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The floating lakes of Escidka sparkle in the sunlight. Keith watches the one hanging above them as the fish swim down to suck on the bottom before flitting away in a flash of light. Behind him he can hear the excited overlap of Hunk and Pidge rewiring the Green Lion’s communication array to let them connect with all the systems they’ve freed without creating a traceable signal the Galra can use to find them. Every now and then, Allura will add something as well, a little bit of Altean science-magic the others would never have thought to ask about. He likes these times, when the everything is not on the brink of collapse and he can take a moment to take in the wonders of this crazy, fantastic, and amazing universe and these people who he thinks he might be able to call friends.
“I can’t feel it anymore.” Lances says, out of nowhere.
“What?”
“The water, I can’t feel it anymore.” He stretches his hand up towards the lake and the refracted sunlight paints a rainbow across his arm. “After we all became paladins I could like, sense it or something. I could just feel where the water was on any planet we were on. But ever since Blue rejected me, I haven’t been able to feel anything.”
Keith looks back up at the floating lake as a bird dives through it, emerging on the other side with one of the big silvery fish in its beak.
“Huh.”
“Got it!” Pidge shouts, startling a curious pink and purple bird that had come to investigate. Keith and Lance pull themselves up to see what the brain trust has put together. There’s a hum of static and then a voice cuts through.
“—us. Please. Someone, anyone. We need help. I repeat, this is Panatism, the capital of the Wolsnia system. We are under attack and we need help.”
Allura’s face slides closed as she slips from their friend to their princess. “You heard them, Paladins. To your lions.”
Once again the war overtakes them. Mission after mission run together and Keith shoves the conversation with Lance to the back of his mind and then forgets about it entirely.
The war takes them to Raptenh, a planet out on the edges of Galra space. It was left unguarded, and Coran and Allura thought it would be easy to retake.
There is no Galra presence at all when they arrive. The military outposts are empty and there are no cruisers in the surrounding space. They land the lions in an open field of clear flowers that break like glass under Keith’s shoes. A couple meters away, the spindly trees knit together in a complex maze of chalky white bark.
Hunk takes one step out of Yellow before frowning.
“Do you guys feel that?”
“Feel what?” Lance asks, striding towards the tree line. “I don’t feel anything. Did you eat something weird again?”
“What, no, you really can’t feel that? It feels, I don’t know.” He frowns, his brow creasing together as he tries to explain what only he seems able to sense.
“Sick.” Pidge supplies, and when Keith looks over, he sees her next to Lance, staring up at the interlocked trees. “This place feels sick.”
“Yeah.” Hunk brightens at having the right word. “It feels sick.”
There’s a groaning noise and then the earth splits. Well, it’s more like crumbles, as though the very bedrock on which they stand has turned to ash. It simply falls away, creating a chasm that goes down and down and down and down without end. Pidge manages to grab Lance as the earth collapses under him. Next to them, the trees slump and break and crumble as well, falling bit by bit into the rift.
“We have to go.” Pidge yells, dragging Lance up to semi-solid ground. Keith nods, already half way back up the ramp of his lion. They make it off the planet in time to watch it cave in on itself. Its core emptied. Its life sucked dry. Something in Keith screams at the loss, his head echoing with the injustice, cruelty, and wanton destruction on display. He thinks he can hear Hunk crying. There is a quiet little voice niggling in the back of his mind that there is something here he should be paying attention to, but the need for vengeance, for justice, burns too hot for Keith for spend much time worrying about that.
The next time he thinks about Lance's odd comment, he is trapped and alone on a Galra cruiser full of troops that are alerted to his presence and without his team or a way out. The door to the storage closet slides shut behind him not a second too soon. Keith leans against it, taking the few seconds he’s bought himself to catch his breath and assess the situation. The situation is that he’s fucked. No. He can’t think like that. Breathe. He can almost hear Shiro’s voice in his head: Patience yields focus. Keith nods, as though Shiro were with him. Patience. Not really Keith’s strong suit, but he can do it, he can think this through and get out of this mess.
God, he wishes Shiro was here with him, or any of the other paladins. He’d even take Lance. He takes another slow steady breath. He imagines, just for a second, being home, in the Castle of Lions. One of those times when they were all together. Pidge and Hunk bent over some sciencey thing he probably couldn’t understand in a million years. Allura patiently explaining some weird Altean engineering magic to them, or maybe telling Lance a story about Altea. Or maybe Lance is peering over their shoulder and generally getting in the way like he so often does. Keith wishes he were actually there, sitting on Black’s head, watching them do their normal dance, unsure, as usual, of how to join.
Keith opens his eyes. The hangar. Of course. There’ll be ships in the hangar he can steal. He still has his communicator. If he can get off this cruiser, he can signal the Blade to come get him. He can do this. He can get out. The hangar, then, that’s his goal. Keith nods to himself and slips out into the hall.
He moves like a ghost through the ship, avoiding the patrols of guards looking for him, sliding through air ducts when he can, until he gets to the hangar door. There are two sentries guarding the only entrance and certainly more inside. If it were just the two, he could take them, but two plus however many they call to help and with nowhere to hide is suicide. Keith is not particularly opposed to death, but when it comes, he’s damn well going to make sure it’s worth it. If he could just get in. The hangar is big enough and crowded enough with ships and tools and parts that he could easily stay hidden. He just needs to take out the guards without giving them a chance to raise the alarm. He has to do it despite not having any way to approach them without being seen. He presses his gun against the edge of the the air vent he’s crammed into. It’s an impossible shot. He has no room to maneuver and he has to hit the sentry in the small eye gap to fry the AI fast enough so it won't alert anyone to his presence and he has to do it twice in just a few seconds.
