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Lance felt Blue shudder as another blast of something ripped through Voltron.
“What do they keep hitting us with?” Hunk yelled, still flinching. There were no other weapons on the Galra destroyer in front of them besides the ion cannon. And as that was currently targeting the castle, they didn’t know what was targeting Voltron.
“Princess? Coran? Any ideas?” Shiro asked. “We can’t seem to dodge their blasts and this isn’t like anything else they’ve ever used on us.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” replied Coran as the castle took out another squadron of Galra fighters to their right. The particle barrier deflected another blast from the ion cannon. “It’s not causing you any external damage, so I don’t think it’s any type of fire power. It looks like magic!”
Lance was looking at Shiro through the video comms and saw him flinch at that word. He heard Allura softly whisper, “Druids.”
Coran continued, “Just try not to get hit by any more of those blasts. We don’t know what kind of damage-”
“We haven’t dodged any of their blasts yet,” Keith said. “They can target us wherever we are. What is this?”
Blue’s nerves were affecting Lance more than they normally would be during a battle. Something was not right. He looked at Keith over the video comm and when their eyes locked he felt himself relaxing slightly.
That had been happening a lot lately. It started at first during particularly stressful battles. Lance had always had a hard time not feeling, and looking at Keith over the video – his determination and precision – would always help to calm Lance down. He’d soon started looking for Keith’s eyes before, during, and after every battle. Although meeting his eyes still calmed Lance, he realized he was starting to look for the Red paladin to make sure he was safe and alive.
Keith nodded to him and looked back towards the destroyer.
“We need to prioritize. Voltron doesn’t have any physical damage right now. The castle’s particle barrier is getting low so lets take out that ion cannon on the destroyer and worry about this… magic… later.” At Shiro’s command, the paladins focused their energy on forming Hunk’s blaster.
Before they were able to lock their target, another pulse ripped through Voltron. Lance heard Blue’s scream in his head and he felt himself being ripped forward before black smoke started filling his cockpit.
Lance looked through his viewport and was shocked to see the other four lions in his line of sight. Voltron had been ripped apart. As Lance tried to process that and choked on the smoke in his cockpit, he saw a blast from the ion cannon rip through the castle’s particle barrier. He realized he was screaming as the explosion momentarily blinded him.
***
“Paladins, back to your hangers,” Allura yelled into the comms as the words Catastrophic System Failure flashed across the castle’s holo-screen in Altean.
The castle’s particle barrier had failed and the blast from the Galra’s ion cannon had hit the left flank of the ship. If they had been in any kind of atmosphere, they would have succumbed to gravity and plummeted to the ground. Now they were sitting dead in space with no defenses and no maneuverability.
“But Allura-”
“Now Lance!”
Allura looked out at the lions. Their forced separation from Voltron had seemed to cripple them. None of the lions were moving as quickly as they should be and Allura could see smoke filling all five cockpits as their paladins tried to continue fighting. She had never seen Voltron forcefully separated, and she had never seen the lions in such a state of disrepair.
“Paladins, retreat,” came Shiro’s firm command, and Allura saw them all make their way back.
“Princess, one more hit and we’re done for,” Coran was carefully reading the messages scrolling across the screen. “We have just enough energy left for a wormhole jump.”
Allura tried to mimic his calmness. It was one of his many qualities that she admired. “Coran, make sure the paladins are all in their hangers – with their doors closed, we don’t need a repeat of two years ago when we were all separated. Look up the coordinates for Earth and open a wormhole.”
“Princess, what are you…” he trailed off as he realized what she was thinking.
“Coran, the paladins have already devoted over two years to this cause. We have no other options. Our ship is beyond repair, the lions aren’t working properly, and I’m going to get them home if it’s the last thing I do.” She realized it would be the last thing she did. Without a working ship and the lions unable to form Voltron, there was no one left to defend the universe.
I’m scared, she realized. She didn’t know what she would do or who she would be without her cause.
She looked up as the paladins stormed the control deck. While they all looked a bit banged up, Pidge was cradling her left arm against her chest and Shiro had a fresh cut across his cheek that looked quite deep. That will be another scar, she thought sadly.
“Princess, how-”
“What’s the-”
“Our lions-”
They all started talking at once, but Coran’s voice drowned them all out. “They’re charging their ion cannon for another blast. We have only seconds.”
Allura saw the wormhole open out the viewport and felt it suck the castle through.
