Archive of Our Own ^beta

                He feels very much a milkman rather than some intergalactic soldier or explorer of a kind, but the villagers insist he fell out of the sky in the giant cat that he woke up in, so he must be from space. They all look very different from him, as well, so he must be the alien, rather than them. Still, they’re hospitable enough, never having complaints about his bartering what little he has in the marketplace and offering what they can despite him being answer-less to their inquiries so they can help him get back up and running. He thinks they must not have cows for how much they covertly savor every drop of milk he delivers daily. It’s almost endearing, their appreciation. He wonders if cows were once alien to him, too, but he was familiar with the creature enough to know what it was called when he woke up and knew what to do with it so maybe it’s from his home planet. If he has a home planet. Why would he have cattle, though?

                Red Lighting, the giant red cat apparent ship he’s slowly but surely repairing—it’s becoming obvious he may not have been a repairman in any life he remembered, but Red Lightning is encouraging if not amused and seems to think he’s making great strides—can only answer his questions with rumbles of different categories that he’s slowly learning to distinguish between one another. Some are pride, when he manages to finagle one wire where it might be designed to go (again, he is not a repairman or at least does not have the memories enough to remember his skills as one), and others are fondness, when he thinks about names or places he can’t remember but wants to create in his head so he bounces ideas off her. She feels like a her. The rumbles for the most part come solidly in the metalwork under his hands and his body and surround him, but in their deeper connections, when she is in pain like she had been when he woke up the first day or when she distresses over his own pain he’s trying to soldier through, he can feel her like a hot brand in the back of his mind and he wonders what world he comes from that lets ships that look like giant cats imprint mental connections onto their pilots or ranchers or whatever his real role is. Space farmer with his space cow and space cat, crash landing on this poor village’s forest. Somehow, he feels like this isn’t his worst first impression and when he bounces such off Red Lightning she only purrs in resounding agreement. Good, so they’ve had a plethora of adventures together.

                The villagers have many questions about Red Lightning that he genuinely cannot answer, because he’s just as clueless as they are, but they don’t seem to mind. Some of them are acutely aware of his distress despite his attempts to hide it, enough to make him think of maternal figures he can’t remember but feels fondness towards anyway, and he takes everything the villagers say to him to heart so he can better his relations with them while he’s imposing. Some of them are helpful in advising him—what merchants to look out for in schemes and high-tickets, what time of the day their Ubyg fruit is ripest and ready to eat without the outer flesh becoming leathery, where he can properly wash himself off without sending half of the population into a giggling tizzy over seeing him take a quick splash in the river (he had thought it was discreet and far enough along, sue him)—other villagers are more cryptic. They touch his hands mournfully in passing and whisper what he has come to learn as prayers and he wonders if he has become a lost cause in their eyes or if they see something he can’t. An older citizen with deep and imploring maroon eyes seizes his wrist as he’s carrying his milk bucket back one day and he jolts at the uninvited contact, a retaliation he doesn’t know forcing its way through him, but before he can do something strange and foreign they ominously explain, “a virus works through you,” and release his wrist to let him walk to his camp.

                He hates it here. He also hates admitting he hates it here, because he knows Red Lightning can feel when he does, so he expels the thoughts as soon as they come and fixates on what the villager had said, their soft talons clicking together tightly over the heart of his wicked cool tattoo. Maybe they’re concerned because he’s a danger to them, or maybe they know that he’s a danger to himself, but he needs more information to go on before he lets himself be afraid because he has more repairs before Red Lightning is operational and he has a cow to take care of, so his mind’s a little occupied.

                Still, he pulls at the cuff of his glove and rolls up his sleeve as he walks, mind unsatisfied, and he looks at the pulsing point of light bearing into his skin that he knows strings farther than he can see without a reflective surface, across his front and around his sides and striking him in red, glowing cuts that don’t bleed. They’re not real wounds, he reasons, but they’re uncomfortable to look at sometimes if he stares for so long, and if he decided on putting the marks on himself he must have been very drunk at the time. He had asked Red Lightning as soon as his head cleared when waking up the first morning if it was something to be worried about, before he realized what was going on or assessed his position or had even named the mechanical cat, but she gave a steady rumbling that reassured him to pursue other lines of thought in that time being, so he let himself get preoccupied.

                Maybe the maroon-eyed villager just thought he was getting sick. It was a fair assumption, he feels a lot less than at the top of his form, but he can’t counteract the lethargy he feels with his meagre fruit and milk bartering and the small rationed packets of goo he had confirmed were edible with Red Lightning multiple times (much to her amusement) before he fully trusted the dissatisfying flavor. He toils his days away squeezed between panels of sheet metal he can’t name, fiddling with wires and screws and doing a variety of things for the sake of pleasing the rumble beneath his back or his feet, and when he’s done with that for the day he’s only left to catalogue what else they might need to do the next and lay in the grass under the stars.

                The cow sometimes joins him, chewing around him polite as she is—he feels bad renaming her when she so clearly has been loved, perhaps even by him, if the delicate pink bow around her tail has any indication of that—and sometimes he talks to the both of his companions about nothing of interest and hopes to see a streak of light in the sky. He had seen one once and known it wasn’t a shooting star, filled with so much raw lifting in his chest he knew it was significant, but the yellow blur had been gone as soon as it had appeared, and the only thing that kept him from doubting his sight was the constant and steady purring from Red Lightning from the rest of the night when it had happened. She’s in waiting for something, too, something he can’t give, but she appreciates his efforts while he’s all she has, he hopes. He doesn’t want to turn into some form of dead weight for a giant robot, of all things.

                He tugs his sleeve and glove back into place as he approaches his camp, not wanting to worry his Red Lightning in the same quiet way he can feel her distress whenever he kicks away the well and thoroughly obliterated helmet that sits in her cockpit. They had checked and it was spiderwebbed beyond belief and gave no hope of communication, just like the rest of their systems, so he tries to keep it out of the way as he does with most of the things littered on the floor in her helm. It stands as one more clue to him he has no other pieces for, nothing to slot it against, and he wonders if maybe that singular helmet is simply what happened to him: a head injury that should have been fatal. It feels beyond that, though.

                He greets the cow as he passes her at the edge of the camp despite not knowing her name, smoothing a hand down her flank and smiling at her returning moo. She never strays despite him having nothing to tie her down with, something that deeply pleases a small familial part of him, and he likes to think it’s her own idea of belonging to him and the Red Lightning’s cockpit as much as he thinks he belongs in that space as well.

                “Hello,” He says politely and professionally to Red Lightning, who purrs and settles delicately on her haunches, “Today, I think we’re going to guess…Marco.” The name leaves his lips easily, and he licks after it in confusion, wondering. It doesn’t fit quite right, and Red Lightning hasn’t reacted at all, so that isn’t quite the occasion he’s looking for. “No.” He says when she gives no indication and he doesn’t need any prompting, “No, I knew one. An important one. That’s not me.” He can’t pull up a face or a memory or even a shade of a voice or a feeling, but he knows, and the rumble Red Lightning gives him isn’t amused or approving of his knowledge. It’s sad and gentle as it settles into him, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.

                “That’s okay.” He says despite it feeling the exact opposite, a crack in his voice and through his chest and a pulse at the point on his wrist that ripples across the dragging light on his body. “We’ll guess again tomorrow. Wish you could tell me but I can’t read.” At least, he definitely can’t read anything Red Lightning’s screens say. Another difficulty.

                With a heave, he settles himself onto the high ridge of Red Lightning’s paw to sit and watch the cow graze while he attempts to peel an Ubyg fruit. Mindlessly, he chucks the bucket a few feet away onto the ground and retrieves the strange handle weapon that sometimes appears when he hovers his hand by his thigh. It materializes into a long red sword at his quiet urging, and he runs the fruit’s rough and leathery flesh against the ever-sharp blade, nothing else in his inventory to aid with the task with the sun so high and the skin so tough. He should listen to the villagers’ warnings about eating at their specific times, because it really is a pain to get to the juicy wedges beneath the layers of flesh when the timing of day isn’t just right, but he thinks whatever species he is wasn’t made for eating only once a day. Or, if he was, they all love being miserable or something, and he can be in ignorant bliss eating difficult food multiple times as his stomach demands until he’s righted into some other type of schedule.

                “We’ll work on that hind leg a little more, then your stabilizers.” He says while he eats, rubbing juice off his chin with the back of his hand, “Then I guess we’ll try communications again but that’s sort of starting to look like a lost cause. You think I even had communications before this?”

                It slips out of him before he can stop it, a question burning in his brain that nags at his clues importantly but insistently, but he hadn’t meant to burden Red Lightning with the pathetic loneliness that crawls at his throat and the back of his mind. She rumbles with so much strength beneath him he nearly topples off the paw he’s perched on, blinking up at her—her assurance is heated and unwavering in the back of his mind, and he supposes she would have no reason to lie to him.

                “Okay.” He croaks, chucking his fruit peel away and starting at his second, “Someone looking for me, then?” She rumbles again just as heatedly, and he shudders, “Someone as close to you as I am? Cool.” It’s a hard impression to take in, something he wants to argue he should be able to feel (if he has a mental connection with a robot shouldn’t he have a mental connection through her to any others who have a mental connection to her as well?), but he takes it at face value alone instead of contesting her prompts and chews over the sick feeling he has in his gut even worse now at the thought of someone looking for him when he has no idea who he is.

                Red Lightning’s rumbles settle down to a purr, a gentle roll and ease at the back of his head, and he sighs.

                “Hey,” He says casually to the robotic beast he hopes won’t decide to lower her foot and crush him as he works at the bolts with his newfound wrench, “It’d be funny if my name was Forest.”

                Sweat drips down him in rivers as he cranks away, pulling mechanics taught to the point where Red Lightning is only barely satisfied. He wishes he were stronger so she could have assurance in his repairs, but she must know they’re all either of them has. She seems as amused as he is at the name, and when he drops his arm to look around and pant she gives a rumble of both satisfaction and dismissal. “It’s not,” He answers because he knows, “but it would be funny.” The cow’s started to find shadier patches of grass much more pleasurable these days, straying just a bit from camp into the dense trees, but he knows there’s no threatening wildlife to worry about so far, so he lets her. She always wanders back.

                Red Lightning rumbles again when his break lasts for too long, and he heaves at himself before getting back to his cranking away. She’s impatient the longer the days tick on, an unmistakable eagerness in her he could bet has to do with the sky and their low goo supply. He doesn’t like it, anyway, so he’s not too bothered. He’d thought about trading some for more local delicacies, but her snarl in his mind had been too ferocious to fight, and he vetoed the idea as soon as he’d attempted it. His bodysuit is rolled to his waist, shiny plate armor abandoned in Red Lightning’s helm and glowing, reaching tattoos on full display, and that might be another source of her discomfort and restlessness, but he doesn’t want to attribute it to that because if he acknowledges his tattoos as an issue he may have to consult resolving it himself, and he doesn’t even know the problem of the matter.

                He’s finally gotten a good look at himself, at least, with the tilting reflection of the river to aid him in knowing the glowing red lines on his body stretch all the way to his spine, sprawling like crooked fingers searching for a point to curl into. They’re frantic, from the epicenter at his wrist and creeping beyond, and he hasn’t checked since he caught that sight because he’s afraid they’ve grown.

                A virus works through you.

                That maroon-eyed villager’s voice was going to drive him insane.

                He gets through the last bolt with great difficulty and rolls out of the way when Red Lightning lowers her paw. She tests the weight, rumbling something satisfied, and he beams up at her. “You’re welcome.” He purrs back when he can feel her gratitude, “Not the best but the patch’ll do. You’re almost ready for a flight and everything again, aren’t you?”

                She throws her jaw open, suddenly silent, and he blinks at the invitation. “I mean, I guess we can do communications the rest of the day.” The sweat still dripping down his shoulders cools under the breeze that racks through the little field, and he contemplates pulling his suit back up. “I don’t want to be a Negative Nancy but it’s really looking a little dumb, though.” She doesn’t respond still, so he jogs up the walkway to the cockpit and jokes, “My name’s not Nancy, is it?”

                The cockpit is just as silent, an eerie stillness always evident in the scattered boxes of items he doesn’t recognize. He thinks the clothes at least must be his if this is his ship and his journey, but something feels wrong in the thought of changing entirely out of his current uniform despite how stale it’s beginning to feel—if he throws on the jeans and worn looking jacket under the dash of his controls, it feels like his mission is beginning to wane. When he had first been found by some of the villagers at the edge of their small settlement, a bold child looked between Red Lightning in the distance and him and asked why he didn’t match, and he had no idea what to say or why he should have. It was a tricky idea to him, then, changing when it was all he knew when he woke up.

                He shoves the box of clothes and other blankets and necessities for a traveler out of the way to wedge himself under the dashboard controls. Red Lightning’s screens are lit up with the same disaster of status reports he can’t read, squiggly lines of confusing distress amplified in glowing red, and he just hopes he doesn’t break something while trying to fix what he can’t identify. He can’t be doing a terrible job, at least Red Lightning seems confident in him, so he does what he can with confidence he musters from somewhere and hopes if he does have company looking for him like Red Lightning assures him he does then they must be the more technically inclined, because he’s no good at that either. Not naturally so, at least.

                When just one of the glowing red screens flick to a mellow blue during his fiddling, evening out in its scans, Red Lightning purrs for hours.

                When they land from their first flight he can remember, he shakes in the pilot’s chair like a leaf. It takes Red Lightning’s purring and him burying his face into a leathery red coat for what seems like eternity for him to come down, but he manages. They hadn’t breached the atmosphere, even, but it had felt like the ride of a lifetime regardless of the shaky landing. Through her eyes, he can see the cow at the edge of the camp as calm as ever, and he’s grateful Red Lightning had the foresight to land them in the same location, as he had gotten too choked up to do much thinking the second they had been airborne.

                “I just want to know,” He says to the red jacket, gripping it tightly and hearing the material squeak against itself under his palms, “what’s going to happen when you’re fixed. Where are we even going after that? Where did I even come from?” The communications still aren’t up, nor is most of what he assumes is vital life support if her negativity when he had even thought of a proper lift off was anything to go by. There are still red screens peppered amongst her cooler readings, angry contrasts of things wrong he can’t pinpoint, but she has no way to direct him and he has no way to know. He’s comforted partially by what he thinks may be a self-healing mechanism in her, but he doesn’t want to read too much into the likelihood of that and only hopes it’s something they can count on when he’s run out of places she approves of to crawl into and dig around.

                “I’m going to be Pike tomorrow.” Red Lightning releases a strange and sad rumble under him reserved only for when he’s close to something she can’t articulate in any conscious way for him to reach. The villagers will have a plethora of questions he can’t answer tomorrow, and he steels himself in anticipation, trying not to cry as he looks down at the jacket that doesn’t even exactly feel like his. He tugs off his chest plate and gauntlets and pulls it on anyway, noting that it’s too taut at the shoulders and only makes it just past his ribs. Still, it floods him with an embarrassing warmth he’s sure he’s felt before but hasn’t since waking up, and he ushers himself out of Red Lightning’s cockpit to go sit outside under the stars and look for more streaks of light.

                When he swears he sees blue, it almost rips his heart from his chest.

                He runs out of goo and doesn’t panic, but it leaves Red Lightning like a clawing tiger in his mind. He knows, somehow, she’s urging him to find more sources of food that are equivalent and likely more satisfying than his fruit diet, but he keeps himself unconcerned because the village has nothing even beginning to resemble the stuff, which is why he had wanted to sell it in the first place.

                The next day, he wakes up to his tattoos hurting in hot pulses, and he blanches at each wave he tries to fight off and wonders if maybe the entire time he was indulging himself in medicine. Red Lightning is in a constant state of worry he can feel, so he’s in a constant state of countering her unease by meaningless conversation she can’t reciprocate.

                “Luis.” A distressed purr as the wind is knocked out of him at the next surge of pain. He thinks he might need to see a healer in the village but thinks of the maroon-eyed villager every time and feels himself shuddering. If they could see something wrong in him then obviously they would have helped if they could.

                A virus works through you.

                Then there must be a way to expel it.

                He eats his fruit with twice as much gusto to try and ease Red Lightning’s concern for his health, but it does nothing to subside his pain. “I knew one of those, too, huh?” He grits out when the worst of the surges are done for a bit. The glowing has increased, as well—an angrier red that sometimes peeks through the seams in his suit when he’s not wearing his gloves or armor to seal everything in place. He doesn’t know much at all about himself, can barely determine a routine based on what feels best in his habits, but he’s certain he’s not intended to glow.

                “Mm.” He decides through a mouthful of juice, “We’ve just got to figure one thing out. Maybe we’ll start naming the cow for now. Cow!” She moos at him from the edge of the camp, a lazy eyed stare in reply to his glowing-armed wave. “Dolly?” She looks away. “Not Dolly.” Another hot pulse rushes through him, and he clears his throat roughly through a groan while he whips away the remaining flesh of the fruit so it flies across the field while he fights through the pain.

                “This is stupid.” He says because Red Lightning’s attempts at comfort are much like the hot brand on his arms and back and the intensity of their surges leave him panting, “Let’s pick something easier. Names are too vague.” A soft rumble, “No. We’ll still do them, I just need something else to work on.” He hops down from his perch on her paw to pace around the camp while his discomfort is becoming more acute and harder to fight through, trying to work it out of his system by the pump of his legs or distract himself by the tromp of his feet. “Let’s finally break me down, you ready, Red?”

