"Lotor? Can we…talk?"
Lotor looked up from inputting Slav's calculations into the gate's mainframe to see an anxious Acxa looking anywhere but back at him.
"Should I be worried you're going to shoot me again?"
"Possibly. If you don't shoot me first."
"Lovely."
He abandoned his post and followed his most trusted general to a little used deck in the upper level of the ramshackle base they'd hastily built in the shadows of Daibazaal.
"What is it, Acxa? We have work we should be doing."
"Zethrid, Ezor, and I are worried that you are letting the Voltron paladin distract you."
"I beg your pardon. What Voltron paladin?"
"The one you go running to whenever she is in a millistrum of trouble."
"I haven't spoken to a single alliance rebel, let alone a paladin, in over thirty quintants," he objected, knowing it wasn't as convincing as it should have been.
"The flower, Lotor."
Well, quiznak, as Allura would say. "How did you—"
"We're not blind, Lotor. You were working on it for an entire moon cycle whenever you thought we weren't looking. Trans-reality ore is precious. Yet you made a trinket out of what little we have left and gave it to a sworn enemy. For her birthday."
Lotor knew better than to deny it. Or to pretend he had some ulterior motive. He did not, and she knew it.
"What exactly is your concern?" he asked instead.
"Our concern is that when the time comes, you will abandon the mission, abandon us. That you'll choose the alliance over us."
Lotor leaned against a metal balustrade. He cared for Acxa, for all his generals. And he'd tried to instill a bond of trust that had never existed between his father and his generals. But Lotor had damaged that trust, and the scar of that wound still lingered.
"This isn't about the Altean princess," he said. "It's about Narti."
It was Acxa's turn to look uncomfortable, but she mustered the courage to say, "You killed Narti when you merely suspected her of betrayal. But I shot you. We were going to deliver you to Zarkon. Why did you take us back?"
"Because it wasn't mere suspicion with Narti. I knew for certain that she had betrayed me. In fact, not only had she betrayed me, she had given her allegiance to Honerva and had been spying on us for some time. Whereas, when you betrayed me, it was in the moment, and because you were afraid I was unstable and you no longer felt safe. That was a failing of my leadership, not your allegiance. It is different. Do you see?"
Acxa nodded, but her brow was furrowed.
"Acxa, if you trust nothing else, trust this: our mission is everything to me. I killed Narti because she threatened it. I reinstated you because I need you to achieve it. You know my reasons. You have the same reasons yourself. This mission will succeed. Zarkon will fall. Everything else is a means to that end."
"Even the royal paladin?"
Lotor considered for a moment before saying, "Let's put it this way. I consider her an asset to be protected. If any of you cannot follow commands to that end, I will demote you and replace you with someone who can. Is that understood?"
"Yes, sir." Then she blurted, with an expression of curiosity more than anything else, "Are you in love with her, sir?"
Lotor thought about it, but he didn't know. The answer was likely hiding behind the same locked door as the answer to Allura's question about why he considered her worth protecting. The response he could give, though, was the same either way.
"It's irrelevant. Focus on the present."
"Yes, sir."
o~o~o~o~o
A few nights later, Lotor had the strangest dream. He and Allura were sitting at a table on Sala in the middle of the wilderness. At first, she took no notice of him as she methodically ate from the plate in front of her.
After a while, in the way of dreams, a long line of people appeared, snaking out into the Salaan plain from where Allura sat, waiting, it seemed, for their turn to engage the princess. They might have always been there, though, and Lotor had only just noticed.
They seemed to be adding things to Allura's plate, and as things were added, Allura ate. When Lotor looked closer at her plate, he realized with a sinking dread that she was eating juniberry flowers. He wanted to stop her, to reach out and take her plate away, because he knew that her heart was breaking with every bite she took, though not a flicker of emotion passed over her face. But he couldn't move. His body was bound to the chair as if with heavy magnets.
For the longest time, an eternity, she seemed to take no notice of him. She simply ate, petal after petal, until the next blossom was added to her plate. Then finally, after Lotor had given up hope of anything changing, Allura looked up at him and said,
"Remember. There is no purpose. There is no purpose without—"
But he never found out what she was going to say, because the dream changed to Allura screaming from the pilot's seat of the blue lion.
Lotor sat bolt upright in bed, blanket drenched in sweat and sliding onto the floor.
