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Pidge gets used to not talking about Kerberos.
Mostly. Somewhat. Little bit.
She has her moments, when it all gets to be too much, and she doesn’t think she can sit through another five minutes of talk about where Kerberos went wrong and what we can learn from it lectures in class without screaming. When she snaps and fights back with sharp words off a barbed tongue of barely controlled grief against Iverson or whichever asshole has opened his mouth on that particular day. But for the most part, she learns to keep her mouth shut.
For the one, it’s a necessary evil to put up with their excuses, their lies, in order to protect her identity. Katelyn Holt could throw a fit and threaten a Garrison officer for talking shit about her family, for leaving them to rot in the cold depths of space. Pidge Gunderson cannot.
Pidge Gunderson, for all intents and purposes, is just a single child from a nice, Midwestern family, with a private school education and an interest in radios—on paper, at least.
Still, what’s on paper is all Pidge has left anymore. She knew the consequences of her mission, and accepted them as a necessary sacrifice. All that she was is now obsolete, and she must become the illusion to the best of her ability.
Besides, it is…tiring, not to be believed all the time. The Garrison, her former friends, even her mother, none of them would listen. Why waste time now arguing with people who won’t ever understand, when it will be easier to prove them wrong.
Which she will, she’ll prove them all wrong. She will find the truth if it kills her.
She thinks about them a lot lately, especially now that she’s here, in the Garrison. Her family, her father and brother, are of course never far from her mind, but the others too—Shiro, who had been Matt’s friend so long he was practically family himself. And the woman, Pidge’d only met her a couple times, but she’d seemed nice enough. She remembers her mentioning having a little sibling around Pidge’s age, someone who looked up to her, someone to come back to.
None of them deserved—do deserve—to be abandoned like this.
She will bring them home, all of them. Bring Matt and her father back to herself and her mother, and the others to their own families.
As far as she knows, all Shiro’d really had was Keith, in terms of family or close friends outside of Matt or…whatever that was. Regardless, they’d been important to each other, and that’s about as far as she cares about it.
Pidge’d only seen Keith the once, after Kerberos. The same day she’d broken into the Garrison, and had been dumped in the waiting room of the commander’s office while Iverson called her mother to come pick her up, already working on her plan to get back in as she sat stewing. She’d stared at him from across the room in their respective plastic chairs, at the scowl on his face and the large, fresh bruise spreading across his cheek, and wondered just what had happened to the kid she used to know that followed Shiro around like he’d strung up the sun.
“What the hell happened to you?” she’d asked bluntly, and he’d snorted.
“McClain’s brother punched me.”
McClain. Lieutenant McClain, Shiro’s co-pilot. The one with the starry smile and the little sibling she’d been planning to take photos for in space.
“Why?”
Keith had shrugged, looking mildly uncomfortable and almost guilty, and her stomach had churned. “Some new report came out about the pilot error they think might have caused the crash, and I told McClain it must have been his stupid sister that was driving the damn thing when it happened, because Shiro would have never made mistakes like that.”
She’d tried to imagine what it would be like if the world was saying the crash was Matt’s fault, and shook her head. “That’s just cruel.”
“…I know,” he’d said, and she decided the undirected misery in his eyes made him look like the most pathetic creature alive. “But I just needed someone to blame. I don’t want it to be Shiro’s fault.”
“Do you really think they’re dead?”
“I don’t know,” Keith shook his head. “I’m not sure I want to know.”
From the next room over, through the window, she’d seen Iverson hang up the phone, and she’d stood, sneering. “If you refuse to go looking for answers just because you’re afraid of what you might find, you’re nothing more than a coward.”
It wasn’t until after Iverson had come back, and led her to the door, that she’d heard Keith whisper. “Yeah, probably.”
After that, he’d just been another non-believer no longer needed in her world.
She’d not heard anything about him until long after that, when she’d returned to the Garrison as Pidge, and realized the position in the fighter class her new teammate had just inherited had been Keith’s previous one. He’d been expelled, apparently. Some combo of telling his Garrison-assigned therapist to go fuck herself, threatening an officer, and breaking into the file room to look through the Kerberos records.
