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Lance lay curled up in his bunk on the last night before the rest of his life. Three years of training were culminating finally in the run-up to real field work: with the dawn, they'd receive their assignments, the teams they'd be working with for the next sixteen months, the teams they'd eventually be running with out in the wide world. The indolence of victory was sweet in his mouth, the back of his throat, and only could have been sweeter if Keith were still around to see him flourish and surpass him.
Tomorrow, Lance would meet the man (or, god willing, the beautiful, wonderful woman) who would complete their three-man band. Who would complete him, at last.
He held his arm out and up above him, letting the sleeve of his night shirt pull back by gravity alone. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the barracks he shared with Hunk, he could see the words in dark natural ink crawling up the underside of his forearm to his wrist, running along the pulse point, following the thick vein there down towards his heart. He'd traced them with the tip of his finger on every morning and in every idle moment since they'd blossomed there like mushrooms after the rain on his tenth birthday, a tattoo, a branding.
"Hey, Hunk," he hissed, barely a whisper, and Hunk groaned in response, the bed frame shifting and creaking as he rolled over, out of sleep.
"Hhnngh?"
"D'you think one of us will meet our girl tomorrow?"
Hunk made another throaty, disquieted noise, glancing over at their alarm clock and its ominous scarlet liquid crystal glow. "Lance, it's two thirty. Go to sleep."
"Do you think, though? There's a chance, right, I mean it's a major life event-- our first time all together as a team. That's gotta be, like, portentous, yeah?
"Who?" Hunk blinked, his brain slowly rebooting from sleep as Lance dropped his head down over the edge of the top bunk to look at him. Then he shook his head and snorted. "Like I'd know, anyway."
"Oh, right." Simultaneously, they both glanced at Hunk's arm, still covered. The first time they'd met, in this room, before either of them had even unpacked their personal items or changed into their freshly minted Academy uniforms, Lance had grabbed his meaty forearm and demanded to see what was written there. Which turned out to be... confusing, a name scrawled in a looping, blocky script that Lance had never seen before or since, and that had failed everyone's attempts to decipher it. "Tough break, man."
Hunk shrugged. "Whatever, you know I think this whole 'soulmates' thing is dumb. When I fall in love, it's not going to be because anybody told me to."
"You're just jealous because I'm gonna have a fly honey hanging off my arm and you'll still be elbow deep in a plane engine every Friday night."
Lance cackled, falling into his bunk as Hunk tossed a spare pillow at him. It flopped back onto his face instead of Lance's, and he seemed content to leave it there, his voice muffled by fluff. "Go to sleep, Lance. If Katie does show up tomorrow you don't want to have bags under your eyes, right?"
"Oh god, no," Lance squeaked, barely having to affect it, and pulled the covers up over his head as if smothering himself in total darkness and the warmth of his own breath against the cloth would help him fall asleep faster. With his eyes closed, he wrapped his left palm around his right wrist, feeling the pulse of his heart, the letters standing out against his skin as if they'd been carved there by fire. They'd taken to talking about the girl as if she were already a friend, someone they intimately knew and accepted, because in a way, she already was: in a way, Lance had known her his entire life.
I'm coming for you, Katie Holt, Lance thought, a hot shiver of hunter's pleasure unfolding down the length of his spine and opening into his stomach. One way or another, you're going to be mine.
---
"Who the heck is Pidge Gunderson?" Lance asked, staring at the notice board as if it contained a litany of increasingly graphic and creative insults against his mother rather than the fairly innocuous list of team assignments he'd been examining. He couldn't quite help the bitter wash of cold disappointment, his hopes crashing to the ground as surely as he'd crashed every flight simulator test so far. It'd been silly, maybe, to expect that today had to be the day, because for every story of someone meeting their soulmate in some grand anointed conflagration, there were twelve mundane tales of the pair meeting when their eyes locked across a crowded Starbucks. Lance always thought of himself as special, of course, marked for greater things, and he'd had such a clear feeling about this day, a pressure and excitement building up in his chest that he couldn't quite account for with the knowledge of his new status as a pilot in training alone.
