Earthling, noun.
1. (archaic) A ploughman or cultivator of the soil.
2. An inhabitant of the planet Earth.
They had gone out as a family, just the Holts, to the state botanical garden. Colleen thought it was a good idea at the time.
Pidge had always loved plants, from before she learned about technology and found her life's calling. She'd kept up a little alien garden on the ship as well as she could, or so Matt had mentioned. Every season, Colleen and Katie had gone to the botanical garden together, for long walks among all the different kinds of plants and blooms. They always fed the koi in the Japanese garden, and in the spring and summer they took their shoes off and walked on the different patches of grass that were there for show. Katie would usually stopped in the shop on their way out and bought a new succulent to bring home and name. She'd had an impressive collection of them before she had built her new identity and left for the Garrison. Colleen had tried her best to take care of them, but many hadn't made it all the way to Pidge's homecoming. Colleen hoped maybe being back with all the plants would help Pidge relax a bit.
It hadn't been the Hallmark homecoming that everyone wished for, in the end.
Sam and Colleen were at home, up late as usual, working on correspondence from around the globe as they dealt with the chaos that the war with the Galra Empire and the apparent existence of aliens had caused all over Earth. The war was over finally, they'd gotten the good news. But it wasn't the time to stop working, and it wasn't the time to celebrate until their children came home. The last time they'd heard from one of them, it was Matt, and he'd only had a few minutes to let them know that it was probably going to be a while before they actually made it to Earth. There were still lots of planets and former prisoners that needed help, and some troublemakers to deal with who were doing their best to take advantage of power vacuums. Saving the universe definitely wasn't a one-and-done job.
Sam and Colleen understood, even though it was agonizing to wait even longer. They passed the time by staying busy, waiting for the message to finally come through saying that Matt and Katie and the others were on their way home.
As it was, the message never came. It was intercepted, and responded to by the Garrison, and when Voltron finally made it back to Earth, it was to a waiting mob of military and government officials that wanted answers and wanted them now.
It took Allura, Coran, Shiro, and the rebel leaders two full days to finally talk their way out of more interrogations and prove that they weren't planning on doing anything to Earth except come home. By that time, it was late in the evening, and the media had started to get wind that something big was up. So the paladins had all had to sneak out using the lions and makeshift cloaking devices that Pidge had built just for occasions like this, and they made beelines for their various homes.
Matt and Pidge landed quietly down the road from their family home in a big field and walked to their front door on foot. When Colleen opened the front door to see who'd knocked, fearing the worst with it being so late at night, it was to see the porch light shining on her two exhausted-looking children, still dressed in their armor and without so much as a single duffel bag between them.
She hollered for Sam, sweeping Matt and Pidge off the porch and safely into her arms, and slammed the front door shut with her foot. The four of them all stood in the hallway together like that for a while, hugging and crying and overjoyed to finally be all together again. Then Matt yawned, loud enough to crack his jaw, and Pidge hit him before yawning herself, and even though she wanted to ask a million questions that night, Colleen put on her mom voice and ordered the two of them to bed.
The next morning, Matt was animated, telling them over breakfast about some of the other rebel leaders and the more ridiculous things they'd been having to deal with lately. Pidge was much quieter, to Colleen's surprise. Her daughter had always been the most talkative one in their family, and that was saying something. But unless she was directly addressed, Pidge wasn't really contributing to the conversation. She seemed uncomfortable all during breakfast, looking around and appearing generally distracted. As soon as it was acceptable, she'd bolted from the room after politely thanking Sam and Colleen for the food. Colleen didn't see Pidge come out of her room for the rest of the day.
"Give her some time," Matt said, when he caught Colleen looking sadly at Pidge's door that afternoon. "She's-we're not used to having parents anymore, or regular schedules. Or regular anything, really. I don't think she's had a normal sleep schedule for years at this point, despite Shiro's best efforts. I'm used to bouncing between places and groups from working with the resistance. Pidge isn't. She'll come around. It's just a shock."
