Chapter Text
The only familiar sound Lance ever heard anymore was the sound of the meek wind pushing water onto the shore in gentle waves. There was nothing else to hear. Other than that it was always quiet. Sometimes silent. It was terrifying.
Lance grew up with six siblings. Silence was not a concept. Ever.
Even since Lance left for school, even when Lance had been alone, the silence had never been like this.
Lance was sure that he was stuck on the most unsettlingly quiet planet in the known universe.
When he and Blue were thrown out of the decaying wormhole, they immediately crashed into a dwarfish planet with no atmosphere and bland gray-blue rocks. Getting off the planet wasn't that hard due to the low gravity, except about ninety percent of Blue’s systems were fried by stupid Galra energy.
The back thruster only worked sporadically and just one side thruster was half operational, so if Lance wanted to turn right he had to turn two-hundred and seventy degrees counter-clockwise. That was fun.
But the scariest part by far was floating around in space, no where close to anything he'd ever know, in a barely functional magic space lion with minimal life support. Lance soon found out that space was fucking lonely.
At the Blue lion’s speed they constantly drifted by totally barren asteroids, moons, even solar systems, with nothing more than pitiful rocks. Space went on forever and there was just… nothing. Nothing, after nothing, after nothing. Alone was an understatement.
After a small eternity of horrible freeze dried rations, Lance drifted into a seemingly habitual solar system with a main phase yellow star. Lance couldn't help thanking God. He was headed straight for an earth-sized bluish-green planet with promising cloud cover. He look at the date on the staticky digital clock in Blue.
A week. What had felt like a soul crushing eternity in space had been just barely a week, Lance realized glumly. Voltron lions could cover thousands of miles in minutes, in a week… Lance couldn't even imagine how far they'd flown, and it scared him. He could still be an infinity away from earth. It could take him years to get back. Years he didn't have. Life support in the lion was three weeks thanks to Pidge. Three weeks that would not get him anywhere near a planet he would recognize. Not that Blue could operate for three weeks either. Not in this condition.
Lance didn't even realize that Blue was already entering the atmosphere of the blue planet. He really tried not to crash, but hey, they can't all be winners. His fuel level was below two percent and the sounds his air recycler was making were not promising. He couldn't quite say whether or not any of his thrusters were even working, when he crashed into the misleadingly shallow ocean.
At least his ship could walk.
And Blue was the guardian of water. That was a plus. The gravity hear seemed to be lower than earth’s too. Every step Blue took felt more like a leap, even through water.
Water. More like the endlessly stretching ocean.
It was just blue in every direction. Lance went on for hours and hours of just water, until there was finally, finally land. It was surreal how far the shallow ocean stretched on. The planet was so smooth he could see far beyond the horizon. What he saw wasn't land though. It was a huge cluster of huge gray and tawny… Vines?
When Lance got close enough, what he saw was a beautiful monstrosity. Huge curling vines as thick as buildings twisting through each other on what looked like the only land mass on the entire planet. Tops of trees and roots were tangled up in perfectly transparent water, while some of the huge trunks stretched up into where the clouds would probably be if it wasn't perfectly sunny on this part of the planet. The leaves were still green with chlorophyll but they had spiky looking flowers, that were a weird silvery transparent color that Lance could describe beyond that.
Blue’s metal paws sunk deep into the fine golden sand and trodded into a patch of shade. Lance would have jumped right out, happy to set foot on something solid for the first time in over a week but there was a small issue.
Oxygen.
If the atmosphere was composed of less than twenty percent oxygen or had even half a percent of a toxin Lance would be doomed to suffocate in his cabin once the rattling air recycler finally broke.
He pulled up the lion’s atmospheric adaptation readings with shaky hands and read slowly;
Atmospheric pressure: 0.999708 atm
Gravity: 86% earth gravity
Atmospheric composition:
27.8% oxygen
70.6% Nitrogen
<2% Helium, hydrogen,other.
Temperature: 78.6 degrees F
Lance let out a huge sigh of relief. Somehow he had managed to float through the outskirts of known universe into, probably, the only human friendly planet for billions of miles in any direction.
Cautiously, Lance popped open the hatch. With his space helmet on he sunk into the warm, alien sand. Lance held his breath as he pressed the button to lift his visor. The only thing between him and possible death by breathing.
