Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Shiro found himself on the detainment level for perhaps the third or fourth time since the Castle of Lions left Arus.  It was a bad habit, and he knew it, but if he was up and nothing else was happening, sometimes he’d find his feet wandering down towards the cryopods to check on their prisoner.

Well, perhaps ‘detainee’ was a better word.  ‘Prisoner’ implied some sort of sentence to be served, after all, while they were planning to hold Sendak...well, until they could figure out what to do with him.  The Galra had collapsed after the fight for the bridge, and Shiro and Allura had carted him down to the detainment level.  He’d been in cryostasis ever since, too dangerous to release on a planet, too competent to defrost for questioning--the last time he’d been loose in the Castle, he and his compatriot had nearly taken off with it and Voltron, and Shiro didn’t like thinking about a possible repeat of the incident.  He didn’t like thinking about Sendak , period.  But he kept finding himself in front of the cryopods anyway.

“Shiro?”

He jumped at the sound of his name and spun towards the door--but, of course, it was only Coran.  The Altean was just inside the door, watching Shiro with odd intensity.

“...Coran,” Shiro said slowly, nodding his head in greeting.

“What are you doing down here?” Coran asked, walking over to join Shiro in front of the pod.

 Shiro rubbed the back of his neck.  “I...I don’t really know,” he said.

 Coran settled his hands on his hips and turned his gaze to the pod.  “I find myself down here a lot, too,” he said.  “If Sendak is any indicator, the Galra as a species have changed a great deal.  Back in our day, none of them looked anything like this.”

 Shiro hummed in acknowledgement.  “I wish there was some way we could question him, find out what he knows without worrying about him lying to us.  He’s a commander, he has to know something about…”

 "About?”  Coran raised an eyebrow at him.  Shiro felt his cheeks warm, and he looked away.

 “About anything,” he said, feeling lame.  “Troop locations.  Bases.  What Zarkon wants with Voltron.”   What happened to me while I was their prisoner , he wanted to add.  Sendak knew something , that was for damn sure.

 Coran’s brow furrowed slightly.  Then he said, “Well...we probably can’t question him without risking him misleading us, but we might have a way to get information from him regardless.”

 “...Then we should use it,” Shiro said.  “If Sendak has information we can use to our advantage, we need to get it.”

 The Altean hesitated.  “Well, here’s the thing, Shiro.  This technology--it was only ever used to preserve the memories of willing participants, not to interrogate prisoners.  I don’t even know if it will work on a Galra, much less an unwilling one.”

 Shiro sighed and took a moment to take stock of the situation, reevaluate the parameters and his stance on the matter.  Coran’s offer of technology that could extract memories--thus negating any possibility of Sendak lying to them--was tempting, but it also might not work or could malfunction horribly if it wasn’t compatible.  At best, it simply wouldn’t work, and they’d have to try something else.  At worst?  If it worked directly with the brain it could kill Sendak--destroying any of his information--or scramble him, or break his mind, both of which would have essentially the same effect--and they would make Shiro feel guilty.  He could live with killing Sendak, but the idea of damaging another person irreparably in pursuit of information--

 He shuddered, scrubbed his flesh-and-blood hand over the elbow of his prosthetic.  No.  Not a chance.  He would not become the people who had hurt him.  But he had to protect the other Paladins, too.  Whoever took his arm wouldn’t hesitate to do the same--or worse--to them.

 “Could we run a test to check without hurting him if it isn’t compatible with Galra?” Shiro asked.

 “We could, certainly,” Coran said.  

 “Then we should do it.”

 “Alright.  You go retrieve the rest of the Paladins, I’ll run a preliminary analysis and get the equipment set up.”

 Shiro nodded and headed for the elevator to the main ‘residential’ floors.  He had no idea where Pidge might be--she’d taken to exploring some of the unused floors lately, when she wasn’t tinkering or poking at the crystal Sendak and his partner-in-crime plugged into the Castle.  Most of the time Lance and Hunk went with her, so the three of them could be virtually anywhere in the Castle.  Keith, on the other hand?  Keith was reliable.  He made routines and settled into them, and at this time of day he was probably holed up in his room.  He’d done that a lot at the Garrison, too--when he wasn’t flying sims or in class or the cafeteria, he was in his dorm room, doing...something.  What ‘something’ was varied from week to week.

 Today, ‘something’ was knife maintenance.  Keith was seated cross-legged on the floor, knife in one hand and some sort of alien sharpening tool in the other, shaggy dark head bowed as he ran the tool from hilt to tip.  He glanced up as Shiro opened the door, then returned his attention to the blade in his hands.

 “Hey, Shiro,” he said.  

 “Keith,” Shiro said, leaning against the doorframe.  “We’re going to get information from Sendak.  Can you help me find the others?”

 Keith lifted his head and set the sharpener aside to brush his overlong bangs out of his eyes.  Then he shrugged, wiped the blade on his pants, and tucked it back into its sheath.

 “Lance and Hunk headed for the elevators like an hour ago,” he said, standing.  “I think they were planning to go exploring.”  Another shrug.  “Dunno where Pidge is.”

 “Thanks.  I’ll get Lance and Hunk, you see if you can find Pidge.”  Shiro hesitated, then added, “She’s probably down in her hangar again.”

 Keith hummed, acknowledging him, and slipped past Shiro into the hall.  Shiro waited just long enough to confirm he was headed for the hangars and walked back to the elevator.  If he’d kept track of their recent explorations, Lance, Hunk, and Pidge had already checked out most of the floors above them--between the bridge and the residential floors--so the two of them were a floor or two down if Shiro had to hazard a guess.

 The boys were easier to find than he expected--he took the elevator down two floors and the doors opened just in time for him to catch Lance’s distinctive, jubilant whooping somewhere else on the floor.  Even if he was the loudest of the Paladins, Lance had to be close to be that loud.  Shiro waited for the next whoop to get a sense of Lance’s location and, when it came, hustled down the right-hand corridor.  He made three more turns--this level twisted and flowed like a waterway, for some inexplicable alien reason--and then rounded a corner and bumped into Hunk.  The Yellow Paladin lurched forward with a squeak, then spun around.  His whole face lit up.

 “Shiro!”

 “Aw, man ,” Lance said, from the other side of Hunk, and Shiro peered over his shoulder.  A door, half-hidden as a wall panel, was open, and Lance’s hands were full of bright patchwork cloth.

 “...Are those blankets?” Shiro asked.

 “Yeah,” Hunk said.  “They had the linen closet hidden--it’s pretty cool, right?”

 “We were planning a surprise blanket fort in the common room,” Lance said.  He pouted and began folding the blanket he’d grabbed.

 “I won’t tell the others if you don’t want me to,” Shiro assured him.  “But that’s going to have to wait--Coran thinks we might have a way to question Sendak, and he needs us on the detainment level.”

 Lance and Hunk shared a look , one weighted heavily with meaning Shiro couldn’t quite grasp.  He got the gist of it, though--Lance had to be uncertain about dealing with Sendak again, after the Galra almost killed him, and Shiro couldn’t blame him for it.  Not while he remembered what it was like to have the massive claws of Sendak’s cybernetic clamped around his chest.

 He’d enjoyed watching Pidge take it to pieces to figure out how it worked a little too much, if he was going to be honest.

 He stepped in and grabbed the other end of the blanket, helping Lance fold it up neatly again, and then let them lead him back to the elevator.  Hunk and Lance obviously knew this floor better than Shiro did, which made sense if they’d been roaming it for the last hour or so.  Lance had an excellent sense of direction--he’d proved as much on the Balmera a week before, and he proved it again navigating back to the elevators.

 Keith was waiting for them just outside the doors on the containment level, lounging against the wall with a sour look on his face.

 “Where’s Pidge?” Shiro asked.

 “She locked herself in Green’s hangar.  Says she’s too busy to come out,” Keith replied.

 Shiro sighed.  “I’ll ask Coran to call her down.”

 “What, she wasn’t interested in interrogating Sendak?” Lance asked.

 Keith shrugged.

 “She might be playing with that crystal again,” Hunk said.  “Last time we worked on it she thought we were pretty close to a breakthrough.”

 That sounded promising.  “If this doesn’t pan out, we’ll have to ask her about it,” Shiro said.  Then he stepped past Keith and into the main room of the detainment level.

 Coran was leaning on a clear tube full of some sort of fluid he’d set up beside the cryopod and tossing a palm-sized disk back and forth between his hands.  He glanced up as they entered the room and tucked the disk into a pocket in his jacket.

 “There you all are!  I was wondering when you’d--wait, where’s Pidge?”

 “In Green’s hangar,” Shiro said.  “Keith couldn’t get her out.”

 Coran sighed.  “I’ll see if I can get her on the comms.”  He pressed his hand flat against a panel on the wall, which lit blue under his touch.  “Pidge?”  His voice echoed back from hidden speakers somewhere in the walls, half a second behind and reverberating oddly.  “Please come down to the detainment area.”

 Pidge took her sweet time getting down to join them, it seemed, because she came slouching into the room almost fifteen minutes later looking sullen and vaguely rebellious.  Then her eyes lit on the tube, and her whole expression brightened.

 “What’s that ?” she asked, head tilting to study the equipment like a curious bird.

 “This,” Coran said, “is a Biologically-Acquired Data Containment System--for downloading and storing a person’s memories in an accessible and easily-interpreted fashion.”

 Pidge’s eyes flickered towards the cryopod.  “And we’re going to use it on him ?”

 “Well, we were--but there’s a problem we need to address first,” Coran said.

 Shiro resisted a groan of frustration.  “He isn’t compatible with it, is he.”

 “No, no, his brainwave functions are similar enough to process accurately, but this technology can be a bit...particular.  To get an accurate map of his neurology, we need a clear scan, and recent head injuries have caused the extraction process to, well, go awry before, so when I remembered you all had at least two fights with him before he was captured I ran a scan.  I’m afraid he’s rather concussed, and being in cryostasis means he hasn’t been given an opportunity to recover from it.”

 “...Alright.  So what are our options?”

 “Well, we could always take him out and interrogate him the old-fashioned way.  There are secure cells on this level we could put him in, and after how long he’s been in that cryopod he won’t be lucid enough to hold out long.”  Coran paused, brows furrowing thoughtfully.  “Or we could transfer him to the cryopods in the med bay and program them to go just long enough to fix the concussion, and use the extractor on him up there.”

 “Why couldn’t we just do that down here?” Lance asked.

 “Because these pods are just for containment, not healing injuries,” Coran replied.

 “...Oh,” Lance said.

 Shiro exhaled.  “We’ll make the decision as a team.  What do you all think?”

 “I say we use the extractor,” Lance declared.  “No way should we give that guy another chance to come after us.”

 “For once, I agree with Lance,” Keith said, crossing his arms.  He glowered at the cryopod, upper lip curled.

 “Thanks, buddy,” Lance grumbled.

 “No problem,” Keith muttered back.

 Shiro only just kept from rolling his eyes.  “Hunk?  Pidge?”

 “...I dunno, man, it seems really creepy to just go digging around in someone’s head like that,” Hunk said.  His big shoulders hunched uncertainly--especially under the look of betrayal Lance shot him.  Shiro offered him a reassuring smile.

 Pidge eyed the cryopod.  “What are the chances of him getting loose if we transfer him upstairs versus leaving him in a cell down here?”

 Coran stroked his moustache thoughtfully.  “Fairly slim on both counts when we transfer him out.  These pods leave their occupants disoriented for at least a varga after they wake up, even after short periods of time, and he’s been in there for three movements.  I doubt he’d be conscious for the first varga after we take him out.  Transferring him back into these pods will be the tricky part--he’ll have recuperated enough to resist, and it’s a much longer way from the med bay than the cells.”

 “Then we should do an in-person interrogation.  We can’t have him get loose,” Pidge said.

 “What do you think, Shiro?” Keith asked.  There was a note of concern in his voice.

 “We could leave him in the med bay pods once we finish the extraction, couldn’t we?” Shiro asked, looking Coran in the eye.

 “...Well, yes, I suppose we could,” Coran said.  “They’ll contain him just as well as the ones down here.”

 Shiro hesitated.  All eyes were on him.  As the Black Paladin, and the only paladin to remain undecided, the weight of the decision rested entirely on him.  He looked back at the cryopod, studying Sendak’s impassive features.  He looked practically harmless, a blank, neutral slate, incapable of the damage he’d wrought.  His lone eye was closed, but Shiro remembered his baleful, predatory yellow gaze with a chill.  He wasn’t going to subject himself to it again unless there was no other option.

 “We’ll transfer him to the med bay cryopods and extract his memories up there,” Shiro said decisively.  

 “Are you sure ?” Pidge asked.  She stared at him like he’d lost his mind, and for a split second, Shiro doubted his choice.  Pidge had been put through the wringer when the Castle had fallen under Galra control, and he never wanted her to go through that again.  Matt would never forgive him if Shiro let anything happen to her--not that he would need Matt guilting him to regret it for the rest of his life.

 “If we interrogate him in person, we have to be ready for him to fight back,” Shiro said.  “I’m not willing to take that risk.”

 Pidge scowled ferociously, but she didn’t argue.  Shiro would have to do damage control later, make things up with her--and with Hunk, too, who looked uncomfortable and disappointed--but right now he had another task to focus on.

 “Well, no time like the present,” Coran said.  “Hunk, Lance, if you wouldn’t mind taking the containment system up to the med bay?”

 “We’re on it,” Hunk said.  He and Lance set to lifting the tube, careful not to slip and drop it, and headed out of the room.

 “I’ll get the pod ready,” Keith offered, disappearing after them.

 Coran nodded approvingly.  “Shiro, get ready to catch him.”

 Shiro moved directly in front of the cryopod and braced himself for impact.  Coran punched in a sequence on the pod’s control panels, and the glass front hissed and receded into the floor.  For a long moment, nothing happened.  Then Sendak’s eyelid fluttered open.  It was impossible to tell where he was looking--or if he could even focus on his surroundings--but Shiro felt the weight of the Galra’s stare before the eye slid closed again.  Sendak toppled forward, boneless, and Shiro barely caught him.  Sendak was massive , impossibly heavy deadweight.  Shiro stumbled, struggling to keep both of them upright.

 Then Coran stepped in, shoring up Sendak’s right side and taking most of the weight off Shiro--and, more importantly, letting Shiro put his cybernetic between himself and Sendak.  He didn’t want to take any chances in case the Galra came to sooner than expected.  They staggered towards the elevator, which Pidge operated for them, and made their way to the med bay.

 One of the cryopods was already up and open, and Lance and Hunk had just finished setting up the tube beside it.  They maneuvered the Galra into the pod and sealed it.  Coran fiddled with the settings on the control panel for a minute or two, then stepped back and set his hands on his hips, studying his handiwork.

 “It’ll be close to twelve doboshes before he’s ready for the extractor,” the Altean said.

 “Wait, really ?” Hunk asked.  “Lance was in there for like a day!”

 “True, but we’re not trying to heal everything here,” Coran said.  “A full recovery from all of his injuries would take fifteen vargas at least.”

 Inside the pod, Sendak’s face tensed, heavy brows furrowing and ears twitching.  Shiro jumped.  The Galra stilled, then stirred again, more faintly that time.  His fist clenched and released.

 “What’s going on?” Shiro asked.  The fingers of his cybernetic prickled, on the verge of activating.

 “It’s alright, just involuntary brainwave responses,” Coran assured him.  “It’s not at all unusual, considering which part of his anatomy the pod is focused on.”

 Shiro wished Coran’s words were more comforting, but he couldn’t focus on anything outside the way the Galra’s lip curled.  A second later, a faint whine reached his ears--unmistakably Sendak’s voice, an improbably pathetic sound to come from someone like that .  Shiro looked away and pretended he hadn’t heard.  

 Twelve doboshes was entirely too long.

 An eternity later the pod beeped, and Coran stepped forward and placed three flat disks on the front face of the pod.  The tube hummed and whirred, bright blue light shining through the fluid inside.  And then nothing.  The light shut off.

 “...Uh, is that what’s supposed to be happening?” Hunk asked.

 “Well, no,” Coran said.

 “Let’s give it some time,” Shiro said, settling his stance a little more comfortably.

 Seconds stretched out endlessly, becoming impossibly long minutes as they waited for a sign of activity.  Shiro was prepared to wait hours if he had to.  The paladins, apparently, weren’t.  Keith excused himself twenty minutes into the wait, grumbling something about the training deck.  At around the thirty-five minute mark Pidge took off as well, presumably back to Green’s hangar to continue her work on the crystal.  Hunk left almost an hour in for breakfast, and Coran followed on his heels, Lance in tow, for Castle maintenance.  Shiro remained, steadfast, staring at the pod and waiting for something, anything, to let him know the extractor was working.

 He waited.

 And waited.

 He lost patience after another hour where the minutes circled back on themselves like ouroboros, repeating endlessly until he lost track of how long he’d been standing in the med bay waiting on a response that would never come.  Shiro stalked forward and slammed the side of his hand against the front of the pod and glared at its occupant.

 “I know you’re in there, Sendak,” he said quietly, trying to keep his tone level.  “I know you have all the answers.  Give them to me.”

 Sendak remained unresponsive, failing to even twitch.

 Shiro vented a shout of frustration and slammed his fist against the pod again.  “You’re a broken soldier, you can’t hold out forever!”

 Sendak himself didn’t respond, but a second later the tube glowed again.  Soft violet tendrils grew down from the top into the clear fluid inside, branching and unfurling from a main stalk, growing out in all directions in a complex web.

 Shiro allowed himself a hint of a victorious smile.  “So you can hear me.”  He took a few paces back and crossed his arms, trying to feel official.  “What was the first rank you held in Zarkon’s army?”

 Nothing.

 He tried again.  “Where did you find the Red Lion?”

 Still nothing.  Not even a hint of a reply.

 Well, that settled it.  He was pulling out the big question.  “What is Zarkon’s greatest weakness?”

 “What makes you think you could possibly defeat him?”  Sendak’s voice came from nowhere and everywhere, reverberating off the walls and echoing from the ceiling.  Shiro glanced between the tube and the pod.

 But Sendak didn’t say anything else, and Shiro tried again.  “If you were to attack Zarkon, where would you strike?”  He kept his gaze on the tube.  Coran had said the memories could be accessed from there, right?

 When Sendak replied, his voice seemed to come from the pod.   “Why strike at all,” he said, his voice velvet-soft and even, “when you could join him?”

 The front of the pod flickered, and for a moment Shiro had the impression that Sendak’s eye was open, that the Galra was staring directly at him.  Then he blinked and, sure enough, his eye was still closed.  It was just his imagination.  It had to be.  He couldn’t look away.  Fear curled tendrils down his back, like ice dripping down his shirt.

 “We’re connected, you and me,” Sendak said, practically purring the words.   “Both part of the Galra Empire.”

 “No.  I’m not like you,” Shiro refuted.  He couldn’t keep a tremor of fear out of his voice.

“You’ve been broken and reforged, just like me.  Look at your hand.”

 Shiro couldn’t help staring down at his cybernetic.  It was on pins and needles again, burning where it plugged into the remains of his arm.   Wrongfully stolen.  Someone had unmade him and build him again .  Was that even his hand now?  Did he control it, or was he the weapon?

 “That’s not me!” he shouted, not sure if it was directed at Sendak or at himself.

 “It’s the strongest part of you.  Embrace it.”  Sendak had taken a more aggressive tone now, fierce and urgent.   “The others don’t know what you do, have never seen what you’ve seen.   Face it, you cannot hope to beat Zarkon.  He has already defeated you!”

 It was true, every word of it.

 “I’m not listening to you!”  Shiro clamped his hands over his ears, clutching at his temples, fighting to block out Sendak’s voice.

 The Galra continued, and Shiro couldn’t ignore him--the voice sounded like it came from inside his own head.   “Do you really think a monster like you could be a Voltron paladin?”

 “ Stop it !” Shiro shouted, as loud as he possibly could, and smashed his fist through the tube.  It had to be the source of the noise, Sendak couldn’t possibly be speaking to him from cryostasis.  Blue liquid spilled everywhere, oozing in viscous puddles.  Shiro paused, took a deep breath, and glanced up from the floor to the pod.

 The front of the pod flickered again, and Sendak’s eye snapped open, cold and venomous.  He bared fangs at Shiro.  All he could focus on was the way Sendak’s cruel mouth opened to devour him.

 Shiro punched straight through the front of the cryopod, grabbing Sendak by the front of his armor and hurling him to the floor.  He had to stop the Galra before he could do anything.  Sendak rolled onto his side.  Shiro’s fist blazed white and violet.  He lunged, smashing his fist into the floor.  Missed by inches.  Sendak rolled again, scrabbled almost upright.  Shiro smashed a foot into the side of his head, knocked him back down.  He hauled back, fist raised.  And froze.

 What was he doing ?  Sendak was down, unmoving, curled up on himself and clearly trying to shield his face with his remaining arm.  He hadn’t fought back.  Shiro couldn’t land the final blow.  Not on an unresisting opponent.  He lowered his arm and took a half-step towards the downed Galra.

 Sendak curled up tighter and whimpered .  Shiro stepped back and looked around at the mess he’d made.  The memory tube was an unsalvageable wreckage of glass and metal.  He’d smashed a hole in the floor, charred black and smoking around the edges of the fist-shaped crater.  The blue field on the front of the cryopod flickered erratically, still displaying Sendak’s snarling face despite the Galra himself lying on the floor a few feet away.

 Something was wrong.

 Shiro grabbed the collar of Sendak's uniform, hauling him partway off the ground, and shook him.  “I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but you’d better cut it out right now.”

 “I--I don’t--”  Sendak choked out.  He flinched away, eye squeezed shut.

 “Don’t lie to me,” Shiro growled.  “I know what you were doing.”

 "I didn’t--what are you talking about?”

 “You’re going to tell me you weren’t just trying to mess with my head?”

 “Yes!”  Sendak’s ears lowered.  “...No?  I--I haven’t--”  He clutched at Shiro’s wrist.  “I can’t breathe.”

 Shiro let go, allowing Sendak to sink back to the floor.  The Galra gasped for breath, palm braced flat against the metal.  His whole body shook violently, and he coughed twice before lifting his head and squinting at Shiro.  Shiro did his best not to shake as the aftereffects of adrenaline ran their course.  He took a few paces back, putting himself between Sendak and the wide-open door.

 “You mind explaining what the hell just happened, then?” Shiro asked.

 “Not until you dim the lights,” Sendak retorted.  “I’ll tell you nothing until I can see .”

 “Explain first and I’ll consider it,” Shiro said, crossing his arms emphatically.

 Sendak’s ears lowered and he returned his gaze to the floor.  “I don’t know what you’re asking.”  Hesitation.  He lifted his hand and pressed it against the side of his head where Shiro had kicked him, leaving a bluish smear on the floor.  “Perhaps you should explain it to me .”

 Shiro wanted to punch him.

 “So you’re telling me you didn’t just tell me that I should give up and join the Galra Empire, because there’s no way we’ll ever beat Zarkon?”

 “I think I would remember if I had,” Sendak scoffed.  “Now lower the lights .”

 Shiro hesitated.  Lowering the lights would swing the advantage to Sendak--Galra had much better night vision than humans by a long shot.  On the other hand, Sendak had given him an answer, and while it wasn’t the one he wanted, he had answered.  He backed over to the panel by the door, keeping his eyes on Sendak the whole way.  A fumble, too-smooth surface slipping under his fingertips, and the lights dimmed to half their initial brightness.  Almost half a minute passed before Sendak lifted his head, blinking and peering around.  He heaved a sigh and settled back on his haunches.  His ears tilted.

 “Do you routinely torture prisoners by assaulting and blinding them?” he asked, sounding entirely too casual for Shiro’s taste.

 Shiro stalked back towards him, coming to a stop just out of Sendak’s reach.  He opened his mouth to justify himself, then hesitated.  If Sendak really hadn’t been messing with his head…he glanced back up at the cryopod.  The half-demolished front still reflected Sendak’s face, wide-eyed and snarling, a sharp contrast to the Sendak sitting on the floor and watching him intently.

 Instead, he said, “I’m sorry.  It was uncalled for.”

 Sendak huffed and muttered something under his breath that sounded an awful lot like “damn straight.”  He tilted his ears the other way and said, “Now, I assume, the interrogation begins.”

 Shiro shook his head, looked at the cryopod again.  “No.  If that wasn’t you, something or someone else tried to get me to kill you.”  Fear tingled in the pit of his stomach.  Hadn’t Coran said something about the Castle systems needing repairs?  If a system as crucial as the med bay could malfunction like that, who knew what was happening elsewhere in the ship?  “Sendak, get up.  Now.”

 “And why should I follow your orders?”

 “Because I can’t leave you in here unsupervised, and if you refuse I’m going to try putting you back in a glitchy cryopod to stop you from trying anything.”  God, Shiro hoped that was a credible threat.  Or at least that it sounded credible.

 Sendak’s ears flattened immediately, and he looked away.  “...I suppose following you is preferable,” he muttered.

 Shiro took a couple of steps back to give the Galra room.  Sendak stood, one long, fluid, sinuous motion, and Shiro retreated a few more steps.  He’d almost forgotten just how big Sendak was, when he stood under his own power--at least eight feet tall and staggeringly broad.  Shiro came up to his armpit, maybe, and no higher.  They stared at each other for an uncomfortable minute, and Shiro did his best not to shift uncomfortably under Sendak’s glower.

 “...You ready to go?” Shiro asked.

 “I suppose,” Sendak said.  His ears were still flat, displaying almost feline aggravation.  If he was smaller, Shiro wouldn’t have been able to take that look seriously.  As he was, Shiro was leery of pushing the Galra much further.  

 The hallway lights were out.  Shiro could have sworn they’d been on when he’d dimmed the ones in the med bay, but no amount of fiddling with the lighting settings would bring them back on.  The hairs on the back of his neck rose, and not just because Sendak was breathing down it.  The Castle was often quiet, but not like this .  The silence, the darkness--Shiro felt like he’d been dropped into one of the horror games Matt had enjoyed back on Earth.  Abandoned space, potentially unhinged and murderous companion, unable to fully trust his senses, the only thing it was missing was a monster with too many teeth lurking in the darkness.

