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Lance couldn’t stand waiting fights out.
It didn’t happen very often, but sometimes Shiro and Allura’s tactics required that he take shelter and stay out of the battle until a certain point in the plans. When that happened, he waited impatiently, anxious to pull out his bayard and protect his team. Sometimes he pulled a Keith and joined the fight too soon, but he usually managed to follow orders and stay back until he was needed.
It was painful, but he could handle it—when it was part of the plan. But when it wasn’t part of the plan? When he was forced into it by injury, or by some unfortunate turn of events that trapped him away from the action? That was just pure torture.
It was a little more bearable when he wasn’t alone, though. Especially when he was with Pidge.
Lance groaned, pressing his hand to his stomach to try and slow the bleeding. He wasn't losing blood fast enough to feel light-headed yet, but he was definitely getting there. He got there every time he looked down at the crimson stain on his suit, in fact.
They’d been forcing their way into a Galra base, fighting through the halls towards the center. Never a great strategy, but they’d thought they could get away with it when raiding a small base like this. But he’d been hit as soon as they got to the main corridor. Pidge had pulled him into a side hallway to escape the heavy fire, then led him down a series of twisting passages into a small, empty room. Her map said they were behind the Galra’s main line of defense, which Lance insisted was the perfect opportunity to catch them by surprise, but Pidge was uncharacteristically hesitant to rejoin the battle.
“Pidge, we really should—”
“No, I need to take care of this first,” she's insisted. She pulled supplies out of her belt and wrapped his stomach with bandages, her hands working carefully and quickly. The medicine she’d dabbed around the wound squeezed out of the edges of the bandage as she applied pressure.
“Where’d you learn this?” he asked in surprise. Pidge had never shown any interest or aptitude for medicine before.
“Huh?” She looked up briefly, then glanced away as if she couldn’t bear to hold eye contact. “Just some stuff I read online. I fall down rabbit holes easily.”
He doubted she could learn to clean and bandage a wound this well from just reading a few articles, but she clearly didn’t want to talk about it, so he didn’t press her.
She bit her lip as she worked, furrowing her brow. “Quiznack, this wasn’t supposed to happen this time!” she muttered to herself.
“What?”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “I knew I should’ve had Allura redesign the suits with carbon nanofibers—it just didn’t work last time, and besides, this was supposed to—”
“Pidge, what are you talking about?”
Again, she didn’t meet his eyes. “It’s insanely complicated.” She secured the bandage. “Probably better if you don’t know. Just—” She rubbed her eyes and stared at him for a while, her expression unreadable. And he could normally read all her expressions. Finally, she sighed and handed him a vial with a murky brown liquid. Then she pulled away, curling up against the wall and turning on her wrist computer, focusing with her usual obsessive determination on the light in front of her. “Trust me, it’ll just be worse if I tell you. Drink that.”
As confused as he was, that wasn’t confusing. Trusting her would always be easy. He swallowed the contents of the vial—the liquid was bitter and stung his throat, leaving his mouth feeling dry. Once he’d choked it down, he leaned against the wall, watching her.
Normally she smiled when she worked—even in the heat of battle. She didn’t smile constantly, but often she’d find something in her calculations or code that made her lips curve upwards briefly. Sometimes she even let out a small chuckle. But she didn’t do that now. Instead, her frown deepened with every swipe of her fingers.
The screen she was panning through displayed an extensive flowchart with boxes of dense text connected with complicated squiggling arrows. A lot of the text was written in math formulas, jargon he didn’t understand, or computer code. But he could make out a few words.
Carbon nanofibers. Wound. Shelter. T-minus. Threat. Medicine. Confession.
Death.
The last word showed up in every box.
“Pidge, are you OK?”
It was a stupid question. She was trembling as she scrolled frantically through the web of boxes, dragging them around with her finger and entering data.
“Nope,” she said in a tight voice. But she didn’t elaborate, and instead created a new box and entered, No CNFs, wound & shelter = true. Time delay: fifteen doboshes (no result yet). T minus 398.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing, everything’s fine.” She turned to him. “Is the wound feeling better? Does your head hurt at all? What did you eat for breakfast, again?”
“What?”
“I need you to answer the questions, Lance, please.”
He couldn’t say no to her when she looked so desperate. “The wound’s improving, I don’t have a headache, and I had some of Hunk’s pancake-flavored food goo. I’m also wearing red underwear with pink fireworks on them and I have some old song from the eighties stuck in my head, since that information seems just as useful as what I ate for breakfast.” She didn’t even crack a smile at the lame joke, which was probably the most concerning thing she’d done so far. “Pidge, what’s going on?”
