"Well then, Number Four, I'm afraid that's as close as we'll be able to land, but I'm sure you'll have no trouble. It looks like a nice enough planet."
Pidge leans halfway out the hatch of the shuttle. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a blur of movement as Keith does the same on the other side. The clearing they've come down in is an isolated sunny spot, ringed on all sides by a thick, shadowy tangle of forest. She can't see more than a meter or two into the undergrowth and the air is dense with a chorus of high-pitched chirps and clicks emanating from the canopy.
She frowns. "Are you sure this is the right place?" She'd been bracing for something like the Knell. But there's no sign of a Green Lion. No loud, insistent ringing, nothing pulling at her. Just a sense of something waiting.
"Of course! The castle's sensors might need a little dust blown off them, but they certainly don't lie. And you've the tracker as well."
Pidge casts a glance down at the tracker, a roughly game controller-shaped object with a v-shaped symbol on its back in the ubiquitous white and blue of the castle. Its screen shows a fuzzy signal somewhere to their left. "Yeah. I guess."
Coran pauses and clears his throat. The markings under his eyes flicker as his face shadows. It lasts only a moment before his expression smooths determinedly. "I'm sure you'll have no trouble. You're all bright lads - fine future paladins. Numbers One and Two as well. I'd come with you if I could, but, well." He sighs. "There's work to be done on the castle, I'm afraid, and not much time to do it in. There's no getting away from ten-thousand decaphoebs. Why," he gives the instrument panel an affectionate pat, "you wouldn't believe what I had to clean out of the vectoring baffles on the shuttle alone."
She gives him a dubious look, which Keith echoes. Coran staunchly ignores it. "Now you and Number Three just need to follow the signal there and it should lead you straight to it. And if you find yourselves in any trouble, just give old Coran a call. You remember how, right?"
She dutifully demonstrates the sequence he'd shown them on the tracker. The console of the shuttle lets out an answering chime.
"Excellent!" Coran beams, and the ends of his mustache curl a little tighter. "Now off you go, no time to waste."
He ushers them out the hatch and they watch as the shuttle ascends back into the sky. They're left standing there side-by-side, all alone on an alien planet. It feels weirdly disorienting. The last time she and Keith were by themselves, they were back on Earth, sitting under his bike stabilizer and arguing with each other. That seems so far away she might as well have dreamed it. Keith feels oddly subdued, his thoughts wound up tight, and the link stretches awkwardly out between them. After several uncomfortable seconds of silence pass without any better ideas, she huffs and ducks her head to focus on the tracker, adjusting the knobs until the signal comes in clear. She stares down at it and listens again, concentrating. There's the flutter of animal noise from the forest, and the familiar hum of Keith's presence. And far, far past that, there's a distant stir and a high, clear chime of not-sound. Something kicks in her chest and her breath catches.
She looks up and points the tracker to line up with the signal. "Looks like it's that way."
Keith makes a noncommittal grunt and squints into the undergrowth. "Kind of a trail over there."
She squints too and picks it out, a narrow gap in the brush. "I guess we follow it."
He hums under his breath, and they set off.
After an initial struggle past a net of thick, vine-like vegetation, the path is clear going. From the air, the forest hadn't looked all that different from one on Earth, but deep down in the understory, it's obvious that they're far from home. The trees have no bark, just a tough, translucent green skin. If she looks up to the canopy, she can see the tips of their limbs slowly coiling and uncoiling, winding their way towards the light. Something above them makes a repeating scale of tinny, high-pitched buzzing noises, but there's no other sound aside from the muffled tramp of their feet in the loam. It's engrossing in a way that's a little eerie.
"Sorry." Keith's voice breaks her out of her thoughts, so abruptly that she jumps a little. He's looking slightly away from her, stiff-shouldered like he wants to cross his arms, holding himself out of the connection as much as he can. "About back at the Garrison. Not leaving when you told me."
She blinks. Somehow, she hadn't really expected him to apologize. "Oh," she says a little awkwardly. "I'm sorry too. For calling you an asshole." She side-eyes him. "Still mad at you for doing it, though."
He snorts. "I didn't-" he pauses, and she waits while he figures out how to get his thoughts into words. "I still think it was worth the risk. To find out what happened to Shiro. But I didn't think-" He pauses again and frowns. "It wasn't fair to you."
"You mean you were fine with getting yourself arrested, you just didn't think I'd care," she bites out, mad all over again. He doesn't say anything, but the flinch is telling. His shoulders hunch again and the link prickles. "Dick move, Keith," she mumbles.
