Chapter Text
CORE Research Logs
Entry #1
Dated five years before the return of VoltronThe year is 9870 Imperial.
It has been nearly ten thousand years since Lord Zarkon came to power, casting down the old Altean dynasty. In that time, the Galra Empire has extended its borders to encompass more than four thousand inhabited solar systems across twelve hundred galaxies.
We are now stretched thin, and progress has slowed. Resources dwindle and ships fail, and so we the druids have created a new initiative we call CORE. Each of the three CORE research facilities exists to answer a different question. Lab 2 studies synthetic Quintessence. The druids of Lab 3 grow Balmera crystal analogues.
Here on Vel-17, at CORE Lab 1, our purpose is simple: to explore the effects of extended Quintessential deprivation on sentient beings; to identify variance in the progression of Quintessential starvation in different species; and to determine if its effects can be attenuated in the absence of naturally-occurring Quintessence.
“I know I said this before,” Lance said as he steered the Blue Lion toward Vel-17. “But I’m really not sure we should be doing this.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Keith. “Scared?”
Lance squeezed Blue’s controls so tight she growled a warning in the back of his mind. He wasn’t sure if she was telling him to calm down, or if she was just grumpy because he was grumpy. He was running with the second option, because he didn't think calm was an option right now.
“Uh, no,” he said, keeping his voice light. “I’m not scared. Pssh. As if. I just don’t want to get back to the others and have Allura yell at me for doing something stupid.”
“Don’t worry,” said Pidge, who was flying point in their little three-man formation. “We’ll just blame it on Keith.”
Lance laughed and Keith scowled in the little box tucked away in the corner of Lance’s viewscreen. Keith had spent the first leg of their mission trying to keep his feed audio-only, but Pidge had modified the comm system so he couldn’t shut off the video. (Not that it would have mattered if he did. Twenty-four hours wasn’t enough time to forget the Galra who’d cheated his way onto their team.)
“Cool your jets, Chewbacca,” Lance said, switching over to short-range scanners as they neared their destination. “The grown-ups all adore you, so it’s not like they’re gonna kick you off the team for this. Hell, they’ll probably give you a medal for taking initiative.”
A faint growl came over the comms, and Lance was pretty sure it wasn’t Red. But all Keith said was, “Stop calling me that.”
“What, Chewbacca?” Lance asked, all innocence and charm.
“Yes.”
“Fine.” Lance gave an exaggerated shrug. “How about Wolverine? Leomon? Beast Boy? Nightcrawler? Or do you want to go back to Furbie?”
Keith was definitely growling now, his yellow eyes glowing like coals in his fuzzy purple face.
Lance grinned, silently daring Keith to say something. Fighting one battle with them didn’t make him a paladin, and as soon as Matt was back on his feet, Keith was a goner. The fact that he’d helped them form Voltron didn’t change anything. They may have all shared a mind, in a certain sense, but the link wasn’t without limits. So, sure, Keith had wanted to save the besieged planet of Berlou—not that Lance believed for a second there was no ulterior motive there—but he’d also kept his mind conspicuously distant from the rest of theirs. Almost like he had something to hide.
Allura and Coran didn’t see it. When Pidge had proposed hitting a Galra base for information on what they’d done to Matt, and Keith had offered his “expertise” with Galra computers, both Alteans had smiled at him like he was a cherubic little icon of paladin virtue. Lance had come because Hunk wanted to see Shay, Shiro refused to leave Matt’s side, and Allura didn’t seem to see the problem in leaving Pidge alone with a Galra.
“Okay, guys,” said Pidge. “We’re gonna have to circle back around to the whole naming issue.”
“There is no issue! My name is Keith.”
Pidge ignored him. “Right now we need to focus on the information.”
“Fine.” Keith leaned on his thrusters and shot ahead of the other two. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Pidge took off after him, but Lance hung back. He wasn’t scared, exactly, but the last time they’d come to Vel-17 Lance had almost been eaten by space zombies, then got dropped on an undead planet halfway across the universe with no way to let his best friend know he was alive. Lance couldn’t do that to Hunk again. No way.
But the little isolated moon base they’d hit a couple hours ago didn’t have access to the research logs from Vel-17, where Matt had been held for almost a year. Pidge had made the executive decision to return to Vel-17, Keith had instantly agreed, and Lance wasn’t going to be the coward who ran away from a challenge. Though he had to admit it felt like a stroke of bad luck Pidge and Hunk had thought to salvage wormhole generators from the wrecked Galra fleet on Berlou. They wouldn’t have been able to come all the way out to Vel-17 without the castle-ship otherwise.
Well. No helping it now. Lance would just have to suck it up and hope the monsters were feeling a little less vicious today. They couldn’t have found much food or water down there in the last week, right? Maybe they were already dead.
Or maybe they were some kind of super-zombie that was basically immortal and ate people just for funsies.
“There,” Pidge said as Lance finally caught up with them. The prison complex lay below them, small and silent from above. Lance’s eyes went to the perfectly round hole in the center of the building, where walls and floor and dirt had been cleanly cut away. There had once been a tarp stretched across the hole in the roof, but it lay in tatters now, crumpled on the bottom of the crater near the newer, smaller hole. That was where Lance, Matt, and Allura had been right before the Galra experiments had drop-kicked them across the universe.
Lance checked the BLIP-tech sensors Pidge had installed in Blue. With all three lions helping, the scanners were able to identify three lifeforms inside the prison—faint signals, clustered together in the northern wing of the building. They seemed to shiver on the display, skittering around the prison complex like cockroaches on a sugar high.
“Keith, hold on,” said Pidge as the Red Lion headed for the surface.
“What?” Keith snapped.
Lance scowled. “Nothing. Pidge was just, y’know, trying to keep you from getting vaporized by the monsters down there.” Red slowed, and Lance let Blue drift around to face her. “Look, you wanna go get yourself killed, I’m not gonna stop you. But you do have one of my best friends’ lions at the moment, so maybe you could show a little common courtesy and keep her out of it.”
“We need to draw those things out into the open,” Pidge said swiftly, cutting off whatever Keith might have had to say in response. “I don’t want to risk destroying the computers.”
“Right.” Lance circled the prison once, worrying his lip as he scanned for movement. The place remained as dead as the rest of the planet, which was even more drab and depressing in daylight, all gray rock and colorless sky. There was no break in the clouds, which pressed down on Blue’s back like a physical weight, crushing her toward the creatures below.
After a moment, Lance retreated toward the Green Lion and blew out a long sigh.
“Okay, I give up. How do we draw them out?”
Pidge hesitated, which made Lance feel at least thirty percent better about not having any useful ideas. Eventually, they shrugged. “Make some noise?”
