Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.” - H.P. Lovecraft

The Sevastopol Space Station is, in Lance’s humble opinion, a brilliant-looking space station. It’s bigger than he even thought possible for a ship, and glows a faint pale blue colour from the wide windows scattered all across. The ship is divided into four main sections, with passageways between that look minuscule from the Castle ship, but Lance would guess they’re much bigger up close than they look. There’s something eerie about the quietness of the ship, though; a bustling space station like that – the base point for several large planets in this system to converge for various social activities and further space travel – should be vibrating with life, instead, it’s completely silent. A light flickers off in the top corner of the station, before flicking back on like nothing ever happened. Lance feels a chill run down his spine. The station might look fancy, but right now it is like a ghost town.

“We received a distress signal from here just two vargas ago. A voice Pidge managed to translate,” The paladin in question flushes under Allura’s mention of her. “It is believed the ship is under attack, but we do not know what from. There is no evidence of Galra activity in this sector, but we must remain alert anyway in case of an ambush.”

“Do we know what kind of attack?” Lance questions, “Because it looks pretty quiet out there.”

“We have no further information, unfortunately, but the Y’Akarti are powerful allies, and if we can gain their trust, it will be a huge help for the Voltron Coalition.” Allura is right, of course, but Lance can’t help the sinking feeling in his stomach.

“I tried to contact the station further,” Pidge pushes her glasses up her nose with a huff, “But everything was just scrambled, so we have to assume communications will be down when we’re in there too, so it might take a while to locate the source of the signal.”

“That is, like, never a good sign,” Hunk says, crossing his arms over his chest.

Lance agrees wholeheartedly. The space station looks peaceful right now, undisturbed and empty, but he still eyes it wearily. He doesn’t want to voice the anxiety climbing up his spine, for fear he would not be taken seriously, but he can’t escape the way it feels like it is choking him as he cradles his helmet under his arm. He runs a tired hand through his hair.

“We will go in together then, taking the green lion so we can cloak ourselves, and investigate on foot.” Shiro’s eyes are narrowed, his brows furrowing together in what Lance would call fear if he didn’t know any better.

Allura nods. “If you find anything, contact us immediately, and we can offer assistance in any way that may be needed.”

They all nod, and with that, the briefing is done. Lance finds himself pushing his helmet over his head and following the others down into the bay, ready to face whatever awaits them.

“Does anyone else have a really bad feeling about this?” Hunk asks, as they all settle into the cockpit of the green lion. He’s stood holding onto the back of Pidge’s seat, with Lance next to him and Shiro at the other side of Lance. Keith is standing with his arms crossed, leaning against the wall behind them.

“It’s probably just a mistake or something,” Keith offers, but the rigid set to his body gives away his underlying unease too.

“Hopefully, we get down there and they’re just impressed we showed up at all. They might even throw us a party.” Lance winks at Hunk as he says it, but the yellow paladin doesn’t seem to believe Lance’s words. Funnily enough, Lance doesn’t believe them either. Whatever is happening on this space station has unsettled all of them to a degree not seen since their early days as paladins. Even Shiro, the man who had faced indescribable horrors before even setting out as a paladin, has a worried look in his eyes. Lance swallows his rising anxiety and refuses to call it fear.

Pidge flies the green lion into the airlock and waits for the doors to close behind them. Lance watches the last glimpse of open space disappear behind the doors with a sinking feeling and tries to focus on the positives. They’re having a movie night later, as is tradition for after missions these days, and Hunk will probably bake cookies to go with it if the mission has stressed him out enough. Lance will fight to watch whichever Altean romcom takes his fancy, and Keith will argue stubbornly, despite all of them knowing Keith prefers the wholesome love stories to the gritty action movies he claims to love most. Shiro will bring the blankets out of his room, and they will all settle under the covers in comfort, snuggling close to one another as a way to celebrate surviving another day. Coran will probably fall asleep first, and Pidge might draw on his face with a Sharpie. Allura and Lance will spend some time applying face masks, and if he’s lucky, Allura will let him braid her hair while they watch the movie.

All in all, Lance has a lot to look forward to when all of this is done. It doesn’t help squish the sinking feeling, though. In fact, as the airlock opens at the other side and Pidge parks her lion just outside it, Lance would say it has gotten worse.

Inside Sevastopol is an endless array of long, dark corridors lit only by the emergency lights, each winding off in a different direction. The room they’re in is huge, big enough to store all of the lions comfortably, and Lance suddenly regrets not bringing his own. The comforting energy of Blue would be a welcome relief right now. She always knew exactly how to calm down his anxieties, and he finds himself missing her a lot as they disembark from the green lion.

A white double door to the left of them appears to be bolted shut, with large red writing spray-painted across it.

“Pidge, are you able to translate that?” Keith asks, he’s moved over to stand next to the letters, and traces one of the symbols with his gloved hand.

Pidge taps a few buttons on the screen they’re holding and scans the words. “I could if you weren’t standing in the way.” She grumbles after a moment when the screen flashes red.

Keith flushes and steps out of the way. Pidge holds the tablet up again and scans.

“It – uh – it says ‘Someone Knew.’”

The icy feeling Lance had before returns tenfold at the implications of the words. “Someone knew what?” He questions after a minute. The words feel forced out of his throat – it is a question he realises that he really doesn’t want to know the answer to. Thankfully, nobody has an answer to give him.

“I’m going to upload the translator to your armour, so all you should have to do is press this button for it to translate – it might not work perfectly cause Coran didn’t give me much time to work on it, but it should be enough to get you by if we end up separated,” Pidge says, after a moment of silence. She walks around all of them, showing which button to press as she fiddles with the left arm of their suits.

An alarm sounds somewhere in the distance just after she finishes, almost imperceptibly faint, but there nonetheless. Lance glances around at the other paladins, and they all seem to have the same idea.

“Guess we’re going that way.” Lance sighs and follows the others down the dark corridor as they take off running.

They make it less than a hundred meters before something inevitably goes wrong. There’s a missing panel in the floor, and as everyone else jumps over it, Lance only has a second to think Hey – should the ground be shaking this much – before the world drops from under him and Lance falls into the darkness.

He doesn’t scream because that isn’t very macho, and he’s always got to stay focused to impress whatever ladies may be watching him, but he does make a choked noise somewhere between a grunt and a wheeze as he tips upside down in his descent. He hears the others shout, and realises with a jolt that it is through the comms now, rather than because they’re right in front of him.

He activates his jetpack, tries to push himself up, but the jetpacks have always been for slowing a fall, not pushing them higher, and their battery life is not long enough to push him up to where he can see the worried faces of his friends in the distance above, lit only by the red emergency light above them.

The jetpack stutters out as its battery drains, and Lance resigns himself to a very long fall.

It turns out, it was not in fact a very long fall, but it still hurts like a bitch anyway as his back slams into the metal ground. His head cracks off the wall, and he suppresses a whimper as black spots dance in his vision until he manages to blink them away.

“L-nce?” His comms crackle.

“Are -” Static. “there?” Static.

He can’t make out much more. Whatever was affecting the distress signal has started impacting his own communication now he’s further away from his team. He turns his mic on anyway.

“I’m okay,” He lies. “I managed to slow my fall enough to avoid hurting myself.” He lies again.

His comms crackle some more. He makes out what he hopes is a sigh of relief.

“Can you –– we –- going –- meet us –- Marshall he-quarters?” That sounded like Shiro.

Do they want him to meet them at the Marshall headquarters? Lance was uncomfortable enough in this station as a group, but the thought of being alone is positively terrifying. As if proving his point, the metal creeks ominously around him, and he swallows nervously as he pushes himself to sit up.

“Okay,” He blinks back tears as his back twinges painfully when he stands, “I’ll see you guys there.”

The corridor he’s landed on is even darker than the one upstairs, the emergency lights blown out by the debris that had fallen before Lance had. A long metal pole sticks out of the floor, and Lance finds himself counting his blessings that he hadn’t landed on it. He kicks a chunk of plastic out of his way and begins his journey into the darkness.

After a few minutes, he reaches the end. The room is empty save for a small storage drawer and a ladder leading up into more darkness. There’s a poster of a lightbulb on the wall that someone has scribbled over in the same red spray paint they had seen upstairs. He pushes the button Pidge had shown him, tucked just under his left wrist, and a small screen pops up. He scans the words.

Keep moving.

Lance’s mouth runs dry. The ship creeks again behind him, and a small voice in his brain points out that it sounds like footsteps.

Lance puts his hands on the rungs of the ladder and begins to climb.

The top of the ladder leads him to a bigger room, with a grate on one side that overlooks what appears to be a large social area. It looks like it was once filled with market stalls and food places, but now the room is empty, save for more graffiti and a large red stain in one corner that looks suspiciously like blood. The comms have been quiet ever since he spoke last, and he misses his team around him.

A few storage boxes lie around, and Lance roots through them looking for something useful. He doesn’t find anything except a roll of bandages and a flare. He pockets the flare but leaves the bandages after a moment of deliberation.

There’s a radio balanced on top of one of the boxes. Lance presses the button on top, and it crackles to life. It’s only static, with the occasional snippet in a language he doesn’t understand. He flicks it off and is reminded of just how silent the ship is.

His footsteps seem to echo down the corridor as he continues walking, and he resists the urge to think about how it sounds like something is following him. A door in front of him slides open as he approaches, and leads him into a large observation deck. There is not much light coming in from outside, and the room itself is only lit by a long light standing on the floor in the centre, which is why he is surprised when he trips over something and comes crashing down.

He flicks the flashlight on his helmet to get a better look at the offending object and finds himself scrambling away quickly. There’s a puddle of blood underneath him that he hadn’t noticed before, and the body it is coming from belongs to a young alien woman. She’s humanoid in shape, with purple marks dancing across the dark skin of her face. Her eyes are purple and lifeless with slitted pupils. His hand is outstretched in his direction, and her mouth is open in a cry for help. She hasn’t been dead for long, but it doesn’t change the fact that she is. There’s a large circular wound through her chest, and when Lance stands above her, he can see the blood-soaked floor where he thinks her lungs should be.

With the flashlight on, he takes another look around the room. There are several more bodies scattered around, and inspection shows they have all died in a similar, gory way. A young boy lies slouched against the wall with a chunk of his neck missing. An older woman lies on the floor in the far corner, missing her left leg. A couple lay slumped over each other, faces turned towards each other as blood drips out of their mouths. There are splatters of blood over every available surface, and when Lance glances down at himself, he is disgusted by how much he has got on him.

Black writing is scrawled on the wall, above the body of someone in a military style uniform. Reluctantly, he translates it.

Don’t let it out.

Several attempts to contact his team later, Lance is feeling pretty defeated. His back still hurts, his head is swimming, and he is still covered in blood that doesn’t belong to him. He’d tried to cover the bodies in the room with a few soft sheets he’d pulled off a giant couch facing the window, but it had done little to dissipate the sick feeling in his bones that something was very, very, wrong here.

Alone and afraid, Lance finds himself looking around the observation deck for anything he could use to point himself in the right direction. The last thing he wants is to be heading in the complete opposite direction to where he is supposed to be.

He is just giving up hope when he spots it. A small computer in the corner, tucked at the side of a large door. He’s not tech-savvy like Pidge or Hunk, but he still knows his way around a computer and decides it is worth a go to see what he can find out.

Unfortunately, when he boots it up, the screen only gives him four options, and three of them don’t contain anything further – the computer clearly having been wiped of all data recently. As a last-ditch attempt, he clicks the option translating as ‘Communication Logs’, and starts reading.

Visitor Code: 235TZ4J

Name: T’Aellra Pshsjeka

Message: Hello, I need my question answered. Why are the Marshals locking us in? They should be protecting us. It’s their job to protect us. Something is on this station with us, and nobody knows what. Nobody knows what it is, only that it is killing people. They put locks on the doors like they’re trying to keep something out, but whatever it is is already here. They should be helping us escape. We’re terrified here. What is going on?

Lance feels sick. Was T’Aellra one of the bodies lying behind him? Or did they escape? There’s no reply to the message logged, and no other communications available.

Why did the station go into lockdown? Was it to keep something outside? Or, Lance thinks with a chill, was it to keep something inside? Even if that meant the death of the people here?

Suddenly, he really wants his lion with him. Even the feel of her quintessence has gone faint; it’s almost like a distant memory right now compared to the usual buzz it fills him with. He wants his team with him, and he wants answers to whatever is going on in Sevastopol station.

Footsteps from down the corridor draw him out of his thoughts, and he looks around for somewhere to hide. There’s a desk in the corner, and he slots himself underneath it and twists until he is hidden from the doors. He flicks off his flashlight as the door closest to him slides open. A humanoid figure walks through, its eyes glow white, and the label on its suit identifies it as a Working Yachi, whatever one of those is.

“What a mess we have here,” A robotic voice speaks, “This simply will not do.”

The android gathers a mop from a closet at the opposite side of the room, and Lance uses its distraction to sneak out. Whatever killed those people did it violently and effortlessly, and although the robot seemed harmless, he doesn’t want to risk getting on the wrong side of it.

With the state of the ship and the communication log he had just read, he doubts they would be receptive to visitors right now anyway.

The door slides open, and he is gone before the android can turn around.

He finds himself on yet another winding, dark corridor. Great, he thinks bitterly, this is exactly the way to find the rest of my team.

The only sound as he continues down the corridor is the clank of his shoes against the metal ground.

He’s travelled about 20 meters when his comms crackle to life again.

“Lance? Are you there?” Shiro’s voice is a welcome comfort right now, and Lance finds himself fumbling with excitement as he reaches up to turn his comms on.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

A few grunts sound through the comms, and what appears to be fighting. Lance is suddenly really worried for his team and speeds up down the corridor.

“The androids,” Pidge says, gasping for breath. “They’ve gone crazy.”

The androids? Like the one that he had just seen? In the background, Lance thinks he hears a door open and drops his voice to a whisper as he speeds up down the corridor, willing his shoes to be quieter on the ground. Turns out he was right to be wary of the one back there.

“What do you mean? Are you guys okay?”

“They’re trying to kill everyone. Something about protecting the company.”

Lance hears that strange robotic voice in the background through the comms. “You are becoming hysterical,” it says, and Keith lets out a grunt.

“What the quiznack is going on here?” Lance mutters as he scrambles up yet another ladder. The android from before is definitely following him, and he hopes that going up the ladder is enough to deter it from finding him.

“Lance, you need to meet us at the Marshal’s headquarters. We need to regroup and figure out a game plan.”

“That’s easier said than done,” Lance mutters, “This place is a fucking maze.”

“Keep climbing, and keep moving. Whatever is going on here isn’t good.”

Understatement of the fucking century, Lance thinks.

He’s about to open his mouth to reply when a loud bang sounds through the comms, and everything goes silent. Static rings through instead of voices, and the sound has him pulling his helmet off before it can exacerbate his head injury. Black spots dance in front of him, and he leans forward with his hands on his knees while he tries to regulate his breathing – helmet tossed to the side.

After a second, the world comes back into focus. He picks his helmet up and holds it in front of him, testing to see whether the sound is still coming through.

Silence.

He slides the helmet on.

“Is everything okay? What was that noise?”

Silence.

“Guys? What’s going on?”

Silence.

“Can anyone hear me?”

Silence.

Lance is alone once again.

It takes ten long minutes before he reaches the end of this corridor, with the corridor opening up into the upstairs balcony of a large room. There’s a large door downstairs that appears to have some kind of lock holding it shut, and there’s another body lying on the ground just in front of it, clutching something in an outstretched arm. The rest of the room is mostly empty, aside from a vending machine in the corner and an office overlooking the doors. There’s graffiti scrawled on the wall to his right, and he translates it quickly.

The end of the line.

Lance decides he hates whatever is going on here.

Voices ring out from downstairs, and he ducks behind the balcony wall, peaking through a small hole to see whatever is going on. People, this time, aliens much like the ones he’d found dead, are entering the room from another door downstairs, one that must have been directly underneath him. He’s too far away for the translation in his helmet to kick in at first, but when it does, he finds himself shaking.

“We need more ammunition.” One of them says, a shorter alien with dark blue marks on pale skin.

“We don’t need ammunition,” A taller one that Lance would guess is the leader says, “We need an escape plan.”

“The Marshals seem to want us all to die here; we need to take them out before we can escape.”

“The Voltron Paladins seem to want to help the Marshals – I overheard them talking while observing their fighting.”

“Then we need to take out the paladins, too. They can’t defeat whatever this creature is, and we need the Marshals to unlock the escape pods.”

“Maybe we will get lucky and the creature will do it for us.”

“Who even knows if this creature really exists. All we know is the droids have gone crazy, and there’s something management isn’t telling us.”

There’s a loud noise from downstairs, a crash as something falls over.

“Careful, idiot, do you want everyone knowing we are here?”

There’s another crash, this one fainter, but the aliens below look at each other uneasily.

“Draw your weapons.” The leader instructs, and each one of the group pulls out a small black pistol.

“What the –- is that?” The translator doesn’t pick up the middle word, but Lance can take a guess at what they meant.

There are footsteps downstairs now, something heavy is running in their direction, but Lance can’t catch a glimpse of it. He watches the aliens fire their guns and draws his bayard. They might have been talking about killing the paladins, but Lance can’t let them die without trying to help. All he needs is to convince them they can all escape together.

His gun appears in his hand, and he raises it over the balcony, prepared to shoot.

“Shoot that gun and you’ll kill us all.” A voice says from behind him, and Lance curses at the fact that he allowed something to sneak up on him.

“I’m trying to help them.” Lance insists, refusing to lower his weapon as his finger twitches on the trigger.

Something metal hits the back of his helmet.

“Lower your weapon.” The voice says again. When Lance turns his head, he’s facing the black metal of a gun pointed straight at him.

A voice screams below him. Lance swallows as nausea rises in his throat.

“It’s too late for them,” The alien says, “It doesn’t have to be too late for us.”

Lance wants to argue, wants to say he can still help, but the screaming has died down now, and the only sound left is those awful, heavy footsteps.

He lowers his bayard, and it disappears.

“Thank you for making the right choice,” The alien tells him while lowering his own gun, “Now follow me if you want to survive.”

Lance watches the figure retreat, and risks a glance behind him at where the aliens were once stood talking. There’s a huge puddle of blood, with a dismembered body part sticking out of it. Another body lies against the wall, and Lance watches as something drags it down the opposite corridor. He doesn’t get a glimpse at the creature, but something tells him he doesn’t want one.

The alien who’d held the gun at him is now crouched in front of a vent Lance hadn’t noticed before, and gestures for him to follow. Lance uses the time it takes him to crawl over to assess the alien in front of him. They have pale skin, with soft green marks tracing the shape of their facial features. They have a mop of dark hair, tinted gold at the tips, with gold earrings to match. They’re dressed in dark clothes, casual enough, but Lance isn’t sure he can trust this guy at all after he’d held a gun up to him. For all he knows, he’s going out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Lance follows the alien into the vents with a resigned sigh. At the very least, he might be able to get information on where he needs to go.

“So,” Lance questions after a few minutes of crawling, “What’s your name?”

“Shush,” The alien tells him, “It’s not safe yet.”

Oh. Great. Lance swallows.

