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There’s a knock at Allura’s door.

It’s enough to startle her, almost out of a trance, and she blinks, baffled as to when consciousness began to slip. Exhaustion had a tighter grip on Allura than she’d realised.

The knock comes again, in quicker succession this time. A little more forceful, a little more desperate.

So Allura slips from her bed, getting to her feet. She doesn’t know who could be on the other side of that door, not when so many of the ship’s crew should be gone by now, enjoying the clear day festivities. But it seems important. It sounds important.

“Lance?” she says as the door pulls back, and his head whips up, but there’s something off, something strange. Something. “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to the carnival.”

Allura had told him to enjoy himself. That she would be fine, here. That missing out on this, for her sake, when he so clearly wanted to go was not something that she could very well let happen.

And yet, here Lance is. Back. Back and—

Hugging her?

She’s nearly knocked off her feet by the sheer force of it, only saved by decaphoebs of training and excellent composure. It’s not like any of their other hugs, the ones where they curl up in bed and he presses stardust kisses to her cheeks in a constellation of love and tenderness, or anything post battle, of which they have had their fair share, where he holds her like a support beam, and she leans too, into his touch, into his trust. Or when he’s afraid to lose her, afraid for her, afraid that one more self-sacrificial act will be it for them. But those have never scared her like this.

Not when Lance holds her like he’s already lost her.

Allura can feel it in his touch, in how he holds her, like letting go would be letting go of everything. It’s frenzied desperate, it’s longing, it’s heartbreak in a hug.

It takes a good few ticks for her to lose rigidity, and relax into his hold, letting this moment just be.

He needs this. Allura doesn’t know why, but she knows this much.

Something happened.

“Lance,” she says softly, coaxing. She rubs circles up his back, though stops, quickly, when she finds a maze in what she thought she could map out. Is it just her, or has Lance got taller? “Talk to me. Whatever is the matter?”

“You were gone, Allura,” he says through muffled sobs, and her heart seizes, the words lost on her, but the grief certainly not. She does not know what he has seen, what trick has been played upon him, but Lance and his selfless, loving heart have been hurt deeply. And she’s at the centre of it. “You were gone and I thought I was never gonna see you again. But now, but now—”

Lance pulls slightly out of the hug, still in her arms, still enveloped by her touch, but enough to look her in the eye, begging, pleading, his words hoarse and broken:

“Please don’t accept that entity.”

Allura blinks. “What are you…?”

And then she looks at him, actually looks at him, and sees those eyes, ones usually so joyous, bright with the light of a thousand dreams, mirthful with that slight gleam she’s grown to love, she sees those sparks dulled, murky with a grief she knows all too well. 

But the determination sticks, like mud, steadfast and determined.

It’s one of the few things that have remained the same. So quick was he to race into her comfort, Allura missed that Lance isn’t the same at all. It’s as if, in their short time apart, he’s swung by the quantum abyss, a little older, a little taller, more downtrodden in ways she hadn’t thought possible for his spring board personality, always uplifting with a crooked smile, or a sprinkled in joke.

There are flecks of white in his hair now, paling as Shiro’s had done before it had turned sheet white upon revival. Quintessence over-exposure.

And then, there, most noticeably, are markings like hers that shadow his cheeks in grieving light.

“Where did you get those?” she asks, horror and awe both bleeding with curiosity as she traces them with her thumbs. They seem to shimmer under her touch, like they’re reacting to her, bonded to the spark of something that dwells within her very being.

It’s in this that has her trust. Allura has been fooled by clones and pretty words, but this? Right here, somehow, this is the man she loves with all her heart. Not that she has put this into words yet, but she trusts the feeling.

She trusts Lance.

But oh, does she have her questions.

Lance’s expression is bittersweet. “From you. A few quintants from now.”

It sounds impossible. And yet, everything they do, every battle they face, it seems full of the impossible.

“You’re talking about messing with the structure of time.”

Lance nods.

“How?” Allura says aghast. “Why? Did we lose against Haggar? Does this mean we lost the war?”

Lance looks at her a long while.

“Told you I thought you looked like a princess,” says Lance to Allura, only that isn’t their Lance, and the Allura he’s talking to isn’t her. 

They had encountered these strange lookalikes upon responding to a distress signal, leading, quite mysteriously, to an old altean ship, long thought missing, and long void of life. So who had sent out the signal? Allura couldn’t say. But what she could say was that the ship was sat inside a bizarre looking wormhole—a rift as per Coran’s deduction—and it was of the utmost importance they inspected it closer.

Of course there was the chance this was an elaborate trap—it had all the makings of one, Hunk was quick to caution them—but there was also the chance it wasn’t. That somewhere, here, someone genuinely needed them—and Allura wasn’t about to fail that. 