They tramp another couple of paces forward, and she hears him let out a long, quiet breath. "Yeah. It was. Sorry."
It's a short, bald apology, but there's nothing thoughtless or glib about it. He means it. She thinks about that moment at the Garrison when she'd known he was going to get caught, heart in her mouth, sick to her stomach. And she thinks about her mother, worn and frayed and older, picking her up at the Garrison gatehouse after the first time she'd broken in, about cutting her hair and taking Matt's glasses and disappearing off the bus on her way home, about counting down the days until she's a missing person.
Guilt squirms in her gut. "You were right, too," she says at last. "About me doing the same thing." The connection flickers, and she feels his eyes on her. "When I went to the Garrison, I kind of knew I might get caught. It just… it didn't seem important. It was worth it. To know what happened to them." She swallows against a lump in her throat, feels Keith hesitating at the edge of her mind.
"Yeah. I know," he says roughly. "It was…" her sense of him abruptly goes hard and opaque, like all his thoughts have crunched in on themselves. "Sometimes I thought it would be easier," he says in a rush, "if the launch had failed. If there'd been something there. But they just disappeared, and no one seemed to care." He lets out a hard breath that shudders a little at the end. Over the link, she feels his nails bite into his gloves. "They were just gone."
"Yeah," she gets out shakily, thinking about how between one day and the next Matt and her dad had gone from far away to lost, how inside of a couple of weeks no one said their names around her. "Yeah, exactly."
The silence stretches out between them, raw and painful. Keith's side of the link is choked and bitter, a familiar hurt that feels too private to look at. She clutches the tracker until her knuckles creak and withdraws as far as she can from the connection, feels him do the same, leaving her as much privacy as he's able. She wonders once again what his relationship is to Shiro, but the thought doesn't linger. It doesn't matter.
"I guess we're both kind of fucked up, huh?" Keith says quietly.
The therapist had talked to her a lot about grief and trauma. Simple, clean words with concise entries in the dictionary and chapters in self-help books, organized into stages and progressions, nice neat charts and bite-sized descriptions. Fucked up feels a lot more honest. "Yeah. I guess we are." It's a relief to say it. Something terrible happened, and they're not fine, or okay, or getting over it. And it should be better now that they know they're not dead, but somehow it isn't. They're still gone, and she'd take every single chance all over again if she thought it would get them back.
"…You think Hunk is right? About us taking risks?"
Keith's presence twists wryly. "Does it matter? I don't think either of us are going to stop doing it."
She gives a humorless snort. "No. Probably not."
His thoughts shift, working at something. "Look," he says at last. "I can't promise I'm not going to screw up again. I'm not-" a flash of inward frustration, and a brief struggle for words, quickly tamped down. "-I know I'm not good with stuff like that. But I'll try. If you tell me something, I'll listen."
"…Okay." She lets out a long, slow breath. "Me too. It goes both ways, right?" If she'd been talking to Keith before she left for the Garrison… yeah. She could have told him what she was planning. Could have let him help her plan, could have trusted him to back her up.
Keith makes one of his weird humming thinking noises and his shoulders come down a notch. "Deal." He pauses a beat, eyes flicking to her. "Are we… okay now?"
She considers, but she can already feel the knot in her chest easing. "Yeah. I think we are."
"Good." He gives her a cautious smile, a quick, shy flash of white teeth, and she returns it. Slowly the link relaxes between them, wrung out like the sky after a storm, and her breath comes easier, a weight lifting.
They continue on for a while in silence, neither of them much inclined to say anything, though they both drift half-consciously to walk down the trail side-by-side. When they come to a place where they have to scrabble up a rocky embankment, Keith wordlessly offers her a boost to the top and she takes it without having to think about it. After the frenetic pace of the last couple of days, it's a relief to make their way through the quiet of the forest without much else to do but follow the tracker. Pidge keeps an eye on its indicator as they go. The path still seems to be leading them in more-or-less the right direction despite the way it twists through the trees. The ring of the Lion is still there in the back of her head, high and clear and constant now, a gentle pull under her sternum. It's persistent and tangible, but not the insistent shout of the Knell. She gives it a cautious prod, but it yields nothing more than a momentary intensification of the pulling feeling.
"Hey. Can you hear-?"
Keith raises a brow. "It's your Lion."
"You heard the Blue-"
"So did you."
"But you were better at it."