Lance didn’t need to ask what that meant. Or, well, he didn’t get a chance to ask what that meant, because Pidge wheeled around and opened fire at almost the exact same moment they finished speaking. Green’s lasers burned stripes across Lance’s vision and kicked up a cloud of ashen dust and rock chips.
Lance pulled back on his controls, eyeing Pidge’s video feed warily. “Remind me who decided you were old enough to be trusted with death lasers?”
Pidge grinned. “Shut up and help me make a mess.”
Matt breathed a sigh of relief as the Balmera came into sight on the viewscreen. It had proved difficult to track down a moving Balmera; more so than Matt had anticipated when they’d set out from Berlou. Balmera were fast creatures when they wanted to be. Not as fast as a Voltron Lion, not even as fast as the castle-ship, but fast enough that by the time Coran and Allura had finished preparations, opened a wormhole for Pidge, Lance, and Keith, and opened another wormhole to the coordinates the Balmeran Elder, Mir, had sent, the Balmera was too far away to be picked up on the scanners.
Granted, it had been something like four hours between receiving the coordinates and jumping to them and, granted, Mir had warned them her people were rusty on navigating from the surface of a healthy Balmera—an ancient art, apparently, but one that hadn’t been needed since the Galra colonized the creature.
Still. The last two hours they’d spent getting new coordinates from Mir and chasing down the Balmera had seemed closer to two days with the way Matt was feeling. He knew a lot of it was probably the fact that he was now aware of the crystals growing throughout his body, but it seemed like he could hardly take a breath without jostling something.
Shiro sat on the edge of Matt’s chair, absent-mindedly rubbing Matt’s back. Most of his attention was on the bridge—Allura’s dais with its twin pillars, Coran’s control panel where he monitored their location, the long-range scanners, and the comms. Matt’s seat was behind the main controls, arranged in a ring with the other paladin stations.
Matt wasn’t honestly sure what the paladins stations were for. They each had a console that connected to the ship’s main computers, so Matt could monitor anything and everything in the castle, and he was pretty sure Pidge used their station to test programs they’d written, but as far as Matt was concerned, it was just a comfortable place to sit.
Sitting was good. Sitting didn’t aggravate the crystal grating against his hip or the persistent pain shooting through the scar below his left knee. He’d been sure there were more crystals there, it hurt so much, but he’d had Coran run another scan using the castle-ship’s scanners, and while there was a small cluster of crystals behind his kneecap, it was no more than anywhere else.
“What are you thinking about?” Matt asked Shiro, leaning back to look up at him. Just yesterday they’d both been fighting for the fate of an entire planet. Just yesterday, Matt had still been searching for Shiro, not knowing if he was dead or alive, or if he had joined Zarkon’s army.
He had been fighting for the Galra, as it happened, but only so he could sabotage the war from the inside. Zarkon's army had been marching ever-outward, the heart of the fleet on a collision course with Earth. Thanks to Voltron, that fleet was now so much rubble, and Voltron's new allies were monitoring the area to make sure no new threats to Earth appeared.
With news of Matt’s condition, there hadn’t been much time for relaxation on Berlou, but Shiro had showered and changed out of the Galra armor he’d been wearing into an Altean jumpsuit Coran had found in storage. The nice thing about living in a castle built by shape-shifters was that most of the clothes adapted themselves to the wearer’s body. The black and yellow jumpsuit was made to look like a jacket and slacks, but the illusion was ruined somewhat by the way the fabric clung to Shiro’s muscles.
Not that Matt was complaining. He needed something to distract him from the pain.
He realized he was staring and forced his eyes back to Shiro’s face—and found Shiro watching him, one eyebrow raised, his lips twisted into an exasperated smile. Matt stared back, pretending not to notice the flush creeping into his cheeks.
“Do I want to know what you were thinking about?” Shiro asked softly, pushing the limits of Matt’s self-restraint. He smacked Shiro’s leg and shot a furtive glance at the others. Fortunately, Hunk had abandoned his station to go hover at Coran’s shoulder in hopes of talking to Shay. Not that he would put it that way, of course. Hunk was much too nice to be openly excited about returning to the Balmera, given the circumstances.
He still looked like he was willing to go out in Yellow and push the castle if it would get them to their destination any faster.
“I was thinking you’re an ass,” Matt said with a teasing grin. “Lucky for you you’re hot.”
It was Shiro’s turn to flush, which was adorable. Logically, there must have been a time when Shiro wasn’t built like a superhero, and apparently that time had been more recent that Matt would have guessed. Or maybe Shiro’s head was permanently stuck in the awkward pre-teen stage. Whatever the case, he seemed caught off guard any time Matt commented on his appearance.
Matt took pity on his maybe-kind of-almost boyfriend, intertwining their fingers and nodding at the holographic map display behind them. “Pretty impressive, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Shiro said. He tried not to gape at the Altean tech and the artistic lines of the architecture, but it didn’t really work. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s all so…”
“Shiny?” Matt suggested. “Futuristic?”
“Thoughtful,” Shiro said. “I mean, let’s face it. Galra ships are just as advanced as this, and they polish everything to a shine, too, but… that’s all they have. A floor, a ceiling, four walls, and you’re done. Maybe some mood lighting, some security cameras or whatever.”
He shook his head, smiling at the recessed ceiling over the hologram. Altean writing was etched into the metal around the edge of the circular space. If Matt focused, he could make the castle-ship’s translator convert the letters to English for him, but a crystal at his collarbone was throbbing now, so he forced a smile and focused on breathing normally.
“The Alteans cared about this place,” Shiro said. “It’s a nice change of pace.”
Smiling, Matt leaned his head against Shiro’s arm and closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept well last night because of the pain, and the day so far had passed in an exhausted haze broken only by sharper fits of pain.
Shiro went back to rubbing Matt’s back, the motion a comforting rhythm that threatened to put Matt to sleep.
“Making our final approach, Princess,” Coran called out. Matt forced his eyes open and watched the Balmera grow larger and larger. He could pick out motion on the surface near the massive bore-holes that had once formed Galra mines. Matt thought he recognized the one they landed next to, though that might have been the sleep deprivation talking.
When they landed, Matt had to work himself up to standing, his body aching like that of a much older man. Shiro’s hovering presence nearby was motivation enough to clamp down on his pain. He managed to stand on the first try, wavering only a little as vertigo threatened to overwhelm him.
Raw Quintessence, Allura had said. That was what Haggar’s druids had hit him with back on Berlou. Their normal, violent-tinted magic drained Quintessence from the victim, but the yellow lightning that had hit Matt during the battle was exactly the opposite. As far as Allura could tell, it was a weaponized form of the Quintessence they’d stolen, injected directly into Matt’s body. And considering the crystals inside him grew in response to Quintessence…
Well, it wasn’t all that surprising that Matt’s pain level had been so high since waking up in the Berlua medical clinic.