Colleen nodded, and settled in to wait for as long as Pidge needed.
Slowly Pidge started coming out more, tinkering with their toaster or playing with Bae Bae. Matt pounced on her every time she stuck her nose through the doorway, and basically forced her to stay out with the rest of them for hours on end. As much as things had changed over the past few years, one constant was Pidge's devotion to Matt. After losing him once already, she couldn't say no to Matt when he wanted to spend time with her.
From there, Pidge branched out to Sam, initially talking to him about the other paladins and what she'd done to upgrade the Castle of Lions since he'd last been on it. He got her to go to the hardware and computer stores with him one day, and when they got back late she didn't protest as he carried her up to her bed like she was still little.
Pidge kept in contact with Shiro, Keith, Lance, and Hunk every day. Colleen heard the sounds of other families and beaches and kitchens over the frequent vid calls. Shiro was still stuck with the Garrison, unfortunately, but they at least let him contact the others. Sam said they were close to getting Shiro out of Garrison custody for good, thank goodness, because if it didn't happen soon no one was going to be able to stop Lance and Keith from going out there and busting him out again.
Colleen watched Pidge reconnect with Sam and Matt and was happy, she really was, but she couldn't help but feel like she was failing her daughter herself. No matter what she tried, Pidge didn't seem to want to talk with Colleen. Pidge didn't want to work on math projects with her, or cook pasta, or paint the mudroom with splatter paint balls, or go out shopping for a pet fish that Colleen remembered her wanting before the Kerberos mission. She struggled to engage with Colleen even when talking about projects and discoveries that the two of them had made in space and on Earth over the last few years. All the easy joy their vid calls had been filled with during the war was gone.
And even on the best days, no matter what she was doing or who she was with, Pidge seemed distant. She didn't stick with tasks, and mostly just wandered around the neighborhood a lot while walking Bae Bae on his leash, unless someone happened to recognize her as a paladin of Voltron. Then she'd make a break for the house, shut herself in her bedroom, and usually not reappear until the next day. Colleen worried. She had talked with Sam about it, and he agreed that Pidge wasn't seeming to adjust well back to living on Earth.
"I caught her out in the backyard last night when I got up for some water," he mentioned. Colleen knew Sam had nightmares. Not as bad as he used to, but still frequent enough for it to be a rare night that he didn't need to get up, walk, and calm down sometime around two a.m. "She was just lying on the grass, looking up at the stars. I didn't see her move once."
"I think she's lost, and maybe depressed," Matt confided in his mother a few days after that, just after Pidge had left the room. "She talks with us, like just now, but...there's no spark to her like there usually is, you know? It doesn't feel like Katie. It's like she's sleepwalking. Even during the war, during the bad days, she had her fire. I don't know what's wrong." He closed his eyes. "I know I've got my problems too. I'm not all right. It's...hard. But I'm not stuck the way Katie is right now. I don't know if it's because I'm older, or because I was working with the rebels and not Voltron, or what. But I don't know how to help her."
"It's not your job to," Colleen said. "Don't put that burden on yourself. You're not meant to fix other people. All we can do is be here for her when she lets us. You need to focus on yourself. Leave Pidge to your Dad and me, Matt. We're parents. It's what we do." Matt had cracked a grin at that.
"Well, I guess I've got to get used to having parents again. Even if I am all grown up now."
Colleen smiled even as she wanted to cry. "It's not just you against the universe anymore, honey. I'd say you've both earned a break to be young again, wouldn't you?"
It felt like they were all still waiting for Pidge to come home from the war. She was back in body, but the spark that made her her brilliant, firey self, her curiosity and passion, it was just...missing. So Colleen had decided to get all of them out of the house and visit somewhere they had happy memories. She'd picked the botanical garden mostly for Pidge, hoping it might help in a way that none of them had been able to. And things had seemed to go well at first. They walked slowly along the winding paths, admiring the flowers and the way the light trickled down in flowing beams through the leaves of all the large trees. Pidge had even commented on how much several of the plants looked like ones she'd had on the ship.
