Chapter Text
Green I
Katie Holt starred in the mirror. She was, she noticed with disinterest at her nearly naked body, that she was very very muscled. The thin, but sturdy support band she had uninspiredly dubbed the ‘space bra’ across her small chest, and the matching set of high waisted space underwear did little to disguise the muscle. Well, she wasn’t on the level of Hunk, by any means, who over the years had lost his ‘insulated layer’ as he put it, and turned into a thick trunk of pure muscle. She had seen him, unaided, lift an entire platoon of child-miners from a Galara slave planet onto his shoulders, back and in his arms as he bolted towards his Lion. She would never be that physically strong, ever in her life. Her body type was all wrong, her frame too small and unable to sustain such a body mass unless she physically augmented her body.
She was also painfully aware that she was the physically weakest of beyond the mice when it came to the people living in the Castle of Lions. But there was a hardness to her body, a leanness emphasized by the hardness of arms, legs, and her stomach. Katie had always been skinny- the Holts tended to run thin and short- but she had quickly lost any fat in the early years. She had never had much to spare and she wonders, sometimes, if she were to come home, would her mother recognize her. At least her father had seen her before he had left for Earth...
She was a far cry from the thin scrappy thing that had joined the ranks of the Garrison in disguise.
When Katie Holt took the mantle of Pidge Gunderson, it was more than cutting off her hair with clothing shears at weird angles in a half-hearted attempt to look like her brother. It was more than buying a binder to push down her non-existent breast( with a large shirt, she looked flat as a board, but she was nothing if not paranoid ). It was more than grabbing her brother’s glasses to obscure her face(prescription lenses poked out, replaced with a thin glass). It was as if she had shed her skin, like a snake, emerging on the other side of the transformation as a quieter, more focused person. She had always admitted, at least to herself, that she had liked femininity- she liked her long hair, she liked her dresses and cardigans, she liked being able to have a secret between her and her mother under the guises of it being ‘a girl thing’.
She wasn’t overly feminine without her hair, her dresses, because she didn’t need to be, she could be a techie and smart and tough and all those things and no one would doubt who she was. She was Katie Holt. Girl. Fourteen and genius, You’re going to reach the stars, Kit-Kat , her mother would often say. She had a loving family, her brother, her father, her mother and their dog. She wasn’t very sociable, had a difficult time picking up on social cues… But her life was good. Not perfect, but better than that. Good and her’s. Loved .
But then of course, her life had been utterly ruined by two words.
Pilot error.
Pidge could admit to herself that it been a combination of denial and grief that had made her hack into Garrison archives. It had been for Matt and her dad, but partly it had been for him too. She remembered meeting Shirogane Takashi. Her brother’s best friend at the Garrison, tall, confident, but too serious Takashi. She remembers the way he had looked her in the eye, despite the height difference, how he had smiled, transforming that rock of a face into something warm and soft. He had taken a look at her, twelve and all oiled up hands and hair a riot around her head and asked what she had been working on with a curious way. No condescension. No hesitation. Just curious and open. She thinks, when she really allows herself, that if such thing as love, at first sight, was real, that at that moment she had fallen in love with him.
When he been announced as the Pilot, four years later, she had been so reassured. So relieved.
She had seen his statistics, both in the simulator and out of it, she knew that Takashi didn’t make errors. Or at least not many. She had ignored the logic in the finality of him making such human mistake. It wasn’t in the man she knew. But to see her validation… that day, heart in her throat at the fact that the shuttle had never left Kerberos in the first place for pilot error to occur…. That had set her on fire with rage and hurt and sheer determination .
Donning Pidge Gunderson was easier then she would have thought.
Just a few aesthetic changes, androgyny was achieved, if leaning on the feminine side. She was small and compact, thin to the extreme, and passed off as a young boy with little to no effort in pursuit of her family. Her personality didn't change much, beyond tempering herself to some extent, being mindful of her monthly cycle, hacking the records to keep the Garrison Medical Staff from looking too deep. And Pidge Gunderson was her life for a year, trying to find answers, trying to find three people lost.
Or, well, it was still her life. She had found all of them, first Shiro, then Matt and finally her father. Then Shiro again- But the Universe was full of lost, displaced people caused by the rise of the Galra Empire over ten-thousand years of conquest. She was a Paladin of Voltron. And it was her job, she thinks, to try and reunite as many people as she could. She was an all or none kind of person. So Katie Holt was still in limbo. Still on hold. She needed to be Pidge- Defender Of the Universe, left arm of Voltron, the Guardian of the Forests.
So with a wry smile, she looked at her muscled, thin self, before turning her back, going for clothing to hide away Kaite for another day. Because the Universe did not need that little girl reaching for the stars. They needed something stronger, fiercer.
Not little Kit-Kat.
Pink I
Sometimes she wondered if the title of Princess was one she was still worthy of.
Oh, Allura introduced herself as such, said it with pride, held her chin high and her back straight. She relished the way it fell from her lips- relished when it was recognized as a title of status and prestige, but adored when her people, her kingdom were recognized. Ten-thousand years was long and many people’s memories were short, especially in wake of suppression and displacement of said memory. Things faded or were erased completely. Her title was empty at best and a constant reminder of the people lost, as far as she knew only three full Alteans lived, four of you counted the Prince despite being half-Galara. She had no people to claim, not in the normal sense…
But she was, on the other hand, very deserving of the title.
She was Princess Allura of Altea- the princess of the Altean legacy, of the Legend Voltron, its heart, sometimes its arms.
Blue I
Sometimes it's the stupid things Lance misses. He misses his sister, Marissa’s obnoxious way of laughing, the way it went so high pitched and then cut off with a horrendous snort. He misses his grandmother Chula’s ropa vieja , how it was so horrendously salty on his tongue, on how she would force feed him at least three bowls because he was ‘ un palito’ . He misses his sister Veronica's perfume, oil based, sweet but earthy, and how you could tell what she had touched just by the smell alone. He misses his Ama’s hands, how they would flutter about as she talked, how they constantly reached out to touch, a squeeze to his arm, a swat of his head, a gentle cupping of his cheek. He misses the little, stupid things they would do, things he took for granted.