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"Princess Allura," Shiro, the eldest of the earthlings, said, stepping forward, "these are your Lions. You've dealt with the Galra Empire before. What do you think is the best course of action?"
"I…" Allura glanced from one earthling to another; each one seemed to be waiting for her to tell him what to do next. "I don't know."
The admission left a bad taste in her mouth. She'd been born to lead, so admitting that she didn't know what to do now was admitting that all the decisions and negotiations she'd been allowed to sit in on as part of her leadership lessons had had no effect on her. She might as well have just spat on her parents' graves.
"Perhaps your father can help," Coran suggested.
Allura turned toward her advisor. "My father?"
Coran nodded, then started steering her out of the bridge. "Excuse us, Paladins," he said. "I must show the princess something."
Allura stiffened at the title.
"Princess of what?" she asked, albeit more to herself than to Coran, as she followed the elder Altean down one of the Castle's many corridors. The honorific was little more than a painful reminder of the future that had been stolen from her. "Altea—."
She couldn't bring herself to say it.
She'd been, at first, too focused on locating the Green, Red, and Yellow Lions to focus on the conspicuous absence of a particular blue planet with golden rings on their holographic map of the universe, but once she'd located the last Lion, she'd swiped back to her native galaxy. The gaping holes in the holo-map seemed to echo the emptiness within herself.
She'd heard about people having their lives "turned upside down," but her whole world had been obliterated. She didn't know what to do about that.
Coran laid a hand on her shoulder again and squeezed. "You're still my princess," he said.
Allura closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
She adored Coran. He had always been like a second father to her, and she was grateful that he had survived the Altean genocide, too—not only because she could count on him to have her back, but because she didn't know what she would do if she were really, truly all alone.
She still felt abandoned and alone, though, and she didn't know how to deal with the loneliness that clawed at her heartstrings.
She'd never been bothered by solitude before. She'd been a calm, quiet child, content to observe others—especially after she had realized that the majority of people weren't authentic to her. She'd known that no one dared offending or upsetting her, lest she go crying to her parents, but the lack of authenticity had grated her nonetheless, and others' unwillingness to display vulnerability in front of her, lest she think less of them for their alleged weakness(es), scared her off showing her own vulnerability.
… not that that was something Allura had ever been inclined to do. She didn't know whether she kept her cards close to her chest because doing so came naturally to her or because she didn't want to abuse the power dynamic inherent in all of her relationships by forcing others to be a listening ear when they would not let her be that for them, but it didn't matter. The result was the same: she had grown up biting her tongue and sharing her true self only with the juniberries that grew in the palace gardens and the mice that scampered around the palace grounds.
She had a better chance of befriending the earthlings—whom she barely knew—than she had ever had of befriending any of her peers back home because she held no power over the new paladins. She wasn't their princess, so they didn't have to bow down to her or walk on eggshells around her. She could, therefore, be herself around them.
It wasn't lost on her that the freedom to be herself came with a price, though, and a steep one at that—namely, ten millennia.
Allura couldn't wrap her head around the fact that the earthlings had had a functioning, modern—and she used that word loosely—civilization for less time than she and Coran had been in stasis. Alteans had had diplomatic relations with plenty of new species, but even the most primitive of them had possessed intergalactic travel capabilities. She couldn't understand how the human race hadn't developed the capacity to so much as leave their own solar system in ten millennia's time.
She couldn't understand how these primitive people from a backwater planet in a no-name galaxy were all she had.
Well, they and Coran.
She missed Alteans—but how could she tell Coran that he alone wasn't enough to quell her homesickness? She couldn't, not when he had lost everyone and everything, too.
Allura opened her eyes. The tears welling there didn't dare fall.
"Where are we going?" she demanded, harsher than she'd meant to sound. "How can my father possibly help? He's—."
She looked at Coran, whose face was drawn tight in determination and solemnity, and bit her tongue.
Alfor and Coran had been close. Indeed, their relationship had extended far beyond that of King and Counselor. If Coran didn't want to admit that Alfor was gone and that it was he and Allura who had to decide how to proceed and put an end to a never-ending war… well, Allura couldn't begrudge him for that.