He gives a shrug, and his end of the link goes exposed and uncomfortable. "I was just hearing it longer."
"True," she allows.
After a second he sighs and tips his head back, and for a moment, all the forest sounds go soft and distant in the back of her mind. The high, thready hum persists. "Maybe something? Hard to tell." His eyes dart to her. "You're hearing it, right?"
"Yeah. But it's… quiet." She frowns down at the tracker. "The Knell was…" She doesn't bother to finish the sentence. They both know what she means.
"Different Lion," he points out.
"Yeah. I guess."
He turns it over for a few steps, fingers flexing absently. "I don't know. Maybe it's not awake? Not powered up?"
"Maybe."
Keith makes a startled noise in the back of his throat, and she nearly runs into him as he stops. The path ahead of them is blocked by a network of snaky, root-like structures arching out of the ground. "Whoa," Pidge breathes, staring up at it. The gaps between the limbs glitter in the sunlight, glistening with tiny droplets suspended on hair-like filaments. As they watch, some tiny flying creature flits into the network, coming to a struggling halt as it hits the sticky fibers. The roots curl up around it, knotting over themselves.
"Let's go around," Keith says dryly.
"Let's," she agrees, with a full-body shudder. They tack left, making a wide swing around the root things and their web, continuing on with more caution. She frowns. As thrilling as the thought of flying an alien spaceship is, just about everything about the Lions is still a mystery. "I'm still not sure what a paladin even is, exactly, or why the Lions need them."
Keith gives a snort before lapsing into a long, thinking silence. "Lance said the Lion was talking to him," he says at last.
"Yeah," she says, and grimaces. She's been trying not to think about that. She hesitates, and then spits it out. "We're probably stuck like this-" she waves a hand at the air between their heads "-because of the Knell in the first place. What if the Lion makes it worse?"
That uncomfortable thought sinks between them like a stone. Right now, the link between them feels stable, but she's pretty sure it only feels that way because they're both being careful. What if whatever psychic connection comes with the Lion overwhelms that isolation? Her grip on the tracker tightens as a cold shiver crawls up her spine, and she feels it secondhand as the hair prickles at the back of Keith's neck.
After a second, he shakes his head. "Pretty sure we'd know if Lance was getting any of this," he says, and repeats her vague gesture between their heads.
She snorts and some of the tension goes out of her. "Yeah, okay. Point." She considers. "Maybe it's not the same thing. It just seemed like it was telling him how to fly, not-"
"-snooping?"
"Yeah."
Keith frowns and she can feel him chewing over some thought. "Are you sure you want to do this?" She glances over to him, startled, and he gives a sharp jerk of his chin. "We just got stuck like this by accident, but-"
But if there is a chance of the Lion squatting in her head or making the link worse, she could avoid it. She bites at her lip a long few seconds before finally shaking her head. "Even if there is a risk, if the Empire's trying to find the Lions-"
"-they're our best best for finding Shiro and Matt and your dad."
She lets out a breath. "Yeah." She looks over to him. "What about you? Are you okay with this?"
"It's the only lead we have." He goes quiet a moment before letting out a hiss through his teeth. "If it really is a problem, we'll just… figure out how to deal with it."
"I mean… we figured it out once before," she says slowly. "We can do it again." He hums an agreement and she nods. As much as she doesn't want the link to get any worse, at least the way it works between her and Keith is a known quantity. The thought's still far from comfortable, but they're on the same page and they've got a plan. Sort of. Hunk would probably disapprove, but what Hunk doesn't know won't hurt him.
A while later, the trail winds around a thick stand of trees and they emerge blinking into the sunlight where a river cuts through the forest. They exchange a glance before Keith shrugs and skates cautiously down the muddy bank. Pidge follows, and they stand side by side on the shore, looking out across the wide ribbon of brown water. She looks down at the tracker. The marker points points steadily downstream. The high hum in her head seems louder, rhythmic almost, and the pull in her chest tugs insistently in the same direction, making her heart thump a little harder.
Keith cocks his head, eying the silhouette of something distant flying low over the water. "What now?"
"It's somewhere down there." She gestures and glances over to him, curious. "Can't you tell?"
He shrugs. "It's like the Knell. Hard to pinpoint." He brings up a hand to shade his eyes against the sun. "Feels pretty far though. Guess we've got a ways to walk."
"Ugh."
His eyes flick over to her. "I think it's nice."
"Easy for someone who lived in the middle of nowhere to say."
