#pvld week day three

[tuesdayandtuesday]

the art of the trade

day three of @platonicvldweek - lions/bonding

2694 words, in which keith and red share a moment or three. s2 spoilers. 

also available on ao3.

--

      Red believes in equal exchange or nothing at all. Trust for trust. Joy for joy. Hope for hope. But she also deals in wrath, envy, even despair. Whatever Keith can offer her, she will match it, and needless to say, he prefers trading lighter memories, few and far between though they seem. However, Red shows no obvious interest in the memories themselves, but in the act of the trade, and when Keith settles into her cabin to think, her presence presses all around him, heavy and warm. Expectant.

        At first, he ignores her needling. The dark bruise in the crook of his neck already prickles with every movement, and Red’s prodding is nothing compared to that. Truthfully, he isn’t sure what might compare to the Trials of Marmora and the assorted purple souvenirs he has returned with for its completion. So little in his life has been so grueling as Kolivan’s challenge, so little has been so exhausting.

        Leaning back into the seat, Keith turns his knife over and over in his hands, returning time and again to the insignia on the hilt. He’s felt disbelief in his life before (his father gone, the Kerberos mission lost, the Blue Lion found), but the disbelief that fills him every time the blade transforms is a far different kind. This disbelief is not colored by awe or despair, or even skepticism, but a vague shade of peace mingled with the shadows of questions he is unprepared to pursue. After years of confusion and ignorance, years of pushing away the dwindling hope that he might find answers, he has them. Not all of them, of course, but more answers than he ever dreamed of seeing in this lifetime or even the next.

        A wave of curiosity washes over him, a tightly checked answer to the What’s next? that he asks himself. It comes from his lion. He rests the knife across his knees. “It’s Galra,” he says. “I’m Galra.” It feels a lot like a confession.

        Silence. The faint pressure lifts from his shoulders to prowl around the cabin. Even seated, he gets the sensation of pacing, tensing, and then a soft weight settles on his chest. Red, expecting more, but not taking it. Red never takes.

        But just because Red never takes doesn’t mean that Keith is ready to give. Or to receive.

        Sometimes he appreciates Red’s reliability, her give and take. He can count on her even when the rest of the universe is unsteady. The knife across his lap breathes hesitation into the cabin, though, and he knows that if he shares with Red tonight, she will not waver in her policy. Offering her the Trials of Marmora means offering all his anger. All his fear. And then Red will trade him anger and fear in kind.

        He pinches the bridge of his nose and exhales. He’s felt enough terror to last a lifetime. What’s a little more? So he braces himself and lets Red in, laying the Trials at her feet. The weight on his chest lifts, taking with it a sense of security, but he pushes the Trials forward through his vulnerability, waiting for his lion to take them.

        And she takes them with a reluctance he has never felt from her before, as if she too dreads the pact they make and the memory she must provide in return. Red hovers over the loose, scattered offering and hesitates to draw it close.

        “I’m here,” he tells her. I’m ready, I’m scared, just do it, he means. But it isn’t until he adds, “Come on, Kitty Rose,” that she pounces.

        She’s never burned through his mind so quickly. He gasps despite himself, hand scrabbling for the armrest to use as an anchor. The Trials rush before his eyes in sharp relief, jerking along at breakneck speed, and even though these are his memories, he can hardly keep up. Only when Red pauses to reflect his emotions back at him does he fully comprehend where she is in his memories.

        The triumph of solving the first riddle of the Trial. The terror of watching Shiro leave him alone. The aching cocktail of regret and desperation and sheer smallness of seeing his father again, losing his father again. For the sake of a greater cause, perhaps, but Keith chokes on that loss in particular. That’s a deeply personal memory, and though it’s too late to draw it back now, it’s probably closer to his heart than anything else he has ever allowed Red to see.

        Curiously, she skims over the truth of his heritage with disinterest rather than surprise before drawing back, leaving Keith to steady himself with his head between his knees, knife cast aside on the floor. The cabin spins when he opens his eyes, and there’s a ringing in his ears that’s just soft enough that he only catches it during held breaths.  Eventually, though, the world rights itself and Red’s composed quiet returns.

