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Lance makes a promise that night with the echo of a longing ringing about his head; he sighs it to the stars, to the comet dust, to the void—for Shiro, for the team, for the universe, his heart will go into a glass case and never open.
The easing into the situation from all the sores and aches he’s taken is surprisingly daunting. It’s nothing than adaptation and learning, yet in time, the bruises begin to fade into memories, the aches fade into soft dullness. As a child, Lance found that a mask perfectly placed is the best weapon; his smile, while tight, is there. His banter, though acted through sheer flagrance, seems to still annoy, but no one is wiser on his act.
Lance feels the frays at his own seams as the ticks pass on. The threads that tie him together split and degrade, and to counter, Blue sometimes purrs to him in comfort. She is the only constant in his head, the only ‘voice’ that is kind and is nurturing.
The Blue Paladin is one that can flow and adapt as water is best to do, so he simply tacks on extra seams on his own soul, glass case undertaking hairline fractures with each cycle of the space void. The act in itself is the hardest thing to do because Lance carries his heart on his sleeve despite how greatly he tries to shove it into the fabric to hide it.
The torture is endless, the daily struggle of telling himself ‘it’s okay, this is okay’ as Keith and Shiro become more comfortable with the blooms of their relationship. It’s the little things that become more observant: their secret smiles more open, their touches more affectionate, and their kisses more calming and loving… In a sense, Lance likens the affair to scenes of older movies where the elderly couples still smile and dote upon each other after years of togetherness. Perhaps, it isn’t too farfetched to perceive that as sometimes he believes that he has aged ten years in what he believes is a day and from the joy lines of Shiro’s eyes when he smiles at Keith. Lance feels that enclosed heartbeat shudder and drop because the want is still there, the desire, the hope that instead, Shiro would be gracing him with love and attention and not Keith.
But Keith is not Lance, and Lance is not Keith, and Red and Blue simply cannot be the other.
With a hard swallow into the pit of emptiness, Lance fixes himself, reminds himself, for Shiro, for his team, there is a mission and a goal beyond his own disgustingly pining heart. He will not fail.
He cannot fail.
-
The thought comes to him after a long fought battle, after destroying a supply line to the main fleet that was heavily guarded. Lance is alone, as he often finds himself when everyone else scatters to destress, staring along the unknown constellations that drift above him in the observatory lounge in his part of the wing.
He is only a leg, a support. According to the banter he hears on the intercom in his helmet, he can barely support any of them. Closing his blue eyes, he closes the ocean away from the sky, tilting his head to press his cheek against the cold metal of the castle floor. It’s a deterrent from those thoughts; glass case, he reminds himself, under careful lock and key.
The plan, however, is brilliant. What better way to know the enemy than to infiltrate it himself. He could cause internal suffering, force the infrastructure of the millennia-old empire down with a simple distraction. He isn’t a necessary piece, despite Blue growling in his head in disagreement, anyone can simply pilot Blue because she’s warm and accepting, so much like his mother’s embrace and sweet comforts. The universe contains a plethora of candidates and any one of them would be so much greater than himself.
Lance can distract with all his annoyances while the others whittle away with a better Blue Paladin at the Empire and save the universe. They can go home, home, Pidge with her family, Hunk to his and Shiro… Shiro could rest. Shiro could finally rest.
He just simply needs a moment of reprieve while the others were unknowing and an escape pod—he would never risk Blue. Blue is a necessary piece, necessary for Voltron and for the universe. Lance, however, is a speck, a dust mote that float about in a depthless sea of stars and dust. There are other motes, other motes that are smarter, faster, greater, not a failure of a fighter pilot that only scraped by out of the cargo division because of Keith dropping out.
Quietly, the Blue Paladin rises from the floor, watching through the glass at the expanses he has grown so familiarly cold with. They’re not as warm as he remembers, and as he relents and leaves, he admits somberly he can’t remember much about home at all.
–
It’s, disturbingly, a success.
A few fortnights (he assumes) finds him piloting a pod miles away from the Castle of Lions, a small map shining from the cuff of his armor. Blue is finally beginning to fade in his head, the distance between them growing so immensely, the fractures crack and grown along the heart case. The tears had thankfully ceased a while ago after she growled at him, why are you leaving, why are you leaving us!?
