title: thunder breaks when i open my mouth
summary: stranded and hurt on a strange planet, with only the voice of her missing friend for company. not exactly how allura planned to begin her career as a paladin. —shiro/allura friendship, au, oneshot.
word count: ~4200
cw: injury, implied/ambiguous character death
a/n:
written and posted pre-s3 because dreamworks will have to pry black paladin allura from my cold stiff fingers
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There was ringing in her ears.
Ringing, and a distant reverb which might have been the final echo of someone calling her name. The ringing was the clearest thing as she waded groggily back to consciousness, and the most cutting. It had her grimace and moan like a migraine, her hands tightening reflexively around whatever she'd been gripping before her unplanned drop into senselessness. Handles. They were handles.
The black lion!
Allura hissed through her teeth, eyes flying open as she tried to claw the fog from her mind. The battle. The blast. The crash. Voltron!
Her pulse tripped, quickened as she took stock of her situation: still upright in the black lion's cockpit, but nose-down in a pool of rust-green liquid. She couldn't have been out for more than a few ticks. She moved the handles—slowly, wincing in pain, something was damaged—but nothing responded. The lion's displays were down. Even the grating alarms would have been welcome in comparison to the heavy quiet; they'd at least signal that she could still do something. She had no idea how far she and the lion had plummeted, but it had been far enough to rock her in her seat through the lion's armour.
"Paladins. Come in. Can you hear me?"
There was no reply, though she thought she heard the faintest hum of static. Bracing herself, Allura dared to shift in her seat—and hissed at the flare of pain in her side, hand flying to cover it. Was she more injured than she'd thought? How would she get back to the other paladins in this state? Where were they?
Where was she?
Fighting a creeping dread, she made one last, desperate grasp at the lion's controls. "Respond," she murmured, closing her eyes, focusing with all her might. What had father always said? You must ease your mind into it. There must be a seamless connection between a lion and its paladin. It is not a thing to be forced. "Please."
Miraculously, something flickered like a pulse beneath her hands. Her heart sparked with hope—she felt it, a brief brush between its mind and hers—but fleeting as a candle, it receded again.
"No. No." She reached for it again (it was still there, she knew it was, it had to be), but the lion recoiled from her as if her touch hurt, its body as inert as before. Her desperation curdled into frustration as she ignored the pain to clutch with both hands. "You must get back up. We need to find the others!" Now there was no response at all, as if she'd imagined the entire thing. "There's no time for this! I am your paladin!"
The lion didn't seem to agree.
She wanted to scream. Tears (Gods, actual tears) of anger burned the back of her eyes; she wrestled them down. No. She wouldn't fall apart over this. She was a leader. She would be calm. She would figure this out. She had to.
But this wasn't the first time the black lion had resisted her—the greatest sentient weapon in the universe, behaving like a petulant child! After so many weeks, it still treated her as an imposter to be welcomed begrudgingly if at all. Yet this was the first time it had had such a drastic impact, stranding her at such a critical moment. She was sure they could have avoided this if only the quiznacking thing would listen to her. Her nails cut into her palm, paling knuckles split and bleeding.
"It's not my fault he's gone!"
She threw down the handles and, teeth grit, limped away from the cockpit. Her body ached with bruises and lesions she hadn't realised she had. It took just a little too long to reach the exit—stumbling out into air so heavy with humidity that beads of moisture were already rolling down her visor. Now with a (relatively) unobstructed view of the world around her, Allura stared in helplessness. It was a jungle. The lion had carved out a swath of trees during the impact, landing face-first in a cloudy pond of something which did not look like water, yet the vegetation circling her (in oddly sinister hues of purple and blue and dark green) was so dense and still and imposing as to look impenetrable. Prison-like.
And it was silent. Not even a rustle or murmur of insect life. As if it were dead.
That should have been a relief, but the absolute lonely quiet of everything wrapped around her chest and squeezed. She felt dizzy again, a sick sensation in her throat, bracing her body against the lion's paw. Panic or head injury? She—she had to stop. She had to calm. She had to think.
Compartmentalise.
Gritting her teeth, Allura considered her situation.