After another few minutes, his back is really starting to hurt again, and he finds himself missing the open corridors where he could stand freely. The vents are large enough to be comfortable to crouch in, but he has to bend his head forward at an angle that is pulling on his back and making his head throb with agony. Thankfully, the room opens up into a small closet that had clearly been used as someone’s bedroom temporarily. There’s a mattress in the corner, and a small box of various personal belongings: a book, a jacket, and something that might be playing cards. There’s a hint of metal under the jacket, but Lance doesn’t investigate what it is. The guy already has a gun on him; he doesn’t want to antagonise this guy anymore. Especially since he can’t be sure of his intentions.

“Are you going to answer my questions now?” Lance asks, voice low and quiet.

The alien turns around to face him, standing at full height now. He’s taller than Lance had thought, standing a few inches above the blue paladin.

“Only if you answer mine.” He says, and pulls his gun back out, levelling it towards Lance’s face.

Okay, this was not going to plan.

“Who are you?” The alien asks.

“I’m – uh – Lance. I’m a paladin of Voltron.” Lance raises his hands up, bent at the elbow to show that he isn’t a threat right now.

“And you expect me to believe that?” The alien scoffs, “What would Voltron be doing here?”

“We received a distress signal from here, about three vargas ago. Figured we would come investigate, but I ended up separated from my team and need to find them again.”

“Well, Lance,” The syllables of his name come through distorted, and Lance realises the translation might be going both ways. He’s suddenly very thankful for Pidge’s genius. “Your team made a mistake. There’s no getting out of here. Not anymore.”

“We have a ship,” Lance insists, “Stored upstairs somewhere, and a Castle ship we can take survivors to. If something is here hurting people, we can save as many as possible and stop whatever it is.”

“There are no ships here, not anymore.” The alien’s hands shake on the gun, and Lance finds himself tracking its movement with his eyes.

“There are now.” He insists.

“Well, hah,” The alien laughs, stepping side to side with frenzy but keeping the gun aimed at Lance, “That’s good news. Cause things are not so good here, the androids have gone crazy, and management has locked themselves away. But, paladin, that’s the least of our problems.”

“What else is going on?” Lance asks, skin crawling.

“There’s something on this station, something you wouldn’t believe.” The alien stops his pacing and swallows, running his hand down his face. Lance notices the dark bags under his eyes and realises just how exhausted the alien looks.

He’s not violent, Lance realises, he’s scared.

“Like what?”

“A killer.”

“Like, Galra?” Lance tries to understand what could be scaring the other man so much.

He scoffs in response, “You think we’d be scared of the Galra? No, this is worse. Worse than anything your puny human mind could come up with.”

“Okay,” Lance says gently, keeping his voice as calm as possible despite the way his heart feels like it is going to beat out of his chest. “What’s your name?”

“Iopel.” The alien – Iopel – tells him.

“Okay, Iopel,” Lance lowers his arms slightly, “If you can help me find my friends, we’ll get you out of here. I promise.”

“Why should I help you? Why me?” The alien questions; his grip on the gun seems to be loosening, and Lance takes it as a win.

“Because you seem to know your way around, and we can get you out of here. We can stop whatever this killer is.”

“You don’t seem to get it, do you?” Iopel groans in frustration, lowering the gun. “There is no getting out of here. There is no stopping the killer. The Marshals sent their best men after it, and all that’s left of them now is a pile of body parts. So we’re on lockdown. Completely, there’s no getting out of here. Not without a fight, we can’t win.”

“You don’t know my team like I do,” Lance smiles softly, lowering his arms and stepping closer to Iopel. “Let us prove to you that we can help. We’ll get you out of here, I promise.”

Iopel grunts, and the gun is placed down on the desk. At the relief of no longer being in immediate danger, Lance feels the adrenaline drain from his body and stumbles slightly. His head is hurting tenfold, and he grabs onto the wall for support as the room sways around him. He blinks black dots from his vision.

“Woah –- are you okay?” Iopel is touching him now, placing Lance’s arm around his shoulders to take some of his weight. The relief is welcome, and Lance finds himself sinking into it.

“I, uh, hit my head and back pretty hard when I got separated from my team. Hurts like a bitch, but I’ll be okay.” Lance tries to wave the concern off as he knows this isn’t the way to build Iopel’s trust in him. The alien doesn’t believe him and lowers him to sit on the mattress in the corner.

“Are you certain I can trust you and your team?” Iopel asks after a moment, rooting around in a blue box in the corner that Lance hadn’t spotted before.

“Absolutely,” Lance says, certain in his answer. His team will get them out. They’ll save everyone they can.

Iopel turns around, holding a mostly empty pack of tablets. “Painkillers,” He tells Lance, “The strongest we’ve got. Take two of these and sleep for a few hours. I’ll keep watch. We can find your friends after.”

Lance wants to argue against it, but his head is spinning dangerously, and he feels seconds away from throwing up. He is in no condition to fight right now, and definitely not against whatever enemy Iopel is talking about. He still doesn't know if he can trust the alien, but this is a risk he’s going to have to take if he wants to get anywhere. He pulls his helmet off and swallows the tablets dry.

Within seconds, he’s fast asleep.

When Lance wakes up, he is alone. His armour is intact, and his bayard appears when he summons it, so he hasn’t been robbed at least, but he is still alone.

He starts to doubt if Iopel was even real, but faint footsteps approach him, and before Lance has the self-awareness to be scared, Iopel is standing in front of him.

“Eat this,” He instructs, holding out an orange bar. “It should help your body heal faster.”

Lance chews the bar slowly. It’s got a strange taste, somewhere between eating a gummy vitamin and chewing a paracetamol tablet, but he eats it anyway. If Iopel is right and this can heal him, he’ll take all the help he can get.

“We’ll start the journey to find your friends as soon as you’ve eaten.”

Lance chews slightly faster, eager to be on the move again and feeling a lot better after having some sleep. He misses his team, and the radio silence is doing little to quell the rising anxiety inside him.

If there really is a killer on board this station, how does he know it hasn’t got the other paladins yet? The last he’d heard from them, they’d been fighting something. Lance remembers the bodies he’s seen and realises there is a very real chance he could find his teammates like that.

Yeah, the sooner they get moving, the better.

When the last of the orange bar has disappeared down his throat, Lance stands. He places his helmet over his head and begins the journey towards the Marshals' headquarters.

As a last-ditch attempt, he turns his comms on again.

“Hello, are you guys there?”

Silence.

He turns them off again with a sigh and follows Iopel into the vents again.

“What do you know about what is going on here?” Lance whispers to Iopel a few moments into their journey.

“We picked up a stranded ship a few quintants ago. All power was out; the only thing left alive on the ship was some form of organism that nobody could identify. The scientists here took it in for testing. A few hours later, we went into lockdown. Nobody knew anything until people started dying. Bodies just disappearing into the vents-”

“Wait -” Lance interrupts, “Like these vents?”

“Yes,” Iopel continues, “Nobody has managed to even catch a glimpse of whatever is killing people, but everyone has their theories. Some think it's some kind of Galra attack, others think it's the government trying to take us out, others think they dug up something they shouldn’t have from that rescued ship, and now they’re trying to silence us.”

“But you don’t believe them?” Lance knows the answer before he even asks the question.

“The ship they picked up, the Torrens, was known for some, ahem, illicit, dealings. I think they bit off more than they could chew and we’re suffering the consequences.” Iopel shrugs.

“What kind of illicit dealings?” Lance asks, curiosity driving the question.

“They were scientists, but not the good kind. Used to experiment on people and were desperate for some kind of big scientific breakthrough. Kept talking about how they’d cracked the code and found this transmission from a big research ship that disappeared in an isolated system 50 deca-phoebs ago. The last transmission known before had been about some unknown creature they’d found, and the company wanted them to bring it in for testing. Nobody had heard anything else from them until now.”

Lance frowns. It would make sense that corrupt research would be found light-years away from Earth. Capitalist greed follows them across the universe, it seems. “You seem to know an awful lot about this. Thanks for telling me.”

“Well, yeah,” Iopel turns to face him with his expression unreadable, “I should know. My family were on the ship when it disappeared 50 deca-phoebs ago.”

“Oh,” Lance freezes, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Iopel shrugs him off and turns away again, continuing their crawl through the tunnels. “It’s okay. I’ve had the time to make peace with their choices.”

“Did you ever try looking for them?” Lance asks.

“How do you think I ended up here?” Iopel says, and Lance nods. He can tell Iopel is eager for the conversation to end, but he still has more questions to ask.

“What do you think the creature is?” He asks.

“I don’t know. All I know is the only people who have seen it are now dead. It’s a powerful hunter; our weapons don’t even touch it. It’s smart and sneaky, and we’re all in danger.”

Great. Just what they need. An all-powerful alien is hunting them down. Perfect. Lance loves his life so much.

He thinks of his family all those light-years away. Would they even find out if he ended up losing this battle? Do they already think he is dead?

“What’s happened with the androids, too? Before my comms went down, my team managed to say that they’d gone crazy and started attacking?”

Iopel turns with a frown. “Are you sure that’s what they said?”

“Yeah,” Lance blinks, “Why would I lie?”

“That’s bad. That’s really, really bad.”

Oh.

Okay.

Great.

Everything is fine.

“Why?” Lance asks, they’ve reached a small room at the other side of the vent, and he stands up to stretch his back out. The pain has already faded a bunch, and he thanks Iopel internally for the medicine and food.

“It means the Marshals have turned on us. They’re the only ones who can program the droids. We’re on our own now.” Iopel sighs deeply. “Are you sure you still want to head up there?”

“My team is there,” Lance finds his voice rising more than he intended, “I have to find them.”

“Shush. Okay. We’ll go on your suicide mission. I’ll trust you can get us out of here.” Iopel raises his hands in a shrug and smiles slightly. Lance apologises for raising his voice, and they continue walking. They’re in another long corridor now, but this one is lit by a long stretch of lights on the floor.

It’s a nice change, not being in almost complete darkness for once. Lance finds himself relaxing slightly as he walks – anxiety eased by the ability to see more than a few feet in front of him. The station itself is a lot less scary than he had thought before, now that he can see clearly. Even the creaking of the walls around him doesn’t seem to bother him.

The sound of voices ahead does, though.

Iopel shushes him and drags him down into a crouch underneath a large window into an office. Lance catches a glimpse of a few people standing and talking. After pressing a few buttons to the left of the window, Iopel opens a vent Lance hadn’t seen before and climbs through. The vent leads through into the walls of the office, and a grate allows them to peer through at the people stood talking. There are around five of them, all aliens similar to Iopel and carrying large guns. They’re close enough now for the translator to work on their conversation.

“Something is going down.”

“There’s always something going down. What’s different now?”

“Yeah, what’s the emergency you called us here for?”

“Someone else has been here. Stay alert, keep your guns tight. Shoot anything that moves.” The leader speaks, a gruff-looking alien with a long braid of grey hair trailing down his back.

“They’re heavily armed,” Iopel says, “There are too many of them to take on.”

“Take on?” Lance whispers back, “What do you mean take on?”

“We need to get through there. Our door to the Marshal’s headquarters is on the other side of this office. We either take them out or cause a distraction.”

“Distraction, please,” Lance offers quietly, “I don’t fancy adding more enemies to the list of things trying to kill us.”

“Very well,” Iopel nods at him, “Figure out a distraction then. Remember, we can’t stay here too long. We have to keep moving.”

Or what? Lance wants to ask, but holds his tongue.

He takes out the flare he had pocketed earlier. “How long do we need to get to that door?”

“Five seconds?” Iopel offers.

“Okay,” Lance breathes deeply, “That’ll do.”

He turns around, crawling back down until the vent opens into the corridor. He lights the flare and throws it up before spinning around and locking the vent from the inside. A bright flash of red comes through the cracks, but he’s already crawling back towards Iopel.

The distraction works; spooked by the flash of red, the aliens run out of the room with their guns held up. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for long, and they spot them just before they can open the door they need. The first bullets recoil off the window they’d crouched beside earlier, but the third shatters the glass. Iopel pushes the button, and they slide under the door before more shots can reach them, and the door slams behind them.

A scream reaches them through the door. A thud of heavy footsteps. The horrifying squelch of something tearing through a body. There’s more shouting, more screaming. And then everything is silent. Lance and Iopel remain frozen, scared to even move. Heavy footsteps walk over to the other side of the door. A moment of silence stretches forever as they hear some kind of throaty growl from the other side.

Thankfully, the door remains closed tightly, and the footsteps recede.

“That was close,” Iopel whispers, face white like he’s seen a ghost. Lance imagines he doesn’t look any better. “We need to keep going.”

They move silently through the ship, Lance’s ears hyper-focused on every small noise that reaches them. There’s no more talking after that, only the careful footsteps as they traverse the ship – eager to put distance between them and whatever had happened behind that closed door.

Lance’s heart is beating so horrifically loud in his chest, he almost misses the creaking of the corridor ahead. Instead, he grabs Iopel’s jacket, pulling him back and around the corner they’d just turned.

A door slides open further down. Footsteps retreat away. Lance isn’t eager to find out who (or what) was walking down there, and they remain stationary for a few more moments, until the footsteps have gone completely.

Which is why, when they eventually turn around the corner, Lance is surprised to see a gun pointing at them.

It’s a man, clearly frightened, but his eyes are deadly calm, and his hand doesn’t shake on the gun. Whatever he is scared of, isn’t them. Lance realises he is the same now. He’s seen what can happen to you on this ship; being shot doesn’t sound too bad in comparison.

Iopel, in a moment of either bravery or insanity, lunges forward, pushing the alien’s arm holding the gun upwards as he pulls the trigger. A silenced shot fires through the ceiling, and the two of them struggle for control. Lance looks around for something, anything to help.

His bayard appears in his hands, and Lance levels it. Takes a deep breath. He pulls the trigger without thinking twice.

A single shot fires straight through the shoulder of the alien who attacked them. He drops his gun in surprise, and Iopel lunges for it. Before Lance can tell him not to, Iopel pulls the trigger.

The alien collapses to the floor, expressionless eyes staring vacantly as a single river of blood slides down his face. Lance feels sick.

“Come on,” Iopel grabs his hand and they take off running, “We have to get away from here.”

Lance doesn’t do much other than focus on the repetitive sounds his feet make on the metal floor. Breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth. He’s briefly aware of Iopel slowing him down and pulling them both into another vent, but he doesn’t really register it happening. It’s like he’s watching his own life play out in front of him.

“I did what had to be done,” Iopel protests, also distressed by the turn of events, “I didn’t have a choice.”

“You always have a choice,” Lance mutters angrily, eyes focused on the wall as he catches his breath.

“I panicked, okay? I thought he was going to kill us, and I panicked. Is that what you want to hear?” Iopel is raising his voice, clarity comes back to Lance with a sickening lurch as he realises he needs to calm Iopel down now.

“It’s okay,” Lance lies, “We just need to keep going. My team – they’ll know what to do. They’ll get us out of here.”

Iopel takes a deep breath, and Lance registers how much he’s shaking. The wide eyes, 

“You’ve never shot anyone before, have you?” Lance asks.

“No, I – uh, never,” Iopel answers after a moment.

“I’ve never shot anyone up close before. I’m a sniper, usually. I don’t get to see the aftermath. It’s a lot different up close.”

Iopel shuffles closer to Lance and wraps him in a hug. Lance finds himself enjoying the comfort; his earlier anger at Iopel’s choices is gone. The alien had done what needed to be done, regardless of whether Lance could accept that or not. At the moment, everyone they meet is a threat. The fewer enemies they have on here, the better.

“I knew him,” Iopel confesses after a moment, “Not well; he worked in the medical wing here. I used to have to see him every month when I’d refill my sister’s prescription.”

“I didn’t know you have a sister?” Lance finds himself saying before he can really think about it. It makes sense that Iopel would know a lot of people around them. He wonders how many bodies Iopel has recognised. He wonders what that does to a person. Lance holds him tighter in the hug.

“Had.” Iopel answers as he pulls back from the hug, eyes filled with an emotion Lance can’t quite decipher. Grief, probably.

“I’m sorry,” Lance says honestly.

“It’s okay. She passed before all of this happened. She never knew the horrors behind Sevastopol, and I’m grateful for that at the moment.”

Lance doesn’t push him for any more conversation; instead, he pulls himself to his feet and extends a hand to Iopel. For better or worse, they’re stuck together now. Lance finds himself grateful then for the company of another person; Iopel’s actions are forgiven entirely as the gravity of the situation they are in overwhelms his own emotions.

“Let's keep going,” Lance says, and Iopel follows him.

They’ve been chatting quietly for a while (they're much more similar than Lance had thought initially) when Lance spots the end of the corridor ahead of them. He shushes Iopel and pulls him in close; they have to move cautiously here in case they run into more people. Or worse, but Lance doesn't want to think about that right now. Lance creeps down the corridor silently.

It opens up into a bigger room, a tall circular room filled on one side with storage boxes. The room is silent, too silent, and Lance gets the terrible feeling that something is very wrong. The room is empty, though, and Iopel steps ahead of Lance, pointing out another vent in the far corner that is the next part of their journey.

If he hadn’t been a sharpshooter, Lance might have missed it. Instead, his eyes catch as something minuscule drops from above, landing on the sleeve of Iopel’s jacket. Before he can say anything, something else drops too, landing in the same place on Iopel’s sleeve.

Iopel notices it that time and reaches a hand up to touch whatever has landed on him. The substance is thick and a strange off-white colour, almost like mucus.

“What the –- have I got on me?” Iopel asks, rubbing his fingers together as if the friction will tell him what the substance is.

Something moves above them, a rattle of metal and a bang against the wall.

“Did you hear that?” Iopel asks quietly, eyes wide, looking up into the darkness. Lance wishes then that they’d taken this room even slower. The darkness above them seems endless, and Lance realises with a sinking feeling that he has no idea what could be lurking there.

Something else drips down, landing on Iopel’s shoulder this time.

“Iopel,” Lance whispers, unable to do anything else.

Iopel glances up to meet Lance’s eyes; his eyes are wide and fearful. His hands shake as he lowers them to his side. They both know what is going to happen next, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Lance feels nausea rise inside him, and the urge to run intensifies as his instincts scream at him. His heart beats so forcefully inside his chest that he is convinced Iopel must be able to hear it.

There’s a moment of silence where Lance is too afraid to even breathe, as if he stays still for long enough, he can delay the inevitable.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. A single black spike pushes its way through Iopel’s chest with a sickening crack, and blood splatters forward, spraying Lance, who is powerless to do anything except stand there and watch. His bayard manifests in his hand, and he levels it towards whatever just stabbed his friend.

Iopel groans in agony, eyes blinking away tears as he coughs out blood. Lance watches it dribble from the corner of his mouth as his friend twitches with the pain.

“Run.” He tells Lance.

Lance aims his gun; he can do this, he can fight for his friend. He can still save him. The castle has the cryopods. Iopel will be okay if he can get him there in time.

But then, as quickly as it started, the black spike retracts, taking Iopel with it. His friend’s body is dragged up and through a vent above them, spraying Lance with more blood as it goes.

There’s a second where the only sound is the drops of blood landing on the floor, then the vent creaks again as the creature growls, and another sickening crack is heard. Lance, broken from his horrified trance, scrambles towards the vent Iopel had pointed out only a few moments ago. It slides open with a soft hiss, and Lance crawls as quickly and as quietly as he can.