But the dream hadn't stopped.
"Lotor! Help us! Hurry!"
He couldn't see her now, only hear her. In his head. As clearly as if she were standing next to him.
"Hurry! I can't hold out much longer!"
"Where are you?" He said it out loud, but also somehow to the Allura in his head.
"Zaleph. You were right." And coordinates fell magically into his brain. He didn't hear them so much as feel them, but it didn't matter. He was already throwing his suit on and striding toward the hangar.
"Ezor!" he shouted through the communicator. "Set a course for Zaleph Epsilon, Section-04978, UPM 2.034."
"Yes, sir. Coming about. With haste, I presume?"
"Maximum hyper speed on my mark. Acxa, meet me in the hangar."
"Copy that," Acxa answered.
She was already suited up and standing next to the second Sincline ship when he arrived.
"Same coordinates?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered, climbing into the first.
"The princess?"
"Affirmative," he said, while she settled into the second.
"Any idea what we'll be facing when we get there?"
His silence was answer enough.
After he and Acxa's ships were clear of the cruiser, he said, "Mark."
Then he, Acxa, and his entire fleet leapt into hyper speed.
The Sincline ships being lightest, Lotor and Acxa were the first to arrive at the coordinates Allura had given him.
"What in the thousand fires of Poltara is that?" Acxa breathed.
Lotor sat silent in shock for half a tick himself just absorbing the scene. He had never in his entire life seen anything like it.
A vast network of ley lines, dark energy the color of bruises, extended in a circle across the gaping chasm of a black hole. And at the center of it, small as a fly in a spider's web, lay Voltron, in suspended animation, caught between the gravity of the black hole and the net of magical energy that had ensnared it.
Snapping into action, Lotor punched commands into his dashboard, scanning the area and maneuvering toward the edge of the trap so he could get a closer look at it.
"It's a net," Acxa said, finally coming out of her shock.
"Worse," said Lotor, scrolling through the readings flashing up on his display. "It's the komar. They rebuilt it, configuring it into a web to trap the untrappable."
"What are we going to do? We have no weapons that can battle magic. And even if we did, you can bet that Zarkon is on his way here now to collect his prize."
"We don't need to attack the energy streams. The weakest points of a net are where it attaches," he said. Then he sent Acxa a screenshot of one of the energy generators suspended along the rim of the black hole's gravitational pull. "We attack that."
"But what of Zarkon?"
"Focus, Acxa. Your job is to take out those generators. Go. Now."
"Yes, sir."
As she sped off to carry out his orders, he opened his mind, searching for Allura.
"Here," he heard her say.
"What is your status?"
"Keeping us alive. Barely. My power. It's being sucked out of me." Her voice sounded desperate and afraid. He wanted more than anything to reach through their tenuous connection and add his own life force to hers.
"It's the komar. Honerva is using it to neutralize you."
"It's working," Allura sobbed.
"Acxa is taking down the net. I'm coming to you."
"Don't! You'll be caught!"
"Trust me, Allura."
"I…trust you."
Satisfied, he closed the connection so he could concentrate. The net was not a problem for a ship as small as his. He could easily avoid the energy streams. The issue was the black hole. Even if they managed to free Voltron, in its current state, it would instantly be sucked in and crushed. As it was, Honerva's engineers had left barely a cruiser's length between the net and the vortex—enough room for her ship to scoop up its prize with a tractor beam, but not enough room to give Voltron time to reboot before being sucked in once the net was turned off.
It was the perfect trap, and despite his warning, the paladins—Allura included—had fallen right into it.
He shook off his anger and focused on the black hole. There was one possibility he could think of. It was a terrible idea, and if Slav were here, he would no doubt rattle off all the ways in which it would go horribly awry and kill them all, but it was the only idea he had. He would have to time it perfectly. He would have to risk that, even completely immobilized and without power, the robot's trans-reality properties would still operate. And he would have to sacrifice every last bit of trans-reality ore he had left in the effort.
After setting the computer to calculate the precise trajectory the ore would have to travel and setting the nav systems to pull his ship as close as possible to Voltron's massive chest, Lotor opened the ship's hatch and slipped out into space, using his suit's jets to help him maneuver the remaining comet ore into the front of his ship's ion cannon.
