Chapter Text
The first time Lance comes across Rogue, he isn’t sure he didn’t hallucinate the whole thing.
The lions touch ground on Velxob-8, the outermost giant looming around a speckled asteroid field. It’s cold, dark as tar, the rain is gelatinous, and Lance wants to go home in every sense of the word.
Irrelevant, because they have a job to do. The carapaced skin of the locals glistens pewter as it deflects the showers. Their host, Hoxxke, is urgently explaining the Galra-made smoke pouring defiantly from their cluster of skyscrapers. A direct attack in response to the Velxob’s declination of offers to brutally colonize their home.
Through the slick mist, Shiro presses a flat hand over his brow. “Okay, Voltron. We’re in a dense civilian center. No lions, and no bayards until you have full view of a potential threat. Slow and steady here. “Hoxxke—” Shiro’s tongue struggles around the thick alien name, “—says the attack force is holed up in the broadcasting tower. Potential hostage situation.”
Said tower spirals directly up, dripping with coiled metal spikes that shake under the storm. Wide-open balconies have been punched out of it seemingly more often than not, spilling a slimy green light. It bounces through the downpour, billions of emeralds spinning in the air. Spirals of metalwork grate the railings, presumably for safety but they look so delicate it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t shatter from a light press.
Shiro rattles off, “Pidge, I want you in the main spear with Hunk and Allura. I’ll be ten steps ahead, checking rooms under the radar. Coran has the schematics, and will be directing us on comms. Lance—”
“Backline,” Lance finishes.
“Yes,” Shiro confirms tightly.
It’s become dogged routine on their missions. They’ve long entered the political stage of things: metal-crushing, skull-cracking force and harebrained schemes are no longer pertinent. Galran infighting has made the war immortal. Every swiftly crushed platoon these days was soon replaced by a rival faction’s forces with no discouragement to the greater fleet. What this meant—it meant a lot of things, actually, but to Lance it meant there was no room for him and his cocksure attitude on the front lines. Pidge’s stealth, Hunk’s stability, Shiro’s caution, Allura’s planning…
Lance’s covering fire, far behind his team.
It’s rewarding to protect them, and it’s not like he’s useless. Lance doesn’t have enough fingers to count the number of times a well-placed laser saved any of the ground team from a long stay in the healing pod. But he’s become an arm without a fist, soft and distant from the efforts.
He watches Pidge and Hunk bump elbows through his scope. They’re laughing.
Lance squeezes the barrel of his bayard. The siren-red of it screams at him, even through the haze, and pushes an ache through his fingers. It’s been a few months since Keith eloped with his stupid knife to join the Blades of Marmora, and count it just Lance’s luck that he’s stuck with his flaming bayard. A shitty hand-me-down.
Lance sighs. His visor clouds, even as he furiously swipes it with the back of his glove every minute or two. Shiro disappears into the shimmering green entryway of the tower, followed shortly by the other three. Lance counts—ten, twenty, thirty, and then slinks in behind them, grateful to escape the weather. A buzz of chatter fills his comms line as Coran feeds directions to the front spear. Lance tunes it out; all he has to do is watch their backs.
They creep through the snakelike passages. Intermittent creaking rakes the inside of the walls, making Lance jump. The structure is perforated with spiraling details that leave the guts of the building exposed. Lines of crimson thread like veins, at odds with the verdant spill of the rest of Velxob. Lance stops walking to peer down between the lattices. The red wires almost look to be pulsing—
“-nce. Lance? Are you clear?”
He straightens abruptly. Shit, the sound-off. “Here, near, and crystal-clear,” he chirps back. The rest of the team clears, and Lance jogs to catch up—though not too close. Shiro pushes into each open door, occasionally signaling a threat, but always quietly dispatched in moments. On open battlefields, there’s a lot more chaos, but these halls swallow them only one way. There’s no alternate directions for Lance to cover.
The wall next to him creaks sharply, and Lance jumps again, red bayard shimmering as it catches the wirelight. Lance could swear this thing was never so damn shiny when Keith wielded it as a sword. And Lance was never so jumpy when Keith watched his back.
Shiro has reached a side door, jerking his head into it. Allura, Hunk, and Pidge shuffle in, and Lance starts his count of thirty.
“Paladins,” comes Coran’s crackling voice, and it’s urgent enough to catch Lance’s ear. “I’m seeing something. I’m not sure, it’s…give me a moment to decipher it. But there’s an irregularity in the architecture of this tower.”
“Yeah, it’s basically a lace napkin,” snorts Lance.
“It’s gonna fall over, isn’t it?” Hunk frets.
