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It wasn’t something she much liked to think about, though not for the reasons everyone else assumed.
The paladins, her friends. They had left her to her own devices, allowing her the space and time to think through her grievances and truly process the nature of what had been lost to her. For that, Allura found herself grateful; she had hardly been able to stand those sympathetic looks aimed her way the first few days after they had left him behind. Friends though they were, none of them were particularly wonderful at cheering her up.
Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite fair. Hunk and Coran were plenty lovely to be around and gracious enough to fill the silence of a room with chatter while Allura receded into her mind and memories, but she always felt their eyes on her during their time together. As if they were waiting for a breakdown, or watching for the tick she might burst into tears so that they could be of direct assistance. Pidge wasn’t all too concerned with that possibility, apparently, as she seemed aware that tears weren’t something Allura was willing to publicly display without impressive lack of control, but the silence left in the room while Pidge clattered away at the keys of technology was much too deafening for Allura’s taste. Hunk and Coran left no room for silence, and Pidge left too large a space for solace to be found.
Keith wasn’t much sympathetic, not that he would be in the interest of showing it to her even if he was. He hadn’t spoken more than a few words to her since they had left the rift behind, remaining at Shiro’s bedside day and night, head huddled with his mother’s. They spoke in whispers while she was around, though none low enough for Allura not to know they were speaking of her and her… tryst, or whatever they chose to call it. Keith had once attempted to rest a reassuring hand at her shoulder, though it had made the both of them feel more awkward than anything else, and that had been his last shot at approaching the subject.
And then Lance… well, she hadn’t seen Lance at all, not really. Allura could pretend she didn’t know why, but she wasn’t very good at lying to herself. She knew it had to do with him.
Everything did, lately.
She had taken to retreating to the solitude of her room these last few days, though that was only if she had been counting correctly. All the same, it could just as well have been weeks. Allura had tried keeping track at first, resolved not to let herself waste away in her anger and frustration over such a frivolous thing. They were only a month or two into their deca-phoebe long voyage to Earth and she would need to be strong in all senses of the word before arriving. As the last Altean Royal, she would need to place her best face forward and remain the picture perfect imagine of grace and composure. Nobody wanted to form alliances with silly princesses who had allowed their hearts to be broken by a member of the enemy.
She would pretend she was not a fraud when the time came, and she would allow herself a week more to work through her skewed emotions before picking herself back up to once again become someone worthy of piloting the Blue Lion. In time, she imagined she could make it seem as though nothing had ever changed, that she had never had tender feelings for the sort of man who could… who could…
Well. It was easier to think about when she was in her solitude, which she was. There was no one to judge her or the feelings she had harbored for someone she had fought so hard to avoid putting her trust in, but had somehow ended up doing that and so much more with. In this moment, for better or worse, whatever she might have preferred, Allura was alone with only her memories to keep her company. She wanted to say they were all bad, to tell herself that if she had just paid a bit more attention during their interactions she might’ve been clued in to the sort of person she had been toeing the line with, but there was no sense in attempting to rewrite her memories.
And, if Allura was being truthful with herself as she rolled onto her side, waiting for sleep that would never come to overtake her, it hurt less to remember Lotor in the light he had carefully painted himself in as opposed to how he had been revealed to be all along.
—
“If I didn’t know any better,” he had said to her one day, walking beside her with his hands folded behind his back. “I’d say you were frightened of me.”
Allura had immediately bristled, skin prickling with the tone of his voice settling over her. They had only released him from the castle’s glass prison cell an hour or two before, and he had proven himself an ally— or, at the very least, aligned with Voltron for the moment. It had been her job to relocate him and find an empty room for him to take up in. Part of Allura had been inclined to throw his royal Galran title back in his face and shove him in the smallest quarters she could find, but… the more sensible part said it was best to keep her eye on him as much as possible.
The royal rooms adjacent to hers, conjoined by a small corridor would do the best, she supposed.
“I fear a short list of things,” Allura muttered beneath her breath, careful to keep a particular amount of space between the two of them to keep their elbows from brushing. “You are not on it.” She paused, fully intending to leave it there, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. “And if you were on it, you would surely be the last.”