Well, at least he’d done something.
It didn’t matter either way, she’d decided. Keith wasn’t her problem. They’d never been particularly close to begin with, and she’d realized discarding her identity meant leaving all things, including former interpersonal relationships, behind. Katie may have been sort-of-friends with one Keith Kogane, but Pidge Gunderson was not. If they ever met again, they’d be nothing more than strangers.
Besides, she didn’t—doesn’t have time for friends, now. The mission is more important than anything else, no matter what that anything else may be.
Which is something she kind of wishes her new teammates would realize, because they really…really haven’t.
On some level, she understands the desire to try and get along with your teammates. Her father had always stressed that team cohesion is key to a mission’s ease and success, and so as far as that logic extends she can get why one might try to build a rapport with the people they’ll be stuck working with for at least the next year or two. But at some point, you have to be willing to accept when someone doesn’t want to be your buddy, and move on. A memo her beloved teammates have not gotten, apparently.
It’s mostly the engineer, Hunk. He talks in this loud, booming voice to try and fill up the empty spaces between the three of them, hands always fiddling with one another and eyes twitching nervously to the corners of each room as if looking for some inevitable danger. When he speaks to her, he always seems to instinctually look well above her head, as if expecting someone else to be walking with them as their third, before correcting himself and dipping his head to see her. Pidge doesn’t belong here, that much is obvious to her, but it doesn’t stop Hunk from clinging. Mostly to their other teammate, but to her as well, always ready to shuffle up to her side and follow her walking path one step too close behind. It’s infuriatingly like how her mother behaved towards Pidge after her father and brother went missing, as if she expected her to vanish at a moment’s notice, and it leaves her with a sick feeling in her stomach that only makes her hate it all the more.
Hunk’s not a bad person in the slightest, even given his annoying habits, but he’s too soft. Too warm and well meaning, and all the more likely to get cut on the barbed wire of her hate-riddled soul. He doesn’t deserve the mess Pidge is looking to make of the Garrison, and so she pushes him away at every opportunity. Running from kind, ramblings words and unsteady smiles, leaving him to care for his other self-proclaimed ward.
Said ward being their team’s pilot. Lance. Lance is—well, she doesn’t know quite what to make of him, honestly.
He’s all these mismatched, odd ends. Sewn together with rough twine that cuts the hands and salvaged thread of all colors that can’t quite keep him together.
Sometimes he’s loud and boisterous, posturing grandly and bouncing off the walls with all this excess energy and not a second thought. Other times he’s serious and methodical, all narrowed eyes and a sharp, steely focus that could cut with just a glance.
Mostly he’s just…quiet.
It’s his eyes that get her. They’re a dark blue that look as if they should sing of the ocean, of crashing waves and salt-kissed lips and birdsong. But, no matter whether he’s the enthusiastic force of the tides, the single-minded focus of the sniper, or the silent shadow at Hunk’s side, his eyes always just seem…dead. Like the life was sucked out of them an eternity ago and he just kept moving regardless.
Broken, she decides. He looks broken—in all the ways she might look, if she wasn’t wrapped up in layers of clever lies and anger-made chainmail to protect herself.
Lance tries, occasionally, to be nice to her. The first time they met, he was in one of those firecracker moods, vibrating with enthusiasm, until he turned to see her, and she got her first glimpse of those dead eyes. He’d frozen in place, completely silent—something she later learned was just a thing that happens with Lance— and Hunk had smoothly taken over introductions. Following that, he’d been almost overly friendly, but after the first couple times she made it clear his presence wasn’t wanted beyond when it was required, he mostly left her alone. Now he just watches her with shrewd, wary eyes she can’t quite puzzle out, and doesn’t bother her so long as she keeps up in simulations.
He’s got a kind of unwavering dedication to the program, to climbing the ranks as soon as possible, that Pidge just can’t understand. Maybe once upon a time she wanted to go to the Garrison out of genuine interest and a desire to further the world with her work, but after everything that’s happened, all she feels is disgust for this place. It’s built on a foundation of rigorous hierarchy and self-preservation that she can’t stand with a loathing that runs deep into her bones.
