest.

She and the Lion play along the desert terrain and Lance can’t remember the last time she felt like this. 

The others aren’t having as great a time as she is though.

“Make it stop! Oh, Akua, make it stop,” Hunk calls from Lance’s left where he has her armrest in a death grip. He’s looking distinctly green, even with his tanned skin. Lance winces, she’d forgotten about his motion sickness in all the excitement.

“If Yellow’s kit throws up in me, I will spit him out,” The Lion says matter of factly in her mind.

“Yellow’s kit?” Lance asks confused, as she evens out their flight pattern. She looks back at her best friend confusedly. “You mean Hunk?”

Now Lance is thinking about him with tiny kitten ears and toe beans and as a chubby, little calico who still wears his headband. It makes her want to coo at him.

“What about me?” The boy in question asks weakly, still swaying oddly even though he’s on his knees.

Lance pats his arm comfortingly, “Nada, cariño. Just calm down,” she pauses. “And don’t throw up.”

“Paladin,” Her Lion sounds tense and with the slightest hint of contempt dripping from her voice. Lance’s shoulders go up, back straightening in response.

“What, baby girl? What happened?”

“What is the Lion saying? What’s wrong?” Pidge asks and Lance raises a hand at him, silently asking for a second.

“Galra,” she growls, the sound harsh and scraping.

“‘Galra’? What the fuck is a galra?”

“Galra,” Shiro repeats, voice low and panicked.

Lance turns around to look at him and finds him staring back at her. The pink scar on his face a stark contrast to the deathly pale skin around it. Lance’s gut clenches at the expression.

Something that can terrify Shiro that much is not something she ever wants to meet.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Keith reach out to the older man, bringing Shiro out of his thoughts.

“The galra are conquerors, destroyers of the universe. They are plagues.” Blue shows her blurred images, memories from long ago, battles won and lost. They all show the same thing; cruel creatures intent on control. “They are currently approaching your Earth.”

A screen flashes to her right, indicating an object heading toward them very quickly and confirming what Blue just said.

“What?!” Lance cries, yanking the controls to come to a grinding halt. She stops so abruptly, Blue skids across the desert sand, tumbling over herself before coming to a stop in a decidedly ungraceful heap. The passengers inside are jostled around violently and curse at Lance and her flying skills.

Blue huffs at the rough treatment but stands up without a problem. She shakes herself off harder than necessary to the annoyance of those in the cockpit. “Calm down, my Paladin. These filth are of little concern to you,” she tells her primly.

Lance whispers under her breath fiercely, voice strained, as she tries to keep the words from the others. “Baby girl, there are evil warlords headed for my home. It is very much a concern.” She can feel the worry and terror and panic welling up within him. Her family is on this planet. Oh god.

Her Lion rumbles at her, concerned at the force of her emotions. Then, apparently coming to a conclusion, she tells her, “Then we will get rid of them,” before jumping into the sky without warning.

“Where the hell are you going?” Keith demands, his grip on the back of her seat so tight Lance can hear it creaking. But Lance doesn’t have the energy to snap at him right now, she's too busy trying to shove the panic down from where it’s crawling up her throat.

“There’s a Galra ship approaching Earth. Blue says we’re getting rid of them.”

“What?” Pidge snaps, “What is it saying exactly?”

“It’s not like, words words. She’s a lion, she can’t exactly talk,” Pidge glares at her and Lance glares back, neither willing to back down until Hunk speaks again.

“Well, this is the weapon they want right? Why don’t we just give it to them?”

Panic spikes in her chest and she doesn’t think it’s entirely hers.

Lance flips around in her seat so fast she gets whiplash, “No!” she shouts at the same time Shiro says, “You don’t understand,” in a sharp voice.

The four of them look at her questioningly—Hunk more worried than the others—and Lance realizes she might be a bit overprotective for someone who only met her alien, lion-shaped weapon-ship fifteen minutes ago. It probably doesn’t say good things that she thinks of Blue as hers. Though her Lion started it first.

“Uh,” she wets her lips, thinking carefully. “She doesn’t want to go with them. The Galra, they’re not- Blue says they’re bad. Very bad. Right, Shiro?”

His face goes grim. “Yeah, I’d say they’re pretty bad.”

“Uh,” Hunk raises his hand, “how bad? Like, exactly?”

Shiro looks at him, eyes piercing, “They spread like a plague, conquering planet after planet. They destroy all who oppose them and won’t stop until everything is either destroyed or theirs to control. There is no reasoning with them. There is no mercy. They are the living nightmare of the whole universe and there is no waking up.”

