Work Text:
Zarkon remembers his Blue in sifts of smoke and dust.
At times, in pauses of cold silence, the former Paladin could hear his name whispered with lost devotion, could hear laughter that echoed with the brightest of stars, and it haunted him. Still, the reverberations of light and tenderness, if Zarkon is honest, deafens him, steels him, and simply reminds him of the lonely millennia he has spent without the warmth of such adoration.
His Blue had loved him, defended him, even to the point it had cost Zarkon his own sanity when the Alteans began to suspect him with his questionable behavior long before he took up a sword and waged war on the free universe.
But years apart from light-hearted endeavors had forged a void of heart that even his Blue could not, would not, recognize.
Solemn stillness greets the tyrant in his weakest moments, those times when his own wrinkled hand bears along the warm skin of a sun-kissed hip. Zarkon mulls over his Blue, his gracious and loyal Blue, his heart and his right support. Such thoughts were not permitted since he turned his sights on power and fearsome tactics. Then, rage and corrupted quintessence filled him with such deadly rapture, whole maps were obliterated. However, millennia casts with its age patience and wisdom, but those olden days were wrought with vengeance and thirst for power. For a glimpse of a tick, he is grateful; now, he is a heartless machine bent on taking over the known world even though it already seems so ripe in the palm of his hand.
His Blue was gone at his most critical point, far out of his Black Paladin’s touch.
It was then that those brighter days were locked away, chained up, put away in a dark, burdened corner of his mentality. Doing so was easier than to give them air, to give his memories of Blue life. Emperors of vast and grand empires lose their way when such warmth overtakes them, so Zarkon is a demon of iron resolve. This was a simple promise is allowed himself the moment Alfor’s corpse laid before him, stark, tattered, and mangled.
To be an emperor, to be a true leader required such prowess in ruthlessness and omnipotence. “Cold,” Blue might have muttered into the darkest confines of their cooling tryst, “Zarkon, you’re cold.”
Cold.
Yet somehow, after years of repressing the aching burden of mourning, Zarkon found himself staring down at his Blue’s successor– or usurper, like that former champion of his. Even now, despite the dark corruption that swirled and clung to his Black quintessence, there was the softest of hesitations, the Galran emperor remembering ballroom twirls and chiming laughs, warm hands along his bared shoulders.
“Do not look so grim; they make your winkles stand out, darling.”
He had loved his Blue, he will not deny. In true spite his own stoic nature– “lighten up with a smile, turtle face!”– Zarkon had loved his Blue so greatly, so immeasurably, that all other emotions fall so profoundly short of it. Blue with his fathomless depths that always found the Galran drowning, sinking ever so deeper into a void for only the both of them. Those eyes cradled with the dark blue cheek marks Zarkon’s thumb always seemed to dare to caress even in the tense public moments when they were Paladins, not lovers in secret. Always secret.
… Zarkon knows better than to linger on memories of a past he cannot retell or rewrite. He is a creature of the present and future (even though the voice, Blue’s own soft chime, in the cages of his skull acknowledge that the past is still there, breathing down his neck, “cold, cold, cold”).
It is in a humorless twist of fate that the current Blue is his now, his alone, with the situation being bleaker than it ever was before though not fault of the former Paladin’s own; This Blue, this Lance, instead had asked for a bond that only aligned in ways that only the stars could accomplish. It would be through the soft manipulations of dark, invasive magic that Blue and Black would be infinitely in sync, forever curled and twisted around themselves, in a horrific marriage that would only end until death do us part.
It is by no means that Zarkon is worried; his pet, though soft and easily manipulated, is as quietly maniacal as himself after their union. Blue eyes, cold and strategic despite the eager adoration to please his Master, finds the Galran’s own for tepid approval; Zarkon, in a sick sense of pride, has trained a killing machine that literally warms and keens to his touch and his praise. After all, nothing pleases Zarkon more than for his pet to perch on his lap after an execution, blood still warm on the floor before their feet, corpses littering the throne room. With the emperor taking his chin to tip his pretty face up, to caress along his cheek, Lance smiles, bright and so damn loving.
It reminds him too much of his Blue, the one that comes to him in dusted nightmares, still broken and still dead.
-
It is almost pathetic to see this sight now after such bright smiles.
Failed, Lance had cried against the steel of the floor before his Master’s throne, he had failed. The plan, the entirety of it all had been so simple, should have gone without so much of a hitch, but the uneasy reality of it all? The hitches of hesitation, of reluctance, they were obvious blemishes on the throbbing Blue quintessence of their bond.