Lotor gave a small, throaty chuckle, originating deep within his chest. “I imagine even making the list would be of the highest honor.” He peered at her out of the corner of his eye, and Allura dutifully continued to stare forward as she walked, refusing to let him in on the fact that she was conscious of his gaze. “Though I pray I never make the achievement.”
Allura couldn’t help it; she arched a brow, peering at Lotor by her side as she continued walking down the corridor. “And who is it that you pray this to?”
He shrugged a shoulder; such a casual gesture from someone with a wildly formal upbringing. It looked strange on him, more than anything else. “No one in particular, really. The Galra do not have belief in any set god and when your childhood is as brutal as mine, you have difficulty finding time to wonder about our places in the universe.” He paused a moment, and Allura could see the smile dancing at the corner of his mouth drop off into a thoughtful purse. “Perhaps I should pray to you, Princess.”
At those words, Allura halted her steps all together. It had been reflexive, a startled sort of tensing of her muscles, but she had nearly tripped over her own feet as a result of the shock. For just a moment she thought she had seen Lotor extend a hand to catch her, but it must have been a figment if her imagination. When she regained her balance, his fingers were drumming at his leg, lavender flesh standing out starkly against the black of his outfit. Trying to think nothing more of it, Allura turned forward once more and continued to walk, doing her best to ignore the warmth beginning to spread over her cheeks. “Surely even you know that prayer is meant to be saved for a figure worth worshipping.”
Lotor’s response had been immediate and certain, as if he had spent hours crafting this conversational scenario just to be able to hand her his response. “Am I not allowed to view you worthy of worship? Would my prayers fall upon deaf ears if I sent them?”
An insistent sort of itch was prickling Allura’s flesh, most troublesome at the nape of her neck. She imagined that, should she turn, that was the level where she would find Lotor had trained his piercing gaze. “You may do as you please,” she mumbled, thanking her lucky stars that her bedroom and his were coming up in just a few more ticks. “It doesn’t seem like anyone has had success in stopping you from doing so before.”
“Admittedly, I can be rather stubborn,” Lotor responded quietly, amusement so clear in his voice. “Though from what I understand, it’s nothing compared to your frightening determination.”
—
Allura blinked and shook her head, fighting the memory off with as much will power as she could muster. This had been happening far too often, and she could neither explain it to herself or seek advice from anyone else. The one person she knew for certain wouldn’t have judged her for her memories was currently in a coma, fighting for his life and hanging on to his last shred of health. Pidge had mentioned that there was a theory comatose patients could hear every word spoken to them, but Allura wasn’t about to sit at Shiro’s bedside and moan on and on about someone everyone had told her not to trust. Her solitude would need to be enough comfort for now; she would just have to find another way of taking her mind off of her issues by her lonesome.
Her toes curled as her feet hit the cool floor of her room, the metal sending a blissfully painful shock of cold through her senses. She tugged at the hem of her sleep shirt as she walked through her room and into the conjoined bathing room, pulling it over her head and allowing it to fall to the floor as she went. It took a few ticks to ready her bath, making sure that the water was no less than boiling as she removed the rest of her clothing and letting her hair down before stepping into the steaming tub, forfeiting allowing herself to get used to the temperature before leaning back and submerging herself up to her face.
It was a bit painful, but the good kind. The only sort of pain she could stand to deal with at this point in her life. And it worked, if only for a short period. The heat of the water helped her forget what she had left behind in the rift, what quintessence had stolen from her but had also given her the clarity to see. For a few perfect ticks, so calm and quiet, Allura was sure she had escaped the pain left behind by one of the few men she had ever deigned to leave her heart in the hands of.
But that bliss was gone in a snap, replaced by another memory, sweeter in nature yet more hazardous because of it.
—
She remembered hearing a soft knock the night she had returned from Oriande, so gentle that she had second guessed whether it had even happened, from the door in her room. Not the main one which led out to the hall, the one she walked each day to greet the Paladins and Coran in the morning, but the one just a little ways away from her wardrobe and bed. The one Lotor had discovered a few days after his victory at the Kral Zera, and which he had never been able to use before returning to his home in the Galra Empire.
