"I find it funny," Lance says with eyes that burn, a mouth that twists, "that even the Galra say, 'We are all made of stardust.' I find it even funnier that nobody has ever realized that we could just as easily take back our dust."
Lance likes to say he was born in a corner of the universe untouched by all life. Most people surmise that Varadero Beach is just a desolate place—the sort of small town in the middle of nowhere populated by generations of the same families.
"A quiet sort of town?" they cluck sympathetically.
"Oh, absolutely, the quietest. As quiet as the void of space," Lance laughs with a lopsided mouth that is more grimace than smile. "So quiet," they almost hear him whisper.
Here's a secret nobody thinks Lance knows and outside of his parents and his older siblings, nobody else knows: he's adopted. Lance always knew, for all that his family never spoke of it. They thought he would never remember, on account of being so terribly young.
He washes up onto shore—springs fully formed from sea foam. A tiny, finely made doll sprawls across the sand. The barest of breaths lifts his chest minutely. He is bare of all clothes and dusted with sand.
He looks like a toddler, and so they think of him as a toddler.
(His parents ignore the fact that they heard the splash of water, the sizzle of water preceding him minutes before. They do an admirable job of forgetting the strangeness in the years after.)
Lance's pale blue eyes (liquid oxygen freezing you up, sending a shiver down your spine and leaving you off-kilter when he looks, looks at you) darken a few days after. They don't know why, but Lance's parents breathe a sigh of relief when those eyelids flutter and reveal a dark blue similar to Mr. McClain's color.
On that day the newly named Lance McClain says, "Hello." He slides into humanity like an ill-fitting coat he can only hope he'll grow into. His humanity is a thin veneer stretched over his nuclear core.
(The McClains find Lance's lack of confusion, lack of anything, really, quite disconcerting. But they attribute it to some unnamed trauma, the sort of trauma that leaves a young boy all alone, entirely bare as he washes ashore.)
Lance grows up a happy kid. (The strangeness of his beginning is forgotten.) He grows up normal. He laughs as he soars in swings. (He laughs when his parents chide him for pushing a boy who had teased him into the pavement. What do stars care if a flame is snuffed out?) He cries as he skins his knees in over eagerness. (He cries when his favorite grandmother abandons him in death. Why do stars even bother to care about flickering flames?)
"Mr. McClain, why are you interested in attending Galaxy Garrison?" A clean-cut man in a clean-cut uniform asks. He feels faceless and nameless, like a speck of dust only rendered noticeable in a beam of sunlight and still manages to look as utterly the same as the next speck of dust your eyes fixate upon.
"Space," Lance flashes a red-white smile, "is humanity's final frontier. Allow me to make a difference in humanity's…endeavor to know, to learn, to reach beyond our limits…" Lance had spent hours prepping for this interview. He has a whole spiel about humanity, curiosity, space, knowledge, and all those buzzwords. (I just want to go home, he had whispered to himself with burning eyes. Even if he was too small, too much of a speck to truly occupy his home.)
When Lance meets Keith, for all that Keith doesn't meet Lance, he knows in an instant that there is something different about him. A fundamental difference between Keith and everybody around them. Not different in the way Lance is different—burning, burning up on the inside. Different in the way that some of his molecules (his dust) were just so slightly off and achingly familiar.
Lance realizes, my brother (my sister, my sibling, my closest star; language can be such an imprecise mode of communication when there is no sense of knowing) helped make you. Perhaps I helped make you, like I've made much of life in this dusty universe with my brethren when our time came, but yes, my brother made you more.
Jealousy is not a foreign emotion to Lance. Ever since he slipped and fell into humanity, he's run the whole gamut of emotions. But this scorching jealousy that sears him inside out is new to him. He can't tell if he wants to be Keith or if he just wants (this flash fire boy who shines crimson in what little sight, what little insight he has left in and into the universe).
No human could ever truly resemble Lance's star-brother but Hunk—Hunk comes close. He feels like a safe haven—the steadfast lighthouse illuminating away the festering shadows. There's an unfaltering kindness to Hunk. He's the sort who expresses his worry through overbearing fussing and tentative offers of food. Hunk just wants to make everything right in the world and he works pasts his limitations with steady determination. He'll lift you up and hold you together as seams and cracks litter your façade. Hunk is the land before your feet that supports you.
