Notes:

If you hated the space whale timeskip, if you thought BP Lance would happen, if you were disgusted by the treatment of Kuron, if you think Keith is the true RP and perma-Black Paladin Keith doesn't make sense, if you think Shiro is the true BP, if you were dissatisfied by the quick offscreen resolution of Keith and Krolia's relationship, if you were dissatisfied by all the aborted character arcs and plotlines, and if you (like me) were like wait, why was Haggar making clones in the first place, that's super weird, are we ever coming back to that or nah, well then this is the fic for you!

Canon is dead in this story, my friends. It's dead and I killed it. Just go into this with a loosey goosey remembrance of canon from the end of s6 onward and I'll tell you through the narrative what 'really' happened; namely, what's stayed from canon and what's canon divergent. Don't worry about it too much. If there's something we collectively dislike about canon, just assume it's been changed lol. Most importantly, the space whale time skip for Keith was 3 months instead of 2 years, and the castleship was not destroyed (negating the need for a road trip back to Earth).

This has been in the works since s5 when we were all dead-convinced that BP Lance and klance were both inevitable. We may have been wrong, but they can't stop us from speaking it all into existence anyway. ;)

Also this is super long, I know, but I do encourage you to read it in one sitting if you have a few spare consecutive hours (which is why I've posted it as a one shot instead of in separate chapters) because I think it reads best that way. You'll understand why as you read. Obviously you can break it up if you need to, that'll be fine, but that's just my author's note. ;)

See you on the other side.

Speak for the Stars

part i

someone else's gun

.

.

I am happy.

The thought crept up on Lance much the way the waves crept around his folded knees where he sat in the sand, watching his younger siblings splash about in the surf and listening to their laughter the same way people listen to music. Seabirds called overhead, and if he closed his eyes and focused past that sound he could hear his mother and father debating about the merits of rare versus well-done steak. (A timeless argument in this family.) The sky was painted; a piercing gradient of fiery blue above that blended into a much softer periwinkle where it hugged the sea, fading the horizon line so you couldn't quite tell where the sea ended and the sky began. The sun was warm on his bare back.

It was amazing, the things you took for granted until they were taken from you. Background things to which you wouldn't pay close attention, like the pitch of certain bird calls, the texture of seafoam on bare ankles, the temperature of the sun on a cloudless May afternoon. Oh, how Lance had missed sunshine. Ached for it every hour of every day, ever since leaving Earth. They had lived through the war in the inky void of space, always on the move, thousands of lightyears on average from the nearest given star. And when they did go planetside it was never quite right. The local stars were always either the wrong color or else the wrong class, either a little too big in the sky or a little too small, and sometimes so hot or so cold they had to keep their thermal-regulating armor on the entire time. Lance had almost cried the first time they landed on a planet with a sun that appeared the same size and color as Earth's Sol. Hunk had pointed it out and Lance had let out a victory whoop, yanking his helmet off recklessly before anyone had yet confirmed the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere. But it was for naught, because the warmth hadn't touched his cheeks the way he'd hoped. Right size or not, the star wasn't right. It wasn't Sol. It wasn't home.

Every molecule in his human skin was programmed by eighty million years of evolution to recognize the sunshine it felt now as home. Home again at last. Lance dug his hands deeper into the wet Cuban sand and let the thought wash over him freely:

I am so happy right now. I could literally lay here for the rest of my life and die happy.

"Lance!" Mamá called. "Food's ready!"

"Be right there!" Lance called back to her. But he put off the moment of rising simply because he could. Because there was no rush, right? There was nowhere to be, no reason to run, no loved ones to chase as the tide bore them ceaselessly farther and farther away. All the people he loved most were gathered here within walking distance, safe and happy and healthy and warm. The childhood home he had so often dreamt of during his years in space sat at the top of the hill right behind him, its salmon-pink paint easily visible between the palm trees whenever he turned to double-check. Sighing with a deep and restful content that he'd never known before, Lance leaned backwards the rest of the way, letting his back come to rest flat on the sand so the Cuban sun could warm his face and chest. Sure he was gonna get sand in his hair, but—

"You're gonna get sand in your hair."

A shadow fell over him, darkening the red amniotic glow that had been seeping through his closed eyelids. Lance peeked, and saw Keith standing over him with one hand resting on his hip, wearing happiness on his sun-kissed shoulders like a cape.

"Hm, and why do you care?" Lance goaded with a lazy smile. Because then I'll have to listen to you complain about it for the rest of the day, Lance expected him to say, and maybe kick some sand onto his chest.

But instead of that, Keith's eyes crinkled and he said, "Because I love you, and you love your hair."

Lance's lazy smile slipped a bit as something heavy rolled in his chest. It wasn't the same deep content he'd felt before. This time something burned beneath it, wrought with flickering edges he couldn't grab onto and colors he couldn't name. Still trying to grab onto that weird feeling before it rolled away completely, Lance blinked up at Keith in confusion. It wasn't the first time this out-of-place feeling had reared its head on this otherwise perfect afternoon, and it was starting to set Lance on edge. Was it supposed to ache like this when the love of your life said I love you? Shouldn't Lance be happy right now?

Of course he should. This was the best day of his life.

But then, where was that ache coming from?

"Guys!" Pidge yelled from up the beach. "Stop flirting and come eat before these garbage disposals you call siblings inhale everything!"

"Coming!" Keith hollered back. "Come on Lance, get up," he laughed, and crouched down to offer Lance a hand.

Lance sat up, but didn't take Keith's hand yet. The longer he stared at Keith, the stronger that creeping dread grew. Like something was wrong. Maybe it was just déjà vu?

"What if I don't want to get up?" he said, stalling for a reason to keep staring at Keith until he figured out what this feeling was. Prismatic sun rays radiated outward from every direction behind Keith, lighting him up with molten gold around the edges, like the clouds at the very edge of a rainstorm. He looked like an angel wrought from fire. He was so terribly beautiful that Lance had a hard time believing he was even real. Lance didn't deserve such a reality. What had he ever done to deserve it?

Keith cocked his head at Lance before shrugging and sitting down beside him, facing the sea. "Then I guess that's fine too," he said. "Whatever you want, babe."

Lance's stomach squirmed at Keith's easy reply. At the word babe. Once, when he was five, he'd found a loose thread poking out of an old dusty tapestry hanging in his Tía Juanita's garage, an embroidered image of a misty mountainscape that she'd brought back with her from some place deep in South America, the name of which he couldn't pronounce at the time and had long since forgotten. Childishly, he'd been certain he could fix it for her, and get the thread out without ruining everything else. Maybe part of him knew all along that he was destined to ruin it. But nevertheless, once he had seen the loose thread he was helpless to do anything but try.

Something told him—instinct, maybe—that this shining, wonderful day was the tapestry this time, and that Keith was the loose thread destined to unravel it. Fifteen years later, Lance still couldn't stop himself from pulling the thread.

"No," Lance said, "no, see, this is when you would normally call me a lazyass, or drag me up the beach by brute force, or toss me into the water. Then I'd pull you in with me and it'd turn into a water fight."

Keith side-eyed him. "What are you talking about?"

"You!" Lance fretted. "You haven't insulted me once all day. You're being way too agreeable. It's weird, man. I— I feel weird. I'm sorry, it's just—ugh."

Concern overcame Keith's confusion when Lance didn't back down. "Are you okay?"

"No!" Lance shouted. "Doesn't this feel off to you?"

"Off how?"

Lance looked between them up the beach at his family. Laura and Jess were hiding in the shade farther up the beach under the palms, while Marco sat the farthest away with that old twelve-string laud that was missing the twelfth string, up on the brick wall behind the house. Beni and Gabi had left the water now and were chasing each other around the smoking grill while Hunk valiantly held his arms out to make sure they didn't stray too close. Beyond them his aunts and uncles and granparents were set up at a picnic table with his second cousins, too far away to hear save for the music coming from some hidden music player. But if Lance focused he could almost hear what Shiro and Pidge were saying to his dad near the grill, and how his mom was fawning over Allura and Coran.

As he looked on from the water his mom took notice, and caught his eye. So often over the last few years he'd imagined seeing them again. Seeing her. But his imagination had involved a lot more crying than this. The blissful look on his mother's face now suggested she had never been happier in her life. It was weird. Where was her wrath? Where was the fierce woman who had lost her son for years? Who'd thought he was dead? Why wasn't she angry with him for abandoning the family with no warning, disappearing for years, and putting them through that agony? She should be furious at him. They should all be furious at him.

"It's not right," Lance finally answered, breaking eye contact with his mom.

"I don't know what you mean," Keith said after a prolonged pause. "Isn't this exactly what you wanted? We defeated the Empire, we came back to Earth, and… and I'm here with you," he finished quietly. "Is that not enough?"

Lance floundered. "Of course it's enough," he backtracked, because how could he explain it when Keith was wearing that puppy dog look on his face? "I'm sorry, Keith. I'm gonna go for a walk, okay? I just need to clear my head, I think. I'll be back in a bit."

Keith watched him from the sand silently as he left.

The sounds of laughter faded into the steady wash of the waves as Lance made his way down the beach, away from his friends and family, ignoring their calls of concern in favor of festering on this for a minute or so. He mulled over Keith's words, one by one.

We defeated the Empire.

Lance remembered that. He did. Right? Something about Allura and quintessence and… The harder he tried to grasp the memory, the quicker it slipped through his fingers. Like a dream. Huh. That couldn't possibly be good.

We came back to Earth.

Frustrated, he tried to remember what that day had been like, what his family had said when he'd shown up at their doorstep dressed like a soldier, and the results were equally foggy. The sand turned to stone under his feet and sloped upward toward a rocky cliff and Lance kept going anyway, slipping further into unease even as he climbed higher up the cliff. He tried to remember where he had woken up this morning and found that he couldn't. Were they all staying at his parents' house? Was the castle parked somewhere in orbit? Where were the lions?

And I'm here with you. Isn't that enough?

Where was Red? Something about not having an answer for that scared him more than any of the other things. Because the last time he remembered seeing Red was before Keith took off from the rebel base on Evry's moon without telling anyone where he was going. When it came to that impulsive idiot, who knew where he'd gone? Knowing Keith, he might have even been reckless enough to—

Oh god.

It slammed into Lance like a meteor from the sky, all at once, and the shadow of unease exploded into a nuclear fire of pure, unadulterated panic.

Keith. Evry. The rebel base. The rumor about the dreamplant. Keith's sneakiness after dinner, his sudden disappearance, the ensuing search when he didn't come back. The Aia. The Aia, the Aia, the AIA!

Lance felt so dizzy when the truth hit him that he had to look down at his hands to steady himself. Doing that only made it worse, because as he drew his shaking hands closer to his face, he realized that he didn't have any fingerprints. Fuck me.Flabbergasted, he gaped at his own hands, willing himself to reconcile what he was seeing with what he was feeling. These felt like his hands, but they couldn't be. Because they were blank. There was the familiar scar from the time he and Laura had tried to sword fight in the backyard with sharpened sticks, right there on the left side of his left palm like always. But no fingerprints. Why?

Maybe because you don't have them memorized. Maybe there was insufficient data to pull from. Maybe because the Aia can only render so much detail at once in your head, and microscopic skin markings are outside the scope of its talents.

Did it really matter why? Either way, there was only one conclusion.

This wasn't real.

The seabirds, the jagged rocks poking his bare feet, the ocean crashing against the rocks some twenty feet below. None of it was real. He should've known better. It was too perfect—his family laughing, his friends safe and sound, the Earth, the sun, the OG Shiro alive and well, the words because I love you fitting in Keith's mouth as though they lived there—it was utterly flawless, and that was its downfall. It was, to abuse the phrase, simply too good to be true. Too good to fool him. Because Lance would never, ever, ever get anything near this perfect in real life.

Alright already, he thought angrily at the carrion on his shoulders from whence the self-deprecation always came. I get it. This was some kind of freaky poison-induced hallucination, and he had to get out of here, like, ten minutes ago. The only question now was how.

He closed his eyes, trying to tune out the sound of the waves below. The events leading from the base to here were hazy and elusive. He remembered Keith's subtle prying into the nature and location of the Aia. He remembered panicking about Keith's absence. He remembered thinking Keith wouldn't be that stupid (he had promised not to go running off alone anymore), until Red had projected his panic so hard into the astral plane connecting them all that Lance had stumbled in the castle hallway, his vision briefly whiting out, despite his distance and despite the fact that Lance wasn't Red's pilot anymore and hadn't been for weeks. He remembered… a mushroom? Yeah, that was it. A mushroom. He'd followed Red's panic to a field of golden mushrooms. Something about that image tugged at his memory. The foggy texture to them was all wrong, like he'd fall through if he tried to walk on their canopies. No defined edges. Way too big. He remembered thinking, nothing should ever be this big as he flew toward the blinking red dot on his scanner. Toward the biggest mushroom of all.

Lance shivered and opened his eyes again to ground himself with the sight of the fake ocean.

That field of mushrooms, that was where his memory things went dark. Weird... He wracked his brain for answers, but try as he might, he couldn't remember what had happened to them after they entered the biggest mushroom. He couldn't even remember entering it, really.

Whatever. The details didn't even matter. It was clear that he'd failed his team, somehow. Obviously. Or else he wouldn't be stuck here in this beautiful place that he wanted to stay in forever.

Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes.

This isn't real. You can't stay here.

But how was he supposed to wake himself up? Craning his neck, he turned in a full circle, eyes to the sky like there'd be some kind of doorway somewhere beyond the clouds. Pebbles skittered over the edge of the cliff as he moved his feet, falling away to the crashing surf below. The thought struck him unbidden: Maybe it's like Inception. Ha. But the amusement quickly gave way to interest, and then fear. What if it was? What if he just needed a good old-fashioned physical jolt, enough to startle himself awake? Could he do it? The wind was cold on his exposed skin and the salt stung his nose, while the sun beat down on him ceaselessly from above. Even if on some level he knew it was fake, it still felt real. It felt as real as anything else ever had. So the longer he looked over the edge, the more uneasy he felt about it. A ghostly echo of a freefall swooping sensation bubbled in his stomach, as if he had already jumped. Like he was already falling.

Something inside him panicked at the sensation and pulled him away from the edge of the rocks. What if he was wrong? What if it turned out it was real after all, and he jumped, and he ended up killing himself rather than believe he'd gotten a happy ending?

He didn't trust himself enough to jump.

As if it'd be that easy, anyway. The Aia attacked its victims from within. It was in his head, giving him what he most desired.

So, maybe he needed to change what he wanted? If what he wanted more than anything else was to save his friends, then maybe, just maybe, the Aia would let him wake up. It wasn't truly sentient, after all. It was just a big, fat, stupid carnivorous fungus. Maybe it was trickable.

Okay. Close your eyes, Lance.

He followed his own instructions.

Want it.

It only took a few seconds, once he'd focused in on the blind panic, the insatiable craving to come through for his team and save them. His eyes had scarcely closed when a peculiar buzzing sensation trickled into his body from his feet, crawling upward through his torso and limbs, pooling behind his eyes with a faraway ringing sound that slowly replaced the sound of the waves until all that was left was that swooping sensation. He was falling.

.

.

. . .

"Lance…"

The urgency to Shiro's voice cut through the star-riddled and fragmented atmosphere that made up the astral plane. But he sounded so far away. Farther than he should. Time slowed, tracers trailing off Lance's body as he turned toward Shiro, redshift and blueshift fighting against each other and keeping him stuck in place when he tried to take a step in Shiro's direction. It was infinitely disorienting.

"Lance!" Shiro shouted.

"What?" he tried to say, but the astral plane pulsed and ejected them back into reality—back to Naxzela—and the last thing Lance saw there in the plane was Shiro's arm outstretched, his mouth hanging open, wrapped around a word Lance couldn't hear.

. . .

.

.

Lance woke gasping in the dark.

Cold wet vines had snaked around his every limb, and even his neck, and for a minute all he did was thrash like a snared mouse until he'd freed an arm. Once he'd managed that he was finally able to rip the rest of the vines off of him. Still, he didn't feel better until he'd gotten to his feet and shot at the slimy little bastards a few times. The ground rumbled below his feet as the freshly charred vines flailed away from him and retreated back into the wall, lit only by the dim light veins glowing on Lance's armor. The rumbling quieted after a tense moment, but Lance was pretty damn far from feeling quieted himself. This whole thing is one living organism, he reminded himself as he eyed the dark tunnel in both directions. Prooobably should refrain from shooting at it any more until he'd found all the others.

Holding his breath, he hit a button on the side of his helmet to check the damage. Altean numerals flashed briefly on his visor before morphing into English for him, and as soft as the glow of the text was, it blinded him in contrast with the pressing black darkness around him.

22:02CT

Wait, 22:02CT already?! But hadn't they'd entered the Aia just after.. after what, like 19:30 or something? Jeez, this thing had really done a number on his brain. No wonder the Sephans called this plant a fatal curiosity. Lance could easily see how animals and people alike could wander in here and never see daylight again.

"Hello?" he spoke into the comm, kicking at a few of the vines as they crept in around his ankles. "Anyone? What even happened," he trailed off, more to himself than to the others as the comm continued to remain eerily silent. He pinged the castle instead. "Coran? We've got a problem out here." More silence. "...Coran? Hellooo? Come on, this is getting ridiculous, I'll even settle for Clone Shiro at this point," he joked darkly. But after he spoke he immediately tensed, half expecting to hear Shiro's voice over the comm.

He was relieved this time when silence prevailed. Phew. Okay, so he was on his own here. No big deal. Nothing he wasn't painfully used to at this point in his life. First Shiro left, then Keith…

The thought of Keith had Lance dipping his head in mortification. He felt like he was on fire.

Jesus, the things he had just dreamt about Keith Kogane. Him and Keith, together. Dating. In love.

Fuck.

It was a long minute before he could gather his scattered wits. He'd only just barely started to get over Allura. He'd only just barely accepted that his feelings toward Keith were of the romantic variety; that he might not have recognized it as love because, as many crushes as he'd waded through, he'd only ever felt infatuation until Keith came along. He'd only just barely started coming to terms with the fact that he might have been gone on him for a long time. (Longer than he'd ever had feelings for anyone. Longer than he'd been in space.) So to have it all dragged out at once from the subconscious vault he'd only just begun to unpack these last few weeks… It was a bit like being slapped in the face with barbed wire.

Again: fuck.

Okay okay okay, "Okay, no one can hear me, that's cool. That's fine. Lance to the rescue then," he said to no one, and pressed a few more buttons in quick succession on his helmet until a translucent radar screen popped up on the visor accompanied by four blinking dots, each of a different color. Blue was closest to the center, then yellow, then green, then finally red, almost out of range but not quite. Allura first, then.

Turning to the downward sloping side of the tunnel, Lance started to make his way through the living labyrinth. He was wobbly on his feet but he hurried along anyway, ignoring the random skeletal remains he stumbled across every so often, and even once a half decomposed bug the size of a Great Dane but which looked more akin to a dragonfly—at least, the parts of it not dripping in dark slime, half digested by the Aia's inner walls. Even as he looked, one of the delicate wings fluttered once before detaching from the body forever, falling out of sight from Lance's wristlight. He shuddered and gave it a wide berth as he passed. Judging by the scale of this thing compared to its tiny look-alikes on Earth, it would probably take days or weeks or even months to get to that point from the initial trapping. Still, the sight of it propelled him toward his friends faster than his legs were ready to carry him. Vines reached out at him as he went but he kept them at bay, running faster and faster as he gained on the little blue dot on his radar.

After a few twists and turns the walls abruptly vanished, and he emerged into a wide open area. He swished his wristlight around the walls, finding it to be roughly cylindrical in shape, and at least the length of a football field across. Dark openings lurked at the edges, leading elsewhere into the void. The heart of the mushroom then? He angled his light upward to check the height of the chamber, and shrieked in surprise when instead of a vine-drenched ceiling the blue light illuminated an enormous head.

Stumbling backward, Lance leveled his bayard at the looming giant. The electrical whine as his gun charged was deafening in the wet quiet, but it faded the instant Lance took his finger off the trigger. Nothing echoed in here; the walls swallowed all sound.

The creature had long been under the Aia's spell, that much was for sure. A pang of pity ate at Lance's stomach as he edged closer, craning his neck up to get a good look at the vines wrapped around the creatures folded legs, its famished rib cage, it's lolling neck. It looked akin to an antelope, or one of the antelope's lesser known plain-crossing cousins, except closer in size to a whale. The scale of the majestic animal humbled him greatly, and he found himself resisting the urge to remove his helmet in respect.

Instead he activated his jetpack, ignoring the angry squirm of vines as they recoiled from the exhaust, and flew up toward the animal's face. Its fur hung loose on its bones, and that foul-smelling slime dripped out from the vines wherever they touched it.

It smelled like death.

But even as he decided this, the animal moved. Lance flinched back automatically at the motion, but he needn't have been worried. The poor thing was just breathing. Or, trying to. It was a labored, exhausted action that took almost a full thirty seconds to complete from inhale to exhale. Lance rested one hand on the creature's long nose. This was natural selection in action. He knew that, and he'd seen it before, but it never seemed to get any easier. This creature was being eaten alive. How long had it been here now, slowly fading away? Days? Weeks? What would it take for it to let go?

Even as he wondered he knew the answer. At the dinner table so many hours ago, when a guard was explaining the Aia's properties to Keith (who'd heard rumor of it amongst the other rebels and wanted to know more), the three-eyed, sallow-faced leader of the Sephan rebels had interrupted them to advise the Paladins against seeking the plant. Later in the evening Nuul Jone had narrowed two out of her three eyes and warned Keith again when he still wouldn't drop the subject, more harshly this time. The only way out of the Aia is death, Keith Kogane. Do not seek it. You will not come back.

Despite that omen Keith had gone in search of the Aia anyway. And of course, Lance had followed him anyway. Death isn't an option, he remembered shouting back at Nuul Jone as he made his way toward Black's hangar. She'd tried to argue back, but he couldn't really remember what she'd said. Knowing for sure where Keith had gone, he'd fallen prey to tunnel vision at that point and it didn't matter what anyone said. It was a good thing he was at least half as stubborn as Keith, because he'd found a way out after all, no death required. He'd find a way out for the rest of his friends too. He always would, even if someday it meant he'd die in the process. But...

But there would be no such way out for this doomed creature, and Lance wasn't about to leave it here to slowly die in agony.

"Que en paz descanse," he intoned with solemn respect, invoking the same words spoken long ago at the honorary funeral held for Shiro, Matt, and Samuel at the Garrison's famous multispiritual chapel. The rainbow stained pews, the intersectional hallowed ground, the sacredness that shone from every molecule of that place as the Garrison Director delivered a speech about dying for the betterment of all mankind—it was as much an antithesis to this malignant Aia tree as had ever existed. In this moment, Lance himself felt like an antithesis to the hero he'd worshipped in Shiro back then. "Has trabajado duro, y te mereces piedad. No lamento enviarte, solo lamento no saber a donde vas. Donde sea, te veré allí algún día." And as he put his gun to the creature's temple and squeezed the trigger he shut his eyes, and wondered if he'd ever feel like a hero too, or if he'd always feel like a kid holding someone else's gun.

The effect was immediate. The creature sagged in its prison of vines before the light of the plasma discharge had faded, its lungs expelling one last breath in a sad gust that kicked up a cloud of dust and spores from the ground below.

Lance didn't stay to watch it finish falling. He had business to attend to, and swallowed the lump in his throat as he followed the blinking blue dot into one of the small corridors that led away from the central hollow stalk, downward in snaking spiral. If he ignored the wetness welling in the corners of his eyes, then maybe it would go away by the time he found—

"Allura!" he gasped, nearly tripping over her, and dropped to his knees beside her to start tearing at the vines that bound her to the wall.

As he touched the one around her neck it tightened its hold. In her sleep Allura gasped, and Lance drew his hand back sharply. The vine gradually loosened. Lance released a shaky, nervous breath of his own as her breathing evened out again in the cold, damp darkness.

Okay. No pulling this time.

Why'd the vines not choke him when he tore them off himself? Was it because he'd startled himself awake first? Maybe.

"Wake up," he shouted. "Allura, wake up!"

Aaand nothing. Not that it was surprising. There must be some high-grade magicky plant witchcraft going on here; that fantasy dreamworld was on another level. It'd been more vivid than any VR system Lance had ever seen, including the otherworldly holoroom in the castle. Chances were that the plant stimulated some kind of hallucination directly in the brain based on the victim's memories, built with their hopes and dreams and aspirations. Like a dream, but realer. Your deepest desires realized, the rebel guard had said before Nuul Jone's interruption.

Sure enough, when Lance prodded Allura's head gently to the left, he saw that the vine had some sort of microscopic spines dug into the back of her neck near the spine. Shit.

Maybe...

Okay, now there was an idea. An insane, shot in the dark idea but an idea nonetheless. Lance followed the vine around Allura's neck with his eyes, around and around and up to a point where it branched off into a secondary vine with a shared root stem. Seizing it, he brought it up to his own neck. This better work the way he was hoping it would. He wasn't sure if he was man enough to walk away from home twice in one day, fake or not.

Something sharp pricked his neck and the passageway pulsed out of focus.

.

.

Consciousness crept up on him mid-stride, and it was so disorienting that he almost stumbled up the marble steps he'd materialized onto.

Okay, he thought as his vision swam into focus, that was a lot more sudden than last time.

Arms brushed him where he stood stopped on the steps of a palace, voices chatting idly and happily all around him. Lance watched a couple pass him on their way down, their dark faces decorated in twisting green birthmarks, their ears pointed, their hair a soft matching shade of lavender. Turning in place Lance soaked in the world around him. The sky was touched around the edges with a smattering of pinks and golds and blues, halfway through sunrise and still ascending. In every direction the planet was a paradise, rolling hills of flowers and distant lava streaked mountains, unknowable winged creatures that flew in groups of three far overhead. The palace stood as a monument to civilization itself. No man-made structure on Earth could possibly compare to the intricacy of architectural design here, the stacked archways, the interlocking spires that reached so high into the heavens that the tallest of them disappeared into the clouds. The castleship paled in comparison.

Lance knew exactly where he was. He'd have known even if he'd been dropped here with no warning or context, just from the way it looked. How closely it resembled the childhood that Allura seldom spoke of except late at night, her words catching in her mouth like she was afraid if she let too many of them out all at once there might be nothing left inside her afterward.

Great.

This was just great.

Pushing on up the marble steps, he followed a group of laughing girls into the castle, whose main set of doors were both fifty feet tall and thrown wide open to the world. Lance was willing to bet the Galra threat didn't exist at all in Allura's fantasy. Maybe Zarkon himself had never been born. What a world that would've been!

Throne room, his brain supplied helpfully as he trekked further into the vaulted chamber, lit with natural light through a thousand stained glass windows. There were so many people here going about their business that nobody paid him much attention; the dream had naturally provided him with Altean formal wear so that was probably why. Although, he did catch a few dream-Alteans looking at his ears as he passed them. He touched his left one self-consciously as he picked up the pace. He could hear Allura's voice now. Almost there.

When he finally found her, her name slipped out of his mouth automatically.

She stood between her mother and father at the base of a raised golden dias, dressed in a silken summer dress, casual and light, laughing about something her father had said judging from the smug look plastered on his face. It was such a dad look that Lance's chest constricted even as Allura heard her name called and turned toward Lance with a quirked eyebrow.

But Lance was speechless now.

She was barefoot. Barefoot.

He'd never once in his life seen Allura barefoot before. Never. For some reason that was what really drove it home for him. That this was her house and these people were her family and he was here to tell her that none of it was real, that it had been gone for eons, and that she had to come back to reality with him. A horrible reality where her planet was destroyed and everyone she loved was dead, where Lotor had betrayed their hardwon trust and Shiro was missing again and Haggar had violated them in the worst possible way, where Zarkon was dead, and yet, somehow, the Empire still lived on and they were still at war. How was he supposed to do that without crushing her spirit completely?

Allura took a step forward, away from her parents. "Yes?" she hummed with a hint of amusement. "Sorry, have we met before?"

She's younger, Lance realized as she drew closer. And shorter. So much shorter than the real, modern day Allura. Even her hair was shorter, and her cheeks were much rounder with youth than they had been on the day she first came out of cryosleep on Arus.

"Uh… yeah," Lance said, his throat dry, desperately trying not to look at her parents. Every glance would make this harder. "You don't remember me?"

Allura blinked up at him inquisitively, one finger coming to rest on her cheek. "Now that I think about it, you do look familiar." Her eyes caught on Lance's ears and narrowed thoughtfully.

"Lu!" someone yelled, breaking the spell, and Lance glanced down to see a small child tugging at the hem of her dress. "Hey, Lu! Come on, come on, you promised you'd show me how to catch palips today!"

"Yes Amira," she smiled, "I'm on my way." Allura looked at Lance and rolled her eyes, not unkindly. Lance wondered who the little girl was; why Allura had never mentioned her before. "Sorry, but I must go. Perhaps we can catch up later."

"Yeah," he agreed. But when she turned to go he caught her firmly by the arm. "I'll come back for you," he promised in sudden earnest.

Her mouth fell open in surprise as she met his steady gaze, and then out of nowhere there were hands on Lance's back, hauling him away from her.

