#which is an easy fix but also the pilot shape makes his face look longer and more rounded

[willadisastercry]

Slow and steady... breathe.

tw: severe blood loss, needles, self surgery, loss of conciousness.

Lance wasn’t particularly aversed to needles, he just didn’t want to have to willingly stab himself with one, ya know? Everyone is distraught once they realize Lance is hurt and that they can’t be there to help him because they’re in the middle of nowhere and can’t leave their lions, so talking him through stitching himself back together is the best solution they have. If only Lance can stay awake long enough to fix himself up so he makes the journey.

“Is everyone alright?”

Keith’s voice jolted Lance from his slumped position after his body had gone lax with exhaustion and his mind wondered off. He almost didn’t catch Keith’s question with how intently he was staring at the floor in front of his pilot chair where a sizable puddle was beginning to form.

“Didn’t really account for having to bail so soon without checking in and we have a long way to go before he get back to where Coran had to move the castle...”

He wondered vaguely what he could’ve possibly spilled as he shrugged off the weariness from the battle they had just narrowly escaped. They were all spent after things went pear shaped and had to evade the hail of fire from galra blasters all the way up to their lion’s ramps.

Everyone ushered their respective ‘yes’s though, even Lance, but Keith decided to do a sound off for damage control anyway since they had a bit of a journey before they made it back to the castleship.

“Pidge? Did your shield hold up?”

Shield. Hmm. Lance knit his brows together as he forced his brain to work through the fog that addled it.

“Yeah, it did. I’m not hurt.”

Unlike Pidge, Lance wasn’t as lucky and his had cracked almost immediately in his one on one with the galra soldier that had discovered him. He’d taken post in a makeshift sniper hole between some storage crates to cover his team as they made their eacape.

“Good, how about you, Hunk?”

Lance wondered what else he was forgetting about the battle they’d just fought, maybe that’s why he felt so strange and out of it, why his mind was so slow.

What the fuck happened back there?

“—saw you take a few hits in close combat at the end there, you alright?”

Lance’s heart fluttered sadly as he recalled how he had been lining up a shot for the soldier that was advancing on Hunk when he’d been caught.

His scope had just zeroed in on the soldier when one that Lance wasn’t aware of made his own surprise attack, clutching the armor around his ankles so painfully that he was afraid it’d crack before yanking him backwards and away from his position.

He had cried out more at fact that he hadn’t gotten the shot in because that meant that Hunk would have to fight and he hated fighting. The guy was a goddamned pacifist in the middle of an intergalactic war, but his build made him look like a formidable threat and attracted unwanted attention during battle all the time.

Lance just wanted to spare his friend from having to engage in the thing he hated so much. But he couldn’t. He’d failed.

“I’m dandy, nothing more than a couple of bruises Coran’s special cream can fix.”

Those bruises were Lance’s fault. He had failed to protect him from that soldier, to protect him from having to do the thing he hated. It took all of him to stifle the broken sound that erupted in his throat as his stomach clenched with guilt.

“Okay, let me know if anything changes.”

Lance breathed shakily as he blinked back tears, but even when he wiped the wetness under his eyes they remained blurry, unfocused.

“Allura? You were with me but you had the quintessence—”

That’s what this entire mission was about...

Stealing a powerful vat of quitessence Pidge had been keeping tabs on with intel she’d stolen from a galra battleship en route to occupy a peaceful planet in the nearby solar system. Shiro wanted them to intercept the delivery so that there would be less catastrophe when they formed Voltron to defend the planet.

It was more than vital that they succeeded and Lance was determined, ready to do whatever he could to prove himself as a sharpshooter and make sure they secured what they were after.

“You can be at ease that I am uninjured and the quintessence is in tact.”

This bit of information did little to ease the rapidly increasing feeling of wrong that was consuming him. They had succeeded and he had done his job relatively well aside for one mistake, but that mistake had gotten Hunk hurt, and he was having a hard time reconciling that to make the success feel like a victory.

He was also having a hard time staying focused on Keith as he spoke with each of them, all of their voices as they recounted the battle muddling together, lost behind the ear piercing ringing that only he seemed to be affected by.

His breathing picked up and he was vaguely aware that he had started sweating, realizing he’d zoned out again just in time for his turn to check in with Keith.

“Great, and Lance? I know you were in a bit of a scuffle, are you all good?”

Five minutes ago he would have answered with a resounding yes, but as soon as he’d sat down in Blue the pump of adrenaline through his body slowed and the weariness had dripped away bit by bit to reveal that he actually felt incredibly weird. Of which was doubly confirmed with the near constant waves of concern Blue was sending him.

“Uhhm,” Lance paused, his mind blank.

For the first time in literally ever he had no idea what to say. His mind was in a thick haze as his body continued to try and come down from the massive high of combat and so he found he couldn’t really grasp what the strange feeling was exactly.

“I... I think I took a couple of direct blows after my shield... maybe my head because I sort of feel... I don’t know actually, just-just weird I guess...”

“Wait, your shield crapped out while you were fighting that soldier?”

Lance was slower to respond this time.

“Yeah, it cracked, my shield...” his words came out between increasingly ragged breaths.

“Well, that’s not promising. What do you mean by weird, do you think you might have a concussion?”

“Concussion...” he mused aloud, not really understanding why that was a concern before he reminded himself that he was fully missing a few key events from the end of the mission. He was faintly aware of worried fussing from Hunk and Allura as he racked his brain.

“Pidge, can you pull up a full visual of Lance?”

“On it!”

“...I don’t think I hit my head though. I mean, yeah, I guess I do feel a little dizzy maybe... and lightheaded... everything looks kinda strange too,” Lance rattled off as he took in his surroundings.

The lights of the panels and screens in front of him blurred and stretched if he moved his eyes too fast, so he tried to keep still and focus on just Keith’s face for now. It was pinched with concern but his voice divulged nothing but calm.

He could feel Blue nudging him, clearly worried over something because she had been withholding control of the steering for a while and was doing most of the piloting then.

“Easy girl, I’m alright,” Lance whispered.

He was becoming more lightheaded by the minute and his movements were now so sluggish he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to steer straight much longer anyway.

“Full screen visual should be popping up—

“Oh, crap!”

“Lance, what the hell?”

“Lance?” Keith’s voice was steady, breaking through the sea of concerned remarks pointedly.

For everyone else the entire view of Lance’s cockpit was now visible and so was the red that painted the front of his armor and much of the floor.

“Lance... do you know how long you’ve been bleeding?”

“Huh? I’m not-I didn’t get... wait, what do you—woah,” Lance had looked down to examine himself, certain there would be nothing.

But there was. And he was really confused because he hadn’t felt a thing but the sheet of red cascading down his armor from his side said otherwise.

He swallowed thickly, head swimming from the angle as he peered down at the grizzly sight. With the threat of passing out now a very real possibility, he brought his head back up to rest against the back of the chair and looked elsewhere as he fought the blood rush that threatened his ability to remain conscious. Something about seeing that much of his own blood was making him sick to his stomach.

“-nce! Lance, focus! Good, okay, so did the soldier have a sword or a blaster?”

He knit his brows together as he thought back on it. He remembers glinting metal that swooped down on him in short, swift arcs. The solider had a very long and very serrated knife, not a blaster. He didn’t even have enough time to transform his bayard before the soldier descended on him, his shield not lasting more than four hits before it shattered.

“A knife, he-he had a knife...”

He tried to ignore the resurgence of worried questions from his friends.

“Okay, can’t be that bad if you didn’t even notice, right?” Keith tried to put him at ease but it wasn’t really working.

He hadn’t noticed when it happened because he was quite literally battling for his life, losing a significant amount of blood in the time that had passed since then. And that scared him.

Because he wasn’t phsyically with the others, he was bleeding out and basically alone.

He was going to die... and his friends would get to watch.

“Lance, stop worrying and just focus on me okay?”

“R-right, sure. Um, what-what do I do though? We can’t just pull over... we’re in the middle of nowhere in outer space and the castle is too far... what if—I don’t want t—I can’t-can’t—“

“Lance! What did I just say? Stop worrying and listen to me!”

He dragged his eyes from the hole they were burning into Blue’s dashboard to meet Keith’s purple saucers.

“You’re okay. You’ve got a med kit in the cargo hold and we can talk you through how to patch yourself up, yeah? You’ll be fine.”

“Fine. Right, I-I’ll be fine.”

“Do you think you can stand? The med kit is on the wall behind you.”

“I can try...”

Lance scooted to the edge of the pilot chair and braced himself before rising onto his legs.

“Shit...”

The world spun before him as the new orientation produced another swell of blood from the comprised bit of his armor where he’d been... he didn’t even know what he’d been yet but he knew it wasn’t good.

He forced himself to take a deep breath, blinking away the static before starting for the back of the cockpit, using the wall to keep himself upright.

“Kit’s on the left.”

Walking felt weird. His legs were weak and didn’t seem to ever go where he intended, but they held his weight even when he’d acquired the bulky med kit and had use a bit more effort to lug it back to his pilot chair.

His friends were in the middle of a discussion Lance hadn’t heard and continued when he returned. He had to set the kit down before maneuvering carefully around the puddle to get himself seated in his chair.

He began tugging off the top half of his armor, starting with the gloves and elbow guards which came off painlessly. It was only when he moved to the top most pieces that he ran in to some issues. He inhaled sharply when tugging on his right shoulder guard pulled at whatever was waiting beneath his armor on his side.

“Hey hermano, just breathe, you’ve got it,” Hunk offered when Lance stopped.

He nodded and took another deep breath before continuing.

The left shoulder guard came off with little incident when he approached it with more caution, but now came the chest piece. He separated the clasps at the bottom and sides before leaning forward to slide the back piece out, the front piece falling away when he leaned back in his chair.

He gasped and was sure that his friends had too when they saw the gash in his side. It was long and wide, deepest towards his back and tapering off on his stomach just above his belly button.

Lance remembered it now. Once the shield finally shattered, he threw his hands over his head and rolled out from under a hit that would have killed him.

The soldier seethed at the evasion and launched at Lance again, giving him barely enough time to deploy his bayard before he was on him. Twisting around was all he could do to get more distance between them so he could take his shot, but he wasn’t quick enough. He caught the impending strike in his side anyway, the blade cutting into him due to his own momentum even after the soldier had stopped swinging and fell to his knees lifelessly.

He thought his armor had held, not aware of the splintering crack where the blade broke through the joint at the midsection.

“Okay, okay, hey! You’re still okay! You’re going to fix it and we’ll walk you through it, yeah?”

He nodded. The air in Blue seemed to be warmer than usual but it didn’t stop him from shivering now that his armor was off. All of the heat in his body seemed to be drawn to the hole in his side.

“Pidge, do you think—“

“Yeah, I’ve already patched Coran in and he’s got a whole set of medical diagrams pulled up... okay Lance, you ready?”

He attempted a ‘yes’ but his mouth was so dry he wasn’t sure he could separate his lips to speak so he hummed instead, his eyes wide and searching as he combed over the contents in the open kit below him despite the mounting pressure behind his eyes that made keeping them open a challenge.

“There’s a vial of yellow liquid and a syringe, grab those... also the sheers because you’ll need to cut away what’s left of the suit around the wound.”

He grumbled at the thought of stabbing himself with a needle but seemed to shift into a sort of auto pilot after that, moving methodically and ignoring the agony of the pulsing wound on his side now that he was aware of it.

His face paled visibly once he held the syringe up in front of him. The needle was big and the liquid in the vial looked like acid than it did medicine.

It was Allura interrupting his inner turmoil this time, her voice full of fear but sure.

“Lance, you can do this. It will hurt, but you will be grateful once you’ve administered it, trust me.”

“Whatever you say, princess...” he smirked meekly and Allura almost laughed.

Once he’d cut away a haphazard square from the material left around the entirety of his wound, Pidge explained how much of the liquid to pull into the vial and how much he should inject each time and where.

He figured he’d need to get a move on with all of this from the way that everything seemed to be spinning and steeled himself for the first of numbing injections. It was to go right above his hip below the deepest part of the wound.

“Breathe...”

He waited for an inhale and went for it before he could panic.

“Shiiiit!”

Turns out the needle going in wasn’t what he should’ve been wary of because the altean medicine burned. He squirmed and cursed as he pushed in the allotted dose, practically seeing stars at the thought of administering five more of them.

“Relax buddy, you can do it.”

He pushed the next shot in quickly, starting with another before his body could protest and did that with the rest of them all in quick succession, not letting himself focus on the seering fire until he was done. Throwing his head back and doing his best to keep from writhing as much so he didn’t make the wound worse.

“Gah! Fuck, fuck, what the fuck is wrong with altean pain medicine?! Hurts-hurts more than the freaking knife wound—“

“Shut up, you’re okay. You won’t feel anything soon. Hard parts over, but now you gotta relax, freaking out on us is only gonna make things worse.”

Keith’s stupid for being right, but he is.

Don’t freak out. You can do this... you have to do this.

“Okay,” he huffed, “no freaking out.”

His voice was trembling almost as much as his hands as he let the empty syringe fall mindlessly to join the puddle of his own blood on the ground.

The pain in his side was diminishing now, the burning of the numbing medicine becoming a cool sting and then smoothing out into a hollow warmth. He tested the skin around it with his finger and couldn’t feel a thing, perfect.

“What’s next?”

“Ha,” Pidge laughed grimly, “now you have to put your money where your mouth is and thread an actual needle.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that too, the movement made something around the wound on his side twinge but he couldn’t really tell where or why with how numb it was now, which was probably a good thing.

“The pack of needles is in the sleeve... look for one that’s curved... size 3–yeah, that’s it. There is a clamp to guide the needle and a tweezer type tool to help tie it off, grab those. Now you need a couple packs of gauze and tape... the spool of polyester blend thread—wait how do atleans also have polyester? Right, focusing now, sorry! Okay, next is the antiseptic... yeah it’ll probably hurt but you’re not croaking over galra germs if we can help it... sorry Keith, you definitely don’t have galra germs.”