                The air around the camp seems to still at the shortened name, his own breath included, and it stays that way until he sucks another sharp heave of air through his teeth as a surge of red shooting through the marks on his skin. “So, Red’s what they call you for real. Not so much Red Lightning. Okay. Red. Okay, Red. Okay.” He feels like an idiot for not figuring it out before but breezes on, “Let’s do me. I’ll start guessing.” Her worried and hot-to-the-touch comfort still remains in his mind, but he’s trying to shy away from it because everything feels suffocating all of a sudden and he thinks he might be freaking out.

                “I’m taking that as a yes. Okay. My plates don’t match. I was never supposed to be flying you.” He tosses it out casually, but it feels like a very quiet secret he shouldn’t be so eager to guess, wondering if he’s a fugitive of some sort living a quiet life out of sheer ignorance of his own past in the moment. Her rejection of his guess is twice as searing as her comfort, and he flinches. “Okay.” He hisses, gripping his head at an echoing growl that seems to carry low throughout the forest for miles beyond where he stands, “Okay, I’m your pilot, nevermind.”

                His arm and shoulder feel like the very skin the tattoo glows on is going to melt off, so he contemplates jumping into the river or flopping into some cool mud from the last rain to ease the sensation, but instead he crouches in the middle of the camp still gripping his head and continues. “The person looking for me isn’t actually trying very hard.” He ventures, cautious to anything self-depreciating to her as she seems so angry and defiant against those thoughts. As predicted, she snarls something near a supernova in his brain and all around them and he feels like he’s lulling in place with the force of everything happening to him. Blind with pain, he wobbles and tries to stand as fast as he had cowered so he can shout, “Then why haven’t they found me yet?!”

                Red offers no reply, unable to give anything but a low and hot growl at the back of his mind at a constant, but he can’t help the desperation in his voice and at every edge of himself. “I crashed here in a giant—a whatever you are! I’m the only one of me I’ve seen, you would think it would be easy to find me! I can talk to you with my mind!” His voice cracks, and he clamps a hand over the aching and glowing skin of his wrist to do something to lessen the experience of everything happening in pandemonium in his head, “Can’t they do the same? Can’t you just tell them where I am?”

                “I just want to go home, Red.” The words leave him breathless because he knows he’s said them before so many times, and he looks up at the mechanical creature sitting defiantly on her haunches, eyes so high in the sky above him, and he wonders if she pities him or despises him for trapping himself here and downing her with him. She might continue to heal, at least, but whatever’s in him might completely destroy him, and he doesn’t even know himself enough to wonder if it would be such a bad thing.

                Swallowing thickly, he looks down at the glowing skin on his arm again and releases his vice grip on himself. Feet from him, his heavy armor is abandoned by where he usually starts his fires at night or decides to lay under the stars. Next to it is the shiny red jacket. “I have armor. I’m a solider.” He finally decides to acknowledge, feeling his shoulders knot up with the almost slow response from Red to confirm his suspicions. The disappointment in knowing he might not be a humble space-farmer is potent, but he tries to mask it. “Is that…normal, where I’m from? I feel young. I have no idea what I’m doing. Do I always not know what I’m doing?”

                It takes him a while before he realizes Red truly won’t respond to that question, and he would be offended if it weren’t for the embarrassing uncertainty of the answer. Maybe him not knowing what he’s doing is what decided his fate to be stuck repairing a giant ship with a cow in the alien forest he’s currently in, anyway. He can deduce the answer for himself.

                When the night’s drawn together and the stars blink into existence in the darkness, he finds himself tucked by the jacket firmly and with his eyes planted above. The cow grazes and lulls at the edge of camp and doesn’t stir when he gasps loudly at the streak of purple in the sky that seems just too close to them to not be a sign of something coming.

                “I know it’s not how it works,” He ventures carefully for the first time since his outbursts earlier, Red doing nothing to acknowledge his speaking even with her warmth in his mind, “but if it’s possible at all, can you make sure whoever’s looking for me knows I’m definitely alive?” It feels like a certainty he owes to whoever might be on the other end, and after a few muted minutes in the still camp, Red releases a gentle purr.

                “I bet your name starts with a ‘Kuh’ sound.” He says to the cow, rolling onto his side in the grass and trying to catch his breath again. His tattoo burns bright in the dimness over any light the fire can create and even covering it with his pitch bodysuit is beginning to do nothing to mute its harsh light. Since his afternoon explosion of energy and questioning, it’s begun to spread to his thighs. The cow doesn’t acknowledge him or his glowing body, so he continues, “Kanye. No. Kenzie? No. It’s Kalivan. Wait.” He licks after the word, certain he’s close to something important, “Kolivan, but you’re not him. Neither am I. You’re…Keith.”

                Slowly, he sits up, leaving the comfort of the jacket under him and feeling a flood of emotions as he does. “You’re definitely not Keith.” Something in his voice is hollow. Red’s brand is hot in his brain again, pushing at something he can’t reach in his mind, and his skin still feels like it’s melting, but he feels calm, suddenly. “I’m Keith?” She grows hotter, and he flinches deeply. “No, no. I can’t be Keith. I’m not him.” The admission feels more important than the actual act of saying it, the words lingering in the open air in the trees, and he shakes his head. “I can’t be Keith.”

                Then, he starts crying. Hot, ugly tears pour down his face, and he curls into himself in confusion and disappointment and pain, uncertain of anything that’s wracking in his brain but knowing that instead of the heat in his mind, suddenly Red’s force is an enveloping and toasty warmth that surrounds him much more comfortingly than any of the painful burns he has been fending from. He embraces it, a second nature in doing so, and he tries to coat as much as he can into the comfort of her presence, into her ground-shaking purrs and rumbles. Under his palm as he fists at the ground, he finds the jacket again, and he knows who it belongs to without having a face or an idea or a voice. He knows with absolute certainty who’s on the other side of Red’s mental connection and who might be someone looking for him, but even with the rip of sheer loss from his chest and the pain aching at him he can’t piece together a memory from the knowledge alone. All he has is the too-small jacket and the name.

                He goes to the village the next day with an intent, shying away from the boring eyes of the merchants who haven’t seen his milk trade in a while and standing his ground under the scrutinizing gaze of elder citizens he passes who seem saddened by his approach. They whisper no more prayers but lower their heads as he tries to push his burning limbs past them without their notice. Still, their lowered, stern gazes catch his as he tries to churn through the midst of the market, and though there are no replicas of one another there is just one pair that haunts him. He pushes through the brand on his flesh feeling like fire with every step.

                A virus works through you. He tells someone he needs a healer and they look at him so sadly and unfortunately that he knows he should have trusted his assumption that they can’t help him. Still, they bring him to a doctor who has him peel down his flight suit and before it’s even halfway down his chest, they stop him. They say he’s beyond anything they’ve seen. They say he’s in the prayer they murmur as he passes sometimes’ wings now.

                He feels sicker than a virus working through him, but nods at the information. He feels like this isn’t the worst he’s ever been, but he doesn’t like the thought and doesn’t like that maybe he’s a solider and he’s gone through pain this excruciating regularly, so he stays tight-lipped and tight-minded about how his trip into the village went when he returns to camp but stills at the disturbance in the air anyway.

                Overhead, a streaking beam of green too close to be any sort of passing body burns through the atmosphere, and he meets the yellow stare of Red across the camp they’ve made home as they both decide simultaneously to frantically work at their communications for the remainder of their day. They still can’t breech the atmosphere, but if the lifting sensation in his chest is anything to go by, the green streak (as the other colors had been) is definitely a friend, and it’s close enough he feels like he can bet on it.

                He tinkers at the dashboard of the cockpit and his completely shattered helmet desperately, trying to bring screens and sounds to life by gritting his teeth through his pain at the burning on his body, but it’s hard when he knows he’s not inclined for the technology or for the work field and everything feels even more excruciating under pressure. Red, he supposes, tries to be helpful by standing without him being secure in his seat and throwing her head back to roar, a deafening sound that captures every aspect of the word lion he’s ever thought of.

                He doesn’t stay to see if the roar has done the trick as he abandons the cockpit entirely, a sick feeling churning in his middle he can’t describe and an incomprehensible ache spreading to every inch of his body.

                A virus works through you. He throws himself out of the Red Lion fully to clutch at his head on the ground, not fearing the roar but feeling claws digging into his skin at every space. He pants and yells something desperate to the Red Lion, who roars again, and he seems to scream in tandem, but when he grits his teeth and manages to right himself he notices the cow is nowhere to be found. She doesn’t seem to be lingering at the edge of the forest, either, and when he frantically darts his gaze across the measure of forest in every direction he can see, he confirms she’s nowhere in sight, and he breaks into a run in some desperation to find her he can’t explain. Behind him, the Red Lion roars again.

                Sprinting, he claws and swats at the underbrush as he careens through the woods, forcing his searing muscles to accommodate the actions between his breathless wails so he can find what little he has and ignore the surging feeling of doom that seems to be approaching him ominously. Without watching, he winds up knee-deep in a creek that offshoots the river, and he pants at his own red-faced reflection in the startled and rippling water as it warps before he beings sprinting again, out of the water and along the side of the bank. She wouldn’t have crossed, he’s sure of it, but he’s not sure of anything else and hasn’t been since waking up like he had been in a coma all his life, so he’s not the most prone to trusting his instincts. A whistle sounds through the air before a thud in the distance shakes the forest floor deeply, and he doesn’t look back as he continues sprinting, but he does hear Red continue roaring.

                His arms and legs feel like they’re being torn off at the joints, heat pouring into every cell of his skin. A virus works through you. The villagers will either see to it he’s obliterated for the disturbances or he’ll die from the supposed illness they find so incurable it wasn’t worth a full look. Another whistle and thud rocks the forest, then two more in succession. Is the planet being bombed? Distantly, he thinks he hears trees falling and sprints harder, pumping his legs beyond reason despite the agony in his panting voice and the ache in his lungs.

                When he finds the cow, he barrels into her bodily and she moos very tamely in response. He gives a pitched noise, kneeling a moment and feeling warbled gasps of pain escape in his catching his breath, but Red’s roar in the distance has him righting himself again. He sees the rope attached to the cow and tangled in the bush and knows someone tried to steal her, and he feels a fire in his heart and his body and coating his entire skin at the thought while he untangles the tie.

                She moos at him calmly while he tugs her from her catch and taking her back to the direction of distant roars is much more agonizing than running had been, no distraction to ease the pain of the feeling of flames licking his skin. He wants to scream and claw at where he’s inlaid with streaks of red light but he knows he can’t hurt himself and he might be a lost cause anyway, so he must show self-control if only to get the cow back to Red so she can keep her safe until Keith arrives to save the both of them, him likely long wasted away by whatever plagues him.  A virus works through you. A mystery he couldn’t solve like the rest of him, a fire burning with no ignition or tinder or origin.

                He gets to camp with his breath raspy, leaning on the cow as much as he’s dragging her, and when he does he’s greeted by the sight of a man with bright armor—a deep red that matches Red Lightning—and dark hair. His back is turned to the other and the arriving cow, looking up at Red in the field suddenly filled with even more broken trees and ships of different colors that look just like her, and when the cow moos he turns around with a furrow in his brows.

                “Keith,” Lance moans without a word needed from him, slumping off the cow to cross the threshold between them despite every flame licking each step. He feels a tether appear at the very sight of him while the distance is closing, a home swelling in his chest that may burst with his arrival so untimely with the virus but still so important to connect to.

                “Is this what you’ve been doing?” Keith snaps, eyes wide and any fear disappearing from them as he glances between him and the cow, “You’re walking Kaltenecker while we have Pidge searching for biorhythms right now? Why didn’t you come when we called?”

                He shakes his head uncomprehendingly, dropping the rope connected to the cow and ripping off his gloves to reach and touch Keith because he’s so near. Keith startles as his gaze fixes on the glowing red that has trailed to the very tips of one hand, face becoming serious. “Please, just say my name, Keith.” His hot fingers skim at Keith’s pale skin, a thumb tracing a delicate sharp scar that looks fresh on the curve of one of Keith’s cheeks.

                Keith softly and imploringly says, “Lance, what happened?” and Lance has just moments to enjoy the sound and the look of Keith’s deep eyes and soft face before everything washes red.

                A virus works through you.

                Lance wakes up with a start, gasping for air and being pressed into the ground below him by strong hands while gentler ones cradle his forehead and his wrist.

                “You have to stay down while Allura works.” Keith bites out from above him, looking tired of an argument Lance doesn’t remember having before, “Stay still.” He can hear voices surrounding him but can’t crane his neck enough to see, the soft hand on his forehead firm in holding him in place. As he darts his gaze, he takes in a silver-haired stranger with hardened blue eyes looking at him but not directly seeing. “We don’t have a pod, Lance.” Keith is still speaking, and Lance can only compose a breathy shudder as it feels like something is being ripped from his very core—there’s something important and desperate in his voice. “You have to let her work.”

                “Keith.” Lance tries to rasp, desperate for something he can’t articulate, feeling like he’s screaming from the other side of a different planet.

                Another voice Lance feels like he should recognize says, “Keith, move aside so Hunk can hold his legs. He has to stop squirming. Coran, I need you to keep his elbow planted just here, he’s wiggling.”

                As Keith shifts above him, Lance screws his eyes closed again, seething through the pain and not understanding. He thinks he hears another roar, but he can’t tell if it’s in his mind or echoing from Red once more. Keith’s grip on him is bruising.

                “…I thought he was being romantic…” Lance hears uttered next to his sleeping form, a voice he would recognize even weeks into a misery of memory loss. The voice stirs him, but he soaks in his waking in layers, a soreness spread throughout him he doesn’t fully understand and something sharp at the edges of his mind he can’t reach without pain. When he flinches at his attempt, still feigning sleep, a careful and warm hand smooths through his hair and idly twirls through the ending locks.

                A foreign snort gives way to a new voice. “Embarrassing. Well, I guess we won’t know for sure until he’s actually up, but maybe you should tell Allura. She could see if there’s anything she could do while he’s still unconscious.” A soft pitched beep rings through the air, and the sound of rustling echoes enough to let Lance know they’re still lying somewhere in his camp, the leaves and breeze as familiar as the very solid dirt beneath him. “I’ve got to check the containment. Want me to send Hunk in for a tap out?”

                “No.” Keith’s voice replies automatically, very quiet. “I’ll stay. I’m probably wrong anyway, we’ll just see.” The fingers in Lance’s hair scratch at the scalp, and he can’t help but move into the touch, sighing softly. “…He’ll probably be up soon.”

                “Whatever.” The other voice laughs gently, and more rustles announce their departure.

                Lance breathes steady for as long as he can, mentally taking inventory of everything he can feel. The searing is gone from his body but he’s almost afraid to check for what has replaced it in his soreness and his exhaustion. The ground beneath him, the hand in his hair, the reaches of his mind that are painful to the touch. He can work better with the new set of information than he had his first waking up, so he makes up his mind towards his awakening. Hesitantly, he ventures a slurred, “Nobody go into the village.” The fingers in his hair grip at it almost unconsciously before they loosen frantically and the hand shies away, so Lance rolls to where he thought the touch originated from and grunts as the action slams him into a body sitting next to him.

                Keith looks down at him with careful eyes widened imperceptibly when Lance peeks his own open, and the heat in the gaze does nothing to keep Lance from reaching a hand out to touch at Keith’s face once more. Keith catches the hand before the contact can be made, though, and he calmly asks, “What’s wrong with the village?”

                “Tried to steal the cow.” Lance mumbles, allowing a sigh that cuts through him like shards of glass escape him and make him flinch. He tries to sit up, and Keith’s strong hands help him. “Unzip me.”

                “No.” Keith says immediately, confusion evident in his voice. His fingers skirt at Lance’s forehead, and Lance flinches again. “How do you feel?”

                In a quieter murmur, Lance admits, “Awful.” He drags his own sore arms up to try and peel his collar down and begin unzipping his bodysuit on his own, and Keith takes the hint despite his initial refusal and helps him ease it down and off his shoulders gently. “Tell me what happened?” As soon as his chest is free, he sees his marks are gone, and something is so relieving about the glowing red tattoos having disappeared that he feels tears prick at his eyes despite them having been there for as long as he can remember. He slumps on Keith before the other boy can protest, and Keith rests a firm hand on his back almost politely at the proximity.

                He takes a moment to take stock of the camp while Keith basks them in glorious silence that doesn’t answer the question. Having decimated other trees on the outskirts of Lance’s carefully arranged circle of camp, there are four other strange ships like Red, some a few different sizes and all varying colors. They match the streaks of light Lance put so much stock in and he’s glad to know he has so much intuition. Under the green ship’s belly is a very rough looking workshop with three figures bowed over it. Under the blue is a girl taking a nap and another sitting on the paw of the ship. At the edges of the camp, not quite disturbing the cow in the distance but near enough for Lance to somehow know it’s an irritant, some kind of wolf stalks the outskirts tamely. The blue ship’s glowing yellow eyes cut directly into Lance’s core, and he shudders against Keith while he finally begins speaking. “We don’t know. Coran and Allura know what was in you but they didn’t explain it very well, so I’ll let Allura talk to you.”

