Voltron Legendary Defender - Shining Like the Stars [83]

[scriveyner]

Title: shining like the stars [83]
Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender
AU: slts
Characters/Pairing: Shiro/Keith/Lance, Team Voltron
Rating: M
Length: 2177
Summary: The console was not unusual to Galra ships; smooth plates that would shift their image to display holographic keys, activated by a palm print. Pidge ran her hand along the top of the console, feeling for the catch and popping the slot open that allowed her to plug her paladin armor directly into the console's mainframe and hopefully bypassing the manual palm print input.



The console was not unusual to Galra ships; smooth plates that would shift their image to display holographic keys, activated by a palm print. Pidge ran her hand along the top of the console, feeling for the catch and popping the slot open that allowed her to plug her paladin armor directly into the console's mainframe and hopefully bypassing the manual palm print input.

"It's quiet," Matt reported, flipping the interior lock on the door instead of standing guard at its entry. The room had been abandoned, a guard's station not currently in use. "Too quiet."

He laid his weapon on the console and looked up at the large split screen display as Pidge typed input directly into the forearm console that her armor supported. "Yeah, I don't like it," Pidge said without looking up. "We haven't run across any drone soldiers either, just a handful of flesh and blood Galra. It makes my skin crawl."

"Most of them are probably at the games," Matt said, and the weird quality to his voice made Pidge look up finally and glance over at her brother. He wasn't looking at her, but up at the split screen covered in Galra writing. He didn't look over or acknowledge her, and the light from the monitor reflected off the front of his full-face helmet. The glare made the transparency moot, and Pidge glanced back down at her arm when the program beeped. "What was that?"

"Decryption check," Pidge said. "It'll start to auto-decrypt while its downloading, we can start filtering while it processes."

"No need." Matt tilted his head forward and popped the latch on his full-face helmet, setting it on the console itself. His hair was plastered down to his head with sweat, and, like Pidge, he wasn't wearing glasses with his helmet. "I can read Galra."

Pidge hesitated a long moment before saying anything else. Matt had slammed both of his hands onto the console and he was staring at the screen with a desperation she felt down into her bones. Prisoner transport lists, inventories, gladiators, injured, dead — they all scrolled past the screen faster than any human eye could read, never mind translate. "Yeah," Pidge said finally. "I can read Galra too, kinda, but not at that speed. You're not going to see anything that my programs can't pick out, Matt."

Matt bowed his head forward, hands still braced on the console's edge. Then he let out a long, ragged sigh. "You're right," he said after the exhale had passed. "I just ... gotta find Dad, Katie. I left him. I have to find him again."

She remained silent. There was a memory there, slipping out the window at night with a backpack and her newly-cut hair still in the wastebasket of the bathroom, her mother, exhausted, sleeping on the couch with the television still on. It hurt to leave her behind without telling her what she was planning, but she had to, if the Garrison had come around asking questions her mom had to not know what she had planned ... and that was leaving her mother to safety, on earth.

Not alone in an alien prison camp.

Pidge swallowed, as Matt looked up again. The violet light hollowed out his face, and he looked even older. "We'll find him," Pidge said softly. "Both of us. Together."

He looked over at her. It took a long moment but then he smiled, stepped closer and put his arms over her shoulders. "I still can't believe you're here, little sis," he said, as she hugged him back with her one free arm. "I keep thinking I've been dreaming, all this time, and I'll wake up right back where I started." He didn't move, and Pidge patted his back awkwardly after a moment.

"I gotta," she said, and he let her go so she could punch more buttons on the arm that was connected to the console. "Shouldn't be too much longer now," she said, as Matt picked his helmet back up off the console and put it on, before picking up the weapon he'd laid beside it. "What are you doing?"

"There are still prisoners on this ship," he said. "We're not leaving them."

"Of course we're not," Pidge said. "But I've gotta finish the mainframe dump first." She watched him walk to the entrance and touch the lock, the color switching from red to violet as it unlocked. "Matt," she said suddenly. "Wait, what are you doing?"

"New plan," he said. "You keep downloading the mainframe, and I'll free the prisoners."

"No," Pidge said. "No, we'll go together, we're not splitting up." He touched the muzzle of his gun to the top of his helmet in a salute, and Pidge fumbled the input keys, trying to halt the data transfer so she could unhook and follow him. "Don't you dare go without me," she said, as he opened the doors. "Matt!"

He stepped out into the hallway, and the doors slid shut behind him, then locked red again. Pidge let out an inarticulate noise of frustration and considered yanking the connector free but that would likely corrupt all the data she was transferring, never mind possibly setting up a system alarm that the Altean software had infiltrated the ship's core. She slammed her hand on the console and looked back at the doors, then to the progress bar that sat on the forearm display, merrily chugging along at barely 18% completed. "God dammit I hate it when he pulls shit like this!"


#

The easiest way to launch one of Voltron's lions was to take the personalized elevator to their speeder and go from there. The more roundabout way was to go through the lion's individual launch bay — which could take longer, but had the added benefit of letting Hunk stop by the main bay for a brief moment. He wasn't entirely sure why he felt the need to but he did, to see the trio of sleek black fighter craft. One had engines running, providing a soft violet glow that ran along the back of the craft and through lines on the swept-back wings. Its canopy was still open, though, and a slim figure clad in a black flightsuit was still standing on a loading ladder.

