Work Text:
The ancient ruins crashed down as the team sprinted to safety. Falling timbers and masonry stones the size of cars cascaded to the ground with a roar and a cloud of flying dust. Lance stumbled, Pidge a dead weight across his shoulders, and Keith yanked him along. Hunk and Shiro, who’d been exploring deeper inside the complex, were in the rear, but safely out of the splash zone.
The noise of the collapse continued for some time after the building had fallen; echoes rebounded through the thick woods and rang in everyone’s ears as a testament to how close they’d come to certain death.
“Everyone, sound off,” Shiro ordered, sounding breathless.
“I’m here.” Hunk sat down and put his head in his hands. Lance could see he was shaking -- a panic attack, no doubt, considering he himself was moments from panicking. But even as he took a step toward his friend, holding out a calming hand, he froze.
Red, all over his gauntlet.
Oh, no. No.
He fell to his knees, easing Pidge down from his shoulder as gently as he could. Her face was pale behind her helmet’s bluish visor, and the blood oh Dios the blood was everywhere, smeared across her chestplate, darkening her undersuit, bubbling up bright cherry red when Lance pressed his hand to her side.
“HELP!” he screamed, though the others had already noticed his shock and Shiro was kneeling trying to hold in Pidge’s blood with his own hands.
Lance couldn’t move, his whole body shaking as he extended a hand to help, then pulled it back to stare at the crimson already staining his glove. There was too much going on, and too little. Too little to distract from the fact that Pidge wasn’t moving and Shiro and Keith were yelling orders and Hunk still wasn’t moving either, and Lance himself was covered in a dozen cuts and bruises and his legs were sore but none of that mattered because Pidge was... Pidge, Katie, his teammate, Pidge was --
Suddenly Keith was in his face, wild hair and wilder eyes, shaking him. Lance fought back with clumsy strength and braced himself on the other man’s shoulders.
“-- help or not? We need you! Snap out of it!” Keith was talking fast and Lance realized that the Red Paladin was just as scared, just as ignorant of what to do to make things right.
“Yeah,” he said at last through lips that were strangely cold. “Yeah, I’m okay. What do you need?”
“Come help with the buckles.” Unlike Keith’s, Shiro’s voice got calmer when he was scared. It was so incredibly calm right now, slow and steady like he was talking to frightened children. But it made it easy for Lance to obey. Nice and simple, right? Undo some buckles. Take off Pidge’s pauldrons and chestplate. Ignore whatever the hell is going on near her stomach. Back off and let Keith take over when your hands shake too badly to get her belt off.
Finally she was laid out in just her black suit and Shiro started working on that as well -- right hand glued to her side while his left fumbled with the zipper under her chin.
“No,” Hunk said, standing up shakily and staring with horror at the scene before him. “No, what are you doing to her? Leave her alone!”
“Shut up, Hunk!” Keith snapped. “We gotta save her, however we can.”
Shiro glanced up, face blank except for his too-tight mouth and his eyes that didn’t have any emotion at all. “Hunk, go find water. Run it through the filter on your suit and make it clean. We’ll need a lot.”
“What --”
“Hunk. Go.”
Lance watched him stumble off into the trees with a sense of envy. Why was he the one left here? Would anyone notice if he just --
“Lance!” Keith grabbed his shoulder and brought him crashing back to the present. “We still need you here. Stay focused!”
He stared at Pidge. Her undersuit was unzipped all the way to her waist, exposing too much skin. Too much blood. Somehow his eye caught on her bralette, white cotton with little green turtles, slightly faded and childish. It was something he should never have seen. Yet he stayed staring at it, aware he was being a creep as the turtles grinned back with their goofy faces, because it was easier to be a creep than it was to --
“Hold her legs. Lance, hold her legs.”
He automatically moved to obey Keith’s order, straddling her legs and putting his hands on her hips, all without blinking. If only he could just fade from existence, this would be okay. This wouldn’t even be happening.
His line of focus on the turtles was broken when Pidge’s body shifted slightly. Keith settled his hands on her shoulders and made sure his grip was firm before looking to Shiro for the next move. Following his line of sight, Lance finally looked up to see their leader, his face compressed into an ugly grimace as his right hand began to flare purple.
Finally something clicked in Lance’s foggy mind as Shiro started to remove his left hand from the wound. They were going to hurt Pidge even more than she already was. They were going to hurt her, and Lance was going to help them.
“You’re going to burn her,” he said. There ought to have been outrage in his tone but everything was flat.
“Yes,” Shiro replied just as blankly. “I can’t think of any other option.” His voice had gone beyond calm, beyond scared, into simply nothing, and that was even more terrifying. Shiro was pale and sweaty, scar standing out horribly against the sallowness of his skin, and Lance saw himself reflected in his eyes. It was the same look as Lance had, as Keith was trying to hide -- the desperate need to drop everything and run into the woods and not think, not think, not look back.
But it only lasted for a moment before Shiro gathered himself, nodded at the two to hold steady, lined up his prosthetic with the wound, and pressed his hand down.
Pidge awoke screaming.
Her legs kicked wildly but Lance fought back, using his whole weight to hold her down while Shiro worked. The air stank of burning. There was nowhere safe to look so he closed his eyes and ignored the screams as best he could until Pidge abruptly fell limp, sobbing.
Lance dared to peek an eye at Shiro and saw him sitting down, arm dormant again, and holding a hand over his mouth.
“You can move now,” Keith said quietly and once again Lance obeyed. He shifted to the side and finally looked down at the livid pink burn on Pidge’s abdomen. The wound was a long stripe, blistered skin near the surface and shades of dark red and black farther in. He didn’t look very closely.
“Is she... are you--” Lance’s gaze moved up to her teary face, her eyes tightly closed as her head rested on Keith’s thighs. Pidge’s hands were clenched into fists but she hadn’t moved her arms from where Keith had pinned them to the ground.
“Here, I’ve got a tissue,” Lance said. It was idiotic, thinking a tissue would help the situation any, but it was all he could think of. He needed to feel that there was some sort of normalcy to all this. Tearing off his bloody gloves, he grabbed a handkerchief out of his belt pack and knelt next to Keith. “Pidge?” he asked softly. When there was no answer but whimpering, he dabbed at her face and cleaned her up the best he could.
At last Pidge relaxed even further, noises quieting as she returned to merciful unconsciousness. Her eyes hadn’t even opened once. That scared Lance more than anything. When was the last time he’d seen her and she’d seen him? This morning at briefing? Last night playing cards? That couldn’t be the last time he ever saw her; he couldn’t even remember the moment clearly!
“It’ll be okay.” The reassurance came from Keith, of all people. Lance met his gaze and felt tears sting his own eyes for the first time. “Shiro knows what he’s doing. She’ll be fine. We’ll get her back to the Castle and into a healing pod, and this will all be just a bad dream for her.”
“Yeah.” It was easy to nod and agree automatically. “Of course. She’ll be okay.”
“Exactly. I’m gonna go find Hunk, then we’ll head back to the Lions.” Carefully, Keith slipped his legs out from under Pidge’s head and laid her out on the thick moss. Lance stayed where he was; he waited until Keith had left and Shiro was gathering up Pidge’s armor before reaching out and holding her hand.
Yeah, she’d get a scar and some new nightmares, but she’d be fine. She didn’t have to watch it happen, after all.
Lance wondered how long it would be before he could fill the blankness inside his head with something other than her blood and her screams.
----