Lotor took the knife from his belt and began sawing the packed snow into a rough block, dribbling water from his reservoir on it as he went. When he had detached it from the ground, he added it to the other ice bricks he'd created over the last three vargas while Princess Allura slept. She had kept watch half the night and finally woken him with a single touch, yawning against the back of her other hand, the air cold and deceptively clear around them. Lotor recognized it for what it was—the herald of a storm.

He hadn't told her, because he didn't need her help to build a shelter. He had time. He willed it to be a passing storm, rather than the weeks-long storms that Sala was famous for. A day of storm they could live through, but longer than that and they'd run out of rations. Lotor didn't want to have to eat the princess, but he would if it were mission imperative. His duty came first. Always.

The oddness of the thought caught him off guard, though. It was a subtle enough distinction that he almost missed it. He didn't want to have to eat the princess… It was more than just the inconvenience, the mess, the fallout from the other Voltron paladins, the distasteful nature of eating another sentient being. He didn't want to eat her specifically. Because, apparently, despite how much her incessant prattling and unapologetic optimism annoyed him, he was growing inexplicably fond of her.

Well, that was unacceptable. He refocused his attention on the work in front of him, and eradicated all notions of liking the princess. He would eat her if he had to and be done.

Another varga later, he'd created a sturdy enough wall of ice blocking the worst of the wind. He moved over to the princess's side of the shelter to start building a wall there as well. Now that he'd recognized her as a potential food source, it was obviously to his benefit to see to her current survival as well.

The swirling snow had intensified with the wind, and a small drift had settled on top of the princess while she slept. She stirred, causing a miniature avalanche as she woke.

"What…what are you doing?" she asked blinking slowly. The drop in temperature was already affecting her. It was probably best that she wake up and get moving.

"There's a storm coming," he said. "I'm building a better shelter before we get buried in snow."

"What?" she said, struggling out of her blanket and to her feet. "We can't stay here. We have to keep moving."

"I'm sorry, Princess. Your plans will have to wait a day."

"A day?" she squeaked. "We can't wait a whole day. We don't have the rations for that!"

"If we're lucky, a day is all it will be. Either way, we cannot travel in a Salaan storm with no protection and no supplies. We would die before half a quintant."

She sank back against the rocky outcropping, her face contorted with disappointment. "You don't understand. I have to get back. Every delay costs lives."

"The universe survived for ten thousand years without Voltron. I feel certain the paladins can keep it from imploding without you for a day or two."

She sighed heavily. "It's not that. It's…"

"It's what, Princess?"

"Never mind. I…I just have to get back. As soon as possible."

Lotor turned abruptly back to his work. He didn't have the patience for coddling whiny rebel royals. He wanted just as badly to get off this black hole of a planet, but he accepted the situation and did what was needed.

"I apologize," she said. "I know it's not your fault. I just…" She bit her lip, then pushed away from the rock wall, folded her blanket into its original square, and said, "What can I do to help? I've never built an ice shelter before."

Wordlessly, he handed her his knife and started stacking the bricks he'd made for her side before waking her. She nodded and started carving.

Three vargas later, they had more of a shelter—still not complete, but it arced over them, diverted the wind, and enclosed the warmth from the co'l packets to some extent. He'd have to be more judicious with the packers now that they were a day behind. He didn't want to alert the princess to his concerns, but he wasn't as confident they would make it to the port as he made it seem. They had no choice but to try, so it wasn't worth bringing up his reservations. But the truth was, their odds were getting smaller every dobosh the storm raged outside.

"Talk to me," the princess said, not looking up from her pensive study of the blue co'l flame. "Talk to me about something or I'll go mad."

"What do you wish to—"

"I don't care. Anything. Tell me about your childhood."

"My—? Why would you want to hear about that?"

"It was the first thing I thought of. Tell me what it was like. Or don't, if you'd rather talk about something else."

What could he tell her? That he was raised more by sentries and quintessence than his own father? That every expectation he didn't meet fast enough was a black mark against him, never mind that he met every expectation eventually, and most more quickly than any other fighter, commander, and tactician in the Galra army? He was fifteen when he finally realized that he'd never earn his father's approval. He was three hundred and ninety-seven before he finally stopped trying. He was older than that—regrettably, far older—when he finally turned against his father entirely.

"I don't think the word 'childhood' is an accurate descriptor for my early years. 'Apprenticeship' might be closer to the experience. In any case, I barely remember it. To say it was long ago is to do the concept of time a grave injustice."