He caught one last glimpse of her startled face disappearing into the now-restless crowd as the royal guards dragged him bodily from the hall. He let it happen, and closed his eyes as they threw him back down the steps he'd so recently climbed.

.

.

. . .

When Red vanished from his hangar it was with only a single projected mental image left in Lance's brain like a parting shot (sunrises and sunsets, dripping clocks and stars distorting impossibly through crimson magnetic waves).

Lance panicked, of course.

How could he not panic? He'd seen Red do this before. He knew what it meant. No matter how long Lance had been flying Red, Keith was still the true Red Paladin. So when Red flipped out and went AWOL, Lance raised hell on the castleship in his absence, refusing to calm down until Shiro agreed to ring Kolivan, who then admitted to having all lost contact with Keith days ago in a rescue mission gone awry. So for the next hour all Lance could think was that Keith was out there in space somewhere, lost or dead or dying. At least, until Red turned up again with Keith at the helm, plus some new Altean girl, a space wolf, and his Galra mother too, having rescued them all from some time dilated star system they'd been stuck in for three months—three months that had passed in three days for the rest of them, between the time the Blade lost contact to the time they escaped the time distortion of the supermassive star's gravitational field.

All Lance could think as Keith shoved past him without so much as a 'hello' was that October-baby Keith was now the exact same age as July-baby Lance was.

Space was wild.

His first instinct was to throw his arms around Keith and bury his face in that stupid hair and refuse to let go until it turned into a wrestling match, and even then maybe not let go. Now that he was home, Lance wanted to make sure Keith wasn't leaving again anytime soon.

But Keith and (Krolia, was it?) had found an Altean with a crazy story about Lotor being evil all along (go figure), and that took precedence over Lance's soul-crushing loneliness.

Part of him would remember Shiro's face when it first went blank every time he closed his eyes, in the aftermath of that day's battle. Nobody else noticed, when it happened. How eerily robotic it looked. Maybe they were just seeing what they wanted to see in Shiro—Keith more than anyone, because when Lance pushed his way to the forefront of the conversation and pointed it out to everyone, Keith stepped in front of Shiro and bared his teeth at Lance like he wanted to bite his throat out. But Lance was through ignoring his instincts. He was through pretending nothing was wrong. Keith hadn't even been here! He didn't know anything about Shiro!

Not this Shiro anyway.

So he addressed everyone except Keith and demanded the floor, finally putting words to the suspicions about Shiro that had plagued him for months.

That was when Haggar revealed her royal flush and tried to take both Lotor and Shiro back from them.

That was when Red revealed his true loyalty and called to Keith again, who sprinted up his ramp and chased after the clone who wasn't really his brother because he didn't know what else to do.

Standing in Red's empty hangar, shouting into his helmet, "Please come back, Keith, don't go, don't do it—" and hearing the line 'click' and go dead as Keith killed Red's comm link...

That was probably Lance's lowest point.

. . .

.

.

Lance woke thrashing in the dark again before he'd struck the steps of the Altean dream-palace.

Fucking hell, he thought helplessly as he stared down at Allura's sleeping face, dark behind her helmet and half-hidden with vines. I'll come back for her last.

Maybe Hunk's dream would be less agonizing.

.

.

part ii

fester on it forever

.

.

It wasn't. Not really.

Because Lance was on Earth again.

He had known right away when he'd found Hunk slumped around the next corner that he was very likely heading into another Earth-setting fantasy, but it still hadn't prepared him to be dropped on the sidewalk of a busy intersection in what looked and sounded and smelled like New York City.

Now that he knew it wasn't real it was infinitely more precious than the first time. This time he knew the clock was ticking, and he didn't take it for granted. He spent a long blinding moment simply spinning in place, face raised to the sky like some tourist from Smalltown, USA who'd never seen skyscrapers before except on TV. Humans flooded the sidewalks in hordes, drove their cars down the roads, slipped in and out of view through the apartment windows on the building nearest to him. English street signs, Spanish on the building across the road, handwritten Greek and Hindi and Arabic on the food carts set up at the nearest street corner. It was so utterly human that Lance felt his knees buckling under the weight of it all.

Get ahold of yourself. You're here to save Hunk.

He'd already chickened out on saving Allura. Who was he to wear the black armor if he couldn't even rescue his teammates from a freaking plant?

Speaking of which. He finally looked down at himself and came up short. Whereas in his own fantasy he'd been dressed for the part in swim trunks, and on Altea he'd been thrown into Altean formal clothes, here in Hunk's fantasy world he was wearing his armor.

His blue armor.

"Ouch, buddy," Lance mumbled to himself. "Not gonna lie, this kind of stings."

"Lance?"

Lance whipped his head around at the sound of Hunk's voice, and Hunk was so surprised he dropped one of the brown paper bags he was holding. A single lemon rolled out and off the curb and was immediately flattened by a passing taxi.

"Oh jeez," Hunk sighed, and despite the fact that it wasn't real Lance couldn't help the urge to rush forward and help him pick everything up and place it back in the bag. Three fat books, a couple more fruits, and some kind of power converter. "What are you doing here? You, uh, you remember me right?" He smiled nervously when Lance didn't answer right away. "Hunk? From the Garrison? You and Pidge and I were teamed up together before you guys… well, you know."

Lance slowly released the bag into Hunk's arms as they rose, confusion and curiosity gearing up inside him. What?

"Yeah, I remember you," he laughed easily. "Of course I remember you, how could I forget? That's actually why I'm here." Lying was a subclause of responsibility; how easily it came to him now was introspection best left for another time. "Came to visit you, man. Just wanted to drop in. Say hi and stuff."

"Oh," Hunk said, and it might've been a trick of the light but his cheeks seemed to color a bit. "My apartment is kind of a mess right now, but d'you wanna come up for tea?"

He's older, Lance took note as he followed Hunk into the lobby of the nearby apartment building, into the elevator. He's definitely older. What year is it in this one?

The first thing Hunk did when they walked into his cozy little apartment was throw his keys down and start moving dishes from the table into the sink. "My family was just here for lunch," he explained with a rueful smile, "I'm not normally this much of a disaster, I swear."

"Dude, it's fine," Lance smiled back, but he took Hunk's panic-cleaning as a useful distraction to try and gather some info about what the heck this dreamworld was all about. Part of him was aware that he could probably just say 'screw it' and skip straight to convincing Hunk this wasn't real, but something in his gut was stopping him. He needed to understand first.

"Sorry," Hunk laughed from the kitchen as Lance ran his hand over a tabletop photo of Hunk with his moms and little sister at Coney Island. "It's just not every day that you have a Paladin of Voltron over for afternoon tea, you know?"

That's when Lance saw it. The poster on the wall.

Voltron, it said, in bold triumphant letters at the top, and Savior of the Universe at the bottom. Pictured between the letters were the individual lions in all their glory with their paladins beside them. Black and Shiro, Red and Keith, Green and Pidge, Blue and Lance. And then… nothing. An empty spot.

Oh.

Oh.

A hissy steaming sound sliced through Lance's realization, causing him to turn back toward the kitchen where Hunk was currently pouring nearly-boiled water from an electric kettle into two mugs. Making his way slowly into the kitchen, Lance watched Hunk spoon a measured amount of honey into each one.

"Didn't realize you were serious about the tea," Lance laughed weakly. The vision of that poster still filled his eyes as if he'd never looked away.

"I never joke about tea," Hunk said gravely, and Lance laughed for real this time as Hunk gave him a dramatically serious look and moved both mugs to the small round table squeezed between the kitchen and the tiny living room.

Following Hunk's lead, Lance pulled one of the wooden chairs out and sat down across from him. His paladin armor was loud and clunky and out of place in the homely apartment. He himself was out of place in this world, wasn't he? The world Hunk wanted.

Trying and failing the swallow the lump in his throat, Lance stirred his imaginary tea.

"So," Hunk began. "Why drop in now?"

Lance's stirring slowed.

"It's just, you guys came back to Earth like, a whole year ago now, right? It was wild, finding out there'd been a war going on without us here on Earth really knowing about it. But you guys saved us, I guess, so… yeah, I'm rambling," he laughed, "you can stop me any time, you know."

"Well I should've dropped in sooner," Lance heard himself say. "What have you been up to?"

Hunk blinked. "Well, nothing as cool as saving the universe. I graduated the Garrison, got my Master's in Oregon, went to work at NASA for a couple years after that."

"That's—" Lance choked. "That's really cool, man."

"Yeah," he grinned. "I guess it is. I'm an engineer now! I'm between jobs at the moment but that's because I'm working on a few projects of my own that I really think are going to… Hey, are you okay?"

Lance sniffed. He didn't realize how tightly he'd been gripping the mug or how white his knuckles had gotten. Good thing it wasn't real or he'd probably have second degree burns on his palm. "Yeah," he lied, "I'm fine. Keep going, Hunk. Please, I want to hear about everything."

But Hunk didn't pick up where he left off. Instead he got up and moved around the table, pulling out the chair directly next to Lance and settling into that one instead, leaning on his arm into Lance's personal space. "I think I know why you're really here," he said, and Lance's stomach lurched. "It's about that night, right? The night you and Pidge disappeared from the Garrison."

Lance stared into the dark liquid in his mug. It was still swirling despite the fact that he was no longer stirring it and hadn't been for awhile. "I wanted to sneak out to go dancing," he remembered numbly. How he had begged and begged and how Hunk had dragged his feet. "You didn't."

"Yeah," Hunk agreed softly. "I often thought about that, in the years after you disappeared, before you guys showed up again with Voltron. I always wondered if I might've been able to change something. Help, maybe. But it worked out better this way, don't you think? You guys went on to do great things—amazing things—things I would never have been able to do. I wouldn't have had any place in that kind of world."

Yes you would, Lance wanted to say. Yes you do. But it got caught in his throat. "I'm sorry," he whispered instead, and to his dismay he realized he was full-on crying now. His hand curled into a fist on the table as a single teardrop splashed next to it.

"Sorry for what?" Hunk pressed softly.

Lance shook his head. "You didn't want to go out that night, and I made you." The realization washed over him like a tidal wave. It was his fault Hunk was caught in this war. Christ, did Hunk hate him for it? Did Hunk blame him for what had happened? Did Hunk see a life of potential torn away from him every time he looked Lance in the eye? "Mea culpa. I'm the one who made you go. Jesus, Hunk, why didn't you ever say anything..."

"What are you talking about," Hunk mumbled, pulling away from Lance now with anxiety pressing down on his shoulders. "I didn't go. I stayed in that night."

"No, no, you did come with us," Lance insisted. "I know you remember, Hunk. The signal, the crash, chasing Keith into the wreckage, escaping the Garrison officers—"

"You're freaking me out," Hunk interrupted, "I'm not following you, Lance."

The choice of words struck Lance hard, with this blue armor Hunk had subconsciously retrofitted him with still weighing heavy on his limbs, even if Hunk didn't mean it like that. Steeling himself, Lance shoved his chair away from the table so hard that it toppled over behind him, causing Hunk to shrink away from him as Lance stomped toward the living room, toward that cursed poster.

"Five," he seethed, slapping the empty space on the poster where Hunk should be and then ripping it from the wall. "There are five paladins, Hunk. Not four."

"That's not—"

"Yes it is. It's true. How could we ever have survived without you, out there? It doesn't even make sense! You're the engineer, Hunk! The powerhouse, the critical eye, the words of caution, the voice of reason, the ray of freakin' sunshine. It doesn't even make sense to you, does it? Just look at yourself! I know that you know how badly we need you, because even in your fantasy world where the Yellow Paladin doesn't exist, guess what, you're still wearing yellow!"

Faltering as he stood, Hunk glanced down at his sun-yellow shirt, touching it briefly before letting his hand fall limp to his side. He looked up at Lance with raw hurt on his face.

"Dammit," Lance breathed to himself. Then, louder: "I can't do this. I couldn't bring myself to pull Allura out either, and you—you're so much happier like this! If I can't even do this much, how am I ever supposed to lead you guys? You're right, okay? You were right to put me back in blue." He stared at the sapphire color on his arms, pulled straight from Hunk's subconscious and painted back on Lance's body, over the black. Hunk's subconscious was right. "I'm not cut out to be the Black Paladin. I mean, you followed me out of the Garrison that day, and where did that get you?"

"Shut up," Hunk blurted, "you're a great Black Paladin, Lance, I just miss Shiro! That's all it is!"

Lance shut up immediately.

It took a moment for Hunk to realize what he'd said. "Oh. Oh my god. You're— and I'm the—"

Lance followed Hunk's eyes down to his armor again, where between one moment and the next the blue had been replaced with the now-familiar black. The surreal subversion of expectation was doubled when Lance looked back up and saw that Hunk the NYC engineer was no longer standing there, but Hunk the Yellow Paladin. Armor and all.

"This… isn't real," Hunk said haltingly. He didn't seem to have noticed the sudden change at all, his eyes still glued to Lance's face in equal measures of horror and wonder. "Is it?"

Lance shook his head, kicking away the crumpled poster on the ground. "No."

"Lance..."

"Can we just get out of here? Please?"

Hunk wilted. "Yeah. How, though?"

Lance turned to the sliding glass door on the far side of the living room which led out onto a tiny balcony, where a few potted plants rested on the ledge beyond a single folding chair. Wind and city sounds flooded into the apartment when Lance pushed the door open. He just wanted to breathe it in one last time. It was so realistic, the way it stuck a bit on the rail, the bird that took off from the ledge as he stepped outside. He felt Hunk's presence beside him but couldn't bring himself to look.

"Do you trust me?" Lance asked quietly.

A heavy hand came to rest on Lance's shoulder. "Lance, I trust you more than anyone. You know that."

Still not quite convinced, Lance sighed. New York was like a microcosm of Earth itself; a little bit of every culture all smashed together in one place. Hell, you could even see Central Park from here, in all its natural glory. No wonder Hunk chose this place. "I'll get you here someday," he swore. "But until then.. You wanna go save the others with me?"

"Yeah," Hunk sighed. "I want that."

"Cool," Lance replied, this time with a genuine smile. "Then close your eyes and concentrate on that feeling."

.

.

. . .

The castleship descended into chaos after Keith's departure. The first thing that happened was that Krolia appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Lance by the shoulders and shook him, demanding to know why her son had done that, why he had taken a lion if he wasn't a paladin anymore, why he had taken Red instead of Black, and why Lance hadn't stopped him.

"Who even are you?" Lance spat at her, bringing his arms up to break her grip on him in two sharp movements. She was strong, but so was he.

She narrowed her yellow eyes at him. "It's as Keith said. I am his m—"

"That's not what I fucking meant!" Turning his back on her, he focused on the voices coming through his comm, where everyone else was also shouting. Everyone but Keith.

"Shiro left some kind of virus in the ship's computer," Coran was saying. "Allura, I need you in the control room, now. Perhaps we can override it somehow?"

"I can fix it," Pidge was shouting back, "I can fix it, Coran, I'll be right there."

"Better hurry," Coran urged. "There's three enemy ships approaching and we're dead in the water here. Someone needs to get in a lion and get out there, because we have no firepower, the shields are malfunctioning, and we're about to be under attack." To punctuate the warning, the castle shook, followed by the flashing of red emergency lights that only ever came on when the integrity of the hull was breached somewhere. Their shields were glitching out. They were taking fire.

"I'm in the engine room with Hunk," Allura panted, like she had sprinted all the way there, "attempting to restart it. Hunk, hold this for me, please."

"This is gonna take too long," Hunk worried.

"Those look kind of like Lotor's ship," came an uneasy and somewhat muffled voice from Coran's channel. The Altean girl, Romelle.

"His generals," Coran answered. "Pidge? Status?"

"I'm working on it! Where the hell is Lance?"

"Hangar bay," Lance cut in, realizing now that he was the only Paladin available to get in their lion and fight off Lotor's lackeys. "I was trying to stop Keith. Guys, he's gone, he followed Shiro and Lotor through the wormhole." A chorus of horrified 'WHAT's deafened him and he almost had to take his helmet off. Krolia glared at him, and he glared right back at her.

Cursing under his breath, Coran made a loud metallic noise. Banging his fist on the unlit console on the bridge, probably.

The castle shook again.

"It's okay. I'll hold them off," Lance told his team, steeling himself and shoving past Krolia, toward the door that led out of Red's empty hangar toward the rest of the bay.

"Alone?!" Hunk wheezed.

"Yeah. I got this. I can do it."

Krolia followed him into the corridor, gesturing at his glaringly red armor and the red Altean blaster in his hands. "But you are the Red Paladin, are you not? What lion do you plan to fly?"

Lance wheeled on her halfway to Blue's hangar, face twisting in rage, letting out all the pent up bitterness and loneliness and anger he'd felt in Keith's absence, all in one breath. "Let's get a few things straight. If you knew your son half as well as I knew him then you'd have known he would follow Shiro the second Shiro left," he snapped, "and you'd have gotten down here to the hangar as quickly as I did, trying to stop him. You wouldn't have gotten here after he was already gone. You wouldn't have had to ask me why he took a lion. You would know he was still a Paladin no matter how long he's been gone, you would know he belongs here with us and not with your stupid spy guild that's almost got him killed a hundred times over, and you would know he took Red instead of Black because at the end of the day Keith is the Red Paladin, not me, and you would know I didn't stop him because Keith doesn't listen to anyone, Krolia, not even the people who love him. So he certainly wouldn't have listened to YOU, if you were here. Which, news flash, you WEREN'T!"

With that he left her, hurrying into Blue's hangar as another volley of blasts rocked the castleship. But he slowed as he neared Blue, because she did not drop her force-field for him.

"Blue," he said, placing a hand on the translucent field. It didn't give. "Blue, please, Red's gone and we're under attack. You gotta let me in. You gotta let me pilot you again."

She sang in his head; a melancholic violin.

"I know I wasn't as quick a learner as Allura's been since you picked her," he begged, his voice growing thick, "and I know I wasn't as good a pilot as Keith was when Red picked me. I'm not the best Paladin there ever was, but I need to do this. Please."

He rested his forehead on the forcefield, squeezing his eyes shut, and sighed deeply when Krolia's voice cut through his despair.

"You love my son," she said—a statement, not a question—and Lance pushed himself upright.

"What? That's not what I..." Ugh. Leave it to a Blade to take him literally. He so did not have time for this right now. "Can you leave? I'm trying to reconnect with my old lion here."

"You think I do not love him," she continued, eyes downcast, trailing eventually across the floor and up toward Blue when Lance offered no answer. The castleship rocked again. Another blow slipping through the glitching shield. To her credit, Krolia did not flinch as the ground shook beneath their feet. "Lance," she said, "answer, for me, one more question. I have wondered for years now, ever since discovering Blue in that Terran desert where Keith was born. Does the lion choose the paladin, or does the paladin choose the lion?"

"The lion chooses the paladin," he replied automatically, sending one last look up at Blue's dormant eyes as he made up his mind.

Time to visit Black again and see if there was anything left in him worth choosing.

. . .

.

.

Darkness again.

Lance didn't thrash this time—he'd grown used to the jarring transition by now, that 'falling dream' gut-wrench that took him from the dream back to his body—but he did feel Hunk thrashing next to him. While Hunk reacclimated to the real world and freed himself of his vines, Lance waited with his arms around his knees. Only when Hunk finally fell still, panting and swearing under his breath, did Lance speak.

"I'm sorry," he said.

He wasn't even sure what he was apologizing for at this point. For being the person that dragged Hunk out of bed that night and led him to space? For being the person to pull him out of the best dream he'd ever had? For being the worst team leader Voltron had ever had? Or was it (D) all of the above?

Hunk didn't reply for a long minute. "I thought I was past feeling like that," he finally sighed.

Another minute ticked by in cold, slimy silence. The paladin in Lance was still in panic-mode, pressing him to get up, to move on, to get to Pidge and Keith and Allura. But the human in him was broken and tired.

"Mine was La Playa Varadero," he offered up after a while. A reparation of sorts, for seeing something so personal of Hunk's. "My family was there. Shiro too."

"Real Shiro?" Hunk said wistfully. "Dang, no fair. I wish he was there in mine. I miss him so much."

"Me too," Lance whispered.

"Alright," Hunk said, switching his tune so suddenly that Lance was forced to look up from his knees in surprise. "Enough wallowing, let's get up." And Lance was hauled to his feet before he'd really had time to give his input on the matter, and yanked into a crushing hug. "That's for all that dumb stuff you said about not being good enough," Hunk grumbled as he let Lance go again, eyebrows furrowed angrily. "Where's everyone else?"

"Allura… is back that way," Lance said, pointing back down the passageway from whence he'd come. "On Altea," he added quietly.

Hunk pursed his lips. "Right. So.. we'll pick her up last then?"

"My thoughts exactly," Lance sighed as he turned and led the way farther into the darkness in the opposite direction of Allura, still sloping steadily downward, hopefully toward Pidge and Keith. "How did we all get so split up?" he wondered at Hunk as they walked, weapons raised to keep the wandering vines at bay. "This should've been an easy mission. In, out."

"I'm not sure," Hunk answered behind him. "My memory's hazy."

"Mine too," Lance mumbled, on edge.

"Maybe there's something in the air," Hunk mused to himself. "Like spores or something? Just enough to lure you in until the vines themselves can get you. I hope we don't black out like that again—"

"Pidge!" Lance shouted, spotting her at the end of the long stretch of passageway nearly buried under a mountain of vines, and broke into a run. Hunk caught up with him as Lance reached her and faltered.

It was invasive in a big way, going into someone else's head like this. For some reason the wrongness of it felt more pronounced now that he was about to do it to Pidge, who was so much younger than him, and who was in so many ways like a little sister to him. The thought of doing this to his own little sister made him queasy. He glanced over at Hunk, searching for some kind of reassurance. Permission, maybe. It's not like Pidge was in any position to give it.

"Maybe you should go in after her," Lance said. Hunk had always been better with Pidge. They clicked better, they laughed harder, they always understood everything the other person said. Lance had become something of an outsider when it came to the two of them. Especially Pidge. Lately, Lance felt like he annoyed her more than anything else, like they'd reverted all the way back to their dynamic at the Garrison when she wanted nothing to do with him. When he was just a distraction from finding her family.

"Is that an order?" Hunk said, raising one eyebrow at him.

Lance frowned. "No." He'd never order Hunk to do anything like this, Black Paladin or not.

"Then with all due respect," Hunk answered, "hell to the no."

Lance's jaw flapped. "But—but you guys are like, best friends," he stammered. "I don't even have a clue what I'd be walking into. You would, though, right?"

"Maybe," Hunk said, "I have some kind of idea, yeah. But I'm not good with this stuff, Lance. People stuff. Not as good as you, anyway. Come on," he joked, punching Lance on the shoulder when Lance didn't look convinced. "You've got this, o' fearless leader."

"Coward," Lance joked right back, nudging Hunk back with his shoulder. Then he sighed, resigned to his fate. "She's gonna murder me for this later, isn't she?"

"Definitely," Hunk agreed, and it was the last thing Lance heard as the prick of the vines dragged him down through familiar oblivion.

.

.

As he stood in the driveway of what must be Pidge's family's home, Lance braced himself to be ready for just about anything. Allura's fantasy was heart-wrenching. Hunk's was a direct punch to the stomach. There could be anything going in Pidge's head and he had to be ready for it, whatever it may be, ready to pull her away from it and back to her senses.

And he thought he was. But when he pushed open the front door to walk in he tripped over the doormat. He had not been remotely ready enough.

The castle. I'm in the castle. What the...

Disoriented, he turned behind him to look out the door he'd just walked through. It was still there, hanging open, the street outside the same picturesque midday suburbia. Birds chirped out of sight in the tree overhanging the driveway, and the sun lit the clouds from below as it sank toward the distant snow-splattered mountain range, turning their soft cirrus edges into dripping pink champagne. This had to be Boulder. Those were the Rocky Mountains. Disoriented, he turned back to the castle hallway, just in time to see Pidge strolling by in full paladin gear, face buried in her laptop. "Hey Lance," she called out to him without looking away from her screen. "Close the door, would you? You're gonna let the bugs in."

"...Sure," Lance said slowly, and reached behind him to shut the door on Colorado, staring at it in disbelief as the latch clicked. The blue wooden door looked so strange on the silver walls of the Altean battleship.

"Wait," he called belatedly, "Pidge, wait up!" He took off in the direction she'd disappeared in, just in time to see her bedroom door hiss shut. "Pidge?" He knocked, but there was no answer. Looking for clues, he glanced down at his own body to see what state of dress Pidge's subconscious had assigned to him. He was further shocked when radiant orange assaulted his eyes—a color that had been totally absent from his wardrobe for several years now. The Garrison uniform? What? What in the heck was going on here, exactly? "Pi-iiidge," he complained, confused and anxious and angry at himself for his inability to get a grasp on the situation. "Pidge, come on! I know you're in there! I just saw you go in."

"Go away, Matt, I'm trying to study!"

Frowning, Lance hit the emergency override on the lockpad. When the door opened he was hit by whiplash again, because the interior that greeted him was definitively not the room on the castleship that Lance had been in a hundred times before. Sunlight streamed through a window above her desk, and there was a soft twin bed pushed into the corner of the room. Posters on the walls, glow in the dark stars, soft pastel colors…

"Oh," she said, twisting in her seat with a mechanical pencil in her hand. She wore a layered sundress, and her hair was longer than Lance had ever seen it, pulled back into a messy braid. "Lance. Sorry, you sounded like Matt for a second. He's the only one who calls me Pidge. Where did you even hear that? Please just stick to Katie. Wait," she said, her pencil slipping from her hand and bouncing twice on the hardwood floor. Her eyebrows furrowed in concentration. "Have you seen Matt? Come to think of it, I think… I think I'm supposed to be looking for him, actually."

"No," Lance assured her, abruptly deciding not to entertain it this time the way he did with Hunk. "No need for that. You already found him. He's back on his own rebel base, probably chilling in his boxers eating food goo out of a space helmet like he always does. We can even call him when—"

But Pidge didn't seem to hear him; she was already pushing past him out of the room, back into the castleship hallway. "Matt?" she called out. "Dad?"

"We found them," Lance tried to tell her, but she was already running away again. Dammit. He took off after her. "Pidge, wait up!"

"I told you, it's Katie!"

"Katie then," Lance huffed in her wake. "Would you just hold still for a second and let me talk to you!"

He followed her through the door into the upper-level training deck and almost slammed right into her. She'd changed, again. Dress-wearing, long-haired Katie was gone, replaced by the short-haired, form-hiding shorts and baggy shirt Pidge he was more familiar with. "Did you just call me Katie?" she deadpanned, side-eyeing him with hard disapproval.

"I—but—you just told me to!" Lance spluttered. "Like five seconds ago!" It was all he could do not to blow up at her out of frustration. He was trying his best here!

Her glare softened. "Did I?"

"Yes!"

"Sorry," she said after a tick of silence. "I'm… confused. I'm really confused, Lance. My head hurts and I… I think I'm supposed to be looking for someone? But for the life of me I can't remember who. I'm supposed to be somewhere too, but where, and where the hell are my glasses? Why did I cut my hair? I spent so long growing it out, Lance. It took three years. Why would I cut it off?"

"Hey, well, you're wearing your glasses," Lance offered weakly. That much he could answer, at least. As for the rest...

Surprised, Pidge felt her face blindly, fingers slowing once they landed on the rims of her glasses. She said nothing, and pushed past Lance back out of the training deck.

Lance watched her disappear down a comfortable carpeted hallway, awash with soft sunlight and lined with Holt family photos. This whole thing was so surreal. How was he supposed to wake Pidge up from this dreamworld if he didn't even understand what it was that she wanted in the first place? It seemed like Pidge herself didn't even understand what she—

Oh.

Ohhh.

It took him almost twenty minutes to find her again, after that. He'd been up and down every last corridor in this M.C. Escher mashup of the Holt family home and the castleship, and it wasn't until he finally retraced his steps to the beginning and went back through that blue door to the suburban street outside that he found her.

"Hey," he called up to her, his shoulders sagging with relief having finally laid eyes on her again. She was sitting on the rooftop, skin aglow where the dying sun hit her. She was back in the sundress again, too. Leave it to Pidge to climb onto a roof in a dress. A tired grin tugged at his lips.

"Hey," she sighed back.

"Can I come up?"

"Whatever," he thought he heard her grumble in reply, so he took that as a 'yes' and went to the vine-covered trellis and started the upward climb.

"Listen," he said as he settled in on the roof tiles beside her to share the view of Boulder, Colorado where Pidge had grown up. This was going to be agonizing for him, but Pidge was family and she needed him right now, so he needed to just swallow his pride and say what needed to be said. "I was so confused when I first traded lions," he admitted, which immediately caught her attention. Never had he betrayed his lack of confidence on that to anyone but Keith, and even that was just the once. Ignoring the shocked look she was hitting him with, he plowed on. "It was like… I thought I was born to be the Blue Paladin. I really did. So when she shut me out, and I realized that I was nowhere near unlocking my full potential, and that I needed to figure out how to fly Red now too… It was rough, Pidge. It was sooo rough."

Eyes downcast again, Pidge tugged at a loose piece of tile until it came all the way off and slid down the roof and few feet before settling. But she didn't seem ready to say anything yet, so Lance kept going.

