Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The last thing Lance hears before the wormhole closes with a crackling ripple is someone shouting his name.

He’s too preoccupied with Blue’s panicked mental yowling to put a name to the voice, gritting his teeth and clenching his knuckles around his armrests as they judder helplessly through the blue-white nightmare of the wormhole.

Alarms are screeching from every monitor, a horrible staticky hum has set up shop in the comm in his ear, and the sensation of chaotic eternity around him is enough to make him nauseous. But there’s nothing he can do but cling on as Blue is carried along by the vicious current.

Lance doesn’t know how long he and Blue bump along miserably, but it feels as though all time and no time has passed before they’re suddenly spat out into realspace.

Dizzy, Lance doesn’t realize at first that Blue has gone limp and that they’re simply drifting along in dead space, but he soon jerks back to reality.

“Blue? Blue, girl, can you hear me?” he shouts frantically, hands scrabbling at his console. To his horror, nothing happens and the screens remain dead.

There’s a hissing in his helmet comm that he’s never heard before, so he slaps it off and then on. Oldest trick in the book — Pidge would be proud. To his relief, the hissing stops, but it’s quickly replaced by an oppressive silence.

Tentatively, he reaches up and presses it. “Is there anyone out there? Anyone? This is Blue, please help, code black.” The comm crackles once and then goes silent again, and Lance is seized by an uneasy feeling settling somewhere under his sternum: there’s no one out there. He knows that if his team could respond, they would. He’s all alone, who knows where, with a dead lion and no team.

Hot tears spring to his eyes suddenly as he rips his helmet off with a hissed, “Mierda!” His eyes remain bitterly wet as he slumps defeatedly back into his chair.

He’s elbows deep under the console, nursing spark-burnt fingers and cursing his inability to hotwire magical robot space lions, when his helmet buzzes with an incoming signal. Lance yelps and recoils in shock, his head smacking against the console.

Muttering imprecations, he wipes the grime from his face and crawls to the helmet. When he fits it over his head, a voice crackles in his ear, the signal distorted but clear enough.

“—this is Black to Blue, Black to Blue. Are you able to respond?”

Lance feels almost delirious with relief, and his whole body sags for a second before he’s gasping out, “Yes! Yes, this is Blue! I’m fine, but Blue isn’t going anywhere soon.”

Chatter floods the other end of the line, what Lance guesses is the standard you’re alive, Lance, thank god! hubbub.

Eventually, the black paladin returns, concern evident in his voice as he says, “All right, we’re sending Red and Green to get you, and then we’ll regroup. Stars’ name, Blue, we thought this was an easy mission.” Before Lance can question the other’s words, the comm clicks off and he’s left to sit back on his heels and ponder.

It’s not unreasonable that Shiro would use an Alternian oath, given how much time they’ve spent with the princess and Coran, but it’s not usually the first choice for the human paladins. (Lance spares a moment to think wryly of Pidge’s particular oaths and Shiro’s subsequent exasperation.) That aside, why in the hell would Shiro characterize their run on Zarkon’s base as an easy mission?

Lance’s ruminations are interrupted when, on the starboard side of his viewscreen, a familiar, and very welcome, pair of lions appear out of seemingly nowhere. He pulls himself to his feet, groaning, and watches as Red and Green draw closer.

Green moves out of sight, and a moment later, Lance feels the gentle rumble that signals that the other lion must have taken Blue’s neck gently in her mouth —  their standard, if slightly amusing, method for towing the lions.

As Green latches on, Red hovers directly in front of Blue before opening her jaw to eject a small red-and-white clad figure. Keith swims easily through the thirty or so feet to Blue’s mouth before he slips out of sight, and a few heartbeats later, Lance hears the hiss of the outer chamber of Blue’s mouth depressurizing. Then the door at the back of the cockpit rises with another pneumatic hiss, and Keith ducks through.

—Wait. Lance rewinds that thought for a second. Keith’s not that short, but he’s never had this much trouble with the admittedly small cockpit doors before. It’s as Lance is opening his mouth to prod about Keith’s increased height that the red paladin freezes.

“You’re not Coran,” she — she? — says.