It’s at least an hour before he reaches the end of the vent. It’s another observation deck; he can see the other towers of Sevastopol from here, which means it must be facing the opposite way to the one he was in earlier. The room is empty, save for some graffiti on the walls he doesn’t want to translate.

He pulls his helmet off with a gasp and realises he is hyperventilating. Iopel’s eyes flash in his brain every time he closes his own eyes, a sick memory of the last few seconds of his friend’s life. Lance gags and throws up into a trash can as the panic attack hits its worst. The room feels suffocating, and he fights for breath as his chest seems to close in on itself.

He remembers the quiet conversations he had had with Iopel - talk about their home planets and their families. About their favourite food and the things they were going to do when they got out of here. About hopes for the future and the dreams Iopel had, which were never going to happen. Lance pushes a shaking hand against his chest and tries to calm his breathing as the strongest of his emotions hits him like a freight train. It's not fair, he wants to scream, he didn't deserve that.

He flicks his comms on, desperate to hear the voices of his team. Nothing, only the same silence he’s been hearing for hours now. He resists the urge to throw up again and throws his helmet off to the side instead. It clatters against the wall with a thud. Lance realises he should care about making noise, but he just can’t bring himself to focus on anything other than the realisation, which has frozen his insides with anxiety.

Lance is completely and utterly alone.

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.” - Stephen King

Chapter Text

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." – H.P. Lovecraft

It takes a while for Lance to calm himself down enough to think about moving again. The reality of being alone in this station, with nobody but his thoughts for company has caught up to him and the fear has left him paralysed. His brain can’t stop replaying Iopel’s final moments in a grim clarity he wishes he could forget. The noise the spike made as it stabbed through him, the deadly precision the attacker had. The way it hadn’t gone after Lance, instead choosing to take away the only company he had throughout this nightmare.

He’s still covered in Iopel’s blood. A thick red substance, leaving a metallic smell permeating his nostrils in a nauseating way. Lance has never felt so hopeless. He has no way of knowing if his team are still alive – for all he knows, they’ve met similar gruesome fates, or the androids took them out, or maybe they lost a battle against some scared survivors.

He’s completely alone. For the first time since coming into space, he can’t trust that there’s anyone out there to save him.

Even before, when they’d been separated, Lance knew his team would be okay. The paladin bond meant he could feel their energies distantly, even without talking to them, he could know if they were okay or not.

Now? The feel of their quintessence is fainter than it ever has been. Lance doesn’t know what that means, and he isn’t sure he wants to. He has to imagine they’re out there still, fighting their way up to the meeting point. If he loses hope in his team, what does he have left?

Lance stands, body stiff from sitting for so long. His back has started hurting again, and he suspects he may need a pod when they return to the castle. If they return, not when, a small voice in his head reminds him, and he swallows it down.

Aside from the vent he had crawled out of, there’s only one way left for him to go. The double doors slide open as Lance approaches, revealing another long, dark corridor.

Lance makes a mental note to ensure the lights in the castle ship never go dim again when they’re all back safely. He never wants to walk another dark corridor again. The corridor leads him towards another large open room with a balcony above, much like the one he’d first met Iopel in. Lance swallows against the memory and wishes he could forget to focus on what needs to be done.

There’s an elevator at the top end of the room, with several bodies scattered around in front of it. Lance doesn’t focus on them too much anymore, emotionally drained from seeing so many already. As much as it sucks, he’s becoming numb to the suffering of the people around him. Hardened by only a few hours in this station. Grimly, he understands now why so many survivors are turning on each other. If Lance had been living in this situation for days with no escape, he might start turning on people too.

There are a few items scattered near the bodies: a keycard for the medical facility, a lighter, and another flare. Items that were grabbed in a desperate fight for survival. These people were already dead; they won’t miss them anymore. Lance pockets the items, flicking the lighter once to check it works before adding it beside the flare.

There’s another computer in the corner of the room, and he silently walks over to it, hoping for some useful information. Thankfully, it seems to be able to point him in the right direction. A map appears first; he’s in a visitors' lounge, with the elevator leading up to the docking bays. The doors he hadn’t even noticed yet, at the far end of the room from the elevator, lead towards the medical facility, but if he turns off halfway down, he should be able to make his way through comms to the Marshal’s headquarters. He taps some buttons on his armour and uploads the map data to his helmet.

With a solid plan in mind, Lance feels slightly more comforted. Being entirely alone and lost had taken a much bigger mental toll than he had realised.

There’s another communication log on the computer too. He hesitates for a second before reading it.

It is dated from just two days ago, one day after everything apparently went down.

Staff Code: 567898

Name: Marshal R’Yori

Message: Got the results on that autopsy for the first Torrens body. Come meet me at headquarters, and we can discuss it there. Need your discretion. Don’t tell anyone what we’ve done here. Keep it low profile, no use scaring people more than we need to. The last thing we need here is a total panic.

Lance feels like screaming all of a sudden. Something had gone on here – between whatever the ship had dug up and the management keeping everything hushed up. Lance wants to get to the bottom of this mystery. He gets a feeling he won’t like what is found, and neither will the rest of his team if they knew.

It turns out, the Galra aren’t the only corrupt forces in the universe.

Backing away from the computer, Lance finds himself reaching for his bayard. The comfort of something to hold, and a weapon in case anything attacks, seems to ground him in reality and makes it easier to focus on navigating through the next dark corridor.

Okay, he repeats internally, follow this corridor. Turn off halfway to reach comms. Take the elevator up from there to headquarters. Easy.

He should know, really, that things are never that easy. He makes it halfway to his turn-off point before he hears footsteps again.

He ducks behind an abandoned storage pallet and peers around at what is walking towards him. It’s an android. Identical to the one he’d seen earlier, but with eyes glowing red now instead of white. Great. Lance loves it when his enemies have helpful little details to show he can’t trust them.

He aims and shoots. The android drops down and crackles with electricity.

Lance pauses for another second, listening carefully for signs of any more movement. Nothing but the crackling electricity from the downed android. He makes his way out from his hiding spot and continues down the corridor.

Or tries to at least, as he steps past the android, an unsteady hand reaches out and wraps around his ankle with bruising force. He trips, the floor coming up to meet his face faster than expected as the android yanks his ankle harshly. That same hand reaches up his thigh now, still with that same tight grip. Lance fumbles as the other hand comes to grab his right arm and bend it harshly around.

Lance doesn’t think, just operates on instinct. His bayard moves with him, shifting from his usual gun to the Altean broadsword he had recently unlocked. Despite his clumsy angle, he swings the sword down.

It lands halfway through the android’s neck. Discontenting some cables as it sliced through, and weakening its grip on his body. Lance uses it to scramble away before swinging the sword down again. The head comes clean off this time, and white goo spurts out. The head rolls off and lands against the wall, and the corridor is still, save for the white goo dripping from the android’s body.

He makes it to comms with no further issue. Comms, however, is crawling with androids. He could have predicted this if he’d thought rationally about how the Marshals would want to protect their communication, but instead it comes as a surprise to him to see them, and he ducks behind the door before they can spot him.

This is bad, he thinks, like, really bad.

A quick glance up tells him there’s at least seven. The one in the corridor hadn’t been too difficult to dispatch, but he could still feel the echoing sting from its grip on his ankle. He’d hate to imagine if it had grabbed his throat instead. Seven feels like too many to take out at once, but he doesn’t have a choice if he wants to reunite with his team.

Idly, he wonders if this is the way Iopel would have brought him. Or, did the alien know some secret way around that would be safer. Lance finds himself fighting back tears at the unfairness of the situation, at the loss of his friend, and allows himself a moment to calm down.

When he feels like he can function again, Lance gets ready to fight. His game plan is to shoot as many of them as he can before drawing the broadsword to finish the rest off. It had taken a combination of both to render the other android incapable of attacking, and he decides it’s best to treat these ones the same. He shifts from his crouched position, angling his weapon around the corner of the door.

He scopes the scene. Picks out his targets in order. The one at the base of the steps first, as it is the closest, the one at the computer, the one walking away, then the rest scattered around the room were far enough away he could pick them off when they got to him.

Lance takes a deep breath. Three. Two. One.

He pulls the trigger.

The first android goes down, thumping down the rest of the steps. The only ones to move were the other two closest ones. He aims again and shoots, taking out a second.

Then a third.

Then a fourth.

Then, the first one, the body at the bottom of the stairs, begins to rise on unsteady legs. Its eyes are glowing red as they lock onto Lance.

Fuck.

Lance hadn’t thought about them getting up again.

He shoots until his fingers ache from pulling the trigger. All of the androids have taken multiple shots now, and all it seems to be doing is pissing them off and electrifying them. With a resigned sigh, he resorts to his broadsword.

He’s not skilled with this weapon, not like Keith or Allura are, but it’s still his best shot at stopping them from getting up again. He steps into the room and swings.

Lance isn’t sure how long it takes until the androids stop coming, but he ends up more beaten up than he would have liked to be. His head is aching again after one had swung him into the wall, and his wrist feels bruised after one had grabbed it and pulled. His back is sore from taking a hard hit from a third. Overall, he feels rough.

Probably looks it too, looking down at himself. He’s still painted with red blood, only now it has mixed with the white goo the androids had spurted at the loss of their limbs. His armour is dented slightly on the arm, probably aligning with some finger-shaped bruises bubbling underneath. His undersuit has torn around the waist, showing the faintest sliver of brown skin and a nasty-looking cut underneath.

He regrets not picking up those bandages all that time ago.

Now the threat has gone, he’s able to look around the comms room properly. A large window grants him a view of the castleship in the distance, nothing more than a faint white spec, but he appreciates the sight of it. Blue is on there, and he can almost feel her quintessence again. He steps over the body of the android in front of the computer and starts tapping away.

He isn’t sure what he expects to find after using the handy upgrades Pidge had given his armour to hack into the system, but he’s relieved when he can access security camera footage. He flicks through different cameras until he finds the one he’s looking for.

The paladins are sitting in the Marshal’s headquarters. Bruised and beaten up, but alive. They look to be arguing about something. Lance fiddles with the settings some more until he finds what he’s looking for.

“- be going out to look for him, we can’t just sit around.” Pidge says, it is full of static and barely comprehensible, but it’s definitely her voice.

“You don’t know what’s going on out there. Your friend is probably dead; he won’t be coming back. And if you go out to look for him, you’ll be dead too.” Lance doesn’t recognise this voice, but based on the authority connected to it, he assumes it is one of the marshals.

“Don’t talk about Lance like that. He’s not dead.” Pidge lunges forward at that, towards the guy sitting just off camera. Shiro grabs her by the arm, and she turns around to glare at him.

“Pidge, we have to be patient. We don’t know what the situation is out there, and we -”

“Yeah, cause that asshole won’t tell us anything!” She shouts back. Twisting out of Shiro’s grip to sit back down, her arms crossed. If Lance didn’t know better, he’d think she was crying now.

“She’s right, Shiro,” Hunk says, “We can’t just sit around here forever. Anything could be happening right now. I hate not knowing.”

“Not knowing is the worst bit, but Lance is tougher than he looks. He’ll be okay.” Keith reassures the others. Lance balks at that. Keith? Paying him a compliment? Wow, things must be dire. Lance makes a mental note to tease him about it later.

He finishes fiddling with the settings and leans forward towards the mic he’d pulled out from underneath the computer. “Can you guys hear this?”

The effect is instantaneous. All five paladins shoot upwards in their seats, looking around the room hopefully.

“Lance?” Hunk says.

“What the fuck?” Pidge says, “Is he in the walls?”

“Close, but no. I’m in comms. Hacked into the CCTV so I could get a better idea of what is going on.”

“Lance,” Shiro says, “Are you alright?”

“Uh, been better, I can’t lie. But nothing I can’t walk off.” Lance says, and watches them all breathe a sigh of relief. It’s good to know they had been just as worried about him as he had been about them. “I’m going to make my way up to you guys soon – I should be able to take the lift up to the right floor, but I’m not sure where to go from there.”

“The lift is out of commission. Has been since the day we went into lockdown,” The authoritarian voice from earlier chimes in, “I’m Marshal R’Yori by the way.”

Lance blinks. That name is familiar. Where had he heard it again?

Oh. The communication log he had read. The one about the body and needing discretion. The fact that this guy didn’t seem to have told his team anything left him with a very bad feeling.

“How can he get around if the lift is broken?” Keith asks, and Lance is thankful he doesn’t have to ask himself. Something about the Marshal is creeping him out in a way he can’t explain.

“He’ll need to climb up, either using the elevator shaft or the emergency exit ladder. Both will take him right where he needs to be.” The Marshal replies. Lance finds himself hating this guy more and more every time he speaks.

“Okay, I can do that,” As if on cue, Lance’s back twinges painfully, “Or I can try to at least.”

“Good. Be careful out there, Lance. Whatever is happening here is bad.” Lance wants to thank Shiro for his concern, but finds anger rising inside him instead – not towards his team, towards everyone who’s put them in this situation. To the Marshals and the management who’d rescued the Torrens. To the researchers so desperate for some money that they’d condemned a space station full of people to a fate worse than death.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Lance replies, the anger in his voice evident, “Tell Marshal R’Yori I have some questions for him regarding the Torrens.”

The Marshal steps into frame after that. The other paladins look on in surprise at hearing their usually cheery blue paladin sound angrier than they have ever heard him. “What do you know about the Torrens?” The Marshal questions.

“I know that when you picked the ship up, there was something on there that you shouldn’t have brought here. That you failed to contain, all in the name of greed, because you thought you could make some money from it. I know you programmed the androids to attack the people who lived here to protect yourselves – to keep people quiet. I know you’ve got in over your head with something you don’t even understand and are refusing to do anything to help the people left, other than sacrifice them to this monster.” Lance is panting at the end of his rant, his voice having risen to the point where he was almost shouting.

Instead of fighting back, the Marshal looks guilty. “Have you seen it? The creature?”

“It killed my friend. I watched it tear his body apart like it was nothing. So, I need answers to what the fuck is going on here.” Lance says. He watches Hunk’s face drop and the rest of his team look at each other in shock.

The Marshal is silent. No anger or witty retort, but an expression on his face that Lance would call pity if he felt that was an emotion the Marshal was capable of.

“If you’ve been that close to the creature, it means you are in more danger than anyone else here. You need to keep going up to find us. I’ll start tracking heat signatures – if you’re in comms, I can locate you from there and lower the defences around the headquarters when you get close. You’ll have to be careful; if the creature gets in, it will kill us all.” The Marshal says after a minute, voice calm and serious, and Lance freezes up internally – anger forgotten completely while he had more pressing concerns.

Why does that mean he is in more danger than anyone else?

He voices his question.

“Because it can track you based on scent now. You need to keep going, don’t stay in one place for too long.”

Oh, brilliant. Exactly what Lance needs. As if prompted by the Marshal’s words, the ship creeks again around him. An ominous bang echoes down the corridor he’d just come from.

“I’ve locked onto your heat signature. We’ll track your movements starting now.” The Marshal says.

“Is that one Lance?” Hunk asks, now pointing at something on the table in front of them all.

“Yes.” The Marshal replies.

“Okay,” Hunk swallows nervously – loud enough to be audible through the CCTV and pointing at something just to the right of Lance, “Then what’s that?”

The Marshal swears. “Trouble. Lance, you need to get moving now. Something big is heading your way quickly.”

Lance swallows. There’s noise now in the vents above him, noise too repetitive to be the station creaking and too loud to be another human.

“On it.” He offers weakly and disconnects the live feed. The paladins flicker off the screen, and he’s left alone once more.

The movement is closer now, just above him. He remembers what the Marshal said about the creature tracking him by scent, and fear fills his whole body. The elevator shaft is the closest bet, but it is too open across the room. He would never make it in time before the creature got in there. The emergency ladder is more covered, but further away. He could hide around the room until it was safe to move.

But that assumes the creature couldn’t track him to his exact spot by scent alone. In a last-ditch attempt to hide, Lance vaults over the first desk between him and the emergency ladder and tucks himself underneath it.

The vent above where he had just been stood hisses open. There’s a moment of silence where Lance’s heart beats so loudly he thinks it is going to give his position away. Then he hears it, a low alien growl, unlike anything he has ever heard before. A raw, primal sound that every part of his body registers as wrong. Something heavy slithers out of the vent and lands on the desk he’d just been standing behind a few seconds before.

Something scrapes against the computer screen he had just seen his friends on, and Lance hears the material tear and warp under the pressure as the creature digs a long black claw into it. He glances to the side, risking peaking out from under the wires, and regrets it instantly.

He didn’t know what he had expected, but the creature is worse than anything he could have imagined. It’s a deep black, less like a skin tone and more like the true black of space, where it isn’t a colour, but simply the absence of light. A large, elongated, round head lifts up, and Lance watches the spines running down its back shift as it moves. Its mouth opens, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth. A long tail extends behind it, curling down onto the floor and tipped with a pointed end like a blade that curves up. That must have been what stabbed through Iopel’s chest – that must have been how the creature could drag him away so easily.

It’s huge too, standing well over nine feet tall, on two powerful legs. Both of its arms end in three long, sharp claws.

Basically, Lance thinks, every part of this creature could kill him.

He watches as the alien inspects the area he had once stood in; he doesn’t see any evidence of nostrils, but that doesn’t mean it can’t smell him. The mouth opens again, and the creature makes a weird croaking noise as it turns around in his direction. Lance weighs his options carefully.

He doesn’t want to end up in a firefight against this creature; he gets a feeling the thick black armour-like skin isn’t just for show. So, a distraction is his best bet. What equipment does he have? A lighter, a keycard, and a flare? Plus his bayard?

The flare is probably the best bet, but there is no guarantee it would work. It might even lead the creature straight to him if his throw is off.

Lance waits for a second, shuffles as silently as possible until he is mostly out from under the desk. The alien has turned, facing the window outside now. Lance spots his opportunity, and lights the flare, throwing it as hard as he can down the corridor he had come from before ducking back down behind the desk, holding his breath while he waits to see if it worked.

The creature ignores it until the flare hits the edge of the door and bounces out of sight. Red sparks flicker out from the darkness, and the creature snarls before running after it.

Lance waits. One. Two.

He moves silently, hiding behind the next desk, and the one after that. It’s a clear stretch now until he reaches the emergency exit ladder.

He’s just about to make the leap when the creature screams. It’s a primal noise, something that fills him with terror in ways he cannot explain. Heavy footsteps thunder across the floor, and Lance ducks under the desk. His arm clinks against a bottle, pushing it into the edge of the desk, and it tips over, clanking against the metal ground loudly. The creature turns around past the furthest desk in this row to face him.

Lance freezes. Time stops.

The creature snarls in victory. Lance’s eyes lock onto its teeth, and the spittle flying out as it growls at him.

Lance manifests his bayard and runs. He fires off two shots, the first misses, but the second is right on target. The shot hits the creature right in the middle of its armoured head and bounces away, smashing through a computer in a flash of blue sparks. It snarls at him, arms extending to the side as it regards him like prey. Lance levels his gun again and fires twice more.

The creature charges at him, bouncing off the desk and jumping an impossible distance to get to him. Lance acts on instinct and runs towards it, shifting his bayard into the sword and slicing upwards. Its claws scratch his armour as he slides underneath it, catching on his helmet and tearing it off. His head stings, and he feels fresh blood drip down the side of his face.