"I like it. It's quiet." It's deadpan, but there a betraying curl in the link. He's teasing her a little.
She makes a face. "I like quiet better when it's not full of bugs."
He snorts and squints across the river, frowns suddenly. "Is that a boat?"
"Wait, really?"
Sure enough, there's a low shape moving across the water, steered by a tall person in the stern. It pulls closer while they watch, and it gradually becomes clear that the tall person is very tall, and also very hairy. They have a smiling, enigmatic face, and there's a bag with little patterns stitched into its strap slung over their shoulder. She can feel Keith watching as well, fascinated and a little wary. The skiff pulls in close to the bank and the ferryperson regards them curiously. They lean over the side with a deep crooning sound, and she and Keith both take a cautious step back. The croon quiets, and very deliberately, they lean away again. A little of the tension loosens out of Keith's spine.
Pidge raises a hand in a cautious wave. "Uh, hi? We come in peace?"
The croon fires back up, rising in tone and interspersed with a series of deep clicks. The ferryperson very slowly leans back towards them and extends a hand toward her. She holds her position, not sure what to do, but the hand stops a few inches away from her, hovering over the tracker Coran had given them, exposed now that she's taken her hand off it. She frowns and looks down. The clicks come a little faster, and their visitor taps a horny nail at the tracker's side, tracing out the symbol on it.
"What are they doing?"
"I don't know." She frowns, and after a moment's hesitation, holds the tracker out for the ferryperson to inspect. They lean further over and tap at it again before lifting their hand to gesture at her and Keith and then back to it. "They recognize the symbol, I think?"
He frowns thoughtfully. "Maybe they know about the castle? Or the Lion?"
"Maybe." The ferryperson gives another low, excited hum, and deliberately raps at the symbol again before pointing to them, and then the boat. "I guess they want us to get in."
"But where are they going?" he asks dubiously.
"I don't know." Their guest repeats the gesture, a little slower and more insistently. "They definitely know something about it."
Keith cocks his head, fingers tapping a slow rhythm against his thigh. "Up to you," he says finally. "It's your Lion."
She looks down the river and listens. The clear, high thrum goes warmer and deeper as she turns her head, and Keith blinks, eyes suddenly a little distant. The pull in her chest turns sharp for an instant. "Let's take the boat."
Their visitor gives a pleased-sounding click as they cautiously board the skiff. Once they're settled, they lean on their pole and move them out into the river's flow. Though it looks calm on the surface, the current must be powerful - they glide along far faster than she would have thought. Their guide is mostly quiet, but occasionally turns their head to deliver a series of low clicks. Keith is sunk deep into his own thoughts, tracking the flying creatures skimming over the water with subdued fascination, his presence a familiar hum in the back of her mind.
Pidge watches the bank drift past, listening to the Lion's call as it grows louder and clearer. Her fingers trace the crest on the tracker's side, following the sweep of it by feel. She pinches her lips together, feels a queasy sort of disquiet take up residence in her stomach. Their guide clearly knows the symbol. Is it just something they've seen elsewhere? Or do they understand where it comes from? Are they looking at it and just seeing a design, or are they expecting Voltron?
She shifts to push herself a little more securely into the skiff's stern, thoughts circling back to the way Allura had talked about the Lions. As if they were legends. A force for good. Something so unique and crucial that Allura and Coran had been left behind to safeguard them while their civilization burned. As if being a paladin were an honor and a responsibility.
The Blue Lion was amazing. A Lion of her own would be incredible. But even leaving aside the question of what it'll do to the link, all she wants to do is find Matt and her dad.
The connection ripples, and Keith flicks a glance over to her, frowning faintly. "You okay?"
"Yeah," she says slowly. "Just thinking."
His eyes stay on her a moment, but he just gives a thoughtful hum and goes back to watching the shore, carefully keeping his thoughts away from hers. She slumps back against the gunwale and turns to watch their wake.
At last, their guide leans on their pole and turns the boat in towards the shore. They draw up alongside a rocky pier in a weedy inlet half-hidden in the trees, crumbling with age. A ziggurat-like structure looms behind it, tangled in old growth. The ferryperson makes another crooning series of clicks and taps at the symbol on the tracker again before gesturing towards the shore.
"End of the line, I guess," Keith remarks.
"Yeah."
