Disclaimer: Voltron Legendary Defender belongs to Dreamworks and Netflix.
I don't ship Sheith, so the fact I got this idea from a piece of fanart for them is kind of surreal. Still, it was too good an idea to pass up. Thanks, charles-kun on tumblr!
It happens to all of them at one point or another, and they can't for the life of them figure out why.
It's not like their situation is typical- they're in space flying magical robot lions and fighting an evil alien empire. It is the stuff of science fiction films and corny Saturday morning cartoons, and should in no way ever feel... familiar.
Yet, for the Paladins of Voltron and their Altean princess, there are key moments where they can't help but think...
一
"This isn't right."
One such moment for Lance is when he first sees the Red Lion. Don't get him wrong- he loves the Blue Lion. In fact, in the grand book of Everything Lance and Why It Matters, Blue Lion is Best Lion, no contest. She's cool as ice and a very lovely color to boot. A robot as harsh as the gaudy, fire-breathing Red Lion is more suitable for mullet-wearing hotheads like Keith. He and Beautiful Blue are a perfect match, and you can't convince him otherwise.
Still, when he's distracting Sendak's ship and sees Keith fly in with the Red Lion, he is shocked to find himself overcome with a sense of something akin to... longing. He imagines himself in Red's cockpit, racing through the air and crossing the stars. He imagines flying farther and faster than anyone else, with the rush of that accomplishment surging through his blood like a forest fire. Together, they are the right arm of Voltron and they are unstoppable. It's invigorating, and all of sudden Blue Lion feels too cold and too big and...
... He wonders if some mistake was made, because in that briefest of moments he feels like he's in the wrong Lion.
A displeased growl from Blue thankfully knocks that nuts-and-crackers thought out of his skull, and once gone the bond between the two of them only strengthens. (He berates himself for getting jealous of anything related to the Mullet Wonder, anyhow.) He returns to Arus, watches the release of the Black Lion, ignores the weird twist in his stomach when he sees Shiro enter it and Keith remain in Red, and helps unleash the almighty avenging power of Voltron. He has Blue, Keith has Red, they have a mutual dislike for each other and all is right with the universe. There are still occasions when Lance stares at the Red Lion a tick too long, but he doesn't dwell on them.
Just like he doesn't dwell on the moments he catches Shiro and Allura eyeing Blue with eerily intense gazes.
二
"I should be up there."
Allura, surprisingly enough, has a similar problem (not that she would tell Lance- it would only encourage him). Hers, however, traces back more than ten thousand years ago, to the moment when she first saw the Voltron Lions as a small child.
The Lions had soared across the skies of Altea with such grace and such strength that it had taken her breath away. She remembers focusing on the Blue Lion especially, as she found it to be the prettiest and the same color as many of her favorite dresses. When they landed and Coran led her to them, she ran up to the Blue Lion and declared it to be her favorite. The Blue Paladin had patted her on the head affectionately while her father pretended to act betrayed in the background.
As she grew older, she tried to find more excuses to be with the Lions. She crept into the Blue Lion's hangar late at night and wouldn't leave for vargas. She snuck away from lessons to watch the paladins' training. She once even convinced the Blue Paladin to take her for a joy ride, and that ride made Allura have an epiphany; whenever she was in a Lion, saw the Lions fly, or watched Voltron take shape, she was filled with an overwhelming sense of pure yearning.
She wanted to traverse the cosmos and defend the innocent. She wanted a bond with a being so ancient and wonderful, that she felt like she was apart of something greater than herself. She felt as if she were meant to be with them and she hated feeling this way- how she could she complain about not being a paladin when her role as a princess was just as important? Thus she quashed those feelings, continuing to do so through the war with the Galra and long after her awakening at the hands of her human paladins. These days she feels closer to the Lions than ever, thanks to the life-force bond King Alfor put between them. For now, that is enough.
Though if she still visits the Blue Lion on occasion... well, no one would fault her for it.
三
"I will do better!"
Pidge obviously has many thoughts on her mind during her little rendition of Die Hard on the Castleship- her family, Shiro and Lance's condition, avoiding agonizing death at the claws of an evil, overgrown purple chinchilla, etc. Underneath all that, however, is an unexpected vein of determination to succeed that doesn't stem from the danger her friends are in.
