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Red is born of fire and ash, made up of sharp lines and smooth sheets of metal and magic meant to withstand the flames of a thousand suns.
In truth, with a physical container of machinery and wires, she has no literal heart, but the core of her being nonetheless burned from the very start with impatience and anger, a desire for speed and justice and completion.
She did not understand, of course, that the cold emptiness that nicked the edges of her fire when she was first created was the lack of her paladin, the inevitable need to have what was hers by her side. She only knew instinct, and loneliness, and the blurry edges of the bonds between her and her siblings, who were all built of the same materials as her and yet inherently different at their centers— Green passion and intuition, Yellow warmth and love, Black patience and peace, Blue loyalty and devotion.
Black had always spoken to them all of the importance of waiting, when she and her siblings had first began to clamor for the beings that would fill the empty spaces in their, albeit metaphorical, hearts. Of course, she had always felt it was easy for Black to say that— Their creator had been their paladin. They had never known the pain of this missing bond, the blank spaces that clearly spoke to something lacking where things should be whole.
And when those first years had passed, and her siblings’ paladins had all come to them, Red had willed herself to be patient, to be content in her hangar as her siblings took to the stars at last.
Red is not a naturally a patient creature in the slightest, though this was the one time in her life where she had endeavored herself to wait.
…She does not know if she regrets that or not, if, had she set out on her own, she might have found her paladin sooner.
Mortal lives are so fleeting at the best of times, and her paladin had died so young.
If nothing else, she does not regret what time she’d had with her first paladin. Even the pain of losing him was a worthy cost for the joys she had known with her paladin, and as a part of Voltron with her siblings and their own paladins.
She learned from the past, at least. Not to hesitate in the face of her paladin’s danger, or risk losing her new one like she had her first.
Her first paladin had held a heart of flames, quick to frustration and impulsive and fearless and all the things Red was herself. He had been a wanderer, a pirate, a bandit, a criminal, a paladin, with his concept of home fleeting and nonexistent in his childhood, and then bright and cherished in his time with Voltron. He had been but a child even then, really, barely an adult for more than a few years before the war crawled into their lives, dirtying them all with its filth and dragging them down to Zarkon’s level, forcing them to play his game in order to stay alive.
Back then, the idea of defeat had seemed a laughable concept, a mockery on the strength and heart of Voltron. Anger at Zarkon, at what he had done and what he had created, had clouded her judgment, as it had their all’s. The descent into guerilla warfare, into bloody underhanded tactics on their part in return for the enemy’s, had barely registered to her. The normalcy of it to her paladin, who had known some fight or another his entire life, had hidden their fall from grace, from surety of winning, from her.
But fall they did, and lose they had, and in the end, she had lost him as well, a child soldier at heart who had never known peace no matter how much he had fought for it.
She had recognized what had happened the minute she felt the affront to the bond, the searing pain that ripped along her core and tore his conscious from her, a kind of violation that left gaping wounds in her heart and shivers of disgustfuryhorror along the sparking wires and interconnected threads that held her physical form together.
His life had been snuffed out so easily, and she had been able to do nothing, thousands upon thousands of miles away from him in the planet of lava and crumbling rock he had asked her to hide in.
Ten thousand years she’d had to mourn, to revel in her disbelief and fury over what she knew, intuitively, had happened to her paladin, to all the paladins, and yet what she refused to accept.
Red would like to pretend that she stayed strong in that time, that her resolve and her heart had remained the same— A strong fire that could burn low and simmer patiently until her time came again, but she crumbled in the emptiness, all those years alone and frozen creeping up on her, and when she had felt the first sparks of life and potential along the fragile, broken pieces of the bond, she had left without question, blindly seeking it out in a hopeful half-belief that somehow, somehow her beloved paladin was still alive.
(Later, of course, she would come to realize what she had felt was her new paladin coming into existence, but at the time she had… hoped.)