“No, Number Two. It’s not structural, it’s intermittent, but I can’t tell where yet. The instances seem to be local, too. Connected. Just keep your guard up.”
Lance shivers. The ghoulish green hues throw long shadows across the smooth floor, spiderlike as he finally approaches the door everyone disappeared into. He’s reaching for the handle when a slight schnk creases the room. Whipping around, Lance sees something worse than if Zarkon himself had wandered in. Or at least something more annoying.
A gaggle of slinking, dark ropes have cast from the sky like terrible omens. Descending them, death-silent, is a pack of Kolivan’s goons. The Blade of Marmora is crashing the party, and they always have their own agenda.
Lance throws his head back, watching them swing in like jackasses. “ You fucking guys?” he groans.
None of them deign to answer, but have the time to spin out some flashy barrel rolls as they touch down.
“What? Who guys?!” Hunk’s voice buzzes in his helmet.
“Is this the architectural irregularity?” Lance whines at Coran. “The Blade blowing our mission?”
“No,” Coran says tightly, “The temperature is rising, I—”
And then the bombs go off.
It’s every direction, every corner. From his stance in the center of the widened hall, Lance is spared the fire but tossed by the force. He goes careening toward the balcony where the Blades landed, spinning out across the cold, wet metal and crashing into one of those frail railings. He grimly confirms his initial theory—they are mostly for show, because his momentum is barely stopped as it cracks under the force. All in a second, it gives way behind his back, and a still-stunned Lance gasps in the frigid air, preparing for a long, permanent fall.
It never comes. A dark hand has wrapped around his wrist, yanking him back so hard his shoulder creaks, but he won’t complain. Lance tumbles on all fours, sucking down breaths before scrambling to his feet.
Facing him is potentially the shortest Blade member Lance has ever seen. He may even rival Keith for the title. He bears the same uniform as every other, but with crossed arms and weight on one foot seems to carry distinctly more of an attitude about it.
“Uh. Come here often?” Lance tries.
Two glowing purple eyes bore down. In a dart, the Blade grabs him by the wrist and yanks him forward for the second time in a minute. They’re flying past the latticed halls, now gorged open and ticking. Shrill beeps trickle all around them, punctuated with the occasional muffled boom .
“Where are we going?” cries Lance as his escort cuts open some lacy double doors. They’re dumped onto a roofed walkway that wraps around the outside of the tower, spiraling up and open on the sides. Gelatinous downfall slinks past the support poles into the crevices of Lance’s armor, gumming up his limbs. The second they step forward, the shadows come alive. Galra crawl out from the blown gaps in the walls, but they aren’t Marmorites and their armor doesn’t look Zarkon-standard.
Lance’s bayard shimmers awake, punching holes in the wave. A Luxite sword sails into the chest of another attacker, and then is plucked back out by Lance’s little helper.
“Phew. Didn’t know they could be sly like that.” Lance smirks, resting his rifle on his shoulder. “Y’know, if you stick with me—” He’s abruptly shoved over by that stupid Marmora glove, and a gurgled cry sounds out from behind him as a particularly quiet intruder is cut down by the Blade’s—well, blade. From the looks of it, they’d been seconds from taking Lance’s head off. The Marmorite wastes no time, booking it in the same direction they’ve been pressing. More assaults pop up like cheap scares, except a lot more liable to kill Lance than cheesy horror flicks. His hands sting, gun hot as the two of them clear a path.
Fuck. This isn’t right, where’s Victory or Death ? “Since when do Galra do ‘sneaky?’” gasps Lance, stumbling around a corner. The rain has picked up, sticky and suffocating.
The Blade throws a glance over his shoulder, enough to grill Lance with a mask-eyed stare, before spinning the Luxite sword in his hand.
“Okay, fine,” Lance grumbles, “but since when does the Empire do ‘sneaky’?”
A twig-thin infantryman bursts over the edge of a railing, scrambling to not slip off. He screams, lifting his blaster at them. “Death to the false claimers! Ubraggus is the true Galra lord!”
Lance’s new friend has put the man’s shooting arm out of use in a single swipe. Black blood swims in the rain, staining the puddles gray. The Blade points at the body with the same sword again.
“ Augh! I get it! Galra are very, very complicated.” Lance whips up his bayard to catch an attacker in the leg that’s ducked into their view. “You’re all so special and cool and it’s so great that new groups of you can pop up all the time now and screw up everything we know about fighting you. Erm— not you- you, I mean, no offense.”
The Luxite of the blade glints with rain, blood, and humor as the Blade soldier tosses it to his other hand and takes back off.
