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There’s a brief pause in the moments after she says her goodbyes and steps through the rift; a terrifying stillness as her body dissipates, the staccato beat of stolen breath after jumping from a ledge.
When the freefall comes, things expand .
Her quintessence refracts outwards like light off a mirror, spreading through the aeons until it’s touching every corner of every reality. Space and time unspool themselves, and existence is spread before her in an iridescent array of threaded light.
From the birth of everything, to her final heartbeat, she sees it all; becomes it all. Her breath is in the rise and fall of civilisations and the shifting of stars. The ongoings of the universe are her lifeblood; she’s woven so intrinsically into the cosmos that they are one and the same.
She does not have the synapses, the neurons or nerve endings needed to construct thought- to feel awe at the completeness of it all. She exists instead in a suspended state of knowing. Guided by an innate understanding of what needs to be done.
The threads pulse with life and light, but there are places where they become tangled. Blots of twisted wrongness where realities have overlapped, and things became as they shouldn’t. Fissures like gaping scars where Honerva’s corruption left its mark. Carefully, like unstitching a ruined hem, she plucks the damaged strings apart. Disentangles the knotted quintessence of frayed universes, and sews things neatly back where they belong.
It takes her an eternity, or several, or perhaps mere seconds of precise work. But eventually, the torn edges of the rift are soothed, Honerva’s influence washing out of the fabric. She pulls tight on the final thread. The rift pulls shut with a satisfying thrum of light.
And then, she falls. Something is calling her home.
*
Breath slams into her, coming fast and sharp, the shocking preface to the realisation that she’s breathing . She has lungs, and hands that come up to claw at her heaving chest, fingernails that snag on the scuffed plating of armour that’s as battle-worn and weathered as the day she died in it.
Every inch of her is screaming with sensation, with feeling. Her hands come down to catch in the grass. She coughs around the cloying scent of juniberries.
A thrumming network of realities pulses in her head, and the frigid chill of night air stings her face. There’s wind smoothing over her skin, Paladin armour pressing into her joints, supernovas behind her eyelids, breath painful through heaving lungs-
Her heart, her heart that’s beat, beat, beatbeatbeat beating with sudden life, and the grass she’s clawing up through desperate, grasping fingers and dirt under her nails and it’s too much, too much, everything at once toomuchtoomuch-
Someone calls out. She barely hears it through the onslaught, but she pries her eyes open all the same. The stars crowd her vision, constellations fixed firmly in place. They’re caught in the slow process of time like flies in honey, and it makes her sick with fear.
Then the sky is blocked from view by a worried face framing two crescent moons of blue.
The singing in her veins swells, the kaleidoscope chaos of living-feeling-thinking- knowing slows to a breathable pace. Trembling arms slowly rise to cradle his face, and she understands that this was her beacon; this person, whose lips are moving to frantic, muted words, guided her here. To this point and time, in this reality, to what was once home.
“There you are,” she greets him, stroking the crests of his cheeks. It’s been so long since she’s spoken, but the words are easy to find again. They come thin and whispered through lips that remember how to smile at the sight of him. “I found you.”
The glow of the marks softens, and then disappears. When she again smooths her thumbs over the planes of his face (familiar, so familiar, and important ), the blue is gone from his skin.
Returned to her, at last.
The cosmos cuts the last of its ties, a ringing hush left in its wake. The enormity of sudden silence is a hollowed-out cave, filled with the deafening echoes of being something bigger. At long last, exhausted and changed but whole once more, the Princess of Altea is given back.
*
She’s bustled inside and sat down on the couch, where she curls into herself and feels time slip away. Gentle fingers help unfold her hands from where she’s holding them crossed to her chest, a mug of something warm pressed into her palms. She blends into the space around her, unable to tell where she ends and everything else begins.
A hesitant weight lands on her shoulder. She flinches, and keeps staring into her tea. It’s hot in her hold, almost scolding.
(Lance, she finally places. His name is Lance, and she loves him. She has to fight to hold onto the memory, because the steam from her mug is tickling her cheeks, the smell curling sweet and too real in her nostrils, and she doesn’t want it to slip away again but the clock on the wall is ticking so loudly–)
“Listen,” he says, voice soft and careful like he can see how much she’s splitting at the seams. “The others– I’m gonna go make some calls. They need to know you’re-” he stops, stutters on a shaking breath. The hold on her shoulder tightens.
“That you’re here,” he finishes, breathless; reverent.
None of this means anything to her, but she nods weakly. Her gaze detaches the moment Lance pulls away, slipping to fixate on the leg of the coffee table, and focus is swallowed once more by a cacophony only she hears.
