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Lance had always loved the concept of soulmates. He fell in love with the idea of them the first time they were explained to him, barely past his fourth birthday. Most people just called him a romantic, which he usually laughed off, but he was a good-hearted person at his core and the notion of having someone to pour all his love into forever was all that motivated him on his bad days.
His mother had sat him on her knee while his father was at work and showed him the sentence which was slowly appearing on her forearm. He’d watched the words form with an acute fascination; although he couldn’t read every word written there, he understood what they meant. It was an innocent, heartfelt reminder of love. “Your father writes to me while he’s away so I won’t be lonely,” his mother told him in a hushed voice, an occupied and faraway look on her face.
Lance remembers smiling and telling her how he was going to write notes to his soulmate while he was away, just like his father. And he did.
When he was seven he grew curious and wrote out a message specifically for the person on whose arm his words would appear. He scribbled a hello and a how are you on his arm in blue washable Crayola marker while he was sitting on the edge of his bed. He didn’t receive a response.
He continued like that for a while; he would attempt to initiate conversation with the other half of his person, but they didn’t answer. At first he wasn’t so disappointed, but as he grew older and saw his peers with writing all over their bodies, he began to wear longer sleeves to hide the lack of conversation.
Lance was thirteen when a scratchy “sorry” appeared on his hand in the red ink of a cheap ballpoint pen. He remembers feeling fifty emotions at once, wanting to say fifty different things, but he was raised to be polite, so he drew a smiley face and greeted this wonderful stranger with a hey, how are you?
He enrolled in the Galaxy Garrison academy and no longer had to hide his lack of conversations under long sleeves. His soulmate wasn’t a wordy person, but they wrote to him often enough that their conversations were visible.
Lance’s soulmate was the no-nonsense type; they never hesitated to tell him when he was being ridiculously cheesy, but they were never malicious. They were usually sarcastic or serious when they wrote to him, but Lance was so excited at any opportunity to communicate with his soulmate that he didn’t mind.
The Garrison was tough for Lance. It was competitive and stressful and he was an all-or-nothing kind of guy, so his slipping school performance was hell for him until he met his little group of friends. He was glad for Pidge and thanked the gods for sending him Hunk. As much as he loved his friends– which was a lot– he still longed to meet his soulmate.
Although he got along with most people, there was someone he always seemed to butt heads with. The top fighter pilot in his class was stubborn and cold and dismissive; everything that clashed with Lance. He had tried out his usual friend-of-all banter and good natured humor in an effort to befriend him, but he had simply brushed him off. Lance decided he’d be as academically successful as this kid, and if he wasn’t able to, well, they’d just have to be rivals in that respect.
He was better than Lance was, and that was hard for him to accept. He was competitive and perfectionistic and coming to terms with losing the top spots in his classes to Keith was almost too much for him to handle. He had Hunk and Pidge to support him, yeah, but the real consolation came from the few words that would appear on his skin late at night when he couldn’t sleep.
He wasn’t at his best during his early years at the Garrison, but he wasn’t terrible, either. He was better than he was after the Kerberos incident, at the very least.
The Garrison received news of the missing ship and the entire academy seemed to shut down. Pidge was snappier than usual and Hunk’s usually smiling face was stuck with a frown. The student body had been greatly discouraged and disappointed; everyone loved Shiro like a brother and Commander Holt was known for his kindness and open door. Lance could not bear to see the Garrison so sad, so he did the only thing he knew to do; he kept smiling. He did his best to cheer everyone up, although they were less responsive than usual.
Eventually things began to return to normal and Lance was glad for it. He couldn’t stand seeing so many people so unhappy. Hunk smiled again and Pidge seemed less distracted. Things were beginning to fall into place for him when Keith was kicked out of the Garrison.
As much as Lance had quarreled with Keith (although their conflict was, admittedly, mostly coming from Lance’s side), he’d never actually wish anything bad upon him. He was sad to see Keith leave, and he was concerned for him. His absence opened a space for Lance to take a piloting position, but his classes lacked the spark of energy he always looked forward to.
Lance thought the excitement of finally being a pilot would replace the emptiness he felt from his soulmate’s radio silence.
Then he and his friends snuck out of the Garrison late one night and witnessed a ship of sorts crash into the desert, where Lance helped Keith pull Shiro out of its wreckage. They were launched into space and thrust into a centuries-long alien war they didn’t agree to participate in. He would’ve said his world was turned completely upside-down, but instead he had been completely removed from it.