This is the place that sent four innocent people into space and then left them to die. The only reason she’s here is because she has to be; she’d never willingly follow their rules of her own volition.
And—okay, yes, most people don’t have the reasoning she does, but Lance is almost unnerving. He sits through every lecture about how they’re just not cutting it, each hurled insult about him being the replacement pilot, with the same polite smile fixed in place, those empty eyes always present.
If he knows genuine anger, he doesn’t seem to show it. To Pidge, who has coated herself in her own righteous fury as both sword and shield, he is an enigma. A glitch in the code that is the Garrison she should be able to understand and manipulate perfectly, free from the consequences of her old life and name.
Hunk isn’t much better, in all that unnamed, terrified grief she can’t quite make sense of, but at least she can get some genuine read on him when she looks at his face, on how he’s feeling and what he might be thinking.
She tells herself she doesn’t care, one way or another. So she has a couple weird teammates. She severed herself from everything else—from Keith, her friends, her school, to her own mother—so why should this be any different? Pidge can’t afford to get caught on the spikes of whatever the hell it is Lance and Hunk are dealing with.
All that matters is the mission. The high-range broadcast equipment she smuggled into her room under the guise of Pidge Gunderson’s documented high school radio interest, and the photo of Matt and herself tucked under her pillow.
All else is secondary. All else is meaningless.
Pidge only sees Lance snap the once—after she picks a fight with another cadet, a real fight.
She doesn’t mean to. Normally she knows better, she’s not Keith for God’s sake. She is usually controlled, keeping an iron-tight grip on the lid of her simmering pot of anger, but it is one of those days where she could not sleep without Matt’s imagined screams in her dreams. Where she stood silently between Hunk’s fidgeting and Lance’s blank stare through another of Iverson’s lectures, and felt the fury of a daughter without a father and a sister without a brother coil in her chest.
It’s one of those days where it’s all just too much, and when she hears some idiot from the cargo-level training class talking shit on his phone in the otherwise empty hallway about how stupid the Kerberos crew must have been to crash a Garrison ship, when the simulators built to match are so easy to fly, she just…breaks.
She’s on him before she can think, kicking and hitting everything she can reach and screaming until her voice runs raw and jagged. For a moment, Pidge feels like the storm, crashing down on those that would dare stand in the way of her pain, of her righteous vengeance in the face of what she’s lost.
And then Lance and Hunk yank her off and away from the boy.
Pidge comes back to herself in a rush, the shame boiling over—not at her actions, because that prick got what he deserved, but at her loss of control. Only then does she notice Hunk’s shaking hands where they grip her arm to keep her from attacking the boy again, the tight dig of Lance’s nails into her shoulder that she doubts is intentional but bites regardless. She looks up to them, and Hunk is ashen and trembling, as she might expect, but Lance…his eyes are narrowed at the cadet they just yanked her off of, and for the first time they look not dead but freezing with a kind of hate she never expected from someone like him.
Suddenly, she feels not so much like stormy water itself as she does the child dragged under by its currents.
Perhaps they’re both the two of them, herself and Lance, more broken than she gave them credit for.
They end up in the commander’s office, awaiting a disciplinary hearing, unsurprisingly, and Pidge finds herself sitting in the same chair Keith was, all those months ago. She figures it’s appropriate.
Despite Hunk and Lance being the ones to break up the fight—if it can even be called that—they all wind up in front of Iverson’s desk. They weave a lie of how the boy shoved Pidge first in perfect unison, not even hesitating, and she sits through the rant of one more incident, boys, one more incident and you’re out with her nails digging into her palm. She bites her tongue so hard she tastes blood to stop herself from screaming at him, and she decides to count that as a success.
Where’s my family, her heart whispers despite it all, where the fuck is my family you absolute bastard. She shoves it down where it cannot be heard as they’re escorted out of the office, and tries not to meet her teammates eyes once the door into the hall shuts behind them.
