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Before you are born, your mother plans to pronounce your name “Lotar”. Your father would pronounce it “Lotor”; the best of all possible meeting places between Altea and Galra. It doesn’t happen like that. Your father calls you a disappointment and a half-breed, and your mother calls you nothing at all.
You know, watching the older children fight, that you will never be able to fight like them. You do not have the strength, the size, the advantages that the other Galra- full Galra- have. Dayak teaches you in the best way she knows how to. It’s not soft. She beats you until knowledge fills the void where the blood used to be. She gives you a sword, and uses her crop to hit the back of your knees, the inside curve of your ankle, the small of your back, until you have perfect form. She drills you until you’re faster, more agile by half than the other Galran children.
They charge at you, and you have already leapt above their heads.
This is how you grow up: the taste of victory has always meant blood. The price of it has always meant working too hard for too little. You learn young not to complain, but to bite your tongue and bow before the throne of your father.
You avoid Haggar, and pretend that the way she makes your heart skip a beat is just exertion from training.
Dayak raises you to the best of your abilities. It is not enough to stop your exile.
This is how it starts.
A man asks “How much would it take to fuck a Prince?”
And the Prince, meaning you says, “Enough to get me off this moon.” And the man laughs, and grins with two missing teeth, though whether that’s from poor hygiene or fights you couldn’t say. You don’t really want to ask either, because you don’t think you’ll like the answer. Ignorance is bliss, and as the world seems to want to remind you, you are no longer any better.
“I’ve a ship and I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” And you, young and desperate, accept. It gets you off planet and you’ve already sold your body for a cause bigger than yourself, even if that meant nursing cuts and bruises from fists and swords rather than whatever this is. It still expects its pound of flesh, palan-bol.
He drops you on a spaceport just on the far side of Galra space, but not far enough to be comfortable.
Except the truth is, it doesn’t start here.
“Come now, little Prince, just give in to me.” A man says. And then suddenly, you are not in the dusty backroom of a spaceport, but balancing in front of Dayak, resisting the urge to move your hair from your eyes.
“You have two options, Prince Lotor,” she says. “You either survive by what means you can, or you are ground under the heels of men stronger than you.” She never taught you to be brave and Galra. She teaches you victory and death, but makes you clever instead; victory comes from restraint, it comes from outthinking your enemy.
You could die here, a voice in the back of your mind says. Maybe not now, but ground under the heel of a nobody or the Galra once they come. Because they will. They always do. Or you can live.
You stab the man in the neck, take his coat to cover your thin shoulders, and raid his pockets for GAC. It is too few to do much of anything, but it will buy you a hot meal.
It is more than he would have given you otherwise.
Victory or death, and Dayak taught you to be clever. What’s cleverer than a long con against the very empire that made you?
This is where it begins. Where you start to become who you were never supposed to be, but had to, because something in the universe broke. Because you have never been its sacred son, and you have had to learn that fact young. Palan-bol, the enlightening pain. There is no room for softness with the Galra, and especially not when it is you against the universe.
Insanity is, you think, leaning against a brick wall of some forgotten bar on a planet that the Galra have not yet conquered, is on the periphery. It’s in your blood, you know this. It’s settled inside your lungs, snuck in under the guise of advice, when you were prostrate on the ground, a man’s boot in your side. You’re still wearing his coat.
Insanity is what your father is, and what your mother became because it doesn't take genius to know that Haggar used to be Honerva. It is genetic, it is a part of you. You were made in the Rift, and it will be from that that you make something better. You have to, because otherwise you’ll never be any better than your father, and you have always wanted to be that.
You are breaking even at cards— at least for now, while the people playing against you still have most of their wits about them; two, three cups deep, rather than your half a one. A few more hours and they’ll be so far gone you doubt they’ll even know the rules of the game.
There’s a woman two tables away that’s clearing out your competition though. There’s nothing at all behind her slightly quirked smile. She's half Galra too, if you had to pick, though you wouldn’t dare to guess what the other half is.
You lean back as you watch her play for a few moments, another competitor throwing down his deck with a grumble about being played out. He doesn't even get another drink, which you think, says everything you need to know about her skills.
