Chapter Text
Yurak clung to the back of the seat as the human, Allura, unsteadily flew the Red lion around Sendak’s ship just in time to see a Yellow lion body-slam the ion cannon mounted on top. “Ion cannon should be down!” yelled someone. Presumably that was Yellow pilot.
A Green lion flew up next to him and turned to face the Red lion. “Kitty rose is here, let’s leave before they can fix that cannon,” said a new voice.
“Kitty rose?” another person repeated.
“He means the Red lion,” said the Yellow pilot. “But yeah, let’s get out of here. I could barely make a dent in that thing!”
The Green and Yellow lions both took off towards the large planet filling the horizon. Allura pushed Red forward after them, her face pinched in concentration.
Yet another new voice came in over the com. “Glad you made it out alright, Allura.”
At this voice, Allura smiled. “Me, too, Takashi. Did you manage to find the Holts?”
A moment of silence. “No, unfortunately. We did help some other prisoners escape, though. One of them–“ the voice stopped.
“One of them what?” Allura prompted.
“I’ll tell you on the ground.”
Allura huffed. With an audible breath, she directed them down into the atmosphere. Yurak expected a smooth descent, as he was used to in Galra ships, but instead it was bumpy enough that he nearly fell down. A part of him regretted handing the controls over to this human.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Allura jumped. She’d clearly forgotten he was there with her. “The castle of lions,” she said. “This planet is called Arus.”
“Sendak’s ship won’t be down for long,” he said.
“We know,” she replied. “But the Bla—“ she cut herself off. “There’s something we need to pick up.”
Yurak ignored the twinge of annoyance in his chest. Of course she wouldn’t tell him what they were actually doing. From her point of view, he was a total unknown. Right now he felt pretty unknown to himself.
What am I doing?
Awkwardly, Allura maneuvered the Red lion into the castle’s bunkers for the lions, directing it to sit in line with the others. The chair pulled itself back, and Allura stood up and finally met Yurak’s eyes with her own dark brown ones. Yurak tried not to squirm under her gaze, tried not to think about how much of her human features he recognized in his own face.
“Okay,” Allura started, “Yurak. After you handed over Red to me, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. But I cannot speak for my friends. I… imagine a few of them won’t react well to seeing you.”
Yurak glowered. He had expected this the moment he’d given up the controls to her, but it didn’t make him any happier about it. “So, what, are you just going to lock me up?”
“I hope not,” she said. “Just… let me go out first, alright? I’ll try to break the ice.”
“What does that mean?”
She stared at him funnily for a moment, before seeming to realize what he was asking. “It’s a saying. on Earth. It means that I’ll bring it up to them in a, hm, a less startling way, so that they hopefully will be more open to meeting you.”
Yurak slowly nodded. His eyes flickered between Allura and the view out the window.
“Allura? You okay in there?” said the Yellow pilot.
“I’m alright, Hunk,” she said. “I’ll be out in a second.” Turning back to Yurak, she said, “Don’t come out until I tell you to, okay?”
He leveled a glare at her. What, did she think he was stupid?
She seemed to wince a bit under his gaze, at least. Then she quickly turned around and hurried out of the cockpit.
A few seconds later, Yurak carefully followed after her. He wasn’t disobeying her – not that he had to listen to her in the first place, but it would be a bad idea to piss off the one person here who wouldn’t attack him. He didn’t plan on leaving the relative safety of the Red lion. It was definitely alive, he’d realized, and it seemed to like him. It purred as he walked down the stairs, and he gave the wall a reassuring pat. Immediately, he felt a bit ridiculous, and hurried down to the exit door.
He pressed himself against the wall and turned his ears to pick up on the conversation.
“–didn’t go quite as planned,” Allura was saying.
“What do you mean?” said the voice Allura had called Takashi. “Did you get hurt?”
“Does this have to with why you started flying away?” another said.
A moment of silence passed. Then, Allura spoke again: “Yes, it does. It’s… there’s no good way to put this, so I ask you to please let me explain everything before you get up in arms. I…” She paused. “A Galra soldier came with me.”
“A what?” one of them cried. Yurak winced, his hand instinctively curling around the hilt of his mother’s dagger. “You brought a Galra soldier back with you?”
Yurak peaked around the corner. He saw four other figures standing with Allura in similar armor to her. A large human in yellow armor who looked pretty startled; a small human in green; a tall one with two-colored hair; and… an Altean.
It was the Altean who had just yelled, Yurak realized. He had close-cut white hair and pointy ears that looked familiar, for some reason.
Allura held up her heads pleadingly. “Yes, he’s on the lion right now—“
“You left him in there?” the Altean shouted. He surged forward, pushing past Allura and summoning a bow into his hands out of thin air. “He could steal it any minute!”
Before he could think about what he was doing, Yurak stepped out into the door frame. “I’m not going to do that,” he said.
He saw the Altean’s eyes, a swirl of bright blue and deep pink, widen and then set into a stoney glare. The Altean swung his bow up and drew back an arrow made of blue light, pointing it directly at Yurak. Behind him, the human with two-colored hair crouched into a battle stance, drawing his right arm back as it began to glow – a Galra prosthetic, Yurak realized. His grip on the dagger tightened, even as his other hand shook.
