Two wormholes and a chaotic, indeterminable amount of time later, Pidge and Keith hover in the castle's infirmary. Keith shifts back and forth on his feet, fighting the urge to roll his shoulder against the cuff that's supposed to support the joint and numb the ache until the pods free up. Pidge flicks him an annoyed glance. You're going to make it worse. He goes to shrug, but remembers the cuff in time and has to settle for an awkward, unsatisfactory one-shouldered motion.

Next to them, Zaas slowly laps a runny mix of food goo and water from a bowl. It is somehow even less appetizing than regular food goo, but Coran has assured them that it's nutritious and "easy on the digestive system for a multitude of species". The other rescuees had looked similarly dubious at that, which makes Pidge suspect that food goo might not be the universal space travel constant Coran wants them to think it is. Across the room, Lance and Hunk shepherd the weaker prisoners one-by-one over to Coran for medical evaluation while the others huddle in small groups of twos and threes in the seating area.

"I can't tell you much," Zaas says gummily around a mouthful of goo. "The people who looked like you-"

"Humans," she interjects.

"The humans," they agree, with a fast, blinking glance between her and Keith. "They were brought in a long time ago. Close to a decaphoeb, maybe."

Keith's whole spine is tense, his thumb passing across his knuckles over and over again. "You said they took two of them to the arena."

"The two younger ones. Yes."

She frowns. "What exactly is the arena?"

Zaas blinks several times in rapid succession. "Entertainment." They pause before continuing, their voice slow and bitter. "They take prisoners for the single-combat matches sometimes. Usually the ones from the edge of the Empire, as a curiosity."

Keith lets out a low, slow hiss, something ugly clawing at the inside of his chest. A bruising pain in her palms jolts her, and she finds she's clenched her fists in tandem with him. She can't get the thought of Matt out of her head, Matt with his shitty puns and his flaily, noodly arms, who'd broken his nose once walking into the automatic door at the supermarket.

The silence has enough time to grow thick before Zaas continues. "I heard the black-haired one became Champion."

"'Champion,'" Keith gets out, voice tight.

"It's been a long time since a prisoner held that title." They look as if they might say something more, but a glance at Keith's face stops them.

"What about the other? Do you know what happened to him?" she makes herself ask.

"No. I am sorry."

She swallows, can't decide if she's relieved or not.

Keith shifts on his feet, pulling himself out of the black cloud of thought weltering under the word Champion with an effort. "What about the one they didn't take to the arena?"

Zaas lowers their chin, jewel-like eyes glinting. "One of the work camps, perhaps," they suggest after a moment. "They transferred him with Taviknakip and Dapp to another ship. I am truly sorry. I wish I could offer more."

Keith gives a rough shake of his head. "It's fine. It's more than we had."

She does her best to tamp down the disappointment. He's right. It's a lead. Something they can follow. "Yeah. It helps. Thanks."

Zaas gives them a long, slow look. "The least I could do." Their eyes shutter closed once and open. "I had thought I would live out the rest of my time in a cell or on a worker's gang. Rescue was most unexpected and most welcome." They tilt their head, and for an instant, their eyes flick their focus to Keith in unison. "No easy thing to stand against the Empire." There's something a little odd about their inflection, but it might just be the translator.

"Hey! Pidge! Keith!" They both jerk upright at the interruption. Lance is leaning a shoulder on the wall behind them in an artfully casual pose, Hunk hovering next to him. Over his shoulder, she can see the line of former prisoners finally empty, Coran making his way to the door. "The Princess says she wants to talk to us."

She and Keith exchange a glance. "Fine-" Keith says.

"-We'll be there in a minute."

Lance gives them a skeptical, eyebrows-raised look at that, but just waves a hand vaguely towards the hall. "Next room to the left."

"We'll tell her you're coming," Hunk adds helpfully, and they meander off.

"Paladins." They turn back to find Zaas examining them carefully. "Talk to Rulla, if you want to know more about the arena." They gesture to the pod closest to them, holding a person of bear-like proportions with a blunt, trunk-nosed face peppered in scars. "I think she passed time there." They hesitate. "But be careful. She is unpredictable."

Pidge draws a breath, feels Keith echo it. A tiny, ferocious hope sparks between them. "Thanks-"

"-We will."

"Ah, Number Three and Number Four! There you are." Coran waves them over to where the others are circled in a loose huddle in the middle of the room. "As I was just saying, most of your new friends should be in good shape with a few movements of rest and food." He sniffs. "Most disgraceful, for them to be kept in such condition."

"Yeah," Hunk adds. "That was…" he shakes his head. "I don't get it. How can anyone do that to people?"

"I dunno dude, I think it just goes with being an evil empire." The words are flippant, but there's an uncomfortable, serious cast to Lance's features.

"It was unnecessarily cruel," Allura says curtly, before her expression softens. "But I am glad to hear that they will make a recovery."