***
Of course with the ship not functional, their wormhole didn’t bring them all the way to Earth.
Kerberos, Keith thought, shocked. He looked at Shiro, not knowing how he would react to seeing the place of his capture. Shiro barely awarded the moon a glance before he turned around to look at Allura again.
“Princess, what is going on?” Shiro asked, “What are we…” he took a breath, “What are we doing here?” The stutter was the only thing that indicated his distress. Keith placed a hand on his shoulder as Allura smiled sadly at him.
“I am so sorry. We had no other options. I’m bringing you all home.” The paladins gasped in unison at her words.
Keith felt his mouth hanging open. It went against everything he’d come to know of Allura for her to just give up.
“Actually,” said Coran, “The castle is completely dead. We’re a bit stuck here for the moment, I’m afraid. I can see we’re at the very edge of your solar system, but we have no forward movement to get you the rest of the way to Earth.”
Coran paused for a moment, looking at the Altean words scrolling across the screen. Keith couldn’t read them, but he knew that flashing red letters were a universal sign that something was wrong.
Keith looked back to Coran when the older man sighed. “Our systems are also shutting down one by one. We’ve already lost our defenses, our firing abilities, and our engines. The castle power will soon be next. Our life support will be the last to go, but I reckon we only have about two hours left.”
The tension in the room skyrocketed. No one spoke as they absorbed the news. Two hours to live until they suffocated. The quiet was shattered when everybody but Keith and Lance started speaking at once.
Keith looked to Lance as the team argued. Lance looked like a man lost in the desert so close to a drink of water that wasn’t quite within grasp. Earth was so close but without power to the castle, the solar system was a vast distance that didn’t seem traversable.
Lance seemed to feel Keith’s eyes as he looked up to meet them and Keith had to catch his breath. He had never seen such seriousness and desperation in Lance’s eyes. He wanted to walk over and take his hand, but he shook the notion from his head. Their petty “rivalry” may have ended two years ago when the team was reformed after going through the decaying wormhole, but as much as he’d always longed to touch Lance, he kept his hands to himself. The longings were dangerous, both for him and the team. He shook his head again and looked away.
“Even if the ship was working and we could make it home, we can’t just give up,” Pidge was saying once Keith rejoined the conversation. “What about all the planets we’ve already liberated? Are they just going to be recaptured? And what about Earth? What’s the point in going back if the Galra are just going to come enslave us? That will probably happen faster now that we’ve been standing in their way as Voltron. And we won’t have any way to stop them.” She choked, “What about my dad and brother? We haven’t found them yet!”
Hunk put an arm around Pidge’s shoulders in a side hug and looked to Allura and Coran, “What about the lions? They’re still functional. Maybe not full capacity, but they can still fly.” Keith remembered the suffocating smoke inside his cockpit when Voltron was ripped apart. Before he’d powered Red down inside his hanger, he had felt her pain.
“I could barely get Black to the hanger,” Shiro said. “I think something must have happened internally in all of them when Voltron was torn apart. Hunk, maybe you could take a look at Yellow to see if you can find the issue? If you can fix her, we should be able to fix all of them.”
“Sounds like a good place to start,” Allura said.
“Pidge, why don’t you lend him a hand?” Shiro asked. Keith saw her look up at the rest of the team and determination flashed across her face. Without another word, she and Hunk turned towards the elevator that led to Yellow’s zip line.
Allura turned toward Coran. “Is the castle salvageable? Can we fix it?”
“I don’t know Princess. I can’t make heads or tails of these readings. I need to check the engine room directly.”
“Okay, can you three assist Coran in the engine room? Since our scanners are not functional, I will stay here to keep an eye out for the Galra.”
Lance looked like he wanted to say something, but then Coran jogged past them toward the exit. “Come boys! No time to waste!”
***
Lance jogged between Keith and Shiro as they worked to keep up with Coran while he led them through the castle corridors toward the engine room. He turned his face towards Keith, “Man, for someone who’s more than 10,000 years old, he sure is quick,” he panted.
Keith gave him a small smile but then turned his attention forward again without replying. Lance noticed that he wasn’t panting. He ripped his eyes from Keith’s profile when Coran suddenly stopped in front of them.
“Did you see that?” Coran asked.
Lance froze. “Please tell me it’s not a ghost,” he said, having flashbacks to a faulty airlock as he edged closer to Keith.