His mouth twisted into a childish pout and he rubbed at his wrist absently as Hunk clapped him reassuringly on the shoulder. "That's rough, buddy," he said, trying to sound consoling without any real sympathy.
"I am," somebody else said, just a beat too late, from somewhere in the vicinity of Lance's waistline. Lance looked down at him--
--And lost his breath, just for a moment. For one shining, sparkling moment he could feel the Earth turning under his feet, spinning him at a thousand miles an hour towards a future too brilliantly bright to be seen with the naked eye. And he didn't understand it at all, because the short, mullish, nervous-looking boy with the hair that looked like he'd taken a pair of garden shears to it couldn't possibly be Katie Holt, and there was no other accounting for the way his heart skipped and stopped and his chest expanded beyond the boundaries of his ribs, just for that moment. Then his sight dimmed back to ordinary reality, and he shook it off, bending down almost ninety degrees at the hips to get a better look at him.
Lance squinted. There was something awfully familiar about this kid, even without the recognition that should have been afforded to his other half; he just couldn't put his finger on what it was. Gunderson seemed to lean back from him, repulsed like a magnet from a similarly charged pole, as if their very auras were incompatible. "Pidge Gunderson?" he asked again, doubtfully.
Gunderson swallowed, and Lance had to fight not to trail his gaze down the arch of his throat. He, too, had a hand clamped hard over his right wrist, like he was trying to keep the poison of a snake bite from riding the line to his heart. "That's right. Which one are you, Hunk Garrett or Lance McClain?"
Hunk politely hip-checked Lance out of the way a little, leaving him room to hold out a hand for Gunderson to shake. Gunderson seemed disinclined to, but after a contemplative pause he dropped his white-knuckle hold on his own arm and accepted the gesture, his tiny pale hand disappearing into Hunk's paw. "I'm Hunk," he said, smiling, and Gunderson's lips trembled in response, maybe pulling up a bit at the corner. "This is Lance. Don't worry about him, he's getting over a disappointment." Hunk's voice turned warm and teasing in a way that made Lance's face warm up as well. "He convinced himself you were going to be his soulmate."
"Ha ha," Gunderson intoned, his voice as flat and dry as the miles of empty desert that surrounded them. And then he glanced quickly back up at Lance and away and again Lance felt a jolt of something wildly electric that made his heart palpate hard. This was weird. He had seen this kid somewhere before, he definitely had, it was on the tip of his tongue.
Lance stood up out of his bend so quickly that all the blood rushed away from his head and left him feeling loopy enough to fall over, smacking his clenched fist against his open palm. "That's it!" he said, with the ruthless thrill of a sudden eureka moment. "That's where I know you from!"
Gunderson was leaning away from them again, and had jerked his hand back from Hunk, holding it curled against his chest like you'd cradle a wounded animal. "What?" he asked, eloquent in his startlement.
"I saw you on TV last year!" Lance exclaimed, still excited. "Well, not you, obviously, but a guy who looked just like you, the guy who... you know, that scientist from the Kerberos mission? The boy genius, or whoever. What was his name?" Lance's eyebrows knitted together in concentration, then he snapped his fingers. Really, he could never have forgotten, because his heart leapt at any name that sounded like it could be related to his sweetheart's. For a second it looked like Gunderson was about to answer, but Lance beat him to the punch, pleased with his own cleverness. "Holt, Matt Holt. That guy. God, you're a dead ringer."
There wasn't any mistaking the lightning flash of real, pure panic that burst behind Gunderson's amber eyes at that, nor the way his shoulders hunched, body bristling. "Yeah," he said, still stiff, trying for a tittering laugh. "I get that all the time. Crazy, right? It's a small world."
Lance nodded enthusiastically. "Hey, this is nuts, but you didn't, like, know him, did you? It's just I'm looking for a Holt, and I thought he might be related to--"
"Lance." Hunk was nudging at him again, still gentle but insistent. "Obviously they're not related."