The gravitational pull of the black hole didn't operate in the bubble of space around the magic-fueled net. But once the net lost power, and gravity was back in play, Lotor had fractions of a tick to act before the unthinkable happened.
"Acxa, how many more generators?"
"Three…I think."
"You think?"
"They're not all in a line. I'm going as fast as I can."
The moment the words left her mouth, Zarkon's ship, and five fleets, jumped into the space around them.
"Go faster," he said.
Then he grabbed a tether line he used to moor his ship to the cruiser, pushed off from his ship, and attached the end of it with magnetic clips to Voltron's back.
"I can't…I can't…"
"Just a few more ticks, Allura," he said. "Hold on! That's an order!"
Then he dived back into his ship's cockpit and enabled its particle barrier just as Zarkon's fleet opened fire.
"Come on, Ezor," he muttered.
"You called, sir?" Ezor responded just as Lotor's fleet appeared out of hyper speed.
"Thank the stars. Return fire!"
"Copy that."
Then Lotor's fleet lit up the void with cannon blasts that eviscerated Zarkon's fighters.
"Acxa, report!"
"Last one, sir! In three, two— Augh!"
An explosion lit up his port viewer.
"Acxa!"
"I've been hit! Quiznaking sentry snuck up on me. Cannon's blown. I'm coming around for another run on the generator."
"How are you going to shoot it without a cannon?" Zethrid said over comm.
"I'm not," Acxa said softly. "Zeth, I'm going to need a ride."
"What? You're going to crash the ship? One of our only two Sincline ships? Are you crazy?"
"Sorry, sir," Acxa said.
Then a massive explosion rocked Lotor's ship, almost causing him to miss his window.
The dark energy net dissipated all at once, and he shot forward, full thrusters, past Voltron, putting his one remaining trans-reality ship between Voltron and the black hole. Then he fired his ion cannon, launching the comet's ore straight into the heart of it. In the micro ticks before the ore reached the black hole, Lotor sent his final message to his generals. Then the gravitational pull of the black hole sucked his ship and Voltron into its gaping maw.
The pressure at first was brutal. Even in the protective cavity of his trans-reality ship, he could feel it like a mountain on his chest. He struggled to breathe. For five crushing doboshes, he thought his plan hadn't worked. That the black hole had not reacted with the trans-reality ore the way other celestial bodies did and create a rift.
But then the pressure suddenly receded and he gasped in a full breath. It had worked after all. He had managed to create a tiny tear in the fabric of reality. Enough to buy them some time.
"Allura!" He shouted, both aloud and through their mental connection, whatever it was. But there was no answer. "Allura!"
He would not allow himself to contemplate what her lack of response might mean.
"Allura!" He shouted again, louder this time. "Allura!"
"Here," she said tiredly, this time through his comm. "All of us. Where are we?"
Lotor explained his desperate plan. He explained about the comet and the rift.
"But we aren't done yet," he continued. "We have to go back through the same rift, and Zarkon knows it. He'll be waiting."
"We can't," she said weeping. "Voltron is not responding. Blue is not responding. The other paladins are alive, but they're unconscious."
"I know, I know," he said. "But they will wake up. We have time. Not much, but it will be enough."
"How do you know it will be enough?"
"Because it has to be."
"Allura?"
"Shiro!" Allura said, relief suffusing her voice. "Lotor saved us."
"Not completely," Lotor qualified. "There's still work to do. Is your lion back online yet?"
"What's happening?" slurred the yellow paladin. "Did we win?"
"Where are we?" The green paladin joined the conversation, sounding surly. "I can't get any readings on my dash. My lion is still out cold."
"We're in an alternate reality," Allura said, sounding much more like her usual self. "Temporarily. Until we can get Voltron operational again."
"What happened? How did we end up in an alternate reality?" The red paladin was awake now as well.
"We fell right into the trap Lotor warned us about," Allura said, her tone sharpening. "Just like I said we would."
The last part was for Lotor's benefit, he was sure.
"We had no choice, Allura. They had my father."
That was the green paladin again. Interesting. Lotor filed that bit of information away for later perusal.
"They very nearly had us, too," the black paladin said. "Thanks for the assistance, Lotor."
Lotor responded with stony silence. Assistance. As if Lotor hadn't risked everything, as if his people weren't dying right now while the paladins took a breath. All because they had ignored his warning. He had lost one of his ships and all his remaining ore, and he might have lost Acxa, for all he knew. Assistance.