        For a moment, the cabin feels lonesome, like Red has retreated. Keith slides down in his seat and puts a hand flat against the dashboard. “I did my part. Come back?” He doesn’t ask out of the desire to see Red’s memories. No, he is rethinking just how much fear he can take in his life right now. But Red has never wavered before, and if she can relive the troubling portions of his past, grounding him, then he will do the same for her. There is no caveat to this, no second-guessing. Just simple responsibility coupled with the unshakable desire to exist together. There is no turning back now. The time for that came and went in the moment he opened the airlock to earn her trust. They chose each other.

        So Red comes creeping back into the cabin, filling the space with a soothing warmth that Keith reads only as an apology for what’s to come. “When you’re ready,” he says, shutting his eyes.

        But instead of blitzing through again, Red eases him down slowly. She begins with a name.

        Cassidia. Cass.

        Then Keith is struck by a burst of pride and affection so strong that he is nearly pitched from Red’s memory. Visions flick past, blurry stills that shine with color, particularly with bright scarlet and streak of sky. He knows those colors. Every time he and Red set out for the emptiness of space, he wears them.

        Red does not need to speak for Keith to understand that he is seeing a guarded glimpse of his predecessor. She is Altean, with cherry bright marks at the corners of her eyes, like Allura and Coran, and her pointed ears glitter with a row of silver studs in each lobe, little lines of starlight. In some scenes that Red supplies, Cass is loose, relaxed. Keith knows very little of Altea, but he doesn’t have to be an expert to understand that these frames show Cass with her people, wholly in love with her place among them.

        There are other moments that Red provides, though, sharper moments. Flashes of the other paladins appear with their faces smudged out, their backs against Cass’s and their weapons raised against a common foe. Red’s pride takes on a fierce, even violent edge before being suddenly swept away in a wave of stuttering fear.

        Here the memories coalesce into a stream. Motion and sound arrive, and though dimly aware that he is in Red’s cabin, Keith still flinches at a series of explosions that erupt behind his back, as if they can still hurt him. Red wants him to watch, though, so he steels himself. For her.

        He recognizes the ship’s interior. Its structure has changed a little with the advent of better engineering and ten thousand years, but not so much that he cannot recognize the cargo bay of a Galra ship. He also recognizes the height from which he looks down at the scene; this is distinctly, immediately Red’s memory, played out through her eyes alone.

        She is not moving. She tries, but a stifling ripple of magnetic interference has locked her limbs into place, making her helpless even as her paladin fights for her life below.

        Cass’s fighting style strikes Keith as reckless, and he shares a faint flare of approval with his lion. The numbers of the Galra have yet to overwhelm her, and instead of fighting the group head-on, she twists between individual soldiers, using them as shields against their fellows as she works her way to the outside of the cluster. Along the way, she doesn’t touch her bayard, instead trusting in her raw Altean strength to throw her foes into one another, blocking the way. Only once free of the throng does she draw her sword and defend herself, which has its own wild abandon to it. Cass does not pause to consider her options, but slides fluidly from one strike to the next, making it up as she goes along. The life-or-death nature of the fight makes it necessary, but there’s a practiced air to her carelessness, as if she cannot fight any other way.

        But even a capable warrior cannot fight numbers, and a reckless warrior rarely fares any better. For every soldier Cass cuts down, two more, three more, four more take their place. She is surrounded in half the time it took her to free herself from their midst, and no closer to Red than before. The bayard gleams, throwing up showers of sparks with every robotic limb severed, but behind the glass of her helmet, Cass has taken on a pale cast.

        The scene slows. Red’s doing. Keith feels her waver, and waits for her to collect herself. They will see this through to the end, as they do.

        Perhaps for Keith’s benefit, or perhaps for her own, Red skips most of the fight, skimming ahead to the worst of it all and leaving the details in the dark. Unadulterated dread rises in Keith’s throat, almost choking him, and he can barely bring himself to look at the carnage in the bay. The cargo has been destroyed, as have the soldier drones. Not a single space is free of debris save for the ring around Red’s feet, guarded by her particle barrier, which sputters from electromagnetic interference that Red still, still cannot fight. But Cass is not inside that ring.