 Sendak shifted behind him, metal clinking on metal.  “This doesn’t look like going to me,” he said.

 “It’s really dark out there,” Shiro replied, squinting into the gloom.  Was that a flicker of light farther down the hallway?

 No, it was pitch black as far as he could see.  Just his mind playing tricks, then.

 Sendak grabbed his wrist--the cybernetic, not his natural one--and brushed past him into the darkness.

 “Maybe to you ,” he said snidely.  “But not to me.”

 “And why should I trust you not to lead me off somewhere and kill me?” Shiro snapped.

 He couldn’t see Sendak anymore, but the Galra’s scoff was loud and clear.  “Do you have another choice?”

 He had a point.

 “...Lead the way, then,” Shiro said.

 Not for the first time, he hated the way the Castle hallways seemed to wind back on themselves.  Every minute was torture.  The whole floor was totally dark--Shiro couldn’t have seen his hand if he’d held it directly in front of his face--and the only sounds were their footsteps and Sendak’s rough, oddly shallow breathing.

 And then, up ahead, light flickered.  Blue light, bright enough that Shiro almost covered his eyes.  He thought for a second that a door had opened.  No.  Wrong shape.  Humanoid, probably no larger than Shiro himself, bluish-white and glowing .

 Sendak dropped Shiro’s hand.

 He had the briefest impression of the Galra hurtling towards the light before it went out.  The sudden absence painted red-orange afterimages on his eyelids--or maybe just in the air.  It was too dark for there to be any difference.  He strained his ears, listening.  Sendak’s heavy footprints moved rapidly away.  Nothing else.  No doors, no machinery.  Sendak stopped moving.  Shiro froze.  Fight or flight response.  Where was the threat?

 “Sendak?” he called into the darkness.

 “There is nothing here,” the Galra rumbled.  A pause.  Footsteps moved back towards Shiro.  A hand closed around his cybernetic wrist, tugged him into moving.

 The silence stretched uncomfortably.

 “...You could have taken off there, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop you,” Shiro said.  “Why didn’t you?”

 “Safety in numbers,” Sendak replied.  “I don’t trust you.  I like you even less.  But I prefer the risk I know to the one I don’t.”  A quiet huff.  “I didn’t live this long by being stupid.”

 Shiro shrugged.  “That’s fair.”

 They fell quiet again after that, and aside from the occasional warning about corners, stayed quiet until they reached the elevator.  Sendak halted in front of the doors--not that Shiro could tell.  They might have been an inch in front of him, or several feet away, or further up the hall.

 “Where to from here?” Sendak asked.

 "We’re looking for the other paladins,” Shiro said.  “Coran and Allura, too, if we can find them.”  

 He paused, thinking.  Pidge would be the easiest to find.  If she was hunkered down with that crystal again, she wouldn’t budge until someone forced her--but he didn’t trust Sendak not to attack her on sight.  Hunk was probably done with breakfast and could be anywhere in the Castle.  The same went for Lance and Coran.

 “Keith,” he decided.  “We’ll get Keith first.”  He reached out and groped for the elevator control panel, which thankfully lit up under his palm.

 Sendak released Shiro’s wrist and shielded his eye from the elevator light.  “...Which one is ‘Keith’?” he asked.  He mangled the name slightly, replacing the ‘th’ with a soft ‘d’.

 “Red,” Shiro replied.  He strode into the elevator, pretending not to be worried it would shut down on them.  “He’ll be on the training deck, so we’re going down a couple levels.”

 Sendak hummed and followed him into the elevator, still covering his eyes.  The rim on his cybernetic eye rotated, making a soft sound almost like gears on a bicycle shifting.  A couple seconds later the sound stopped, and he dropped his hand.  His organic eye was squeezed shut against the light.

 “I should have warned you about that,” Shiro said guiltily.

 Sendak huffed.  “I’ll live.  I always do.”

 “...I take it that eye lets you see in conditions that blind you?”

 “Do you need verbal confirmation for everything ?”

 “Could you stop being an ass for five seconds?”

 “ Having an ass doesn’t make me one.”

 “No, I meant--” Shiro groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose.  “It’s an expression back on Earth.  I meant you’re being rude.”

 “I am rude, just ask Hax--”  Sendak broke off on a choked sound, and Shiro turned around in time to watch Sendak conceal his stricken expression.

 Something in Shiro’s chest ached in sympathy.  “...For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about what happened to your--”  Underling?  Partner in crime?  “--Friend.”

 Sendak snorted.  “Don’t bother lying to me.”

 “What makes you think I’m lying?” Shiro asked, struggling to keep his frustration out of his voice.

 Sendak looked away and didn’t respond.

 It took too long for the elevator to ping and the doors to finally, finally open onto the training level.  Shiro poked his head out and was relieved to see the lights were dimmed but not off--no way was he doing another pitch-black floor.  Sendak seemed relieved too, when he trailed Shiro out of the elevator.  His organic eye opened, and his massive ears tipped and swivelled like satellite dishes.  Shiro kept half an eye on him and made for the training deck.

They didn’t make it past the first intersection when, somewhere else in the Castle, someone screamed.

Chapter Text

“I have an idea,” Pidge said.

Hunk spun to look at her--he’d been counting the tiles on the hangar ceiling for the last half-hour at least, after all three of their attempts to reach each other in zero-G failed.  It was frustrating , being suspended and unable to reach anything for counterweight, and air resistance just wasn’t enough to propel either of them towards each other.  And, yeah, he’d tried it.  Several times.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Grab on!”  Pidge reached out, grunting with effort.  Hunk stretched towards her, flipping upside-down in an effort to get as close as possible.

Pidge’s fingertips brushed Hunk’s, but just barely.  Not enough to grab hold.  He reached again, shoulder straining to get just a little closer.  Their fingertips brushed again--and then caught, clinging desperately at the first joint.  Pidge used the new leverage to get a better grip.  Then she flipped, using Hunk’s mass to swing herself around so they were oriented the same direction, face to face.

Hunk whooped.  “We did it!”  He paused for a breather, assessing the situation.  They were a good ten feet off the floor, gravity still off, no way to maneuver.  “...Okay.  Now what?”

Pidge glanced over her shoulder at the door, then back at Hunk, then back to the door.  Her hazel eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“Now kick me as hard as you can.”

“...What?”  Was Pidge out of her mind ?  “No!  We’re friends, friends don’t kick friends--”

“No, no, kick me so I can fly across the room and get to the control panel!”

Oh.  So it was just normal Pidge-brand insanity instead of ‘Castle has gone nuts and short-circuited her brain’ insanity.  Pidge spun to face the hangar doors.  Hunk planted his boot in the small of her back and shoved.

The momentum of it sent him flipping head-over-heels, further away from the floor.  He got glimpses of the rest of the room as it spiralled around him, enough to make him glad he hadn’t gotten breakfast after all or he would have thrown it all back up again right then and there.  Pidge hollered with frustration just as his momentum slowed, and Hunk righted in time to watch her bounce off the wall and then the floor.

And then the doors hissed open and Hunk crashed down.

“How can you guys be taking a nap while this castle is trying to kill us?!” Lance shrieked.  He stalked through the door, scowling, flanked by Keith on one side and Coran on the other.

Hunk sat up and rubbed his hip where he’d landed on it, wincing.  There wasn’t time for math when you’re falling twelve feet to the hangar floor, but under Earth gravity the fall should have broken something.

“Taking a nap ?” he said, almost indignant.  “We’ve been floating around in zero-G for like half an hour!  Do you know how scary that is?!”

“That’s not scary, that’s fun!   I was almost ejected into space !  Twice!”

“Well, I got attacked by killer food, and that’s the most horrifying thing you can imagine!”  Well, if he was going that dramatic, he was going to ham it up.  “The stuff of nightmares !  It’ll haunt me to my grave !”

“Well I had a robot trying to kill me!” Keith chimed in.  He looked it, too--there were scrapes all down the side of his face, like he’d been thrown, and a graze on the elbow on the same side oozing a thin line of blood down his forearm.

“I don’t care what you say, Coran,” Lance huffed.  “This Castle’s gone apples and bananas.”

Coran sighed.  “Perhaps the infection from Sendak’s Galra crystal is worse than we thought.”

“Well, let’s get rid of it,” Hunk suggested.  It seemed like the most obvious course of action.

“ What ?” Pidge yelped.

“It’s too late for that now,” Coran said.  “When Sendak plugged it into the ship, it corrupted the entire system.  It’s just energy, though, and it’s not siphoning off the Balmera crystal on the bridge, it’ll burn itself out before long.”

“Sendak…” Keith said, slow and thoughtful.  “...Wait.  Has anyone seen Shiro?”

“Nope,” said Hunk.

“Me neither,” said Pidge.

“Not since we left the med bay like an hour ago,” Lance said.

Hunk’s heart missed a beat.  “He--he’s probably still in there trying to get information out of Sendak, right?  Right?”

Nobody answered.  Hunk locked eyes with Lance.  He shrugged.  Hunk shrugged back and looked over at Keith, who stared at him with wide-eyed anxiety.

Then, as one, they booked it for the exit.

From the outside, the med bay looked fine.  Worryingly deserted, but everything seemed to be in its place.  It wasn’t until Hunk crossed the threshold and the first piece of glass crunched under his boots that he realized something was up.  The memory tube was wrecked --it was the only thing the glass could have come from.  The bottom half of it was where he and Lance had set it down two hours before, in the middle of a pool of bluish slime.  The top part was on the opposite side of the room, had trailed glass and ooze with it all the way to where it rested a foot or two away from the wall.  The cryopod was still up, but the blue front panel was gone, and so was its occupant.  And there was no sign of Shiro anywhere.

“Shiro?” Keith shouted.  He spun, looking around frantically.  No reply.

Coran strode over to the control desk and tapped in a command.  “Well, he’s not in any of the pods,” he said, scanning the screen.  “I can’t seem to get access to the security feed for this room, but the pod mechanisms report that Sendak’s pod was opened...hm.  Twenty doboshes ago.

“Guys, you better come look at this,” Lance said, over by the pod.  “I think there was a fight.”

Pidge crouched down next to him and tapped a scorched divot in the floor.  “This is from Shiro,” she said.  “That’s what his prosthetic does to metal.”

“And these here look like Galra blood to me,” Coran said.  He tapped his foot beside several bluish smears across the floor, thinner than the memory tube goop and already drying.

“...Okay, so what does that mean?” Hunk asked.  “Am I missing something here?”

“If there was a fight, Sendak got out of the pod,” Keith said.  “And since he and Shiro aren’t here, that means he won --and he took Shiro with him.”

Coran hummed.  “That seems unlikely considering the condition Sendak was in, but it can’t be anything else given the evidence.”

“So where could they have gone?” Pidge asked.  “I mean, if Sendak was hurt and probably dragging Shiro with him, he couldn’t have gotten too far, right?”

“So they’re probably still on this floor,” Lance chipped in.  “We just have to go look for them.”

They weren’t on that floor.  They weren’t on the residential floor, either, or the levels between the med bay and the residential floor, or in any of the hangars--not even the pod bay, which Keith suggested when it hit him that Sendak would probably take the opportunity to escape.

“Are they even still in the Castle?” Lance groaned, flopping dramatically against the wall outside the pod bay.

“They have to be in the Castle,” Keith said adamantly.  “The pods are all here.  The Black Lion is still here, and if Sendak has Shiro he could have gotten in and taken off with it.  They’re still here.”

“I can’t tell,” Coran said.  “The Castle scanners aren't responding.  But they haven’t been shut down--the program is still running, but I’ve been locked out of access.”

A chill ran down Hunk’s spine.  “Wait, you’re locked out ?  That’s really bad.”

“Lemme see,” Pidge said, holding out her hand.

Coran handed over a hand-sized, wafer-thin translucent cardlike object.  Pidge leaned against the wall and studied it, frowning intently.  Hunk peered over her shoulder.  Lines of what he recognized as binary code mixed with incomprehensible Altean script scrolled across the screen.  Pidge tapped a few keys and the Altean converted to binary.  It was still mostly incomprehensible to Hunk--he’d taken basic computer sciences as a prerequisite for one of his engineering courses and then promptly forgotten almost everything, not expecting to need binary in the real world.

Well, here he was in the real world, needing binary.

Pidge scrolled down the page, and her frown deepened.

“Hunk?  What was the mode of the readings we got from the crystal last time?” she asked.

Hunk scratched his head, struggling to remember.  “Uh...I think it was either the four-six-three or the four-six-nine.”

Pidge sighed.  “I’ll try both and we’ll see what comes up.”

“Do we really have time for this?” Keith demanded.  Pidge raised an eyebrow and plugged the values in anyway.

The analysis took less than a minute.

“...Okay, so unless we had the wrong reading, there’s no interference from the crystal here,” Pidge said.

“Maybe someone else who’s logged into the scanners blocked him?” Lance suggested.

Dead silence.

“I mean, that’s pretty plausible, right?” Hunk asked.

“The only other person with access to the scanners is Allura, and right now she should still be in bed,” Coran said.

“Why would Allura lock you out anyway?” Keith asked.

“We can ask her about it later,” Pidge said.  “All of you shut up for a minute, I’m hacking the scanner.”  

Her fingers flew across the screen.  Paused.  Darted again.  Her brow furrowed more and more deeply with every pause.

And then she grinned and fistpumped.  “I’m in!”

“That’s our Pidge!” Lance whooped, offering her a fistbump.  She bumped back, beaming.  Hunk patted her on the shoulder.  Even Keith cracked a relieved half-smile.

Pidge passed the tablet back to Coran, who switched the display back to Altean and began scrolling through the readout.  “Aha!  There they are--but what are they doing on the diplomats’ floor?”

“The where now?” Hunk asked.  Diplomats’ floor?  That was the first time he’d heard anything about that.

“Back in the old days, the Castle used to house diplomats from other planets in our alliance,” Coran started, clearly warming up for a full-blown lecture.

“How far is it?” Keith cut him off.

“Only a couple floors up--”

“We’re going.   Now .”  Keith shoved past, hurrying for the elevators.

Hunk wanted to feel bad for him--Keith was blatantly stressed about Shiro--but his attitude made it hard to empathize sometimes.  He got cold, or worse, angry, and then he’d blow up and snap at whoever was closest and take off for his room or the training deck or anywhere other people weren’t.  It was impossible to help him, and it made Hunk’s heart ache.  

So, of course, the elevator ride was painfully tense.

Hunk knew the second the doors opened onto the diplomats’ floor that there was going to be a problem.  The elevator was situated at the junction of three hallways, all three of which were barely lit.  He could hardly see anything past the lights from the elevator.  Keith pushed past first and spun in a circle, taking in their options.

“Which way do we go?” Lance asked.

Coran tapped at the tablet again and frowned.  “The program must have caught on to me--I’ve been locked out again.”

“I could hack back in--” Pidge started.

“We don’t have time !” Keith yelled, cutting her off.

“We could split up and look for them?” Hunk suggested.

The others turned to look at him.

“Are you nuts ?” Lance squeaked.  “Hunk, buddy, you’ve seen Scooby Doo--you know what happens when we split up the gang!”

“But this isn’t Scooby Doo,” Pidge retorted.  “We know exactly what’s going on, and it’s not a ghost or a real estate developer, it’s the Castle being glitchy.”

“We’ll cover more ground if we split up, too,” Keith chimed in.

Coran nodded.  “It’s highly unlikely we’d run into trouble on this floor, at any rate--aside from the bridge, the diplomats’ floor is one of the safest places in the Castle.”

Lance’s shoulders slumped.  “Fine.  But I’m sticking with Keith, because he’s got his bayard.”

“Fine by me,” Keith muttered back.  “Just don’t yell about ghosts the whole time.”

“What ever .”

Keith whipped around and took off down the left hallway, leaving Lance to sprint after him.  Hunk and Pidge looked at each other, and then at Coran.  

“Pidge, you’ve got a map of the Castle on that communicator of yours, right?” Coran asked.

Pidge pulled her phone out and opened a document or two.  “Yeah.”

“You and Hunk take the right hallway,” he said.  “I’ll take the center one.”

“...Do Lance and Keith have a map?” Hunk asked.

“I’m sure they’ll be alright,” Coran said nonchalantly, and started down the center hallway.

Hunk looked over at Pidge.  Pidge met his gaze and shrugged a little, and he knew they were thinking the same thing: Alteans were weird .  Lance did have an amazing sense of direction, and Keith wasn’t half-bad himself if Hunk remembered their one midnight group ramble correctly, but Coran was weirdly casual about letting them go off on their own without a map or anything.  Maybe letting a couple teenagers wander off on their own in a potentially dangerous situation wasn’t a big deal in Altean culture.

Pidge tucked her communicator back into her pocket.  “C’mon,” she said.  Then she turned around and headed down the right hallway.  Hunk followed her.  

Now that it was just the two of them, Lance’s ghost anxiety had him on edge.  He knew it was ridiculous--ghosts weren’t real--but every flicker of the too-dim lights made the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck standing straight up.  Pidge didn’t seem fazed in the slightest.

And then the lights up ahead brightened, just for a second, and Hunk got a glimpse of a pale, humanoid figure farther down the hallway.  It was roughly Shiro’s size and not too far off in shape, but he hadn’t been wearing his armor earlier, had he?  Hunk grabbed Pidge’s shoulder.

“Tell me you saw that,” he said.

“Yeah,” Pidge said.  “I saw it.”  She sped up, and Hunk matched her pace.

Ahead, the figure seemed to turn towards them.  Then it rounded a corner and vanished from sight.  They hurtled after it.  Hunk’s lungs burned.  He wasn’t a sprinter, not even close, but Pidge definitely was, and despite her shorter legs she was starting to get a lead on him.  The figure turned another corner, the opposite direction, and Pidge darted after it just a few steps ahead of him.

And then she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Hunk scrambled after her and came to a skidding halt.  Pidge was frozen shock-still, maybe a foot away from Shiro--who was in his normal clothes after all, and not in armor.  And then Hunk’s eyes landed on the looming figure just behind Shiro.  Sendak.  Hunk had seen him conscious once before, in his transmission to the Castle during that first terrifying day, but not since.  His ears flicked and swiveled, pointing from Pidge to Hunk, then back to Pidge.

Then they flattened against the sides of his head, and his upper lip curled to expose his fangs.  Hunk felt the Galra’s growl more than he heard it, reverberating behind his sternum.

Pidge lurched back, slamming into Hunk and losing her balance.  She dropped to the floor, pressed her back up against his legs.  Hunk couldn’t move.  The growl built to a roar.  Sendak lunged.

Shiro reached out and slapped his cybernetic hand on the front of Sendak’s armor.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Sendak snarled at him and didn’t answer.  It was impossible to tell where he was looking, but his body was still directed at Pidge.  He took another step forward.

Shiro got a better grip on his armor and hauled him back.  “No,” he said, quietly but firmly.  “I’m not going to let you go after my team.   Stand down or I’m putting you back in the cryopod.”

Sendak’s ears flattened further.  “ Murderer ,” he hissed.

What?

Pidge sagged against Hunk’s legs.  A quick glance down showed crumpled brows and a quivering lower lip.  Then she took a deep breath, stood up, and said, “Yeah, and I’d do it again if I had to.”

What?

Sendak snarled again.  Hunk tensed up, bracing himself.  If the Galra charged, he was going to have to put Pidge behind him.  She was unarmed.  She wouldn’t stand a chance.

And then the others came racing around the corner behind them, and Sendak’s stance immediately shifted.  He moved behind Shiro, ears still flat, and scowled ferociously.

“Shiro!” Keith shouted.  His face lit up for a full five seconds before he noticed the Galra and went straight for his bayard.

“Keith, put the sword down,” Shiro said.  “It’s alright.  I’m fine.”

Keith’s eyes darted between Shiro and Sendak, and he lowered the bayard but didn’t dismiss it.  “...What?”

“It’s alright,” Shiro repeated.

“He’s not making you say that, is he?” Keith demanded, glaring at Sendak.

Shiro’s brows quirked.  “No.  There was a...malfunction in the med bay.  I didn’t want to risk putting him back in the pods, and I couldn’t leave him unsupervised, so when I went looking for all of you I brought him with me.”

Behind him, Sendak grunted incredulously and tilted his ears--the first non-aggressive expression Hunk had seen on him.

And then the lights went out completely.

Lance shrieked.  Keith yelped--Hunk would bet Lance had grabbed onto him, like Pidge was doing to Hunk.  Coran yelled too, something the translators didn’t put into English.  Shiro gasped, and Hunk wished the lights were on.  He’d never heard Shiro make a sound like that before.  Then, light.  A humanoid figure at the end of the hallway--the same one he and Pidge had followed.  It lingered there, seeming to stare at them.

“ Alfor ?” Coran called.

A blur of movement--something big and fast shot past Hunk, toward the white figure.  The light went out immediately, plunging them back into darkness.  The footsteps continued several paces, then paused.

In the darkness, Sendak snarled, “Nothing.   Again .”

“Get back here, now,” Shiro snapped, sounding frustrated.  The footsteps trailed back.  Someone moved past Hunk--probably Shiro--and then a moment later Sendak gave a cry of protest and Shiro said, “The next time you take off, I’m asking Coran for handcuffs.”

Lance snorted.

“The next time?” Pidge asked.  She’d softened her grip on Hunk’s arm a little, but still clung to him in the darkness.

“We’re being hunted,” Sendak stated flatly.

“You keep saying there’s nothing there,” Shiro said.

“There isn’t a scent ,” the Galra protested.  “There’s nothing, but it’s hunting us.  I keep telling you, this ship is haunted.”

“The ship isn’t haunted !” Shiro shouted, finally losing his cool.

The lights came back on.

“Haunted,” Sendak said smugly.  His ears tilted towards Coran.  “What is an Alfor?”

“Not a what, a who,” Coran corrected.  “He was the last king of Altea.  We have a file of his memories preserved here in the Castle.”

“Hang on, isn’t his AI supposed to be, you know, confined to the holodeck?” Hunk asked.

“Well, yes,” Coran said.  “At least, it should be.”

Sendak pulled his wrist out of Shiro’s grasp and placed his hand on his hip.  His brows arched smugly.

Shiro glared back.  “Alright, I get the point.  You can shut up now.”

Sendak opened his mouth to retort.  The alarm cut him off.  A panel on the wall lit up, lurid red and blinking, depicting what was obviously the Castle of Lions with the prow resting against...something.  An ellipse.  There was a label written in Altean underneath--and wasn’t it pointless that everything onboard the ship was written in a language only two of its occupants could read?  What did it mean ?

“How is that possible?” Coran squawked, alarmed.

“What is it?” Lance asked.  He was still clinging to Keith’s arm, and Keith had yet to shake him off.

“The ship is making a wormhole jump,” Coran said.  “But Allura should still be in her room--”

“She isn’t,” Shiro said.  “We looked earlier.  She wasn’t there.”

“We must get to the bridge, quickly,” Coran declared, and bolted for the elevator.

The bridge was full of blue light, washing the white-and-chrome walls and floor the same ghostly hue.  Allura stood on the command podium, tall and proud, her back to the door.  Her focus was clearly on the wormhole, to the extent that she hadn’t noticed their arrival.  She was still in her nightclothes.  Her hair was unbound, wild and mussed.  She responded slowly when Shiro called out to her, turning to face them with a vacant smile on her face.  Her pale eyes were wide and empty.

“We’re going to Altea,” she said, her voice soft and whispery and totally unlike any tone she’d used before.  “We’re going home .  My father is taking us.”

Shiro lunged for her--to pull her away from the controls, maybe?--and slammed directly into a particle barrier.  Hunk scrambled forward to flank him, saw the others settle in position around Shiro.  A face shimmered into view on the screens.  Masculine, dark-skinned and platinum-haired, clearly Altean and clearly furious.  King Alfor.  It had to be.

“Stay away from my daughter!” he bellowed.

“Allura, wake up !” Shiro said urgently, ignoring him.

“The crystal must have corrupted King Alfor’s artificial intelligence!” Coran said, just as urgently.  “It’s taken over!”

As if Coran had cued it, the face vanished from the viewscreens.  A hologram of the dead king shimmered into place beside Allura on the command podium, as if to guide and support her.  Hunk recognized the shape of his armor.  He and Pidge had chased it earlier.

And then they emerged from the wormhole, and Hunk scrambled to cover his eyes as the bridge filled with brilliant, bloody light.  A massive red star loomed directly in front of them, blinding, inescapable--

“It’s about to go supernova!” Pidge yelped.

Clearly, Allura wasn’t getting the same view.  “Father!” she gasped.  “I can see Altea!”

Coran pressed his palms against the particle barrier.  “Allura!   Allura !  Wake up!  What you’re seeing isn’t real !”

Allura began to turn towards him, confusion scrawling across her features.  Then she froze, half-turned.  Her luminous eyes tracked something invisible in the air, and her face softened momentarily.  Then her brows crumpled again, and she stared around at something invisible to everyone but her.  She took a step or two away from the podium, bending to grasp something that wasn’t there.

“The juniberries,” she whispered.  “The most exquisite flower of all…”

“Allura, please!” Coran shouted, pressing harder against the barrier.  “You’ve got to listen to me!”

Allura stared back, wide-eyed.  “Is this...real?”

“Of course it is real, Daughter,” Alfor’s hologram replied.   “That flower you’re touching is real.”

“But where is the fragrance of sweet juniberries?” Coran pressed.

Allura raised an invisible flower to her face and shut her eyes, inhaling deeply.  Her eyes flew wide, and she spun towards the bow of the ship.  Her posture stiffened.

“That’s not Altea,” she whispered, stricken.

“When that star goes supernova, it will destroy the entire system,” Pidge said urgently.  “Allura, you must reset the course and get us out of here!”

Allura reached for the control podiums, but the second her palms touched the curved surface, bolts of purple energy arched out around them.  The force of it hurled her backwards out of the particle barrier.  Shiro caught her gently, hands on her waist.  Alfor’s hologram flickered back into existence where Allura had stood, his back to them.  Like he was controlling the Castle himself.