They disembark and she waves to the ferryperson. "Thanks." They rumble in response and tap the back of their hand to their forehead. The skiff draws away and she and Keith are left standing in the pyramid's shadow. From the base, it looks enormous, impenetrable. The note in her head is clear and close as a heartbeat now, pulling gently but insistently towards the structure. It might just be her imagination, but there's something anticipatory about it, a subtle thrill of interest and intent.
She takes a deep breath. "It's definitely in there." Her feet are frozen to the ground, fingers clutching the tracker hard enough to turn her knuckles white.
Keith's brows knit. "Pidge?"
"Just-" she swallows dryly, the words jumping out of her without her meaning them to. "What if I'm not really its paladin? What if it doesn't want me?"
Keith frowns and tilts his head. "Why wouldn't it?"
"I'm not a pilot. I've never flown anything. What if I can't fly it at all? What if I'm too short to reach the pedals, or my arms are too stumpy to move the sticks? What if I'm just bad at it? What if-"
He blinks, baffled. "You're overthinking it."
"There's a lot that could go wrong here!"
"Either it'll work or it won't. Only one way to find out." He frowns. "Besides, the Blue Lion doesn't have pedals."
"Of course you noticed that." She takes a breath and the truth creeps out of her, small and unsteady. "Maybe Voltron's supposed to be some kind of legend, but I don't want to fight an empire or save the universe or anything. I just want to get Dad and Matt back."
He's quiet for a moment, watching her. Eventually, he gives a deliberate shrug and glances away. "If the Green Lion doesn't want you because of that, then the Red Lion's probably not going to want me either." He shifts on his feet and there's a cautious, awkward nudge through the link. "Look, if that happens, we just do it without the Lions. It's not like before where they were just gone. We know they're out there somewhere. We're out here now." A split second of hesitation before he continues. "We're friends, right? We stick together and we get them back."
Her throat goes tight as a sudden, fierce rush of gratitude wells up in her. Keith blinks and ducks his head, the tips of his ears going red. "You'll be fine," he mumbles.
"Thanks." He goes stiff as she latches onto him in a hug. After a moment, his spine loosens and he very carefully hugs her back. They rest like that for a couple of heartbeats before she pulls away and takes a breath, listening to the Lion's hum, close and eager. A memory of her dad flashes through her head, that day he'd brought her to visit the launchpad right after he'd accepted the Kerberos mission. "You can't let fear hold you back from something great." She shoves Matt's glasses up on her nose and feels herself steady. "Okay. Wish me luck."
The corner of his mouth quirks, and for an instant there's a strange double-echo of the Lion's note, warm and resonant. "Don't think you'll need it."
Scaling the ziggurat is easier going than it looks. Vines grow thick over it, packed so tight it's almost like climbing a ladder, and with every beat of the Lion's call she seems to find another handhold. Finally, she stands panting at the top of the structure, peering down into a dark chasm choked with vegetation. The interior is pitch black, but the note in her head is overwhelming now, a steady, clear ring. She gauges the tangle of vines, and crouches to find a way inside.
As she does, the thrum comes to a halt, and she freezes. There's a sense of something huge and ancient looming over her, a draw of focused attention like the inexorable, inescapable pull of a magnet against iron filings. For a split second, she's afraid - it's so vast and strange, it's like being under the scrutiny of a star or a mountain. The tiny prick of warmth in the back of her mind that is Keith's presence is still and frozen as well, before his heart gives a hard thump and a terrified burst of adrenaline floods the connection. But then that vast presence seems to settle, folding itself down small until its size is comprehensible. The thrum comes back, and this time the warmth under it is clearer, welcoming. It waits patiently at the borders of her self, curious and interested, its hum loud and clear and bright. Holding her breath, she reaches back out to it.
There's a strange moment where her thoughts go quicksilver and electric and her heart is an engine. The chill of vacuum between the stars and the hidden gravitational paths between planets are briefly familiar, and there's a sense of fit and rightness, like the teeth of gears meshing together. The Lion turns its attention to the corner of her mind where Keith's presence lives. He's stock still, but behind the rush of fight-or-flight, there's an ache of awe and curiosity. The Lion prods gently at the link and he startles. There's a different sense of fit, a feeling of right-but-not-mine, and the Lion sings another long, clear note before retreating to a steady rumble at the bounds of her consciousness.
Pidge opens her eyes and catches her breath, exhilarated and bizarrely at home. The Lion's a bulwark to one side of her thoughts, Keith a blazing beacon at the other, and in that moment, it feels like that's the way it should be. She slips through a gap in the vines and trusts the Lion to catch her.