"Obviously," Gunderson echoed.
Lance's face fell, his temporary elation collapsing back in on itself in the face of optimism such poor odds couldn't hope to sustain. "Yeah, you're right," he sighed. "That'd be too easy. I just thought I'd ask. You never know, you know?"
"You never know," Gunderson said, and Lance rounded back on him again, irrepressible.
"So! We've got the rest of the day off. Who wants to go cruisin'?"
---
Pidge Gunderson, whoever he was, turned out to be... something of an enigma. He moved into the empty bunk in their room that night, the stand alone bed, but he spent hardly any time there, even sleeping, and he didn't spend any time at all with them outside of classes and training. Lance should have found it irritating, and a part of him did, but waiting to eat the irritation was a broader and more mystifying sense of calm that he felt when they were together. Like Gunderson was a friend he'd known from childhood, rather than some rando he'd been shoved together with last week on what should have been the most important day of his life.
Correction: Gunderson didn't sleep in his bed, barely ever, but he was always there for lights out and bed check promptly at nine o'clock. The sergeant would come in, count heads, make sure everyone was present and accounted for (and that there wasn't anybody extra), and as soon as his bootsteps had retreated far enough down the hall Lance would hear the slight soft sound of Gunderson shifting off the mattress, swinging his short legs over the side. Lance would hold his own breath in anticipation until his lungs burned, listening to the sounds of someone desperately trying to be quiet and not quite achieving it, and then the door would open, letting in a shaft of searing fluorescent light, and Gunderson would go, and Lance would allow himself to exhale.
"Where do you think he goes at night?" Lance asked one evening at dinner, just after Gunderson had excused himself and bustled off to buss his tray and dishes and the remains of a meal that tasted, always, like microwaved cardboard and watery lime gelatin. He frowned at the boy's retreating back, finding it easy to track him across the loud, busy mess hall to the kitchens. Lance always knew where he was in a room, any room they were in together: his soldier's intuition, naturally watching out for everyone under his care and direction.
Hunk shrugged, shovelling another spoonful of reconstituted mashed potato substitute into his mouth. "I don't know. Where would you go, if you could go anywhere on the base after dark?" He paused after the words had left him, examining Lance's delighted, wolfish grin, and quickly revised the statement. "Other than the obvious. Also, don't be gross."
Gunderson had dropped off his tray, ducking under the arms of taller cadets and scooting towards the door with a steady determination. "That really cuts down on a lot of options," Lance said, without taking his eyes off of him. "But like, I'm not a five-foot-nothin' computer nerd." He felt it the instant Gunderson slipped out of the room, a tension he hadn't known he'd been holding falling from his shoulders and letting him slump forward slackly, elbows braced on the table in a way his mother would have chided him for.
"Training, maybe?" Hunk suggested, spearing a brace of muddy brown green beans on the end of his fork and pushing them around a puddle of oily butter. "He's a communications guy, sure, but it still wouldn't hurt him to brush up on his hand to hand."
"Maybe." Lance frowned. "I just can't believe that guy. He won't sneak out to the movies with us, but he'll go wandering around at all hours of the night to do god knows what around this place. Whatta tool."
Hunk gave him a look. Three years of training and working and fighting together hadn't left either of them any illusions about each other. "You don't really think that."
"No," Lance sighed, glowering at the remains of his own meal. "I don't."
But it still vexed him, which was why that night after he let out his baited breath, he waited and stared at the ceiling and counted out to ten before vaulting himself over the edge of the bunk. He pulled on his boots fast enough nearly to tear the laces and barely remembered to pull his old comfortable jacket on over his pyjamas before leaving, afraid that Gunderson's tiny legs would somehow have managed to carry him out of sight before he could get on his tail. No such luck: Gunderson was just rounding the corner as Lance was quietly shutting the door behind him, and he only had to skip a little bit to catch up at a reasonable distance.