The alien quivers where he had sliced it. The wound isn’t deep, but it drips something green onto the metal floor, which promptly fizzles and disintegrates, leaving a small hole in the floor.

Oh, lovely, the creature that is trying to kill him has acid for blood. Absolutely perfect.

A strip of his undersuit has torn off on his shoulder, revealing a thick red cut underneath, oozing blood into the rest of his suit. Lance grabs the torn strip and pulls; it detaches easily, and he flicks the lighter to the end of it.

Fire, his brain supplies, everything is scared of something. Why not fire?

Lance twists, the end of the undersuit catches fire, and he kicks the bottle that had gotten him into this mess into the air. It shatters on impact, coating the creature in alcohol before it can think about attacking him again.

It watches him curiously, like he is a show built for its entertainment. Lance can imagine it laughing at his futile attempts to beat it; he gets the feeling this is a creature that has never lost a fight before, and that terrifies him more than he can say. It’s emotionless head watching him like this is almost worse than it attacking him. What is it waiting for? What does it want from him? Is there any point fighting at all?

The answer is revealed when Lance stumbles as his leg comes down from the kick, and the creature lunges towards him with deadly precision.

The strip of cloth is now fully on fire, and Lance throws it forward before the creature can hit him, throwing himself backwards while he does it.

The strip lands on the ground, and Lance waits for a few long, painful seconds while the creature stares down at him from above. It is savouring its victory before going in for the kill. Lance braces himself and closes his eyes.

This is it, he thinks, this is how I die.

He pictures his mother, her warm, comforting hugs, and the way she always knew just what to say to make him feel better. His siblings and the summers Lance spent playing with them. His father and the patience the older man had shown him when he struggled so hard to learn English, when he had first shown interest. The crystal clear waters and beautiful white sandy beaches, he knew and loved so much.

He thinks of his friends, just a few floors above him. Hunk, the bestest friend he had ever known. The bestest friend anyone could have. His hugs and his ability to always make Lance laugh. Pidge, the closest thing he had in space to a younger sibling. Her tech-savvy ways and science-oriented brain making her the smartest person he had ever known. Keith, his once-enemy-turned-rival-turned-friend. His training buddy when he needed to work off some steam, and someone he knew he could always rely on to have his back. Shiro – his hero. How incredible it was to find him that day at the Garrison, and how incredible it has been to get to know him as a friend.

Allura and her beauty, with a wisdom and suffering within her that the rest of them couldn’t even dream of. Coran and his eccentric stories and willingness to just sit with Lance when he was homesick and fill his mind with tales of times long since past and a planet that hasn't existed for ten thousand years.

The sadness takes over the fear when he realises he’s never going to be able to tell his friends how much they mean to him. Suddenly, death isn’t scary – it’s cruel and unfair. How inhumane to show him what a life worth living really means, and snatch it away again without a second thought.

Instead of sharp claws tearing his insides out, the creature's tail catches fire. The flames spread quickly, until everywhere the alcohol touched is lit up. It screams angrily, spitting thick saliva at him as it retreats back and disappears up the same vent it had come down from, leaving another thick gash on his ankle as a goodbye present.

Lance picks up his helmet, lying just outside of the growing flames the creature had left behind, and runs.

The climb up the emergency ladder is slower than Lance would like it to be. The exhaustion of the day is catching up to him quickly as the adrenaline has worn off, and his arms and legs are shaking with the exertion. There’s a steady trail of blood dripping down from his leg into the empty space below him. He must have climbed up at least five levels before the next exit, and the creaking of the ship around him is filling him with fear.

He hasn’t killed the creature; he knows that much. Probably hasn’t even wounded it. Now he’s got a pissed off super hunter tracking him through a long climb where he is incredibly vulnerable. Every vent he passes is somewhere new the creature could be lying in wait, every noise the ship makes could be the creature announcing its arrival, every jolt the ladder makes could be it joining him in the climb.

If he gets cornered here, he is toast. He’s out of supplies, his bayard does nothing except annoy it, and he’s so tired he couldn’t even attempt to fight it right now anyway.

He pries the exit open with the tip of his broadsword and climbs through, glad to be leaving the ladder behind. He braces himself on unstable legs and glances around the room he has climbed into.

The world outside the ladder isn’t much better, it would seem. The room he finds himself in is trashed, papers scattered everywhere, and graffiti lining all the walls. There are bodies everywhere, including those of some androids someone must have taken out. He steps around them carefully, all too aware of how difficult those things are to stop. There’s a reception area, where what once would have been several comfortable waiting room seats in front of a desk is now scattered and broken apart into several big pieces strewn around the room. The computer is smashed, and there’s a body of someone sitting in the chair behind the desk. They’ve been dead for a while, judging by the discoloration of the skin.

There are several other items scattered around, along with more documents than he even thought possible and more bodies than he ever wanted to see. Whatever had gone down here was bad, and Lance is eager to get himself away.

There are signs now, pointing him in the right direction, and he creeps forward slowly and quietly to avoid drawing the creature back to himself. The door is right in front of him, made of thick metal and covered in even more graffiti that he gets the feeling is not too friendly towards the Marshals themselves, or what is left of them, judging from the bodies in uniform lying around.

As he approaches, the metal doors unlock and creak open. He spots his team, standing there a hundred meters away, waiting with relieved smiles on their faces, and he runs.

He hears a vent slide open distantly behind him, and the heavy footsteps he had hoped so hard not to hear again run after him.

I can make it, Lance thinks, it’s okay.

The doors start closing before he’s even halfway there.

He runs, faster than he has ever ran before. Legs pounding on the steel underneath as he forces his body to move faster than he ever thought possible. He can hear the creature catching up; in a few seconds, it will be on top of him.

The doors are over halfway closed, and the gap left for him is getting smaller and smaller.

He can’t not make it. Not making it means certain death. Not making it means all of this was for nothing. It means Iopel died for nothing.

He has to make it. There isn’t another choice.

He pushes himself, and just as the gap is starting to get impossibly narrow, he throws himself through it as the metal slams behind him. Something large pounds on the metal behind him, but it doesn’t shift even an inch.

“Lance, fuck, are you alright?” Someone asks him, a voice he should remember, but he can’t hear anything past the pounding in his skull and the frantic beating of his heart. His hands shake while he gasps for air. Someone touches his shoulder where it was cut, and he flinches away before he can stop himself. The world spins alarmingly, and every part of him feels like it is on fire.

He’s still gasping for air, but he glances around at his team. They’re watching him worriedly, and he realises again that he must look a mess. Still covered in blood that isn’t his, with various cuts and scrapes added to it now. There’s a red smudge on the floor already, and he’s losing a lot of blood from his ankle.

“I’m just peachy,” Lance says, giving an exaggerated thumbs up as the energy drains from his body in one swift motion.

His legs crumble from underneath him, and the world goes black.

Waking up is not a fun experience. The first sensation he becomes aware of is just how sore his body is, deep muscle aches that seem to penetrate all the way through to his bones. His arm burns, and his head is throbbing. His ankle burns with a vengeance – probably revenge for running so fast on it. He must shift slightly on whatever he is lying on, because his back decides to join in the fun and twinge painfully.

The next thing he notices is that his whole body feels heavy – not tired, not even injured, heavy. Like there has been a 50kg weight placed over every single part of him.

By the time he becomes aware enough to recognise he’s lying on a bed, there is a voice talking to him.

“Lance, how are you feeling?” It’s the Marshal from before. The guy he had only seen briefly on the CCTV, and not at all since. His memory of how he ended up lying down here is a little fuzzy. He vaguely remembers Hunk carrying him and someone holding his hand. They might be connected, but he isn't sure.

He resigns himself to his fate and blinks his eyes open. The room is bright, far brighter than it should be, and his eyes burn before he can snap them shut again. Even through his eyelids, the light in the room burns and makes his eyes water. He must show some discomfort because the lights are dimmed a few seconds later, and he risks opening his eyes again. This time, his eyes can focus on what’s happening around him.

He’s lying on a hospital-style bed, with a thin blanket draped over him. The outer part of his armour has been removed, leaving only the black under suit, but even that has been peeled down, exposing his chest. There’s a thick wad of bandages wrapping around his injured arm, and something else pressed to his back. A thin black material wrapping around his abdomen, it’s then that he notices that it’s pressing into and out of his sore muscles randomly. His ankle is bandaged tightly, with only his toes left sticking out after someone had rolled his under suit up.

His back twinges again.

His wrist is bruised a deep purple where the android had grabbed it. If he focuses his eyes, he can almost see finger marks defined in the bruise. There’s some kind of cream on his skin when he touches it, and he wipes it off onto the blanket.

The room itself is small. Not much larger than his room back at the castleship. There’s a machine attached to his finger that beeps in time with what Lance assumes is his heart rate, and another attached to a needle in the crook of his elbow that appears to be giving him some kind of fluid. The only person in there is Marshal R’Yori. Lance’s eyes flash with anger, and he’s reaching to the side for his bayard before the Marshal can even blink.

“Where’s the rest of my team?” He snaps, fully aware of his weakened state and hoping the threat alone will be enough if it comes to it.

“Outside this room, sleeping,” R’Yori replies, holding his hands up in a surrender, “I sent them away because you needed treatment and they all needed rest.”

Lance blinks at him, uncertain. His hands shake on the bayard. “Show me them.”

Marshal R’Yori taps the screen beside him, and a light flicks on outside. What Lance had disregarded as a wall was actually a window through into a dark room. They’re all curled up on an assortment of chairs and sofas. Hunk is lying flat on the biggest sofa, with Pidge tucked into his side, snoring loudly. Keith’s legs are resting beside Pidge from where he is reclined on an armchair. Shiro has tucked himself onto a separate sofa to the rest of them, curled facing the door, but with his human hand stretched out towards the sofa Hunk is lying on. It’s adorably sweet, and Lance wants to join them more than anything.

“I need to talk with you,” Marshal R’Yori tells him, and Lance feels his stomach drop.

“I don’t have anything to say to you that can’t be said in front of my team.” Lance replies, crossing his arms now that his bayard has been discarded to the side.

“Well I do,” The Marshal responds, “I need to understand what you’ve found out. I need to know what information is public.”

Lance takes a moment to really study the Marshal. He’s a gruff-looking man, with thick grey hair on the top of his head and similar grey marks tracing around his facial features. His skin is pale, paler than Keith’s even, and the grey marks give him an almost sickly colour palette. His uniform is torn around the collar, but otherwise remains in pristine condition. He’s carrying a gun in a holster around his waist, a sleek black weapon designed for efficiency over style. Lance takes a moment to focus on his face, on the purple irises looking far too anxious for someone Lance had previously disregarded as a heartless bastard, on the tired bags under his eyes, on the healing cut under his chin. Lance takes pity on the man and decides to indulge his questions.

“I ran into a guy called Iopel who saved me from some trouble with some survivors. Asked him about it later on, he told me that his family had been on the original ship that went missing all those years ago. He mentioned hearing that the Torrens had managed to decode the last transmission sent out from that ship. That they’d gone to see what they could find. He thought they had brought something back with them, something more than you guys could handle.”

The Marshal runs a hand down his face and sighs. “He’s not wrong.”

“How did the creature end up here?” Lance asks, “How was it not quarantined on the original ship?”

“We thought we could contain it, to research it. This creature was incredible, something we had truly never seen before. Studying it would have put us deca-phoebs ahead of every other civilisation around.”

“And it escaped?” Lance doesn’t need a verbal confirmation to his question; the guilty look in the Marshal’s eyes says it all.

“That was never my intention.” He says after a moment, voice tired and defeated.

“Well, how can we fix it? There has to be something we can do to save the people still alive out there?” Lance is growing frustrated rapidly; the carelessness of the man in front of him has cost hundreds of people their lives, including the life of someone he had grown rather attached to. The Marshal's casual disregard sounds incompetent at best, and downright inhumane at worst.

“That’s for our discussion with your team when they arouse themselves.” The Marshal says after a minute.

“And what happened to the androids? Why did you turn them on the people here?” Lance asks again, desperate for answers to explain something about the horrors he has witnessed.

“I thought it might be the kindest thing to do – for the people to die at the hands of someone they consider an ally or a friend than be aware of what was truly going on here.”

Lance doesn’t know how to respond to that, and the Marshal retreats from his room before he can come up with something. Resigning himself to talking about this more in the morning, Lance drifts back into a dreamless sleep.

Waking up the second time is much more pleasant. The ache is almost gone from his limbs, and the only pain remaining is around his injured areas, but even those seem much better. The bruise around his wrist is already fading to a watercolour mess of green and yellow, and when he pulls the bandage on his arm back, he’s surprised to see the cut has already closed.

He’s alone this time, but doesn’t mind because it gives him a few seconds to orient himself in his surroundings. The other paladins are visible through the window, but they’re facing away from him – clearly having some kind of discussion. Pidge is tinkering with his helmet and seems to be ignoring the discussion, but she’s the first one to turn her head and spot him watching them.

“Lance!” She shouts, discarding his helmet and racing through into the room with him. She jumps up onto his bed and wraps her arms tightly around his neck.

Lance is glad his body isn’t as sore, but his head still throbs as she sways slightly and he eases her arms off him with a soft groan.

“Hey guys, did you miss me?” He grins, but it falls flat as the other paladins join them. They’re all incredibly relieved to see him, and it fills him with a sense of uncertainty.

He wasn’t that badly injured, was he?

Pidge pulls him in for another hug, gentler this time, and Hunk joins them with much more force. Lance’s head aches, but he finds himself laughing in spite of it as the relief of seeing his team catches up to him.

He’d thought he was going to die down there, that he’d never be able to experience this again.

He hugs them tighter and ushers Shiro and Keith to join in.

Shiro does enthusiastically, pushing Keith in too, and the red paladin grumbles, but when his hand comes up to ruffle Lance’s hair, Lance knows it’s all for show.

The moment is over too quickly, as Lance’s stomach rumbles and he flushes at the noise it makes, but the realisation of how long it’s been since he ate a proper meal is enough to get him eager to get out of bed.

Hunk pulls back, grabbing Lance’s arm and helping him out of bed. Lance wants to shrug him off and say he doesn’t need help walking, but the room spins slightly as he stands, and he finds himself gasping for breath, so maybe he’s not out of the woods yet.

Hunk is just serving him a bowl of soup stored in a tin, part of the Marshal’s rations that the paladins had decided to help themselves to, when the Marshal reappears out of a room to Lance’s left.

“Now that Lance is awake, we need to talk.”

Suddenly, the warm soup in front of him looks a lot less appetising. Lance swallows the first spoonful, and it tastes like fresh herbs and tomatoes – a taste so human, and so dearly missed during his time in space.

“Can it wait until I’ve eaten?” Lance asks, “If we have to rehash everything bad happening right now, I’d like to at least enjoy my soup first.”

The Marshal’s lips quirk upwards in a small smile, but it doesn’t deter him.

“We need to talk about the creature, and discuss what we know. Lance, do you feel up to sharing any information you got when you saw it?”

Lance, in all honesty, does not feel like sharing. He pushes the half-empty bowl of soup away with a sigh. “Big, black, tried to kill me several times. Not much else to say, really.”

“Could you talk about how it moved around? Did it do anything you found strange? Move in any way that didn’t make sense to you?”

Lance thinks back, racking his blurry memories for anything of use.

“It hesitated before attacking me in comms. Not like it was scared of me, more like it was,” He pauses, unsure of how to word the next part.

“Toying with you?” The Marshal suggests. Lance nods in agreement, and the Marshal purses his lips with concern, “I feared that would be the case. How did you stop it from killing you?”

“Luck?” Lance suggests. Keith scoffs at him and rolls his eyes, and Lance resists the urge to rise to an argument. Usually, he would be jumping to defend himself – but something about the reminder of how powerless he had felt in that situation stops him. Really, Lance thinks, there isn’t any other reason why he made it out other than luck.

“Luck doesn’t scare off a creature like that. Relying on luck or guns is how most of the people out there ended up nothing more than blood splatters and body parts. Your team told me that you are a sniper, but you know now more than anyone that guns won’t even touch it. What exactly did you do to escape?”

Lance shrinks under the curious stares of everyone around him, “I threw a Molotov cocktail at it.”

“You what?” Pidge exclaims, eyes wide as she squints up at him, “That’s cool as fuck.”

“Language, Pidge,” Shiro chastises with no real bite to his words, “But that is quick thinking, Lance, well done.”

Hunk echoes the sentiment, and Lance blushes. It hadn’t felt that impressive at the time, just a desperate attempt to survive, but the praise of his team is still nice to hear.

“How do we know it won’t be harmed by our weapons?” Keith asks, his voice sounds innocent and curious enough, but a slight side glance to Lance reveals his true question.

“Because I shot it several times. That thing didn’t even flinch – just carried on charging at me like I was dinner.” Lance rises to the bait, unable to resist both the argument and the urgent need for his team to understand exactly what is lurking outside the headquarters.

“You sure you didn’t miss, Sharpshooter?” Keith fires back.

“Shut up, Keith, I swear,” Lance is too tired for this all of a sudden, “Whatever this is, our weapons will not work against it.”

Keith backs down, the severity of the threat starting to register with him.

“What about if we fired it into space and shot it with an ion cannon?” Hunk chimes in, only semi-seriously, but the Marshal’s eyes take on a weird glint and Lance finds himself uncertain of whatever the Marshal is going to say next.

Lance interrupts him before he gets the chance to even open his mouth, “I also sliced it with the sword. All I did was piss it off and make it start dripping acid.”

“All creatures are scared of something,” The Marshal says with a new rigidity to his voice, “And what do all living beings fear most on an instinctual level?”

“Capitalism?” Pidge suggests.

“Taxes?” Hunk follows up with.

Lance knows the answer, remembers the heat of fire on his skin and the burning room he had run away from.

“Fire.” He breathes, voice so quiet it’s almost imperceptible.

The Marshal nods.

“We haven’t tested it yet, but we started working on something before it got out of containment, a fail-safe, of sorts.” The Marshal gestures behind him, “I’ll show you it later, before you begin the mission.”

Lance baulks. “Mission? What do you mean mission?”

The Marshal looks him up and down slowly and carefully. “To save the people left alive on this station, we need to trap this creature somewhere it can’t come back from. Somewhere it won’t be able to get back in from.”

It’s Shiro who gets the idea first, and his face morphs into an angry frown that Lance has only seen when he gets really pissed off. A vein pops out on his forehead as emphasis. “You want to use Lance as bait?”

Woah, what?

Lance is not being used as anyone’s bait, thank you very much. He quite enjoys living and being alive. If it were up to him right now, they’d be throwing themselves out the nearest window and trying to swim back to the castle.

But then he remembers the people he’d seen outside. The rest of his team starts arguing around him, but Lance’s thoughts are with the people he’d seen who were scared out of their minds. The ones who’d already been brutally murdered, and the ones who were unbelievably scared waiting for it to come for them. He thinks of Iopel and the way his friend’s eyes had lit up at the mention of Lance helping him escape. He thinks of the bloody stain that was all that remained of Iopel.

“- a suicide mission.” Someone says around him.

Lance speaks before he even really considers the weight of his words.