You slide into the abandoned seat, and smile. “Care to deal me in?” You ask, and she lifts an eyebrow, looking at you questioningly and deals out the cards to you without another word.
You play against each other- and it is each other, as the other competitors come and go, their pockets lighter than when they started. Until eventually, the other men playing– aliens and undesirable drunkards alike– look at her, and look at you and decide to cut their losses before they amount to debt at the bottom of a bottle. Some of them get another drink before they leave, others don’t.
When it’s just the two of you, and your single drink has long since expired, you offer a grin. “Care to make it more interesting?” You ask, and she lifts an eyebrow.
“What are the odds?”
You shrug, and this is a calculated show of ease. “I’m looking for some generals, and well, not a lot of former Galran military here.” She levels a sharp gaze on you, and you can’t help but smile.
“How did you know?”
You adjust your posture to be straight again, old habits that die hard. It’s aristocratic, the thing that Dayak taught you to be while your father cursed your existence. And then the posture beat into you by a crueler master than your governess. The military. You were too small, too smart, too not-right but better than all of them. “You and I share it.”
Her expression twists into bitter suspicion, her fingers tapping against the cards. “Why should I trust you?”
You grin. It’s sharp, even without the fangs. Half-breeds, overlooked. She’s like you in some way, even if you don’t know the full extent yet.
“Lotor,” you introduce and watch her expression turn to surprise, like she’s cataloging your features.
“The Prince?”
“One in the same,” and maybe it says something about how far you’ve fallen that her tense shoulders seem to relax at that, leaning against the back of her chair.
“Acxa,” she introduces. “So let me guess, if you win, I join your little party of exiles?”
You fan your cards, looking down at them and can see the pieces falling together. “Is it any better to stay and keep winning at cards?” You know the answer, this is a place you end up when you have nothing left, and are just waiting to die. You can’t stay here, or else you’ll have killed a man for his coat for nothing.
You look at her, and think she wants more than to be forgotten on some lowly backwater.
You win the game.
Acxa meets Narti, and brings her to you. Ezor and Zethrid find you, because you’re making a name for yourself. Prince Lotor and his band of half-Galra generals. Exiles and thieves the rumors say. They’re only half true. Your generals are like you, it's why you work. You are not meant to exist in this Empire, the soldiers say, and the rumors echo the sentiments.
The periphery becomes narrower. And if that’s because the madness seems to sink, or because the Galra Empire never stops devouring, you think it might be both. You can’t work fast enough, but it’s still better than dying under the heel of a regime or of a man.
Voltron comes and it doesn’t take a genius or a spy to know that Zarkon isn’t happy. And you know they’re your best bet. The Paladins of Voltron come anew. They liberate planets, and you watch them ping up on your scanners. The galaxy actually thinks there’s a chance. You would laugh, if you don’t hope they’re right. You don’t think they are, but you've always been too much of an idealist to temper your desire with the hunger to consume.
You want Voltron to succeed, despite your better instincts saying they can’t.
You should have known that the periphery could not last. It closes in again. The Empire starts to crumble. Your father isn’t dead enough to die. Haggar is going to be your ruin.
And all of this, you think, sitting on a bed of a too-small cell waiting.
Your generals are gone, and you have fallen for the judgment– on the mercy of children.
There’s nothing you can do to change that. So you are waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
What is it like to know exactly how much your life is worth? You know the details as intimately as you can: one fake prisoner exchange, worth less than the Voltron lions. Your worth judged against that of Sam Holt— beloved father, one who won’t kill his only son, and found wanting. On your side, the borrowed black bayard on hope and prayer that you can do the impossible. Your odds are not good, but you have never had them in your favor before, why would that change now?
You learned young, and you learned hard not to dismiss something out of hand with ulterior motives. You’ve only made it half as far as you have because of them, yours and everyone else’s. Altruism is nice, but you’ve never had the luxury of relying on only it.
