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Krolia’s son is not subtle.
She’s glad for that, really. She never wanted the life of a Blade for her offspring. And despite the fact that her only child had ended up in it, anyway, she’s nothing but proud of how eminently unsuitable for it he is. Nothing but thrilled when he continues to push his agenda of transforming the Blade of Marmora into an arm of humanitarian relief, undoing—reworking—centuries of tradition with a disbelieving tilt of the eyebrow or an earnest word.
No, Keith isn’t suited to the life of a spy.
So when he asks her the unsubtle question, she knows exactly why.
“Mom?”
Even a year ago, there was a fifty-fifty chance that that would have come out “Krolia.” She puts down the dagger she’s been sharpening and looks him full in the face at his tone—the one that tries so desperately to be casual.
“Yes, Keith?”
“Were you and Dad actually married? Or just…”
She takes in everything about the way he looks when he asks the question: the half-protective, half-shy hunch of his shoulders; the busy hands that twitch, wanting to be doing something else, something useful; the inward focus on his face. She knows that while he does actually want her answer, whichever one she gives is not going to change anything about the thought process that has his expression in such turmoil.
Taking a breath, Krolia pushes herself back from the low metal table in the belly of their cargo ship. “Is Acxa flying?” she asks.
“Mom-”
“I thought we were near enough to Earth that we’d need to begin our pre-entry checklist.”
“…We probably have about fifteen minutes before I need to get back for reentry,” he says, reluctant.
She raises her eyebrows. “And you think a few doboshes is enough time for this conversation?”
His next expression, squashed and recalcitrant, makes him look so young that Krolia’s breath catches in her throat. She’s so accustomed to her son as a young man—as a soldier—that she’s often able to make herself forget that she’ll never witness so many of the changes to that face. From babe to toddler, from child to man.
But she’s gotten to see him shift from the scared, lonely youth she met those years ago to a stable, loving adult.
And this makes fierce pride claw up her throat.
She swallows.
“So you’ve decided to propose to Lance.”
(Krolia, like her son, is not subtle.)
His jaw drops. She takes in the way he colors—exactly like his father, though he, too, always denied it. “Uh…”
“Keith, you never think idly about anything,” Krolia explains. “If you’re asking about family history, about whether your father and I were formally partnered…”
“He never said anything either way,” Keith says slowly, joining her at the table. “Didn’t wear a wedding ring, but…”
“No,” she confirms. “Though he did have a ring that belonged to his mother. It never fit any of my fingers, of course, but I wore it on a chain until it was confiscated during an undercover mission, years ago. I’m sorry I don’t have it to give to you.”
Grief, a microcosm between one blink and the next, flashes over her son’s face and then is gone. “It’s fine.”
“Is it?”
Keith doesn’t answer her, quiet for a long moment. Instead, he says, “You know he never even dated anyone else? Never brought anyone around. Even though I’m sure he was lonely. He was loyal to you. And I think that mattered a lot, to him.”
After a long silence, Krolia says, “To answer your question, yes. We did marry. When we realized I was carrying you, he insisted.”
Keith gives a little half-nod. “He was kinda old-fashioned about some things.”
“Chivalry.” She nods in return. “It’s not valued among the Galra—there’s not even a word for it, not really—but apparently among the warriors of Earth’s far-distant past, it was prized quite highly.”
Her son offers a soft, proud smile and a quiet huff at this. “Yep.”
Krolia taps one finger lightly against the table.
“You’ve never given anyone a reason to think you’d be anything less than loyal,” she muses, thinking of the way the two of them, the former Red Paladins of Voltron, have crept their way through war’s aftermath to a happiness that shimmers, rare and precious. “Least of all your Lance.”
Krolia doesn’t know the reason for the scoff that follows, but she still frowns at Keith when he says, “You don’t know what I put them all through, before we met. The whole team. Especially Lance.”
Tilting her head, Krolia offers her son a patient smile. “You’ve told me enough of it that I know you’ve more than made up for it, since.”
He surprises her, then. Far from defensive, he looks vulnerable, and lost. “Maybe. But Mom, I’ve been gone… so much over the years…” Now he looks up, directly into her eyes. “Dad would have been there, waiting for you, if he was alive to do it.”
All the breath leaves Krolia, then. A sound leaves her, too: one she didn’t know she was still capable of, small and high and tender, and so full of yearning. She coughs at its tail end: bad camouflage, but better than nothing.
“It is… not the same,” she says. And she knows she can’t pretend, to herself or to her son, that the words are steady.