“I’ll do it.”

“God, preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past.” – Bram Stoker

Chapter Text

“In the cycle of nature there is no such thing as victory or defeat; there is only movement.”

–Paulo Coelho

Immediately, the displeasure from the other paladins hits him. Several voices talk at once, and Lance struggles to make any of the words out. The Marshal slams a hand on the desk, and everyone quietens down at once.

“It’s the only way to save anyone who’s still alive outside.”

“He almost died last time,” Pidge snaps, “The only reason he’s still here right now is because you sick fucks experimented on that creature enough to be able to make an antidote to the poison.”

Oh, he’d been poisoned. Lance guesses the still-burning cut on his ankle is to blame. The revelation doesn’t shock him as much as he had expected; in fact, it even explains a lot. He hadn’t been that injured while running, and he hadn’t even felt that bad until he’d collapsed. Somehow, the fact that the creature is poisonous doesn’t even surprise him. Of course the ultra-powerful and deadly alien would have a poisonous tail. Why wouldn’t it?

“We did what we thought we had to do,” The Marshal sighs, “And if we hadn’t, your friend would be long gone by now.”

“If you’d never picked the creature up in the first place, we wouldn’t even be here right now, we could be attending to more pressing matters – like the Galra trying to enslave the entire universe, or had you forgotten about that part?” Hunk looks livid, an emotion rarely seen on his usually kind-hearted friend. Despite the situation, Lance feels his heart glow with warmth at the care his team are showing him.

“We thought we could use the creature to help us join the fight. Galra forces have been trying to take over our home planet for years – the breakthroughs we could’ve gotten would have made us unstoppable.”

“And instead, quiznack knows how many people have died.” Pidge is still fighting for him, but Keith and Shiro have both dropped quiet.

Lance decides to interrupt again before things escalate further.

“I’ll do it on three conditions. One; everyone else stays here.”

There’s more outrage at that. Lance holds his hand up, and they fall silent again.

“Two; you deactivate the androids before they can do any more damage.”

The Marshal grants him a tense nod at that, and Lance feels a brief sense of relief before he makes his third point.

“Three; you tell us everything you know about what we’re up against. Every bit of research you have, every unethical test you ran. Every bit of data from the Torrens. Everything you know about the original ship that went missing.”

Marshal R’Yori sighs, defeated, “Very well. I suppose that is fair.”

“What do you mean that’s fair? We can’t offer Lance up as bait while the rest of us have to sit here waiting to see if he dies or not.” Keith snaps, hand reaching to summon his bayard, but Shiro stops him by grabbing his arm and holding it in place.

“Wow, Mullet, didn’t know you cared about me that much.” Lance winks at the red paladin, trying to ease some of the growing tension.

Keith relaxes in Shiro’s grip, who makes the unfortunate mistake of releasing Keith’s captive arm. Keith raises it up to slap Lance around the back of the head.

He probably deserved that one, to be fair.

“The creature knows Lance’s scent. It wouldn’t be able to resist following him down to the Tech Spire. There, Lance can program the doors and vents to deadlock, trapping the creature inside. After Lance is safely away, we can eject the spire – firing it into space.”

Lance can only bring himself to nod, mouth going dry as he faces the knowledge that he’s going to have to leave his team behind once again and confront the nightmare outside.

“And what if it doesn’t work?” Lance asks, quietly.

The Marshal’s expression is unreadable. “We can’t let it come to that.”

Lance swallows around the lump in his throat.

“Lance, you can’t be seriously thinking about doing this?” Hunk says, grabbing him by the shoulders as he speaks. “That thing almost turned you into a Turkish kebab twice already, you can’t seriously want to go out there again. At least let someone come with you.”

“And put you all in danger?”

Shiro steps between them, gently pushing Hunk back to place himself directly in front of Lance. “There’s no changing your mind, is there?”

Lance smiles softly. Shiro knows him too well after all their months in space. “No, Shiro, there isn’t.”

“Okay,” Shiro doesn’t look happy with the answer, but continues on anyway with a turn to face the Marshal, “Then you better tell us everything you know.”

The Marshal pulls out a chair at the far end of the table, opposite where Lance had sat to eat. The other paladins follow suit from where they’d been hovering awkwardly around.

“It all started 50 deca-phoebs ago,” The Marshal begins, “A large research ship began its journey to the distant planet of X’thryitlopz, an unknown world on the far edges of the next system over. It was the furthest any of our ships had prepared to go. We don’t know exactly what went down, but a ship called The Torrens-”

“The same Torrens that Lance mentioned?” Pidge inquires.

“That very one,” The Marshal confirms. “They managed to find the wreckage of the research ship approximately 8 movements ago. Data retrieved from The Torrens tells us that the research ship crash-landed on an uninhabited moon three-quarters of the way to their final destination. The wreckage was found while The Torrens were scavenging for scrap metal to sell on, and when they realised what they had stumbled upon, they decided to try and bring as much back as they could to make some money. While there, they ran into some lifeform. Their records suggest it attacked a crewmember, attaching itself to their face. They brought the crewmember and the lifeform aboard their ship – it is unclear whether this was to save their friend or to sell the creature on. We don’t know what happened after. All we know is that four quintants ago, the Torrens showed up on our radar for the first time since it had signalled locating the wreckage.”

“And what happened to the Torrens?” Lance asks.

“At the time we picked up the ship, every member of its crew was long dead. As soon as we realised, that whole section of the station was quarantined. All that remained inside was a large black cocoon. We picked it up with the intention of studying it to see what it was, keeping it in a research lab in the third quadrant. That night, the creature hatched out. We managed to contain it for several vargas while our scientists analysed everything they could, but it broke out. We tried to keep the people here safe – but it descended into chaos very soon. Most of what we know about the creature now comes from our attempts to defeat it.”

“And what do you know about it now? There has to be a way to kill it, right?” Typical Keith, Lance thinks, always planning with his sword and not his brain.

“You still don’t understand what we are dealing with, do you?” Marshal R’Yori’s expression is unreadable, but his eyes glimmer with something hopeful.

“Then tell us,” Pidge pleads, “We’ve been kept in the dark about what is actually out there for so long. If we know what we’re up against, we can plan how to kill it.”

“We called it a X’Enomorph. Most of its external body is covered in a mesoskeleton that no weapon can penetrate.”

“A meos-what?” Hunk asks, chewing his fingernails in anxiety – a nervous tick of his he’s had since long before the Garrison days. Lance finds it calming to know how some things never change.

“A mesoskeleton. It uses a layer of polarized silicon as a barrier from the outside world, leaving it impermeable to firearms. It also protects it from extreme temperatures – though it still reacts to fire, as Lance found out – and shields it from anything else we throw at it. It also has two jaws – an outer one filled with razor-sharp teeth and an inner pharyngeal jaw – capable of shooting out of its mouth and smashing through metal. It has a long, sharp tail – pointing at the end like a blade. The tail is strong enough to stab through someone and can also release poison when attacking. This is why you fell so ill upon arriving here, Lance, as the poison had started working its way around your body. And, in the event you do succeed in injuring it, the creature bleeds a highly corrosive compound of hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur.”

“Sulphuric acid?” Hunk fills in, “It bleeds sulphuric acid.”

“Is there anything this creature can’t do?” Lance asks, only semi-sarcastically.

“Die.” Marshal R’Yori says with a grim smile. Lance feels sick. “It is the perfect organism for this war – its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.”

“You admire it?” Lance asks, after a second of silence. It isn’t a question, not really. He knows the answer he is going to get already.

Marshal R’Yori at least has the decency to look guilty, “I admire its purity. It is unclouded by emotion or morality. The perfect killing machine.”

“I am liking this plan less and less, Lance.” Hunk jumps in.

“What are the odds of this plan succeeding?” Lance wishes he could take back the question before he is even finished talking. It sits heavy in the silence, while Marshal R’Yori regards him with a remorseful look.

“I can’t lie to you about your chances,” He says after a moment, “But you have my sympathies.”

It takes another two hours before the discussion is wrapped up and there’s a solid plan in place. Lance tunes most of it out halfway through, exhaustion catching up to him as he picks at the cuticles on his fingers.

“Okay,” Hunk repeats for at least the seventh time, “Lance takes the transit down to the tech spire while Pidge helps him hack into the security system to deadlock the doors. The alien should follow Lance down, which is when he can activate the deadlocks. Lance then sneaks out using the vent system, before deadlocking that behind him. When he’s safely away, we jettison that thing into space.”

“Exactly.” The Marshal is starting to look annoyed, and Lance understands his frustration. He’d got the plan after the first five times they had discussed it; this is starting to feel excessive.

“And the rest of us just sit here?”

“Any other people out there would just be a risk to themselves and the mission.”

“I fixed the comms in everyone’s helmets after the EMP mine blew them out. We should still be able to talk to each other this time, so we’ll have more of an idea of what is happening.”

Lance blinks. “What’s an EMP mine?”

“Oh yeah, you weren't there for that. It stands for electromagnetic pulse, a short burst of energy that I used to damage some androids when they attacked us. Had the unfortunate side effect of destroying all our comm systems too.” Pidge looks sheepish as they explain, and Lance guesses it’s because they felt bad for leaving him alone with no warning. He smiles gently back to reassure the youngest paladin, and her posture relaxes slightly.

That bit was some new information at least. It explains the loud noise Lance had heard before the silence, and the static that had him terrified for his team. It had been reassuring to know they were all okay; it was even more so to know he wouldn’t be completely alone when venturing out this time. They’d keep him safe. Lance had every bit of trust in his team.

He knows the odds of this succeeding are low, but he has the best fighters in the universe around him. He also knows that the blue paladin is the most easily replaceable, so he doesn’t mind that it’s his life on the line. The universe needs the others a lot more than they need him. It hurts his heart to think about it, but his time in space has pushed him to see the bigger picture.

Sure, he doesn’t want to die. But if it had to be any of them on this suicide mission, he’s glad it is him.

Lance just hopes that the others can manage to make it out if everything goes wrong. At the very least, maybe he can distract the creature until his team are safe. Keep it far enough away for them to be able to run back to the green lion to escape.

Lance thinks of Blue fondly, and can almost feel their bond vibrate with love – but she is too far away and the quintessence is still drained, so it’s more like a tickle than its usual pulsing energy. Still, it is something that helps ease the sick feeling in his stomach.

Lance runs his eyes over the map in front of him again, ignoring the voices still talking around him. If he turns right out of the headquarters, he enters the transit station. From there, he can call a car to the tech spire. When he’s there, he’ll have to move down the stairs to the very bottom and seal each floor off one at a time. When the last floor is sealed, he can manually override a vent to escape out of before locking it behind him.

Sounds easy enough.

The most dangerous bit will be the initial dash to the transit station. The creature may still be lurking around tracking his scent, and any movement could alert it to his position.

If he makes it to the tech spire, he’s got maybe ten minutes before the creature can make its way down there towards him. This is his time to get as much done as possible before the creature can catch up. Three floors. Approximately seventy-eight steps. Sixteen access vents. Six deadlocks to activate. Countless places for something evil to lurk and grab him.

Lance does not like the sound of this plan one bit, but the risk is worth the possible reward. The lives he could save, the people he could protect. It all has to mean something. If he couldn’t save Iopel, he could at least try to save everyone else.

He hopes, in the distant future, when the war with the Galra is over and the rest of the paladins return to earth, that they will tell his family that he died trying to save people. That he risked it all to help those who were stuck and trapped and living an inescapable nightmare. He hopes his family can forgive him for putting himself at risk like this. That one day they will understand.

His mama used to tell him, back when he was just a kid, that nothing was worth causing himself pain over. He wonders if she would understand now that some things have to be worth the risk. Without risk, there is no reward. Without evil, there is no good.

He realises that he’s already thinking about himself as if he has died, and resolves to snap himself out of this. This will work, he tells himself; there isn’t any other option.

Suddenly, the comforting image he had earlier of the paladin movie night they would have when they returned back to the castle feels a lot more distant. Lance wants to postpone the inevitable and hide. He wants to seek out the comfort and company of his team now, before it is too late.

Instead, he takes a sip from the glass of water in front of him and tries to pretend he is okay.

When he places the glass back down, he becomes aware that everyone else is watching him intently.

“Did I miss something?” He asks, nervous under their stares.

“I asked if you were ready to get started,” Shiro says. His voice is calm, but there’s a tremor to his human hand and a worried frown knitting his brows together.

Lance grins, full of fake bravado, “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

Marshal R’Yori nods. “Then it’s time to show you something.”

The Marshal stands, walking away from the table and through a door at the far side of the room. Lance follows from a distance, not particularly eager to see whatever the Marshal has to show him.

“We haven’t tested it fully yet, but we do know it burns through fuel fast. You have to use it sparingly.”

The Marshal pushes the door open, and inside is a desk. Upon the desk rests the largest gun Lance has ever seen. It’s clearly handmade and bulkier than he would have liked, but the red bottle feeding into it gives him an idea of what this is.

“Is that a flamethrower?” His eyes are wide with admiration, and okay, maybe he should have been more excited for this than he was.

The Marshal confirms with a nod. “If it was fire that spooked the creature off before, this should help keep you safe if it spots you. Remember that the fuel is not limitless. Please only use it in emergencies.”

Lance cannot think of a single reason why it wouldn’t be an emergency. Maybe the hidden message is not to have too many emergencies, but Lance is aware of his luck and knows things never quite seem to go his way.

However, a flamethrower is a very cool way to fight off an evil alien creature seemingly intent on killing him personally.

Hopefully, it works.

He picks up the gun, holding it with his finger ghosting the trigger. It’s heavier than it looks, and up close, he can tell it was made in a rush. The metalwork is shoddy, and the casing bends slightly under his grip, but a weapon that might work is better than several that don’t.

Lance sets it back down carefully.

“Okay, who’s ready to help me fling an alien into space?”

An hour later, and another bowl of soup, and he’s ready to begin. His armour has been fixed up from where it had been dented before, and his black body suit has been hastily patched up by Hunk for that extra layer of protection.

His previous injuries feel mostly healed, aside from the slight headache that has begun to develop, but Lance attributes that to stress more than anything else. His ankle is itchy, but when he looked at the once angry red mark, he was pleasantly surprised to see it had faded to nothing more than a thin pink line stretching across the skin. His once bruised and sore back is now feeling fresh and new, even after he’d spent a solid few minutes stretching it out to check on the healing. Whatever medicines they had given him had worked amazingly. Lance makes a mental note to raid the infirmary for stuff for Coran to replicate when they’re back at the castle. No sense going in a cryopod for an angry gash if some cream will heal it to nothing in a similar time.

He’s holding the flamethrower in front of him, finger already resting on the trigger just in case. It’s a heavy gun, uncomfortable to hold with its bulky design compared to the sleek bayard he was used to. His fingers itch to be holding his own bayard out of fear, the comfort of the familiarity of it versus the alien new weapon in his hands that he wasn’t even sure would actually work.

He gives the rest of his team a quick hug, telling them he will see them all soon. He tries to pretend it doesn’t feel like a goodbye. Hunk holds him tight, pressing Lance’s head into the crook of his neck and squeezing him with love. Lance feels loved by them all; he feels warm and soft and content with the knowledge that they love him as much as he loves them. It’s a small comfort in the face of the mission ahead.

Keith hugs him too, short and sweet as the red paladin has never been one for physical contact in the way Lance and Hunk are, but Lance appreciates it nonetheless. Shiro ruffles his hair and wishes him luck, and Lance ignores the way Shiro’s hand is shaking. He hates that he’s putting this much stress on Shiro’s shoulders – the last thing he needs in the middle of this war is to be worrying about the rest of them. Pidge tells him to “Stay safe out there, loser,” and fist bumps him. Lance pulls her in for a hug anyway, and she squeezes him almost as tight as Hunk did.

It reaches a point, though, where there is only so much more procrastinating he can do before he has to face reality. The metal deadlock of the door looks much nicer closed, and Lance wishes it could stay that way forever.

“Okay,” Pidge says with a worried frown, “There’s no heat signatures picking up within a 70 metre radius. Now is probably a good time to make your way out.”

Lance salutes her, throat too closed with anxiety to even think about talking. The metal door creaks behind him, and he turns to face it.

“Good luck,” Pidge whispers from behind him, and Lance swallows his nerves.

He needs all the luck he can get right now. He pushes his helmet over his head and readies the flamethrower.

He slips out of the gap in the door and turns to face his team one last time as the door creaks shut behind him. He waves at them with one hand and tries to smile through the sound of his heartbeat in his ears.

The door shuts. He is once again alone.

Nothing much has changed outside since he was here last; there’s more dried blood on the ground that Lance thinks could be his, but there are no big changes. He doesn’t know what he had expected really; he isn’t sure there are enough people left alive to see any real differences anywhere.

It’s quiet around the Marshal Headquarters, not even the metal of the station making any noise, and it fills him with fear. Every step he makes seems to echo around the room, every time he shuffles the flamethrower in his grasp he thinks he has finally made enough noise to attract the creature.

Which is why, when his comms spark to life with some static, he almost lets out a very manly squeal.

“You need to take a right at the end of this room,” Pidge tells him, and Lance is thankful for the guidance because, despite the long meeting about it, he’d already forgotten the way he needed to travel.

He doesn’t reply, too focused on moving as stealthily as possible.

After a long minute, he makes it to the corridor. This one is white, a stark contrast to the long, dark maze he had found himself in last time. It’s almost too white – sterile like a hospital and soulless like a corporate office. The light level is comforting, but he’s all too aware that there is nowhere to hide in this area, and being caught here means almost certain death.

The journey is agonizingly long. Lance finds himself holding his breath, too scared to make even the slightest sounds. His footsteps seem to make far more noise than possible, sounding more like he is a herd of elephants instead of one man trying to walk as quietly as possible. He knows it is in his head, that he isn’t making as much noise as he feels like he is, but it does little to calm his racing heart.

Something crashes in the distance. A scream. A gunshot. Silence.

Lance freezes in his tracks, waiting to hear those thundering footsteps running towards him.

A minute passes.

Then another.

Finally, he continues moving.

It takes far longer than it should have, but eventually Lance spots the transit station at the end of the corridor. It’s a long room, still that same sterile-white colour, but with several gates on each side of the room, each with a large green button at the side. Behind the gates is nothing but darkness, but a cool breeze hits him as he passes the first labelled medical before finding the one he needs.

The green button labelled tech spire looks simple enough, but when he presses it, an alarm sounds, and a light above the gate starts flashing a bright red colour.

A robotic voice tells him to keep a safe distance before boarding the transit, and Lance freezes as something crashes down the corridor he’d just come from. There’s a row of lockers in the centre of the room, full-length ones like you would usually find in a changing room, and he dashes inside the nearest one. The flamethrower smacks against the edge with a loud bang, and Lance holds his breath as he waits.

The transit is still beeping, but there’s another sound now joining in. A low growl, and familiar clawed footsteps making their way around. There’s a small grate in the locker, and Lance peers out of it just in time to watch the creature appear out of the corridor he had just come from.

“Lance, you’ve got company,” Pidge whispers, unhelpfully.

“I know,” He whispers back as quietly as possible, “I’m hidden, now be quiet.”