After not exploding, choking, suffocating, or anything of the sort, Lance peared past his eyelashes at the extraterrestrial world around him. Harsh sunlight filtered through bright green leaves that were almost the size of Lance’s face. The sand glowed under the sun’s touch.
Literally glowed. It must have had some sort of metallic property because it was almost impossible to look at in direct sunlight it was so reflective.
Lance looked across the utterly bare stretch of beach between two distant but colossal roots. Creamy pink and white boulders littered the cove. They looked sort of like marble with sparkling swirls of pure white stone mixed in among the pink and off-white.
His feet sank deeper into the sand. For a second Lance thought it might not be the worse place to be stranded. For a second Lance had thought that he would be okay here. For a second Lance had had hope.
That was three weeks ago. At least he thought. It had been pretty hard to keep time since Blue had powered down, but what Lance had gathered was that the day's lasted around thirty-four hours. Seventeen hours of sun and seventeen hours of dark. And when the sun was out it was hot.
Like really fucking hot.
No more space suit for Lance unless he felt like baking to death. It was always above eighty-five degrees during the day and never below seventy at night. The sand got so hot in the sun that Lance would spend the hottest hours of the day sitting in the crystalline ocean, or up on one the huge roots of the trees. The scaly light gray bark peeled back to expose soft red-orange wood. Lance learned that if he dug far enough with a rock, it would expose veins and arteries filled with sweet yellow sap or fresh water.
That was how Lance discovered the first forms of life on the planet.
Closer to the shore, disgustingly slimy red eels would dig through the submerged trunks into the the trees vessels. Tiny brown creatures that looked like pins with legs also could be spotted drilling into the roots.
In the forever clear water, Lance found small reflective fish that had as many fins as centipedes had legs. There were flat marbled gray fish that swam slowly like stingrays. And larger but fast dappled white fish that looked like they had bony scales and tube shaped mouths.
Then there were the birds. Bats? Flying lizard-monster was probably the most accurate. The had narrow lime green bodies and whip like limbs connected by a thin vile looking green membrane that let them fly. Lance had never seen one’s face up close and he hoped to never have too.
Those three weeks had gone by and gone straight to Lance’s head. The loneliness was antagonizing. He had never talked to himself more. He never worried more. He'd never wanted to give up so much in his life.
He'd sit on the rocks and watch the sunset every day. That was one of the only things that felt real. It didn't even look much like an earth sunset. It was white hot and dull, providing little relief from the heat.
The ocean helped a little too. Although it was too shallow to swim in and tasted like bitter metal, it was water, it was still the same element he had been drawn to on earth. He spent a lot of time floating in the shallows, on his back, staring up at the few dark gray clouds that always lingered in the sky.
It was always too tempting to let his mind wander to the suffocating fears that plagued his thoughts.
If he would ever see his friends again.
If he would ever see his family again.
If he would ever see another human again.
There was no feeling in the world like being completely and utterly alone.
Lance did all he could to keep his mind off darker things. He sung the loudest most annoying pop songs he could think of. He drew his family's faces in the sand. He looked at the stars and wondered.
Just how far away was he from earth.
One humid sunrise three and a half weeks in, Lance woke up to the ground shaking beneath him. At first Lance thought it was earthquake. Planet-quake? Not an earthquake right?
Then something exploded or crashed or … Sonic boomed? Lance was too tired to think straight, but startled nonetheless. Nothing seemed to happen on this planet. It had rained all but once even though it was always humid, and the wind was never more than a sputtering breeze. The planet appeared to have no moons so the tides were pathetic as well. Not to mention the unsettling lack of noise that drove Lance partially insane until now.
Lance stumbled out of Blue with a sense of urgency, and saw thick gray smoke rising from the distance. He easily pulled himself up onto a root the same height as he was. It took no effort to leap from branch to branch with the low gravity. Lance liked it, it made him feel like a superhero, the way he could grab onto a branch and swing into the air like he was afraid of nothing. It was about the only thing he still like on the miserable planet.
He flew around a corner and onto an enormous pink boulder overlooking a small patch of beach next to a wall of roots.
Sunk halfway into the thick sand was the red lion, smoldering.