Chapter 9

A/N: Hey y'all welcome back! So, it looks like I'm done procrastinating. Anyways, I hope these rewritten chapters are meeting expectations. I know I like the flow of these newer chapters better than the older ones. Alright then, I just own my OCs, nothing else is mine.

Yorak talking with Keith.

Flashbacks

"And the monster fell from the sky!" the loud voice of the Arusian king exclaimed as he threw his hands in the air, regaling the story of Voltron's battle from the other day. "It was an epic battle! But, in the end, Voltron was victorious!"

At his cue, the two pairs of Arusians stacked on each other faced each other and one threw their stick at the other causing them to flop to the ground.

"No! Voltron was victorious!"

The pair that had fallen scrambled back up while the other pair toppled over as the crowd cheered excitedly.

"Thank you, Your Majesty, for that wonderful production," Allura interrupted with a sheepish smile. "While it saddens me that we are leaving tomorrow, we must continue our battle with Zarkon and spread peace throughout the universe." She turned to the king, holding up a small silver and blue disc, "Your Highness, please accept this gift. This will allow you to contact us anytime you need help. Arus will be the first planet in the Voltron Alliance."

Taking the communicator with the respectful bow, the small king turned to his people and raised it into the air with a joyful exclamation, "Hoorah!"

"We should get something like that," Hunk's voice said somewhere to his left, causing Keith to jump as he turned to see both the Yellow and Blue Paladins approaching.

"Like what?"

"Like a cheer! Like a team cheer we could do."

Keith raised a brow. Why did they need a cheer?

However, Lance seemed to be on board with the idea. "Yeah!" he nodded, tapping his chin rapidly. "We could—oh! How about I say 'Vol' and you say 'Tron'. Vol!"

By the Traveler this was stupid. "Voltron?" he deadpanned.

"No! No, no, no. The cheer contains the instructions," Lance repeated. "I say 'Vol', you say…"

"Voltron."

He could see Lance die a little inside at his response. But, frankly, Keith didn't particularly care. Having a cheer like that wasn't useful to them, especially one that couldn't be used to toss their opponents off their rhythm and catch them off guard. If it'd done either of those things, then maybe he would've considered it.

"We'll work on it," Lance grumbled swiping a cup off a floating plate.

Keith glanced to Hunk and the other boy gave him a shrug. So either this was normal for Lance or he was just as confused about this apparent need for a cheer as he was—though he was the one who suggested the idea initially.

Though anything he could've asked about the situation was stopped by the sound of something dying.

Whipping his head in the direction of the sound, Keith's brows shot up as he looked at the slightly green face of Lance. "Is…is he ok?" Yorak inquired.

"I don't know," Keith muttered under his breath as the Blue Paladin shuffled over to Coran as he passed by.

"Coran, what is this?"

"Oh, this is Nunvill, the nectar of the gods."

"It tastes like hotdog water and feet."

"Yeah," Coran replied as if something that tasted like that was normal—but given what he'd tried to feed them earlier it wasn't too farfetched. "It makes a wonderful hair tonic as well." As if to demonstrate he reached into his cup and splashed some onto his moustache.

Lance made a retching noise as the advisor walked away and Keith and Hunk shared a glance as they approached the motionless boy. "Is he alive?"

"He'd complain more if he were dead."

"True," Hunk agreed tentatively reaching out and tapping his friend's shoulder. The Blue Paladin collapsed to the ground and his comrades shared a glance. "Walk away and pretend nothing happened?"

"Sounds good to me," Keith agreed as they parted ways and tried to act inconspicuous.

-.-

"You checking the perimeter too?" Shiro asked as he stepped up to Jaz's side as she stood outside the Castle watching over the moonlight landscape.

"I don't want to be caught off guard again."

"Seems we agree on that," he sighed tiredly. "So, how are you handling all this?"

Crossing her arms, Jaz shrugged, "I've been in a lot of different situations over my enlistment: prison riots, rebellions, assassination attempts, gang wars, interspace battles. But this…" she trailed off, putting her hands on her hips, "I mean, I've trained for being a prisoner of war—but this, being abducted by a unknown alien race, that's something I never prepared for."

"What were you preparing for? Xenomorphs?" Shiro chuckled.

Jaz gave a slight smile as she shook her head. "Something like that," she replied quietly. "Let's just say there's far, far worse things out there than the Galra."

Shiro's soft smile faltered, "Well…let's hope we don't have to meet them."