Keith shifts on his feet. "You wanted to see us?"

"Yes." Allura inhales and smooths her skirts briskly before straightening her spine. "I wanted to thank you all. I appreciate that you have all been thrust into unfamiliar circumstances and set a difficult and dangerous task. I am very aware that it cannot be easy, but you have all performed admirably. To have retrieved the Lions so quickly - it gives me hope."

Lance somehow affects a swagger while stationary. "I guess some of us are just born to-"

"However," Allura continues, her voice suddenly hard, "I cannot approve of you taking careless risks. Keith. Pidge. Would you care to explain?"

Pidge feels her jaw set stubbornly, and Keith's mental presence goes bristling and sharp-edged with the instantaneous snap of an old reflex. "We got the Red Lion. We did what we were supposed to do," he bites out.

"You were supposed to locate the Red Lion and escape with all possible haste."

"We-"

Pidge cuts hotly in before he can finish. "We couldn't just leave people in there!"

Allura frowns down at them. "I understand that. And I am glad that you were able to rescue these people, but according to them, you purposefully sought them out. You intentionally derailed your mission."

"It turned out fine," Pidge says mutinously.

"We got everybody out," Keith adds.

"You were also nearly captured, if your new acquaintances are to be believed," interjects Coran quietly, in a more serious tone than she's yet heard from him.

"We-"

Allura's lips press into a thin line, the markings on her cheeks going flat and dark. She holds up a hand. "No. You endangered yourselves. You endangered your comrades. And I need to understand why."

They flinch back in unison, stung.

"Uh, yeah." Lance breaks the silence after a couple of seconds. "I mean, it was pretty bad out there. And I get that you had to help those guys. I'd have done the same! But I can't pretend I'm not pissed that you just kind of went off and did your own thing without, you know. Giving us some kind of warning."

Hunk's brow knits as he looks to each of them in turn. "I'm kind of with Lance on this one. We kept waiting and waiting and you didn't show up. And I was really glad when you finally called in, but-" he draws a deep breath "-I think we kind of deserve an explanation."

A beat of tense, guilty silence holds. She and Keith exchange a look, and something gives.

He hunches further into his jacket, shoulder twinging faintly. "It was the same ship that took the Kerberos crew. We-"

Hunk blinks. "Really? The same ship?"

Pidge gives a sharp nod. "We overheard some of the guards. We thought-"

"-We thought they might still be there."

"Seriously? Kerberos again?" Lance narrows his eyes. "What is it with you guys and-"

Allura cuts him off, lips pinched as though she's trying to puzzle something out. "This was the expedition from your planet? That the galra captured some time ago?"

"Yeah. That's that one," Hunk nods.

She examines them another long moment, brow creased. "I understand that you must have felt an obligation to help them, but-"

"But what?" Keith snaps.

"But you took a terrible risk going after them by yourselves."

"You're saying we should have just left them?" Pidge bursts out.

Allura pauses delicately. "Not indefinitely, but-"

Keith sucks in a sharp breath. Something cracks and splits in her chest. "That was my dad and my brother!"

"And Shiro," puts in Keith stubbornly through gritted teeth.

"Wait, what?" says Lance. "Your dad and brother? What do you mean that was-"

It's out now. There's no taking it back. "My name's actually Katie Holt," she gets out in a rush. "Also I'm a girl," she mumbles as an afterthought. Next to her, Keith bunches up his shoulders like a cat trying to make itself look bigger, doing his level best to stare down the rest of the room.

"What?" says Lance.

"Oh," says Hunk, a little abashedly. "I, uh, kind of suspected that part, but I didn't want to make you uncomfortable or anything. Should we call you Katie?"

"Pidge is fine," she says tightly.

"Ah." Coran clears his throat softly. "Then the missing crew are family for both of you?"

There's a painful hesitation from Keith. "Yes," Pidge says firmly, and gives him a mental shove. After half a second, he nods stiffly.

Allura blinks several times, something in her expression softening. "I am sorry." The iridescent markings under her eyes go dim and then bright again. "I do understand."

Both of them stay wary, prickling with tension. It's the kind of sentence people are always saying when there's a "but" attached to it.

Sure enough, Allura continues on. "But it was still a reckless course of action."

The hair at the back of Keith's neck hackles. "We're not-"

"We're not just giving up on them," Pidge bites out.

Allura holds up a hand. "And you shouldn't. But you could have told us." Pidge takes a breath to protest, but Allura keeps going, frowning delicately. "Perhaps not while you were in the ship, but certainly afterwards. We could have gone after them later, all of us, with a plan and less risk to you and them. We could have helped."

She blinks, feels Keith freeze in place next to her.

"Yeah," Hunk says into the sudden quiet. "I was really worried about you guys. I thought maybe they'd got you. And, I mean, going by what they said, they did get you."