If he was a color, he'd be a bright golden yellow lighting up your life. He's the gold of your supernova explosion.
(Lance later learns about quintessence. They say it's life itself and a self-generating power source, as if it's a substance entirely separate from them. You fools, Lance cannot help but laugh. How wrong they are. So very wrong.)
Finding the Blue Lion feels like recovering a remnant of his brethren, of his home. Lance feels the Blue Lion in all of its entirety. It is more than just words, feelings, thoughts, mental communication. It is an intimate communion of two beings, two existences that is purely about energy. It is knowing without learning, without communication. If they spoke in words, it'd be like this: "Little cousin, little comet. Voltron, Blue Lion. Blue. Water. Liquid. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Mine." And in turn: "Eldest, elder, star. Eternity. Human. Paladin. Lance." Disjointed but comprehensible.
Blue and Lance slot into each other like long gone missing puzzle pieces, a jigsaw completed. It's not the same as being with another star. Comets are not stars. They're lesser, but it is enough for Lance's diminished core to heat up in delight. And perhaps true communion with a star would be too much for Lance, who has gone through his supernova and has finally recoalesced into this lesser, so very lesser form.
We are parts of each other, Lance and Blue conclude. They share some of the same dust, so much so that Lance almost feels like he's come home.
Surprisingly enough, the Altean Princess's comment about his hideous ears offends Lance. But perhaps not surprisingly enough. Lance is no longer a star indifferent to all but his brethren. It chafes that this Altean would dare to malign the form he has settled in. Humanity is Lance's species. He contributed to their creation and now he is one, if only barely, of them. For all that being human is something odd, something wrong for him, it is not wrong for humans to be humans. Their ears are written in their DNA—adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, all nucleotides made up of elements—his elements. You humans and your bodies are formed by our remnants and our explosions. You are mine.
There are days that Lance forgets that he ever was a star. There are days when his carefully constructed personality is not just a façade, but something that is bone-deep and distinct. Flirting with people is fun. There is something indescribably wonderful about using words to entice, to tease. He likes tilting his body towards another, showcasing his genuine interest. He likes it when they smile at him and lean in in turn. Flirting feels like extending himself into somebody else (a connection, a bond). It feels like leaving a part of yourself behind and assimilating them in turn. He offers his interest and he either leaves the room with someone else's interest, or he is left bereft.
Plus, he also likes pretty people and well, flirting is just his way of conveying his appreciation.
Ever since he's become a human, he has wholeheartedly dived into the human experience. He knows what he likes and he goes for it. Adventure gets his blood pumping, his heart going, his mind excited. It electrifies him.
Lance likes being cool, smooth, and suave. There's an allure to those types of effortless people and it's only natural that he wants to emulate them—to be alluring and create his own gravity to draw people in. And while, sure, he doesn't always succeed, he is still trying. The drive to be better is an entirely human desire and well, these days, Lance is altogether too human.
While Lance is a jovial person, that doesn't mean he is just a shallow imitation of a human pantomiming joy. Being in space doesn't feel like the homecoming he ever imagined. Sure, he's not planet-bound and constrained to the stardust of a small area, but he did leave some things behind on Earth. And by some things, he means his human family—his family that took in a fading star and nursed the dying embers of his core into a roaring blaze.
Growing up human meant experiencing love. Poets and writers describe love in a multitude of ways. There are so many types of love out there and Lance feels pretty sure that he has thoroughly learned familial love. Love is feeling the sharp bite of tears when your favorite grandmother dies. That choking, closing sensation of your throat and that forced effort to just breathe in the absence of someone is a facet of love. Then there's the love that leaves you energized—spending time with that person recharges you. What is misery in the face of companionship? You take courage in the fact that you are not alone. Your problems cannot overwhelm you when you are with them. You have fun with them. You talk to each other and take solace in the fact that you exist and that you are being acknowledged. There are people to share your joys and sorrows with.
Lance loves his family, and he is starting to love his team.
Hunk, Pidge, Keith, Shiro, Allura and Coran have carved their places in his core.