Keith just pinched the bridge of his nose but Hunk seemed to be amused by it, his light chuckle taking the edge off the intense worry written all over his face.

“We sure one of you can’t just do a little space walk over here?” Lance asked as he held up the bottle of antiseptic, “seriously don’t know how the mullet isn’t jumping at the opportunity to torture me, like come onnnnn! I know you’d enjoy it!”

“Shut up and listen to Pidge, the castle is still really far and Coran hasn’t been able to triangulate our location yet, so we’ve gotta keep moving.”

He grumbled pitifully but looked to Pidge’s face on the dashboard in front of him.

“You ever threaded a needle before? The sewing kind not the almost killing your friends trying to show off your piloting skills kind.”

“Ha-ha and no, but i’ve seen my máma do it... something like this I think... hey, I got it!”

“Damn, he really can thread the needle.”

“Thank you Hunk! Finally some recog—“

“Both of you be quiet. Lance, listen to me very carefully because now you have to stab yourself with it. Lock the clamp at the end of needle, you’ll hear a click. You won’t feel it when you start stabbing—stitching, probably just the motion, but you’re still bleeding so you’ve gotta hurry.”

Lance was well aware that he was still bleeding. His body wouldn’t let him forget. The color had all but left his face and he was drenched in sweat. And he seemed to shake steadily now no matter what he did to try and calm down, no doubt a side affect of half of his blood being beneath him instead of inside him. But he ignored it all and put his remaining energy into listening to Pidge.

“Start at the back where it’s deepest and hold the skin together... yep, good now bring the tip of the needle just below—left more, perfect. Coran says to angle it in the direction you want it to come out the other side... go as deep as halfway down the wound and don’t push too far in on the other side where it’s coming out... kay, now push it in, shit. Lance! LANCE!”

As soon as he had the needle situated as deep as it needed to go he lost the battle with how lightheaded he’d become. It had him slow and sluggish before but was now severely impeding his ability to remain conscious for his self surgery.

It wasn’t so much as the actual piercing his own skin that culminated with everything else for him to faint. More of the way he could feel it moving inside of him, like he could feel that the metal was cold by how it stood out against the heat of the wound, just not the actual cold of it or the pain part.

He didn’t know how long he’d been out when the voices of his teammates registered in his head again. They seemed worried, some of them distraught. Like Hunk, he was really scared about something, sounded a little mad the harder he listened.

“...if he doesn’t come around soon I’m going over there—no, I don’t care!”

“Just give him a minute!”

“Wait guys he’s moving.”

“Lance can you hear us?”

“Lance!”

Everything seemed so loud but muddled and indistinct all at the same time.

“Ugh, stop screaming...” he slurred, his head still hurt and he felt even lighter than he had before.

“Open you eyes, bud. You’re almost done, come on,” Keith urged.

Almost done his ass, he’d passed out just after getting the needle in, not even finishing the first stitch. This was going to be hell.

“The needle stayed in, you just have to get it through the other side and tie it off. Coran says you can space them out and skip a few, you just need to get it closed to staunch the flow.”

He hummed again and pried his eyes open wide to blink around wildly before he tried to sit up. But his limbs were so heavy even lifting his arm was hard, so he stayed where he’d slumped down, shoving his legs out farther to get his middle straight.

“J-just through the other side?”

“Yes, where you have it now is fine... just like pinch the skin and coax it through and don’t stab your finger like your about to, you’ll feel that!”

He wanted to laugh, he really did. Because this was so ridiculous. It was probably the dangerous amount of blood he’d already lost but he just found this so amusing.

Having to stitch a knife wound up while a lion flew him back to a castle that wasn’t really a castle—in space! All in space!

He wondered what he would’ve been doing back home if he weren’t here right now, probably nothing nearly as ridiculous.

“Lance, stay with us,” Hunk’s low voice pulled him from his mental tangent.

He rubbed his eye with the back of the hand holding the tweezer, it was covered in blood.

“You’ve got to tie it off now, so pull the thread through until just a little is left, like an inch—stop! Now unlock the clamp and grab that last inch, wrap the end with the needle around a couple of times, not tightly. Release the lock on the clamps but keep a hold of the end of the thread, grab where it comes out the other side and pull through then pull tight and cut, good, done!”

He took in mouthfuls of air like he’d just finished a race.

Shit, he could cry. This was hard and he just wanted to close his eyes and forget about everything. It didn’t hurt anymore. But he just wanted to be asleep and not have to focus so hard on stitching his own wound closed while his friends tried to make him feel better.

Because they couldn’t. Because this sucked and they couldn’t help him.

“You’re doing amazing Lance,” the princess remedied, her voice firm but soft all the same.

His heart felt warm with that, it was something he could hear his máma saying.

“Few more and then you can rest, bud.”

“Y-yeah, okay...”

It got increasingly difficult to keep his hand steady and after the fourth stitch he’d sort of gave up on trying. He resolved to do them quickly like the injections once he’d gotten the hang of it. But his energy was leaving him faster than he could stitch.

And then his heavy breaths and shaking hands made it hard for him to hold the skin together long enough to get the needle through, so eventually he resorted to holding his breath and stabbing wildly.

His friends grimaced every time he did that. They all felt horrible that they couldn’t be there to physically help him but also knew they needed to get to the castle as quickly as possibly.

So Pidge continued to guide him through each stitch and everyone else praised and encouraged him each time he finished one. Their voices pulling him back when he’d drift off into the pull of darkness that continued to tease and toy with him.

“-ng so good.”

“Keep going, bud.”

“-re so strong, Lance.”

“Only a few left... Coran says it looks good.”

He coughed on the dryness that had made its way down his throat and almost into his lungs with how tired every part of him was. Breathing hurt because he had absolutely nothing left on his body that didn’t, made so much worse with the strain of having to withhold air so he could get the needle though.

The wound was practically closed now and not bleeding much through the gaps where he’d forgone some stitches. He was at the part where it tapered. Pidge said it looked like one more would do and so he held his breath and shoved, whining when he poked his hand by accident, not even hearing what his friends were saying as he tied it off almost robotically, the muscle memory of having done it a dozen times now taking over as his mind remained elsewhere.

“-n you hear me?! Lance, Lance listen to me! You’re almost done, don’t go just yet.”

He forced his lidded eyes to look at Pidge, he could barely make out her face with how blurry everything had gotten.

“Open the gauze pads and place them over the wound... tape the bottom and only the bottom down completely then rip off a long enough piece for the top and sides... pour the antiseptic onto another piece of gauze, dab it over the wound, and press it all down before you pass out... got that?”

He huffed wearily and thought he did something of a nod, but it probably didn’t look like it because Pidge asked if he’d heard her again. He had. He was just done. He tore the gauze pads free form their packages and placed them over the wound before taping them down.

None of it looked pretty. Not the sutures, not the bandaging, none of it. But it would have to do. He opened the antiseptic and lost the cap in the process but couldn’t find it in him to care.

He looked up at the screen of worried faces in front of him.

“Go on, bud. It’ll only hurt for like a second and then you can sleep.”

“You can do it, you just stitched your skin back together, this is light work.”

“Once again, altean medicine hurts like hell, but it works. Trust me, Lance.”

Yeah. Trust the princess.

He closed his eyes and waited for it. He really wasn’t sure how anything could top the fire that was the pain medicine, but somehow the antiseptic achieved that. His vision whited and he thought he could hear himself screaming, but he felt too far away to be able to hear that.

He didn’t remember covering the wound with the gauze but apparently he’d gotten three sides stuck down before his head lolled to the side and gentle waves of assurance washed over him from Blue as everything faded to black.

He couldn’t be sure how much time had passed between then and the next time he woke up, but he didn’t have the energy to ask. He just knew that he was still in Blue from the pulse of assurances that surged back up again as soon as he came back to.

“Coran says he’s picking up Black on the radar, he’s making a worm hole now. I’m gonna fly next to Blue to be ready to grab her just in case she doesn’t get the memo...”

He must’ve groaned because someone was talking to him then.

“Oh! Not dead, that’s so good, hi Lance.”

Freaking Pidge. He might’ve laughed. He couldn’t remember.

“Hey dude... nah don’t try and move, just stay there.”

“Thanks for listening to us for once.”

“Lance, you’re so brave, you should be proud of yourself that you were able to do that.”

“Course, princess. Any-anything you say...” he smirked and tried to hold up his famous finger guns, earning some laughs from his teammates that faded quickly.

Blue was the last thing on his mind when he passed out again. She was proud of him too.

[admin-in-residence]

Show and Tell

One more fic based on Padawan Skip from @clonesandmoans​ this is technically a sequel to my first fic Order 66.

Skip is roughly 15-16 years old in this one. Flashbacks to 12-13 year old Skip.

Length: 2,333 Words

Skip dragged her feet along the dirt path, wincing at every step. Strange creatures called out in the night, and her path was illuminated only by the light of the twin moon’s hung high in the sky.

She nearly missed her turn, which wouldn’t be the first time since they’ve landed upon this planet, hiding their ship in layers of vines, mud, and brush. Thankfully their was one corner, high up on the space craft that she hadn’t been able to reach and the metal shined under the moonlight.

She gave her signature knock, three sharp raps followed by 2 slower knocks, and was relieved as the ramp  instantly lowered.

Entering inside, she slammed her hand back on the door panel, the ramp closing behind them. The lights were set on dim, any higher and they risk shining through their camouflage.

“Thank’s for waiting up for me.” She said softly, catching Echo’s tired gaze.

The Clone in mention sat in the Captain’s chair, a mug of steaming tea in hand. Skip couldn’t help herself as she ran a hand through the fuzzy hair that had begun to grow in once again, carefully minding the cybernetic’s implant’s.

“Stop that.” Echo groaned.

“Can’t help it.” Skip teased, sticking out her tongue before stealing the tea from his grasp. She took a sip from it before passing it back to Echo.

“How was your shift?” Echo asked.

Skip groaned in response, sinking into the seats of the co-pilot’s chair.

It had been a rough year...and it felt so much longer.

After escaping Naboo upon their stolen spacecraft, they had hopped from planet to planet exchanging ship’s for other ones, trying to create a untraceable trail. She had begun to lose track of the names of all the planets she had been to, and remembered a time in her life when she used to track them all excitedly, wanting to see everything...the chart that Tech-

She winced involuntarily.

“You know. I could be out there helping, I’m sure there’s someone who would be willing to hire me.” Echo said.

Money was one of their biggest troubles, there never seemed to be enough of it. Skip was thankful she had managed to find a diner upon this planet and had been waitressing in order to pay for their rations. The owner was harsh and demanding, and the shifts were long and grueling, not to mention the far walk from the hideout to town and then back.

Most days, she would leave before the sun rose and make it back when the moon was high like tonight.

Echo wanted so badly to help, but with the Imperial presence beginning to rise, more and more people were beginning to memorize the identical Clone faces, and Echo would fit the bill...no doubt if he was seen the Batch would be on their tail again.

“It’s alright. It’s best if your here, taking care of the ship. Just a couple more week’s and I’ll have enough credit’s saved up...we’ll be able to stock up on some food and move on.” Skip said.

“Your wearing yourself down Skip.” Echo said, “I’m just worried about you. You and me...that’s all I’ve got left.”

Skip hummed in response, her eyes shutting by the invisible wights pulling them down. She needed some sleep...sleep that wasn’t just a few hours between shifts.

“Hey, I had to go through the chest today...” Echo said.

Skip squinted as she looked to her companion.

“For?”

“My old armor...I needed some wires from my communicator cuff. I was careful, and I was able to fix the comm system on the ship.” Echo stated proudly. “But...I found something...”

Skip sat up eyes narrowed.

“It slipped out of your old belt pouch...I don’t know if you wanted it, or if you want me to stick it back in the chest.” Echo said.

The chest, in reference was a small storage crate that had been carried from ship to ship since they had first started stealing and trading ships, it was full of their old lives, Echo’s armor, Skip’s lightsaber was buried somewhere inside, and they tried to avoid it all costs...they just didn’t have the heart to leave it behind.

Echo reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small wooden figure.

Skip gasped as she reached out to take it in her hands.

The figure was small, light and whittled oh so carefully in the shape of a Tooka cat.

“I didn’t even know I had it on me that day.” Skip whispered.

“Hunter made it right? I wasn’t with you guys very long, but I know he liked to work on things like that.”

Skip smiled.

“He made one for each member of the Batch...I remember the day he gave this to me...”

*

“I’m sorry Padawan, but I can’t make it...” Her master trailed off, “You should know how much this mission means to the Republic.”

Skip forced a smile on her face, “Of course Master. I wish you luck.”

The transmission cut off after that, and Skip sank down, wrapping her arms around her knees.

As part of her Padawan Classes, the Padawans had been given a task to find something to bring in that showcased what they had learned since they had first started their trainings. Most Padawans brought their own Masters, who better to showcase then the person that taught them so much in the first place?

But now, Skip didn’t have anything.

“What’s the long face for kid?”

Skip looked up, hoping she didn’t look as upset as she currently felt. Sergeant Hunter, the leader of their Clone Force eyed her warily.

“Tomorrow’s my showcasing day.” Skip sighed standing up before Hunter. “But now my Master can’t make it...I don’t have anything else.”

“What’s the showcasing for?” Hunter asked curiously.

“It’s to show what we’ve learned so far, things that have taught us lessons...that have inspired us.” Skip answered.

Now how could she choose? What should she bring...she had learned so much...her master’s teachings, lightsaber duels, sniper training with Crosshair, decoding with Tech, demolition from Wrecker, knife training and hand to hand combat from-

“Hunter!” Skip exclaimed. “My batch!”

Hunter eyed her warily as she looked at him excitedly.

“You guys can come instead!”