Lance coughs. "Yeah. I was starting to think-" he gives an uncomfortable shake of his head and runs a hand through his hair. "It's your family, right? I get it. But it wasn't a good feeling."

Allura examines them each in turn. She purses her lips, and her expression shifts into something a little uncertain. For the first time, Pidge wonders how old she is. "I do understand," she says very gently. "I do. And we will do everything we can to find your family. But you are neither of you expendable. You must not be so careless with yourselves."

Hunk nods. "We're all in this together, right? We have to help each other out."

Pidge blinks, feeling suddenly adrift. In the back of her head, she can feel Keith equally askew. For most of a year it's just been her and him, chasing ghosts into places they're not wanted, knowing there was no one who would believe them. Just them on their own against the world. It's settled into her bones, she realizes abruptly, the certainty that if they're going to find her dad and Matt and Shiro they're going to have to do it themselves. That there's no one else they can rely on.

But it's not really true anymore, is it? Lance and Hunk have been sucked into this right alongside them, and even when they didn't know anything about what was going on, they'd still been willing to take a risk to help them, simply because they knew her. Allura and Coran had been willing to put their own lives on the line for the slim chance that she and Keith might be able to steal the Red Lion back from her captors. Even the Lions, ageless and inscrutable, were willing to break millennia of slumber and relative safety for them. All of these people have trusted them.

Maybe they should trust them back a little.

She meets Keith's eyes. His thoughts are still wary, full of a sense of wait and watch. But at the edges, there's something new and hopeful, like the shy green things that bloom from hidden parts of the desert after a rainstorm.

She swallows, shoves Matt's glasses up on her nose. "I- Yeah. Sorry. We'll-"

"-we'll try," Keith finishes quietly.

Allura's expression eases. "That is all we can ask."

Much later, after the ex-prisoners have been settled and the rest of them have dispersed to clean up and rest, Pidge follows the restless thrum of Keith's thoughts up to a deck of the castle she hasn't seen yet. She finds him in a small, circular room, occupied mostly by a seating area sunk into its floor. It's dark, aside from a row of low blue running lights around its perimeter, and the opposite wall is consumed floor to ceiling with a view of space. At first glance it looks like a window, but when she peers closer, she can see the telltale jut and wiring of a screen. Keith is on the floor of the seating area, elbows resting loose on his drawn up knees, head tilted back against the seat to look up at the stars. His attention flicks toward her when she opens the door, and he half-turns to raise a hand in vague greeting. After a moment, she enters and clambers into the seating area to sit on the floor next to him.

"Hey," he says quietly.

"Hey yourself," she replies.

For a while, they just watch the stars together. It feels a little like the early days of their acquaintance, sitting side-by-side on the shack's porch and staring up at the darkening sky. She can feel him just at the edge of her thoughts, a steady, constant presence.

"Kind of wild that we're galaxies away from Earth right now," she says after a few minutes.

Keith hums an agreement. Most of his attention is still focused on the pinpricks of light in the darkness, his eyes reflecting oddly in the room's blue glow. In the underlayer of the link, she can feel a sense-memory of cold night air, the heavy, scuffed weight of binoculars in his hands, a kick of awe and longing in his chest as he watches the distant spark of a Garrison shuttle ascend. "Did you always want to go to space?" she asks after a moment, curious.

He's still for a couple of seconds, and she thinks he might not answer, or brush it off. "Yeah," he says finally. "Used to watch the stars with my dad when I was really little." A pause, and the corner of his mouth quirks. "Meeting Shiro kind of cemented it." There's another flash of memory, a thrill of speed and the sticks of a simulator in his hands and a voice over his shoulder. He glances over to her. "What about you?"

She thinks about it and he waits, content to let her. "Yeah," she says eventually. "Not the same way you did, I guess. There's so much we don't know, and going to space is hard. I just kind of wanted to figure all that out. Make it work." She pauses, suddenly melancholy. "Matt was the same, I think. Dad was the one who really wanted to explore for exploring's sake."

A silence settles down on them. After a moment, Keith sighs and shifts, inching himself a little more upright against the seat. "I'm sorry. That we didn't really find anything on your dad."

"We've got more than we did before. At least we know where Matt and Shiro went." She pulls her knees to her chest and tries not to let it be disappointing that they don't have anything more. It's a step forward, even if it doesn't feel like it.

He looks down at her, brow creased, before letting out a sigh. "Yeah." He settles back against the seat, and very carefully, bumps his shoulder against hers. "We'll find them, okay? Your dad too."

She swallows past the lump in her throat. "Yeah. We will." After a moment, she takes a deliberate breath. "Matt's going to give me so much crap for stealing his glasses again." Keith makes an inquiring hum. "I hid them from him for like a week when I was ten after he overwrote my Darkblade III save."