Simple, dammit, it was supposed to be so damn simple! The other paladins were there, easy targets within a sector of fleets that Zarkon and his pet attended to. Zarkon, having full faith in his loyal Blue bondmate, had agreed to let Lance work on this one on his own once the lions were detected. After all, who better than to destroy the Paladins of the last Alteans than one of their own, the one that left to distract, to keep the empire from finding them. After all, the promises were resolute, that Lance would see to it if his former team ever breathed wrong within Galra territory.
Firmly resolved—vrepit sa– is this little one of his as all his attentions are driven towards his Master. Not even the most heartless and merciless of Galran generals can phase this one.
But then the Blue Lion appeared and Voltron formed in its great prowess, basking the universe with an essence of hope that Zarkon felt startle their bond.
As Zarkon allowed a moment of pause when this new Blue was brought to him, so too had Lance; seeing the war machine with all its functioning parts despite Lance having left for the sake of his then Black Paldin and his lover, having left for the sake of them finding a more worthy pilot for the Blue Lion, still stabbed icy and deep so sharply through to his core. For a brittle extension of his existence, Lance was nothing but an observer to an embodiment of hope, body frozen within sleek, altered armor as the great warrior reared up, ready to fight for the good of what was left in the universe.
There was a chill of pain within the air, almost as if the boy was hissing traitor; Zarkon did not once remark upon it.
It is a weakness they both seem to share, a hesitation in the midst of what they truly long for, and what better cure for weakness is there than to cut it off.
But in his throne, the former Paladin waits, even hours after the battle was over and Voltron had been simply pushed out of the sector Lance had used to spring his trap. The boy still knelt there, having begged, pleaded, “please don’t hurt me, I am so sorry, I failed you.” It all created an endless sort of babbling that, for once in his existence, Zarkon allowed to reach an end, as everything must always end, the Galran king supposes, when Lance grows silent. There is naught a shift of an inch after, nothing else outside of his fearful trembling.
In prior cycles, Zarkon would have shown how iron thick and lacking of compassion he is. He has stood from this very throne to smite one of his own for even uttering one traitorous word. As a king with power unimaginable, mutiny is a concept he does not have to accept and permit. An exception lies here instead in his pet, the one he has regaled and prided in, his new Blue that was beginning to slowly corrupt as much as he, had likened reactions more to soft pleasure and to rewards in contrast to pain and to torture. Were things different, and they could always be different, his pet would know the arena, would know what his champion endured, would know the rush of adrenaline, of ground-shattering fear as a gladiator stood well above his height and size, ready to smash that pretty face into the dirt.
(The thought had crossed his mind once before when he felt the soft tugging of longing from Blue quintessence for another Black’s. It had been within the silence of ‘night,’ when only the midnight patrols wandered the halls and both former Black and Blue Paladins instead found solitude in bed chambers Zarkon had not frequented for centuries.
As the conquered galaxies loomed beyond a pane of cold glass, Zarkon could feel it, the longing, that sickening, disparaging tug of something unattainable. Disgusting, really, how angered he had been, how he had turned the boy onto his back and took what he believed was rightfully his. It was the boy’s own folly to allow himself to be owned, his own foolish heart that led him to warm a monster’s bed, after all.
He wanted to kill that fluttering sense quietly, he acknowledged in somber tones as Lance slept. Jealousy is a beast all its own.)
“Rise,” Zarkon finally commands, voice low, yet almost cautious. Will this pet of his rise? Will this Blue truly be as loyal, as faithful?
Hesitation is gone, thrown away like that last sense of longing that Lance himself killed instead as he stands before his king, eyes red-rimmed and cheeks swollen with his tears.
Eyes meet, and again, why again, must an old image of sorrowful grimaces return to the forefront? This is no longer his Blue. His Blue is dead, corpse decayed, long decayed, soft skin gone, those gorgeous blues gone forever, bones brittle and dust like. Blue, like the Altean King, like the Paladins of Old, like every other creature that dared resist the Galran Empire, is just another body, another count that forms the mountain that Zarkon stands on, triumphant.
Blue eyes, Altean eyes, watch him worriedly as a hand reaches to cup a strong jaw, voice dripping with lovelorn, “Zarkon, why are you so cold…?”
“… I will not fail again,” is the smallest of croaks, a swallow of assuredness following the mutest of wretched declarations. It resounds within the throne room, makes Zarkon pause and rise more in his seat. Observing his pet, he finds there a sense of newness to the Blue light, that Blue glow mottled with Black bruises.
Lance stands there, shoulders stiffening with resolve, with an agonizing burning of something raging beneath those blue depths. It is nothing more than a storm, the elder surmises, a storm on the horizon that Zarkon himself wonders is nothing more than a reflection of his own rage from days past.