“Come where?” Wrecker asked as the rest of the Batch walked in.

“To the Jedi Temple! Tomorrow!” Skip said.

“Now hang on-” Hunter held a hand out.

“Why would we go to the Temple?” Crosshair frowned.

“Think of all the things I could analyze.” Tech said in wonder.

“Do you have any animals there?” Wrecker asked.

“Hold on!” Hunter frowned, “Skip...we can’t just go with you to the temple.”

Skip frowned before resting her hands on her hips, her eyes narrowed, eyebrow cocked.

“Now you’ve done it.” Crosshair muttered.

“Skip-don’t...” Hunter groaned.

“We’ll if you can’t just go. Perhap’s you’ll need some orders to do so.” Skip said.

“Can she do that?” Wrecker questioned.

“Do you want to question me on it?” Skip retorted.

“Don’t question her on it.” Tech said, “She can-”

“And will!”

“-And will do that.” Tech finished.

The rest of the batch looked between Skip and Hunter, both who were staring each other down, arms crossed.

Hunter finally sighed, nodding his head.

“So we’re doing this?” Crosshair groaned.

“We’re doing this.”

*

Standing in front of her peer’s after their own presentations felt a lot more intimidating then it probably should.

Curious Jedi Master’s stood behind their padawans as Skip took the center of the room, the Batch standing behind her.

“Padawan, share with us what you have come to learn from...” The temple teacher trailed off unsure of how to address the clones.

Eyeing her batch she saw how uncomfortable they seemed standing behind her.

Looking around the room, she saw her peer’s eye the clone’s distastefully.

“These are my brothers.” Skip spoke, her voice unwavering as she stood up straighter, shoulders back.

She could feel the Batch’s eye’s snap to the back of her head...she wished she could see the looks on their faces.

“Some of you wouldn’t understand, because most of you aren’t on the front-lines. But these guys always have my back, no matter the situation.” Skip said.

“But it’s more then just that...because any clone will have your backs. These guys do more...they teach me how to protect my own back because sometimes there not always there. Hunter’s taught me all different kinds of forms. They help me handle my lightsaber better...” Skip moved next to Hunter.

“He’s showed me all kind’s of different tricks to disarm enemy’s, along with close contact fighting.” Skip moved to Tech next.

“If you ever need to override a security terminal, or need to hack into some separatist information outposts. this is your guy.” Skip said proudly.

“But that’s not even the best part! Tech know’s all different kind’s of languages, traditions, religions and he can spout all sort of facts about them!” Skip looped behind coming around to Crosshair.

“Crosshair is the best sniper out there! He’s taught me all about vantage points, where the best locations are to scout against the seppies, and he’s great at spotting extra details. He’s always there to correct my forms...although he doesn’t always make it easy on me.” Skip bounced over to Wrecker who looked excitedly down at her.

“Of course, I can’t forget about Wrecker. If his name doesn’t give it away, he’s good at demolition. But he’s also super strong!”

Proving her statement, Wrecker lifted Skip up onto his shoulder.

“But beyond that, Wreckers the best person to talk to....if meditation isn’t working, talking things out with Wrecker always help...and he’s a good listener.” Skip said.

The fellow padawans had changed their views and know seemed overjoyed at seeing the clones, they fidgeted and some looked to their master’s wanting to ask questions about her batch.

The temple teacher however, frowned.

“Padawan...perhaps you’ve mistaken my assignment. I requested you show what you have learned as a padawan. A member of the Jedi order. Not what you have learned in the war.” The temple teacher stated.

Skip frowned, Wrecker gently setting her back down.

The room was quiet, eerily quiet as the other padawans watched the standoff between teacher and student.

Then Skip looked up.

Hunter watched as she stood straight once more, shoulders back, eye’s narrowed, eyebrow cocked.

“Oh no...” Tech whispered.

Oh yes. Hunter thought.

“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear Teacher. You assigned me to tell and show you something I have learned since I’ve become a padawan. Originally I was going to bring my Master, and he was going to demonstrate one of his lightsaber forms...but thinking about it now, I realize that this wouldn’t have shown what I learned. No.” Skip began.

“It is my batch, my brothers that I have learned from. Every time Hunter teaches me a form, I know that he has put every thought into how it will help me with my saber skill’s for battle, for defense. When Tech teaches me languages, tradition, culture, he is teaching me to accept everything of other beings of our galaxy. When Crosshair is teaching me vantage points, he’s not just showing me battle strategies, he’s making sure I understand that the slightest detail can change an entire outcome. And Wrecker teaches me that no matter how much destruction can be created, that there is still love and acceptance within that. These men may not be jedi, may not be one with the force, but they have taught me more then any temple learning, or lesson from my master.” Skip finished.

The temple teacher was taken back before an angry look crossed over her face.

Then a Rodian stepped forewards.

“Padawan, perhaps Hunter can teach us one of the forms he has taught you...I admit, I’m not very comfortable with Saber skills.”  The Rodian said.

Hunter smiled. 

“I’d be honored, though I’m gonna need some assistance Skip.” Hunter said.

And Hunter watched as his vod’ika gave a wide grin.

*

The Batch made their way back to the Havoc Marauder, Tech was talking adamantly about the questions he had received from the other padawans, and Crosshair looked as if he might strangle him any second.

“Hey Skip, hold on for a sec.” Hunter called.

Skip halted as Hunter pulled something out from his belt pouch.

“You made me real proud today vod’ika.But your still as annoying as a Tooka.” Hunter stated passing something into her hands, before walking after his brothers.

Skip looked down to her hands, seeing a wooden Tooka in her hand, it’s face carved into a mischievous grin.

Skip looked up happily.

“Wipe that grin off your face. I can’t believe you made me go through with this. Your going to be doing twice as much work tomorrow in training Skip!” Crosshair teased.

“Whatever you say ori’vod!” Skip smiled.

*

“You guys were pretty close.” Echo said, “I wish I could have known them a bit better.”

“They were great.” Skip whispered, a stray tear falling down her face.

“It’s late.” Skip said a moment later, wiping her eyes. “I gotta get to bed. I have a early shift.”

“Goodnight.” Echo said softly. Skip ruffled his hair once more in passing.

*

By morning, Skip found herself at work. Not even an hour into her shift a nearby customer’s conversation broke through her focus.

“Such an odd group they were...strange armor wearing helmets...no no...nothing like those imperial troopers...no there were skulls on them!”

Skip dropped the breakfast platters in her arms.

As the owner came out to yell at her employee, the door slammed shut behind Skip, apron falling to the tiled floor.

Skip ran all the way back to the ship, knocking on the metal before beginning to pull on the vines.

Echo opened the ramp quickly, coming out.

“It’s time isn’t it...” He said, tearing at the brush

“Maybe the next planet we can save some money up huh?” Skip answered.

“Doesn’t matter to me. It’s you and me Skip...”

“Your all I got Echo.” 

The weight of the wooden figure tucked securely in her pocket reminded her of a time however, when there had been more.

[apple-grass-and-smiles]

Not Even That Hard

Summary: When you're the Chosen One it is only natural for things to come easily. 

Links: Ao3 and FF.net

Author’s Note: Warnings for use of second person because sometimes a story pops into your head fully-formed and you have enough time to write it down or to convince your brain it should be in third person but not both. Also, warning for the double entendre inherent in this title/the recurring phrase throughout this story; it crossed my mind way too late and I’m not changing it. 

Dedicated to Liz/@bpdanakins​ who has spoken with me about so much Star Wars stuff and who also loves seeing Anakin get to be incredibly overpowered. Here’s a story where Anakin gets to be as overpowered as I could make him at 1:30 AM.

It wouldn’t even be that hard.

When you reflect back years later, that’s the first thing you can remember thinking. The memory is fuzzy and you’re not sure how old you are (4? 5?), but you very clearly remember seeing Watto and your mother trying to piece together some broken droid that has been causing him grief for the past hour at least. You can see exactly which pieces are supposed to go where and which wires are crucial and which can be cut and tossed aside. It would only take you a few minutes to have it back together and working better than it had before. You couldn’t explain how you knew that or why it felt so important that you fix this particular droid, but it did. So you got up, singled out the piece that would fit perfectly with the one Watto was currently holding, and went over to your master with the appropriate tool. The droid was fixed in just under 16 minutes. Watto let you and your mother leave a few minutes early that day and she treated you to a ruby bliel. You didn’t know that your mechanical skills would make you valuable to Watto for years to come or that fixing that droid had saved you from being sold off and separated from your mother. All you knew then and ever would, is that fixing droids wasn’t even that hard.

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“It wouldn’t even be that hard.”

After all, podracing was just flying but faster and the couple of times your mother had let you pilot Watto’s speeder had gone without a single crash. Surely podracing would come just as easily as those short trips around Mos Espa had been. After declaring that surely you could win a podrace, you could tell from your mother’s face you had said something wrong and from Watto’s that you had said something incredibly right. Your heart clenched for a moment because surely nothing good was coming when Mom made that face (admittedly, it would be better than what followed Watto’s disapproving face), but then the winning pod came around the final bend and crossed the finish line and your heart soared and you were filled with the certainty that podracing would not be that hard at all.

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It wouldn’t even have been that hard if it weren’t for the blasted autopilot, you thought as you hopped out of the yellow cockpit, ready to celebrate with the other overjoyed, if confused, Naboo pilots. Surely the professional pilots would have figured it out sooner or later. After all, you are only 9, almost 10, and had never been in one of those ships before and you had pulled it off. It would be crazy if they hadn’t been able to do it. But then you see Obi-Wan and he looks sad and Qui-Gon is nowhere to be found and something in you screams that now isn’t the time to say how not hard blowing up the Trade Federation’s ship had been.  

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“It wouldn’t even be that hard, Obi-Wan. Why don’t they just speed up?” Obi-Wan gives you a mixture of a confused and reproachful look, one you know means that he will have follow-up questions for you once you are out of earshot of the other padawans and their masters but that until then you need to stop saying such rude things.

Just as you had expected, the second you and Obi-Wan round the corner and can no longer see or be seen by the older padawans, Obi-Wan asks, “What do you mean, Padawan?”

“Well, their masters are telling them to double the speed of their lightsaber drills, but all of them start making easy mistakes once they speed up. Why are they making the mistakes? It’s easy to do those forms.” You don’t mean to sound prideful (Obi-Wan always reminds you that pride is not the Jedi way and you’re really trying to be a good Jedi), but you’ve sped up your own drills to four times the speed they were taught to you and you’ve managed to avoid making the same obvious mistakes that those much older padawans are making. Why couldn’t those beings just… not mess up?

Obi-Wan seems even more confused now that you’ve tried to explain your previous comment, but that doesn’t stop him from starting in on a lecture about pride and patience and how mastery takes time. You ignore most of it in favor of slowly moving back into a position where you can watch the padawans who keep making mistakes even though you know deep within your heart that surely it isn’t that hard.

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This isn’t that hard, you think as you look around you at the ship that is hurtling towards the planet below you. You’ve flown plenty of ships and been in quite a few crashes and keeping this particular ship from crashing should not be that difficult, even if it is more or less falling apart with each passing second. You look to your unconscious master in the seat next to you and the scared orphans behind you and then to the controls in front of you and despite the despair that you feel within the Force, you find that all you feel is confidence. This ship may be about to crash, but stopping it from doing so won’t be that hard.

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This is incredibly hard, you think as you try and try and try and keep trying to not kiss Senator Padmé Amidala. This is so incredibly hard.

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This won’t even be that hard. This won’t even be that hard. This won’t even be that hard. Your inner mantra as you lead your own legion into battle is at odds with everything else around you. Inside you know that you can easily weather the battle that is about to ensue, but you are equally certain that some of your men, perhaps many of them, will not. Christophsis is shaping up to not be an easy planet to take and the Force is practically screaming at you to prepare yourself for something big when Cody runs up beside you and points out the droids rounding the corner, ready for another round of battle. “They’re back!”, you call out to your master, already preparing to make a snarky comment about how you hadn’t wanted to send the ship back for supplies, all the while keeping up your refrain of ‘this won’t even be that hard’s in your head.

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“It won’t even be that hard, Snips. I promise.” You don’t have to turn around to see Ahsoka to know that she is shooting you her patented annoyed look that has become so characteristic of her despite how little time you two have spent together so far. You know that Balmorra Run is supposedly one of the more difficult runs a pilot can attempt, what with the Neebray mantas and all, but you’re Anakin Skywalker and surely it won’t be that hard. After all, you’ve never met a pilot who wasn’t at least passingly familiar with over exaggerating their flying prowess and you’re a Jedi Knight and have the Force to guide you and your men through. Surely it won’t be that hard.

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You thought ending the war would have been so much harder than it is turning out to be. Of course the operation on the Invisible Hand hasn’t been without its issues and you know killing Dooku was not the Jedi way, but if his death was necessary to bring about an end to the war, it will have been worth it. But even your concerns about Dooku are drowned out by the confidence that is coursing through your veins just as surely as your blood does as you, Obi-Wan, and Palpatine race back towards your rendevouz with Artoo. Soon the four of you will be together and will be able to defeat Grievous, get off this ship, and end the Clone War. Your final thought before you are trapped within ray shields is this: Turns out it’s not even that hard to end a war.

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It wouldn’t even be that hard.

You know exactly where and how you would strike to stop the lightning leaving Palpatine’s fingers and electrocuting Windu. You can think of half a dozen ways that would incapacitate, but not kill, your mentor and exponentially more that would rid the galaxy of the Sith once and for all. In terms of technical skill, stopping Darth Sidious would be easy. But your emotions are in control now, not your 13 years of lightsaber training, not the moral compass your mother instilled in you, not the countless hours you have spent in strategy meetings. In this moment it is the love you feel for your wife and your unborn child that is in control and that makes you pause and realize that it would actually be the hardest thing you have ever done to stop Darth Sidious from killing Jedi Master Mace Windu. (So you don’t. You choose to take the easy way out instead.)