There’s no reply. Lance almost wishes someone had kept talking to distract him from the fear crippling his body. The creature is getting closer, head angled towards him while its mouth opens as it growls. He’s frozen in fear, and suddenly regrets picking a locker to hide in, because there’s not much he can do from here if it spots him.

The footsteps get closer. Lance squeezes his eyes shut, terrified as his hands grow clammy and the headache from before comes back full force.

He thinks of Iopel in this moment, of his friend and their final conversations. The light-hearted ones, where he had really gotten to know the alien a lot more, and started to consider him somewhat of a friend in this horrifying place. He remembers telling him about his family – his mama and her determination that he was going to be brilliant one day. Her cooking – the ropa vieja that was simply to die for, and the picadillo that his sisters always favoured most.

He thinks of the night before he left for the Garrison, all those years ago, and the tea his mama had made for him when he hadn’t been able to sleep. A vanilla and cinnamon blend that had instantly calmed his anxieties and settled his soul.

He remembers telling Iopel this story, and his friend matching it with a similar one about his own childhood. Apparently, the Y’Akarti lived for hundreds of years, so the story was from decades before Lance had even been born, but still had that same hopeful feeling that Lance needed so desperately right now.

He opens his eyes again. The creature is standing right in front of him.

He says a prayer in his head – to a God he isn’t sure he believes in anymore after the carnage he’d seen since leaving Earth – and closes his eyes with the grim realisation that these could well be his final moments.

Killed before even reaching the tech spire. The worst way this mission could have gone.

He’s briefly aware that he’s starting to panic and tries his best to regulate his breathing as the sound of footsteps fades away.

It takes so long to get his breathing under control that he doesn’t even notice the creature leaving.

“It’s gone, Lance, are you still there?” Pidge’s voice sounds small, and Lance realises how stressful this must be for her too. He wonders if the rest of the paladins are around her for support, or if she is alone in this.

“I’m okay,” He breathes out, trying to sound like he’s telling the truth.

The locker pushes open with a groan of metal, and Lance slowly inches towards the open transit car. He pushes the button inside, and the gates shut with a bang. The car starts its descent into the tech spire, and Lance resists the urge to fall apart.

“I’m in the car,” He tells his team instead.

“Good work, Lance,” Shiro tells him, “You did well hiding. We thought it had got you for a moment there.”

Lance thinks back to the clawed footsteps just outside his hiding place. “Me too,” He admits, “I thought I was toast.”

“Onto the next part now. You’ll need to work quickly down here. Do you remember the plan?” Pidge asks.

He goes to confirm it, but something else comes out. “I don’t think I can do this,” He murmurs instead, “I actually, really, can’t do this.”

“Breathe, Lance, you’ve got this. If anyone can do this, it’s you.” Usually, Hunk’s voice would calm him down, but now Lance finds the panic rising even further.

“No – No, you don’t get it. None of you have seen this thing. I can’t face it again; it’s going to rip me to pieces. I can’t. I can’t – fuck – I can’t do this.” The flamethrower feels impossibly heavy in his grip. Lance puts it down, freeing his hands up to gesture wildly as he continues talking, “I need someone to tell my family what happened to me – but not this part. Tell them I died fighting in the war or something, not alone on some creepy station somewhere hunted by some shit from my worst nightmares, fuck.”

He’s not usually one for swearing, but it feels necessary right now. Nobody calls him out for it either.

“And – fuck – I told Iopel I would get him out of here, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything as he was killed, and now I can’t do this to protect everyone else. Fuck. Shit. How did this go so fucking badly?”

“Lance,” Shiro’s voice is eerily calm as he speaks, “You need to calm down. I know you’re scared right now, we all are too, but you have thirty seconds before the transit arrives, and I need to know you’re going to be okay by the time you get there.”

Dios mío. Thirty seconds? Lance was dead meat.

“I need you to do something for me – do you think you could try?” Shiro continues. Lance grunts in affirmation and is glad when Shiro continues to save him from having to actually talk. “Okay, I need you to hold one hand out in front of you, okay? Are you doing that?”

Lance nods.

“Good, okay, I need you to slowly trace a finger from your other hand up the edge of your thumb and you’re going to take a deep breath in while you do it,” Lance copies what he’s saying, taking a deep breath in that threatens to escape as his lungs itch to start hyperventilating, “Keep tracing your thumb, and when you reach the top, follow it down as you breath out. Slowly. Keep going until you’ve traced around all your fingers.”

Lance follows the instruction, and slowly but surely, the thick fog of panic fades and he finds himself more coherent.

“Thank you, Shiro,” Lance says after a moment, still following that same motion.

“Don’t worry about it, Lance, just stay safe out there.”

The car begins to slow down before Lance is finished calming himself down. The breaks screech awfully, and he resists the urge to cover his ears and instead picks the flamethrower back up.

“Okay,” He says, “Let's do this.”

The gate slides open with a screech.

“Be careful, I’m picking up signals from various sectors suggesting a whole lot of system problems in this area. Keep your visor down just in case.” Pidge sounds concerned, but Lance doesn’t spot anything visibly wrong as he steps out slowly. He slides the visor down anyway.

The room he has found himself in looks eerily similar to the one upstairs. If not for the giant sign in front pointing him towards the tech spire, he might have thought the transit was broken. There’s more graffiti on the walls, and he translates this one out of curiosity.

All dead and gone.

He regrets it immediately.

“You need to make your way through to the tower, and down to the lowest level. It should be the first right when you leave the transit station.”

Lance is thankful for Pidge’s guidance. He resolves himself to thanking her greatly if he makes it out of here alive. He’ll have to make her some of that stew she liked so much, or a batch of cookies. And Shiro too, for his calming techniques. Lance doesn’t want to dwell on why Shiro knows that works, though.

The tech spire is quiet, which is why he isn’t expecting to see someone.

As he passes a bench, a girl jumps back, knocking over a stack of documents. She’s visibly terrified and unarmed, and appears mostly uninjured except for a long cut on her cheek. She’s got long purple hair that was probably once tied in an elegant up-do, but is now falling out in strands that frame her face. She’s got matching purple marks trailing across her face and under the collar of her bloodstained shirt. She’s pretty – in a different situation, Lance would probably hit on her.

As it is, he understands how scared she must be feeling.

“Hey, you’re okay,” Lance holds his hands up to try and show he’s not a threat, but ends up waving the flamethrower towards her, and she flinches back, “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to know your name.”

“S’aachi,” The alien whispers, “My name is S’aachi.”

“Okay, S’aachi, are you hurt?” Lance asks gently, the syllables of the alien name sounding foreign on his tongue.

She shakes her head.

“Can you walk?” He asks.

She nods.

“Okay, if you can make it up to the Marshal’s headquarters, I’ve got some friends there. They’ll keep you safe. Give you food and shelter until we can get you guys out of here.”

She doesn’t look like she believes him, and this is confirmed when she shakes her head.

“I promise I’m telling the truth, they’ll protect you from everything out here.”

She doesn’t say anything else, just pushes herself up to run and disappears down the corridor. Lance sighs, defeated. He can’t go after her – not without wasting too much time. He just hopes she manages to find somewhere safe to lie low.

He begins the descent down the stairs. The metal beneath his feet groans under the pressure, and he hesitates after every movement. It’s slow going, but he reaches the bottom eventually. The corridor stretched out to a long, dark room, with several doors leading off into different offices. A gun lies discarded at his feet, and he resists the urge to kick it away.

There’s been no bodies so far in this bit, which is why he’s surprised when he enters the first room and sees a pile of them stacked in the corner. Lance doesn’t stay to dwell on whether it was people or the creature that did that, and instead beelines straight for the area he needs. The scent of copper is heavy in the air, and a distant part of him wonders whether the aliens on board here bleed the same as humans.

The deadlock is attached to a thick piece of machinery at the side of the main doors to leave the tech spire on this floor. He follows Pidge’s instructions, and the doors slide shut with a satisfying clank. The next one is on the opposite corner of the same floor, and he deadlocks that one with no trouble, too. He spots an airlock and a huge window out to space, and feels impossibly small.

Relief is short-lived, however, as he gets halfway to the next floor when he hears something heavy drop to the ground further above his head. A familiar growl echoes down the stairs towards him, and slow, heavy footsteps start walking above him.

The footsteps retreat away slowly, and Lance continues his ascent to the next floor. Luckily, the creature appears to have landed on the floor above him, where he’d run into the other survivor, and he hopes that she’s hidden somewhere.

In the distance, he hears another growl, and the footsteps speed up, chasing something. A gun fires, and then another.

Lance stops listening after that.

Activating the deadlock on this floor is easy enough, but the door slides with a much louder noise, and he freezes in place – listening for that tell-tale growl and those fast, clawed feet running towards him. After a second, nothing moves, and he shifts again towards the next one.

He’s just walking past another locker when something changes. The atmosphere grows still, tense. Like the entire station around him is holding its breath. He freezes for a moment, his whole body screaming at him to run.

Lance listens to his instincts and ducks behind a nearby table.

A second later, a vent slides open at the far side of the room, and a single clawed arm reaches out of the vent. He ducks behind the table again, pushing himself as far against the wall as he can in the hopes of hiding.

“Lance,” Pidge says, “You’ve got trouble.”

Lance resists the urge to give a sarcastic “No shit, Sherlock.” Instead, he chews the inside of his lip with fear as the creature begins its hunt around the room.

Several agonising moments pass before a loud bang sounds from several floors off and the creature bolts towards it. The metal around him seems to vibrate with the force as the creature races out of the room and up the stairs. Lance breathes out a sigh of relief.

“Good job, Lance, well done for staying calm.” Shiro’s voice is a welcome relief from Pidge’s straight-to-the-point chatter. Lance doesn’t think he particularly deserves any praise, but relishes in it anyway.

“Not much else I could have done there, Shiro my dearest.” Lance winks, despite knowing no one else is around to see it.

Shiro chuckles, but before he can respond, Pidge is talking again.

“Lance, I’m picking up a lot of malfunctioning systems down there. Be careful.”

In all honesty, Lance thinks malfunctioning systems are the least of his worries right now. The whole throwing-a-deadly-alien-lifeform-into-space-without-dying seems much more of a concern, but he thanks Pidge for her intel anyway and starts to uncurl himself from behind the desk.

The station is oddly silent as he makes his way around to the next deadlock. Nothing moves even an inch as he climbs the stairs, and there’s no noise at all from around him. Lance doesn’t have the same instinctual urge that something is wrong, however, so he counts his blessings and continues up the stairs.

He’s aware now that he’s on the final floor he needs to seal off. The alien has to be lured back into this section before he can close the final deadlock, and that’s going to have to involve him putting himself in danger to do so. Attracting it to his location by announcing exactly where he is and praying he can survive long enough to get the final lock shut.

All that would be left to do after that is unlock the vent he can escape through and seal it behind him. Easy-peasy. Or at least that is what he tells himself as he ascends the final stairs and begins manoeuvring across the floor.

If he turns his head, he can see the exit he came from. The transit station and the car he had stepped out of not too long ago seem to be calling his name. In a few moments, he could be back with his team, they could be getting in the green lion and leaving this godforsaken place. Reuniting with Allura and Coran, who must be worried about them, and finally settling down for that damn movie night Lance had spent so long dreaming about. He’s not even been separated from them for that long, but Lance misses them all dearly.

Even Keith, with his strange mullet and personality as sharp as the sword he carries.

Lance thinks of the soft moments the two had been sharing lately, since he had abandoned the rivalry for a more friendly competitive streak.

Especially Keith, a small part of his brain thinks. He doesn’t want to dwell on why that is.

The second-to-last deadlock is right at the far side of this floor. A long, dark corridor with several rooms branching off. The nearest one is a research lab, from the looks of it; they’d been building some kind of machine Lance can’t even begin to figure out. Pidge would love it, probably. There’s an android in here, back turned away from him as it types something away on a computer.

Lance freezes, remembering the way the androids had been before and the violence they contained. He knows that the Marshal had said he would deactivate them, but this one seems very much alive and functioning.

Did Marshal R’Yori lie?

Lance voices his question. Pidge mutters something sounding awfully similar to a curse word broken up by static, and he hears her pass the question on to the Marshal.

“They are set to escort civilians out of the tech spire. It should pose no threat to you, Paladin.”

Lance is not convinced until the android turns around, those once red and menacing eyes are glowing a soft white. The android spots him, and there are a few tense seconds while it clearly scans him, looking for some form of identification.

“Follow me, please.” It says after a second and walks off in the direction of the transit station. Lance breathes out a sigh of relief – he seems to be doing that a lot lately – and continues on down the corridor.

The next room he passes is another research lab, empty this time except for a body lying draped over the table. There’s a large hole in its chest, and a sickening trail of blood dripping onto the floor. He doesn’t look in any more rooms after that.

The second-to-last deadlock closes with ease; he doesn’t even need to ask Pidge for help after doing it four times before. The routine is long-established and efficient by this point.

Now, however, comes the difficult bit.

“Do we have any idea where the creature is?” Lance asks, cursing himself for almost wishing it into existence.

Pidge hums, “I’ve got a read on it not too far away, but you’ll need to make some noise to draw it back into the tech spire.”

Great, exactly the answer he hadn’t been hoping for. He looks around idly, wondering what he could possibly use to create some noise, when he remembers the computer the android had been messing with before. If he could just link it up to something, he might be able to create enough noise while keeping a safe distance away.

He begins the journey back, checking for one final time that the deadlock is sealed before walking slowly back to where he needs to be.

The research lab is empty when he gets there, the android not returning from wherever it had tried to take him, and the computer is left unlocked. He scans through it quickly, looking for anything that might be of use. He flicks through several different programmes, all devoid of anything useful, before flicking open the communication logs. The top one is dated from only a few hours prior.

Staff Code: 567898

Name: Marshal R’Yori

Message: All androids have been set to help survivors escape. Please follow your nearest Working Yachi to a designated safe area. The company apologises for any losses you may have faced at their hands previously.

The message sends shivers down Lance’s spine. The tone and message are pleasant enough, but there’s something about the separation of the android murders from Marshal R’Yori that creeps him out. Lance knows the Marshal was the one to program them to do so, the one interested in covering his own back at the loss of his people’s lives. He keeps reading down, the next one is dated from about a day ago.

Staff Code: 567898

Name: Marshal R’Yori

Message: Emergency lockdown procedures in place. Special Order 939 initiated. Priority one: protect the specimen. Maintain station quarantine. Disallow communications.

Special order 939? What the hell is that? Lance keeps the question in his mind for later and continues reading down the list of logs. There isn’t anything else interesting until the last one, from only three days ago. This must have been around the time everything went badly.

Staff Code: 567898

Name: Marshal R’Yori

Message: Heightened Hazard Level: Please can all civilians be aware that we are entering Hazard Level Omega after a containment breach. No ships are allowed to enter or exit. There is no need to panic. Everything will be restored soon.

Lance feels nauseous. He understands now the rage the people left alive here felt. The deep level of betrayal as the place that was once their home became so hostile and unsafe in just a few hours, and everyone who was supposed to help turned their backs away and hid. The greed of the researchers here, who thought they could keep a creature like that confined while they experimented on it for their own twisted research and weapons. The cowardice of management who hid away and locked the doors, trapping everyone left alive for the creature to get one by one.

He understood it all anyway, after talking with Iopel and seeing the fear left in the survivors he had come across, but the feeling comes back tenfold after reading those logs.

“What is ‘Special Order 939’?” Lance asks instead, voice steely as he refuses to give any hint of emotion away to the Marshal.

He gets a response straight away this time, without the need for Pidge to relay the message.

“You weren’t supposed to find out about that. I’ll explain it later, when you’re back.” The Marshal says. The nausea bubbles up his throat, and Lance has a strange feeling that the Marshal isn’t expecting him to return.

All the small signs he had been ignoring come rushing up then: the logs he had read just then, the lies, the way the Marshal needed to speak to him alone before he could talk to his team, the log he had read before – about the body and needing discretion, the admiration the Marshal so clearly held for the creature. Something isn’t right here, his body seems to scream at him. His instincts tell him to run, and all of a sudden, he isn’t convinced that the creature is the biggest threat to the station.

And his team are all up there with the Marshal. Do they even know? Have they even picked up on these small signs that Lance has?

Was this whole mission a trap?

Lance finds his palms sweating as he picks the flamethrower back up from where he had discarded it to read through the records.

“You need to get moving. The mission is almost done; you have one deadlock left to go.” Marshal R’Yori’s voice sounds stressed, and Lance swallows down his nausea to question him back.

“How do I know I can trust you if you won’t tell us what the special order means?”

Lance hasn’t heard anything from any of his team for a concerning amount of time. He can feel himself getting anxious again, and follows the breathing exercise Shiro had taught him on the transit car.

“We can worry about that later. Hurry up down there.” Pidge’s voice sends a rush of cool relief through him, and combined with the breathing exercise, he feels his anxiety fade away.

Sure, the Marshal is definitely lying about something, but they had gone over this plan so many times, and Lance trusted his team had checked everything out to make it safe. All he had to do was get rid of the creature, and escape, and then he could get the answers he needed.

He hears Keith say something in the background, and finds himself desperate to know. He almost wishes the red paladin was wearing his helmet so he could talk to him – Pidge and Shiro’s voices were calming enough, but he desperately wanted to hear from Keith for some reason. Hunk too, but he finds his heart doesn’t race the same way when he thinks about Hunk talking to him compared to Keith. He can worry about that later though.

Diverting back to his original plan, Lance places the flamethrower down while he shifts through the computer until he finds what he is looking for. It isn’t anything much, an instructional video about how to reset the actuator in an android, but he turns the volume up and sets the video off to play in approximately 30 ticks.

Which gives him 30 ticks to find a very good hiding spot before the noise hopefully attracts the creature back.

He heads back down the corridor towards the transit station, the final deadlock is just before, and he’ll need to activate it quickly before locating the vent he can escape from that should be just to the right of the door when it has sealed. There will be one exit or entrance at that point, and Lance will have to be careful and quick while sealing the vent behind him, or not only is he dead, the creature will escape, and this was all in vain.

He finds the deadlock and ducks behind a storage container just as the creature reappears from the transit station. It growls as it appears to sniff the air. His scent must be heavy in this area, and if the creature can track him by smell alone, then surely that has to be enough to lure it through. Hopefully, it isn’t good enough to detect him now.

The video plays, it isn’t particularly loud, but a human-sounding voice starts talking faintly, and Lance watches the creature tense, its head snapping in his direction, and he pushes himself against the wall as it runs in his direction.

For a horrible second as the footsteps get closer, Lance thinks this is it and it has spotted him, but thankfully it continues past and towards the video.

He doesn’t have long to act, so he moves the second the creature is out of sight. His heart is thundering in his ears, and his hands shake as he turns the dial and presses the button he needs to. A heavy metal grate slides down now with a loud groan, separating him from the transit station. More doors slide shut, and he hears the vent to his right seal and another door to his left.

“Is the creature still in that room?” He whispers, “I sealed the deadlocks, going for the vent now.”

“Yeah – be careful, Lance.” Pidge sounds concerned. There’s no need to worry, he wants to say, but the bitter feeling towards the Marshal sneaks back in, and he keeps quiet.

The vent is right to his left, and should open with a tap of the button on the side. A screen should appear, allowing him to type the override code in and let him out. It should take seconds.