                Lance licks his lips, forcing himself to look away from the blue ship to try and find the comfort of Red in his mind. When he does he meets the piercing pain of the edges of it, and he recoils. Deciding to avoid these games all together, he instead wonders the possibilities of Keith being generous to him if he told him he was thirsty. “Can you get me a drink?” He tries quietly, admittedly feeling a little weak and very pathetic, “Or an Ubyg fruit or something?”

                Keith’s up in an instant, steadying Lance by the shoulders when he inevitably teeters and jogging off to somewhere Lance can’t see because he doesn’t want to twist around when everything feels so fresh and painful. Keith returns in seconds with a plastic pouch of water and a packet of goo.

                “Oh,” Lance can’t keep himself from saying, “There’s some of these left?”

                Keith’s hand finds his back again, rubbing softly. “Yeah, Coran and Hunk are drafting a goo machine to fit in one of the lions for emergency supplies until we reach Olkari, but we’ve still got some for now.”

                “Cool.” Lance says. He looks at the pouches in his hands for a long moment before he realizes he should do something with them, readying to sip his water. Cautiously, he looks up to Keith and asks, “Which one is Allura and which one is Coran and which one is Hunk?”

                He knows the question will start a wave of unease in whoever his people are, and it’s confirmed by Keith’s hand freezing on his spine. Lance noisily sips his pouch and looks away again, giving a small wave to the awkward one he receives from the girl propped up on the blue ship’s paw. At the quick gesture, the ache in his arm feels more a burn, and he drops it quickly. When Keith still hasn’t said anything, Lance slowly tries to glimpse at what his expression could tell, but his gaze is fixed sternly on the grass in front of them. The red jacket Lance had taken to napping on and curling in is just some ways ahead of his gaze. “What do you remember?” Slowly, Keith extracts his hand.

                “You.” Lance says immediately, desperate and allowing a trickle of water down his chin at the fight to get the words out while he tugs the straw from his mouth. Keith tenses. “Not everything. Only your name. Our connection to Red. I didn’t even know mine. I don’t know anything.” He tries not to sound miserable and definitely fails by the way his shoulders bow and he hunches into himself.

                Through the corner of his eye, Lance can see Keith make an insistent motion towards the blue ship, and the girl atop the paw hops down to shake awake the girl sleeping under the head, who shoots awake at the first contact. Immediately, the slumbering girl rushes across the field, and Lance jumps as he realizes he’s going to be approached. “Lance!” The approaching girl calls from the distance in the same tone as the voice that had held him down in his throes of pain. At her voice, the heads at the makeshift workstation look up, and they begin to scramble over as well.

                “Explain to Allura and Coran.” Keith says softly, somehow sensing his anxiousness, “They might be able to do something.” They’re growing closer and Lance turns slightly to grip firmly onto one of Keith’s arms, seeing a grounding presence. Belatedly, he says under his breath, “Sorry. We should have found you sooner,” but before Lance can reply the hounds are upon him.

                “How do you feel like you’re healing?” The voice that held him down asks expectantly, surprisingly keeping a comfortable distance between him and his death grip on Keith, but Lance tenses all the same.

                “Badly.” He responds truthfully, drinking in each of the inhabitants of the camp as they follow the silver-haired stranger’s approach. His once solitude is swelled with people so unexpectedly that he isn’t sure what to do with himself now. “Everything feels like it’s on fire but not as bad as it did before. Bad enough to still feel like a problem.” Keith must think that’s a joke because he snorts quietly. “What’s…can we do introductions or is that too awkward and not fair of me to ask?”

                The ensuing silence is deafening, but the cow moos in the distance to break it. The girl who sat on the paw of the blue ship, with long blonde hair and a confused sort of unsettled gaze to her, speaks first to say, “I am Romelle, if you mean, Red Paladin.”

                “Am I—” Keith nods fractionally before Lance can finish the question, and Lance blinks up at the other staring gazes. “Okay. Nice to meet you, Romelle. Sorry I don’t remember you. And…and the rest of you guys?”

                The largest from the worktable, with a sash around his head and soft brown eyes, tears up as he asks, “What do you mean, buddy? You don’t remember us?”

                The smallest rears her head back as the largest definitely looks like he’s about to cry, but the older man with long ears and the silver-haired girl share a look and weave forward with grace and caution. “I was afraid this would happen.” The older man says, “Nasty stuff, that Crik’stigloh magic.”

                The silver-haired girl hums, and she kneels delicately near Lance and raises her hands gently. “I am Allura, Lance. This is Coran. I healed you from the glowing wounds you had and I’m going to see if I can do something for your memory, alright?” Her tone is soft, a smile on her features despite the very serious look in her eyes, and Lance knows he is so familiar with her face but he feels unease creep through him.

                “Can you do that?” The smaller girl says, crouching a distance but staying close by.

                Allura automatically responds, “I’ve brought him back from far worse. I must try, at least.”

                “You’ve what?” Keith asks sternly, and Lance tucks himself closer into Keith’s steady arm as he slowly tries to lean from the glowing on Allura’s fingers. They’re a wash of blue magic of sorts, and he knows he can trust it but everything in him is in pain already and his mind feels so piercing when he ventures farther than his most forefront thoughts, so he panics.

                As soon as Allura is within inches of his face, he slaps it away, and she stills. “Don’t touch me.” Lance rasps, and even Keith behind and around him freezes.

                “Lance…” She says, her offense palpable and her shock evident. Her hands are still suspended in the air, and Keith’s grip around him does nothing so he twists out of it to scramble at least a few feet from her.

                “Just…” He feels bad as her serious eyes suddenly look lost, turning to the older gentleman almost instinctively, but something is clawing in his chest for his own safety, “Just don’t do that.”

                Keith’s voice is clipped when he turns in the grass to look at Lance as well, eyes big and imploring despite his frown. “Lance, we don’t have a pod for you right now. Allura is our best bet for being able to heal you. We have to see what we can do for your memory.”

                “No.” Lance spits immediately, still backing up. The larger boy with the sash on his head really does cry then, swiping at his face quickly and letting his shoulders shake. The goo packet still in his grip bursts at the pressure he applies to it, and he heaves a moment as he chucks it away. Allura shuffles forward again very quietly, but Lance keeps his gaze trained to her. “I mean it. Don’t touch me.” The handle weapon he has is probably still in his thigh plate, but none of them look like they’re willing to approach anyway with the franticness in his voice, so he won’t have to use it. Despite the protest from his body, he scrambles upright and searches for Red, who opens up not far from him and seals him away as soon as he’s inside. She purrs around him though he can’t venture enough to feel any of her concerns in his mind, and when he curls up in the pilot seat to clutch at his head in desperation she seems to get the hint and quiets entirely.

                Lance can hear their voices outside periodically between his fitful naps, and he wonders if that’s something that’s always true or if Red is amplifying the behavior outside the camp for the sake of letting him know what’s going on. She doesn’t try to reach him through his mind, feeling the frailty in the connection, and he’s been appreciative of that in the last day or so because something feels taut and ready to snap at each end of his thoughts.

                “The red lion wouldn’t seal him up unless there was something wrong we weren’t understanding.” Keith says every once in a while, whenever Lance assumes somebody’s trying to approach his ship. It’s the same thing every time he says it, and Lance wonders if Keith gets on everybody’s nerves by his persistence. “Maybe the magic Allura pulled from him compromised something we can’t mess with. It doesn’t matter.”

                He says things don’t matter a lot, and it’s always followed by Lance’s favorite thing to hear, “We just need to make sure he feels safe with us.”

                Lance hears it so often that his soft unease ebbs away by the time night blankets the camp, and he’s so tired despite his naps that he just wants to see the stars and lay on the red jacket again for a proper rest. He asks Red gently, trying not to be afraid of these people who have obviously come to rescue him despite everything that’s wrong with him supposedly, if he’s going to be okay to go down to the field, and her purr is gentle and low in response.

                He knows her lowering her entry point is in no way quiet but he tries to be silent and stealthy as he exits anyway, rubbing at his bare arms at the chilly night air that immediately sweeps through him and fighting a shiver. He doesn’t want to roll up his bodysuit again yet, relishing the sight of his bare skin still, so he simply wraps his arms around himself and tentatively approaches the makeshift firepit he had spent so many nights by. There are three bodies by it, one standing, and he wants to retreat again, but Red’s purr rolls across his mind and he flinches at the contact enough to drive him forward.

                The standing body is unfamiliar even from his earlier encounters with everyone, so Lance stiffens a safe distance from the fire and meets eyes with her.

                “Ah,” She says blandly, setting a heavy hand on Keith, who looks half-asleep hunched by the flames, “You’re up.” The other body near Keith is the larger boy from earlier, well asleep and snoring a safe distance from the heat.

                Lance tries not to let tension gnaw at him, and any doubt he has almost completely dissipates when Keith’s head perks up to look at Lance. There are dark smudges below his eyes and he doesn’t shake out his hunched form, but he looks considerably more awake taking in Lance from the distance. “Hey.” He says, shaking his head, “Sit. You’re probably hungry and we have to talk.”

                The woman standing nods, but she doesn’t move as Lance locks eyes with her, wariness written in his frozen stance. “Okay.” Lance says, not moving. The woman lifts her hand from Keith slowly, watching Lance watch the action, and she slowly crosses her arms despite her bulky armor. When she turns her face, a long rattail flicks behind her, and Lance takes a deep breath before he steps just close enough to the fire to feel its warmth and sits.

                Keith seems confused at the distance visibly, frowning at Lance across the top of the flames and then turning that frown to the woman. “Can you get the fruit the villagers gave us?” He asks quietly, and the woman nods before sauntering off.

                “You went into the village?” Lance asks, training his eyes into the pit and blinking them rapidly when he shivers again. Keith moves around the fire without being asked, though he’s slow as if he’s attempting not to startle Lance.

                He sits closer, nodding, and sighs when Lance slumps into him without the other having to be prompted. “Allura wanted to do some peacekeeping because we landed pretty abruptly and you’ve been here a while. They gave us two crates of this fruit they said you would buy all time…for the cow.”

                With a start, Lance shoves Keith away and eyes around the dark camp quickly. “You sold her? What!?” His loud voice cuts into the snoring of the larger boy, who jumps a little in his sleep but doesn’t do much else.

                “No.” Keith says exhaustingly, holding his hands up and taming his stricken expression into a scowl at Lance’s yelling. “No, they gave us the fruit as an apology. They said they thought you’d be dead or something already, so they just tried to take her.” His voice comes out with heat, but Lance isn’t satisfied until he finally lands his gaze on the cow nestled between the green and black ships, grazing even at this hour.

                He sits heavily once he’s sure she won’t wander off, and Keith’s hand hesitantly rests on his shoulder. “Lance.” He says with no ceremony but quiet enough that it makes him shiver again. Keith adjusts his hand in a false attempt to warm him at the shake, wrapping his arm fully around Lance’s middle almost intimately. “What else do you remember? We’re not going to do anything right now, we just need to know.”

                Lance tries not to let the question irritate him, but it’s hard when he had been so answerless for so long. “I didn’t remember you until…days before you guys found me, if even that. I knew my cow was a cow and my ship was a ship but I have no idea where I’m from or what I’m doing out here.” Keith’s arm is solid but stiff around him, and a little quieter, he admits, “Something feels wrong with my head. Like everything is pulled too tight or covered in something. I guessed your name accidentally.”

                He hears Keith’s swallow but can’t look up to take in his expression. “What do you remember about me, then?”

                Before a full answer can form, something solid lands beside Keith, and they both look up to see the woman setting a large basket down. “I’m going into the black lion for the night, Keith. Sleep safe. It’s good to see you up again, red paladin.”

                Lance realizes she’s talking to him, so he nods, and she walks away when Keith waves goodnight to her. “Who.” Lance bids quietly when she’s far enough away for it not to feel rude.

                Keith glances at him carefully. “My mom. Krolia.”

                “Krolia.” The name isn’t as familiar on his tongue as others, but he leaves it as he watches Keith pick up an Ubyg fruit and try to rip at the flesh. Lance snorts at the fruitless attempt, well versed in the trick to them. “You look like her.”

                “She’s purple.” Keith dismisses easily with a grunt. “Why are these your favorite?”

                The question is a clear distraction from the difficulty Keith is having, so Lance holds out a hand for the fruit and pulls the knife on Keith’s belt out of its sheath, speaking before he can protest and running the fruit gently across the blade, “It’s the eyes. You have the same hard emo look.” The blade doesn’t feel as sharp as the handle weapon in his armor, but it’s much more conveniently sized.

                “You don’t know anything about emo.” He says, sounding relieved somehow and fluttering his hands around Lance’s as if he’s attempting to snatch the weapon back. Lance ignores him, still cutting, and Keith tries his earlier question again. “Give me all you remember, and we can work from there.”

                “The jacket belongs to you.” Lance hums, popping the first edible bit into his mouth and sighing pleasantly at the taste while he cuts a slice for Keith. “The red one. I didn’t know that until I guessed your name, though. I knew it was you when I saw you. I think it has to do with Red.” Keith hesitates before popping the piece Lance offers him into his mouth, but he nods along to what Lance says agreeably. “I uh…I don’t know.” It feels pathetic to leave it at that, so Lance babbles, “It’s hard to say what I know without sounding like an idiot, so.”

                “I’m not going to make fun of you for having memory loss, Lance.” Keith says immediately, holding his hand out for another slice once he’s done chewing. “This stuff isn’t very good for your favorite.”

                Quietly, Lance murmurs, “Sorry if I usually have better tastes.” He slices the rest of the fruit and wipes the blade on the leg of his bodysuit carefully before shoving it back into Keith’s belt, holding his palm out for Keith to grab a slice. “Alright. I woke up here. I haven’t counted the days because by the time I realized I should it had been too many to count. I don’t think I can read?”

                “You can read. It’s been twenty-three days.” The information is quiet, and Lance takes it in a moment while he savors the flavor of the fruit.

                He asks, “The squiggly lines in the ship?”

                It brings a surprised chuckle out of Keith, who meets Lance’s gaze with a relieved one of his own. “That’s all Altean. Only half of us can read that.”

                “Altean. Okay. Uh.” He chucks the rind into the fire when the meat of the fruit is gone and Keith wordlessly removes his knife to start cutting another one. “I know…something was wrong with me but I didn’t know what it was and I couldn’t do anything about it. It got worse when I ran out of goo. Red got worried. There was a villager…some old one…” He tapers off as he looks at the fire and thinks about the maroon eyes, wondering if any of it is relevant, but Keith is eyeing him with no subtlety and the other boy sleeping on the other side of the pit snorts a bit in his sleep, so Lance continues. “They said a virus was working through me. I knew that the red tattoos weren’t supposed to be there because I was probably wasted if I wanted to put those on me.”

                Keith huffs a laugh and holds out the second fruit, sliced a little less cleanly than Lance would like but still maintaining the curves of the fruit. “That’s the magic. Allura pulled that all out of you.”

                “Uh-huh.” Lance says because the thought of the glowing blue hands sends him spiraling down some forced grip of panic again. “I didn’t know my name until you said it.” He shoves a few bites of fruit into his mouth at once, “Kept guessing trying to see if I could come up with it on my own. Do I know a Marco?”

                A breath punches out of Keith, who quickly stares across the fire at the sleeping form and clearly implores the body to awaken and take over the conversation. Lance watches with thinly veiled anxiousness as Keith struggles to compose an answer. Finally, he says, “That’s your brother. One of them.” The words feel like a snap at Lance’s ribcage, and the sound that leaves his mouth is fluttery and aborted of a sob.

                Keith drops the fruit into Lance’s hands so he can put a strong and warm palm to his cheek, their eyes meeting. Lance, to avoid bawling at the raw and exploding feeling in his chest, barrels on with, “I knew how to milk a cow.” They both ignore his wet voice and his deep breaths, “I knew how to summon the weapon on my thigh.”

                “Your bayard.” Keith supplies.

                “That’s a funny word. You’re important. I didn’t know if somebody was looking for me and Red would get mad when I doubted it, but I knew there was somebody like me with her in their mind.” He closes his damp eyes and tilts his head to thud into Keith’s, who takes the impact with only a soft grunt. “I told you something important. What did I tell you?”

                A beat of silence passes, only interrupted by the ticking of the fire beside them, and Keith realizes a response is due by answering, “Nothing.”

                “Not nothing.” Lance insists, “You were my confident. I know you were.” He drops the fruit in his hands to grasp at Keith’s shoulders, who sucks in a sharp breath.

                “You don’t talk to me like that. You talk to Hunk like that, I guess. Not me. I don’t know what you’re remembering.” Lance doesn’t want to peek his eyes open again, afraid Keith’s are wide and imploring as they have been so many times since they’ve reunited. There’s so little convincing someone has to do with eyes that can look like that.

                Lance steels himself and says, “No. I remember telling you something super important to me. Maybe a few important things…that was you. It’s not my fault you don’t know what they were.” Keith takes another deep breath, so Lance lets his hands fall from the other boy’s shoulders, feeling strange and rejected of his comfort, “Awkward.”

                “Lance.” Keith tries when Lance folds his arms around himself, voice quiet and hard, “I’m sorry.” He peeks his eyes open to find Keith looking at his own hands in his lap, a deep pinch to his brow that spells only confusion. “We have to get the rest of you back.” With tense shoulders, he strikes his head up to meet Lance’s gaze again and sternly continues, “I’m going to sit with you, but you have to trust Allura. You always have. We’re not going to do anything that feels wrong if you think there’s something going on in your head, but she’s the only one that can help you.”