He doesn’t seem to judge her for it. Keith is incapable of looking down on sincerity in anyone. He just nods and clears his own throat.
“I know,” he says. “I know it’s not the same. But maybe… maybe I can do one thing better than anyone before me had a chance to do. For… for his sake.”
Krolia feels the tenderness on her face even as some small portion of her war-torn heart thumps with bitter regret.
“Lance’s? Or your father’s?”
Either way, you’ve already done so much better than I, my son.
***
Their cargo ship comes planetside at the Galaxy Garrison, and there’s an entire entourage there to greet them. The desert, cold and pale with midwinter, seems somehow warmer for the reunions. Acxa and Veronica pair off immediately. Keith manages not to be literally knocked off his feet by a Lance who launches at him, all love and no mercy. (Lance hasn’t managed to fell Keith yet, with a greeting; but Krolia has heard whispers of a bet on the subject. There are more than a few GAC riding on the wager.)
They’ve made it back to Earth in time for the Christmas season. Later that night, over a communal dinner, Team Voltron argues about whether they’re going to exchange gifts, and if so, in what format. “Secret Santa,” “DIY,” “white elephant”… she never knew there were so many various customs for the practice.
Then again, Earth—with its insistence on its divided, tribal ways—is rare in its diversity.
“Jólabókaflóðið.”
Her own voice surprises her. Several heads lift and brows tilt upward.
“…Come again?”
“That a Galra thing?”
“Icelandic, actually...”
“Indeed,” Krolia says. “Jólabókaflóðið, as I understand it, is a Christmas Eve custom. If Keith’s father could be trusted on matters of family tradition…”
She half-wishes she hadn’t said anything at all. Particularly when, as he eyes skate over the group various bemused stares, she finds Keith’s stricken expression.
“Oh right,” he breathes out. “Grandma—my dad’s mom... she used to get me a book every Christmas, when she was still alive.”
“Right. The Christmas Book Flood,” Pidge muses, translating the term for the group at large and giving Krolia a shrewd look. “Since everyone here is a huge nerd about at least one thing, that’s a great idea, actually.”
“Capital!” Coran agrees.
“And a pretty good way to cut all the B.S. about hunting for gifts for people who’ve pretty much seen everything.”
“Lance, you’re pretty much the best gift-giver here…”
“Yeah, because I participate in the B.S.! Do you know how long it took me to find you those knives last year, Hunk? They’re literally supposed to be the best in the entire universe.” Keith’s partner ticks off the points on his fingers as he continues, “The research. The planning. The getting on an intergalactic flight to get to a planet where buying and selling them wasn’t illegal!”
Keith, sitting next to Lance, laughs—and it seems somewhat at his expense, but Krolia has never seen him look so fondly at any other being. “You couldn’t have just asked me to pick them up?”
“That’s hardly in the Christmas spirit, chiqui.” Lance waves a hand. “And don’t even get me started on the right wrapping paper…”
Krolia enjoys the waves of conversation that follow that—Lance’s continued posturing; Keith’s complaints about the apparently endless Spanish nicknames and the constant need to translate; Shiro’s musing on whether they still need a spending limit for the gift exchange. Someone suggests physical media only (“Way more fun to actually have something to unwrap!”), and the group quickly agrees to the rule. Krolia doesn’t offer any feedback of her own. With her idea accepted, she’s content to allow her wheels to spin over the kinds of books she might get. For everyone else, anyway; Krolia already has just the book in mind, for Keith.
Fortunately, she won’t need to take a leaf out of Lance’s book and head off world to obtain a copy.
She may not be able to give Keith his grandmother’s ring, nor a similarly tangible piece of family history. But Krolia’s husband wasn’t the only one with family. And Krolia has one thing—one single object—that dates back from before her own childhood. She’d had to return to a decimated home-world to reclaim it after the war; but witnessing the devastation had been worth the preservation of legacy.
“Knowledge or death,” she muses aloud.
***
After Earth’s New Year’s Day, a sub rosa video makes its rounds on social media.
All of the former Paladins of Voltron have been the subject of footage that’s circulated through intergalactic news—some flattering, some less so. All of it gets filed away under the collective imagination’s characterization of their heroes. No one who actually knows them is shocked by anything that surfaces.
Through this video, however, Krolia does learn something about her son.
(In addition to the fact, which she learns alongside the millions who have viewed the video within the first hours of its circulation, that he’s now engaged to be wed.)