Allura must have sensed his mood, because she chimed in quickly. "We all must get our lions operational as soon as possible so we can go back and face Zarkon."
"Can we, like, not do that?" the yellow paladin said. "I kind of like this reality. It's peaceful here. None of that Galra nonsense."
"Well, except for Lotor," the red paladin said.
It was all Lotor could do to refrain from screaming at them.
"Ow! Hey! Who just smacked me?" the red paladin said.
"I did," Allura said. "And I'll do it again if you lot don't start taking this seriously. We have to get back there and fight for the people who right now are risking their lives to save ours, battling Zarkon's forces, overwhelmingly outnumbered and with no one to support them, while we get back on our feet. We will not abandon them or keep them waiting for one tick longer than necessary. We will rally our lions, travel back through the rift, and get Voltron back in this fight as soon as possible. Am I making myself perfectly clear?"
Allura's voice rang with the authority of someone long accustomed to command, and Lotor found himself inexplicably ready to follow that voice into any battle to which it saw fit to lead him. He had never felt so willing to be a follower before, but he would follow Allura of Altea to the ends of the universe.
"All right, team, you heard the princess," the black paladin said. "Connect with your lions. You know what to do."
And one by one, the lions of Voltron lit up and roared.
The trip back through the black hole was as unpleasant as the initial trip, but with Voltron empowered, Lotor didn't have to worry about the gravitational field sucking them back in. His ship was still tethered to Voltron's back, but he could deactivate the magnets from inside his ship. Once they'd made it past the point of no return, he did exactly that.
"We don't have to defeat Zarkon today," the black paladin reminded them. "Just hold him back until we all get clear enough to retreat."
"I don't know," the red paladin said. "I'm still feeling pretty miffed about the net thing. I say we go for the jugular."
"You know it's not that easy, Lance," the black paladin said. "Let's get clear and get home. Coran has to be wondering why we didn't make the rendezvous point."
"All riiight," the red paladin drawled.
Lotor tuned them out as they started their attack on Zarkon's main battle ship.
"Acxa, Ezor. Report."
"Ezor here. Glad you're back, sir. We took heavy hits on decks five, twelve, and thirteen. Eighty casualties thus far, not counting the sentries."
"Call the fighters in. Prepare to jump to hyper speed to the coordinates I sent you."
"Yes, sir."
"Acxa!"
"Sir."
Lotor let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "You made it."
"Of course, sir. Not making it would have been against standing orders, sir."
"That's right," he said, smiling. "And don't you forget it."
With Voltron's help, they managed to jump Lotor's fleet—or what was left of it—to safety. But no sooner had he seen his forces settled, orders given, then he jumped back in his ship and headed for the coordinates the Voltron team had given him before they returned through the rift to face Zarkon. He had some unfinished business to attend to.
When he caught up to the castle ship, he docked in the shuttle bay and made the now familiar trek to the bridge. As he walked, his battle persona wore off and his rage at their careless disregard grew. They were infants acting like they were gods, immune to mortality, when in fact, they were among the most vulnerable creatures he knew. How dare they put so much at risk for their own petty concerns? As if no one in the universe had ever had to sacrifice as much as they had.
Upon entering the bridge, Lotor caught sight of the black paladin and his rage boiled over. He strode straight up to the man and punched him hard on the jaw.
Surprised, the paladin fell to his knee, a hand to his face.
"What the hell was that for?" the red paladin said, having jumped out of his seat and drawn his weapon.
"I put my mission at risk to warn you about that trap. Yet you take them there anyway? Because it was personal? Would it have been personal enough if they had all died because of it? Would it have been worth it then?"
"Hey, we all agreed to go," the yellow paladin broke in.
The black paladin had risen to his feet again by then, his lower lip bleeding. He did not assume a defensive stance, however.
"You are their leader," Lotor continued. "It is your responsibility to protect them, especially from foreseen and preventable dangers. You failed them today. You failed her. And you cost me eighty good soldiers."
The paladin had the sense to drop his gaze then.
"What do you know about it, Prince of Galra?" the green paladin broke in, looking even younger than usual in her bitter exhaustion. "They had my father on that ship. What would you have done if they'd had your father? Oh, wait. I forgot your father is a—"
"Pidge! That is enough!"