                The conviction is Keith’s voice and the same sad imploring in his gaze is enough for Lance, so he shivers and reaches forward to wrap his fingers into Keith’s and let him know he’s relenting. Keith stiffens at the contact but says nothing. “Fine. Only if you sit with me.” They both ignore his voice cracking, and Lance tries not to let mindless fear grapple at him as he thinks about the woman’s glowing blue hands again. He knew her. He knows he did.

                Keith opens his mouth to say something, a slow breath being released first as he mulls his words clearly and stares down at their linked hands—and Lance figures maybe he’s shy or uncomfortable with Lance compromised the way he is—but across the fire, the slumbering body releases a louder snort and jolts into awareness, mumbling a string of nonsensical words. When they stop, the same person who’d cried at Lance asking for introductions peers at the two of them and sucks in a breath before beaming something straight and warm into Lance’s core. “Good to see you out, man. How’re you feeling?”

                “Bad.” Lance replies automatically, blinking and huffing a laugh. “You woke yourself up snoring.”

                He waves a hand and rubs his face tiredly. “Happens. How’s the memory? Pidge says if Allura can’t figure something out with her heal-y hands she might be able to whip up something because she snagged some mind-meld helmets before the castle exploded, but that might take a while…”

                “He doesn’t remember anyone but me, Hunk.” Keith says firmly when Lance is stuck in a loop of mouthing ‘the castle exploded’ to himself.

                “Hunk.” Lance says because he knows the name certainly now and he feels like he’s known it all of his life. Hunk’s smile is radiant in return. “…Yeah. I don’t remember a lot. Anything. It’s sort of just Keith and some impressions.”

                A grimace falls across Hunk’s face then, and he stretches out his back. “Oh, man, like first impressions? Because if you don’t remember us I don’t think we made a good one of those at all. In fact, I think everyone wishes they could get a do-over but Keith. He’s livin’ high right now.”

                “Hunk.” The fingers at Lance’s hand squeeze gently, but Lance feels it all the same and he feels himself color.

                “I meant, like, impressions of some stuff that might have happened, but yeah your guys’ first impression blew, too.” Hunk snorts at the confirmation Lance gives, so Lance continues, “I was already half-dead looking for my stupid cow—what did you call her when I came back, Keith?”

                “…She’s Kaltenecker. You didn’t name her, I don’t think. Maybe Pidge did, I don’t know.”

                Lance barrels on because Keith looks lost, “I was already half-dead looking for Kaltenecker, and I feel these four earthquakes while I’m running through the woods at night—all really great—only to get back here and black out, like, as soon as I saw Keith. What do I wake up to? Aliens.”

                “I mean there are a selection of aliens among us but you and I are human.” Hunk sniffs, a pout poking at his lips.

                Lance wonders about who his hand is linked to but remembers that Keith’s mom is purple so he can question it later. “Yeah but I don’t even know what human is.” The tone he uses must set something off in both Keith and Hunk, who visibly seem uncomfortable at the admission, “I knew I was an alien the second I woke up and walked into the village. Wasn’t hard to figure out who the odd one out was.” He feels bad, then, knowing maybe he’s said too much but having been unable to stop himself from spilling the beans of how he’s feeling about the ordeal even just at the slightest glance. Keith’s eyes are still fixed firmly onto his lap, and Hunk seems startled.

                “I’m sorry, man.” Hunk’s voice is wet and Lance stares with wide eyes because he knows the other’s going to start crying through some vicious instinct he possesses.

                He rushes to say, “You don’t have to apologize. I just.” He doesn’t know what to say to back pedal, so he lets a stiff silence consume them for a second before he throws out, “Hey, what’s, like, my job? What can I do?”

                “Your job?” Keith croaks, something explosive in his voice. His fingers tighten around Lance’s again, and his eyes widen as they stare at the fire, but he says nothing else.

                Hunk seems to pick up the slack easily despite his still wet eyes. “Well,” He begins, rooting through his head obviously by the way his head tilts back and around, “You were a top pilot before we headed into space. Now, you’re a defender of the universe and our Red Paladin.”

                Keith blurts, “You’re our sharpshooter.” The words come out hard, like he’s begging Lance to commit them to memory, so simple but loaded, and Lance blinks as Keith whips his face over to let their gazes meet.

                “That.” Hunk continues, voice betraying nothing as he watches Keith with absolute interest, “You’re the right-hand man for the Black Paladin, who is Keith.”

                “Aww.” Lance coos before he can help himself, a smile pulling at his cheeks unexpectedly at the thought, “I’m your second-in-command?”

                Keith’s voice is still clipped, “No.” Lance flinches, but he continues, “We’re partners.”

                A loud snort rolls out of Hunk, who dusts off his knees and holds his hands up to the fire. “Yeah, you guys have had this argument a million times, so let’s just cut it off because you can’t remember the conclusion. No one part of Voltron is more important than another.” Keith is nodding, and Hunk gives a hum, “Man, I feel like I sound like Shiro. Should we get him?”

                “No. He’s sleeping.”

                “He’s been sleeping all day!”

                “When we have to pull your soul out of the Yellow Lion and shove it into another body we won’t complain about you sleeping in.”

                “Oh, Galra Keith with the jokes—"

                “Which one is Shiro?” Lance tries to keep his voice quiet so the question is only for Keith, but Keith seems so uncomfortable now that it makes him feel bad, and instead of waiting for another long pause before Hunk answers him or Keith grits something out, Lance slowly pulls his fingers from around Keith’s and tucks his hands into his lap. “Nevermind.” He tries not to convey that he definitely is embarrassed by interrupting the banter that had begun slipping easily, and instead rolls on to question, “I’m not, like…an engineer or anything, am I?”

                That makes the two others pause in a much less sad way. They seem confused, above all else, blinking at Lance’s question and furrowing their brows in sync. Hunk carefully says, “No. Why?”

                Something useless wiggles in Lance’s chest, but he doesn’t know what the spur of negative feelings are for so he ignores them. Instead, he breaths a heavy sigh of relief, “Phew. I’m so bad at it. The whole time I was fixing Red Lightning up I thought I was messing everything up. She would let me know when stuff was right, but man was it flying blind. I was basically just shoving wires together that looked wrong until something worked. Even still, as of the last time I flew we weren’t ready to breech the atmosphere.”

                Hunk laughs loudly then, leaning back into the grass and almost bellowing. Beside Lance, Keith quietly says, “Red Lightning?” in a soft and sweet question of a lilt.

                “Don’t worry about it, man.” Hunk assures before Lance can embarrassingly answer about the nickname. He feels his face heat anyway. “As soon as you’re alright, me and Pidge are going to make sure Red gets in working order so we can get back on the road. Allura’s pissed we’re losing so much time, but she’s too worried to actually say anything, so.”

                “On the road.” Lance says experimentally, knowing there’s definitely no roads once they breach the atmosphere. “Where are we going?” Suddenly, a burst of light appears near the fire and Lance flinches violently at its suddenness. When he looks, the light is overtaken by the wolf that had been prowling earlier, who gives him a weighted stare that he can only swallow at in return.

                Keith offers the hand that had been holding Lance’s own to the wolf, making a low and inviting sound, and it blinks to bound towards him and curl at his feet. “Olkari is our main first stop, but we have a lot of pit stops in-between there and now because the lions aren’t made for such long, continuous caravans like this.” He explains, looking at Lance and offering his hand again once the wolf is settled. He must be able to sense Lance’s wariness or feel it through Red or some other form of partnership, and Lance is grateful but doesn’t want to bother him like he feels like he might be starting to.

                Quietly, Hunk says, “Ultimately, we’re all going home, after our Olkari stop.”

                “Okay.” Lance shivers despite the fire and tries to ignore Keith’s hand while he asks, “Where’s home?”

                When they tell him about Earth, something in him feels hollow and chipped at. Keith’s arm slings warm and gentle around his waist, grounding, and Hunk barely lasts a few minutes into describing beaches before he claims he can’t stand it anymore and demands a hug from Lance memory or not.

                Lance lets Allura approach only after he’s milked Kaltenecker and has made his way to Keith for a grounding hand-holding session. She’s cautious and her smile is gentle, like she’s coached him through harder stuff before, and he doesn’t like those implications. He panics a little, when they tell him to lay down, but Keith stays in his view and in his hand and it’s easier, to see something familiar. Before the blue hands can touch him fully, he flinches and asks if they can move to below the Red Lion.

                They grant him that comfort with a thousand assurances, and Allura’s hands—despite harboring such a similar and terrifying glow that only spelled pain for Lance—are cool when they cradle his temples. Her fingers are gentle as they press into his skin, and she flutters her eyes shut, seeming deep in thought, as he feels things working and moving in his body. He still aches terribly, and he wonders if she can do something about that, but before anything else happens he feels an uncomfortable shift and crack in his head and—

                He screams, hot and angry and throwing Keith’s hand away to clutch at his skull. Allura barks something but Lance writhes in place as he’s held against the soft grass, panting.

                “Stop,” He tries to plead, the tension in his mind groaning at the pull, “Please, it’s not working! That’s not right!” His voice cracks at the same time his mind feels like it might, and Red roars belligerently above them all.

                “Allura!” Keith yells, and everything stops in a suspension, only Lance’s exhausted breathing to cut through the suddenly stale air.

                When Lance throws his eyes open again, Allura’s above him are glowing, too, but as they fade she looks dismayed and uncertain. Lance’s hands scramble, and Keith’s are there to catch them.

                “I died.” Lance breaths up to her, the eye-contact a ripple of revelations.

                A long breath leaves her slowly. Keith is questioning something fiercely but nobody is listening to him. “Yes,” Allura confirms quietly, “But we fixed you up, then. We’ll find a way to fix you now as well, Lance. I’m sorry I’ve put you in pain.”

                “You have really pretty eyes.” Lance slurs, and her smile is gentle as she rests a glow-less hand to his forehead. “You remind me of someone, I think. I’m going to pass out. Where’s Keith?”

                Keith pops into his vision, but he still stares at Allura, who says, “Thank you. I can’t wait for you to tell me who that is. Sleep now.”

                Lance hears Keith beckon his name softly as he’s slipping his eyes closed, so he lets go of one of his hands to find Keith’s jaw and fumble through raking into his hair.

                Lance wakes up on the grass in the mid-afternoon, at least a little less sore. Keith leans against Red’s paw a few feet away, looking up at her maw and seeming distracted as he fiddles with his knife on his knees. When Lance chances a glance around the rest of his vicinity, he sees a small body tinkering away at Red’s hind leg he had sweat over so long.

                “Hey.” Lance finds himself protesting lightly, “Don’t mess up those bolts, I sweat for ninety years getting those bad boys in.” The tiny body and Keith simultaneously jolt to look at him, and Lance continues, “You guys weren’t even going to, like, tuck me in or anything? Keith’s jacket is right over there. You could have shoved anything under my head.”

                “I’m recirculating the retraction of this leg so there’s no problems in our formation.” The tiny body says. After a stark bit of silence, she tacks on, “Oh, hey, I’m Pidge. We’ve known each other for a pretty long while.”

                “Did you name the cow Kaltenecker or was that me?” Lance blurts because that’s really all he’s got on her.

                She goes back to her work, shifting around parts that are revealed to her Lance hadn’t even known about. “When we got Kaltenecker free with purchase that’s what the shopkeeper called her instead of cow. ‘A Kaltenecker.’” The way she answers, like Lance’s question is pretty sound and he might not be an insane person for wondering these things in the midst of it all, makes him swell with appreciation.

                Still, “I feel like I’m more creative than that.” He rolls properly to sit up, and Keith shifts from his sitting position, tucks away his knife, and finds Lance’s side in seconds to provide any help.

                “You’re not.” Pidge answers immediately, “We were going to re-name her but you would only listen if it was a stereotypical cow name. Like, Bessie I think was your favorite. Clarabelle.” Under her breath, she grumbles something about what she wanted to name it, and Lance finds himself smiling.

                Lance slumps against Keith because he can. “Clarabelle Cow is an icon, obviously I want to emulate her through our free pet.” Keith doesn’t protest, pausing only to tuck his knees under himself and find a comfortable position to accommodate Lance’s proximity.

                “You remember Clarabelle Cow?” Pidge asks dubiously, “That cartoon is as old as our grandmother’s grandmothers.”

                It takes Lance a minute before he thinks of how to phrase it, “I remembered that’s what the name must have come from, if that makes sense.”

                Graciously, Pidge doesn’t seem affected by the answer, even if Keith’s eyes are curious for him to go on just in case he’s sparing any details. “It does.” She hisses something fierce as a jolt sparks from the leg, and Red rumbles above her before she gets back to it, “Our containment study of that magic isn’t giving us a lot of information but what we can tell is that it was nasty, and it targets. You remembering stuff that didn’t seem important enough to erase—like Clarabelle Cow, or how to milk Kaltenecker, or simple stuff—is normal because it never reached the husk stage Coran keeps talking about.”

                Distantly, Lance echoes, “Husk stage.”

                “Yeah,” Pidge carries on without making a fuss of the phrase, “That’s what would have happened to you if we hadn’t had the stuff pulled out of you in time. You would have turned into a husk.” Keith feels stiff next to him, and Pidge stops her tinkering to close the panel she’s working at. It disappears seamlessly. “Want to see it?”

                “No, Pidge.” Keith answers before Lance can wonder, annoyance edging his tone.

                “Yeah, see what?” Lance agrees over Keith’s protest. Pidge holds a finger up as she walks away to go retrieve something across the camp, headed towards the tables under the Green Lion. When she’s out of sight and Lance is still unanswered, he turns to Keith and tries to ebb into a new question despite knowing somehow that Keith will hate it. “Are you guys sure,” He starts carefully, watching as Keith’s jaw works and he seems to be grinding his teeth, “That I’m not…too far into that husk stage now?”

                A variety of expressions Lance hasn’t seen pass through Keith’s eyes, but he settles on haunted. Instead of answering, however, he leaves Lance in the dark by coming up with a question of his own, and his refusal is enough of a confirmation of the uncertainty. “Have you flown Red yet?”

                “Yeah.” Lance breaths, shaky at the memory. “Why?”

                Keith closes his eyes and tilts his head as a low breeze racks through the camp, and Pidge is approaching again with something clutched in her hand, waving off the older gentleman who has been manning the tables. Keith sounds reluctant as he admits, “We’re going to have to fly again soon. The Black Lion takes point, and it might listen to Shiro if you’re not comfortable flying Red alone, but we can’t stay here much longer.”

                There’s something terrifying at the thought, but Lance can’t bring himself to protest beyond a feeble, “We’re leaving? I haven’t even started to—remember…” His voice is halting, because he realizes, when Pidge reaches the edge of Red’s shadow over them with a tube in her hand that only holds a glowing red light within it, that he might not remember at all. So, instead of paying attention to Keith’s grip on his shoulder, he flinches at the sight of the tube. “You kept it? Whatever was inside me?”

                “What did you want us to do with it?” Pidge snorts, seeming to think something funny of the situation despite Lance feeling like he’s coming to a stiff head of a realization he wasn’t prepared for. “We’re trying to understand it better so we can help you. Look, it gets all sharp looking when you shake it.” She shakes the tube, and Lance’s breath leaves him in a wheeze. She pauses then, a much more sincere look on her face and refusing to meet Keith’s eye that is surely glaring at her. “Don’t worry about it escaping. This tube is made of near impenetrable glass. Same stuff as the Lion’s helms, the castle’s observations, our helmets…”

                He does start panicking then, because she shakes it again and he feels like his skin will start burning as it pulses brighter in its tube. “The-the helmets.” He confirms in a broken voice, shifting away from Keith and backing away from Pidge in a roundabout sort of way.

                “Oh.” Pidge seems to realize he’s getting worse and worse in his breathing, and she blinks and dives out of the way as Red’s maw drops open to let him in. He breaks into the cockpit, which seals behind him, and he scrambles on his hands and knees to find the stupid thing he’s been kicking around since he woke up.

                Outside, because he assumes Red is letting him hear it, Keith is calling his name in an overly cautious way. Lance secures his hands on the helmet under a group of boxes and yanks it free, ignoring the boxes that crash down. The surface is shattered, which he knew, but now as he stares at the spiderwebs across the glass he knows how distinctly impenetrable it’s supposed to be and how it’s supposed to pull him beyond atmospheres and handle that pressure.

                Keith calls his name again, and something burns under Lance’s skin, so he marches. The Red Lion’s maw opens again, and Lance traverses down the walkway with the helmet in his grip, thrusting it outwards to Keith and Pidge as they look imploringly up at him. “I woke up like this.” He says, gravely serious.

                Pidge snorts, but her face is pale and twisted, as if she doesn’t understand what she’s looking at. Lance thrusts it forward again and steps closer, off of the walkway and into their orbits, the helmet strikingly beyond repair in his hands.

                “You need a spare helmet.” Keith says distantly, also uncomprehending.

                A beat of silence passes, and Pidge turns around to loudly yell, “Coran!”

                Coran and Allura express bewilderment over the state of the helmet maybe a billion times over the course of the next few hours. Hunk and Pidge tell Keith (once they’re allowed into the cockpit of the Red Lion after Lance confirms the containment will stay sealed away in another giant industrial box that looks much sturdier) that repairs to the life support systems and the rest of the downed communications will only take a few hours, and they should be ready for lift-off as long as everything’s prepared in the morning.

