Keith had always wanted to travel. He figured that he'd save up enough money to go places one day. Like New York City, or to his hometown in Canada. Greece if he was lucky. He'd always wanted to see the monuments that had some of the ancient roots of civilization in it. But he always imagined them as skeletal white buildings surrounded by tourists. He didn't expect to see them while they were still still new and actually being used, with three people from his high school, an old friend turned gladiator, and a futuristic warrior princess and her handler while on the run from a tyrannical empire that ruled time itself.

And it all started out calmly enough. Keith was on the way home from kendo in the evening. One way his aunt and uncle kept him occupied while they were never home was getting him involved in basically every class and lesson  under the sun. He wasn't an idiot, he knew what they were doing. But whatever, he liked being busy. It meant he got his drivers license quick, and he could spend some nights just driving aimlessly around town. Walking wasn't so bad. Sometimes he preferred the cool down after the workouts. But usually  Sometimes, like now, he really wished he had druven because he was exhausted and just wanted to be home. Maybe take a soak before ignoring his homework to do some research. Instead, as he rounded the corner to his house, there was someone loitering out front. He looked familiar, lanky with brown hair and a dark green jacket. But Keith for the life of him could not place his name. The guy was toying with the edge of his jacket, smoothing out any non existent wrinkles before exhaling, looking up at Keith's house, and then hunching over again and crinkling his jacket again. Keith slowed two houses down, contemplating whether it'd be worth sneaking through the neighbour's backyards to get to his. But he was too tired to jump so many fences. So instead he just walked by and up to his front door, fishing for his keys. The guy, now behind him, sputtered and started at his sudden appearance. "I wasn't creeping!" He shouted. Keith stopped, hands still in his jean pockets, glancing over his shoulder with a brow quirked. The dude was pointing loudly at him wearing a dramatic scowl, red-faced.  That is, until they made eye contact.  He dropped the pose immediately, his face going even redder.

“Keith,” he declared. “I have something to show you.”

It was Keith’s turn to start. Who was this guy again? How did the know each other? He furrowed his brow.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but who are you?”

The guy gasped, pulling back his hand and looking extremely offended.

“You don’t… How don’t you…”

The guy looked completely lost. Absolutely flabbergasted.  Keith started to inch backwards to his house.

“You’re in my autoshop class,” the guy said. “And my advanced physics class and my gym class and my advanced math class.”

Oh. They shared every class? Keith narrowed his eyes, trying to place a name to the face, but he drew a complete blank. The guy noticed.  He pointed to himself.

“Lance. I work across from you in autoshop. Other side of the room in physics. Same section in gym. Two seats behind you in math.”

He had a vague idea now. If memory served, he could feel a strange glare at his back during math whenever he answered a question right when he was called on.

“Uh, sure. So what are you doing here again?”

Lance’s jaw clenched. “I’m gonna prove to you that I’m better than you.”

Keith blinked, but felt his proverbial hackles raise. Better than him? What was with this guy?

“Look man,” Keith started, “I don’t know what your problem is, but-”

Lance grabbed his arm with the obvious intention to pull away, but Keith was honestly too tired to deal with it. A quick lock onto his wrist and a shift of his body had Lance flying over his shoulder and landing with a thump on the ground.

Lance squeaked when he landed, taking a moment to clear his blurry vision before scowling up at Keith, who was honestly slightly shocked at his automatic reaction.

“Dude, what the hell? Just, come see this thing my friends and I have been working on.”

Keith shook his head. No way was he going anywhere with some weird guy because he asked equally weirdly. He stepped over Lance up towards his door

“It’s time travel,” Lance shouted. Keith froze, and turned back around slowly. Time travel? Was this guy serious? A quick look to Lance’s face showed no trace of humour. Only brows furrowed and mouth pressed firmly together.  

Time travel? Did this guy really think he’d invented time travel? They were only, like, seventeen. How the heck did this guy think he’s done something this crazy? Time travel was something he’d only dreamed of. To go back and stop that. To stop him from leaving...

Keith wanted to just walk away. Just head into his house and maybe soak in the pool. But as he showed the slightest bit of interest, a wide grin broke out across Lance's face that made Keith want to punch him.

“You don’t think I did it,” he said. Keith scowled and looked away.

“You really don’t think I could have,” Lance added louder. “Hah! Well then. I’m going to go back to Ancient Greece without being able to rub it in your face then!”

Lance bounced back to his feet, unfazed from being completely bowled over, and pristinely dusted and dust from his jacket and pants. He only got half way down the path before Keith called,

“Do you have to go back that far?”

Lance paused, spinning on his heel to face Keith with that terrible know-it-all grin again.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

Keith exhaled deeply, fists clenching at his sides. “Can we go back to a more recent time? Say, four years?”

That was when he left. With only a casual goodbye, like he did every morning. He never came home. Lance slowly lifted a shoulder and dropped it.

“Why don’t you come find out?”.

--------

It took Keith about sixty seconds to regret his choice, trotting behind Lance as he led him to wherever this time travel device was. It wasn’t Lance making him regret this time, even though he was prattling on about things Keith wasn’t actually listening to.

No, he was constantly reminding himself how stupid this was. They were teenagers, still in high school. There were people way smarter out there that couldn’t figure it out. Plus hadn’t time travel was already proven impossible by some weird shaped molecule discovery, or something?

But there was still this small part of him that told him to go. Of that part, half was saying to go just to laugh when it inevitably fails. The other half, however, was the part that held belief in this random guy who wanted to prove himself better.

Lance let him a few streets over, to a house that Keith didn’t recognize in the slightest. It was rather large for their suburb, certainly smaller than Keith’s aunt and uncle’s house but sizable enough. Lance lead him around back to a large garage, who’s large door was peeled back. He could hear a pair of voices chatting inside.