“Father, please,” Allura gasped, “I beg you to turn this ship around.  If we don’t do it soon, we will all perish!”

“I know.  That is my intention,” Alfor said, horrifyingly calm.  He did not turn around, and somehow, that made it worse.

“What?  Why?!”

The hologram fuzzed out briefly, outlines wavering like it struggled to hold shape.   “Don’t you see, dear daughter?  Zarkon can never be defeated.  He’s been ruling for ten thousand years.”

“But we must continue to fight!”

“Fight?  For what?  It is all over for Altea.  You don’t have to live a lifetime of war--you can be with me, and the rest of our people.”

Allura sobbed.  “Father, please !  The paladins and I--we can still stop Zarkon!  Somewhere in there, you must want that to happen!”

The hologram glitched out completely for a heart-stopping second.  Then it flickered back in, wavering between an upright, confident stance and a crouch.  The edges blurred and wavered worse than before.

When Alfor spoke again, his tone was completely different--urgent, firm, rather than soothing and dreamlike.   “Allura, my AI has been corrupted.  You must disconnect my power source--”  His voice fuzzed out, came back in disconnected snippets.  His hologram glitched violently.   “We can stroll--Blossom can--Every morning, just for you.  Remember how much you loved that.”

Allura bowed her head, slim shoulders shaking.  “...I remember,” she whispered.  “I’ll see you soon, Father.”  When she spun to face them, her face was hard and determined.  “I’ve got to get into the holodeck, to disconnect my father’s power source manually.  Paladins, get to your Lions.  I need you to slow the Castle’s descent into the star.”

She plowed directly through the middle of the group without another word, out the doors and into the darkened ship.

“I can try to override the system and open the hangars,” Coran said, sprinting for his controls.

Hunk had completely forgotten Sendak was even there until Shiro turned to the Galra and snapped, “Can we trust you not to cause problems?”

The Galra flattened his ears, squinting back.  “I have no interest in dying here,” he huffed.

“Follow Coran’s orders,” Shiro retorted, spun on his heel, and bolted for his hangar.

Well, that was Hunk’s cue to get moving, now .  He made it to the cockpit in record time, launched, joined the others at the bow of the ship.  Yellow’s shoulder braced against it, thrusters wailing as he pushed them as high as they would go.

It wasn’t enough.  It was never going to be enough, not even if they’d formed Voltron.  The Castle’s engines were much more powerful.  They barely slowed it, even giving it everything they had.  How much good would a few borrowed seconds do Allura?  They couldn’t help her.  And nothing, not even Voltron, could stop a supernova.  Dread and horror reverberated across the mindlink.  The only break to it was a solid ferocity Hunk was certain came from Keith.

Yellow strained and shuddered around him, and Hunk squeezed the throttles gently, as much to reassure the Lion as himself.  “Come on, buddy.  We can do it.”

Yellow pulsed anxiety back to him, as fearful as Hunk himself.  The expanding corona washed the world bloody and starlit.  He squeezed his eyes shut and pushed, urging Yellow to do the same.  They had to hold out.  It was all they could do.

And then, Allura’s voice over the comms.   “Paladins, get to your hangars.  We’re getting out of here.”

Relief surged through the link.  Yellow pushed off the hull and darted back inside, landing hard on the hangar floor.  Hunk pressed his face against the too-warm dash and let out a shaky sigh, trembling.  Yellow rumbled gently in the back of his head, trying to calm him.  They felt the shockwave of the supernova, but only for a second.  Not long enough to kill them.  Hunk patted the throttles.

“Thanks, boy,” he whispered shakily.  Yellow purred in reply and settled to a warm, solid glow down in the core of Hunk’s being.  Hunk was getting used to the gentle pressure of the Lion’s consciousness up against his own.  It made him feel safer, more stable, more capable .  He never wanted to give it up.

Unfortunately, the peace didn’t last.  He didn’t even make the bridge before he felt the other Paladins’ frustration/concern/irritation through the temporarily-heightened mindlink--the others’ emotions were always much more tangible and overwhelming after they flew together, and right now, they were stressed .  And he wasn’t at all surprised by the root of that stress: Sendak.

The doors slid open just in time for Hunk to hear the last of Allura’s tirade: “-- entirely your fault any of this happened!  I should toss you out an airlock and be done with the whole affair!”

Sendak’s ears were flattened, but his expression was...almost contrite.  As far as Hunk could tell, he was avoiding Allura’s gaze by looking at the floor.

“Princess--” Shiro started.

Allura rounded on him in a hot second.  “Do not interrupt me, Shiro.”

Shiro pressed on doggedly.  “Princess, if anyone should take responsibility--”

“ You did not plug that crystal into my Castle, he did!”

“Enough,” Sendak said flatly.  “I am capable of taking responsibility for my actions.”  He lifted his head and tilted his ears towards Allura.  “Do what you must.  I am prepared to weather it.”

Allura’s eyes narrowed.  “Do you really expect me to fall for more Galra trickery?”

“No,” Sendak replied.

“Someone get this... monster off the bridge of my ship.  Put him back in cryostasis.  I never want to see him loose again ,” she said, gritting her teeth.

Coran cleared his throat.  “Princess, I’m not sure cryostasis is our best option right now.  Both sets of pods have experienced severe malfunctions today, and until our systems are totally clear of that crystal’s energy, I have concerns about the possibility of another one.”

Allura looked on the verge of frustrated tears.  “Then put him in a cell.  I don’t care.”

Coran stepped forward and put his hand on Sendak’s back.  The Galra jerked away from him, upper lip curling to hint at teeth.  Coran clucked his tongue and said, “Well, come on.  We don’t have all quintant.”  He glanced up at the door, eyes landing on Hunk.  “Oh, there you are!  Hunk, would you mind helping me take Sendak back to the detainment level?”

“Uh...sure,” Hunk said, and stepped out of the way to let Coran and Sendak through.

Things stayed quiet until they got down to the detainment level.  Sendak kept his head down and stayed absolutely silent.  Hunk didn’t speak, either--he wasn’t sure if the quiet was a sign of an impending explosion or not, but he didn’t want to provoke one.  He was just relieved Sendak wasn’t choosing to fight back, even if it was a little odd.  He remembered Keith and Pidge’s description of the fight for the bridge, and he half-expected a similar one to force Sendak into a cell.

It never came, though--Coran opened one of the cells, and Sendak eyed him cautiously for a moment or two before walking in without protest.

Chapter Text

Sendak had to fight to keep his knees from buckling as he crossed the threshold into the cell.  It was too bright, too warm, and it made his head hurt.  Well, hurt worse than it already did.  He leaned against the nearest wall and shut his eye, just for a tick.  He was going to go down any moment, and he knew it.

He couldn’t bring himself to care.  Gods knew he was exhausted, from fighting, from trailing Shiro all over the Castle, from following the Paladins, from...he wasn’t even sure what had happened on the bridge, and he was too damn tired to process it.  Maybe later.

His knees folded under him, and he sank awkwardly to the floor of the cell.  He curled in on himself, wrapping his arm around his aching ribs.

“Uh...you okay there?”

Sendak cracked his eye open and regretted it when the lights stabbed needles straight into his brain.  Any response he would have made converted itself into a strangled whine, and he shielded his face from the light.  There was a flurry of loud movement somewhere nearby--two voices talking over each other, but his head hurt too much to untangle the separate translations his translator and the Altean one were giving him.  It was all unintelligible gibberish.  Meaningless.

Then a hand landed on his knee, and he flinched away from the touch.

“Calm down,” a voice said, from far too close.  “It’s alright.  We won’t hurt you.”

Liar.  He tried to move away again, scooting further into the cell.  Clothing rustled, soft footsteps moved away from him, and he risked opening his cybernetic eye.

Oh.  They’d dimmed the lights.  That was almost nice of them.  The Paladin and Altean who had ‘escorted’ him down to the cell were still there, however, which was much less nice.  They were staring at him, too.  Sendak shifted uncomfortably and peeked at them through the gap between his arm and his knees.

“What do you want ?” he rasped, and immediately kicked himself.  He sounded weak.  He couldn’t afford that, not here.

“Dude, you just fell over,” the Paladin said.

Sendak flattened his ears.  “And?”

The two of them looked at each other.  Sendak couldn’t make heads or tails of their expressions, not without ears to emote.

The Altean spoke next.  “Well, we’re a bit concerned, that’s all.”

Sendak picked his head up enough to bare his teeth at them.  “I don’t want your pity.”  If he’d had the energy, he would have gotten up and mock-charged to drive his point home, but lifting his arm felt like trying to pick up a battle cruiser.

“What?  Wait a second, neither of us are pitying you,” the Paladin said.  “I don’t even like you, but...I mean, I’d feel really bad if you died in here.”

So that was the game.  They were playing with their claws sheathed, hoping he’d fall for feigned kindness.  Sendak knew better.  “Don’t bother lying to me.  I know how prisoners are treated.”

“Perhaps how Galra prisoners are treated,” the Altean said.  “To treat a defeated enemy like that goes against everything Altea stood for.”

That was officially the biggest lie anyone had ever told him in the two-hundred and twenty years he’d been alive, right up there with ‘serving the Galra military is the greatest honor that will ever be bestowed upon you’.  He knew damn well what Altea had done to the Galra--Zarkon had hammered it into his skull, sometimes literally .

He scoffed.  “You want information.  I know how interrogations work.”

“What do you expect us to do ?” the Paladin asked, sounding incredulous.

Nope.  Sendak wasn’t falling for that one either.  He ducked his head again, concealing his face with his arm.  “If you’re not planning to torture me, just go away.”

Silence.  No sound of movement.  Then the Paladin asked, “Do you want a blanket or something?  Food?”

They thought he was an idiot.

“Are you offering because you intend to provide either of those, or just to let me know you have them and are going to refuse me if I ask?”

Dead silence.  Sendak shifted slightly to peer at them.  Both the Paladin and the Altean stared at him open-mouthed, features slack with surprise.  That was...odd.  Odd reactions were never good.  He tensed and ducked his head lower, flattening his ears.

“...You know what, I’m just gonna get you a blanket and something to eat,” the Paladin said, and by the time Sendak looked up, they were gone.

The Altean was still there, though, and he walked right over and crouched maybe a foot away from Sendak.  He growled threateningly and flattened his ears, and shifted towards the nearest corner.  The Altean sighed.

“You,” he said calmly, “are on the way to making yourself more trouble than you’re worth.”

Sendak fought to keep from shrinking away from him.   More trouble than you’re worth .  He’d heard that one before.  Usually it heralded pain, and lots of it.

“Then why not kill me?” he snapped.

A shrug.  “Well, you’re not wrong: we want information, and you’re the only source we have unless we want to go raiding another Galra base.”  His head tilted.  “And, well, right now that isn’t an option, so we’ll keep you around.”

And then, quicker than Sendak expected, the Altean reached for him.  Sendak yowled and jerked away, then made an undignified scramble into the back corner and curled up, growling defensively.  The Altean frowned and stepped closer, and Sendak growled louder.

“Touch me, and I swear I’ll kill you,” he hissed.

“We both know you’re injured,” the Altean said.  “I’d like to make sure none of your injuries are going to kill you while you’re down here.”

Sendak pinned his ears back against his skull.  “Doesn’t mean you get to touch me.”  

Why didn’t they get that he wanted to be left alone?  Too close, overly familiar, invading his personal space, touching him--most other people who did that intended to hurt him.   Had hurt him.  The shoulder piece of his cybernetic felt like it was biting into his skin.

It took him a couple ticks to realize it probably was.  How long had he been wearing it?  He stared hard at the Altean--what had Shiro called him?  Coran?--but the alien had moved back to the doorway, apparently content to observe for the moment.  Far enough away, then.  He uncurled enough to reach the release hatches, and the equipment hissed.  The lower section came away first, sliding out of the upper part and rotating.  Sendak caught it and set it aside.  He almost fumbled the upper section, wincing as the metal pulled away from bruised, chafed scar tissue.  He felt raw and exposed, and he could tell without looking up from his inspection of the stump that the Altean was staring at him.

He ignored it in favor of running his fingers over the scarring and around the ports, checking for...well, he wasn’t entirely sure.  He had vague memories of it getting infected once, when he’d first been fitted for cybernetics, but he’d been so feverish at the time that he didn’t remember what to look for now.  He wasn’t oozing pus, though, which he supposed meant he was alright.

Coran made horrified sounds from the doorway, and Sendak did his best to ignore it.  He was well aware of just how bad the remnant limb looked--it ended less than a hand-span from the shoulder joint, terminating in a ragged mass of black-violet scar tissue.  The scarring clawed up onto his shoulder, tendrils of dark skin peeking through his fur.

“I hope you’re aware that you can stop looking if it disgusts you,” he said, not looking up.

“I’m not disgusted, merely surprised,” Coran said.  His voice quavered oddly, though, which probably meant he was lying.  

But he didn’t say anything else, and Sendak elected to ignore him.  He kneaded gently at his shoulder, wincing at the soreness in the muscles.  He’d clearly been stuck in the cybernetic for far too long.

How long?  That was the big question.  He remembered nothing between the bridge and waking up on the floor somewhere else in the ship.  Shiro had mentioned cryostasis as a containment method, which...told him less than he’d hoped.  It could have been only a few quintants or a few cycles , and he wouldn’t know.  The thought paralyzed him.  How much time had he missed?  It couldn’t have been too long if they’d chosen to question him, could it?  They wouldn’t have risked keeping him alive very long after his capture--it would be a stupid risk.  Too stupid.

The Paladin chose that moment to return, carrying an armful of bright-colored fabric.  “I got the blanket, but the food’s gonna take a little while,” they said.  

Their tone was friendly but their smile had teeth in it, and Sendak flattened his ears as they approached.  They didn’t seem to notice and kept coming.

Sendak bared his teeth and growled.  “Don’t come any closer.”

The Paladin balked, brows quirked with confusion.  They stared at Sendak, and Sendak stared back, keeping his ears flat.  Eye contact felt like a threat, but he refused to back down.  He would not be intimidated.

The Paladin crossed their arms.  “Look, do you want the blanket or not?”

That was more along the lines of what he was used to.  Intimidation, pushing his boundaries, offering a reward for allowing them to take liberties with him.  Sendak growled a little louder and hiked a shoulder.  He didn’t need a blanket, not at the cost of his personal space.  Not.  A.  Chance.

“Hunk, put down the blanket and come back here,” Coran said from the doorway.

The Paladin--Hunk--glanced back and forth between Coran and Sendak, then cautiously set the blanket on the floor and retreated to the door.  Sendak hesitated.  What sort of trap was this?  A way to lure him out of the corner?  What purpose would it serve?  They already had him confined where they wanted him.  Did he even want the blanket enough to risk a trap?

Yes.  He did.  Even though the ship was too warm for his liking, the pressure of a blanket around him would be better than, say, leaving his armor on for the same sensation.  Armor didn’t bruise like a cybernetic, but it could certainly chafe and the friction matted his fur like nothing else.  And matted fur was the road to a host of other issues he couldn’t afford to deal with.

Sendak uncurled and reached cautiously for the blanket, keeping his eyes on Hunk and Coran.  Neither of them moved to stop him, and he snatched it up and retreated into the corner before they could change their minds.

“You...really think we’re planning to hurt you,” Hunk said slowly.

Well, that should have been obvious.  He wasn’t about to say as much, though, and he flattened his ears and turned his face away.

Silence.  Shuffling fabric.  Then Hunk said, “Hey, Coran?  Would you mind helping me out in the kitchen?  There was a malfunction earlier, and…”

“Of course,” the Altean chirped.  More fabric rustling, and then the whoosh of a door opening and closing.

When he lifted his head again, he was alone.  Sendak sighed and tilted his head back, letting it rest against the wall, and shut his eyes.  Gods, he was tired .  If he weren’t worried about them coming back, he would have gone to sleep right then and there, still in his armor.  As it was--well, his ribs ached.  He’d heard them grating on each other earlier--they were definitely broken.  His right shoulder was sore and aching, and probably needed to be iced and slung properly instead of braced.  He was doing his best to ignore the gash on his palm, but it stung anyway and with how wet the skin around it felt, it was probably bleeding again.  He didn’t dare look at it.  He should have been removing his armor to inspect his injuries, but...no.  Not now.  Later, when he was certain he would have a couple vargas alone.

He must have dozed, if lightly, because the next thing he knew the door whooshed back open and a set of footsteps entered the cell.  He lifted his head immediately and opened his eyes, feigning alertness.

It was just Hunk that time, holding a bowl of something steaming.  Then the scent hit his nostrils.  Salty.  Something rich and almost fatty.  Other scents he couldn’t quite identify.  His stomach clenched up, a stark reminder that he hadn’t eaten since before he and Haxus attacked the Castle of Lions.

“I brought food,” Hunk said, rather unnecessarily, and set the bowl down in the middle of the room before retreating to the doorway.

Sendak glanced at the bowl, then eyed Hunk suspiciously.   This was a trap.  It smelled too good to be anything but poisoned or drugged.  “What is this?” he asked.

“Uh, soup?”  When Sendak remained still, Hunk crossed their arms and looked hurt.  “Dude, I put effort into that.  The least you could do is eat it.”

Yep, definitely a trap.  His stomach, apparently, had other opinions, because it chose that moment to rumble like an ion cannon powering up.  He weighed his options.  If it was a trap and he fell for it, it would put him at their mercy until whatever was in the soup wore off.  He’d been hungry before, truly hungry, the sort of hunger that devoured you from the inside out, and he wasn’t anywhere near that point yet.  But he couldn’t afford that here, or the weakness that came with it, and even drugged food would be better than starving himself.  Unless it was poisoned--but no, they wanted information.  You can’t get information from a corpse.

Sendak reached for the bowl, slowly, carefully, waiting for Hunk to take it back.  Nothing.  He hooked a finger over the rim and pulled it back towards him.  Hunk moved.  Sendak snatched his hand back and braced, but the Paladin only sat down in place and kept watching.  Sendak reached out again and pulled the bowl the rest of the way over to him.  Hunk had apparently set a spoon beside it, but the bowl was narrow enough to sip from without spilling.  He lifted it carefully, brought it to his mouth, and tilted it just enough to get a taste.

Salty.  Rich.  Almost earthy.  A hint of sweetness mingling with something vaguely spicy.  And hot , settling in and beginning to warm him up from the inside.  

A well-laid trap indeed.

“What are you playing at?” he demanded, setting the bowl aside.

Hunk’s jaw dropped.  “What?  Is it that bad?”

The Paladin was going to try and sell it, then.  “The opposite,” Sendak said, squinting at them suspiciously.  “No one wastes good food on prisoners.  If you’re going to manipulate me, you could at least try for a little subtlety .”

“Wh--I’m not manipulating you!” Hunk yelped.  Sendak hesitated.  They seemed sincere, but...no, not possible.   No one was that nice.

“Then what do you call this, if not manipulation?”

“Um, being a decent person?  Look, if I was going to manipulate you, I wouldn’t do it with food.  I love food--I like cooking, I like eating, but my favorite thing is watching other people enjoy what I made.  And I made that--” they gestured towards the bowl-- “for you.  So it kinda hurts that you’re turning it down because you think I’m going to use it against you.”

Well.   That was something he hadn’t anticipated.  He stared at Hunk, trying to process it.  “...You put time and effort into this...for me , specifically?”  He had to be lying.

“Yeah.  I even asked Coran to make sure I wouldn’t add something that would make you sick.”

Gods.  They weren’t lying.  

Sendak hesitated, then picked the bowl back up.  “...Thank you.”  

That was the right response, wasn’t it?  He wasn’t sure.  None of this was as it should be.  He wasn’t being tortured.  No one was interrogating him.  One of his captors had cooked for him.  It was...strange.  Wrong, in a way that left an itch under his skin.  They were sure to ask something else of him for this kindness somewhere down the line.  But he was an idiot if he didn’t take advantage of it while it lasted.

“You’re...welcome,” Hunk said.

It really was good soup, especially in comparison to the emergency rations the escape pods were stocked with.  Sendak had learned to savor anything that wasn’t rations long ago, and he sipped slowly, letting the flavor linger in his mouth.  He took a surreptitious glance at Hunk over the rim of the bowl.  The Paladin had stopped staring at him quite so intently.  Even better.  If he wasn’t being watched, he could stop wasting energy watching back.

The bowl was empty entirely too soon.  Sendak debated, briefly, on the pros and cons of attempting to get the last little bit out of the bottom before deciding to spare what remained of his dignity and set the bowl down to slide it back across the floor.

Hunk stood up before he could and took a step towards him.  Sendak flattened his ears.  To his surprise, Hunk seemed to get the message--the Paladin stopped where they were, then moved backwards and tucked their hands behind their back.

Well, then.  Maybe the aliens weren’t as bad at reading body language as he’d thought.  He slid the bowl across the floor and flicked his ears back upright.  Hunk stooped to pick it up.  They ran their thumb over the rim and eyed Sendak.

“Uh, if you’re still hungry, there’s more upstairs,” they said.

Sendak failed to hide his surprise--had the Paladins ever kept a prisoner before?  With the way this one let him dictate how their interactions went, it didn’t seem particularly likely.  “...I would appreciate it,” he said slowly, studying Hunk’s face.

The Paladin flashed a toothy smile--gods, did they just threaten each other all the time?  Was it a way to pull rank or something?--and said, “Great, I’ll be right back.”

And then they were gone.  Sendak settled back against the wall, wincing as his ribs protested, and lifted his hand to inspect it.  He’d torn the scab off the gash at some point and failed to notice, apparently, because his palm was coated with blood.  Lovely.  He sighed and licked his hand, ignoring the sting as his tongue brushed the edges of the wound.  He could only hope it hadn’t gotten all over the bowl--the longer he could hide his injuries, the more time he would have to recover before his captors took advantage of them.  And he could use all the time he could get, he thought, as he shifted slightly and his ribs grated on each other.  He tucked his hand under his stump and settled a little more comfortably, letting his eyelid fall to half-mast.

The door whooshed open again before he could drop off to sleep, though, and it took Sendak a few ticks to rouse himself again.  By the time he’d forced his eye back open, the bowl was back in the middle of the cell, Hunk was seated opposite him...and the door was open.  Not cracked, open , wide open, giving him a clear view out into the hall.  He ignored it in favor of the soup.  If the Paladins were going to be lax with him, that was their problem, not his.

“Alright, I gotta ask,” Hunk said as Sendak lifted the bowl again.  “Do you have something against spoons?”

“...I don’t understand the question,” Sendak replied.

“I mean, there’s a spoon right there .  Do Galra just not use spoons or something?”

Sendak arched a brow.  “I have one arm.  This is easier than trying to balance the bowl and use utensils at the same time.”

Hunk’s face reddened.  “...Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

Sendak shrugged and took another sip of the soup.  “What is the point of leaving that door open?”

Hunk blinked and turned around to look back at the door.  “Huh.  Guess I did leave it open,” they said.  “Uh...I guess I’m trusting you not to try and escape?”

Now that was just stupid.  If Sendak wanted to leave, well--he was armed, armored, and had a clear exit and an advantage--Hunk was very clearly not dressed for a fight.  But considering his situation…

“There would be no point to an attempt,” Sendak said flatly.

Hunk stared at Sendak--in what he supposed had to be surprise, with how wide their eyes had gone--and said, “Why?  You don’t think you could make it?”

Sendak snorted.  “I could make it off this ship with ease.  Escaping the range of your artillery would be...more difficult, but doable.”  A wry smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.  “But, unfortunately, I don’t like my odds after the escape.”

“Your--wait, what?  You mean you don’t want to go back to the Empire?”

The consequences will be worse than anything you can imagine.  “I like what limbs and sanity I have remaining, thank you.”

“... What ?”

Either Hunk was more obtuse than Sendak had anticipated, or he wasn’t making himself clear enough.  “I failed a mission given to me by Emperor Zarkon himself--not once, but twice.  I’m not particularly keen on being handed over to the druids to pay the price of my failure.”

“The...druids?”  Hunk’s eyebrows were creeping towards their headband.

The scarring around the ports in his stump itched.  No.  It couldn’t --the nerves had never healed there, he didn’t have sensation in the scar tissue.  It was all in his head, like usual.  Haxus had a big, fancy, technical term for it, but Sendak had never bothered to remember what it was.  He scratched at it anyway.

“Yes,” he said simply.  “The druids.  Ask Shiro, I’m sure he’ll be glad to tell you about them.”  He drained the bowl in a few quick gulps and slid it back.

Hunk picked the bowl up and turned it, inspecting the sides, and Sendak tensed.  Even at this distance, he could see the blood smeared on the side where he’d held it.  There wasn’t much , but the blue streak stood out against the white of the bowl.  Hunk set the bowl down and unzipped one of the pouches on their belt.

“Can I see your hand?” Hunk asked.

Sendak tucked it back under his stump and scowled.

Hunk scowled back.  “Dude, you bled on the other bowl too.  I’ve got a gauze pad and a bandage here if you’ll let me help you out.”

“I could do it myself,” Sendak muttered.

“You have one arm,” Hunk said, and Sendak regretted his comment earlier.  “I’m not gonna push you, but that’s going to get infected, and you won’t enjoy that.”

They had a point.  Sendak remembered vividly what it felt like when wounds got infected.  It wasn’t pleasant among allies, and there was no doubt as to whether the other Paladins would use it to force him to bend to their will.  But Hunk...didn’t seem like that sort of person.  They were pushy, yes, but Sendak had met pushier.  And their concern seemed genuine.  Sendak cautiously extended his hand for Hunk’s inspection.

Hunk took hold of his wrist and turned it, staring at the gash.  “What’d you do, try to catch Keith’s sword?”

Sendak scoffed.  “No trying involved.”

“...Wow.  I’m surprised you didn’t lose your hand.”  Hunk fumbled around in their pouch for a tick or two, then pulled out a packet of something--wipes, probably.  “Okay, I’m gonna try to clean this up a little before we put the gauze on it.  It’s gonna sting, though.”

