But you were history with the slamming of the door
And I made myself so strong again somehow
And I never wasted any of my time on you since then.
~Celine Dion "It's All Coming Back to Me Now"
CHAPTER TWO
Carver burb-city, Mars
SEVEN YEARS AGO
"More green, babe?" said Eric. "I thought you were letting go of all the Voltron shit."
Katie and Eric, her husband of three weeks, were in his apartment in Los Altos, an upscale, middle-class enclave in the Martian burb-city of Carver. Site of the biggest spaceport on Mars, it was the most prosperous of the burbs, home to Mars Regional Government; corporate headquarters for some of the system's biggest power brokers; rich in arts and culture; and most relevant to Eric and Katie, home to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Martian branch.
Katie had yet to give up her apartment in Rosalind Park, aka the student ghetto, which was a sticking point between the newlyweds. Instead, she was slowly moving her life into his place a box or two a day.
("Slowly," Eric said. "More like glacial. Mountains move faster.")
In retrospect, it was portent of things to come, where "things" meant one thing in particular—divorce. At the time, Katie dismissed it as her need for independence.
"Green is my favorite color," she said.
Eric did his subtle eye roll thing. He was too sophisticated to do the real thing. "And it just so coincidently was the color of your lion."
"So, I'm supposed to avoid the color green for the rest of my life?" The object in question was a brass desk lamp, trimmed in green. Hardly an explosion of verde. "Besides, I look good in green."
Eric's smile, white against rich, warm brown skin, grew wide. "That you do, that you do." He snagged a finger in her pants' waistband and pulled her over. When it came to height, Katie's taste split along gender lines. She preferred women her height, soft curves pressed together like mirrors. But men? She wanted a man she could reach way up and hang onto.
Her new husband had nearly a foot on her. Pressed up against Eric's fit body, she wondered, not for the first time, if all the tall boys of Voltron had spoiled her for shorter men.
His hands fisted her hair, pressing her mouth against his. His other hand rucked up her shirt and found her breast. "No bra, I like," he said into her mouth, thumb moving over her breast.
After a minute, she broke the kiss. "I've got a seminar in thirty minutes."
"I can be quick." His dark brown eyes, heavily hooded with lust, swept over her face.
She wiggled free. "Quick is for horny teenagers." Realizing that she might be saying something obnoxious, she tried softening the comment with a smile. He laughed, so she reckoned it worked.
Katie Holt was still terrible at peopling.
Shoving her shirt back down, she walked over to the box that sat on the coffee table and reached in, extracting an image crystal, the kind made to sit on a table top. In the photo, the Voltron team and Coran clustered for a tight selfie; Allura's statue in the background.
She sat it on the end table next to the couch. Eric scooped it up. "And…this is not Voltron…how?"
She snatched the image from him. "I can't obliterate my entire past, Eric. Voltron was a huge part of my growing up. It…shaped me."
"We talked about this. Being…normal."
Katie clenched her jaw. She wanted to make this work, wanted a chance at normal. And yeah, Eric was right. Voltron wasn't normal. There was nothing normal about being a child soldier, unwittingly conscripted into a conflict spanning millennia and galaxies, anointed the chosen ones, dragged from everything you know, and told the fate of everything depends on you. It was a wonder any of them emerged relatively unscathed, physically and mentally.
And she was moving on. A new career path, far removed from anything involving giant, battle robots, far from any combat. She still worked out and sparred with her best friend, Yrta, a Galra who was also exorcising the worst of her demons. Life now, however, for Katie Holt, two months from presenting and defending her doctoral dissertation in technobotony, was about saving the universe through science, not war.
She studied the image crystal, her gaze following the familiar contours of her friends' faces. They were all still friends. Well…, except for him. Time and geography had done the inevitable; they'd all moved on, busy with family and careers.
Friendship, if expressed as a mathematical equation, was inextricably an inverse function of distance. There was only so much you could convey through a text or video message. They'd never be as close as they once were.
But they'd always be friends.