"I mean, it took me years to figure it out," he said, feeling his stomach squirm nervously. He was toeing a serious line here. "Between the rivalry, the insecurity, the feelings of inferiority... All that stuff got mixed up in my head and I let it inhibit my ability to grow as a person. To be happy. That's my fault, I know that, but I am working through it. Sometimes this stuff takes awhile, Pidge. It doesn't happen overnight."

Beside him, she groaned into her kneecaps and kicked at the loose tile so that it tumbled and fell all the way off the roof. "Ugh, this is just a thinly veiled metaphor for figuring out that you're gay as shit for Keith, isn't it."

Flames erupted on his cheeks and his mouth opened and closed and opened again soundlessly. As the silence stretched on, Pidge glanced up at him with a smirk, like she was totally ready for his comeback with another jab of her own. The second she saw his face her smirk evaporated.

"Oh my god," she gasped, "I was just kidding. Were you really talking about that?!"

"Maybe," he grumbled angrily. She was such a little shit, sometimes. Just like a real little sister. He wasn't sure he'd ever been this red or mortified in his entire life. "I'm not gay," he pushed on, "like, not completely? But I might be, like.. you know. Ugh, why is this so hard? "

"You can't even say it yet," she realized with wide, sympathetic eyes. "No wonder you were using a metaphor. And I just—yikes. I am so sorry. I'm such a douche sometimes."

"Yes," he sniffed, "you are. And anyway," he went on, a lot more airy and friendly in tone, "I had to use a metaphor. If I'd come up here shooting my mouth off about sexuality and gender and stuff right off the bat you'd have pushed me off the roof before I got three words out."

A puff of laughter escaped her. "True."

"You know," he said softly, nudging her knee with his, "it's okay to not know exactly who you want to be right now." He counted on his fingers: "Pidge, Katie, some other third thing. You have your whole life to figure it out. That is, if I don't kill you first for being such an ass about my feelings when I was trying to help you with yours." Pouting dramatically, he lowered two of the three fingers so that he was flipping her off now.

"Ugh," she groaned, trying not to laugh as she shoved his hand away. "Okay, now you sound like Shiro. Or… like the real Shiro, at least."

"Pidge," Lance said slowly, "you remember it, don't you? About Lotor and Haggar and Shiro. How we found your dad and brother."

"Yeah," Pidge whispered, and she said it so casually that Lance knew she must have figured out she was dreaming on her own. Clever kid. Pride blossomed in Lance's chest even as Pidge sank further in on herself, resigned to the despair of this unknowable place. "So what the hell am I supposed to do now?" she went on. "My whole life has been about finding them for years, Lance. Since we left Earth it's been the one thing driving me, grounding me, centering me. It's the thing that's kept me going whenever hope seems lost. When I've been bleeding on the ground, bone tired, feeling like I couldn't possibly lift my weapon and keep fighting, it's the thing that gave me enough strength to stand again. And now it's gone. I'm so selfish, aren't I? You probably hate me for this. I got what you still want, right? I'm so sorry, Lance, I know I should be happy, but I feel so lost."

Her voice broke at the end, and Lance's heart broke with it. Of course he didn't hate her, how could she ever think such a thing? She was human. She was allowed to feel this way; he couldn't believe she'd been feeling this way quietly for god knows how long when she could have reached out to them for support. They were a team. They were friends.

No, they were family.

"You're not lost," Lance said, willing as much strength and warmth into his voice as he could. "You're in the star system Sepha 9, on Riander—a moon orbiting the planet Evry, stuck in a gross venus fly trap that I am really starting to get pissed off at, and you're the Green Paladin. You're not lost. You just need a hand," he finished with a sly grin.

Pidge looked over at the outstretched hand that Lance was now offering her. "Please tell me this isn't like Inception," she sighed.

"It's not like Inception," Lance blanched, although he was inwardly smiling at her reference. Maybe there wasn't quite as much unbridgeable distance between them as he thought there was. "Nobody has to jump off of any buildings, okay? We just have to focus hard on wanting to save the others."

"Good," Pidge sighed with relief, and took his hand. "I was hoping it'd be easy."

Together they closed their eyes.

.

.

. . .

When Black lit up for him, it wasn't as triumphant as he'd once imagined.

The moment that struck him like a miner struck gold was actually when Red came back and Keith reacted to him sitting in Black with a total lack of surprise. With complete and instant acceptance. It caught Lance off guard, and it caught Lance even more off guard that when Keith looked to him for direction in the battle, it wasn't all that different from those months when it had been Keith flying Black and Lance flying Red. Maybe that was why it all hit home in that instant how much he had missed Keith the last seven months while he'd been off finding himself in the Blade. How much of a team they were, him and Keith, two halves of a whole in whatever messed up way they could be in this chaotic universe. In that moment he ached for Keith in a keen, targeted, and all-encompassing way that he never had for anyone else before. Not any boy. Not any girl, either. Not even Allura, and that scared the absolute shit out of Lance in way that Lotor didn't, even when he was currently hellbent on murdering them all.

It wasn't just that moment, of course, that made him see how stupid he'd been about Keith. It wasn't any one moment. It was a million moments, culminating here in this terrifying nexus.

So Keith never got the 'welcome home' hug Lance had dreamt of tackling him with for months, because by the time things were calm enough to allow it, Lance had been shocked numb by the realization that he was in love with him.

They'd won the fight, yeah, but for Lance the world had basically ended. What the hell was he supposed to do about being in love with a boy? What was he supposed to do about being in love with Keith Kogane, who'd never noticed him until he'd crashed a rescue mission and flown him to space where he couldn't possibly escape Lance's presence, and who'd somehow found a way to escape Lance anyway even out here where ancient Altean prophecies dictated that they were supposed to stick together, and who probably would do it again as soon as the opportunity arose. What was Lance supposed to do?

Probably just fester on it forever, like every other thing he'd felt about Keith.

"Can you be nice to my mother, please?" was the first non-mission-related thing Keith barked at him after they'd kicked Lotor's ass and fled to some other sector to lick their wounds, grabbing Lance's arm to keep him from following the others as they left the hangar bay. "I get that she's Galra, but she's on our side."

Lance blushed, remembering the conversation he and Krolia had had right before he'd gone to Black's hangar, hoping she hadn't said anything to Keith about 'love' or whatever other incriminating things he'd let slip. "I don't dislike her because she's Galra," Lance snapped. "Besides, you don't seem to like her very much either."

Shuffling on his feet, Keith grimaced. Aha. Caught you. "I'm still getting used to her. What's your excuse?"

"Well I dunno, Keith," Lance drawled sarcastically, "maybe I'm just annoyed that she abandoned you with no clues to her whereabouts, leaving you to grow up part-alien all alone, I repeat, with no clues, so that when you went off to go search for her it took you months. She—" She ruined your childhood. She gave you abandonment issues. She made you deaf and blind to love. You barely know what it feels like, so you can't recognize it even when its slapping you in the face. It's her fault you left us because she's the one who showed you leaving your family behind was a valid option, when it's not, it's not, it's fucking not. He didn't say any of this. Instead he said, " I think I'm justified in disliking her for making you leave your team when we needed you most."

This seemed to confuse Keith. "What? That's not why I left."

Lance rolled his eyes. "Please, you were just itching to go find her. You've wanted to join the Blade ever since we first found it and you saw their swords."

"I mean, yeah," Keith admitted, "I wanted to know more about them, and myself, and hopefully find my mother. But that's not why I left Voltron when I did. Do you really think I'm that selfish?"

The sincerity in his voice gave Lance pause. It was absent of the usual cadence Keith used when they were arguing. It also held something else. Weight. Reluctance. Uncertainty. Lance frowned at him, trying to follow. "Why did you leave, then?"

Keith pressed his lips into a thin line. He looked down, and didn't answer.

Something hung in the air between them, tentative and small and infinitely fragile. A single bubble. Lance didn't know whether he was supposed to catch it or let it fall; wasn't sure which action would keep it from popping, wasn't sure what was waiting inside it, wasn't sure he was even ready to know yet.

He took a chance.

"Don't go back," he blurted, perhaps a bit louder than he meant to. It echoed in the empty corridor. He couldn't look at Keith as he spoke, hands curled into fists at his sides so he wouldn't be tempted to reach out. "It doesn't matter why you left, just don't do it again. You're supposed to be here, with us, not with them, risking your life on assignments any other Blade could take. There's hundreds of Blades," he huffed, "but only one Red Paladin. Please, Keith, just stay. If not for yourself then do it for—for the team."

Huffing a little breath of disbelief, Keith put his hands on his hips. "For the team, huh?"

Lance really hoped he wasn't blushing. "Yes."

There was a long, tense moment before Keith sighed, letting his arms fall. "Okay."

Brightening, Lance felt himself almost smiling, despite all the horrible things that had happened today. "Really?"

"Yeah. I mean, with you flying Black now, someone's gotta fly Red." He gave Lance one of his signature half-smirks, but it didn't reach his eyes. With a flicker of sad understanding, Lance realized he wasn't smirking at all, but was trying to smile at Lance without moving the side of his face where Shiro's clone had burned him today. The wound was raw and red and made Lance's face hurt just looking at it. It was too close. Could've easily been lethal. What if Keith hadn't pushed him off in time? Lance should've been there, fighting at his side.

"Hey," he said slowly, stepping in a little closer. "Promise me something?"

Keith's adam's apple bobbed when he swallowed. "What?"

"No more running," Lance said. "No more taking off in the dead of night, no more secret solo missions, no more leaving us behind and running headfirst into danger. If you're gonna run headfirst into danger, take me with you, okay? So that this…"

He trailed off, realizing that he'd lifted his hand to Keith's face without meaning to. The side with the burn. His hand hovered about an inch away from his cheek, not touching. He could feel the warmth from here though, contact or no.

"So that this doesn't happen again," he finally whispered.

Keith's eyes flitted to Lance's hand before he shrank away from it. "Yeah, yeah," he said, "I promise," and slid out from between Lance and the corridor wall, dancing around him and punching him playfully on the shoulder as he retreated.

To his credit, he kept that promise for almost eight whole weeks before breaking it.

. . .

.

.

Unlike Lance and Hunk, Pidge didn't thrash when she first woke up. Instead she calmly removed the vines from herself, one by one. Lance gave her plenty of space as she got to her feet, using Hunk as a balancing point. But as soon as she'd gained her balance she shoved off of Hunk and went straight for Lance. He took a panicked step back at the determined look in her eye, expecting murder, but was taken aback when she threw her arms around his waist.

Hunk's jaw dropped behind her as Lance relaxed and returned the hug.

"Thank you," Pidge said. "For everything you said."

Lance laughed self-consciously as their rooftop conversation replayed itself at quadruple speed in his head, feeling the burn return to his face. "Just doin' my job," he squeaked, "bein' a bang-up team leader, you know how it goes. Gotta stay magnificent. And uh.. and all that jazz."

She did not take the bait. Instead she pushed him to arms length and hit him with the softest, fondest look she'd ever given him. "Look, I know you weren't ready to co— uh," she snuck a glance at Hunk and then amended her words, "to say some of that stuff yet. But you did it anyway."

"Yeah, well, you needed to hear it."

Her shoulders drooped a bit. "Yeah," she settled on finally. "I think I did. Do we know where Allura is?"

"I'll give you one guess," Hunk answered with one hand raised, looking supremely left out in the background. He was practically wriggling with place in curiosity over Lance and Pidge's moment.

"Right," Pidge sighed. "Altea, obviously. So we'll get her last, then?"

"We'll get her last. Onward to Keith," Hunk announced. They both looked to Lance expectantly, then, and it finally dawned on Lance what was about to happen. He'd been so caught up in the chaos of the rescue mission that he hadn't had time to truly process what lay at the end of it.

"Ohhhhquiznack," he breathed.

"What," Hunk teased, "you mean you don't wanna get all up inside Kei—hrk," he spluttered as Pidge jammed her sharp elbow directly into his stomach.

"You'll do fine, Lance," she soothed.

"Uh, no, I think maybe one of you should do Keith," Lance squeaked. "Yep. Definitely has to be one of you. Doesn't feel right."

"And why not?"

"Because, Hunk! It's Keith. And— And me."

"Lance," Hunk said, halting his panicked thought process with one raised hand. "I hear you. I hear exactly where you're going with this, and I get it. But Keith's been stuck in this thing for like, I don't know, way over half a quintant already. And he's Keith. You really think anyone's gonna be able to persuade him out of a trance that deep except you?"

"Shiro could," Lance muttered, glaring down at the black bayard in his hands.

"But I didn't say Shiro," Hunk said, "did I? I said you."

"If Shiro was here—"

"But he's not," Hunk snapped. "He's not, Lance, and even if he was, you know what? I'd still vote to send you in after Keith."

Lost for words, Lance looked to Pidge for backup. But she backed up Hunk instead. "No, me too," she said. "Hunk's right on this, Lance. It's gotta be you."

"But why me?" he heard himself saying. He felt like he'd been saying that every time he looked in the mirror, these days. Why me.

"Maybe Keith will answer that," Hunk shrugged, and led the way ever deeper into the mushroom.

When they finally found Keith, relief flooded Lance from head to toe. He'd known on some level that Keith had to be here—after all, Red's mental warning had led them here. It was all but certain. Still, knowing was one thing. Seeing was another. "Thank god," he whispered, more to Keith than to Hunk and Pidge. "I'm seriously gonna kill you for this one, mullet." Out of all the crazy stunts Keith had pulled over the years, this was by far the least productive and the hardest for Lance to understand. They all had things they wanted! They all had dreams that hung tantalizingly out of reach. Keith was just the only one reckless enough to sneak out in the dead of night for a trip to the freaking Man-Eating Mirror of Erised without telling his friends where he was going so they could save his stupid ass when he didn't come back.

"Any day now," Pidge teased after a long moment of silence.

"I'm working on it!" Lance hissed back at her. The little goblin. "Jeez, give me a sec. Who knows what kind of crazy crap he's dreaming about? He could be surfing in an active volcano for all I know. I might appear in a pit of lava! A guy needs to prepare for that physically before just diving headfirst into it. And emotionally too, you know? Spiritually, even."

"Will you just admit that you're stalling?"

"I'll admit that I hate you."

"Lance, look at him," Hunk said, crouching down beside Lance to peer through the twisting vines at Keith's sleeping face. He looked so at peace. Lance couldn't remember him ever looking so restful before, even in his deepest sleep. Lance's heart already hurt and he hadn't even seen what fantasy he was going to have to rip out of Keith's hands yet. "I sincerely doubt that he's dreaming about active volcanoes."

"What do you think he's dreaming about?" Lance mused softly, only loud enough for Hunk to hear.

In response, Hunk reached up and tugged the central vine from the wall behind Keith. "Only one way to find out," he said with a grin, and passed the vine to Lance.

.

.

part iii

turn my lead into gold

.

.

Houses.

As Lance appeared on yet another sidewalk, he was struck through the heart by the common theme across the board in all their dreams. It was houses. They all dreamt of home. Lance of the one he'd left behind, Allura of the one she had lost so long ago, Hunk of the one he might have had if things had gone differently, Pidge of the two she was torn between, and now Keith.

What sort of home was Keith dreaming of?

Walking slowly, Lance looked up at the house he'd appeared in front of this time. It was a condo, or the alien equivalent at least. One piece of an enormous building, a skyscraper of sorts but built directly into a rocky mountainside, ripe with flowers and wildlife that didn't seem to care they were sharing their living space with civilization. Lance paused at the steps that led up to the lavender doorway and instead went to the concrete ledge on his left. Beyond lay a sprawling metropolis, teeming with afternoon life. Speeders of all shapes and sizes cruised by at low altitudes while vast trade ships hugged the clouds. Passenger ships curved around the high rises that fanned out in every direction for miles, springing directly from every curve of the jagged mountain range with no qualms at all with the physics-related backflips required of such architecture. With the same disregard for reason, bushy flower-covered trees grew right out of rooftops. As Lance raised his face to the cerulean sky he saw two suns: one near, dark red enough to look directly into without hurting his eyes, and one distant, white-hot and less than ten percent the size of its massive sister. A dark sun and a daytime star. He knew this place.

"Imicka," he whispered to himself.

He remembered this with bright and colorful clarity. It was one of his favorite planets that they'd ever been to; in fact he'd often begged Allura to bring them back here someday when the war was over and it wasn't overrun with enemy soldiers. Keith never said anything about how he felt about this place. He must have loved it even more than Lance did—enough to dream of buying a house and settling down here, which for a self-enforced wanderer like Keith would have to be a damn lot.

Still reeling a bit, Lance turned away from the city and made his way up the stairs. He was wearing regular old street clothes in this one. A boring white button-up and jeans. What did that mean, he wondered?

He turned the handle as silently as he could.

It wasn't even locked, which was so utterly unlike Keith that Lance nearly spun around right then to look elsewhere. But something in him told him to keep going, so he did. He eased the door open and crept inside.

The first thing that hit him was the smell. It was so homely. So familiar. Sage, maybe? Incense? It smelled like Keith had been burning it a few hours ago. Faded, but not quite.

The second thing that hit him was the sound. Somewhere in the house, some old prog rock song was playing from a speaker. The song itself was soft, the chord progression warm and wistful, the shape of the notes keening and emotional as they drifted down the hall from somewhere out of sight. Each plucked string plucked a string in Lance's heart to match. He had never heard this particular song before and nor could he make out the words yet, but he would have recognized the buzzing thrum of an acoustic guitar on his deathbed even with dissociative amnesia. Human ears didn't forget the instruments they grew up with, and despite having not been able to look into the sky and see Earth's moon for three years and counting now, Lance's body had not yet forgotten this feeling. The wave nostalgia was nearly enough to bowl him over.

The third thing that hit him was how lived in the place looked. From the entryway where he was standing he could see frames and art on the walls, though he couldn't quite see what was in most of them from here, except the small tabletop one that pictured Keith and Krolia in some kind of boat. As it was.. he'd kind of gotten the impression that Keith bore a world of resentment against the mother he'd found during his time away. Seeing them together like this, happy and smiling and familial, twisted something Lance's chest. Jealousy again? Or maybe it was just sadness that he was gonna have to take this away from Keith, whatever life it was that he'd dreamt up here? Maybe Krolia had never abandoned him in this dreamworld. Maybe his dad had never died.

Forcing himself to turn away from the photograph, he crept farther inside. There was a pair of converse and two pairs of hiking boots on the ground by the door, and a pair of overturned slippers left halfway down the hall, like someone had kicked them off in a hurry. Lance slipped further into the house, still creeping so as not to break the spell, and saw a red jacket slung over the back of a chair in the dining room. His heart flipped over.

He passed the kitchen by, and as he entered the hallway he could begin to make out some of the words in the song. Let me in from the cold, turn my lead into gold… 'cause there's a chill wind blowin' in my soul, I think I'm growin' old…

For reasons beyond his grasp, Lance felt himself choking up as he passed the pair of slippers. Nostalgia threatened to drown him over a song he'd never even heard before.

Fire bright by candlelight, and her by my si-i-i-ide. And if she prefers we will never stir again...

The farther down the hallway he got, the more he realized there were two voices singing. The confident one on the audio track, and another quieter one underneath it. The second voice was soft and casual and not at all performative, more an absent minded afterthought than anything else. But still there.

It tore at Lance's insides to admit to himself that it was Keith's voice he was hearing. Because he sounded so happy. So at peace. Lance wasn't sure he'd ever heard Keith sing before, or sound this at ease with existing; certainly not since the whole Shiro disaster blew wide open two months ago. Not since he'd come back from the Blade with a mother he didn't even know to find out the brother who'd raised him in her absence was gone again. Not since Shiro had first disappeared during that battle a year ago. Actually, not since Kerberos—three years ago. Before space. Before all this.

It was entirely possible Lance had never heard Keith sound like this. Maybe he had never had any reason to sing before.

"Someone sent the promised land, and I grabbed it with both hands. Now I'm the man on the inside looking out…"

Easing numbly into the doorway, Lance's eyes finally fell on Keith where he was standing on the far side of the room in front of a half-finished abstract mural, his back to the door as he bobbed his head in time with the music and swiped a long streak of sapphire blue across a patch of gray. His hair was pulled back into a messy knot near his neck, and he had paint of every color imaginable on his jeans and t-shirt, even a bit of it on his bare feet.

"Hear me shout," Keith half-sang to himself as he bled the blues and grays together, "'Come on in. What's the news and where you been?' 'Cause there's no wind left in my soul, and I've grown old..."

A few more resolving guitar chords, and the song ended.

"Hey," Lance croaked into the silence right before the next song picked up into wordless folksy piano, surprising himself by how wrecked his voice sounded. And when Keith turned, his face brightened so swiftly that Lance's heart pole-vaulted high enough to have earned a gold medal if anyone had been watching it.

"Lance!" he beamed, tossing his paintbrush and pallet onto the tarp covered bed as he skipped—yes, skipped across the room. "That was fast," he laughed, "I expected you to be gone a lot longer than that."

..What?

Still smiling, brighter than Lance had ever seen, Keith skipped all the way up to Lance, placed a hand on his chest before Lance had even had time to panic and wonder what was happening, and kissed him.

Wait, what?!

Before he'd even had time to fully come to terms with this development Keith was leaning away again, casually, like, as if they did that all the time and that's just how things were.

UM? WHAT!

"How was it?" Keith said, already leaving Lance in the doorway to go back and pick up his paintbrush again, humming under his breath along with the folk song.

Easing into the bedroom on jelly-legs, Lance stared at Keith slack-jawed, still replaying the last five seconds in his head like it would somehow make more sense if he just thought about it hard enough. Maybe Hunk messed up when he grabbed the vines. Maybe Lance was back in his own Aia dream and it was just changed somehow. Maybe this wasn't the real Keith. "How was what?"

"Earth," Keith laughed, and squeezed a few more globs of paint onto his messy pallet, mixing them together without really looking. "Duh?"

"Oh," Lance choked. "Um. Good?" Wait, that sounded like a question. "It was good," he repeated a little more confidently.

"Why'd you come back so early? I thought you were staying there for dinner." Keith stopped mixing to add a bit more yellow, and quirked an eyebrow at Lance when Lance continued to simply stare at him, short-circuiting. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I, uh— I just forgot my jacket," Lance choked out. His eyes flitted around the bedroom, soaking everything in with eager abandon. There were pictures on every wall filled with familiar faces, a fish tank by the huge bay windows filled with actual Earth fish, and a half finished wall-sized mural so abstract that Lance couldn't begin to parse its meaning, let alone come to terms with the fact that Keith was secretly a goddamned artist. Or at least, he wanted to be? What was the story here?!

Raising an eyebrow at Lance, Keith tapped the paintbrush on his cheek, smearing blue near his jaw and not noticing at all. "But it's summer in Cuba."

Lance shrugged frantically, unable to come up with anything better when he was this close to panicking.

"Okayy," Keith hummed, his voice tinged with amused concern. "I'm pretty sure it's in the closet. You know, where it always is."

And Lance melted. Like, physically melted. It started in the corner of his eye as a tiny drop of wetness and ended in his feet, stealing all his strength and leaving him a boneless puddle.

"Oh," he said again, like some kind of broken record, and when he crossed numbly to the closet and threw it open, he saw his jacket hanging there just as Keith said, next to all of Lance's other clothes. "Oh."

Oh my god, I live here. I live here...

Abandoning the mural entirely, Keith got up and circled around the bed, approaching Lance from behind. "Okay, it's official. You are being weird, Lance. You have been weird all day, alright, and I thought a visit to Earth would help, but now you're back and you're just being a different kind of weird."

Lance turned to him almost against his will. It wasn't fair. He wasn't being given any time to process this. How long had Keith felt this way? Why didn't he ever say anything? Or was it new? What if it was it brand new and Lance was screwing it all up by being here and seeing it and betraying Keith's trust and crossing every boundary imaginable?!

"Why do you have that serious look on?" Keith mumbled. "You haven't looked at me like that since… Well, since the war, I guess. What's wrong?"

Lance nearly flinched straight out of his skin when Keith reached up to touch his jaw, searching his face with concern.

"I guess the trip to Earth just brought up some old juju," Lance lied. It was mesmerizing, the sensation of Keith's fingers brushing his skin more lightly than they ever had before. Was it wrong to play along with this? Just for a few minutes? Was it so wrong that he just had to know where it was going before telling Keith what was really going on, just in case there was nothing inside when the bubble finally burst? "You know. About the war and stuff."

"Lance," Keith intoned softly. "Here. Come here." Lance was helpless to do anything but let it happen as Keith moved his hand down and caught Lance by the wrist, then led him across the room, around the tarp-covered bed and past the tarp-covered dresser until they were standing in front of the largest of the three bay windows that took up the majority of this wall. You could see all of Imicka from here. As the suns descended toward the horizon the clouds had begun to descend as well, slowly rolling into the network of valleys, obscuring the cityscape around the edges. As the fog thickened the lights were beginning to blur and refract into halos of every color, and the thousands of ships that zipped to and fro were little more than stars in a galaxy now.

"You see this city?" Keith asked plaintively, and nudged Lance in the side.

Lance could scarcely focus on anything except Keith's hand, but he tried to follow along. "Yeah."

"A Galra soldier hasn't set foot here in five years, Lance."

When Lance didn't answer right away, couldn't answer right away, Keith pulled him closer until they were pressed side to side. Lance was helpless to do anything to stop it. Stupidly, he thought that Keith was probably getting paint all over him.

"This," Keith breathed, "just, all of this. I never thought it was possible, you know? The Galran chokehold was so strong here that I never thought we'd free this place one day, let alone get to live here. As a kid—you know, when I was being passed back and forth between foster homes week after week—I never dreamt that someday I'd be able to go a whole day without wondering where I was going to sleep that night, what I was going to eat, whose face I was gonna see when I woke up again, or whether I was gonna be alone. During the war I never dreamt that one day I'd be able to go the whole day without lifting my sword." Smirking softly, he added, "I'm not even sure where my bayard is right now. Under the bed maybe? Or it might be jammed in the couch cushions again. I dunno," he laughed. "And that's kinda my point."

Slowly, Lance peered down at Keith in incredulity. Keith was still gazing out the windows at the city, but Lance was finally processing the last of the clues, finally putting the last puzzle pieces in place. The home Keith dreamt of. It was safety. Permanence.

Keith was a drifter. A wanderer. A loner. He always had been and Lance had come to simply accept that as part of what made Keith Keith. But here Keith was, dreaming of a future where he could puts roots down someplace without any fear, without any need for backup plans or safety nets, without threat of war or missing family members. Keith dreamt of a future where he didn't have to run anymore.

And Lance… Somewhere along the way, Lance had become a part of that dream. Keith had given Lance a place in it, right at the heart. That realization was so profound that it stunned him into doing something really, really stupid.

Keith leaned in automatically when Lance reached up to touch his cheek, like it was something they'd done a thousand times, turning until he was facing Lance rather than the window. He looked older here in this dreamworld, but not by much, and he'd grown a few phantom inches so that they were exactly the same height now. The dark circles under his eyes that Lance knew so well were almost totally gone. But he still had the burn mark he'd sustained in his fight with Shiro's clone, which had left a dark scar because of his refusal to get in a healing pod until it got infected, at which point Lance had physically dragged him away from his self-appointed guard duty outside the clone's door and into the medbay.

Keith's intense gaze softened as Lance brushed his thumb over the scar where it crested on his cheekbone. He'd ached to do that since the moment he first saw it. "Lance, seriously," Keith mumbled as tears pricked Lance's eyes. "What is it?"

Lance swallowed thickly. "I'm sorry, man, but… this isn't real."

The only effect that had was to make Keith smile, like Lance had told a funny joke. "Not real?" he chuckled incredulously. "Feels pretty real to me." Lance's breath hitched when he felt Keith's fingertips trailing up his chest, then snaking around to the back of his neck, tugging gently. He pressed a quick kiss just off the corner of Lance's mouth before Lance had gathered the wherewithal to push him away. It was an electric shock to the heart. "That feels real, right?"

"Y-yeah," Lance shuddered.

It was too much. The hand on his neck, the other hooking around his waist, the warm breath on his jaw. He was weak. The hand he had on Keith's cheek flattened out, inviting him back even as Lance's brain screamed at him to push Keith away, to end this before it got even messier than it already was.

"Everything's fine." Keith breathed against his lips, his fingers scratching soothingly at the base of Lance's scalp. "Relax, Lance, and kiss me already, dammit."

Everything was most certainly not fine, but Lance was weak. He was human. He was a fool. He gave in all at once, and Keith hummed in appreciation when Lance finally crossed the last centimeter of space and pressed their lips firmly together.

And, oh wow. How could this seriously be fake when it felt this good?

Because Lance had kissed before, but not like this. Adrenaline shot through him and settled in his stomach like electrical plasma, like rolling sun flares, shattering his reservations and sending him further into madness. Lips gave way to tongue and teeth, noses clashing, hands grasping. It wasn't a kiss anymore. This was a full-body experience, mind and soul, and Lance lost himself to it completely, didn't protest when Keith started shoving, hardly even registered the fact that he was walking backwards until his knees struck something crinkly and sent him off balance. The plastic tarp crinkled loudly as he fell back onto the bed with an 'oof' and Keith laughed at the sound as he followed, climbing onto Lance's lap and shoving at his chest as Lance tried to sit up. Hands wandering up under Lance's paint-smeared shirt, he leaned down and bit at the side of Lance's neck.