Lance skipped around to the front and gestured widely to what was inside.

“Tadaaa,” he sang.

Inside was the most ramshackle vehicle set up on cinder blocks that Keith had ever seen. It was certainly some kind of black vehicle at it’s core, but there were so many mish-mash additions to every side that it was difficult to tell. The four doors had all been painted different colours: the drivers side was red, the passenger green, and the back two were yellow and blue. They were the only things easily seen behind the wires, tubes, and other seemingly random bits of technology fused to the car. The red door was propped open, and Keith could see feet behind it as well as a pair of shorter legs sticking out from under the vehicle.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking good at,” Keith said.

"I just invented time travel,” Lance preened. "We just invented time travel," a large guy who looked about his age popped up over the other side of the car, welding mask propped up on his head and pointing a small soldering iron at Lance. "We re-engineered my brothers chicken scratch notes for time travel," a guy who looked strikingly familiar and much younger skirted out on a board from under the car, wrench in one hand and the other smearing grease across his sweaty forehead. "Hunk can you double check that I did this right?" "Sure thing Pidge, swap with me," he agreed. Pidge creaked up and stretched before they tossed each other their tools. "Aww, come on guys." "Sorry man. Credit where credit's due." Keith frowned and quirked a brow at Lance, who may have been blushing just a little. "Time travel?" "Technically space-time travel," he said, rubbing the space behind his ear. He went over to a desk covered in papers and too many pizza boxes. He picked up a thick binder and handed it to Keith. The coverslip had a sheet of paper in it with the word VOLTRON in a rainbow of crayon. He looked at Lance curiously before flipping to a random page.

He immediately had no idea what he was looking at. The writing was perfectly straight across lineless paper, including neat diagrams of shapes, lines, and the occasional car part. It was in the neatest writing he'd ever seen, if he only knew what was saying. All of the words were certainly English and formed logical sentences but there was so much technical and scientific jargon that it might as well have been in ancient Greek. Lance added, "Yeah, technically it was Pidge's brother who wrote it, but we did have to translate the scribbles and fill in some gaps because it was actually illegible." "YOU had to fill in the gaps," Hunk corrected before disappearing under the car. "Credit where credit's due."

“You wrote all of this?” Keith asked, flipping through the pages more rapidly.

“W-Well rewrote, yeah,” Lance stammered. “Pidge writes as good as his brother, and Hunk didn’t have the attention span to translate it all.”

“Plus we didn’t know how to fill in the missing bits,” Pidge chimed in. “We could look it over, but Lance carried us through.”

“This is actually impressive,” Keith admitted. Lance gave a harumph of triumph. Then Keith added, “But you forgot to carry the two here.”

The room went silent. Lance gawked at him. Suddenly there were three bodies hurling in his direction. The binder was snatched from his hand, an elbow to the ribs knocked him backwards into a waiting Hunk has Pidge flew by. The pair peered into the pages as Hunk propped him back into balance and patted him on the shoulder. He didn’t have time to apologise or anything before Pidge cried wordlessly and jabbed Lance in the side.

“If we would have used that much plutonium we could have been torn apart atom by atom!” He shouted, snatching the binder from a wheezing Lance and whisking it to the cluttered desk. Lance followed, arguing back,

“I messed up one thing, okay? Those notes were completely insane, and you guys didn’t catch it either!”

The pair continued to bicker and they scribbled in corrections on various pages.  Hunk laughed and slapped Keith on the shoulder again.

“Nice catch, dude. Definitely would not have appreciated be becoming atomic pudding.”

“Uh, yeah, sure.” While the other two worked Keith went to see the car. At an up-close-and-personal look, the ramshackle-ness of the vehicle looked like at least some kind of organized chaos. There was little room actually inside the vehicle, so the trunk and exterior were the only places for things to really go. The exterior pieces looked solid, and he when he tugged on pieces they were solid as a rock.  

Inside where the radio would have been was a dissected tablet, with a the screen blank and a ton more wires coming out of it. The trunk had a series of seriously dangerous looking canisters and tubes that linked up into the front hood.

“She ain’t pretty,” Hunk commented, “But she should ride. Ready to take her for a spin?”

Keith blinked. “Take her for a spin?”

“Nope” Lance interrupted, physically coming between the two of them “Nuh-uh. No way.”

“Didn’t you bring him to drive Voltron,” Pidge shot back, his nose still buried in the binder.

“What?” Lance flushed. “N-No, I was going to drive! I brought him along to be impressed.”

“Riiiiiight,” Hunk and Pidge said in unison, looking from Lance, to Keith, to each other.

“I-It doesn’t matter!” Lance humphed. “He’s saw Voltron, now he knows I’m better and he can just go home.”

“Technically you’ve just shown me an ugly car,” Keith said. “I bet it can’t even get out of the garage, let alone go through time.”

How a car was meant to go through time was a mystery to him in the first place, but the way that Lance bristled was enough to make him grin.

“Well,” Pidge intervened, “We need to make some changes now that we have the right numbers. But we should be able like test it tomorrow.”

“Sweet! Wanna stay and help out?” Hunk offered. Lance immediately rejected the offer for him, touting that his purpose had been fulfilled and he could go back to his fancy house now. Hunk and Pidge gave him a look before looking to Keith.

Agreeing with Lance never even crossed his mind. The notes looked legit enough. The three of them looked too serious about it for him to even think it was a joke by this point. And to be honest Lance telling get him not to was enough incentive for him to stay.  

“I’ll see what I can do. I know cars pretty well.” Hunk and Pidge cheered, while Lance managed to sulk loudly. “Although,” he added as he grabbed an empty tool belt along the wall and started to fill it, “I have to ask: where’d you guys manage to get plutonium from?”