She didn't want to admit those things to herself, after all.
If Coran wanted to act like Altea—and civilization as he had known it—hadn't been destroyed, and that ten thousand deca-phoebs hadn't passed, making everything he'd ever known mere folktale to anyone who might still know of its existence and he and Allura themselves remnants of the past at best and wholly irrelevant at worst, she would let him.
She wished she could do the same. She knew that dwelling on the cultures and customs that had been lost, first because of Zarkon’s bloodlust and then because of the passage of unfathomable stretches of time, wasn't healthy. She knew this because although she'd buried her anguish while she looked for the Lions, the physical symptoms of her grief were now making themselves known. The memories she'd buried in the deepest recesses of her mind begged for attention and throbbed alongside her heart. The questions she'd conjured and then bitten back lodged themselves in her throat and made it nigh impossible to talk. The heartache she'd refused to acknowledge had fallen to the pit of her stomach, which was now churning precariously, and threatened to stop her heart and spread outward until her ribs closed in on and pierced her lungs, stealing her ability to breathe.
… so yeah, denying reality might be better than dwelling on it because there was no fixing reality. Allura could, at least theoretically, turn this rag-tag group of space explorers-in-training into a victorious team of warriors and win the war that's been raging for ten thousand deca-phoebs, but she couldn't revive extinct cultures and obliterated worlds.
She couldn't go home.
She didn't know what to do now, and she didn't know what to do when she didn't know what to do about something because she didn't usually struggle to find solutions. She had never had any trouble seeing the "big picture." She could see patterns as easily as if the dots and pieces had been connected with bright red strings.
But now?
The patterns looked as if a blind man had drawn them; the dots she could discern had zero correlation, and the puzzle pieces she could find were all broken and haphazardly discarded.
… and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't see how she and Coran fit into this world.
The whoosh of an opening door drew Allura back to the present.
"Coran, what is this?" she asked, looking curiously into the unfamiliar chamber before her and then stepping inside.
"King Alfor knew there was a chance he might never see you again," Coran began. He followed his charge into the chamber but stopped just inside the doorway, content to let Allura wander around the large room. "So his memories, his very being, were stored in this computer for you."
Allura approached the computer. A glowing ball of light floated and, as if it had a heartbeat, pulsated above its center.
She had known that her father and his fellow scientists had been experimenting with combining artificial intelligence and quintessence to create soul expansion and storage technology, but she hadn't known how far they had progressed because before Alfor could ever show her the results of their latest experiments, Zarkon had attacked.
She cautiously held her hand over the undulating orb. It exploded, projecting throughout the chamber an image of the palace gardens. Allura stared, mesmerized, at the juniberries around her, but the whirring of the computer soon compelled her to return her attention to it—and there, holographic but life-sized, was her father.
"Father!" she cried. "Father, it is so good to see you."
She ran toward the hologram.
"Allura," her father said, and tears welled in Allura's eyes at the sound of her name in her father's voice, "my only child, how I've missed your face."
Oh, right, she thought. For him, it's been ten thousand deca-phoebs.
She couldn't wrap her head around the fact that she had been in stasis so long. Indeed, every attempt she had made thus far to comprehend that length of time left her feeling abandoned and lost.
"I'm so frightened," she admitted, averting her gaze but bending down to touch the computer. The AI program at the heart of the hologram was augmented by her father’s quintessence, she knew, and she could feel the remnants of his life force beneath her fingers. "A Galra ship is set to attack—." She fell to her knees in front of the computer. "—and I don't know what to do." She looked up at her father's face. "Please, Father. I need your help."
"I would do anything to take this burden from you," her father sighed.
Allura pressed her face to the computer. "I don't know if we should run to preserve what we have—."
What do we have anymore? she couldn't help but wonder.
"—or stay and risk everything." She furrowed her brows. "I want to fight, but the Paladins of Old are gone."
She recalled her last conversation with her father.
