#takashi shironage | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

avidbeader · 8 years

Text

Voltron fanfic: “Scattered” Chapter 10

Season 2 AU. No ships, K+ to T rating. Begin at the beginning here.

<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

As they waited for the Metreans to prepare for departure, the Paladins and Alteans gathered in the kitchens. Hunk brought a selection of fresh fruits and greens that he had discovered while exploring the riverbanks and worked with Coran to supplement the space goo into a more appetizing meal.

Lance was arguing with Shiro and Allura. “I don’t understand! If we think there’s a real chance of Keith being held by Earth’s military, why aren’t we going straight there? It’s not like we need Voltron to bust him out!”

Allura shook her head. “My hope is to do this through diplomacy, but if it comes to a firefight, I want all our resources to hand. The Green Lion is still the only one outfitted with the cloaking device and we may need that capability.”

“And Lance, think about it. You’re the one who remembered how they treated me when I returned. What happened next? Four kids and a presumed-dead pilot vanished in an alien ship. What do you think the reaction will be if there are only three kids accounted for? We need Pidge’s presence if we’re going to present a unified front to them.” Shiro restlessly drummed the fingers of his Galra hand on the table next to him, producing a steady clinking noise.

Lance opened his mouth to argue some more, but couldn’t think of anything to add to his side. He glared at Shiro. “You’re worried, though.”

“Yes, I am. I’m a lot worried.”

<> <> <> <> <>

Lieutenant General Darzi stood to attention in front of General Benítez’ desk. Perkins was off to the side. The general stacked the recollected papers that held the results of Kogane’s blood tests and pushed them through a slit in the wall to the incinerator. She then turned and planted her hands on her hips. “Explain yourself.”

Darzi wanted to swallow hard, but resisted. Calm was necessary. “As Perkins was preparing the new round of amotrazephine combined with adrenaline, Kogane began struggling and shouting. I only wanted to prevent him from hurting himself.”

The general turned steely eyes to Perkins, who shifted his feet as he debated with himself. He looked up. “What I witnessed suggests that Darzi wanted to justify it by claiming he was preventing the boy from crying out or hurting himself, but he intended to incapacitate at the very least. He came damn close to killing him.”

“And your evidence?”

“Only my word, ma’am. As I said in the meeting, the signs of suffocation were gone within a few hours. A normal person would have had bloodshot eyes and bruises for days after.”

Benítez turned back to Darzi. “I am giving you one more chance to explain.”

At that point, he knew he had lost. He might as well lay everything out. He picked up his tablet from where he had laid it on the desk and pulled up the relevant files. “This is Kogane from when he was a cadet, from a vid of a workout session made for training purposes. Do you see the knife in his hand?”

Benítez and Perkins looked closely. Benítez picked up her own tablet and searched briefly. “The inventory of his belongings included a knife. It was assumed to be part of that armor, because the lab techies can’t identify the materials in the blade or the stone on the hilt.” She looked up, worry lines creasing her forehead.

Perkins shook his head. “Anyone could have given it to him at any time.”

“Maybe,” Darzi replied. “But look at this.” He pulled up another photo, showing the upper half of a humanoid robot. “This was in the ship that brought Takashi Shironage back from wherever he was for a year. Look at the symbol on its chest. Now, look at the symbol on that knife.” He handed the tablet to Perkins so the other two could compare the photos side by side.

Perkins shook his head again. “Now you’re reaching. Yes, they could be the same alphabet, but they could just as easily be unrelated. You’re determined to make that boy into some kind of alien threat and you don’t have enough reason to.”

“He won’t answer our questions!”

“Maybe that’s because you took him prisoner first!”

“Gentlemen, enough!” Benítez dropped both tablets on her desk. “Darzi, I will grant that Kogane having a knife of theoretically alien origin for years is an issue, but your reaction was still far over the line and made the situation much worse. I am removing you. You have forty-eight hours to clear out and report to Fort Bragg. You will stay there until a hearing is formed to investigate charges of wrongful imprisonment and assault.”

“General!”

“Want me to add attempted murder? No? Then dismissed!”

Darzi’s face darkened, but he grabbed his tablet, saluted, and backed out of the room.

Benítez turned to Perkins. “This fact about the knife is bad, Sam. I’m trusting you an awful lot.”