He was so homesick he could barely drag himself out of bed at times. He had gained a new family at the loss of his old one. He laughed off Voltron’s dangerous role in the universe in front of the others, but once he was alone, he let his walls down. He sometimes spent hours at night writing out stories of his mother and his sister and his uncle and his cousin across his arms, legs, stomach if he had to. They didn’t answer him.
Their missions were dangerous, to say the least. Voltron had an effective team dynamic which helped them come out on the winning side of many a space battle, but the seemingly never-ending string of violence affected their morale more than they were willing to admit. They all coped with it in different ways; Allura and Shiro worked on spreading the rebellion against the Galra, Hunk cooked, Pidge tinkered, Coran did god knows what, Keith trained, and Lance did a bit of everything.
Although their relationship had improved, Lance knew that Keith was still bitter. At the time, Lance denied remembering their alleged “bonding moment” in a split second of panic. It wasn’t that Lance didn’t remember or didn’t want to (he certainly did); he didn’t want to grow close to people he could have ripped away from him like his family back on Earth had been. He wasn’t sure he could handle the loss of anyone else.
Shiro disappeared again and his soulmate finally started answering him. Everyone one the castleship had isolated themselves in their anxiety, so Lance really had no one else to turn to. He wrote paragraphs about how he missed his friend and how helpless he felt in his efforts to keep his other friends’ moods up. His soulmate responded in short sentences, but the contact was enough to satisfy Lance. He asked if they were alright and they told him not to ask again.
Shiro returned and everything seemed back in order. Keith, however, seemed more distracted and irritable than normal but only brushed Lance off when he tried to ask what was going on. He had thought the few honest conversations they’d shared when Keith was acting Black Paladin had brought them closer together. Maybe this was Keith getting him back for supposedly not remembering their bonding moment.
His soulmate apologized for being cold and Lance assured them it was alright. He said his problem had fixed itself and he hoped whatever they were going through was over as well. They told him they were just trying to figure some things out.
Keith had been going on missions with the Blade of Marmora consistently enough to detract from the team’s dynamic. Shiro was hard on him for it, and although it was understandable, Keith had been through a lot and, in Lance’s eyes, deserved some slack. He asked Keith if he was alright and Keith told him it was nothing.
The next week Keith decided to leave and train with the Blade full-time. Lance’s blood had frozen when he made the announcement but he put on a smile for Keith’s sake.
Pidge had finally found her brother and Lance’s soulmate started to open up about how lonely they felt. Although Lance had never felt as lonely as he did then, he did everything he could to reassure this mysterious stranger. Long paragraphs were appearing on his skin, not unlike when he wrote about his family, but Lance could only think about how Voltron would function without Keith (he kept rationalizing that it couldn’t). He felt guilty for not being as invested as he could be in the heartfelt sentences his soulmate had scrawled out over his whole body, but his heart ached for his friend.
Lance had poured his heart and soul into building Keith up as a leader. He supported him when he could and helped guide him with all the wisdom he had; Lance was no Shiro, but he seemed to do an okay job of helping Keith. Then Shiro came back and he was harsher and less human and didn’t listen to anything he had to say and Lance wondered what had happened while he was gone.
Blue and red always seemed to be a logical color combination to Lance. After they got over their initial butting of heads, Lance and Keith had grown into quite the dynamic duo. They weren’t exactly best friends, but there were a few nights when neither of them could sleep where they found a strange comfort in each other. Keith liked to talk about his times with Shiro, however vague, and Lance could talk for hours about all the happy memories he had with Hunk and Pidge back at the Garrison, although he was unable to bring himself to talk about his family.
The whole team worked well with Keith. He was an essential part of it; that’s not to say Allura didn’t make a fine Paladin, but the absence of Keith as a whole from their day-to-day lives had a heavy emotional toll on all of them. Even though they’d said goodbye with smiles and well-wishings, none of them were happy with his leaving.
Lance’s soulmate did more than write to him; they’d draw sometimes, too. Lance would wake up in the morning with intricate doodles all over his arms and legs, like a network of tattoos. They were quite the artist– he’d ask more about this previously hidden talent if he wasn’t so focused on the lonely aching in his chest. When his soulmate finally caught on to his distance, Lance told them that he was missing an old friend. They said they knew the feeling.