It did sting.  Sendak kept himself from flinching, though, and looked away until it was over.  Hunk was gentle, but they were also much too close for Sendak’s comfort.  They seemed to understand that--or perhaps they themself were uncomfortable, because they moved back towards the door once they’d finished.  Sendak tucked his hand back under his stump and curled in on himself.  Hunk apparently got the message, because they said a quick goodbye and left the cell, taking the bowl and shutting the door behind them.  The lights dimmed further, still brighter than the inside of a cruiser but better than before.

Sendak let himself slump against the wall and shut his eyes, let his exhaustion take him for a few doboshes.  The food had done something for his energy levels, but he still felt battered and paper-thin.  He shut his eyes and took shallow breaths, forced the pain down deep where he wouldn’t pay attention to it.

Then he began unbuckling his armor.  Breastplate first--hidden seams at his shoulders and sides hissed and uncoupled, easing the pressure on his chest.  He set the armor aside, stacked neatly, and worked his way down his legs.  His arm gave him problems--the upper arm was alright, but the armor on his forearm necessitated the use of his teeth.  He removed his boots last and stretched carefully, wincing as his shoulder flared up.  

The shoulder brace was easier to remove than he’d expected.  Sendak ran his fingerpads over it and winced again.  Not good.  The soft tissue at the joint was swollen and sore, warmer than the surrounding musculature.  There wasn’t much he could do for it, though--avoiding using his arm wasn’t an option.  He could limit how much he did with it, and that would have to be enough.

He removed his undersuit next and ran his hand over his ribs, pressing lightly, wincing at the pressure on hidden bruises.  Three of the ribs on his left side moved where they shouldn’t have--of course it was the left side, that was always the side people targeted when they realized his arm was a prosthetic.  They weren’t displaced, though, which was better than it could have been.  It was going to make trying to groom difficult, though, and he could already feel the fur on his shoulders matting where it rubbed against his suit.  He’d have to ask Haxus about--

Haxus.

Haxus .

Sendak had seen a sinkhole open up once, the ground falling away as the earth beneath opened like a mouth.  Something similar was happening behind his sternum, hungry and devouring and wrong , impossible .  He curled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arm around himself, squeezed his eye shut and tried to breathe.  The void in his chest leached the air from his lungs, and his exhale became a sob somewhere on the way out.  He choked the next one back down and sank his claws into his stump.

It wasn’t enough to ground him, and he couldn’t stop himself from crying out.

“Haxus--”   You should never have--not for me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry--  “Forgive me, please forgive me, I--”

I can’t do it, not without you .

He was never going to see Haxus again.  Would never hear his voice or breathe his scent, would never get to tell him--

He dug his claws in deeper.

Hadn’t he promised Haxus they would get off Arus?  He’d lied.  He’d lied to Haxus, betrayed his trust, led him into a death trap--

He might as well have killed Haxus himself.

“It should have been me,” he whispered.  “It should have been me .”

Consciousness returned by slow degrees.  The pain came back first--of course, it always did--and he curled in on himself, breathing through it until the throbbing in his ribs faded to a manageable level.  Sendak cracked one eye open, then uncurled and pushed himself upright.  His shoulder twinged in protest.  He took his weight off it, settled back against the wall and took stock of his situation.  A few vargas of sleep hadn’t fixed his injuries, but his head was clearer and the hole in his chest was...less agonizing.  Sendak could live with that.

He stretched his legs, wincing as matted fur tugged at his skin.  He’d have to groom himself in short order, ribs be damned, or the knots wouldn’t come undone, and Sendak didn’t fancy the idea of allowing one of the Paladins close enough to cut the mats out--he knew just how easily you could kill with even dull scissors.  He sighed and began carding through his ruff, tugging gently at the knots to detangle them.  His upper back was going to cause problems--he had difficulty reaching behind his right shoulder even with full range of motion.  Haxus usually got those spots for him, but he’d have to find a workaround now.  No more gentle grooming sessions that ended with him purring and boneless in Haxus’s lap.

He shoved the thought down aggressively and ripped out a particularly stubborn knot in his chest fur.

Sendak was halfway down his right leg, detangling a wide knot at the back of his knee, when the door hissed open.  He tilted his head just enough to get a glimpse of black-and-white hair and dark clothing, then returned his attention to his grooming.  Just Shiro.  If Shiro hadn’t killed him earlier, he was unlikely to do so now.

For his part, Shiro made an alarmed squawking noise and took a couple steps back.  Sendak’s cybernetic targeted him as the alien turned and blocked his view with a hand.  “I--sorry, I didn’t mean to walk in on you,” he sputtered.  His visible ear had gone red.

Right, the nudity taboo.  Sendak snorted--the reaction was funnier than he’d anticipated.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, then grumbled in frustration as his claws hooked into the knot instead of pulling through it.  “You won’t see anything anyway.  My genitalia is internal.”

Shiro squeaked , sounding scandalized.  “You’re awfully cavalier about this.”

Sendak chuffed.  “Your species would care less if you were covered in fur.”

That one got a mumble of assent.  Shiro put his hand down but looked very pointedly away from Sendak, still red-faced.  He shifted from foot to foot, awkward but apparently unwilling to leave.  Sendak finally worked through the knot and lowered his leg to card through the fur on his calf.

“You obviously want something from me,” Sendak said, when the silence became too tense.

Shiro’s shoulders lowered.  “I have a couple questions to ask, but I can wait until you’re finished.”

“So you have a varga to spare, then?”

“...If you can multitask, I’ll ask now.”

“Don’t be surprised if I refuse to answer you.”

“Yesterday, you told Hunk you weren’t going to try to escape.”

Ah.  He’d thought that would pique Shiro’s interest.  It would certainly have grabbed his own, if the roles had been reversed.  “I considered my odds,” Sendak said, switching legs to work on a knot on the inside of his left thigh and enjoying the way it made Shiro squirm.  “You can guess what awaits me if I return to the Empire.  Emperor Zarkon is undoubtedly very displeased with me at the moment.  You Paladins are an unknown, but given what I have observed , my chances of survival are much better here.”  What he was going to do with those odds was still up in orbit, but he wasn’t about to let Shiro know that.

“So you’re just...fine with being a prisoner?” Shiro asked.  He sounded utterly confused, and Sendak hid a sharp-toothed smile.

“No, but it’s better than the druids,” he said slyly, peering around his knees.

His cybernetic still targeted Shiro, so it registered clearly when the small alien shuddered.  “I bet.”

“I doubt you have to.  You clearly spent some time there yourself.”

A heavy exhale.  “I didn’t remember it at all until Hunk told us you mentioned them, and what I do remember isn’t very clear.”  Pause.  Shuffling.  Sendak peered between his legs and found Shiro looking directly at him, still flushed pink but staring steadily at Sendak’s face.  “I was hoping you could tell us a little more about them.”

“Hope I don’t and be grateful,” Sendak retorted.  He lifted his leg casually, ostensibly to get at the tangles on the back of his thigh, but mostly for the way Shiro went scarlet and looked away.

“Look, we’re on good terms from yesterday, but you’re really starting to get on my nerves,” Shiro snapped.

“Will you leave if I anger you enough?”

Shiro practically growled with frustration.  Sendak could see his fists clenching and unclenching, clearly trying to reign in his temper.

Just tell me what you know,” Shiro ground out.

“Make it worth my while,” Sendak countered.

Shiro crossed his arms and turned back towards Sendak.  “What do you want , then?”

What did he want?  He wanted everything they’d taken from him returned, restored, exactly as it had been when they’d destroyed his life.  He wanted the solidity of his position in the Empire, the routine of his patrols, the camaraderie of shared jokes with other commanders.  He wanted the freedom of the bridge of his cruiser, the knowledge that he could go anywhere virtually whenever he chose, the tingle of starlight on his face from the viewports on the observation deck.  He wanted Haxus, Haxus grease-splattered and playful, Haxus smart and elegant in his uniform, Haxus laughing, Haxus .

He wasn’t going to get any of those.  He would have to look smaller, more immediate.  Survival, not comfort.  He’d been good at that, not terribly long ago.  He could do it again.

“Medical attention,” Sendak said at last.

Shiro looked surprised--well, as surprised as one could look without ears to communicate the emotion.  “...Huh.  Would have thought you’d ask for...something else.”

Sendak scoffed.  “The broken ribs say otherwise.”

Shiro winced.  “I’m sure they do.  I’ll have to talk to the princess and Coran about it, but I’ll see what I can do for you.  Now tell me about the druids.”

He was really going to do this.

“They’re the Witch’s order,” Sendak said, starting slowly.  “A completely separate organization from the military, with their own hierarchy and leadership.  We cooperate at times, but not often enough for me to know their inner workings.  The druids are...roughly half of the scientific and experimental department and are usually in charge of interrogation and torture, but they have their own business that I am not privy to.”  He paused, then sat up to look at Shiro more directly, ignoring the way his ribs stabbed at him.  “And that is about all I can tell you.”

“What about the cybernetics?” Shiro asked.

His stump burned .

“Don’t ask me about that ever again,” Sendak snapped, flattening his ears at Shiro.  He curled his lip just enough to flash fangs without outright snarling--he still wanted Shiro to do something for him, and it wouldn’t do to aggravate him enough to withdraw that favor.

Shiro touched the elbow of his own prosthetic.  “...Sorry.  I--it’s not important.”

Ah.  The Paladin wanted to understand what they had done to him, then.  That was fair.  Some days, Sendak wondered the same.  He brushed his fingers across the ports in his stump.  The silence between them stretched, but Sendak was content to allow it to do so.

“Alright.  I’m going to go talk with the others now, but I’ll be back later,” Shiro said at last.

Sendak nodded, and Shiro turned towards the door to leave.  It was awfully trusting of him, Sendak thought, for the paladin to turn his back.  Injured or not, Sendak could have killed him easily--Shiro was unarmored and very minimally armed, and Sendak was trained to ignore his injuries and fight until he died or his enemy did.  It was only a very confident or very foolish opponent who turned their back on a Galra soldier, but perhaps Shiro no longer viewed him as an opponent.  Something had shifted there.  Sendak couldn’t name it, only that things no longer stood as they had.

“Shiro,” he said, and the Paladin stopped just inside the doorway.  “Take that arm off occasionally.  They tend to bruise if you wear them too long.”

Shiro turned back and studied Sendak, eyes glinting.  “...I’ll consider it,” he said, and left.  The door hissed closed behind him.

Chapter Text

Pidge lined the old Altean plasma gun up with the target on the far side of the training deck, centered the bullseye in her sights, and pulled the trigger.  The bolt seared a black splotch on the left side of the target, nowhere near the center, and she sighed and lowered the gun to give her arms a break.  She wasn’t entirely sure why Allura had suggested they practice with ranged weaponry when they had Lance and Hunk around, but the princess had been insistent and it was just easier to go along with it than to fight her on things she wouldn’t budge on.

To her right, Keith was still trying to figure out which hand he was supposed to hold the gun with--she’d suspected he might be ambidextrous earlier, what with the hand-switching with the sword, but she didn’t know if ambidextrous people had dominant eyes or not, and apparently Keith was figuring out the same thing.  That, or he was more used to Earth guns than she was, and probably not pistols, either.  She remembered him kicking what looked like the muzzle of a shotgun under the couch when they’d arrived at his shack.  She’d wondered where he got the ammo for it, or if there even was ammo.  Pidge was fairly certain you had to be a legal adult to purchase ammunition, and Keith wasn’t.  Wasn’t a legal adult, that is.  He probably had ammo.  Keith was smart enough not to keep a gun he couldn’t use.

Shiro, on her left, had accidentally activated his hand and welded the grip of the gun to his palm.  He and Coran were attempting to pry it off without shooting anything, to little effect.  It would have been funny if Shiro didn’t look so exasperated--or maybe it was funnier because of how utterly done he looked.  He was the punchline to a meme, and the only reason she wasn’t laughing was that he’d probably ground her if she did.  Or he’d get Coran to ground her.  One of the two.  

Pidge was pretty sure she remembered her dad giving Shiro permission to ground her back in fifth grade, anyway.

She lifted the gun and took another shot.  Another miss.  It was almost enough to make her wish she’d taken the gun safety course the Garrison had offered, like Lance and Hunk had, but really the extra programming course she’d taken was coming in handy, what with the extraterrestrial computer hacking and all.  The gun thing would have been useful, but she didn’t really need it when 1) Hunk and Lance were around, and 2) her bayard was a katar/whip/grappling hook hybrid.  And since she never intended to be out in the field without her bayard, the gun stuff wasn’t necessary.  Like, at all.  Well, maybe it was a little necessary if she ever had to steal a gun from a sentry or something.  Hopefully it never came to that.

It was pretty cathartic, though, she had to admit.  Especially after the chaos of the last couple days--after the Galra mess , really.  She hadn’t even wanted to interrogate Sendak--she’d wanted him dumped somewhere far, far away from all civilization so he couldn’t come near her team ever again, and she’d gotten the opposite scenario.  And, worse, he was getting his filthy, evil claws into her teammates and turning them to his side--he’d gotten Hunk that first day, and then somehow managed to eke some sympathy out of Shiro around lunchtime yesterday.  Pidge couldn’t understand it.  He’d tortured Shiro and almost killed Lance, and yet two of the people who should be most upset over it were being friendly with him.  At least Lance and Keith were still sane.  But then again, neither of them had gone anywhere near Sendak yet, so maybe he just hadn’t had a chance to corrupt them.

She almost wished Shiro had agreed to just get rid of him back on Arus instead of insisting that killing an unconscious enemy was wrong.  Even if said enemy was a genocidal, xenophobic alien who’d tried to kill them and steal the Lions not once but twice.

Maybe Shiro just didn’t want any more blood on his hands than necessary

Pidge got that, she really did.  If she didn’t keep going until she literally couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer, she woke up with the other Galra’s screams ringing in her ears.  She didn’t even remember his name , but she was never going to forget the look on his face when he fell.

She wondered if Shiro remembered the faces of the people he’d fought in the arena, or if the dead in his nightmares were faceless.

Next to her, Keith finally got his hands figured out and lined up a shot.  He was no Lance, but he was much closer to the center of the target than she’d been.  His second shot was a little closer, the third shot closer still.  She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t jealous, at least a little.

She was also more than a little jealous of Hunk and Lance, who weren’t stuck on the training deck doing what felt like a pointless exercise.  Hunk had been assigned to keep an eye on Sendak--Shiro had made a deal with the Galra the previous day, treating his injuries in exchange for information, and he was set to come out of the cryopods sometime within the next hour or two--and as the member of the team Sendak was least likely to attack, Hunk was the natural choice to watch his pod.  Lance, on the other hand, had plugged five straight bullseyes within the first three minutes of the training exercise and been promptly excused by Coran, mostly to keep Keith on target.  Pun intended.

Allura herself had been down briefly, but she still tired out fast after the Balmera and Coran had ended up escorting her back to her room.  And that was when Shiro welded his gun to his palm--‘by accident’, he insisted, but Pidge had seen him watching Allura the whole time she’d been down.  She knew what was up.  Shiro wasn’t as subtle as he thought he was.  That, or Pidge had gotten a lot better at reading people since she infiltrated the Garrison.  Maybe both.  Probably both.

The gun detached from Shiro’s hand with an alarming pop , and Pidge jumped.  Not as bad as Keith, though--he’d been mid-shot and his finger had reflexively squeezed the trigger, firing off a blast that charred the paint off the wall about twenty feet up.

“...Oops,” Keith muttered, going red.

Shiro chuckled.  “Well, you’re doing better than I am,” he said, and held up his hand.  Parts of the gun’s casing were still stuck to the palm.

Pidge snorted, stifling an outright laugh.  Keith grinned, and the next thing she knew, all three of them were laughing.  Coran looked on in what was probably benevolent bemusement--Alteans had totally alien senses of humor, as far as she could tell.  That, or the translator wreaked havoc with translating wordplay.  Both were pretty likely.  She’d like to get her hands on the translator and see just what was going on with it, and how it had downloaded English so quickly.

She’d have to save that for later.  Lance had just come sprinting in, huffing and out of breath.  He doubled over, hands on his knees, and heaved for breath.

“Hunk--” he gasped out.  “He asked me--come get you guys--Sendak’s coming out in, like, five minutes.  Tops.”

“What?” Coran yelped.  He checked something on his tablet.  “But he should still have another varga left to go!”

“...Maybe your calculations were off,” Shiro said.  “Lance, Coran, you come with me.  Keith, I’m putting you in charge of Pidge.  Make sure she stays away from Sendak.”

“What?” Pidge demanded.  “You don’t need to put Keith in charge of me!”

Shiro shook his head.  “I want both of you out of the way.  The less conflict we have escorting Sendak back to his cell, the better, and I don’t want to risk him deciding to fight back.”  His gaze landed on Pidge.  “And that means you in particular, Pidge.  He might decide he wants you dead more than he cares about not picking fights.”

Well, she couldn’t fault Shiro’s logic there.  Sendak did want to kill her--he’d already shown as much.  She was tempted to tell Shiro it was his choice to go through with his side of the bargain and heal a dangerous enemy who wanted to kill at least one-fifth of his team, but Shiro was probably already aware of that.  She wasn’t sure it was worth it to have patched the Galra up, but Shiro apparently thought it was important for securing his cooperation.  It probably was, but Shiro could almost definitely have gotten more information for his assistance.

Like what he’d done with her family.  He was a commander , damn it, and they’d been on his ship at some point.  He had to know something.

And instead, Shiro had gotten some bare-bones intel on the druids, whatever those were.

“Al right ,” she said, shrugging, emphasizing her resigned-teenager tone.

It worked--Shiro nodded, acknowledging her, and headed for the elevator.  Lance and Coran followed on his heels, leaving her and Keith alone on the training deck.  She turned to look at him.  He stared back.

Then Keith shrugged.  “I’m not going to keep you here,” he said flatly.  He checked the safety on the plasma gun he’d been using and stored it back in the cabinet Coran had taken them from at the start of the session.

“Thanks,” Pidge said, relieved.  “I’m gonna head back to my lab, then.”

“Go for it,” Keith replied.  He’d already retrieved his bayard and, from the looks of things, he was getting ready to square off with the gladiator bot again.  Hadn’t that thing tried to kill him a couple days ago?  She definitely remembered him mentioning something about murder-bots when he and Lance busted into Green’s hangar.

God, that was such a Keith thing.  

Pidge stowed her own plasma gun and took off, heading for the elevator.  If she timed it just right, she could get in and ride up to the hangar level before Shiro and the others were ready to take Sendak back down to the detainment floor, and Shiro would be none the wiser.  He’d never specified that she had to stay on the training deck, anyway.  That was his fault for being vague, not hers for her interpretation of his instructions.

She made Green’s hangar without issue and immediately began booting up her computer, grateful it had survived the crash back to the floor when the gravity had turned back on.  Say what you like about old hardware, it was durable .  A few cracks in the plastic casing, some wires that needed resoldered, and a chip in the screen, and that was it .  She’d have started disassembling the shoulder piece of Sendak’s prosthetic, which Shiro had given her after they’d moved him back up to the cryopods, but Hunk would be upset if she got to work on it without him.  That didn’t make the device any less tempting, but she resisted it in favor of connecting to the Castle’s computer system.  Thank god the Alteans used binary and could interface with her computer.

Of course, it took a lot of her processing power to access the system, and even more to run the rudimentary translator she had running--actually an amalgamation of several code-breaking and cipher programs she had installed, patchworked together to give her a rough translation of the Altean until she could download the Castle’s translator.  She was dreading how much more of her processor that would eat up.  Lag was obnoxious enough when she wasn’t hacking a sensitive alien device, and if she was unlucky she’d have to start setting up a computer farm with the processor in her suit.  Ugh.

And then she found the security cameras.  At least, Pidge was pretty sure they were security cameras.  Because, yes, that translated to ‘training deck’, and that one seemed to be for the bridge, and there were three for the main entrance--but why was one of them labeled ‘pool’?  There couldn’t possibly be a pool in the Castle--that was a massive waste of water.  But before she could click on it to check it out, her eyes landed on the row of icons down at the bottom.

“Detainment level...containment rooms,” she said.   That sounded like something she wanted.

Of course, that meant she had to figure out which cell they’d put the bastard in.  And she couldn’t have all six cameras open at once, which meant she’d have to go through them one at a time, and she’d have to wait until they had him actually in the cell.  Joy.

Well, it wasn’t like she hadn’t done it before.  She’d hacked the Garrison security system from her phone once, and that screen only let her view one camera at a time.  This was much less risky.  She shrugged and opened the first one.  Empty cell.  Second one.  Empty cell.  Third.  Empty cell.  The fourth one was the jackpot--still Sendak-free, but there was a neatly-folded blanket and an equally neat stack of armor in the back left-hand corner.  As she watched, the door reopened and the Galra entered the cell, followed by Shiro at a safe distance.

And there was no audio.  Shiro was obviously talking--she recognized some of his gesticulating--but she couldn’t hear him.   Damn it.  The audio button was nowhere in evidence, either, and he finished his piece and left the cell before she could find it.

Sendak looked up, almost directly at the camera, and a thrill of fear ran down Pidge’s back.  She closed the program hastily and shut down her computer.  Nope.  Not doing that today.  It was like he knew she was watching him, and that was just creepy.  It wouldn’t have surprised her if the Galra had some kind of wacky alien ESP--Allura had fixed a whole planet with her quintessence stuff and the Balmerans could talk through solid rock--but evidence of it would freak her the hell out.  Unless he’d just coincidentally looked up at the security camera, or was trying to figure out where it was, which...still creepy, just a weird coincidence instead of alien stuff.

The door to the hangar hissed open just as her computer finished shutting down, and Hunk joined her at the desk.

“Lance accidentally taught Sendak ‘fuck’,” he said, right off the bat, no context.

Pidge stared at him blankly.  “...What?”

“Lance taught Sendak--”

“No, no, I got that part, but shouldn’t he already know what it means?  I mean, the Galra would have a word for that, wouldn’t they?”

“Probably?  I mean, unless they reproduce by budding or they’re all grown in test tubes or something, but he looked at us like we were nuts and said it didn’t translate.”  A pause.  “It’s probably the test tubes, isn’t it.”

“Probably,” Pidge said, shrugging.  “Most organisms that bud aren’t that complex.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Hunk said.

“Wait, did Lance actually tell him what it meant, or--”

“Nah, Shiro shut him down before he could.  And he didn’t explain it, either, and was like, ‘don’t use it if you don’t know what it means’.”

This was too good an opportunity to miss.  “Let the Galra say fuck!” Pidge said, grinning.

Hunk cracked up laughing, and Pidge joined him.   God , she liked Hunk.  Hunk was great--an intellectual equal, finally, someone who could keep up with her on the technical stuff without getting lost if she slipped into jargon.   And he had her covered on the hardware angle.  Pidge was a software kind of girl, always had been.  Didn’t mean she couldn’t wrangle the hardware when she needed to, but it was easier to specialize in one and work with someone else.  That, and Hunk was just funny.  Working with him was great.

They sobered up around the same time and dove into disassembling the prosthetic, taking it apart a piece at a time and meticulously diagramming and labelling them.  It was hard to gauge wear and tear on alien alloys, but Hunk had the bright idea of comparing the shoulder piece to the forearm--which was much more dinged up, since apparently Sendak didn’t give a damn about what he hit with it.  Or who , for that matter.  She still got angry thinking about him throwing Shiro around, and being picked up and held in that monster hand made her shiver even now.  He could have crushed her easily, even with her armor, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.  

“...Hey, Pidge?” Hunk asked, after almost half an hour of near-silence.  He was quiet, almost hesitant, which was...weird.

“Yeah?” Pidge asked

“Something’s been bugging me the last couple days, and I gotta ask,” he said.  “When we found Shiro and Sendak, he called you a murderer--but, like, you didn’t actually murder anybody, right?  Just busted a couple of his sentries or something?”

Pidge had been dreading that particular question.  She hadn’t told anyone--except Shiro, who already knew--and she’d hoped to keep it between the two of them.   Murderer .  What an ugly word.  But then, wasn’t it hideous, what she’d done?  She’d killed another thinking person--yeah, Galra were people, there was no way around it--with a machine she’d reprogrammed to serve and protect her.  She’d killed him as surely as if she’d cut his throat with her bayard.

There was only one option, really.

“...Yeah.  Just sentries, that’s all,” she said.  “I...guess he said that because I was the one who destroyed his mission, and he’s still expecting to die?”

Hunk shot her a skeptical look.  He wasn’t going to buy it.

“Though it might have been a translation error?  I mean, the Castle translators are like ten thousand years old and languages change, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I can see how that would work,” Hunk said.  “I mean, English has changed big-time in the last six hundred years, Galra’s probably changed a lot in ten thousand .”  He scratched the back of his head.  “Guess that means we’ll be looking into the translators sooner rather than later, huh?”

“Yeah, probably,” Pidge said, relieved.  He fell for it.  Hook, line, sinker.

Of course, that meant they’d be updating the translator, and if Sendak was still around by that time, he’d blow the whole thing.  One word about the other Galra he’d come shipside with, and the cat would be out of the bag.  Or, you know, whatever the space equivalent was.  Evil purple cat-person.  Something.  Semantics.  The secret would be out, that was the whole problem, which meant…

Which meant she had to do something about Sendak.  Shut him up somehow, or get her teammates to be more aggressive with questioning him while avoiding his attack on the Castle.

What had Shiro said earlier?   He might want you dead more than he cares about not picking fights.  Right, because of what she’d done.  But the only person who knew about it was Shiro--the others would just think he’d gone after her for the whole wrecking-his-plans thing, which would put him under more suspicion and more security.  And she was the lynchpin of the whole thing.

She just couldn’t chicken out.

Pidge settled back into the work of disassembling and labeling the parts of the prosthetic, but her mind was whirling.  A plan.  She needed a plan.  One that would get her down to the cells undetected but not unarmed, with enough opportunities to call for backup when Sendak went after her.  Because, yeah, that was a when and not an if , and if she wanted to piss off the murdercat she had to be ready to deal with the consequences.  But then, getting him to go after her was the whole point, wasn’t it?  If they deemed him too dangerous to keep unfrozen because of it, they’d go another round with the memory extractor--or they’d just ditch him somewhere and raid a base for information, which was much easier.