"I know Voltron is an important part of your past," Eric said. "I get it. But this isn't just about moving on. I worry about you. All this talk of crazy resurrection cults on the news feeds. You don't want to make yourself a target for fanatics."
"The 'Allura Lives' crowd isn't interested in me at all," she said. "As for Honerva's cult…according to their crackpot prophecy, Honerva will return when all the Paladins are sacrificed on Altea before Allura's statue. Since we're not stupid enough to hold reunions there anymore, the loonies are shit-out-of-luck." Nowadays, everyone was too busy for more than a quick vid-con, anyway.
"Religious nutters change their theology all the time."
"I can take care of myself."
Eric favored her with a pained smile and a slow nod. "My warrior woman. Except even warriors die. You're not invincible."
His concern stirred up two incompatible emotions: gratitude and resentment. She shifted the course of conversation. "It's just a photo, Eric. No different from than those." She pointed at a cluster of his image crystals on a nearby shelf.
"That's different. They're family."
"So are these guys!"
Eric rubbed a hand over his short black hair. "Okay, okay." He held out his hand and she handed him the image crystal. He studied it and after a beat said, "Who's the guy with his hands all over you?"
"What?"
He tapped Lance McClain's face. "Him."
"He doesn't have his hands all over me." In the photo, Lance was behind her, one arm leaned on the back of her shoulders in his typical loose-limbed manner. "He's also got a hand on Hunk."
"So, he's a grabby fucker."
She sighed. Eric had a jealous streak. It never manifested as anything dangerous or controlling; she knew enough about people to be wary of that kind of bullshit. His jealously skirted the line between flattering and annoying.
"He was…is from a big family. Touchy is his thing." It was hard to speak in present tense about someone who refused to speak to her.
"Katie, darling, there's touchy and there's grabby, and that guy is giving me a definite 'all hands below deck' vibe. You sure you two didn't…?"
"Oh, for quiznak's sake, turn down the testosterone. Lance treated me like one of the guys. He only had eyes for Allura."
Eric handed back the image crystal. "Oh, right. He's Mr. Tragic Love Story."
"Don't be cruel." She really didn't want to defend Lance, of all people. "He's a good guy. You'd probably like him." He's an irritating showoff, just like you.
"Good guy? Isn't Lance the one that blew you guys off?"
Katie shrugged. "I guess he really knows how to move on from Voltron." Maybe I should ask him for advice on doing that. Except, oh, wait…he stopped taking my calls years ago.
"Uh-huh." Eric chuckled. "Hey, you didn't have a crush on him back then, did you?"
Her eyes bugged out, and she wondered what her face had given away. "On Lance? Hel no!" The lie ramped her voice up several octaves. The only people who knew about her crush were her family and a couple of the Paladins and that was five too many.
Eric nodded, satisfied. "Good, because he's obviously the kind of guy who'd never be into you."
Stung, she spoke before thinking. "What's that supposed to mean?" Her eyes almost settled on Lance's face before she quickly shifted her attention, focusing on Hunk and Keith's contrasting versions of male attractiveness, square-jawed versus pretty boy.
He shrugged nonchalantly. "Ah, you know. He's the type that wants a girl on his arm that stops traffic. Eye candy."
"Whatever. It's not like I was into him." But just once, she thought, it might be fun, to be someone's eye candy.
Eric, fortunately dropped the subject, moving on to his favorite topic, himself. In retrospect, Katie wouldn't say that Eric Nelson PhD, PE (and a whole host of other initials after his name) was a bad guy. Sure, he was the stereotypical professor with a penchant for grad students. Which, unfortunately, made her said stereotypical grad student. And she was his third wife, which, to anyone not chasing normal like a crazed dog after cars, should have been a red flag.
But he had been fun. For a while, until he got threatened by her career success, a process that only took a year. But in the end, she'd done the leaving, and in the process hurt him more than he'd ever hurt her.
Her eyes moved involuntarily to the guy behind her in the picture, Mr. Tragic Love Story, cute, funny, and astonishingly annoying. He could be grabby, she thought. Just not bad grabby. Her gaze skated down, settling on Lance's slim hand, which really wasn't a safer resting place, so instead she panned upward and focused on Shiro's face.
