Future Pidge Holt Scenario
Pidge Holt didn’t bother with the “nice girl” mask anymore. That version of her had been stripped away years ago, left somewhere on a battlefield lightyears from Earth. Now, in college, she had no patience for pleasantries or bullshit.
She was taller now, wiry but sharp-edged, her skin littered with tattoos that told stories no one else could quite decipher — fractured constellations, mechanical diagrams, broken lion silhouettes. Piercings dotted her ears, nose, and brow, catching light in dim lecture halls. She smelled faintly of smoke and weed more often than not, always carrying herself like someone who was permanently daring the world to test her.
Her professors knew her as “that Holt kid” who never sugarcoated anything. If a classmate said something stupid, she’d cut through it with profanity-laced honesty. If someone flirted, she didn’t shy away — she hooked up, unapologetically, with women who knew from the start this wasn’t about romance. Pidge made sure of that. Love was a battlefield she refused to revisit.
But beneath the bravado, the war clung to her like a shadow. PTSD was her uninvited roommate. Some nights, she’d wake up drenched in sweat, phantom screams in her ears, Galra blood on her hands in her dreams. She despised them — despised their insignia, their memory, everything they’d taken. Pride flags waved across campus this month, and Pidge wore hers like armor — bisexual colors stitched into her jacket, pins cluttering her bag. She was loud about who she was, about the girls she fucked, about the fact she wasn’t going to hide anymore.
Still, this month was harder. Her period hit like a meteor — cramps twisting her insides, migraines clawing at her skull. Painkillers only did so much, weed blurred the edges, but it was still a storm she carried in silence. And silence was dangerous. On those days, when the pain mixed with her temper and her hatred, she found herself snarling at people in bars, picking fights with anyone who dared bring up the Galra like they weren’t monsters.
She didn’t socialize much with strangers, but her old teammates were different. They were in the same college now — each scarred in their own ways. They looked out for her, even when she pretended she didn’t need it. Lance tried to drag her out to Pride parties. Hunk checked in when he noticed her migraines getting bad. Keith… well, Keith understood the anger. Sometimes they smoked together in silence, both too haunted for small talk.
Counting was still her thing. Numbers kept her grounded. Equations gave her control in a life that had been ripped apart too many times. She’d mutter under her breath during migraines, running through prime numbers or mechanical sequences just to focus on something other than the sharp, clawing ache in her skull.
Darkness hung on her, though. She’d walk home from a party at 3 a.m., boots crunching on broken glass, blood from a split lip drying on her mouth after a bar fight she started and finished. She wasn’t “Katie Holt” anymore. She wasn’t the girl who once cared about fitting in, or being polite, or even being approachable.
She was Pidge Holt — foul-mouthed, inked, pierced, queer, brilliant, and broken in ways no one outside of Voltron could ever truly understand. Pride month or not, she carried her colors like a warning sign: she was still standing, but anyone who mistook that for weakness would regret it.
And in the quiet, in the migraines and smoke, she still wondered — if she stripped away the anger, the hookups, the bravado, the drugs, the ink — what the hell would be left of her?