“No not a ghost. It looked like one of the mice! It was running towards the engine room. I think I saw it run inside. Drat! If only our comms were working. Allura is the only one who can communicate with them. Maybe the mice know what to do the way they did with the particle barrier when we were back on Arus.”
Shiro turned to look back the way they’d come. “Keith, Lance. Head back to the control deck and send Allura to meet us in the engine room so she can communicate with the mice. You two can stay up there on lookout duty.”
He didn’t even wait for their answer before following Coran the rest of the way into the engine room. Lance looked at Keith again and shrugged. They jogged back to the control room in silence.
When they reached Allura, she had taken Coran’s place at the screen trying to decipher the warning messages still flashing across it.
“Princess,” Keith said, “Coran sent us to tell you he needs help with the mice in the engine room. He thinks they might have ideas for fixing things.”
“Of course!” She replied, flashing them a small, hopeful smile as she hurried from the room.
“We’ll just…stay here…” Lance said to the now-princess-less room.
Lance’s heart started to beat harder when he realized he was alone in the room with Keith. In the two years they’d worked together, Keith had become his partner and his friend. He’d been his supporter and his confidant, and as the right side of Voltron, they’d become a pretty good team. Lance had been in love with Keith for longer than he could remember.
He’d never told Keith about his feelings, partly because he didn’t think they’d be reciprocated, but mostly because they were defenders of the entire universe and the way he felt just seemed so small in comparison.
“You gotta go for it, man,” Hunk had told him a few months ago after cornering him in his room. “I see the way you look at each other. There’s no way he doesn’t feel the same.” Lance knew he could always count on his best friend to have his back. But he couldn’t take Hunk’s advice.
“I can’t Hunk.”
“But-”
Lance interrupted him, “Even if I did tell him how I felt, and even if by some miracle he felt the same way, what then? We’re fighting a race of aliens that has been enslaving the ,em>entire universe for more than 10,000 years. I can’t risk ruining what we have on the off chance that we could make some semblance of a relationship work. This mission is so much bigger than feelings.”
Hunk looked impressed, “Wow man, I don’t think that would have been your answer two years ago.”
“Yeah, well. Being an awesomely important member of team Voltron has matured me in ways you’d never have predicted,” Lance said with a smirk that faded as soon as Hunk left his room. He knew what he’d told Hunk had been true, but damn if he had to like it. All he allowed himself – selfishly, he thought – was the eye contact. He’d gotten so tuned to Keith that he could find his eyes in the middle of a crowded room on a planet that he’d never been to.
Right now, he knew there was a very good chance they could die. They were running out of air and they would suffocate once time ran out. Lance knew he should be thinking about his family and how close they were to their planet, to their home, but his world narrowed down to Keith standing in front of him looking out the ship’s large viewport in the direction of Kerberos.
“Keith…” Lance whispered, watching him turn around to face him, “What if we die?”
***
Keith turned around to look at Lance directly. He’d never heard the Blue paladin sound so hopeless and scared. Keith walked closer so he was standing in front of him. He hoped his face reflected confidence even though he didn’t feel any.
“We’re not going to die Lance. Allura and the mice will fix the engines and Hunk will fix the lions.”
“It’s never been this bad before Keith,” Lance said, looking down. “And now we’re closer to home than we’ve been since we started this thing but we might as well be millions of light-years away.”
Keith did something then that he’d never allowed himself to do before. He reached out to clasp Lance’s hand in his own. Lance was still looking at the floor, but he intertwined their fingers and Keith smiled.
“Lance look at me,” he said. “We aren’t going to die,” he continued as soon as he had Lance’s complete attention. He squeezed his hand against Lance’s to punctuate his statement.
Keith could feel a small smile on his face as Lance nodded. His gaze flicked quickly to Lance’s lips and Keith heard him suck in a breath.
“Keith I have to-”
Whatever he was going to say was cut off when the castle lurched violently towards Kerberos. They both lost their footing as the floor tilted beneath them. Lance’s elbow dug into Keith’s ribs as they fell and rolled across the floor. He grunted as they came to a stop and realized he was pinned to the floor by Lance’s body.
“What-” Keith started before he realized that Lance’s eyes were still closed. “Lance,” no response. “Lance!” Keith said a little louder. The taller boy started at that and opened his eyes. Keith could see they still weren’t focused. “Lance, hey,” he said, putting his hand on the side of Lance’s face. “We’re okay. It’s okay.”