So they took Voltron through, into the unknown, unsure of what to expect.

Shiro—their leader in black, mysteriously gone, presumed dead by every one of them but Keith who held onto hope like a suffocating man, stuck in the void of space, and needing, relying on that hope to breathe, and Allura understood, she did—he was there. Alive.

And utterly perplexed they thought he was dead.

“I don’t understand,” said Shiro, like he hadn’t been gone all of this time. Like keith—who’d latched onto Shiro with a hug so tight only a relapse of Coran’s slipperiness would be able to pry him off if it wasn’t of his own accord—was the one they should be worried about. Though perhaps they should be. In his armour that really can’t be comfortable. “Not that I’m one to turn down a hug from Keith, but I saw all of you a moment ago.”

Allura stepped forwards. “A moment for you, yes, but phoebs for the rest of us.”

And then Shiro looked at her, really looked, somehow managing to become even more confused—and was it the new pink paladin armour? Allura couldn’t imagine why he’d look at her like—

“Who are you?”

Like he was struggling to make out who she was.

She blinked, stunned. “Sorry?”

“Err, are you feeling okay? That’s Allura,” said Lance, waving an arm in her general vicinity with an air of panic. “You know, our badass space princess? Saved our lives a bunch, lets us live in her castle? She’s a paladin now, but it’s just a costume change.”

“Allura?!” Shiro echoed, eyes searching. “But she’s not… and you’re… who are you?”

“Aww man,” said Lance, scratching his neck, dejected. “Me too? You remembered Keith just fine.”

“That’s because he’s Keith,” said Pidge.

“Of course I remember Keith,” added Shiro. “You too, Pidge. I remember everyone but not—ah, Hunk? What are you doing?”

“I need you to tell me how many fingers I’m holding up,” said Hunk, waving four in Shiro’s face. 

Pidge decided to do Shiro’s personal space a favour and pulled Hunk back. “He’s amnesiac, not concussed. That won’t help.”

“Hold on, I’m not amnesiac,” Shiro assured. Given the evidence, Allura was doubtful. “But something is going on here.” He addressed Lance, “Who did you say you were?”

“Oh, I’m Lance.”

Shiro stared. And stared some more. He was giving him the same look he had just given Allura, like he was looking for anything, anything at all, that could light the spark of recognition. “Prince Lance?”

“Come again?” said Lance, who had never had such a title to his name. It rang in Allura’s ears, not an unpleasant sound, but an unconventional one. Its dissonance, never conjoined before, could have been a tune on its own. One she would not be repulsed to hear again. 

But its use was sobering enough to shake Keith out of his limpet hold around Shiro. “Yeah, what do mean by that? How badly did Zarkon fry your brain to make you think Lance is a prince?”

“I can be princely,” Lance rebutted with a pout. 

“And I’m a galactic overlord,” Pidge snarked as Hunk clapped a hand over Lance’s shoulder, a pitying gesture. 

“Shiro,” said Allura, her concern tough and brittle. “Lance is not a prince. Not that I would know of. Are you well?”

Shiro took a step back, something in his expression shifting, changing. In mere ticks, he had fortified an entire artillery of defence in his stance. 

“I’m fine,” he said, and then, over his comms which did not come through on theirs he requested the location of his teammates. And then for them to come quick because he was surrounded by lookalikes. 

They all shared a look, baffled, unsure. Pidge appeared to be wrestling with theories, but the truth had to stand in front of their faces before they could all quite believe it. 

You see, the problem with flying through mystery rifts in space is that you often end up in mysterious places. Like alternate realities. And upon the arrival of her other self, summoned over by the comms call, that had become increasingly apparent. The blue armour she wore was the least of their differences. Her markings? Gone. Her hair? Brown. Her ears—though a sight she has grown accustomed to on her paladins, not quite hideous but still out of the ordinary—were uncomfortably, confoundingly round. Human.

“Oh,” other human her said, a strange lilt to her accent. It reminded her of her paladins, each now doubled up as the doppelgängers had burst in, given the exception of two. “I see what you mean, Shiro. You really are… me.”

“It would seem so,” Allura agreed.

Human her blinked. “Huh. You sound so regal. Sort of like... hmm. If you’re a princess here, then does that mean… the prince?”

Shiro nodded an affirmative and gestured to Lance. “From Earth like us.”

There was a playful twitch to her lip as other her regarded Lance. “Oh he’s going to love this.”

In an effort to decide what to do with the rift in space, in a way that may or may not have also been about giving them extra time to bond with their alternate selves, they had been lead back to the castleship. Another castleship, an echo of everything Allura had known. Every time she almost convinced herself she was back in her own reality, a difference would jut out, jarring her present predicament back into her. 