He tried not to lean too heavily on Shiro as they left the castle-ship, but it was preferable to collapsing at his feet. The elevator ride down to the main ramp was long and awkward. Allura and Shiro’s eyes on Matt’s head felt like needles under his skin, and the way Hunk and Coran conspicuously avoided staring was only marginally better.
Mir, Shay, and Rax greeted them at the base of the ramp.
“Welcome, paladins,” Mir said with a slight bow. “It is good to see you again, unfortunate though the circumstances may be.”
Matt forced a smile. “What, me? Nah, this was all just an excuse to let Hunk and Shay catch up.”
Shay giggled into her hand, Hunk scowled at Matt, blushing, and Mir’s eyes softened.
“Come,” she said, waving to Rax. “Let us take a look at you.”
Rax stepped forward, wringing his hands. “I will carry you—if you do not mind?”
Matt was seriously tempted to decline, but he honestly wasn't sure when his body would decide it had had enough. If he turned down Rax’s offer now, Shiro would probably end up carrying him at some point—and as much as he liked the idea of Shiro carrying him bridal-style, the thought of Shiro seeing him at his weakest tied his stomach in knots, and not in a good way.
So he nodded, doing his best to stay dignified as Rax lifted him, one long, rough-skinned arm at his knees, the other around his shoulder. As brusque as Rax had been on their first visit, he was surprisingly gentle now, careful to hold Matt steady so the journey didn’t jostle him too badly.
Allura and Mir took the lead, conversing softly about the progress the Balmerans had made in rebuilding after the generations-long Galra occupation. Coran was tactful enough to distract Shiro, who quickened his pace to keep up with Rax’s longer strides.
Shay, meanwhile, pulled Hunk to the back of the group with a soft, “Hello, Skyling.”
Matt met Hunk’s eyes over Rax’s shoulder and smiled, taking a guilty sort of pleasure in the way Hunk pouted and proceeded to ignore Matt’s gaze.
“Hey, uh, hi,” he said, staggering slightly as Shay bumped her shoulder against his. “I, uh, I told you we’d be back before you had time to miss us.”
Shay laughed. “You did. I must confess, I thought you were exaggerating.”
“Yeah, well, you underestimated Team Voltron’s thirst for danger.”
Keith waited out fifteen minutes of aimless shooting before he spoke up.
“Okay I don’t think this is working.”
Lance hunched over his controls. “I don’t think you’re--”
“No, Lance, he’s right.” Pidge gave up on blasting the landscape into oblivion and slumped in their seat. “I don’t think we’re gonna draw them out like this.”
“Are you sure they’re even down there?” Keith cringed as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He really needed to learn to think before he opened his mouth if he was ever going to make friends with the other paladins. “I just mean—some types of biolife sensors can give a false positive if there’s something recently dead in range. Or—or maybe those things are still alive, but they’re too weak to move around.”
Keith’s gaze flickered to the visual feeds in the corner of the screen. Lance still looked like he wanted to drop-kick Keith into an active volcano, but Pidge’s face was neutral. That was something.
“You might be right,” Pidge conceded after a long moment. “But these things are nasty. I’m not going in there until I know for sure they aren’t waiting to ambush us or something.”
Keith should have left it alone. He should have just nodded and backed off and let the other two come up with a plan. But he’d already been alone with them—the two paladins who hated him the most—for nearly five hours. If this didn’t end soon, he was going to punch something.
“So, what, we just hang around up here forever?” Keith demanded.
Lance, of course, was not amused. “Hey, big shot, if you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears, but if you just wanna complain, why don’t you do us all a favor and shut your cake hole.”
The Red Lion growled in Keith’s ear, every bit as fed-up with Lance’s attitude as Keith. That was some comfort, even if it didn’t keep his hands from shaking as he wheeled his lion around and split off from the others.
There was a moment of silence, and then both humans started talking at once.
“What are you doing?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Go ahead and run, you overgrown chinchilla!”
“Lance… I don’t think he’s running away.”
Red touched down near the outer wall of the prison complex. “Pidge,” Keith grunted. “Am I anywhere near the main computer?”
Pidge hesitated. “You aren’t going in there, are you?”
Keith grit his teeth, running his thumbs along the controls. Matt had lent him the red paladin’s armor, lightweight polymer plates over a bodysuit that was made of some kind of fabric Keith didn’t recognize, something thin enough that he could feel the rough texture of the throttle’s grip. He reminded himself to breathe. “Am I near the computers or not?”
“…No. They’re pretty much dead center of the building. But Keith--”
He didn’t let Pidge finish. Keith squeezed the trigger, and Red unleashed a low-power blast from her tail that blew a hole in the wall. It probably also took out three or four rooms on the other side, but it got him inside without wasting time. That was all Keith cared about right now.
Ignoring Pidge and Lance’s increasingly frantic protests, Keith lowered the ramp and jogged out into the stagnant Vellian air. Red’s presence in his mind was restless with the need for action, and he didn’t doubt that if she’d been small enough to fit in the prison complex’s corridors, she would have followed him over the rubble and into the darkened interior.
It was eerily silent inside the building. Keith fumbled with the buttons on the side of his helmet until he located the switch for the headlamp, which lit up the corridor with a soft yellow glow. Shadows stretched away from him into the darkness, sharp angles and stark contrast that made everything look surreal.
Lance was ranting in some language Keith’s translator didn’t recognize, which was actually something of a relief. It was much easier to tune out gibberish than barbed insults, and Keith needed to focus on finding the creatures the paladins had encountered the last time they were here. His face mask provided him with a readout of Red’s BLIP-tech scan, which grew more precise as Keith approached the source of the signal. His suit must have had its own scanner installed—but the signal was too faint for the scanner to pinpoint, even from here.
Navigating the building in the dark was difficult, even once he’d turned the comms down to near-nothingness and focused on building a map in his head. He’d spent his whole life in space, and surface structures had a logic all their own. There was no central corridor here, no symmetry to make navigation easier, and he kept finding himself at rooms with no other exits.
Eventually, though, he reached the area where the scanners placed the creatures. Slowing, Keith drew his sword and scanned the corridor as he progressed, looking for signs of movement.
His only warning was a solitary red light glowing at him from the darkness. Something scraped against the floor, and Keith leaped back, narrowly avoiding a clawed hand the size of his head. Yelping, Keith brought his sword up.
The blade bit into hardened flesh, stuck for a fraction of a second, and then turned aside. He smelled burning flesh and the acrid scent of blood, but the creature’s hand was still intact and fully functional, swiping again at Keith’s head as he retreated back the way he came.