Lost and wounded on an unfamiliar planet. Her communications were down (her helmet must have taken the brunt of the impact). Her lion was damaged or stubborn or both. The robeast which scattered them was, as far as she knew, still out there. She had no idea the status of the rest of her team.
This scenario was cruelly familiar, as if the universe were playing a trick. Or perhaps this is a trial, she thought bitterly. If I succeed, will the lion accept me then? Not long ago, Shiro was in almost the same position: grounded on a barren waste of a planet with a festering wound in his side. She could still recall their reunion, fresh from her stint in the time loop. There had been Keith, half-supporting, half-dragging Shiro's weight into the castle; there had been Shiro, collapsing feverishly into her arms, decorum forgotten in his delirium; there had been panic as she'd recognised the signs of rapidly progressing Haggarium infection. They'd barely gotten him to a cryopod in time. He didn't resurface for days.
But Allura couldn't depend on Pidge to find them all this time. She didn't even know if Pidge were safe. Worry for her team gnawed at her gut like an animal, but there was nothing she could do to ease it. Her head spun.
She'd failed.
Allura?
Her breath stopped. Allura's eyes flew open.
Allura.
That voice.
She looked around, as if there were anything nearby which could possibly be causing it. As if she hadn't sensed it more than she'd heard it. As if it hadn't echoed from somewhere nestled deep in her own head.
The familiarity of it was shaking.
Your wound.
Oh. Oh, Gods. "Shiro?"
Allura, your wound!
With a gasp, her hands tightened around the wound. Everything was suddenly sharper with urgency: colours and shapes and thought and feeling.
You need to patch up!
Even mildly delirious, she couldn't possibly mistake that voice. But she couldn't find a source, or one that made sense at least. A tremor began in her hands, pulse rising to her ears. "Shiro, I—are you—wh-where are you? I can't—"
Don't think about that now. You're bleeding. There's medical supplies in the cockpit under the seat. You need to go, Princess. Now.
She didn't recall storing any there. "But—"
Everything else can wait, alright?
This made no sense. Nothing made sense. It hadn't for a long, long time now. But her head was swimming again and the impossible voice made a point, and truly she didn't have enough mental strength to address both the voice and her wound at the same time. Numbly she obeyed, dragging her aching body back into the lion.
There were bandages under the seat.
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"You aren't Shiro."
She was back outside, leaning against the lion's foot once more. Altean medicine had shrunk the pain in her side to a mild ache, the wound dressed (her hands shook as she applied the bandages, but the voice was steadier than she was, guiding her step by step). Truly it was too warm for a fire, but the sky was darkening and she needed the light and comfort and to clear just a little of the cloyingly humid air—it had taken a good twenty dobashes to even create a spark, but sheer pigheadedness and a little Altean technology saw her through—and now she sat in the flickering glow, feeling hollower as her head cleared. She could think straight now, and that meant truly acknowledging the awful depth of her situation.
Unfortunately, the voice was still there. Which meant it was more—worse—than a momentary fever dream.
"You aren't Shiro. You aren't real. You can't be. It's not possible."
She felt the heavy pause of a man weighing his words. Maybe. I don't know.
Hearing him shouldn't have felt so cutting. Perhaps it was merely her acute awareness that the true owner of that voice was gone. There was something lacking in the quality of this one, too, the way a voice might distort and compress when recorded. Her arms tightened around her chest. Had she really hit her head so hard? "You don't know? Should you not know if you're real?"
You're the one talking back, to be fair. And I guess I should. If I work it out, I'll get back to you.
Despite herself, she loosed a quiet, exhausted laugh. "Because I needed to feel more unstable than I already do."
I'm sorry, that's not…
"No, no, don't—don't apologise. I—I just don't understand. I don't understand what you are."
I'm Shiro?
"You hardly sound sure yourself."
It said nothing. She couldn't decide if its silence was welcome or not—the world felt so empty without noise, and it was hard to resist the familiar voice, but it wasn't exactly helping her to organise her head. She focused on the helmet in her hand: the fall had nearly halved it, a harsh crack splitting the metal. Her communicators (main and backup) were crushed entirely. Hardly a patch job—she'd need Coran for this. It had, at least, taken the brunt of a blow which would have shattered her skull.