And it was there, in that uncomfortably unfamiliar command deck, that she met him. Standing next to a Coran that was not her own, was Lance in a way she had never seen him before. 

Before her stood a prince. An altean prince. 

His eyes danced not with mirth, but with flecks of light, alien to humans, alien on him, but stunningly beautiful to her people. It was as if someone had taken her palette, and reapplied it onto the boy she’d known. Not only was it his eyes, but his hair. White as the silk of her pillow and bedsheets, which she assumed was just as soft. Atop that head was a circlet, her circlet, the crown of her birthright, nothing more than an opulent trinket these days. 

And then were his ears and markings, blue as his eyes. Heat blistered Allura’s cheeks. It was a strange, horrifying thought, but Lance made a rather fetching altean. She wondered if this was how he looked in human standards, and then was promptly embrassed to have ever wondered that at all. 

He regarded her with immediate interest upon arrival, sizing Allura up as she did him. His eyes only strayed as Allura’s counterpart filed in. 

Which takes Allura to now, her peculiar present, with duplicates strange and familiar, her and Lance’s stranger still. 

Of all the changes. Of all the ways reality could take shape. To find herself at its centre with him—it holds too much inflated self importance. Why them? Why him?

Of all the paladins, why show him in her shoes?

“Told you I thought you looked like a princess,” says Prince Lance to other Allura as her counterpart rolls her eyes—human but still blue. Even as a prince, perhaps even more so as a prince, a Lance will be a flirt. The accent surprises her, though. It shouldn’t have. She knows her other self speaks another dialect, doesn’t enunciate as an altean does, but it’s Lance. 

She has heard him make a good Coran impression—which is as impressive as it is unnerving—but this one? This one talks like a prince. 

The prince then makes his way to her, and stops, dipping his head in respect, and—much to her surprise—presses his lips to her hand. Distantly, Allura hears an uproar. 

“Princess,” he says, with all the respect she thought she had lost. “It is an honour. These halls haven’t seen a princess of Altea in quite some time.”

There’s something in the way he says that, something that makes her stop for grief. There’s a twin of it nestled in her heart, aching for a kingdom, aching as a daughter. She thinks of the faces Lance had projected during synchrony training in those early quintants, and knows, should they exist here, they wouldn’t have for quite some time. 

It’s not just a title he’s taken, but her tragedy too. 

“Prince,” she returns in kind. “What an… interesting reality you have.”

“I could say the same about yours,” says Prince Lance. 

Coran—not hers, not hers—nods. “Interesting is one way to put it. The last time I saw double like this, the queen had invited those speedsters, the velox, to stay for dinner. I’ve never seen so much zipping around. It was like they were in two places at once!”

Allura remembers them. So many nobles her father had invited for talks of diplomacy, she had often been left with their children. Some would fancy themselves suitors, but what she was after were friends. She remembers two siblings, lightning on their feet as she gave chase, and thinks that time could have been close. 

“Veloxians are never ones for taking things slow,” Allura agrees. “Those dinners never lasted long.”

There’s a sparkle in the prince’s eyes, and it’s not just from their natural, altean look. “No,” he muses, “they didn’t.”

A throat clears, as subtle as a clamour. Lance, her Lance, gives his duplicate a look of distrust Allura would reserve for Zarkon, or any one of the sort. Not as hostile, but the rest of her paladins’ eyes are on him too, each with varying degrees of disbelief. Hunk hasn’t stopped mouthing “altean Lance’’ since they got here.

“Oh!” Prince Lance delights. “You’re other me!”

“Yep. Other you,” says Lance, his eyes still darting between herself and the prince, like he’s half expecting him to take her hand once more and press to it another kiss. 

“And Blue chose you.” Awe swirls in droves, almost drowned out the stir of envy, but it remains as sediment, the foundations to his wide eyes. Allura recognises that look well. From the beginning, she had longed to be a paladin, and if she had to pick, then red. Nostalgia and admiration and fuelled her want. And here came these earthlings from nowhere, barely any training, barely any cooperation, and the lions declared them theirs for her war. It hadn’t felt fair. 

No more does it feel fair to have the position at the cost of a teammate. 

“Er, Red now,” Lance amends. “Not gonna lie man, we haven’t kept up with the colour coding.”

“We do look good in blue,” says the prince with a grin—it’s more practiced and refined than his human self’s, but it contains an edge to it that she can only describe as Lance. He offers his counterpart a hand he does not kiss, but shakes. “It’s nice to meet you. I never expected to meet myself as a human—tell me, do you know how to operate Pidge’s games machines? Oh! And there’s some phrases the other paladins use that—”

As Prince Lance pulls his counterpart aside to grill him on all things human, her human self comes to stand next to her, and starts up her own private conversation. 