"Hopefully," Jaz replied a grim look on her face as golden eyes watched the hills around them, "because as much as I hate to say it, Voltron's nowhere near ready to handle them."

Personally, Shiro wanted to disagree. They'd made progress with Voltron, faster than expected too, but the look in her eyes made him stop. He knew his memory of his time in the Galra prisons was fragmented and mostly missing; heck, he'd only just remembered his first battle in their god-forsaken gladiator matches just the other day. The parts he did remember…they weren't pleasant: there were experiments, long periods trapped in a cell with Jaz, and a few battles in the arena.

One of which, always without fail, always made his blood run cold. He remembered that one vividly, mostly because of how Jaz was acting when they got put in the arena.

The thought made Shiro pause. Had…had she seen one of those things before?

It made sense. When they fought one of those…beasts, she knew exactly how to take it down. She didn't even need him to explain what happened the first time he'd been thrown against one of those mosters. Jaz took one look at him and somehow knew exactly what happened and what he fought against.

Was it responsible for what he saw just over a year ago? Back before the Kerberos mission?

-.-

Shiro sighed as the door to the apartment he was sharing with Jaz, Darvah, and Matt closed behind him. Setting down a box of pizza, he pulled his jacket off and hung it up tiredly.

"That well huh?"

Jumping slightly, Shiro looked up and met the concerned gaze of Matt as he sat on the couch, a computer in his lap and several open books around him. "Yeah," he answered walking over and slumping onto the other chair, rubbing his head.

"Well, then it's his loss."

Shiro felt the corners of his mouth twitch at the comment. Keith had said the same thing when he'd gone to hang out with his adopted brother after his attempt to talk things out with Adam had gone so well. Although…Keith's language had been far more colorful.

"So where'd you go after?"

"Just to hang out with Keith for a bit."

"So how's the little Nukruu?" Darvah spoke up as he entered the living room, his four eyes blinking as he popped the lid of a bottle of ether.

Shiro blinked as he tried to process the word. Eliksni wasn't one of his best languages; usually he just left it to someone else to translate cause he found it too complicated. Though it was moments like this he often wondered what exactly he was missing. "He's doing alright. Though he did tell me to remind you that you still owe him thirty bucks."

The massive alien gave a loud groan as he took a ship of his drink, "Damn kid never forgets a bet." Setting his bottle down, Darvah got up and walked over to him, grabbing the paper plates as he used his other arms to grab a pizza slice. "Thanks for the food though."

"Oh pizza!" Matt exclaimed, scrambling off the couch to grab a slice.

"Has Jaz had dinner yet?" Shiro inquired.

"Uh…" the engineers looked at each other, "I don't think so."

Rolling his eyes, Shiro grabbed a slice and put it on a plate before he walked down the hall towards and knocked on one of the doors. "Jaz?"

Not getting an answer, he tried the knob with his free hand and gently pushed it open. She wasn't on her bed or at her desk; stepping inside, he looked around to see light coming from under the door of the conjoined bathroom. She must've been in there.

He stepped forwards, raising his hand to knock on the door when it swung open, revealing Jaz, whom was wearing nothing but a bra and underwear, showing three long scars travelling up her side.

"Uh…I…"

"You are so lucky I know you're gay."

-.-

"Shiro?" Jaz spoke up, pulling Shiro out of his thoughts. "You ok?"

"Uh, yeah," he sputtered. "So, uh, I don't mean to pry, but is that…" he trailed off, running his hand along his side around where he thought the marks were.

"Where I got my scars?" she finished for him. Her hand drifted her side, as golden eyes glanced away, "Yeah, back home, in the Reef, our military worked on…well, alien threats. Now, before you freak out, we didn't know about the Galra before our unfortunate encounter. But, other species…that's another story."

Shiro's brows shot up as he stared at her. "Seriously?"

Jaz nodded, "Yeah—technically I'm not supposed to say anything, but given everything that's happened, why not at this point?" she shrugged. "I got it when Keith and I snuck into the prisons to see what hostile thing they caught, only it got out and, managed to get a lucky hit on me before Keith's dad shot it and my mom dragged us out."

"Wait, Keith's dad?" Shiro said. "I thought his dad was a firefighter? He died in a fire, that's the story I remember hearing."

Jaz sighed, "That was the story the public was given. In reality Keith's dad was Special Ops, he did classified missions with my mom. That's why we know each other; we literally grew up together."