Was this the culprit? The force of it triggering a sort of psychic aftershock, leaving a stored mental imprint of its last pilot on her brain…
A pretty theory. Not that it made her feel any better.
How did this happen?
She would not humour her own delusion. She would not.
Princess, please.
She shouldn't, at least. "Lotor."
Lotor?
"Zarkon's son."
Something hissed. Zarkon had a son?
"I knew him. A long time ago. I don't want to talk about it."
Okay...okay. Lotor. So what happened?
"It's only my third battle. Or my third in your place. I was supposed to lead them against a group of Lotor's robeasts." Her stomach churned, and she said what she'd never dare to say to her team's faces: "I failed."
Princess—
"The robeasts scattered us. The lion was...damaged, and crashed. It's worse than the last time, I think. I couldn't even perform a diagnostics check, though I'm not entirely sure that's from the fall."
Allura ground her eyes with the heel of her palm, suddenly exhausted—the accumulation of battle-worn muscle and healing lesions and months of war. Her skin itched more with every passing tick as the lack of ambience and needling anxiety for her team dug into her chest. Were they looking for her now? Were they even in a state to look?
So...you're the black paladin.
Despite everything, her mouth twitched upwards at that. "Don't sound so surprised. And do not think I missed your attempt to designate Keith leader behind my back."
Oh. I'm, uh. Guessing that idea went down badly.
"Spectacularly. Even the lion disagreed." She closed her eyes. "I suppose you'll have to come back so I can yell you for it."
I'm...sorry.
She almost laughed. Of course he'd apologise.
Then something—a gut feeling—snapped her head up.
Did you hear that?
She hadn't—at least, she didn't think so, and there was a decent chance her brain was playing further tricks. But she strained to listen anyway, muscles tensing, gritting her teeth when her wound complained.
"Hear what?"
There's something out there.
The jungle was silent still, quiet enough to hear her own pulse. If she stared, it seemed that the leaves might have shifted. Or paranoia was bending her ear.
A hot flush lit her face. What was she doing? "There's nothing there," she snapped. "Why am I listening to this?"
Prin—
"No. There's nothing here! There's no one here but me! You're not—"
She choked. Her arms drew her knees to her chest, tucking in her chin. Her raised voice was absorbed by the trees. She was truly alone.
Hadn't she done her best? Hadn't she been patient? Hadn't she put sleep and grief and anger aside again and again to avoid this sort of catastrophe? She thought of her mother and father, straight-backed and regally dignified in the face of an army they could not possibly hope to defeat. She thought of Shiro, who'd refused to bow and break beneath the pain the Galra caused him. She'd tried. She'd worked so hard to emulate that strength, to fill the hole her father's death had left, but she was angry and tired and couldn't seem to stop losing everything she wanted to protect the most. Even the team responded differently to her authority now, without Shiro there to balance her. Her team were scattered (again) and her lion still rebelled against Shiro's loss and his voice echoed in her head like a cruel trick.
She couldn't afford to crumble now. Planet or no planet, she was a monarch, and monarchs did not break. But beneath the weight of everything, she felt like a small child again. She wanted to flee to her mother's skirts. She wanted her father's comfort. She wanted Coran's smiles.
"Were you ever frightened like this?" Allura whispered.
Shiro didn't respond, and for a moment Allura feared he'd vanished (to miss a voice in her own head—perhaps she truly was going insane). Then he whispered back: All the time. When the castle was hit, and I...I thought you were…
She felt the hitch in his words more than she heard it. It made her throat thick. Her brow furrowed; perhaps, if she focused hard enough, she could grasp his voice and pull it into clarity—will him into something corporeal, something that could be salvaged.
"Please." It was that stubborn flicker of hope again—he can't be dead. After everything else he's survived, he can't be gone like this. "Please, tell me how to find you. The lion won't listen to me and I-I...I can't...do this alone."
Silence, for a long, long moment. It wrung the air out of her.