With a rasping cry, a second creature joined the first, this one covered in a network of neural-dermal enhancements. Keith had never seen such an extensive application, but even a small fraction of this would have been enough to grant a noticeable uptick in agility and precision. As much as this creature had been augmented, Keith knew better than to engage it head-on.
He raised his sword to block a swing from the first creature, the one with the cybernetic eye, not unlike the one Sendak had used, then turned and ran. Pidge had said there were three creatures here, but they’d have to content themself with two, because Keith wasn’t hanging around to see if the missing test subject was still combat-ready.
Keith ran without slowing, letting the sound of claws on steel tell him when to dodge and when to risk a counter-strike. He tried to identify the species the test subjects had been before the experiments, but it wasn’t one he recognized—though the decomposing flesh wasn’t exactly doing him any favors.
The map he’d built in his head wavered in and out of focus as he ran. He didn’t have time to stop at intersections and debate, so he navigated on gut instinct. He was pretty sure he’d already gotten himself lost, but he could sense the Red Lion distantly, and that was as good as a compass for pointing him toward the exit.
The creature with the ND network lunged, and Keith wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid the blow. Two-inch claws glanced off his shoulder, leaving gouges in the armor there, and Keith staggered, lashing out with his sword as the creature skidded past him. He twisted, slashing at the other creature, then sprinted through the nearest door into a laboratory. The shelves on the walls were laden with glass jars containing indistinct specimens, but Keith didn’t stop to study them, just charged through the far door and turned left, back toward Red’s silent call.
He felt her getting closer with each breath, reaching out to him. He swung around a corner to the left, pushing his legs to move faster as the creatures skidded and slammed against the wall in their haste to follow him.
Sunlight bleached the corridor ahead, and Keith cranked up the volume on his comms.
“Coming out with two,” he cried. “Get ready!”
He stumbled on the mound of rubble, clawing his way up as the creatures grasped at his heels. The unsteady ground slowed him more than it seemed to slow the creatures, and their angry cries spurred him onward.
When he reached the top of the rubble heap he staggered forward and leaped for solid ground, landing awkwardly and pressing a hand to the earth to steady himself.
Something heavy shook the stone behind him.
Keith ran for all he was worth, but the creature was faster. It was going to catch him before he reached the Red Lion, it was--
A shadow swept over Keith, and he covered his head with his arms as wind and heat whipped around him.
The creature hissed, and something scraped against metal, the sound an assault on Keith’s adrenaline-sensitive ears.
He spun, ready for a fight, and found the Green Lion towering over him, pinning the creature with cybernetic eye beneath her front paw. Her tail arced up, shooting at the other creature, who dodged with uncanny speed.
The Blue Lion dropped from the sky in a swirl of wintery air. Ice crystals bloomed across the second creature's skin, rooted it to the ground. It fought a second longer, stretching its claws toward the Blue Lion, and then stilled, cocooned in a thick layer of ice. With a flick of her tail, Blue shattered the ice and the creature within.
Silence settled over Vel-17.
Keith braced his hands on his knees, drinking in deep lungfuls of air as his heartbeat returned to normal. He tugged off his helmet, letting the breeze of the Blue Lion’s passing cool his scalp. In retrospect, this probably hadn’t been his brightest plan ever. Though, on the bright side, it had taken care of two-thirds of their problem.
“Well,” Pidge said, the Green Lion leaning harder on the pinned creature until it stopped moving. “That was exciting.”
“Crazy,” Lance said, setting the Blue Lion down beside Green. “The word you’re looking for is crazy. Maybe monumentally stupid.”
Both lions’ ramps lowered, and Pidge flashed Keith a grin as they came down. “Effective, though, you gotta admit.”
Lance groaned, refusing to even look at Keith as he headed for the hole in the wall. “Don’t encourage him, Pidge.”
Keith scowled at Lance’s retreating back until Pidge elbowed him.
“Ignore him,” they said in an undertone. “He’d have done the same thing if you hadn’t beat him to it.”
“Stop spreading lies about me, Pidge!” Lance paused atop the pile of rubble, hands on his hips like old propaganda recordings of explorers surveying new worlds. Somehow Keith doubted Lance would appreciate the comparison. “Don’t forget there’s still one of these things in there somewhere.”
Pidge rolled their eyes and hurried to catch up with Lance, Keith trailing several steps behind. “Thanks for the tip, O fearless leader. Wanna wait for the rest of us, or are you gonna solo this fight?”
Lance froze, turning to glare at Pidge, who smiled innocently and plunged past him into the darkness.
Rax carried Matt to a small chamber off one of the quieter sections of tunnel. Someone had strung a curtain up here to give a bit of privacy, but the miniature parade they’d attracted as they made their way through the tunnels ruined the illusion. Mir attempted to shoo them off, but many of the youngest Balmerans lingered, openly gaping at the paladins. Matt supposed it was only to be expected, after all Voltron had done for the people, but it still left him feeling self-conscious as Rax set him down on a carved stone bed covered in moss.
“I wish you well, Paladin,” Rax murmured, rubbing his arm. He seemed nervous, and Matt wished he had the brain power to comfort him.
Instead, he just smiled. “Thank you, Rax.”
Rax smiled, then turned toward a ripple in the curtain where several children were trying to sneak one final peak at the humans. With a sigh, Rax waved to his sister and grandmother and stormed out past the curtain. A chorus of squeals greeted him, followed by pounding footsteps.
With a playful roar, Rax gave chase. “What wicked ogres are these, spying on our guests? Exunt!” One of the children shrieked with laughter, and Rax grunted. Matt leaned over to peer through the gap in the curtains and saw Rax rubbing his jaw, one of the children draped over his shoulder. “You have a tough vein in you, little ogre. And hard feet.”
Hunk raised an eyebrow at Shay, who bit back a smile. “Fear not. My brother often watches the young ones while their parents work. He will not let them disturb us.”
“I’ll bet he’s one tough babysitter,” Hunk muttered, and Matt had to agree.
Mir smiled. “He is at that. Now.” She turned to Matt. “Take off your shirt.”
Matt flushed, but did as she asked, shrugging out of the long-sleeved red shirt Lance had sewn for him out of fabric he’d “borrowed” from spare bedrooms in the castle. Wadding up the shirt, Matt hugged it to his chest and stared at the floor as Mir and Shay stood behind him. The others waited by the doorway, an awkward silence growing between them as Mir laid one rough, warm hand against Matt’s back.
The heat sank into Matt’s aching muscles and he relaxed into the touch, though it didn’t last long.
When the heat faded, Mir breathed out, patting Matt’s shoulder. “Not to worry, young one,” she said. “These are indeed Balmera crystals growing within you. We should be able to ease your pain. Granddaughter?”
