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It had started like any other post-battle recuperation day on the Castle of Lions. Pidge was minding her own business, stretched out on a sofa, analyzing data for some indication of where the Galra had taken her father and Matt, perfecting her hacking techniques. Basic stuff. She'd been vaguely aware of Hunk teaching Coran to play chess and Shiro enjoying one of his adrenaline crash naps on the other couch (being one of few times he could sleep uninterrupted), and she assumed Keith had been staring out a window at the unending void pocked with stars -- as usual.
He thought stars were "pretty". Nerd.
So basically, everything was fine until Lance walked in with his space juice and his occasionally annoyingly high degree of emotional intelligence. He took a glance at her, and said, "Hey..." The unmistakable sound of a thought appearing in his brain, like the proximity of magnetic force summoning an electric charge out of nothingness. "Wait a second, Pidge... your human name was Katie Holt, right?"
"Um. My birth name was Katie, or Katherine anyway. I never stopped being human, thanks."
"Right, but I just remembered..." Dropping his juice on the table, Lance held up his hands like a frame, which he squinted through. "I saw a 'Missing' sign at the bus stop whenever I went to visit my family last year. Missing, Katie Holt. And it was totally your picture!"
Hunk and Keith turned around, and Shiro must've sensed the atmosphere in the room growing heavy. He didn't jump, but his easy breaths stopped and his eyes flicked open.
Lance, meanwhile, looked like he might be sick. "Did you seriously let your mom think you'd run away for a whole year right after the Kerberos crash? Holy baloney, Pidge! That's--"
"I'm gonna stop you right there." Pidge stuck a hand in Lance's face, because seriously? Did he think she was that much of a jerk? "Mom knew where I was. I left her an encrypted video explaining how I was infiltrating the Garrison and where to find paperwork she'd need to extract me if things got messy--"
"But!"
"--and I had a flag on it so I know she watched it. The Missing signs must've been her touch, for verisimilitude, but I wasn't going to leave my mom without a word when she'd just lost Dad and Matt. I'm not a monster!"
Hunk slipped a seat under Lance's ass to keep him from hitting the floor, but picked up the interrogation right where he'd left off. "I think what Lance is trying to say is, it's kind of hard to believe that your mom would, you know... just let you fake your own disappearance, assume a false identity, and infiltrate the Garrison so you could attempt to uncover evidence of a dangerous conspiracy to cover up abduction by aliens. That doesn't strike me as a mom thing. You know?"
"Spoken like someone who's never met Annabel Holt," Shiro laughed. "Trust me, Hunk. If Pidge had found enough evidence about what happened to Commander Holt and Matt on Kerberos -- not to mention the cover-up -- that she wanted to infiltrate the Garrison, Mrs. Holt would have been right there, packing her bags and forging her identity paperwork."
Pidge gestured wildly at the one person here who understood. "Thank you, Shiro. Not that I would've asked her to forge anything. Obviously, Mom had to have plausible deniability. Hence, I assume, the Missing posters, since that's what any normal mom would do if their kid ran off."
"That's kind of awesome," Keith murmured.
She shrugged. Sure, she was awesome, but this stuff was basic espionage. "Well, it's not like I'd be able to maintain a secret identity if I were constantly leaving the dorm to go have family dinners. Commitment to uncovering the truth requires sacrifice."
"But you must've had some kind of contact," Keith argued, ignoring Shiro's chuckles and Lance's occasional shocked squeaks. "How was she supposed to know if you needed extraction if you weren't talking?"
"Obviously I was archiving evidence in a secure server location that was programmed to deliver its contents to my mom automatically if I didn't reset the timer every 24 hours. Duh. If I died, she'd have real answers, and be able to get the truth into the right hands!"
Rolling his eyes, Keith griped, "Right. How could I have possibly not guessed that."
It wasn't her fault that not everyone here was a genius.
The thing was, now Shiro was starting to look concerned, and Shiro only worried about real problems. He didn't even have to say a word, and everyone gave his brow furrows their full attention, except for Coran, who was trying to decide whether to use a bishop or a knight. That's when Pidge realized.
"Oh no. Mom must've gotten that data dump, like, a month ago... This is bad..."
Lance threw his hands in the air. "There we go! Finally some concern for the heartbreak of our poor mothers -- and in some of our cases, also fathers, no offense -- who probably think we all died in a training accident!"
"Heartbreak?!" Pidge paced back and forth, trying not to pull out her hair. "Are you kidding?! My mom, with that data? She's probably waging media war at the head of a small army of conspiracy theorists, while publicly fronting a letter writing campaign by military widows, bent on forcing the federal government to do an inquiry into the Garrison!"