Is this how he had looked? Defiant? Righteous?
“D… Did you hear me, Master?” Lance inquires, voice gaining confidence, regrowing its own backbone all over again; his failure is not a stumbling block, a crux for him to weep over, but now a learning experience, a cataclysm. This storm rages, waves threatening to sink any vessel that dare breach its wrath. Flotsam, once gentle and caressing, is now poisonous and seductive. The abyss that awaits below is a hell only Lance can fathom, can only sculpt with his own hands.
Those hands now shake, fists formed as the pitiful trembling prior crystalizes into anger and something that Zarkon cannot place his finger on, but it seems almost as though pride is sinking into the crevices that even Black cannot reach, cannot mollify even with his patient touch.
“I won’t fail again! I promised you, remember!? I promised you, I would kill them!”
“And you will,” is the soul-crushing answer. The king rises above, gazes down as Lance kneels, accepting the role of being Zarkon’s most endearing liege, his pet, his… dare he say it? Dare he give it a voice?
“You know that I love you, turtle face.”
No. This one, this once-usurper, is merely a whore that kills in his name under the guise of an emotion the Galran was once intimately acquainted with. His bleeding heart, the core of his goodness has rotten through, and so too would this Blue, this one that spreads beneath him so tenderly that the darkest, most hidden part of Zarkon that once knew what agony was, cries.
-
Lance’s promise is one that seems to fail miserably for months. The Paladins are cunning, intelligent, and evasive if anything else. With Princess Allura actively serving as the Blue Paladin for the team, the battles seem to take a turn to upend Lance’s best efforts, even despite keeping his own identity away from their knowledge.
The fire storm only seems to burn at the seams of their bond, singeing and smoking out the tiniest of worries from the emperor. The storm is a thunderous applause of incensed determination to waterlog and sink all that stands in his path to bring his Master the greatest of weapons.
If this one succeeds, the elder questions to the dimming stars, will the fire die? Will it succumb to victory so bone-soaking that Lance will be ever so docile again unless it is to kill on command? It is a sight he misses, and regret is he that he must admit it so timidly. For a moment, when Lance smiled softly saccharine, Blue was there, if only in desperate imagination, chirping, “where’s my smile, love?”
But the day long arrives when the Paladins of Voltron make their gravest mistake, and only two of the team manage to eke out an escape, leaving Zarkon summoning the three they’ve managed to capture in thanks to Lance’s efforts: Yellow, Red… and Black.
Zarkon has seen this usurping creature in his arena time and time again. During the most crucial, most blood-abating matches, Zarkon would wonder if this inferior species that bled, that ached, that bruised so easily, could ever stand against a horrific onslaught of power and might greater than his smaller self? Yet, surprise, surprise, every match, a victory squandered.
What an invasive parasite.
Yellow hunkers down, can’t even bear to raise his head, yet still has a sense of unyielding that Zarkon would expect from a Yellow Paladin. It is almost a rogue attempt, to falsify submissive fear, but seen through by eyes and mind that knows too well.
Red is the angriest, the one that wants to bark; another trait that serves his Paladin role so well. The smaller man has cursed, spit at his pet, called him every scathing name in the book: shithead, liar, fucking traitor, Galran slut. Lance has taken everything with nary a blink of an eye from his perch on his Master’s throne. Both of them have played audience to a repetitive play of fury as Lance lets Zarkon’s thumb trail absently over a thigh too high for Red’s personal tastes.
“Guess he fucked you and you decided, hey, must be good enough to be a shitty ass traitor!” screams Red, throat hoarse from his yells and his fits. The last batch of violent conniptions must have finally brought his own vocal chords pain, the coughing fits more progressive with each round.
Lance, his dear sweet pet, just smirked once Red shut up. It was a feat he admired in his pet, this aura of strength that he derived from their bond, from the patient authority of Black comforting faithful Blue.
It is the grim silence from the new Black that personally has offended Zarkon.
For raging about sluts, the bond formed between Red and Black is an interesting one. Zarkon, enriched with quintessence from nearly every corner of the universe, can sniff it all out. Lovers, these two, finding themselves intertwined in fate and in bed. It is this bond that spiraled Lance into his sacrifice, an act that led to all this.
Zarkon does not know if it the cards folding so perfectly into his own luck, or simply a matter of time before that luck runs out.
Yet while Red has done everything imaginable with his hands cuffed behind his back, Black has been a stone with not an ounce of emotion given away.