“Stuff. You don’t need to worry.” She entered his answers into the text box, then pulled up a window on the side where she quickly adjusted variable values in an equation. A graph above the equation warped, the curve of the line shooting upwards. Pidge swore and quickly adjusted the values.
She’d been acting weird the past four days—quiet, distracted, anxious—but this was surreal. Asking what he’d had for breakfast? Not taking the opportunity to explain one of her projects? And what was with the medical aid?
He grabbed her shoulders. “Pidge, tell me what’s wrong.”
“I really don’t think that’s—”
“Please, Pidge. I want to help.”
She screwed up her face in frustration, then burst out, “You died, Lance.”
What?
“Really? Well, I’m breathing pretty well for a dead person,” he said with a smile.
“N-no, you died in an alternate timeline. To simplify the complex multi-level quantum physics and relativity I had to play with, I time-traveled back to save you. To give myself another chance to save you.” She laughed ruefully. “Turns out Everett’s right and Copenhagen’s wrong. Parallel universes from time splits are scientifically vali—” She saw his confusion and sighed. “The point is, I’m from the future. I came back to keep you from dying.”
“Oh.” What do you say to that? How do you— “So you’ve seen me die.”
She squeezed her eyes closed and nodded. “And I’m not letting it happen again.”
“I fully believe that,” he smiled.
She winced, grabbing at her messy hair with a tight fist. “Oh quiznack, please don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true! Thanks for giving me a second chance to live,” he winked.
He’d misjudged the weight of the situation, because she looked like she was about to cry. She wasn’t, obviously, because she didn’t cry, but she looked pretty close. “Second? Lance, this is my twenty thousand, two hundred and fifty-fourth try.”
His eyes widened. “You—you’ve s-seen me die—”
“Twenty thousand, two hundred and fifty-three times. Yep.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I keep trying to . . . to find the right combination of events that will save you, but nothing works.”
“And you still keep coming back?”
“I’ll keep coming back until you survive,” she said firmly. The absolute conviction in her voice made it impossible to doubt her.
“Pidge, twenty thousand whatever . . . that’s . . . you came back four days ago?”
“You could tell?”
“You’ve been acting strange. So, wait. Four days times twenty thousand whatever attempts is . . .”
“221 years, approximately,” she said.
His eyes widened. “T-two hundred and twenty-one years—”
“Does it show?” She raised an eyebrow. “It’s just my consciousness that gets transported back, so even though I’m 236 years old mentally, all you see is a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“And you’ve done all that . . .” He swallowed. “For me.”
It was unimaginable. She was a driven and stubborn person, he knew that, but that kind of determination—to save him—was nearly incomprehensible.
It must’ve been torture, seeing him die thousands of times, living hundreds of years to save his pathetic life. How could she stand it? How was she willing to go through that? She could’ve just given up, settling down in some reality and dealing with the loss. No one would’ve known she gave up, and it would’ve been justified.
“Why?”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I can’t lose you, Lance. And speaking of which, there’s some planning I need to do if you’re going to survive the next few minutes.”
The next few minutes. If you’re going to survive the next few minutes.
Oh quiznack, he thought. I’m going to die.
That knowledge drowned everything else out, deafening his thoughts, making it impossible for him to process anything. The pain of a knife in his chest, making it hard to breathe. A rock in his throat, so he couldn’t speak. Ears arching from the blood rushing past them and the tension from his clenched jaw. Head pounding, heart trembling, and in his mind, that one echoing phrase. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to—
No, no. Pidge is here. She can save me.
He grasped onto that thought, clinging to it so he wouldn’t be washed away by the crashing waves of his mind. He focused on it, trying to think of anything except for that insistent, pounding, I’m going to die I’m going to die I’mgoingtodie in his head. Focus on her. Focus on anything else. Don’t let the terror overtake you. Block it from your thoughts, ignore it, just pretend it isn’t true.
Slowly, his muscles loosened enough for him to move. He could breathe again. It’s OK. She’s here.
He turned to watch her as she worked, knowing it would ground him more.
She was so cute when she focused. She was always cute, but her cuteness was somehow more Pidgey when she was working. The hair she usually fought to keep behind her ears fell into her face, since she was too distracted to notice it getting in the way. She pressed her lips together, and her eyes came alight. She sank into her calculations, almost completely forgetting the world around her.
He smiled. And the fact that just looking at her was enough to make him smile, even at a time like this . . .