Lance fell to swearing in Spanish. Maybe this wasn't fake. That'd be amazing, wouldn't it? Maybe it was real and the whole Aia thing was just a really vivid dream, or a distant memory, and Lance really did live here with Keith and they were happy and healthy and the war was a thing of the past and—

Something dark pooled in Lance's stomach as Keith whispered his name into his neck. He said it with such fondness. Such trust.

Suddenly he felt sick to his stomach at how far he'd let this go. "Hang on, Keith."

"Mhmm?" His hand strayed farther.

"Keith wait. Fuck," he breathed when Keith's snide response was to bite him again, this time hard enough to actually sting.

Keith yelped in surprise when Lance seized him around the waist and abruptly threw his weight, flipping him over so that Keith's back was now against the bed, his own elbow resting squarely on the paint pallet. So much paint, it was everywhere now. On their skin, their clothes, their faces. The sly grin that immediately took the place of Keith's surprise suggested that he was totally into this turn of events, and so Lance had to squeeze his eyes shut and center himself. Had to seize Keith's hands as they reached back toward him and keep Keith still long enough to speak. This boy was gonna be the death of him.

"What did you have for breakfast this morning?" Lance blurted. Like an idiot. Like a total moron. It was all he could think of, okay?

Keith furrowed his eyebrows like Lance had lost his mind. "Um… We had waffles with strawberries? Don't you remember? You're the one who made them."

Oh my god that is so cute. Dammit. FOCUS.

"And for dinner last night? What did we have?"

"Why do you—"

"What did we have for dinner last night, Keith!"

Keith's face fell, and he briefly tried to take control of his arms back—presumably to distract Lance with kissing again, which would have worked —and was surprised by the force with which Lance held on. "I don't remember, okay? You're starting to really scare me here. What the hell is up with you today?"

"When did we buy this house? Huh, Keith? Do you remember that either? How did the war end? What did we do to stop Haggar? Where did we find Shiro?"

"I— I don't know, exactly. That's..." Panic entered his eyes. "Oh my god, I can't remember. I can't remember any of that. Why can't I remember anything properly? It's all fuzzy. What's wrong with me? Lance, what is going on?"

Relieved at having finally got through to him, Lance released Keith's wrists and slipped off the bed, taking a step back to give him some space. "Do you remember visiting a gas planet called Evry? Lots of blue rings, a small moon with a rebel base?"

Keith sat up slowly. Lance hated the worry lines that returned to Keith's face like old friends.

"Yeah," Keith said after a few seconds. "Riander. With the jungle and the giant plants and animals and the… What was it called? The Aia? That was so long ago."

Lance shuffled on his feet, feeling his face burn out of control, unable to look Keith in the eye. He was never going to forgive Lance for this. "Think again, mullet."

Keith scoffed. "You cannot be serious."

Lance stared at him then, injecting every last ounce of 'serious' he had at his disposal.

"Oh my god, you're serious. You… you really want me to believe that? That I'm—what, that I'm stuck in the Aia still and the last seven years have been a crazy fever dream? That none of this is real?"

"It would explain a lot, though, wouldn't it?" Lance pressed. "The gaps in your memory. The way I was acting earlier, so odd and so unlike myself. The reason you don't have any fingerprints," he ended pointedly.

Keith's mouth fell open. "What?" He brought his hands up automatically to check, and then launched to his feet, nearly falling over in his haste and dismay. "What the—?"

"I know," Lance soothed as best he could. "It's a real mindfuck, right? You were in here longer than anyone else so this is probably a big shock—"

Keith wasn't listening. "What the hell," he was saying over and over, "what the hell, this isn't real. None of this is real. No wonder. You were so weird earlier, and I just thought I was going crazy but it was because you weren't real. None of this is real! Evry,Evry, shit, I am such an idiot, why did I think this would work? Lance is gonna murder me for this. How long have I been stuck in here?! HEY!" he shouted at the ceiling, so loud and sudden that Lance jumped. "LET ME OUT OF HERE YOU STUPID FUNGUS!"

"Hey, it's okay," Lance tried to interject, reaching forward to stop Keith's pacing. But Keith shoved him away.

"Don't touch me," he warned, backing away from Lance the way a man in a desert might back away from a mirage. "Lance would kill me if he knew I— Just. You, uh. You stay over there," he demanded awkwardly, pointing to the farthest corner of the room and backing away at the same time. "Just go face the wall or something while I figure a way out of this. Thanks for the help and all, but I need to get out of here before the real Lance comes to save me and sees this place and—and sees you."

"Actually," Lance said, and he had to drag every syllable out with sheer force of will, "the rest of this is fake, yeah, but I'm.. real."

Keith froze.

"Not the whole time!" Lance blurted, blushing furiously as he wondered for the first time what Keith and dream-Lance had been up to before Keith caught on and sent him away to Earth. "Just in the last ten minutes. I came to wake you up."

"You… No. Oh my god. No. No no nonono— "

"Keith—"

"Oh my god."

"Look I'm sorry, okay, I'm really sorry, what would you have done if—"

"You're sorry? What in the holy shitfuck are YOU sorry for? I just jumped you. "

"For going along with it?! I should not have done that, I know that, you weren't in your right mind and it wasn't fair to you. You just—you caught me so off guard! Here I come to save you, and after all the others, I really don't know what I was expecting. Butthis? Wasn't prepared for this. It happened so fast! Will you say something to cut off my rambling please? I'm going out of my mind with guilt, here."

Keith was still frozen in the exact same place, and had cycled through about eighty different emotions in the last minute, each one more indecipherable than the last. He'd stopped on something like 'shocked amazement.' "You did go along with it," he said, half in disbelief. He shook off the disbelief, pointing weakly at Lance. "You went along with it."

"Uh.. yeah," Lance said, shrinking back, totally at a loss for interpreting Keith's reaction. Was he pissed? Was he so pissed that he'd transcended his usual berserker mode for whatever the hell this was? "And I'm really sorry."

Keith squinted at him, shaking his head. "I'm not angry at you. I'm mortified. Or, I was. But now I'm just… just really goddamn confused, to be honest." He sighed heavily, turning toward the bedroom door. "I don't get you, Lance."

Lance let him go, biting his tongue against calling after him. Maybe he just needed a minute. Maybe it was too much.

Instead of following after him Lance sank to the floor beside the bed, letting his head come to rest on the mattress.

The suns were sinking beyond the south end of the city, now, casting miles-long shadows from every building and ship and hill. Lance watched them lengthen through the windows, thinking about what a fuck-up he had turned out to be. Maybe everything would have been better if he'd just never pursued the off-feeling he'd gotten in his gut about Shiro's clone. Maybe even the Haggar-spy Clone-Shiro was a better leader than he was. Clone-Shiro wasn't a perfect copy of the original, but he still wouldn't have chickened out on waking Allura, or blown up on Hunk the way Lance did, would have known what to say to Pidge without making it about himself, wouldn't have taken advantage of Keith's feelings like a slimy scumbag.

Both suns had gone all the way down by the time Lance accepted that Keith wasn't coming back. It had been almost an hour. Maybe more. Time was weird and sluggish in this place.

Lance rubbed at his face, hoping that his eyes weren't as red and puffy as they felt as he stood to go find Keith.

The house was dark and empty, and Lance had no luck. That is, until he looked out a south window and saw a dark figure silhouetted against the neon fog, leaning on a fence down a hill in the backyard. Lance slid the glass door open and stepped out into the breezy night, but if Keith heard or cared as Lance descended the hillside he didn't let on.

The yellow porchlight was enough to see, even though the fog had now reached them up here as well. He'd never allowed himself to really look at Keith before. There was always some filter of jealousy clouding his vision. Or guilt, later on. Or confusion. Or (even worse) shame. Lately it was just this intense wistful longing which hurt so acutely that it was easier to just look away. But now, for the first time ever, Lance was able to remove all those filters and look at Keith with fresh, open eyes.

In this moment, where he was leaning against the fence, barefoot in the grass and hair flicking in the breeze, Keith didn't look like a pilot. He didn't look like a swordsman. He didn't look half-alien, or half-paladin, or half-rival half-friend.

He just looked like a boy.

A boy who was probably just as confused about all this as Lance was.

Prickles of moisture condensed on Lance's skin as he drew up beside Keith, who still did not turn away from the city to look at Lance. The ground beneath the fence dropped off sharply here, over the side of the strangely architectured building space that Keith's—that their house shared with so many others. The drop-off was so deep that in the gathering darkness Lance couldn't make out the distant bottom. He kicked a pebble off and watched the darkness swallow it.

You couldn't have cut through silence this thick even with Keith's luxite blade.

As the minutes stretched on, Keith plucked leaves at random from the vines covering the fence they were both leaning on. Then, after another few minutes, he plucked some kind of berry and sighed before taking a bite. Lance looked at it and gasped, completely forgetting about the tension and blurting out, "Is that a strawberry?"

Keith's eyes slid toward him and Lance felt his jaw click shut.

Opting to answer it for himself, Lance found a berry of his own and promptly picked it. He moaned at the taste of it, completely against his will as the taste of fresh strawberry made sweet, sweet love to his taste buds. It had been so long! Who cared if it was fake when it tasted so good? Finishing it in two bites, he quickly picked another.

Keith was back to staring at him. "I thought you weren't into strawberries."

Lance raised an eyebrow as he finished his second strawberry and picked several more from the vine, grateful for the distraction from the real issue here. "When the hell did I ever say that? I love strawberries."

"You said, quote, 'strawberries are gay, blackberries are the good kush,' and then you dumped your whole fucking drink on my lap when I flipped you off for it. You had a black eye for a whole week after that fight since you refused to go back into the pod so soon after Arus. I know you remember that bonding moment."

Lance gaped at him as the memory clicked into place. It had been their very first 'sleepover' as a team.

After Lance's stint in the healing pod on Arus, spirits had been low. It was starting to sink in that they really weren't going back home, at least not any time this year. Maybe not even this decade. The mood had hung heavier and heavier over the castle like gathering rain clouds until Lance had caved to the loneliness and existential dread and demanded a 'sleepover,' insisting that they needed to bond as people and not just as teammates or they were all going to lose their minds out here in space. Lance had dubbed one of the rec rooms the sleepover room, and they'd all piled onto the couch and floor with blankets and pillows and watched a bad Altean romcom. They even played truth or dare until Lance and Keith ruined it by getting into a fist fight over which Earth berries were the best, of all the stupid things. But even though that first one had ended in Keith and Lance being sent to their rooms like children, sleepovers still became A Thing for the team, if a little chaotic and a little rare.

At least, until Shiro disappeared. They hadn't had a single one since then.

Feeling like the universe's most oblivious jackass, Lance poked at his small pile of strawberries now gathered on the top of the fence. So, Keith hadn't been mad about strawberries that day. He'd been offended because Lance had called them gay.

Ugh. Why was Lance so dense? Why hadn't Keith just been honest?

"Well, I feel like a jerk for saying that, now," Lance muttered. "In retrospect, no wonder you flipped me off. Plus, as it turns out, I'm kind of into strawberries after all. I'm really into strawberries, actually. If you, uh.. if you catch my drift," he joked weakly when Keith did not, in fact, catch his drift right away. He really needed to stop sugarcoating this with metaphors and just say the damn words out loud already. But it was hard, okay! Especially when Keith was holding himself like Lance might try and shatter him. He had never looked quite so vulnerable before. "It doesn't seem fair that I got to see your dream but you didn't see mine," Lance went on as bravely as he could. "So uh. I'm just gonna tell you about it, if that's okay."

That piqued Keith's interest. "You had a dream too?"

Toying with the leaf of another strawberry, Lance nodded. "Yeah, I got stuck there first and had to wake myself up from it. La Playa Varadero," he explained, and Keith nodded in understanding. "My whole family was there, and the others too. Real Shiro was back and you were…"

The words 'because I love you' echoed in Lance's head. He took a deep breath.

"You told me you loved me. That was what brought me to my senses actually," he laughed nervously. "I knew that could never be real."

Shock coursed through Keith, but quickly simmered down into something more manageable. "Wow," he deadpanned. "You… You're really obtuse, then. I always thought you knew how I felt about you and were just ignoring it."

"What! No, I didn't know! For starters, I didn't even know you were gay, Keith, and you are way better at hiding your emotions than you think you are, because even if I did, never in a million years would I have figured out that you had feelings for me, of all people. I would have just gone on forever, thinking you still hated me—"

"I never hated you!" Keith squawked indignantly. "You're the idiot who wanted to be rivals or whatever the fuck—"

"Oh, you know I only pulled that so you'd notice me," Lance bit back. "I tried to be your friend the nice way for three years at the Garrison, but you only responded to antagonization! Excuse me for not falling all over myself a second time when you finally realized I existed!"

"I was young and in mourning," Keith retorted, but then his face softened. "What the hell did you want to be my friend for back then, anyway?"

"Stop fishing for praises, I'm trying to scold you here."

"Are you?" Keith teased. "'Cause to me, it kinda sounded like you were trying to confess a crush or something."

Huffing dramatically, Lance dragged a hand down his face. "Stop that," he said. "I'm not confessing anything till we're out of this mess. God, you drive me crazy, sometimes. If you only knew the absolute hell I've been through over you today. We all got caught by the Aia coming to rescue you, Keith, not just me. I had to go into everyone's head, Keith, to drag them away from what they wanted most in the whole universe. Can you imagine how much that sucked? It fucking sucked, okay? Why did you come here? Why did you do this to me? You— You promised me you wouldn't pull this shit anymore, running off on your own. The day you came back, you promised me. I get it, okay? Wanting a—a home or whatever. I know what we have in real life, it's not perfect, and I-I'm not perfect. But I'm trying. I'm trying so hard, Keith—"

"Hey," Keith soothed, and Lance almost jumped out of his skin when Keith scooted a few inches closer, easing Lance's clenched fist open (he didn't remember doing that) and pulling the mashed up strawberry out of his death grip to toss its mangled corpse over the fence into the abyss. "Gross," he muttered, and Lance's palm burned where he'd slid his fingers across it. "That's not it," he sighed. "It's not you, okay? I just thought I could use the Aia to find Shiro."

"What? How? "

"They said that it shows you your deepest desires, right? Well my deepest desire was finding Shiro, and so I thought that maybe the plant might pull some great idea out of my subconscious, or a clue that I hadn't thought about, or draw my attention to something that I knew but didn't know I knew. Whatever, I don't know," he sighed. "I guess part of me just wanted to see him again. I messed up. Clearly my 'deepest desires' or whatever weren't clear cut enough to work the way I hoped."

"That…" Lance ached to touch his face again in comfort, the way he'd done inside the house. "That's completely insane, man, but on some level it actually kinda makes sense to me. Did you see him?"

Keith nodded. They were almost totally in the dark now. They'd stood still too long and the porch light had clicked itself off, leaving them lit only around the edges with distant muted lights. A handful of scattered stars were visible in the deep navy sky through the fog, but the majority of them were drowned by it, and by the neon glow of the city as the rays of light rained upward through the clouds. "He and Black came by to visit earlier. But we didn't talk about anything important, we just flew Black around for fun, and then he left. So, I suppose I've got nothing to show for this."

A little butterfly fluttered in Lance's stomach as he looked at their hands on the fence. So close. He needed to be brave, now. No more dancing around it.

"Well, I mean, not nothing," he reasoned.

"What do you mean? I failed the mission in pretty much every…" He trailed off when Lance moved his hand onto the back of Keith's to slowly snake their fingers together. They were so close now that when Keith turned the tips of their noses brushed, and it had Lance's stomach churning as he remembered how to felt to kiss him.

"We need to wake ourselves up," Lance said, even as he tightened his hand and felt Keith's hold tightening in response. "Hunk and Pidge are probably worried sick."

"Just Hunk and Pidge? What about Allura?"

"On Altea," Lance sighed.

Keith wilted. "Saving her for last, then?"

"Yeah. I really need to go get her. But uh… we should talk," he fumbled before he could chicken out. "Later. Like, alone and stuff. About.. stuff." Smooooth.

"Stuff," Keith repeated, one eyebrow raised.

"Shut up," Lance hissed, "there's a learning curve, okay! The fact that you're up for this is breaking news to me and you haven't exactly given me time to—"

"Calm down," Keith laughed, "I'm just messing with you. And kinda relieved that... you know, that you didn't freak out and our friendship isn't over."

"Keith, you probably would have been way more freaked out by my dream than I ever could've been at yours, because mine was cheesy as all hell. It was a regular romcom happy ending. Fade to black, roll credits. The whole thing."

"Hmm. Kinda wish I could've seen that."

"Hmm. Maybe you still will," Lance teased.

Keith blinked, his eyes reflecting the light of the city far more brightly than any normal human's would have, with absolutely no idea what to do with Lance's response. "Oh. O-okay," he finally settled on. Then all of a sudden he backed away from Lance, nervously pushing his hair out of his face. "We should—"

"—Right," Lance wheezed. They'd gotten way too close. Not the time or place. Not yet, anyway.

"How do we..?"

"You just gotta want it hard enough," Lance shrugged. "That's it."

"Wait, that's it? I was running around out here for like an hour searching for a door in the sky."

Lance giggled. Oh my god. No way in hell was he ever gonna admit he'd done the same exact thing in his own dream.

"You ready? Just close your eyes and think really hard about wanting to save Allura. Or you can think about seeing my beautiful face in real life if that helps— oi!" He grabbed his bicep where Keith had just punched it. "Domestic abuse! Now I really wanna wake up."

Keith snorted and closed his eyes, leaning down until his arms were crossed atop the fence and his chin resting on them. In the faint light of the city, his angular features were outlined in silvery-blue, cast with soft shadows, every inch of which Lance wanted to trace with his hands. He looked positively ethereal. "See you on the other side."

"Yeah," Lance sighed. "See you."

. . .

Deciding what to do in the aftermath of the battle with Lotor was hard. So many things had happened that day. Keith aged three months and brought home both a Blade member and an Altean girl who spoke of secret colonies. Should they take Krolia back to the BoM? Should they pursue the possibility that Lotor had other colonies hidden elsewhere? They had defeated Lotor, but god only knew if he was dead or alive. Should they refocus on Allura's quest to master Altean alchemy to keep a step ahead of Lotor if he comes back? Or should they focus on the fact that Haggar had infiltrated their base and lives in the most invasive way possible? That she had at least two facilities full of clones born of Shiro, the purpose of which was still ominously unknown and only one of which was destroyed?

"We need to take Krolia back to the Blade of Whatever," Romelle said right away once they'd all gathered on the bridge. "She doesn't belong here."

"Neither do you," Krolia answered coldly. "You'd never even been on a spaceship before this morning. Keith, I think we should drop her at one of the refuge moons in Coalition territory. She'll be safer there."

"Absolutely not," Allura cut in. "Romelle has priceless information!"

"Woah." Lance stepped between them, hoping to defuse the tension. "We're not dropping anyone off anywhere just yet."

"And who are you to decide?" Krolia said, narrowing her eyes at him. "They call you the Blue Paladin across the Coalition, yet you wear the red armor and wield the red bayard, and now you fly the Black Lion into battle. I cannot begin to understand this team, least of all your place in it."

"The team adjusts," Coran piped up loudly from the back of the room as Lance flinched away from Krolia, trying not to let it show how much her words had cut him. "We've learned to become fluid. I, for one, am not surprised to see yet another changing of the guard. For all intents and purposes, Lance is the Black Paladin at this moment in time, so I'll expect you to show him the teeensiest mote of respect."

Krolia exchanged a wordless glance with Coran, whose smile was a little too wide to look truly genuine, and then ducked her head at Lance in that clinically deferential manner unique to the Galra. "I meant no disrespect. It has been a long and arduous day."

"Truer words were never spoken," Romelle sighed, and they all took a moment to sit on that.

"Alright, Black Paladin," Pidge said into the silence, mostly with sarcasm but also with a hint of sincerity. "What's the plan then?"

Lance sighed, leaning back on the console and taking a look around the room. He wasn't used to having everyone look at him. Especially not lately. Especially not Keith. How did this happen? How was HE the one calling the shots now when less than a day ago he couldn't get anyone to listen to a word he said? He swiped a hand through his hair and cleared his throat, straightening again and putting on confidence the same way he used to put on that too-big army jacket passed down from his older brother, hoping against hope that if he just kept wearing it, someday, it would fit him.

Hey, it worked once, right?

"I want to hear everyone's opinion," he said. "What's our most pressing objective?"

"Finding Shiro," Keith blurted right away, too loudly in the quiet. The adolescent wolf laying at Keith's feet stood up and whined, and in response one of Keith's hands fisted loosely into the excess fur on the back of the wolf's neck, like a grounding point. Whether the comfort was for Keith or for the wolf was anyone's guess.

"Noted," Lance said with a tired tilt of the head. "Anyone else?"

"Finding the other Altean colonies," Allura said firmly, and Romelle nodded along.

"I'd say finding Haggar is pretty high up there too," Hunk threw in. "I hate that Shiro is back on the to do list, and I'm eager to find him too, but we have to be realistic. He's been missing for over nine phoebs now with no clues in the right direction, and in the meantime, Haggar kind of wrecked our entire shit by exploiting the very fact that we were putting the search for him above everything else. Pardon my French," he added sheepishly with a sideways glance at Romelle, who was now mouthing the curse word to herself with furrowed eyebrows. It was cute; jarringly so amidst all this tension. It was the first thing all day that had made Lance feel like he could smile again sometime in the future.

"In that vein, I personally think the first thing we need to do is deal with the clone currently sitting in a healing pod," Pidge said, then cleared her throat uncomfortably and shifted so that she couldn't directly see Keith. "Like, are we gonna just.. deactivate him? Or what?"

"I don't think it works like that," Lance frowned. "He's not a robot. Besides, he's a tactical advantage. I think one of our biggest priorities should be finding and dismantling the rest of these cloning facilities, and our clone could be the key to finding them."

"I can see if I can hack whatever chip is in his brain," Pidge mused. "We can start from there and see where it goes. It's better than nothing."

"This is all well and good," Coran said, "but fixing the ship is number one. Lotor's generals really did a number on us. Decks two, three, and seven are breached and totally inaccessible, and we're running on backup backup power."

"Anyone else?" Lance asked, and let the silence stretch for a few moments before nodding. "Okay then. Castle first. Coran's right," he laughed ruefully, slapping the console behind him, "we need this baby to get anywhere. Hunk and Pidge, you guys are on clone duty while Coran fixes the castle. Do your magic. Decrypt those files or whatever. You two," he said, pointing to Allura and Romelle, "exchange info. As soon as the castle's fixed we're going clone hunting and colony foraging." Good thing he'd always been skilled at multitasking.

"What about Haggar?" Hunk asked, tapping his fingertips together. "I don't like knowing she's just OUT there somewhere."

"If we focus on finding the cloning facility our clone came from, and any others, there's a good chance it could lead us right to her. That's our best shot right now," Lance said, and was relieved to see some nodding from around the room at his logic. "Does that cover everything?"

"No!" Keith barked, and Lance turned back to him to see he was nearly shaking, fists clenched at his sides. "No, it doesn't!"

"Keith," Krolia began softly, "I know you're hurting, but Lance is right. This course of action makes the most sense considering today's events." But Keith shrugged away violently from her touch as her hand came to rest on his shoulder, nearly tripping over his wolf in the process. The small wolf warped away, coming out ruffled and offended on the other side of Krolia's legs.

"Stop DOING that," Keith barked at her. "You don't know anything about anything, especially not Shiro. You've never even met him!"

There was a collective sharp intake of breath at Keith's outburst.

Lance, for one, was a little shocked at the unfolding dynamic between Keith and his estranged mother. He didn't know what he expected to happen when Keith found his missing Galra mom, but it wasn't this. Animosity, resentment, bitterness… But then again, didn't Keith deserve to feel those things? It wasn't like the two of them had know each other very long. They hadn't had a lot of time together to heal the damage of her nineteen year absence. A gravity so strong that it warped time itself and trapped them for months wasn't strong enough to mend the emotional rift. Nineteen more years of that still might not have been enough. Realizing that, seeing the way Keith's fists shook as he refused to make eye contact with anyone…

It saddened Lance almost more than anything else today had done.

"Uh," Lance said, and met eyes with Hunk, who nodded at him subtly and began to usher everyone else from the room. Krolia sighed, and looked like she might argue the point or try her hand again at reassuring Keith, but in the end she left without saying anything else, calling the wolf from the doorway with a short whistle. The wolf warped across the room, and then they too were gone. Only when the bridge was finally empty and Lance was alone with Keith did he speak again. "We'll look for Shiro too," he said. "We'll keep a constant sharp eye out like we always have, for clues and hints and anything that could help. We're not giving up on him, Keith."

"It feels like we are."

"We're not," Lance insisted. "I'M not. I just— I don't want to mess this up. It's a lot of responsibility, and there's so many things going wrong at once. I kinda feel like the captain of the Titanic trying to steer with six different icebergs looming all around us. It's fucking scary," he laughed shakily, and wow he did not mean the conversation to go this way but here they were. "Is this how you felt when Black first picked you?"

Keith's death grip on his arms softened, until finally he dropped them to his sides. "At first," he admitted.

"What changed?"

Keith's mouth opened and then closed again, then opened, and finally Keith met Lance's eyes. The soft burn that Lance found there caught him off-guard, like a rug sweeping out from under his feet. Keith looked amused, almost. Like Lance had told a very funny joke without realizing it. It was a far, far cry from the hopeless inferno that had burned there a minute ago.

"Mostly you," Keith finally answered with a ghost of a smile, and Lance's breath caught in his throat as Keith crossed the distance between them in a few halting steps. "You know, Krolia was right about one thing." Reaching behind him, he unhooked the black bayard from the BoM uniform he still wore, which he'd taken from Shiro's clone after knocking him out and bringing him back to the castle. It took Lance a second to get what Keith was saying, and to draw his own bayard—or rather, Keith's bayard.

It should've been a small thing, trading weapons. But it never felt small. It had felt like the whole universe shifting when Lance had first handed Allura the blue bayard, and it felt doubly so now as he and Keith placed their weapons in each other's hands.

Once, as a child, Lance had visited Arlington National Cemetery in the states while on vacation with his grandparents, and watched the ceremonious changing of the guard. For a long time after he had been left puzzled at the pomp and grandeur awarded to that daily ritual. After all, it was just one guard handing a gun to another. But he understood now. It was symbolic. It wasn't about the gun at all; it was about the untenable trust between one guard and the other, the knowledge beyond a shadow of a doubt that when one person released the weight of responsibility, the other would be strong enough to carry it.

God, he hoped he wasn't blushing as hard as it felt like he was. If the twinkle in Keith's eye was any indicator, he probably was, though.

"I guess you probably want your armor back too, then," Lance said with a finger gun tucked under his chin, trying to diffuse the intimacy of the moment and going a little too ham in the process.

"Red IS my color." Keith's grin was lopsided; he was still trying not to move the cheek where he'd been burned. "So I've been told, anyway. But, for what it's worth, I think you'll look good in black, though."

And maybe Lance was just drunk on Keith's faith when he first put on the black armor the next day, but it turned out he did look pretty good in black.

. . .

.

.

part iv

the breakfast club

.

.

. . .

They pursued their objectives, if somewhat erratically. First they fixed the castle in a star system at the edge of the galaxy, where they had to run for their lives again after a chance encounter with a battlecruiser, during which they found themselves unable to form Voltron.

Lance knew it was his fault, but he was too afraid to say it. Too afraid to hear the confirmation.

Defeat and frustration hung heavy on everyone's shoulders. As they recovered from the unexpected attack and wormhole escape, Coran, Romelle, and Krolia couldn't stop offering advice on the matter. Allura of all people was the one to finally shut them down in an uncharacteristic display of impatience. That was when Lance first began to suspect that he wasn't the only one on the team who blamed himself for the rift in their mental harmony. Looking into Allura's face, he saw that the lines beneath her eyes were more prominent than ever; she didn't even try to disguise her guilt, and the realization shocked him. She thought it was her fault.

Driven by this newfound information, he turned to Pidge, who had slumped into one of the laser cannon control stations and placed her face in one of her hands. The other was curled tightly around her helmet. She too looked distressed—not frustrated, as he'd originally assumed. Distressed. Hunk too, who was hugging the wall near the back of the bridge next to Romelle. It was hard to tell with Hunk unless you knew him, simply because he was such an imposing presence with his height and broad shoulders, but when he got super anxious he did that thing people with anxiety do where they pull their limbs in and hunch their shoulders to try and make themselves smaller. He was doing it now.

And Keith?

Keith had thrown his helmet down the second they'd made it through the wormhole, and all but sprinted away to some other part of the castle. The helmet was still resting on its side at Lance's feet.

He'd assumed Keith was angry. That he was disappointed at Lance's ineptitude as a leader, and pissed that he'd put his faith in him so readily, and impatient about relying on a team again when he'd spent so long now as a runner for the Blade where he was basically on his own.