She recalls having similar feelings when she got the rare bad grade on an assignment- the vague notion that she hasn't lived up the best of her individual ability and she needs to surpass her limitations the next time around. In this case, it's her ability to cause as much grief as she can for Sendak while Allura and Keith try to get into the castle. This isn't even the first she's felt this recently. When she first saw Sendak's ugly mug on the monitor, she had an overwhelming desire to smash his plan to annihilate Arus into a million pieces. At the time she chalked it up to it being the right thing to do, but she now realizes it was that and one other, slightly more prevalent feeling:
Pidge wants to screw with Sendak's machinations because she feels as though she failed to do so with someone else in the past, and she wants to do better.
From an objective point of view, it goes relatively well. She stops the Castleship from launching, she defeats the robots, she manages to hold her own against Haxus, and Sendak is put on ice. From her personal point of view, she's failed again. The mice take down the barrier, Rover sacrifices himself to kill Haxus, and Shiro is tortured. She knows that disconnecting the Galra commander's robot arm helped in his defeat, but a small part of her feels like she did little in the long run. Still, however little she did or did not do, she acknowledges that had she not been there, had she left the castle an hour earlier...
She chooses to stay. The team has become like family to her, and she'd rather feel this way than contemplate what would happen if she weren't there at all.
四
"Never again."
When Hunk enters the hangar and sees Shiro surrounded by copies of Haggar, his heart nearly stops.
He hasn't known Shiro long, granted. He only met the guy for the first time the night he crashed back on Earth, but in the short time since then he has come to respect him as a leader and care for him like a brother. If you saw your brother on his knees, wounded, with a freaky space witch working her sorcerer's ways on him, you would be frightened for them too, right? This is what Hunk tells himself as he asks Allura which witch is the real one.
But he knows in his gut that it's more than that. Shiro has been hurt by the Galra in the past, and he instantly knows that this witch has hurt him more than a man like him deserves. Shiro, who has been nothing but encouraging and a pillar of stalwart strength since they started on this insane adventure despite all the crap he's been put through, does not deserve this. But here Shiro is, injured and vulnerable and about to die and Hunk wasn't here last time Lance was too late Keith was too late like hell he's going to let this happen again when he's here and he can do something-
He opens fire on Allura's command, and stops the witch- whose name he learns is Haggar later- before she can land a death blow. Hunk doesn't think he's ever been more relieved in his life, and that's saying something. It's only after they get separated then reunited, and he's standing in front of Shiro's cryo-pod, that he realizes just how bizarre that moment had been. He'd never seen Shiro in a situation like that before, but he knew without a doubt that if he and Allura hadn't been there, they would have lost their Black Paladin. It had nothing to do with the fact Shiro had suffered a serious injury- Hunk instinctively knows that any one-on-one encounter between Shiro and Haggar could only end in the former's demise. Shiro is the strongest guy on the team, and the fact he feels so certain about this terrifies him.
Hunk has nightmares about Keith clutching Shiro's bleeding corpse, and vows to never let it become a reality. He has armor, and he will protect his friends.
五
"I can endure this."
Shiro doesn't remember, but there were times he contemplated ending his life in the Galra prison.
He was tortured for information he didn't have. He was treated like an animal- an attack dog during a bear-baiting or a glorified guinea pig depending on the day. He was beaten for the the slightest transgression and branded as to be reminded he now belonged to the Galra. He often felt that "Shiro" was no more and all that remained was the Champion they forged him into. There were so, so many instances where he came close to breaking- his body had already been broken a dozen times over, it was only natural his mind would follow. He truly believed perhaps he was better off this way- "Shiro" was nothing but failure who let his team get captured and allowed himself to be turned into a beast and would never escape his captors. He couldn't handle that.
But whenever the thought crossed his mind, that dying was preferable to living in the cavern-like darkness of his prison cell forever, something within him would motivate him to continue on. Similar to his Lion's way of speaking, it was a voice but not a voice, gentle yet unyielding in its fortitude. It told him that he wasn't at fault- that he was not what the Galra made him, that he was not some wild thing born of the arena and pain. He was Shiro. He was still the brave, selfless man who took his friend's place in the pit. He was still the kind person who saw how alone a young cadet was and forged a brotherly bond with him. As long as he survived, there was a chance he could go home and stop the Galra. These encouragements were always accompanied with phantom sensations of caresses on his cheeks or fingers carding his hair, which he should have found disconcerting but were oddly soothing.
Shiro thought the voice was being too generous, but it got the job done. He was reminded of all that was still waiting for him and depended on him staying alive, so he did. He won his matches, counted sentries' marching patterns, and did everything he could to find a way to escape the Galra and warn Earth of their arrival. Everything wasn't much, but for whatever reason he trusted this something within him and he didn't want to disappoint them. He could endure this, at least for the time being.