Shay grunted, and added her hand beside Mir’s. Matt didn’t have to ask to know when they’d started their work. It stirred something in him, some awareness that, though dampened by a flash of pain, left him feeling small and out of place. He was keenly aware that the stone he sat on grew from a living creature, that this entire world was alive. He couldn’t sense the Balmera, not the way he could sense his lion, but through Shay and Mir’s touch he could feel a vastness that left him dizzy and disoriented.
A moment later the crystals began to shift, and Matt forgot all about the Balmera and the two women behind him. The aches he’d just begun to get used to shifted, awakening fresh pain as they found new bones to grate against, new nerves that weren’t yet desensitized to their presence.
Matt hissed, and Shiro moved as though to stop the Balmerans. Allura held him back with a hand on his shoulder, and Matt sent her a silent thank-you. The pain was already receding, and his breath came easier. It was like letting out a breath he’d been holding too long, a release of tension he hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying around.
Mir and Shay continued their work on Matt’s back for several long minutes, Matt tracking the motion of the crystals by the pain and the nausea and the icy numbness that followed. When they’d finished, they moved on to his neck and limbs and gut and repeated the process. Sometimes they drew a crystal fragment out of his body through the skin, leaving small puncture wounds that oozed blood until Shay spread a cool, fragrant gel over them.
More often, no crystal appeared. Matt wasn’t sure if these shards were too large to extract, or too deep, or if they simply didn’t want to do them all at once. It hurt enough when they poked through the skin that Matt didn’t complain, but he didn’t relish the thought of going through this several more times, extracting a handful of crystals with each pass.
It was difficult to say how long it took, all together. Matt spend a good deal of the time only vaguely aware of the world around him, his mind floating somewhere outside his body in a typhoon of unpleasant sensations.
All he knew was that by the time Mir passed him a cup of warm broth filled with cave root and what was probably some kind of Balmeran insect, Hunk had flopped sideways on a stone bench carved into the wall, Coran was examining the jars stacked on the shelves at the back of the space, and Allura and Shiro were deep in conversation, their voices too soft for Matt to hear. Not that he made much of an effort. It felt like he’d just run a marathon, and all he wanted to do was sleep.
“Are you done?” he asked, yawning.
Hunk sat up, rubbing his eyes, and the others turned expectantly to Mir, who only frowned and tapped the bottom of Matt’s cup. She stared at him until he drank, grimacing as the cave bug chunks went down.
He had to take two more drinks before Mir was satisfied—and as soon as she started talking, he set the stew aside.
“We are done for today,” Mir said, frowning pointedly at Matt’s cup. “Your life is in no danger, and you need rest. We will speak when you awake.”
“But--”
“Rest,” Mir said firmly. She nodded to Shay, who quietly ushered the others out beyond the curtain. “We will return.”
Before Matt could protest any further, they were all gone, and Matt was alone in the quiet alcove, his body growing heavy. He wondered with some irritation whether Mir had dosed the stew with a sedative, but he couldn’t find it in him to fight it. Within a few short minutes, he was deeply asleep.
“So… rebuilding seems to be going well.” Hunk shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked a loose rock underfoot. He and Shay were alone for the moment in one of the main tunnels, the others having scattered through the tunnels to help out with whatever small projects they could find. Shay had invited Hunk to help cook dinner for her family—which, as it turned out, included a good two dozen Balmerans. Apparently on the Balmera family had less to do with shared blood and more to do with shared work. Those who lived and worked in these tunnels were one family among about five hundred scattered across the Balmera.
Shay carried a bundle of dry, flaky rock chips on her back. She called them bark, and apparently they were flammable. Privately, Hunk thought they looked more like cow pies than tree bark, but hey. Whatever got the job done.
She smiled at a pair of Balmerans working in a side tunnel. They were replacing the haphazard supports the Galra had installed with newer, cleaner versions, and they paused every so often to lay a hand on the wall. Whether they were communicating with an overseer or checking on the Balmera itself was anyone’s guess, but they seemed cheerful enough.
“It comes along,” Shay agreed. They entered a larger chamber dotted with mossy beds and carved stone stools, and Shay set her bag of bark down by an empty fire pit. “Slowly, but it comes along. It will be many years before Balmera returns to her full glory, but we have already come a long way from what we were under the Galra.”
“That’s good to hear,” Hunk said, sitting beside her. Someone had already left a pile of cave roots and a jar of cave bugs by the pit, and under Shay’s instructions, Hunk got to work peeling the roots while Shay got the fire going.
Well… fire maybe wasn’t the best word. The bark glowed red like coals, and there was definitely heat coming off it, but there wasn’t an open flame, and it produced surprisingly little smoke. (Probably a good thing, considering they were in a cave half a mile underground.)
“And you?” Shay asked, once she deemed the fire good enough and turned her attention to the cave bugs. “Aside from this latest trouble, have you been well?”
“Eh.”
Shay turned a curious look on him, and he rubbed the back of his head. “I mean, we’ve saved a rebellion and a planet or two, but mostly it’s been run-for-your-life, fight-for-your-life, sabotage-a-giant-alien-space-gun-for-your-life.” He paused, mood lifting as Shay laughed. “Let no one ever say the life of a paladin is boring.”
“It sounds so.” Shay dumped a handful of cave bugs into a pot of water, and Hunk added the cave root he’d peeled and chopped. Some moss and little twiggy herbs followed, and Shay stirred the pot once before moving to another fire pit and beginning the process all over. “You have not been hurt too badly, I hope?”
This was about the point where Lance would have said something cheeky like, Why? Worried about me?
Hunk was not Lance. He felt himself blush just thinking the words, and he laughed self-consciously as he focused on his cave roots. “Nah, I’m good. Good as I’ll ever be.” He resisted the urge to check his pocket for the bottle containing his last Ativan. He’d managed nearly a month only needing to take one pill, which honestly was nothing short of a miracle. (If by miracle you meant constant low-level anxiety about running out of his anxiety meds.)
He’d have taken that last pill ages ago if he wasn’t ninety percent certain he wasn’t getting any more for the rest of the war. Minor panic attack now was better than major panic attack with Zarkon in the room. Or something.
“Oh, hey, yeah.” Hunk sat up straight. “I've been to more planets now. You'd like them, I think.”
“Oh?”
Hunk nodded, adjusting his grip on his knife as he switched from peeling to chopping. “Yeah. Wa’resha’s covered in trees that are, like, a thousand feet tall, and they have ferns the size of a Voltron Lion on all their skyscrapers—honest-to-god skyscrapers, though they look puny next to the trees. Oh, and on Berlou they’ve got this, like, non-Newtonian stone. Sand? Whatever. It’s light enough for the wind to blow it around like sand dunes, but it turns solid if you walk on it.” He paused. “Sorry, did that make any sense? I mean, you don’t have sand dunes here, and I’m sure you don’t know who Newton was.”