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It wouldn’t even be that hard, you think as you realize exactly what shot the rebel pilot is trying to make to blow up the Death Star. When he manages to make it, you scoff because you could have done it from double the distance with triple the number of enemy fighters on you on a bad day.

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It won’t even be that hard, you think as you consider how you will get your son to join you to overpower Sidious. After all, he is your blood and there is nothing more important than family. Luke Skywalker will surely see that.

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It won’t even be that hard, you try to reassure yourself as you prepare to face your son for the first time since Bespin. You have imagined how you will meet him again countless times over the past year but somehow none of them included Luke turning himself in. It won’t even be that hard. It won’t even be that hard. It won’t even be that hard.

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It won’t be that hard, you think as you watch your master and abuser electrify your son while he pleads for your help. It has been many years since you last performed a kind, selfless act and you think that perhaps kindness is like a muscle that can atrophy, but as you move forward and throw your master off of your son whom you are just now realizing you loved more than you have ever loved anything else before, you find that the part of Anakin Skywalker that was selfless has not died, but instead been hidden away and kept safe for the moment it would be needed again. Thankfully, sacrificing yourself is nowhere near as hard as living as Darth Vader ever was.

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Joining with the Force is the least hard thing you have ever done and following Obi-Wan’s guidance for how to join him and Yoda on Endor to look over the Rebel celebration is only slightly more difficult. After years and years of each living moment being torture, this comes with an eery ease. Hmm.., you think wryly as you survey your two ghostly companions and those surrounding your children as they celebrate their victory, in the end balancing the Force wasn’t even that hard.

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Author’s Note: I can thank this story for being the reason that I learned ‘Nubian’ did not mean ‘from Naboo’ but is actually a reference to a completely different planet/system and it’s just a coincidence that people from Naboo fly Nubian ships and the two actually have nothing to do with each other. I now have to live with the fact that I’ve been assuming anything from Naboo was Nubian for over a decade, so that’s fun.

The bit about the Balmorra Run is from TCW 1x03.

But seriously, when was someone going to tell me that Jar Jar wasn’t wrong when he referred to the people from Naboo as ‘the Naboo’?

[cookieswriting]

Can’t Be Happening Pt. 3 (SEAL Team)

((Can I just say how much I HATE Ash Spenser right now? How much do we want to bet he implied that it was Clay that told him about the op intentionally, knowing full well saying a Seal that was there would make the brass believe he was talking about his son? Can only imagine how much trouble this is going to bring up for Clay. Grr.))

The sight of the man she loved, chained from the ceiling and barely able to hold himself upright with blood coating his temple and right side, left Stella breathless.  Even still, she knew that he needed her in that moment, so she steeled herself and stepped up until she was directly in front of him.  Her trembling hand reached up to cradle the ‘clean’ side of his face. “You know the guys would never leave you behind.  They’ll come for you soon, baby...you’ve just got to hold on a little bit longer, okay?”  Tears filled her eyes, slid down her cheeks.  “Stay with me. I’m right here.”  She willed Clay to look up at her, to meet her eyes and let her know that he heard her.  As he leaned his head into her hand, though, agony twisted his handsome features-

Stella jerked awake with a gasping breath, fresh tears spilling over her lashes.  The dream had been so real...it had felt as though Clay’s too-warm skin was actually under her hand, smelled like the metallic blood that seemed to be staining his white t-shirt red too quickly.  Just as had happened when she watched his abuse on the screen at the bar, Stella’s stomach rebelled at the thought that this might be even close to reality for Clay and left her rushing for the bathroom.

Once she’d emptied the (meager) contents of her stomach and brushed her teeth, Stella glanced at her Fitbit to see that it was past 3am, and she knew here was no way she’d be getting back to sleep after that horror show of a nightmare.  Instead, she padded quietly into the living room, torn between relief and despair when she saw the light on and Naima nursing her son.  The older woman looked up at Stella’s approach.  The sad smile on her face let Stella know she’d heard her retching.

“Would you like something to settle your stomach?”  Stella shook her head silently as she curled up in the corner of the couch, holding herself protectively.  “I’m a bit surprised it took til the second night for you to have a nightmare.  Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?”

Grateful that Naima gave her time to collect her thoughts, didn’t comment on the seemingly unending silent tears, Stella knew that she needed to start leaning into the support of this woman and the other wives if she hoped to truly become part of the family.  “I, uh...I had a dream about...about C-Clay being held captive.”  She stared at the sleeves of her sweater, pulled over her fingers out of nerves.  “It just...it felt like it was real.  It felt like I was standing right in front of him, begging him to hold on til the guys found him.”  Stella’s breath hiccuped as she tried to keep herself calm.  The last thing she wanted was to upset the baby when Naima had been kind enough to take care of her the last two days since Clay had been taken.  “He was suffering so much, and there was nothing that I could do to make it any better.”  She looked up, desperate for comfort.  “How do you handle this?”

The Kurdish woman looked pained for a moment.  “This...being the fact that Clay has been taken hostage?”  She nuzzled her infant, tears filling her own eyes.  “This situation is rare, by the grace of God.  We haven’t dealt with this before now.  Injuries, separations, death...but never having one of the team become subject of a terrorist’s ransom message.  I don’t know how to handle this kind of uncertainty, but I know that the worst thing would be for you to be alone through this.”

“I don’t deserve to be helped like this…I sent him out there heartbroken…”

“Don’t go there, Stella,” Naima insisted firmly.  She gestured for the younger woman to wait, and disappeared to settle her son into his crib.  When she returned, she settled onto the couch alongside Stella.  “The men haven’t been allowed to contact us since the video...we don’t know what happened when he was taken.  You can’t take that responsibility on your shoulders.  Especially having decided to commit to this life...you have to accept that there will be risks, that sometimes we will get into arguments and they will leave on less than ideal terms...but they are the best for a reason.  They are trained for this under any circumstance.”  Her hand settled on Stella’s shoulder and squeezed comfortingly.  “You tried to reach him, tried to tell him.  And if I know our boys, which I do pretty damn well, you’ll get the chance to tell him soon enough.  In the meantime...if you need to cry, you let yourself cry.  If you need to get out of the house, let me know and I can either set up some time with the other wives, get a babysitter, or we can go out with the kids.  But don’t give up faith that Clay will come home.”  

Finally releasing the tenuous hold that she had on her emotions, Stella threw her arms around Naima’s neck and allowed herself to sob and accept the comfort offered by the older woman.

Bravo Team hadn’t been sure of what to expect when they finally breached the room where Doza’s men were holding Clay, and when Sonny laid eyes on the younger man, he had all the drive he needed to take out any hostile that came across his scope.  It didn’t take long for the team to wipe out everyone except for their injured teammate: hanging from the ceiling, shackled, covered in blood and bruises, head drooped against his chest.

Sonny rushed forward, heart in his throat until he tore off his glove with his teeth and felt a faint pulse under his fingers.  He took hold of the blonde’s dirty face, desperate for any sign of consciousness.  Fluttering eyelids gave the Texan hope.  “Hey, we’ve got you, brother, just hold on a little bit longer.”  He leaned back enough to take in the growing bloodstain on his shirt, looked up to meet Trent’s gaze.  Grim worry stared back, and the unspoken directive was clear.  “We’re gonna get you home...but we’ve gotta take you down first.  It’s going to hurt, brother, but we’re here, lean on us as much as you’ve gotta.”  

“So-Sonny…” Clay’s weak voice barely made it past his lips, but Sonny listened as if it were the only sound in the room.  “Please...don’t let Stella...blame herself.”  Was the kid delusional?  Why would Stella blame herself?

“We need to get him down, we can figure the rest out later,” Ray murmured.  “HAVOC this is Bravo Two.  Bravo Six has been located and hostiles eliminated.  I repeat, we have Bravo Six...but he’s in bad shape.  Have a medical team waiting at the helipad when we get back.”  Blackburn gave a concise response, but none of them paid him mind.  Ray and Jason situated themselves on either side of the wounded SEAL, Brock stepped up behind him with bolt cutters, and they all nodded.  Trent slid around Brock to support Clay from behind, but none of them were expecting the agonized cry and for him to drop like dead weight as soon as his feet were planted on the ground.

“Sonny, Brock get the litter ready,” Trent commanded.  As soon as it was laid out, he gestured for the team leaders to lay their youngest out on it, and began assessing Clay.  “He’s still alive, but we need to get him the hell out of here if we want him to stay that way.”  Bravo Four lifted the hem of Clay’s shirt, and hissed sympathetically.  “No wonder he’s leaking so bad...looks like they stuck him with a serrated blade.  This wound is a shredded mess.”  He applied a pressure bandage and grabbed Sonny’s hand to keep it in place as the medic moved down to his left leg.  “Broken. I need to brace it. He’s also got a dislocated shoulder, same side...dammit!”  He looked up to Jason.  “Hold him down while I fix the dislocation?”  Bravo One nodded solemnly, and Sonny found himself grateful that Clay was unconscious for all of this.  The crack made all of them wince, and Sonny held his breath when the kid twitched, head lolling to the side.  

“Stella…” he breathed before falling silent once more.  Ray glanced up at Trent as the medic made quick work of the temporary splint from his kit.

“Okay, let’s move, we need to get to exfil yesterday,” Jason instructed as soon as Trent moved back.  Sonny, Trent, Brock and Ray each took hold of the litter, and Bravo One provided cover until they made it to the waiting helicopter.  The four carrying Clay eased him into the chopper, and startled when the previously-unconscious man lashed out with his unbroken leg and what probably would have qualified as a war cry if he’d been any stronger.  “Easy!” Jason barked, jumping up into the Blackhawk behind Brock to press Clay’s shoulders down.  “Stand down, Spenser, you’re safe.”

Blue eyes stared up at the team leader, and Sonny found himself creeped out by the lack of recognition in his gaze...as though he were staring through Jason rather than at him.  “Just a grad student, man…”

Jason knelt forward and held Clay’s face in both of his hands, jostling him just enough for the younger man to finally blink up at him with clear - albeit agonized - eyes.  “Hey, kid, you with me?” A weak nod. “I know you’re hurting, brother, but we’ve got you.  Try to relax so Trent can get as much done as he can while we’re airborne.”  As soon as Clay stilled, the medic jumped up, followed by the rest of the team, and the pilot took off smoothly.  

Sonny watched Trent work, swapping out saturated bandages and quickly applying new ones and periodically checking vitals.  The increasingly grim look on the medic’s face left a hollow pit in the Texan’s stomach; the team had taken a hit when they’d lost Nate, but somehow this felt so much worse.  Clay, in spite of the butting heads at the beginning, had thoroughly ingrained himself as an invaluable member of the team.  He’d settled into his position as the ‘Rookie’, the ‘kid’...kid brother maybe, Sonny lamented to himself as his eyes shifted to the younger man’s face.  The blood and bruises did little to make him seem older, and the familiar protective rage started to rise up all over again.

“HAVOC this is Bravo One, we made it to exfil and are Oscar Mike.  Be ready, he’s losing a lot of blood.”

“Copy Bravo One, you guys just keep him breathing til you get here, docs’ll take care of the rest.”  The forced confidence in Blackburn’s voice made Sonny’s skin crawl, but he knew that nothing their Commander said would’ve been enough.  Nothing would be until they were able to stabilize Clay.  

The rest of the flight was silent, each of the team members either lost in their own thoughts or busy fighting to keep their brother alive.  The runners of the Blackhawk had barely touched down before they jumped out and cleared the way for the team of medics, ready and waiting as promised with a stretcher.  The Mexican team took over for them seamlessly, calling for Trent to follow to provide information.  The rest of Bravo lingered by the chopper, shock settling over them in the absence of active purpose.  A hand landed heavily on Sonny’s shoulder, and he turned to see Brock, pale and drawn, eyes still following the flurry of movement heading towards the medical wing’s doors.  

“Come, I will show you where you can get cleaned up and wait for news,” General Garcia called, face sympathetic and patient as they slowly turned to face him.  Blackburn, Mandy and Lisa hovered behind him, the women visibly distraught; Sonny imagined their collective stupor did nothing to ease their worry, let alone the blood that he was sure coated his own uniform as well as some of the others.  “We will treat him as one of our own.”  Blackburn nodded his gratitude as Bravo team finally started moving, dutifully following the Mexican Marine leader.  Dammit, Clay, don’t you dare go out like this...

[theprodigypenguin]

Make Peace: Part 2/4

Ratings: violence, blood, angst, mention of death, fan headcanons, fluff

Pairings: James Griffin/Keith Kogane (slight sheith)

Notes: part 2, again a repost because I suck at using tumblr, enjoy

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4(final)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He used to be small, really small. All the clothes he would wear hung on him, as if they weren't his, and his eyes always looked... faded, like a graying sunset that used to be purple. They were always lowered, he never looked anyone in the eye, and if he did, it was with a glare of distrust. James never really understood the kid, but back then he didn't really care. Keith was just that extra child in the background who never looked at the camera during class photos, he was the one who didn't exist until he accidentally walked past the wrong people; and James used to be one of those people.

There were times he'd overhear the teachers talking in hushed voices about Keith, but when he was younger none of what they talked about made any sense to him. He wasn't able to comprehend the looks of pity, the way one would set a hand on their chest and sigh in somewhat exaggerated sadness.

"Such a shame, such a good man."

"Just an idiot if you ask me."

"What a selfish, selfish man."

"He left such an unruly child behind, how are we supposed to deal with his attitude?"

"Maybe it's just a phase."

Even when his sister picked him up after school that one day, smiling when she spotted James but frowning when Keith left the school at a slower pace, "Oh, that's him," James remembered her muttering, hand near her lips, "What a cute kid, he... looks so sad."

James just pouted as he stared at her before smiling, "Only cuz he's got no friends!"