Shiro doesn't remember the suicidal thoughts, but sometimes he dreams of his unlikely savior. He envisions soft lips on his own and a kind embrace, and on those nights, he is content.
六
"I can't be that."
Out of all the members of Team Voltron, Keith is the one who experiences this the most and he absolutely loathes it with every fiber of his being.
He loathes how when he first sees the Black Lion, he superimposes an image of himself entering it and not Shiro. He loathes how he will sometimes find himself looking back on previous battles and pondering how he would have conducted them. He loathes the little moments when he reaches for his bayard and half-expects a blaster. He loathes how he will occasionally want to ask Lance's opinion, as if the loud mouth were his right-hand man or something. He loathes how he looks at the princess and imagines blonde hair where there's white, because what the heck? He loathes the times he misspeaks and refers to Alfor's AI as a "ghost." He loathes how when piloting the Black Lion for all of a minute, in that minute he feels like he's come home. He loathes how when he cradles Shiro after saving him from the man-eating lizards it's all too easy to see a bleeding face and a limp form. He especially loathes how when Shiro looks at him and calmly admits that if anything were to happen to him he wants Keith to lead Voltron, Keith can see himself doing it.
Keith loathes that one the most, because dammit while he can see where Shiro is coming from, that doesn't mean he actually wants to do it. Imagination is a far cry from reality, and in this reality Keith is an impulsive rebel who is more likely to shoot first and ask questions later. He could never be an eighth the leader Shiro is, and even if he could be, him being leader means at some point he would have had to say goodbye to Shiro and he can't do that again.
If he has any say in the matter, Keith will never be leader. That doesn't mean he won't do whatever he can for his team, especially after his Galra heritage comes out. Galra or human, it doesn't matter. He is the Red Paladin of Voltron, and that's all that matters. No amount of cold glares from Allura (which hurt more than he would like to admit), crises of identity, strange sensations, moments of déjà vu, or insecurities will keep him from his duty- even if he really, really, really hates it.
Of those strange sensations though, the weirdest he experiences and doesn't hate is when Allura hugs him before his mission. They just seem to fit, and amongst all the wrong in his life it feels so right. It's nice.
He's not sure how to feel about that.
七
"It's totally worth it."
The various members of Team Voltron all have their moments. An event that's just too familiar, an argument they've felt they've already had, a person they think they already know- they experience all this and more.
And funnily enough, at the end of the day they don't care.
While alarming at times, these moments are their greatest asset. They're all so different, but are able to work together so seamlessly you'd think they have been working as a team their entire lives. They can predict each other's moves even without use of a mind-meld. They know how a teammate is feeling just by taking one look at them and knowing what to expect. It was kind of scary for several of them, to feel like they knew others this well when they've only been team for a matter of months. At the same time though, it was comforting to have them at their sides and they can't imagine life without them now. Nor do they want to.
The Paladins are connected, for better or worse. When that connection comes full circle during what they believe to be their final showdown with Emperor Zarkon and the Galra Empire, they embrace it.
Because the sense of completeness- of rightness and unity, of grasping something vital that has long been out of reach- that emerges when Shiro inserts his bayard and the sword becomes ablaze with improbable flames?
Best damn feeling in the entire universe, and they wouldn't trade it for anything.
They are Team Voltron, and this is how they were meant to be.
八
"Defenders of the Universe, huh?"
It really does got a nice ring to it.
DONE!
I finished all in one day, and I'm insanely proud of it. Be sure to read and review, because with this one I really want to know what you all think! See below for story notes!
1/2- In Defender of the Universe/GoLion, Lance piloted the Red Lion, while Sven/Shiro and Allura piloted Blue and Keith piloted Black. Allura's not a pilot (yet) in VLD, but as you can see...
3- In one of the early episodes of DOTU, Pidge ran off to harass Yurak's (Sendak's) forces while the others tried to locate the Black Lion's key. Pidge didn't do very well back then.
4- Shiro/Sven was grievously injured (killed in GoLion), by Haggar in DOTU. DOTU!Hunk was not present during that scene, but that doesn't mean it didn't affect him.
5- Hmm, who did Shiro/Sven meet in darkness at his lowest point, who ended up encouraging him to continue on and fight back against the Galra? I doubt he'd ever want to forget her.
6- So, so many here. As well as a hint to Kallura. I'm a sucker for nostalgic romances.
7- BLAZING FREAKING SWORD, PEASANTS!