No one else had seen him, each Paladin in their own realm of their new ‘home.’
This is for the best is all Lance can mutter into the solitude of the cockpit, his hands trembling along the steering handles. It’s silent at first, the only company being the hum of whatever powers the pod. When he planned this out as thoroughly as he could, Lance wondered what would be racing through his head; would he be scared? Apathetic? Would he simply cower and return back and pretend nothing had occurred?
Instead, what he wonders now is if anyone other than Blue has noticed at all. Doubtful, he chides himself, so softly it nearly breaks him. Maybe they’ll all be elated he’s gone, the dumb, rambling buffoon that hid his own insecurities with skirt-chasing and overly confident antics. Shiro will probably sigh in relief, kiss Keith and say in wistful relief, “thank fuck.”
Oh, God, oh, God, he’s weak, he’s fucking weak! His hands fall away from the handles, reach up to grab his hair in clumps because his lungs suddenly feel full and tight. Thank fuck, Shiro would say, thank fuck, thank fuck, Lance is gone. The sobs itch at the back of his throat, he’s so weak, the pins prickling at his eyes as he tugs brunet strands harder and harder (weak) and harder until–.
When the beeps from his cuff start, the fear grips his throat tight, the anticipation of what he’s doing fully steeling his back with a chill. The pinging signals on his map begin to grow far more in numbers sporadically, the red glows filling his vision so numerously that the blue grid of the map is no longer visible. It takes nothing more than a hesitant glance out through the window to show him that he’s shit deep in Galra territory. Bones shaking, skin crawling, the main fleet ship approaches and all Lance sees is red light.
–
There’s no reason to fight, Lance tells himself in the black space of his cell, curled up along the floor with his armor intact, the black suit in tatters. The sentries had descended upon his pod once it was in the hull of the main ship, grabbing at him despite his lack of resistance. Lance was cold, chilled to his very core with anxiousness that maybe, just maybe, this wouldn’t work like he had hoped. Ice stings at his nerves and he dismays because what if he isn’t taken where he had imagined being taken, but instead he would be left to rot in this darkness with nothing but the voices bouncing about in his skull?
Ticks turn to seconds turn to hours, he thinks, before footsteps approach in the far distance of his senses, and recognition slams into him at the door hisses open and he’s manhandled up, his cuffed arms struggling in instinct as the guards drag him down corridors and past others, Galran or otherwise until he finds himself on a lift with the guards, all fight gone because there’s no use to it. The decision, the circumstances of it all, is why Lance hangs between two alien guards that look like they’ll rip off a limb if he so much talks.
The ride on the lift is long and yet only lasts for a breath of a moment it seems. The door opens to an observatory—no, a throne room—and there perched on a grand seat is the emperor himself, and if any sentient divinity is listening, Lance would almost praise them because he did it, he’s here, and he’s in the one place to cause the greatest disturbance.
The guards drag him until he’s at the very stairs of the throne, dropped haphazardly and uncaring before a low grunt sends them away. Lance lays there for a moment, tugging at the cuffs that hold his hands behind his back before he manages to shift onto his knees and meet the eyes of the most terrifying creature to currently exist.
The sudden snap in his own core causes him to double over, a gasp sharp and deep as he shakes. Something is overpowering him, no, something is slithering into him, but nothing is around and Zarkon sits still on his throne, so why, why does he ache?
“Blue Paladin of Voltron,” comes a soft croon, deep and methodical, careful with each syllable the person behind such voice rises slowly, as if so burdened with power, his limbs are weighted, “how tired you are, how broken.”
Lance almost laughs at how pitying this asshole king sounds. Where’s the fight? Where’s the boot to his head? Where’s the demand that he surrender despite already doing so?
Zarkon grows quiet in almost sheer spite, slowly trailing down his steps to stand above Lance’s prone form. The ache, the whatever the hell this is snakes around something inside and Lance’s shoulder fight with everything he can muster to not cry in front of the ‘original’ Black Paladin.
