This story is definitely not how I imagined writing it. XD Considering that all I had to start with was a bunch of romantic cuddle scenes and like one rant on the nature of war, that’s probably not surprising… But hey, the fluff starts showing up in force by the end of the chapter. Yay!
This chapter brought to you by Morten Lauridsen (also listened to Lux Aeterna and Les Chansons des Roses because those are also the best).
Part 3: Flowers For Her
Elslince didn’t quite fit in instantaneously to Team Voltron, as might be expected. Shy, unused to space travel, she spent a lot of time wandering the stark corridors softly at first. Shiro was busy with his own problems and the problems of the team and the galaxy, but he tried to talk to her a few times a day.
He found out that his comparison of her to a plant wasn’t as far off as he’d first thought – she photosynthesized, and only ate once a day. He learned that Teleran blood was indeed yellow, and that was why she blushed the way she did. He learned that she liked collecting Thundercats trading cards (and consequently that humans had not invented Thundercats, they’d only turned it into a TV show), and she’d brought her collection in her meagre possessions. She had about thirty, gathered over a decade; it seemed they were hard to come by when fighting a war without consistent access to intergalactic markets.
But he couldn’t spend all day with her, and for a while, he worried that it hadn’t been a good idea to bring her after all. Thanks to the cryogenic healing chambers, her skills weren’t exactly in demand, especially when they were just traveling through space and not engaging in combat. Although… if they were ever on the ground again, separated from the Castle, she could be a lifesaver. They’d have to see. In the meantime, there was little for her to do. She volunteered to help Coran keep the castle clean, but that wasn’t exactly why she’d come.
But after a couple days, she found her way to the Green Lion’s hangar and spent time with Pidge. Pidge didn’t mind the company, chattering about her discoveries and inventions to Elslince’s willing ears, and Elslince found a data terminal and began studying as much of the galaxy outside Teler as she could, or looking through display screens at the beauty of space outside, the nebulae and vast expanses of stars.
She also began making friends with Hunk, sweet, gentle Hunk, whose own awkwardness put her at ease. And sometimes she go to the observation room of the training arena and watch Keith and/or Lance fight… and bicker, and be dorks.
She seemed shy of Allura. “She’s a princess,” she explained when Shiro asked – Allura had been wondering.
“And you’re the great-granddaughter of the Elder of Teler,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to be shy about when it comes to rank. And we’re all in this together, there aren’t enough of us on this ship to make a distinction like that.”
“I… I guess. She’s just so… elegant, and regal. I’m in awe of her.”
Shiro chuckled. “Well, give her a chance, will you? She’d love to get to know you, too.”
“O-okay. If you say so.”
“You’ve seen how the others sass her, right? She’s not so scary. Except when she’s mad. And she won’t be mad at you.”
“Hmm. I might actually have a question for her. I’ll ask her sometime. Soon.”
“Good. I do have another question for you. I know we haven’t really had time to make you feel really settled, but tell me now, and I’ll try and arrange it – is there anything else we can do to make you feel more at home?”
She hesitated. “I know it’s a bother…”
“Elslince. I know you’re making friends with the team, but you still don’t look comfortable to be here.” Or really happy, even. Well, perhaps none of them were really happy to be here, except maybe Allura and Coran, but the humans had adjusted faster. “C’mon, you can tell me.” And he wanted to make up for the fact that he’d dragged her away from her home.
“Well… it’s just… this spaceship is beautiful, but it’s so cold. All this metal and ceramic… I saw pictures of when it was on Planet Eris, it was beautiful there.”
“You want a garden,” he guessed.
She started and blinked, then smiled, abashed. “Yes.”
“I’ll see what we can do.”
The first contribution he made was on the next planet they visited. He knew nothing about planets, just grabbed a ceramic pot from storage, dug up the first flowering shrub he saw, and plopped it in. It looked decent when he was done, so he figured it would survive long enough to get to the plant expert. It was quite pretty, too, pink trumpet-shaped flowers and velveteen leaves.
The others had seen him. “Hey, that’s a good idea!” Hunk said. “We should have been growing our own herbs all along. You have any more of those pots?”
“Not with me, sorry. Just got the one.”
Pidge peered at it. “I hope no one’s allergic to it.”