Then out of nowhere, there was the sound of a child crying in the distance, and both Matt and Pidge snapped taut, ready for action. Pidge's hand flashed to her hip for the bayard she was no longer wearing, and Matt scanned their surroundings, trying to pick out a threat. find where the child was being held. Colleen looked at Sam, who shook his head slightly, frowning.
Sam stepped directly into their fields of vision, serious and quiet.
"Hey. It's all right," he said slowly. "It's just a baby crying. I'm sure they're with their parent. We're on Earth. The war is over. The child probably scraped their knee playing in the fountains. There's no enemy to fight here."
Matt remained tense for a few more moments, before his shoulders sank and he slowly bent down to rest his hands on his knees. His shaggy hair covered his face, but couldn't hide the tremble starting to roll through him. Pidge's expresion wavered, torn between relief and disbelief.
"Pidge," Colleen said softly. She reached out and placed a hand on her daughter's shoulder. "Katie." And that was enough.
Pidge's face broke. Something flashed in her eyes too fast for Colleen to identify, and then Pidge was whirling, fingers flexing open and shut by her side where she'd reached for her weapon, and Colleen found herself chasing after Pidge's wild head of hair as her daughter sprinted down the familiar paths. Colleen didn't bother to offer any apologies to startled visitors as she and Pidge ran past, nor any apology to her husband and son before she left them in the middle of the path. She trusted Sam to handle Matt, and keep both of them out of trouble for a while. Pidge needed her more right now.
"Katie!" Colleen cried out once, as she lost sight of Pidge darting down a side path. She sighed and walked after her. Colleen had a pretty good idea of where Pidge was headed.
When she came around the last curve, she saw Pidge curled up tight on what used to be her favorite bench, surrounded by trellises of climbing vines and right next to the beatuiful rose garden. The cobblestone alcove had one concrete ledge in it to act as a bench, and was only about the size of a small elevatore. It smelled heavenly, and was fairly well hidden from the main paths. Katie had loved it from the first time they'd stumbled in there on accident. When she was smaller and had a harder time keeping up with her tall family, she used to like to read there when her legs would get tired.
Colleen sat down next to Pidge on the concrete , close enough to touch knees at an angle but not pressing into her space. Pidge didn't come out of her hunch.
"Sweetheart...Katie-" Colleen started. She reached out and brushed a bit of Pidge's hair from over of her eyes, tried to find the right words. "You went off to war. I don't-I don't expect you to come back from that unchanged." Colleen took a breath and looked up at the vines above them. "But Katie-tell me if I'm wrong, but I bet you spent the whole time out there holding onto the hope that once you brought our family all back together and did what you had to do and came home, everything would be all right, and go back to our old happy normal."
Pidge curled her shoulders in even further, and Colleen placed a firm hand on her back.
"I won't lie to you. I can't. During all the time you were gone, once I knew you were still alive and out there doing what you had to do to save the universe, I dreamed sometimes about what it would be like when you and Matt came home. I would let myself imagine tears and hugs and having you back here in my arms again. I imagined celebrating, and going on picnics, and sitting in sunshine, and being a happy, whole family again, just like before. I got myself through the worst days of worrying about you by daydreaming how everything was going to be beautiful, happy, warm, normal. I would have my children back, and we would all be wonderful. We'd all be all right again." Colleen smiled, bittersweet. "I lied to myself all the time so that I could keep going through the days. And I wasn't the one fighting in the war."
Pidge huffed a shaky breath, and straightened slightly.