Chapter Text

“I—what?” he manages before the red-armored woman strides across the cockpit to where he’s leaning against the pilot’s chair. He can feel the prick of a blade in the hollow of his neck, and he chances a look down to see the tip of what is unmistakably the red bayard pressed to his throat.

Lance’s gaze flicks nervously back to her own eyes, mostly obscured by the tint of the helmet. “Look, lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m Lance McClain, I’m the blue paladin of Voltron! You can ask the Princess or Shiro or—”

Suddenly, she retracts the bayard, returning it to her belt, and peels off her gloves. The hands underneath are five-fingered, but unmistakably inhuman, with a pearly pink sheen and webbing between the digits. Lance gulps as she takes one of his gloves too, and then suddenly he feels a questing tendril of thought as her fingers, cool and smooth, press against his skin.

It’s scarcely a heartbeat before she gasps and drops his hand like it’s a live wire; her mind recoils from his with a painful flicker. Then, before he fully processes her mental flinch, those pale hands are coming up to her own helmet and lifting it.

Lance blinks for a moment. That’s definitely not Keith, is all he can think as he looks at the alien staring back at him with liquid black eyes. She has no nose, and her mouth curls across her face in what must usually look like a cheerful smile. Right now, though, there’s just enough downturn in it, and enough agitation in her facial fronds, to scream distress. She sort of reminds Lance of the salamander his high school biology teacher had once kept in a tank — if salamanders were bipedal and evidently semi-empathic.

“Who are you?” she says, barely more than a whisper. Now that Lance has gotten past her appearance and her not-Keith-ness, when he listens, her accent is similar to Allura’s — if a little less crystal-cut.

He licks dry lips before repeating, “I’m Lance, I’m the blue paladin of Voltron—”

“No, no. That’s not possible,” she interrupts him. “Coran Laksis of Altea is the current blue paladin.”

“Coran? We talking about the same guy? Dorky, red-headed, practically Allura’s kooky uncle?”

The salamander-alien peers at him again. “He is…sometimes silly, and has red hair, yes, but none of his siblings have a child named Allura,” she says, puzzled.

Then the confusion in her eyes parts. “Oh,” she breathes. “What time are you from?”

Realization hits him like a freight train. After all, the last paladins were alive — fuck, ten thousand years ago.

“I think,” he says slowly, “I’m from the far future. Your future, I mean. Our past. You know what I mean.”

He can see that sink into her gaze, and he swallows again. But then her face suddenly splits in a grin.

“In that case then, I’m pleased to see Voltron is still doing its job! I’m Marjonnet Saphin of Xoloti, but you can call me Jonni.” He spends a moment bemused by the fact that her nickname is one that transcends time and space, but then she clutches his arm. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I ought to get you out of here! Red is impatient to get going.”

The cockpit of the Red Lion is exactly as Lance remembers it from the few other times Keith has allowed him into his sanctum, except — is that the fucking intergalactic equivalent of a dashboard bobblehead he sees?

Marjonnet bustles about as Lance seats himself in the freshly-appeared secondary chair. Lance knows his teammates are skilled pilots; there’s a reason they’d all been so high in the ranks at the Garrison. But Marjonnet is on a whole new level — she’s completely in tune with her lion as she flies, and Lance can barely believe they’re in motion right up to the moment they drop into realspace into orbit over a planet.

Lance can’t help it; he strains forward to drink in the sight. The planet is maybe a little larger than Earth, with scudding clouds, graceful silvery rings, and the mirrorlike blue sheen of large bodies of water. As Marjonnet pilots them closer, the tiny specks Lance had first seen resolve into gleaming silver ships darting back and forth from some sort of orbital station.

Marjonnet obviously notices his gaping, for she murmurs, “That’s the Altean Intergalatic Space Station. Beautiful, right?”

Altea. Lance’s eyes widen as he realizes that must be the world below. Allura and Coran’s homeworld is still here in this time. This must be before the war, before everything went all to hell.

He needs to find the other paladins, and fast. Are they even in this time?

Lance turns to Marjonnet again. “Marjonnet—Jonni— has your Voltron detected any other signals from ours?”

She doesn’t look away from the symbols flashing across her screen to tell him, “I am sorry, Lance, no. But I’m sure our black paladin will know what to do to find them. He’s a great leader and a good man.”

