Work Text:
“Have we arrived yet?” she asks, having left the training room and Keith’s infectious negativity. The door to the bridge hisses closed behind her, shutting out the echoes of the hallway and her previous train of thought.
“For the last time, no,” Lance drawls, slumped idly in the navigation seat over to her right.
From where she’s standing, the view from the bridge is vast, impenetrable darkness stretched endlessly before them. Pure starless void flecked with brief streaks of light. It’s unlike anything she’s seen before - terrifying in its scope and profound in its beauty.
They are the first humans to see this; explorers.
Lance cranes his neck over the side of his chair and smirks at her, goading her to make a remark he can respond to to pass the time. She declines.
The room is otherwise silent. Shiro stands at the front of the deck, staring out at some destination none of them can see. He barely acknowledges her arrival.
“It’s boring ,” Lance whines, “just sitting here like this.” He huffs a dramatic sigh and crosses his feet on the dashboard. And yet she notices how he can’t bring himself to leave his station and his viewscreen as his fingers flick between external cameras honing in on various sides of the ship; most of them looking aftward. Shiro glares at him and Lance adjusts his legs, subdued. It’s enough to spark a laugh from her.
“At the very least, we can enjoy the journey.” Shiro smiles as he walks toward her. He extends a hand that he probably thinks is gracious, but she can only see as patronizing. He draws her deeper into the bridge toward the wide bay window to stare alongside him at nothingness.
She wants to say something, to make an excuse and leave, but, with every inch he pushes her toward the front of the ship, she feels her chance slipping away.
Her stomach is unsettled as she stands before the prow, gazing into the deep void of space ahead of them. Shiro’s presence beside her is a small comfort, and his hand on her shoulder is warm and steady. Something, some object flashes past them outside, traveling faster than they are; too quick to be recognised and too insignificant to be scanned. Another.
“Rocks?”
“Maybe,” says Shiro, “Ice. Metal. The remains of some old ship. We might not be the first ones here.” He shrugs.
The idea doesn’t sit well with her. Shiro’s pragmatism is good for settling arguments and seeing the more rational side of things, but it’s hell when she needs to express herself. Suddenly his hand on her shoulder feels too heavy and too hot. She shrugs it away.
“I’m going to try to send a message home,” Lance interjects from somewhere behind her.
“Good luck,” she replies, “I don’t think it’ll reach them.”
“Interference?”
“Not exactly. We’re travelling too fast, I think. It would take several lifetimes to get there, if at all.” She doesn’t have the energy to explain it in terms he’d understand.
“What about prayer?”
His laughter echoes around the bridge, and she doesn’t quite make out what he mumbles to himself when he’s done.
Shiro is still staring out the window as she walks back to the entrance, surveying the scene one last time. Occasional streaks of light flick past them outside and disperse into scattered nothingness. She tells herself she’d like to stay. But being around both of them, just standing around, witnessing the trajectory of the ship leaves her feeling tense, irritable, and inconsolably bored.
She doesn’t make an excuse to leave.
She finds herself wandering the upper hallways again, poking her head into disused offices and the empty medical bay. Thankfully, no one has needed it lately, and if their luck holds out, no one will. She circles the room, pretending she’s not wasting time as she pulls out odd drawers full of ancient alien versions of cotton swabs and tongue depressors.
The various curiosities are enough to satisfy her until the comm in her suit crackles to life and she hears Allura’s voice. She’s being summoned to one of the meeting rooms in the lower decks, near the engines. Hunk too, by the sound of it.
Her descent through the main levels is slow, despite the familiar hum of engines, interrupted by the occasional groans of structural stress rumbling through the belly of the ship. The sound vibrates up, through her feet, urging her onward. She can’t decide if it’s curious or nauseating. Hunk would know what’s going on better than she would, she thinks. She’s always been a bit more theoretical than hands-on. She decides in that moment to intercept him at his dorm on her way downstairs.