"Come to see me off, Hunk?" Allura said from behind him, and Hunk jumped a little, nearly fumbling the helmet of his paladin armor. She smiled at his reaction, and rested her hand on his arm for a moment. "There will be time enough later," she said softly, and passed him by.

Hunk looked down at the helmet in his hands, then watched as Princess Allura walked along the length of the Galra fighter craft. Illianya turned to see her, and gave a thumbs up to her, a surprisingly universal symbol it seemed. Then she climbed into the cockpit of the craft, kicking the loading ladder away in a smooth motion as she pulled down the canopy and sealed it. Allura crossed the bay and headed toward one of the shuttle bays, and Hunk put on his own helmet, heading out of the main bay and toward the hatch that led him to the Yellow Lion.


#

Shiro was sitting in the cockpit of the Black Lion, not really looking at the screens around him. Hunk had been right, earlier — without Keith and Lance they wouldn't be able to form Voltron. It was risky business flying the lions against any Galra ships without that in their back pocket, but they didn't have much of an option at the moment. They were in the memory core, for better or worse, and Shiro straight-up ignored the way his throat tightened at the thought. They'd both been in the memory core before. They could handle themselves. He had to focus on this.

His communications screens went live as Hunk settled into his flight chair. "Sorry 'bout that," he said as he leaned forward, activating a few switches in the Yellow Lion. "We're running at peak over here, primed and ready to go."

Shiro glanced over at the audio feed; the smaller Galra craft didn't have a video connection. "Illianya, do you copy?"

"Call sign is Kestrel Lead," Illianya's voice came through the communications. "Three engines lit and fourth at 99%."

"Understood, copy that, Kestrel Lead," Shiro flipped over to the bridge camera that showed Coran at the main console of the Castle of Lions. "Any word from Pidge or Matt, Coran?"

"Comm lines are still down I'm afraid," Coran said. "Both of them are appearing on the map of the prison ship."

"The moment Keith and Lance decide to grace us with their presence get them to their lions," Shiro said. "Keep us in the loop, Coran." He pushed both of the thruster bars forward, as the Black Lion rumbled around him, launching out of its bay at tremendous speed. "Kestrel Lead, go make some noise."

"My pleasure," Illianya said, and the dark craft lit with purple glowing lines looped past the Black Lion and shot around the vacuum of the small moon, headed for the populated moon of Eaphus, and the Galra waystation where the gladiator matches would be well under way.


#

Lance put both his hands on the lip of the building's roof and looked down, the wind blowing through his hair. The air was clean and breathable, but there was an unmistakable tinge of something to it that seemed to make Lance the slightest bit giddy. Keith wasn't about to waste the time trying to figure out what about it was affecting Lance so, it pricked at his sensitive nose and the wind tossed his bangs into his face.

There had been someone on the stairs they found at the end of the hallway; footsteps echoing heavily on the stone. Without hesitation Keith and Lance thundered up the stairs, which led them to the room; a long, flat expanse covered in gravel and small bits of dirt. From here they could really see the sprawl of the city around them; the buildings packed close, all low to the ground and stretched in either direction as far as they could see. In the distance, a castle-ship. The opposite direction, mountains — strangely, tinted almost green. Now that they were outside, Keith could see the stonework had the faintest tinge of green itself. It was familiar in an unsettling way; but he put that aside.

"So what do we do now?" Keith asked.

"Find Rian," Lance said, both hands on the stonework and watching all the Altean pedestrians below. "This is fucking amazing, Keith, I wish Allura could see this!"

"Okay, we'll just find Rian somewhere in this mess of, oh, I don't know, twenty-five thousand or so Alteans," Keith said. "How do we find him, if he even wants to be found?"

"He wants to be a paladin so bad, I'd say that castle-ship in the distance is probably a good place to start," Lance said, pointing at it. The castle was of a similar construct to the Castle of Lions, although it had taken on a faint green hue like what the rest of the worlds seemed to be giving off.

"Yeah, that seems logical," Keith said. "We're gonna stand out like sore thumbs. Me, especially." Purple, furry skin and yellow eyes would go great among a race whose extinction was very nearly precipitated by the Galra. "That's gotta be a few klicks from here."

Lance said, "I have an idea."

He should know better than to listen to anything that came out of Lance's mouth that started with the words "I have an idea." And yet, here he was not ten minutes later, on the ground after a rather tumultuous descent from the exterior of the building to the tight alley below.

Where Lance pulled down some loose cloth awnings and draped it around Keith like a cloak. "Ugh," Keith said as the heavy material tented over the paladin armor, his ears going flat under the weight of it. "It smells like someone pissed on this, Lance!"

"Someone probably did," Lance said nonchalantly as he pulled another one down and wrapped himself in it.

"Great, now we just look like lepers or something." Keith tugged at the edge of the material, pulling it more over his face, casting his coloring in further shadow. "This is a great plan," he said, deeply sarcastic. "No one's gonna look at us twice."

"To be unseen," Lance said matter-of-factly, "you gotta be society's unseen. C'mon, and don't forget to hunch. No one's gonna look too close at a beggar, not even an Altean."

Keith nodded his head, because it made sense and while he was absolutely certain Lance was out of his mind, it wasn't like there was a better option to be had. Without another word he followed Lance out onto the street, hood pulled down so low that it covered the glow of his eyes, and one hand holding tight to the back of Lance's cloak.