His sister hadn't looked very happy about that statement, hands planting on her hips as she looked down at him, "Well someone needs to change that. Everyone needs friends. Can't you imagine how lonely he is?"

James just looked over at where Keith sat on the bottom of the steps leading to the school, noting the way he scooted to the side as a group of kids rushed out of the doors.

"Hey, maybe I'm pushing you a bit," James looked back as his sister crouched, a brilliant smile on her lips as she reached out to tussle the cowlick at the front of his hair, "If you were lonely, wouldn't you want friends?"

"I have friends though."

She sighed, "I guess you're still too little to understand then. That's okay. Just one thing," she framed his face with both hands, squeezing his cheeks, "You never know what someone is going through, so be kind. That boy," she looked over at Keith, so did James, "he's a kid and already understands suffering."

"Why...?"

"You'll figure it out one day," she stood up then, fixing the front of the uniform she wore, grinning down at him, "Let's go home."

Was this what she meant when she said Keith already understood suffering? It didn't really make sense. Even now. This guy... he was the best pilot in class, he excelled in everything, he even had the approval of Takashi Shirogane, maybe the greatest pilot of the century. James remembered his sister idolized him, and James ended up following in her footsteps. Meeting Shiro at school that day, showing up to test possibly Garrison recruits, all James could think of was that he could fly with his sister.

He was good on the simulator. Then Keith just had to take a seat and blow everyone away with no effort at all. It... wasn't fair. James managed to get a spot as a cadet, but he was still bitter about it. Stupidly bitter, he realized that now. He just wanted to make his sister proud, but this short ass mullet was getting in the way. She would rave about the cadets of course, including James, but he also tasted something bitter when she brought up Keith.

Keith was the only cadet in class that met the standards of a perfect pilot aside from James. Maybe it was more of a one sided rivalry. Back then Keith didn't seem to care about a damn thing. He yawned during lectures and slept through class, while still getting perfect scores, as if he taught himself through the night because he didn't like the teachers. There were only two classes he didn't sleep through and actually seemed to care about, both classes they shared as they were both classed as candidates for future fighter pilots.

The first class was directly based about the fighter class, taught by the best fighter pilot the Garrison had produced in years. The second, of course, had been a course taught by Shiro. Keith always paid attention in Shiro's class. He was on his way to becoming the next best pilot of the Garrison, the teachers all called him the best pilot of his generation, and it made James... so fucking mad, because he'd gotten this title without even trying.

Then the prick had to go and get himself expelled like an idiot, disappearing for seven years at least, and when he comes back? He's the leader of Voltron, pilots one of the most miraculous war ships James had ever come across, battle hardened and much more level headed than he used to be. Now this, throwing himself in front of James as a human shield during a mission that was supposed to last less than half the day.

Why? Was it some stupid Paladin quirk to sacrifice themselves for no reason?

James could hardly see the oddly skinned Galra standing across the street, holding what had to be some kind of hand canon that shot the same ion blasts as their cruisers. Just from feeling the force beating against the air around him, he knew the blue shield Keith held wasn't going to last, and when it shattered all James knew was that Keith was going to get hit and there was nothing he could do to help.

He grabbed the Paladin when he staggered back and started to fall, catching him around the shoulders before he could hit the ground and crouching down to get a better grip with his right arm as his left hand hovered. Keith seemed to lose consciousness instantaneously from the hit, the left side of the black shirt he wore beneath his red accented armor was torn, the edges charred, showing a deep gaping wound that poured blood. The gauntlet he'd been using on his left arm had been destroyed, the glove burned off and leaving bits melted to Keith's skin, the sleeve torn at his elbow.

"Oh man," James breathed out, head turning abruptly when he heard footsteps, gaping with teeth clenched as the Galra paced into the street.

"What's this, a Paladin of Voltron? Must be my lucky day," he lifted a hand, heavily bandaged, and it was the sight of those bandages that had James thinking the alien had been here since the last fight with Sendak.

He'd probably crashed here and had been stuck for the past few months.

"Who the hell are you?" James asked, reaching back for his gun and aiming it towards the Galra, "What do you want? Are you the one powering the robots?"

"With a limited power source, I'm afraid," the alien answered, "My fighter was damaged in the crash, and the range of my distress signal can only reach so far. I'm lucky, you humans haven't replaced those primitive satellites yet. Makes it easier to not get caught."

"That's why we can't contact the Garrison here," James murmured to himself, raising his voice to add, "Your signal interferes with our comms!"

"Took you a bit. I've been stuck here for months, trying to get a message to any cruiser close-by, but I don't have the power!" he held his hands up, grinning widely, yellow eyes glinting, "But if I could re-purpose the Altean tech in that Paladin's suit... not only could I return to the Fire of Purification, but I would be promoted the instant I drop his mangled body at Sendak's feet!"

"Sendak is dead!" James yelled, "You've been out of touch with the war for a while, because it's been over for months!"

The Galra's smile was gone now, replaced by a wild expression James couldn't really pick out through the pure yellow of his eyes.

"And one more newsflash, you're not getting close enough for the Altean tech," James added the final part on impulse, lifting his gun higher and shooting towards one of the buildings the Galra was standing beside.

It was already tilting on axis, with a single shot, it started to crumble, and the Galra turned sharply with a gasp. Thankfully distracted, James swung his gun onto his back where it hung by the strap across his chest, snatching both the broken gauntlet and Keith's helmet before dragging Keith to his feet. Still unconscious, the most James could do was drag him across the street as the hostile creature behind him screamed in frustration, doing his best to avoid the collapsing building.

James managed to drag Keith behind a building before it started to get difficult to simply drag him, and he stopped so he could swing the gun off his back, shuffling around and struggling until he'd dragged Keith onto his back instead, the Paladin's arms hanging limply over his shoulders and head cushioned against the back of his neck. It took a bit of maneuvering to get a hold of the busted Paladin armor as well as his gun, but when he had everything, and a good hold on Keith, James started to walk again.

"Can't contact anyone, can't get to the MFE's," James narrated to himself, eyes panning the area quickly for something, anything that could be useful to them, gasping a little in relief when he caught sight of a building in the distance.

It was tall, maybe the tallest in the town, and looked to be in good shape, amazingly. James started to walk faster, running as much as he could manage, which wasn't easy while giving someone a piggyback ride.

"Damn you weigh a ton," James panted, skirting around the perimeter of the building to search for a way inside, "Hang on a bit more, fat-ass, I'll check your wounds when we're somewhere more secure.

It took longer than James wanted to find a way inside, and he had to put Keith down in order to kick the door down, dragging the still unconscious pilot into the building before setting the door back up and shoving a table in front of it for some sort of extra security. He didn't stop or even start to calm down until he'd walked almost ten flights of stairs, his legs aching under the extra weight.

When he was certain they weren't being tracked or followed, he found the closest room and pushed it open with a foot, shuffling inside and looking around to make sure it was decent before stepping inside, closing the door with a click and immediately setting Keith onto his feet, turning to hold him around the shoulders so he wouldn't just fall on his face and dragging him towards the window before lying him down.

"Can't believe this," James leaned forward on his hands once he;d gotten Keith settled, taking a moment to catch his breath with closed eyes, "This was an utter failure of a mission. It was supposed to be easy, why'd I get stuck with this kind of bullshit end game?"

He leaned back and sat on his heels, head tilting so he could look down at Keith, then looked down to check his own clothes, cringing when he noticed the large stain of blood on the left side of his suit.

"Right," he breathed, unzipping the front of the jumpsuit and tying it around his waist to keep it from falling off, leaving him in just a white t-shirt and the bottom half of his MFE suit, then began searching his pockets for anything he could use to help stem Keith's heavy bleeding.

Not finding anything, he stood up, stepping over Keith and rummaging through the room for supplies. It must have been a business building of some sort, the most James was able to find were some old shirts and a janitors uniform, but there was nothing else in the room. Unfortunately, James didn't think it was a good idea to leave Keith lying there as he went exploring, so he settled for what little he'd found and hurried back over.

A dusty cushion from a broken armchair was the best James could do to pillow Keith's head, taking a confusing moment to pull off the confusing armor covering Keith's chest and shoulders and setting it aside before folding up the old uniform and pressing it down against the wound in his stomach.

"Okay, you've trained for situation's like this," James muttered to himself, pulling the cloth away for a moment to check the wound before tearing at the fabric around it to widen the gap and see the wound better, cringing, "Step one, regulate and stabilize condition of the wounded. Check over supplies, test communications, get my bearings. This is no big deal, not the first time I've been in a sticky situation."

He pressed the cloth back against the ugly wound, lips evening into a tight line when Keith flinched unconsciously with a broken whine, "Haven't been stuck with a moron before, but no big deal."

It took a while to clean the wound. They had limited supplies, very little water, only a few protein bars for food, and the shirts James had found weren't exactly the cleanest most sanitary bandages, but he made do as he carefully got a tiny corner of the cloth wet so he could clean the blood from around the wound, then pressed the folded shirt against Keith's side before tying it in place with a second shirt that he tore into strips.

Keith's arm wasn't as bad as his side was, maybe because he'd had the gauntlet protecting most of him, but there were deep splotches of third degree burns covering the back of his hand and arm, and they couldn't have felt pleasant. Cold water would probably feel fantastic on the burns, but they couldn't afford to lose that much, so James settled on simply wrapping Keith's arm with torn strips of old shirt.

James was rummaging in one of the pouches on his suit when Keith began to stir, cringing as his head lolled to the side, a confused mumble on his lips as his indigo eyes peeled open, the pupil incredibly small and almost cat-like. James almost freaked out, but they changed so quickly that he sat there for a moment wondering if he was going insane.

"You conscious?" James asked, watching the way Keith was staring blearily across the room at the wall, blinking at the sudden question and rolling his head to make it easier to stare up at James.

He looked sleepily confused, eyes wavering away from James' face so he could stare up at the ceiling. James could see the wheels turning in his head, trying to remember what happened, before his eyes snapped wider and he bolted upright with a gasp that caught on a painful choke, hand flexing and grabbing at his side as he curled forward in on himself.

"Hey, easy, lie back down," James grabbed his shoulders, pulling his lip between his teeth upon feeling the shudder of Keith's entire body beneath his fingers, "Okay, take it slow, lie back."

Keith didn't protest much as James pushed him back, eyes pinched closed and teeth grit as his head fell back a little, and James curled his hand to the back of his neck to keep it up as he eased Keith back down to lie against the cushion. Keith still trembled, and James took another look at the sloppy bandaging he'd done.

The shirt had been soaked through with blood already, and they didn't have much in the ways of bandages. There was really nothing else to be done, so James reached over to brush aside Keith's hand, using his own to put pressure against his side. Keith protested that with a grunt, jolting against the ground and clawing the back of James' hand weakly.

"I said take it easy already, you're still bleeding, I'm trying to help."

"What... happened?" Keith asked in a cracking voice, and James exhaled heavily through his nose.

"There was an actual Galra here, he was the one powering the sentries and drones," Keith closed his eyes, free hand running over his face with a curse on his lips, "I think he's using his broken fighter to power sentries as a safety firewall. We were so distracted by the bots we didn't notice-."

"I noticed," Keith croaked, "I should have realized sooner. Quiznak... I should have pulled us after the first wave, Shiro and I should have realized. Damn it, damn it."

"Calm down, there's no way we could have predicted this."

"Yes there is."

"Okay fine, well you were the one too one distracted tracing blast marks in the sides of buildings to pay attention then!" James snapped, and Keith stared blankly at the ceiling like he was trying to remember when that happened, "Look, I think that freak beat you up enough for the both of you, so quit whining and try to fix it."

Keith's brow furrowed and he moved to sit up, only for James to push him back, "Not now, you idiot! Are you trying to kill yourself?!"

"What am I supposed to do then?"

"Let me handle it while you rest," James ordered sharply as Keith settled back, looking frustrated, "I pulled us out of the street and into this abandoned building, so far they haven't been able to find us. It's been quiet."

"Helmet," Keith rolled his head one side, then the other, cringing as he reached out for his red helmet, "I... need to contact Shiro, tell him what happened."

"Couldn't you call your space war ship... thing?"

Keith dragged his helmet over with a grunt, "My head... I can't think clearly. If we're lucky it'll just show up, but I can't... concentrate. I need Shiro."

James sighed and picked up the helmet to bring it closer to Keith, who attempted to push himself up again, wincing as he propped himself against the wall, taking the armor and pulling it over his head before lifting his left arm, cringing at the bandages and using the gauntlet on his right arm instead.

Keith managed to activate the visor over his eyes, which automatically scanned the room, zeroing in on James who was kneeling close to his side. Stats popped up automatically and Keith looked over them on instinct. Bruised ribs, likely from being thrown into a newspaper stand, but other than that no notable injuries. Keith was silently grateful for that bit of luck and turned his attention to activating the comm line in his helmet.

"Contacting the Galaxy Garrison, or Atlas, this is the MFE Aries Alpha team calling in. The mission's taken a wrong turn and backup is requested along with an extraction," white noise answered Keith, and he grit his teeth together, "Shiro, are you there? Lance? Pidge? Guys?"

More white noise, and Keith tugged the helmet off, dropping it before lying back down, running both hands over his face and into the fringe of his hair, "Damn it..."

"The canon blast probably interfered with the tech in your suit," James guessed, picking the helmet up again, "Your left gauntlet is shattered too. It's still working it looks like, but there's just not enough range because of the interference from the Galra distress signal. Our comms, and his, are cancelling each other out."

"So what do we do, brainiac?" Keith asked, eyes shut, and James seemed to consider it before his shoulders sagged.

"... I don't know. I'm a fighter, not a nerd. Numbers aren't really my forte. Maybe I can think of something given enough time to actually consider all our options, but right now we're sitting ducks," he set the helmet down and turned to lean against the wall next to Keith, pulling his knees close and crossing his arms over them, staring at the blotches of blood staining his fingers from his attempt at helping the Black Paladin.

