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Monika McLean was 54 when her youngest son disappeared.
The call came early on a Saturday morning, a commander at the Garrison cooly and professionally informing her that Lance had been seen on security footage walking out into the desert with a group of friends, and had not been seen since.
She packed her and David’s bags in a rush. The whole time, she was on the phone with him telling him their son was missing, he needed to leave work, they were flying out that evening.
She called each of her children to tell them the news, called her work to let them know she’d be gone for a few days, finished packing her bags and left.
They stayed in a hotel in Plath City. Daily, they met with Garrison officers who never had any news. Once or twice, they spoke with the families of the other two students who disappeared.
At the end of the first week, they were told that with no leads, prospects were grim. At the end of the second week, they were told that the search had turned into a body recovery.
They returned to Varadero after three weeks.
Silently, they unpacked Lance’s things from his dorm at the Garrison. They placed each item exactly where it belonged in his room and shut the door.
For a year, Monika maintained hope that her son was alive, hidden from her somewhere, his eventual homecoming an inevitability. That hope faded over the next years.
They had a funeral after two and a half years. The Garrison had long stopped actively searching, long declared the three students dead. It was a quiet service, just family. They invited the other students' families, but no one showed up.
And despite the grief, life continued on. Graduations, weddings, anniversaries continued to pass. Her children all moved out, her grandchildren taking over their rooms when they stayed over.
She and David grew older. Her back ached when she worked too long hunched over her computer. He started using reading glasses.
Often, she wondered what Lance would be like if he was still with them.
Five years later she had achieved a level of peace in her life. The grief still carved a gaping hole in her heart, but her family helped. Her husband, of course, was a rock, taking over the household when the grief became overpowering, forcing her outside when she couldn’t bear to leave her bed. Her children made sure she was never alone long, always dropping by for dinner or to help in the garden, or to throw their own children in the door and run off for a long awaited date night.
It wasn’t easy, but she could see the light in life again.
And then, on a sunny august afternoon, the doorbell rang.
It wasn’t unusual, and she wandered over unhurriedly. She grabbed the knob, drawing open the door to welcome whoever in.
The man who met her was wearing a suit of white armour. Her eyes met his chest first, adorned with a sleek design she didn’t recognize. He held a matching helmet under his arm, which, though hanging casually, ended in a tight fist, like he was trying hard to appear at ease.
Her eyes rose slowly from his sleek armour, up to his face. And she swore her heart stopped because that face–
She didn’t feel herself collapse on her knees, but she did feel her son's hands on her shoulders, the ozone-gasoline smell that came off him as he held her tight. The sound of the helmet dropping and rolling across the deck as he ducked to catch her.
She did hear the waver in his voice as he whispered “I’m sorry, I’m home now. I’m so sorry,”
“Monika?” came David's voice from back in the house. Lance’s head lifted from its place on her shoulder, and she felt him shake.
“Dad?”
A very long pause, and then: “Lance,”
A second pair of arms wrapped around them.
“Lance, where have you been? What happened to you?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave,” He was sobbing, tears falling from his face and onto his strange armour as Monika and David held him close. “I’m home, I’m so sorry,”
They sat in the kitchen. The tears had stopped, more out of dehydration than dried up emotion.
“I was in space,” Lance said. “That's where I was the last five years,”
Monika stared at him unblinking. Gone for years in space?
“What do you mean?”
He gave a halfhearted smile, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small… phone? A more futuristic phone than she’d ever seen.
“This is Voltron,” He tapped something, setting the phone on the table. An honest-to-god hologram appeared above it, showing a hulking robot wielding a massive sword. “The day I disappeared, it was because I was chosen to be one of its Paladins,”
The next few hours were such a blur Monika couldn’t recount them if she tried. They, at some point, called each of their children, to tell them to come home, right now, that Lance had returned to them. One by one, Veronica and Luis and Rachel and Marco and all of their families poured through the door, interrupting whatever story they were on to grab hold of their brother, each time setting off a new wave of tears.
In the end, the whole group ended up in the kitchen, grandchildren asleep in the guest room down the hall. They didn’t get far in Lance’s story, just getting the basics: that he’d been in space, that he’d been fighting a 10,000 year old war, and that they’d finally won.
At some point, early in the morning, it was decided they needed to sleep. And they pulled fresh sheets out of the closet, and Monika and David worked together to change the sheets on Lance’s bed while he showered.
It felt so mundane, Monika felt tears form in her eyes yet again.
When she woke up the next morning and rushed downstairs to find Lance making coffee with Marco, it felt like he had been revived a second time. Not just a dream, but a real, tangible person, here in her kitchen.
She wrapped him in a tight hug, pulling Marco in as well. They both laughed at her, but hugged back so tight she thought she’d burst.
After a second Monika stepped back and looked at her son. Lance had grown to match Marco’s height, and now that he was out of his armour she could see he’d built up a lot more muscle as well. No longer her lanky teenager, the Lance standing in front of her was a man in his twenties.
The t-shirt and shorts revealed more than that though; littered across his skin were an assortment of scars. She’d seen the thin line across his cheek the night before, but there were so, so many more. Each felt like a knife in her heart.
“What happened to you, cariño?”
He gave her a smile, and it was the same smile he’d give her when he was seventeen, when he was twelve, when he was three, and her eyes welled up with tears again.
“I’m ok mama,” he said. “It looks worse than it is,”
And she didn’t believe him for a second. But he squeezed her shoulder, and Marco placed a cup of coffee in her hand, and Lance led her away to sit at the table where David had already made her a plate of toast. And she let it go, and let him talk about happier things.