Allura had found that she missed the knowledge of his presence in the next room over terribly since he had left, no matter how much she had pretended to be indifferent to his proximity. Admittedly the fact that they had been much too far from the Galra base for him to return for a few days had been something she’d thought of as a blessing in disguise. He had returned once more to the room joined to hers for the next few nights, only at this point in time she liked the idea of his closeness. Between the fact that she knew he was only a few steps and a door away and the memory of everything she had experienced and learned in Oriande, the thrill of it all still coursing through her veins, she hadn’t been able to get to sleep.
As it appeared, neither had Lotor.
He entered her room just as she sat up, and she brushed her hair to the side and watched as he stepped closer, feeling mildly accosted at the simple sight of Lotor in his sleeping clothes. They were nothing more than a pair of dark linen pants and something similar to Lance’s sleeping top. A ‘tee shirt’ she thought she remembered her human friend’s calling it, black in color and tight in fit. The ordinariness of it seemed like a visual sort of lie.
“Hello,” Allura breathed, blinking and hoping that she didn’t look too childish. Tossing and turning for the last few hours had surely turned her hair into a nest, and now she was feeling self conscious, unsure of what to do with her hands or if she should pull her blanket up to her chin to cover her body, though it wasn’t as if her nightgown was revealing. The way he looked at her was just so disarming, so… she wasn’t sure what she could compare it to. She had never felt anything else like it. “You’re… forgive me, I thought you might be asleep by now. It’s rather late.”
Lotor looked a little worried at her words, and he gestured with his chin over his shoulder, the question plain as day on his face. Before he could voice it, Allura waved his concern away with a hand and beckoned him forward, watching as he took barefooted steps to meet her at the edge of her mattress. He hesitated for only a moment, then sat across from her and smiled fondly. “I wasn’t sure if you would still be awake, I just… something seemed to be pushing me here. I thought I might come to see if you were all right, not that you cannot take care of yourself.”
“Kind of you,” she told him, doing her best to stifle the yawn that was trying to burst from her lips. She blinked a few times, rubbing at her eyes and waiting for her sight to adjust to the darkness in the room. There was a glowing, violet sort of light present, and Allura thought it was her imagination until she fully let her gaze settle on Lotor’s face. There, she found that his altean marks were shimmering bright purple, reflecting off his bound hair and turning the white strands an inviting shade of lilac. Before she could stop herself, Allura had extended a hand forward, fingers just shy of skimming Lotor’s cheek before she hesitated, remembering social boundaries. “Your marks are still glowing,” she breathed.
Funny how innocent and juvenile Lotor seemed in that moment, clad in his pajamas and long hair pulled back from his face. He looked young, hopeful. For ten thousand years of existence, physical appearance effected by quintessence corruption, he looked no more than a year or two older than Allura herself.
Instead of shying away as he might have just a week or two earlier, Lotor caught Allura’s hand in his own, pressing her fingers to his cheek and letting her know that if she wanted to touch him, she need only do so. “As are yours,” he told her, rubbing a thumb against the back of her hand. It was true; she could see the pink light of her marks shimmering in his irises. “I assume we are not yet far enough away from Oriande to stop the physical effects. The fact that we are the only two marked worthy on this ship must have been what called me to you.”
“That would make sense,” Allura mused, skimming a thumb across Lotor’s cheekbone, brushing just the edge of his mark. They would disappear once they were far away enough from Oriande and the skin of his cheek would then return to normal, but for now the two of them matched, and Allura quite liked the idea of it. “I would like to thank you again, if I may. I would never have been able to learn what I did without you and your help.”
“Of course you would have,” Lotor murmured, extending his hand to cup Allura’s own cheek. They were mirrors of each other in this moment, perfectly reflecting one another and bonding over something that only the two of them could understand. “I only helped you find the location, and even you did the majority of that. You are the one who is the true Altean alchemist. You never needed me to discover the truth about yourself. It would have come out eventually.”
Her heart had fluttered at his words, and the feel of his hand at her cheek made her chest tighten. And to think she had once loathed this man, that she had once wished for his downfall and disgrace. His death, even, in her darkest moments. How she wished she could apologize for all of that; how she longed to show him that she wasn’t like that anymore, that she wanted to see him succeed, and preferably by her side.
Vargas had passed, but Lotor had stayed.