Krolia learns, through this video, that Keith had, in fact, not only read the handwritten compilation of diaries and personal accounts—the “book” she’d given him on Christmas Eve for their jólabókaflóðið exchange—but that he’d made it to the later entry she’d marked for him, the one that describes an archaic Galran courtship ritual. Despite being long out of favor by Imperial times, it survived in fragments around the empire’s vast reach, and it was one she had always dreamed about as a girl.
The lover, seeking the hand of the beloved, cannot ask that ultimate question under the light of the system’s satellite: not the sun nor the moons, but rather under the fire of aurorae. Back on Daibazaal, where the electromagnetic phenomenon of colored flaring lights in the sky had occurred over most of the planet’s surface, that was… not easy, but easier than it is on most habitable planets. It still took some planning and some knowledge of solar weather patterns. Easier than on Earth, certainly, where the aurora borealis is far more likely to be seen at the poles.
Her own husband would have sought them out, she knows. He would have asked her the ultimate question under the northern lights, would have taken her in one of Earth’s suborbital crafts to a place above the Arctic Circle, if the secret of her existence on Earth hadn’t been a matter of life and death. Would have walked there on foot to bring the lights back to her, if he could have.
It was said, by the ancient peoples of that place, that those lights represented the souls of departed ancestors. Spilled warriors’ blood, sometimes—which, to her, feels very Galran, and not very Earthling, in fact.
Regardless, Krolia isn’t an Earthling and doesn’t know about any of it.
But it was said, in ancient days of the Galra, that the color and nature of the lights in the sky could forecast the nature of a resulting marriage. The grander the light display, the luckier—and the more blessed—the couple would be.
Trust her son to catch this moment:
One of the most spectacular displays of the aurora borealis Earth has seen in a hundred years. The lights aren’t just the green of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere but also rarer hues, purples as well as distinct reds and blues. All limn the two figures in the shaky video as they promise their lives to one another.
***
~
***
Keith’s man isn’t subtle.
“It’s us,” Lance had said, warm breath clouding the air and the arcing fire in the sky above them lighting up every feature on his long-beloved face.
Later, when Keith watches the secret video taken of the proposal by the… fan (for lack of a better word, as Lance asks him to stop referring to the individual in question by four-letter words), he sees himself shake his head at Lance’s observation.
(Not every single instance of the colors red and blue are a sign just for them.)
((Although, if his mom’s book has any basis in reality, this time, they just might be.))
The point is, Lance’s comment had made Keith paranoid that Lance had figured out what they were doing there. So he’d shaken his head and blurted out the words before he even had a chance to pretend he knew how to build up to them.
Next, the video shows what everyone else is talking about most, in the comment sections (which, yeah, he knows he shouldn’t have read, but he couldn’t help himself):
Lance’s utter, unsubtle joy in his “yes.”
Most people who watch the video don’t know Lance, of course. So they only see the shock, and the happiness, and the overwhelmed tears. Between these, in the micro expressions, is Lance’s inability to keep a single thought hidden: his annoyance (no, Keith hadn’t warned him that he would be doing this, and so Lance hadn’t been wearing his most stylish winter gear, just the warmest) or his utter relief at not having to be the one—for once—to ask Keith stay.
But in Keith’s memory, burned like the afterglow of the northern lights behind his eyelids, that’s all there, plain as day.
In that moment, as they stood together under the shifting midnight at the top of the world, the flares above had highlighted every expression from the ridiculous straight to the sublime. Even after he had knocked Keith down into the snow and kissed him until Keith thought he’d burst from the contrast, the heat of the man on top of him and the ice below, the ambient light had been enough to highlight every freckle, every eyelash. Lance is very beautiful; and although the video of the proposal doesn’t capture at all just how beautiful he is, in Keith’s memory, that moment is technicolor and precious. For all that he hates that it’s on video for all the world to see, he doesn’t hate that the moment itself was worth capturing. That it’ll be something he’ll be proud to tell their children about.
He never does learn exactly how his father proposed to his mother. Krolia keeps that precious memory to herself. So Keith is left only with the impression that his pops had “insisted” on marriage.
Keith guesses that he kind of insists, as well. He doesn’t ask: “Will you marry me?” He says it. Demands it. “Marry me.” Because… well because he knows that with Lance, he doesn’t have to ask. He knows what his answer will be.
Maybe that had been how it was for his parents, as well.
But maybe, just maybe, the lights in that sky above—all those apparently auspicious signs—will portend better for the family they’ll make.