I know I'm supposed to be working on the next chapter of The Last Aspect, but this popped into my head yesterday morning and demanded to be written. Warning, angst ahead.
EDIT: Apparently ffnet ate the coordinate string Matt yelled at Coran, because this site is stupid. Should be fixed now.
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There's a flare of orange fire, and the shield falls.
Matt feels sick, but there's no time. No time to grieve, no time to feel guilt, no time to think about the fact that Takashi just lost his little brother to the cause of this senseless, bloody war. Keith died to give them this chance and they have to take it, now.
Olia sends the ship plunging toward the now-vulnerable weapon, guns blazing and stitching holes across the enemy's hull-
A blinding flash of white.
From behind them.
By the time the blast wave reaches them, Matt's ears are already ringing from the deafening silence on the coms.
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He doesn't remember the flight to rendezvous with the Castle of Lions. Doesn't remember screaming himself hoarse into the coms until his crewmates are forced to sedate him. Doesn't remember Coran holding him close and sobbing into his hair even as Matt sags into blissful unconsciousness in his arms.
He does remember the emptiness in the Castle when he wakes up.
The rebels are manning the ship for the time being, to allow Coran time to rest and grieve. Matt doesn't intrude, but he hears them talking. About the failure of the war. About the coalition falling to pieces without Voltron to rally around, to spearhead the fight. About how what should have been a monumental victory instead became a mortal blow.
About how they've lost the war.
Matt can't bring himself to care about that right now. He retreats to his room and cries for his sister and the man he loves. The people he'd only just got back who are now gone forever. There's a terrible, painful ache in his chest that nothing seems to ease, that he can only avoid by collapsing into sleep.
He sleeps a lot, those first days. So does Coran. The others leave them be.
They've taken the ship into hiding, although Matt wonders at the point of it. The paladins are gone. Voltron is gone. Nothing they could do now would be any threat to the Empire. But running and hiding is ingrained in their bones now, and so they do it for something to do.
Some nights, when the others are asleep, he wanders up to the observation deck and stares out at the stars. Wonders when he started hating the sight of them. Probably when they took his family away.
He may hate the stars now, despite all the joy they once gave him, but the stars aren't finished with him yet and so they're the ones to give him the idea. He sees a black hole one night, as they drift through a young galaxy far from the center of Zarkon's Empire, and old habits die hard as he automatically starts calculating the distance they need to keep from it to avoid time dilation effects.
Matt freezes, staring out at the corpse of a star.
Then he's on his feet and running, yelling for Coran.
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It's never been done, Coran tells him.
That doesn't mean it can't be, says Matt.
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They do it.
Matt doesn't know how long it takes. Doesn't want to think about it, about weeks, months, years of hallways that no longer echo with the same voices they should.
His days and nights are filled with calculations. They're inventing new science, making up the terminology as they go, with help from the scientists of a hundred conquered worlds. Even then it doesn't come easy, and he breaks down crying more than once, begging the stars to just give him back his loved ones. They don't.
He keeps going. He's a Holt, and Holts don't give up.
It's an age-old problem they have to solve. How do you build a time machine that can send things back to before the machine itself exists? You can't. Not physical things, anyway.
Information, though…
They solve it. They can send his mind back, overwrite the past version of himself to try to fix this, save his family, save Voltron, save the universe. It has to be Matt, Coran says. If they get it wrong, he's the only one with the knowledge to do it all over again.
He doesn't want to think that he might have to. He doesn't know if he can endure that loss twice.
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Temporal distance travelled is a function of the square root of the energy supplied to the system. The further you go, the more energy you need.
By the time they're ready to make the attempt it's been long enough that the energy required is mindboggling and Matt doesn't know where they're going to get it. He's done the math. The Castle can't supply even a fraction of the energy they need. He cries again, pulling his hair in frustration. But when his tears stop, there's a friendly face waiting, with tissues and an answer.
She's a Balmeran, by the name of Shay. Hers was the first world liberated by Voltron, and Princess Allura saved their Balmera's life. Now they want to repay the favour.
It's enough, just enough. The life-force of an entire mature Balmera, with its crystals and core, is enough to send him back to the battle of Naxcela, provided they act quickly. So they act.
They won't remember what they've done for him, when he rewrites the timeline, their sacrifice undone in the moment of its making. But Matt will not forget.
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He makes the jump.
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When he opens his eyes they're already mid-battle. Voltron is trapped. Naxcela is counting down. And Keith streaks past in a Galra fighter as they try desperately to break through the shield. How long does he have? Minutes? Seconds? Not enough.
Voltron rips free, streaking towards the stars. Naxcela burns with energy behind it, too hot, too close. They have to shut the weapon down.
We'll never get through the shield, he doesn't say. But someone else says it for him, and suddenly Keith is plunging toward his death again.
"Keith! Don't!" Matt begs. He's supposed to save all of them, but he doesn't think he can. Not this close. "There isn't enough time!"
"What?!" Keith falters, slows. Hesitates, thrown by Matt's unexpected words.
Naxcela blows. This time it's Keith's anguished scream that echoes on the coms.
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Matt waits three days before he approaches Keith or Coran, to give them time to ride out the initial shock, and to give himself time to endure his own. When he does go to them, it's with red-rimmed eyes but with diagrams and calculations in hand, the circuitry and energy that will give them another chance at this. They stare at him, afraid to hope, and Keith cries into his chest.
With the hard part already done, it only takes a few weeks to build the machine again. The energy requirements are tiny compared to before, a much smaller temporal jump. But they give it extra power, aiming to send him back further. He has to warn them not to go to Naxcela.
Keith hugs him tight, and then he jumps.
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He comes out in the middle of the battle again. He doesn't know why. He should be further back. Weeks earlier, when they were still planning this ill-fated mission. Not here, minutes from disaster once again. Matt hammers the console with a cry of frustration.