Shay just hummed distractedly, poking at the burning bark with a thin stone rod.
Hunk fell silent, watching her. “Is… something wrong, Shay?”
“Hm? Oh.” She shook her head, her earrings clacking as they bounced off her carapace. “My apologies. I did not mean to worry you. I am only thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing.” She dumped her cave bugs into the pot and stood, hoisting the rest of the rock bark. “Come. We have much stew yet to make if we are to feed my family.”
Lance was careful to keep an eye on Keith as he and Pidge got to work on the prison’s computers. It was getting harder and harder to find reasons not to trust Keith, but then, trust wasn’t really a logical thing, was it? Lance had been dragged away from home, ripped apart from half his team, put through a blender, then shoved into battle with a Galra at his side. So, yeah, he was a little on edge.
It would have been easier to trust Keith if the guy wasn’t such an obnoxious, arrogant asshat all the time. Always trying to make Lance look stupid, rushing in places to look cool and hog all the glory. Keith was not a team player, and Lance didn’t think it was fair for all the team-building to come from one side.
Pidge backing off the whole you stole my brother’s lion thing only made it worse. They were still out here alone, with one of the Galra monsters unaccounted for, and Keith was doing god only knew what with the computers here. For all they knew, he could be calling in reinforcements.
Okay, sure, he could have done that well before now.
And, fine, he had legitimately risked his own neck to lure out those other two zombie-creatures.
It just…
Lance huffed, forcing his eyes back to the big, dark, open space he was supposed to be watching for signs of the last Galra monster. Pidge had insisted, even though Lance was pretty sure they would have seen something by now if that thing was still out there.
But watching for nonexistent monsters was better than thinking about Keith. He was fully aware that not thinking about Keith was a pretty damn big part of the problem, but it was such a big, complicated issue that he didn’t even know where to start. Because it wasn’t just Keith. It was Matt and Shiro and Allura and all the people the Galra had hurt and everyone Lance had left behind on Earth and the terrifyingly massive number of Galra Lance and his friends had killed because, after all, weren’t all Galra just faceless evil monsters?
Nope. Not going there. Lance switched his bayard to his left hand and wiped his right on his armor (for all the good it did.) He scanned the room, switching his bayard back to his right hand, then back again to his left. A restless energy simmered inside him, amplified by the darkness and the missing creature. Maybe it was still out there after all…
“Are you nerds done yet?” he called over his shoulder.
Keith let out a strangled groan that brought a smile to Lance’s lips. “Zarkon’s archive program is complicated, okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Lance leaned his shoulder against the door frame. “Sure.”
“It is,” Pidge said. “Stupidly complicated. I’d say it’s designed to keep out hackers, but, well, I think hacking is the only way to use it without bashing your head against the wall.”
Keith snorted, and Lance whipped around. He wasn’t--
He was. Lance caught Keith mid-laugh, a smile tugging at his lips. He had a hand on the computer console, which Pidge had powered with a crystal they’d “requisitioned” from the resistance ship Hope of Kera, and he leaned over Pidge’s shoulder to look at their laptop screen, guiding them through the directories (or...something. Lance had tuned out the computer-speak for a while there.) He didn’t notice Lance looking, and for that instant he didn’t look like an enemy. Didn’t look hostile or pissed off or suspicious. He looked like just a regular person who’d been chewed up by Zarkon’s war and was trying to find his feet now that he’d come out the other side.
Guilt churned in Lance’s gut. Keith, the other Galra, this whole damn war... Shit.
“What are you staring at?”
Lance blinked and found Keith staring back at him, his smile gone. A sour, defensive look had taken its place, and Lance couldn’t help feeling grateful for it.
“Just trying to figure out what your game is.”
Pidge’s fingers stilled on their keyboard. “Lance...”
“What?” Lance released his bayard, freeing his hands to gesture around the room. “Have you seen where we are? Sorry for being cautious, Pidge. I’m just trying to keep you alive.”
“Cautious?” Keith muttered. His lip pulled back, revealing a pair of fang-like canines. “Here’s a thought. If you want to keep us safe, how about you watch the hallway?”
Lance crossed his arms, taking a single step closer to Keith. “How do we know you didn’t already kill that other thing, huh? How do we know you aren’t just trying to distract me from your real plan?”
Keith’s eye twitched. “What, exactly, do you think I’m planning?”
“I don’t know. You probably lured us out here to murder us where the others wouldn’t find out about it.”
“That doesn’t even make sense!”
“You don’t make sense!”
Lance pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, forcing himself to breathe. He could feel Pidge’s eyes on him, curious and judgmental, and he struggled not to laugh. What a mess he was. Picking fights with Keith, letting his ugly blender full of emotions get the best of him. He couldn’t even come up with good comebacks today.
He was shaking, and he knew he was shaking, and he knew the other two could probably see that he was shaking. This is war. He cringed away from the words, which echoed in his head like an accusation. This is war. People die. Good people. This is war, fighter pilot, so stop being such a baby.
“Lance...”
“Shut up, Keith,” Lance snapped, but there was no heat to his words now. “I’m really not in the mood right now.”
“Lance.” Keith’s voice had taken on a shrill edge that raised hairs along the back of Lance’s neck. He opened his eyes to see Pidge on their feet, summoning their bayard, a look of rising panic on their face.
Lance spun, but the creature was already charging, a flash of metal and rotting flesh dancing between the beams of the three paladins’ headlamps. Lance scrambled back into the room, summoning his bayard, though he knew it was already too late. The monster was inches away, a Galra freight train intent on crushing Lance between its metal palms.
A hand struck him between the shoulder blades. Lance pitched forward, his helmet cracking against the wall, and Pidge shouted an alarm.
Head pounding, Lance stood and spun toward the creature’s angry hiss. It had Keith backed against the far wall, where he held off one clawed metal hand with his sword while the thing's other arm, a misshapen lump of melted steel, hammered his shield.
As it raised its melted arm for another blow, Pidge fired their bayard. The blade lashed around the creature’s arm and ignited the air with crackling electricity that left the creature howling. Keith tried to slip away, but the creature buried the remnants of its hand in the wall, hemming him in. The other arm grabbed the still-sparking energy cord and yanked Pidge off their feet.
Lance activated his bayard and opened fire on the creature’s back. It twisted, eyes flashing in the light of his headlamp, and howled. It slammed its good hand into Keith’s chest, and the sound of cracking armor hit Lance like a punch to the gut.
He didn’t have time to worry about Keith, though, because the creature picked him up like a stuffed animal and threw him at Lance, knocking them both to the ground in a tangle of limbs. A pained wheeze escaped Keith, but he rolled off Lance and struggled to his feet, his sword in one hand, his dagger in the other.