“H-Hey!” Lance hoists up his rifle. “Look, I know you guys are all about mystery, but if you’re going to drag me around I need a name. Coran makes us write these reports, and—anyway, what do I call you?”
The fighter doesn’t break his sprint.
Lance pops an approaching climber off the side of the building with a blast to the stomach. He doesn’t watch them go careening down. “You’re kind of small for a Blade, so maybe Tiny? Shortstack? Shrimpman? Do you guys have, like, school ID numbers?”
No response except the squelch of a sword sinking into flesh and being pulled back out. They’re almost at the top of the stairs.
“You’re also real quiet. Maybe…Mr. Sneaky? Ninja? Samur— ah, um. Rogue?”
The Blade stutters to a stop, masked eyes flashing over Lance for only a second. It could have been anything, but so far he’s had nothing, so Lance grasps it with both hands. “Rogue! Awesome. So, I’ll ask again, where in Altea’s name are we going? ”
Rogue raises his head, whipping it around suddenly. Lance is baffled by the panic, until he hears it, too.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Extremely close. But from where? The innermost walls are free of bloodred wires, and the rain makes it impossible to track the exact direction of the omen.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep—
The heat boils, but it’s not the worst of it—all that fancy railing wirework turns to needles when shattered by the bomb. They both hit the deck, Rogue knocking into Lance’s knees to push him further back. The stiff vinyl of Lance’s undersuit is torn with the spray, cuts opening like wellsprings across his skin. One chunk is flung like a dart, piercing his visor and biting his temple. Thick red life flows freely, pooling around his chin. His helmet’s environmental seal is too good, choking him with the stinging odor of his own blood. He groans, but shoots upright. Coran said the bombs are local, so that means—
The culprit has already crossed the threshold onto their balcony. Lance is a faster shot. The man is down before he can cry ‘ Ubraggus!’
Rogue is already shifting back up, taking stock of the shattered entryway. A gaping hole in the ceiling guiltily exposes the bomb location, but it doesn’t matter now. Lance is already tasting his own blood.
Really tasting it. It’s thick on his tongue, and he coughs, splattering it inside his helmet. A hand puts pressure on Lance’s chestplate—right across the big V—and edges him backward toward the shattered door. And then down.
It’s hard to fight back when Lance can feel the consciousness escaping from his temple, bright red. He splutters, “Man, are you guys vampires? Do you need a vial of this stuff?” chuckles Lance, swiping generally at his face. For a second, he’s seized by hilarious panic as Rogue unseals and lifts off Lance’s helmet. Maybe he will take a drink. But the reality is even more baffling, as this Blade of Marmora opens his hip pouch and takes out a medkit. Lance didn’t think these guys even knew what those were.
“Knowledge or death,” Lance babbles, though fails to tone it as a question. Rogue understands anyway, shaking his head. He starts swiping the pour of blood away with some small cloth. The cut is small but deep, generously bleeding, though slowing more as Rogue works. The fabric must be treated with something, because it’s even colder than the Velxobian night and fills the wound with a numbing buzz. Lance can’t help the relieved sigh that floats out of his mouth.
A crackle snakes up from somewhere nearby, and Lance twitches, fearing another bomb. Rogue places one hand on his forehead, steadying him down, before pointing to the discarded blue helmet at his hip. It crackles again, and Lance realizes it’s the comms. His team.
Lance makes a loose grabby hand at the thing, and Rogue obligingly passes it over, though places a warning hand on the top of it. “I won’t put it on,” understands Lance. “I just need to talk to them.”
Satisfied, Rogue goes back to cleaning the wound, moving on to stitching while Lance tries to catch the signal. There’s some kind of Galran staple gun—hopefully medical-grade—pressed to his temple, knitting him back up.
“ ...saw him last on the fourteenth floor.”
“...No, not sure. Has anyone—”
“His tracker must be damaged, I can’t…”
“Guys, I’m—” Lance hisses as another stitch is knitted into his head, “I’m here. I’m okay.”
“Lance!” cries Hunk. “Dude, where are you? Are you sure you’re alright? It’s chaos. The Blade showed up!”
“Yeah man, I…” He glances at the impassive curves of the Marmora mask as they focus wholly on his injury. “I noticed. I’ll be on my way soon. Where’s rendezvous?”
Allura cuts in, “We were pushed a little less carefully than we hoped once the bombs started going off, but we made it to the top. We’re stuck outside the control room. Pidge has visuals through the security system. Nine civilian hostages, five armed guards. Two of them are on the raised balconies.” Her voice is tight.
“Impossible to take out before they catch wind of you,” Lance parses. And then start firing on the hostages. Hostages are only valuable alive, but the acolytes of Ubraggus must know their time is running short. Anything could happen. “Where do you need me?”