Hunk’s door is uncharacteristically locked. She knocks once. Twice. There is a soft, unplaceable thump from inside, but no answer.
She hangs around as long as she can without drawing noticeable ire from Allura. Leaning against the opposite wall and scrunching her small toes in her boots, she waits in hope of another clue from inside. It’s incredibly quiet.
Just her and a metal door and the jingle to Matt’s favourite Icy-Mint gum commercial stuck on repeat in her head.
The one she could never get rid of, no matter how hard she tried.
The minutes that stretch on and on between her and the door conclude that he’s not coming. And she leaves down the hallway letting herself quietly whistle the tune.
By the looks of how busy Allura is, she figures she could have hung around a lot longer. There’s a holoboard between the two of them, and Allura’s eyes are focused on the long strings of formulas and equations covering it. It takes her several moments to notice a whole human being standing in the doorway.
Allura’s desperate optimism remains in the strained grimace on her face. She’s punching in numbers, fuel capacities, trajectories, wormhole opportunities. She’s determined to find an answer. A solution.
“It’s good you’re here,” Allura says lightheartedly, as if she wasn’t the one who summoned her in the first place, “Maybe you can look over some of these equations. There seems to be an error- I just can’t get everything aligned to correct our trajectory.”
She looks over the numbers performatively. There isn’t a mistake. Any wormhole they opened would rip itself apart before they could even enter.
Allura becomes more frantic when she doesn’t hear the answer she so obviously needs. The air is thick and tense as she pounds the keyboard in front of her, muttering that time is of the essence. That they still have time. They still have plenty of time.
Her clipped voice commanding “Don’t leave-!” is cut off when the door seals shut between them.
She walks past Hunk’s door one more time, and her hand hovers over the metal frame. If he were awake he would have heard her footsteps coming. She strains, but she can’t hear anything inside.
Maybe he left?
Soon enough, she’s in the kitchen, but it’s not Hunk in the cupboards, pulling the stopper from a reserve bottle of spirits. He offers to get her her own drink, but she smiles and politely declines.
Coran grips the cup of nunvil, and she knows that he knows that she can see his hand trembling slightly. Her gaze darts back up to his eyes.
“Allura thinks she can save us.”
“I know,” he sighs.
They take their seats, him on the bar stool and her across the smooth metal counter. Her eyes flick to the doorway, seeing the spectre of a familiar face. But it’s nobody, and Coran starts speaking again.
“You doing alright, lass?”
“Shiro said that there were bits of other ships falling in with us. Is that true?””
Coran shakes his head. “It’s us, actually.”
“We’re coming apart?”
“Not exactly, though that will eventually be true. The extreme gravity bends the inescapable light in a circle. We’re seeing the back of our own heads, essentially. Optical illusion.”
“Neat.”
Coran’s drink is drained in near-silence. Neither of them have much to say. He knows she can’t stop fixating on the door and she knows he’s thinking about a second cup.
“Are you scared?” she asks.
“Terrified.”
“No one’s really talking about it.”
Coran nods solemnly.
“Nothing can escape a black hole, pip. We’ve crossed the event horizon. That beautiful ring you see above, or, er, around us, is the other light and objects falling simultaneously towards the singularity. We’ll join them, soon, as tiny bits of crushed matter and solid light. It’s quite… poetic, I guess, when you think about it.”
“Will we know when it happens?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “It won’t seem like we ever get there. Time is stretched beyond meaning as we fall. All possibilities, all potentialities converge into one as time slows down and eventually repeats itself.”
He chuckles. “We may have even had this conversation already.”
She stops chewing the inside of her cheek when she realises, “I think I was starting to feel it in the hallways. It felt- I dunno. Slow, I guess. Heavy.”
She reconsiders her thoughts. “Boring.”
He’s swirling the dregs in his glass.
“It’s not the dying that gets me, Coran. It’s that there’s nothing to do until then. Lance is busy, Shiro’s boring and Keith’s mad about what I said.”