“Hey, lumpy! Over here!” Pidge shouted, leaning heavily against the wall as they raised their bayard. They fired, catching the creature around the neck and unleashing an electric storm that singed Lance’s nostrils with the stink of smoking flesh.
Keith charged.
The creature saw him coming, and even with the electricity coursing through its body, it hardly seemed inconvenienced, turning toward Keith with both arms raised and ready to Hulk-smash the puny Galra into purple pulp.
Not today, Romero. Lance raised his rifle and fired two shots into the creature’s face. It wasn’t any more effective today than it had been last week, but it made the monster flinch, forgetting the sword aimed at its chest for just a second.
A second was all the time Keith needed. He threw his whole weight behind his attack and buried the point of his sword in the creature’s heart. The thing could withstand a lot of damage. Slashing swords, electricity, laser blasts. But the full momentum of a charging Galra, concentrated on the tip of an energy sword—that was more than any engineered skin could handle. The sword met resistance as it entered, but it penetrated deep enough to make the creature scream and collapse, shuddering, against the wall.
Deactivating his sword, Keith stumbled back until his legs hit the edge of the computer station. He reached out to steady himself, and his hand on the console lit up the screens with an eerie red glow.
Keith pressed his other hand to the side of his face and slid to the ground, letting out a shaky laugh. “How’s that for excitement?”
Pidge was doubled over, shoulder pressed against the wall, and they giggled, a slightly manic sound that threatened to pull a laugh from Lance. “I’m so ready to be done with this planet,” Pidge muttered.
“Seriously.” Lance poked the creature with the barrel of his gun, heart still pounding. The whole fight had taken less than a minute, but he felt like he’d been running for an hour. “Hurry up and finish with the hacking, Gunderson. I want to get out of this hell-hole.”
By the time Matt woke up, Shiro was back in the little alcove, sitting on the stone bench with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. Matt blinked at him a few times, and when Shiro looked up, Matt smiled.
“Hey, stranger,” he murmured.
Shiro stood, joining Matt on the moss-and-stone bed as Matt forced himself upright and put his shirt back on. “How are you feeling?”
“A little pissed that Mir decided to drug me.” The words strayed a little too close to the realm of haunting memories, and Matt forced himself to perk up. “I can’t complain about the sleep, though. How long was I out?”
“Two or three hours,” Shiro said. He seemed to be searching Matt for any sign of pain, so Matt sat up straighter, bumping his shoulder against Shiro’s. “You’re feeling better, though? Does it still hurt?”
Matt considered straight-up lying, but Shiro knew him too well for that. Or, well, he had, before all this, and Matt wasn’t eager to find out that they’d lost their ability to tell what the other was thinking. “A little. Not nearly as much as before.”
It was true—more or less. The pain was better, but it had been the pain that woke him, throbbing and hot in his core. Not the sharp pains of the last twenty-four hours or the tension that had been growing for the last week, just an all-over ache that kept him from getting truly comfortable.
They were silent for a moment, and Matt closed his eyes against the weight of mounting suspicion. Mir and Shay hadn’t removed all the crystals from his body, not even close. At the rate they worked it could be weeks before he was back to full health. Weeks that the other paladins couldn’t afford to waste sitting still. And that was assuming a full recovery was possible at all.
Matt drew in a long, shaky breath. “So what did Mir say? How long am I stuck here?”
“I don’t know. She told me to bring you to the main tunnel when you woke up.” Shiro lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “If you’re feeling up to it?”
In answer, Matt pushed himself to his feet. Walking was easier than it had been before. Now instead of feeling like his legs were filled with rusty nails, it only felt like he’d spent the previous day hiking a mountain, maybe pulled a muscle or six while he was at it. His left leg still ached, but it wobbled only a little as he started for the gap in the curtain.
He turned to smile at Shiro, who returned the expression half-heartedly and walked beside him the short distance to the main tunnel, where tools and scrap metal from Galra structures lay in piles along the wall, waiting for reconstruction crews to put them to use. Coran had his hands on a vein of crystals, which glowed cheerily. Matt could only assume Coran was sharing some of his Quintessence with the Balmera, as Allura had done before. Allura lurked behind him, her face as close to a pout as Matt had ever seen. Matt suspected she'd been banned from a repeat of her last performance.
It was Hunk and Shay, seated near a cook fire skinning cave roots, who spotted Matt first.
Hunk grinned as he stood and crossed the tunnel to pull Matt into a hug. “Matt! You’re awake!”
Matt wheezed a little as Hunk squeezed the air from his lungs, but returned the hug, patting Hunk’s back and offering a smile to Allura and Coran, who abandoned their work with the crystals to join the others.
“How are you feeling?” Allura asked, her calm demeanor undermined somewhat by the open concern in her eyes.
“Much better,” he assured her. He nodded to Shay and to Mir as she approached with Rax, who still had two young Balmeran’s hanging off him, one wrapped around his neck, the other dangling from his arm. As they drew near, Matt pulled away from Hunk and turned to face Mir. “How long…? When can I…?”
Mir’s eyes softened. She glanced toward a quiet corner of the tunnel, away from prying ears, and Matt recognized the offer of privacy. Considering what he’d heard the last time a healer had offered him privacy, Matt was expecting something close to a death sentence, but he shook his head. If it was bad news, he wasn't sure he'd be able to put on a brave face long enough to tell the others.
Mir sighed. “Your life is not in danger,” she said, catching his eye. “You should know that before we speak of anything else.”
“Great,” Matt muttered, tension creeping back into his shoulders. “That’s a very reassuring way to start off a conversation.”
“It is the truth,” Mir said. “You have a long road ahead of you, young one, and I would not want to discourage you before you begin.”
“How long?”
Lowering her eyes, Mir took Matt’s hand in both her own. “What the Galra did to you… It is no small thing. You have many crystal seeds within you—more than when the Galra lost you, I think.”
“Wait.” Shiro leaned forward, his face pale. “It’s spreading?”
“Slowly,” said Shay. “Perhaps only because of the attack you spoke of. Quintessence makes the crystals grow. It may also cause them to multiply.”
“Even so.” Mir dropped Matt’s hand and looked up at him, her luminous eyes bright with sympathy. “It makes for slow healing. We have guided the crystals to where they will not harm you, so you can leave now and continue your fight.”
Matt swallowed, his throat so thick he could barely force himself to speak. “I’m sensing a ‘but’ in there.”
Mir’s eyes closed. “You will need healing in the future. To remove crystals and to redirect new ones as they grow to where they will do the least damage.”
“How often?”
“It is difficult to say. If you avoid Quintessence, you may be able to go some time without needing aid. If you encounter trouble—well, you see how far it has progressed since last you visited us here.”
Matt sucked in a short, sharp breath and held it, disappointment pressing at the back of his eyes. “I see,” he whispered. Shiro reached out to comfort him, but Matt pulled away, turning to face Shiro and the others. “You’ll have to leave me behind.”