"Sometimes the only way we can get through the hard parts is by giving ourselves hope about how things will be so much better in the end. But that doesn't mean it's entirely true. War is...it's..." Colleen trailed off, looking over at a bird that had landed on the sidewalk nearby. "I don't know if you know this, but your Granddad fought in a war not long after he and my mother were married. One of my earliest memories is of him coming home from a deployment."
Pidge looked up a little. "He did?"
"Yes. And I thought when he came home everything was going to be perfect. I'd have a daddy like everyone else, and he was going to play with me all the time and do things around the house and make my mother laugh and smile every day. He was going to be the best dad in the world. And my family was going to be perfect, and nothing would ever make my mommy sad again. But that's not how it went, of course. It's hard on both sides." She carded her hand through Pidge's hair, tugging gently at tangles when she found them. "Those left at home have spent months or even years wishing and waiting for the person they love to come home, worrying so much for them. And also building them up into an idealized version of the person they remember, and thinking everything will be pretty much the same when they come back as when they left. And the person who went off to war, they change in so many ways. A person's thinking has to change when they're in danger so much of the time like that, and they build up new skills and forget some old ones. You get used to a different kind of life." She looked back over at Pidge, whose eyes were looking distant now. "And then all of a sudden, the one who went off to war is brought home, and they'd idealized home, and the people at home had idealized them, and everyone wants so badly for things to just be perfect and easy again, but that's just not how it goes."
"It's not easy at all," Pidge muttered.
"No, it's not," Colleen agreed. "It's so hard. Coming back from war, you have to relearn how to live in a normal life, all the day to day things you haven't been used to for months or years. You have to get used to people you haven't been around for ages, and you're usually missing all the people you got close to while you were away. Everything is different, from your routine to your surroundings to your duties, and everyone else around you wants you to adjust perfectly from the very start. But you can't. You have to relearn how to live again, and everyone else has to relearn the new you."
"But we lived all this before," said Pidge suddenly. "We came from families and homes, and went to school, and had pets, and went grocery shopping and visited zoos and had lazy Saturdays. It shouldn't be so hard to do it again. It's not fair! I wanted to come home." Pidge took a few slow breaths. "I went out there to find Dad and Matt and bring them back. I didn't mean to end up in a war. I didn't know anything about what I was getting into. I mean, none of us did, except Shiro just a little bit, but even he didn't know anything about fighting in an actual war against a real-life, honest-to-goodness Empire. I mean, it was like Star Wars out there. I just wanted to find my family, and suddenly I ended up with sentient robots and magical forces and a great big war and some kind of destiny."
"You're like a real, live Luke Skywalker," Colleen laughed.
Pidge smiled faintly. "Too bad Mark Hamill isn't still around to tweet at me about it." Her smile dropped, and she tilted her face up to the sky, squinting against the sun.
"Everything was so big and important and everything mattered," she said. "And yeah, we had to shower and eat and have some down time, but we were fighting against enemies and saving people and rescuing prisoners and making diplomatic alliances between powers all the time and everything we did, even the small stuff, like rewiring the screen to play a little clearer, or giving mice a bath, or writing down the castle's groceries, anything-it all felt so big, and everything was important, and things were life or death." She looked over at Colleen. It was like now that she'd finally gotten going, everything she hadn't been able to put into words for the last few weeks was all coming out whether she wanted it to or not. "And now we're home, and I'm trying so hard but nothing feels like it matters because it's all just-waking up and eating breakfast, and playing with Bae Bae, and answering a billion questions for the Garrison and governments, and I don't know what to do with myself anymore. I want to care about the things I used to care about. I want to enjoy playing with my pet dog. I want to feel like going shopping again. But I can't. I spent all that time out in space just wanting my family back together and to go home and have all of this back, and now I'm back and things are normal again and I can't stand it because none of it feels-" Pidge cut herself off, taking a big gulp of air. She squeezed her eyes shut.
"Everything here is just so small!" she gasped, and burst into fully-body sobs.
Colleen held on to Pidge as she cried.
