He didn't frequently catch the paladins alone. He was surprised when Pidge approached him.

"Good evening," he said to her.

"Yeah… hi."

She was carrying something.

"Were you looking for me?" he asked.

"Yeah, actually."

It was a nice feeling, just a little.

"What's that you've got there?"

"My dad sent a care package."

"That's thoughtful."

"Yeah. Well… I think this one's for you."

She handed him the object. A primitive, codex-form text. He rifled experimentally through the pages. It was an alien script, interspersed with simple illustrations.

"Your planet's literature?"

"Yeah," she said. "It's one of those 'timeless classic' things."

"Is it, now."

"I mean, it's not TERRIBLE but it's not my favorite or anything, and I really can't think of anyone else my dad must have sent it for…"

"You're giving it to me because you don't want it," he began to get amused.

"No, I never said that!"

She was looking uncomfortable. Perhaps not a time to play around.

"Well. I appreciate your father's gesture."

"Great. …I was hoping you might."

He felt her watching him as he flicked through the pages one more time. Drawings of humans and stars and trees.

"You… can't read it, can you?" she said.

He looked up.

"No, I'm afraid not."

"Do you… want me to read it to you?"

He turned it over.

"If you feel it's important."

Apparently Commander Holt had felt it was important. But the Earth natives were a species of strange fascinations.

"I mean, it's fiction," Pidge said.

"Then I would like to hear your planet's fiction," Lotor replied.

"Okay, then," Pidge said, taking a breath. She didn't look too happy. He suspected he knew why.

He suspected this was an apology.

"Is there somewhere we can sit?" she said before she opened it. "It's the kind of book you have to see."

They sat against a wall and she began.

"It's called The Little Prince."

It was definitely the kind of book you had to see, and the kind of book you had to be a native of Earth to understand.

It began with a question of art. Of things that adults couldn't see.

"This is what an Earth hat looks like?" Lotor indicated the drawing.

"Well, only some of them."

A man who was lost in the desert.

A child who wanted a drawing of a sheep.

"What is a 'sheep?'"

"Some domesticated herbivore with wool."

There were drawings of sheep but they didn't look very comprehensive. Least of all the one that was only the box that the sheep was inside.

The one that the little prince decided was perfect.

"'Tie him! What a queer idea!'" said the child in the book.

For he lived on a planet scarcely bigger than himself, with his three volcanoes and his flower and just enough room for a sheep.

"Not that an object that size would have enough gravity to hold a breathable atmosphere, forget a human being," Pidge said, and it took him a moment to realize she had broken from the text.

"You yourself said it was fiction," Lotor said.

"Yeah, well this is why it bothers me sometimes."

"I don't read much fiction myself," he said. "The only fiction in the Empire is unapproved historical documentation."

"Oh. Right."

"I appreciate that your planet still has this," he said.

A quaint little planet, the child of the universe. Unaware and alive with possibility.

A place where childhood could HAPPEN.

If they all died, they might die happy.

As it said in the book, grown-ups never were.

'Grown-ups love figures," Pidge read. "When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, 'What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?' Instead, they demand: 'How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?' Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him."

Yes, it was a ridiculous thing. But it was a truth of the lonely world. One couldn't afford to talk about games and voices and whatever butterflies were when there were angry forces behind every star. And numerical questions like 'How fast does this craft go?' were VERY relevant in a world like theirs.

"Perhaps I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old."

He had.

He felt like he had lost something but hadn't allowed himself to notice.

She was looking a little unhappy too.

"You seem a bit perturbed," Lotor said to her.

"Oh," Pidge stopped. "It's nothing."

"I'm sure it's not nothing."

"Fine, I just… don't always agree with this book."

It was, of course, fiction.

"Which part don't you agree with?"

"The part where things that can be objectively quantified apparently have no soul or whatever, and that people who need to use them are idiots. I just… don't really get things that can't be put into numbers." She looked to the wall. "I know I'm not a soulless idiot, but I get treated that way a lot."

He frowned.