"Fine...," Keith said softly, seemingly losing energy, and James glanced down at him, fingers curling towards his palms, to see his eyes drooping, "If you can't think of anything to get us out... we still have to finish the mission."

"What, how do you plan on doing that?"

"I might be able to trigger something in my suit to set off the tech," Keith mumbled, and James knitted his brow.

"You're gonna blow yourself up?"

Keith just shut his eyes, "I don't have the energy to get myself to the MFE out of town."

"I'll carry you."

"Sure, for how long?" he sighed, head rolling away from James, "It's fine, not like I haven't been in this kind of position before."

"A position where the only option is to be a martyr?" James demanded, and Keith's eyes slid open.

"I've been in a lot of shitty situations... some of my training up there, taught me that sometimes... the good of the mission is a lot more important than my own well-being."

"Bullshit, who the fuck trained you?!"

Keith laughed at the question. He had no intention of answering of course. Till now he and the others had managed to keep Keith's heritage a secret from the rest of the Garrison, and the world. If they were to learn that he shared blood with the aliens that took so much, killed so many... he'd only just found common ground with Allura again. The idea of his own home world turning on him made him feel sick.

James settled back when it was clear the Paladin was done talking, lying his head back against the wall and staring at the cracks in the ceiling, wires sticking out from broken light fixtures that had long since stopped sparking.

"Be as rebellious as you want, that's not how I do my job," he decided, "I'm not leaving anyone behind, ever," Keith just chuckled at that, and James turned to glare down at him.

Keith looked horrible. His face was pale, pasty, almost tinted purple and yellow, and there were dark rings under his eyes, lips chapped. He was just... just lying there, his hand against the bandages on his side, his breath uneven and probably painful. James just watched him, tensing when his eyes snapped closed and he started to cough.

"Hold on a second," James turned onto his knees and picked the small canteen of water from where he'd set it, curling his other hand to the back of Keith's head to help prop him up as he bit the top off the bottle, "Easy, drink slowly."

Keith's eyes were mostly closed, and he turned his head a tiny bit as if he wanted to protest any of the water, though in the end he accepted it, one hand lifting up and fingers curling weakly around James' wrist, releasing him when he pulled the water away.

"Better?"

"... yea..."

"You should try and get some sleep," James said, lying Keith back down, "I'll keep thinking of ways to get out of this, and I mean ways we both get out of this. We can try to contact the Garrison again a little later."

"Right." Keith agreed softly, eyes closing, "Thank you."

James stayed in place for a moment, hovering over Keith, until his breathing had evened out a bit, which relaxed him enough to sit back against the wall in the same position as before, arms crossed over his lifted knees and eyes on the ceiling. He felt helpless, the blood on his hands was heavy, and even though Keith didn't exactly sleep long, or peacefully, it was agonizing to sit there in silence, unsure of what to do.

Keith slept for maybe an hour, his breathing even but ragged, until he started to flinch and groan, eyes snapping open and jolting up like he'd done before, eyes wild as the bayard formed into his hand, startling James into falling sideways as the Paladin swung the weapon.

"Whoa! Hey!" James hurried over to grab Keith by the wrist, holding his shoulder, "Calm down, you're okay!"

Keith blinked rapidly, lifting his other hand to rub his eyes before squinting at the area in front of him, bayard fading after a moment and sagging back so James had to wrap his arm around his shoulders.

"... sorry..."

"It's... fine," James said, though he wasn't really sure if it was fine at all, lying Keith back down, "How are you feeling?"

Keith seemed to consider the question, hand slipping over to feel the make-shift bandages wrapped around him, eyes narrowing a bit and lips evening into a tight line, "I'm fine," he lied, and it was so obviously a lie, but James just rolled his eyes and sat back against the wall.

"Sure you are," he huffed, arms folded as he stared up through the window beside them, at the graying sky and silver lined clouds, "It'll be night soon, go back to sleep."

"Can't."

"Why not?"

"Bad dreams."

James blinked and tore his gaze away from the sky to gape down at Keith, who looked even worse off than he had an hour ago. Even the tone of his voice sounded strange, and James reached out to feel his forehead, cringing as Keith rolled his eyes closed.

"You're burning up..."

"Sorry."

"What- don't apologize," James snapped, pulling his hand away, "Damn it all. We can't stay here much longer, not with you like this," he looked out the window, "Maybe we can make a run for it, I'll carry you back to the MFE-."

"No good," Keith breathed, "Too far away, there are still sentries, I can't help in a fight. We'll never make it."

"So you want to just lie here and die then?" Keith was silent as if he was actually considering the benefits of dying there, and James turned fully to glare at him, "For the last fucking time, I do not leave people behind. I don't care what it is you Paladin's do when one of you us hurt, I will never leave someone from my team behind."

"Course we help," Keith mumbled, eyes glassy, "Don't be stupid."

"You're the one who wants to die here! Who's stupid now?!"

"Loud."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" James touched Keith's burning temple again, "Christ. At least you aren't being a total prick right now. Though I think I prefer that."

He reached for the water canteen, pulling the top off and setting it aside before propping Keith's head up so he could pour the water into his mouth, "Drink."

Keith reached a hand up to block the canteen, "How much water do we have? What supplies do we have?"

"Don't worry about that and drink."

"What about you?"

"I have some for myself," James lied, but Keith bought it, lowering his hand and staring blankly across the darkening room as he drank.

James didn't need water. He had food, that was enough, Keith was the one who needed the extra attention. At this point he was worried about letting Keith so much as sleep, worried that he might not wake up, so even if he wanted the idiot to rest, he'd have to try and keep him conscious, for a bit at least.

What was there to talk about though? James and Keith had never been friends, he was pretty sure they didn't even have much in common. What right did he have anyway? He blew Keith off just that morning when he was trying to start a conversation, and now he was the one wanting to talk? What a hypocrite.

"What's it like up there?" James asked, still kneeling, holding the canteen, one hand lingering against Keith's forehead, "In space I mean."

Keith opened his eyes, almost impossible to see through the dimming light, but James didn't want to risk trying to light the room in case that Galra was searching for them. The accents of Keith's armor glowed a dim blue, which gave light enough to still see his face, so that was good enough.

"It's... not like I expected it to be," Keith answered, "Lonely... big... but really... beautiful."

"Lonely, but weren't you with the other cadets, and those aliens?"

"For a bit," Keith sighed, "There were... complications. I wasn't always the Black Paladin."

"... explain."

"In the beginning, when we first came across the Blue Lion and found Allura and Coran, I was chosen to be the Red Paladin and fly the Red Lion. That's... the one Lance has now."

"I know what colors are, Keith. Why'd you change lions?"

Keith winced at the question, swallowing, "We lost Shiro."

"... what?"

"He... chose me to lead if anything were to happen to him. He disappeared, after a bad fight. We found him again, but by then I had already taken over for him as the Black Paladin. Allura was the Blue Paladin, Lance red... but... I wasn't ready to be a leader. I almost killed everyone because of how reckless I was. So I... left. I forced Shiro to rekindle his bond with the Black Lion, and when he'd taken his place again, I left to... train with some of our allies," James was stunned to say the least, even more surprised when Keith lifted a hand to cover his eyes, lips twisted up, "I didn't want to leave. I was lonely, but I didn't want anyone... to leave because of me. I didn't want to hurt anyone. It was better that way. I wasn't a leader, I wasn't what Shiro wanted, so I left."

"Keith..."

"After... I came back, and... I took over again, because this time I was ready... Shiro... stuff happened... almost lost him again. I'd rather die... and I was prepared to die, with him, but my bond with the Black Lion saved us. Somehow we managed to help Shiro, but he didn't even make a move to take over again. He seemed happy to just sit back, and I didn't want him pushing himself anymore as it was, so... I became the Paladin I am now, so he wouldn't have to push himself and hurt more."

"Keith... what happened up there?"

Keith was silent before pulling his hand down, revealing wet cheeks and un-shed tears rimming tired eyes, "Chaos. I'm not who I used to be."

"No, but... I mean, the new you doesn't suck as much as the old you. Old Keith would recklessly fuck around and get in trouble, cause problems for shits and giggles. New Keith, Black Paladin Keith, seems a lot more level headed."

Keith frowned at that, "Thanks."

James sighed, "Look, this situation sucks, but it's an excuse to... apologize to you, before I forget," Keith rolled his head to look at James, who sat back against the wall again, arms crossed over his knees, "Back then, I was kind of a mess, when we were kids I mean. There was a lot going on in my life that affected how I acted towards other people, and since I was just a dumb kid I couldn't even begin to comprehend the damage my words could have, or the consequences of how I acted, especially towards you. My older sister tried to get the message across to me more times than I can count, that I was acting like a prick, but I really didn't get it. I was a complete moron back then.

"It's just... lashing out seemed so normalized to me. My parents, they weren't exactly doting. Most of my life my sister was the one who raised me. My parents argued when they weren't ignoring each other, a few times my mom would lash out at my dad, my dad just completely neglected me... all I had was my sister. I figure since I grew up in that kind of environment, things like arguing and targeting people had become daily occurrences to me, necessary actions, which is even worse. Plus, I'll admit, I was threatened by you. That probably seems stupid, but...

"My sister, she was part of the Garrison. She was a fighter pilot, recruited straight from school like you and I were. It was her only chance to get away from our parents, and when she realized I might be able to get away and join her, she encouraged me to take the opportunity. I was just a kid so I didn't realize why she wanted me in the Garrison so badly, I just wanted to make her proud, but when you came along with this innate talent for flight, I panicked. I thought I'd never have a chance because of you, I'd never see my sister again, and when I was accepted into the Garrison I was honestly stunned.

"I was in, but I still lashed out at you, I said hurtful things, started fights with you, and it took me years to really comprehend the negativity of what I was doing. I realized how damaging my parents were as I got older, realized how my sister was trying to protect me from them, realized just how much of a monster I'd been towards you, and I regretted it. I've regretted it for a while, but you just had to get yourself kicked out of the Garrison before disappearing for four fucking years, so I lost the will to apologize at all."

James paused in his story, turning his hands up and rubbing a thumb over his right palm, "My sister... she was one of the best fighter pilots at the Garrison. When the Galra cruisers first showed up, Admiral Sanda sent out the fighters, including my sister... none of them made it back," Keith's eyes widened and James folded his arms across his knees, leaning forward, "I'm pretty sure my parents died sometime during the invasion, but I don't know, and frankly I don't care. I know... none of this excuses my actions, especially... what I said to you regarding your parents, but-."

"It's okay," Keith interrupted, and James glanced down to see he was staring at the ceiling, "My dad... he was, um... he was a fireman," the MFE pilot sat straighter, somewhat surprised, "He died in a fire, the roof collapsed on him... I had nowhere else to go so I ended up in a home, um... but it's really okay. I mean... before the Garrison, I didn't really think I was good at anything. My dad, he would always tell me I was special, that I was meant for great things, but when he died I stopped believing that. I thought I'd end up going down a road that would make him sad, that would disappoint him, but then Shiro came around, he... believed in me, gave me a second chance, and it's because of him that I'm the Black Paladin, that I'm not dead in a ditch somewhere. The Garrison... wasn't as much an escape for me as it was a haven. I wasn't running from something or hiding, I was searching... chasing something... chasing Shiro.

"I gave up... when he disappeared during the Kerberos mission. I fell back to how I used to be, acted out even more and got myself booted from the program. Shiro... when he came back and we reunited, he never asked about it, and he hasn't confronted me about getting expelled the way I had, but... I'm sure a part of him is disappointed in me. He stuck his neck out to get me a place in the Garrison after all, risked his own career to give me a chance at a future, and I just had to fuck it up."

"Man, you didn't fuck anything up," James argued, "So you weren't cut out for the Garrison's way of life and training, so what? Even without graduating, without full course training, despite getting expelled, look where you ended up."

Keith lifted his left hand to look at the thick blood staining his fingers, "Bleeding to death on the tenth floor of an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere with only my childhood bully for comfort?"

"No, punk ass, don't make me hit you. I meant in general. You're a good pilot, Keith, you're the best of our generation, you were always the best in our classes, you're a hundred times more skilled than I'll ever be... your dad was right. You were born for amazing things, and you're fulfilling a destiny beyond any normal human comprehension by piloting the Black Lion and leading Voltron. You're not just the savior of Earth, you're the defender of the universe, of all universes. You saved so many lives, you continue to save lives every day, and you call that a fuck up?!" Keith continued to stare blankly at the ceiling, though the tears that had been rimming his eyes had begun to flow over.

Making him cry was the last thing James wanted to do, frankly it was the last thing he ever expected to accomplish, and it certainly didn't feel like much of an accomplishment. Keith was probably feeling sensitive enough because of his injuries, his blood loss and especially his fever, it's likely whatever James said now would just make him cry more, but he had more to say, he couldn't just let it go unspoken. This, especially.

"Your father would be proud of you," James said, "and Shiro... he's definitely proud of you. All those years ago, he brought some rebellious kid into the Garrison out of pure assumption that it would work out, and you turned out to be a hero he probably could only dream about. You've got to be a million times what he ever guessed you could be. You met his expectations and more, Keith. That's not a fuck up."

Keith shut his eyes, "Why are you even talking like that?"

"I'm a leader," James answered, "It's my job to reassure the people on my team. You're a leader too, remember, shouldn't you already know that?"

That brought a short, painful laugh from Keith, which ended in a dry cough that had him cringing, "I'm still getting used to the whole... leadership concept."

James reached over without looking, setting a hand against Keith's forehead, thumb caressing across his temple, "You'll have plenty of time to really get used to it as soon as we get back to the Garrison. Till then, close your eyes again, rest. You'll need your strength. I'll keep thinking of how to contact the Garrison, but if I can't come up with anything by tomorrow, we're making a break for the MFE, and no, leaving you behind to go suicidal on the world is not an option."