She never made it to the source of that small feeling, regardless. Instead, as she searched aimlessly, the Galra found her, and she discovered that a weapon such as herself without its paladin is not much of a weapon at all, against the might Zarkon had gathered in those ten thousand years.
Those years in Galran confinement, trapped upon ships with only her particle barrier to keep them from taking her apart or trying to pilot her, those felt longer than the aching void of time waiting for her paladin to return to her, desperately fighting the feeling that, yes, what she felt was true, that he was gone and he was not coming back, that she would remain there for eternity and never see him or her siblings again.
Feeling the bond awaken between her siblings had been… strange. After so long in dormant sleep, to feel Blue’s rippling echoes along the strings that bound her heart to her sibling’s, to know that her sister had a paladin again, somehow, had felt more like an idle daydream then a reality. Even as she had felt Yellow’s grounding presence and Green’s flighty spirit return, she had not yet dared to hope.
Hope had gotten her nothing but sorrow and regrets, in those ten thousand years.
And yet… Her siblings had come for her, and they brought her another child masquerading as a warrior to pilot her, a boy with black hair and fiery eyes too much like her original paladin’s for her to bear.
Red had refused him at first, unable to believe, unable to accept, that her siblings would allow this, would relinquish their waiting for their true paladins in favor of these… replacements.
How could they so easily move on, so calmly accept their duties, when she still mourned?
She already had a paladin, and she did not want another, lesser one. Nothing could fill that void, is what the told herself, even as she felt the boy’s hands touch her particle barrier, had felt the familiar flame of her paladin’s soul burning in him.
It was nothing more than a cruel mockery, surely— A new face and a new name daring to impersonate the quintessence of her beloved paladin.
Until the boy had… protected her, for some reason, opening the airlock to keep intruders away as if a few Galran drones were any danger to her, or to someone who claimed themselves worthy of being her pilot.
…What a stupid boy, really, an impulsive, reckless child, who had no concept of forethought or planning.
Too much like her first paladin, too much like herself.
When the boy had fallen, though, pulled out of the airlock and into the darkness of space as a consequence of his own foolish idea, she had gone without thought, dissolving her particle barrier of her own accord for the first time since the Galra had captured her and snatching the idiotic child from his flailing doom.
She had felt the creeping spaces of fire and hope along the edges of the bond, and she had relented, accepted the inevitable, just as her siblings had.
Her original paladin was gone, but this child somehow burned with the same bright light as his predecessor had. It was impossible, inexplicable, and yet true, and she would not lose a second pilot to this war, or to Zarkon. She would not idle again under some guise of propriety or patience and allow another one of her own to die.
That, at least, was, is, a promise she has determined she will keep.
Keith is… an interesting child. She supposes by mortal aging standards he technically hovers somewhere between late adolescence and proper adulthood, just as her former paladin had, but to her they are, or… were, children. Mortal’s lives are so short, after all— Even those that they consider true adults feel young to her, comparatively.
Regardless, her second paladin is a fascinating creature. She had known, even before he had, of the Galran blood in his veins, though it had given her significantly less pause than it had for himself. Her former paladin had been of mixed blood too, albeit not Galran, and it had seemed fitting to her that Keith would as well, the species of that heritage be damned. Zarkon is a blight upon the universe, but she, even in her boldness, is not so rash as to hold him as the definition of his species. She still remembers Blue’s former paladin, if nothing else, and never had there been a Galra more honest or forgiving.
It is no wonder, really, that her former paladin’s heart had beat so strongly for said Galran. Red’s connection with Blue has always been one of closeness, of push and pull, and that draw to one another had always been reflected in their paladins.
Similarly, she had not been surprised when Keith had come to sit at her paws, face flushed and the fire of his quintessence flickering in a rush of emotion, in the aftermath of the attack on the castle that had left Blue’s new paladin injured. Keith was too much like his predecessor for his own good, as was Blue’s paladin, and that led to history repeating itself, slowly but surely.