“Maybe you should go apologize to him.” He’s definitely going for the bottle, now.
“Settle my affairs?”
“Give you something to do.” He winks at her. It’s forced.
Maybe sulking is a better word for what she’s doing. Because she’s certainly not dancing down to the training room with open arms. The sound around her is dimmer, now. And the trails of light more pronounced as she passes each shifting, flickering hallway bulb. Like an overexposed photograph. Or what she imagines a weird drug trip might be like. She’s trailing her fingers over the lights as she walks and feeling the tug of gravity shift away from a particularly downward direction. It’s strange.
The trip to the training room takes forever.
“Hey,” she says, a few steps into the large hall.
Keith grunts, and she’s not sure if it’s a reply. He’s hard at work, engaged in vicious combat with the training bot, blocking an assault of blows with his shield and looking for an opening for counterattack.
“I thought I should come and, maybe talk.”
Gravity still seems to be mostly functional in here. That’s a plus. Keith’s bot slams its fist across his cheek.
He stumbles back, breathing heavily and swaying from the dizzying impact. She’d have shut down the training module by now, but Keith is stubborn like that. She waits. Keith spits. The bot gets closer.
“If it makes you feel any better,” she says, as Keith readies his sword again, “you won’t notice when you die. You’ll just be doing normal stuff and then-” she shrugs, “y’know.”
He lunges at the bot, coming down hard on its left shoulder with a decisive strike. His sword almost cuts through the joint. Almost. The limb is left hanging and sparking, useless, by its side.
“I can’t die like this,” he says, finally. He and the bot are pacing circles around each other.
“It’s just a training module-”
“NO!” his shout interrupts her, and for the first time she can see his face, dripping with sweat. The bot is recalculating its strategy in its newly disabled state.
“Knowing and not knowing that suddenly I won’t exist. That everything was a waste. That our existence ends because we… we tripped up and fell into a black hole.”
She watches as the bot lunges at him, swiping with its non-dominant arm, attempting to grapple with his shield, but Keith is fast and not easily taken off-guard. He delivers a decisive blow to the neck. And then to its chest.
“We were supposed to save the universe,” he shrieks, and sparks cut from his blade as he wrenches it from the metal cavity, “And if not that, then die in some kind of- blaze of glory. Or…”
Keith’s voice trails away into racking sobs as the bot collapses, defeated and broken, to the floor.
“This is bullshit, Pidge.”
“I’m sorry I said anything.” She wants to scream about how it’s not her fault. How she didn’t personally navigate the ship across the event horizon to plunge into the inescapable slow death of a black hole. She’s just a kid bearing bad news.
“You never should have told me.”
Keith’s anger is blunt and toxic and she can’t handle its intensity. He’s back at the comm panel, summoning another training bot to pass the time or kill him from exhaustion. It emerges from storage and he begins another round of self-flagellation that she can’t be bothered to sympathize.
The door shuts on him as he cuts himself and swears.
She can’t wait to just get it over with. That’s what’s bothering her, she realises. The waiting. Keith’s starting to affect her. She just wants to escape it all, to not have to think about the future. She decides that getting as far away from him as possible will clear her head, so she rounds the corner and climbs another set of stairs.
“Hunk, I’m a little worried,” she admits to the still-locked dormitory door and the crushing silence beyond it. It’s not ironic, but the situation still annoys her. The one person she wants to talk to, and he won’t answer.
Maybe he needs more time.
Keith’s words keep repeating in her mind, sinking into her skin. She can’t decide if she’s being too hard on him. Or perhaps she’s just impatient. Maybe they both deserve what they get.
She peels herself away once more, ambling up the long, lonely hallways, and opens the door to the bridge.
“Have we arrived yet?” she asks, having left the training room and Keith’s infectious negativity. The door to the bridge hisses closed behind her, shutting out the echoes of the hallway and her previous train of thought.
“For the last time, no.”