"It's going to be okay," she murmured into Pidge's sweaty hair as she pulled her into her lap like a child. "It's going to be okay."
"Mom," Pidge hiccuped in between sobs. "I'm so tired."
Colleen held her tight. "I'm sorry, baby. I'm sorry this is so hard. I'm sorry I can't make this easier for you." She pressed a kiss to the crown of Pidge's head. "You're allowed to be tired, and you're allowed to be angry and sad and scared and lost and whatever else you need to feel. We're not going to let you go through this alone. We're here with you all the way."
"I love you," Pidge whispered. "Mom. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. I'm sorry I didn't tell you enough. I never told you enough. I missed you so much but I was too scared of losing everyone and I love you sounded too much like goodbye. But I was so stupid. I love you. I'm sorry. I love you."
Colleen hugged her tight, then pulled away so Pidge could see her face. "Shhhh, baby, no, you weren't stupid. It's okay. There's nothing to forgive. I know you love me. There's never been a doubt in my mind. I love you too, so much, and I'm so sorry that I wasn't able to go with you out there and make this easier for you. I'm sorry I wasn't able to be there for you while you went through all the hard things you did. It's my job as a mother to take care of you and protect you how I can, and I wasn't able to. But I'm here now, and you're here now. We can make up for lost time."
Pidge sniffed. "I'm a mess, Mom, and I don't know how to fix this. I'm the one that fixes things-well, and Hunk too-but-"
"We're all going to help. We've all got our own ways we've been hurt and need to heal, Katie. It's okay. The first thing you should do is talk to your friends and tell them what's going on. They've been messaging me every day, sweetheart, worried sick about you. They'll understand. Espeically Shiro."
"Is he okay?" Pidge gasped. "I didn't even realieze he hasn't been around the house since we got home, I was so wrapped up in myself, is he-?"
"He's fine, sweetheart. He's staying with Coran and Allura for a bit over in , and he's doing a lot of hard work in therapy. He's taking care of himself. He wants to talk to you when you're up to it."
"Oh, good," Pidge said, deflating. She teared up again. "I just wanted to go home. All this time, I just wanted to go home, and I feel like I'm never going to get there."
"You will," Colleen said firmly. "I promise you will. You're not the first person to go through this, and you're not going to go through it alone. It'll take time. It's going to be hard. But it will be okay, Katie. You're going to make it through this just like you have everything else so far. You saved the universe, kiddo." Colleen smiled at her. "After that, there's nothing you won't be able to do when you work at it. You have your determination and your family and your team, just like you always have. I promise it's going to be all right."
Pidge reached up and hugged Colleen tightly. "I missed you," she whispered. "I'm sorry I haven't talked or wanted to be around since I got back. I wanted to see you more than anything, but I couldn't figure out how to be the me I used to be again. I'm sorry I didn't just talk to you about this sooner."
"I forgive you, sweetheart. I understand. I missed you too. We have all the time in the world now, remember? You can take as much time as you need. Just don't shut us out again, okay? Even when you're feeling worst."
"I won't."
"I love you," Colleen said again. She didn't think she'd ever lose her joy and gratitude over being able to say it to her family in person again. "Now we should probably go back to your dad and brother. I know Matt's gotten more mature since he went off to fight in a space war and everything, but he's still Matt and your dad is still Dad and I don't trust the two of them to stay out of shenanigans for very long."
"Yeah, probably a good idea," Pidge agreed, scrubbing her face with the hem of her shirt. "When we find them, do you think we can head? I'm really tired now. And I kind of want to have some time just for the four of us. Now that I'm. You know."
"Of course we can." Colleen stood and pulled Pidge to her feet by the hand.
They walked out under the ivy-covered trellises together, Colleen's arm around Pidge's shoulders, and Pidge leaning into her mom, her own arm wrapping around Colleen's waist.
"Come on, Pidge," Colleen said, and ruffled Pidge's hair. "Let's go home."