Every mission they went on without Keith put Lance on edge more than it should. He was never exactly calm in the heat of battle, but he usually managed fine; now he found himself almost too tense to think straight. It was hard to put your life in danger when you’re missing the one who had your back the most. That didn’t mean that he didn’t trust the rest of his team, but the particular presence of Keith had been a comfort in the dangerous conflicts of space.
That comforting presence was one which Lance really wished he had in this particular fight. A rare faction of resistance against the Voltron coalition had caught the team in an ambush as they were passing through the star system, and they put up much more of a fight than expected. They were doing their best to keep all the Paladins apart; Lance did all he could to protect his teammates but in doing so he was gradually isolating himself from his team, which appeared to be exactly what the resistance group wanted. His situation got worse and worse and before he realized it, he’d fallen right into their trap. He heard voices in his comms yell at him to watch out before his lion was hit with a force he was unable to describe.
He was sure he was hurtling through space towards god knows what at supersonic speeds, but his mind was on the team he was just torn away from. His body felt numb and his teeth vibrated as the screams of his friends echoed in his head. Lance wasn’t quite able to process what happened until he collided with something that threw him out of his seat and set every one of his nerves on fire.
He didn’t know how he was oriented or why he crashed or where he was or what the warmth he felt trickling over his skin was. He felt Blue’s raspy murmuring in his mind, comforting him, asking if he was okay, but he couldn’t find the energy to open his eyes. So he laid there, his body uncomfortably warm and achy, waiting for something to happen. And nothing did, not for what felt like hours.
Then he became more aware. He felt the pain– not the dull ache he’d been feeling, but sharp stabs of white fire in his leg and his ribs when he breathed. The warmth trickling over his skin was blood and when he opened his eyes he could hardly recognize the inside of his lion for what it was. The emergency lights were off and the room was absolutely silent. Lance tried to reach out for his team on his comms, but speech hurt and no one answered; he doubted they were within range to hear him.
He was alone and injured in some unknown corner of space and began to panic. He didn’t know where he was or if his team knew how to find him and he had no way to communicate. He tried to sit up and was immediately struck with a wave of pain; Blue purred and he relaxed just a bit. He was about to break down in tears when Blue put an idea in his mind.
He wasn’t unable to communicate; he had a soulmate who would see what he wrote on his body. A desperate idea, but an idea nonetheless. He forced himself to sit up; he was at the front of the cockpit, unfortunately across from his junk drawer. He bit his cheek as he dragged himself across the floor, swallowing thickly as he yanked the drawer open and fished out a pen. The only accessible skin was his on face. At least if he managed to write something, it’d be seen.
He peered out the windows and saw he’d crashed into an asteroid of some sort; there were a couple planets nearby, some of them he thought he recognized. He pulled himself over the control panel to get a better look at his surroundings; yeah, he definitely had seen this area before. It was one of the systems they’d flown through before, one he’d seen on Allura’s maps.
He looked at his reflection in the glass of his lion and took a deep breath. He took off his helmet. He tried to steady his hand as he held his pen and though it still shook, he wrote.
I’m Lance & I need help, right under his hairline.
I’m in space & I’m hurt, on his forehead.
In a blue lion robot, on his right cheek. Inaid star system, on his right. On an asteriod, on his chin.
Please, on his throat.
Then he dropped his pen, put his helmet back on, slumped back down onto the floor, and waited. He didn’t know how long it took for his eyes to begin to slip shut. He didn’t know how long he was unconscious. But he did know that he woke up when someone else slipped into his lion.
His eyes cracked open and a figure stood before him, framed by light. His whole body felt numb and his vision was hazy. It took him a moment to recognize the figure as belonging to Keith. His heart beat.
“Lance,” the old Red Paladin whispered, kneeling in front of him with concern written plainly on his face. Lance was then able to see a few more people in the background– probably Kolivan or other Blade members. Keith tried to pick him up the best he could without hurting him, and when he was safe in his arms, Lance saw the wobbly writing scribbled all over his face. Lance let his eyes close again, knowing he was safe, safer than he had ever been before.
Lance had always loved the idea of soulmates. He loved the reality even more when it meant that he had a firm hand in his, a body in his arms, a smile waiting for him at the end of a day, and red hearts drawn on his hand with a cheap ballpoint pen from hundreds of miles away. He kept his promise, too; the moment Keith was away from him, Lance would write little reminders that he loved him in blue washable Crayola marker. And Keith wrote them back.