It startles a muffled breath of laughter out of him. "Shiro probably isn't going to let me live down stealing the Red Lion either." There's an old, mostly-buried sense of remembered anger and shock and fondness tangled together under it. She eyes him curiously and prods a query over. He watches her sidelong and his mouth twists like he's not sure whether or not he wants to smile. "I stole his car once."

She splutters into a cackle and files that information away for future use. "I think a Lion is a step up."

Keith just snorts at her.

Thinking about Matt and her dad still aches. She misses them, and she can feel Keith nursing along the old hurt of Shiro's absence. But it doesn't hold the crushing finality it used to. She can tell stories like this now and it's just bittersweet, as much fondness as there is sting in it. They're still out there somewhere. They know where to start looking. They're going to find them and get them back.

The Green Lion croons a long, satisfied note in the back of her head and she blinks. Keith catches it and looks over to her. "I guess the Lions are going to be a shock when we do find them. You think they're going to know what Voltron is by then?"

"It feels like everyone out here knows what Voltron is. Except us."

"Point." She pauses, makes a face. "Still really weird to have a spaceship hanging out in my head."

He raises an eyebrow. "No weirder than having you hanging out in my head."

"Hey." She aims an elbow at his ribs. Her mental sense of him starts a little as he catches the impulse, and there's a quick flash of his teeth in a grin as he hastily brings his arm down to protect his side. The point of her elbow collides unsatisfactorily with his forearm. "Pretty sure that's cheating," she grouses.

He lets out a low haah. "You knew the risks."

They lapse into an easy silence for a while. Pidge's mind drifts with the loose ache of overtaxed muscles and the starry darkness outside. The hum of Keith's thoughts moving through whatever paths they take inside his head is a comfortable background, the pleasant tactile echo of his fingers idly working against the material of his gloves familiar. Without really thinking about it, she finds herself leaning on it. Not making any effort to cross the gap between them, just letting her thoughts rest against that point of shared presence. His attention flickers, and after a moment, she feels him tentatively lean on his end as well.

The quiet lasts for a couple of minutes before she bites at her lip and blurts it out. "Sorry. For pushing at the… at this." She waves a hand between their heads. "Back on the ship."

Keith's thoughts abruptly ground themselves, retreating into a tight, inscrutable knot. He glances over to her, eyes glinting in the half-dark. For a long moment, he considers. Finally, he makes a low noise in the back of his throat and looks away. "I pushed at it too. Once I figured out what you were getting at." He shoves his hands into his pockets, pulling the jacket taut over his shoulders. A chill bites at the connection before he pushes it down. "Don't think we would have both made it out of there if we hadn't."

She hugs her knees tighter to her chest. They're both resourceful. She's pretty sure they would have escaped from their containment even if they'd been totally free of the link. They hadn't really needed each other's help to do that.

But then?

She could have backtracked to the prisoners' cells and hoped she could find her way to Keith from there. Or tried to continue to the Red Lion and gambled that he was doing the same. Either would have been a risk. The link would have told them enough to know the other was out there somewhere, but not where. Not enough to coordinate. Just enough to guess and to worry. They would definitely have had to leave the prisoners behind. And she doesn't like either of their chances against Sendak alone.

"Yeah," she says at last, voice small. "I don't think so either. But still. It's-" She's not sure what the word she's looking for is. Big. Invasive. Terrifying.

Keith catches the sense of it and she feels that fear ring through him as well. But he just settles further down into his jacket and gives a rough, one-shouldered shrug. "It's done." He falls silent for a moment. "I think it's permanent. The way it is now," he admits quietly.

The breath leaves her in a whoosh. "Yeah." The link feels different at a fundamental level. Reversing it feels about as possible as un-boiling an egg. "I think we're stuck with it."

Keith's fingers tap against his thighs as he thinks. "Going to need to figure out a new set of rules."

Her grip on her knees loosens. It'll be better once they have a strategy to deal with it. "Probably going to need to practice."

"We'll figure it out," he says firmly. There's an echo of that determined, single-minded focus he gets under the words. Farther back, the Red Lion thrums a rolling, decisive note. "I'm just glad-" he trails to a halt, and she waits through a slow lock and hitch of his thoughts while he tries to package something into words. "You're not the worst person to have hanging out in my head," he mumbles.

She snorts, but something tender wells up in her chest at the careful weight under the words. "You're not the worst either."

He makes another amused exhalation and slouches further back against the seat. After a moment, Pidge sighs and does the same. When she slumps into his side, he just gives a minute reflexive jump, with none of his usual stiffness. A careful warmth bleeds through the connection.

"Stay up here for a while?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says, and turns her face up to watch the unfamiliar stars.

AN: And we're finished! Not with this universe - there's more to be written there. (I mean, they don't even have Shiro yet.) But that's where this installment ends, at least.

Thanks for reading! I hope you've enjoyed it!