Three hours later, Pidge stood outside the cell door and took a few deep, steadying breaths.  The handle of her bayard was a comforting weight in her right hand.  She wasn’t armored, but with any luck she wouldn’t need it.  She set her left hand on the palm scanner beside the door, and it beeped gently and opened.

And for a terrifying second, the cell looked empty.  He couldn’t possibly have gotten out, could he?  No, no he couldn’t.  The blanket was heaped up in the corner, tented in a way that suggested ears.  She squeezed her bayard tighter as the pile stirred.

Sendak poked his head out, blinking and squinting.  It took him a tick or two to focus, but then he zeroed in on her and his ears flattened.  “ You ,” he growled.  “Come to finish what you started?”

“I have some questions, actually,” Pidge said, trying to keep her tone mild.

That got her a scoff and a curled lip, but other than that, Sendak didn’t move.  He kept staring, though.  Her pulse sped up.

“Where are the two humans who were captured with Shiro?” she asked.

“Why should I know?” came the retort.

Pidge glowered.  “They were on your ship !  You have to know what happened to them!”

Sendak scoffed.  “As if I keep track of every prisoner who passes through my ship.”

“You kept track of Shiro.”

“As if .  I couldn’t have cared less about any member of your species.”

“Well you better start caring and try to remember!” Pidge snapped, activating her bayard.

Sendak smiled, but the look had teeth in it.   Lots of teeth, long and wickedly sharp, and the smile didn’t reach his eyes.  “And why is this line of questioning so important to you?” he asked mockingly, uncurling from the blanket and standing to his full height.  A brow quirked, and then he said slyly, “If I recall correctly, the younger one bore a strong resemblance to you .  Kin of yours, perhaps?”

He’d begun to pace, making as if to circle her.  She cut him off, moving between him and the door, and his smile widened.  The scared little animal in the back of Pidge’s head said start running, that’s a predator and it’s going to eat you .  She ignored it and brandished her bayard.  Sendak paused, head tilting.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Pidge said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice.

It wasn’t enough.  She couldn’t take her eyes off the teeth.

“They were your kin, weren’t they?”  A rhetorical question, obviously.  Sendak changed direction, circling towards her other side.  “That’s why you are the only one asking about them.”

That stung a little.  Did Shiro just not care enough to ask about his former crewmates, even though he knew how desperate she was to find them?  Was she just reading too much into it?

“Why does it matter if they’re my family?” Pidge snapped.  “They’re Galra prisoners .  As a Paladin of Voltron, it’s my responsibility to rescue them from the likes of you .”

Sendak paused, changed direction again.  He was slowly backing her towards the door, she noticed, but she didn’t want him any closer than he already was.  She took a half-step back, knew he knew she’d done it by the way his ears flicked.  His gaze stayed fixed on her face, though, as far as she could tell.

“The likes of me, hm?”

“Monsters.”

That earned her a quiet, deadly chuckle.  “Yes,” he said, practically purring the word, “I am a monster.  How perceptive of you.”  His head tilted, and then he added, “But you’re on your way to becoming one yourself.”

“Don’t compare saving the universe from your tyranny to murdering thousands in cold blood!”

“And who in this room has committed the more recent cold-blooded murder?”  He crossed the space between them in a stride, looming ominously.  Pidge held her bayard in front of her, the tip a hair’s breadth away from his stomach.  “Or do you not remember what you did to Haxus ?”

“I remember,” she said coldly.  “He was just as much of a monster as you are, the only difference is that Haxus is dead, and you’re still around to make everyone else miserable.”

“Then finish what you started, brat .”

“Tell me where my family is!”

Sendak laughed at that and stepped back, grinning ferociously.  “No,” he said.  “Go and search the universe alone and unaided.  Chase half-imagined clues for the rest of your short, miserable existence.  May you find nothing but the shattered echoes of your dreams and corpses.”  He spat, and the wad of saliva landed half an inch away from the toes of her shoes.

Pidge gaped.  She could feel tears beginning to well up in her eyes and blinked rapidly to keep them from forming.  She lifted her bayard and aimed it at him.

“...I’m going to kill you,” she whispered, hearing her voice break on the last word.

“Then do it,” Sendak hissed back.

She couldn’t.  She couldn’t do it, not in cold blood.  The other Galra--she hadn’t meant for Haxus to fall.  She’d been trying to stop him, not kill him, but Rover had a mind of its own.  Well, not literally, it was a semi-autonomous machine, but it was capable of its own decisions, and it had shut itself off.

It took her far too long to realize there were tears rolling down her cheeks.  

“Well?” Sendak demanded.

Pidge gave a shuddery exhale and lowered the bayard.  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said quietly.  “I--I didn’t--he--he was going to kill me, and--and he fell.”

Sendak’s eye narrowed.  “You mean you pushed him, and gave him a coward’s death instead of a warrior’s.”

“ I didn’t want to kill him !” Pidge yelled.  “I didn’t want to kill anyone !  I just--”  Her voice broke on a sob.  “I just want my family back.”

Sendak tilted his head, staring at her.  He looked...confused.  Almost skeptical, but...hurt, too.  And angry.  And thoughtful.

And then he said, flatly, “Get out.  Now.”

“Wh--”

“You heard me.  If you’re not going to finish what you started, then leave , and if you ever come near me again, I will kill you.”

“I can’t believe he thought sending in Keith would be a good idea,” Lance muttered irritably.

Pidge ignored him to the best of her ability, focusing on bypassing the Castle firewall from her laptop.  They were out on the sunken couches in the common room, Lance on her left and Hunk on her right, both crowding her space to watch her work.  She was more used to their casual invasion of her personal space now, so it didn’t bug her as much as it used to.  Lance usually didn’t stink, but whatever space deodorant he’d gotten from the Castle’s replicators had this weird quasi-floral scent she couldn’t get used to.

“Oh, come on, Lance,” Hunk said.  “He’s probably just trying to get Sendak used to the rest of us in case both of us are busy.”  He nudged her gently in the ribs.  “He’ll send Pidge in at some point, I bet.”

“No thanks,” Pidge said, scowling.  “Not unless he’s chained to the wall or something.”

“Aw, Pidge--”

“What?  He’s a bag of dicks!”

“ Pidge !”

“He is !” Pidge protested.  “Just because he’s playing nice now doesn’t change that he tried to kill Shiro, Lance, and me and almost stole Voltron.  Oh, and all the malfunctions the other day were technically his fault.  He’s a bag of dicks .”

“...I mean, she’s not wrong,” Lance said.

“Well, yeah, true,” Hunk admitted.  “That doesn’t mean she needs to swear the whole time.”

“Whatever, Dad ,” Pidge huffed, opening the security program.

“Nah, that’s Shiro,” Hunk said, chuckling.

Pidge selected the security camera in Sendak’s cell and-- finally --located the audio button.  Not that it did much--Sendak was curled back up in the corner and staying quiet.  Probably asleep, the bastard, like he hadn’t just no-sold her plan to get him to ruin his standing with the other paladins and reverse-interrogated her.  It still stung, even a couple hours later, and just seeing him so relaxed afterwards made her want to hit something.

Keith chose that moment to enter the cell, moving into frame with a bowl of green goop in his hands.  That was Shiro’s executive decision--better to switch Sendak over to the goo as soon as possible, so he could suffer with the rest of them.  Pidge took an almost vindictive glee out of it--the food goo was gross , big-time.

Lance snickered right in her ear.  “I can’t wait to see his face when he gets a bite of that stuff.”

“Dude.  The goo’s not that bad,” Hunk protested.

“Uh, yeah it is,” Lance said.  “You said so yourself when we first got here!”

“Dude.”

“ Dude .”

“Shush!” Pidge hissed.  “I wanna hear what they’re saying.”

Onscreen, Keith slid the bowl of goo towards Sendak and sat down by the door.  The Galra uncurled and studied him for a couple seconds, then the bowl, then Keith again.  His ears tilted, and the corner of his mouth quirked upwards.

“Well,” he said wryly.   “And here I had thought emergency rations would be the most rancid-smelling thing anyone suggested was edible.”

“Too bad,” Keith said, shrugging aggressively.   “It’s what you get.”

Sendak studied the bowl a little longer, then nudged it aside and returned his attention to Keith.  His body language was much less hostile than when he’d stared at Pidge earlier.   “So this is the one the Red Lion chose for a Paladin,” he said slowly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Keith demanded.

“Nothing in particular,” Sendak said.  His ears tipped back the other way.   “And I suppose you have questions, like the others.”

Keith shrugged again.   “Shiro sent me down with a couple.”

“I would like to make a deal with you, Keith.  A question for a question.  I will answer you as honestly as I am able, so long as you agree to do the same.”

“...You haven’t suggested this with anyone else.”  At least Keith had the good sense to be suspicious.

Sendak shrugged, a curious, rippling motion.   “Reciprocity.  The others did something for me, I returned the favor.”  His expression was knife-sharp and utterly focused, but his tone was casual.   “You can ask the first question, if you like.”

Keith crossed his arms and scowled.  He was actually considering it--that look was thoughtful, not angry.

“What’s he doing ?” Lance hissed.  “Anything he tells Sendak’ll probably get used against us!”

Or told straight to Zarkon when Sendak decided to make a break for it.  Pidge was about to say as much when Hunk said, “I don’t know about that, but...do you think we should get Shiro?”

Pidge was about to shush them again when, onscreen, Keith shifted his stance.  They both shut up and turned back to the laptop, staring intently.

“Alright, I’ll play along,” Keith said.   “How many Galra installations are in your territory?”

“My sector ,” Sendak corrected mildly, “contains two permanent bases and two active patrol units, including my own cruiser.  If I guess correctly, you’ve already taken the installation on the Balmera?”

“Yeah, that was the first place we went after we kicked your ass.  Is that second patrol going to cause us any problems?”

“That depends on our current location.  The last time I spoke with the subcommander in charge of that unit, they were on the opposite side of the sector.”  A pause, awkwardly long.   “How long was I kept in cryostasis before I was awakened for questioning?”

“Uh, almost four movements.  I think.  Why?”

“Curiosity.  I’m surprised you decided to keep me alive for so long.”

“Trust me, some of us wanted to get rid of you when we took the Castle back.”  Another too-long pause.   “So what does Zarkon want with Voltron, anyway?”

“To use it, of course.”

Keith cut Sendak off before he could ask his question.   “But then what was the Red Lion doing on your ship instead of somewhere nobody could take it?”

Sendak grinned, showing the barest hint of teeth.   “Take a guess, Paladin.”

Pidge’s mind turned over once, twice, and kicked into gear.   Take a guess .  Allura had told them how the Lions operated, sort of--Lions needed Paladins to fly.  And, quote, “the quintessence of the Lion is mirrored in its Paladin,” i.e. the only people who could fly them were people whose energy signatures were compatible with the Lion’s.  She still wasn’t clear on what, exactly, quintessence was --fuel? power source? cosmic life energy?--but she remembered the characteristics of the Red Lion and Red Paladin Allura had described.  Temperamental.  Difficult.  Unstable.  Picky.  Someone who relies more on instinct than on actual skill.

The epiphany hit her like a freight train.

“Sendak was Zarkon’s pick for Red Paladin!” she exclaimed, just as Keith said, onscreen, “He thought you could fly her, didn’t he.”

Lance and Hunk’s startled shrieks drowned out the response through the speakers and--worse--startled Pidge.  She jumped hard enough to knock the laptop airborne and down into the floor of the couch pit.  The audio cut out abruptly, and Pidge could have sworn she heard something crack even over the screaming.

“No!” she wailed, scrambling for the laptop.

Shiro chose the exact wrong moment to walk through the common room doors.  Pidge didn’t even notice he was there until he said, in his loudest and most commanding voice, “What’s going on in here?”

He was met by a chorus of incomprehensible screaming from the boys.  Pidge kept her mouth shut--the noise was starting to hurt her ears, and she had a laptop to check over for damage.  The screen was fine and she still had camera visuals, but nothing she did would return the audio.  Great.  Just great.  No replacement parts for broken speakers in outer space.  She’d probably have to ask Hunk to help her repair them--you know, after he and Lance stopped screaming.

Shiro held up his hands.  “Woah.  Slow down and say that again.”

“Okay, so you sent Keith down to go interrogate Sendak, right?” Lance started.  “Well, he just asked about the Red Lion, and--”

“Yeah, and Sendak basically just said Zarkon picked him for Red Paladin,” Hunk chimed in.

One of Shiro’s eyebrows crept towards his hairline.  “And how do the three of you know?”

“I hacked the security camera,” Pidge said casually.

The eyebrow inched higher.  “Pidge, I’m impressed, but I think we need to have a talk about ethics and respecting people’s privacy.  Hacking security cameras back on Earth could get you in a lot of trouble.”

Well, now would probably be a bad time to mention hacking the Garrison to investigate what had happened to her family.  She knew she could get in trouble for it--she’d been lucky Iverson had chosen not to press charges.  What Shiro didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him.

“Look, if Sendak was Zarkon’s candidate for Red Paladin, we should be down there questioning him for everything he knows about Zarkon’s plans instead of just letting him hang out in a cell.  He could have vital information for taking down the Empire!”

And saving her family , she added internally.  Sendak knew something , she was sure of it.  She might not have been able to make him give her answers, but all five of them would.

“And we will,” Shiro said, making a ‘calm down’ gesture.  “But we’re not going to torture him for it.  That’s not how Voltron operates.”  His eyes flickered to the laptop screen, where Keith and Sendak were engaged in what looked like an intense back-and-forth discussion.  “But it looks like he’s willing to give us information on his own terms, we just have to find the right opportunities.”

“Yeah, but who says he’s telling the truth?” Lance said.  “For all we know, he’s sitting in there bullshitting Keith.”

Pidge nodded.  “For all we know, everything he’s said could be a lie--including being Zarkon’s Red Paladin.”  She hesitated a second, self-doubting, then barrelled on down the tangent.  “I don’t think he was lying about that, though--the circumstantial evidence seems to line up in his favor, since I can’t think of a reason why the Red Lion would just be out travelling in the main fleet instead of being in some high-security location unless it was with someone Zarkon thought could control it--”

“Pidge,” Shiro cut in.  “I...don’t think that’s what we need to worry about right now.”

“Yeah, especially since Keith just took him out of the cell,” Lance said.

“ What ?!” Pidge shrieked.  Hunk yelped out a ‘what’ of his own, and Shiro’s eyes widened almost comically.

“Where’s he taking him?” Hunk asked.

Pidge’s fingers darted across the keyboard, snapping her back to the main camera database and scrambling for the feeds for the detainment room, for the elevator, for the hallways.  Her internal monologue descended immediately into screaming at the translator program to work faster, dammit , even though she knew she had limited processing power on the laptop and the translator took a ton to work, much less display the translations alongside the view from the cameras they controlled.  Also, Alteans named things really weird and sometimes she had to check to make sure a camera feed was actually the one she wanted instead of a random one with a similar name on the other side of the Castle, which really, really got on her nerves.   Come on, come on, come on --

The door slid open and Keith strolled in, hands in his pockets like he didn’t have an eight-foot alien death machine tailing him.  Said alien death machine looked utterly nonchalant, almost like he walked into rooms full of his enemies every day.  No, wait.  Not totally nonchalant, not with the way his ears swivelled.  

“Sendak’s agreed to work with us,” Keith said casually.

Chapter Text

Silence roared in Keith’s ears like a badly-tuned hoverbike engine, and for the first time it hit him that he may have made a mistake.  The whole common room felt magnetized, lines snapping taut between two poles--the other four Paladins down in the couch pit, himself and Sendak just inside the doors.  He could hear the Galra shifting from foot to foot behind him, like he was bracing himself for an attack.

“...You’ve got to be kidding me,” Pidge declared, glowering at Keith--no, over his shoulder.

Sendak rumbled low in his chest and said, “Don’t think I’m being altruistic here, brat .”  

Keith looked over his shoulder, got a glimpse of flattened ears and bared teeth, and turned back around to try to do damage control.  This was not a fight they could afford, not now.  He shot Shiro a slightly desperate look.  Shiro’s mouth quirked towards a frown, and he sighed heavily.

“Pidge, go get Allura and Coran,” he said, giving her a firm look.

“But--”

“ Pidge .”

Pidge went, muttering under her breath the whole way.  She took a fair chunk of the tension with her--Keith heard Sendak shift again, relaxing his stance the second she was out the door.  Lance and Hunk looked at each other uncertainly.  Then Lance turned to stare at Shiro, while Hunk turned his gaze on Keith and raised an eyebrow.  Keith shrugged, not sure what that look meant.

“...Shiro?” Lance asked.

Shiro sighed again.  He looked frustrated--Keith half-expected him to rub his temples, like he usually did, but instead he put his hands down in his lap and said, “Alright.  You two take a seat.  We need to talk.”

Well, no point putting it off.  Keith headed towards the couch pit.  Sendak didn’t follow immediately, and Keith paused on the first step and glanced back over his shoulder.  The Galra lingered in the doorway, ears lowered and brow pinched.  His posture screamed uncertainty, like he was beginning to doubt his choices.  Keith intentionally relaxed his stance and half-smiled, keeping his teeth hidden, and Sendak’s ears flicked back upright.  Something else about his expression softened, the tension under his eyes maybe, and he padded after Keith, almost soundless in his heavy boots.

Keith sat a little closer to the stairs, on the opposite side of the couch pit from the other Paladins, and wasn’t surprised when Sendak leaned against the seats next to him.  He stuck close, but not too close--within Keith’s reach, just far enough away that he could move out of range if need be.  His slouch spoke of languid wariness, all relaxed muscles and watchful gaze.

“So why the change of heart?” Shiro asked, mirroring Sendak’s body language.

Sendak’s hand gripped his knee, claws flexing, tendons standing out.  “...It suits my aims better to cooperate than to resist,” he said flatly.

“So how do we know you won’t just run back to the Galra as soon as that works better for you?” Lance demanded.

Shiro opened his mouth to shush him, but Sendak cut him off.  “The only way I would be accepted back is if I returned at the helm of this ship, with all the Lions in tow and all of you captured or dead,” he said bluntly.  “Return without Voltron, and the least I could hope for is a quick death for my failures.”

That got more shocked looks.  Not from Keith--Sendak had confessed the same thing down in his cell, urgent and earnest and frightened, more so than he was now.   They’ll take me apart, he’d said, break me down until there’s nothing left and I’m begging for the end, and then deny me that mercy.  He was much more controlled facing a larger group.  The only indication of his earlier distress was the way his hand clenched and unclenched, bunching the fabric of his suit.

Shiro nodded thoughtfully.  “We’ll have to talk it over with Coran and Allura, but I would be glad to welcome you to Team Voltron,” he said.

“I wouldn’t,” said Allura.

Keith jumped--he hadn’t heard the door open to let her in, but there she was in the doorway with her arms crossed.  Coran and Pidge stood behind her, Coran apologetic and Pidge gleeful.  Allura stalked towards the couch pit.  She stopped directly behind Shiro, glaring death at Sendak.

“You may have tricked Shiro, but I am not so easily fooled by your deception,” Allura snapped.

“ What deception?” Sendak retorted, flattening his ears.

Allura gestured to him.  “Whatever this is.  This ‘switching sides’ nonsense.  Galra help no one without ulterior motives.”

“Is ‘not dying’ motive enough for you?”

“I doubt that’s your only reason.  What is it, glory-seeking?  The fame of destroying Voltron from the inside?  Revenge?  Bloodlust?”

“If it were bloodlust, I would have killed everyone in this room before you arrived,” Sendak spat.  “Revenge?  My only personal vendetta is with that one--” he pointed to Pidge, “--and I don’t care enough about the rest of you to wreak vengeance on you.  And glory ?  Please.  I have had enough of fame and glory.  It sates no hunger.”  His eye narrowed.  “The only thing I want is to stay out of the Empire’s hands, and cooperating with you is the only course of action available to me.”

“ Liar ,” Allura hissed.

“ Skeptic ,” Sendak hissed back.

“Now, let’s not get too aggressive,” Coran said soothingly.

Sendak growled at him, and the hairs on the back of Keith’s neck stood up.  He glanced at Sendak out of the corner of his eye.  The fur around Sendak’s neck had lifted and he’d hunched his shoulders, bared his teeth.  His ears were totally flat to his skull.  Keith had owned cats before.  Sendak looked like he was about to pounce.

“Sendak,” Shiro said warningly.  The growl died, but the Galra’s posture didn’t relax.  If anything, he tensed further, digging his claws into his leg.

Then, abruptly, he tilted his head and flicked his ears back up.  “I can tell where I’m not wanted.  I’ll return to my cell.”  He pushed off the wall of the couch pit and strode towards the door he and Keith had come through.  Keith scrambled up to follow him.

“Sendak, wait ,” Shiro said.  The Galra paused a step or two from the door, back to Shiro.  “Allura, Coran, and I are going to talk it over.  You stay here until we’ve come to a decision.  Alright?”  Sendak didn’t answer.  “ Alright ?”

“I heard you,” Sendak replied testily, turning around and setting his hand on his hip.

“I would appreciate it if you would acknowledge that you’d heard me,” Shiro said.

Sendak huffed.  “Acknowledged.”

He was teasing Shiro.  

“Good,” Shiro said, shaking his head.  “Coran, Allura?”

Allura folded her arms and looked cross, but she followed him out of the room nonetheless.  Coran left last, shooting a glance over his shoulder at the rest of them before the door closed behind him.  Pidge, who’d stayed quiet by the other door, looked Sendak dead in the eye and sat down next to Hunk, maintaining eye contact the whole way.  It was a hell of a power move.  Sendak flicked an ear and leaned against the wall by the door, looking at the floor.  Awkward, suffocating silence fell.

“So, uh,” Hunk said, “Zarkon’s top pick for Red Paladin, huh?”

Sendak flinched and looked up.  “How did you know that?” he demanded.

“Pidge hacked the security camera in your cell,” Lance said.

“...You are the most incorrigible and obnoxious little wretch I have ever encountered,” Sendak growled, glaring at Pidge.

“I’ll take that as a compliment ,” Pidge retorted, glaring back.

Sendak broke eye contact first, looking back down at the floor.  “So I suppose I should assume you all heard the rest of that conversation.”  Silence.

“Well, I mean,” Lance started.

Hunk chimed in.  “The laptop kinda-sorta--”

“--Fell,” Pidge finished.  “My speakers are broken, so no , we didn’t hear the rest of your super-secret conversation.”  Sendak’s shoulders relaxed, almost imperceptibly.

“Why the hell were you spying in the first place?” Keith snapped, glaring at Pidge.

“To make sure he wasn’t gonna eat you or something!”

“I don’t eat sentients,” Sendak said flatly.  Shocked silence.  Sendak looked back up.  “What?  If it’s capable of rational thought, it isn’t a meal.”

“...Well, at least you guys don’t eat your prisoners,” Lance said.

Sendak pulled a disgusted face.  “No, thank you.  The idea kills my appetite.”

Another awkward silence fell.  None of them bothered to break it--the second Sendak stopped eyeing them all in favor of cleaning out from under his claws, they were free to do whatever they wanted.  Pidge and Hunk began disassembling her laptop to get at the speakers, and Lance sidled over to Keith.

“So what’d he tell you that he doesn’t want the rest of us to know?” Lance murmured, tilting his head toward Sendak.  Keith glanced over, but Sendak didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything going on around him.

“Not much,” Keith muttered back.  

Sendak hadn’t really said much.  He feared the Empire, Zarkon’s wrath specifically; he wasn’t sure what to make of Team Voltron.  His body language said more than his words did--every tilt or flick of an ear had meaning, every slight shift of his weight and change in his posture spoke volumes, and Keith understood it.  Sort of understood it.  Something about it made sense.

It wasn’t what Sendak had said that mattered, anyway.  It was what Keith told him.

Voltron can protect you.  You just need to trust us.

Can I trust you?

Keith glanced at Sendak again and found the Galra staring back.  Those big ears tilted like satellite disks, and he inclined his head ever so slightly.  Keith shook his head, not big enough to be obvious.  Sendak blinked, tipped his head to the other side, and flicked his ears up.  Then they swivelled, and somehow Keith had a feeling they were aimed at Lance.  Another head-tilt, questioning, and Sendak’s brow arched.  Keith tilted his head slightly towards Lance and raised his shoulder slightly, receiving a nod in return.  Keith nodded back, and Sendak blinked slowly at him and settled more comfortably against the wall.

It certainly wasn’t the weirdest conversation Keith had had, but the means of communication were definitely up there.  Keith wasn’t even sure what he’d said.  It seemed to have satisfied Sendak, though.

It was weird that he got the hang of Galra body language more easily than he did human body language.  He didn’t get it.  They were aliens .  Why should anything about them make sense?  And yet…

He didn’t have time to pursue that change of thought, though, because the door opened and Shiro and the Alteans walked back through it.

“Alright,” Shiro said.  We’ve come to a decision.”

“And?” Keith asked.

Shiro shot him an odd looked, then focused on Sendak.  “We’re willing to let you join us--on a couple of conditions.”

Sendak rested his hand on his hip.  “State them.  I would like to know what I’m agreeing to.”

“First: you’re going to have to prove that you actually want to join us and that you’re not planning to lead us into a trap or sell us out to the Empire,” Shiro said.  “Second: until you prove it, you won’t leave your cell unaccompanied or unrestrained.  And, third: after you prove yourself, we’re putting you on probation.  We’ll move you up to the main levels, but one of us will accompany you at all times until Allura, Coran, and I agree to take you off probation.  Are we clear?”

“As crystal,” Sendak replied.  He arched a brow.  “But, restrained?  I must question the logistics of that.  How do you intend to cuff me?”  He shrugged his left  shoulder for emphasis.

Shiro shrugged.  “I argued against that one,” he said.

“We put the other cuff on your thigh,” Allura said coolly.  “Like a garter.”

The Galra looked up at Allura sidelong.  “ That sounds like a humiliation tactic.”  The tips and upper side of his ears had gone faintly bluish.

“That’s because it is,” Allura retorted.

“I’ve had worse,” Sendak said mildly.  “What do you want from me as proof of my lack of ill intent?”

“Pidge told me that you told Keith about a second base in your sector,” Allura said.  “We haven’t been able to find it.  I want that location.”