They laid together in Allura’s bed, face to face as they laid on their sides and whispered back and forth to one another. They spoke of mundane things, humorous subjects and petty annoyances and favorite memories. Lotor asked about Allura’s childhood on Altea, if she could remember what her mother looked like, if she ever wished she hadn’t been born a princess. In turn, Allura asked Lotor after his fondest memories of his youth, if there was ever a time he could remember his father being kind, if he wished he had been born purely Galran or Altean as opposed to the mix of the two species his people often mocked. They both listened intently to each other’s answers, paying deep attention and engaging in playful and teasing banter. Allura didn’t remember when she had taken hold of Lotor’s hand during their impromptu story time, but she did remember the feel of his warm fingers constantly drawing back and forth over her wrist, the back of her hand, her knuckles.
It was a nice feeling, she had to admit.
“Do you ever wonder,” he murmured, eyes glittering in the low light, the marks on his cheeks weakly glowing through the darkness, “what it might have been like if we’d been raised in the ideal? If our parents had never gone to war, and we had been raised in the world ten thousand years ago?”
“I imagine we might have been friends from the start,” Allura had offered, tracing the contours of the profile of Lotor’s face with her eyes. “Children of two renowned empires, destined for greatness.”
Lotor hummed in agreeance. He stayed silent a tick, then another, then a third. Then, with a bashful lilt to his voice — truly amazing, considering there was nothing even remotely bashful about Lotor — he whispered, “You could have been my betrothed, you know. In that perfect life we were robbed of all those thousands of years ago.”
Allura’s breath hitched, caught off guard at the statement. Lotor wasn’t wrong, not by any means. Her father would never have made her marry anyone she did not love, but if everything had been right in the world back then, if Zarkon and Honerva hadn’t bent to the sheer force of exposure to quintessence, Allura surely would have loved Lotor in the purest and truest sense of the word. “I could have,” she agreed, lowering her gaze to his throat in an effort to avoid his eyes. If he made eye contact, he would surely see through to her thinly concealed heart. “We would have been childhood friends, and the union of our kingdoms would have brought technological advances beyond our wildest dreams. And you are easy to love, Lotor, and I am good at loving. I can only think that we would have been the perfect royal match.” Allura sighed, something wistful creeping into her mind. “Silly to think about now, I suppose.”
“‘Silly’ is one word for it,” Lotor sighed quietly. They remained silent a few more moments, just listening to the sounds of each other’s breathing. Allura had begun to think that Lotor might have fallen asleep when he reached with his free hand to gingerly thread his fingers through the strands of her white hair, fingernails dancing across the skin of her scalp as he gently tugged at her locks. When his fingers reached the end of it, he repeated his motions over and over agin. It wasn’t until Allura involuntarily shivered at the delightful feeing of it that Lotor paused. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked, halting his motions. It took everything Allura had not to scream at him to continue what he was doing, it felt so wonderful. “It’s just, you are the only person I know with hair like mine. Though I admit, yours is far more lovely.”
“Please,” Allura told him, hoping she didn’t sound too desperate. “Feel free to continue.”
And so he had, and the last thing Allura had remembered before finally falling asleep that night had been the light touch of Lotor’s fingers running over her scalp.
—
She opened her eyes, snapping herself out of the vivid memory and sitting up in her tub, unable to discern whether the dampness on her cheeks was bath water or tears.
As twisted as it all was, as twisted as Lotor had evidently turned out to be, she wished he was here now. The good side of him, the side that liked to laugh and smile and play with Allura’s hair as she slept. The side that had spoken of unity, the side that made daily jokes of praying to her even though she insisted she was no one deserving of prayer when he so stubbornly contended that she was. The side that had promised her unity, friendship, and something even more. The side that had kissed Allura moments before she had discovered it had all been a ruse, and Lotor had been outed as the killer she had suspected he might be all along.
The side that Allura had loved with all her heart, and still did no matter how hard she tried to tell herself she didn’t.
She raised a hand from the steaming bath and held it in front of her face, concentrating and focusing. She watched as it turned purple, the color threading over her skin from her forearm to her fingertips until it was a solid lavender. Once that was done, Allura stole a breath, closed her eyes, and touched her fingertips to her cheeks, letting her nails skim over the flesh as Lotor had taken to doing days before their catastrophic fight.
And, in the solitude of her own bathroom, a single purple hand pressed against her cheek as she tried not to dwell on the love she had lost, as well as the lives of the Altean people she hadn’t even known she’d had to lose, Allura let herself sob.