                Lance feels sick to his stomach.

                “The entry point was clearly his wrist,” He listens to Allura repeat to Coran for the millionth time, “Was he struck twice? I don’t understand.” Her glowing hands touch at the Red Lion every once in a while, a connection Lance wonders if is similar to his own to the ship, but she seems to be working more than anything else. He wishes he knew what he could contribute, but every time he gets up somebody flutters to his side or asks if he’s in pain, and he can barely keep their names straight, so he stops bothering to face them.

                Keith seems to sense his unease, because throughout the evening he brings him Ubyg fruit and water pouches periodically and every now and again will haltingly ask if he needs anything else while he butchers the peel of the fruit deliveries because he thinks Lance can’t get them himself or something.

                “So, we’re leaving?” There’s a white-haired man roaming the edges of the camp near the cow and the wolf, tossing sticks for the latter to keep it distracted while Kaltenecker grazes.

                Keith grunts an affirmative, handing the fruit over once it’s been thoroughly butchered and tucking his knife away. Lance calls his bayard to summon his sword and cut the chunks of fruit off into cleaner bits so he isn’t shoving his face into the mass of it like some kind of animal, and Keith stares.

                “You all know…I’m not going to be very on top of it, right?” He can’t help but ask, mindlessly holding a piece of the fruit he’s separated out for Keith and waiting for his fingers to slowly accept it. “I think we’ll be fine, but if we’re in some kind of traveling war I don’t know if you guys can rely on me too much.”

                Keith doesn’t respond, so Lance roves his gaze up to find his dark eyes distractedly fixated on the sword Lance is using as overkill to organize the fruit. Finally, Keith asks, “Is that new?”

                Lance blinks down at it, then looks to Keith again in bewilderment. “I don’t know, man, you tell me.”

                With difficulty, Keith seems to manage, “It looks new.” He turns away, eyes cast towards the pair of aliens who have been discussing the poisonous magic pulled from Lance in the distance, and calls Allura’s name. When she turns, she looks delighted as Lance waves the sword in the air jauntily, so Lance assumes it’s safe to say it’s not actually new. At her reaction, however, Keith seems to sour fractionally.

                “Lance!” She exclaims as she approaches, “You can still summon your broadsword, that’s wonderful! And your rifle and blaster? Have you had any trouble with those?”

                “My what?” Lance blinks, immediately unfamiliar.

                Her voice is patient as she explains, “That’s not your only weapon. You’re quite skilled in long-ranged combat.” Sharpshooter, he remembers Keith saying so emphatically, “Have you not summoned another weapon in your time here?”

                A flash of panic rings through him along the lines of Husk and Pain and Red and he assures her, “Well, I didn’t really try, so.” It’s more of an attempt to soothe himself than anything, and it must show because her gaze becomes much gentler and she crouches a little so she isn’t towering over him on the ground. “This is all I’ve gotten, but I don’t really use this thing a lot. I didn’t really need it for anything but the fruit. Nothing to really slice-n-dice out here.”

                Keith rubs his face as he walks away but says nothing. Allura waves a hand, like she’s excited for him, and Lance looks helplessly down at the sword because he has no idea what he’s supposed to do to prompt it to do something else. “It should just change?” He asks dumbly when it doesn’t. She nods, and he tries to concentrate. A low whistle crosses the camp from the far side where the white-haired man is playing fetch, and Lance closes his eyes.

                The most he can get the bayard to do is deactivate and reform as the red sword still, which it does in rapid succession at his deep concentration, but it refuses to take another form no matter what he wills, and when he prods too far into his mind he can’t help his flinch at the recesses behind the taut and barriered areas that seem inaccessible to him still. “Nothing’s happening.” He says lamely despite knowing Allura will be well aware of that. He swallows loud enough for him to know she’s well aware of it as well, and continues much graver to ask, “What are you going to do if I don’t get any of myself back? I won’t be functional or reliable in battle. I don’t even think I know how to use this thing.” He flashes the sword away again for posterity sake.

                Allura’s answer is careful and articulated slowly, as if she’s a master craftswoman with her words and he believes that must be a part of her character by this interaction alone in comparison to the others where he had been held down while she tried to heal him. “You will create new parts of yourself. You are unconditionally a part of Voltron and our coalition, and no matter what you’ve lost, we will always accept you as a part of our team and family, Lance.” He can’t look as her breath catches primly on the word, family feels so intimate and important to the both of them but he can’t remember his or hers besides the one Keith had confirmed and it feels inappropriate to look at her vulnerability when he can’t even expose his, “There are still options we haven’t explored for regaining your memories, but if you’re starting to lose faith keep in mind that regardless of your remembering our experiences together, we are still grateful you are here and we’re so happy to have found you again.”

                A moment passes, and Lance feels like there’s a world of weight on his tongue to pour out and explain to her but he has nothing to say. Before he can come up with a single thing in response to her reassurances, the whistle sounds again, sharper, and she stands without letting him even thank her.

                “Alright, team!” A stronger voice is calling from the end of the camp, someone Lance hasn’t spoken to yet, “Debrief, finally, let’s fall in!”

                Allura doesn’t look back as she walks off, and Lance wonders if he’s botched something by not knowing what to say, but her shoulders don’t shake and her steps don’t falter either, so he modifies that worry to instead wonder if she’s always been a strong figure he’s looked up to for words of encouragement. If not, he would certainly start to.

                Belatedly, he joins the group at the firepit, cold in the early evening and cramped with all the bodies of their apparent party. They don’t all look like soldiers, though a majority show it better than others and some have certainly surprised Lance (Pidge, he’s mostly thinking about, with her earlier tinkering through the Red Lion’s systems without so much of a second glance). Romelle seems unaccustomed to the setting as well, hanging to the back of their gathering with the wolf and Lance when they’re all in an awkward sort of circle of sitting on the ground. Only the white-haired man and Keith stand, and when Lance points in a way he hopes is very subtle Keith fixes his eyes on him and makes sure to say to the man, “Thanks, Shiro.” Lance appreciates the pseudo-introduction.

                Shiro gives Keith a strong pat to the back and sits heavily at the edge of their group. Keith, alone in his position, looks awkward and stark but raises his head a little and meets Lance’s eyes before he begins speaking. “So, most of us know the plan was to stop at Olkarion,” Lance assumes they all knew before Lance knew nothing, “So, we’ll re-establish our connections with them hopefully when our communications with their galaxy are within Pidge’s range and we can start talking about a proper touchdown before we shoot straight for Earth, but we lost a lot of time looking for Lance.” Keith flinches at his own words, as if he didn’t mean the way he had phrased them, and their eyes meet again before he sweeps them around and he continues to the rest of the team. “The official status of Lance’s condition is something we can’t be sure of without functional pods and without the data from the castle, so we’re working with Coran and Allura’s knowledge, and Lance has lost his memories. Physically, he’s clear to fly and Red is still responding, so Shiro will stay with him in the Red Lion in the event of any trouble to stay safe and I’ll remain point in the Black Lion. We’re taking off again in the morning, despite delays, and we’re going to shoot for as little stops and mishaps as possible until we get to Olkarion.” He finishes with a long and slow breath, looking directly to Shiro when he’s finished, and Lance wonders if he practiced to himself all he had to recite to the rest of them.

                Shiro makes a gesture that Keith takes a moment to decipher before he perks to ask, “Oh, questions?” Some in the crowd throw polite hands up but others, like Keith’s own mother and Coran, begin speaking without turn or ceremony.

                “Are you sure you’re going to be able to form Voltron in the event of an emergency if he’s recovering?” Krolia begins, “Is his connection to the Red Lion significant enough to prove that bond?”

                “Voltron has always been dependent on the paladin connection with the Lions as well as the relationship between the paladins, keep in mind, my boy!” Coran answers, speaking directly to Keith, “Remember,” He hesitates a moment, “that when things go down the Guevbuxi you may not be able to rely on that relationship if Lance doesn’t feel that connection between you all as well.”

                Lance senses the eyes shifting before the bodies in the little huddle all seem to turn towards where he’s seated at the back. “Well, how do you feel towards us, Lance?” Pidge asks it in a way that might be teasing but Lance has no idea what to make of the question because there’s so much to say about what might be expected of him and what Voltron even is technically.

                Someone might catch him mouthing ‘Voltron’ a little blatantly, though, because Hunk explains a little too obviously, “I’m sure whatever gets thrown at us on our way between planets won’t warrant a universe-saving robot made up of all of our lions combined.” He beams when Lance stares at him, and instead of letting someone else interject he continues, “But that connection is serious business, bro, how do you feel about that?”

                “Uh,” Lance says as he looks at Romelle, who raises her eyebrows and looks away because she has no part in this and Lance realizes it was dumb to look to her despite being the closest in proximity to their little back of the huddle. He looks to Keith then, for salvation. “It might change once I’m in the air with all of you, in Red. When I saw you flying in your lions through the sky, I could feel the pull. That’s as connected as I’ve felt to anything on my own here besides the way I feel about Keith.” Their leader’s face washes a few different splotchy tones of red as his brows pinch but the look and composure settle again as soon as they had been lost. “That’s…all I’ve got.”

                “Well,” Keith clears his throat, and someone coughs a laugh but the rest of them straighten again, “We don’t exactly have time for drills and we can’t afford to waste any more on re-training. It’s a calculated risk to make our shot for Olkarion like this, but we have to go for it. The longer we wait, the longer we give the rest of the rebelling Galra and Haggar a chance to regroup and obstruct our trip when we’re low on resources and we have two compromised paladins.”

                Lance mouths the foreign words to himself to try and memorize them, and Allura, from in front of him in the huddle, turns slightly to pat his ankle before turning away again. As if she could sense his distress at the information and wanted to assure him he wasn’t being left behind in his lack of knowledge. Keith continues, “Pidge, have you had any luck getting a jump on contacting the rebels or Matt?”

                Pidge’s wispy hair bounces as her head shakes. “Communications are nowhere near as sophisticated as the castle’s systems, so I’m still trying to work through a solution to amplifying them in the lions alone. If we had a giant satellite, maybe we’d be a little luckier, but…” She shrugs. Lance senses an inside joke, and the corners of Keith’s lips curl into a mysterious smile of recognition. “The Olkari should have what we need, unless we happen to pass a junkyard planet—then I’m calling a pit stop. Thankfully the lions’ navigations are sufficient on their own to get there, and me and Hunk will be workshopping through the areas until we’re in their system, but we’ve got nothing.”

                “Can confirm.” Hunk adds dully.

                “But everything will be in order for launch at least, correct? You’ve combed through the Red Lion to make sure it’s properly recovered from the damage sustained from Lance’s original crash and made sure any communication failures we were having before have been rectified between ourselves?” It’s Allura who speaks this time, turning pensively to Pidge and crossing her wrists over one another primly on her lap.

                Pidge nods and adjusts her glasses while Hunk beams at Lance and speaks first. “Lance actually did a ton of the legwork—haha—on the repairs before we even got here, from what it looks like based on the auto-crash data feed and the Red Lion took a lot of initiative from there.”

                “I was wondering if she could self-heal or something weird like that.” Lance says without thinking, shrinking his shoulders back slightly when a few heads turn to his comment. “After a while stuff started to calm down on the screens even though I knew it wasn’t the same stuff I had been working on.” He feels dumb not knowing exactly what his fiddling had been doing, working with illegible scribbles, but at least now he knows he can read as assured, it’s just alien and alludes him apparently and he’s not the only one of their group who is so disadvantaged.

                Hunk smiles wider, “Yeah, they can, dude! You just had to get her started, so by the time we got here a lot had already been set in place and we’re all set to go now that me and Pidge have finished it off. Obviously, we’ll do a safety check just to be sure before a proper lift because the crash was nasty.” A beat passes, and Hunk tacks on, a little more serious, “How’d it look when you woke up, man?”

                For a second it seems like they won’t make him answer, because there’s a quick back-and-forth happening and it seems like a lingering sort of a question that’s inappropriate during their debriefing, but the air seems to turn stale and everyone waits for the response while Lance stares at Hunk. Hunk stares back. When Lance turns away, everyone else is staring at him, too. The gazes are not unkind, but they feel a little suffocating, and Lance feels bad he has so little to know how to offer them.

                “Um,” He says, feeling his eyebrows raise as he tries to think of a lie and feeling the urge to leave him as he locks eyes with Keith instead, “I was bleeding, and my helmet was shattered, and…I mean I didn’t really take a lot of stock of the situation until later.” Keith blinks in his hard stare and Lance reconnects his gaze with Hunk’s. “Red couldn’t perch properly and we sort of tore down the forest a little just making a landing here, you guys can see the damage. After the adrenaline wore off after I woke up and got my helmet off, I realized I didn’t really…know what was going on. At all. So, I just kind of worked from there. I couldn’t really assess anything because I didn’t really know…what I was doing here.”

                It’s murky, to remember Red’s first echo in his mind of a worried rumble, injured herself but wanting to make sure he was okay. He had gone to her belly to find a cow, had left her to find a ruined forest, and had dragged himself from it to find a village of wide-eyed onlookers at his person, all in humanoid shapes not matching his own and painting one giant, alien picture for himself. In an instant, he wants to throw up again at the memory.

                “Did you guess?” Pidge avoids his gaze as it moves to her with her question, looking down with interest. “You had to have a hypothesis at least, I mean. I bet all those villagers who hated you wanted to know something.”

                Keith sort of looks like he wants to move on or say something to diffuse the tension by the way his jaw clenches—Lance prides himself on picking up the cue at the distance—but nothing comes from his position and he’s starting to look silly without any comments as the only one still standing, leader or not. “Well,” Lance drawls, looking around camp and jabbing his thumb over to Kaltenecker when he spots her, “For a while I was banking on farmer.” He says it just too softly to be a joke and hurries to cover it up with, “I used to guess my name and stuff every day to see if Red would be able to confirm something for me because I had no idea. Now that I know it I guess I wasn’t as close as I thought I was a few times, but I mean Pike is still a super rad name, so whatever.”

                Pidge’s eyes positively gleam, and Hunk scrambles to his knees to lean forward as they shove at each other. “No, it is! You were! That is your name!” Pidge laughs brightly, seeming delighted, “You have to have some kind of access to anything that poison magic stuff sapped away if you were able to draw that back!”

                Lance balks a minute, “My name is Lance Pike?” He tries to keep the grimace off of his face because he doesn’t want everyone to think he’s so petty but he can’t help his distaste, “That’s disgusting, wait, what kind of parents—”

                “It’s better than Yorak.” Hunk says solemnly to Lance in a way he knows is also an inside joke he cannot follow. Krolia glares tightly and Keith quietly and bitterly says something under his breath that suspiciously sounds like ‘please, my mom is right there.’

                Pidge carries on quickly, “No, Pike is your Monsters and Mana persona name!” She’s infectiously excited so Lance, with the relief that his last name is not actually Pike so hopefully it is much more appealing, lets himself relax into her enthusiasm.

                “What, I play that nerd game?” Lance blinks, a small smile on his lips.

                “Yes!” Half the group cheers at the same time. Pidge exclaims, “A nerd game you have the audacity to remember so check yourself!”

                Lance hears Keith mutter, “What are they talking about?” to Shiro with no bars held for potency in his confusion, and Shiro whispers something back that seems to right him in his delivery of the de-brief before Lance can think of a response to Pidge’s call-out for his brain’s unfair residing of nerd game knowledge. “Alright.” Keith says loudly enough to grab everyone’s attention again, not without an expected pout from a few faces at the huddle, “I want everything packed up from the camp tonight and brought back to the lions, no more spreading cozy. Containment will go to the Yellow lion—”

                “Ew.” Hunk interjects tactlessly, Keith glares.

                “—and we lift after the safety check at dawn. No late rising, Lance.”

                He tacks on the end bit like it’s a force of habit but something twitches in Lance to respond and question, “Oh, do I sleep in a lot?” It’s both conniving and teasing of him to ask, and it seems to throw Keith off as they blink at one another.

                “Why, yes, you do!” Coran says grandly, standing and brushing off his trousers exaggeratedly. “Like a little nesting ebbig, that one!” Allura, Pidge, and Romelle giggle at the unknown comparison. Krolia raises her brows. The rest of them begin to stand as well, stretching and patting Keith on the back despite his unofficial dismissal, and Keith looks to Shiro to see his thumbs up before Lance watches tension leave his shoulders and his arms cross to hold a different kind of stand-offish expression entirely.

                When Lance is still sitting and the rest of them have scattered, Keith raises his brows expectantly. Lance raises his back. “Any other orders, sir?” He can’t help but ask, biting back a smile as Shiro huffs a laugh and wanders away as well.

                Keith smirks, “Dismissed, paladin.” Lance takes it as his cue to go pack.

                Lance realizes he doesn’t have much to justify his time in his lost forest hell aside from what the experience has taken from him approximately two exact moments into packing. He takes one trip into the Red Lion to fasten all the armor he hasn’t been wearing proper into place and set his spare helmet someone had procured for him into the pilot’s seat, but his second trip in is only to bring the fruit in, his third is to bring the cow, and there is no fourth because he is left with nothing else.

                It takes him a while to remember anything else he’s removed from the Red Lion that he would need to replace, and Coran provides extra packets of goo and other provisions to restock the Red Lion without Lance having to have asked, so he’s stumped wandering the camp for a bit looking to assist anyone before he spots Keith’s red jacket by the cold fire pit and he remembers that it’s probably his duty to look after its whereabouts.