He crouches outside the vent, fingers feeling around the edge to find the button. He feels a ridge and pushes down. There’s a loud screech from behind him, and the sound of something smashing. There are several more loud noises from that room, and Lance forces himself to focus on getting out.

The screen appears, and he types the code he was given. 7789. The screen flashes red, and nothing changes.

“Pidge,” He whispers with an increasing sense of urgency, “What was the override code again?”

“7789,” She replies, voice uncertain, “Why?”

Lance tries it again, and the screen flashes red.

“It’s not working.” He’s trying not to panic, but the noises behind him are getting increasingly loud, and he’s certain the creature must have left that room. He is somewhat hidden behind a pillar, but all it would take is for the creature to step a few meters either left or right to reveal him.

“That is the override code; it has to work. What do you mean it’s not working?”

“It’s not working! That’s what I mean!” Lance’s anxiety is rising inside him, and he feels a rush of frustration at this whole situation.

“It is not going to work,” Marshal R’Yori sounds oddly calm as he delivers Lance a death sentence, “There is no way to override the deadlock from inside once it has been initiated.”

“But that leaves me trapped here?” Lance hates how small his voice comes out, but he is so scared he can barely think straight, and the noises behind him are getting closer and closer.

“I’m sorry, Lance.” The Marshal says, voice quiet and gentle, and Lance understands with grim clarity.

He isn’t making it out of here. The Marshal was never working against them; he only wanted what was best for his people. And the plan was brilliant; they fell for his lies because what possible reason would he have to lie? There is no override code or way for Lance to escape. Marshal R'Yori knew this all along. He will be ejected into space with the alien and will most likely die before his team can rescue him. The final piece of the puzzle falls into place and brings a strange sense of calm with it.

He can hear his team yelling, but he turns around to face the creature. It hasn’t spotted him yet, pacing around the far edge of the room. It is moving quicker than it was before, not quite the sickening sprint he has seen previously, but definitely agitated. He wonders whether it has picked up on the fact that there is no escape from here.

Lance almost feels bad for it. It is only following instincts, and now he has sentenced it to death.

“I had no choice. You have seen the creature, Lance; you saw what it can do. I had to protect my people, I had to get it off the station by any means necessary.”

“You son of a bitch!” Pidge yells in response to that, “Lance, stay calm, I’m working on something. I’ll get you out of there.”

Lance pushes his back against the vent, like he is trying to become one with the wall. He wants to believe in Pidge, he really does, but he knows how the odds of survival look now. He remembers the Marshal's words. I can’t lie to you about your chances. He knew all along that he was sending Lance out to die. He had decided that Lance was a sacrifice he was willing to make, and Lance is surprisingly okay with that.

Marshal R’Yori is right. He knows what the creature can do; he knows the violence it is capable of. If it had been after his family or friends on earth, Lance would probably be willing to sacrifice himself for it then, too. It doesn’t mean he isn’t upset about the thought of dying. Never seeing Earth again, never seeing his friends or family. No more movie nights or team bonding or exploring strange new worlds. No more anything. He wonders if death will be peaceful, if he will finally feel relief, or will he just fade out of existence. Will his family remember him as a hero? Do you go to heaven if you die in space?

But at least the rest of his team will make it out of here; that has to count for something. Iopel won’t have died for nothing if he can save everyone left alive. It’s an easy choice to make, but it still surprises him when the words leave his mouth.

“Don’t do it, Pidge, let this thing be trapped here forever.” His voice isn’t small anymore; it’s more confident than he expected, despite the sadness rising up inside him.

“Lance shut the fuck up, this guy is a dick, and he is insane. We’ll figure something else out, just stay alive.”

There’s more shouting through the comms, but Lance tunes it out, taking the time to watch the creature pace around. He can appreciate it more now for what it is, rather than being scared. And it is just as beautiful as it is terrifying. It’s long tail curls around its feet at the ends, the steps it is taking are quieter now – graceful almost – and a long arm is stretched upward towards the vent above. Lance watches as it jumps up to escape, and promptly jumps back down upon realising it is trapped.

“Keith –” Someone shouts, and Lance finds himself wishing he were there to watch whatever is happening right now. Half his team aren’t wearing their helmets, per instructions from Shiro in case things went bad, and so all he can really make out of what is happening is what he can pick up through the ones who are. Keith might be trying to stab someone, Hunk is panicking, Pidge is swearing a storm up under her breath, and the Marshal is silent.

“You’re a heartless bastard, R’Yori, you know that, right?” Lance whispers with a humourless chuckle.

“I did what I had to do. I’m sorry things have worked out this way, blue paladin.”

“In another universe, I’m kicking your ass right now.”

“In another universe, I would probably let you.” The Marshal laughs slightly, but it is not a happy sound. This must have been a difficult decision to make, and Lance doesn’t envy him for that.

“Shut this guy up before I stab him,” Keith shouts angrily, a bitterness to his words Lance has never heard before, despite all the arguments the two of them have had, “Lance, hold on, okay. Don’t do anything rash. Don’t let your stupid self-sacrificial tendencies take over here. There has to be another way.”

“I second that, Lance, hold on. We’ll get you out of there.” Shiro sounds furious. There’s a faint hum of energy through the comms, and Lance wonders if that means Shiro has activated his Galra arm.

Lance wants to believe them, he really does. But the creature is getting closer and closer, and he has to be dead as soon as it spots him. The flamethrower feels heavy in his grip, and the headache he had before has come back with a vengeance. He wants to run, more than anything. He wants to escape and see his team, he wants to panic and cry and scream at the frustration, but he pushes it down in favour of that calm feeling that overcame him in the face of this revelation.

He might be dissociating, but he finds comfort in the way his mind switches off and allows him to spend what could be his last few minutes alive calm. He doesn’t want to die scared; his mama would hate that.

“It’s okay.” He says instead, trying to comfort his team.

“There has to be a way, Lance, there has to be. I’m not letting you die.” Pidge sounds angry, and her voice is trembling.

Lance wants to hug her, tell her it will all be fine. The words don’t come to him. He’s never been one for lying in times of crisis.

Pidge curses again.

“Fuck, I –” Her voice cracks, “I don’t think there’s any way to open it from here.”

Lance knew it was coming, but it doesn’t stop him from resigning himself to his fate completely.

“Stay alive, Lance, we’ll get you out of there.”

Stay alive. He can try to do that. Easier said than done, though.

There’s no more shouting through the comms, no more talking at all, even. Whatever the outcome of their argument was has left everyone silent. Lance misses the noise, something to distract himself from the dire situation he is in.

The creature steps closer, its head raised right in his direction. Lance freezes, hoping it can’t see him.

“Do you guys swear you can get me out of here?” He whispers.

“Yes,” Pidge says, her voice determined. Lance knows Pidge will stop at nothing to achieve a goal once she has one. He has seen this same determination in the hunt for her missing family and trusts her completely.

“Okay,” He murmurs, “But you need to be quick.”

The creature has spotted him for definite, its footsteps are slow and careful as it crosses the room towards him. Lance scrambles away until his back hits the far wall. He’s trapped now, nowhere else to run to. No hiding, no escaping. He just needs to survive.

The creature edges closer, thick black claws grating against the floor. It growls, long and slow. It’s only a few meters away now, that long black tail could reach out and stab him from here, but Lance gets the feeling it doesn’t want this to end quickly.

It drops onto all fours, crawling towards him. The elongated head fixated on him as it dribbles a thick liquid onto the ground. He fixes his grip on the flamethrower and raises it slowly.

His vision blurs as the alien’s mouth opens, revealing too many sets of teeth. There’s a chunk of something that might be a fabric stuck between two of its lower teeth, and Lance blinks away the doubles. The creature is impossibly close now, clawed feet clacking on the metal floor. The grace he had seen earlier is gone as it closes in for the kill. He can smell its breath on his face ,and his stomach churns.

His head swims, he has seconds to pull this off before he is nothing more than a blood stain on the floor.

Lance, despite the drumming in his skull and the anxiety threatening to choke him, levels the flamethrower.

The creature snarls.

He pulls the trigger.

“The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.” – Mario Puzo

Chapter Text

"True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces." – Noah Hawley

The flamethrower vibrates in Lance’s hands, and a thick column of fire explodes out the end. The heat is incredible; if he weren’t wearing his helmet, it would probably have singed his eyebrows off.

The creature growls as the fire hits it, and it is gone before Lance can even process what just happened. He relaxes his finger on the trigger and slumps back against the wall, bringing a dull ache with the motion.

His hands shake uncontrollably, and he can kind of hear someone talking through the comms, but he focuses on calming his breathing and heart rate before he tunes back in.

In for four, hold, out for four. In for four, hold, out for four. His hands won’t stop shaking. His breathing is coming far too fast. In for four, hold, our for four.

It takes a few long minutes before it works, and after another minute, he feels ready to plan the next move.

“If you can get to the airlock, you might be able to use that to escape out and jetpack back towards us,” Pidge says.

Lance doesn’t even want to think about moving, but the flamethrower only has so much fuel, and the creature knows where he is right now. It won’t be gone for long.

“Where is the airlock?” He asks anyway, despite his reluctance to move.

“Lowest level, right in the rear left corner. You’ll need code 7477 to unlock it.” Marshal R’Yori’s voice is not a welcome sound right now. Lance does not want to talk to his guy any more than he wants to become dinner for this creature.

There’s a muffled sound through the comms.

“Lance,” It’s Hunk, and god, that is someone that Lance has wanted to talk to.

“Hunk, my man, I missed you!” Lance is unable to stop the grin spreading across his face; if he tries, he can pretend they’re just reuniting after spending a day apart doing a mission and are both safe in the castle. Not that it has only been an hour at most, and there is a huge space station and several layers of deadlocks separating them.

“I missed you too, buddy. How are things over there?”

“Oh man, I’m having so much fun,” Lance says with a sarcastic grin while he pushes himself up to stand, levelling the flamethrower again. He’s prepared for anything right now. “Nothing beats being trapped in a rather small area with a creature that hates me personally.”

Hunk, despite the anxiety clearly coming through his voice, laughs, “Well, at least you’re having fun. Keith gave the Marshal a black eye, and Shiro threatened him with his Galra hand. It was actually kinda fun to watch aside from the, ya know, fearing for your life part.”

Lance drops his voice to a whisper as he begins his hunt for the airlock. “I was thinking about that before, wish I could’ve been there. Hope the Marshal is expecting a black eye from me, too.”

Someone else laughs then, Keith or Pidge maybe, but it’s hard to tell.

“You'd better stay alive, Lance,” Hunk whispers like he is scared to voice these words out loud, “No more of that self-sacrificial crap from you.”

Lance feels guilty suddenly for giving up so easily. He hadn’t really considered the impact it would have on his team. It makes sense now why Hunk was allowed to talk to him. To talk some sense into him. Maybe this place has changed him more than he thought.

“I’ll try.” He says after a moment, it’s not a promise. He can’t promise he will stay alive right now, because Lance knows the situation he is in and knows how dire his odds are, and he has never broken a promise before and doesn’t intend to start now. But he can try. He can make an effort. He can do everything in his power to prevent something bad from happening to him.

And then, if he fails, at least his team knows he didn’t give up on them.

Wow, Lance thinks, this emotional whiplash is exhausting.

“I’m exhausted,” He mutters after a moment, mostly to himself, but Hunk responds anyway.

“I know, buddy. You’re nearly there. We’re gonna come and try to meet you outside the airlock if Shiro can get the Marshal to open the headquarters for us.”

Okay, that is something nice to look forward to. He just needs to find the airlock and get himself out of here.

“Do we know where the creature is?”

Lance doesn’t really want the answer to this, but figures he needs it anyway.

“I’m detecting something moving a couple of floors down, right about where you’ll need to be.”

Typical. Lance can never catch a break, can he?

“Okay, I’ll try and lure it back up here and sneak around it.”

“The airlock will need to pressurize before you can enter. This will take approximately 30 ticks and set off an alarm that will sound until it is finished. The creature will be drawn to the noise and the movement as it will view it as a means of escape. You should be able to hide in the maintenance vents under the floor while it sounds, but be careful, as using the flamethrower there may set off the oxygen pipes.” God, Lance really wishes someone would shut Marshal R’Yori up for good.

“And what happens if I set off the oxygen pipes?” Lance swallows, “Because I have a really bad feeling about what that means, and I need someone to tell me I’m wrong before I freak out any more than I already am.”

Nobody talks.

“I’m feeling very pessimistic right now, so I need someone to tell me I’m wrong because I think that means that if I set fire to the oxygen pipes, this whole station blows up? But that’s crazy, right?”

The silence is all the confirmation he needs.

“Great, so I’ve got to survive 30 seconds with a creature that, if I need to remind you all, hates me personally right now, and is capable of killing me violently with just about every part of its body, and the only weapon I have that works on it could blow up everything in this station?”

Lance wants to laugh at how this just keeps getting worse, but he can't quite bring himself to indulge. It’s a sick sense of irony that reminds him that he really is in one of the worst situations any of them has ever been in.

Weirdly enough, he isn’t scared anymore. He’d taken the intro to psych class at the garrison, and just before they’d rescued Shiro, they had looked at phobias and why people were scared. The treatment he remembers the clearest for a phobia was something called flooding, which worked on the assumption that the human body could only keep up the heightened state of anxiety for so long before it was forced to relax. He wonders whether that is what has happened to him, his body finally forcing itself to calm down to avoid any more damage.

If Lance were feeling more eloquent, he would find something oddly poetic in that. His house had flooded once, back in Cuba, after a particularly nasty storm several years ago. Lance hadn’t been old enough at the time to understand just how bad it was, but he remembered having to live somewhere else for a while. He remembers the state their house had been in when they had returned, full of damp and the furniture ruined. The broken family pictures and the smashed plates littering the ground as his mama had tried her best to hold herself together. It had been a rough time for them all, but they’d come out of the other side stronger as a result. They had rebuilt the house almost from scratch together, abandoning the dated yellow wallpaper for a fresh light blue that Lance had massively preferred. New furniture, new plates, new family pictures. It had been beautiful among the chaos.

He thinks then that if he makes it out of this, he’s going to use all the time left in this world to build something he loves with the people he loves.

His traitorous brain then takes a second to think about Keith. The red paladin that Lance had grown awfully fond of in a way that would be somewhat embarrassing if he dared to speak any of it out loud. The stupid mullet he actually rather liked because it suited Keith in a strange way that had Lance thinking there is nobody else in the universe who could pull it off. His tough exterior, which, when cracked, revealed just how soft Keith could be, even if he was awkward and stilted with it. Their bonding moments had been happening more and more as of late, or maybe Lance was just getting himself in more and more stupid situations. Either way, it was getting harder to ignore his growing feelings for the red paladin – he was certain Hunk had picked up on it if the small looks he had started giving Lance every time he argued with Keith were any clue.

“Hey, Keith,” Lance says before he can think about it, “If I make it out of here, will you teach me more sword fighting?”

Keith laughs, “If you make it out of here, it’ll be my treat to kick your ass some more.”

“It’s a date then,” Lance smiles, not registering what he has actually said for another few seconds, “Wait, I didn’t mean like a date date just like you know a scheduled thing, but we can work around stuff, I just meant we should plan som–”

He’s cut off from his nervous rambling by Hunk laughing at him, his evil best friend.

“It’s a date,” Keith confirms, his voice soft and quiet, but Lance treasures every syllable.

“Can you two stop being losers for one second, Lance, you gotta start moving soon.” Pidge is as blunt as she is smart at times, but Lance needed the push to start moving. He pushes himself to stand and slowly creeps his way towards the stairs.

He peers in the research lab as he goes past, and the computer he had started playing the video on is smashed to smithereens on the floor, with a thick layer of slimy mucus covering it. Gross.

The stairs are empty, but there’s an awful lot of noise coming from the floor below. He sends a silent prayer and begins his descent.

“I’m picking up a lot of movement from that thing, it’s agitated and getting desperate,” Pidge tells him, ever so unhelpfully, “There’s also a looooot of stuff going haywire down there, be careful.”

Lance feels ungrateful, but he’s almost sick of them telling him to be careful. He’s being as careful as he can be, given the circumstances.

He reaches the bottom of the first set of stairs and ducks behind the wall separating him from the open expanse of this floor. There’s a lot of background noise on this floor, more than there was the last time he was down here. An alarm is beeping somewhere, there’s an automated voice spewing something the translator can’t pick up, and there’s the near constant sound of things crashing to the ground. The whole station jolts to the right, and he stumbles with the force of it before catching himself again. He can hear the footsteps louder here too, but can’t work out if they are coming from this floor or the floor below.

Luckily, or unluckily, the answer becomes apparent quickly when a long black tail whips above him, exactly where his head had been not a few seconds prior. Lance freezes, slowing his breathing to near impossible levels to be as silent as possible. His hands shake, the flamethrower feels impossibly empty in his grasp. He’s caught, the creature knows where he is; it has to.

And then, like some miracle, a small explosion sounds at the far side of the floor – shaking the whole tech spire again. The alien bounces off, chasing prey that Lance hopes doesn’t really exist.

He uses the creature’s distraction to his advantage, sneaking around the wall and across the room to the next set of stairs down.

Now the footsteps are coming from above him, which is a lot easier to deal with than not having any idea at all where the creature is. He’s on the right floor now, only needs to make his way across the base level to the airlock. The home stretch.

Lance is more careful crossing this floor, searching for anything he could use to survive if it comes to it. He pockets another flare, but doubts the same trick would work twice, and a small handheld device that seems to be akin to a music player. It’s beaten up and scratched, but it looks like it should still work. There’s a small silver disk loaded into it underneath a black plastic screen, and when Lance lifts the plastic, he can see an inscription on the disk in that same alien language he’s been seeing everywhere.

It might not be perfect, but it will have to do.

He reaches the last room, spots the doors through to the room where the airlock is. The creature is still above him, loud footsteps shaking the ceiling every time it moves. He’s in a good position, which is, of course, when everything goes wrong.

He doesn’t notice the slight cloud in the air, the greenish haze to everything that has settled over the room. He misses the smell of gas and the shimmer of something just waiting for a spark.

The door to the room slides open.

Then, there’s nothing.

The ground underneath Lance disappears, and he is weightless in the air. The silence is so strong it seems to cover every part of him, but everything is so hot and the heat is so intense he feels like he could drown in it. It burns so intensely that he thinks this is it, this is how I die.

And then, just as quickly as it started, it ends. Lance falls hard, hits the ground even harder. His vision blurs, and the world around him is ringing, ringing, why is it ringing? He tastes copper and smoke and something else bitter and acrid that burns his lungs as he tries to take a breath.

The room swims in his vision, red and orange and black, and something tells him he needs to be concerned about that, but he can’t work out where that thought is coming from. There’s a thick haze that has settled over every thought and chases them away like clouds before he can make sense of anything.

His ears ring, and it is the only thing he can hear for a while until it fades just enough to let some voices come through.

“-nce?”

“Wh-- happ-ing?”

His head hurts.

“Lance, are you there?”

Yes, he wants to say, I’m here.

Instead, he shuts his eyes and the world slips away.

Keith had just about managed to calm his heart rate from Lance’s last near-death experience when he hears the explosion through the comms. A loud boom that seems to shake the whole station, followed by the sound of something hitting the ground. A loud clunk of something metal, a croaky robotic voice muttering something garbled.