They dock at one of the smaller orbital stations in the shadow of Altea’s rings. Out of the corner of the Red Lion’s viewscreen, Lance sees Green alight with Blue in her jaws. As she sprawls limply on that cold, gleaming floor, he feels a pang of sorrow. His beautiful Blue, reduced to dead metal and dimmed eyes.

Marjonnet focuses on bringing Red in for a smooth landing, but once they’ve settled and Lance’s fingers go to undo the straps of his safety harness, she turns to him. “I can feel your pain, Lance,” she says, dark eyes sharp and kind. “I am sure we can fix your lion, and that we will find the rest of your friends. If they’re anything like my team, I understand that you are family. Now, up. The others want to meet you.”

“The others,” as it turns out, have been waiting for them. As they step out of the Red Lion’s mouth, Lance leaning heavily on Marjonnet, a tall white-haired boy in the armor of the yellow paladin steps forward from the rest in obvious shock.

“Jonni, where’s Coran? Who the hell is this?” he demands, and Lance’s eyes flick across the turquoise scales under his pale eyes and his pointed ears — Altean, then.

Marjonnet opens her mouth to reply, but the black paladin comes up behind the yellow paladin to place a quelling hand on his shoulder. The gesture reminds Lance so much of Shiro that at first he doesn’t process the black paladin’s short violet fur and golden eyes.

Galra. He’s Galra.

Lance ignores the half-born exclamations of the other paladins to launch himself at the Galra. “You — what did you do to my friends?” he howls, just as the leg he’d been favoring gives way and then there are hands supporting him.

The Galra paladin is staring at him, horror in his eyes, and the yellow paladin looks furious. Marjonnet has a hand over her mouth.

Lance is being held up by the green paladin, a humanoid with slate-gray skin, long curving horns, and a tidy dark bun. Their viridian eyes, with their amber sclera, are quietly sad.

“Why do you hate him so on sight?” they ask. Their teeth are unnervingly sharp, but their voice is a delicate, inquiring little thing.

“I don’t know how much I can tell you, since I’m from the future,” Lance says, mind flashing to the vintage time travel movies he and Hunk used to watch, “but his kind have hurt a lot of people in our time.”

“Konya would never hurt anyone,”  the green paladin says, the certainty of a proven hypothesis in their tone. “Whatever reason you have to fear the Galra of your time, put it aside. Konya Orri is one of the best beings I’ve ever met, and I have no doubt you’ll learn that.”

Lance turns to the Galra, in whose eyes sadness still lingers. Hesitantly, he offers his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m Lance; I’m, well, a future blue paladin.”

Konya nods and steps forward to shake his hand, even as the yellow paladin mutters something obviously unflattering under his breath.

“I’m sorry, but is there a reason you don’t like me already?” Lance asks. Gee, this yellow paladin couldn’t be any different from Hunk.

“How about this: your time traveling nonsense is obviously the reason my pair-bond has gone missing, and then you insult our leader!” exclaims the Altean paladin hotly.

Lance throws his hands up. “Dude, I don’t have a clue who your “pair-bond” is, and I didn’t exactly ask to be thrown into the distant past!”

The Altean paladin flushes and opens his mouth to reply, but then something on Konya’s wrist beeps loudly. Silence falls as the black paladin glances down, brow furrowing.

After a few moments, he looks back up and announces, “There’s been a sighting recorded of the Blue Lion in the Adoha system. Looks like we’re about to get some answers.”

Sudden relief washes out the anger in the yellow paladin’s eyes, and he pivots on his heel to near-run to his lion without another word.

Konya sighs. “Jonni, you go with him. Queita, you and Lance handle support. I’ll go and brief the queen,” he says, striding off towards the Black Lion as Marjonnet nods smartly and jogs after the yellow paladin.

Queita — the green paladin — beckons. “Come, tell me about your green paladin as we walk,” they say.

As they walk to the Green Lion, Lance chuckles. “Oh, Pidge. Where do I start? They’re tiny, but give them a single computer and they can take down an entire Galra fleet—” Lance stops, eyes darting guiltily to Queita.