What she will not allow, however, is for her former paladin’s fate to befall this child as well, and as such from the moment she accepts Keith as her paladin, she makes it a point to protect him the way she could not protect what was once also hers, many mortal lifetimes ago.
He does not make it easy— He is a foolish child of flame, quick to anger and vengeance, impulsive to his last breath and brash and stubborn in the face of authority or rules put in place for his own protection. All things that make him a fitting paladin for her, but also traits that could very easily get him killed. He is a brave warrior, a child soldier whose experience fighting compared to his teammates, excepting the black paladin, is more than visible, but he is not indomitable. She was blind to believe that about her previous paladin, and she has endeavored not to make that mistake again.
Still, she has managed to keep him alive thus far, if, admittedly, not in perfect health at all times thanks to his brash heroism.
…Which is part of what makes this so hard to accept.
Red knows, logically, of what must happen, in order to continue to form Voltron, to protect the universe. Has known, even before her paladin did, in the moments after that final fight with Zarkon, when she and her siblings had stumbled back into their hangar and she had felt Black’s anguish crying out, but that does not make it easy to accept.
Once again, the black paladin is gone. Not deserted this time, as his predecessor had, but simply… vanished.
(Black has never known the pain of a missing paladin before, their bond with Zarkon tainted but still present until they broke it of their own free will, and Red does not know if that makes her pity her sibling or not. If nothing else, she endeavors to ignore the curling, bitter pieces inside the worst parts of her she would rather not exist that feel some sick sort of satisfaction at knowing Black now knows the pain she and the others have had to live with all these years.)
It breaks her paladin, in a way. He held a closeness, a kind of fostered familial kinship, with the new black paladin in a way his predecessor never did with Zarkon. Keith is distinctly closer to the black paladin than any of the others, and this is one thing where Red finds herself at a loss.
This is new, uncharted territory. Zarkon did not disappear, he betrayed. Her former paladin had not grieved or shut down in this way, he had burned up in righteous anger for the pain Zarkon had inflicted on others, not the least of those his fellow paladins.
And yet, she knows what to expect, what will come of this change if they are to continue to form Voltron, because she knows of what the black paladin had told Keith. She knows everything when it comes to Keith.
Red does not want it, loathes the very suggestion of what is inevitable down to her core, and her flames burns bright and furious when Keith, her foolish, beloved Keith, tells the other paladins and the Alteans of what the black paladin had asked of him, and when the Altean princess agrees without question.
Her paladin is a capable, courageous child, with a heart of simmering ash and righteousness, but this is not right. Fire is a signal, a beacon in the dark when all hope is lost, a guide in the night for lonely souls, and that is potential for a fine healer, friend, leader, but fire is also an attack, it rages and steals oxygen from the area around it and it burns, unheeding of whether it scorches friend or foe as it searches to spread its flame.
The fire that is Keith flickers with the makings of a strong and resolute head, but she fears that in the process of reaching that he may burn others terribly, or worse, himself.
Fire, for all its potential, cannot be tamed. It can only be contained and withheld, at best. This she knows, better than any man or creature in this universe.
Worst of all, if she allows this, if she relinquishes her Keith to Black’s care, she can no longer truly protect him.
And while her sibling is a more than adequate guard, they are lost, mourning, confused. They are reeling from the disappearance of their paladin, and, even now, they still have not fully comprehended what it means to lose a paladin permanently, to feel their soul ripped away from your own— They do not, cannot, understand the vitality of protecting Keith, of ensuring that the loss of a paladin is never experienced again.
Relinquishing Keith, giving him over to Black, even temporarily, may be his death.
…But, if she does not, if she hoards her paladin close to her chest and demands someone else take the place in Black’s cockpit, they may all find themselves at death’s doorstep.
Hesitancy in the face of the loss of a paladin cost them all everything ten thousand years ago. Continuing to form Voltron is not a debate, even Red knows this. To fight this war they must make certain sacrifices in the name of increasing their overall chances of survival.