Once the last echoes of coughs diminish, Lance finally slinks off his perch, sauntering right over to Black—no, Shiro, if Zarkon is correct from what his pet has mentioned in passing. Shiro almost leaves Lance unabated before a hand reaches down, leans his head back so that their eyes can meet.
Something must quiver within Lance as Zarkon feels it; it’s a longing that creates another pang of jealousy that roars, that demands him pull Lance back because that Blue quintessence is his, but again… Lance is but a whore that murders in the name of his beloved Zarkon.
The longing, though, is ripped to shreds the moment Shiro murmurs hopelessly into the silence, “weren’t we family, Lance?”
Lance drops his hand so abruptly, as if the words were incendiary, toxic. A few steps back puts space between them, necessary due to the weight of Shiro’s question; weren’t we family, Lance? A chuckle erupts from the defector, bitter and cold, as Lance slips his bayard from his its holster and forms his rifle. “No, Shiro… I don’t think we were very much a family in your terms.”
The Yellow—Hunk?—is immediately up, helpless as he pleads, “Lance, bro, no, we are family! We’re brothers, remember? Why did you do this, man? We couldn’t find you for weeks!”
Red is snorting, the sound derisive and offensive, “because he was too needy apparently.”
If any other situation, Zarkon would be assured his pet had it under control had Lance’s shoulder not been hunched in despite his hold on his weapon. This time, though, he is slightly concerned, because one wrong move is an end that leads to their captives escaping to wreak havoc elsewhere in the Galra territories.
But, Blue pulses along his Black, as if saying, so timidly, you make me strong.
Lance simply lets Yellow and Red prattle about, Yellow begging, constantly asking why, why while Red is insistent he comprehends the motives entirely. Black is so somber, head hanging low and heavy until the gentle nuzzle of a gun barrel grounds him back into the most grave of realities.
“… I left my family a long time ago when I found Blue,” Lance mutters, each syllable spoken with such careful precision, as though his voice could reveal how wrathful floods of insecurity thrash against a cracking dam. Red is yelling, tugging at his bonds, murderous in every intent he can possibly fathom as Yellow begs and begs, don’t. Lance heeds them no mind, Zarkon sitting quiet and stiff with his own revelation.
For countless moments, it seems, an eternal damnation of war and violence, ensued from a deep unquenchable vengeance, has finally ticked away to bring him here. The Galran king is now audience to the zenith of the plot, the moment the crescendo reaches its peak; here it is, the universe quivers in tense breaths, here is the true beginning of the end.
Lance’s finger rests against the trigger, eyes sharp, shoulders poised as he digs the barrel into the nape of Shiro’s neck, cold metal against hot skin as final words thread throughout a formulated woefulness, “and you are not my family.”
The anticipation of it all finds Zarkon almost unable to exhale his breath. He can feel the tightening on the trigger, Blue pulsing, aching, as though this is what he was born to do, to smite, and conquer, in the name of a tyrant, a murderer, so undeserving of this praise and adoration and yet—.
“I’ll leave Altea for you.”
Yet there is the wafting scent of sun-warmed juniberries, dancing petals along a mountain breeze; there are ivory pillars with dazzling cascade lights, banners gently waving in that breeze. There is jubilant laughter, tender kisses, and intimate affairs. There is a small hand cradled in his own, as the juniberry fields mottle his vision with perfect pink and greens.
Then, there is a shot that ends with a whining, electric hum that fades into silence, deafening black silence.
What should have been a beginning of the end is simply the absolute end.
-
Shiro is stunned, hot breath caught in his throat as he stares at the singing face of the emperor his team and himself had sworn to vanquish, sworn to fight in order to for stabilized peace to reign in her ivory stead. The shot meant for him in a rite of execution went instead to the king, and the king is dead. The king is motionless, lifeless, the rank odor of seared flesh invading their lungs, causing a near retch in their throats.
It’s almost criminal, the quiet that settles in the room. Even Keith (God, his right hand and lover, thank every star, he’s safe) stares in such fascination at their sudden, unfathomable victory without even a breath of a remark.
Behind them, there the sound of armor hitting the floor, the clatter of a rifle as it falls away from a young corpse whose blue eyes blindly stare out through the glass of the hull, empty oceans watching the stars, those uncaring witnesses of this final chapter.
For Black and Blue make a bruise, and a bruise is nothing more than an aching, yet fading thing.
-
“Love, why are you so cold?”
In the dimly lit hangar far from any other presence, Zarkon, with his adornments fit of his position as Black Paladin, chuckles, a rare smile forming along his normally grim countenance. His hand, scarred and life-worn, holds the warmer, smaller hand against his cheek so that he may revel in such a sublime touch.
“My heart was not here with me, so I grew cold.”