It's Voltron Week over on tumblr, and I finally have an excuse to write ridiculous amounts of fanfic for this show! The prompt choices for Day 1 were Space / Travel, and I, obviously, chose space. Once I remembered this challenge's existence, which was, like, less than an hour ago. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out despite the rush, though.

With all that explained, let's get kickin'!

Space

Honestly, Lance couldn't care less about space.

After all, space was literally a whole bunch of nothing. Just a huge, empty void. And, sure, the stars were certainly different than anything you could find on Earth, but he never really saw them as pretty. In fact, he never really understood what was so "pretty" about anything―except for people. People were pretty―in fact, he'd so so far as to wager that just about everyone he'd ever met was damn near beautiful―but tiny specks of light against a dull black background? Not so much.

He didn't go to training at the Garrison because he liked space. He didn't go because he had big dreams of piloting spacecraft, or even because he wanted to be an astronaut like 85% of kindergarteners. He went to the Garrison for two main reasons.

1. Being a badass space pilot was bound to help him pick up chicks.

2. Being a badass space pilot meant he didn't have to fill in any stupid bubbles on any stupid tests or sit down for five hours and try to write three-thousand words on whether or not Romeo and Juliet was a love story.

As soon as Lance heard that enrolling in the Garrison gave him a free pass out of high school without disappointing his family, he was jumping at the opportunity. Even though he didn't like the idea of being surrounded by pure black boringness for hours on end, he was willing to entertain it, if only to get away from those God-awful teachers and shitty curriculums.

And, hey, even if he only made it in because of Keith's discipline orders, who cared?

But Lance had always been a bit too quick to adopt other people's feelings, and when he found himself surrounded by people who loved space and piloting more than anything almost 24/7, he was bound to come around eventually. Soon, he was just as excited at the prospect of hurtling through the void as anyone else, even if he still wanted to get back home eventually and go back to surfing with his siblings.

After all, Lance was a ladies' man and a space man, but, above all else, he was a family man.

Space was the most terrifying concept Hunk had ever even heard of.

There was nothing in space. No air; no people; no food or water. Not even the slightest hint of life. No one to hear you scream. The glimmering stars were more intimidating than pretty, given how easy it would be for one of them to kill you. And the sheer vast emptiness of it was enough to send shivers down his spine just thinking of it.

That was why he had to go.

Enrolling at the Garrison had been a last-minute, heat-of-the-moment decision. His moms had been understandably shocked―they knew how he felt about space, not to mention his crippling motion sickness and general squeamish nature. And, although they were as supportive as they always were, he could hear the unsaid question on their lips as they helped him fill out his forms and apply to be a mechanic.

Hunk didn't want to ride in a huge hunk of metal as it wandered aimlessly through the endless abyss of space. But he'd heard one too many obnoxious snickers as the bus driver pulled over so he could puke out the window. He'd endured one too many sneers of "crybaby" as he excused himself to the bathroom while they talked about the atrocities committed by all involved parties in World War III. He'd been given one too many degrading nicknames that mocked him for having feelings; for having motion sickness; for being scared of space.

So he signed up for the Garrison, uncharacteristically spiteful, if only to see the look on his classmates' faces.

Of course, since he signed up over the summer and never started attending school the next year, he realized too late that they would never actually know. So his first-ever rebellious attempt at showing someone that they knew nothing about him was an utter failure. By the time he realized that he would have to actually go flying around in space, it was too late to back out. He thought about bombing the entrance exam, but there were so few people who signed up for the role of mechanic this year that he would feel bad doing so.

So, with only about five pounds of panic running through his system, Hunk stepped into the ship and buckled in, hoping beyond hope that he wouldn't have to do too much galactic travel before he could drop out and go home.

He really just wanted to go home.

Katie was one of the most precocious children you would ever meet, and one of the things that piqued her intellectual curiosity the most was space.

It ran in the family, too. Her father was the captain of his own ship, Matt was an on-board scientist who handled the samples and did some on-site analysis, and her mother was part of a team that studied anything and everything that could be brought back from the many planets they studied.

Katie didn't really want to do any of that in particular, though. She liked theoretical science and coding, whereas all of her family had rather tactile jobs. That was why she vowed solemnly that she would be the one to design and program the first ship that could bring Dad and Matt all the way to the other end of the galaxy.

(Matt's friend was allowed to come, too, so long as Dad and Matt were there. She liked him. He was great with the cats.)

When they left for the Kerberos mission, Katie was at school. She knew she wouldn't be able to see them off, so she told Mom to hug them each twice as much in return. In the middle of English, when the clock hit 12:00, she smiled quietly, muttering a quick goodbye to Dad and Matt under her breath.