                He must have the same idea as Keith though, because when he’s halfway to walking towards Red again with it in hand for his fourth and final trip, Keith jogs up to him and holds out his hand for it expectantly.

                “What?” Lance asks first despite knowing he wants his jacket back because he has a moment of panic where he wants to make him work for it.

                Keith blinks, “Oh, that’s mine. Wait, you said you knew that.” He seems confused for a minute but shoves the hair out of his face and shrugs, suspending his hand again in the same manner. “I’ll take it.”

                “No.” Lance blurts.

                No sense comes to him before or after the single word is uttered, and they stare at each other a little manically at the exchange.

                Keith gruffs out an echo, “No?”

                Lance thinks about how even before he knew there was somebody on the other end of Red Lightning’s tether, he had curled up on the jacket and felt safer. His fists clench in the fabric and he wants to keep it close to him until he’s ready to part with it, but maybe that’s selfish of him to ask and sounds exactly like a security blanket and maybe he’s acting like a baby—“Look,” He babbles nonsensically, “I found it in my lion so, uh, finders keepers—and—and I landed here by myself so everything in there is auto-super-mine.” Keith’s eyes are trained on the way he’s twisting the fabric in his knuckles and Lance tries to will his grip gentler, but something akin to panic sets in at a softer layer, “No return policy on too-short jacket-pillows. It’s mine to keep now.” He breathes heavily through his nose and realizes he’s acting like an animal, so he turns his gaze away a moment.

                Keith touches a surprisingly gentle hand to one of Lance’s own unyielding ones at the fabric, but he doesn’t tug at it or show any sign of wanting to draw it away from him. “Okay. All yours.” He says, removing the hand as soon as it had arrived and taking a step back.

                Releasing a slow breath, Lance wills himself to calm and meets Keith’s eyes again. “Thanks. I’m all packed.”

                “Great.” Keith nods, though his eyes scan the camp as if he’s surprised. “You need anything?”

                Lance shakes his head slowly, feeling his shoulders slouch, and he begins walking towards the Red Lion again with Keith at his side. He wants to put the jacket on but he doesn’t want Keith to see him do it for an inexplicable reason, so he just feels the material under his thumbs instead. “I’ll be fine. I might get some extra rest if the rest of the camp is going to be packed up okay. Don’t want to sleep in or anything, uh.”

                “That’s not actually a huge problem you have, you know.” The voice Keith cuts Lance off with is cryptically serious, like he’s carved his words into a tablet of stone and there’s no undoing his opinion on the matter. “Don’t get hung up on some of the little stuff. I know a lot’s going on right now. Just focus on your piloting and your connection to the Red Lion.”

                A huff of laughter escapes Lance like a wave, and they mosey up Red’s runway. “My piloting that I am so experienced at right now.” He tries not to sound bitter or nervous, but it’s hard to imagine him keeping up with the group he’s supposedly a part of if they’ve done as much as they say.

                They pass Kaltenecker, and Keith affords her a pat to the flank in greeting as they do that Lance appreciates much more immensely than he should. “It’s instinct. We’ve been training for a lot of years just for skill and tech alone on piloting, and these things take our knowledge on the slightest whim. You’ll be fine. You said you’ve already flown her anyway.”

                Lance lets the silence linger as they reach the cockpit, which is a little bit of a mess still. He drapes the jacket carefully over the back of his chair and busies himself with straightening the collar to no avail. “I, like, burst into tears when I did. Full on ugly cried when we took off for a quick little speed around the area. It’s going to be a little awkward with Shiro in here and me bawling, so…just a fair warning.”

                “Guess we should teach you how to mute the comms then, huh? Doubt everyone would love to hear you sap it up about the stars.” Keith’s voice is soft despite the sass, and he nods towards the seat once he’s in Lance’s field of vision again to encourage him to take his rightful place. “Shiro’s probably fine with people crying, anyway.”

                Lance takes the seat, moving the helmet there to his lap, and Keith half-sits half-leans on the arm rest right by Lance’s elbow as the Red Lion’s screens all emerge and appear at his presence and insistence. “At least let’s try a rundown.” Lance tries, and Keith hums in agreement.

                Sitting with Shiro in the cockpit isn’t awkward until Lance is done choking up about the expansiveness of space and, all emotional outbursts aside, there is only silence. There had been a strange camaraderie throughout their takeoff where he had smiled with an understanding in his gaze at Lance’s hesitance, but now, something is lost in the way they fly. Red moves fast through the void of space and Lance feels a little tug of breathlessness in him, and Shiro is saying nothing. He only shifts in his seat and seems to grow comfortable. The Red Lion flanks just by the Black, the communications are silent, and they make their way to the planet Olkarion that is detrimental in their journey to Earth, both stops in which Lance does not understand wholly why are necessary but at least now has the background to know he originates from one of the two.

                Shiro grunts, and Lance peeks tightly and quickly over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of him tucking his arm across his chest and under the stump of the other. He tilts his head back, looking ready for a nap, and Lance focuses his attention to the controls again quickly so at least one of them can watch what he’s doing. A bit nervously, he finds himself using one hand to play with the cuff of Keith’s jacket, thrown in his lap in a moment of weakness before they had launched.

                It surprises Lance when Shiro asks, with all tired nonchalance and still seeming very casual about the affair, “How are you doing, Lance? I know we haven’t really gotten the chance to talk one-on-one.”

                “We haven’t really gotten the chance to talk at all.” Lance mumbles, something bitter and unappreciated turning over in his stomach he doesn’t know the true origins of. “It’s alright, though.” He’s quick to assure, because it is and despite his having to repeat that in his head it is the truth, “You’re injured, right? You’re supposed to have one more hand.” It comes out without any thought or check from the rest of his brain, and he whips around quickly to correct himself, “UH! I mean—”

                Shiro laughs loudly, “No, you’re right.”

                “I swear that wasn’t just a rude guess—” Lance tries to bumble on, “It just seemed like something that was off about you when I saw you!”

                “Eyes up front.” Shiro’s eyes crinkle with amusement still, and Lance’s spine goes ram-rod straight to focus all his attention on piloting again, having begun to drift from their lazy formation in his panic. “It’s fine, Lance. I lost my arm in a battle not too long ago, and without our usual castle-ship we don’t have the equipment to draft a functional replacement.” He explains it patiently, and by the sound of shifting it seems like he’s gifting more comfortable in his seat still. “Really, though, how are you doing? Other than the de-brief and the little information we still have about the Crick’staglow magic—” Lance doesn’t think that’s the same way Coran had pronounced it, but he leaves it, “—I haven’t heard much about your condition, but I know that’s mostly my own fault. I haven’t been the most present, but I am concerned now.” Under his breath, Lance thinks he hears Shiro mutter something about Keith running blocks, but he’s an expert breath mutterer, because it’s entirely indecipherable.

                “I’m...here.” Lance says because it seems like all he’s got to say for a second, his eyes trained firmly ahead. “Just trying to keep up.”

                Shiro chuckles again, a little quieter, and Lance wonders at the casualty in it. There’s a tiny light flicking on one of his dash screens that he thinks, if he remembers correctly, means someone wants to speak through his communications privately, but it’s not the same as the urgent ones, which would break through automatically, so he leaves it to ask later. “Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s hard, feeling so displaced, and it can really start eating away at you if you let it.”

                Something in Lance snags at the opportunity to relate, though he isn’t sure if Shiro is even speaking from a point of view of general advice or actual specifics for him. Regardless, he quietly agrees, “I know, it definitely feels like it’s going to. That red stuff definitely felt like it was going to eat me, anyway. It’s just…annoying. Frustrating. Stupid.” He groans loudly, rolling his head back and hating the action as soon as it escapes him because he doesn’t know a lot about his group and team that had found him quite yet and he doesn’t know their behaviors as much as he knows his own but he knows that he’s been acting whiny because he can get away with it when he’s only talking to Red and he should check himself at least until he knows himself better. Red rumbles something at the thought, but he ignores her to continue, “Ever since I woke up it felt like I was waiting for some kind of stupid crack to realize what I was doing, now with all of you guys here it feels like I should have already been ready or something.” It’s hard to admit to himself and harder to say out loud to Shiro, but the sounds behind him indicate the man’s shifting again, and Lance takes a deep breath.

                “Lance.” Shiro calls, his voice suddenly serious. Lance hears him get up, but he can’t bring himself to tear his eyes away from his dash again despite his ability to sneak glances before. “Don’t think about your survival as a failure because you haven’t managed to recover your memories.” A hand claps down onto his shoulder and jostles it slightly, and Lance tenses, “It’s not fair to yourself or to everything you’ve been through for you to think that way, and it won’t help the way you feel about the situation. We’re glad to have found you again, no matter how long it took and no matter what we still need to work on in that recovery process.”

                A silence fills the lion then, and Lance hesitantly finds himself nodding. “Must have been a pretty nasty fight, huh?” He tries to change the subject into another mystery he wants to finally slot together, blinking rapidly at Shiro’s kind words that sound a lot like Allura’s own and wondering if their wisdom was well-heeded from the rest of the team. “Keith said I was missing twenty-something days…I saw you guys passing, but I had no way to beacon or communicate so I couldn’t signal my location until we were in better conditions.”

                Shiro’s hand leaves his shoulder, and Lance hears him take his seat again heavily. “Twenty-two.” He starts, “I was awake for the battle, but I’ve been in and out of our stasis pod in the Black Lion for my recovery and it was difficult for me to keep track of the details of the search while it was happening. I know as soon as you were struck we lost all readings on the Red Lion entirely, and Pidge couldn’t even get anything but a rumor from another local planet until a few days before we found you.” He hums, “Allura and Coran said they’d never seen anything like it, but Coran was sure you’d be back online within a few movements. We weren’t sure what to think when you weren’t.”

                Below Lance’s feet, the Red Lion thrums with a sudden purr, perhaps sensing his upcoming question or knowing the impending answer and wanting to provide early reassurance. “Was it at least badass? Was it one good last look?” He hopes the humor will alleviate the soft tension before it lays too thickly in the small cockpit, because now that he’s found there’s nothing much to be said about what would have happened if they couldn’t find him, but he doesn’t like to linger on the thought still.

                “When you got hit?” There’s a surprised lift in Shiro’s voice for a minute, as if he’s really thinking it over, before he snorts a little, “No, it really wasn’t. We were clearing surface-level debris on a barren planet we were going to let the lions recharge on when our disruptions awakened what must have been the Criskecglews—” another entirely new pronunciation, “—Coran wasn’t exactly clear on the specifics, but they attacked and we defended while we prepared to retreat and make a new plan for our rest stop. It got drawn out, your lion was struck, and you screamed and shot off like a bullet.”

                There is no short silence that follows Shiro’s explanation. Lance drinks it in slowly, though there’s not much to process and he doesn’t know why he’s so disturbed by the recital.

                Finally, he asks, “I just left?”

                “Pidge, Coran, and Hunk are still running diagnostics to figure out how the magic could have affected you directly through your helm and done so much direct damage because it clearly impaired you, and Coran seems to have the most knowledge but he’s not very direct without the Castle’s encyclopedia, but yes. You fled, and Red is the fastest, so we lost visual as well as our signals not long after.” Shiro seems to take a deep breath, “At the risk of putting a damper on the mood, it’s important to remember you were in a very critical situation, Lance, even if you didn’t realize it. That magic you were poisoned with is very deadly and very serious, and we weren’t sure if we were going to find you alive when we finally managed to lock on to the Red Lion’s signal.”

                “Me?” Lance croaks, “I’ve survived worse.” He thinks about Allura’s dimming eyes above him as her healing gaze subsided and hopes to anything he doesn’t have to survive worse again.

                “You have.” Shiro agrees very seriously, “And hopefully you never have to again, but you’re made of very tough stuff, Lance. So, I want you to know that I mean it when I say it’s important not to push yourself or build up your stress over the memories you’ve lost because of their utility when you’re going to experience the stress of their absence regardless. It’s not often I get to say this to one of you guys because we fight the way we do in the war we’re fighting, but right now the best thing you can do is take a deep breath and take the day off. As long as we’re not suddenly thrust into battle, Lance, all we need you to remember right now is that we’re happy to see you alive and well.”

                Lance sniffles, and Shiro shifts in his seat again, probably making himself comfortable after his master artistry of a speech of encouragement. “Thank you.” He manages after another rumble from Red lifts through his feet. “How...” He doesn’t know what he’s asking exactly, but it feels like something Shiro would understand, and Shiro seems like the type to have a lot of answers to a lot of questions normal people wouldn’t typically have to know. “Do you think this part gets better? Even if I don’t get my memories, making new ones will be great, I know that…but do you think the not knowing will get better?”

                Another long silence ensues, and Lance worries that Shiro’s finally gone down for the nap he looked ready for earlier, but he doesn’t disappoint. “The hardest part, I think, is not knowing what to believe. It helps when you get context, but sometimes...” He trails off for a second, and Lance is left scrambling to fill in the blanks for a moment, realizing that Shiro does fully share in his experience now, but Shiro doesn’t leave him hanging in finishing in explanation, “you latch onto memories from the wrong perspective. You learn them the way someone else told you them, and they change the way you start to know yourself. You’re definitely at a greater disadvantage than I was,” It’s something small but Lance feels uncomfortable at the words Shiro lays out so plainly, “I still knew myself, I just lost some bits of what was going on. You’ve lost a lifetime of context, I can’t imagine what that does, and I’m sorry, Lance.”

                “Don’t apologize!” Lance blurts, jolting his grip on the controls a second because something strikes him as distinctly uncomfortable at the notion. Shiro snorts but says nothing. “At least—I mean…I’ve got something. It would be different, I guess, if you guys were forcing memories and stuff into me or trying to make me remember stuff from beyond places I can’t even reach, but you’re not. You all just tell me your name a lot and let me do my thing. It’s been fine. I think, even if I’ve only gotten a little tiny bit, it’s nice that what little context I do have wasn’t fed into me from some crazy de-brief where I would have to just assume I was part of all this because I looked like the rest of you guys and my Lion fit the part.”

                Theoretically, the connection could have helped with the latter comment as well, but before Lance can continue that train of thought, Shiro breaks in to ask, “How much context do you have for us from the Red Lion alone? I always wondered how strong her connection was to her paladins, I know Allura said once that her connection to Keith was one of the strongest, it’s just hard to communicate very clearly with them.”

                Lance can’t help but groan though, “It is hard to communicate with her. It’s just like various degrees of approval or not. I would guess my name and stuff, like I told you guys, but…I didn’t get most of my context from her. I wasn’t really talking about that. Talking about what I remember is getting really old, you know?” Something embarrassing suddenly twists in Lance’s gut, and he wants to avoid the topic all together, but he knows if he does he’ll look suspicious, he just needs a moment to compose a way to dance around the real meat of the conversation and the jacket blatantly still draped over the back of his seat.

                “I know it does.” Shiro huffs a laugh, “But it’s important to ask yourself sometimes, it can be a little grounding. If it stresses you out, we’ll stop, no problem.”

                “No, no.” Lance assures, because he won’t back out of Shiro’s question on the first try by being a baby. He thinks about what they’ve been talking about, though, and tries to think about what he’s figured out by context alone with his meeting the rest of their team and what he’s figured out on his own. Compared to anything he might have been told, it’s hard to sort through all the little information swirling through his head. Suddenly, it seems like a lot. If he gains all of his memories back, he stupidly wonders for a second if they’ll even fit in his little headspace he feels like he has. “I guess I’m just trying to think of what I know from me and not guessing from something somebody else said real quick.” Shiro hums, and Lance takes another second while he’s got permission to mull it over. Ultimately, he decides to say, “I think the only memories or…instincts I feel like I can really trust or know for sure are my own are what I feel about Keith. I know the rest of you all feel familiar, some of you more than others, but I don’t know if that’s because I feel like you should be or if it’s because you actually are. I don’t know if anyone else would have triggered the same response out of me if they had said my name first the way Keith did when you guys found me. I remembered him before you guys even showed up. Something important was there.”

He realizes he’s mumbling a little and lets himself taper off, glancing back at Shiro, who wears a bright-eyed look despite his slouched position in his seat. “Lance,” He says carefully, leaving his mouth open a moment and definitely seeming unsure of how to respond to the awkward sort of monologue. He continues with a smile, “Your instincts are always going to be your best guide, especially in this sort of situation. Remember that, okay?”

                Lance pauses, turning over the words in his head carefully before smiling and nodding with a hesitance. When Shiro bids him to turn forward again he complies, and it’s only when the silence fills the cockpit once more that Lance thinks about their conversation and lets one last question slip past before it can eat away at him alone. He keeps his voice quiet, “Shiro, how long did it take you to recover your memories?”

                Shiro is honest, “Sometimes I think I’m still missing fragments of them, Lance. It just takes patience, and no matter how frustrating, remember the team is always here for you. We’re our own family, here, and we’re not going to let one of us fall.

                “Okay.” Lance manages, trying to keep his swallow quiet. When his communications beeps again, he works to compose himself before asking Shiro to remind him how to respond.

                They have to land not two cycles later, much to Keith and Allura’s irritation regarding their schedules. Luckily, according to Hunk and Pidge, they are near a Swap Moon, and the Lions can recharge while they can explore on whatever a Swap Moon is. As Lance prepares to leave and ask, however, he is accosted on his way down the catwalk, Shiro laughing just steps ahead of him as Pidge barrels past.