But now, looking around the room at the other three paladins, he wasn't so sure anymore. If he wasn't mistaken, he was not the only person in this room who blamed themselves for today's failure. Maybe Keith feared the exact same thing.

Of course, the next logical step would be to revert back to square one. Break out the mindmelds like they did way back on Arus while they were struggling with the exact same thing the first time around. But Lance didn't suggest it—couldn't—because the thought of everyone seeing and knowing what was going on in his head right now was too much to bear. The crushing weight of his combined homesickness, lovesickness, fear of failure, and ever-growing certainty that Black had picked the wrong guy… It was too much. They couldn't know.

Luckily for him, even though their inability to form Voltron persisted over the course of the next few weeks, none of the other paladins suggested the mindmelds as a potential solution. Which kind of looked like four more flags just as red as his own when he thought about the situation for longer than ten seconds, but he was so scared of baring the mess that his heart had become that he closed his eyes to this particular issue. They'd figure it out. They'd find another way.

And they tried, anyway. They moved along. They did their best. They practiced formations and ran their drills as they pursued the unravelling of these various tangled knots they'd gotten themselves into.

. . .

.

.

"Finally," Pidge breathed, half relief and half tired exasperation as Lance opened his eyes, the taste of strawberry still lingering on his tongue. "You've been under for over two vargas! We almost went in after you!"

"You okay?" Hunk pestered Keith, helping him sit up. Keith pitched to the left and Hunk had to seize him by the arm to keep him upright. "Woah, I got you. You must be disoriented. It's been almost a full quintant since you first disappeared. Take your time."

"I'm fine," Keith groaned, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. "Guys, I'm so sorry, I thought I could handle it—"

"Don't apologize for doing this," Lance cut him off, kneeling in front of him to offer a hand. "Just apologize for not telling anyone about it. It was actually a pretty solid idea, Keith, and I would have listened to it if you'd come to me instead of running off in the dead of night. I'm not the kind of Black Paladin that shuts down good ideas without hearing them out."

"Idea?" Pidge leaned in with curiosity. "What idea?"

"It didn't work anyway," Keith ground out sadly.

"We don't know that for sure yet," Lance said, thrusting his hand at Keith impatiently. "Let's save that for the debrief, yeah?"

"Yeah yeah," Keith sighed, but took Lance's hand and allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. He pulled his hand away as soon as he'd gotten his balance, and cleared his throat. "Allura?"

"Allura," Hunk and Pidge echoed, and motioned for Lance to lead the way.

"Sooo," Hunk began as they walked, with that musical lilt to his voice that always meant trouble. "Wha'dya dream about, Keith?"

To his credit Lance kept facing forward without flinching, but he did hear Keith trip. "What'd you dream about?" Keith countered with a grumble.

Hunk stammered with embarrassment until Lance saved him. "Let's just get Allura and get out of this place, okay?" he called back without turning. "We can all tease each other till the cows come home, later, once we're safe in the castle."

.

.

It took him nearly an hour to find Allura once he'd entered her dream again.

In the end he had to bribe a servant with pickpocketed gold to find out which balcony was hers. He'd just finished scaling the wall and climbing over the railing when she spoke and almost scared him into falling six stories to his dream-death.

"Hello, Lance."

Reeling until he'd gained his footing, his eyes searched the floral wonderland of a balcony, finally landing on her. She was hidden away between a rose-looking bush and a descending wall of spiralling flower streams, leaning on her elbows and surveying the magical landscape beyond the palace with a faraway look in her eyes. She must have remembered.

"Hey, Allura," Lance countered gently, easing his way across the marble floor. As he walked, a few of those winged creatures startled into flight from beside Allura. She watched them go, eyes misty. Briefly her eyes fell on Lance, and then she turned away to the mountains again as if the mere sight of him had burned her.

Lance slowed. Time seemed to slow, too.

"I have existed here only for a moment," Allura eventually said. Her voice was oddly detached, as though she were reading the words from a book. As though she was copying them down into a diary by candlelight. "To myself I am everything; to the universe, I am but a single breath. So it was here before and so it will remain when I am gone. When I am stardust. When every last record of me, too, has gone away. When there is no man left who remembers my name, the universe will carry on to the next breath, and the next, and will not speak of me. Should I speak for myself now, then? Can I speak for the stars? Or must I silently become them, and part evermore with my history?"

The pervasive clicking buzz of hidden insects not unlike the cicadas of Earth carried on after Allura's speech. When Lance allowed that silence to go on for longer than a minute, Allura cleared her throat.

"The mortal words of Reon Psyning," she explained, "an Altean philosopher from the age of enlightenment. Spoken on his deathbed."

The pitch to her voice broke his heart. "Allura..."

"Must we go?" she whispered, hugging her arms tightly about her chest. "So soon?"

Lance touched her back tentatively; felt her shuddering beneath an unseen, crushing weight, fathoms deep beneath an ocean of sorrow. "Yes," he said. "I'm sorry, Allura. I know it's hard."

"It's so real," she whispered, even more broken than before. "I— I wish it were real."

"And that I was the dream, right?" Lance smiled at her crookedly as she turned to him, stricken.

"No! That's not…"

"I know," he said. "It's okay, I know. I wanted to stay in mine too. It'd be so much easier, wouldn't it? To just give in. To just dream forever."

Allura sighed, closing her eyes and turning into Lance just enough for him to pull her into a hug. "But we have never been the types to choose the easy path," she said. "Have we?"

"No," Lance agreed. "No we haven't."

"Thank you," she added, pulling away with a tinge of pink to her cheeks and wiping at her eyes before straightening her shoulders, "for leaving me in a little while longer. In your first appearance you alerted me to the fact I was dreaming, and therefore I was able to enjoy this day without taking it for granted. I am ready, now, to return home with you."

"Home?" Lance echoed dumbly. But she was already… ah.

"Yes," Allura repeated, and closed her eyes like she'd already half-figured the way out. "Let's go home, Lance."

.

.

It took them awhile to find their way out again, since none of them fully remembered how they'd entered into it in the first place. By the time they'd climbed their way back up from the depths of the mushroom's stalk through the tangles of vines, their armor was messy with dirt and slime. Lance was relieved when they finally found what appeared to be the outermost edge and shot their way through it. It was night again when the five of them emerged from the mushroom into the towering jungle. Lance pulled up the clock on his visor again,

25:57CT

and saw that Hunk had been right, back there; almost a full quintant had passed now since Keith had first disappeared.

Removing his helmet to take a deep breath of hot and humid but safe-to-breath air, he tilted his head upward. Night on Riander was a bright affair, what with the planet Evry taking up over half its sky. The dayside of the nebulous gold-and-ultramarine-swirled gas planet shone as a thin crescent of light on the left side of the celestial body, splitting the sky in two, kinda like the time-lapse photo of a rocket launch Lance had kept on the wall above his bed at the Garrison. Looking up here was an exercise in vertigo, especially if he allowed his eyes to trace the segmented rings that orbited this gas planet from the microscopic line where they passed around the far side of the planet, all the way across the thousands of miles they spanned until they widened so far Lance couldn't see the edges anymore where they hugged the horizon of the moon they were all currently standing on. The perspective made him think of that old video game, Halo. Riander was the biggest body in these rings, but in comparison to Evry itself, Riander was just as much a speck of sand as every other piece of rock orbiting it. As everyone made their way to the two lions waiting outside the mushroom tree, Lance's eyes lingered on the thin crescent of daylight shining on Evry, and the even thinner crescent of twilight separating that vanishing dayside from the encroaching nightside.

"You coming?" Hunk called out from Yellow's ramp, and when Lance looked he realized everyone had already boarded, and he was the last person left standing on the jungle floor.

Picking his feet up, he afforded one last glance to the sky as he made his way to his lion. He didn't know why, but something about that hair thin crescent of twilight made him uneasy.

Maybe it was just the vertigo.

"Can't wait to shove our daring escape in Nuul Jone's face," Lance joked over the video feed after they'd split off to their respective lions. "The only way out is death, my ass. Lancey Lance saves the day as always! You're welcome, everyone."

It was only a minute later that Lance realized no one had challenged his bold statement.

"What," he laughed uncomfortably as he navigated above the canopy into the open air, "why are you guys so quiet all of a sudden? Isn't this the part where everyone eviscerates me and puts me in my place?" He looked to Keith on the screen specifically, but Keith was determinedly paying attention to where he was flying and wouldn't break the silence. Allura cleared her throat.

"Not this time," she said.

"Jeez, you guys are gonna make me cry," he laughed, somewhat uncomfortable about the unexpected attention and taken aback at the serious mood that pervaded the air. The mood lingered even after the Aia lay miles behind them.

The castleship had set down in the thinner outer reaches of the jungle, on a steep rising hillside that rested above the Rebel base, which itself was built into a valley where it would be shielded from the tropical storms that visited this jungle, its domed rooftops interspersed among the forest canopy. Another storm was already beginning to blow in, the rain drizzling at first and then hammering on Black's hull as they over the base to the castle. The sound of the rain cut out as they split up and Lance entered his hangar.

As soon as he'd landed, he called up Nuul Jone on the screen. Wherever she was in the base, it was dark there. "We're back, and we saved Keith," he said, leaning on his dash and beaming up at her. "Just FYI. And nobody died in the process."

Nuul Jone's sallow, three-eyed face remained impassive; she didn't look surprised in the least. If anything she looked... troubled? "The only escape from the Aia is death."

Frowning, Lance sat up straight, removing his elbows from the dashboard. "Yeah, well, we escaped," he retorted, "and we're not dead, so you might wanna rewrite that page of the textbooks. Look, I'll explain how we did it later but for now we all need to rest up. We'll be back at your base tomorrow to resume discussions."

Two out of her three eyes blinked. "You paladins and your sleeping habits. How do you ever get anything done? Very well. As you wish."

"Thank you for understanding," Lance sighed with a mote of relief. The Sephans needed less than half as much sleep as humans and Alteans did, and Nuul Jone was kind of a tight-ass; he'd honestly expected a fight on that one. Especially since they were knee-deep in discussions to assist the Sepha 9 rebels on the promise of information on the location of Haggar's cloning facility. They wanted to help each other, but the rebels were wary and had suffered many casualties, and Voltron was desperate for leads. The situation required some delicate diplomacy, so Lance was already tired before this whole Aia thing happened. Now he was double-tired.

Everyone was. It showed in the fact that they were all already trudging down the corridor in various states of droopiness when Lance emerged from Black's hangar. Even Keith—that kinda stung a bit. But, they'd had a hell of a day so it was to be expected…

Still.

"Hey guys," he called after them, "hold up!"

And they did, if a little reluctantly. They all stopped where they were, and looked back at him, which caught him a little off guard in his state of exhaustion. Even after almost two months of being Black Paladin, part of him still expected them not to listen to him at all.

"I think we should talk," Lance said casually.

"Can't the debrief wait?" Pidge complained, the closest one to the door that led out of the bay corridor to the elevator. "I'm dead."

"Not a debrief," Lance corrected. "Actually, I'm reinstating sleepover night."

The reaction to this was slow and subdued. They continued stretching and exchanged various glances at each other; except Keith, who stood stock still and stared resolutely at the nearest blank wall. "No."

A strongly-worded five page essay of a response welled up in Lance's mouth, and he opened up to let it fly. But he didn't quite get to. Ever the peacekeeper, Hunk stepped between them deftly before Lance could speak. "I think what Keith meant," Hunk eased, "is that it might feel kinda weird without.. you know."

Without Shiro.

That word was so weighted around here these days. It had been like that in those months when he was originally missing, and it was doubly-so now that he was missing for the second time, especially with his clone sitting in a cell down in the bowels of the castleship. Now that they knew he'd never really been found in the first place. They hadn't had a single 'sleepover' since the first time Shiro went missing, and they didn't pick it up when he came back, because then it was Keith's turn to be missing. It went unspoken. They just stopped having them and nobody asked to bring them back. After all, they couldn't have family night with a broken family, right?

Except, yeah, they could. And they really should.

"You know I hate to invoke the Black Paladin card," Lance began, and Pidge rolled her eyes.

"Please, that's your favorite card."

"Will you guys just trust me?" he huffed. It seemed like no matter what he did, all he got was resistance from all sides. "We're doing sleepover night. No arguments. It's gonna be fun, I swear." And Lance made sure to elbow Keith playfully on the way out, knocking him off balance.

Krolia and Coran and Romelle were all there spilling out of the elevator to greet them when it hissed open, waiting to ensure the mission's success and Keith's safe return, even though Lance had called it in on the flight over, the second he'd lifted off. For a split second Lance watched Keith squirm as his mother enveloped him in a warm embrace. He was pretty sure he'd never seen them even smile at each other before. It was usually just a lot of hovering on her end and tense tolerance from Keith. She hadn't tried to hug him yet, at least as far as Lance knew. She must've really been worried.

"Don't scare me like that," she reprimanded, "I don't want to lose you again," and that was when Lance had to look away, fighting the urge to scoff and scowl at her. He wanted to remind her that she had given him up on purpose, especially with the vision of Keith's Aia dream fresh in his head. He wanted to know why she thought motherly love was to demand his safety for her own peace of mind.

"I'm fine, Krolia," Keith bit out, and Lance decided to save him.

"Okay, everyone's fears have been assuaged," he announced. "That's enough of that. We're all fine." He jokingly pried Romelle and Coran off of Allura, and Krolia took the hint immediately by stepping away from Keith too, who then busied himself adjusting his armor for far longer than was necessary.

"You three, get some sleep so we can resume discussions with the Sephan rebels tomorrow. Team? Reconvene with pajamas in the rec room in forty-five dobashes."

"Pajamas?" Krolia wondered.

"Don't ask," Keith answered, and the group dissolved.

Fifty-five dobashes later they had settled like they used to on the rec room floor, five (six minus one) young adults in piles of spare blankets and pillows, snacks to the side, drink pouches strewn about the shared blanket space. Keith looked angry about it, but he was here, and that's all Lance could've hoped for. Taking Lance's cue and hand gestures, everyone moved into circular formation. Kinda like the mindmeld training. This was sort of going to be like that actually, now that Lance thought about it. Just… a little less Altean, and a little more human.

"Hmm. So.. what. Is it teasing time?" Hunk joked lightly from his place across the circle from Lance.

"Oh yeah," Lance joked back, and Keith made a show of getting up to leave on Hunk's left side but Pidge flopped over on his lap, effectively stopping him.

"Jeez, I'm just kidding," Lance laughed. Then he cleared his throat, schooling his face into something a little more serious. "But uh, actually…"

"Oh, he's got his serious face on," Pidge moaned as Keith pushed her off, "I thought we weren't debriefing tonight!"

"I lied," Lance shrugs. "I'm not gonna make you guys talk, but I do want you to listen. From what I saw in the Aia, we've all been secretly bearing our own crosses. I thought it was just me doing that, but.. well, obviously I was wrong. We haven't even been able to form Voltron since our fight with Lotor two months ago, and I think I know why, now. It's because we're not opening up to each other. It's because we're not talking."

Everyone was silent. Watching him and waiting.

"Okay. Okay," he sighed. "So, I messed up with Shiro."

Almost immediately Allura began to object, but he shook his head.

"No, I really did. I never told you guys this, but I suspected something was wrong for two whole phoebs before he went rogue." He couldn't look at Keith while he quietly explained about Naxzela. About Shiro calling out to him in the astral plane, and how he hadn't remembered it upon waking, and how that small spark of suspicion had grown into a forest fire by the time the clone went rogue.

"Why did it take you so long to speak up?" Allura offered when no one had reacted for a solid minute following his confession.

"Because nobody was listening to me," he said. "You guys still barely listen to me even though I'm literally the Black Paladin now! I was—I am a joke to you guys. You were all distracted by Lotor, Shiro kept benching me, and Keith was just gone—"

"I'm sorry," Keith muttered, shattering Lance's train of thought.

"No, Keith, that's not—"

"Lance, shut up," he said, although it held no vitriol. "Let me apologize. I should have never left, I was just… I thought I could…" he sighed, running a hand raggedly through his hair. "I guess my reasons don't matter now. I should have been here when everything went sideways."

"And I should have raised my concerns a lot sooner," Lance admitted. "But I didn't feel like I could. This isn't easy to admit, but I felt like my opinion didn't matter here." I still kinda do, he didn't say. "My point is that we all need to feel like we can communicate. Like our voice is going to be heard. If I'm gonna be BP for however long, I don't want any of you feeling the way I did a few months ago with Clone Shiro. We're going to listen to each other. I'm going to listen to you," he pressed, looking at Keith directly when he said this. "We're going to talk. Because otherwise, these problems we have, they get internalized until we do crazy shit like not telling anyone we suspect there's something horribly wrong with Shiro, or running off to a man eating dreamplant to test a theory without telling anyone. This is probably why we haven't been able to form Voltron."

"So you want us to talk about our problems?" Hunk raised an eyebrow at him.

"What is this," Pidge joked dryly, "The Breakfast Club?"

But Lance saw through to her anxiety.

"Yes," he said. "That's exactly what this is. And I'm trying to make this easier by going first."

"Was there more?" Allura prodded gently. "Besides the unfortunate business with Shiro?"

Lance nodded. Unfortunately, yes. "I saw my family in the Aia today," he admitted. "I miss them, you guys. So much, it's like a physical pain. It hurts every day and I... I'm scared that I'm starting to forget things, little things like their favorite songs and flavors and colors and… so I wanna talk about my family sometimes," he hurried through the rest, "and to know that I'm not gonna be made fun of for being homesick. I know you guys think I'm dramatic but it would really help me cope if you guys just let me ramble about them sometimes."

Almost done. Taking a deep breath, he looked at Pidge for reassurance.

"And one more thing," he said. "I'm…"

You can do this.

"…bi."

Shocked silence.

"Surprise," he laughed nervously, feeling Keith's gaze on him like a physical weight. Pidge gave him a gleeful double thumbs up.

"Oh!" Hunk finally blurted. "Okay. Totally not what I expected you to say. Wow man. That's cool. Cool cool. We're all cool with that here, right?" Hunk warned, glancing around the circle and only easing his glare when no one contested it.

Tapping her chin at everyone else's reactions, Allura asked, "What is bi?"

"Oh that's where you like multiple genders," Hunk told her with a casual handwave, "instead of just the opposite gender—we call that straight on Earth cause there's other ways of doing the whole love thing. You had that on Altea right? Varied sexualities?"

Allura blinked. "What? Of course we had that. Bi is a perfectly normal thing to be!"

"Thanks Allura," Lance beamed. "It's kind of a bigger deal on Earth I guess. Okay, now that that's out in the open. Shoot, I feel so much better!" he giggled. "What a load off! That was like, years in the making, and now I just can't believe I've been such a baby about the whole thing, dragging it out and all that." He was still avoiding Keith's eyes. This wasn't about Keith. Okay yeah, it kinda was, but not yet.

"You're not a baby. Sometimes it just takes a while," Pidge told him fondly, quoting him.

Lance threw a handful of Sephan pretzels at her. "Uhuh. So. You wanna go next then, Pidgey?"

Shaking pretzels from her hair, she grumbled under her breath. "Do I have to?"

"No. But lemme tell you, it feels great. I'm high as a kite right now."

"Right," she relented with an eyeroll. "Uhh. I don't know what to say exactly. My Aia dream was wonky. I guess I have no idea what I want now that my dad and Matt are safe. I feel kinda.. lost. Maybe that's why I've been so hyperfocused on my projects, brushing you guys off, snapping at you. Sorry Lance," she mumbled in his direction. "And… and I feel weird, too, I guess."

"Weird how?" Hunk asked.

"Like. In my own skin? It's stupid," she rushed, "we're at war, it's not like what I feel when I look in a mirror matters—"

"It's not stupid," Allura said, her voice soft but firm. "Elaborate please."

Groaning, Pidge tossed her hands around as she spoke. "I guess.. I don't know. When I first started to transition I was nine and my hair was like two inches long. It took me years to grow it out all the way, to feel like I could wear a dress in public and not be mocked. It took a long time to feel like a girl. So when I chopped all my hair off to go undercover at the Garrison as a boy it royally sucked. But then we came out here, and I'm free to be a girl again, but.. I don't know. I just don't have any desire to grow my hair back out again. I like it short, I guess. And I don't wanna wear dresses anymore either, dresses are impractical and dumb, no offense Allura, I just don't want to. When we all went to that gala last year on Faruq and we all wore suits that felt right for me, you know? Which feels wrong, because I'm a girl."

She was close to tears now, and of all the people in the circle it was Keith who found the words to comfort her. Tentatively, he put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Pidge," Keith said softly. So softly Lance almost couldn't even hear him. "News flash. If you decide you're a girl then you're a girl. Full stop. You don't have to like all the shit Allura likes in order to be a girl. You can wear suits like us guys and cut all your hair off, and you'll still be a girl. Or, if you want to, you can decide that you're not. You can be whatever the fuck you want to be, and you're allowed to change your mind as many times as you want, too. We've met an alien species with eight biological genders before," he scoffed, "remember? I don't think the universe is gonna begrudge you not conforming to the dumb standards set by one tiny planet in one tiny galaxy."

Pidge just stared at him, flabbergasted as he finished speaking. "Crimony, Keith, I think that's the most I've ever heard you talk at once besides that time Lance poured soda on you. Since when did you know so much about this stuff?"

"Since I was gay my entire life," he joked back. "You pick up a few pieces of wisdom here and there. Uh." Shrinking back, he eyed the rest of the circle like he'd momentarily forgotten they were there.

"Thanks," she laughed, looking miles happier than before. "I guess it's your turn now?"

"I mean.. it's not like it was a secret, so some of you might've guessed already, but…"

"Wow. Always gotta one up me, don't you, mullet," Lance deadpanned. "Kidding!" he backtracked as Keith's nostrils flared like a bull about to charge.

"Lance, would you shove it, it's my turn," he huffed dramatically, halfway between amusement and rage, "whatever, I missed you guys while I was gone, okay? I'm... I'm really glad to be home. That's what my Aia dream was about if you must know. I just.. I've lost so many things in my life. I want something that I'm not in danger of losing, for once. I want something that I chose myself instead of something someone else chose for me."

"Aww," Hunk cooed.

"Keith," Lance said, gutted by Keith's unexpected show of sincerity, but Keith shook his head slightly. Lance pressed his lips together tight.

"Hunk's turn," Keith redirected. Later, his eyes seemed to say.

"Oh." Hunk tapped his fingertips together. "Pass."

"Huuunk," Lance whined.

"Fine jeez fine I guess I wish none of this ever happened and the universe was an amazing peaceful place but it's not and I've accepted that okay? Uugghhh Allura's turn!"

Lance's mouth hung open. "Hunk—"

"I don't want to talk about it, Lance."

The cool stuff to his tone cut sharply through the warmth Lance was trying to exude. He swallowed against the knot in his throat. "Okay, that's fine, I'm sorry."

Despite Lance's minimal response, Hunk picked up on his guilt right away and his whole demeanor softened. "No, Lance, no, it's not that," he groaned. "Ugh. I just.. no matter what I do or how much I mature there's always gonna be that part of me that thinks 'what if?' What if it hadn't been me? I know the universe would be screwed without me but I still just wish I hadn't been chosen for this. But wondering that, knowing my Aia dream was about that, it makes me feel so selfish."

"It's not selfish," Allura says, leaning in to rest a hand on his knee, "in fact, that's the most selfless thing about you, because you put those desires aside every single day. It's commendable, Hunk."

Hunk flushed deeply at her praise, giggled for a moment, and couldn't seem to figure out what to do with his arms. "Wow, thanks Allura. You know what? I actually do feel better now. Who woulda thunk? Okay everyone stop looking at me, it's Allura's turn for real now."

"Oh.. oh no thank you," she said quickly, retracting her arm into her lap at light speed.

Lance sighed on her left. "Allura, I did this for you more than anyone else."

She looked down at her hands, lip twitching from the effort it took her to keep from frowning.

"I think it would really help if you talked about it sometime," Lance pressed softly. "It doesn't have to be right now, or tomorrow, or even next week. But you should know that we're all here when you're ready. You can't just go through something like that and be fine. You've got your job to do saving the universe and that's all well and good, but it wouldn't hurt to save yourself while you're at it, right?"

That last sentence had an effect. Allura's lip twitched (upward, this time) and she laughed tearily. "Well. When you put it that way." She toyed with her pajama pants for another few moments before continuing. "I saw my family in the Aia today as well," she said after a long silence. "I saw my little sister."

Everyone sucked in a breath of shock, Lance most of all.

Hey, Lu! Come on, come on, you promised you'd show me how to catch palips today!

That little girl in Allura's dream.

Her sister? Allura had a sister?

"I don't know where she was when the war went south," Allura whispered. "She was supposed to have gone to a safehouse in another system, but communications were lost. I don't know whether she died that day with our parents or if she lived another hundred decaphoebs in hiding somewhere. I suppose I'll never know."

Everyone was dead silent. The four of them looked at each other, silently asking for help and getting none. They were all as blindsided as Lance was. It was clear that not a single one of them had known about Allura's sister.

"Amira," Allura whispered. A tear hit her hand. "Her name was Amira."

Shockingly, Keith was the first to reach out. But since he was opposite her in the circle he stopped, unsure whether to cross. It broke the tension though, and soon everyone was closing in, grabbing Allura and pulling her into a group hug that she gladly melted into, and it quickly turned into a dogpile.

"Alright alright," she finally laughed, sniffling to herself, "that's enough of that."

"Wow," Lance sighed, "I don't think we've ever been this close before, you guys."

Hunk giggled—an action which jiggled the entire pile since his arms basically encircled it. "Was that genuine, or just a pun?"

Lance tickled him in the ribs. "Can't it be both?"

"No," Keith said, and tried to shove out from the pile.

"Nope, you're not going anywhere, it's snuggle time," Hunk told him, and reeled him easily back in. "We're sleeping like this tonight."

"Oh no we're not," Pidge grumbled from somewhere in the depths of the pile.

"I quite like that idea," Allura latched on. "Is this another human slumber ritual? Why have we never done so at past sleepover nights?"

"One, yes," Lance said. "Two, because it's usually reserved for like, ultra mega friendships."

"Aw, you're right," Hunk grinned sappily. "Guys, we levelled up in friendship!"

Keith groaned. "Stop trying to make our lives into an after school special."

Digging his knee into whatever part of Keith's body that was, Lance yelled in his ear. "Shut up and take our affection like a man, Keith!"

Pidge squirmed. "We're not really sleeping in a pile are we?"

"We actually are," Lance said, and squirmed out of the pile to begin rearranging the blankets and pillows around them. "Everyone get comfy!"

And comfortable they got. Allura pulled out her comm and started playing some music as they all rearranged into a slightly less suffocating arrangement, complete with pillows this time. It was some kind of Altean poppy classical that Lance couldn't help bobbing his head to as he threw himself in between Hunk and Pidge—realizing a second too late that he should've maneuvered himself in next to Keith. Shit.

Keith was the only one left standing now, and had his hands on hips as he scrutinized the people-pile. "This is... impractical. I'm gonna sleep on the couch."

"Quick, grab him!" Lance yelled, and Hunk hooked him around the shins, bringing him crashing down horizontally across all four of them. A brief wrestling match followed, and then Lance and Hunk had him effectively pinned between the two of them. He gave up at that point for the lost cause it was, blushing like mad all the way down his neck toward his shirt collar, which Lance was kinda hoping was directly his fault.

"See?" Hunk hummed. "This is good. It's good for the soul. No one is too cool for snuggle time, Keith. Look, even Pidge is doing it."

Sure enough, Pidge was dutifully allowing Allura to cuddle right up to her on Lance's other side, and they were looking through the music playlist together while Pidge rested her head on Lance's shoulder. Hunk was right. This was super good. This was what they all needed, actually. A little physical contact that wasn't violent, for once.

"Yeah yeah," Keith said, and slowly untensed, getting more comfortable and bringing his head onto Lance's chest and that…

That was pretty damn exhilarating. Oh no, could he hear Lance's heart beating? Could he tell? Should Lance pull him closer? Would that be weird? They hadn't talked yet and... and Lance didn't know exactly how that was gonna go. Yeah they still butted heads and had like a million and one issues to unpack between the two of them, and yeah they'd existed in the weirdest limbo ever since Keith came back, but the bottom line was that Keith liked him. Loved him, maybe. Dreamt about kissing him. Imagined a future with him beyond the war, beyond Voltron, beyond all of this. Keith wanted him.

And that was terrifying. How was Lance ever supposed to live up to the dream he had witnessed?

His heart sped up as the music played on into a long suite built of reed flutes and minor chords that never resolved no matter how much it seemed that they would. The group fell quiet, and Lance was left alone with his thoughts. Trying to decide what he would say to Keith when they finally got a chance to talk one on one. Spiralling further and further into the possibilities, until he was pulled from the reverie when Keith lifted his head up. The suite was still playing on Allura's comm, but her and Pidge's breath had evened out long ago with that telltale cadence of sleep. Lance snuck a glance at Allura then and saw her eyes were closed too, her hand lax on Pidge's stomach. Satisfied that both girls were fast asleep, he turned his attention back to Keith, who was now gazing down at him with the softest, fondest expression. So different from the Keith who had come back from the Blade with all his walls thrown up again. So much closer to the Keith he had glimpsed on rare occasions with growing curiosity, on rainy days, at midnights, after the worst battles when he was half asleep or half dead and wholly unable to hide. This was Keith with his walls down.