"I remember mine as if it were yesterday," she said wistfully. "My father used to... Well. He was a good man."

"You miss him." Lotor felt the truth of it as he said it, though it puzzled him. He couldn't imagine any emotion connected with the loss of his father beyond relief.

"I do," she said, her eyes glistening in the firelight.

Lotor looked away. He felt a strange emotion of his own, a desire to protect, to reassure, to heal. He'd never felt anything like it before. He didn't like it. At all. He cast about for an alternate conversational topic—anything to derail the current conversation.

"What were you doing at the moon base yesterday? Were you there to intercept me? If so, how did you know I would be there?"

He tried to soften the questions, to not sound accusatory, but he clearly failed if her responding glare was anything to go by.

"My mission had nothing to do with you or quintessence. Though, now that you bring it up, I'd dearly love to know what you were planning to do with that much raw quintessence."

"I asked you first," he said, belatedly adding a smile in an effort to restore the spirit of camaraderie that they'd been operating under the last twenty-four hours.

Her expression said she wasn't buying it.

"Not that I have to tell you anything, but I guess it doesn't make any difference now." She held up her arm as if it held some meaning. "I was supposed to get the disarming codes for the Naxzela bombs buried beneath the surface of several of Zarkon's key outposts. I got them, but our adventure with exploding quintessence melted my gauntlet and the disarming codes with it."

"Is that all?" Lotor held out his hand for the gauntlet. Surprised, the princess detached it from her suit and handed it to him. "I cannot promise I can fix it, especially without replacement parts. But I have some experience with telecommunications technology from my assignment in the Yaldresh quadrant."

"Thank you," she said. "We must protect our people in those sectors."

"If I'm not mistaken, the Galra still control the majority of worlds where bomb networks of the type used on Naxzela are employed."

"You are not mistaken. They do still hold control. But the rebellion is establishing a network in the bigger cities, undermining from within." The princess covered her face with her hand. "Why am I telling you all this?" She laughed mirthlessly. "I must really think we're about to die."

"Come now, Princess," Lotor said, his eyes flicking up briefly from his work on the singed wires beneath the gauntlet's interface. "You have been in worse predicaments than being momentarily stranded on an ice planet. In fact, I believe I myself have put you in one or two of those situations. In recent memory."

She laughed again through her fingers as she let her hand fall—this time it was a genuine laugh. "I suppose you are right."

The gauntlet proved a challenge. It had been thousands of years since his training on Yaldresh-4. And the gauntlet itself was of a technology he'd never seen before. It was more art-form than programming, yet something about it felt familiar. Regardless, it was a far cry from the pragmatic nuts-and-bolts of Galra technology. He was confident he would not be able to repair the communications functionality without access to new wiring and a solder iron. But the memory chip seemed only minimally damaged. If he could reroute some of the power from the communications hardware, he might be able to recover some of the data from the chip.

"Your turn," she said.

"Hmmm?"

"It's your turn to confess to your crimes against the empire. Why were you stealing that quintessence? And while we're on the subject, why are you Galra enemy number-one right now? Zarkon can't be that angry with how you ran things while he was recovering, can he?"

Lotor did not look up as he answered. "Zarkon is angry with a lot of things, not the least of which is the fact that having a child at all means he is destined to be replaced someday."

He felt the princess's silence after this revelation as oppressive pity, whether she meant it that way or not. It bothered him that she would consider him pitiful in any capacity, but it should not have, and he did his best to ignore that it did.

"Zarkon senses my treachery, though he does not officially know it's full extent yet. Honerva has always suspected, even before I came to the decision myself. But she was born paranoid, I'm fairly sure."

"I don't understand," the princess said.

"I don't expect you to."

"Don't patronize me. I'm not as ignorant of the machinations of politics as you assume. And I know Zarkon's history, his obsession with quintessence. Is that what you were trying to do? Reduce his access to quintessence?"

"If that were all, what I stole would be but a drop in the ocean of the amount of quintessence my father has access to. I had much more planned for that quintessence, but it's gone now. I will have to try again to get more from another remote base. Please, do me a favor, and do not show up while I am there."

Princess Allura smiled slightly at that. "I make no promises."

Lotor smiled back, but he didn't really take her seriously. The likelihood that she'd actually end up at the same base as him at the same time again was negligible.

"So then why did you take the quintessence? Why bother risking it? Are you obsessed with it as well?"