Veronica was the next awake. She walked down the stairs slowly, like she was afraid she’d come down and see an empty spot where Lance had been the night before. But there he was. She stopped at the table to scruff his hair, and he swatted at her hand but smiled the whole time.
She looked across the table at David to see him with a gentle smile and a tear in his eye. Lance’s disappearance had been every bit as hard on him as on her. He’d spoken, at the funeral, about how much he missed his son’s laughter filling up their home, his easy humor and exaggerated confidence. Monika knew this moment of their children playing around meant more to him than almost anything else.
“Anyone want anything from the kitchen?” Veronica called from beside the fridge.
“Can I get a water?” Lance replied. Veronica nodded, and the rest of the family continued their breakfast.
“Last night you said your ship was a lion, and then you didn’t explain that at all. I’m so confused, how does that work?” Marco asked.
Lance smiled, eyes lighting up at the chance to talk about his ship.
“Well, she's literally built like a lion, they all are. And- Oh!”
Lance practically jumped out of his seat, elbowing the glass Veronica had just tapped on his arm, emptying it on them both and letting the glass shatter on the floor.
They stood there, staring at each other for a second. Then Lance said: “S-sorry. I just got surprised,”
Without saying anything, Veronica swept the glass shards away and Lance grabbed towels to sop up the water. They didn’t talk about it. And when they returned to the table, David took over and told Lance all about the road trip he’d taken Luis and his family on last year.
They spent the whole day catching up. They told him about every milestone that he’d missed. He listened intently as Nadia and Sylvio told him about school and soccer and their favourite superheroes. Rachel pulled out her phone and showed him every family photo from the last five years.
“Oh my god,” Lance said, staring at a photo of the family at church in formal wear. “That's my funeral,”
“Well, yeah,” Rachel replied “We… really thought you were dead,”
Lance winced. “I’m sorry,”
“Don’t apologise, you were out there fighting off an evil alien empire,” Rachel shoved his shoulder. “You’re home now, that's what matters,”
Over the next few days, a sense of normalcy returned to the McLean home. Marco, Luis, Rachel, and Veronica had to go home, work, care for their families. But It seemed every few hours one of them, or sometimes their partners, were stopping by, asking if they needed anything. It was wonderful and overwhelming, and exhausting, and Monika wouldn’t trade it for the world.
But Lance also started to let some things slip.
The second night, he woke her and David up screaming in the earliest hours of the morning. He’d been sobbing when they rushed into the room, panicked about something neither of them could understand. It wasn’t until David had grabbed his hands and forced him to breathe that he even acknowledged they were in the room.
The next morning he had apologised for waking them up, explaining he’d had nightmares for years now, but refusing to share more than that.
The day after that, he’d sat them down and told them he wasn’t staying on earth.
That had hurt. They’d actually fought about it. How could he leave again, after everything they went through? Did he even know what his disappearance had done to them?
“Of course I do. I fought every day for five years to come back here,”
“And now you’re here. Why throw it all away to go back there?” David pressed.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lance snapped, then sighed, head falling into his hands. “Lo siento papa,”
They sat in tense silence.
“You have to understand,” Lance started again, pleading. “I will come back. It won’t be like before. I’ll go for a few weeks and come home. No more years in space, just weeks. A few months at most,”
“And we’re just supposed to let you go back out there and fight again? Get more scars?”
“No, we’re a diplomatic force now. We aren’t at war anymore,”
“You can’t do this to us again,” Monika finally said.
Lance… deflated. He slumped over in his seat, elbows on his knees, head hanging down. He sat like that for a long moment, seeming to collect himself, and then sat up and met her eyes.
“There are still factions of Galra that would do anything to kill me. Every moment I spend here puts you two in danger. I- I can’t live a normal life, probably ever. I’m the face of a revolution, and people don’t forget that,”
He stood, muttering a final apology before walking up to his room.
That night, at dinner, he’d promised he wouldn’t be leaving soon. They’d have him for weeks before he was needed. All Monika could do was hold his hand and nod.
More time passed, and the whole family started figuring out Lance’s triggers. He was liable to pull a knife on anyone who startled him from behind. Loud noises made him jump. He would not talk about his scars, and asking made him irritable.
His hands shook. Violently, sometimes. On those days, he would get a distant look on his face, and startle even when you approached him from the front.
One morning, she woke up to find him talking to someone on his futuristic looking phone. He was smiling softly, sitting on the couch drinking a coffee.
He looked so young. Still her baby.
“Oh, hold on, my mom just woke up, I’ll call you back later,” he said something in another language, softly, before closing his phone.
He turned to her smiling. “Morning mama,”
She smiled back. “Who was that?”
His smile didn’t falter, but it did shift for a second. “Keith,”
The red paladin. Their leader. And, as far as Monika could gather, one of Lance’s closest friends.
“I was thinking,” he said, shifting forward a little from where he sat on the couch. “I’d like you to meet him,”
“I’d like to meet all of your team,”
“Me too! And I will make sure I introduce you to everybody. But,” he took a breath. “Keith is very… important to me. I’d like to invite him here for a little while,”
Oh. Maybe not a closest friend, maybe something else entirely.
“Of course he can stay with us,” she smiled at her son. “You should have told us sooner,”
The blush that had started creeping up Lances neck since the start of the conversation reached his cheeks. “I wanted the first week to be just us. I owe that to everyone,”
“I’m very glad to have time with just you,” Monika smiled again. “But I want to meet the man who likes you enough to call at six in the morning,”