“What?”  Sendak looked like he’d been struck.  He shook his head.  “No.  I can’t tell you that.”

“And why not ?”

“There are soldiers there, formerly under my command.  I cannot, in good conscience, bring Voltron down on them.”

“You had no problem destroying that village on Arus.”

“You’re asking me to condemn my own soldiers to violent, terrifying, inevitable death.  That base cannot hold out against Voltron.  I can’t--”  He shook his head more frantically.  “I can’t.  I won’t do it.”

“They aren’t your soldiers any longer,” Allura said.  “They’re your enemies.”

“ No ,” Sendak said.  “Ask anything else of me.   Anything .  I can’t do it.”

“...What if we don’t destroy the base?” Keith asked.  Every head in the room turned towards him.

“...Come again?” Coran asked.

“This base isn’t an occupied planet, is it?” Keith asked, looking at Sendak.

“...No,” the Galra said.  “It’s an outpost on a planetoid.  Minimal natural atmosphere, no native species.”

“Then it’s not somewhere we need to liberate,” Hunk said.

“And it’ll probably have information we can use!” Lance added, catching on.  “Shiro, isn’t that why you wanted to talk with Sendak anyway?”

Shiro nodded slowly.  “That’s right.”  He looked at Sendak, then Allura.  “A show of good faith on both sides: Sendak gives us the correct location, and we’ll go in, get information from their computer systems, and get back out without killing anyone.  How does that sound?”

“I...would be amenable to that,” Sendak said.

Allura sighed.  “I suppose I could allow it.”

“Great.  Then we’ll do it,” Shiro said.  He looked around at the other Paladins.  “Let’s get suited up.”

“Wait, now ?” Hunk asked.  “Like, we’re doing this now?”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” Shiro said.  “Unless someone has an objection, we’re doing it now, before they have time to get paranoid and up security.”  When no one said anything, he nodded.  “Alright.  Get suited up.  Sendak, you come with me.  I’m keeping you under observation, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to cuff you.”

The corner of Sendak’s mouth twitched up.  “Be gentle, Champion,” he said, padding across the room to join Shiro.  “It’s my first time in a couple decafeebs, I’m not certain I remember how this works.”

Lance burst out laughing.  Hunk joined him, and Keith couldn’t stop a chuckle.

Shiro smacked him lightly on the shoulder.  “Quit that.  And don’t call me Champion.  My name is Shiro.”  Sendak nodded slightly, and Shiro returned his attention to the Paladins.  “Meet us on the bridge in fifteen minutes.”  

Then Shiro grabbed Sendak by the arm and towed him out of the room.  Coran and Allura shared a look, then hurried after them.  Keith looked around at the others and found them doing the same.

After a good thirty seconds of silence, Pidge said, “Keith, do you really trust him not to betray us?”

“Yeah,” Keith said, shrugging.

“ How ?” she yelped.  “Didn’t you want to kill him when we first caught him?  What about what he did to Shiro and Lance?”

“He’s not going to turn on us,” Keith said.  How to phrase the next part?   He’s more afraid of the Empire than he is of us.  He’s not as strong/confident/unruffled/put together as he wants us to think.  “He’s smart enough to know he’s outnumbered.  He couldn’t take all of us, and he knows it.”

Then he turned and headed for his room.  Footsteps hustled after him--two pairs, heavier than Pidge’s.  Lance and Hunk caught up to him, then slowed to walk on either side.

“How’d you do it, man?” Hunk asked.  “I was down there for hours and barely made a dent, but you go down for like twenty minutes and you get him to switch sides?!”

“...Guess I just said the right thing,” Keith said, hesitated, and added, “but you working on him that first day probably helped.”

Hunk grinned.  “Thanks, Keith.”

“...No problem.”

“I’m just surprised he’s telling jokes,” Lance said.  “I mean, come on!  The Alteans are way more like us than the Galra are, how come they share our sense of humor?”

“Might’ve been a mistranslation,” Hunk said.  “I mean, Pidge and I think it’s probably way out of date with Galra.”

“No, that was definitely an innuendo,” Lance said.

“Yeah, you’d know, wouldn’t you,” Keith said.

“What’s that supposed to mean, Mullet?”

“ You know what it means.”

“Hey!  I do not make that many innuendos!”

“‘Oh, Princess, you’re really activating my particle barrier’.”

“Shut up !”

“ Make me.”

“Alright, that’s enough,” Hunk said, pushing his way between them.  “We’re doing a mission, we gotta get in that team mindset, and we can’t do it if you guys are arguing.”

“...Yeah, you’re right, Hunk,” Lance said.  Keith kept his mouth shut, but shrugged in agreement.  Hunk was right.  They reached his room, and he peeled away from the others to duck inside.

He’d kept his room as orderly as he could--not that it was hard , none of them had much in the way of belongings aside from what they’d scrounged elsewhere in the Castle.  Keith hadn’t done much of that, not really--a whetstone, cloth, and oil for maintaining his knife, that was it.  He hadn’t touched the red pajamas hanging in the closet.  It felt wrong, somehow.  Like an invasion of someone else’s privacy, even if that someone had been dead for ten thousand years.  He’d hung his armor and bodysuit up in the closet to try and lessen the feeling.

It only sort-of worked.  That had been someone’s armor before it was his, and those pajamas had been someone else’s, and this bedroom--someone else had slept in that bed, put their knickknacks up on the shelves, stored clothes and shoes and...whatever else Alteans kept in their bedrooms...in the drawers.  He had spare batteries and cords and lighters and a sewing kit and half a dozen other things in what his dad had called the ‘junk drawer’, back in the cabin, and he could think of at least a dozen things he wished he’d brought along.

Keith opened the closet anyway, pulled on the bodysuit and slipped into the armor.  The whole assemblage tightened around him till it fit like a second skin--not an entirely comfortable feeling, but he could deal.  He tapped the thigh of the suit, and the resulting tingle in the palm of his glove told him his bayard was stored properly.  Good.  He didn’t need to go looking for it with probably five minutes remaining between now and when Shiro wanted them on the bridge.

Pidge caught him in the elevator on the way up, sliding in just before the door closed.

“Are Hunk and Lance already up?” he asked.

Pidge shrugged.  “I don’t know.”  She hesitated, glanced furtively at the corner, then said, “Keith, I really don’t think we can trust Sendak.  He’s dangerous.”

“ We’re dangerous,” Keith replied.

“Yeah, but…”  Pidge sighed.  “Keith, you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”

“...Okay?”

“When he took the Castle…”  She took a deep breath, visibly steeling herself.  “When Sendak took over the Castle, there was someone else with him.  Another live Galra.”

“But we only captured--”

“I know .  I know.  The other one...he fell.  Off the catwalk in the engine room.  He’s dead.”  Pidge shuddered, then shifted her helmet under her other arm and wiped at her eyes.  “And that’s why Sendak can’t be trusted.  At least one of the soldiers under his command is already dead because of us.  He’s got a reason to betray us.”

Keith sighed.  “Look, Pidge, you make a lot of sense.  But I’m going to give him a chance.  Besides, if he tries anything, Allura’s going to kill him before we’d get a shot.”

Pidge shrugged.  “Yeah, if she’s there when he does it.”

Somehow, Keith doubted Pidge’s predictions were going to happen.  She made good points, sure, but...he had a feeling she was missing something.  Or maybe he was missing something.  Maybe they’d both missed something.

It turned out that Lance and Hunk were still getting dressed, because they weren’t on the bridge.  Coran was making some sort of preparations at his control panel, apparently oblivious to the tension in the rest of the room.  Allura stood stiffly on the command podium, every line of her body rigid with anger.  Sendak hovered awkwardly behind Shiro, ears lowered, expression uncomfortable.  Shiro, for his part, was leaning against this chair, relaxed except for the way his arms were folded across his chest.  He looked up when they entered the room and nodded.

“Pidge, would you mind checking for the coordinates of a ‘Galactic Hub’ in the information you downloaded from Sendak’s cruiser?” he asked.

“...Sure thing,” Pidge said, hurrying over to her control area.

Sendak snorted.  “I thought you might investigate the wreck,” he muttered.

“It wouldn’t make sense not to check it out, with--” Shiro started.

“With how close it was to your base,” Sendak said, cutting him off.

“...Yeah,” Shiro said.

“Found it,” Pidge said.  “...I think.”

“Good job, Pidge,” Shiro said.

Keith settled quietly into his own control area as the bridge fell quiet again.  Lance and Hunk were definitely taking longer than fifteen minutes, and by the way Shiro drummed his fingers on his cybernetic wrist, it was beginning to irritate him.  Sendak seemed to be getting antsy, too--he was beginning to pace behind Shiro, only a few steps in either direction, but definitely pacing.

And then he came to a stop at the end of his range, turned to face Allura, and said, “Requesting permission to accompany the Paladins on their mission.”

“ What ?!” Coran shouted.  

“Absolutely not ,” Allura said.

Sendak set his hand on his hip.  “None of you know the layout of the base.  I do , and there’s something of mine I want to retrieve while we’re there.  It makes sense to take me along.”

Allura’s eyes narrowed.  “ Or you’re looking for an opportunity to deliver the Paladins and at least one Lion to the Empire.”

“What will it take to convince you that I’m not ?” Sendak snapped, looking frustrated.

“You can’t,” Allura said.

“...You have something stored on that base?” Pidge asked.

Sendak flattened his ears and glowered at her.  “None of your frexing business, runt.”

“Sendak,” Shiro said.  “Quit picking fights with Pidge.

“She’s had her warning,” Sendak muttered.  His scowl deepened.

Shiro sighed.  “So what do you have on that base?”

Sendak eyed him skeptically.  “...I have a prosthetic in storage there,” he said, “and I would like an opportunity to retrieve it before anyone takes it or destroys it.  It--I dislike being unarmed.  That’s all.”  His ears lowered, and he looked away.

“He’s not going,” Allura said immediately.

Shiro frowned.  “Allura--”

“He’s not going,” Allura snapped.  “Absolutely not.

“If you trust me so little, why even approve the mission?” Sendak snapped back.  “Either I’m trustworthy enough to send along, or everything I say is potentially riddled with falsehoods.  Make up your mind!”

“Then the mission is off,” Allura said, just as Lance and Hunk entered the bridge.  They both froze, staring around in obvious confusion.

“Uh, what’s happening?” Lance asked.

“Allura, you can’t cancel the mission,” Pidge said urgently.  “This base could have critical information.”

“We don’t even know if this base exists yet,” Allura said, eyeing Sendak.  “ Someone has yet to give us the coordinates.”

“You don’t need the coordinates if you’ve cancelled the mission,” Sendak said smugly.

“I hate to intrude,” Coran said, “but we can’t do the mission without the coordinates.”

That stopped the argument in its tracks but did nothing for the tension.  Keith couldn’t help remembering the westerns he’d watched with his dad as a kid--particularly the standoffs, a room full of people all pointing six-shooters at each other.  This was exactly like it, minus the guns.  The darting eyes, the stiff stances, everything hinted at impending violence.

And then Sendak sighed and relaxed his stance.  “ Fine .  These are the coordinates--”  He took a deep breath and rattled off a long string of numbers.

“Pidge?” Shiro asked.

Pidge glanced down at her screen.  “It checks out,” she said.

“I’m pulling up the location of this ‘Galactic Hub’ on our screens now,” Coran said, punching in the coordinates.

And pulled up empty space.  There were two planetoids and a small moon in roughly triangular configuration around the spot the base should have been, and no base at all.

“...So, where is it?” Lance asked.

“I don’t know,” Coran said.  “Our long-range sensors are unable to find anything at those coordinates.”

“I knew it!” Allura said, spinning on her heel to glare at Sendak.  “Of course we couldn’t trust this lying filth .”

Sendak shook his head.  “It’s there.  The base is embedded in a planetoid, moving it would be impossible.”  His brow furrowed.  “There’s a reason it doesn’t show up on scanners...void take it, I can never remember the technical term.  Some big complicated word with electro...something-or-other.”

“How do you not know this stuff?” Pidge demanded.

Sendak glared at her.  “I command troops and kill people.  Fancy technical things were Haxus’s jurisdiction.”

“...So you’re saying it’s a hidden base,” Hunk said.

“Essentially,” Sendak replied.

“Who’s Haxus?” Lance asked.

Sendak stared at him, hesitated, then took a deep breath.  “...My lieutenant,” he said quietly.  “He’s dead now.”

Keith resisted the urge to turn and stare at Pidge.  She’d asked him not to tell anyone.

“I’m not convinced the base is there,” Allura said.

“We’re just going to have to check it out,” Shiro said.

Half an hour and a wormhole later, they rounded the dark side of one of the planetoids.  There was definitely something in the middle of the triangle--a small, jagged hemisphere of dark rock.  Long, pointed spars of grey metal protruded from the flattened side of it, lined in places with pale violet light.  A few cruisers and other, smaller ships slid in and out of berths along the spars, but otherwise, the place was quiet.

“...There it is,” Shiro said.

“It appears the gravitation between the two planets warps the electromagnetic emission spectrum enough to keep the planet off the deep-space scanners,” Coran said, leaning over the controls.

Pidge shot Sendak a condescending look over the rim of her glasses.  “Those terms aren’t even all that complicated!”

“Do you ever stop talking?” he snapped back, flattening his ears at her.

“Knock it off, you two,” Shiro said.  “Sendak, what goes through this base?”

“Shipments passing in and out of the region,” Sendak said.  “Fuel, equipment, other supplies.  Occasionally prisoners.”

“So if it only handles stuff from this area, why’s it hidden?” Lance asked.

Sendak shrugged.  “Probably the druids.”

“The druids,” Shiro said.

“Why do you think I was out patrolling instead of staying holed up in the Hub like most regional commanders?” Sendak said.

“What are they doing here?”

Sendak shrugged.

“Well then,” Allura said.  “We’d better go down and take a look.”

Something about that statement struck Keith as odd, but it took him a second or two to place it.  “...I’m sorry, Princess, did you say ‘we’?”

She had, in fast, said ‘we’.  And she meant it.  The ride down to the base--in Green, because of the cloaking device Pidge had installed--was cramped, awkward, and horribly tense.  They’d brought Sendak along with, still cuffed, unarmored, unarmed, and more irritable than ever, especially because part of Allura’s reasoning for accompanying them was to make sure Sendak didn’t lead them into a trap.

He’d said something in Galra that didn’t translate but made Allura look like she wanted to stab him.

She still did, actually, glowering from the opposite side of the control room.  Keith stuck close to Sendak, at Shiro’s suggestion.  They all knew Pidge or Shiro himself would have been better choices for keeping Sendak under control on weaponry alone, but Pidge was doing the tech stuff, Shiro was trying to keep the peace, and Lance and Hunk were both ranged fighters, so that left Keith and his sword.  It probably wouldn’t last much longer, and Keith could tell from the way Shiro’s eyes darted between the paladins, Allura, and Sendak, that he knew it too.

Shiro cleared his throat quietly, just enough to get everyone’s attention.  “Keith, Lance,” he started.  “You two go with Sendak, see if you can find his arm.”

“But--” Lance started.

“ Lance ,” Shiro said, eyes narrowing.  “I need Hunk and Pidge here to get into their files.  Allura can help me if we get unexpected visitors...and I think the two of you can handle one of him .”

Sendak scoffed quietly.  “I do not need handling.”

He went without further protest, though, leading the way down deeper into the facility.  Lance and Keith trailed him by a few steps, Lance with his bayard active.  Keith didn’t activate his quite yet, but his fingers clenched and unclenched around the grip.  Sendak seemed almost at ease, though--and why shouldn’t he?  He was a product of these environments, with his soft tread on steel floors--Keith still wasn’t sure how to walk quietly in his paladin armor--and the casual ease with which he led them around patrolling sentries.  The Galra looked born to this, like he led infiltrations every day of his life.

Keith would be lying if he said he didn’t admire it a little.  He wished he could be so calm about the situation, but he was roiling with tension.  The dark halls felt like they were closing in on him.

And then they ducked into what looked like a locker room, not unlike ones Keith had seen in dozens of gyms on Earth.  Sendak glanced around, ears flicking, and padded across the room to a locker on the far side.  Unlike most of the other lockers, which just had the standard palm scanners, this one had a keypad of some sort.  The Galra punched in a code, and the door of the locker clicked and hummed open.

“ There we are,” Sendak said quietly, and pulled something out.  

Keith’s brain registered gleaming black metal and limp, splayed fingers before he actually recognized it as a prosthetic.  It looked like the dark twin of the one currently on Shiro’s right arm--matte black and dull grey metal where Shiro’s was bright chrome, glowing violet on the pauldron, forearm, and the back of the hand.  Sendak tucked it under his arm and turned back towards them.

“Now.  We need to go before someone else comes in here,” Sendak said.

“...You’re not gonna put your arm on?” Lance asked.

Sendak jerked at the cuffs emphatically and tilted his ears.  Not enough range of motion, probably.

They were a third of the way back to the control room--they’d picked up the pace a little when Shiro had said, over the comms, that he and Allura were infiltrating a Galra cruiser for more information and he wanted the whole team ready to go at a moment’s notice--when Keith caught a flicker of movement further up the hall.  The tromp of sentries, led by a silent and purposeful patch of darker shadow.  He barely got a glimpse before a hand clamped down on his belt and yanked him back against the wall.

The hand was Sendak’s, of course--his back met the wall and a moment later Sendak shifted in front of him, positioning Keith and Lance both behind him.  Keith shot Lance a wide-eyed, confused look.  Lance shrugged, frowning.  Sendak blocked the view of the hall completely.  All Keith could see was his broad back.  He jabbed with an elbow.  Sendak swatted at him, not turning to look.

And then he stepped away, releasing the Paladins and starting off again.

“What was that ?” Keith demanded.

“A druid,” Sendak huffed back, ears flattened against his skull.  “Now be quiet and stay close, we can’t stay here.”

Lance fell back into step behind the Galra, but when Keith spotted the flickering shadow down another hallway as they passed he turned and darted after it.   Druid .  Druids had hurt Shiro.  If he could learn something by following it, they would all be better off.  He turned first one corner, and then another and another, and skidded to a stop just outside the entrance to a cavernous room somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hub.

The shelves and the containers of whatever-it-was began moving--had to be a conveyor belt of some sort.  A container settled into a socket atop the globe, yellow liquid oozing from it and flowing in rings around the globe.  No liquid Keith knew of moved like that.  And then he caught a flicker of movement--just to the side of the globe, a figure had shifted.  The dark shape he’d chased there--the druid--flowed out of the shadows and raised its hands towards the globe.  Energy rippled around its outstretched hands, so dark a violet it was nearly black.  The darkness ripped out, roiling around the globe, and when the liquid flowed from the bottom and into a waiting container the length and girth of Keith’s thigh, it was glowing a soft and ominous magenta.

He took a deep breath and activated the video feeds in his helmet’s visor.  “Coran, you need to see this,” he murmured.

Coran’s voice hummed over the comms about three seconds later.   “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What is that?” Pidge asked.

Something in the background of Pidge’s channel began making noise--he could barely make out a robotic-sounding voice, though not the exact words.  Quint-something, energy per unit volume something else.  Must have been the sentry they incapacitated in the control room.

“What?” Coran yelped.   “Impossible!”

The robotic voice came through a little clearer the second time-- “Raw quintessence material is transported here from throughout the galaxy and refined into standard Galra fuel requirements.”

“Did you guys hear that?” Pidge asked.

“I can’t believe it,” Coran said.   “They’ve found a new way to acquire quintessence.”

“Guys,” Keith said, “I’m gonna steal some of that quint-whatever.”

“No, you’re not,” said a voice emanating from somewhere over his shoulder.  Keith whipped around and found himself nose-to-nose with Sendak.  “You are coming with me and Lance, and we’re leaving before the druid notices we were here and kills us all.”

Chapter Text

The stench of druid hung heavy in Sendak’s nostrils: herbal and sharp and bitter, the hint of decay on the back of his tongue, all layered over with the lightning-strike odor of quintessence.  It had driven him from the Hub seventeen cycles back, when he’d first been stationed in his region--the smell was everywhere , filtered and all-pervasive, even in his personal quarters, and Sendak had bribed the first of his subcommanders to check in to let him take their cruiser and get out, out, out into the black where he belonged, as far from the reek of druid as he could get.  It wasn’t a perfect solution, but he hadn’t had to spend more than four consecutive vargas in the Hub since, and that was the way he liked it.  That smell …

And now it was everywhere , all around him, radiating in gut-churning waves through the open door.  The Red Paladin--Keith--glowered at him, and much as Sendak wanted to put all his attention on intimidating the insolent cub back into line, he had to stay on alert.  If the druid caught them--if it saw them, or sensed them, or even suspected them, they were finished.  Bile rose in the back of his throat.

“I don’t remember Shiro putting you in charge,” Keith said, all but snarling.  His upper lip curled, flashing a pearly hint of his blunt teeth.  “If I remember right, you’re still a prisoner .”

Sendak’s ruff rose.  “You don’t know what you’re dealing with, brat ,” he growled back.  “I do.  If you trust me on nothing else, trust me on this: the last thing you want is to get that druid’s attention.  It will take you apart, piece by piece.”  He stared Keith straight in the eye and flattened his ears.

“I won’t get caught,” Keith hissed.  “Look, we need to get that stuff.”

“And I can’t let you go in there.”  Keeping his voice to a whisper was an exercise in self-control, but he couldn’t be louder.  The druid would hear them.

“You’re not in charge of me!”

“I cannot watch another cub die!”

Sendak regretted it the second the words left his mouth.   Another .  He’d said too much.  Keith’s brow furrowed, and he stared at Sendak in obvious confusion.  Sendak realized, belatedly, that he’d sunk his claws into his palm hard enough to draw blood.  He forced his grip to relax and maintained eye contact.  Keith had to understand, surely?  He had to.

“I’m not gonna get caught,” Keith said quietly.  “But if I do...if anything goes wrong, I trust you to help me.”  He hesitated.  “Please.  I need to do this.”

Sendak sighed quietly and looked away, down at the floor.  “...I can’t stop you.  Be quick about it and get out before the druid can catch you, so I don’t need to step in.”   Be safe, he meant.  He would never say it, not again, not after... after .

Keith nodded and slunk off, circumnavigating the room, and Sendak peered over his shoulder and waved the Blue Paladin--Lance? was that his name?--up to join him.  His ears twitched at the volume of the Paladin’s footsteps.  Evidently, nobody had taught them how to walk quietly .  The Paladin crouched next to him, blaster at the ready.  His eyes darted, taking in the quintessence laboratory.

“Where’s Keith?” he whispered.

“He decided stealing quintessence was more important than an undetected infiltration,” Sendak murmured back.  “If he is caught, he will need us to back him up.”

The Paladin’s brow furrowed.  “...You want your arm now?”

“It will make too much noise, and I am capable of fighting without it.”  Sendak peered through the door, watching for Keith, but there was no sign of him.  “If things go wrong, I want you to remain back out of the way and take any shot available to you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“...Whatever I am capable of doing.”

Sendak closed his eye briefly and took a deep breath, trying to ease the tight-coiled tension in his guts.  It didn’t help.  The druid-scent was too strong to do anything but set him on edge.  The arm he didn’t have ached and throbbed.  He ignored it in favor of trying to remember the fancy term Haxus had used for it.  Something.  Psycho-something-or-other, just a big word for the pain not being connected to anything actually going on in his body, not quite the phantom pain he dealt with but fairly close.  He was accustomed to flare-ups after any time in the Hub.  Sendak took a tick or two to focus on his breathing, to tamp the pain down further.  It couldn’t be allowed to affect his performance.

The roaring of machine and magic in the next room went silent.

Sendak’s eyes flew open, and he glanced at the Blue Paladin.  The Paladin stared back, and Sendak nodded ever so slightly and eased himself forward for a closer look.

The druid was gone.

Sendak hissed a curse under his breath.  He couldn’t see the bottom floor of the lab from his position.  He crept further into the doorway, edging out of the shelter of the shadowed hallway.  A flash of white and red--Keith, emerging from a side tunnel to look around.  And, behind him--

“ Move! ” Sendak roared.

Keith looked up, and that tick of inaction cost him.  The druid blasted him from behind, hurling the human out of the tunnel and onto the floor, out in the open.  The tube of quintessence he’d grabbed went the opposite direction.  The druid flickered in and out of existence, returning the tube to a cart, and prepared to blast Keith.

The right side of Sendak’s face flared with pain along that old scar, bursting like explosives behind his eyelid.  His knees buckled.  He planted his palm flat on the floor to stave off collapse and took a deep, shaky breath.  Not now.  Not now.

A shriek of pain jerked him out of the pain space and back into reality.  The druid was back up on his level, raining bolts of energy like a vengeful god.  Keith was nowhere in sight.  But that had been Keith’s scream.  Sendak lurched back to his feet and charged the druid, bellowed a challenge deep in his chest.  It turned towards him.  Too late, too late.  He smashed his shoulder into its abdomen.

And then it was gone .  His momentum carried him forward, through the space where it stood.  Over the edge.  Airborne.  He flipped, twisted.  Hit the floor boots first, felt the plates crack and give beneath him.  He stood and looked around, peering through ash and debris.  Keith was the first combatant visible, crumpled against a wall and clutching his right forearm to his chest.

The druid loomed out of the smoke.  The yellow eyes of its mask bored holes in him, rammed needles of ice into his chest.  Sendak glowered back, flattening his ears and allowing his ruff to rise.  A snarl rumbled in his throat.  The druid’s mask tipped sideways, head cocked like a nightmare bird’s.

“So, Commander Sendak returns,” it said, voice rasping and humming at a pitch that scraped Sendak’s nerves raw and made the base of his skull ache.  Sendak ramped his snarl up to a growl and shifted his stance.  The mask tilted the opposite direction, and the druid made a gurgling sound like a drowning cub.  “We are not surprised to find you’ve turned traitor.”

Sendak took a half-step back towards Keith.  “Go,” he snapped, flicking an ear towards the Paladin.

“ What ?” Keith yelped.

“ Go !” Sendak bellowed, and charged the druid again.  