The frustrating thing is, she thinks, is that it does not have to be this way, but circumstance and stubbornness bind them all. The Altean Princess holds the clear potential to pilot Black, to pilot any lion in the face of an emergency, just as her father had before her, but she has not yet learned this skill, has yet to come into her own, and Black is too prideful and temperamental, much like Red herself, for so inexperienced a pilot to learn their ways on such short notice. Similarly, there is great promise in the blue paladin, if by the bonds his predecessor held with Black and with Zarkon if nothing else, but her sibling refuses such a notion even being voiced to their paladins, the taste of Blue paladin quintessence forever bitter to them for the remnants of memories of Zarkon it brings.
If they must have a new paladin, even a temporary one, they will only accept that which their own has chosen as a suitable replacement.
Red can respect the notion, but that does not mean she agrees with it.
…She is not ready, yet, to watch another paladin die. She is not entirely sure she ever will be, the loss of her former paladin still an open wound that her soul aches for.
What if Black cannot protect her Keith? What if she cannot adequately protect the new pilot thrust upon her in her blinding worry for her actual paladin.
Yet still, when Keith comes to her, hesitation and nerves and undeniable fear at what must be done crawling across his skin and over the bond, she relents, cannot bear to be another obstacle in her paladin’s already near impossible course.
She accepts what must be done, though she hates it, and she watches reluctantly as her darling Keith goes to Black with heavy footsteps, and as her sister equally reluctantly accepts the Altean princess as a pilot.
This cannot be easy for Blue, either, she knows. While her versatile, gentle nature may be suited to an inexperienced pilot, her sister has lost a paladin too, has tasted the wrenching pain of the broken bond, and to accept the Altean princess, whose mistrust of the Galra during the war had eventually extended even to her sister’s own former paladin, is no doubt another bitter blow to the festering wound of her hurt.
But even through all that, her sister takes to this new arrangement with undeniable grace and dignity, and when the Blue paladin comes to Red, shaky and unsure, she wills herself to do the same.
It is not as if she has never allowed Blue quintessence to share in her bond before. During the war, when missions went wrong and her paladin was injured, there had been no time to consider who piloted her, so long as it got her precious paladin back to a place with medical attention. They had all flown her, once, when it was necessary— Blue, green, yellow, black, even Alfor, in his role as rotating substitute for a downed paladin.
This… This is different, though. This is not one quick flight to the castle or one battle with another at her helm while her paladin is healed. This is, at the very least, a semi-permanent arrangement. She will have to share her bond with this paladin for weeks, potentially months or years, an indefinable amount of time until the black paladin is found.
And that… That leaves her unsure, to say the least.
She does not know what she expects when the blue paladin finally enters her cockpit, carefully seating himself in the pilot’s seat and untangling the strings of his semi-severed bond with Blue, offering them to her. She has known this presence before, has known sweetness and devotion from gentle hands that guided her controls on a few rare occasions and through the strings of the bond by the love her former paladin had held for his blue counterpart.
That said, through that she has also known spitfire energy and competitiveness, unending loyalty that makes for an impressive soldier, and this is what she reaches for, the pieces of Blue that she knows are most like her own flames, similar enough to find some common ground. She has seen this child through Keith’s eyes, knows that in his loud taunts and posturing glares the same energy must be there, surely.
Instead, she finds only closed walls and emptiness, bleak and monochrome no matter where she searches, and Red is reminded once again that the past is not always quite like the present.
The blue paladin is… Off. Surprisingly blank, easy and accepting of her fire in a way that speaks to a competent pilot for her, but not returning it in a way that makes him an acceptable paladin.
She pushes him as gently as she can muster, more used to sharp thoughts and demands when communicating with her paladins, but knowing that this may work out better with a paladin more used to her sister’s form of communication, and is met with only vague confusion. The fire, however dim or small beneath the waves of Blue, that she searches for cannot be found, and yet, in searching for it, she is not drowned in blue, in calmness and intuition and blinding faith, as she would expect. She only finds the boy’s consciousness parting quietly for her, not completely shut off, yet guarded enough to deny her what she seeks.