Lance and Keith weren’t paying any attention, arguing over strategy instead. As long as they didn’t start throwing punches, everything was fine. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Pidge smiled reassuringly at him. “I think she’ll like it.”
“The gesture, at least,” Hunk said, less reassuringly.
“And if you want us to help out, just say so,” Pidge continued. “In fact… Hunk, conference when we get back to the ship. I have some ideas and I will need your help.”
“Righty-o,” Hunk said.
Allura and Coran couldn’t miss the fact that he attended the mission debriefing with a potted plant under his arm, but neither of them said anything about it, only smiled knowingly at him, and as soon as they were done, he went off to find Elslince.
“Hey,” he said when he found her, in the Green Lion hangar. Pidge was not there, but hadn’t she said something about meeting with Hunk?
She looked up from her laptop. “Hi! Oh, what is that?”
“I dunno,” he said, and presented it to her bluntly. “It has flowers on it, so… it’s a start?”
She stared at it, then at him, and her face melted into the biggest smile he’d ever seen, with a little giggle. “You are the nicest person. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I think Pidge and Hunk are interested in contributing too, and if we can get Lance and Keith to think of it as a competition, you’ll have a garden in no time.”
“Hahaha, that would be hilarious. They don’t mind?” She was peering into the flowers, feeling the leaves diagnostically. Her hair was curling around the stems.
“No, of course not. Gives them something to do that’s not connected with missions. Sure, Hunk cooks and tinkers, and Pidge codes things, and Keith works out, and Lance… gets into trouble, but it’s good to have something else to do too. In fact, this could be a really good team-building exercise.” His mind had begun to race. “This one was kind of spontaneous, but if you tell us what to look for, we could do a really good job, I bet.”
She smiled, and he felt light-headed. “That would be lovely. All of this for me… I haven’t done anything to deserve this…”
“Not the point,” he said. “We- I don’t need a reason to do this for you, do I? Don’t worry. You’ll find your niche in the team soon enough. Remember, we haven’t had any serious planet-side missions for a while.”
She sobered, and now he felt bad for reminding her. “True. I’ll do my best when we come to it.”
“I know. Now, where do you want this?” It wasn’t that heavy, but he could carry it to her room for her.
“My room… Hmm, or do you think Pidge would mind if I left it here? I spend a lot of time here, after all.”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to ask her.”
But as they approached Elslince’s room, they heard the sound of loud banging, and the whine of electric saws. Elslince’s bag was in the hall with all her things in it. “What on Earth-”
Pidge’s head popped out of the room, her hair covered in shiny metal shavings, a breath mask over her face and goggles over her glasses. “You can’t come in yet!”
“What the he-” He remembered just in time Pidge wasn’t old enough for that kind of language and leaned into the room.
Hunk was kneeling by what was left of the wall, a circular saw in his hand, also wearing a breath mask and goggles. He offered a sheepish smile at Shiro’s confused frown. Metal shavings littered the entire floor, particles were floating in the air – but that was nothing compared to the fact that the wall was missing into the next room. The next room, which wasn’t a bedroom, but a small living-room type area, if he recalled correctly. “What are you two doing? Did you get permission from Coran and Allura to hack up the Castle of Lions? Where did you get those tools?”
“We’re enlarging Elslince’s room, yes, of course we did, and they know what we’re doing – mostly – and they gave them to us.” Pidge counted off her answers on her fingers.
Shiro shook his head, trying to dispel the disoriented feeling. It didn’t work. And just when he’d thought Hunk and Pidge were the steady ones… “Enlarging-”
“This is just step one!” Pidge explained, stepping into the hallway and shutting the door behind her to keep the noise and the metal bits contained. She brandished a paper plan at the two of them, drawn in brightly coloured crayons. “First, we make her room bigger. Second, we install proper planter beds. Third, an irrigation system. Fourth, proper sunlamps. Also maybe a curtain for the bed alcove, since the room is bigger now. Then you can have the best garden that’s ever been on a spaceship, ever!”
Shiro could feel his mouth hanging open and closed it. “That’s… ambitious.”
“I know!” Pidge said proudly. “But it can work. Allura told me that we can do whatever want to these rooms as long as we don’t build up or down, or cut any of the power lines, and I checked, there aren’t any in this wall that we cut down, so stop making that face.”
“O-okay.” Now that she was explaining it, it seemed… slightly less crazy. “Did you think to get Lance and Keith to help?”