        The worst of the devastation is against the doors that lead deeper into the belly of the ship. Entire pieces of the infrastructure have been ripped out and thrown into a colossal heap of mangled metal, still smoking from whatever destroyed it. At the edge of the mountain, Cass’s hand curls around her bayard, now in its compact state, and suddenly her voice is in Keith’s head even as it crackles over the comm and into the cabin.

        “Sorry about that,” she rasps, and Red’s translation is shaky; he can hear the underlying Altean in weak, jagged notes. “Thought I was clear. Can you come get me?”

        They all know the answer. Paladin and lion alike are trapped. They spend some time in total silence save for Cass’s labored breathing and weak struggling. She is pinned down by the debris, her legs crushed by the weight above. Suddenly, Keith is glad that this is not Cass’s memory; he doesn’t know if he could bear sharing that pain. He doesn’t know how she does it.

        Did it.

        Even as he realizes that this is a memory long past, even as he remembers that Cass was the Red Paladin of Voltron, Red’s anguish catches him unawares, bringing hot tears to his eyes.

        He is right. Cass is–was–reckless. She forces herself upright as far as her trapped legs will allow, and even as he follows her line of sight, she whips the bayard along it. Straight for the cracked, flickering control panel across the room. Altean strength is a marvel, because the bayard sails without slowing, and Cass’s coordination is a miracle, because the weapon hits its mark exactly. A red light comes to life overhead, blinking on and off as a precautionary alarm begins to sound. At the bay’s edge, the shuffle of locks and pistons grows into a roar. The airlock begins to open.

        “Here’s the plan!” Cass shouts, though Red can hear her no matter what. “That door is gonna open and carry everything out in about ten tics. Me, you, this scrap pile, everything. And then you can come get me. We can get away from Zarkon. All right?”

        Keith knows it won’t be all right, and so does Red, but there’s still a desperate hope in them both that somehow this will work. And for Cass, that hope is more than enough. She seems to sense Red’s terror and doubt in the final tics, and smiles anyway, thumbing her nose before sealing her helmet again.

        “You’ll catch me. Rosie, you always do.”

        The Altean is not precise, given the way that Red stammers over the translation, but Keith can hear the echoes of his nickname for her with heart-wrenching clarity. It doesn’t matter that he adopted it from Hunk, albeit in private. It doesn’t matter because it’s his name for her, Cass’s name for her, it’s a name that spans centuries and she has clung to it all this time.

        And then the universe drops out from beneath him as he watches Cass get sucked into space, even as Red is held back by the magnets and her own emergency measures that can’t be overridden without her paladin. Red’s loss finds all the fragile crevices in his chest and splits them wide open, stealing his breath and setting fire to his spine. His head swims as he sees glimpses of Cass spiraling out into the void, laid over with a translucent shadow of him doing the very same thing.

        There are only two differences amongst the overlapping, overwhelming grief. The first is that while this is Red’s last glimpse of Cass, it is her first glimpse of Keith.

        The second is that she could only save one of them.

        Just like that, the memory is gone and Keith is back in the cabin. He sucks in the deepest breath he’s ever taken, curling his hands around the armrests to keep them from shaking. He is one part human, one part Galra, but after that, he may as well be one part despair and one part rage. The fury is residual, he realizes as he waits for Red’s emotion to work through his system and fade away. It is residual, and it is inward. Red blames no one but herself for Cass’s death, and guilt-ridden, Keith silently promises to make an effort to float freely through space with far less frequency than he has been as of late.

      After sharing so much, they share silence. Keith’s heart slows to a crawl, and Red’s warmth creeps back into the cabin, coloring the air with a heady mixture of apology and regret.

      For the first time, these things are freely given.

      Keith almost doesn’t comprehend it at first. Searching for the absence of something is harder than finding the thing itself. The sense that something is missing crawls under his skin, insistent and wary, and then it suddenly dissipates as he realizes that Red is not waiting for him to offer a memory in kind. Tonight, they’ve traded hearts, and there is nothing more they can ask of one another. Nothing more they should ask.