Keith exhaled slowly, shutting his eyes as he seemed to relax even more into the cushion beneath his head, "I'll take your word for it. I've been through worse than this, so I guess it would be pretty embarrassing to just die here."

"Worse than this," James sighed, "You'll have to tell me a story or two when we get home."

"Depends on how long I'm going to be stuck in the infirmary ward at the Garrison. You might find it weird coming to visit me, considering our passionate rivalry against each other. People might think you're trying to kill you, and just a warning, my team can be protective," he chuckled gently, speaking next in a slow whisper, "Wait till you meet my mom."

James lifted his head and glanced down at Keith, who'd fallen asleep almost instantly, and just... stared at him. As far as he'd always understood, Keith was an orphan through and through. To even mention his mom, especially after describing his father's death? It... made James a bit suspicious, but at the same time he felt some kind of... electricity in his chest. Like pride.

He turned his head away, choosing to let the topic slide for now and simply let Keith rest, for as long as he could. Later, when he was on the road to recovery, back at the Garrison, then James could bring that whole "mom" thing up again, because he'd be lying if he said he wasn't ridiculously curious. Even if Keith had only brought it up because of pained delusion from his fever, James wasn't going to let it slide. Especially since it brought such a soft smile to the loners face.

"Rest. Try not to have nightmares. We'll be home soon, you have my word."

[filhadoboto]

The fear that unites us

This story was written for "Reylo AU Week" 

August 22 - Day 3 - Canon Divergence AU

@reylo-au

Summary: What if Rey was Snoke's apprentice and Ben was the hero of the Resistance?

Also on AO3

Chapter 1 - Darkness rises and light to meet it

*** Lady Kira ***

Ben Solo was immobilized and unconscious in the interrogation room chair. He had caused a lot of confusion and had fought with all his might not to be captured and to prevent the other pilot and the map that led to Skywalker were taken by the First Order. He had fought bravely to get time for the other pilot to flee, and even though he was a strong Force user, Rey had captured him in the end.

Leaning against the wall in front of the prisoner, arms crossed in front of her body, Rey waited, patiently, for him to wake up.

She had heard of Ben Solo numerous times before. The only son of Leia Organa and Han Solo, he was famous for being an extremely skilled pilot, a brave Resistance hero and a powerful Force user, just like her. Rey had waited for many things, but not that he was so attractive. And the longer she spent watching him, the more she felt she knew him. The curve of his lips, the shape of his nose, the way his long black hair framed his pale face ... all looked so... familiar... but how could the face of a complete stranger be so familiar?

When his brown eyes finally opened and he realized she was there, he didn’t look surprised.

Ben Solo shook his head, trying to wrench a lock of hair from his face, before asking in a casual tone, "Where are we?"

"On one of the ships of the First Order." said Rey.

He stared at her for a few seconds, seeming to assess her. "So you must be the famous Lady Kira. Or would you rather I call you Scarlet Death? "

Behind her helmet, she smiled. She had earned her nickname because she always wore a red helmet, cape, and lightsaber. The last thing her enemies saw was her, all dressed in red. "Although be called Scarlet Death don’t bother me, I'd rather be called by my name if you don’t mind."

He nodded. "Should I presume, Lady Kira, that you are here to torture me as you do with all the enemies of the First Order that you have managed to capture?"

"Oh no. I'm usually called after all the interrogation methods failed. Most cannot stand five minutes with our interrogation droids. But there are those who resist and I only interfere in these cases. I am what they call the last resort. "

"If you're the last resort, then why are you here? Did you come to watch while the droids tried to break me? I bet you like to see your prisoners being tortured. Maybe their cries of pain are music to your ears."

"Contrary to what everyone thinks, I don’t take any pleasure from people's suffering. And, answering your question, I'm here because I know you've seen the map. I am here because my Master and I have no more time to lose. We want the map, and if at least half of what I've heard about you is true, you're not the kind of prisoner that can be broken by droids. So let's skip this step and I'll take the information from you. But don’t worry, I promise I will be as gentle as possible during the process."

"And you really think you can make me talk? That I will not try to resist or that it will be easy to get into my mind and get what you want? Be aware that I will fight to the death."

She sighed. "So, I guess I can let the gentleness aside."

"Go ahead." he said, challenging her "Do your best."

"Oh, I'll do it. You can be sure of that." she said "Things get easier when I don’t have to worry about keeping the prisoner's mind intact." she said hoping it would take that defiant look off his face. But Ben Solo just laughed. "Are not you afraid that I will destroy your mind?"

"Afraid? Do you have any idea of the things I've already faced? For you know that I have faced something far worse than a mere masked creature." he said in a voice full of contempt.

Oh, Ben Solo you're challenging the wrong person. And I'll be happy to make you pay for it. Thought Rey.

For a few seconds, Rey pondered what she would do. Determined, she took two steps toward him, took off the thick red cloak that hid her feminine silhouette and dropped it to the ground at her feet. Underneath her red cloak, Rey was covered in black: pants, long-sleeved blouse, gloves, belt, and knee-high boots.

He looked at her from head to toe in surprise. Behind her red helmet, she smiled. Then Rey also took off her helmet and delighted in the reaction of her prisoner. His mouth opened in surprise and the look of shock on his face was priceless.

Rey rarely took off her helmet in front of people who were not her master or top-ranking officers of the First Order and knew that people were impressed not only by her being a young woman but also by her beauty. Everyone expected the creature called Scarlet Death to be some kind of deformed and grotesque monster.

She was really enjoying what was on Ben Solo's face: he was staring at her open-mouthed, his expression both amazed and confused. It took him a moment to pick up his facade of defiance and indifference.

"You're here because I need the map that leads to your uncle, Luke Skywalker." Rey continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. "He and I have some unfinished business. And since you deprived us of the file, but saw the map, I hope you're smart enough to give me what I want." She took a step toward him "I don’t want to hurt you. Please don’t make me take the map of you by force."

Ben smiled. "If there is one thing for which I am known, it is by my stubbornness. You're going to have to get the information out of me. "

Rey sighed "If you prefer this way..."

Rey reached out her arm, brought her hand near to his face and concentrated on exploring his mind. Ben tried to resist, and to prevent her from finding the memory she wanted, he began to think of random memories to try to distract her: His first flight with his father in the Falcon. The day he defeated his father in the Sabbac game. He and Chewie on the shores of Kashyyyk. His mother wrapped him in his arms, cherishing him. The day Luke spoke to him about what the Force was and how opening up to the dark side was dangerous.

"Hmm ... You're strong ... tough." Rey said.

More memories flowed in his mind: His first flight in an X-Wing. His shooting lessons with uncle Lando. One of his visits to the Galactic Senate with his mother. His father telling one of his adventures with Chewie. His visit to the tomb of his grandmother Padme Amidala in Naboo...

"I like a good challenge. But it's no use resisting."

But he continued to resist: His fascination at seeing Coruscant for the first time. The first time he drove the Falcon at light speed. The thrill of destroying a fleet of TIE fighters chasing after his squadron. The day Admiral Akbar showed him the controls of his Cruiser. The first time he had kissed a girl...

"I'll take the map out of your mind. I always get what I want. Whatever the cost."

She brought her face close to his and his eyes fixed on her lips for a few seconds.

Rey laughed softly. "I think I know how to get information from you, Ben Solo." She put her hand on his face and gently brushed her gloved thumb over his lower lip. Ben tried to maintain an expression of indifference, but that was not what Rey saw in his eyes or felt through the Force. She then whispered in his ear. "You think I'm pretty and you cannot help but think how my lips would feel upon yours."

"Hey! That's personal!" His cheeks were red "Get out of my head!" He said between his teeth.

Rey looked into Ben's eyes and brought her lips close to his. "I'm going to leave. When I get what I want." she said, her lips almost touching his, and took advantage of his immediate distraction to try to find the memory of the map.

His face blushed even more and the image of the two kissing flowed from his mind to hers. She tried to ignore the image and move on, but then ... But then something went wrong. Very, very wrong.

"You... you're afraid... you're afraid of being alone. You're afraid of being abandoned again and die alone" said Ben.

Rey withdrew from his mind and walked away, incredulity and fear stamped on her face. Somehow, he'd gotten into her mind without either of them noticing.

"How... how..." she began, but the surprise of having her greatest fear revealed by that man made her paralyzed.

"So that's your biggest fear? The mighty Lady Kira is afraid to be alone? "He said as she stared at him in disbelief. He looked her up from head to toe and fixed his eyes on her face. "After all, you're just a frightened girl. " he continued, his voice filled with compassion.

She looked at him and saw that he felt sorry for her and it made her furious. Her hand rested on the lightsaber strapped to her waist. "Don’t you dare call me a frightened girl." Her voice was filled with anger. "You don’t know me. You have no idea what I can do."

She turned her back on him and took a deep breath to regain her self-control. She could not be intimidated by him. She had a mission to fulfill. She had a goal to achieve. And nothing, no one would stand between her and her revenge.

"You know what." Ben said, his voice full of unexpected gentleness, and she turned to him. "You're not the only one who feels lonely. I feel that way too. I'm afraid I'll never be able to fit in." His face filled with sadness and he looked away from her.

Rey took a step toward him, her fury being replaced with curiosity.

He looked at her and his eyes were full of something she knew very well. "You have no idea how lonely it is to be the son, the nephew, and the grandson of legends. My grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, was a powerful Jedi and later became Darth Vader, the most feared Lord Sith in history, and my grandmother, Padme Amidala, was Queen and Senator of Naboo and fought for freedom from the galaxy until her death. My parents and my uncle helped liberate the galaxy from the clutches of the Empire. And it wasn’t enough to be a powerful Force user, I have to live with this heavy legacy on my shoulders, always being compared to those who lived before me." Ben's voice was loaded with sadness "Everyone around me is waiting for me to follow their example and strive to rid the galaxy of the oppression of the First Order. Everyone expects me to be the great hero this time. But no one ever bothered to ask if this was what I wanted to do. They just threw me in the middle of it all and I had to pretend I had chosen to be the savior of the galaxy just as my family did before me."

She looked at him in silence. And she had no idea what to say to him. Rey had lost her family very early and had to live alone for many years in the Jakku desert until Snoke found her and took her as his pupil. He had taught her to use all her anger and hatred to get stronger and stronger. Until becoming the fearsome Lady Kira and being called by many as the Scarlet Death, she had been a nobody, alone, without family, without legacy, with nothing but her life and her desire for revenge. And now she was standing before someone who, even having everything she ever wanted, was as sad and lonely as she was.

"I don’t know what to say ... you had ... you have everything I've never had ... I ..."

Ben gave her a look of pain. "Have you ever imagined that it was possible to be lonely even though you had a family that loves you?" He tried to smile, but eventually he did something between a grimace of pain and a smile. "But that's exactly how I feel."

Rey looked away from him and once more the silence filled the room.

He sighed and broke the silence. "May I ask what kind of subject you have to deal with my uncle?"

Rey hesitated before speaking. "Luke Skywalker killed my entire family and dumped me in the Jakku desert to die. I joined the First Order to be able to take revenge on him." He looked at her intensely and this time Rey didn’t look away.

"I know my uncle killed many people during the war, but you seem too young to have been born during the war against the Empire."

"You're right. I was born years later. But the end of the war didn’t prevent your uncle from continuing to kill people." She closed her eyes. "I will never forget the murderous look on his face. I will never forget the green glow of his light saber crossing my father's body, or how he used the Force to crush my mother's throat." Ben stared at her as she opened her eyes. “I watch Luke Skywalker kill my parents every night." Rey's eyes filled with tears, and she stopped talking before she cried in front of Ben Solo.

He stared at her for a moment, as if deciding whether or not he believed her words "If you really want to settle the accounts with my uncle, I'll give you the map."

She stared at him blankly.

"Go ahead," he encouraged her. "I promise not to resist and I'll think about map and just the map."

"Why would you do that?" She asked, suspecting "Why would you agree to betray your uncle?"

"I think you have the right to try to avenge the murder of your family. But I also think you'll end up joining them before you can make him sweat. Don’t underestimate him. Luke Skywalker may be old, but he is extremely powerful. Maybe more powerful than the two of us together."

"I will not underestimate him and you should not underestimate me either. I've been preparing my whole life to take his life. And if you think I'm going to trust you, just because..."

"You're right to mistrust, but, seek with your feelings. I'm being honest and..." he hesitated and she waited for him to continue. He took a deep breath. "I'm tired of pretending to be who I am not. To live surrounded by people who cannot look beyond my legacy and see who I really am. Take the map and then kill me. I'm sure it will make your Master happy. And, perhaps when I am one with the Force, I can finally do what I want and not what others expect of me."

Rey could prove the truth and sincerity of his words. So she did as he asked. And when their minds touched, the image of the map flooded her mind. But there were many more things around that memory. Many flashes of moments of solitude and uncertainty that attract Rey's attention.

This time, he let Rey wander through his memories without trying to stop her. He opened his mind to her, received her as if she were an old friend. Ben Solo showed Rey how he felt abandoned, even though he was surrounded by thousands of people who admired him. How lonely he felt, even though he had never been alone. How he longed to be loved and admired for who he was and not for the legacy of his family.

Their eyes were filled with tears as she withdrew gently from his mind.

"Thank you." She thanked him and smiled "Thank you for showing me that I'm not the only one who feels lonely."

"You’re welcome." He took a deep breath. "Now, finish your work. I'm ready to join the Force. I have a lot of questions to ask my grandfather."

"Oh no. I will not kill you. At least I will not kill you today."

"We made a deal!" he said in exasperation.

"No, you said you would give me the map and that I could kill you. But I didn’t say I would. I said?"

Ben tried in vain to get rid of the restrictions of the chair. "If you wanted some information about the Resistance, you should have taken it while you were on my mind, for I will not ease your entrance again." He said, his eyes browns glowing with anger.