"Please," she begged again. He couldn't just be an echo, or worse, a figment of her own grief. A wishful apparition. If it weren't real—if her hope were for nothing—
I don't know, Princess. I...I think… Panic bled into the thought. I think I'm dead. I can't feel my body.
No.
The words landed like a fist to the gut. She curled in tighter around the imagined wound, reminding herself to breathe. Somehow, hearing the words from Shiro himself, real or imagined, made it worse. Made it more real.
She forced strength into her voice. "I won't believe that."
There was an odd feeling in her chest then, like a sad smile. I never could change your mind when it was made up.
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At some point, she must have lulled into uneasy sleep. It was barely deep enough for dreaming: an anarchic, restless blend of shape and noise, faces and fire.
You have to wake up.
An Altean field shrivelled at her feet. Her father offered a flower, smiling, but when she touched it it was a knife and he stumbled, bleeding, becoming Lotor with razor teeth. Shiro reached for her but became smoke when she stretched back.
Princess, you need to wake up!
She couldn't make out his features, scattered as the rest of him, but something mouth-like yawned in his face and he yelled—
ALLURA!
—she gasped awake, moving reflexively to lift her body but her head spun and the painkillers must have
worn off and she hissed through her teeth. She counted her breaths to ride out the pulses of pain as she waited for her eyes to adjust, her fire reduced to desperate, flickering embers. The abrupt dark was disconcerting, the dim hues of the leaves becoming faces in her imagination. Her skin itched. "What? What happened?"
Then she heard it: a whisper from beyond the branches. Less than a whisper, like the suggestion of noise in a vacuum. Like the potential of a breeze. It was enough to shoot ice through her chest.
Not alone, then. Somehow, it wasn't the comfort she'd wanted.
She had to move. Her hands scrabbled behind her for purchase on the lion's foot and forced her upright, legs trembling, knuckles paling. Her mind worked as swiftly as it possibly could through the haze—the bayard? No, I'm stronger with my staff. But how can I fight in this state? Perhaps it's not a threat. Exhaling long and quiet, her hand crept towards the collapsed staff at her hip. It expanded at the press of a button, crossing her like a shield.
"Hello?" she braved, because no way had they not heard her already. "I am Princess Allura of Altea. I mean you no—"
A knife flew from the branches, true as an arrow. Allura barely moved her head in time. It clipped her ear and she felt the sting of blood as two more followed and she shoved herself away from the lion, tumbling through the embers with a pained grunt. She scrambled to her feet as two dark blurs darted into the clearing and converged on her without a sound and she lashed out to knock them aside at the last moment. Her wound screamed, bandages falling away.
Behind you! Shiro cried and Allura rolled away as a knife scarred the dirt where she'd just been. The third assailant pulled back to strike again. Without thinking she pulled the bayard free; it morphed in her hand and she aimed, fired, the small blaster kicking the assailant back into the rusty pool with a splash which shocked her system, the only loud noise in the scuffle.
Another few blasts send the others skittering, but they were edging closer regardless and the fire radiating from her side made it hard to strategise. Panic choked her. On her back, injured, alone, mere feet from her own lion—what a pathetic way to die.
You've survived worse than this, Princess. Don't give up now!
She closed her eyes, digging deep for—something. There had to be something left, some buried reserve of strength, some spark of an idea, some—
Spark.
There was a buried reserve alright, but it was more than strength. Something far older than herself, a birthright she had yet to master, but it stirred in her hour of need and this was no time to worry about finesse. She snatched at it desperately and pulled—
The world went white, her body hollow. A deep, unravelling hum echoed inside and burned up her skin until the pressure was too much and the clearing was swallowed in light. She landed on her back, spent, waiting for the scattered shapes above to resolve back into trees.
Moments passed in a daze until Allura gathered her thoughts enough to organise her limbs, pushing herself onto her knees. The burst of magic had scorched the ground, bent back the trees and left her assailants prone (whether dead or unconscious, she preferred not to know). Allura staggered to her feet, approaching one of them—a reptilian creature in shades of indigo and deep green, mouth slack to reveal rows and rows of wicked teeth. They hadn't made a single sound in the fight, not even a cry of pain.
Her blood iced over. She knew them.