                “Wait, what are you doing?” Lance calls after her as she delves into the Red Lion mercilessly, jogging through her interior. “Are you not going to the Swap Moon?”

                “I’m here to see Kaltenecker really fast.” She answers shortly, rolling her eyes plainly and waving Lance to follow her when he seems confused still, “She’s half mine. I miss her, and I want to bond.”

                “Oh.”

                Kaltenecker is tucked in a very small artificial pen enclosure at the very rear of the Lion, and Lance contemplates taking her outside for grazing but wasn’t paying attention to whether or not the planet they landed on had good atmospheric conditions or not, let alone…grass…or anything. He also doesn’t think Keith or Allura wants them to be there long, so maybe he would be wasting their time by trying to get his cow to have a snack.

                Pidge interrupts his thoughts with a pleasant greeting to the cow and a soft series of pets down her side. Kaltenecker moos pleasantly in return, and Lance smiles. “Sorry, didn’t mean to steal her off on a dream vacation for a while if we’re supposed to be sharing.”

                Thank goodness Pidge laughs instead of taking the humor a little too seriously like he would be afraid someone like Hunk might. “It’s cool. Don’t do it again, though. It was sort of a pain how we couldn’t find you and all.”

                “I can imagine.” Lance chuckles, leaning against the wall and sighing pleasantly. Pidge eyes him suddenly and stops her petting to cross her arms, which is very counter-productive of bonding, but he doesn’t have much time to question it.

                “Saving the universe sort of sucks, huh?” She says, no malice in her voice but a definite challenge in the question. Lance feels like he’s being baited, so he only raises an eyebrow, because he’s been told enough to realize that it’s his job at least, “I mean, compared to farmer.”

                Something passes between their gazes, and Lance blinks a few times before he flits his eyes to Kaltenecker, who moos again but much softer. “What.” He really doesn’t know what to do with that one.

                Pidge laughs, “You said you thought you were a farmer. I thought it was funny at first but now I’m bummed out thinking about it because ever since Olkarion I realized I miss my Poppop’s garden and its always weird stuff that you don’t appreciate when you’re there about the places you miss.” Under her breath, she says, “What I wouldn’t give for a peanut.” Lance also doesn’t know what to do with that.

                Something clicks though, because Lance pushes off the wall to resume Kaltenecker’s petting for her. “You want to be a farmer too, genius?” He teases, nudging her in the side.

                “Yeah, a little.” She scoffs. Lance continues petting, and she watches him before she continues, uncrossing her arms to pet Kaltenecker’s other side.

                Lance decides to help create a little future. “If saving the universe is boring in ten years,” He decides, very diplomatically and officially so she knows he is very serious, “You should help me convince everyone to start a space ranch with me. We’ll open a farmer’s market stall on Earth, but we definitely grow everything in space.”

                She pretends to deliberate it for more than a second, but her face-splitting grin is sharp and shark-like, assuring Lance there wasn’t a second of hesitation in her agreement at his proposition. “Yeah, I’d be down. Do we abduct the cows?”

                “Um, no?” Lance snorts, “That would be stealing—”

                “Lance!”

                Both of them turn to the runway of the Red Lion, still open from where they had decided Kaltenecker needed a visit and now with Keith’s head just visible over the crest of the flooring. “Oh, Keith—” Lance says, somehow a little relieved or breathless sounding despite not being out of breath or in distress in the first place, “What’s up?”

                Pidge snorts. “Have fun on the Moon. I’m stickin’ with the cow for a while.”

                Lance blinks at Pidge before waving goodbye to her and jogging over to the runway to see what Keith wants. Keith gives a tiny smile up at him while he begins walking down, and they both say ‘hey’ at the same time and glance away. “We’re stopping for supplies.” Keith reports despite him knowing Lance probably heard it over the communications before they had even taken their landing. “We’ve got individual lists to make retrieval easier because we’re short on a lot of things between the castle explosion and the time we lost, but…uh. You’re coming with me.”

                It’s certainly no invitation but it feels like such a polite one with the way Keith glances at Lance from the corner of his eye, like he isn’t willing to lose him from his sight again, and Lance is happy to shrug and comply. “Whatever you say, boss man.” Something thrills him at the idea of Keith wanting to keep him close a while, though, and he had missed him while being cooped up with Shiro in the Red Lion, so he’s excited to wander around whatever a Swap Moon is and pick up groceries or whatever it is they’re doing. “What’s our objective?”

                Keith glances away to a data pad clutched in his hand, flitting his eyes across short and tight scrawl that Lance rushes forward to see because he realizes he can read it. “Did you write that?” He can’t help but blurt, grinning to himself and reaching to snatch it, “Hesalite Sheets, Deodorant, Juxbally Bearings, holy crow I have no idea what this stuff is.” He can’t keep the delight from his voice, looking at the alien-seeming words as they walk through what seems like a giant and hectic looking crowding of different types of ships and vehicles, but no matter how foreign he can still translate them and that counts for something.

                “You don’t know what deodorant is?” Keith snorts, grabbing at the data pad to snatch it from Lance’s hands again and raising his brows at the wounded noise Lance can’t help but make in return. “Most of the things on our list are going to be for Hunk and Coran’s new goo machine—”

                “Nasty.” Lance mumbles, tucking his hands into the pockets of Keith’s red jacket he’s wearing and watching Keith watch the action.

                “—but we still have to get basic stuff we lost from the castle, too. You don’t know what you lost, we guess, so get whatever you want within budget. It’s hard for us to get a barter around here.” Keith shrugs like it’s a reasonable offer, and Lance balks a little at him while he tucks away his screen and they continue walking in silence.

                The further they get from the lions and the closer they get to the actual hub and center of the market activity the more uncomfortable Lance becomes. Keith must sense it, because his glances to the side of Lance’s face become more frequent and lingering. Once they reach beyond the parked strange vehicles of every origin and variety, the swap moon is an explosion of activity, all of it alien and entirely bizarre to Lance. Keith seems to orient himself immediately, finding one of the items on their list and some kind of reusable shopping bag within the first couple of stalls to take advantage of, and Lance feels like he’ll lose him in the flood of activity in a moment of panic, so he latches onto his hand as they walk and Keith does nothing but squeeze it and keep his gaze determinately forward.

                Keith tries to point to stalls he thinks would interest Lance but a lot of it seems like it would cut into wasting time they’ve already lost and he doesn’t want to burden them in a short supply run when they’re already weeks delayed in their mission. He drags Lance to pause at a table filled with tubs and tubes of thick creams and perfumes and gestures towards them with a careful tilt of his head, and Lance politely gives them a cursory glance at Keith’s insistence before he shrugs and tries to insist Keith moves to look for the next item with him. Something seems hesitant in Keith’s gaze, and Lance wonders if Keith wants to stop himself because it would be an entirely different affair he wouldn’t mind standing still for, but Keith pushes on with him before he can question it further. They get their sheets of metal rolled up into little tubes in a way Lance doesn’t understand and it all goes into the reusable bag as well, they find the deodorant along the way, Keith explains that the ‘wln’ on the list stands for ‘whatever Lance needs’ and makes a face when Lance coos.

                It all feels very significant no matter how much Lance tries to pretend it doesn’t, and somewhere between passing Hunk and Romelle and comparing their lists very quickly in a fun competition and finding another stall that Keith nods at and looks meaningfully at Lance for him to enjoy, Lance finds something in him. He stops them between two stalls, at the corner of the one Keith is nudging them towards so they don’t burden the actual attendant, and he squeezes Keith’s hand to get his attention. Keith flits his eyes back immediately, his eyes so wide and imploring, and Lance takes a breath.

                Keith seems to suck his own in when Lance toes forward to crowd into his space, and Lance gives him a moment before pressing forward in what feels like the most natural seeming instinct of his in this moment, but Keith squishes a hand between them at Lance’s shoulder just before their lips can connect. Keith’s breath tumbles out clumsily as Lance flicks his eyes open to re-evaluate the situation, but Keith’s are closed. They’re frozen in their position before Keith seems to get his bearings and the hand on Lance’s shoulder squeezes, pressing Lance back slowly, an inch at a time, and Lance swallows.

                “You don’t—” It’s clear Keith can’t articulate what he wants to say to Lance as he finally looks at him again, nothing unkind in his gaze but something stinging in Lance’s nonetheless.

                Lance cuts him off before he can think of a better phrasing, dropping his other hand and wiping his sweaty palms on his shirt. “It’s fine.” He clears his throat, “It’s probably not great to do anything again until I can remember it all. Just sucks.” Something angry gnaws at him at his own words, so he turns away before Keith can realize how frustrated he is. Out of the corner of his eye, he can tell Keith has something else he wants to say, but he rushes on, “I’m going to uh…I saw a stand a little while ago that looked like it had buckets…I’ll check back with you guys later!” And he bolts.

                Keith calls his name twice while he runs off, but aliens part for him as he pushes through and his getaway doesn’t actually seem to be pursued. Belatedly, as he makes a few skidding turns in the dirt paths through the stalls and down the walkways in the narrow lanes, he realizes he should just make his way back to the lions before he forgets the way or gets too far or too lost, but he feels hot embarrassment plastered onto his face and wants to sort of curl up and hide away from everyone and take his frustrations out on the atmosphere.

                Stall attendants beckon to him as he reaches quieter alleys, but he tries not to pay attention to them, used to ignoring their goading from his time peddling milk daily while stranded. Allura had called the planet they left Ulvik, but Lance can’t recall any more information she had fed him politely over the communications while they were lifting regarding what he was leaving behind. He can’t help but think of the maroon eyes again suddenly, A virus works through you, regardless of how long it feels like it’s been and how far removed the virus is. In this moment and fit of frustration and weakness, it feels like he’ll be stuck looking through a glass dome to where he fits into this universe and forced to comply to what he can tell he sees. He thinks of his first helmet, shattered and still abandoned in the Red Lion. For a moment, he had entertained asking one of them to fix it for the sake of his uniform matching, but his armor hadn’t matched his lion anyway, and he doesn’t think it’s all that important to him in the big picture.

                Right then, with his face still hot, he wishes with all of his frustrations that he could just decipher, above all else, what he’s not understanding about his relationship with Keith as well. It’s not the most important concern by far, and there’s a million other things that seem to be happening in his head that might be slipping through his cracks that need more attention, but he clings to the shame of Keith’s hand pushing him away, and he needs to know why it matters so much that he confided something in Keith that Keith didn’t remember when Keith was the only thing Lance seemed to be able to—

                There’s a stall that’s selling snow globes, and Lance feels frozen in time. They’re like no snow globe he’s probably ever seen, maybe made of a million different sands and glitters from a million different planets and filled with different swirling liquids that make them move mysteriously when different patrons shake them and giggle like they understand, but Lance is transfixed by his incomprehension and his feet carry him to the middle of the tables to look around at the collection of them. There are larger ones that paint scenes and cost numbers he doesn’t need to be able to read to know are too high and there are tiny ones that he can fit a few of into his palm, but a majority of them are a standard size he knows he is familiar with in the souvenir world. The stall attendant smiles tightly at his awe, looking exhausted, and Lance pours his gaze into each one he passes, feeling something important swell into him.

                It breeches through his cracks when he hears a shatter, and he flinches. The stall attendant grumbles something alien, but Lance is frozen, eyes wide and transfixed on the puddle of water on the dusty ground and the shards that surround it. A knobby-looking alien child is trying to cry through an apology, but the attendant waves him away, passing him one of the tinier globes before he scurries off.

                Lance grapples at another snow globe, the closest to his hand, before he thinks of what he’s exactly doing, and the stall attendant eyes him warily. They can probably sense the off-beat of Lance’s heart rate or the escalating breath as he begins to heave, still watching the puddle as the shards are picked up quickly.

                It’s just before Lance can do anything drastic with his palm full of smooth glass that Keith bodily obstructs his vision. Lance flinches again, and Keith looks as though he’s been calling his name. “—nce. Don’t run off like that, I didn’t give you a comm.” He takes a breath and Lance does too, thinking he looks tired, but Keith looks down into Lance’s hand and sees the firm grip Lance has on the snow globe, “Did you want this?” Lance joins the gaze as Keith snatches it from him and shakes the thing. Instead of a simple sand or snow or glitter kicking up into the water, a metallic grey kicks off of the base of the globe to swirl into the top and make it look as if a thunderstorm is beginning in the dome.

                Keith looks impressed as he continues to stare at it, ignoring the attendant as they pass them, and Lance feels like he’s hyperventilating. “Keith.” He says lowly, feeling for another on the table and forcing his eyes to meet Keith’s when the other blinks away from the novelty. The second globe feels weightier in his palm but he pays no attention to that as he flips it and smacks it against the table as hard as he can. Keith flinches. The attendant yells something.

                “Lance.” Keith says very seriously, like he doesn’t quite know how to scold him for behaving like a toddler and breaking glassware right now, “What are you doing.”

                Lance ignores him, holding up the leaking snow globe and looking down at its cracked surface. It’s not completely shattered, the table cloths on the displays preventing too hard of an impact, but the damage is enough of an example. “This is what happened.” Lance says, desperately trying to ignore the growing tightness in his head and the heat behind it.

                The attendant yells something again, and Keith doesn’t look at them as he thrusts a handful of mysterious bills in their direction and he drags Lance out of the stall by his forearm. “Explain.” He says, but Lance can’t, shaking his head and clutching his temple with his free hand. Distantly, he feels like he hears Red roar, and Keith pauses in his steps before dragging Lance faster.

                “We have to—” Lance tries, wanting to stop them in their tracks to find another solid surface very fast to explain in a clear way to Keith what he is trying to display with this stupid leaking snow globe, “Allura and her stupid—God, it’s going to hurt.” Keith retrieves a small device from his pocket and presses a button, growling as it flashes a cool color. Lance whines, and Keith’s grip on him becomes bruising.

                “We’re not far from where Coran had a hauling pod rented, hopefully he’s still nearby, hold on.” Keith practically snarls, shoving through crowds and barely glancing back as he bowls people over. Lance can feel himself tucking in half at the waist the further they go, the need to curl smaller and smaller and grip his head firmer becoming stronger, but he can’t become dead weight to Keith before he has the chance to explain what he needs them to do because now that he knows it’s suddenly, inexplicably unbearable to feel so close to the fissures in the barriers in his mind but he can’t stay away even if he tries.

                “Mom!” Keith screams, thrusting a hand up through the crowd and dragging Lance through faster to run into Krolia, “Shiro—Allura, no, we need Allura, where did they take the pod?” Krolia blinks down at her son, then at Lance in his condition and casts a quick and wary glance around. She had been stood calmly next to a weapons stall, a long and curved blade in her hand that she gently sets down as she scans.

                She bats Keith’s hand away without asking, dragging Lance into her arms without a twitch of exertion and nodding across the alleys. “Princess Allura and Coran are preparing to drive off to the lions, go catch them, Keith.” And Keith shoots off like a speeder, shoving people and jumping over alien animals and children. Krolia runs with Lance not far behind, but Keith hits the side of the pod and slams his hands down into its hull loudly just seconds before its blasters are ready to incinerate from their proximity.

                It drops like a stone at the sudden disturbance, Coran a competent pilot enough to sense the commotion, and Allura pokes her head out from the passenger’s side as the helm screen drops to blink warily down at Keith. Her gaze fixes to become sharp and serious as soon as Lance is in view. “What happened?” She moves over so Krolia can crowd into the pod, and Keith scrambles in as well, “Coran, begin again, we should return to the lions at once.”

                Lance tries to explain for a second what he’s realized, but he can only thrust the snow globe out to Allura and look at her imploringly through his hooded eyes, knowing he looks crazy but having to settle for so. She blinks down at the offering, its drippings making its way to her thigh, and Krolia sets him down properly so he can sit in the very cramped space between the five of them. “He said that’s what happened.” Keith supplies when Lance doesn’t, his chest heaving from some bizarre adrenaline rush.

                Allura blinks at him again, then at the snow globe, and when she says nothing Lance hisses in frustration and smashes it on the dash of the pod, startling the rest of its inhabitants. “You have to.” He groans, rocking forward to bury his head in his knees and his hands in his hair. Someone touches his shoulder delicately, then another hand does his back much less so to rub up and down. The shards of glass and water pool at his feet, and he feels like he’s going to throw up onto them as well but at least it’s already a mess.

                Coran muses very quietly, “Nasty stuff, that Crik’stigloh magic. Not to worry, number three, we’ll have you right as a Tyvil soon enough.” Lance nods and chokes very quietly, and the rest of the short trip is only sounded by his heaving into his own lap.

                When Keith pops out of the helm first, Hunk and Romelle wave their lists in victory but are immediately silenced by Krolia hefting Lance out of the pod as well. They settle him below the Red Lion’s shadow, which he is grateful for, and he manages to look Keith in the eye and obtain some strength with her presence. “Do not stop no matter how much I scream.” He grits out, panting as he pushes at the barrier in his own mind forcibly and watching Keith’s eyes widen and his brows pinch. Lance fixes Allura with the same look to let her know the message is for her as well, and her eyes harden as she nods.