"Well they're wrong about that. A soulless person wouldn't love someone the way you do."

He swore she was going to look back at him, and he swore she was going to say, "I'm sorry."

She didn't.

"There's too many variables in the human brain," she said at last. "It's impossible to make reliable predictions about behavior. And sometimes one action is appropriate in one context, and then it's not appropriate in another, but it's up to YOU to figure out what the difference is, and nobody just TELLS you, they just get mad."

Her planet was foreign to her as well as him.

"That's what I like about computers," she said. "The language is so much simpler. Everything means what it's supposed to mean, you don't have to have all this stupid context, and if you do things right you get a predictable outcome every time."

He nodded.

"Not everyone works in the same way. But your planet hasn't sanctioned the way that works for YOU."

"Well I'm… glad you understand."

He understood.

"My father filled his empire with people just like him. For anyone who wasn't, things… didn't go well. But without his rule, they would have lived valuable lives of their own."

Pidge rifled the pages. There was a picture of a man.

"You don't seem much like your father at all."

"Well. Thank you."

She laughed a bit.

"Why are you laughing?"

"Because if someone told ME that, I'd be upset."

"Well, your father seems like a good person."

"He taught me almost everything I know…"

He tried to hide it, but at that moment he started to feel jealous.

And it seemed, from what he gathered, she really couldn't tell, she might not have been able to tell even if he HADN'T been hiding it.

It was better that she didn't know.

But how many people had used that to her detriment instead.

"I'm glad your father is someone you can look up to," Lotor said absent-mindedly.

If he'd loved someone that way, he might have done the same thing.

But somewhere inside him was a coward.

Pidge wiped her eyes.

"What are we talking about this for? We have a book to read."

They turned back to the pages.

The little prince's planet was infested with baobabs.

"And yes, there really are trees like that on Earth, but not where I live," Pidge said. And she continued to read. "Before they grow so big, the baobabs start out by being little."

Trees tended to. Everything tended to.

"But seeds are invisible. They sleep deep in the heart of the earth's darkness, until some one among them is seized with the desire to awaken."

He thought of the Champion.

The story of the baobabs turned out to be a moral tale, about a man whose planet was torn apart by three enormous baobabs, three baobabs that had sprouted as tiny little shoots.

He understood the metaphor. But he couldn't deny his respect for the trees. They started small, they cracked stone that was tougher than they were. Under watch and against odds, they claimed their own world.

There was something to be said for small things.

"So, what do you think so far?" Pidge said.

"Hm? Oh. It's interesting."

It was strange and slow and quiet. He'd never heard a story like this.

"Yeah, don't get the wrong idea, this really isn't what most Earth literature is like," she said.

"So what IS most of it like?"

"Well, you know. It makes a lot more sense."

Numerically, perhaps. Or maybe a bit less… metaphysically.

"I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman," Pidge read to him. "He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride."

He found himself looking at something else.

A light slightly dim.

"Uh… are you sure you're enjoying this?"

There might have been a word besides "enjoy" but he couldn't find it.

"Please continue."

But he kept thinking of that man.

"Are you actually paying attention?"

"Just a little distracted."

She looked at him, then back at the text.

"Whatever, this part's stupid anyway."

"Why is it stupid?"

"Because this flower character has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and it's pretty blatantly sexist."

He hadn't been following enough to notice that.

"Well, I suppose you can skip that part?"

Pidge scoffed.

"Nah, the book's short enough and you kind of need to hear the whole thing."

She read to him about the flower. He didn't like it much, either.

The prince said goodbye to his vain little flower and went to visit another tiny planet.

"Is this… how your species views space travel?" Lotor asked. Using birds.

"We don't suck THAT badly," Pidge rolled her eyes. "My dad is one of the greatest astronauts our planet's ever seen."

Her face changed a little.

"It was the longest mission anyone had ever been on…" she said.

He knew she wanted to see him again.

"I suppose it seems different now," he said. "The idea of spacefaring."

"Yeah," she said. "It's different. It makes Earth look so dumb but… it's never gonna make my dad's work any less special to me."