It's a mistake. Keith hears him over the coms and plunges toward the shield again. He does it earlier than he did the first time, and Matt is unprepared to stop him. He can only watch in horror as the shield falls in a burst of fire.
They have enough time, this time, to make the weapon go dark. Naxcela does not explode. Voltron does not burn.
The knowledge that Katie and Shiro are alive does not make it any easier to tell them that Keith is dead.
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Matt doesn't wait, this time. He needs to go back. Needs to try again. For Keith's sake, and for Shiro's.
This time as soon as he's back at the Castle he heads straight for the main deck and the big holoscreens. He hears the others come in, but doesn't look up from the equations and diagrams he's scrawling across the screen in rapid, frantic strokes. He can hear them crying, hear their disbelief, and it only makes him work faster.
"Matt...this…"
Finally, he looks up. His sister is beside him, his beautiful, brilliant baby sister who he's had to watch die twice now, whose eyes are puffy and red from grieving for someone who's become another brother to her in his long, painful absence. He owes it to her, too, to get him back. She's staring at what he's written.
"...Can we do this?" There's hope in her eyes.
"Yes. I've already done it twice."
He carefully doesn't look at their reactions to that.
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They build it fast, and dump more power into it. They have to be sure he gets far enough back.
He kisses Shiro before he goes, and crosses his fingers as he steps into the circuit. Third time lucky, he hopes.
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Third time is not lucky.
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Neither is fourth.
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Matt stops crying whenever Naxcela burns, whenever Keith crashes, whenever he fails and loses the lives he's trying to save. Tears take energy he doesn't have, energy he needs to build this awful machine over and over and over again.
Things change each time he tries. There has to be a solution, a way to get everyone he cares about out of this mess alive. Sometimes Keith dies. Sometimes Voltron dies. Sometimes both do. Once they come close, so close, but the edge of the blastwave catches them from behind and the Yellow and Blue lions are the ones that take the brunt.
He keeps trying. There has to be a way. He's a Holt and Holts don't quit.
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He's losing count of the jumps.
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He screwed up.
Something he did caused the Castle to be moved closer and get caught in the blast. Not only did he lose them all this time, he lost Coran as well. He needs to figure out what he did wrong, make sure it never happens again. It's hard enough trying to find a way to save the others with the few precious minutes he has each jump.
With the Castle gone, he's working out of his old listening post again, with only Olia and the others to help him. It's harder, none of them know quintessence systems like Coran does, and it's slowing down the process to a frustrating degree. He has to build it almost entirely alone.
One good thing happens this time, though.
He's literally up to his neck, from the top of his head down, in a circuit box when a so-familiar voice that he hasn't heard in so, so long says from behind him, "looks like you could use some help, son."
Matt smacks his head off the top of the box, breaking half a dozen delicate boards, looks up into his father's face, and cries.
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Before he jumps again, he makes sure to memorize the coordinates of where his father will be at the time of Naxcela. When he finally gets this right, he'll find him again.
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Another jump, another failure. Hunk and Allura again this time. He jumps.
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For three jumps in a row, he deliberately sacrifices Keith to try to save Voltron, and hates himself for it as he does. He needs to figure out why he keeps coming out in the same spot, no matter how much power he dumps into the systems, and for that he needs Katie and Hunk's brilliant minds to double-check the science and figure out what he's doing wrong. It takes three jumps because the first time, he loses all of them again, and the second, only Shiro survives and that just barely. He's still in the pod by the time Matt jumps again.
The third time, though, he takes almost a week to write down everything he knows about the temporal physics he and Coran and the others discovered by sheer force of will and desperate necessity, and drops it in their laps without a word.
"Tell me what I'm doing wrong." He begs.
Katie looks at him in confusion with red-rimmed eyes, then looks down at the papers and he sees her eyes go wide. "I'll try." She promises.
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It's not what he's doing, it turns out, it's what he did.
Apparently when he made the very first jump, that desperate long-distance jump powered by a planet's life force, he set up a fixed temporal resonance point, with a latent energy capacity too high for him to get past without harnessing something like a nova. Hunk has to make up half the terminology to explain the problem, but Matt gets the idea.
He can only go to that one point, no matter what he does, because that's where he went the first time.
He thanks them, kisses Katie on the head, and jumps.
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He keeps jumping. He'll do it as many times as it takes. He's got all the time in the universe, after all.
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Voltron. Keith. All of them. Everyone but Keith and Shiro. Hunk and Allura. Keith again.
He buries his tears in the shattered wreckage of his heart and keeps trying. He's a Holt. He has to.
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There's a solution, and it's so stupidly simple he breaks down crying for the first time in god knows how many jumps. He hates the fact that he never thought of it before. But he has to be careful. If he messes it up, there won't be any more chances.
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Matt jumps again. The same battle, the same ship movements, the same shouts.
A new plan.
He has to act fast. There isn't much time. He throws himself out of the seat and towards the command chair, hitting the ejector on Chaila's seat on his way by. Olia's seat follows before she even realizes what he's done.
"Coran!" He yells, even as he twists the control yokes and guns the throttles to their stops. "Tell Katie 1734-123-457-1279!"
It's not a goodbye, but it'll have to do. He hopes his sister will forgive him.
He hits the shield and Matt's world flares with orange fire.
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.
.
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He tumbles out of the healing pod into his father's arms. It takes a moment for him to remember, and when he does, he scans the room desperately.
Katie and Shiro are close by on either side, red-rimmed eyes but smiles on their faces. Further back he can see Olia and Chaila, Coran and Allura, Hunk and Lance, and Keith. All are watching him with relieved expressions.
They're all alive. It worked.
Matt buries himself in his family's arms and cries.