Altruism exists for people with the resources to achieve it. Princess Allura has never sold her pound of flesh for the chance to get off a moon. The Black Paladin though… now he’s something else. You think that you could like him, if given the chance. You think he understands you better than either of you might realize. It’s his bayard you're using afterall, his teams commands he contravened.
The Black Paladin brings you to the Kral Zera, and you feel somewhere between ten, and twenty, and the age you’re actually supposed to be. And oh, how heavy those years feel resting on your shoulders now.
You’re exhausted when you set foot on the stairs, and then Sendak is back, but you can recognize enough of Haggar’s handiwork to set you on edge. The fight is long, and by the end of it, you feel like every muscle is bruised, and that you could sleep for a phoeb or three. And yes, you feel like, for the first time, that there may be an actual chance to do something worthwhile, but a larger part of you thinks it might be too little, too late. If Haggar is causing problems, you don’t know how to stop her. That’s one secret you have never been able to figure out.
Daibazal might have been a dynasty, you don’t know. You were never there. Your father would be ashamed, but you killed him, so what he wants doesn’t really matter.
Is patricide or regicide a bigger crime? Would they try you on both counts, you wonder, if they bothered to try you at all, or would they simply execute you. They wouldn’t, you think, forget you in the Arena because it would come with too much risk of breaking out, or winning. It wouldn’t be the punishment it should be. But then the fight is over, the torch lit, and you are Emperor.
Long live Emperor Lotor, long may he reign.
You think there’s a target on your back, and that someone is going to try and kill you before you get a chance to see if you are right. There is so much you have to do, and no time to rest. You are running out of pounds of flesh to sell. The next thing is going to start prying out bones and ribs to satiate the price.
Allura is easy to love— Altean and beautiful, and so, so good. She is everything you wished you could have been. And she loves you- at least you think she does, until you are too Galra, and not Altean enough for her, too old and broken, with one too many ‘for the greater good’ choices to be redeemable.
You want to make her understand what happened. That you are so very, very old in comparison to her. That there has never been another option. But you can’t because it’s over. Because they have condemned you for your choices despite your best intentions. The Black Paladin told you once, about an old Earth saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You always told yourself that the ends would justify it.
There was no room for only good actions when your options were victory or death because you had to win, had to keep winning. The alternative was death or stagnation.
And now you’re losing everything.
You take stock of what you have: Sincline, aching and clawing its way into your mind. You no longer have an empire, or your generals, or the support of Voltron— not that you ever did. You have yourself, and nothing else for the first time in centuries, but not for the first time. But this time, there is no pound of flesh that you can sell off in exchange for safe passage. You have come too far, gained too much, sold off too much.
This is where it ends, expect it isn’t.
You fight in the same way that you always have. Fast and desperate, just like Dayak taught you. You strike fast, and you strike hard where they can’t hit you.
You’ve never liked Haggar, but her teleportation works wonders.
You can feel yourself slipping- and right now, you can’t tell if you’ve always been on that precipice or if you’ve just been ignoring how close you’ve been coming. You never wanted to be your parents. Sincline whispers in your head, and you take and you take, and you keep taking. Unlimited quintessence, unlimited power, it’s all you’ve ever wanted. All you need- all you-
You’re slipping, and you can’t stop it. What do you want? Do you want help? You drove all that away. Do you want power? It burns.
Maybe you’ve always been burning.
You are leaning against a wall and there is madness on the periphery. And now you are no longer looking ahead but at the dark that is closing in all around you.
Your father would make you into a weapon, and your mother would make you into a monster of a boy if they could. You have never wanted to be either of these things. You have only ever wanted to be you.
You are son and martyr instead because there has never been room for you.
All you have ever known is burning, and this at least, is what you would call resurrection. It is always resurrection. Haggar, Zarkon, Altea, you, Shiro.
Except now, there isn’t any room for resurrection. Just the Rift, and the white, and Sincline screaming in your mind. Or maybe it’s your screams.
And then there’s nothing but the Rift, and the truth that you pulled yourself right into what you have always feared becoming.
There are arms around you. Ones under your knees, and around your back, and there is something warm, no- cold, no- something outside the white of the Rift.