"Yes and no," Lotor said. "Honerva has been dosing me with quintessence since my childhood, so I have built up a tolerance for it, and it has extended my life the way it has Zarkon's and Honerva's. Without it, I'm not sure what would happen to me. But I am not as dependent on it as my father. As I get older, I go longer and longer between doses. The longest I've gone without quintessence is a ten years. Each time, I go longer without, and I feel few ill affects."

"Then why steal it? If it's not to prevent your father from having it and not in order to have it for yourself, then why take it? Why risk so much?"

"I need it for my own purposes, just not for myself. I am using it to end Zarkon's rule of the universe, and that is all I am willing to say on the subject."

"So you can take over?"

Lotor shook his head, still engaged fully in his work on the gauntlet. "I have no desire to rule a bloated empire on the verge of collapse. Or any empire at all, for that matter."

"What do you want?"

Freedom.

For a tick, he was afraid he'd said the answer out loud. When he realized she was still waiting expectantly, he let out an inaudible sigh of relief.

"Balance," he said instead. "The universe is slowly but inexorably tumbling into chaos and ruin. My father's obsession is sucking this reality dry, hastening entropy rather than forestalling it."

"You want to kill him," the princess breathed in a flash of insight, her eyes wide.

But Lotor shook his head again. "I don't want to kill them. I want to make them mortal again. And if doing so kills them, then…I am content with that."

"Make them mortal? But why? What effect would that accomplish that is worth the amount of effort and danger required of you to make it so? And how would you even go about it?"

Lotor had thought so much about this. For untold centuries, he'd plotted and failed and plotted more, until the only option remaining to him became clear: the only way to stop his father was to give him exactly what he wanted. But Lotor wasn't about to tell a paladin of Voltron that. He could answer the why, though. He shouldn't, but he could.

"From whichever perspective you assess the symptoms of strife, unrest, and instability in this universe, the root cause of it is the unnaturally long life of my family."

Her eyes widened further, and she opened her mouth to say something. He quickly interrupted her.

"Don't misunderstand, Princess. This is not altruism. I am not and never will be a hero. I just recognize a losing strategy when I see one."

She relinquished whatever she had been about to say and fell into silence, for which Lotor was profoundly grateful. She was far too inquisitive for his liking, and every wrong assumption on her part needled him to correct it, for some reason. He was starting to become uneasy, almost afraid that spending much more time in her company would lead to him confessing every facet of his plan to break through the reality portal and accomplish what his father had never managed to.

He couldn't tell her, though. The alliance would never allow him to continue, and he didn't blame them. But it was the only way to bring down Zarkon. He knew it with a certainty that only a person as close to Zarkon as a son and as long-lived and experienced as he was could have. Zarkon's greatest desire would be the instrument of his downfall, and the only way to hasten the second was to grant him the first.

A few more doboshes of blessed silence, and Lotor was able to coax the gauntlet's display to light up. Finally. He was grateful for the win, no matter how small.

He handed it back to her with a triumphant smirk.

"You fixed it?" Allura shrieked, her face glowing with sudden joy as she grabbed the gauntlet and clicked it back into its place on her suit.

"Not entirely," he cautioned. "The connections to subspace are still nonfunctioning, so we cannot call for rescue. But I believe you'll be able to access your—"

She squealed with delight as a set of glowing numbers appeared in the air above her gauntlet. "These are the codes I was telling you about! They're all still here!"

Then she threw herself across the enclosure at him.

He instinctively flew into a defensive crouch, arms raised. But before he could scan for whatever oncoming threat she was fleeing, he had arms full of princess that he had no idea what to do with. She had circled her arms around him and was crushing his rib cage. Was she attacking him? If so, it was the most bizarre attack he'd ever seen. And it didn't hurt. It almost felt…nice.

"What are you doing?" he asked finally.

She laughed. "I'm hugging you, obviously."

"Hugging? Why?"

She pulled back to look at him. "To thank you. You fixed my gauntlet." She held her arm up again for him to inspect, as if he could have somehow missed that detail. "And saved a lot of good people. Well, assuming we can get off this hateful crater sometime soon."

Lotor felt very uncomfortable. This was not how this mission was supposed to go. Every time he thought he had a hold of it, it slid further away from his control.

"Do you mind going back to your side?" he asked.

She laughed again. She did that a lot. "Of course. Sorry, I got carried away."

"It's all right. Just…no more hugging."

The sound of her laughter rebounded from the ice above them and sailed out into the storm.