He snapped off a kick, aiming directly for that monstrous mask.  The druid flickered out and back in, a few steps back.  Sendak followed through.  Front foot planted, roundhouse with the rear.  Miss.  Spin through the move.  Duck.  Bolt of energy roaring over his head, directly between his ears.  Dropped back-first to the ground.  Not enough give in the cuffs.  Flipped backwards, braced for impact.  The next blast roared towards him.  He swayed aside, heard it smash into the wall.  A flash of red and white in the corner of his eye--Keith, sprinting for the main door.  Another flicker of white.  Not enough time to focus.  He dodged another blast by a hair’s breadth.  The heat of it seared his left side and stole his breath.  The druid geared up for another blast.  No space to dodge.

And then it was gone.  A bolt of blue energy seared the floor where it had stood.

The Blue Paladin.

Sendak muttered a quick thanks to whichever god was listening and bolted for the exit.

“Move, move !” he shouted, barely restraining himself from shoulder-checking Keith.  

The Blue Paladin grabbed him by the wrist instead, and they sprinted through the door.  Sendak followed, slapping his palm against the panel beside it.  He didn’t bother waiting for the door to close.  Not enough time.  The air was full of noise and flashing red lights--alarms.  Someone had tripped the alarms.  Void take the druid.

“Pidge, we need an extraction now!” Keith shouted.  Sendak barely made out the other Paladin’s response through the helmet.  Not clear enough to hear her properly.  Shiro’s voice came through too.  Both the Blue Paladin and Keith looked stunned, then paled dramatically and slowed.

“Keep moving,” Sendak snarled, and did shoulder-check them.  “The sentries will be on us in less than a dobosh.”

“Shiro and Allura need an extraction too,” Blue--no, Lance --gasped at him.  “And Pidge--Pidge can’t be in two places at once.”

He could already hear the tramp of sentry feet.  “How quickly can you two get to the Green Lion?”

“A couple minutes?” Lance said.  He sounded uncertain.

“If the sentries don’t hold us up,” Keith yelled back.

They passed through another set of doors, and Sendak slammed his palm down on the panel and stopped, turning to face the door.

“They won’t catch you,” he said firmly.

“What are you doing ?” Keith shouted.

“Buying you time,” Sendak said.  He settled his stance.

“But--”

“You said you trusted me to help you if things went wrong,” Sendak said.  He didn’t look back at them.  “Trust me now.  Get out.  Get Shiro and the Princess.  Come back for me if you can, but if you cannot…”  He took a deep breath and steeled his spine.  “Then I die with honor, in combat.”  Like he’d always been meant to die.

“No!” Keith yelled.  Footsteps approaching--Keith’s and the sentries.  Sendak smashed the panel beside the door.  Bought them a few extra doboshes.

“This isn’t a discussion,” he growled.  “Go.   Now .”

Sendak tuned out the rest of it--Lance and Keith arguing quietly, then their footsteps moving rapidly away.  He hoped they had the good sense to take his prosthetic with them, and that they’d return before the sentries overwhelmed him.  The thud of sentries’ steps came closer and closer, louder and louder.  Had to be virtually every sentry on the base.  The first trace of fear trailed down his spine.  He should have had them uncuff him.  

Something thudded against the door.  Then again.  Again.   Again .  The metal dented, warped, began giving way.  He could see the magenta glow of the sentries’ faceplates through the door.  The first one jammed the barrel of a blaster through the gap--

He sidestepped the shot and grabbed the barrel, wrenching it from the sentry’s grasp.  Spun it in his hands, flipped a switch.  The hard light bayonet protruded from the front.  Sendak maneuvered it carefully--and slashed it through the energy cord linking the cuff on his wrist with the one on his thigh.  The tip sliced his undersuit and cut a thin gash on his outer leg.  He ignored it and flicked the bayonet back off.

Then he shot the sentry he’d disarmed through the faceplate.

The sentry dropped.  Two more took its place, prying at the doors.  He shot them, too.  The third wave forced the doors open.  Sendak turned the bayonet back on and closed quarters, slashing through them.  The rest of the world faded around him, and Sendak didn’t care.  There was only the burn in his muscles and the slice of his bayonet, the flash of their blades and roar of their blasters, the drumming of his heart and the air in his lungs.  He was alive.  He was alive, and he was fighting.  Nothing else was important.

And then pain .  Blinding agony all along his left side.  His vision went black for a tick, then came back, and he spun towards the attacker.

Druid .  Its hand was still raised from blasting him.  Sendak roared at it and spun the blaster, lifted it, aimed.  Fired.

The trigger clicked.  Nothing.   Empty .

Quiznak.

The bayonet flickered and died when he tried to reactivate it.  Useless hunk of metal.  Sendak hurled it at the druid, ducked an oncoming sentry, and charged the druid.  It hurled another bolt of energy at him.  Sendak dodged and kept coming, lashing out at it with hand and feet.  It was never where he aimed.  There.  Gone.  There.   Gone .

And then it planted its hand on his stomach, and he didn’t have time to process it before he came to on his back on the floor.  Every inch of his abdomen and his side screamed with pain, and it took every ounce of his self-control to keep from crying out.  He made a dedicated attempt to curl in on himself to protect the injury, but then there were hands on his shoulders and under his arms dragging him off the ground--lots of hands, cold, hard ones.  Sentries.  The ones he hadn’t managed to destroy.

The druid stooped and thrust its masked face right up in Sendak’s, mask-eyes level with his.

“The emperor will be delighted to see you,” the druid hissed.

Sendak spat directly in its face.  Blood-laced saliva oozed down the mask.  He couldn’t see the druid’s expression, but he could sense its fury like an oncoming storm--a thickening of the air that turned the breath in his lungs to stone.  The ozone scent thickened, overwhelmed the herbs-and-rot smell of the druid itself.  It reached for him, and Sendak forced himself not to flinch as an ice-cold hand landed directly on his forehead.

Light.  Dark.  Light.  Dark.  Searing pain.  Heat.  Cold.  Heat again.  And then Sendak slammed down on a frigid steel floor--on his side, sans druid.  He rolled to his knees, whipping his head from side to side.

Central Command.  Of course.

And, as luck would have it, the druid--it was still there, standing off to the side, the wretched thing --had landed them directly in Zarkon’s throne room, evidently interrupting a war meeting.  Sendak recognized every face there--Throk, eyes comically wide in shock, Thace with his mouth agape, Prorok looking thunderstruck, all the others--and Zarkon and Haggar looming above the rest from the dais and staring at him, Zarkon with barely-masked surprise, Haggar inscrutable beneath her hood.  Sendak forced himself to stand on unsteady legs, breathing heavily and ignoring the way his chest and side burned.  He instinctively lifted his hand, clenched his fist and rested it over his heart in a shaky salute.

“Sendak,” Zarkon intoned.  “We had assumed you dead.”  His face was too calm, expressionless, and dread tied Sendak’s guts into knots.

“Not dead, my lord, merely a traitor,” the druid said.  Sendak opened his mouth to protest, but the druid cut him off.  “He was captured in the company of two Paladins of Voltron, in the Galactic Hub in his sector.”

Zarkon’s eyes narrowed.  “Is that so?” he said, slow and menacing.

Sendak’s lowered ears spoke for him.  He sank to his knees, making himself a smaller target, and stared at the floor.  Heavy fabric rustled and shifted, and a moment later Zarkon’s heavy tread rang out.  The toes of his boots entered Sendak’s field of vision.  Sendak resisted the urge to flinch.  He was already in trouble.  Such a sign of weakness would not endear him to the emperor.  

“ Sendak ,” Zarkon hissed.  “Is this the truth?”  His tone said he already knew the answer.

Sendak swallowed.  “I have not betrayed you, my lord,” he said, forcing the words from a too-tight throat.

“Yet you not only failed to capture Voltron, twice, but led them to one of our strongholds and allowed them to wreak havoc?”

“My lord,” the druid said slyly, “he assisted them in wreaking havoc.”  

Everything around him went deathly silent.  Fear knotted his guts--if Zarkon believed the druid, it was all over for him.  Zarkon would kill him.  Sendak lowered his posture a little further, as submissive as he could get without prostrating himself.  There was no movement, no sound from above him, and he very nearly relaxed.

And then a hand clamped around his throat and yanked him upright.  No, higher--Zarkon lifted him clear off the floor, glaring directly into Sendak’s eyes.  Sendak grabbed at his wrist, trying to take the pressure off his neck.  He could breathe, but shallowly.  Spots danced in the vision of his organic eye.  The shutters on the cybernetic flicked open-shut-open-shut, strobing his vision dizzyingly.

“Again and again you disappoint me,” Zarkon snarled, shaking Sendak like prey.  “I have given you more opportunities than most, and yet you continue to squander them.”  

Then he hurled Sendak back to the ground.  Pain slammed up Sendak’s spine and into the base of his skull, and if his teeth hadn’t been clenched anyway he would have bitten through his own tongue.  He smothered the urge to cry out, buried it down deep and braced for the next blow.

“Sire,” Prorok said.  “Perhaps you should hear Commander Sendak out before you pass judgement on his actions.  He has been one of our most effective commanders since you yourself placed him in the field, and he says he has not betrayed us.”

“His actions have always spoken louder than his words,” Zarkon declared.  “He is a traitor.”

“My lord,” Sendak rasped.  “It was a necessary action.  I--”  He broke off, coughing, but resisted the urge to rub his throat.  It would be a weakness.  One that would get him killed.  “They had me prisoner.  I still intended to bring Voltron to you, but I--”  More coughing.  “I needed to gain their trust to win enough freedom to take their ship and bring the Lions to you.  Giving them the location of the Galactic Hub was a...calculated risk, my lord.”  

It had to be enough.  Zarkon had to believe him.  He clenched his fist, digging his claws into his palm, just enough to keep his focus without breaking the skin.

“Well, Prorok?” Zarkon said smoothly.  “What do you make of this confession ?”

Prorok shifted slightly from foot to foot, visibly uncomfortable.  Sendak couldn’t help pitying him a little--his good intentions had put him right in the corona.  “Sire, I believe it was well within reason for Sendak to take such a course of action under the circumstances he faced--”

“It was a coward’s route, if such were his intentions,” Zarkon interrupted.  “No true Galra cowers and feigns compliance when presented with an opportunity to destroy their enemies.  Sendak has betrayed the Galra Empire.”

More whispering fabric.  Then, Haggar said--from far too close-- “Sire, his betrayal was not unanticipated.  You could expect nothing less than treachery from one of his lineage.”

His lineage ?   What lineage?  He didn’t even remember what planet he was from, and Haggar knew of his family?

He didn’t get time to process it, because Zarkon said,“Take him.  Find out what he knows, and punish him for his misdeeds.”

Haggar made a soft, pleased noise.  That was all it took to get Sendak on his feet, ears flattened and braced to fight.  He flashed fangs at her.  If he was going to die, there were no consequences anyone living could make him fear.  Then he shot Zarkon the most poisonous glare in his repertoire.

“You promised me I would never return to her labs,” he snarled.

“I do not make promises to traitors,” Zarkon said flatly.  The massive plate-scales at the back of his neck rose, betraying his anger.

“I never betrayed you, but if you hand me over to her you make me your enemy.”  Sendak lowered his voice, but the growl building up in the back of his throat edged into his words.

Zarkon hooded his eyes.  “I have faced much more dangerous enemies,” he said, “than a crippled brat .”

Sendak spat.  The wad of saliva landed on the toe of Zarkon’s boots.  

Dead. Silence.  Sendak froze under Zarkon’s glower.  He’d just made a huge mistake.  Zarkon’s eyes narrowed, and Sendak swallowed hard.  Cold terror oozed between his shoulderblades.

And then something smashed into the side of his head.  The vision in his cybernetic fractured, then went dark.  His legs were loose and liquid, and the next thing he knew, he was on the floor.  His limbs refused to respond, and forcing his eye open--the organic one, as the cybernetic made alarming grinding noises and refused to operate--gave him a view of red-black-violet blurs and wisps of movement.  

Someone, many someones, grabbed at his arm and his shoulders tightly enough to bruise and dragged him up and back.  He tried to fight back, but his limbs were still more mush than muscle.

His vision wavered back in, and he shot a desperate look at the other commanders.  Only Throk looked back at him.  His brow creased sympathetically, but he didn’t move.  Prorok’s back was turned, but he gesticulated emphatically, clearly still speaking to Zarkon.  The ringing in Sendak’s ears kept him from hearing anything he might have said.  His eye slid closed.  He forced it back open, and then shut it again when they dragged him around a corner and his vision spun and wavered sickeningly.

He got his nausea under control by the time the rot-herb-antiseptic scent of the labs hit his nostrils and set his gut churning again.  He jerked, wrenched his arm free of the bruising grip on his bicep--sentries, they were only sentries, he could do this--and smashed his elbow back into one of the sentries behind him.  Pain shot up to his shoulder and down his forearm, put his fingers on pins and needles.  He ignored it and smashed back again and again.  The hands grabbing at his shoulders released him.  

Sendak tore himself free of the one clutching his stump and staggered up on wobbly legs.  His head spun, and he lowered his stance to compensate.  The loss of vision on his right side was going to hamper him until he readjusted.  He turned, trying to get a grasp of his surroundings.  Something hard smashed into the back of his head.  A fist.  The butt of a blaster.  Something.  Not important what it was, only that it hit him.  He staggered forward.  Forced his feet back under him.  A hand grabbed him by the ruff, yanked him off-kilter.  He scrambled to find his balance.  

No good.  

Movement on his blind side.  He lashed out with his fist.  Caught nothing but empty air.  The grip on his ruff yanked him backward, pitched him further off-balance.  Another hand closed around his right forearm and yanked it behind his back.  Sendak shrieked and doubled over.  Ease the pressure.  Don’t let them break his arm.  He needed that arm.  More hands on his left shoulder, and then his boots skidded across the floor as they dragged him back and back and back--

He was slammed against something hard and unyielding.  The back of his head cracked off the surface, and his teeth clacked together.  Something clamped around his chest, constricting his breathing.  Wrist.  Biceps.  Ankles.  He jerked against the bonds and shrieked defiantly.  No give.  No give .  The hands pulled away.  He arched his back and fought a few more ticks, then slumped in the bonds and struggled to get his breath back.

And almost choked.  The smell was stronger than ever, potent and cloying, and he forced himself to breathe more shallowly and opened his eye.  The room spun and tilted like a fighter in a tailspin.  Up, down--the words were meaningless.  The lights were bright, too bright, dark figures hung in the corners of his vision and cast hungry shadows across him and above it all the whispering--

Sendak slammed his eye shut again and clenched his fist, dug his claws into his palm pad until he drew blood.  Pain was an anchor.  Pain was a lifeline.  He knew his body, and fresh pain would not lie to him.  Each claw was red-hot in his flesh, and he clung to it.  To the aching in his head from Zarkon’s strike.

He just had to hold out until Haggar got bored or distracted.  That was all he had to do.  There was no place for fear here.  He could hold out.  And then, when she left, he could work on his next move--on escape, on freedom .  He opened his eye.

The only person in the room was Haggar, hooded and cloaked like an omen of death.  The lighting behind her cast long, looming shadows across the floor.

Her eyes narrowed under her hood, piercing his chest like knives.  “Tell me what you know of Voltron,” she hissed.

“Go jump out an airlock,” Sendak hissed back.

And then the electricity hit--one of the restraints, it had to be--and for a terrifying tick or two or three he couldn’t breathe as every muscle in his body spasmed.  He bit back a cry of pain.  Literally bit it back, sank his teeth into his bottom lip and restrained the sound to his throat.  And then it released him.  He took a deep, rattling breath, clenched his fist until his claws bit into his palm again.

Haggar stared him down, her face cool and emotionless.  “That was not the correct answer.”

“And why should I tell you anything?” Sendak snapped.  “You’ve already decided I’m a traitor.  You’re going to torture me whether I tell you what you want or not.”  He let the grin crawl across his face, lips curled and fangs bared.

Haggar began to pace, moving off to his right--into his blind spot.  He gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead.  No weakness.  But still, not being able to see her unnerved him.  Who knew what she was doing out of sight--preparing for some worse torture?  The electricity he could handle.  The other tools at her disposal?  He could still feel the cold slice of the scalpel through the new-healed flesh of his left arm--either nerve damage or the sharpness of the instrument had kept the pain from registering for doboshes, and then he’d screamed until they were forced to gag him.

There wouldn’t be a gag this time.  His claws dug deeper into his palm, grounding him.  He hadn’t had claws back then--Haggar had clipped them after he’d tried to claw her face off in blind panic.  He had them now.  He relaxed his fist, then clenched it again.  Blood oozed between his fingers.

“Voltron is coming here,” Haggar said smoothly.  “The princess of Altea was captured during your little stunt at the Hub, and the cruiser holding her is en route to Central Command as we speak.”  He could hear her moving, the faint rustle of her robes on the floor and her near-soundless footsteps.  “If you give me the intelligence I ask of you, I will speak with Emperor Zarkon on your status as a traitor to the Empire.  If I tell him you gave the information willingly, he may lighten or revoke your sentence.”

Sendak scoffed.  “Don’t lie to me.  We both know where he stands on traitors.  Zarkon will never pardon me.  I am already dead, witch, and you cannot touch me.”

Another shock.  This one went on longer than the first, twice as long, infinitely longer, and he screamed until his lungs gave out.  His back arched, he sank claws into his palm until he thought he could feel their tips scraping his bones.  And then it was over, and the most he could do was lay there and gasp for breath.  The shock numbed his extremities, and the ports in his stump throbbed--he would bet on electrical burns to the skin around it.  At least, he reflected, his fur had yet to grow back over the scars.  Burnt fur stank.

The thought drew a snort from him.  Haggar was going to take him to pieces, and here he was, relieved the last scent in his nostrils wouldn’t be his own burning fur.  Typical Sendak.  He let out a slow breath, hissing between his teeth.

He didn’t have to do this, did he?  He could tell her everything she wanted to know.  She’d leave him alone after that.  It wouldn’t win him Zarkon’s favor, it wouldn’t set him free, but Haggar would leave to tell Zarkon everything she’d gleaned from him--and hadn’t he been planning to betray the Paladins anyway?  The raid on the Hub had only been a step in his plans, to retrieve his arm and begin garnering their trust.  And then--escape?  Hijack the Castle?  Something else?  Surely the Paladins weren’t worth his pain.

Stop that , he told himself.  No weaknesses.  No folding, no caving.   No foe had ever stood against him, and none ever would .  And that included his own cowardice.  He would break before he bent.

Another shock.  Longer still.  He bit through his lip, fangs meeting through it.  Blood flooded his mouth, and the moment the electricity released him he spat blood onto the floor.  Another shock followed on the heels of the first, and he wailed in agony.  Hot sparks and brilliant flashes danced behind his eyes and down his limbs, and his heart stuttered in his chest.

And then it was over.  He slumped in his restrains, whimpering.  His throat felt raw, strained.  His hand had gone numb, but in the silence after his screaming he could hear his blood dripping on the floor.  Every breath ached.  He squeezed his eye shut.  A single tear tracked down his cheek, soaking into his fur before it could fall.  It was hot.  No relief.

“Give me the information and the pain will cease,” Haggar said, still too smooth and too calm.  Her hand landed on his left cheek, blessedly cool, but he refused to lean into it.  The tip of a claw traced the arch of his cheekbone.  “Tell me what I want to know, and this will all stop.”  Her cold, stale breath ghosted across his ear.  “I rebuilt you once on Zarkon’s whim.  Bow to me, and I will do it again, remake you stronger than ever before.  You will serve me instead, and I will protect you from his wrath.  All you must do is tell me everything you know about Voltron.”

Sendak exhaled and opened his eye.  He stared Haggar directly in the face.

“Never,” he rasped.  “I will die first.”

Her face contorted into a snarl, and she dug her claws into his cheek.  “How did they secure your loyalty?” she demanded.

Voltron can protect you.  You just need to trust us.

Can I trust you?

“They didn’t ,” Sendak said.  “I just really don’t want to cooperate with you.”

Haggar pulled back and slapped him across the face.  He spat blood onto the floor and grinned down at her.

It was a mistake.  Electricity tore through him again and again, and he lost his voice screaming.  The world faded, spinning and dancing and darkening until, finally, it all went black.  There was only the agony to cocoon him, and he sank down and down and down into the darkness until--

Nothing.  

Nothing.  

Nothing.

Light.  

A dark figure hovered over him.  Not one of the bad ones.  This one was faintly blurred, with two distinct peaks at the top.  Soft.  Gentle.   Familiar .  They held something cool to his lips.  He sensed moisture, opened his mouth.  Liquid.  Cold, vaguely sweet, faintly chemical.  He recognized this taste.  The cool thing--the hydration pack --moved away, and he swallowed.

“Haxus?” he asked.  His voice was no more than a whisper.

“I’m sorry,” the person said, and Sendak blinked, trying to clear his vision.  “I’m not Haxus.”

Sendak squeezed his eye shut, then opened it again.  The figure resolved itself, slowly and dimly--

“Thace?”

Thace offered him a friendly half-smile, difficult to make out in Sendak’s wavering vision.  “Just in time.  I was afraid you wouldn’t wake up bef--”

The ship shuddered violently around them, jerking like something had smashed into the structure.  Something--medical equipment, probably--clattered to the floor nearby.  Sendak jackknifed into a sitting position, ignoring the spike of pain it drove into the base of his skull.

“What’s going on?” Sendak yelped.  He regretted it immediately.  The louder sound cut his throat like a knife.

Central Command rocked again before Thace could answer--and then slammed back the other direction, hurling them both to the ground.  Sendak rolled, throwing his body across Thace’s.  Just in time, too.  Something behind him toppled over with a tremendous crash.  Shrapnel flew.  Shards of glass skittered across the floor and rained around them.  Sendak winced as a particularly large chunk of metal crashed into the back of his shoulder.  The shards settled, and before Sendak could react, Thace shoved him aside, scrambled to his feet, and pulled Sendak upright.

“What’s happening?” Sendak demanded again.  “Are we--is Central Command--”

“Under attack,” Thace confirmed.  “Voltron is here.  They’ll retrieve the Altean princess at any moment and they’ll be ready to flee.  You need to get out and go with them.  This is your only chance to escape.”

The ship rocked again.  Sendak staggered, would have fallen if not for Thace’s grip on his shoulders.

“I--” Sendak began, then hesitated.  “Thank you.  I owe you one.”

“Don’t count your asteroids before you’ve scanned the belt,” Thace said sternly.  “Can you fly a fighter like this?”

Sendak chuffed.  “I could fly a fighter blindfolded, with my hand tied behind my back.”

“Good.  Get to the nearest fighter bay.  There will be a pod in there for you, already loaded.  Get in, get out, and rejoin Voltron if at all possible.  Another member of my group will be in touch within the next movement, if everything goes well.”

“If everything--your group ?  Thace, what the quiznak are you talking about?”

“We’re called the Blade of Marmora.  I’ve left a data chip in the pod for you.  It will explain everything.”  Thace shoved lightly at Sendak’s shoulder.  “Now, go.  Hurry.  You need to get out, and I still have a task to accomplish.”

Sendak hesitated another tick.  “...Thank you, Thace.  I won’t forget this.”

Thace nodded, acknowledging, and saluted.  No.  Not a salute.  The hand he rested over his heart was open, not a clenched fist.  Some other salute or greeting.  Sendak copied the gesture and bolted for the hangar.

Every step was agony.  His legs were wobbly and uncooperative, stumbling and lurching with each stride, and his feet felt numb and uncertain.  Moving sent shocks of pain up his spine.  His chest and side throbbed, and when he pressed his hand to the wounds, it came away wet with blood.   That was a relief, at least--the weaponized quintessence the druid wielded against him had worn off rather than eating into his flesh.  The claw marks on his palm oozed blood too.  He could only hope Thace had thought to include a first aid kit.  And that the Paladins wouldn’t shoot him down before he got an opportunity to use it.

The fighter was still in the bay, just as Thace had said.  And there were no sentries .  Even better .  Sendak scrambled up into the cockpit and nearly landed on the gear Thace loaded for him--a waistpouch of some unfamiliar, vaguely reflective fabric containing several large, lumpy objects, and--gods favor Thace in every endeavor, he’d left Sendak an undersuit, too.  A clean one, without the gaping holes the druid had left in Sendak’s.

That was the first priority.  Sendak scrambled out of his undersuit and pulled on the fresh one, ignoring the strain on his injuries, and, with some reluctance, folded his ears into the pilot’s helmet.  He hated them.  But if the fighter depressurized for whatever reason, he would be grateful for it.

Then he turned on the fighter.  The engine purred, rumbling around him like a greeting, and Sendak smiled and set his hand on the controls.

Chapter Text

Oh yeah, when they made it out of here, Lance was definitely starting a cardio routine for training.  He was getting a stitch in his side, he couldn’t seem to get enough air, and Keith outran him effortlessly.  He tried to speed up, fixing his eyes on the jetpacks protruding from between Keith’s shoulders.  No use.  Keith was just fast .

Pidge’s voice crackled over the line.   “Where are you guys?”

“We’re--we’re on our way,” Keith panted.  Lance was glad to hear him so out of breath.  “One minute.”

“Shiro?”  That was Hunk, sounding nervous and uncertain.

“Three minutes until this ship jumps into hyperdrive,” Shiro said.   “Allura and I can get out in a pod, but you’ll need to pick up.”

“Got it,” Pidge said.   “Guys, you better hurry up.”  

“We’re hurrying,” Lance gasped.  He would’ve tagged a ‘geez, Pidge’ on that if he had the breath.  He got the impatience, he really did, but god was she pushy.

Up ahead, Keith skidded around a corner--one Lance recognized, finally.  They were one short hallway and a sprint across the planetoid’s surface away from the Green Lion.  Lance tucked his head and struggled to put on more speed.  Freaking Keith .  He just had to be ten steps ahead at all times.  Or, y’know, most of a hallway ahead.  The doors ahead of Keith opened, showing a wide swath of star-speckled black.  Lance could just barely make out Green’s hunched back over the rise.  So close.