"Is... that bad?" Hunk asked.
Stupid, stupid! How could she have been so focused on finding her Dad, she hadn't tried to get a message back to her Mom! "We have to get word to her before she starts blackmailing senators, assuming she hasn't already, because she won't stop until the Garrison gives her all the Kerberos footage, plus my body, dead or alive. And then she'll sequence the DNA herself so she can say for sure my body's not a fake!" Facing down a room full of saucer eyeballs, she pleaded with Coran, as the most likely person to have the means to do anything. "You don't understand. She's an evolutionary biologist! She'll tear society apart, yelling 'Adapt or Die!' the whole time, because the Garrison doesn't have my body to give her."
Coran coughed and sputtered. "Well... I can find Allura? I'm sure we must be able to do something if it's a matter of preventing your mother from annihilating the planet. You're quite sure you're fully human, then? If we need to be aware of any special... world-ending needs of an evolutionary biologist/human hybrid--"
"Relax, Coran," Keith sighed. "Evolutionary biology is a job field. Pidge is clearly human, and this threat to the planet sounds a little hyperbolic to me."
Shiro patted Keith on the shoulder slowly, shaking his head. "I wish that were true, buddy. I'd rather take on Zarkon's entire army bare-fisted than Annabel Holt with a pen in her hand."
Keith turned green, and Coran ran out of the room, screaming for Allura. Maybe now people were finally ready to listen!
"So let's assume we can get Allura to open a wormhole, and there's some kind of thingy we can send through it with a message--"
"Wait," Lance interrupted. "We all have family back on Earth."
"Not me," Keith shot back. "My whole family died when I was a baby."
"Which is really, really sad, and I'm honestly appalled right now at the number of 'Your Mom' jokes you let me make at you in class, because in context what I said was in terrible taste--"
"But I obviously knew they weren't true."
Lance clapped a hand over Keith's mouth, which Keith batted away, even though Lance kept putting it back like an ornery cat. "Anyway, I get that not all of our families are going to cause Armageddon, but if you're sending your mom a message, I want to send my mom a message. I can't be the only person who wants someone to know that I'm okay!"
"I second the motion," Hunk said, raising his hand.
The steadying touch of Shiro's hand on her shoulder stopped Pidge in her tracks, and also stopped her brain from moving ten million miles per second. Shiro was good at that. "All right team. If we can get a message back to Earth, everyone gets to send something to their families. That's only fair. Now the question is, how do we do it?"
"I think I get where Pidge was going with sending a thingy through a wormhole," Hunk offered. "I mean, this Castle must have something that can survive re-entry, and I'm willing to bet we can hack some kind of GPS locator to send it to a specific place."
Pidge nodded. "But where? We want to make sure it gets the right person or people's attention, without calling down the Garrison, and it's not like equipping it to fly through my mom's university to her office is feasible. Have any of you memorized the GPS coordinates of your parents' places?"
She took the silence that followed as a no.
"What about NASA?" Lance suggested. "The FBI? The CIA? Some other member of governmental alphabet soup?"
Keith shook his head. "Too risky. We have no idea who's in on the Garrison cover-up."
With a frown, Shiro said, "I'd send it directly to the media if it weren't for the fact that your mother probably has a system for controlling media exposure, and might try to discredit the story if it didn't come through her."
"Well..." Hunk said, shrugging. "We could always drop it at a post office?"
The entire team blinked at him and chorused, "What?"
He pulled a booklet of freaking US postage stamps out of the bag where his magnetic chess board had been. "They've got to send anything with stamps and an address on it, right? I mean, that's their job. And since these stamps made the trip with me, all we'd have to do is write letters and have our little wormhole drone thingy drop the package in a mailbox. How hard could it be to program in mailbox image recognition, seriously?"
"That sounds like it just might work," Pidge said. Thank goodness for Hunk, rememberer of all things normal!
"That settles it!" cheered Lance, cracking his knuckles. "Now, where do you think Allura keeps the space paper, so we can write us some letters!"
Pidge waved the notebook where, what felt like a lifetime ago, she'd taken notes about Voltron transcribed from space radio chatter. "Guys. Seriously. I have Earth paper."
~//~
Annabel filtered through the hacked contents of every major news editor's mailbox on her way from her classroom to her office. Keeping the eyes of the world focused on the Garrison and stoking their outrage was more than a full-time job, but cellphones and speed reading made it easier. A few flicks of her thumb, and she'd alerted her message boards as to which videos should be played for tomorrow's Garrison website hack, and which documents should be emailed to the news channels (from within the Garrison's network, of course) while they had the world's attention. Done and done.
