Chapter Text
“Hurry up,” Keith hisses.
“Shut up, Keith,” Lance returns, annoyed, “I’ve almost got it.”
Keith keeps his eyes trained on the horizon, certain that it won’t be long before Shiro figures out that they’re missing and comes looking. “Shiro—”
“Yeah, Keith, I know, hostiles.” Lance says, drawing away from the scope of his sniper to meet Keith’s eyes. He adds, testily, “you didn’t have to come.”
He returns to fiddling with his scope, and Keith takes the opportunity to look back the way they came. Lance is right; he really shouldn’t have come along. The very act had, no doubt, enabled Lance. In fact, it had been his intention to rat immediately upon seeing Lance sneaking out of camp, but then Lance had looked so earnest when Keith had caught him. Knotting his brow and frowning, like he’d known just how to appeal to Keith’s softer side.
Keith thinks, even if Lance had snapped at him, he still would’ve fallen into step without a second thought.
Lance lifts his head and squints up at the sky, before making a final adjustment to the angle of his scope. He gasps, reaching out blindly for Keith. Hand finding and grabbing at Keith’s shoulder, eye still pressed to the sight, he says, “look!”
Lance worms only partly away, hovering close enough that Keith has to press in tight to look down the scope. The cloud cover, freshly breaking, boasts a glimmering moon, craters hollowed out in such a way that Keith feels a twinge of remorse for Earthen soil and the wash of their moon over it. Keith pulls away after a moment, never one for sentimentality. Lance is eager, anyway, his hand still on Keith’s shoulder like he might absorb the view through the point of contact.
Lance replaces Keith at the scope so quickly his hair brushes Keith’s cheek, and melting at the shoulders, he murmurs, as if in grief, “aw man. It looks just like ours.”
The clouds work quickly to cover the moon over again, like their eyes are only worthy of a single glance. Lance pulls back to watch it disappear with just his eyes, the last bits of moonlight reflecting brightly in the blue there.
“Yeah,” Keith says softly, pulling his gaze away from Lance to observe the last sliver of moon fade away.
Lance deforms and stows his bayard, sighing heavily. He doesn’t speak, but he gets the lines under his eye that Keith knows to recognize as a relative of sadness. He stays like that, looking up, though there’s nothing much to see, aside from a smattering of unconstellated stars, visible through the patchy clouds.
Keith flexes his jaw, hoping he has given Lance enough time to mourn the moon, before he prompts, gently, “we should head back.”
“Shiro was passed out,” Lance dismisses, “he’s not gonna notice we’re missing.”
“He might wake up when we come back, then. Sooner better than later.”
“Nah,” Lance smiles, traces of mirth returning to his features, “he’s been wiped out lately. Both of you, actually.”
Keith bristles, dropping his gaze to the red clay of the shingled roof. The tiles press into his stomach, and scratch lightly against the hard plans of his armour. He resists the feel of warmth in his cheeks, knowing it’s true—he’s become a heavy sleeper for the first time he can ever remember. It’s deserved sleep, if he may be so bold—but it’s almost as if some kind of badge of honour, of being jaded and alert, has been stripped away. What kind of leader doesn’t stir at the faintest sound? “It’s been a long few movements,” he decides, sheepish.
He’s been through a fair enough bit now that he must now have the proper accreditation to sleep a little heavier than he normally does.
“Preaching to the choir, man,” Lance says, lighter. He bumps his shoulder to Keith’s, as if noticing how timid Keith grows, “I’m just glad I’m not waking up to you training.”
Keith wavers. He considers saying he likes that he doesn’t find Lance pouring over star maps, too, but wonders if it’s been long enough that that’s not in Lance’s practice, anymore. It’s not like he could, really, anyhow; not with the castleship so recently blown up. Keith’s not sure how to feel about the fact that Lance knows Keith well enough to know that his listless training never quite ceased, even on the whale, even when Krolia lay a small distance away, watching Keith’s movements through lidded, but alert, eyes.
Keith turns onto his back again, propped on his elbows to follow their path back to camp with his eyes. “It’s just good to be back,” he mumbles, weakly, like that’ll explain it, “safer.”
He never thought twice about putting his life into Voltron’s hands, into Lance’s. His mother hadn’t earned such a merit until well into their sojourn.
“Safer?” Lance repeats, amusement evident but inoffensive, “in the middle of an intergalactic road trip? Let me remind you—this pitstop is hostility central. Supposedly, at least.” Lance squints out at the horizon. “Seems fine to me.”
“It’s better than an inter-reality whale.”
“A whale?” Lance sits straight up, barrelling wide-eyed into Keith’s space. “Space whale?”
“Whale adjacent.”
“Whoa, so, this thing was making its own atmosphere? Or were you—”
“…Yes.” Keith side-eyes Lance, surprised at his guess being serious and scientifically verifiable.
“Inter-reality?” Lance repeats, “so, what? You wake up with purple hair one day?”
“What—? No,” Keith says, giving Lance a withering look. Keith flattens his back to the roof, folding his hands under his head. “It just showed us glimpses of the past and future.”
Lance doesn’t speak for a moment, looking at the spot where his own elbow meets the shingles, propping him up. The mirth seems to leave him all at once, his eyes meeting Keith’s in the next moment, steely but hesitant. “So…” he begins, “do we make it?”