He wished he could feel the same way.

The first planet the little prince visited was inhabited by a king.

"To them, all men are subjects."

His hatred was immediate.

The king condemned a creature for the sole purpose of having power over it.

He was glad when the little prince left that planet.

"I guess it must be funny, huh?" Pidge said as the prince went back into space. "The idea that this tiny planet counts as an entire kingdom."

"I've seen men die on smaller rocks than that."

"Right."

She paused.

"I guess it's more of a novel idea on Earth, that one person could own an entire planet."

Or thousands.

The child of the universe.

The second planet the little prince visited was inhabited by a conceited man.

The third was the home of a drunk.

"Right, I'm not sure if alcohol is a thing where you live, it's a substance that causes changes in the brain, and sometimes people become dependent on it."

"I'm familiar with the concept."

Dangerously so.

There were other little planets, with a man who owned the stars, and a man with an empty book, and a man who kept to his orders when all logic had gone.

And then there was Earth.

A place with thousands of kings and drunks and conceited men.

The prince had landed far away from them all.

"'It is a little lonely in the desert…'" he said.

"'It is also lonely among men.'"

He had been that way all his life.

And so, he surmised, had the Green Paladin.

"'But you are innocent and true, and you come from a star…'" a creature told the prince.

He never did have a star to call his own. To him, all the stars were the same. There were no suns, only stars.

But here was Pidge, who had once lived beneath her own sun.

He doubted she realized how lucky she was.

He didn't know her enough to love her. But he could see it happening someday.

He rather hoped it would.

She read to him about the garden. The garden on Earth, with five thousand roses, all looking just like the prince's.

"'I thought that I was rich, with a flower that was unique in all the world; and all I had was a common rose. A common rose, and three volcanoes that came up to my knees—and one of them perhaps extinct forever… That doesn't make me a very great prince…'

"And he lay down in the grass and cried."

The empire had thousands of soldiers. Only four of them were his friends. Had been his friends. Three. Had been.

That didn't make him a very great prince at all.

She probably knew that. There was probably a vein down inside her that pitied him.

It was better than being hated.

The prince then met a creature who wished to be tamed.

"'To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes," it said. "But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world.'"

He had loved them more than anybody.

He wondered if they missed him, too.

And they were sad to part, the prince and the fox.

"I guess it never really meant much to me before," Pidge said. "This part about friends."

"Not something you're used to?" Lotor hazarded.

"No. Not at all."

He nodded.

"That's unfortunate."

It was just as the fox had said. It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

Some people just didn't get much time wasted on them.

In that moment he truly wanted to love her.

And in the time it had taken, from the opening of the book to where the little prince died, he felt like something had taken hold. It was small, like the seed of a baobab. Small and alive.

"But I know that he did go back to his planet, because I did not find his body at daybreak. It was not such a heavy body…"

He could have been wrong, but he thought he saw a tear in her eye.

"This book is a bit sadder than I remember it," she said at last.

He looked over to her.

"Perhaps you're just a different person."

"I guess there's that…"

She looked in his eyes and then looked away.

"Well, I hope you enjoyed that."

"I did. Thank you."

"I'll be sure to tell my dad…"

Perhaps it was just as much an apology from him.

"Your planet is surprising," he said.

"Well, you're surprising, too."

He felt like he knew, those words were what she meant as "I'm sorry."

It was a little jewel he could carry in his heart.

He stood up and helped her off the floor.

She was such a small thing.

It shouldn't have bothered him. She was a paladin of Voltron, she'd been capable enough to survive thus far.

But she wasn't just small. She was a CHILD.

The universe was a terrible place.

"Hey… are you okay?"

He tried to smile at her.

"I'm fine."

What I see here is nothing but a shell. What is most important is invisible.

Strange how some things were true on every planet.

And with her as well. There was something inside her he couldn't see. But he knew it was there, by the sweep of her head, by the crease of her eye. It was frighteningly strong, it loved with the fiercest love and never let go of what it cared about.

It was a Lion.