“You are so very tired…” Zarkon croons again, kneeling down to take Lance’s chin, make fathomless blue eyes peer up at him. The wariness that Lance must show must nearly delight him as the corners of his mouth twitch. Lance wishes, hopes on every star, that maybe his head will be crushed instead so that his dust will fly in the galaxies away from there.
A thumb trails along the corner of his lips, tugging just slightly at the bottom. The act is almost so tender that the black that crawling and clawing into his inner crevices howls with the gesture. Zarkon watches patiently, as though he has another ten thousand years, but then speaks when Lance thinks there is nothing more to say.
“My Blue… was faithful also.”
Blue eyes widen, his own core shatters and the glass Lance has placed so carefully, so hopefully, around his own faith and his own heart is gone, it’s in pieces, millions of sharp pieces. The hand that holds his chin turns then to cup his cheek and something feels right, something hisses and nips at his fear to tell him this is right. Recklessly, he sobs, doubling over because these weeks, maybe months, have been so hard, so heavy, that the bruises Lance took were all worth is until this moment when he is weakly and pathetically crying in front of a sworn enemy.
Zarkon allows him, never once presses him away or stands. He is power and authority, patient and withstanding, a presence that betrays Lance for a moment because it’s almost as if Shiro is kneeling there, allowing him to spill before he ebbs.
The storm in his core slowly quells, Black and Blue intertwining within Lance. Did the former Paladin feel this way? Did the Blue Paladin of Old also love his Black so much?
“He did,” Zarkon answers the quiet throne room, “and that is why he had to be sent away from me first.”
–
The melding, the filling of Black into the crevices of his Blue are breathtaking, all encompassing; Lance no longer knows loneliness, no longer knows the empty void that was his own heart in his little glass case. Instead, there’s a bitter warmth that he almost relishes in, something that speaks to his own soul yelling out, please, please, please!
The foreign softness of a bed does not frighten him as he thought it would. The searching touches and near painful bites do not make him fear. He is whole, somehow, despite his own little consciousness screaming, but he smothers it as he would with a pillow, relishing how the small ember fades out under dark promises crooned in his ear.
The touches, he craves them. The reassurances and the praise of good, so good, they delight him. Lance is broken, stripped away, into something less than before and yet so much more. He is so good, Master says, he is so good now.
It’s easy to crawl into the emperor’s lap, sit there and be petted. It’s easy to crawl into the same creature’s bed. It’s even easy to let his paladin armor—now refitted to his Master’s whim—to slip along the curves and lines of his body and to take the Galra rifle in hand.
It’s not nearly as easy to nuzzle the end of the barrel against the nape of a prisoner of war, but Master, though, he is comfort and he is there, the Black swirls pressing along the Blue, and then the trigger pulls.
(Lance remembers he was scared of bugs as a kid. He never liked them; mama or papa would have to get rid of them for him, or maybe even an elder sibling. There was something unsettling about them, with their legs and their eyes, as though they were not natural for his world. For the few he could stand and sympathize for, they would be taken outside instead of done away with.
His first kill is strangely fulfilling.)
The flow of his routine begins to run perfectly, and his Master is so proud, he practically brims with it. He goads his officers while he pets Lance, offers Lance as a shining example of how the emperor’s plans are perfect so long as they follow them. ‘Look at my beauty, my treasure,’ Lance hears him in the rumbles of his own breaking mind, ‘he never fails me.’
Another promise to the void, Lance whispers, is that no, he will never fail Zarkon. He will never see the crease of a frown (the ones another Black would give him), he will never hear disappointment lace his voice (he can just barely hear that chiding, deep void); he will be so good, even if he must face his former team of Paladins. He will retire them, force them to do so, if they ever try to destroy his Master’s empire. Lance will be his Master’s knight, the rightful executioner if the Paladins ever try.
Even against Green? She will be easy—her smaller stature, while harder to fire at, leaves her vulnerable to overpowering blows.
Even Yellow? Harder, but his size makes him slower. Easier target to hit. Deception… will make the kill simple.
Red? Red will spill onto the metal floor of his Master’s ship, vengeful and righteous.
And your false Black Paladin?
A pause. A flutter of a heartache he once knew but–
He will not fail.
–
He fails.