He nodded. “I know you are, Mari. But we can’t get answers from a dead body.”

<> <> <> <> <>

It was getting close to the midday meal in the village. Pidge continued to scan the prisoner files, knowing Sofee would come fetch her when it was actually time to eat. She paused for one moment to scrub her eyes, which were beginning to tire, and resumed.

Ears, gills, snout, ears again, scales… She zipped through photo files in rapid succession. Horns, four eyes, ears AGAIN, how many times did they go after those people, jeez, mane, Shiro—

Shiro!

“Omigosh, omigosh…” Pidge stared at the picture of Shiro, his dark hair falling over his forehead and his terror-filled eyes staring out of an unmarked face.

With trembling fingers, she copied all the text from Shiro’s file and set it as a search pattern. Her hope was to find cross-references in the Galra text that included either the date of Shiro’s capture, the location, or the ship involved.

Please, please, please…

A dozen files popped up. The top two showed her exactly what she had hoped for.

Pidge stared at the pictures of her father and Matt in disbelief for a moment, then squealed and hugged herself. “I found them! I found them!” She saved the two files to her gauntlet interface, then pulled Shiro’s file up next to them and began studying them intently.

Green nudged her mind in a way that felt almost like an impatient poke.

“What, girl? What is it?”

My navigation database.

“Oh? Oh! Yes!” Pidge scrambled out of the hut and ran for her Lion. Once in the pilot’s seat, she shared the files to Green’s databank. A star map, a miniature of the one from the Castle-ship. appeared and showed three locations.

The first location was the farthest away.

Your planet. Where they were found.

The second location was deep within Galra territory.

Where they were all taken first.

Pidge thought a moment. That must be near the Galra’s central command, possibly close to the gladiator rings where Shiro spent far too many months fighting for his life.

The last location was still deep in Galra territory, but not near any major population centers.

The last known location of your father and brother.

The slave camp. She had coordinates to the slave camp where Dad and Matt likely were.

Not yet. Wait for reinforcements.

Pidge dropped her shoulders, feeling the powerful pull to just take off and start flying there on her own. But Green was right; she was alone and she had no way to make wormholes or access a Galra hyperdrive to cross the distance (but there’s a thought, having a second option for super-speed travel).

“So in the meantime, we keep busy. I’ll work on that wrist communicator idea.”

She felt pride running through the purr that Green sent.

<> <> <> <> <>

Keith swam up from true sleep to awareness of himself, in the now-familiar red-gold aura of his Lion. Before he could try to wake up fully, he heard her voice.

Wait.

He obeyed, taking the opportunity to bask in her reassuring presence. Her warmth surrounded and soothed him. He sent back his affection and trust and was rewarded with a thunderous purr.

Now.

Keith opened his eyes to see the back of a medtech as he left the room. A noise drew his attention and he looked to see Perkins there. The man was doing something with his armor…

Keith bit back a gasp when he realized that Perkins was hiding his knife inside one of his gauntlets. He knew that Earthforce had no access to his bayard – Pidge had once tried to describe her theory on the tiny dimensional pockets that the armor seemed to possess, but he had been lost very quickly.

But his knife…it was one of the few things that had been passed down to him from his parents and he would be damned if they tried to take it from him.

Perkins turned and saw Keith’s gaze on him. “I tried my best, son. Darzi’s been reassigned, but if I’m going to be a witness against him I have to stay away. But you should be safe. General Benítez is in charge and she won’t let anyone hurt you. But you should be honest with them when they start asking you questions again.”

Keith’s expression hardened at that. Perkins looked unsurprised. He laid one hand on Keith’s shoulder. “Good luck, son.” He went to the door, paused and checked the hallway, then left.

Keith tried yet again to get loose, attempting to slide up or down far enough to get one of his arms free enough to undo a strap. Just as he began to make headway, a new medtech entered the room. Without speaking, she set a syringe in her hand down and moved to roll up the sleeve of the arm they hadn’t used yet.

“No, come on! Just stop it already! I’m not going to hurt anyone! Stop it!”

Without speaking, the woman picked up the syringe and clinically administered whatever was in it.

They were clearly learning. The sedative was strong enough to hit him immediately and he fell into blackness once more.