Gunderson had a backpack almost as big as he was. He had a green and white windbreaker on over his garish uniform pants, and an expression of stern determination Lance had never seen before drawing up his features. There was a scattering of freckles on the back of his neck, Lance noticed apropos of nothing, that was absolutely charming. He'd always thought it would be nice if Katie had freckles; he'd thought he would have liked to kiss them until the faceless girl in his fantasies giggled and smacked at his shoulder and told him breathlessly to cut it out through a peal of warm and ringing laughter, and then he'd kiss her breathless in a different way--
"Why are you following me?"
Lost and gone wandering in the moors of his imagination, Lance didn't notice until Gunderson had already whirled around to glare at him (until he'd almost tripped right over him, honestly) that he'd been caught. He blinked and steadied himself, and considered making up some half-cocked excuse, but really, he wasn't in the wrong here. "Why are you out after curfew?"
"You are too!" Gunderson protested, his voice going up an octave until he squeaked like an ungreased door hinge. Blotchy color rose to his cheeks and he hunched in on himself again, thumbs hooked under the straps of his backpack with every inch of him radiating stubborn defiance. "It's none of your business, anyway," he muttered, intentionally deepening his voice until he didn't sound like himself. "Go back to bed, Lance."
"Nah," Lance said airily, rocking back on his heels as his eyes dropped heavily half-lidded. He felt like a fox strutting through a hen house, with Gunderson caught and under his claws. "Don't think I will. I think I feel like taking a walk."
Gunderson blew out an irritated breath, turned back around towards his destination. "Okay. Fine, whatever, you do that. Just stay away from me."
Lance let him get a few paces down the hall towards parts unknown, then started up again, shadowing him. "But I was going this way."
"No, you weren't. You were following me. And now I know you're there, so you can just... go somewhere else."
"Like where?"
"Get a midnight snack. Sneak into the flight simulator. I don't know and I don't care."
Lance tucked both of those options away as valuable insight into what Gunderson definitely didn't do at night, in case he managed to give him the slip. "You should lighten up a little," he said, conversationally. A few strides brought him back up flush with Gunderson, who scuttled a bit faster in response. "I'm not going to narc you out, you know."
Gunderson glanced up at him. He had an odd way of looking at Lance, which he did only when he had to and only in brief glimpses, like someone trying to catch sight of the sun. Like Lance would burn out his retinas, or grab hold of some sacred truth, if he looked too long. "You're not?" he asked, cautious and tentative and disbelieving.
"'Course not. If I was gonna, I'd have done it already."
"Hmm." Gunderson chewed his lip, and Lance watched his mouth with interest. He was cute when he got that serious, pondering look on his face, Lance decided, but not cute in a condescending way. More like a tiger kitten, something adorable that could nevertheless give you a good shredding if you underestimated it. "And you really just... want to know where I'm going?"
"That's right." Lance nodded to confirm, glad he was getting it.
"And you're not going to go away until you find out." That one wasn't a question. They were both aware enough of what Lance was like.
"Nope. You're stuck with me, now."
Lance didn't have much of an opportunity to wonder why that statement seemed to make Gunderson freeze up again, closing up into himself. "Okay," he said again, strangely subdued. "You can come, if you promise to be quiet." Unable to contain himself, Lance bounced a bit and let out a whoop. Gunderson elbowed him in the hip. "That's exactly the kind of thing I don't want you doing."
"Deal."
Gunderson took him through the warren of tunnels and seldom-used passages beneath the base, darkness intercut by the occasional red warning light and silence it seemed wrong and unwise to disturb, and out an access hatch that left them in a sparse utilitarian courtyard, and under a ream of loose and flapping chain link fence that Lance was a little surprised wasn't electrified and seemed like maybe it should have been. He took him down a road a little ways-- a dirt road, yeah, but still obviously something official and occasionally travelled, and then they split off over a ridge, following a deer trail through the scrub and the dust. It was dark out there, too, a worse kind of darkness because Lance felt exposed, silhouetted between the vast empty Earth and the wider empty sky, a dark shape moving through darkness, illuminated only slightly by distant stars no more than pinhole pricks in the black velvet canopy above. They seemed, suddenly, very far away. Twenty minutes off base, twenty minutes filled only with the rasp of cloth and his own increasingly ragged breathing, and Lance felt like he was a million miles from anywhere, the lights from the academy as distant and incomprehensible as Sirius or Betelgeuse.