"Father!" Allura cried as she regained her balance following Zarkon's attack on the Castle. "We must form Voltron and fight before it's too late!"
"It's already too late," Alfor responded, his resignation apparent in his voice. "We must send the Lions away. We can't risk them falling into Zarkon's hands."
Allura balled her hands into fists. "We can't give up hope!" she insisted.
Allura blinked back tears.
It was easier then, she thought, since I still had a people and a planet to fight for.
She looked up at her father's face. "I know what you would do," she said.
"I scattered the Lions of Voltron to keep them out of Zarkon's hands," Alfor said. "You urged me to keep them and fight, but for the greater good of protecting the universe, I chose to hide them."
Allura shifted her gaze to the juniberries she was crushing by kneeling on them. "I think I understand."
She hadn't understood her father's decision to exercise caution all those deca-phoebs ago, not even when he'd explained to her that battling Zarkon ran an unjustifiable risk of defeat. She'd been sure that her father—well-known as he was for diving headfirst into battles—would agree that the only thing that could stop Zarkon's reign of terror was brute force.
She'd neglected the fact that Alfor's recklessness stemmed from his adamant belief in the importance of the preservation of innocent lives. He'd been unwilling to chance Zarkon obtaining the unparalleled power of Voltron and using it to conquer and/or kill billions of people.
She understood now, though, that her father's decision to scatter the Lions had been—or had seemed to be, at least—the strategic choice. While Alteans, as a diplomatic people, had had ample allies, many had had no standing military, and of those who had, few had been as advanced as the Alteans themselves—and Alteans would have been a poor choice to stand up to Zarkon. The Black Paladin had known the Red Paladin—his right-hand man—well, so he would have been able to predict and thwart the Red Paladin's every move. Alfor couldn't have won.
… but even if he had been able to win, Alfor likely wouldn't have acted differently. A war between Alteans and Galrans—two of the most advanced species in the universe—promised nothing but destruction for all involved and the vast majority of those who weren't, and Alfor hadn't wanted that.
"No, daughter. You were right."
Allura looked up again, surprised.
"I made a terrible mistake," Alfor declared. "One that cost the universe countless lives."
Allura contemplated that for a tick. Alfor couldn't have predicted that the Lions would lie dormant for ten thousand deca-phoebs, or that Zarkon would live for just as long, but they had, and he did—and now, despite Alfor's attempts to preserve life and prevent war, there was a hole where Altea should have been in the holo-map, and the vast majority of species were under the dominion of the Galra Empire.
"Forming Voltron is the only way to stop Zarkon," Alfor continued. "You must be willing to sacrifice everything to assemble the Lions and correct my error."
The hologram dematerialized, forcing Allura to confront the fact that all she was doing in reality was kneeling in front of a computer in the center of a cold chamber, Coran and her thoughts her only company.
She didn't get up yet; instead, she continued contemplating her father's words.
She'd been ill-suited to the life she'd been born into. Indeed, in the moment of truth, when a bloodthirsty tyrant threatened her people and her planet, she hadn't wanted to be a mere princess. She'd wanted to be a warrior.
… and now, she had two choices. She could join the fight, despite having nothing to fight for anymore, or she could lay down her weapons—which would ensure her own death as well as the eradication of Altean culture.
She didn't have much of a choice at all, apparently.
She wasn't naïve. She knew that her odds of winning this never-ending war were slim, and virtually nonexistent if she failed to help the earthlings bond as paladins. She also knew that, for most races, peace had become an almost incomprehensible quality of a bygone era—much like her.
She also, however, knew that if anyone had ample motivation to defeat the Galra Empire, it was her, and that only someone like her—someone who knew of peace as a possibility, not just the stuff of legends—stood a chance of restoring peace to the universe.
She stood up, determined once again. The laws of war had changed in the ten millennia she'd been in stasis, and that scared her, but she could use them to forge a place for herself in the modern era—not as Allura, Princess of Altea, but as Allura, the brains behind Voltron and the bringer of peace.
What did she have to lose, anyway?