It actually made a lot more sense than Shiro liked and explained so many questions he'd had about his foster brother. His dad being in black ops explained why Keith knew Awoken and Eliksni so well, how he and Jaz knew each other, how he was frighteningly proficient with combat and weapons. "That…explains a lot."

"Yeah, it's also why the officials at the Garrison didn't like him much. Technically Keith would outrank them upon graduation," she replied. "To even know minor details on heavily redacted mission reports, you have to have obscenely high clearance. Like so high not even Admiral Sanda can't know all the details."

"Wait, why would Keith have outranked them?" Shiro questioned, his brows furrowing. He understood the clearance thing, but otherwise it didn't make much sense.

"Well, Keith was going to join," Jaz answered hesitantly. "He'd already had the training from his dad and other members of the squad. He met all the requirements. The only reason he wasn't already in was because he had to do stuff at the Garrison to learn the bureaucratic stuff. And, members of that particular unit don't have to report to anyone except Queen Mara and the Generals in charge. They're also able to take command of any resources they need. So if needed, a member of that unit could go into the Garrison, take whatever equipment and personnel they needed, and their requests would supersede any orders from another commander. Make sense?"

"No."

Jaz opened her mouth to probably try to explain further, but she was cut off as Pidge called out to them, "Hey guys. I need to talk to you."

"Sure, about what?" Shiro answered, barely hiding his relief at the change in topic.

"Uh…well, it might be easier to explain to everyone at once," she replied, scratching the back of her head.

Jaz and Shiro shared a glance. "Ok then." Going inside, they gathered the others and stepped into the entrance hall away from the main crowd of the party. "So, what do you need to talk to us all about?"

"I'm leaving. You're going to have to find someone else to fly the Green Lion," Pidge stated. "I'm going to go find my family. The data I downloaded from the ship was enough to at least get me going in the right direction."

"What?" Jaz sputtered, "The right direction? I'm sorry, but do you really think that's enough for you to go off into unknown space on your own?! What if they aren't where you think they are? What will you do then? What will you do if you're attacked? Cause I know that you're not planning on taking the bayard. Also, what about hacking Galra stuff? Do you have a power source? Tech? Can you even read the language?!"

"I have Rover!"

"Oh great! You have a droid I could blast to ash with a flick of my wrist! I feel so much better about letting you go off on your own!"

"I already have a pod all ready to go."

"Oh, and do you have enough supplies? Life support? A spacesuit—and no not your armor," Jaz continued. "Do you realize how stupid you're being?!"

"I'm going to find my family, you can't stop me."

"I bet dying alone in space will stop you," Keith snapped. "And guess what? If you leave, we can't form Voltron. Which means, we can't defend the universe. You aren't the only one with a family. All these Arusians have families. Everyone in the universe has families."

"Yeah I have a family," Hunk interrupted. "They live on Earth, I wanna see them. Is that a thing that can happen?"

"You want to leave too?" Allura gasped.

"I mean, Voltron's cool and all, but I didn't sign up for a lifetime of fighting aliens in deep space."

"Are you kidding me?!" Keith snarled, his dark violet eyes seeming to glow with rage for a moment. "You guys are so selfish! You're putting your own interests before the lives of everyone else in the galaxy! Tell me, how will it feel having the blood of billions of innocents on your hands?"

"Keith!" Shiro exclaimed putting his hand on his little brother's shoulder and pushing him back. "Keith, that's not how a team works. People have to want to be a part of it; they can't be forced."

Keith snapped back in a language he didn't understand as he shoved his hand off, "Kostagonsagon daor skoriot ao māzigon hen.1"

Shiro took a step back at his brother's violent outburst. He didn't like the prospect of Pidge leaving either, but it was her choice—he just hadn't been expecting to see Jaz and Keith react so cruelly. Frankly, he'd say their reactions were way, way out of line. "Pidge," he spoke up, "if you want to leave, we won't try to stop you. But, please, just think about what you're doing."

"I'm sorry," she replied, "but you're going to have to find someone else to pilot the Green Lion."

Without waiting for another word, Pidge shrugged her bag back onto her shoulder and started walking away from them. "This team is falling apart," Allura whispered, speaking up for the first time since the start of the conversation. "How will we ever form Voltron?"

She didn't get an answer before the Castle shook with an explosion.

A/N: The translation for this chapter.
1. Maybe not where you're from.