“Lance!” He shouts, hearing the crackle of fire getting louder.

Pidge looks just as concerned next to him, where they had settled down to track Lance’s movements on the tablet the Marshal had handed her.

“What’s happening?” She asks, eyes wide and fearful as she watches the screen, desperate for any kind of movement.

“Lance,” Hunk asks, voice frantic, “Are you there?”

There’s a groan and a weak cough through the comms.

“Lance,” Keith tries again, “C’mon, man, don’t die on us now.”

Nothing. Not even a groan or a wheeze.

Keith feels the earlier anxiety come back when he’d watched that huge shape get closer and closer to Lance on the screen. Heard the panic and the fear from the blue paladin as he stared down the creature, and the way he’d spoken so calmly about sacrificing himself for them all.

He’d wanted to grab Lance by the shoulders and shake some common sense into him, but Shiro had forced Hunk to step in to try. And it had worked, if the slightly guilty tone to Lance’s voice had been any indication. Keith had insisted on listening in anyway; Shiro’s earlier instruction for it to be just him and Pidge communicating was disregarded completely as the helplessness rose in all of them.

Keith understood Shiro’s reasoning behind that decision, wanting to protect them all from hearing if something were to go terribly wrong. Wanting to avoid Lance’s anxiety being broadcast to them all.

He also thought it was a load of shit. They regularly shared mind spaces when forming Voltron, and they all knew far too much about each other. Lance’s anxiety at times was no stranger to any of them. Nor was the constant fear of dying in a gruesome and bloody way. As much as Keith wished it could be different, he had long since accepted that something horrible could happen to any one of them at any moment.

Still, he had listened to the instruction at the time and sat with Hunk on the same couches they had slept on. Far away from any of the danger, but close enough to still be able to work out what was going on. Hunk had helped him through his anxiety then, and Keith has returned the favour with each close call, each second of silence where the team couldn’t be certain what had happened to the blue paladin.

When Marshal R’Yori had revealed that there was no way to open the airlock, Keith had almost skewered him with his sword. The way Lance had agreed hadn’t helped. None of them have even had a glimpse of whatever is out there, except Lance and the Marshal, but Keith is almost certain that they could take it on together. His anger at the Marshal had resulted in R’Yori getting a black eye and a solid kick to the ribs. Keith thinks the Marshal should consider himself lucky that it isn’t worse. Lance had joked with the guy, called him a heartless bastard, and threatened to kick his ass, but had still accepted his fate with that same belief that it was worth it to die if he could at least save someone else.

Keith might not be good at talking to people, but he’s a lot better at reading them than he will ever let on. There’s a long pattern of Lance putting himself in danger to protect others. He’d been so angry when he’d heard that, enough so that not even Shiro had been able to stop him from grabbing his helmet to listen to the conversation, but at the moment where it had counted, Keith had lost the words to convey his message in all the ways he wanted to.

Instead, he had threatened the Marshal. Told him to shut up, before he gets stabbed for real this time. Even summoning his bayard for emphasis. The rest of his team had been angry too, but Keith had never felt such a pure, blinding rage directed at a singular person before. He’d been angry, sure. Growing up an orphan in the care system does that to you. When the Kerberos mission had failed, and Shiro had been pronounced dead, he’d been angry then, too.

But that had been different. He’d been angry at everything. Angry at the world, angry at the instructors, angry at Iverson for so clearly hiding something. Angry at Shiro for leaving him. But he had never felt this amount of rage directed at just one person; even when Lance had been winding him up, it hadn’t even come close.

He had been able to angrily tell Lance not to be self-sacrificial, to not do anything rash, but between his anger at the Marshal and his growing fear for Lance, he hadn’t been able to put as much eloquence into the thought as he had wanted to initially.

Lance – stupid, kind, selfless, Lance – had gone quiet. Tried to comfort them all. Resigned himself to his fate, and Keith couldn’t even blame him. Pidge had confirmed what Keith had already known – that there was no way to open the deadlock from there, and everyone had fallen silent.

Then, when Lance had finally accepted that they wouldn’t let him die there, Keith had been powerless to watch as that large blue dot on Pidge’s screen had crept closer and closer to the Lance-shaped dot. Heard the growls through the comms, a dark sound that sent shivers down his spine, heard the clack of clawed feet scraping against the metal floors. Heard Lance swear, take a deep breath, and the blast of the flamethrower going off.

The long second before they knew it had worked to scare the creature away. The way Shiro had spoken to Lance so softly, but the panicked breaths of their blue paladin had been enough to tell them all that Lance couldn’t hear them. The way they’d all listened closely to every breath sound, until it had evened out, and Lance had taken a big deep breath in.

Pidge’s brilliant idea of the airlock, and the prayers that Lance’s suit hadn’t suffered any damage.

The way Lance had lit up upon hearing Hunk’s voice, and the slight bitterness that had Keith wishing he could bring out that same light-heartedness in Lance. Lance saying he’ll give the Marshal another black eye, and the way Keith had eyed the already blooming bruise before laughing.

Lance’s guilt for giving up, and the muttered confession of his exhaustion.

The way things had just kept getting worse, in a way nobody could have predicted. The airlock needing pressurising, and the oxygen pipes and all the dangers Keith couldn’t even begin to name.

He’d thought R’Yori’s comment about giving Lance his sympathies had been odd at the time, but he had realised then just how sinister it was and resisted the urge to punch the guy again.

The bit that stuck with Keith the most, though, is the way Lance had asked him to teach him some sword fighting.

Keith had laughed, said something about how it would be great to be able to kick his ass again. He hopes Lance picked up on the hidden message there.

Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.

“It’s a date.” Lance had said, and stumbled his way over an explanation of it not being a date date in a way that had Keith blushing despite the knowing stares of Hunk and Shiro.

“It’s a date.” Keith had confirmed, telling himself the butterflies in his chest were anxiety from the situation, and nothing more or less.

Then, Lance had started moving. Making his way out of that place to escape. Keith’s heart had been pounding in his chest the whole time, unable to look away from the screen, tracking all of Lance’s movements.

And what was the reward for their hard work? A deafening explosion that had them all jumping out of their seats instantly.

Keith’s anxiety rises to an impossibly high level as he begs for any kind of response from Lance, but the silence persists. Nobody else looks any calmer either. Shiro has gone ghostly white, and Pidge is running stressed hands through her hair in between typing rapidly on her laptop to try and get any sign that Lance is alive. Hunk looks like he might puke – might have already if the red flush to his skin is any indication.

Marshal R’Yori looks far calmer than he has any right to be. Keith snaps.

His arm is up, and he’s backing the Marshal into the wall before anyone can stop him. Nobody makes any moves to, even after the Marshal groans as his arm presses onto what he thinks might be the alien’s windpipe. Keith growls with anger.

“This is all your fault,” Keith spits out, his fury lighting every bone in his body on fire.

“Your paladin knew the risks he was taking. I hope he is alright, but you have to understand that it had to be done.” Marshal R’Yori says, his voice still so impossibly calm. Keith wants to slam his sword through this guy’s head and shut him up forever.

Shiro grabs Keith by the shoulder and pulls him back slightly, allowing the Marshal to take a deep breath. His Galra arm is glowing, and the reminder that everyone else is just as angry as him is somewhat comforting. It doesn’t stop him from glaring at the Marshal, but Shiro is glaring just as hard, so it’s okay.

“It wasn’t your choice to make, to trap Lance down there,” Shiro says, his voice is calm, but there’s a steely anger to it that Keith has only ever heard a few times, “You do not get to sacrifice my team to fix your mistakes.”

The Marshal sighs in response, “It is clear that you still do not understand exactly what we are dealing with here. Is it not better to lose one life to save many? Or should we lose everyone to save your friend?”

Shiro punches the wall beside the Marshal's head with his prosthetic and leaves a large dent in the metal. “You do not get to make that decision for us. You don’t get to hide the truth to trick someone into giving up their life and hope we will just come around to your viewpoint.”

“There really was no other way.” The Marshal looks defeated, like he knows that he has lost this battle.

Shiro glares at him, “Then get out of our sights, because next time I’m not going to stop them from hurting you.”

Keith backs off, removes his hold on the Marshal, who turns and backs out of the room. It isn’t a satisfying resolution to the conflict, but it lets them all focus on the more pressing matters at hand.

Pidge is still furiously typing away. Hunk is sitting beside her, tapping away on a separate screen of his own he must have picked up from somewhere around the room.

“There has to be some way to override it,” The youngest paladin groans with frustration, “There’s no way they wouldn’t set something up.”

“Well, they appear to have done a whole lot of dodgy things since we got here, so who knows.”

“Shut up, Hunk, you’re not helping.” Pidge pushes her glasses further up her nose.

Keith groans, “This is so stupid, can’t we just go down there and try the deadlock from outside. That’s where I’d put the override.”

Pidge rolls her eyes at him, but he is saved from her snark by Hunk cheering loudly.

“I found it! There’s an admin control deck just outside the tech spire transit station. If there’s an override, it has to be there.” Hunk pumps one fist into the air in celebration.

“Good work, Hunk,” Shiro pats Hunk on the shoulder, with his human hand, and his Galra arm loses the power up and fades to its usual grey colour.

“So,” Keith asks, “Who’s going down?”

Shiro smiles at him softly, “No more splitting up, we go down together.”

Keith sighs with relief, and the sentiment appears to be matched in the other paladins.

Pidge stands suddenly and leaves the room to go into the separate lab that the Marshal had walked into. She returns, dragging him behind her by his ear. “You will sit right here,” She points at where she had been sitting previously, “And you will not move a muscle until we come back, at which point you will let us back in.”

“And what if I don’t?” The Marshal asks.

Pidge glares at him and releases her grasp on his ear. “I hacked these doors before, and I’m not afraid to do it again.”

“Besides,” Hunk jumps in, “If you don’t let us back in, who else is going to save this stupid ship?”

Marshal R’Yori sighs, defeated, and sits down in the chair Pidge had pointed out.

It doesn’t take long for them all to get ready to leave. Ten minutes pass at most before they have all gathered their armour and supplies ready to head down to find Lance. Keith was ready first, his impatience pushing him to rush everyone else too, finding their actions too slow when literally anything could be happening to Lance.

He knows there’s only one likely outcome right now, but just like before, when Lance had fallen all that time ago and disappeared, he keeps hoping for something. A crackly voice over the comms, a groan, any sign of movement from the Lance-shaped dot on the map he’d spent so long staring at.

Nothing changes. The disappointment could choke him.

They don’t move quietly when the doors creek open to let them out. With the creature trapped with Lance, there’s nothing to worry about aside from other survivors, and Keith isn’t anywhere near as scared of them as they should be of him.

Not when his friend is in danger.

He thinks of their sword-fighting date Lance had asked for – it’s not a date, it’s not a date, stop calling it a date – and feels a fresh determination rise in him. He’s going to kick Lance’s ass for scaring them all half to death, and then he’s going to make sure he is so skilled with the sword that nothing like this could ever happen again.

The station is quiet, and it sends a chill down his spine. Somewhere like this should be buzzing with life, not quiet enough for him to hear Hunk’s stomach rumble while he taps his fingers idly on his armour over where his bayard forms from.

They make their way to the transit car easily enough and find it is already there waiting for them. Keith pushes the button to open the gate, and they file in. He’d remembered this part of the journey taking a while, so he sits down and crosses one leg bent over his knee.

Shiro flops down next to him. “Lance will be okay, you know?”

Keith wishes he had Shiro’s optimism, even if it’s faked to reassure everyone else. “We don’t know that.” He says instead.

“We know Lance is stubborn, and he would never miss out on his date with you.” Shiro winks at him. Keith blushes and resists the urge to hit his shoulder.

“I’m just teaching him to sword fight, Shiro, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Oh, I’ll come along then.” Shiro’s grin makes it clear he is being mocked, but Keith honestly couldn’t care less in this moment. After all of this is done, he’s going to be training for hours anyway until he can forget the fear and the stress of these last few days. They’ll all join at some point, except maybe Lance, who will most likely sleep for hours until he’s feeling better. Some extra company wouldn’t bother him. There's plenty of time for him to train Lance privately, and even if the opportunity never arises, at least they would all be stronger.

Except it would bother him, wouldn’t it?

Keith pushes that thought away as the car starts to slow down.

He isn’t sure what he expected when the gate to the tech spire slides open. More tech, maybe, some indication of the carnage they had all witnessed over the rest of the station, possibly even other survivors or an android.

Instead, there’s just a big sign pointing them in the right direction, and a long white room. There are benches scattered around, a few fake potted plants with beautiful dark red leaves. Some storage lockers are scattered around a column in the middle of the room. Keith could see it being quite nice when there are people around.

Until he faces the far wall and can make out some more graffiti on there. He’s seen enough around to not want to translate this one. Pidge does, though, and her face whitens slightly as she reads what it says. She doesn’t pass the message on, for better or for worse.

Keith assumes that Lance had previously gone down the corridor labelled Tech Spire, so is surprised when Hunk directs them to the right down a separate corridor with a door Pidge has to hack to get them through.

It opens into a room that clearly isn’t designed for visitors. Several androids are wandering about, but they pay no attention to the paladins. Keith eyes them warily anyway. A huge desk lines the middle, with several computer screens set up with large, fancy-looking keyboards full of symbols he doesn’t understand. The symbols don’t look like the language he’d seen scrawled over the walls, but instead something else.

Pidge sets herself up, plugs in her laptop, and begins clicking away.

It takes five minutes until she groans in frustration. “God,” She runs a tired hand through her hair, “This security system is tougher than it has any right to be.”

Keith agrees, he’s growing restless as the silence on the comms seems almost deafening. Where is Lance?

It takes another few minutes until Pidge can unlock the door, and Keith is running before he can even think about it.

Consciousness, for Lance at least, feels a lot less like a constant presence in his life and more like a fleeting idea. There for a painful second, where he can sense the heat from the fire and the burning in his lungs, and then gone again as the world fades back out quicker than a cloud of smoke dissipating.

When he isn’t almost conscious, he seems to be dreaming. Or at least he hopes it is a dream, because something is pretty wrong if it is really happening.

He’s stood on the beach in Varadero. His Mom stands a little way back from him, Veronica is standing just a little bit in front of him, knee deep in the ocean. The water brushes his bare feet, and the hot sun beats down on his shoulders.

In real life, he hasn’t been back to Varadero for many years. Something isn’t right here, his brain supplies. He can’t figure out what, though, and the white sand between his toes looks so much like it used to that he can’t even imagine how this could be fake.

He turns around, smiles widely at his Mom. She waves at him from where she is standing, just a few metres in front of the tree line separating the street from the beach. At the other side of the trees would be the milkshake shack he used to go to often as a kid; his throat burns all of a sudden. Strange. Where did that come from?

The sand beneath his feet is suddenly hot – too hot to stand on – and he jumps into the water. The ocean isn’t much better, a thin layer of steam rising from the surface as his feet turn red and blister.

Something is ringing? That’s not right? Nothing should be ringing. The only sounds he can usually hear at the beach are the noises of people and the ocean crashing against the shore.

He looks down at his arms, and the usually brown skin is speckled red and blistering.

Something isn’t right.

Before he can think too much about it, the ground opens up beneath him and he falls back into unconsciousness.

Keith makes it to the Tech Spire in record time, and he doesn’t even think about the risks before throwing himself through the open door. He summons his bayard, holding the red sword in front of him as a defence while he races down the stairs. He tries not to think too much about the blood splattered on the walls and the absolute destruction left in the wake of the creature.

There’s a loud clanking of metals as the deadlocks around this section are lifted one by one. With any luck, the creature is going to take its chance to escape and run – leaving them plenty of time and space to grab Lance and get out of there.

Keith tries not to imagine the worst, he really does, but he can’t get the vision of the last time Lance was blown up out of his head. And, God, how fucked up is it that there even was a last time? He remembers seeing Lance look so small and so frail, his body covered with soot and blood. The way the power had been cut from the castle ship and the way they all had to fight, Lance included, to save his life.

He rounds the corner, taking the steps three at a time, and prays to a God he doesn't believe in that this time things are different.

Lance blinks his eyes open.

The room blurs together, and there’s too much noise around for any of it to make any sense.

An alarm is going off somewhere in the distance.

A door opens.

Someone might be walking nearby, and he should be concerned about that, but the room swims, and his eyes are closing before he can think too much about it.

Something grabs his leg, a clawed hand breaks the skin, and it burns. The hand tenses, and he’s being dragged up off the ground into the air.

Lance fights to open his eyes, but his head hits something hard, and he’s unconscious before he can even begin to panic.

Keith rounds the last corner, can smell the room he needs before he even sees it. The thick smoke and the flames licking up the wall giving him all the signs he needs to know he’s going in the right direction. He can faintly hear the rest of the team behind him, only one floor up, but it makes all the difference as Keith races forward into the smoke without them.

There’s a flash of something dark moving up into the vent. Keith turns on his flashlight, uncaring if the creature spots him as he searches for Lance.

He should be here. Where is he?

He spots the flamethrower, discarded against the wall and miraculously still in one piece, untouched by the fire rampaging through this section. The door to the airlock is just to his right; the room beyond it is destroyed almost completely. A burnt android twitches on the floor. A chunk of metal drops from the ceiling. The charred remains of some papers are scattered all across the hallway.

There are so many signs that life once existed here, but none of them point to Lance.

The rest of the paladins enter behind Keith as he comes to terms with the realisation that Lance is not here anymore.

Keith doesn’t really know what happened after that. Somehow, he’d ended up back in the Marshal’s headquarters while Pidge tried her best to track Lance’s location using his armour. It had been easy before to track his heat signature, but now they had no idea where he could possibly be, which added a whole new layer of confusion.

Marshal R’Yori had been furious when they’d come back without Lance, but had kept his mouth shut after being on the receiving end of a death glare from just about all of them.

Probably a wise decision from him, Keith wouldn’t have been able to hold his anger back, and he doubts any of the others would have stopped him from killing him there and then. They would have said he deserved it.

It’s been about half an hour since they had returned, and the silence that has settled over them all is suffocating. The only thing making noise throughout the whole room being Pidge’s furious clacking as she typed away endlessly trying to find anything about where Lance had gone. Hunk had disappeared from sight a few minutes ago. Keith had thought about trying to find him, but had written off the idea when his own emotions left him feeling paralysed. Shiro was sitting next to him, just close enough where he could reach out and touch him if he needed the physical comfort, but far enough away to keep his distance, too. The oldest paladin looks exhausted in the same way Keith is.

Keith feels nauseous. Thick and heavy in his stomach as he tries to understand what could possibly have happened. Did Lance run away? Did his comms break? Did he come up with a plan and try to action it without telling them?

Or did the creature get him? Is Pidge furiously searching for something, someone, that doesn’t even exist anymore? Is Lance nothing more than a blood stain left on the ground somewhere?

He shakes those thoughts out of his head. If Keith knows anything, it’s that he can rely on his team to be strong. To pull through impossible situations. Lance had done it before, beaten impossible odds and come out the other side laughing; there’s no reason why this wouldn’t be the same.

He fights the bitter feeling in his stomach and the small voice telling him this is all pointless, and tries to pretend it’s okay.

“Even in the grave, all is not lost.” ― Edgar Allan Poe