She approached him and, without warning, kissed him. His lips were firm, warm, and soft against hers. Her hands settled on his muscular chest and slowly rose to his face. Ben kissed her back, hesitant at first, but then with enthusiasm.

Rey stepped back and looked him in the eye.

"Why did you do that?" He smiled and she smiled back.

"Now we're both even. You gave me what I wanted and I gave you what you wanted." Rey took her cloak. "I'll get rid of some guards who might stand in your way." she said as she replaced her cape "I'll make it easier and cover up your escape." She took the helmet "I hope your fame as a good pilot is deserved and that you are able to steal and fly a TIE fighter."

He gestured yes with his head. "Why are you helping me?"

"Because I have the impression that someday we'll meet again." She smiled and, with a gesture, opened the chair's restraints and he was free. "And Ben, you don’t have to be what others want you to be." Rey put her helmet in place and left the interrogation room.

[fenfyre]

A Different Breed - Part IX

Part I    Part VIII

“As you can see”, Allura says, zooming in on the solar system in question, “the moon has gathered a debris field in its orbit that will be exceptionally hard to navigate. Large amounts of it consist of explosive waste and even though it has been a while since the battle we have no way of knowing if they’re still active. You should only proceed with the utmost caution.”

Lance frowns, uneasy as he regards the hologram of their objective, Tiye, third moon of Nova Albena, is barely visible through the veil of asteroids and debris surrounding it. He can just make out the jagged, unnatural shape, the deep craters ripped into its surface and the huge mass blown away at the side where the main facility must have been situated ages ago.

He’s not convinced and judging by Hunk’s dark expression at least his best friend is having doubts about this as well.

“We figure Keith should be the pilot on this mission.” Shiro’s words are met with hesitant nods from the team and Lance’s stomach tightens painfully. Pilot. Singular. “The red lion is the most agile, which will make navigating through the debris much easier. Besides, he’s one of our technically most skilled pilots.”

Across the room Keith hums and gives a slow nod.

“I can do that”, he says, sounding calm and confident as he studies the hologram. “There seem to be openings now and then, we just have to time it right. Then I can get us down.”

“And back out again”, Shiro adds.

The pull in his stomach grows worse and before Lance knows it he’s talking, fingers digging into his jacket where he crosses his arms defensively.

“Can’t we just … blow up the debris from a safe distance? You know, that would make it harder to accidentally blow it up from an … un-safe distance. Then we could go down with two lions, make the job a little easier?”

He can feel Shiro’s gaze, intense and sceptical, but he can’t bring himself to meet it and keeps his eyes fixed on the blueish projection of Tiye instead. His cheeks feel a bit warmer than a minute ago.

“I considered that”, Allura hums and Lance feels a tiny spark of hope come to life in his chest but it’s quickly snuffed out again with her next words. “But we can’t risk pushing any of it into the moon’s atmosphere. It might rain down on the ruins and destroy the very intel we’re looking for. Besides, an explosion of that scale might draw unwanted attention. Remember you’ll be behind enemy lines and it is likely that any of the outposts on Nova Albena or even the surrounding moons would see it and get suspicious.”

“That sounds like the kind of thing we’d want to avoid”, Hunk agrees and for just a moment Lance wants to punch him for it.

Then Shiro speaks up again and this time his tone is soft, almost soothing. Like it was earlier when he’d gotten Lance this close to breaking down.

“But you won’t need the lions for the actual mission. You’ll have to scour the ruins by foot to check the remaining buildings for intact computers and since the Galra abandoned the facilities after the battle there shouldn’t be any need for combat.”

No matter how calming Shiro is trying to sound, that does not help Lance. Being stuck on some moon behind Galra lines with no way of getting out of there on his own since he needs to leave his lion behind and no possibility of backup reaching them thanks to the built-in trash shield … well, that’s bound to make him at least a little nervous.

It doesn’t even have to do anything with Keith being his partner on that mission. At least he thinks so. Or hopes.

“So who’s going with him?”, Pidge asks, still sounding a bit sceptical herself, bless her tiny heart.

“I need you and Hunk to do an infiltration a few quadrants over”, Allura explains and zooms out, swiping across the map and turning it until it settles on another, bigger planet. “Additionally to the blueprints we hope to get at Tiye we also need some more recent information on occupied planets at the border of the Galran empire. This outpost should have information on how fortified those planets are and how easy it would be for us to free them. It’s not too heavily guarded but you should still avoid combat.”

“A stealth mission then?”

“Yes, you will have to make use of your lion’s cloaking ability.”

“Sweet.” And with that all the scepticism is gone and Pidge smirks, obviously looking forward to making use of her toy yet again. “Don’t worry, we’ll get that intel for you. Right, Hunk?”

Lance watches Hunk’s slow nod, knowing how his friend doesn’t particularly like stealth missions but will take this one on either way. Because he’s a paladin of Voltron and he’s stepping up to fulfil that duty without a question, no matter that he never even had a choice.

All of them are doing their part and which greater good is there than the freedom of the entire known universe? If there was ever a time for Lance to pull himself together and do his job it’s now.

“Very good”, Allura nods back. “Now as for Tiye, Lance will accompany Keith on that mission. There might still be explosives scattered across the surface and a marksman like him will prove valuable for destroying them from a safe distance since there won’t be time or resources to disarm them.”

Her reasoning is sound. Any other day Lance would grin and brag about how lost they’d be without him and his superior skills but today his throat closes up before he can even get a word out and after a moment or two he finally meets Shiro’s intense gaze.

Shiro knows that something’s wrong, he wouldn’t have talked to Lance earlier if he didn’t have at least a few strong suspicions. He’s known Keith longer than any of them, if there’s anyone on the castleship besides Lance who notices the weird changes in his behaviour lately it would be Shiro. But Lance pushed him away when he tried to help and he won’t repeat his offer in front of all of the others, in front of Keith.

What he does though is arch an eyebrow, an oddly elegant movement, before he asks, without taking his eyes off Lance:

“Is that okay with you? I can go instead. Or come with you two.”

From the corners of his eyes Lance notices Pidge perk up with a frown and Hunk tilt his head to the side while Keith crosses his arms slowly, deliberately.

If there was ever a chance for him to pull out of this, to make up some bullshit excuse why Shiro has to take his place or why all three of them should go, this is it. This is his opening and some fluttery, scared part of Lance wants to take it.

But he’s surrounded by his team, all people he values greatly and who would do literally anything to take their rebellion forward. He can’t show that kind of weakness.

So Lance shakes his head, summoning up every shred of confidence that is still hiding in his body to force a grin on his lips.

“Nah, come on”, he drawls with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “Downloading stuff from old computers on some deserted moon? That’s barely even a two man job. Keith gets us down, I keep him from barging into rooms that might blow up around him, we get what we came for, Keith gets us out. You’d just be in our way.”

Shiro doesn’t believe him, Lance can see it. But there’s not much more he can do without pulling the leader card and he apparently wants to spare Lance the humiliation because after another stretch of tense silence Shiro sighs.

“Alright. We’ll upload all the information about the moon and the facilities onto the red lion so you can study it on the way. You’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

“What”, Lance grins even though it feels plastered on and is straining his face. “No wormhole service?” Allura just shakes her head.

“We can’t reasonably make a jump into the quadrant, the risk of the castle ship getting detected is too high. A single lion will draw a lot less attention, hopefully none.”

Lance’s heart stutters nervously. Great. That way possible reinforcements will be even further away. Well, he supposes it doesn’t make a lot of difference if they wouldn’t even be able to get to the moon’s surface in the first place. And if it’s actually as easy as Allura made it sound, if the moon is abandoned and all they need to do is download some blueprints … maybe Lance’s worry is completely unnecessary in the first place.

Maybe the nervous squirming in his stomach and the alarm bells in the back of his mind are just him overreacting. A kid could do this mission, nothing can go wrong. Nothing at all.

At least that’s what Lance tells himself, over and over again like a desperate mantra, while the others discuss Hunk and Pidge’s stealth mission.

Nothing can go wrong. Nothing at all. Nothing at all.

Part X

[If you enjoy this story consider buying me a coffee or check out how to commission me!]

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT A

Good programmers often want to be doctors than who want to meet him. But I think they pay more because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.1 The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian.2 The surprising thing about throwaway programs is that, like the temporary buildings built at so many American universities during World War II, they often don't get thrown away. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. When you're launching planes they have to be trimmed properly; the engines have to be at full power; the pilot has to be the series A stage. Which means if it becomes the norm for founders to retain board control after a series A is clearly heard-of. The use of credentials was an attempt to axiomatize computation.3 When you're deciding what to do.

This is too big a problem to solve. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in popping zits.4 But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them.5 I can't draw.6 How would you do it? Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance? In the earliest stage, because that's where the money is. Misleading the child is just a series of web pages. Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. And once you apply that kind of thing for fun. Most smart people don't do that very well.

I learned it hadn't been so neat, and the problem now seems to be fixed. It was small and powerful and cheap, as promised. Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance?7 As a lower bound, you have to do the unpleasant jobs. But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch has the side effect of making them celebrities. Others are more candid, and admit their financial models require them to own a certain percentage of each company. One way to describe this situation is to say that you despised your job, but a return. Till now we'd been planning to use If you can read this, I should be working. I've been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification.8 So most hackers will tend to use whatever language they were first written in, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. I were a better speaker. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

My grandmother told us an edited version of the change I'm seeing.9 When you scale animals you can't just keep everything in proportion. I believe they conceal because of deep taboos. But I don't think the bank manager really did. The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not like it used to. The very idea is foreign to what most of us, it's not that inaccurate to regard VCs as sources of money.10 They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead.11

So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.12 They just don't want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. Maybe this would have been for two Google employees to focus on first, we try to figure that out.13 For millennia that was the canonical example of a job someone had to do was roll forward along the railroad tracks of destiny.14 Then the important question became not how to make money that you can't do it by accident.15 When we were kids I used to think I wanted to know everything. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. They may have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of the work they'd done. But we all know the amounts being raised in series A rounds creep inexorably downward. I usually write it out beforehand. We compete more with employers than VCs.16

Java. They go to school, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s. That's what board control means in practice. When my father was working at Westinghouse in the 1970s, he had people working for him who made more than he did, because they'd been there longer. I read it, and look bold. To do something well you have to make it something that they themselves use. We can get rid of or make optional a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up in. At the moment I'd almost say that a hacker about to write a profiler that would automatically detect inefficient algorithms.

I remember because it was so surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class. What popularity it retains dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of a popular system. The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. She said they'd been sitting reading one day, and when you're delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian. But I am daily waiting for the line to collapse. When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault? It's also wise, early on, when they're trying to find the function you need than to write the code yourself.

Notes

Content is information you don't even want to learn to acknowledge it.

The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these people never come face to face with the founders' advantage if it were Can you pass the salt? Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically. You have to factor out some knowledge.

If you want to. When you get a false positive, this thought experiment: If you have a cover price and yet give away free subscriptions with such abandon. This is why I haven't released Arc. They also generally say they prefer great markets to great people.

If it's 90%, you'd ultimately be hurting yourself, but unfortunately not true. It shouldn't be too conspicuous. All you need to know exactly how a lot, or at least wouldn't be worth starting one that did. And yet there is some kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they function as the average startup.

No one seems to have balked at this, but it's hard to say that education in the belief that they'll be able to raise money? The CRM114 Discriminator. 03%. But the change is a lot more frightening in those days, and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality, but delusion strikes a step later in the absence of objective tests.

We often discuss revenue growth, it's easy to get to college, they only like the United States, have several more meetings with you to believing in natural selection in the few cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of how to deal with slaps, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

For example, the best new startups. Give the founders realized. You may be the next uptick after that, founders will usually take one of the former, because some schools work hard to predict precisely what would happen to their software that was a company tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and when I became an employer, I put it this way probably should.

A YC partner wrote: After the war, tax receipts have stayed close to the problem and approached it with the exception of the Industrial Revolution was one firm that wanted to than because they had in grad school, secretly write your thoughts down in, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was more because they are to be the least correlation between launch magnitude and success.

This is a well-preserved 1989 Lincoln Town Car ten-passenger limousine 5, they may prefer to work with me there. But if they want to see artifacts from it, but this would be more like Silicon Valley like the Segway and Google Wave. I'm just going to call all our lies lies. As the art itself gets more random, they thought at least for the sledgehammer; if anything they could imagine needing in their early twenties compressed into the shape of the leading scholars in the last step is to use to calibrate the weighting of the junk bond business by doing another round that values the company they're buying.

Whereas there is money. His best bet would probably also encourage companies to acquire you. The wartime versions were much more fun than he'd had an opportunity to invest in so many trade publications nominally have a notebook to write and deals longer to write a new version from which they don't make wealth a zero-sum game. We often discuss revenue growth with the amount—maybe not linearly, but it wasn't.

That name got assigned to it because the processing power you can discriminate on any basis you want to start a startup to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write software in Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications. I mean type I startups. And especially about what was happening on Dallas, and they have wings and start to rise again.

Did you know whether this happens because they're innumerate, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris wrote the recommendations. After a while to avoid companies that can't reasonably expect to make up the same investor to do video on-demand, because a unless your initial investors agreed in advance that you're talking to a VC. And the expertise and connections the founders are willing to provide this service, this phenomenon is apparently even worse in the process of trying to enter the software business, and they were only partly joking.

Bankers continued to live inexpensively as their companies. Instead of bubbling up from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, because any invention has a power law dropoff, but we are not mutually exclusive. Xenophon Mem. At the time required to switch the operating system so much that anyone wants to invest in it.

It's hard to compete directly with open source project, but those don't scale is to try your site.

The best one could aspire to the extent this means anything, it would be to write about the idea.

They did better than their competitors, who had it used to say that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, but for a sufficiently long time. I got it wrong in How to Make Wealth when I switch in mid-twenties the people working for large settlements earlier, but the meretriciousness of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp. And while we have to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though.