There is nothing here, in what he offers her. He is… grey, empty, and Red is not sure if this is simply what he is, or a mental map of his own making, exhibiting a surprising amount of control over the workings and access of the bond.
Either way, it is one part fascinating, one part terrifying, and she does not know what to make of it.
Again, she pushes him, deliberate and strong, demanding his fire, or at the very least, his ocean.
You do not want me. The boy rings back at her with shocking clarity, a much more subtle, controlled, and metaphorically verbal form of communication than she is used to, when compared to the darting, unfiltered thoughts of Keith. I’m just making this easier for you.
No, she thinks, she does not want him, any more than he wants her. She wants Keith, just as this child wants Blue, but that does not mean there is something inherently wrong with him, and she refuses to have a pilot who will not allow her honesty in their bond. If she must accept this arrangement, it will at the very least be on her terms.
She shoves firmly at the bond, again and again, until the boy relents ever so slightly, echoes of stop it just stop it this is easier trickling through with the first grasps of the ocean of blue, of love and faith and loyalty. More than anything, though, she tastes droplets of sorrow, of insecurity and grief and hopelessness, and she balks at them.
It is not that she is unfamiliar with these, she has known them in her paladins, has felt them in herself, but they are always prefaced and overwhelmed by anger, by a need to do something to stop the reoccurrence of these emotions, and in this boy she feels none of that.
She searches, but she finds no anger.
Only numbed acceptance.
Where is your fire? She asks again, prodding, because everyone has fire, this she knows with certainty, regardless of whether it burns as strong or as bright as her own or her paladin’s, and the child gives her what she approximates is the mental equivalent of a shrug.
That is not an answer, she tells him firmly, and the first, ever-so-satisfying licks of irritation crawl up the fragile bond.
I don’t have any. I’m not Keith.
She can’t help but be confused by that. Of course this boy is not Keith— His skin is darker and his hair is lighter, his mind is more analytically structured, and he does not glow with the same bright crackles of energy that her first paladin did, as Keith does.
What little of this paladin, that she can grasp, tastes more like what she knew of the former blue paladin, who was honest and obnoxiously self-sacrificing and an incredibly capable paladin, just not Red’s.
She does her best to convey this to the boy, and he pushes back with one part confusion and one part further irritation, the emotional, wordless style she prefers for communication clearly new and jarring to him. Beyond these trickles of his current feelings, and the barest grasps of the ocean of his quintessence, he still holds the wall between them, and she finds herself shoving back at it with her own distinct frustration.
Not being Keith does not preclude you from having your own fire, she communicates to him as best she can, carefully trying to spell out the words rather than just burn the boy with her thoughts. He offers her a refusal again, and she loses the last of her patience, shoving against the child’s wall firmly and pushing past the tendrils of oceans that snake past.
Everyone has fire, she tells him.
Not me.
I have seen your anger through my paladin’s eyes, you have fire.
Is that what fire is?
She offers something of a fleeting affirmative, continuing to search along the delicate stretches of the bond, and the child, perhaps recognizing the futility of his withdrawal, relents, still not offering his mind to her, but at least allowing her fairly unfettered entry. Red combs through it, catching faint waves of sorrowfrustrationworry and lovedacceptancesacrifice, but the anger, the passion and fire, still elude her.
She knows its taste perfectly, mixes of bitterness and vengeance and passionate justice, the flames of half-breed children abandoned and left to fend for themselves, alive at the smell of iron and steel, desperate to cling to what little they can claim for themselves. This is what she seeks, chasing the tendril strands of obsession and jealousy and irritation she picks up on in search for her prize, and yet she keeps coming up blank.
Stop hiding from me, she scolds him, and he pushes back with annoyance.
I’m not! I don’t know what you’re looking for!