      Still he closes his eyes and presents her with one last memory for the night. There is smallness again, this time created by the legions of stars all around, by the cold kiss of space, but there is also a touch of peace and ease as he floats by. The universe is grander than any dream he could possibly harbor, and out here, he should be scared.

      But then Red’s muzzle looms before him, eyes burning, and in the scant seconds it takes for her to catch him for the very first time, he is home.

      Judging by the way she drops her head to her paws, the cabin lights dimming, so is she.

[tuesdayandtuesday]

when it rains, it pours

day three of @platonicvldweek - lions/bonding

2460 words in which lance cannot bear to be himself, and blue cannot bear to have him otherwise. s2 spoilers.

also available on ao3.

--

      Of all the paladins, perhaps Lance has the greatest chance of being found with his lion. He’s always present with the other pilots, hanging off Hunk’s every word, bickering with Keith, complaining with Pidge, wreaking havoc between the three of them, and yet at the same time, he’s gone so often. And when he’s gone, he’s with Blue.

        Or, as the case may be, Blue is with him.

        The castle is large, but not large enough to keep them apart, and Blue cuts into his waking moments seamlessly, no matter where he is. One moment, she is just a robotic lion in a hangar, and the next, Lance’s head swims with her presence. Colors he’s never seen before explode behind his eyes until Blue’s gears and sprockets rise into what very well could be the sweetest symphony in the galaxy. The first time this happened, he thought the castle was under attack, but now he recognizes every note in Blue’s call with perfect clarity, particularly the low thrums of pride and the high keen of worry.

        It’s that high keening that resonates with him tonight. Blue is not especially prone to startling him anymore, not since their moods have begun to shift as one, but the knot in his gut is not his own, not after a hot shower and the quietest moment of peace to watch the stars drift by. Not to mention the castle alarms aren’t blaring.

        “I’m coming,” he says, sliding out of his bunk and into his jacket in one fluid motion. He almost makes it out the door before thinking better of it and snatching his bayard from the shelf. Just in case.

        Barely an hour ago, the castle halls felt peaceful, like the rare hour before dawn when everyone else is asleep and the rain patters a lullaby against the roof. Now, Lance fights the urge to check over his shoulder every few steps, and when he does check, and when there’s nothing there, he gets the unshakable sense that there should be. If there isn’t, then he’s just scared of his own shadow, something his pride can’t bear when the universe teems with far darker things to fear.

        The hangars are close, but not close enough right now. Even a single turn is too many as Blue’s distress sharpens, slashing through his twisted gut and leaving cold terror to fill the wound. The zip line takes an eternity, the speeder ride a lifetime more, and the moment Lance spills out on the hangar floor, he sprints to her side.

        She looks sick. Her chin rests on the floor, cradled between her paws, and even though her eyes glow softly as he reaches up to run a hand over the side of her muzzle, the yellow lights are dimmer than usual. “I’m here, beautiful,” he tells her when even chin scratches don’t do the trick. “It’s me, I’m right here.”

        Together, they sit in the dark of the hangar, and even though Blue doesn’t have lungs, Lance refuses to believe that she isn’t breathing in perfect sync with him. The lines between lion and paladin blur in that strange way they have, almost imperceptibly. With his eyes shut, Lance watches himself trying in vain to soothe Blue, his lips moving with stories he doesn’t have to say aloud to share. His hands seem to scorch against the cool metal of her hide, and he can hear his heartbeat thundering in his ears.

        Then the storm breaks, and Blue drags him under.

        Connecting with Blue is usually like wading into the shallows or sifting through tide pools, searching for treasures in crystal clear water, but this time, it’s like a rip current has snatched him by the ankle and whisked him out into the heart of the ocean. The waters are murky, he cannot think, he cannot breathe, and the pressure is everywhere. He fights the urge to inhale, desperate to find the surface, any surface, but even Lance cannot hold his breath forever, and when he gives in, the rest of Blue floods him in an explosion of noise and color.

        He knew from the moment she filled his head in his room that she worried, but now he knows the rest. He knows why the alarms haven’t sounded, why the worry isn’t his, why she looks so limp on the floor.