                Her hands glow as she crouches, and Lance’s flinch is immediate, but they descend on him gently to press him into the soft and dusty dirt below and when she reaches his temples he receives the false respite of her cool wash of presence. It’s interrupted immediately when she hits his barrier as well, and he screws his eyes shut and screams, the Red Lion roaring above him. He can feel the barrier fracturing and splintering where there were only seams before, and he swears at himself for not realizing it before but Allura is pushing harder and his mind is a wash of colors before everything seems to go white in both noise and mind.

                Lance thinks the thing he misses the most about the castle is the stupid trinkets he had lined up on his dresser, but it’s a bad thing to admit in the middle of a war, and it’s hard to explain to his friends. They had so little time to grab everything and he had barely made it to his room in the first place, and it was only after the Yellow Lion was swallowing a pressurized diamond that once was the Castle of Lions that Lance thought about the keychains or the pin cushions or the snow globes he had picked up after alien diplomatic missions, thinking of home.

                He thinks of his mom, Cuban born and Cuban raised and never setting foot in a place that was ever going to see an ounce of snow in her life, collecting little glittery glass domes for the sake of irony. The way she insisted on getting a new one every time they took a vacation or how she said it was all she wanted when Lance went on field trips and asked her what he should bring from the souvenir shop. They’re shoved on a little shelf in the living room in his childhood home that grew to become three little shelves of a collection over the years, and when Lance returns he’s going to pride himself in having given her the coolest ones because all of his will be from wild alien space places and he’ll also be alive and get to say that to her, and that’ll be really cool.

                But he forgot to grab them somewhere between shoving Kaltenecker up into the Red Lion and passing Keith’s room and thinking that idiot probably doesn’t even think he’d miss it, does he? So he ends up with a stolen jacket at the last minute and a hodgepodge of stuff and a cow but the clock is ticking down and he doesn’t think about his keychains and fridge magnets and snow globes until the castle is gone.

                “It was my mom.” Lance whispers when the dam breaks and everything fades. He opens his eyes to Allura’s above him, familiar as ever and filled to the brim with tears. They still glow faintly, but the brightness is dimming in them.

                “Thank you, Lance.” She says as he closes his eyes again.

                Waking up after unconsciousness is much nicer after being tucked in, Lance decides. He’s in the underbelly of Red, and a stiff green jacket he knows is his is folded neatly and shoved beneath his ear. As soon as he shifts, another body stirs to his side, and then a few more follow suit in the rustling.

                “Please be okay.” Hunk murmurs, mostly to himself, and when Lance slowly pushes himself up to look at them better he sees his best friend wringing his hands and the group of them in various states of unrest along the wall Lance is also tucked against. When Lance and Hunk’s eyes meet, Hunk smiles something watery and hesitant, and Lance beams back enough to reduce Hunk instantly to tears.

                There’s not a lot of dry eyes that can withstand the reunion, Lance smiling so brightly as he takes in all the truly familiar faces and stands despite his sore knees to help each of his friends up to give him firm hugs and reassurances to his absence. They look more haunted than he would have recognized before, but he knows that now and he knows the gaze will fall with his recovery, at least a little, so he tries not to worry about what effect this little stint of his has had on their team as a whole. Pidge and Hunk clutch at him despite how kind they had been and how well they had shown they were contained in their distress for Lance’s state, and Lance tries to imagine how it must have looked to be an outsider to see Allura’s healing, but he can’t get out of his own head in imagining the flood of memories surging back into himself. Beyond the abyss of whiteness and the deafening screams from Red and himself, he’s not sure how it would have looked. Probably embarrassing, him panting and writhing on the dirt like an earthworm.

                Allura hugs him next, sighing and patting him gently between the shoulder blades despite the way her strong arms squeeze around him almost vice-like. She’s hopelessly unaware of her own strength, and when she pulls away she looks like she’s still unsure of something, but Lance cuts her off. “It’s all there. I can feel it.” And he can, roving his connections to the lions as best he can and feeling Red purr in his mind. He can feel his steadfast tether to Voltron again, can recall some of the most potent of his last few years, and maybe they’ll hit some snags later but he can tell the globe has been shattered and he’s been pooled again, and he’s more than relieved enough to leave it at that when everything feels so natural for the first time since waking up after his crash in the forest. Allura nods, satisfied and relieved.

                He hugs Shiro with a strength he musters from deep in him not from his time as a paladin, but from what he learned after his memory loss. Shiro hugs back with a warm chuckle and tells him how good it is to see him again. Coran joins this hug that becomes a group hug when Hunk says he wants seconds, and Lance thinks a few of them are crying again but he’s so glad to be back and to see everyone see him back that no matter what he’s gone through he wants to enjoy these few moments while they last. The hug disperses only by a foot or so and Romelle offers Lance a polite smile from the outside, jumping when he laughs and drags her into it.

                It only ends fully when Kaltenecker moos, and the group seems to collectively stir and gain their bearings, because Lance asks, “Where’s Keith?” and Pidge laughs.

                “You just recovered from a month of memory loss.” Hunk boos, “Priorities. He went for a walk with his mom and his dog.” Delicately, he backs away from the group hug and sniffles while he wipes his tears, bending to pick up the Lance’s jacket and shake it out for him. “Here. We found the right one for you in the cockpit.”

                Lance can feel heat on his face and has the decency to splutter and feel like he should explain himself, but he’s spent the last while being entirely too incriminatingly comfortable around Keith on instinct alone to justify his actions. He takes his jacket and shoves his arms into it hurriedly, nodding. “Thanks, guys. Thank you for everything.” Coran opens his mouth, a gleam in his eyes that spells a long-winded disaster, but Lance continues, “I mean it. We’re burning a lot of time and man I just…really. Thanks. I’m going to go find Mullet and tell him we’re clear to get the heck out of here.”

                “Uh,” Pidge starts, “Are you sure you don’t want to at least, like, eat or something. You’ve been out for a while.” Lance turns away and ignores her, shaking his head so they know he’s as serious as can be and bolting for Red’s lowering runway. He feels such a lurch of guilt when he thinks about their lost time that he has to pause once he makes his way down, hearing the murmurs of his team behind him, but he presses on in favor of running off between where they’re all parked to find the Black Lion among them.

                “Keith!” He screeches at the top of his lungs from the distance. He can see a dark head whip from the Black Lion’s own lowered runway, and Lance starts sprinting over before Keith even thinks about approaching. He seems frozen in place, anyway. Beside his still body, his mother calmly walks past him and continues down the walkway while ignoring Lance’s approach, walking away from the lion while Lance zooms towards it.          

                He forgets to slow the closer he gets, accidentally barreling straight into Keith, who seems too shocked to remember to gripe about it and falls over with the less-than-conventional attack method. They land in a heap on the tilted ramp and Lance says, while admittedly out of breath, “I’m all cool now so we’re never going to talk about this for the rest of my life. Lift off is in like ten minutes.”

                “You don’t get to decide lift offs.” Keith says immediately, dazed seeming and settling his hands on Lance’s waist to shove him off probably but leaving them there because Lance has forgotten to roll off of him in their heap. “How’s your head?”

                “Clear.” Lance hums, perking up to look down at Keith properly and think about all their interactions for what they were instead of how his memory-deprived brain was interpreting them. He grins, “Miss me?”

                Keith groans, but his response isn’t what Lance expects, an emphatic and resolute, “Yes.” He wraps his hands around Lance’s waist properly to bear him down into a lazy hug at their angle, and Lance feels all the air escape his lungs as he’s captured. As soon as the touch comes, it’s gone, and Keith seems to get his bearings and drops himself entirely from Lance—which seems ridiculous because he had just enforced how much Lance was truly and fully draped on him. “Glad to have you back.” Keith says honestly, a little quietly, and without looking at Lance at all.

                Lance peers down, but Keith looks upwards and away. Their faces are close, and Lance can feel his own heat again with their proximity alone. “Mmhm.” He can’t help but goad, “I’m proud of you all for hunting me down so well. Only took you a million and a half days, thanks for that from Official Lance, who is different from Memory Addled Lance.” Keith snorts under him, turning his face, and Lance rolls off before their noses can brush because it’s dangerous territory they’re heading into that he can’t help but be nervous approaching. “So,” He clears his throat, “You get your jacket back?”

                There’s a pause as Keith sits up, but he tsks and stands, offering a hand to Lance. “Yeah, why did Red have it?”

                “Uh, I did, you’re welcome.” He takes the hand and follows Keith into the Black Lion’s underbelly, where he heads towards one of her back workstations and roots through a box suddenly, leaving Lance feeling awkward. From within it he pulls the reusable shopping bag they had been walking around with earlier, and Lance feels a fondness in him swell despite himself, unable to stop as he over-explains, “I grabbed it before the castle went down because I knew you would forget.”

                Keith sends him a piercing gaze he can’t decipher, one hand buried in the bag, and they hold each other’s eyes for a long and still silence as Lance’s words linger. When Keith moves again, it’s to pull a snow globe from within the bag with a very serious look to his face, and Lance almost laughs, but then he offers it with a flick of the wrist that sends the metallic dust inside into a tizzy, throwing them into storm cloud-like shapes and creating the effect of a storm within the globe itself.

                “Oh.” Lance says in wonder despite having seen it before. In his defense, it was a very compromising situation, and he couldn’t truly appreciate it, “We didn’t steal this, right? No, you paid for the two…” He grabs it from Keith, who sets the bag down again and watches Lance’s reaction blatantly.

                “You’re not going to have nightmares if I say this is yours, right?” Keith asks warily, “Like, you’re not going to associate this with your smashing that snow globe and dry heaving until we had to break your brain or whatever Allura did?” It sounds like a joke, but it comes out too soft, and Lance peeks up at Keith once the storm clouds subside to see his arms crossed tightly over his chest and his face pensive.

                Lance tries to hide his smile. “I mean, I wasn’t, but now…” Keith’s shoulders tick up, and Lance laughs. He shakes the globe again and watches the clouds before he gets into another serious matter he knows he wants to head with Keith before they move out. “Hey, really, though,” He tries to make it sound casual but nothing ever comes out that way when he needs Keith to understand something, “When I was talking to you by the fire—”

                “You said I was your confidant.” Keith says briskly, with absolute clarity and laser focus.

                “—well,” He considers lying, “yeah, and I just want you to know that…you are, in a lot of ways, but it wasn’t a super great time, obviously, so uhh…pass.”

                Keith blinks a moment before his entire face scrunches up, and Lance tries not to laugh again. “You can’t pass, we’re the only ones in this conversation and you didn’t even finish your thought!”

                He thinks about his words, flipping them over and over and over desperately trying to find a way to make them less of an admission that he’s some sort of faker or some sort of blow to the team without having to lie. Finally, he settles on admitting, “Before I had all my memories back, doy, I was sort of…I guess I was riding on being brutally honest about my instincts and what I had on all of you. I didn’t lie about anything, but…” Keith’s eyebrows furrow deeper, but he doesn’t look as irritated as he does confused, which is a blessing, “I just don’t know if I would have said some of the stuff I did.” He shakes the globe again and again, staring down at it, “It’s wasn’t really fair of me to dump that on you.”

                Keith doesn’t say anything for a minute, but when he does it sure is a whopper, “What the fuck did you confide in me?”

                Lance bristles immediately, his shoulders squaring defensively and his body automatically trying to turn himself away. “I told you—” He tries to fight the urge to deflect again, to run off from this because Keith should already know regardless of whether or not he remembers, “When we talked…after we got Shiro back, but it wasn’t him and we didn’t know that yet. After you had been flying the Black Lion.” It seems so difficult and complicated to explain now, and the words leave him in heavy layers, but Keith is staring at him with so wide and imploring eyes that he can’t help but continue to explain until he gets it. “Before you left for the Blade. I told you we had too many pilots.” Keith does.

                He feels stiff in his own body when Keith speaks again, something working in his jaw before he seems to be able to figure out his words. Lance wonders if this will hurt them—if this will put something delicate on an already fragile series of events and create a complication by forcing Keith to realize how much that moment meant to Lance when it was probably so throwaway to him in the series of chaos. “I didn’t—”

                “Realize. I know.” Lance cuts him off, “That’s why I wanted to let you know not to worry about it. Actual Lance knows not to force emotional intimacy down a wild Keith’s throat, don’t worry, buddy.” He turns away finally, looking up to the ceiling and shaking the globe again for the sake of it. “We should get ready for lift off, we’re wasting a lot of time and we can’t really afford to blow any more.” He can’t help the long sigh that escapes him at the thought, knowing their final destination and their giant detour provided only by one unlucky strike to one bad pilot.

                Keith’s stern voice cuts off his thoughts before he can reach even halfway to the catwalk again, though, careful in its question, “Does that still bother you? Did you ever tell anyone else?”

                “Why wou—” Lance immediately laughs but freezes when he glances back at the look Keith is pouring into him. The rest of the mirth dies on his throat, and he tries to express some form of reassurance, but he knows Keith isn’t going to understand as soon as it forms, “I didn’t.” He can’t lie to him because something in him refuses to, “I didn’t think they would get it.”

                “I would?” Keith asks it carefully, his voice much gentler than Lance thinks he’s ever heard him say anything, and his boots are noisy as he approaches Lance’s side again.

                Lance can’t help but snort a little. “I think we get each other a lot more than we let on sometimes.” He fixates on the globe in his hand one more before meeting Keith’s eyes again with a determination, thinking back on the last few days. Softer, he says, “I missed you, too, Mullet. Even if I didn’t really know what I was missing. I know now and that’s twice as embarrassing.” Keith shoves a hand onto his shoulder, in no way gentle about the gesture but his face looking both disastrously curious and fond, “What, is that so surprising?”

                “Your place on this team is never up for debate.” Keith says with no ounce to budge on his opinion, “Even if you hadn’t gone down with the Red Lion we would tear through this galaxy and the next looking for you no matter how long it took, don’t forget that.” In his wide eyes, despite the upturn of his brows making them gooey and gentle looking, there’s a sort of stone look to them that makes Lance believe if he even began the idea of protesting Keith would have a field day, so he realizes Keith is trying to make up for the dissatisfying assurances he had bailed from in the first place so long ago. When Lance fully realizes and tries to think of a way to assure Keith this is unnecessary, Keith leans forward and suddenly, they’re kissing.

                Somehow, it’s everything he had been enchanted by Keith for at the marketplace amplified by his determination for intimacy in this moment, and Lance melts immediately despite how uncalled for the gesture is. They meld against one another easily, Keith’s hands finding Lance’s waist to pull them closer and Lance clutching at the globe so it doesn’t fall from his sweaty and shaky hands despite that meaning it has to press uncomfortably between them. Keith’s lips are soft despite how he seems like the type of person who would not know what lip balm even is, and Lance nips at one too abruptly because it drives Keith to glide a hand to that special place on his shoulder and press him away again.

                Lance feels a fire in his bones. “Uh.” He says because Keith’s eyes are closed like he is in agony or bliss or some kind of unreadable emotion Lance hasn’t decided on yet at their current adventure. Between them, a storm still brews, and Keith takes a deep breath. Before he can stop himself, Lance asks, “Did you mean to do that?”

                Keith flicks his eyes open a fraction, letting his hooded gaze answer Lance as he tugs him in again. It’s more fervent this time, with a hunger Lance can’t describe that gnaws at him while he wrenches his only free hand into the front of Keith’s shirt and Keith grunts. When they break apart so Keith can take a breath, he grunts, “You said you were telling the truth,” before diving back in again, and Lance has to admit he has him there.

                Nothing lasts when it comes to their small and cherished moments, though, because as soon as Lance sinks a hand into Keith’s dark tresses (just as soft as they look), Krolia is ascending the catwalk and calling Keith’s name. “The team is mobilized,” She’s saying as Keith paws at his waist still, his grip firm enough to let Lance know he’s reluctant to remove it, “I believe the Red Paladin got them to arrange themselves as soon as he woke up. Are you ready for departure? If we stay any longer we’re going to get a parking ticket.” She seems unaffected by their proximity as she reaches the top of the platform, staring directly at Keith and raising her brows when it takes him a dragging moment for him to straighten his shoulders properly.

                “We’ll be ready in a few minutes.” Keith says quietly and carefully, “Can you find—”

                “The pup?” Krolia finishes, seeming amused and walking down again while she whistles.

                Lance can feel his face heating steadily but as he looks to Keith’s he knows he’s not alone. His is alight with color. “Your mom’s fun. Bold of you to assume I wanted to make out just because Untrustworthy No Filter Lance thought you were hot and nice or my soulmate or something, though.”

                Keith tenses under his palm, and Lance reels him back in before he can over-think it. “It’s not wrong, but still pretty bold of you.”

                “You thought I was your soulmate?” Keith wins the war as their lips seal again, and Lance shoves him off to splutter.

                “Or something!” But Keith is laughing too hard to reason with and he knows what he heard, capturing just one more kiss before Krolia teleports in with Keith’s crazy space wolf and ruins their privacy once more. The wolf is friendly enough to jump and lick at Lance before it teleports off somewhere else again, though Keith seems unconcerned, and Lance backs towards the runway one last time knowing everything’s righted itself at least for now and they can finally make their way properly to Olkarion.

                Keith calls his name before he turns fully, and they give each other stupid little shy waves as they disappear from one another’s view. In Lance’s still sweaty hand he has the snow globe, which he shakes and watches the storm clouds form and twirl in, and he thinks that it might be one of the coolest he’s gotten so far, but he’ll find an even cooler one for his mom at some other moon or planet somewhere. For now, this can just be the first of his and Keith’s collection or something. That sounds really nice.