Katie was also at school when the news came weeks later. The intercom frantically called her down to the Principal's office, interrupting roll-call. On the way, she had bit her lip and fretted that the prank she'd pulled on some bullies a few days ago had been discovered.

When she got there, the first thing she saw was her mother in tears.

Pilot error, they said. No bodies recovered, they said. We're sorry for your loss, they said.

Katie Holt loved space. She loved every part of it; she wanted to know more about it and map out the entire universe and be able to travel across it in the blink of an eye. The Garrison might as well have been family to her.

Space had taken her family away from her. And the Garrison had slandered their memories.

Pidge Gunderson chopped off all his hair and signed up for first-year space flight training.

Keith had always felt a sort of pull towards the void that extended beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

He couldn't tell you why. After all, there wasn't much of interest to him in space. Sure, he liked to pilot things, and he was pretty damn good at it, but there were far more things he could drive than just spacecraft. And, to be honest, the idea of being stuck in space for months on ends was more than a little constricting. After all, if there was one thing Keith valued above everything, it was freedom.

Still, there was no denying that something―some part of him; some strange, instinctual urge―told him that space was where he needed to be. When he closed his eyes and focused on the urge hard enough, he could just barely make out a vast background of purple and a vaguely animal-like blob of red.

So, against his better judgment, Keith applied to the Garrison. It didn't exactly take a lot of effort to get in―his skills spoke for themselves. Soon, he was at the top of his class, leaving everyone else in his dust.

The visions started getting stronger; more vivid. He could now make out many pairs of yellow eyes, along with four other, smaller silhouettes of different colors―yellow, blue, green, and black.

One day, he woke up with a sense of urgency unlike any he'd ever felt before. Something was pulling him―harder than ever now, and with less gentle persuasion and more brute force. He'd spent the first few minutes groaning, his head in his hands, before immediately deciding that space wasn't the place to be at the moment―he had to get to… wherever these dreams were leading him.

It was far too late to back out now. But it was never too late to get kicked out. It was relatively easy to strike up an argument with his superior officer about something completely irrelevant, and he was pretty good at making it escalate at just the right pace until the officer took a swing at him. From there, it was even easier to be dragged out the front door by security, but he made certain that it was something he could fight if he needed to get to space for real someday.

'Besides,' he thought to himself as he hot-wired the same superior's car and drove the direction his gut pulled him towards, 'space really isn't for me.'

Because, after all, Keith treasured nothing more than his freedom. And how was he supposed to be free when there was nowhere to run?

His first trip into space was the single best moment of Shiro's life.

The Garrison had turned out to be everything he'd ever dreamed. Since he was a boy, he had always dreamed of flying into the unknown; of seeing the majesty of the stars and the planets for himself and helping scientists better understand the world. Of floating around in zero-gravity in a spacesuit; of being able to let go of something only for it to continue to float in mid-air.

The Garrison had offered him that and more. His piloting skills turned out to be legendary, so he had the chance to work with many different students who had many different points of view. As he graduated through the levels, he became more and more confident, evolving from the quiet, meek boy who had spent all day reading and dreaming.

The bonds he made at the Garrison were ones that would last a lifetime. Not only did he meet people his own age and a few underclassmen, but he had people to look up to; role models to aspire towards. The Holt family, in particular, had become so close to him that he dared to call them his own honorary family. Matt and he had immediately struck it off, and Captain Holt was an inspiring man, while Mrs. Holt was sweet as could be without taking shit from anyone, and Katie was amazing in her own way, being able to keep up with the adults when they had their discussions about technology and science and samples despite being only a child.

Shiro felt that he owed everything to the Garrison, and it all began to line up on his first official flight off of Earth. It was smooth sailing, but not too smooth―just enough bumps in the road to keep it exciting without ever giving him reason to worry. Matt and Captain Holt were his teammates, and, as always, they worked together like a well-oiled machine. Soon enough, they had landed on Kerberos and were extracting the sample.

They came out of nowhere.

Cold cells. Blood dripping from the wounds of fighters and the blades of their enemies. Boiling hot sand under his feet; ragged clothes hanging off of his figure. Loneliness. Grief. Agony as his arm was taken from him. Agony as a new one took its place. Memorization. Guard routes, always the same. Escape. The pod. Flying frantically. Barely remembering the controls.

Arrival. Being tied down. Trying to warn them. Being ignored. Sedatives.

His first trip into space was the single worst moment of Shiro's life.

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...what... genre... is this...