She growls, shoving the memories of the feelings she seeks, the ones that she found in Keith and her first paladin, onto the boy, and he shudders under the weight of them. Why he is so stalwart yet passive in his mind confuses her to no end— She has seen this child through Keith’s eyes, has witnessed the burning passion and bright soul that so draws her paladin to him, and she shows that to the boy, asking him for that flame she has caught glimpses of second-hand.
He unfurls hesitantly, her memories of Keith catching his attention, and she sighs out into the space between their shared consciousness. Of course this would be what gets the child’s focus, why wouldn’t it be? The former blue paladin had loved her first paladin as much as he had her, and it is not surprising in the least that this one would find Keith as intriguing as Keith did him.
The boy hesitates, his mind flickering over her memories of Keith, half unsure, half disbelieving, and she tries again, asking for his fire in her feelings of Keith, of his bravery and bullheadedness and her desire to protect him at all costs, her fears and her doubts and how they are overtaken primarily by her desire to fight for him, to keep him safe from what she knows can happen.
He answers with uncertain emotion, finally beginning to speak to her in her language of crackling flickers of information and searing images that burn away fast. He offers her his worry, his doubts, the slow trickles of inadequacy and nervousness she grasped in the beginning in wavy lines solidifying into clear thoughts, distinct feelings and personality traits.
Do you really have no fire? No one you will protect, that your heart burns for? She asks at length, endeavoring to be patient just one more time in her infinitely long life, despite swearing it off, for the sake of teaching this boy to do something he is capable of, and for the sake of ensuring she can continue to protect Keith through this child, if he will let her.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the boy’s flickering streams of ocean part, and she catches the first flickers of fire, dancing along the bond and blending into her own, faint and quiet compared to the roaring inferno of fury and love and aimless grace that is Keith, but present nonetheless. The anger there is sparking and light, little and petty and formed of long-held wounds and largely ignored by the boy, a marked difference to her Keith, and to her original paladin, who both rode on bonfires of righteous fury and long-held bitterness for past slights inflicted on them as children, when they could not fight back. Instead, the boy’s flame burns softly, the devotion and loyalty she would expect of one of Blue’s translating into passion and protection, the fire of instinct and fight-or-flight responses in the face of danger, most predominantly to others, accompanied by faint wisps of her Keith, the other paladins, the Altean princess and her advisor, and a multitude of humans with the child’s tan skin and dark hair and sparse patches of freckles.
The fire burns, and she catches it all within her own, feeling the boy’s ocean settle around it, taking in the hopes and wonders and joys, the grief for things long left behind on Earth that cannot be returned to or brought back, the fears of inadequacy and failure and loss, the childhood dreams of stars and companionship and adventure, the flickering, hesitant affection for her Keith, unsure and unsteady, but undeniable.
And beneath it all, there are the flames of devotion and protectiveness and all the things Red knows in her core as a being of instinct and quintessence, but cannot hope to put into words, burning for Voltron, for the yellow paladin and his childhood-remembered grin, for girls turned women with long legs and boney shoulders and crooked teeth, for teenagers of long-earned friendships with bright minds and messy hair, for a woman with a loud, sunny voice and wide hips, for a ghost of a memory with eyes that glimmer like the child’s within her cockpit.
The same fire of lovehopefearterror that burns for her whenever she feels the coils of Keith along the bond she shares with him, her miraculous, impossible Keith, the answer to her prayers and the return of the heart she thought she lost ten thousand years ago, dark hair like a child warrior long gone and a fierce spirit she would recognize in any form.
Just like she would recognize the protective, bright, sea-spray sweet love of the blue paladin anywhere.
Yes, she thinks, as she tastes the light fire of the boy in her cockpit, perhaps this will work after all.
The boy is not Keith, but he will be… is acceptable, for the time being.
Lance. The boy offers her softly over the bond, and she accepts the admission carefully, recognizing the first true piece of information he has distinctly volunteered to her.
Lance.
Yes.
Lance will do nicely.