Chapter 9: Home and sickness
The silence after Lotor’s betrayal had a texture. It was brittle, sharp-edged, and filled the Castle of Lions like a toxic gas. Trust, once fractured, didn’t heal cleanly. It scarred over, thick and sensitive. Missions were executed with flawless, impersonal coordination. Debriefings were curt. No one mentioned his name. It was a wound they all agreed, without speaking, to stop poking.
Voltron rebuilt itself slowly, not as a family, but as a machine. A very efficient, very lonely machine.
So when the opportunity to return to Earth finally solidified from a dream into a viable set of coordinates, the relief was palpable, but quiet. No whoops of joy, just a series of determined nods. It was an escape, a chance to breathe air that wasn’t recycled through the ghost of his deception.
The Blue Lion broke through Earth’s atmosphere, and Lace’s heart hammered against her ribs. The familiar blues and greens, the swirl of white clouds, hit her with a physical force. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the smell of rain until she caught the scent of it through the Lion’s environmental filters—real rain, on dirt, not the sterile water-vapor of the castle’s systems.
Her family’s house in Cuba was a riot of noise, color, and scent that felt almost assaultive after the vast, silent loneliness of space. Her mother’s arms around her smelled of cumin and cilantro and fabric softener. Her old room, with its slightly-too-small bed and fading posters, was a sanctuary. She slept for fourteen hours straight, her body finally believing it was safe to shut down.
The welcome-home party was a sprawling, chaotic affair. Relatives spilled out of the small house into the yard, music battling with overlapping conversations. Platters of food covered every surface: golden tostones, steaming ropa vieja, mountains of white rice, and a huge bowl of her mother’s fresh, bright pico de gallo. The air was thick with the smell of fried plantains and love.
Lace stood at the counter, constructing a taco. She took a warm, soft corn tortilla and spread a thick layer of creamy frijoles refritos. Then, instead of the seasoned meat or chicken, she reached for the bowl of pickled jalapeños, fishing out several slices and layering them precisely on the beans. She topped it with a single, careful sprinkle of crumbled cotija cheese, then folded it with surgical focus.
“Mija, what in the world are you making?”
Her grandmother, Abuela Rosa, appeared at her elbow, her eyes sharp behind her glasses. She nodded at the taco in Lace’s hand.
Lace blinked, looking down at it as if seeing it for the first time. A flush crept up her neck. “Oh. I don’t know. Just… craving something, I guess. I probably missed the cooking here. Just wanted something normal.”
Abuela Rosa’s gaze didn’t waver. She gave a slow, non-committal hum. “Sí. Normal.” She patted Lace’s arm and moved away, but Lace felt those eyes on her back for the rest of the evening.
Later, the last relative had gone, the music was off, and the house was filled with the quiet clatter of cleanup. Lace had retreated to her room, pleading exhaustion. It wasn’t a lie. The weight of normalcy was exhausting.
In the kitchen, Lace’s mother, Elena, sighed, wiping down the counter. “A success, no? She’s home. She’s safe.”
Abuela Rosa, drying a platter with methodical slowness, didn’t look up. “She is not all here.”
“Mamá, please. She’s been through a war. She’s allowed to be quiet.”
“It’s not the quiet.” Abuela put the platter down with a definitive click. “It’s the taco.”
Elena laughed, a short, tired sound. “The taco? She made a weird taco. The girl has been eating alien food for years.”
“Escúchame,” Abuela said, her voice dropping, low and serious. She moved closer. “Beans. Pickled jalapeños. A little cheese, not too much. Nothing else. You remember?”
Elena’s wiping slowed. Her brow furrowed in confusion.
“When I was pregnant with you,” Abuela continued, her eyes locked on her daughter’s. “That is all I wanted. Beans, jalapeños, cheese. Every day. When you were pregnant with Marco, it was tostones with hot sauce and sour cream. For Luis, it was mango with chili powder.” She leaned in. “For Lace, it was flan. You ate it for breakfast. You remember?”
A flicker of memory crossed Elena’s face—a strange, specific craving, a momentary obsession—but she shook her head, a defensive gesture. “That’s… that’s superstition. Old wives’ tales. She’s just hungry.”
“It is not a tale,” Abuela said, her voice granite. “It is a thing that happens. A woman’s body knows. The family knows. It whispers a craving. For her, it is beans and pickled jalapeños. Simple. Sharp. Needing to be grounded.” She let the words hang in the steam-filled kitchen. “That girl is not just craving normal food, Elena. Her body is building something. And it is asking for what it needs.”
Elena stared at her mother, the damp cloth forgotten in her hand. The cheerful chaos of the party was gone, replaced by a cold, dawning clarity. She thought of Lace’s newfound quiet, the shadows under her eyes that weren’t just from fatigue, the way she’d instinctively placed a hand low on her own belly earlier when she thought no one was looking.
“No,” Elena whispered, the word barely audible. It was a denial of everything it implied—the danger, the complication, the source of it. “It can’t be. She’s a child.”
“She is a Paladin of Voltron,” Abuela corrected softly, but not unkindly. “And now, she may be something else.”
Upstairs, in the dark of her childhood room, Lace lay awake. The ghost of a spicy, vinegary taste was still on her tongue. She placed a hand on her own flat stomach, where a different, deeper silence was growing. A silence that had begun in a tangle of digital vines and the cold, star-lit quiet of an abandoned deck. It wasn’t a craving for normal food.
It was a signal. And somewhere, across the impossible gulf of space, in a palace of obsidian and cold light, the other half of that signal slept, haunted by a vision of a child with blue eyes, completely unaware that the future had already taken root.