“I’ll be right back,” the words wash over her through the fog and she latches onto them, clinging tightly, trying to remember which way is up and where her feet land and how to make herself keep breathing. Then, quieter, steady like a promise-
“You’re going to be okay, Allura.”
For a moment the world rights itself into clarity.
Allura.
The shape of it settles over her skin like sunlight, and something in her responds with an aching familiarity. Allura; it belonged to her. Something to label the distance between herself and the mess of existence thrumming around her, too bright and confusing and real. He’d given her back her name.
Her name, which she had carried with her and never lost sight of even when her world crumbled and constellations had shifted with the time she’d lost; something she died with and was now remade into.
She holds it close, and resolves never to forget it again.
***
It takes effort, finding a foothold in lucidity. Days go by, and it’s so easy to slip away into the labyrinth her mind has become. To detach from the tangible, and let herself drift amongst the echoes of a cosmic awareness too vast and all-encompassing to fit painlessly into her cranium.
She struggles to realign herself with the linear mortality of beginnings and endings and in-betweens. In the rift she’d existed beyond time, untouched by its ruthless momentum, witnessing the birth and death of everything in simultaneous occurrence. Closing her eyes means seeing the latticework of realities pulsing in the veins behind her lids, their histories unmeasured by hours, years, millennia.
And when the ticking of the kitchen clock becomes too loud and chases the echoes away, binds her again to the here and now, it’s all she can do to press her hands over her ears and try to breathe through the sudden claustrophobia. Time is strangling her, and her feet still stumble as it drags her along its path.
Lance asks if she wants to see the others. It takes days of sifting through her crowded head to even pull up each of their faces, match them to the names Lance mentions. Longer still, to remember exactly what they are to her, why the word family drifts to the front of her mind whenever she thinks of them. Lance’s touch and worried attention alone toe the line between soothing and overwhelming. She’s not ready for the other Paladins, not yet.
But she does ask for Coran.
Within a few hours of Lance making the call, he’s already arrived. Frantic banging on the front door causes Allura to freeze in her pacing of the lounge, wringing her hands with her heart in her throat. And suddenly he’s right there, caught in the doorway. Staring at her with glossy eyes like she’s a miracle.
“By the stars,” he says distantly, a heartbreaking hope splitting his voice down the middle. “You’re really here.”
He charges forward and folds her into his arms. Pressed this firmly against him, she can feel the way every inch of him shakes with the sobs wracking his body. Coran wails, messy and loud and without a shred of shame. For every second of every iteration of her existence, Allura has known this man. He is the one constant throughout her distorted timeline, her fierce love for him a pillar of stability she can ground herself in. The ticking of seconds loosen their grip, and she breathes easier.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, when he’s finally calmed down, “for not saying goodbye.” There’s no blame in his eyes but there is grief, and that cuts Allura deeper than anything. He gives her a watery smile, and takes her hands.
“You’re back, now,” he replies, like that makes it better. Perhaps, she dares to think, it does.
***
She wakes before the others one morning, early enough to see the honeyed sunlight of dawn filtering through the curtains, pooling pale gold onto the floorboards. For an idling minute, Allura lays awake with eyes open and watches the dust motes floating listlessly in the day’s gentle greeting. She longs suddenly to get caught in it herself, to feel the morning against her bare skin. Careful not to disturb the rest of the house, she slips quietly out of bed and out to the fields, stopping only to pull a thin shawl around her shoulders.
Allura wanders. The chill of dawn raises goosebumps on her arms, and with a shiver she pulls the shawl tighter. Her bare feet are numb and dirtied, dew-soaked grass catching between her toes and dampening the hem of her night gown. The crisp air is sharp in her lungs, breath fogging into clouds in front of her.
Gradually, the memories have receded. They still shadow her mind, a storm cloud of a forgotten existence hanging over her head, burning at her synapses. Every now and then, they strike her with lightning-bolt moments of clarity, of knowing , and she’ll be left disorientated and reeling in the aftermath. But the dizzying duality of it all is getting easier to reconcile.
She knew once, when each blade of grass in this field first sprouted; knew how many times the wind changed directions. The position of the stars from where she stands were printed on the backs of her eyelids, and she could trace every inch they’d shifted since they were born. But now it’s all fading, and she’s left only with the path before her. The uncertainty about where her feet will fall.
It’s a peaceful feeling.
The feeble sun is a barely-there kiss, a tender whisper of warmth against her skin that promises a gentle day. She stands on the threshold of morning and finds her bearings around the newness of it all. And then, she keeps walking.
Inevitably, she finds herself in the shadow of her own statue, standing in the juniberry patch. Kneeling down amongst the blossoms, she plucks one from its stem and twirls it in her fingers. The petals are soft, and a dusting of pollen falls from between them to scatter on her lap. Idly, she brings the juniberry up to her nose and breathes in its sweetness. Like always, the fragrance catches on her grief and turns bitter in her lungs. It’s familiar but not quite right. An approximation.