Allura had just walked in, hair freshly washed and wearing a uniform he'd not seen before. It wasn't her usual paladin suit, though it was a fairly close approximation. She looked glorious in her anger, the air practically crackling with energy around her. He'd never seen anything so beautiful in his life, the thought of which made him irrationally angrier. He was tired, and he still had work to do, and he wanted off this quiznaking ship.
"You are right, Prince Lotor," the black paladin said, his expression aggravatingly humble and grave. "It is my responsibility, and I let my feelings cloud my judgment. We owe you a great debt. I won't forget it."
"I am not here to mark a debt but to deliver another warning. One day I will no longer be here to assist. Do. Better."
Then he turned and strode toward the doorway, wanting to leave before another paladin spoke and he lost all control of his temper.
As he passed Allura, though, he looked her dead in the eye and growled, "Don't ever scare me like that again."
And within three doboshes, he was in his ship and heading away from the castle, cloaking as he cleared the shuttle bay doors.
He had one more errand to run before he could sleep.
o~o~o~o~o
"W-what did you do?" Allura asked, as if it weren't blatantly obvious.
"I found the problem, and I fixed it," Lotor answered.
"What do you mean, you fixed it?"
Six quintants had gone by since the Voltron team had fallen afoul of the Zaleph trap, and in that time, Lotor had used his few remaining connections to track down the Voltron team's weakness and eliminate it. Having accomplished that goal, he used the castle encryption code to arrange a meeting, figuring that it was beyond obvious now to his parents that Lotor was working with the alliance in some capacity, so subterfuge was no longer as necessary.
Still, the scene unfolding in the shuttle bay was not quite what Lotor had expected. For one thing, arms were everywhere. What was with this team and all the hugging?
"It was clear to me that Honerva would use the green paladin's father as bait again for another trap. So I found him and brought him here. He cannot be bait if he is not in their possession."
Suddenly, the green paladin threw her arms around Lotor and squeezed rather hard for such a tiny lifeform.
"Okay, okay, I take it all back!" she shouted, squeezing harder. "I officially like you. In fact, you're my new favorite person!"
He looked to Allura for help, but she merely laughed at him.
Later that night, after he'd endured an eternity of back patting and toasts of gratitude and—he shuddered—more hugs, he turned down the light in his chamber back at the Daibazaal base and sat on the edge of his cot. He rubbed his temple, finally able to marginally relax since he'd asked Slav to calculate the likelihood of a trap in the first place.
"Lotor?"
He heard her voice in his head, hopeful and unsure, and his heart sank even as he smiled.
"Yes, Allura?"
"I am so sorry. About Zaleph. You warned me, and I... Well, I was stupid, and it will never happen again."
"I understand that life means more to you than it does to me. When you've actually lived ten thousand years, you start to see life as a pattern rather than as a series of individual variables. Keep seeing the variables for as long as you can. Just don't let yourself get hurt in the process."
Allura was silent for a long moment before she said, "You know, if something good could be said to have come out of the Zaleph disaster, I would say it's discovering this new form of communication."
"What was it you called that? A good thing inside of a bad?"
"A silver lining," she said.
"That's right. Silver."
After another few doboshes of silence, Lotor said, "I am still angry at you for putting yourself in unnecessary danger, but…"
"But?"
"I want you to reach out to me again if you are ever in distress. I'll always come when you need me."
"I know," she said.
o~o~o~o~o
In a ship several galaxies away, a druid speaks to her emperor.
"As you know, my lord, I have been studying the young witch for some time. Ever since she destroyed the original komar. Each day her power grows, and she has been harnessing it with greater control. If we are to stop Voltron, we must stop her. She is the heart. Without her, Voltron falls."
"But she is well protected, and not without her own power, as you have observed. How are we to take her?"
"I had the same reservations myself, my lord. But it appears she has earned the favor of our own fallen prince. He cares for her and she for him. If we are to draw her out, we must take what she loves."
"Are you sure it is Lotor she cares for?"
"Very, my lord. Nearly every time she has increased in power since we brought him in from exile has been when he was threatened. She has always shown up at his defense, and he to hers, even when they were lightyears apart."
"If you are sure, then make it so."
"The experience will not be very…pleasant for Prince Lotor."
"That is of no consequence. We all serve the glory of the empire."
"Vrepit sa."