If he was going to die—his throat caught at the thought, but he forced down the terror—he had to tell her something. Before he disappeared.
“Pidge,” he said, his voice trembling. “If I’m going to die—”
“You’re not going to die,” she snapped, scribbling equations with her finger on the screen. “That’s what I’m trying to prevent, you idiot. You’re not going to die.”
“OK, but if I might die—”
“I’m not going to let you. I—”
“Pidge, please, just let me say this,” he said, turning her to face him. Finally, she met his gaze and held the connection for more than a few seconds. Her amber eyes were shining with unshed tears. Because of course they were. She didn’t cry, but this was clearly hurting her.
“Please don’t,” she whispered, shaking her head. “You always say it, you always—”
“I need to tell you.”
“No, please—”
“I love you.”
She groaned, leaning forward and pulling her knees up to her chest. “You always say that. It always makes this so much harder.” He was surprised to see the tears finally slip down her cheeks. She always seemed so unbreakable that the thought of her crying seemed ridiculous. But she could cry.
She was crying for him.
“Pidge, it’s going to be okay,” he said, pulling her into a hug.
“You shouldn’t be comforting me,” she growled. “You’re the one who’s about to die. You have about a minute left, why are you spending that minute on me?” But she didn’t push him away. “I’m sorry,” she added in a small voice.
“I’m the one who’s about to die,” he agreed, blocking out the meaning of the words so he could make himself say them. “But you’re the one who’s seen me die a thousand times.”
“Twenty thousand, two hundred and fifty-three,” she corrected. “I failed you twenty thousand, two hundred and fifty-three times.”
“You didn’t fail me. It’s okay,” he repeated, running his finger through her hair. “I’m happy right now. I’m fine with dying happy.”
It was a lie. He wasn’t happy, and he wasn’t fine with dying. He didn’t want to die—who did? The thought filled his chest with terror, made him cling to Pidge harder. He didn’t want to leave this reality, fade into blackness, abandon the people and places in this universe that he loved. Voltron. His family. Earth. Pidge.
He was terrified. But kneeling there, clutching Pidge as she sobbed, knowing that if anyone was going to save him it was her, he could hold back the terror. Just barely, but it was enough.
And hey, he’d finally been able to say the words he’d wanted to say for so long. Even if she’d already heard those words twenty thousand, two hundred and fifty-three times.
“Lance?” she whispered, pulling him out of his thoughts.
“Yes?” He looked down at her.
She closed her eyes as if making a decision, or gathering her strength to execute a decision she'd made a long time ago. Then she opened them and captured him with her gaze.
“I love you too.”
“You—”
“I love you. I’ve been trying to say it for a while now, but I can never pull it off, and . . . but I do love you, Lance, I really do.”
He grinned. He probably looked like an idiot, but how could he not smile like a maniac after hearing that? And okay, maybe he was a little rattled by the emotional rollercoaster, but quiznack, he’d be grinning no matter what situation he heard those words in.
And she was rambling, of course. “I don’t know why it was so hard to say it, you’d think after twenty thousand attempts I’d be able to get the words out, but it’s always been so hard knowing you—”
“Come on,” he cut her off, helping her to her feet. She rubbed at her eyes furiously, trying to make it look like she’d never cried. “I may be consigned to doom, but if I am, I’m going out with a bang. The wound feels much better. What do you say, think we can take the attackers down?”
She tilted her head. “We are behind their lines. Nothing like a surprise attack from behind.” Her eyes widened. “You’ve never said that before, by the way. Things are going . . . differently.” She raised an eyebrow. “What do you think? Is it a good sign?”
“I’ll hope it is, for the sake of my lifespan.”
“I wonder what it was,” she murmured.
“You said you love me,” he said, without hesitation.
“Why would that . . .”
“It’s all about hope,” he grinned cheekily. “I feel much more motivated knowing you love me. And motivation is key, isn’t it? Things will turn out better this time.”
She blushed. “I’m . . . quiznack, don’t say that! I’m trying so hard not to get my hopes up!” But she was smiling for the first time in days, and it was absolutely wonderful to see.
“What’s wrong with getting your hopes up a little?”
She opened her mouth to fire a snarky retort back at him, then stopped herself and settled for shaking her head and smiling even more.
“You win,” she sighed, clearly not at all annoyed. “Come on, Lance. I have a feeling this time will be better.” She activated her bayard and held out her hand. He took it without hesitation, turning his bayard on and opening the door to the rest of the world.