“If we didn’t have to get you back to your reality, he’d probably question him for hours. Big fan of Earth, that one. I describe it once and suddenly he’s besotted,” says other Allura with a certain level of fondness she’s only starting to come to terms with on her own. It’s strange to see it so plainly. 

“Hours?”

“Doboshes? Err, sorry. Vargas.”

“Oh. Well, I can’t blame him. I have many questions I want to ask you as well.”

“Yeah? Me too, Princess. I mean, what’s it like being altean?”

“What’s it like being human?” she fires back. 

“Touché,” says her counterpart, something her translator has to temporarily switch language settings for. “It’s just… I never thought I’d meet myself as a space princess. You’re me, but you’re just so different. And then there’s him.”

Her gaze follows her counterpart’s. She sees a royal, desperate to connect, to belong, but still light deca-phoebs behind in a time period called home. 

But she sees no mirror. 

“And then there’s him,” she agrees.

“You know, the first time we met, he thought I was a princess,” human Allura says. 

“He is a flirt.”

“It was the most sincere thing I ever heard from him. At least, at the start. Until we sat down and talked.”

“… Oh.”

“He had so many walls built up of bluster and ego, I didn’t know where the real Lance started. I wonder, if I met him back then, all those deca-phoebs ago, if he would have been anything like yours.”

Less burdened.

“Perhaps,” says Allura, “though a little more princely.”

Her counterpart gives her a look that makes her feel all too seen. “Oh, I think your Lance has his own sort of charm to him.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Somehow I don’t believe you,” other her teases with a levity in herself she has missed. 

Maybe strange, maybe human, but there is something in this girl that resided in her once, not even a deca-phoeb ago. She has questions to ask, about her past, about the fate of her family. And she will ask them, before they must part ways, most likely never to meet again. Not unless reality shatters, and how likely is that?

The call of the stars has forever been a strong one, Lance’s heart enchanted, and dreams forged in their direction. Every exam, every test, every up, every down, it was worth it to get into that seat—to sit a pilot, a paladin, soaring through the very stars that had beckoned him to follow, and into the castle that lay beyond.

To her.

Lance finds with Allura not destiny, but belonging, home for the homesick—for he misses home with its ache in his chest, salt encrusted, perpetual, as does she, out of time in a world that knows only her home as ancient history. But Allura, Allura, he has to wonder when her name could conjure the same warmth of such a place, when home became synonymous with the sparkle of her eyes, or the sight of her smile, fleeting sights in the thick of war.

They find their moments, few and far between. But they find them. Hope. A beacon in the dark.

Of all the stars, Allura shines brightest. With a light she does not let dull from her eyes, always ambitious, always determined. Allura sees a future.

Maybe it could be one with him.

But no one wrote Lance’s story in the stars, no one named him a hero before his time. The stars are full of aspirations, dreams, but they do not dictate wishes out of dust. He has to make it so, to decide the type of person he wants to be amongst this, inspired by stars, her shining north.

There is direction to be found, she offers it, but it must be earned. Lance will not be a paladin in name only. He won’t be a seventh wheel. He will do more than fake it, he will make it.

Because she inspires him.

He, once seven years old and with a telescope pointed upwards, now seventeen, with a lion his sky roaming chariot. He, who thought the stars called, but there is no sound in space.

They never wanted anything. They shine for everyone should you look up.

She inspires him.

Allura who lost everything. Allura who fights to persevere. Allura, who took what she had, and hunted for good.

There is no call to greatness.

Just a war. A war they stumbled into. A war where Allura found herself at its centre, the weapon for its end in her hands, and she asked them to hold each of its keys. It’s everyone’s fight.

For a future. For tomorrow. So everyone may look up at those same stars and see their own dreams, their own opportunities reflected in light. So that they may be free to wish.

And Lance?

He’s a paladin of Voltron. He’ll fight for that tomorrow. He’ll fight to be someone who can.

Because though there is no call to greatness, there is hope. And there are dreams.

Allura wonders how Lance has the words to say—when she sees failure, her own judgement fractured by broken trust, he still believes in her guidance, her leadership, in her, despite everything that has amounted to. Her mistakes have lost them the castleship, it’s teleduv, it’s charging station—and as a result Voltron itself. At a time when hope is needed most, their symbol, their strength is gone. 

Allura wonders what there is left in her to trust.

And yet—

“All you can do now is get up and try to make it right.”

“You can’t doubt yourself now.”

For all her doubts, for all she has second guessed herself to infinity, she knows she can trust in him.