        Blue is worried about him.

        The sea clears as quickly as it drowned him, and he floats on Blue’s music, letting it rock him in waves. In the deep, she was erratic, even violent. Discordant. Every click and rumble, the ones Lance is used to hearing in her joints as she flies, fought against one another, tearing the notes out of harmony and into pieces. Now, though, Blue is easy to read, like sheet music, even if Lance doesn’t have a wealth of formal musical experience at his fingertips. Her worry crests and falls, punctuated by the color of white beach sand and bleeding sunsets, by old lullabies and new pop hits, all in fragments somehow recognizable among the chaos. Everything swirling through Blue is keyed exclusively to Lance, all the way down to his earliest days, before Blue was ever his and he was ever Blue’s.

        And then he recognizes the familiar pang of homesickness laced into it all, and lets himself sink under the water and back to the surface, where the hangar is no brighter than it was before. Not entirely to his surprise, the rest of his face feels dry compared to the tear tracks running down his cheeks, and his voice is hoarse.

        “I want to go back,” he croaks, resting his forehead against Blue’s paw. She shifts, sitting upright and filling the room, and her tails curls around to graze Lance’s back, the closest thing to a hug that a robotic lion her size can come to. He’ll take it, though, because the only thing he could need more right now is a wormhole straight to Earth, which is precisely the one thing he cannot have.

      He chokes on his next words, swiping the back of his hand under his nose, hissing between his teeth as he grazes his knuckles on the upper edge of one of Blue’s claws. Skinning his knuckles in itself isn’t a big deal, but suddenly Lance feels so clumsy, so misaligned, like the audio stuttering and skipping half a second behind its video, so intolerable and frustrating and insufferable, and with that the dam breaks.

      Blue makes an uncanny mirror for his misery. Eyes screwed shut to hold back tears, he has to deal with snatches of the past hurtling his way. He hears his family laughing, singing, and he can name every voice like it was only yesterday (except was it yesterday or yesteryear because now it’s hard to keep track, too hard), and he can see the pilot classification lists in hard black type, and he can feel the shudder of the flight simulator as it crashes again, and, and, and…

      Everything rises to the surface at once, all of it tainted with the ugly black sense of watching from the outside. No matter how hard he tries, Lance somehow always manages to be an observer in his own life, cut out from the bulk of the story by everyone who is so much better suited to the roles he so desperately wants to play. How many of his siblings and cousins tell better jokes, cook better meals, craft better stories? Most of them, he thinks. And how many people outstripped him to reach fighter class from the start? Enough that he only made it because Keith flunked out, and chance doesn’t equate to talent. And what about the other paladins?

      Lance forces himself to open his eyes so Blue can’t keep reflecting the worst parts of him, but it’s too late. He loses himself to Pidge’s wild brilliance, Hunk’s endless capacity for friendship, Shiro’s easy leadership. Keith can fly through an asteroid field and make it look like the simplest thing in the universe, and Allura can heave a grown man through a wall, not to mention the fact that she flies a ship bigger than anything Lance has ever dreamed of, doing so with confidence forged of iron and ice. Hell, even Coran has his value in the Castle of Lions, the resident jack-of-all-trades with a lion’s heart. He may not be a paladin, but he could have been. Maybe should be.

      His bayard feels heavy in his pocket, and he is caught between the desire to hurl it across the hangar and the desperate need to cling to it, his lifeline. Without the bayard, what is he? Without Blue?

      Blue. She is still there. Waiting.

      Lance sucks in a haggard breath and closes his fingers around his weapon, scratching his nails into the rubbery black grip. For every nick he finds, he forces himself to hold his breath for five seconds, then exhale for another five. He does this seven times before he thinks that he’s just finding the same flaws over again, and by then, the tears have stopped, replaced by a numbness that blankets his mind, even from Blue. His lion keeps prodding until he finally notices she’s there. Expecting to be let in. Maybe even demanding.

