#balmera

7.40

Voltron: Legendary Defender S01E07 - Return to the Balmera

Hunk is Shay's Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

They are the QUICKEST relationship to start and the most stable... just LOOK at the others.

They met similarly to how they did in canon, but we break away from canon in the sense that they will facetime! The Paladins give Shay a small communicator, and instead of using it for important things, Shay and Hunk call on the regular.

Them getting together is not the most interesting thing about them. They are stable and healthy, and narratively, the relationship contrasts everything else going on. Pidge's favorite couple is Hunay because they are not obnoxious about it.

Shay, in general, will come up more often, either in the background or as a player with everything going on. She's not just some random love interest that fades into the distance after 3 episodes.

Some tensions will be built in the sense of Hunk is risking his life on the front lines, and as much as Shay understands the reasons why, its still scary for the both of them. Furthermore, they will have most of the same struggles of long distance relationships (except cheating you see).

The two of them do try to work through Hunk's anxiety and panic disorder, but it is difficult because of everything going on.

The next time Shay sees Hunk after the Balmera is freed from the Galra, she gifts him a necklace with a small crystal on it.

Aaaand @vldtenyearanniversaryfest day 3! I GOTTA give Shay some love <3

AO3 mirror

~*~

Shay sometimes liked to disobey her elders. Well, she did not like to disobey them, the act of disobedience brought her no pleasure, truly. But she liked the deeds that could only be done in a state of having skirted her Gran-gran's orders, her brother's protective gaze, and her family's cautious warnings. When it was just her and the Balmera, who loved her without condition, and seemed, in its way, to delight in her tiny mischiefs, harboring her secrets for her with a tiredness beyond its age, but with also fondness.

She trailed her hands along its walls, her oldest and truest friend (as the Balmera was to all its people, their friend always, the mother of their mothers, their home). It nudged her gently where she wished to go, and she smiled as she crept past the mouth of its tunnel into the great tower of the Galra's mineshaft.

It was laced with beams of metal from foreign planets, which pierced the Balmera like splinters it could not work free of itself, and which its people could not move, lest they risk the Galra's ire. The shaft was crooked, also, likely for ease of the Galra's ships to fly in and out of, always moving forward in some direction, though she often wondered if the beams would not act as hindrance to the same people who'd put them there. But those very beams were also the things which gave Shay what she needed, and so, here when all Galra were either asleep or guarding their night shift, and Shay's family was likewise resting, when her actions were known only to her dearest friend, she climbed.

It would've been easier if Rax were here. The two of them could lift one another upon their shoulders and climb easily from beam to beam, and catch one another should either of them fall. But Rax was not here, on account of how he was too governed by his fears, and would worry that the Galra would find them and punish them for feeling even the thinnest shred of joy. And so she climbed without him! Let him remain as joyless as the Galra who controlled them. The beams which were to far apart to leap from (which were most beams, to permit the Galran ships), she navigated by climbing the rough edges of the Balmera, crouching on the beams to rest her hands and flex her fingers. It often seemed that the Balmera itself had grown those bumps and ridges for her to climb upon specifically, which would have been a silly waste of its energy, when already they mined it beyond what it could offer, but Shay knew, too, the power of small joys. And who was she to begrudge her truest friend this little joy alongside her, when she was the one skirting all her family's wishes to take it?

She climbed higher, higher, higher still. Past the bend in the mineshaft. Up higher still. As high as she could possibly go, and perched on a beam, and settled her hand against the Balmera's rocky wall, and looked up.

She let her legs dangle off one edge and her tail off the other, still short but growing longer. She was not a woman yet, but on nights like this, neither did she feel like a girl anymore. Up, up, up, up, up the mineshaft, past the metal beams and twists in the Balmera's rock, Shay could make out small glimpses of the sky.

She leaned her head against the Balmera, feeling its warmth beneath her palm and cheek, and felt its deep, old joy echoing back at her. Her accomplishment at having climbed so high. Her wonder at those little scraps of sky. It shared those joys with her, and together they two settled into this quiet moment. Just the two of them, and the sweat of Shay's brow, and the stars, so far away, but still there. Just waiting for her.

"One day," she told the Balmera, a quiet whisper meant only for the two of them, though they already were alone. "One day, I will find a mineshaft which best suits my needs. I will discover what none else in my lineage have found, and I will go all the way to the top, and I will see the sky in its fullness."

How she would find the strength for this after a full day of mining crystals for her Galran overlords, or how she would escape their gaze while on the exposed surface of the top, she did not know, nor did she have a strategy for. It was reckless dreaming. She knew well how thoroughly the Galra quashed any sense of happiness in their conquered subjects, the savage glee they took with purple whips of pulsing energy and the beating of their own metal-clad fists on unarmored skin. She had seen it, and borne it, and heard it echoing down the tunnels, and felt it transmitted by the Balmera's silent and cavernous grief.

and their faces are like this

Moxie's bestie, Murime Garrett.

Universe KLO-BWQ

Half human and half Balmera, she followed Moxie to help save her new intergalactic friend's captive race. Knowing if they were able save the race together, Moxie wouldn't be seen as different just for being half Galra.