Lance turns on her instantly, those suddenly alive eyes cutting into her. “What the hell was that? Are you trying to drag us all down with you?”
She sneers on instinct, wanting nothing more than to go back to her room and just not think for a while, the sooner the better, even if it means being cruel. “It’s not like I asked you to get involved, fuck off.”
Pidge turns to leave, and Lance grabs her arm. She shakes it off with a scowl, wheeling around to face him again, and the hurricane descends on her. “You’re not the only one with something at stake here,” Lance snarls. “We’re a team, Pidge. You may not care about whether you ever graduate or not, but I do, and I’m frankly not in the mood to wait while they try to find us another communications officer because you’re trying to get your ass expelled! I need this to work, ok?”
“What would you know?!” she screams, and the blood in her mouth tastes like grief. “What the hell would you know about why I do the things I do?”
Lance straightens up, and the anger in his expression is gone, lost to a cold indifference that leaves her feeling tiny. “Not all of us have the luxury of time or circumstance to defend echoes that can’t hear,” he says. “You may be one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, but if you can’t be bothered to do a basic Google search on your own teammates, then you’re an idiot. What the hell do you even know about me?”
He’s right, Pidge has to admit, and she shrinks beneath his gaze. She’d never wanted anything to do with the two of them beyond what is necessary, and has studiously avoided trying to learn any of the details of who they are. She knows the names they’d given her, their speaking habits, and their grades in class, and that is the extent of it.
She hadn’t wanted the attachment, hadn’t wanted to care. The less of a life she has as Pidge Gunderson, the more of Katie Holt she can save within herself, even if she may never be able to reclaim it as her own.
Lance scowls, and turns. “C’mon Hunk, this is a waste of time.”
He makes it five steps, Hunk trailing unsurely behind him, casting glances back at Pidge all the while, before she breaks.
“They’re not dead!” she screeches, an echo of the question she’d asked Keith, and she doesn’t quite know why. “I know they’re not dead.”
Lance stops.
“You’re right,” he says, and Pidge’s world shatters.
No one has said this to her before, has acknowledged the lie as Pidge has known it for the better part of a year, and it takes her breath away.
“You’re right,” Lance repeats quietly. “They’re not dead. I’d know if they were, trust me. But—“ he glances over his shoulder at last, and those sea-storm eyes are filled with a kind of sympathetic understanding that makes Pidge want to claw her skin off. “You can’t get what’s missing back with scanners and radios. If you want to find a lost thing, you have to go looking for it yourself, and you can’t do that stuck on the ground.”
He disappears down the hall, dragging Hunk with him, and Pidge is left standing there, lost in her own head.
Later that night—much later, after curfew when the lights have been shut off—she powers up her laptop, and hacks the Garrison student records. It’s the work of five minutes, being so low down on the security priority list that she enters with full confidence of avoiding detection, and she pulls up the fighter-class simulation teams in order to sort by her own and find Lance’s file.
When she does, the realization that she’d never bothered to learn Lance’s last name, hadn’t even considered, hits her like a train, and her world rewrites itself as she stares down at the tiny letters glowing on her screen. Silently, she closes her laptop, and crawls into bed, trying to ignore the words swimming behind her eyelids.
Lance. Lance. Lance effing McClain.
Objectively, she knows that she needs to get some rest, that they have simulation testing tomorrow, and she cannot afford another fuck up—still she tosses, still she turns.
Across the room, illuminated by a sliver of light from the window, the poster of the Kerberos crew that she’d tacked up as a reminder of why she’s here is thrown into sharp relief. Moonlight dances across a picture of a young woman with blue eyes, a smile of stars, and the name below her.
Loraine McClain, co-pilot.
Sleep doesn’t come for a long time after, for neither Pidge Gunderson nor Katelyn Holt.
The next morning, dead eyes, nervous fingers, and barbed wire hatred go back to work, same as usual. They don’t talk about it, for better or for worse.
It is what it is, after all.
Everyone always wants something they can’t have back. That’s just the way of their world.