Chapter Text
It had been mostly an accident, something that couldn’t have been avoided even if they had tried. It had started off as a simple peace mission, go to so and so planet and make alliances with the locals, get supplies, yada yada. To Lance, it was the same old schtick. They’d been at this for at least two years now, had many quite a few alliances and had settled who knows how many wars. And had gotten into who knows how many fights.
Lance was proud to say that none of the fights were his fault. Of course, no one really cared. Okay, maybe a few were his fault, but those were just honest mistakes. Things he couldn’t avoid. Like this one. It hadn’t been started by him. They’d been intending to make peace but, once on the planet and talking with their leaders, they’d discovered that they weren’t quite on the side of good. They should’ve figured that out with all the purple they kept seeing everywhere, but they’d been busy talking. Well, Lance had had his suspicions, but when did they ever take him seriously.
Now, they found themselves in a fire fight, away from their Lions and sort of each other. Shiro was on his own, Pidge was with Hunk, and here he was with Keith, of all people. They had a tentative friendship going on, for now, and so Lance had dove to save Keith, pushing him out of the way of whatever magical burst had been thrown at Keith. Instead, Lance was grazed by it, shuddering and collapsing. The others took the rest of their attackers out as Lance lay on the ground, sweating and shuddering and coughing and looking terrible.
They got him back to the castle ship and checked out. Coran diagnosed him as having a fever and some disease or something or other that he didn’t quite catch the name because it was mostly in Altean. Suffice it to say, his vocal cords were damaged by the disease/magic/whatever it was but, because of how it worked, they couldn’t heal Lance right away. There was an incubation phase of something like two weeks that they would have to wait through. In the mean time, Lance would be unable to talk. Coran reassured him that everything would be fine, that he could just communicate via his writing tablet with everyone and that two weeks would pass by quickly.
The two week period started off alright, Lance supposed. It didn’t take much to get the teams attention, though they kept forgetting that he couldn’t talk. Keith would get snappy at him. Hunk would ramble on and on and on and then get mad when he couldn’t comment on his cooking, which he always did. During training, Shiro would call for everyone to make sure they were alright, as if they were out in the field and had been separated, and would also get mad when he couldn’t answer. Pidge would do the same thing, the few times he tried hanging out with her. They would also joke about how much quieter it was now that he couldn’t talk, how much they could hear their own thoughts now. It hurt to hear, but Lance took it in stride. That’s just what happened around him. He was still their team mate, he still had a job to do. When it got to be too much, he’d just go curl up in Blue’s cockpit, comforted by the purring only he could hear. Blue didn’t care if he couldn’t talk. She didn’t need him to speak to hear what he was saying.
It got worse the longer the week went on. They continued getting mad when he didn’t answer back. And then, one of his fears happened. He had gone to get Pidge for training and, when she didn’t hear him, he’d hesitantly touched her shoulder, intending to shake her gently. It was barely a touch at all, but she’d jumped and snapped at him. Everyone knew by now that Pidge had a problem with being touched, and she reminded him, rather loudly, of that fact. After that, he avoided touching anyone to get their attention. He relied on waving his hands and arms around, which never really worked 99 percent of the time. Usually he just ended up getting ignored.
So he stopped trying as much to get their attention. They wouldn’t get mad if he got the work done, so he strived to do better, shoot better, fly better. One week slowly turned into two, and everyone got over him not talking to them, stopped asking his opinion on things. He ate quietly, trained quietly, did his job quietly. If they noticed how hard he worked during training sessions, they never said so. He was sure they never noticed his late nights spent in the training hall, or the times he’d sneak out in Blue to practice flying.
Two weeks turned into three pretty quickly. And then into four. And five. A month later found Lance still unable to speak, but by then, he didn’t care. The team didn’t care if he spoke at all, he noticed, so he didn’t remind them about the surgery or whatever they were supposed to do. It didn’t matter anyways. All he ever did was train or read. Blue became his only companion, her purrs the only thing that rocked him to sleep at night after long, painful training sessions or on nights when he couldn’t sleep at all, the tears too much to handle. No one ever noticed anything, and Lance preferred it that way.
Why be a bother to the team?