“What are you doing here?” the Altean said.
Defensive anger rose up in Yurak’s throat. “I didn’t plan to be here!” he said.
Stars, he really hadn’t. He felt sick. He wanted to leave, he wanted to be off on some distant moon, outside of Zarkon’s sights, outside of this war. When the lion ship had rescued him, and shown itself to be impossibly alive, he’d thought he had a chance to get out of here.
That wouldn’t have worked, he now realized. This lion was part of Voltron, the one thing Zarkon feared and wanted more than anything. Yurak would’ve been putting a huge target on his back if he’d escaped with it.
“Prince, please,” Allura said, stepping in between Yurak and the Altean. “I don’t believe he’s on Zarkon’s side. He saved… well, tried to save me, earlier.”
“So he had a moment of good consciousness. That means nothing,” the Altean, the Prince, said. Despite his words, his bow wavered, just a bit.
“Look, you can lock me up if you have to,” Yurak said. “Sendak will have the ion cannon fixed any dobosh now. If this really is Voltron, you need to be out there, not wasting time standing around deciding whether or not you’re going to shoot me.”
The human with the Galra arm stepped forward, placing his organic hand on the Prince’s shoulder. “He’s right, Prince,” he said. Yurak was pretty sure this was Takashi. “We need to focus on protecting Arus for now.”
The Prince’s eyes flickered between Takashi and Yurak. Slowly, he lowered the bow and loosened the string. The arrow disappeared back into nothing. “Fine,” he said, sounding anything but fine. “For now, I’ll—“
The castle’s speakers crackled. “Whatever is going on down there, you might need to hurry it up,” said a new voice. “Sendak’s ship is entering the Arusian atmosphere. We’re going to need Voltron in the next ten ticks.”
The Prince froze. The small green human muttered something that caused the yellow one to sweat. Takashi squeezed the Prince’s shoulder and said, “He can come with me in the Black lion for now. We need to get out there.”
Great. They wanted to take Yurak back out into the fight. Did they forget the part where he had tried to fly away from all this?
“No,” the Prince said.
Yurak sighed in relief.
“He’ll come with me in Blue,” the Prince finished.
Allura’s eyes widened in shock. Yurak groaned. Now Takashi’s offer didn’t seem so bad. If he was going to be thrown back into the battle either way, he’d rather be with Takashi, who was managing to keep a level head, than the Altean who had been about to shoot him.
Takashi looked like he wanted to argue this, but all he said was, “Alright. So, Prince, how do we get the Black lion?”
The Prince turned back to face all the humans. “Everyone get back in their lions. Then the door should open, and we can fly up and out. You,” he said, turning to Yurak, “hand over your weapon to Shiro and then come with me.”
He wanted Yurak to hand over his mother’s dagger? Yurak gritted his teeth. He knew he was in no position to argue, but the desire to snap at this Altean Prince was growing by the second. Takashi stepped up to him with a soft expression and a hand outstretched.
Slowly, Yurak unbuckled the scabbard from his belt and handed it to Takashi. “Take good care of it,” he said.
Takashi nodded. “I will.”
Takashi walked up to the large doors in front of the lions. The yellow and green pilots were already back in their lions. As Allura ran past Yurak to get into the Red one, she hesitated. “Sorry,” she whispered.
What she was apologizing for, Yurak didn’t know. The Prince was standing with one foot in the Blue lion, clearly waiting for Yurak despite not looking at him. He dutifully trotted over to the Blue lion. The Prince walked one step ahead of him, sliding a blue helmet on over his white hair as he ascended the stairs.
Before he sat down in the pilot’s chair, he turned to face Yurak. “Prince Lancelor of Altea,” he said. It took Yurak a moment to realize he was introducing himself. “If you try to mess with any of us, I will put you in a world of pain.”
“Got it. My name’s Yurak, by the way.”
The Prince nodded absently, his eyes already focused elsewhere. He took the pilot’s seat, which slid up to the dashboard smoothly. The floor jolted as the lion, who the Prince called Blue, moved up into a seated position.
The room’s ambient blue glow brightened. Then, as if by some cue, the large doors opened in from of the small form of Takashi, revealing a lion ship larger than all the others. It was painted black with large red wings sprouting from the back and a yellow crest across the chest. With remarkable grace, it bent its head down and opened its mouth, allowing Takashi to board. A moment later – a bit too quickly, really, almost as if Takashi had run to the seat like an excited child – the Black lion rose.
Without any direction from the Prince, the Blue lion stood up. Yurak grabbed the back of the pilot’s seat for balance, throwing a wild look out the window. All the other lions had stood up as well. Together, they roared; a slightly metallic yet somehow very living sound. Yurak could feel it down to his bones. He half felt like joining in. There was a joy to it, triumph, a sense of completion. Yurak reached for his dagger, but of course it wasn’t there.
Takashi’s voice filled the room. “Alright, Team. Let’s go!”