“That depends, how close do you need to be to shoot down two soldiers?”
“Shiro,” Lance smiles, “Not very close at all.”
“Then rendezvous for you is on the nineteenth floor. There’s a line being set up by the Blades to the next building over, and their mission captain says it’s got visual on the control room.”
“Ye-auugh,” Lance’s affirmation is strangled out as Rogue makes one last painful stitch, standing up swiftly. He rudely yanks the helmet from Lance’s hand, swiping it down with the cloth before passing it back, significantly less bloodstained. “Thanks,” Lance says dumbly.
Rogue nods, and then dashes into the hallway. Lance is too struck not to follow.
“The stairwell,” Lance manages. “Where’re your little groupies? Nineteenth floor?”
Without looking back, Rogue pushes through a fractured side door that leads to a spiral staircase. Fucking everything here is spirals, Lance’s head is starting to spin. They mount the floors, rumbles sounding off below them as bombs flower throughout the facility. Lance fixes his eyes on the Marmorite hip pouch as they climb, corner of the bloodsoaked rag still dangling out. Rogue finally leads them out another dizzying door, and Lance finds himself grabbing the edge of his belt, yanking him to a stop. Rogue’s shoulders hitch, and he’s stock-still.
Lance pushes the rag back into the pack, gesturing at it. “I, uh. I don’t think that’s Blade-standard.”
“Thanks.”
Lance keels backward, almost falling back through the door and down nineteen flights of stairs. “Woah! You talk?!”
Rogue looks at him, shadowy hood falling low over his mask where it’s heavy with water. “No,” he says simply, voice crunchy with cybernetic distortion from the Marmora mask.
“You—” Lance huffs, but they turn the corner to find a flurry of other Blades fixed on what looks like a fancy space zipline.
“Blue Paladin,” the squad captain greets him. He acknowledges Rogue with a nod.
“It’s, uh, Red Paladin now,” Lance corrects.
“You are wearing blue.”
“Yeah, but there was this thing with our Red guy, and… ah, nevermind, man. Put me on the zipline.”
“It’s a transport line. I do not know what ‘zip’ means, Blue Paladin.”
“ Red— just hook me up.”
The captain waves a hand, and two Blades scramble to pass Lance an obnoxiously sleek hook and wire. Lance pushes out a breath, stepping to the anchor and wrapping the line through the grapple hook. A shadow falls over his shoulder. Rogue has stepped up to… run checks? His hands flit over the line, pulling the connecting knot tighter.
Lance’s heart rate picks up. The city sprawls below, and it’s a long fall. Swallowed in a sea of faceless purple Marmorites, he can’t say he isn’t eager to get back to team Voltron. But as Rogue’s small hands finish their pass, Lance reaches out to graze his fingertips over his knuckles to catch his eyes. Or mask. “Look, seriously. Thank you.” Lance ducks his head closer. It was only a patch-up, but with a stoic Blade warrior something so gentle feels like a nuclear secret he has to keep. “If you ever need anything…I owe you one.”
Rogue stares at him for a moment.
And then pushes him down the zipline.
A brief shriek is ripped from Lance’s throat, but he swallows it back down as he comes to a running stop on the next building over. He exhales, switching his comms back up. “I’m in place. Breach in two?”
“Two,” Shiro confirms back.
It’s everything, and then it’s over. Lance’s senses are burned by hyperawareness, tracking every raindrop, every whisper, every beep of the remaining bombs. On Shiro’s cue, he pops the two guards on the balconies, and the rest of the team are able to clear the lower level in perfect sync. The rest of the dominoes—and Ubraggites—fall soon after.
No hostage casualties. It’s the least they can do, Lance thinks, watching Velxobians start to carry out the bodies of those who weren’t as lucky. That sick feeling, the feeling of seeing corpses, it never really goes away. But it dulls like a cold limb over time. Lance scrambles down to the first floor of his post, crossing the street to meet back up with his team. The Blades are long gone, absconded with whatever data they were chasing.
“Let’s go home,” Shiro sighs. Everyone huddles back to their lions in the city fringe.
Post-mission is always a rush. Collapsing into their control chairs for debrief, running through events even faster now that Allura is in the field and too exhausted to ask for details like she used to. The hustle to the showers, washing away the tiredness, the weight. Combat seems like the only thing in the universe when he’s in it, but a distant dream once escaped. That goes double for mysterious Blade members who are dangerously gentle with their touch.
So by the time Lance is stumbling back to his room, promising Coran he doesn’t need a trip to the pods, he finds himself touching the bumps of his stitches as the only talisman left.