Lance looked down at him as their bodies were still pressed together and slowly moved his face closer. Keith didn’t know what was happening until their mouths were crushed together in a desperate kiss that made his gasp. Lance tried to pull away at that, but Keith made a small noise and pulled him back. As their mouths opened to deepen the kiss, Keith moved both of his hands to the back of Lance’s head and twined them into his hair. Lance was bracing himself up with one hand, but the other was cupped around Keith’s face and slowly dragging down his neck and chest.
Keith had never imagined that Lance shared his feelings, and this kiss was everything he had wanted for over two years. He moved one of his hands down Lance’s side to the hem of his shirt and slipped it underneath the fabric. Lance moaned softly against his lips as Keith’s hand touched the skin of his chest. After a few minutes, their kiss became less desperate and turned into something deeper and more passionate. Lance pulled away and gasped, resting his forehead against Keith’s as they both panted for air.
“I’m in love with you Keith,” he whispered, “I have been for years but I thought it was best not to say anything because of our mission. I couldn’t risk jeopardizing what we’ve been doing.”
Keith licked his lips and saw Lance track the movement with his eyes. “Lance, I’m-”
He was interrupted as Shiro, Hunk, and Pidge ran in. They all looked like they were about to say something but stopped when they saw the two boys entwined on the floor. Keith and Lance both blushed and struggled to untangle themselves so they could stand. Hunk was smiling and giving them a thumbs up, Pidge was smirking, and Shiro just waited until they were both standing.
“We’ve been pulled into Pluto’s orbit,” he said. “Allura says the mice think they can patch the engine and life support, but only enough for one more wormhole jump and the power we’d need to land. We can’t go to Earth.” Four mouths dropped open and Shiro paused, sighing quickly before he continued his explanation, “Earth hasn’t had any alien contact, so landing there in an alien spaceship with the universe’s most powerful weapon would just get us all captured.”
“But Shiro, we’re so close,” Lance said softly.
Shiro smiled back sadly and turned to Hunk and Pidge. As soon as he turned away, Keith reached out grab Lance’s hand in one of his own. Lance took a deep breath and clenched his teeth but didn’t drop Keith’s hand. Keith squeezed softly before turning his attention back to the other three paladins.
“What’s the prognosis on the lions,” Shiro was asking them.
“It’s not as bad as we thought,” Hunk answered. “When the Galra were able to rip Voltron apart, it caused the same failure in all the lions. It disengaged the locking mechanisms and tore out our forward thrusters.”
“So basically,” Pidge continued, “the lions are a bit like the castle right now. No power for movement. What’s really concerning is the locking mechanisms. We’re not sure if we’ll be able to form Voltron again.”
“Okay, one problem at a time,” Shiro said, massaging the bridge of his nose.
“-can test to see if they’re working,” Allura’s voice cut in suddenly. “Hello, can anyone hear me?”
“Princess, we are all on the control deck and we can hear you,” Shiro answered.
“Oh, wonderful!” She exclaimed, sounding excited for the first time since their disastrous mission had started. “So we have the comms up, and we should have a wormhole ready within a few ticks. We were thinking of heading to Arus since the local population is friendly.”
“Sounds like a good plan, thank you Princess,” Shiro said before turning to Hunk and Pidge, “You two head back to the hangers and see if you can make anymore headway with Voltron. And you two,” he said, waving his hand at Lance and Keith, “you just… stay here and continue lookout.” They were both still blushing as he walked out of the room.
“So-” Lance started once they were alone again before Keith cut him off by kissing him. It was just a quick peck and Keith was smiling when he broke away.
“You talk too much,” he said to Lance.
“I didn’t even-”
Keith cut him off with another kiss. Lance huffed and kissed him harder until both their mouths opened. Keith stepped closer until there was no space between their bodies and pushed one of his legs in between Lance’s. His arms wound around Lance’s waist, and both of Lance’s hands were fisted in Keith’s hair. He moaned as Lance tugged lightly. One of Keith’s hands slid lower to cup Lance’s ass through his jeans, and Lance broke away gasping. Keith didn’t move his hands, but he did crane his neck back to look into Lance’s eyes.
“I’m in love with you too,” he said. Lance sighed and smiled back at him.
Still embraced, they looked through the viewport as a wormhole opened in front of the ship, but Keith knew that wasn’t what Lance was looking at. He was looking in the direction of Earth, which was now only a tiny spec of light in the distance. Keith moved both of his hands to cup Lance’s cheeks and turned his face so they were looking at each other again.
“We will make it back here someday,” he promised.