They’re at the Green Lion’s jaw now, and Queita presses their hand to the metal to open it before turning to Lance. “I am sad to hear that the descendants of those I call friends now will hurt so many, but I don’t want to invalidate the suffering the Galra have caused you — it’s clear things are very different in your time. You can speak freely about your experiences with me, and I will do my best to refrain from judging your reactions to the Galra. Now, you were saying about Pidge?”

Lance gives them a wobbly smile, but resumes telling Queita about their successor as he follows them into the cockpit.

Chapter Text

Pidge had gotten lucky; any closer to the shockwave of the wormhole snapping open, and they have no doubt they and the Green Lion would be in a world of hurt.

That is, they’re still in a world of hurt, just not that kind. They’d gotten out of the wormhole gently enough, but the situation on the other side had been…ugly.

Pidge and Green had been spat out into nothing less than a raging space battle, and they’d barely finished dry-heaving from wormhole-sickness before the ragtag collection of ships ripping each other apart had turned their attention to the Green Lion.

Wherever they’d ended up, the locals sure didn’t like Voltron. Before long, even Pidge’s best efforts at evasion had failed — after all, they were one paladin against hundreds of hostiles with no backup. Grinding their teeth, Pidge had been forced to cede victory and allow themself to be captured.

Which is why they’re in the current situation: locked in a dripping prison cell planetside, freezing without their armor, and wishing fervently for a rescue about now.

Pidge’s furious muttering is interrupted by a smartly accented voice from the next cell over. “Excuse me, are you by any chance good with wiring?”

Pidge gives into the impulse to snort. “Am I good with wiring, he asks. I’m the best damn tech in this galaxy, I guarantee you that.” After a pause, they tack on, “Is that your pronoun?” 

The voice sounds amused when it returns with, “Yes, it is. And excellent!” A clap echoes through the corridor, making Pidge jolt. “Let’s get out of here!”

“And how do you plan on that?” asks Pidge, peeling themself away from the cold stone bench to peer through the light-beam bars. Their neighbor had been loud, after all, which could be bad. Thankfully, the corridor remains slimy and silent, and Pidge sighs in relief.

“This part of the facility is mostly low-grade technology, which is easy enough, but once we get out there, it becomes rather complicated rather fast,” their neighbor explains. “I’m not awful with technology, but I admit I’m not as good as I should be. My friends keep trying to get me to take more tech classes at the Royal Academy….” The voice has turned ruefully affectionate, and Pidge grunts sympathy as they examine the lock of the cell.

Then they grin suddenly. The Hattai-Adohans had taken their armor and most of their means of escape…but not the subdermal link to the rebuilt Rover. They, quite literally, have a friend on the other side, quietly slumbering with the rest of Pidge’s confiscated belongings.

Interrupting their neighbor’s latest tangent — this guy rambles almost as much as Coran, and that’s something — Pidge brings their wrist up to their mouth and whispers, “Rover! Silent mode. Come to my location.”

The implant glows once under their skin in acknowledgement, and Pidge sits back against the wall, satisfied.

Thankfully, it isn’t a long wait, and the faithful little robot is hovering outside their cell within minutes. After Pidge explains how to dismantle the energy-lock, Rover flashes a cheery affirmative and extends a mechanical limb to fiddle at it.

As Rover clicks and whirrs to itself, Pidge’s neighbor says, “That’s quite the helpful friend you have there. Did you build it yourself?”

Pride blooms in their chest. “I did, actually. It’s a second-generation drone built on the model of an earlier one I swiped from a Galra ship. That one….died saving my life.”

Rover lets out a comforting chirrup at its master’s dejected tone, and Pidge’s neighbor is silent for a few heartbeats. Then, “You stole a drone from a Galra ship?” It isn’t incredulous and awestruck like Pidge might have expected; rather, there’s something low and unidentifiably ugly in the words.

“You’re a sympathizer, then?” Pidge lets disdain curl off of their tongue, the way they learned long ago when people used the wrong pronouns or picked on them for their size and smarts.

“A sympathizer to a peaceful farming people? Certainly. You seemed a friend, but now you tell me you steal from the innocent. Are you a pirate or some such?”

Pidge barks a harsh laugh. “The Galra? Innocent? Peaceful? I don’t know what kind of propaganda the Empire feeds people around here, but where I come from they’re murderers. Thanks to them, my father and brother are probably dead. So go fuck yourself with your peaceful farming people.” They scoff, and then add: “And when the hell ever have the Galra been farmers? Their business is stealing life, not growing it.”