“I didn’t think they’d be interested…”
“Are you kidding? You’re going to need some way to build these ‘proper planter beds’ of yours, and setting up this irrigation system without flooding anything, and you don’t think they’d love to get their hands on welding torches? Maybe we should leave wiring the sunlamps to Hunk, though.”
“All right!” Pidge saluted enthusiastically, then glanced behind him. “Elslince, are you okay?”
Elslince was blue-screen-of-deathing behind him, staring vacantly at Pidge. “This is… kind of overwhelming.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Pidge said. “And I’m sorry… I wasn’t thinking about how long it would take when we started. I guess we should have asked you first, if it was okay to take your room apart. We… got kind of carried away. Now you have to sleep somewhere else until it’s done…”
“Don’t worry about that,” Elslince said, recovering some animation. “It’s very kind of you. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you in return.”
Pidge grinned. “Give us more awesome projects! This is the most fun I’ve had in weeks!”
“O-okay.”
Shiro nodded at her bag. “Shall we get you settled in another room for the time being? It’s going to take them at least a few days to get that mess straightened out.”
She picked up the bag. “Right. Lead the way!”
It took Team Voltron the better part of a week to get her room garden straightened out, but Shiro had to admit they’d done a good job by the time they’d finished. Even Lance had done well, welding the planters together. They had to be watertight, so that mold wouldn’t start growing in the cracks. If that happened they’d have to rip it all up and start over again.
That first plant had lived long enough to make it into the garden, and it had been joined by a few others. Hunk contributed the most, although his gifts were self-motivated – he wanted fresh herbs. Elslince didn’t mind, in fact, she was happy to take care of them. But even Keith picked up some interesting little cactus-y things. Lance brought her the closest thing he could find to a red rosebush, giving it to her with flourish and fanfare, but Shiro wasn’t sure she got the significance of red roses.
She spent less time with the others now, spending a lot of time in her larger room with her slowly expanding collection, but now the others came to seek her out, to see how it was going, to help her water or prune. She remembered exactly who had given her which plant, and it didn’t take her long to start naming them.
Shiro liked to drop by, especially. It was a peaceful place, the antithesis of much of his life since he’d left Earth. And there was always good company there.
“You’re like their dad,” she giggled one time, when he was complaining about the antics of the team.
“What? I’m not that old…”
“I know, you’re the same age as me, aren’t you? But you support them, keep them in line, direct them… you’re totally their dad.”
Shiro put his head back, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his forehead. “If you say so. I don’t feel like a dad, but I guess I can see what you’re getting at.”
She giggled again. She really liked this idea, didn’t she? “Heehee, Voltron Dad. And Allura’s kind of like Voltron Mom.”
“Now that, I can see,” Shiro said, and chuckled. “What does that make Coran, then? Voltron Uncle?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Definitely. And I’m Voltron Aunt. We’re all just one big family in space.”
“That should make Lance happy,” he said.
“I know, he misses his family. He was telling me about his mom’s pies last time he was in here… They’re so young, aren’t they?”
“Hunk, maybe not so much… Pidge, definitely. She’s brilliant, especially for her age, but… sometimes I wonder if she should be out here at all. But she’s stubborn, and driven, and she won’t take no for an answer. Every chance she gets, she’s looking at Galra prisoner manifests, trying to find her family. I hope we can help her find them soon.”
“Mm.” Elslince was quiet a moment, and looked more somber than she had a minute ago. “Do you think they realize what’s going on, really?”
“I don’t know if I realize what’s really going on,” he said honestly. “This whole thing is so big, too big for us. Not so long ago, we humans thought we might be alone in the universe. Now, there’s an empire conquering the entire galaxy, and more species than we can begin to count fighting for their freedom? But no… I don’t think the others know what fighting a war really means. You hear their mission chatter, right? All the cheeky one-liners, the energetic exuberance…”
“Do you think they should know?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“But if they’re not taking it seriously…”
“Well, I have been thinking about it. They don’t realize the impact their actions have, true… the consequences, not for themselves, but for the rest of the galaxy… Sometimes I really think Lance just thinks he’s playing a videogame. Keith… Keith might guess at it.” Or maybe that was just Keith being quiet and serious about everything.
