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Lance opened his eyes into darkness. His head pounded like someone was slamming a hammer into it, and when he moved his arm he felt his whole body throb in response. He slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position.
Red’s lights were off — that was the first thing he noticed. She was there, in the back of his mind, but just barely, like she was sleeping.
“What… happened?” his voice rasped into the darkness.
Red seemed to awaken in his mind and fed images into his head, the scenes moving in front of him like a movie reel. The Robeast releasing a blast of pure energy into Voltron’s chest. Keith’s voice, crying out. Falling, the sandy-colored Earth rocketing towards them as they fell.
Lance’s eyes widened. Voltron’s chest… that’s the Black Lion. Was Keith…? Was he-
Red lights flickered as Lance pulled himself up. His vision swam, and he felt hot blood trickle down his temple as he took a wobbly step forward. He took another step. Fell against the door. Staggered through the cargo bay of his lion and outside.
There were black pillars of smoke rising around him, and orange Garrison off-roaders kicking up dust as they charged toward Red’s limp body. Lance turned around and rested the palm of his hand against his Lion’s hull. “I’ll be right back, Red. Just hang on.”
He started stumbling towards the largest pillar, the one with the darkest smoke, where he knew the Black Lion would be. He walked until he thought he would pass out, and then he walked some more. One foot in front of the other, the commotion around him blurring until all he could see was the smoke in front of him. He just had to make sure Keith was okay, that he was even alive.
Lance crested a rise and looked down. Below him was the Black Lion. Behind him was the Garrison, their trucks still coming. His breathing was haggard as he slowly made his way into the crater, tripping hard but getting back to his feet even as his tired muscles screamed for rest.
Black’s mouth was already open, the doors wide for Lance to stumble through. The lights weren’t even flickering as the Red Paladin climbed inside. His heart jumped into his throat at the same time as his stomach dropped.
“Keith,” he choked out. “Jesus Christ.”
Keith was on the ground, limp, thrown against a wall. The back of his chestplate was blackened, not from fire, but from what Lance recognized as the residual dark magic of the witch Haggar. He was bleeding from somewhere, but Lance’s vision was getting fuzzy and it was hard to tell where it was coming from. His long hair covered his eyes.
Lance shakily grabbed the boy’s shoulder. “Keith, wake up. Keith?”
He didn’t respond, didn’t even stir.
Lance leaned down and pressed an ear to his chest. It was faint, but there was a heartbeat. Hot, grateful tears streamed down his face and beaded like crystals on Keith’s chestplate. “You’re one lucky bastard, Keith.”
Keith didn’t respond, but that was okay. As long as his heart was still beating and his eyelashes were still fluttering, everything would be okay. Lance felt something in his chest swell and burst, didn’t acknowledge the tears that were streaming down his face. He just held onto Keith — knowing there was nothing he could do about the magic burn and hating it — until the paramedics came.
“Lance?" The Cuban boy jerked his head up, startling awake in his seat. “Wuh?” Keith’s eyebrows drew together, his expression both amused and irritated. “Did you just fall asleep?”“Uh…” Lance said intelligently, subtly rolling his shoulders to expel some tension. “No?” Keith looked like he wanted to smack Lance with his the back of his hand, but he leaned back against the pillows of his hospital bed with a resigned expression. Outside, the sun dipped below the horizon and streaked the sky with pale golds and pinks, the desert landscape made softer by the sunset. There were hundreds of casualties from their final battle against Sendak, but Keith had managed to get the best view in the hospital. “If you were awake, what was I just talking about?” Keith teased, his eyebrows resuming their natural place on his face. “That’s a trick question,” Lance shot back. “You weren’t talking because you never talk.”The Black Paladin rolled his eyes, and Lance watched the way his lips twitched up in the barest hint of a smile. “Okay, Lance.”They settled into an easy silence. Well, easy for Keith. Lance was still trying to recover from his flashback. The fact that he could remember it so clearly scared him. The fact that it had happened scared him. The fact that Keith was here, in the hospital, for the third week in a row with a giant lightning scar on his back, scared him.“Hey,” the object of Lance’s eternal torment said. “You don’t look so good.”“Gee, thanks.”“Something bothering you?”It was the question to end all questions, going right down to the root of the matter. Well, not all the way. What had happened to Keith, his friend and his teammate, was doing more to Lance than bothering him. He wanted to put Keith in a bubble and never let him leave — he couldn’t do that, of course, because Keith would find a way to escape anyway.Lance rolled his shoulders. It was his tell. “Nah, I’m just thinking.”The Black Paladin looked like he wanted to argue, but he shook his head. He said, “Wow, Lance, thinking ?”“Haha,” Lance deadpanned back, reaching out and throwing an empty styrofoam cup at the other paladin. “It’s not like you’re any better.”Keith let the cup bounce off his shoulder and fall to the floor. They both looked at it, lying sideways on the floor and slowly rolling away. Lance felt like a styrofoam cup. He felt like he was going to fall over and roll under a hospital bed for the staff to find a few weeks later. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he felt it anyway.“I do think,” Keith said after a silence.“You mean after you do the thing.”“Same thing.”Lance scoffed, the sound a little too loud for the quiet hospital wing. He and Keith had never been awkward, always finding a way to bicker over some petty disagreement, but Lance was so focused on keeping the mood light that he couldn’t think of anything else to say that was light. He wanted to tell Keith about his recurring nightmare (the one where Keith featured as the main lead), but he knew that would make things between them even worse.His lips were moving before he could stop himself, the tone of his voice far too vulnerable and far too unstable. “Keith-”The door slid open with a soft swoosh, and a male nurse was stepping through. Lance swallowed down his sentence, face growing a few shades paler. Saved by the bell. “Hey, Austin,” Keith greeted him, his eyes slowly sliding away from Lance reluctantly.“It’s time to check your bandages,” the nurse, Austin, said. The message was clear.“I guess that’s my cue,” Lance smiled, pushing up from his seat, but the expression was a little too forced to be called easy. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Keith.”The Black Paladin looked like he wanted to argue, to tell Lance to stay right where he was and finish the sentence that was going to torture him until tomorrow, but he grit his teeth. “Yeah." Lance closed the door quietly behind him and took a deep breath. That was too close. He almost fucked up. They’d been good so far, and he almost ruined it all.