      “So you can show me everything else I’ve done?” he snaps, wishing immediately that he could take it back. Blue would never try to hurt him; it isn’t her fault that she speaks in reflections. She’s merely taking what he provides, seizing on the sights and sounds to make her point. Sometimes, those memories get away from them both.

      As he reaches up to pat her nose in apology, though, it seems she has gotten a much better grip on them. Grip enough to speak.

      This was in you, she says. The words are cobbled together from fragments of his past, each spoken by a different voice. They are simple words, easy to find no matter where inside his head that she looks. We had to talk. I was worried for you.

      “You didn’t have to show me all of...that, though,” he protests.

      Her great mechanical joints click as she fixes him with her glowing eyes. I did. So I could show you why it is all false.

      Though it’s not precisely her tone, borrowed as it is from Lance’s mother, two cousins, Coran, and Iverson, Blue still brooks no argument. Lance can do nothing but accept the scenes she shows him.

      Pidge’s overbite gleams at him first, rapidly hidden by the video game they bought with scavenged fountain money. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t compatible with Altean technology, or that they haven’t figured out how to fix that just yet. What matters is that they spent half an hour splashing around an alien fountain, and ended up with one power glove, one cow, and one desperate need for a change of clothes. Blue loops Pidge’s laugh a couple times for good measure, then points out, You did this. This is happiness.

      In a similar fashion, she returns him to the planet of the mermaids and his adventure with Hunk, followed by their crusade to rescue Yellow from the mining planet, and still after that, she dredges up the Galaxy Garrison, distant as it is. Lance relives the first night that he and Hunk snuck out after curfew, which involved Hunk worrying the entire time that they would be caught, all the way up until they returned without a scratch from making a secret snack run to the nearest convenience store in that godforsaken desert. At the end of the night, clutching a pack of glazed mini donuts to his chest, Hunk had given him the warmest thanks, tearing the plastic wrap to offer him one. That had been the seal on their friendship. An unsanctioned donut run. Lance can’t stop the weak laugh from escaping at that point; how much had they risked just for junk food and a quick flirt with the cashier? Probably too much, but being the master of his impulsivity has never been his strong suit.

      For better or for worse, Blue observes. It goes on this way. For every fault Lance can dream of, Blue can dream bigger and better and kinder. She sees the consequences that span wider than her paladin first realizes, and instead of telling him that he is not this shortcoming or that, she shows him, laying the proof irrefutably at his feet. He is quick on his feet, he is persistent, he is enthusiastic, he is vibrant and clever and passionate.

      Most importantly, she reminds him as his hand nervously seeks out the bayard, the one thing they have not addressed, he is the Blue Paladin of Voltron. He is hers.

      I did not choose you for who you should be. The markings on the cave glow, fresh in his mind as the day he first laid his hands upon them.

      I did not choose you for who you wish to be. The ground crumbles beneath his feet, giving way to water, and with his jacket streaming out behind him, he feels like he’s flying. Like he’s alive. And then there’s Blue’s formidable barrier, impenetrable except all he has to do is knock, say hello, and just like that, she lets him in, claiming him as her own for the first time.

      Do you understand? she asks, releasing him from the chain of memories. I chose you for who you are, and all that you can be. I chose you.

      “And if you chose wrong?” He has to ask. The question escapes before he can even think to bottle it up again, perhaps for the better, given how Blue has taken to his previous attempts at bottling.

      But Blue is gentle, even as her eyes begin to dim, as she powers down for the night once again. I did not. And Lance? His name is a hundred voices all at once, each one of them overflowing with affection. Not just from family, but from friends, too. The other paladins particularly, even Keith. And most startling, his own voice, touched with a hint of flirtatious pride that brings the faint heat of embarrassment to his cheeks.

      “Yeah, Blue?”

      You are not alone. Not now, not ever. Remember that.

      Lance leaves her to rest in the hangar, returning to his room and draping his jacket over the chair. For a heartbeat, he considers sliding under the covers in search of beauty sleep, but he hesitates, staring at the weight hanging from the jacket’s pocket. Then he takes his bayard out and rests it on the desk, positioning it just so. As it deserves. As he deserves.

[tuesdayandtuesday]

Ohohohohohohoho. There’s a Klance angst week.