Lance felt his arm curl around Keith's lower back sort of on its own, pulling him closer. In response Keith moved his hand to Lance's chest to accommodate the shift in weight. He leaned in close, eyes roaming down Lance's face to his jaw and back up again, moving at a snail speed so as to avoid waking Hunk, who had begun to emit the softest of snores behind him. When Lance felt Keith's warm breath on his mouth, he released the breath he'd been holding all in one go, making Keith's too-long hair flutter in place, tickling his cheek.

Every point of contact was pure shining starlight. If he could have bottled this moment in a tiny vial, he would've worn it on a necklace for the rest of his life. Would've used it as a light every time the sun went down.

When Keith leaned in the last inch and pressed his lips to Lance's, Lance felt his heart actually skip. Like, full stutter. Until this moment he didn't think that actually happened to people. He thought that it was just a figure of speech. A product of romanticism. But no. When Keith's lips touched his Lance's heart skipped a beat. And he was never getting that beat back, either. For however long he lived, however many times Lance's heart was destined to beat between today and the day he died, as of now that number would be one less. This particular heartbeat belonged to Keith Kogane.

He curled his fingers into the back of Keith's shirt, one hand brushing ever so lightly at Keith's face. He was afraid to move more, lest he wake someone. This moment was theirs alone. Neon darkness and dry lips, catching, the lightest graze of teeth. Agonizingly slow. Agonizingly soft.

Keith pulled back, his eyes (purple in the daylight) glowing gold now in the dark. Lance was well and truly lost in them.

He knew they couldn't do more. They couldn't make out next to their friends, they couldn't talk about feelings when their eyelids were sleep-heavy and their bodies bone-tired. So he patted his chest, offering it up as a pillow again. Keith gave him a soft smile before obliging, and after a split second of hesitation he finished getting comfortable by wrapping his arm around Lance's middle.

It wasn't long afterward that Lance fell asleep with his hand in Keith's hair.

.

.

The mushroom tree was different, this time. Was wrong. Was bigger and brighter than he remembered, the column he was standing in miles high. Maybe hundreds of miles. No. Thousands. Thousands of miles. Worlds deep, and growing ever deeper. Vertigo swirled in his stomach as he craned his head upward at the billowing sulfurous clouds, at the blackish-cerulean clouds several thousand more miles behind them. The world was frozen somewhere between night and day. He followed the clouds with his eyes. Reached out, and found that wisps of gold followed his arm, disrupted by the movement. Alarm hung heavy in his belly as if from a nail.

A faraway scream hit his ears the way a violin might hit asphalt. Distant lightning flashed in the clouds, purple and strange and rumbling through him like a tectonic shift, and a new thought came with it:

I think I'm supposed to be looking for someone.

As soon as he remembered that, he took a panicked step forward, and fell.

He fell and fell and fell because there was no ground here and never had been, through crackling alien thunder and clouds the size of continents, toward unfathomable depths, an ocean of pressure pressing in on his ears and eyes as he fell faster and faster and—

.

.

—woke up gasping.

It was still dark (meaning the night cycle wasn't over yet, either on the castle or on Riander) and there was, in fact, a heavy weight on him. It was just Keith, though. In his sleep Keith had somehow rolled most of the way on top of him.

As nice as that was, try as he might Lance couldn't go back to sleep. Not with that existentially ominous dream fresh on his mind. When he closed his eyes he still felt like was falling. So he gently maneuvered Keith off his chest, who immediately woke at the movement despite how careful Lance tried to be.

Lance apologized in a whisper. "Can't sleep," he explained. "Bad dream." He could tell Keith wanted to push the subject but he got up anyway and left the dogpile without another word. Left the room.

After wandering the ship for an hour or so, he ended up in his hangar, as usual, standing in Black's shadow.

"Hey girl," he spoke, his voice echoing in the dim and empty chamber, lit only by the emergency blue night lights lining the bases of the walls. "Me again."

She didn't answer. She never did.

With Blue he always got this feeling. He knew exactly what she wanted even though she didn't speak to him in English or Spanish, or talk at all in any known language. If he had to describe it, he'd say it was like music. She might not have used words but it was always abundantly clear to him when she was happy or triumphant, or sad or panicked or afraid. Red? Red's 'voice' was more like colors. Harder to read. More often than not, the feelings overlapped and blurred together, and Lance was left feeling like an art school freshman trying to write an in-class essay on Picasso, having forgotten to study cubism till the night before.

Black was… well, she was silent.

She never 'spoke' to him. Sure she let him pilot her, but he always felt like he was sitting in someone else's chair. He'd sort of felt like that in Red, too, but now, with Black's stony silence…

As he boarded her and slunk into the pilot's chair, the dash remained dark. It wouldn't light up unless he asked her to do so. He knew she was there, but, sometimes he questioned her intentions. Her motivations. If she would just talk to him, maybe he wouldn't feel so damn lost all the time.

"I wish you'd just answer me for once," Lance said, sinking a bit into the chair. "You were the only one who was there when Shiro vanished."

Nothing.

"Ugh," he sighed, "it's like talking to a mountain."

"Lance?"

Lance snapped to attention at the sound of Keith's voice, swiveling in his chair to see Keith's head poking up through the hatch. "Keith? H-hey man. What's up?"

"Are you okay?" he asked as he made his way into the cockpit. "What are you doing in here?"

"Uh. Yeah. I just.. I dunno, I was thinking about Shiro, and.. I guess Black makes me feel closer to him."

Keith blinked sleepily. "Oh. Me too." Slowly, he moved around the chair to lean on the dashboard. The air was tense, verging on awkward.

"Hey, can I ask you something?" He knew full well this could out him as the worst Black Paladin ever, but he was the one who had told everyone they needed to start talking to each other, and he had to follow his own directive. "Did Black ever talk to you?"

"The lions don't talk, Lance."

"You know what I mean!"

Keith fidgeted in place before giving up his answer. "No. Does she talk to you?"

"No!" Lance blurted, and just like that the awkward tension was gone. "Not even a little. Thank god it's not just me."

"Oh," Keith blinked, looking a little more awake now. "That's kind of relieving. And here I thought I was just a terrible leader."

"Yeah, me too," Lance chuckled.

"Shiro told me once that Black was like the twin he never had," Keith said after a minute of mutual contemplation. "Do you think Black talked to Shiro?"

"Yeah," Lance said. "I think she probably did."

"Lance." Lance looked up from the dark control panel into Keith's face at the shift in his tone to something serious. "In the astral plane, when you saw him, what exactly did he say?"

"He just called my name," Lance said. "That's it. We were all standing in formation—kinda the same distance in space as we were in real life in our lions at that moment, which made it super, super trippy. Shiro, from his spot, looked right at me and called my name, twice. Sharp and clear. He looked... I dunno, like he had something of vital importance to tell me. But then we all woke up before he could say it. Afterward, after the battle, I asked Shiro about it—Clone Shiro," he corrected, "but he didn't remember being in the astral plane at all. Total blackout. And with everything else that was going on, I had to let it go. But now, I just keep coming back to it. It feels important."

"Maybe it is," Keith posed. "I've been thinking, and if the clone didn't remember it, then maybe that's because he wasn't there. Maybe the clone wasn't connected enough to Black to actually make it to the astral plane with the rest of you."

"Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"

Before Lance had even finished his sentence Keith was nodding. Lance leaned forward in his chair, drumming his fingers on the armrest as he let this soak in.

As crazy as it sounded, there was some real credence to this idea. At first Lance had written it off as stress—possibly PTSD related (Lance didn't fully understand how PTSD worked and it's not like he could google it out here in space)—and in the last few weeks since the clone went AWOL he had chalked it up to faulty wiring or some shit. But now Lance drummed his fingers on the armrest, considering Keith's idea with growing discomfort. It rang with a surprising amount of validity. It made sense.

"Okay," Lance extrapolated, "let's just assume for a sec that that was the real Shiro. It begs the question: how would he have reached out to us through the astral plane without Black as an entry and grounding point? How would he have even known we were there at that moment? Where was he reaching out to us from?"

Where the hell is he?

"We should wake Allura and talk to her about this," Keith suggested. Lance agreed, even though he had already pestered Allura about the astral plane a few times these last two months, because Keith was visibly excited about the possible clue. He hadn't looked this full of energy and determination since he first picked up the clone's signal from deep space almost a full year ago.

He had to jog to keep up with Keith as they exited Black's hangar, but he stumbled as he passed by the closed door that led into Blue's hangar, his mental ear catching on something. She wasn't as loud as she'd been when he piloted her, but he could still hear her whenever he listened for her 'voice,' for the blue-colored music. When she was pleased it was all bells and whistles. When she was angry it was more like an electric guitar. When she was feeling multiple things at once it was anywhere between a small band and a full symphony orchestra, depending on the depth or the complexity of the emotion, and how difficult it was for her to convey it to Lance in a way that his human mind would understand.

Right now, she sounded like a symphony orchestra if they were standing on their chairs and trying to play loud enough for an audience to hear them over the sound of an earthquake.

She was screaming.

He'd only ever heard her sound like this once before, right before that bomb exploded in the engine room way back on Arus, alerting him to the fact that something was horribly, horribly wrong. Her protectiveness had saved him from certain death that day. If he hadn't listened to her, he'd be dead.

So as he stood there listening in disbelief, the disquiet he'd been feeling all night revved up into panic.

.

.

. . .

Romelle spent her days meticulously sharing everything she remembered about her colony. Every detail of its history, every plant, animal, and person who lived there, and every little word she ever remembered Lotor saying. Allura listened raptly to Romelle's stories and took careful notes, and sometimes Lance caught her crying in the castle library surrounded by open books, but she would always straighten up when she saw him and pretend to be fine, and Lance didn't want to be a hypocrite so he usually just let it slide.

Truth be told, nobody knew quite what to do with the clone. Coran, Pidge, and Hunk sedated him and went in together to take a look at his mechanics, and it turned out that he was indeed almost as human as Shiro himself was. In most ways he was simply a clone. The only thing the clone had that the real Shiro didn't was a single robotic eye, and a chip wrapped around his spinal cord near his brainstem, shaped like a cat's claw thorn and coded with complex command sequences that would have taken them years to parse without a dedicated decoding team. Unable to remove the chip without a similar team of trained brain surgeons, they settled for scrambling the code and thus rendering it useless, snipping most of the wires between the robotic eye and the brain, and then removing his Galran prosthetic arm, which housed all the transmitting equipment that had once relayed information to Haggar.

Now, he was a hundred percent human. Or, "He's as tame as a Benturian acrowatl with clipped wings," as Coran put it brightly, which Lance thought was a little in poor taste.

The clone was definitely the most well-behaved prisoner they'd ever kept. He ate and slept and worked out to fill his time—something Lance knew because he visited the clone a lot over the following weeks. The clone never asked for anything, or yelled, or cried, or begged for his freedom, or even for a bigger cell. He did not act like any other enemy prisoner they had taken before. For the first week the only time he even spoke to Lance was simply to ask if Keith was okay.

And Lance didn't know what to make of that, exactly.

"The mindmelds!" Pidge blurted out in the middle of an otherwise silent dinner one night, just over seven weeks after the changing of the guard.

Keith immediately choked on his food at Lance's right, and Lance barely escaped the same fate. "What about them?" he managed to squeak as casually as he could. Please don't ask me to wear one. The refusal to do so would probably be as condemning as whatever his team saw inside his head.

Pidge was already standing up across from him. She ignored him entirely, picking up her bowl of soup and dumping what was left of it into Romelle's bowl, who squeaked indignantly and tried to protest but also went ignored. "Can't believe I didn't think of this," Pidge muttered to herself, "it's so obvious…"

"Pidge?" Hunk called after her as she hastened to the door. "What about the mindmelds?"

"Oh," she said, apparently remembering that other people existed. "Wait, I'll need help." She eyed the room, eyes flicking quickly over Keith, who still looked kinda red in the face from almost choking, passing over Allura and Krolia too, and landing finally on Hunk. "Hunk," she decided. "And… Lance. Yeah. You two follow me."

"Uhh." Lance pushed his fork around his bowl, willing his voice to remain even and his face to please, please stop blushing, for the love of god stop blushing. "What for, exactly?"

"Just come on," she huffed impatiently, "and bring your bayards." Lance and Hunk could do nothing but share a confused look and abandon their dinners half eaten.

Lance didn't get what her plan was, even when the three of them were standing inside the clone's cell—which was essentially just one of the castle's many guestrooms, but with a forcefield set up between the side of the room where the door was and the rest of it. Keith hated it. He hated how comfortable it was. He hated that people visited him and brought him things and treated him better than the Galra soldiers they'd held in the past. He hated everything about the clone, and probably would've ejected him straight into space sans-spacesuit if Lance hadn't put his foot down and pulled the Black Paladin card on him.

"You want me to remember my escape?" the clone summarized after Pidge had explained her plan to him. "While wearing the mindmeld circlet?"

"Yes," she said.

The clone approached the forcefield that separated him from them, hands deep in his pockets. "I wasn't lying about any part of my escape," he said quietly. "Everything I've ever told you has been the truth."

"It's not that we distrust your account of the events," Pidge dismissed, "I just need a visual record of it."

The clone furrowed his eyebrows at that. "You're trying to locate it, aren't you? To destroy it. To find the others too, maybe?"

Hunk and Pidge exchanged wary glances—it was easy to forget that this clone had all of Shiro's memories prior to his disappearance. All of his smarts and intuitions.

Before Lance could open his mouth to redirect the clone's suspicions, the clone nodded his head. "I'll do it," he agreed. "I told you, I'll cooperate with whatever you ask of me. I'll do anything to help."

The clone's eyes flickered downward as the words 'I wanna be a paladin again' echoed in Lance's head. They'd meant nothing to him at the time except as a passing joke. Another Shiro-ism to make lighthearted fun of. But now, he just kept thinking about those words, and the clone's sincerity when he'd said them, and his patient persistence, and his certainty. It was either some damn good programming or there was a lot more of Shiro in him than any of them were willing to admit. "

I've done enough hurt as it is," the clone said. "So just tell me what I can do to make it right and I'll do it."

That was how with the careful study of the clone's memories of his escape from the facility, the castle's universal starmap as a reference point, and a helluva lot of advanced math that Lance couldn't begin to follow, Pidge and Hunk were able to use the positioning of the stars in the sky from the clone's memory of his escape to triangulate the location of the cloning facility he had come from.

"The Sepha 'Cluster?'" Romelle spoke up in confusion as Pidge finished relaying this breaking discovery excitedly to everyone on the bridge a few hours later. The room was dark with the holographic starmap open.

"Yes," Coran answered on Pidge's behalf. "It's a tightly concentrated cluster of nine different stars, with over a hundred planets between them, all colonized by the same species."

"We weren't able to pinpoint the exact location of the facility within the cluster," Pidge said. "We're lucky we even got this far. We'll just have to go there and do some reconnaissance."

"The map says the whole cluster is Galra-controlled," Lance noted, eyeing the blaring red addendum at the end of each star's title on the map, Sepha 1 all the way through Sepha 9.

"True," Allura said, "but the Coalition has them marked down as mid-stage rebellion. There should be a large rebel base on a moon orbiting one of the gas planets in the Sepha 9 System. Perhaps they will aid our search. Here," she said, and clicked on a dot orbiting one of the stars. The projected map zoomed in until a yellow and blue swirled gas planet loomed over them, ripe with segmented rings and a couple small moons.

"Alright," Lance said. The gas planet hologram loomed above them all, stats and info flicking by underneath it in various languages, its rings wide and majestic and calling their names. "Let's take a trip to Evry."

. . .

.

.

part v

the twilight zone

.

.

When he heard Blue screaming, Lance's gut reaction was to wheel around, half-expecting to see another bomb there ticking away, or a Galra soldier raising their gun.

But no. Just the empty corridor, innocuously white and sterile. Empty of visible threats.

Okayyy.

With confusion and disquiet swirling in his gut, he yelled at Keith to go on ahead without him. Instead of following, he went back to Black's hangar, asking her to light up for him this time. From the cockpit he scanned the castle for heat signatures. There was one in Coran's chambers, one in the room beside Keith's (Krolia), one in the room beside Allura's (Romelle), one in the holoroom (Kaltenecker), one in Keith's room (space wolf), three overlapping ones in the rec room (Allura, Pidge, Hunk), and one final figure (the only one moving) walking toward them. Keith. That was everyone. Okay. He widened his scans to the valley housing the rebel base; there were two hundred sixty-seven, the display told him, exactly as many as there had been when they first landed here. Okay, so no infiltrators there either… He widened his scans again, checking the rest of Riander and the bodies orbiting Evry, and found no Galra ships lurking around any other moons or asteroids. Just a few radio satellites showing up as innocent green sprinkles on the scanners. So, not that. It was true that the Galra could've figured out they were here in the Sepha Cluster, somehow, and could be planning an ambush and were on their way to Evry en masse. It had happened before. Many, many times.

But if that was the case, how would Blue know? She was intuitive but she wasn't psychic. Whatever had her panicking had to be something tangible that she could see or hear or feel. Something right in front Lance's face.

With a frustrated huff through his nose, he rubbed at his eyes, hoping to alleviate some of the bags there as he rang up Nuul Jone again.

"Lance McClain," she greeted, sitting now in the chair Lance recognized as being at the head of the triangular war room table. "This is earlier than we expected to hear back from you."

"We have a small problem," he said. "Something's—" He faltered here. What was he supposed to to say? I've got a bad feeling in my gut? My old lion is yelling at me in a language I don't technically speak? "Actually, I was just wondering, is everything alright down there in the base?"

"Yes, everything is just fine," she said, folding her spindly hands on the tabletop. "In fact we've just come to a fortuitous decision," she told him, smiling for the first time since he'd met her. He wasn't even aware smiling was a thing for Sephans. "We have debated amongst ourselves while your team rested, and come to the decision to retract our previous conditions. We will give you the information you desire up front, and trust that you will still assist us in the rebellion once you have it."

From the pilot's chair, Lance blinked up at her in confusion, and had to consciously close his jaw. What? No one ever handed them information this valuable this easily. Of all the ridiculous luck.

"That's awesome," Lance said slowly, "we're grateful to have you aboard. We'll set up a meeting in-person sometime later today for that purpose. You don't seem surprised we got out of the Aia okay," he tacked on at the last minute when he saw her reaching for her own control panel, presumably to disconnect the line. "Shouldn't you be, I dunno, updating the biology books?"

"No. The only way out of the Aia is death," she said, her voice tonally jarring from the open kindness she had exuded mere moments ago, and then disconnected, and Lance was left frowning at a dark screen.

Uhhh that was.. weird. The rebels here were weird. Why would Nuul Jone say something like that? Lance felt pretty alive, and he had escaped the Aia.

Okay so maybe the base wasn't under attack. Something was still wrong. He knew better than to ignore such a blatant warning from Blue.

Everyone was awake again when Lance reentered the rec room on numb legs. Blue had still been screaming when he passed her hangar again, so he'd gone inside this time, all the way up to her paws. On the surface she looked impassive. Unmoving. But he heard her. Her projected mental panic was continuous and unending, but far away somehow, like she was calling out to him from across the quadrant instead of right beside him.

Keith was already in full swing when Lance entered. "The clone had trouble getting Black to light up for him at first, remember? It's because Shiro's the one with the connection to Black. And these lions are what connect us all to the astral plane, so as far as I can see, that could have been the real Shiro," Keith pressed, and upon seeing that Lance had now entered the room, he added on, "Tell her, Lance."

"I'm simply not sure where to go with this theory," Allura reasoned. "It's beyond my expertise."

"Well, we can look into it, right?" Hunk suggested. "The database on this castle stores over eight million terabytes of Altean history. I'm sure if it's possible the answer is in there somewhere."

"Yes, I suppose so," Allura said slowly.

"I'm coming with you," Keith said immediately, and practically ran toward the door, slowing as he passed Lance. "What's with you?" he asked. "What took you so long to get here?"

"I dunno," he said. "I've got a bad feeling, I guess. It's probably nothing. Allura, what's up? Are you okay?" She hadn't moved an inch despite Keith's clear eagerness to get started right away.

"There is a lot of information to sift through," she explained with soft reluctance. "An entire planet's history. I am only one person."

In the open doorway, Keith shifted on his feet, frowning. "I said I was going with you." He didn't look at her while he said it, though; they all knew this was about more to Allura than just this one mission. Unlike Coran, she had always avoided the archives unless absolutely necessary.

"Of course," Allura said, clearing her throat afterward and trying again with a little more confidence. "Of course. Let's go."

"And get into your armor," Lance called after them as they went.

Keith raised an eyebrow.

"I told you I had a bad feeling," Lance said, and turned to Hunk and Pidge as the door hissed shut behind Keith and Allura. "As for you two, can you scan the rest of the star system for potential Galra mobilization? Blue's warning me about something, and I don't know what."

"Blue?" Hunk said with surprise, and Lance tried not to blush over it. "You mean Black?"

"No," he said, "Blue. Just— Just scan for threats, okay? Please? And keep me updated. And put your armor on!" he shouted as the two of them also made their way out of the room.

Lance made his way to his own bedroom after that to don his own armor, and when he exited it again he almost ran straight into Krolia, of all people, who was apparently standing there waiting for him.

"Um? Hi?" he probed when she didn't speak right away.

"I was wondering," she said, "if you had a moment to talk."

Lance fought the urge to dig his finger into his ear sarcastically. What in the everloving hell was going on with the universe today. "I'm kind of busy," he told her. "We're on yellow alert. I need to go scope the base for potential threats."

"Then I will assist you," she said, and there was just something super weird and out of character about it, so weird Lance almost suspected her of having something to do with Blue's panic before he shook his head, dismissing the crazy thought. No way would Keith's mom betray him like that. But still, Lance couldn't help eyeing her over his shoulder as she followed him down the hall and out of the castle and into the rising light of day on Riander's surface.

As soon as he stepped outside, he slowed to a stop, the clover-like grass almost burying his black boots. That feeling struck him again. The same feeling he'd gotten when they first emerged from the mushroom in the jungle and he'd looked into the sky. It was a deep and primal feeling. Something was inherently wrong, and Lance may not have known what it was yet on a conscious level, but his body knew it the same way it would've recognized something was off if it started raining sideways or if gravity switched. But he just couldn't put his finger on what it was.

"Is everything alright?"

And Krolia being nice to him? Being all motherly? That was throwing him off more than anything else.

"Yeah," Lance lied, still lingering in place.

Krolia lingered as well, eyeing him with something like tentative understanding as he squinted skyward. "The sky unsettles you," she observed.

"What? No, I just.."

"It is not like Earth's," she went on, ignoring his objection. "Earth has a simple sky." Normally Krolia was even harder for Lance to read than Keith was. But right now, if he wasn't mistaken, she was speaking from a place of nostalgia. Kindness, even. "Always, always blue," she said, "except in the hour of sunrise and sunset. Except at night."

"And except when it's cloudy," Lance added with a little huff of amusement. Her attempted distraction was working, to his chagrin.

"Yes, except then," she smiled. "But in the Sonoran desert, there were never many clouds. I used to track your sun as it moved across the sky," she said. "Daibazaal's sky was almost never cloudless, like that. I miss Earth's sky more than I miss the one on my own home planet. Is that strange?"

"It's not that strange. Earth has a good sky," he agreed thickly, remembering his so-recent encounter with it in his own Aia dream. Sometimes, as a kid, he too used to while the day away outdoors, tracing the path of the sun across the Cuban sky as the Earth turned and carried it toward the horizon.

"Are you ready to inspect the base now, Lance?"

No. Honestly, no I'm not.

"Actually, can you lead the investigation of the base?" he asked on a sudden whim.

She nodded readily. "How so?"

"Just…" What the hell, why is she suddenly listening to me? Why is she acting like this? "Just take a look around, see if anything unusual is happening, keep an eye out for Galra or for suspicious behavior."

"Will do," she agreed, and Lance was left staring at her with growing disquiet as she made her way down the hillside. It couldn't be that Krolia was planning a betrayal, could it? She wouldn't do that. She couldn't. It didn't make sense. He watched her shadow flicker among the clovers and between the tall saplings, long and dark in the early morning light. Sepha 9 was rising in the north, and it hurt Lance's eyes when he looked up at it.

But even more than it hurt, it filled him with existential dread.

Why?

Why did looking up into the Rianderan sky fill him with such overwhelming discomfort? Frowning deeply, placing a hand on his chest in the hope to ease the sensation that he was falling again, he followed the rings upward from the horizon line with his eyes and lingered and lingered and lingered on Evry, on the broad nightside of the planet, on the thin crescent on daylight, on the even thinner crescent of twilight. He stood out there for a long while as Sepha 9 continued to rise in the north, looking up at Evry until the muscles in his neck was screaming from the angle. For some reason he thought back to three days ago, when Pidge and Hunk had sat pouring over the starmap and figured out the Sepha Cluster's location using spatial projection, speaking fast in math and geometry that he didn't understand. There was something here too that he didn't understand. A number in the wrong place. An angle that didn't line up.

When he finally tore his eyes away he had no idea how much time had passed. He needed to talk to someone. Needed assurance that he wasn't losing his mind. The Deck 1 airlock hissed shut behind him as he went back inside and reached into his pocket, pulling out his comm to dial up Keith. It rang for almost a minute before Keith picked up.

"Hey," he said. "How's the astral plane research going?"

"Not great," Keith said, and he heard Allura's voice somewhere in the distance.

"Is that Lance? Let me talk to him." And then it was her on the line, ranting her frustration at him. He could practically see her pulling her hair the way she did when she was ready to lose her temper. "I know there was information here I'd yet to read!" she complained. "As smart as I am I do not know everything. There's hundreds of volumes… but every time I open a new one it is just the same old rhetoric again and again. I don't know where else to look! This was a solid lead and I can't just let it go, but my hands are coming up empty."

Lance frowned. "Maybe it's just bad luck," he offered, although something told him that wasn't the case at all. Something was gravely wrong.

"That's not it," she sighed. "I can't explain it. There is a wealth of untapped Altean knowledge in this castle but for some reason I just cannot seem to locate it. It's almost as if it isn't here at all. Keith, where are you going?"

"To talk to Black," Lance heard him call out, and then heard the sound of a door hissing shut.

But when Lance finally found Keith ten minutes later, he was in Red's hangar and not Black's, standing beneath Red, staring upward with a stricken expression on his face. When he heard Lance walking in he snapped to attention. "Lance, something's seriously wrong. I think we're going to be ambushed or something. The castle's computer is acting sketchy, and now Red's trying to warn me about something. I don't know what he's saying, though."

"Yeah, Blue too," he said. "I've already looked into it. I don't know what they're up in arms about. There's no enemy ships nearby, no spies at the base, no intruders on the ship."

"Red doesn't panic easily," Keith insisted.

"I know," Lance said, "I piloted him too, remember?"

Keith fumbled his words. "I—yeah, I know. I just..."

"Keith, can I ask you something? Before I got to your dream, how did you know that the Aia version of me was a fake?"

Pink dusted itself on Keith's cheeks at the mention of the dream. They'd skirted around the subject until now, but Lance needed to know this, even it it was—well—embarrassing.

"I mean… I didn't," he mumbled, leaning sideways onto into Red's paw. "Not really."

"But you knew something was wrong with him," Lance said. "You said it yourself. He was acting weird so you sent him away, thinking he was just having a weird day or whatever. What tipped you off?"

Keith ran a hand raggedly through his hair. "I guess he was too nice. No offense," he added quickly. "It just wasn't you. I threw paint at him and he didn't even throw any back. He was being way too agreeable."

"Right," Lance said, the knot in his throat growing ever thicker.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Sorry, I'm—I'm just gonna go for a walk, okay? I think I just need to get some fresh air. Clear my head and stuff." Nevermind that he'd only just come back inside.

He left Keith in Red's shadow and made his way to the outer hangar door, opening it and walking through it into the dew left on the grass there, and into golden shadow. Sepha 9 was passing behind a section of Evry's rings right now, dimming the whole moon's surface. But Evry itself was unaffected by the dramatic shift in light, even where the rings should have probably been casting a long shadow on its winding stripes. In fact...

Now that he thought about it, Evry looked exactly the same as it had the moment they'd emerged from the Aia.

The exact same. Which was... Wait. Holy shit.

That was it, wasn't it? That was it.

When the source of his abstract dread finally clicked, it clicked all at once, leaving him reeling. Once it clicked, there was no question about it. No doubt. No wiggle room. It was absolute.

Legs like jelly, still kinda sleep-deprived and therefore unable to comprehend the upturning of his entire reality right away, Lance tore his eyes from Evry and went to lean against the castle's outer hull for support. He couldn't help looking down at the fingertips on his right hand. There were fingerprints there, this time around. Clever fucking plant.

Not quite clever enough, though.

He jumped as Keith's hand snaked into his open palm.

"Hey," Keith said softly, "don't do that. I'm real, Lance. This is real."