“What?” Shiro took a small step forward, then hesitated, his face unreadable. “No. I’m not leaving you, Matt.”
“You have to. Zarkon’s not just going to wait because I’m sick. You can’t afford to make the trip back here every week or two so Mir can heal me—and it’s not like you actually need me. Keith can pilot Red. You’ve already formed Voltron with him once.”
“Then I’ll stay with you,” Shiro argued. “Allura piloted the Black Lion before. Why can’t--”
“Don’t.” Matt’s fists clenched at his side, and he turned his gaze aside. “The others still need all the help they can get. You can’t just abandon them for me.”
Shiro opened his mouth to argue, then stopped. Matt smiled to himself. If there was one thing he could count on, it was that Shiro would always do what was best for everyone, even if it wasn’t what he wanted. Voltron needed someone like Shiro. Matt could get by without him. He’d done it before.
“Forgive me,” Shay said in a small voice. She seemed to shrink as five pairs of eyes turned to her, and she glanced at Mir, who nodded encouragingly. “There is yet a way for you to remain with your team.”
Shiro brightened almost imperceptibly. “How?”
Shay glanced over her shoulder at Rax. “I… could accompany you. Then you would have no need to return here for healing.”
“What?” Rax’s voice was low and sharp, and Shay flinched. “You cannot—vex.” He rounded on Mir. “You knew of this?”
Mir nodded placidly. “It is the best choice. The universe needs Voltron more than you need your sister, young one.”
Bristling, Rax disentangled himself from the children he was carrying. “She is younger than me! How can you send her off with these skylings to their war?”
“Our war.”
Rax stilled at Shay’s words and turned toward her, frowning. “What?”
Lacing her fingers together, Shay looked up at him. “Our war. The Galra do not distinguish between those who fight and those who do not. They took over our home. They have taken over many other Balmera, and many other worlds besides. Anything I can do to aid the paladins of Voltron I will gladly do.”
“It’ll be dangerous,” Matt said, trying to contain the bubble of relief and gratitude growing inside him. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”
Shay nodded. “Since you left, I have dreamed of leaving this place, taking a stand against Zarkon. I wish to help the other Balmera out there who still live under his thumb—and not only Balmera. All people deserve freedom. If I can help in any way…” She squared her shoulders. “Please allow me to accompany you.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Allura stepped forward and took Shay’s hands. “Well, then. Welcome aboard.”
Keith and the others didn’t make it back to the rendezvous point before the castle-ship. There had been a few hiccups in the data-transfer process, and Pidge had insisted on creating a back-up, just in case. Keith would have thought they’d be impatient to get back to their brother, but if anything they seemed to be dragging their feet.
They seemed almost relieved when they emerged from the wormhole to an angry lecture from Matt that chased them all the way to their hangars.
“You can’t just run off like that without telling me! What if something happened to you? What if you got attacked?”
“It wasn’t like we planned it,” Lance muttered as Keith disembarked and headed for the elevator. “We hit the base like we planned and didn’t find anything useful, so we improvised.”
Keith crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall of the elevator. He’d contemplated taking off his helmet so he didn’t have to hear the argument, but he was trying to be part of this team, wasn’t he? Ignoring the other paladins—tempting as it was—probably wasn’t the best way to get to know them.
Matt let out a sigh just as the elevator doors slid open. “You should have at least found the rest of us before you went back there.”
Pidge skulked out of their elevator, pulled off their helmet, and tossed it onto the chair at their station. “So, what? I was supposed to just sit there and twiddle my thumbs while I waited to see if you passed out from the pain again?”
Matt ran his fingers through his hair, sighing. A Balmeran stood behind him with Hunk, and Lance dug an elbow into Hunk’s side as he passed, making the taller boy blush.
Allura fixed them each with a frown in turn. “Matt is right. Disappearing without leaving word of your destination was reckless and irresponsible.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Keith sat sideways on the red paladin’s chair—his chair, he supposed, though it felt strange to call it that—letting his feet dangle over the arm. He felt the pressing weight of eyes on him and turned toward Shiro and Allura, who regarded him with matching scowls. Keith ducked his head into a shrug. “What? No one got hurt, and we got the information we were after. What more do you want?”
Shiro pressed a hand to his forehead and Allura crossed her arms, launching into a lecture Keith didn’t hear. His attention drifted toward Lance, who watched him from across the bridge where he still stood with Hunk and the Balmeran. Keith couldn’t put a name to Lance’s expression—furrowed brow, lip caught between his teeth.
As soon as he caught Keith watching him, Lance’s face shut down, regaining that familiar, hostile edge. Keith scowled right back at him.
It was Lance who broke eye contact first, his hands rubbing at the armor over his hips like he was searching for pockets. He hesitated, then crossed to where Keith sat.
“So…” Lance pursed his lips. “Back there, you...”
Lance let the sentence hang, and Keith stared at him, narrowing his eyes. “Back there I...what?”
Running a hand through his hair, Lance stared hard at the wall. “You know.”
“No,” said Keith. “I don’t.” He waited, but Lance didn’t go on, and Keith felt his fur begin to stand on end. “If you’re planning on accusing me of yet another evil Galra scheme, just get it over with.”
Lance’s head snapped back toward Keith, and his eyebrow twitched. “I was trying to thank you for saving my life, asshole.”
There was a hard edge to his voice that set Keith’s teeth on edge. “Don’t worry," he said tightly. "It won’t happen again.”
Lance stiffened, and Keith got the sense he’d been expecting some other response. He opened his mouth like he was ready to argue, then thought better of it. With a huff, he turned on his heel and stalked from the room, silencing whatever it was Allura had been saying.
Pidge watched Lance go, then turned to Keith. “What was that all about?”
Keith groaned, slumping backwards in the chair. “I have no idea.”
“You… don’t get humans, do you?”
“I don’t get people,” Keith said. It had never bothered him that he didn’t know how to connect with the other Galra, but this did. He wasn’t sure what made it different, but he wanted the paladins to like him. He just… didn’t know what they wanted from him.
Pidge hiked their laptop higher on their back, then held out a fist toward Keith. He recognized the gesture as something Shiro did on occasion, and he instinctively raised his own fist to meet Pidge’s. In the instant of expectant silence that followed, Keith wondered whether he’d misinterpreted Pidge’s intent, panicked, and snatched his hand back.
Then Pidge broke into a grin. “I’m gonna grab some food goo, then get started on these files. I could use some help with the translation, if you don’t have anything better to do.”
Keith recognized it as a peace offering allowed himself a small smile. He may have been stumbling blind through his attempts at friendship, but apparently he'd managed to do something right. “Sure,” he said. “Sounds fun.”