At first, when Lance dropped out of sight, ignoring her calls and messages, she'd been hurt. Okay, it still hurt a little even now. She had, however, no time to mourn—not lost friendship or childhood, or the collateral damage of everything Voltron—in the ensuing years. Work, school, reconnecting with her mom (over plants, no less), and sometimes, albeit reluctantly, helping Matt and her dad with their stuff. She barely had time to date, much less moon around over someone who didn't care enough to reply to a message.
Plus, deep down, she envied Lance and his escape from all things Voltron.
Eric wasn't the only reason she'd put aside her past (aside for a fondness for the color green). In the early days, no one saw her as anything besides the quirky, androgynous Green Paladin. Being the center of attention made her uncomfortable, and her lack of social skills made fame all the more challenging.
It might have been tolerable if people didn't pepper her with questions about the experience. Or at least, asked something intelligent like: "How exactly do the lions join up to form Voltron? Technical details and specs, please."
No. Instead, the questions dipped into the shallow, adolescent side of the press pool: "What's Keith like? He's so dreamy. Is it true you two were in love? Hunk is adorable; can you get me his number? If you were trapped on a deserted island, which Paladin would you wish to be trapped with?" Her answer to the latter question—"None of them. Who needs another mouth to feed?"—spawned several months of tabloid speculation that the Paladins had despised each other.
"This is why I hate people," observed Keith, Paladin of the Red, and later, Black Lion. "And why I never talk to the press."
"I guess it's a good thing," Katie had replied, "that I didn't go with my first answer: 'Shiro or Hunk. They're the biggest and would provide the most meat.'"
Keith had laughed. "Next time, say that. Please."
By far, the most popular question was: "Did you ever hook up with any of the other Paladins?"
Because five, six, counting Allura, attractive young adults in a flying castle couldn't possibly be just friends. Katie smirked. Okay, admittedly, teenage hormones plus no parents should have added up to more sex than a brothel in New Las Vegas.
But it hadn't. Except for Lance and Allura, team Voltron was astonishingly platonic.
Of them all, Lance was the only one who spent much time chasing romance. Katie had been too consumed with finding and rescuing her father and brother to give a space mouse's hairy little ass about getting laid. Identity, a heritage that included a race of genocidal imperialists, probably put on a damper on Keith's love life. Hunk, in the early days especially, was too unnerved by the metric ton of crazy that got dropped on his plate. And Shiro, well Shiro had the unenviable job of playing space dad to a bunch of Galaxy Garrison cadets.
"You need a ride to the office?" Eric asked, snapping her from her thoughts. "I can drop you there on the way to uptown."
"Uh, no. I'll just walk. I need the exercise."
"Love you, babe. See you at seven." He kissed her and left.
She scooped up her bag, realizing the image crystal was still in her hands. Why keep it all? At times, looking at all their faces, so painfully young, made her ache. Plus, she had other, more recent photos of everyone, even Coran.
Except him. I'm keeping it for him.
Shit.
Lifting her gaze from the photo, she looked toward the kitchen, thinking of the waste incinerator. It would be gratifying to burn the last vexing reminder of her stupid, childhood crush. Suddenly emboldened, filled with purpose, she marched to the spot where carpet gave way to kitchen tile. Three steps more, a tap on the "open" button, and she stared into the incinerator, its gray metal interior slightly ashy. Holding the image over the incinerator's mouth, her gaze dropped squarely onto Lance's face. Long lines that drew an angular, but boyishly handsome face. Thin, almost elegant eyebrows cocked at a goofy angle.
Trapped in his eyes, she saw something there that she—and all the other Paladins—had failed to see: Goodbye. Even then, amid the happy laughter of their reunion, he had already left them. Unable to pull away entirely from his face, she fixed her gaze on the blue Altean mark under his left eye.
Shit.
She shut the incinerator. Heaving a sigh, she returned to the living room, set the image crystal down on the side table and left the apartment.
Thanks heaps and bunches for reading my story!