Well, there’s nothing to do but try.
One more deep breath and he shoots. He’s moving to shoot the second one before the first bolt lands, letting instinct take over as though his arm were moving on its own. They hit, one right after the other, and the sentries go down.
Keith kicks out the grate and slides into the hangar. It’s easy to sneak through the crowded room, lots of odd angles and weird shadows to hide in as he makes he way down to the ship closest to the door. He slides underneath and pops off one of the bottom panels to reveal a mess of wires. One of them powers the built-in ship communication that he will need to disable if he wants to get away without being followed. He knows this. Regris has shown him how to do this. Pidge has shown him how to do this. There are so many wires, though, and the wrong one could cut out his power, his life support, his navigation. How he supposed to—no. Breathe. Patience yields focus, breathe. He lets his instincts take over. They almost never steer him wrong. He cuts the wire.
Inside the cockpit, a red light turns on next to the symbol Keith is beginning to associate with speech. Success.
In a few seconds, his ship is screaming out of the hangar while the Galra are left scrambling to get after him. They’ll never be fast enough. Even without Red, Keith was the fastest pilot in the garrison. Though the stars don’t sing for him in these slower vessels. Not even Black is fast enough to get that feeling.
He gets as far as the next solar system before the ship he stole starts the telltale shuddering of dangerously low fuel. He manages to make it into the gravity well of a habitable planet before he loses power; after that, it’s just wresting the few movable parts around to try and slow the fall enough not to burn up on atmospheric entry. It’s close but he manages, tumbling out of the smoldering wreckage, skin pink and blistering from the heat. As he’s stumbling away, half delirious with smoke inhalation, he hears Allura’s voice crystal clear in his head.
There’s water to the north.
Keith doesn’t think to question it. He adjusts his path and staggers north until he finds a spring, cold and deep and clear.
Kolivan finds him there two days later.
“Did you get it?”
Keith reaches into this pocket and hands over the tiny disc of encryption codes.
Kolivan nods and in a rare show of affection places a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “Well done.”
Keith assumes Allura’s voice was a hallucination. There are reasonable, rational explanations for why he found the spring exactly where her voice said it would be. Brains are weird and funny things, and hearing a trusted friend in a time of crisis isn’t even that weird a thing to happen.
Then he gets lost in a space where time does not run straight. Where he is in his past and his future and versions of him that were and will be and might be and weren’t.
Then Allura pulls Shiro’s mind out of Voltron.
Keith is forced to admit that there is so much about Voltron he doesn’t understand, so much more possible than he can hope to imagine. They haven’t even scratched the surface.
They find themselves back on the splintered remains of Daibazaal. They keep coming back here, drawn again and again to where it all began, where the fabric of reality ripped and undiluted quintessence began leaking into the universe, poisoning it drop by drop.
This is where Zarkon was made.
This is where Voltron was made.
This is what Voltron is made of.
It comes together suddenly. All the little pieces Keith hadn’t even realized he’d been gathering. Lance’s gained and lost ability to feel the water. Hunk and Pidge feeling Raptenh’s death. The way the stars would sing with Keith when he flew Red. That missions ages ago when he’d heard Allura so clear in his mind. He understands finally what Voltron is, what Voltron really is, and what it can do.
It is so much more than Zarkon thought, so much more than King Alfor dreamed.
Voltron is quintessence and quintessence is life.
Voltron is life.
It is the rocks that it lives on. It is water it is born in. It is the star that feeds it. It is the weird and wild complex systems it grows. It is that ineffable, intangible connecting fabric of everything that binds the universe together.
Keith reaches out for Pidge’s hand. “I know what to do,” he says, and it echos in his mind and reaches out to the rest of them. They see what he sees, they know what he knows, because they are all connected to him and he is connected to everything and they are everything. They are the building blocks of life. They are every molecule of hydrogen, of oxygen, of nitrogen, of carbon, of sulfur. Everything that burns. Everything that breathes. They are quintessence, glittering and raw and more powerful than anyone can ever truly comprehend.
They are Voltron.
And time is not a river, flowing ever in one directions. It’s an ocean.
The broken shards of Diabazaal stop their slow circling. The pieces hang motionless as time freezes—as Voltron freezes time—suspends it in a bubble because they can. The rocks start circling backwards. They spin back through time and the planet comes back together, green and beautiful and alive again, and they spin backwards with it as time undoes itself before them. At last they come to an empty and open field on a clear night. They watch the comet streaking across the sky -- turning to fire as it descends on the planet. It catches on the fabric of space and time as it impacts, and rends it.
Quintessence begins to leak through.
Keith reaches out.
Pidge and Lance and Hunk and Allura reach out.
Voltron reaches out.
They push the edges of reality back together and close the rip, locking the comet on the other side, in that place between realities where it came from. Time freezes again. It hangs still and uncertain as the tides of history change around them. Keith feels Pidge next to him. Her hands sifting through the waters of time pulling out threads, and her mind is a whisper against his, hold on, hold on, I need a little longer, a little longer, a little longer.
So Keith holds on. He clings to this moment as long as he can.
Allura’s mind lights up against his. I love you all.
He answers as best he can, sending his love back to her through their bond. He can feels everyone else as well their love echoing back and forth.
It last an eternity. It lasts less than a second.
Then Voltron is unmade.
Keith opens his eyes.
He is home, in his bunk in the garrison, and the whispers of dreams of space—of stars that sing and empires that span galaxies—cling to him as he gets up. He doesn’t have time to dwell on them, not today.
Today Shiro is coming back from Kerberos.