These are not the flowers I remember, she thinks. This is not my Altea.
And then, Allura thinks;
That’s okay.
That version of her home is gone. The truth of the loss exists now as a dull pressure weighing in her chest, her grief evolved into the unremitting pain of acceptance. Heavy like a stone, it’s easier to carry, at least, than the saw-tooth, wild edges of denial and anger it was carved from.
Allura no longer cuts herself on her longing for the past. Altea will always be the bedrock of her bones; where they stand tall in her mind, the walls of its kingdom house everything that helped shape her. But she’s different now. She’s grown. She can breathe around her loss. She’s stopped fighting it, stopped clinging to ghosts and clawing desperately for a way back to the familiar.
The old gives way to the new.
The grass grows; the wind changes. And Allura as she is now is a stranger to it all until it happens. She has mourned the past for far too long; it’s time to cease looking back. There is a place waiting for her, somewhere here in the present, and Allura finally feels ready to find it.
*
When she makes it back inside, Lance is poking at a frypan full of eggs. She kisses his cheek, and moves to set the table.
“I think I’m ready,” she says. “To see the others again.”
Lance turns around so fast the eggs almost go flying. In the next second, she’s being lifted at the waist and spun in circles, his excited laughter bouncing off the kitchen walls.
“Allura, that’s awesome!” he says, and she grins. “I’ll go call them all right now.”
He draws her into one last hug before he dashes from the room, and as Allura goes about making sure their breakfast doesn’t burn, her heart swells with love for him.
She finds herself imagining what she’ll say to everyone when they each arrive. For the others, it’s been over a year since they last saw her; for Allura, a few grueling months of trying to find her feet before reaching out. The few days more it’ll take for everyone to arrive feels like a millennia away.
Nevertheless, she’ll be waiting to welcome them all home.
***
The midday air is balmy, and even from the porch where she and Coran sit side-by-side, Allura can catch the sweetness of juniberries on the breeze. She’s watching Lance wrestle with a fold-up table out on the grass, setting up for their friends’ arrival. A meal outdoors on a nice day seemed an appropriate festivity for their reunion.
Coran has been chattering nostalgically away about his old family recipes, of which Allura is quietly thankful she won’t have to be taste-testing this afternoon. She listens all the same, feeling light. There’s a lull in Coran’s storytelling, a sigh as he stares out at the fields with a sentimental smile. Allura leans against him, and for a long moment they simply sit in the quiet content of each other’s company.
“I don’t suppose you’ve had any thought,” he asks out of the blue, “about what comes next?”
Allura pauses, and considers the question.
A year and an eternity ago, when she’d made her choice, she hadn’t thought about the future she’d be giving up. Even when she’d reached her final goodbye, had kissed Lance thinking it was the last thing she’d do, she was thinking of the life she’d be giving him. Not of her absence in it.
Of course, she’s never been good at staying still. There are things that still need doing; peace talks, rebuilding efforts, distress signals beeping away in the distant vacuum of space. Always, across the starways, there will be people who need help. As long as her heart is still beating, Allura will be ready to answer their calls. And she knows that sooner or later, the restlessness in her will demand she make a start.
But Lance catches her eye from the yard, stops what he’s doing to wave at her with a grin as bright as day, and she realises there’s more to look forward to.
She wants to meet Shiro’s husband, and try new dishes from Hunk. She wants to go shopping with Pidge again, and drag Keith away from work for a friendly spar, and listen to Coran ramble on and on with more of his stories. More early morning walks across the farmland, catching dew on her skin. Picking fresh juniberry blossoms to brighten up the windowsill. Fashion shows with the mice, and watching the brilliant performances they put on for her.
Warm evenings curled up with Lance, counting his heartbeat, falling asleep tangled together. Loving him, and being loved.
She looks ahead, and sees a thousand mundane moments just like these. The thought flourishes with a happiness that sits in her chest and doesn’t move.
The humming of a ship carries on the breeze, its shadow passing briefly overhead. She watches the small passenger vessel land in a neighbouring field, and counts the people that climb out of it.
Coran stands up and holds a hand out to her, and she smiles.
“I haven’t decided just yet,” she finally replies as Coran helps her to her feet. “But for the time being, I’m happy here.”
Coran’s eyes are bright when he returns her grin. She feels a gentle squeeze on her hand before she pulls away, and starts towards the ship. Its passengers are sprinting across the field in their direction, distant calls of her name catching on the breeze.
“Excuse me for a tic,” Allura tells Coran. “I’m going to say hello.”
And at last, she is herself again.
fin