“How do you know this? You clearly speak from experience, but I have never met a cruel Galra.”

Pidge watches Rover work for a couple of heartbeats before murmuring, “Have you ever seen a Balmera?”

“Yes. Beautiful creatures,” their neighbor says, evidently surprised at this conversational direction.

“You say you’ve never met a cruel Galra. Then tell me what you call what they did to the Balmera we rescued from the Empire a few months ago. They had drained her to the point of death, taking and taking and taking. They never cared to return the energy, and the Balmerans were slaves in their mining operations. Before we saved them, they had never seen the sky.”

There’s a heavy swallow from next door, and then a choked, “I see.”

Right then, Rover lets out a satisfied whistle, and the humming orange light-bars suddenly crackle out of existence. Pidge gets to their feet and steps out into the corridor, stretching. As they work out the kinks in their back, Rover quickly repeats the lock-picking routine with the neighboring cell.

Pidge doesn’t know what to expect from the Galra sympathizer next door, but it’s certainly not the tall, pale-skinned boy with messy red hair and unmistakable faintly-glowing turquoise eye-scales that steps out. He carries himself with the assurance of long martial arts training, and the arms revealed by the short sleeves of the prison garb are leanly muscled, with delicately curling tattoos that match his eye-scales.

He raises one copper eyebrow as their eyes return to his face. “What? You look like you’ve never seen an—”

“You’re Altean,” Pidge breathes out.

He seems taken aback by that, but before either of them can say anything else, they’re distracted by distant shouting.

“Time to go,” the boy says, and Pidge and Rover are left with no choice but to follow him as he lopes easily through the winding corridors. By the time they reach the room where Pidge knows their belongings have been confiscated, Pidge is out of breath, but the Altean boy’s breaths are still light and even.

Curse high-stamina aliens, Pidge thinks as they pant for air. Across the room, their co-conspirator has already found his belongings and is stripping out of his clothes — nope, nope, time to turn around.

Pidge quickly locates the box containing their belongings thanks to Rover, but they’ve barely pulled it partway out of the alien filing-cabinet-equivalent before one of the Hattai-Adohans appears in the doorway.

They narrow their eyes at the advancing, definitely armed alien, and then at the frozen Altean boy. His eyes are flashing panic and anger, as he’s currently stuck with his arms in a black jumpsuit not unlike the one the paladins wear under their armor. The alien has now begun snarling what sound like threats in their native language, but Pidge ignores them to lunge for their belongings.

The Hattai-Adohan shoots, but Pidge has the advantage of having learned to dodge fire from Coran’s murder-robots. The shot goes over their head, leaving a smoldering hole in the wall behind them, and —ah! Pidge’s fingers finally close on their bayard.

Before the Hattai-Adohan has a chance to respond, Pidge shakes out the bayard’s whip-function and flicks their wrist. The Hattai-Adohan goes down screaming and twitching as Pidge retracts the bayard with a smirk.

“Fifty thousand volts to the neck tends to hurt, whatever species you are,” Pidge remarks as they notice the Altean boy staring. “What?”

“That was…a little terrifying,” he admits, and they notice he’s still tangled in his jumpsuit.

Pidge just grins at him, before pointing out, “You’re still hopelessly stuck in that thing.” The boy’s pointed ears turn pink, and he immediately begins detangling himself.

Pidge chuckles and turns back around to start donning their own armor. A comfortable silence, save for the gentle rustling and clicking of clothing and armor, falls for a few minutes.

It’s just as a now fully-clothed Pidge is about to turn and offer introductions that an alarm goes off, its wailing scraping across their eardrums.

“What’s that?” Pidge asks, turning as they inspect their helmet for damage.

There’s silence from the Altean, and when Pidge finally looks up, his face has unadulterated shock written all over it. Then their eyes drop to his outfit, and they can see why.

It’s twin to their own, but in the bright royal blue Lance wears with such pride. It’s unmistakably the blue paladin armor, right down to the bayard hanging from his waist.

Pidge feels that they speak for both of them when they give a heartfelt, “Okay, what the fuck.”