Grateful that Keith had followed him out here, Lance laced their fingers together, letting his arm drop again but this time with an anchor to reality by way of Keith. Even if he was unconvinced about everything else in this world, he knew Keith was the real deal.

"Are you sure?" he whispered.

The little smile that had been tugging at Keith's lip faded. "Not when you look at me like that, I'm not," he relented, disquiet pushing in at the edges of his voice. "You— You really think it might not be? That we might still dreaming? That's crazy, Lance."

"Crazier than anything else that's happened to us?" Lance said. "Keith, look up."

And Keith did, searching the sky for whatever Lance was talking about. Lance too frowned upward. "Look at Evry," he said, tracing its shape with one finger across the sky. "Its dayside and nightside are still in the exact same place as they were last night. The planet hasn't turned on its axis at all."

Keith's hand tightened on his as that soaked in. "Okay. That's… I'll admit that's weird," he says. "But maybe Riander and Evry are just tidally locked. Evry wouldn't look like it was turning to us from this vantage point, if they were."

"No, it gets weirder than that. Way, way weirder. Do you remember the moments leading up to when the vines grabbed you?" Lance asked. "Do you remember entering the Aia?"

Keith thought about it. "No. I guess not."

"The rest of us don't either," Lance said. "While we went searching for Pidge, Hunk suggested something about spores maybe fogging up our memories, and I just took it at face value. But now? I'm not so sure. I'm trying to think back, and I don't really remember flying after you all that clearly either. It's all fuzzy and dark. Do you even remember flying toward the Aia, Keith?"

"I… No," Keith breathed. "I don't."

Evry glared down at them from its place taking up half the sky, its twilight crescent a Cheshire smile, a looming behemoth ready to swallow them whole, an elder god whose arcane nature rested far beyond the scope of their wildest imagination. Nuul Jone's words echoed in Lance's head. They had nagged him all day, and now it felt they were warning him, pushing him, as loudly and as desperately as Blue.

The only way out of the Aia is death.

"Let me get this straight," Pidge deadpanned, her hands steepled in front of her face. "You guys think we're still in the Aia?"

"What is this," Hunk laughed, "The Twilight Zone? Guys, we got out. We're fine."

"We're not fine," Keith snapped, "listen to Lance for once, would you?"

The room went quiet. It was just the five of them at the dining table, and they all looked at Keith in surprise where he was sitting on the table beside Lance. Finally, Allura spoke. "It would be a convenient explanation for some odd things that have been bugging me today," she said. "I will admit that. But still. It's a bit fantastical, don't you think? A bit extreme?"

Lance sighed, pushing his chair back and rising to his feet. "Follow me, okay? You'll see."

Muttering amongst themselves, they followed Lance down the hall, into the elevator, and over to the Deck 6 airlock. They all went inside, and Lance could feel the stares on his back as he activated the override code to open the outer doors. The light of Sepha 9 immediately flooded the sterile silver airlock; you could see all of the rebel base and beyond the edges of the valley from this high in the castle, Sepha 9 and Evry's rings in all their shining glory, and most importantly, Evry.

"What is wrong with this picture?" Lance pressed.

"Uhh.. we're ridiculously high up from the ground with no guard rail or anything and I'm getting queasy?" Hunk said, shrinking away from the edge.

Lance pointed up. "The sky," he said. "It's all wrong, you guys! We've gone through half a Rianderan day cycle here since last night and nothing except for Sepha 9 has moved across the sky."

"Wha— oh my god," Pidge gasped, leaning forward all at once with a start. "Oh my god, he's right. Hunk, he's right. Look."

"What..?" Hunk mumbled, coming back over to the edge to look out again, followed by a hesitant Allura.

"If the sun is rising in the north," Lance pointed, "that means Riander is turning on its axis the opposite direction." This wasn't even advanced math or physics. It was basic knowledge. The sun rises because the planet is turning. "Which means that as Sepha 9 rises," he continued, "Evry should be setting in the south!"

"These rings should appear be moving as well," Allura whispered. "This doesn't make any sense."

"Nope. It goes against all laws of physics," Pidge agreed. "It's true that Riander could just be tidally locked with Evry, or not turning, but then..."

"Then the sun wouldn't rise," Lance finished.

"The Aia isn't sentient," Keith offered grimly. "It wouldn't understand physics. It can't do complex orbital calculations accounting for so many different celestial bodies. It's probably just giving us the most basic image of Riander's sky that it can comprehend, from the one in our memory."

"You really think this means we're still in the Aia?" Hunk pressed. "That's just… But this feels so real. There's gotta be some other explanation."

"It is pretty out-there," Allura agreed softly. "We should talk about this before jumping to rash conclusions."

"Look, I know I haven't been the leader all that long," Lance said impatiently. "I'm not as good a pilot as Keith, I'm not the powerhouse Hunk is, I don't have Pidge's brains, I don't have Allura's prodigal connection to quintessence, and I'm not Shiro. But I have good instincts," he said. "My instincts are always right. They led me to the Garrison, they told me to follow Keith and rescue Shiro, they brought me to Blue. My instincts are why I'm the best shot on the team," he said, his confidence growing the closer he got to the end of his speech, "and they've saved hundreds of lives. Now my instincts are telling me this isn't real, and that we haven't escaped the Aia yet. We're in danger, and I need you guys to trust me now. Do you trust me?"

The four of them nodded then without hesitation, and Lance's heart swelled.

"What do you suggest we do?" Allura asked.

"I don't want you guys to do anything. Not yet, anyway. I'm gonna go first."

The only way out of the Aia is death.

If he told them his batshit insane plan they would mutiny. They would try to stop him, and he didn't have time to sit here arguing with them and convincing them to let him do this.

"Go first..?" Keith mumbled. "What?"

Lance took a deep breath, thinking back to that ocean cliffside the Aia had rendered outside his home, where he had contemplated jumping. He hadn't trusted his gut enough to do it. More than he needed his team to trust him, Lance needed to trust himself.

And he did. He really did. His instincts were screaming at him. They had screamed at him way back on fake Varadero Beach, but he hadn't trusted himself enough to listen, then. It was time to get over that. It was time.

But…

An eerie calm came over him as he made up his mind, and it left him unafraid when he took Keith's hand, pulling gently until he took a step closer to Lance, jaw slack as he visibly attempted to catch up with what was happening now.

"There's one thing left that I didn't confess last night," Lance said. "I was gonna wait, but now... Just in case, yeah?"

There was a collective gasp in the airlock as Lance leaned in to kiss him.

After a few seconds of firm, warm contact he pulled back just enough to speak—but not far enough to open his eyes and see anything but Keith's eyes or to be free of the heat of Keith's stuttering breath, so he kept his eyes closed and whispered. This was just for Keith, anyway. "I should've told you how much I missed you when you finally came back," he said. "Should've asked you to come home a long time ago. Should've never let you leave us in the first place."

"Lance, I—"

"Everything you want, Keith, I want it too."

"Wha— Really?"

"Yeah, man. All of it. Your jacket on my chair, my slippers in your hallway, you painting some weird abstract shit I don't understand on our bedroom wall. I love you. I just.. wanted you to know that before I went through with this."

Just in case.

When he pulled back fully, straightening to full height, Keith was left gaping up at him. Everyone was gaping at him.

"What the hell are you going to do?" Keith said, his voice somewhat strangled.

"Wake up," Lance winked,

and stepped backwards off the ledge,

and fell.

.

.

. . .

Evry was, to put it simply, mystical.

As they were led from the castle through the Rianderan base to meet with their leader, Lance couldn't take his eyes off the gas planet where it covered the south half of the sky, bisecting it in two halves: one like a Van Gogh painting, and the other black and full of twinkling stars that went dark where the rings blocked them from view. He had always imagined the view of Saturn from Titan might look something like this, or the view of Jupiter from Io. He'd always dreamt of visiting a gas planet someday, but their travels had not yet taken them any closer to a gas planet than its rings or moons. It wasn't like there was anywhere to land there, anyway. It was gaseous elements all the way down. A planet-wide storm. But still, as an astronaut and explorer and curious human, he couldn't help wondering if there were any lifeforms that lived there, in some manner of speaking. He imagined they would look something between fish and birds. He wondered what it would be like to live your life on a planet that had no surface, that just got deeper and deeper and darker and denser…

"Yes," was the surprisingly succinct answer that he got when he asked one of the guards if there were any known lifeforms on Evry itself. "There are many."

"Really?" Pidge said, shoving herself between them with a delighted sparkle in her eye. "Fascinating. Can you describe them? How do they move around? What are their skeletal structures like? Are they sentient?"

"No," another guard piped in on Lance's right, "none of them are sentient, but there are thousands and thousands of different species residing there. They are the subject of extreme fascination and study across the Sepha Cluster."

"Evry has a... reputation," the first guard agreed. "There are not many gas planets in the universe that give rise to the evolution of life."

"You can say that again," Pidge said. "We've never directly encountered one before."

The guard paused outside a tall building and gestured for the paladins to head up the stairs without him, to the meeting. "Even among gas planets that do harbor lifeforms, Evry is wholly unique."

"Why's that?" Keith said, and the two guards shared a dark look with each other before both angling their faces skyward in tandem.

"The Aias," they said.

Diplomacy was delicate, and Black Paladin or not, Lance still thought that was Allura's strong suit, so he let her lead the conversation as Nuul Jone seated them for a generous dinner along with several other rebel leaders from other planets in the Sepha 9 system, to discuss their options. All they needed was some help finding the facility that was making clones, but the rebels needed help, and they were hesitant to give up their bartering chip. Lance trusted Allura to negotiate the situation. He kind of had to, because he was busy getting distracted by Keith, who was currently talking to an annoyingly attractive rebel named Malli Ro, a lean and muscular Sephan from Sepha 4.

"What is an Aia, exactly?" Keith asked him through a mouthful of food. Pidge perked up on Malli Ro's other side as well at the mention of it, though she pretended to still be mostly interested in her food.

"Aias? Why do you ask about them?"

"The guards outside mentioned it," Lance offered from across the table.

"They're a mystery, is what they are," Malli Ro explained. "We're not even certain if they are plants or animals or fungus, or none of the above. They're the most difficult Evryan creature to study by far, and so much of their existence and habits and their very nature is left unknown. It will probably remain so. Study has been limited, due to the number of deaths they've caused. We cannot seem to succeed in making the study of them completely illegal, though. Even if we did, people would continue to pursue them anyway."

"What?" Keith pressed. "Why?"

Malli Ro hummed, his lips pressed tightly together. "We Sephans first discovered them back in the early days of space exploration, when we had only recently begun colonizing the planets of Sepha 9. We began losing ships as they passed over the twilight line between the day and night sides of Evry's atmosphere. It took us decades to learn why. It was something of an urban myth back in those early days. A superstition. Even seasoned pilots would refuse to fly there."

"Kind of like the Bermuda Triangle," Pidge said to Lance. "Interesting."

"And these ships were disappearing because of Aias?" Lance asked. "Were they attacking them, or what?"

"Not in that sense," Malli Ro said. "Here, it'll be easier if I show you." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small tablet, which he then typed into for a minute before a little holographic projection appeared. Lance blinked at it, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.

"It just looks like a mushroom," he said blankly.

"Yes, quite innocuous at first glance, isn't it?" He pointed to the hologram, to the yellowish stalk. "But this mushroom isn't the Aia at all. You see, the outermost layer of Evry is mainly dense cloud and hot wind. That's where most of the creatures we've discovered live—mainly because we cannot take our ships any deeper without succumbing to the inhospitable conditions of the secondary layer. As for this 'mushroom,' when day becomes night, on Evry, the extreme change in temperature causes bubbles of air to rise up from the secondary layer into the outer layer—"

"—resulting in these mushroom clouds," Pidge finished.

"Exactly. You couldn't tell just by looking at this image, but each one of these twisting mushroom clouds are thousands and thousands of miles deep, carried along by the wind like storms. Sometimes they only last for hours. Sometimes, if conditions allow, they can last for quintants or movements or even phoebs after forming."

"And the Aias?" Lance prodded. "Where do they come in?"

"They lurk," Malli Ro said, pointing to the very base of the mushroom cloud, "in the secondary layer, in the depths we cannot reach. They cast their tendrils upward into the hollow interior of the mushroom cloud and snare any creature that strays inside—Evryan or not."

"So why doesn't everyone just steer clear of the mushrooms then?" Keith said. "Seems obvious."

"Because the Aia's snare is not physical," he answered simply. "It's mental. An Aia uses its tendrils to get inside a creature's head, and give them what they most desire in all the universe. For most of the creatures on Evry I assume the Aias give them those simple things that every animal desires, like water and warmth and companionship. For us sentient beings... the allure is more complex. The reward is much more fantastic. Some people are incapable of resisting that kind of curiosity."

"A fatal curiosity," Nuul Jone cut in loudly from the end of the table, and all four of them snapped to attention. "And a distraction, at that."

Allura was now glaring at them with her disappointed-big-sister look, so Lance turned his attention back to the meeting, and put all thoughts of Evry out of his head.

Until later that evening, that is, when Keith brought it up again, and Nuul Jone narrowed two out of her three eyes and gave an ominous warning, more harshly this time. "The only way out of the Aia is death, Keith Kogane. Do not seek it. You will not come back."

"I'm not going to seek it," Keith said, and it wasn't until a few hours later that Lance knew Keith had been lying, when Red projected his panic so hard into the astral plane connecting them all that Lance stumbled in the castle hallway, his vision briefly whiting out.

"The only way out of the Aia is death," Nuul Jone called after him as he sprinted through the hallway, yelling into his comm for everyone to wake up, Keith was gone, he was gone again and they had to save him, it could already be too late—

"Death is not an option!" Lance shouted back at Nuul Jone as he sprinted back toward the castle. Toward his lion.

She was still shouting at him but he didn't hear her. He had tunnel vision. Why had Keith done this? What the hell did he want so badly he would risk his life chasing a mirage?

When Nuul Jone appeared on his screen as the lions took to the sky together, it was with a look of desperation. "Please understand my meaning," she said intently. "Listen carefully and take my words heavily to heart. The only way out of the Aia is death. If the Aia takes you under on this rescue mission, once you are stuck in its mental labyrinth, you must die in order to wake again. It is the ONLY known way. If the Red Paladin had insisted upon going, we would have been forthcoming with this information. I am sorry, Lance McClain. I did not think he would go."

"Neither did I," Lance ground out.

"Do not forget," Nuul Jone impressed upon him, her sallow face leaning in close to the screen. "Whatever you do, do not forget."

"I got this," Lance told her, even though he was terrified that he didn't, and repeated her words to himself over and over and over as the other three lions followed him and Black from the outer rings of Evry toward the sulfur blue atmosphere, toward the red blinking light on his radar that rested halfway down the outer layer of Evry, as they followed him all the way down through the tumultuous, rioting wind. The only way out of the Aia is death. He wouldn't forget.

He couldn't possibly.

Because Keith was counting on him, and Lance wouldn't let him down.

. . .

.

.

part vi

sunshine

.

.

He was falling.

That was the first thing that hit him, and it did so like a hurricane, ripping him from sleep with callous instantaneousness. Butterflies roared upward in his chest, stealing his breath, scattering his waking thoughts. His limbs were weightless. That falling sensation that had plagued him for days was his whole existence now—he was practically rising out of his chair, except that something kept him from doing so. Outside Black's screen was an undulous world of sulfurous gold, howling, deafening, haze hurtling upward as his lion fell, and he knew where he was now, and what had happened. Purple lightning flashed far away beyond the dense edges of this semi-hollow section of the clouds, and as it flashed he caught sight of these thin wavy lines. Like loose spiderwebs, with the faintest hint at what might be Evryan creatures caught in their grasp. The Aia's tendrils. They were nearly invisible until they caught the brief purple light, and then they disappeared again. All of this happened in an instant, at which point he sat up in a panic, but found himself constricted.

All around him were the same nearly translucent vines. Tentacles? Animals? Plants? They were snaking in through the hatch behind him, wrapping around his chest, his neck, his head. Reaching blindly, he pulled the black bayard from his hip and activated it into its sword form. It sliced upward through the vines like they were made of nothing but soap bubbles, and they fluttered to the floor, lifeless and weightless.

"Black, wake up!" Lance shouted at the dark dashboard, and the interior lights flashed to life. As soon as it did, four faces appeared on his screen. Relief flooded through Lance's body like morphine as their faces filled his vision. They were still blinking sleepily, and they all looked as mindfucked as he felt. But there was no time to dwell on the existential horror that they had all just been through.

They were falling toward the Aia.

"Look alive," he shouted at them. "We need to shake these vines off!" God only knew how long they'd been falling, how many thousands of miles of gas they'd fallen through, and how close they were to the Aia's world devouring jaws.

A loud roar answered from below as the five of them twisted and shook off the weightless tendrils. But 'roar' didn't even begin to describe it. It was like a tectonic shift; so bass-heavy and crackling that he couldn't believe it had come from anything but a continental plate in motion. Lance angled Black's nose downward and saw a deep, deep darkness opening up below them, a raging maelstrom of wind impossible to see through. They were nearing the bottom of this mushroom cloud, and the currents were a whirlpool down here, spiralling and crushing, pushing them ever further and further down. Wind thousands of miles an hour tearing them in the wrong direction. This must be why Aias hung out at the base of these mushroom clouds. Kind of like a bear waiting at the end of a waterfall, right?

"The wind is too strong!" Keith called out. "I'm miles and miles deeper than you guys. I'm not gonna make it."

Lance could barely see anything through the glass anymore. As they neared the bottom of the escaped air bubble the gas grew denser, like it was closing in. They were nearly at the mercy of Evry's secondary layer, of the perpetual torrent of hot gas pressurized nearly to the point of liquidity, into a mindless raging river that had run for a eons and would run for eons more. His screen was covered in haze so thick now that it was more like water than gas. Soon enough he wouldn't be able to see a single thing beyond the glass. He swore he could feel the stress on Black's hull on his own skin.

"Allura," he called out, "use Blue's sonar to scan for the Aia's location."

"It's close now," she replied readily, "waiting not too far beyond the end of the outer layer. Quiznack, it's so big. Aside from Keith, we are no longer falling toward it—"

"We're not gaining much altitude either," Hunk threw in.

"It's this wind," Keith said, "it's too strong, and the atmosphere down here is too thick. It's like a hundred F5 tornadoes."

Growling with desperation, Lance minimized everyone's faces. "Black, show us our coordinates in Evry's interior."

A yellow globe appeared on the screen, sectioned into three concentric circles. Lance raked his eyes over the diagram, taking in all the information as quickly as possible. Evry was 87,346 miles in full diameter. It was 41,022 miles from space to Evry's core. 13,659 miles from space to end of the outer layer. He eyed their dots, 13,602 miles deep in the outer layer. They were way too close to the secondary layer for comfort. Way too close to the Aia. Worst of all, Keith was 13,633 miles deep and and still falling, and even without the Aia lurking in the deep there, breaching the secondary layer would be a death sentence all its own.

Pidge must've been looking at the map too. "This is bad," she said. "Keith, you're approaching the point of no return." Over the comm Lance could hear Red's hull creaking ominously under the pressure of the atmosphere. It was like having ten thousand oceans sitting on top of you. Too much weight for a spaceship. Far too much. "Lance, if he passes completely into the second layer of the atmosphere, Red won't be able to match the speed needed for escape velocity. Not with that kind of pressure. And the windspeed is over a thousand miles per hour down there!"

"We're not in too great of a position ourselves," Hunk pointed out. "We're all maxed out at twenty percent speed trying to get out of this whirlpool. What are we going to do?!"

"Everyone except Keith, stop fighting the whirlpool," Lance ordered. "Follow it down."

"What?" they all shouted, Keith loudest of all.

"Keith's falling, you guys, we gotta go to him. And then.. well, Voltron's our only hope to beat the windspeed down there. We can do this."

"But we haven't been able to form Voltron since we defeated Lotor," Hunk worried, even as he followed Lance's directive and tilted Yellow's nose downward along with everyone else, toward that blinking red dot. Vision was gone, now. Black's screen was a wall of dark haze with the occasional muted flash of light and the low rumble that came with it, buzzing through Black's interior and down into his bones. All Lance could see were his teammates faces and that red dot on his scanner. That was all he needed, though.

Lance pushed his levers to max. "Because we weren't talking!" he said. "We were all keeping secrets, and it was driving us apart. But we've cleared the air now, right? We can do this. Unless— Is there anything left anyone hasn't confessed yet? Any secrets left that might interfere?"

A chorus of 'no's followed...

...from everyone except Keith.

"Keith?" Lance nudged, bringing Keith's video feed to full screen. He searched Keith's face, which was swimming in uncertainty. What else could there possibly be?

Keith swallowed, his hands gripped so hard on Red's controls that his knuckles were turning white. "Okay, okay fine," he blurted, suddenly and all at once, "I didn't leave Voltron to find my mother, or because I wanted to join the Blade, or because I didn't want to be Black Paladin. It was a little of everything, but mostly? I did it for you, Lance."

Lance blinked. "What?"

"It was stupid," he said, dragging a hand down his face before lurching to grab the controls again as Red's entire hull groaned like a sinking freighter, "I know that now, but you—you told me you were going to step down. You called yourself extraneous. And you're just—you're fucking not, okay? And I always kinda felt there wasn't enough room for both of us anyway, so it felt inevitable that one of us would leave, and I was already used to doing things alone so it wasn't hard to just take the bullet for you and go back to that. But I.. I don't want to do things alone anymore," he finished thickly, looking up from the controls into Lance's eyes, his face fraught with purple shadow from the depths of Evry, open and wrecked and overwhelmingly sorry.

They were to almost to the red dot. If the maelstrom wasn't so thick he would be able to see Red coming into sight, now.

"You don't have to," Lance told him, and for once in his life the confidence in his voice was real and solid and backed up by miles of experience. "Listen to me. Together we are the strongest team in the universe, and we are not going down at the hands ofgravity. Team?" he whispered, taking a deep breath and throwing himself into those familiar waters that connected them, but this time, without any reservations. "You know what to do."

And they did.

They did it so easily, so seamlessly, like they'd never had trouble with it in the first place. Coming together like this was the most thrilling sensation in the known universe. It was an electric buzz, a sense of becoming bigger than oneself, of being born all over again from the ground up, and it never, ever, ever got old.

"WOO!" Lance whooped as his vision cleared of spots, and grinned triumphantly as he activated their engines, which were leagues more powerful with their lions combined.

But his smile quickly faded as not much changed. They were no longer falling but they weren't climbing either. They had fallen too far too fast, and were poised right now right at the very precipice of no-return. And as he looked at the map, their dot began to edge downward again. No no no!

Hunk didn't hesitate to point out the obvious. "We're still falling!"

"We need the big guns," Pidge hurried. "Quick, Lance, didn't Shiro activate a super turbo mode once? A set of wings?"

The memory exploded in his mind's eye, the advanced-form wings that Shiro had only tapped into once. He'd never explained how he did it. Keith had never managed to replicate it in his time as BP. Lance certainly hadn't managed it.

"I— I don't know if I can," Lance said. "My connection to Black isn't as strong as Shiro's was. If he was here—"

"He's not here," Hunk shouted. "You can do this, Lance!"

Lance swore his frustration, pushing harder at his controls even though they were already maxed out, throwing his entire weight into it as if somehow that would help. Hunk didn't understand. Only Keith understood that their connection to Black just wasn't as strong as Shiro's was. Keith was the only one who understood the situation with Shiro at all, the only one who'd picked up the weird clues that Shiro left behind, who kept tirelessly searching no matter how hopeless it seemed, who had realized that the vision of Shiro Lance saw once in the astral plane wasn't the clone, but in fact the real deal. Only Keith understood that it was hard to even remember that Shiro was gone when you were flying Black, because honestly, when you were sitting in Black's cockpit it kinda felt like Shiro was still—

"Wait," Lance breathed. "Wait."

"What?!" Pidge yelled. "Whatever your plan is, do it now!"

"Everyone concentrate," he shouted. "Astral plane, again, just like on Naxzela! I know what to do!"

I know where Shiro is.

He jammed his eyes shut, shutting out the world and focusing his mind inward. The familiar buzzing sensation flooded his body, and when he opened his eyes, he was there again.

The astral plane.

The sky here was endless, infinite in a way that seemed somehow even vaster than the infinity of space even though that was impossible, and filled with stars that looked millions of light years away and yet gave the impression that if he reached out they might flit away from his hand like fireflies. The ground was glassy; illusory black water that reflected the sky back at him from below. Everyone was standing around him in formation, just like before, eyes closed and incorporeal, roughly the same distance from him that they were right now in the real world. It was almost exactly as he remembered it.

Almost. This time, Keith was here, and Lance was standing in a different spot.

The spot where he had last seen Shiro.

"Lance."

The sound of Shiro's voice sent a shock through Lance's soul. He wheeled around to see Shiro standing behind him at a short distance, and his legs nearly buckled with happiness and relief. "Shiro!"

He was here. He was really here. He had been here all along...

"I knew you'd come back for me," Shiro said, his hands resting on his hips, a proud smile tugging at his face.

"I'm sorry," Lance blurted, "I don't have a lot of time. We're falling, Shiro, into a gas planet—long story—but we're not gonna make it. We're gonna die if we don't pull up."

Shiro's face cleared. "Ah, I see. Need a little wind under your wings?"

"Yes," Lance begged.

"Well you don't need me for that." Shiro smiled somewhat sadly. "Mine is back on Earth. I don't talk about him, 'cause.. you know, cause it hurts," he laughed. "So you probably didn't know."

Mouth agape, Lance shook his head once, his understanding still just out of reach.

"Now you know. He's my wind," Shiro said sagely, sharing the words like a solemn vow. "Who's yours, Lance?"

Oh, Lance thought, and turned to Keith. To his surprise he found Keith looking back at them with wide open eyes, his mouth hanging open in shock.

Then the ground destabilized.

It rippled below their feet, once, twice, before surging low and rushing upward all at once, bringing Lance up with it, all the way back up up up—

As soon as Lance's vision cleared, he and Keith locked eyes on screen, and an understanding passed between them unspoken. Somehow, they just knew what to do. In sync they jammed their bayards into their respective slots and turned them, and it was like a whirlwind passed through the interior of the whole ship. It was weird how he could just feel it in his boneswhen the wings formed behind them, sending them skyward with a rush and a flourish. All at once the pressure was lifted.

"You did it!" Hunk hollered as they broke free of the whirlpool, back into the safer hollow of the air bubble. "You guys did it!"

Keith laughed freely as they rocketed upward, higher and higher and still gaining speed as they neared the end of the air pocket—the cap of the 'mushroom.'

"What's so funny?" Lance asked him, unable to school his own expression into anything less sappy. He was grinning so wide that his cheeks stung.

"Door in the sky," Keith replied, still laughing, his eyes crinkled from the extent of his joy. "I was right after all." And they broke through the cap.

The mushroom quickly shrunk below them and as they continued to gain altitude they turned around to look back on it. They were moving so fast now that they were already a hundred miles above it. When they looked, Lance couldn't even tell which one they'd been falling through anymore, because there were thousands of them. A whole field of golden mushrooms that looked small from up here, hazy through the bluish gas that separated them from the visitors staring down. The smoky alien garden stretched so far in every direction that his head spun.

"Incredible," Allura whispered, and they turned skyward again and continued to climb.

They passed through oceans of complex elements and pockets of air filled with awe-inspiring alien beings whose anatomies Lance couldn't begin to comprehend. Winged fuzzies and frilly whirligigs and hordes of puffballs that he was pretty sure were alive because of the way they trailed excitedly after them, like harbor seals playing in the wake of a speedboat. He pointed out every one with excitement, feeling like a kid again, totally swept through with adrenaline and not at all caring that he wasn't acting like a serious leader right now. They were astronauts, and the luckiest ones in the universe, at that. Who else would ever see these hidden landscapes, everchanging, riddled with rainbows and fraught with perpetual lightning, these thousands of miles of swirling wonder?

"WOOO!" Lance hollered again when he just couldn't hold it in anymore, "TAKE THAT, EVRY!"

Everyone was laughing freely, and he loved it. He didn't even care whether they were laughing at him or with him. They were laughing and Lance was happy and he was in love. He was in love with Keith, in love with the universe, in love with space and flying and all the precious forms of life that lived here in this crazy reality, in love with the very sensation of being alive. He loop-de-looped upward through another random air pocket where they could see the swirling cloudscape for hundreds of miles all around, through a flock of alien birds with a dozen wings each and bioluminescent tails that extended behind them like comet streaks.

The others played along and indulged him as he continued his over-the-top aerial maneuvers, not showing off so much as he was playing in Evry's atmosphere like a little kid splashing around in the ocean, all the way upward, until they had cleared the last wispy layer of atmosphere and broken back into wide open space, into Sephan starlight. Evry's blue striped rings spread out across the sky, the planet's shadow casting the distal half of them into darkness.