“Shouldn’t they know the consequences?” Blue eyes turned on him anxiously. “They don’t even notice when they blow up those big ships. It’s just one target fewer to them. There are people on those ships, Shiro. And yes, those people are trying to blow us up, and maybe some or most of them want to do it whole-heartedly, but… it just doesn’t seem right to me! People die, and Voltron laughs at a job well done, because it’s a child that doesn’t understand!”
“Elslince…” It wasn’t completely true, often it was more the exhilaration of surviving danger. But he could see her point.
“And what if there are prisoners on those ships? When you found the Red Lion, you freed prisoners at the same time. If Pidge hadn’t decided to take a different path, they would have all died when Voltron attacked the ship.”
He looked away, uncomfortable. “I know. But in one of those big space battles, it’s just not possible to cleanly disable every ship.” But she wasn’t wrong; the thought that they might lose Doctor and Matt Holt in the struggle for survival nagged at him. “But that I might be able to point out to the team without killing their innocence.”
“Oh. Oh, I see.”
“Yeah. You’re right, they’re so young… they shouldn’t be exposed to this stuff. And yeah, I was in the military, they were in military training, but Earth has been at peace for decades. Galaxy Garrison is mostly about exploration now, not fighting. So… they didn’t know… don’t know… what they were getting into. No one’s talked to them about death, about the hard choices people make in war. We joke about ‘still being alive’, but I don’t think they’ve thought about what that really means, or that they want to.” He glanced at her. “They haven’t seen what you’ve seen. Haven’t been through what you have. Haven’t had to endure that level of hardship.”
She looked sad. “Is that one reason you’ve been so nice to me?”
“…Yeah.”
“And that’s why you don’t want them to think too hard about the horrible things of the universe.”
“If they do, they’ll either become hardened soldiers, or they’ll become beaten down by the horror of it all, and I can’t tell which outcome would be worse. So I think it’s okay, in comparison, that they don’t necessarily treat things as seriously as they ought to. As long as they’re still alive and we work well as a team, that’s enough for me.”
“Allura and Coran, they’ve also seen terrible things, haven’t they?” Elslince said. “And they seem to be going along with your decision about not telling the others.”
“We haven’t talked about it, but yeah, they haven’t brought it up.”
“And Allura’s lost her father, twice,” she said softly, almost to herself. “It’s so sad. I cried for her after she told me.”
He got up and knelt beside her chair. “You lost your sister.”
“But I didn’t lose my planet. I didn’t lose everyone I ever knew, except one person. And even to come here… I came because I wanted to, because I wanted to see the galaxy, because I wanted to try to help the person who saved me. Not because I went through a wormhole.” She reached out, and took his artificial right hand in both of hers. He stared at her. “You’ve lost so much, too. I cry for you, too, sometimes.”
“Elslince…” She was going to make him choke up in a second. “The Earth I left behind was a planet of peace. Sure, it took us almost all of human history to get there, we’re a pretty violent species, but we got there. So we have to have hope for the galaxy, too. Even though it’s been at war at least ten thousand years.” Which was most of recorded human history to begin with.
“I know,” she whispered.
“And deep down, I don’t think we’ll win by sheer force. Most of the conflicts in human history, especially the ones about conquest, ended up… losing a lot of lives for not very much. I don’t want to say pointless, but we could have done better. So this war might end up being the same. We can break Zarkon’s military, but until we change his mind, and the minds of his followers, we won’t truly succeed.”
“Do you think it’s possible? That the same peace that Earth and Teler had before Zarkon will spread throughout the galaxy?”
“I don’t know,” he said, squeezing her hand gently. “Not quickly, anyway. But until then, even if it’s pointless… I’m willing to give up everything to protect the people I care about.” Grey eyes met blue eyes. “I don’t want you to lose any more. I don’t want you to cry anymore, for anyone’s sake. Not even mine.”
“Then you can’t give up your life,” she whispered. “You can’t give up everything. Because I care about you, too.”
Did Telerans kiss? Because he really wanted to kiss her right now.
She hesitated. “Is kissing a thing humans do?”
He coughed a relieved laugh. “Yes. Yes, it is. Can I kiss you?”
She tilted her face towards him, yellow blooming on her cheeks, blue eyes sparkling and tender. Her hair reached out towards him, touching his face gently, and then his lips brushed against hers.