And now she knew where she was.
Allura swore. Of course they were quiet. The whole planet was. Hadn't Coran told her stories of Quiexus as a child—its silent forests and mute, omnivorous hunters? An Altean must have seemed an irresistible delicacy.
Worse still: there were only two bodies.
She couldn't have long she had before the escaped hunter returned with reinforcements, ferocious and starving, and she'd already exhausted as much magic as her damaged body had to give. She had one option.
Hooking the staff and bayard back onto her hip, she turned to the lion. It was as still as before, mocking. Her heart shuddered in her throat, pain and fatalism gnawing at her, but she closed her eyes anyway and lay her palm on the lion's jaw. There was nothing—no contact, no sense of another mind, only cold metal under her hand. She may as well have been touching the castle walls.
"I know you don't trust me," she said. "But right now, we need each other."
It didn't reply. Of course not—because she was approaching this wrong. The lions were sentient, but not in the same way she or her paladins were. Words and logic would not be enough; she'd have to reach out with something more primal, something the lion could understand. But her chest seized at the thought of reaching so deep, dredging up everything she'd been working so hard to bury. She didn't think she could do this without breaking.
Yes, you can. You're a paladin, Allura, not a stand-in. You're in your place, not mine. She felt something brush the small of her back, chills spreading from the point of contact—the spectre of a hand, straightening her spine. You're strong enough for this.
With a steadying breath, she forced herself to take the plunge.
Fear.
Fear for the people she loved. For Coran and Lance and Hunk and Keith and Pidge and the worlds upon worlds they had to protect. A fear which threatened to choke her, met with desperate determination—the soul-deep knowledge that the greater the fear, the more she must refuse to concede to it.
And once she felt it—once the dam broke—it didn't stop. All the fear of the last few weeks collapsed on her, swallowed her, threatened to cave her chest in but she grit her teeth and pushed further. Grief—Gods, the grief! An ocean so deep she might drown in it. So deep, she could see a million faces in the water. Mother. Father. Altean children. The lost paladins of centuries ago. Entire planets she'd awoken to find no longer existed.
Shiro.
So many sacrificed on the altar of Zarkon's greed and arrogance. Ten thousand years of death.
The lion trembled under her hand. From deep within, something awoke and reached out, tentative. Its grief bled into hers, becoming the same sea. She felt it echo back: Shiro.
Swallowing thickly, Allura reached further. Coaxing. I know. I miss him too.
But it wasn't enough. It struck her suddenly—the lion was afraid as well. Of course, her father hadn't been the only one betrayed by Zarkon. Understanding softened her frustration: after being abused by one paladin and losing the next, how could she resent its reluctance to accept a third?
More importantly, how could she convince the lion that it could trust her?
Something pulsed in the back of her head. Allura gasped as the sensation pulsed down her spine, along her arm, leaving gooseflesh in its wake—travelling through her fingertips and into the lion.
It shifted, flickering to life, pulling away from Allura to right itself. Its movements were sluggish, as if still labouring under injury, but with noticeable effort it managed to pick itself up, claws carving out the dirt. After a moment, it leaned down and opened its mouth. A low rumble echoed in Allura's bones, rippling across the stagnant pond.
She blinked back tears she hadn't realised were there. Her heart ached worse than any wound and her throat was tight enough to hurt, but she had to smile. "Thank you," she said, barely a whisper.
But the world was fading back in, and all its sensations—including the telltale shift of leaves. Her cue. If the hunters couldn't find her before, they'd definitely track her now. She limped into the lion's mouth, the neon lights of the cockpit an indescribable relief, and fell into the seat. It hummed when she took the controls.
"Shiro?" she said. "Are you there?"
Her head was quiet—as if that last act had spent him—which suddenly seemed a terribly lonely thing. She hadn't realised how much she'd been aching to hear his voice again, even as a hallucination. Even as a shadow. Still she steeled herself, twisting the handles and feeling her spirit lift with the lion to leave this treacherous sphere behind.
It didn't matter if this were real or not, because this would not be the last time she heard his voice. She'd scour every inch of the universe if she had to.
In the meantime, her team needed their leader.
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