The air in the cockpit is tense and heavy. Lance, who never turned away from Hunk, watches his face slowly morph to a mix of sheepishness and terror.

Lance squeezes his hand comfortingly.

“Okay, uh, that’s pretty bad. So that’s a no on the giving vicious alien species advanced superweapons. What are we gonna do instead?” he asks.

Hunk doesn’t get his answer.

Because at that moment, Blue finally breaks through the atmosphere and then there is nothing but open space in every direction with Earth laid out below. The part that catches her attention though, is the warship floating menacingly in front of them. It creeps closer and closer and the air in the cockpit is thick with fear.

The others are tensed behind her, all of them staring dumbly at the ship more advanced than anything Earth could even dream of.

Lance feels like panicking. Panicking sounds like a great idea and if the way her heart is pounding at her rib cage is anything to go by, it agrees.

Having a panic attack and curling up in the corner for an hour or so, sounds like a grand idea. Just like the good old days.

Lance is pulled out of her dark thoughts when Blue shouts at her. “Paladin, move!”

She jerks the controls without thought, dodging the laser beam directed at them by a hair's breadth. The warship is firing on them and Lance’s heart hammers in her throat as she twists and spins, dancing away from the oncoming fire as best she can.

The cockpit is chaos. The others are screaming, trying to back seat pilot or just making unintelligible, distracting noises.

Pidge’s voice, unsurprisingly, rises above the rest. “Lance, if I die, I’m coming back and haunting your ass so hard!”

“Language, Pidgeon!” she screams back as she does a barrel roll away from a giant blast headed for their chest. “Also, hey! Baby blue and I got this covered!”

“This isn’t the simulator, man!”

No shit. Lance thinks. The simulator had never felt this fluid. This intense. It’s everything real flying feels like and more.

Instead of saying that, she laughs tightly, pulling her easygoing persona more securely around her. “Well, that’s good! I always wrecked the simulator!”

“Paladin, we must take the fight away from your home planet. We can lead them away. It’s not your planet they truly want, but me. If we run, they will follow.”

Lance nods, “You got it, sugar.” She pushes them forward, charging the warship and slashing along the side with Blue’s wicked claws before dancing away from the laser beams and shooting off past them, away from Earth.

“I hope you know it’s really weird hearing you have only half a conversation,” yells Hunk as he hangs on for dear life.

It takes a heart-stopping second, but the warship does give chase, doing a one-eighty frighteningly fast and rushing after them. Lance realizes with dread that they are much slower than them. The warship is gaining, eating up the distance between them like it means nothing.

Keith speaks again, the first time since they left the atmosphere. “Where are we?”

Lance doesn’t answer him, half because she’s busy piloting a ship and half because she’s petty and doesn’t care.

“We’re by Kerberos,” Shiro answers, sounding surprised and awed, gazing around the cockpit disbelievingly. The feeling is shared by all five of them.

“What?!” Pidge exclaims. “It takes our ships months to get out this far. That was five seconds.”

Lance beams with pride. Her baby girl is so fast.

In the space between one second and the next, a giant swirling mass of… something, flares to life in front of them. It’s huge and unsettling and a deep inky black that absorbs all light. For a second Lance thinks it’s a black hole before she realizes that the thought is ridiculous.

“What is that?” Hunk asks, voice shrill. He grabs her upper arm, choosing to hold on to that instead of the armrest. He squeezes tightly, just on the right side of painful, still cautious of his strength even when terrified.

“Paladin,” Blue stresses. “You need to go through the wormhole.”

“I need to do what now?”

“What is the lion saying?” Shiro asks. The calm, confident leader they need. Lance doesn’t even think to question his authority as she normally does with anyone else who tries to boss her around.

“She wants us to fly through the wormhole.”

“Where does it go?”

Her Lion stays silent despite her mental prodding. “I- I don’t know. Shiro, you’re the senior officer. What do we do?”

He’s quiet for a moment and Lance is hyper-aware of how much time they have before they reach the wormhole anyway or get run over by a warship. Her fingers tap anxiously on the grips, waiting.

“The Lion knows more than we do. I say we follow her,” he stops and looks at each other them, children compared to him. “But we’re a team, we decide together.”

The other three look at each other, unsure of their decisions. Lance holds her tongue. Her decision was made the second Shiro agreed with Blue, but he also said that they decide together.

She knows what they’ll choose, but it’s not about that. That’s not why Shiro asked for their opinion.

Slowly, the three all nod to her. She breathes a sigh of relief and pushes Blue faster towards the wormhole, hoping to make it there before the warship is upon them.

The grins she wears is far from genuine and her voice is too flat, but she makes the joke anyway.

“Looks like we’re skipping class tomorrow.”