I need someone to talk to.
To say he was stressed would be an understatement — everything with Keith and the Lions and the humongous orange monstrosity of a replacement for the Castle and Shiro and even Allura, his mental state had plummeted and kept falling ever since he woke up after the crash. Maybe the doctors would give him some medical marijuana.Lance twisted and reached up with an arm, fluidly sliding into a different pose. Yoga was something he’d done with his family even before joining the Garrison. It had a way of loosening his mind from the tight, spiraling stress he usually resorted to and also keeping his body in shape.As Lance contorted into another shape, his door swished open with a hydraulic sound. “Yoga?”“Wanna join, Shiro?” Lance asked him serenely. “There’s another mat in the locker.”“Sure,” the white-haired man shrugged, reaching into the footlocker Lance had indicated and shrugged off his military jacket. He settled on the floor and began to try and mimic the pose Lance had settled into.“What brings you here?”Shiro managed to get the position and sighed as something popped. “Hunk told me that you were stressed out. What’s going on?”Lance considered for a moment. He knew Shiro would never say anything as long as Lance asked him not to, but it was one thing to have nightmares about and another thing to actually say out loud. He moved on to another pose.After Shiro followed him, Lance said, “I’ve been having nightmares lately.”“About what?” his captain asked casually. He tried to act like there was nothing going on, but the rest of the team could hear when his own nightmares got too bad anyway.Lance paused. “Keith.”Not even a hint of surprise showed in Shiro’s expression if he felt it. He merely waited for Lance to continue, to explain more and get everything off of his chest.“You know, regular nightmare stuff,” Lance shrugged. “Exploding, Haggar, sometimes Zarkon. Sometimes he flies the Black Lion into an exploding planet to save some family or something." “Nightmare stuff,” Shiro agreed, keeping his voice even.Lance looked at him sideways, feeling his calm begin to ebb. “Yeah.”“Why Keith?”Good question. Lance himself didn’t know exactly why he was so hung up over this, why Keith was the one featuring in his dreams and not Hunk or Pidge or even himself. “I-I don’t know. I guess I haven’t thought about it.”“Maybe you should,” Shiro told him gently, easing out of the knot he’d tied himself into and getting up from the floor. “You should pick up anything you want from Earth before we go. It’s wheels up in five days.”“Yeah,” Lance sighed, running a hand down his face. “Thanks, Shiro.”“Of course,” the man smiled, shrugging on his jacket.“And, uh, don’t tell Keith about this?”“I won’t.”Shiro let the door swish shut behind him, the mat back in the footlocker and Lance’s frown back on his face. Hunk told him he was stressed? He must be more obvious than he thought. Lance let his head drop against the side of his bed as a sigh tore from his mouth.What was wrong with him? Lance has always been able to keep most of his true feelings under wraps, so how come he’d suddenly lost the ability to keep his heart away from his sleeve?Suddenly, the door was swishing open again and Hunk was barging into the room with a panicked look on his face. “Lance! The Altean is awake-”Before his friend could even finish his sentence, Lance was on his feet and moving with him out the door. “Has she said anything?”“No, but she did try and kill one of the doctors,” Hunk told him as they moved quickly down the hallway, passing surprised technicians and soldiers. “I think Coran managed to calm her down before anything too bad happened, but he said over the comms that she wasn’t in the best frame of mind.”“What about Allura and Romelle?” The only other Alteans had to be on their way or already there.“Romelle is already there — Allura said she was on her way.”They reached the unmarked door they were keeping the possibly rogue Altean behind and the keypad scanned their security clearance cards, hissing open. Allura, Shiro, and Coran were already standing behind the one-way glass. It was completely silent except for the voice of a young woman over the speaker.“- will kill me if I tell you anything,” she was saying. “Luca,” a voice who Lance recognized as Romelle said sadly. “Is there no way? The people here — the paladins, the Garrison, the civilians — are good people. Whoever is forbidding you to say anything is wrong.”There was a long silence. Lance and Hunk moved up to the glass, and Lance was shocked to see Romelle sitting across from another young Altean with a pleading expression on her face. Luca’ features were wary and stony.“What’s happened?” Hunk whispered.“She’s a zealot,” Allura muttered back. “She thinks Romelle is a traitor to Lotor.”“So she-”“She’ll kill me soon,” Luca interrupted them, her voice full of spite and… regret? “Honerva knows it’s for the bes-”And without another word, the rogue Altean’s eyes flashed purple and rolled back, her body spasming once before it went limp. She was gone.“Luca,” Romelle whispered, her melancholy twisting something in Lance’s gut.Shiro shook his head despondently. “Let’s get some med techs in here to collect the body.”