It was a short trip from here back to the moon Riander, and when they broke formation to land their lions in the center of the rebel base's valley, Lance launched himself backwards over his pilot's chair, adrenaline still pumping loudly in his veins as he sprinted down Black's ramp and straight for Keith, who was coming down from his own lion with the same amount of urgency. They met in the middle, twisting and turning and nearly falling over with wild abandon, with that overflowing adrenaline of a mission cleared with flying colors. He could hear the rebels talking and see them out of the corner of his eye, could see the others and knew they were there, but it just didn't matter. Not yet. All that mattered right now was that this was real. The Rianderan sky was different now—strikingly so. Sepha 9 was high above the mountains and Evry's rings were now stretching out to the south in the opposite direction as they'd been when they first arrived, and Evry itself was just the faintest sliver of yellow light there at the edge, tucked so far beyond the horizon that it could have been taken for an unnaturally smooth mountain range. This side of Riander was facing away from Evry now, toward the outermost rings and the stars beyond, and it was real. It was real.

Realest of all was the feeling of Keith in his arms.

That was the weirdest thing about dreaming. You never knew it, when you were. Never questioned the strangeness of anything. But when you were awake—truly awake—you knew it with a blinding and untenable certainty. There was simply no replacement for true reality, and this was it. There was no doubt in his mind this time.

Their raucous reunion calmed down as Keith took his turn staring skyward, his eyes blown open wide and full of shimmering daylight. They slowed and stopped then lest they trip and fall over each other, their expressions softening. Before Lance could chicken out, he leaned in and kissed him. For real, this time.

A chorus of cheers went up around them.

They broke away swiftly, reminded of their audience, but Lance held onto Keith's waist when he tried to take a step away, keeping him close.

"Somehow," Hunk yelled (a little louder than he meant to, probably), "even with all the crazy stuff that happened back there, this is still the craziest thing that's happened today!" He motioned between Keith and Lance wildly, almost tripping on his way over.

Throwing his arm around Lance's waist to mirror Lance's arm around his, Keith laughed. "Yeah, I'll be honest, I didn't see this coming either."

It was at that moment that Nuul Jone pushed her way through the crowd to greet them.

"You have done well," she exclaimed, her face more alight than Lance remembered ever seeing it. She was beaming at them. In fact, she looked almost proud. "Beyond well. Not many of our people have gone into the Aia and come out again to speak of the voyage. You must each be very strong of will and heart."

"It's the fact that we're a team that makes us strongest," Lance replied, shaking Keith around a bit for effect. "No man left behind." Keith shoved his hand away when Lance ruffled his hair affectionately.

"No man left behind indeed," she said. "Paladins, your display here today has affected my people greatly. She gestured to a couple of Sephans in the surrounding crowd who Lance now noticed were holding cameras. "Every rebel in the Sepha cluster has been watching and waiting for your return. As you know, the Aias are famous among our people. We here at the Sepha 9 base are impressed and humbled and we wish to join your coalition. We will act as liaison to the rest of the Sepha 9 planets and to the rest of the cluster as well. We will relay the location of the Galra facility you are looking for with no further delay, and we will assist you in looking for any others that you seek as well."

"Oh, that is wonderful news!" Allura crowed, and ran forward to shake Nuul Jone's hand. "You have no idea what a monumental stride forward this will be in the war effort, both for your people and for ours!"

"We do," Nuul Jone said, placing her other hand on the back of Allura's as they shook. "Believe me. If we did not before, we do now."

Throughout this conversation, Krolia was standing a ways off behind a short Sephan family, watching Keith somewhat forlornly. Lance was certain that she wanted to hug him. She usually tried to get into his physical space when he was out of danger, but this time, she kept her distance. As soon as the two of them made eye contact she tilted her head at him in acknowledgement, and then vanished into the crowd. He wasn't quite sure if this was a good or bad development, but Keith was still smiling, so he hoped that it was good. More than ever before, he wanted desperately to like Krolia. He wanted her to like him back. He wanted her and Keith to find some kind of middle ground. He hoped someday Keith could put a picture on their coffee table, of him and Krolia smiling and having fun, like the one he'd seen in the Aia. He knew the past could never be erased, but that didn't mean there couldn't be hope for a better future.

"Thank you," Krolia later told Lance, and she said it so fast as she walked by on their way up the hillside toward the castle that he almost didn't hear it. But he definitely heard it. Keith did too, judging by the soft smile he was aiming at the jungle grass, and the way his fingers tightened in Lance's hand.

The world was bright and wonderful and so, so real, and Lance was so tired he could sleep for a year, but the day wasn't over. Not even once they'd gotten safely back inside the ship.

"Alright, team meeting," Lance called out once the main entrance door had slid shut and closed out Riander, and everyone groaned.

"Not another sleepover," Pidge muttered.

"Lance we're dead on our feet," Hunk said, "can't it wait?"

"No," he replied. "Keith? You wanna tell them?"

With dawning apprehension, Allura straightened and walked back toward them. "Tell us what?"

Keith stepped forward, placing himself directly beside Lance to deliver the news. "Shiro is in the Black Lion."

The reaction was silence. Everyone's faces remained impassive. Blank. Numb.

Hunk fidgeted. "Like.. in a 'so-and-so will always live in our hearts' kind of way?"

"Or in a literal way?" Pidge asked, adjusting her glasses.

"In an abstract way," Lance said. "It's hard to explain. He's there, though."

"We saw him," Keith explained, "and heard him, and felt him there too."

"Is it possible?" Romelle whispered to Coran.

"Certainly. I never would've thought of it but it is possible."

"But then, where is his body?" Romelle wondered.

"It is conceivable," Allura sad slowly, "that his body was destroyed in that fight with Zarkon, and that he felt himself dying, and so projected at that moment to the astral plane. With no body to return to he would have been forced to remain there, tied to our plane only through Black. I've not seen it happen before of course, but, the idea makes a shocking amount of sense, all things considered."

"This is it then," Keith said. "We know where he is. What do we do?" Lance could feel him itching to run. Somewhere. Anywhere.

"The entire history of Altean alchemy resides in the castle's archives," Coran said. "If the answer is in there, we will find it."

"I can do it," Allura breathed. "I don't know how yet but it should be possible, to shift his consciousness's ties from Black to a human body again."

"Well where are we gonna get a human body?" Pidge wondered.

"We could steal one from the cloning facility," Lance suggested. It was obvious, right?

"That's gonna severely complicate the mission," Hunk pointed out, "since we were just gonna destroy it and run."

Krolia nodded, stepping forward. "We don't want to alert the Galra here to the fact that there are rebels hiding in the cluster. We can't endanger them by having an unnecessary firefight in their backyard."

"We did promise the Sephan rebels we would help them," Allura pointed out, "and we shouldn't start by mishandling this and putting them in danger."

"Everyone relax," Keith said, "there's no need for that."

Everyone turned to Keith where he was now folding his arms and setting his jaw. The rash-decisions-leader-face. Lance knew it well. Of course he was the one to voice what everyone was thinking.

"We don't need to steal one because we already have one."

.

.

Outside the room where Shiro's clone was being held, Keith came to a stop. He hadn't seen the clone face to face since the day he went rogue. Since the day he burned him. Mostly he'd spent his free time standing angrily outside this closed door with his eyes shut and arms crossed tightly over his chest, glaring at anyone who came by to bring the clone food or water or something to do to fill the long hours of the day. Despite his insistence on (unnecessary) guard duty, Keith had not gone inside once.

"Hey," Lance soothed, nudging at Keith's fist with the back of his hand. "You ready?"

"Yeah," Keith said, and he sounded fine, but he must've been warring on the inside because he captured Lance's hand in his and squeezed it hard as the door slid open.

Probably having heard their approach, Shiro's clone was already sitting at the edge of his bed and was currently in the middle of setting his book aside. He made sure his bookmark was tucked in, then looked up—and as he did his eyes caught on Lance and Keith's interlocked hands, and a surprised smile flickered across his face. Sheer joy. The flash of emotion fascinated Lance. It was so real. It was so similar to Shiro, but in many ways completely different. It was only for a second, and then it was gone, and the clone looked up at them expectantly. But he was clearly trying to hide something. His eyes were shining. With excitement, Lance's heart told him. One of his greatest strengths was reading people, and this clone of Shiro had been as open as a storybook since the day Pidge freed him from Haggar's influence.

If I'm not mistaken, he's happy for us.

That was interesting, right?

But when he glanced at Keith to see if he'd noticed, Keith's face was hardened. Keith was not good at reading people, and he clearly didn't see anything in the clone's face except his real brother's absence. If he did, he was ignoring it.

"You were programmed to want to be a paladin," Keith said. "To want to save the universe. To be a hero."

"I… Yes," the clone said, shifting on the bed. The forcefield that separated the room in halves shimmered, obscuring him for a moment. "So they say."

"Lance says you feel guilt," he said. "That you wish you could make amends for everything you've done."

"Yes," the clone answered again, looking at Lance this time with guilt loud and evident in his eyes. Crocodile tears, Hunk had sniffed moodily when Lance voiced his thoughts on this matter a few weeks ago, and Lance had bit his tongue and not brought it up again.

"How far would you go, then?" Keith pressed. "Would you would you sacrifice your life to help us get the real Shiro back? Because his consciousness is stuck in the astral plane, and he needs a new body."

The clone leaned forward, resting his one forearm on his leg with a tired sigh. "Which I have."

"Exactly," Keith said. "I wanted Allura to just do it but apparently you have to be a willing participant in the process. So. Are you willing?"

"Yes," the clone said without hesitation, and Lance frowned. Okay, that was it. He already had cold feet and about eighty bad feelings about this whole thing, but the clone's ready response just sealed the deal. Humming with discontent, he grabbed Keith by the arm and pulled him into the small alcove just inside the doorway, angling slightly away from the clone and throwing his forearm up on the wall by Keith's head to further muffle their voices.

"Keith, hold on," he whispered. "This doesn't feel right."

"What do you mean it doesn't feel right?" Keith snapped. "That's not the real Shiro. It's not even a real person, it's just a clone. If he's programmed to want to sacrifice himself for the greater good then we should take advantage of it. We could have the real Shiro back by the end of the hour!"

"That's the thing," Lance said. "He's not just a clone, Keith, and he has no programming anymore. Pidge scrambled it. He has all Shiro's memories. For all intents and purposes he thought he was Shiro until Haggar activated her creepy homing signal. And what about the four whole months he was just out and about, living his own life? He didn't know he was a clone, dude, so now he's got all these extra memories now too that aren't even Shiro's. They're just his, and, I dunno," he trailed off with uncertainty. "Doesn't that make him a person in his own right? Who are we to determine what makes a person and what doesn't, anyway? I mean, come on. Look at him, Keith."

Surprised at Lance's shift in tone from serious to amused, Keith did as he said and peered over Lance's outstretched bicep. As soon he saw the two of them looking, Shiro averted his eyes. Caught staring. Tapping his fingers impatiently on the bedspread, he pretended to inspect the blank wall on the far side of the room.

"He wants to ask us what's up with us," Lance laughed softly. "He wants to know if we're together. He's desperate to know, just look at him. Is that something that would matter to a soulless clone?"

Keith sighed. The breath fell hot on Lance's arm. "He betrayed us, Lance."

"That was the chip in his brain."

"He burnt half my face off."

"Also the chip. Also you're still handsome."

Keith flushed at that, but didn't back down. "You're seriously suggesting we keep the clone as—what, as a pet or something?! What about the real Shiro?"

"We go with Plan B," Lance said. "Hey, Clone Shiro?" He left the alcove and approached the shimmering forcefield, wincing as he heard how ridiculous 'Clone Shiro' sounded aloud, considering what he was about to ask of him. "Okay, that's such a mouthful, we really gotta think of a new name for you."

"Kuron," he replied, almost right away, like the word had been at the tip of his tongue for weeks, just waiting to be spoken. Then he blushed. He looked even more surprised that he'd said that than Keith and Lance did. "It means clone in Japanese," he said nervously. "I'm sorry, it's in poor taste—"

"No," Lance laughed. "No, it's good. Shiro will love it." And he knew with all his heart that that was true. "Listen, Kuron, I'm really impressed that you're ready to go full self-sacrifice. But it won't be necessary. Waste of resources, am I right?" he joked, and for the first time since he'd seen them holding hands the smile returned to the clone's—to Kuron's face. "Actually, I just had a new idea. You're gonna go shopping with us at that cloning facility that you came from." As that sank in, he dug his comm out of his pocket and buzzed the resident techie. "Hey Pidge? You disabled all the questionable tech in Clone Shiro's arm, right?"

After a moment of crackly fumbling, her voice came through. "Uh… yes?"

"Cool." He duly ignored Keith's indignant balking. "Hunk, you there too? How soon can you guys reattach it?"

"In like an hour, give or take?" he called from somewhere near Pidge. "Is that a trick question? Why would we do that?"

"Because we're doing the more complicated version of this mission," Lance said, "and it'll go a lot smoother with someone who's been there before." Truth be told, they didn't really need Kuron's help to pull this off. They could do it just fine on their own, he and Keith. But Lance had his reasons.

"You can't be serious," Keith shouted, "you seriously trust him to go on a mission with us? Into a Haggar-controlled Galra cloning facility?!"

"Yeah," Lance said. "Hunk and Allura will be the distraction at first while you, me, and Kuron here sneak in, and then they can blow it to bits once we're out. Pidge will drop us off with her cloaking veil, Tachikoma-style, then get us out again once we've kidnapped another clone."

"And you trust him to raid a base with us?"

"I trust you to raid a base with me," Lance pointed out, and Keith threw his hands up, curling his lip back in offense.

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

So dramatic. And they called Lance the theatrical one. "It means what it means, Keith. Character isn't based on where you were born, or how, or why. Just on what you do. And I think," he said brightly, winking at Kuron who was now standing right at the edge of the forcefield looking totally ready to take on a whole Galra base, "that he deserves a chance to decide what kind of person he wants to be. Just like the rest of us."

.

.

The mission went off without a single hitch.

In fact, it was their smoothest mission success in months, and it was largely thanks to Kuron, who led Lance and Keith through the labyrinth of a facility without alerting a single sentry to their presence, keeping a cool and level head even with the tip of Keith's knife pressed to his back half the time. They even managed to snare a handful of memory chips on their way, which might very well lead them to the next facility and that much closer to Haggar if Pidge could manage to decrypt them.

Their choice of a new clone did not wake as they drained him from the pod. Didn't wake as Pidge picked the four of them up at the agreed rendezvous point, or when they entered the firefight that had been taking place outside, or even when they activated the bomb to annihilate the rest of the orbiting facility as they fled the cluster, making sure Haggar's ships saw them leaving so that they wouldn't suspect an inside job from the Sephans and the hidden rebels weren't in danger of discovery. The clone didn't so much as stir as they repeated the precautions they'd taken with Kuron so many weeks ago, scrambling the chip, disconnecting his robotic eye, and removing his Galra arm to be later tampered with and perhaps replaced altogether. He didn't stir when they propped him up in the pilot's chair inside Black.

Not even when Allura touched the dash and it lit up under her hand.

She gasped as it did so and shot a bewildered look at Lance, who gave her a big thumbs up. He too was excited, and also not at all surprised that Black had lit up for her. Maybe it was because she was a wonderful leader; and maybe it was because Black knew she was trying to help save Shiro. It was anyone's guess without Shiro here to interpret. He'd be here soon enough though if all went well.

"Lets give her some space," Lance whispered at the crowded group in the back of the cockpit, and ushered everyone out and down the ramp. Although, he had to practically drag Keith.

They watched from below with bated breath as Black's eyes lit up. They all leaned in with tense anticipation—Kuron included. Attitudes toward him had shifted as soon as the mission was over and it had ended in total success. No one was watching him with their hands hovering over their bayards anymore. They just stood together and waited. It was several long minutes of nothing...

...and then, the whole lion pulsed with energy.

They all felt it, based on the group gasp that went up among the others. Keith lurched forward and Lance reached out, taking his wrist gently. Just a minute more.

It didn't take long. Soon enough Black lowered her head, and out came Allura almost right away, supporting Shiro by the elbow as they descended together. Tears shone in her eyes as she smiled bright enough to rival a sun. She truly looked like a queen, in that moment, with a shining knight standing tall at her side, his eyes squinting as they looked into the light for the very first time.

As soon as they came into view, Keith made a choking noise and took off running, tackling Shiro right as they made it to the bottom of the ramp.

"Hey there, troublemaker," Shiro laughed, wrapping his arms all the way around Keith and squeezing hard enough to muffle his crying. Cheek resting on Keith's head, he looked up and saw Lance as the rest of the group arrived to greet him, and his face lit up. Keith sniffled and moved aside as Shiro went to envelop Lance in the next hug. "I'm so proud of you," he said, and then looped Keith back in via chokehold. "And YOU TWO!" he shouted, the mirth in his voice echoing in every corner of the hangar, decorating it with the happiness they were all feeling. "WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN!" he lamented, and Lance's forehead smacked into Keith's as Shiro roughhoused them. "I'M SO FUCKING MAD THAT I MISSED IT!"

"Very recently," Hunk said, and Lance and Keith were semi-freed as everyone else moved in to devour Shiro with hugs. "As in, literally yesterday. We were all super shocked."

"I'm not," Shiro laughed. "Keith here has been crushing on Lance since day one—"

"Shiro! Shut up!" Keith shouted, shoving a hand at Shiro's face, at which point Shiro's eyes finally fell on Kuron where he stood alone about ten feet away from the group.

"Woah," he said. His arms fell away from Keith and he cocked his head at Kuron with curiosity. "He's still here, huh?"

Kuron waved nervously.

Shiro looked to Lance with an eyebrow raised. "What—"

"It's okay," Lance said quickly, "he's cool now. He's like Malfoy at the end of book seven."

"What? No," Pidge argued. "That's too negative of a connotation. He's more like Data from Star Trek. Or Data's morally ambiguous brother."

"No no no," Hunk said, "he's like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. You know, because he hunted replicants without knowing he was one all along?"

"What?" Lance shrieked. "Deckard was a replicant?"

"Uh. Yeah," Hunk laughed.

"How do you know?!"

"It was in the subtext," Pidge said with a smarter-than-thou adjustment of her glasses. "It was super obvious. You need to pay more attention when you're watching movies."

"Actually," Keith interrupted, "they're all wrong. Its more like a 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' situation than anything else."

Shocked at Keith's input, Lance shot him a happy grin. It was the first inkling he'd given that he was beginning to accept Kuron as a real person, separate from Shiro. Progress!

Shiro blinked at Kuron. "And you're Finn."

"Uh.. yeah," Kuron said nervously. Then again, with growing confidence. "Yes. I go by Kuron now, though."

A smile split across Shiro's face—presumably at the pun. "Nice. Welcome to the family, then, Kuron."

"You people are all insane," Romelle announced irreverently, and if Lance wasn't mistaken Krolia had to fight to keep a hold on her stoicism. "Space has desensitized you to insanity."

"Okay okay, everyone release Shiro now," Coran said, clapping his hands together and shoving in to begin steering Shiro toward the door. "His clone body is going to be weak for awhile. He needs food and rest."

"Clone body?" Shiro wondered, and patted at his stomach. "I'm a clone now too?"

"Yeah, about that," Hunk laughed. "We'll explain while we get you something to eat."

They all walked out together, laughing and crying and all that jazz which fell like harmonious music on Lance's tired ears. But something came over Lance as they passed Blue's hangar, and he fell behind, giving in to the urge to go see her. He didn't think anyone had seen him slip away until Keith came up beside him as he was standing there in Blue's hangar looking up at her face, her voice like tinkling bells in his head. She'd saved him, again. Even though he hadn't been her pilot for over a year now. Even though he'd flown two different lions in the intervening time. She'd still reached out to him like nothing had ever changed, and his gratitude and adoration and love for her was vaster than the size of his physical body allowed; he could feel it spilling out of him and mixing with her quintessence in the space between them. It was an ethereal feeling. Larger than life.

"Go on," Lance said, nudging Keith with his elbow without bothering to remove his hand from his jacket pocket. "I'll catch up with you." He was a little distracted by his moment with Blue, but he had to tear his attention away when Keith didn't leave, and instead continued to stare up at him with his eyebrows furrowed and his lip curved in a cute little pout. "What?"

"Just making sure you're not getting any stupid ideas in your head," Keith said. "Like last time."

Oh. That.

Honestly, he hadn't thought about that too much. Not yet, anyway. He'd been busy, alright?

Taking a deep breath, Lance took a long hard look at Blue. There was a time when he was so desperate for glory that he'd been happy Keith dropped out of fighter class and left a Lance-sized open slot in his wake, even with the awful circumstances that had led to it. A time when he'd been so desperate to prove himself that he'd sat in Black's cockpit and begged her to light up for him for two whole hours, already knowing that she wouldn't. To know what made Blue choose him in the first place, what made the lions choose any of them, to know that Red saw in him that he'd also seen in Keith, and what Black had seen in Keith that she hadn't seen in Lance right away. This desperation had plagued him for so, so long.

But now? He didn't feel it anymore. He felt kind of at peace, actually, which was strange, considering they were at the height of the war. But he knew what he was doing now. He knew he belonged here, wherever he happened to fit. Wherever they needed him. For the first time, everything about the changing of the guards they'd gone through made perfect sense to him. Because after all, maybe the lions chose the paladins, but wasn't it only after the paladins chose what kind of people they wanted to be? Maybe nothing was as fateful as he'd once believed, when he was young and starry-eyed and standing on an alien planet for the first time ever, listening to an alien girl tell him he had always been destined to fly. Maybe fate was only set in stone when you carved it there yourself.

What a scary thought.

What a liberating thought.

"Nah," he finally said, tearing his eyes from Blue and pulling his hand out of his pocket to snake it around Keith's waist. "No stupid ideas. And what about you? You gonna take another four month sabbatical just so I feel like I have a place on the team?"

"No," Keith said, and Lance's heart fluttered as he reached up to touch Lance's cheek, searching Lance's eyes, back and forth. He couldn't seem to figure out which one to look into and it was endearing as all hell. "Both of us belong here," he mumbled.

Lance laughed, a little breathlessly, and Keith took it as a cue to kiss him. Lance hummed into it, wrapping his arms around him and pulling them flush together, quickly losing himself in it.

It was their second real kiss.

He was looking forward to losing count, someday.

He was looking forward to a lot of things, actually, which was a wonderful change of pace.

The mood in the castle was soft and celebratory that night, which was yet another wonderful change of pace. Lance was giddy and weightless, almost drunk on it—totally not at all how he felt the first time Shiro came back. For once he didn't feel like someone else's success came at the cost of his own, or that his worth was tied to his rank. Maybe he should be wondering about the future, about what was going to happen next, and which lion he was going to fly now, if any, because as of now he was a man untethered. Kind of like this ship they all lived in together, which was currently floating in deep space as it usually was between missions, thousands of light years from the nearest star.

But, he was mostly just happy that Shiro was back. He was excited at the turn of their luck, intrigued to see Shiro and Kuron talking to one another, and content to just spend the evening in everyone's company. Content to be close to them all. His friends. His family. It was getting pretty big, lately, wasn't it?

The universe looked endless way out here, especially in the observation deck where the windows spanned walls taller than Lance's childhood home. He could stand here for a lifetime and never finish counting all the stars visible just from this spot. Living out in space, it was easy to let the view fade into background noise. Easy to get used to it. But today, he found himself unable to look away from the stars. Found himself enraptured by the sight of his little found family silhouetted against the scintillating galactic center: six humans, four Alteans, one Galra, one spatially disobedient wolf, and one... well, one of a kind.

After the tenth PDA joke of the night, he pried himself from Keith's side and made his way over to Allura, sitting on the arm of her chair to ask her what she was reading. With one finger holding her spot she angled the spine of the book toward him.

Wish I Was Here,

he read,

by Reon Psyning.

"Oh," he said, the name tugging at his memory. "That's the philosopher you quoted at me in the Aia, isn't it?"

"Yes," she said. "That was always one of my favorite quotes. I suppose Altea is heavy on my mind, these last few days." She placed the book on her lap reverently, eyes on the rest of their friends where they were laughing and talking, their bodies stark and familiar against the backdrop of stars. "He was particularly torn, among philosophers, on the concept of destiny," she explained. "Can we decide our own fate, or is our fate preordained? Can we write our own stories, or are we destined to live and die as pieces of a moving puzzle that none of us can ever see in full? 'Can I speak for the stars? Or must I silently become them, and part evermore with my history?' "

"Hmm." Lance hummed and stretched and stood again, his hands resting interlocked behind his head. "You know, I'm starting to think it might be a little of both," he said with a wink, "just judging from the week I've had. What do you think, Lu?"

"I think you are right," Allura said, one hand still resting on the book like it held some secret that she fully planned to unlock. "But today?" she whispered. "Today, I believe we have spoken."

"Hey Lance? Buddy? Best friend of mine? Come settle this argument, would you?"

Across the room, Hunk was beckoning him and really laying it on thick, to which Keith and Shiro and Krolia were all reacting with pronounced exasperation while Pidge made a face at them and tried to goad Kuron into joining her via sharp elbow jabs to the ribs. Romelle and Coran were standing together in the background and laughing, and Coran had his comm out and aloft, ready to film the fallout when Lance dropped his tie breaking opinion into the conversation.

Allura giggled behind one hand at the scene. "It seems you are needed."

"Yep," Lance said, "it seems that I am," and a familiar warmth settled on him in the wake of her words as he crossed toward the black, starry windows. It was a heavy feeling, long and slow like it had traveled thousands of miles to get to him, yet impossible to see or grasp except where it was touching him, changing him, changing everything around him and giving it new life, coming to rest on his shoulders without any pressure at all, weightless and welcome and overwhelmingly warm.

If anyone ever asked him to name this feeling…

He would probably have to call it sunshine.

. . * . .

End Notes:

Re: Krolia:

I was SO unsatisfied and hurt by the way they handled Krolia's return. As someone who has actually gone through parental abandonment just like Keith, the handling of her reintegration into Keith's life was unrealistic, ridiculous, disrespectful to people on Keith's side of the situation, and borderline harmful for people in Keith's situation who are still CHILDREN. I hated it, and this is my take on how it should've gone down. Krolia needs to earn her place in her child's life again, regardless of the reason why she left, and Keith shouldn't be shamed into immediately accepting her by the narrative. Ugh. It's just gross. Give him time. He's freaking human. Actually SHOW them reconciling. To you writers out there, please don't ever do this when you're writing. It's so hurtful.

Re: Kuron:

If I'm mad about how they handled Krolia, I'm downright disgusted by the way they handled Kuron. Like killing him without a second thought was just normal and the right thing to do. Seriously, they present Voltron as this gritty coming of age sci-fi epic and try to tell us its a mature story that we need to take seriously, and it's backed up with the art style and the music and the acting. But then the story itself is given the 80's anime-as-toy-commercial treatment. Ugh. I could rant for days about the emotional blindness of the canon story. They made Kuron sympathetic, made it genuinely impossible to tell if he was evil or not, and then had the heroes kill him with no remorse, refer to him as a Thing, etc... it's fucking gross, full stop. That's NOT science fiction. Isaac Asimov is rolling over in his grave. Get fucked, showrunners. Even if this show ended with a klance wedding I'd still hate it till my dying breaths just over the Kuron storyline alone.

Re: Lance's place on the team:

Mainly I left this story open-ended on that front, because I headcanon that after Shiro comes back Lance is left lionless for a short while. (I think this is really important to his arc). And then... well, Allura's arc finally takes off and she pursues her badass alchemist master queenhood because she is destined for places way higher than flying a lion, and Lance goes back to Blue because he was really kinda the blue paladin all along. Except now its more like his CHOICE, which is just so important to me. The concept of choice and agency has always been key to my interpretation of this story and just.. Yeah.

Random thoughts:

Hey, Shiro gets a twin brother and Kuron gets to be alive! Cool, right?! Kuron is gay too obviously and there's probably gonna be some major angst over Adam (who is alive and a war hero in my world) when they all get back to Earth... but it's okay because its the interesting kind of angst and not the 'death for shock value' kind, and Kuron can still have a happy ending and marry some hot rebel because I said so. Also headcanon that Kuron eventually is able to pilot Black again in a moment of need, following that whole choice theme.

Also, I'm firmly in camp 'the black bayard becomes Shiro's new prosthetic arm' - acting as symbolism for his final freedom from the Galra's chokehold on him and his agency and his life. How beautiful is that? I'm so glad that's canon. :)

If I had time I'd rewrite all of the end of vld lmao, and I would've toned down the klance here in this part of the story, making it more about Keith wanting a home than Keith wanting a home-with-Lance and it would've focused a lot more on Krolia, and then the klance would've culminated closer to the end of the show lol. But yeah. This is my general interpretation for how the Black Paladin Lance arc should've gone down! I think it would have made him one of the best characters ever written... and I also believe Shiro is the one true Black Paladin. It would've been so powerful seeing him come back to it after Keith and Lance both filled in for him. It would've been so powerful to see the juxtaposition of Keith's leadership vs Lance's, and how they were both needed for different reasons. It would've been so powerful for there to be actual, solid, contextual depth to the lion switches that lined up thematically with the story and drove character growth from the beginning to the end.

It would've been great to see this stuff followed through on. But, sadly, sometimes you gotta push up your sleeves and do it yourself because other people are lazy, inept cowards. (Drops mic at LM and JDS's feet and puts sunglasses on and stage dives backwards into the crowd and hits head on the concrete and has to be taken to space hospital)

Also eyyy I finally made a twitter. Come follow me at speak_swords!

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