She'd take five minutes to dash off a letter to Congress, of course, once she was at her desk, which she'd be hand-delivering on the 7-o'clock news tomorrow as part of her respectable appeals, but then she had to write the script for tonight's pirate broadcast. Annabel knew the Dean could tell she was the one breaking into every frequency at exactly 8:13 PM every night (including the Garrison channels, and the resulting cadet riots were lovely), but he wouldn't be able to prove it. Even if he could, she had tenure.
The large envelope on the floor of her office was a surprise. It was lying exactly where she'd expect mail to be, but crafted from some kind of odd, plasticized paper. She wasn't expecting anything from her sources, so she was sure it could wait until--
That was her Katie's handwriting. Was this some Garrison trick, to throw her off the scent?
No. She inspected the return address -- their home address to any average eye, but some letters were made of tiny double helices, with patterns of marks to look like DNA. It was a code she and Katie had made up when Katie was bored with her schoolwork one day, and what this said was, "I'm safe."
She collapsed in her chair, trying to hold back the tears. No one could fake that. Katie was alive!
As fast as she could collect her breath, Annabel cut open the envelope, and seven smaller envelopes made of simple folded notepaper fell out, along with a piece of metal projecting a holographic photo of five people, with her daughter right in the middle! Hunk and Lance were there, too. Mr. and Mrs. McClain and Mr. and Mrs. Garrett needed to see this immediately. The young man in the red jacket looked familiar, too, but she couldn't place him.
Perhaps the biggest shock, more than knowing her daughter had survived whatever the Garrison had done (Katie was quite capable), was seeing past the white hair and the scars to realize the man wearing black was Takashi Shirogane. Sam's pilot on Kerberos was alive. Seeing him wasn't as good as seeing Sam and Matt would've been, but if Shiro had survived, there was hope.
The first paper she picked up was the one that said, "From Katie, To Mom." Even if she could barely read for crying, every word was her girl -- from, "So you'll never believe this, or actually you probably will, but we're in space! 'Voltron' turned out to be this giant robot warrior made of five robot lions, and guess what! I fly the green one! If you press the button on the picture stick, you can see," to, "And don't worry. I won't give up this fight until I find Dad and Matt. Like we always said, with your shield or on it."
That was her girl.
Almost all the other packets were labeled like she expected. From Lance to the McClain Clan went by her keyboard where it wouldn't get lost, followed by From Hunk to Mom, Dad, and Everybody. They both had addresses on them, although she knew where to send them. She'd have to do more research to deliver From Keith Kogane to whoever cares, which didn't have an address. She'd read it herself if she couldn't find someone. She remembered where she'd seen him now, talking to Shiro at one of those Garrison press events. Someone ought to read his letter.
The last three were all from Shiro. One, From Takashi, to Mother and Father. Naoko and Tetsuo Shirogane had made it clear enough that she was never to call them again, but surely they'd want to see this. The second was more formally written, despite still being on notebook paper: From Lt. Takashi Shirogane, to the Office of the President of the United Nations. No doubt trying to inform someone that the Earth should be prepared for interstellar war, clearly not prepared to trust just one government with that information. Such a good boy! She'd have to call in some favors to get that letter to the UN President's hands, but she'd do it -- and make a copy first.
The last letter from Shiro was for her, with a small clicker folded inside. The device was labeled, "Do not push unless aliens invade!" in her daughter's handwriting.
"Dear Mrs. Holt: I regret to inform you that I was unable to bring Commander Sam Holt and Ensign Matthew Holt with me when I escaped from the enemy who captured us -- an alien empire known as the Galra. Your husband and your son were sent to a work camp, where I must believe they are still alive. It was an honor to serve with such good men, and it will be my further honor to bring your boys home as soon as we are able. Until then, with the permission of our host here in space, a woman named Allura whom I hope you can meet someday, I have enclosed a signal button for you. Please push it to summon us in the event that the Galra attempt to colonize Earth. Sincerely, and with my deepest apologies, Takashi Shirogane."
She'd tell Shiro a thing or two when he came home, Annabel thought, blotting her tears with a tissue. No doubt Sam would tell him off for feeling sorry over nothing before she got the chance, but she'd do it anyway.
Now, there were so many calls to make. All her media messaging needed to change, too. She'd have to make sure the planet was suitable to welcome them back, and very possibly, she'd have to ensure that Earth was ready for an interstellar war. A woman's work was never done!
But before that, she flipped through the pictures on the projection device until she got back to the group photo with her daughter smiling in the middle, and she read her letter another fifteen times. Lightly, making sure not to leave any tear stains on the paper, Annabel traced the last few words with her fingertips.
"Love from space, Katie. Or actually, Pidge. I've decided I like being Pidge. See you when we're done saving the universe!"