Chapter Text
A foreign coldness seemed to engulf him, slow and steady. It crawled up his back along his spine, counted the vertebrae of his neck, threaded through his hair, creeped over his eyes and gagged him to remain mute. Then: numbness and a vast void in his mind and soul. Nothingness was the result of a battle which never really took place.
Death was… a concept that got introduced to Lance in this specific way sooner than he had imagined. He had known that it was always waiting for all of the paladins right around the corner. He had to a part seen it coming due to them being in an intergalactic war but he never would have thought to hit him there. Lance had known that protecting his friends and family had its price but he might have underestimated the extend and severeness.
When he had pushed Allura out of the way he was expecting the extreme pain resulting from being hit by the energy discharge but he hadn’t exactly expected to die from it.
While the fire had been sweeping over him it was unbearable. Hot electricity had pulsed strongly through his veins threatening to burst him into small particles of glass crystals. The energy had pulled and pushed heavily on the whole of his being. It had felt like thousands of sharp scalpels had been hacked into his skin, stringing his blood to threads to hold him down to the pilot seat, cracking every bone in him into the amount of stars surrounding the scene. It had felt like a vacuum rushed down his windpipe while he had screamed in agony, making itself at home in his lungs and swallowing any attempt of air, of life force to reach him to stay conscious through this assault while also sucking in anything that was still left in him. It had been so overwhelming from one moment to another: first calm, then the pain and then?
Cold.
He didn’t really register that he was dead until a warm, soft, calm, blurred something seemed to tuck on him, lift him up. Lance hadn’t even registered the previous numbness and nothingness until he slowly regained that feeling of simply being. But with coming back to existing came the remaining tension and soreness of what previously transpired. He could feel the lingering energy run from his heart up to his shoulders, down his biceps, swirl around his forearms and finally kiss his limp fingertips with a slight spark. Everything ached and Lance wondered for a moment why he had to be bought back. He preferred the emptiness over remembering the pain and the torture of being in that moment before death had hold him in its grasp. It was with that thought that he noticed that he came back from being dead. He had died.
It wasn’t a huge realization, a shock to him. It was just a fact that he simply accepted while floating on the edge of unconsciousness.
The increasing prickling of the remaining energy roused him to face life again. He already forgot what the sight before him had been when he left his life behind but it certainly wasn’t what his eyes registered now as he slowly opened them. Relieved, teal-blue eyes met his own, only separated by two helmet visors.
“Huh?”, Lance wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this situation while he blinked a couple of times, getting rid of this weird, foreign feeling on his eyelids that apparently accompanied being dead for a couple of doboshes. He suspected that Allura had been rather close to crying judging by the soft glint in her eyes and how they glimmered in the warm light of the red lion.
Did she bring him back? He didn’t really know much about quintessence and didn’t bother ever trying to get it because first on the list of “learn to understand it” came the mystic that was Keith and then math… But if anyone from the whole crew was able to bring someone back from the dead, it was definitely Allura.
“You saved me,” he whispered.
From what, he wasn’t sure. The coldness, numbness, nothingness. Everything probably. He didn’t know if that feeling was only a moment between the here and now and the afterlife or if his soul would have existed in that paradox void for eternity. Whatever it would have been, he was back to reality and life now.
“I owed you one”, Allura answered with the same look on her face which then shifted to one of sadness.
Right. She had owed him. That was all there was to it.
Lance gulped down the unsettling feeling that this statement gave him, blamed it on the recent events and instead tried to appreciate the moment.
He gave her a tired smile.
Why else would she want him back from the dead if not for a debt? Why would she resurrect him of all people? He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that debt...
Now he felt more welcome in the void.
His throat still hurt from the screaming he did when the energy had pulsed through him and he knows that the coms had been active before. He faintly remembered Pidge previously powering up the shield with Shiro and relaying this to Hunk. His yelling would have had blasted their ears out and all of them very probably knew what happened.
With the coms silent and the very present lack of conversation or questions he noticed: He should have stayed dead.