The track ended at the top of a cliff, a sheer drop into nowhere and a barren, blasted valley that welled up with soft starlight like a pond flush with rain. Gunderson went out all the way to the edge without a flinch of fear and shrugged his pack off his shoulders, not quite letting it drop in the dirt but lowering it with more reverence than he threw himself down a moment later. From its depths he extracted devices that Lance had never seen before, in the course of his ordinary life or even laying around their shared room, monitors and wires and slick black boxes. He arrayed them out in front of himself and plugged everything in while Lance found a place to sit himself, and soon the hum of electricity and the subtle whir of fans joined the sound of the wind blowing across the scabbed earth.
It was a breathtaking view, Lance had to admit, and maybe just a nice place for Gunderson to go to be alone and do whatever it was he was doing. After a while Lance went from hugging his knees to stretching out his back against the ground, giving himself vertigo as he faced the void and the blackness and the stars. "This would be a great place to take a girl," he said.
Gunderson made a guttural noise of frustration in the back of his throat. "What happened to being quiet?"
"Just a thought," Lance said, and then he turned over on his side to face the other boy, his cheek propped up against his hand. "You don't have a girlfriend, do you?"
"I don't have time for one," Gunderson said, his fingers clacking with maddening constance against the keyboard. Or for you, the subtext read.
"Well, you never know; maybe you'll get one all the same. Fate works in mysterious ways, my friend."
Gunderson snorted. "I don't believe in that stuff," he said, and then the frantic motion of his hands stilled, fingers twitching with residual reflex. And then he added, unnecessarily, "I really, really don't."
"Man, you neither?" Lance gave a low whistle of disappointment. "Between you and Hunk I'm never going to have any fun."
"You're into gossip, Lance?" Gunderson asked, giving his screen a private little smile. "I didn't know you were secretly a fourteen year old girl."
"You've wounded me, sir," Lance pronounced dramatically, flopping boneless back in the dirt, arms splayed out like he was going to make an angel in the dust. "C'mon, it's fun. Don't you wonder at all about your soulmate? Who they are, what they're doing, if they're hot?"
"No."
"I bet my girl's super hot," Lance said proudly, rolling up his jacket sleeve to look at the letters again. "Katie," he sighed with intoxicating sweetness, letting his head fall back with a crack that he barely felt; his mind was already swimming, visions of the girl he’d dreamed up over the years floating across his dazed thoughts. He’d pictured her the same way since he was small, tall and long of limb with smooth, creamy skin, hips like an hourglass that swung like a metronome to the time of his step, long silken hair that smelled richly of strawberry. "My Katie's going to be cute, and smart, and she'll love to surf. We'll go to the beach to show each other off and everyone will be jealous."
Gunderson was quiet for awhile, and when Lance opened his eyes again he was looking at him. He didn't flinch away this time, and the light from the monitor made his eyes flash a green as deep as the sea, like the heart of polished jade. "What if that isn't what completes you, though?" he asked, voice blank and careful.
Lance raised an eyebrow at him. "I don't follow."
"You're describing a girl version of yourself, aren't you? Everything you like about yourself, but that's not what a soulmate is supposed to be, Lance. A soulmate is the other half of you, she's everything that you lack."
A frisson of deep unease made him shiver, with something that wasn't the glacial desert cold. "Not just what I want, you're saying."
Gunderson nodded, and turned back to his work. "More like what you need."
"I thought you didn't believe in it."
"I don't. But at least I know what I'm not believing in."
Lance listened to his own shallow breathing, his own tidal heart beat in his chest. "What do you think you need, then?" he asked.
The answer, when it came, was small and soft and stripped raw. "A family," Pidge said.
They didn't speak much after that. But Lance sat with Pidge, and watched the stars, and for once didn't feel the need to be anything other than quiet.