<> <> <> <> <>

After eating, Pidge sat down with the sentry head and finished isolating its communicator. She set it out and began tinkering. She found the tech simple enough and reassembled the thing, mounting it on a clunky bracelet she fashioned from a piece of another sentry’s wrist. She put on her helmet and tried speaking into the comm. “Pidge to Pidge, can you read me?”

Nothing. But she wasn’t deterred. Pidge had figured that she might need the castle’s resources to finish this invention. Now she wondered if the modification still worked on its original frequency.

“I need another head…” She looked around at the sorted salvage. “Oh, quiznak.” She popped off the helmet and went outside.

She spotted Sofee playing with a few other Arusian children in the village square, looking much more normal than even a day ago thanks to the repurposed sentries.

“Hey, Sofee, if anyone asks, I ran back out to the Galra crash site. I need to find a couple of specific things. I should be back in less than a bleer.”

Sofee nodded and Pidge jogged to her speeder.

<> <> <> <> <>

Hunk’s face popped up on the comm screen. “And we are set, Princess! The transports are loaded and we just need to get the rest of the Metreans aboard. We’ll be ready to take off on your command in about fifteen derbyshires.”

“Doboshes,” Coran corrected.

“Finally!” Allura’s patience was at an end. She pulled up another screen. “Lance, is everyone ready for takeoff? The Metreans are almost ready.”

Lance’s face appeared on his screen. “We are all set, my lady.” He gave an exaggerated bow and Allura tried to stamp down her now-reflexive impatience with her Blue Paladin’s attitude.

Shiro took his seat and brought up his own controls. “Shiro to Pidge, do you read me?”

There was no answer.

“She’s off without her helmet again.”

Allura nodded. “At least she’s in safe territory. And we should be there in less than a varga.”

<> <> <> <> <>

Pidge was cresting the ridge of the crash impact site when she realized that she had left both her helmet and the metal detector back in the village in her haste. She wondered if she would have left the rest of her armor if she hadn’t put it on this morning out of habit.

“Oh, for crying out loud…”

But she remembered leaving a pile of sentry parts in the northwest quadrant after going through them for hands intact enough for the Galra-glove experiment. She drove the speeder over and hopped off, going to the pile of metal. Hopefully there was a head in good enough condition there.

She had tossed aside two heads that were too damaged to be of use and was digging for a third when she noticed a strange shadow zipping across the ground. She looked up and felt her heart jump into her mouth.

A Galra drone was zeroing in on her location.

She dove into the edges of the wreckage pile. If there were the slightest chance that they were only investigating the crash site, she might get lucky and remain undisco—

The speeder.

Quiznak.

Grabbing the element of surprise while she had it, she brought up her gauntlet and quickly turned on one of her most useful distractions. At the touch of a screen, a hologram Green Paladin raced from the salvage pile toward the speeder.

The drone reacted and fired on the running figure. The image showed static and winked out of existence.

Pidge stood and fired her bayard at the drone, sending crackling green energy through it. Its red lights went out and it fell to the surface as she retracted her blade.

Score!

She started for the fallen drone, eager to investigate it, when a purple bolt hit the dirt not two feet from her. She ducked back behind the salvage, bringing her shield up as more bolts flew. She peeked carefully through a gap between a couple of legs and saw two more drones coming in. She worked her way to the other side of her barrier and watched the shadows.

As they honed in on her location, they swooped close together. She tumbled out and sent her bayard forth again, wrapping her grappling rope around one and swinging with all her might. The trapped drone collided with the second one and they exploded in a fireball.

There were no other drones in sight. Pidge knelt to catch her breath and sent assurance to her Lion, who was suddenly flooding her awareness with concern.

I’m fine, girl. I took care of them.

<> <> <> <> <>

“Commander Prorok! Two more drones are offline!”

Prorok nodded at the shouted report from the soldier monitoring the scouts. “I think that’s confirmation, don’t you, Thace?”

Lieutenant Thace looked impassive. “It would seem so, sir.”

Prorok opened a communication channel. “Commander Gelor, you are ordered to investigate the planet Arus and track down whoever is using Galra technology and taking out our drones. Deadly force is authorized, I repeat, deadly force is authorized.”

Next chapter

#scattered by avidbeader #voltron #voltron legendary defender #voltron fanfic #fanfic: voltron

0 notes