Lance kicked on his jetpack and launched himself forward, landing beside Keith just as they hit the surface.  He turned and shot Keith a look, ready to rip off on him if Keith decided to poke fun at Lance for using his jetpack, and almost tripped.  Keith’s face was pinched, ashen and angry-looking.

“You okay?” Lance panted.

“Fine,” Keith snapped back, not looking at him.

Less than a hundred yards ahead of them, the Green Lion’s head lifted and turned, scanning the area, and then locked onto them.  The massive head lowered again, jaws opened.  Just in time.  Keith pulled ahead of Lance again and hurtled into Green’s waiting mouth.  Lance scrambled after him, and the jaws snapped shut, plunging them into...well, not darkness.  Dimness, lit only by the turquoise lights the Alteans used in everything.  Lance sprawled face-first across the floor, gasping for air.  If only the Garrison had sports teams.  He would never have gotten so out-of-condition if he’d still been swimming competitively before they found Blue.  By the time he caught his breath and sat up, they were moving.  He could feel the way the Lion shifted around him, the faint tug in the back of his mind that came from being in a Lion.  It wasn’t as strong as it would have been in Blue’s cockpit, but the others’ emotions simmered against him.  Only Keith was close enough to sense properly, and he wasn’t happy.  Not angry , but definitely not pleased.

Then again, you didn’t need Lion-based telepathy to get that.  Keith’s expression was a shade darker than his usual scowl, and he stood with his arms crossed.  Lance pushed himself upright, and Keith nodded and headed for the cockpit, leaving Lance to scramble after him.

They reached the cockpit, and Lance would have taken a second to admire the view if it weren’t for the cruiser blotting out half the starfield in front of them.   Man , was it ugly, all twisted black and grey metal and sickly magenta lighting.  And Shiro and Allura were on that thing.  Where did the escape pods leave from?  How big were they compared to the cruiser?  Would they even be able to see it when Shiro and Allura escaped?  

Hunk looked up from Green’s dashboard when they came in.  His face brightened to a smile.  “Hey, you guys made it!”  He hesitated, glancing back at the door, and his brow furrowed.  “...Wait, where’s Sendak?”

“He bought us time to get out,” Keith said.

Pidge whipped around immediately.  “He what ?”

“The sentries would have caught us before we got out.  Sendak stayed behind to let us get away,” Keith snapped.

Pidge’s brows furrowed.  Movement over her shoulder caught Lance’s attention, and he completely missed whatever she said trying to get a better look at whatever it was.  The space around the cruiser seemed to warp and twist, wrenching the stars around it dizzyingly before it vanished .  Something dropped from the place it had been, something much smaller and slower, reflecting light from around it.  A meteorite?  No.

“There’s the escape pod!” he yelled.

The other three spun back to the viewscreen.  Pidge plunked back into her seat, hands darting across the controls.  A bright green box popped up around the speck, zooming in--Lance recognized the pod, the same model as the one Shiro had crashed on Earth.  She grabbed for the controls and took Green in.

Reaching the pod was no trouble at all.  Maneuvering to catch the pod and let people into the Lion, on the other hand?  Tricky as all hell.  Pidge ended up grabbing the door end of the escape pod in Green’s mouth like a Lion-sized chew toy.

The door hissed open, and Shiro entered the cockpit.  Just Shiro.  Lance glanced over at Keith, who nodded slightly and popped the big question.

“Where’s Allura?”

Shiro’s face crumpled, and he gripped the back of Pidge’s chair in shaking hands.

“...Shiro?” Lance asked.

“She sacrificed herself to save me,” Shiro said.  Shock and dismay rippled through the link.  Lance felt paralyzed, like he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs.

Pidge recovered first.  “You mean she’s still on that ship?” she demanded.  Concern and anger flooded out from her in waves.

“The one that’s headed to Zarkon’s Central Command?” Hunk prompted.

Oh.  That was bad.  That was really bad.  

“...Shit,” Keith said, summarizing what they were all thinking.

“We can’t let Zarkon get Allura,” Shiro declared.

“...But you say going there would be a huge mistake,” Hunk said.  Lance didn’t remember Shiro saying anything about that.  Maybe he’d said it while Lance and Keith were with Sendak--he knew he hadn’t heard everything over the comms.  “You said attacking that place head-on would be the dumbest possible thing we could ever do.”

Shiro ducked his head, showing tension in the line of his shoulders.  “I know,” he said quietly.  “But now, we don’t have a choice.”

Silence fell.

Then Shiro lifted his head and looked around, and Lance felt confusion jangle through the link like pebbles through water.  “...Where’s Sendak?” he asked.

“He, uh, pulled an Allura,” Lance said hesitantly.

“We’re going back for him,” Keith snapped.

“There’s no point !” Pidge snapped back.  “I already told you, he was just using it as an opportunity to escape!”

“No, he didn’t !” Keith all but shouted.  The air shimmered with his anger.  Pidge opened her mouth to yell back, but Shiro cut her off.

“Pidge, take Green back down to the Hub.  We’re going back for Sendak.”  Pidge shook her head.  Shiro’s expression darkened.  “ Pidge .”

“ Fine ,” Pidge muttered, and turned her Lion back towards the base.

As they approached, Pidge’s viewscreen targeted several panels on the arms of the base.  Large bays were opening, something was rising--

“Cannons!” Hunk yelped.  

The first blast roared across the void, and Pidge jerked at the controls.  The change in direction flung Lance sideways into Keith, who grabbed him by the shoulders and staggered.  Pidge pulled Green into a dive to dodge other blasts.  Keith dropped, pulling Lance to the floor with him.  Hunk did the same on the other side of Pidge’s chair, and he could see Shiro’s death grip on the headrest warping the material under his fingers.

“I can’t find a way in!” Pidge yelled, pulled Green back out of range.

“Maybe if we took out the cannons?” Lance suggested.

Shiro shook his head.  “That could depressurize the whole base,” he said.  “Disengage.  We’ll come back for Sendak later if he can’t make it out on his own.”

“But--” Keith began.

Shiro cut him off.  “There’s too much risk for everyone involved.”  He paused, then added, more softly, “We’ll get him back, Keith.  Voltron doesn’t abandon people.”

Pidge pulled the Lion back, piloting them up and away from the base, back toward the Castle.  Lance kept his eyes on it until it left the viewscreen.  He couldn’t believe things had gone so wrong so fast.  Allura, captured?  Impossible.  And he couldn’t unsee Sendak choosing to stay behind, to give him and Keith a chance to escape.  It was almost funny, in a way that made his throat tighten.  They landed in Green’s hanger, and, as one, booked it for the elevators.

They made the bridge in record time, and the second they crossed the threshold, Shiro snapped off orders.  “Pidge, scan the download from the ship, find out where Zarkon’s Central Command is.”

“On it!” Pidge yelled back, sliding into her chair.  Hunk hovered behind her like an anxious technical cloud.

“What happened?”  That was Coran--Lance hadn’t realized he was still on the bridge, but the Altean bustled over from his control area.  His brows pinched, his eyes darted--they were short two, and Lance knew Coran knew it.  “Where’s Allura?  And Sendak?”

“Captured,” Shiro said.  “Allura sacrificed herself to save me and the information.  Sendak stayed behind to protect Lance and Keith, we can only assume he’s fallen back into Galra hands.  There wasn’t a choice--”

“How is that possible ?!” Coran demanded.

“Coran, I’m sorry things didn’t go as planned, but we can’t focus on what went wrong.  We’ve got to figure out how to make it right.”  Shiro turned away, looking over at the others.  “Pidge, anything?”

“...You’ve gotta look at this,” Pidge said.

A few taps on her work station brought something up on the main viewscreens, and for a long moment Lance’s brain refused to process it as ship schematics.  It was just too big, monstrously shaped--something like that could never have been built in gravity.  Long, scything arms stretched out from an improbably small central hub like spokes from a wheel, like, like--like the symbol that had preceded Sendak’s transmission the first day.  The Galra imperial crest.

“Look at the size of it,” Coran whispered, sounding shaken.

“I think we should go in right away,” Pidge said.  “Every minute we waste gives Zarkon more time to prepare for us.”

“I agree,” Lance said, crossing his arms.  “We form Voltron, fly in, fly out, dust off our hands, and walk away.”

“Uh, remember the Balmera?” Hunk protested.  “We could barely take on one fleet, but this--a base this size could hold a thousand fleets!”

“That’s why we should have gone back for Sendak,” Keith snapped.  “ He would know exactly what we’d be up against here--he could tell us how to fight it!”

“Gone back ?” Coran asked.

“He stayed behind in the Hub,” Lance said. 

Coran’s eyes widened.  “You didn’t remove his cuffs, did you?”

“Well, no--” Shiro said.

“There’s a tracker implanted in the cuffs.  Even if they’re deactivated they should still emit a signal we can detect so long as he’s in range--”

“Is the base in range?” Keith interjected.

“It should be,” Coran said, pulling up a screen.  His fingers darted, pulled up what looked like a radar scanner.  And there, a blue dot in the general direction of the Hub--

It flickered and vanished.

“Uh, what just happened?” Hunk asked.

“...I don’t know,” Coran said.  “Either Galra have developed their own wormhole technology in the last ten thousand years, or the cuffs have been destroyed.”

“I told you we couldn’t trust him!” Pidge said.

“ You don’t trust him because you’re afraid he’s going to take revenge for you murdering his friend!” Keith shouted back.

Silence.

“Wait, what?” Lance asked.  Pidge had killed someone?

“You said you wouldn’t tell anyone!” Pidge yelped.

Hunk looked ashen.  “Pidge, did you lie to me?”

“What was I supposed to tell you?”  Pidge looked on the verge of tears.  “I didn’t mean for it to happen, I--”

“Everyone, calm down,” Shiro said, pushing his way to the middle of the group.  “Let’s save this conversation for later.  Right now we need to focus on rescuing Allura.”

“Which we wouldn’t need to do if Shiro hadn’t lost her!” Coran snapped.  

“Okay, okay!” Hunk shouted.  Everything went quiet again--the beginnings of a shout on Shiro’s face, the murderous glaring between Keith and Pidge, the hum of anger rising in the link.  “This isn’t helping,” Hunk said, more quietly this time.  “We can’t just sit here and bicker like this.”

Shiro’s expression softened, then firmed up again with determination.  “Let’s focus,” he said.  “We know where Allura is.  We need a plan to get to her, get her out safely, and avoid being captured.”

“We have the command system schematics,” Coran said thoughtfully.  “If we can find a way in undetected--”

“Then that’s a third of our problem gone,” Hunk chimed in.

“Pidge,” Shiro said, making direct eye-contact with her, “send copies of those schematics out to everyone’s stations.  I want everyone looking for an opening we can use.  Any gap in their security we can exploit, somewhere they’ve let down their guard, anything that looks like a chance.”  

He looked around, meeting everyone’s eyes, and there was something flinty in his stare.  Lance felt a chill run down his spine.  He’d never seen Shiro like that before, but he recognized the implacable determination rolling off him in waves.  There was no room for argument here.  Lance hurried to his station and pulled up the schematic, rotating it, scanning it from different angles.

The monstrous command ship was only a small part of the whole system.  Rings orbited it, whole planets caught up in the path like the universe centered on Zarkon.  Most of it probably did.  Lance turned the model again and again, searching, searching--

“Anything?” Shiro asked from behind him, and Lance nearly jumped out of his skin.  He hadn’t heard Shiro’s footsteps approaching.

“There’s just no way in,” Lance said.  “They’ll have us tracked from every direction.”

Shiro’s brows furrowed, and he looked from the screen to Lance.  “There’s got to be something.  Keep looking.”

Lance returned his focus to the screen, but he kept track of Shiro in his periphery.  He moved forward, level with Coran.  They were far enough away that Lance couldn’t hear them talking, but he could tell by the way Coran turned and looked that Shiro had something to say.

And then Coran said, a good bit louder, “Wait a tick, I think I’ve got a way.”

Up on the big screen, a box lit up around one of the ring planets and zoomed it in for a closer look.  Coran pointed, Shiro leaned over, and they put their heads together and conspired for a few seconds.

Then Shiro turned around and faced the rest of the bridge.  “Everyone, eyes front!” he called.  “We’ve got a plan to get Allura.  We’re going to jump to the heart of the enemy, unseen and undetected.”

“I thought we needed Allura to open a wormhole,” Pidge said.  Lance turned and stared at her.  Where had she gotten--oh.   Jump to the heart of the enemy.

“It’s true that Allura powers the Castle’s ability to travel through wormholes,” Coran said.  “However, I think we have enough of her residual essence stored in the system to make one jump.  We’ll hide the Castle here--” he pulled the planet back up on the screen-- “inside one of these giant gas planets in Zarkon’s command system.  The gas is so dense, we’ll be completely hidden.”

Shiro took over.  “From there, we’ll use the Castle to scan for Allura on Zarkon’s ship, then attack before he knows what hit him.”

“There’s only one hiccup,” Coran said, reclaiming the flow of conversation.  “We have enough energy to wormhole in, but without Allura, we won’t have enough energy to wormhole back out.”

“It doesn’t matter.  We’re not leaving without her,” Shiro said adamantly.  He looked over the Paladins one more time.  “Get ready.  We’ll need to launch as soon as we have Allura’s location.  There’s no time to waste.”

Coran opened the wormhole, and the Castle moved through it.

Lance got his first look at Central Command through a haze of red gases.  Wide rings lined with violet light rotated slowly around that hulking ship, which loomed from the void like--like--the only analogy Lance could think of was that old sci-fi movie his parents had been so fond of, with the gigantic planet-destroying ship.  Central Command was spikier.  More threatening.

“I’m detecting Allura’s energy signature!” Coran exclaimed.  Part of the ship lit up and zoomed in on the screen.  “From this distance, the signal’s pretty weak, but she’s somewhere in this part of the main ship.”

“...Gives us a starting point,” Keith said.

“Once we get closer, we’ll be able to narrow down her location,” Coran said.

“Okay guys, this is it,” Shiro said.  “Voltron is going to come in fast and without warning.  We’ll smash our way into Zarkon’s ship and grab the Princess before they know what hit them.”

Then, without another word, he started for his hangar.  Lance stayed frozen for a second, staring around at the others.  As one, they booked it for their own hangars, their own Lions.  And then Lance was scrambling into Blue’s cockpit, feeling her presence uncurl in the back of his mind.  She wasn’t happy.  Her anger-- how dare Zarkon touch her pride! --bled into his own mind like dye on white cloth.  They shot down the launch tunnel, out of the Castle, and it wasn’t just Blue’s anger anymore.  The other Paladin’s consciousnesses brushed up against his own, anticipation and anxiety and rage, rage, rage, and Blue arched up to join the rest of the pride--

They are furious .  Zarkon had taken from them their Princess, bright-shining Allura, and they are going to take her back.  He had no claim.  Usurper, usurper.  They scream across the void, toward the monstrosity Zarkon had hidden himself within.

Dark energy arches from the spires of the command ship, reaching for the rings, and parts of themself splinter to watch it more closely.  A violet dome encircles them from the outermost ring.

“What is that?” Hunk asked.  They feel the question as much as they hear it, dancing across their mind in blazes of gold.

An answering gout of green from Pidge -- “I don’t know, but I hope we can find a way out of here once we get the Princess.”  The oncoming ships blaze with magenta and violet.   “They’re gonna fire!”

Black--or Shiro, impossible to tell--snarls, and they smash Red-first into the nearest cruiser.  “Form sword!” Shiro bellows.

Red and Keith respond with the same vicious eagerness, and they tear through steel like wet paper.  The cruiser implodes in their wake, and they feel the shockwave all through their body.  Some part of them thrills with vindictive delight, with vengeance ten-thousand a year s in the making.  Ion cannon blasts ripple the void around them, to no avail.  Cruiser after cruiser smashes beneath their sword.

“More trouble straight ahead!” Lance shouts, blazing blue auroras through their consciousness.  

A line of cruisers.  They pull back, and Shiro barely has to cry a command before Hunk and Yellow arm them.  Blue light roars across the void, leaves them only a field of shrapnel to dance through.  They draw their sword again and advance, closing with Central Command.

Claws tear across their mind, raking through their consciousness, and they feel themselves fragmenting.  Paladins cry out, but even with the comms the words are unintelligible.  The center cannot hold.  The center cannot hold.  Black’s fear drowns them.

You are a fool to bring Voltron here, that voice says.  Fear crashes through them in waves from all directions, every part of their awareness cries for escape.  The center cannot hold.  The center cannot hold, and they shattered.

“What just happened?” Hunk shouted.  The comms were back, Lance realized, because he was definitely hearing Hunk’s voice again.   “Something tore us apart!”

“I don’t know,” he replied.  “But we’ve got bigger problems right now.  Look!”

Cruisers.  Every single ship they hadn’t destroyed swam through the void towards them.  Oh, yeah.  They were fucked.

“Why do I get the feeling these guys knew we were coming?” Keith growled.  

Fighter pods arched from the rings, rocketing towards them, and Red shot past Blue and dove into battle.  Lance spurred Blue after them, firing on fighters and cruisers alike.  The universe blurred around him.  Out of Voltron it was mostly him and Blue, and he could feel their edges blurring together as they sank deeper and deeper into each others consciousnesses.

“There’s no end to these guys!” Hunk shouted.  The advancing line readied to fire.

The Castle got them first.

“Coran attack!  I’ve waited ten thousand years for this!” Coran yelled over the comms.

Lance whooped.  The Castle had the big guns.  They could do this!  Maybe.  Probably.  They could probably do this.  Space filled with explosions.

None of them had realized anything was wrong until Shiro groaned over the comms.

“Shiro!  Are you okay?” Keith called.

Shiro growled with frustration.   “Something is overriding the controls--my Lion is not responding--”  Something back at the command ship flared purple, and Shiro screamed.  Then he cut out.

“I’m going in,” Keith declared.  Red zipped past, soaring towards the monstrosity.

Shiro’s comms cut back in on a startled shriek.

“What do we do now, guys?” Hunk asked.   “Our plan isn’t really working out as, well, planned.”

“I’m going for the Black Lion,” Shiro said.  His voice sounded strained.   “You guys get the Princess, now!”

“I’ve identified her exact location.  Uploading coordinates to you now,” Coran said.   “In the meantime, I’ll provide covering fire from out here...all alone...against the entire fleet...so, yeah, do you mind hurrying?”

“You guys go get the Princess without me,” Keith said.

The hell?  “What?” Lance yelped.  “We’ve gotta stick together!  What are you doing ?”

“Whatever I can,” Keith said.  Red shot around the corner of the ship and disappeared from sight.  Lance almost pursued, but a swarm of fighters descended on him and by the time he’d finished them off Keith was gone.

And then Hunk yelled, “This is it!  The Princess is in this part of the ship!”

Lance disengaged to group up, joining Hunk and Pidge as their Lions circled one of the scything arms.  “How do we get in?”

“Maybe I can try hacking one of their cargo bays,” Pidge suggested.

“We don’t have time for that!” Hunk said.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Actually, yes!  I do!”

Hunk rammed the Yellow Lion, headfirst, through the hull of the ship.  Maybe a second later, a wave of fighters descended.  Lance wheeled Blue around to face them.

“Looks like we gotta cover Hunk’s butt!” he hollered to Pidge, who grumbled back.  “Hunk!  Did you get the Princess?”

He could tell Hunk was out of his Lion by the crackly tone his comms took.   “Yeah, I got her, but there’s a change of plans.  We gotta get Shiro.  Can you cover Yellow?”

“...Yeah, we gotcha,” Lance said.  He spun to face the next wave.

And the next.  And the next.  They just kept coming .

“Hunk, buddy?” Lance yelled into the comms.  “Me and Pidge are getting slaughtered out here, you think you can hurry it up in there?”

“I’m trying, dude,” Hunk panted back.   “We got Shiro--Allura and I are getting back to Yellow as fast as we can, but this ship is huge and--”

“Sentries!” Allura shouted.  

The comms descended into chaos and fighting, and Lance had to block it out to focus on the new troop of fighters flying around a corner of the giant ship.  They always seemed to fly in groups of three or more, moving in sync--no way there were real pilots in there, not even professionals could possibly fly so fast, so close, so precise--but the controlling AI was...well.  Really, really predictable.  Same patterns, same maneuvers, over and over, and Lance was getting the hang of it.  It was almost like playing a video game.  Except the stakes were a lot higher than beating his older sister’s killstreak.  Another fighter shot around a different face of the ship--the opposite direction the other pods were coming from--and Lance lined up a shot and fired.

And missed.  The pod wasn’t there--it had rolled neatly out of the way.  Lance lined up another shot.  Another miss.

“What the quiznak ?” Lance muttered.  “Hey, Pidge, there’s a fighter on your eight, you wanna help me get a bead on ‘em?”

“You got it,” Pidge replied.  Green spun dramatically, firing off a burst from the Lion’s tail laser.

The fighter spiraled out of the way, looping and pinwheeling around the blasts.

“What the fuck ?” Pidge yelped.

“I think this one’s got a pilot, it’s definitely not flying like the other ones,” Lance said.

“Maybe.  Hang on, has he actually fired on us?”

“...No?”

“Weird.”

The fighter zipped around Lance in a wide arc.  He held his fire--though it took everything he had to keep his fingers off the triggers.  Blue hummed aggression in the back of his mind.  Her pride was in danger, and every successful strike helped protect them.  But they held back.  Waiting.

And then another salvo of fighters whipped around a corner, peppering the area with laser fire, and Lance fired indiscriminately into the cloud.  Pidge joined in--and then, to his shock, a burst of red lasers shot over Blue’s head, ripping into the swarm.  Blue spun, and the solo fighter came into his viewscreens.  It bobbed up and down and fired another round off, then zipped forward, banking around Blue’s shoulder.

“Pidge, I think he’s on our side!”  

“What?”

“I said--”

“I know, I heard you!  But why would a Galra pilot be on our side?”

“I dunno?  Can you get him on the comms?”

“Lemme check.”

The wave of oncoming fighters died down, and Lance took the opportunity to catch his breath and ask Blue to zoom in on the solo fighter.  She obliged, but the dim shape visible through the thick red glass told him nothing about the pilot.  They swiped their tail over the fighter, which spun towards them--startled?--and bobbed what was probably a greeting.   Come closer , Lance urged.  He wanted a better look at their unexpected ally.

“You getting anything, Pidge?”

“Nothing.  It’s like that pod doesn’t have communications or something.”

“Weird.”

“Guys, Allura and I just got back to Yellow,” Hunk said.   “Are we clear out there?”

“Yeah,” Lance said.  “But, uh, we got a buddy.”

“A ‘buddy’?” Allura asked.  She sounded skeptical and out of breath.

“There’s a Galra fighter hanging around, but he hasn’t fired on us--he actually went after the other fighters during the last wave.” Pidge said.

“It could be a trap,” Allura said.   “Take him out.”

“But what if he’s an ally?” Lance asked.

“Are we really going to take that risk?”

“I think we have bigger problems than just this guy,” Pidge said.   “Keith’s fighting Zarkon, and he turned off his comms a couple minutes ago.”

The Yellow Lion lurched backwards out of the hole in the ship and spun around, bracing its hindpaws on the hull in preparation for push-off.

“I think Shiro was headed that way to get Black?” Hunk said uncertainly.

At that moment, the dim shape of the Black Lion shot around the curve of the ship, back towards the Castle.  The Red Lion dangled limply from its jaws.

“And there’s Shiro and Keith.  Come on, let’s just get out of here,” Lance said.

Allura sighed.   “Alright.  Let’s go.”

Blue’s scanners blipped the fighter pod a couple times on the way back.  A quick glance showed it trailing them at a safe distance, dodging other pods.  “...Hey guys, that fighter’s still following us.”

“Well, it probably won’t survive the wormhole,” Allura huffed.   “And if it does, we’ll take care of it on the other side.”

Lance wasn’t sure he liked that ‘probably’, but...well, if the pilot did follow them through the wormhole and the pod survived, he’d like to meet the guy.  He was probably a better pilot than Keith , even, considering his sheer confidence in maneuvering around the Lions.  He guided Blue back into her hangar but stayed in the cockpit, waiting.  If they had to go back out to handle more Galra ships, he wanted to be ready.

Allura sounded out-of-breath when her voice crackled back over the comms.   “Alright, Paladins,” she declared.   “Time to get out of here.”

Nothing happened.

“Hello?  What’s going on?  I don’t see a wormhole.”  That was Hunk, sounding panicky.

“The Galra barrier is jamming our ability to create one!” Coran hollered back.   “They have us completely surrounded!”

Lance flipped on Blue’s link to the Castle’s visuals in time to watch the violet barrier that sprang up around them when they entered the command system flicker and die, fuzzing out and vanishing.

“What just happened?” Pidge yelped.

“Who cares?   Wormhole !” Hunk yelled back.

The now-familiar blue vortex opened up in front of them.  It always looked like a whirlpool to Lance, like every kids’ cartoon he’d watched, like the one his uncle described from a trip once.  He’d been afraid of it when Blue called up the first one at the edge of Earth’s solar system.  He wasn’t anymore.  The Castle plunged forward into the blue.

And then disaster.  Streaks of black and maroon shot past and around them, the walls of the vortex shifting rapidly from turquoise to red-violet and strands of energy crackling between them.

“Coran, what’s happening?” Shiro demanded.

“The integrity of the wormhole has been compromised!  It’s breaking down!”

“What does that mean?”  Lance couldn’t help shrieking.  

“It means we have no control over where we’re headed!”

This was bad, this was very bad, this was how they were gonna die--not taken out by Galra soldiers, but by someone messing up the wormhole.

The Castle jerked and shuddered, and Lance felt Blue’s paws leave the hangar floor.  Her claws scraped against it, almost clinging.  The others were all screaming into the comms.  He recognized Keith’s shriek above the other’s, saw the Red Lion vanish into the wall of the wormhole.  Black tumbled after it.  He screamed his teammates’ names, desperate, knowing it wouldn’t do any good.  And then he hit the wall himself and everything was confusion--his own screams, his teammates’ screams fading out through the comms, light and dark flashing past his viewscreens, Blue’s terror ringing in his mind like a siren.

And then they hit the ice.