Keith feels guilty, then, seeing Lance’s finger scratch at a crevice in a shingle, his face held still, but his gaze evasive and wandering along the space between them. “I don’t know,” Keith admits. “It was vague. Think of it as snapshots of the potential of the future.”
Lance considers this, looking back up at the sky. “Snapshots…” he repeats, pensive, “like what?”
“Like…” Keith trails off, his gaze anchoring somewhere beyond Lance. “It’s like, if I saw you, I’d just get a feeling.”
Lance hums thoughtfully. “Probably a mix of, like, pure joy and insane jealousy, right?” he asks, smiling boyishly and light when he meets Keith’s eyes again.
“…Sure.” Keith drops his gaze.
Pure joy; Lance on a beach next to a woman Keith only vaguely recognizes from mind-meld exercises. Lance grinning in Keith’s direction. Reaching for him.
“Did any of the stuff you see happen yet?”
Keith sighs, sitting up. He crosses his legs, cupping his palms over his knees. “Yeah. The fight with Shiro.”
“Oh,” Lance says softly. He shifts a bit, and after a moment, asks, “was what you saw… y’know. Accurate?”
“Pretty much,” Keith murmurs, “I… haven’t thought too hard about it.”
Lance nods, slowly, thoughtfully, like taking great care to navigate his next words. He parts his lips, poised to speak, only for Keith to suddenly be blinded by a white light.
“Shit,” Lance says, grabbing Keith’s wrist before his hand can shield his eyes.
Below them, Keith can make out a reinforced truck, almost tank-like in scale, apparently packed to the brim with planet natives, their voices raising into various phrases demanding surrender and promising swift retribution, only Keith doesn’t have time to hear much of anything before Lance is dragging them both over the roof’s peak and down the other side. Their armour scrapes roughly against the shingles, and in the next breath, they’re tumbling off the edge of the roof and rolling to their feet.
They hit the ground hard, but Lance is already grasping at Keith to get them both upright and taking off running into the woods. Unhelpfully, Coran’s spiel on the planet’s hostiles starts replaying in Keith’s ear; militia mobilized following a narrowly deterred Galra invasion, with surviving intruders becoming, essentially, prisoners of war, though, mostly, killed on sight.
They go sprinting into the thick brush, markedly in the opposite direction of camp, feet pounding hard on dry soil. Keith stumbles over a tree root once; pumps his legs harder to catch up to Lance.
“What’s the plan?” Lance yells, blaster in hand.
His face is hardened, and Keith shelves Lance’s newfound courage away for later inspection; Keith’s used to a panicky but capable Lance. He tries not to let this change disorient him, another in a sea of realized changes in Lance, and willing himself to go faster, Keith grits out, “run!”
“That’s not a plan!” Lance cries, casting his gaze over his shoulder. He readjusts his grip on his blaster, eyes steely. “I have an idea.”
Lance slows and turns so quickly Keith hardly has the sense to stop. Still, Lance keeps right on creeping back, firing off three consecutive shots and swiftly taking out the on-foot pursuers Keith hadn’t even realized were behind them. The truck roars, not far off, and before Keith knows it Lance has hooked his hand in the crook of Keith’s elbow and pulled them sharply off their original course and into the foliage. “This way,” he says, finally showing some muted alarm, eyes wide and brow high and tight.
They keep running. Keith has no idea how far or long they run, but it’s long enough that his lungs start to burn and he’s heaving breaths when they finally begin to feel safe enough to slow. Beside him, Lance huffs, back to Keith so he can scan the trees behind them. “I don’t think they’re on us,” he says, “and it might be thick enough here that they can’t get their… tank thing through.”
“We can’t lead them back to camp,” Keith says, finally catching his breath.
They keep moving; Keith senses any stop longer than a moment might make his legs give out completely.
“Christ,” Lance huffs, “yeah. Let’s just keep moving.” He jabs his thumb to his right, “then cut back through and try circling back.”
They pick cautiously through the brush, growing hesitantly relieved as every undisturbed moment passes. A rabbit-adjacent creature scampers across the path in front of them once, and though it’s enough to have Keith draw both swords, eliciting a laugh from Lance, poses no real threat.
The arc they travel in is wide and borderline nonsensical, weaving, so as not to have any sign of their passage be immediately traceable.
Keith thinks almost a full varga has passed when Lance, first to break the silence, whispers, “I think we lost them.”
Though he grits his teeth, Keith hopes Lance is right. “Let’s go a bit further out,” Keith suggests, “and keep watch when we get back.”
“Okay,” Lance agrees, voice low and worried.
They lapse back into creeping along wordlessly, willing each footstep to be quieter than the last. They’re shocked into freezing once, when voices pass ahead of them, close enough that Lance reaches out and grabs Keith’s arm, tight. Both of them crouch low and close, perfectly still and wide-eyed, hardly breathing.
Still, they cut their arc short when Keith figures enough time has passed on his—admittedly somewhat warped—internal clock, the two of them sticking close and hunched over, like the brush might hide them better that way.
“Remind me to never ignore Coran’s warnings again,” Lance murmurs, maybe halfway back, “I really thought he was exaggerating.”
“I told you not to leave base,” Keith reminds.
“And yet, here you are, right next to me.”
“You could’ve seen just fine from on top of Red.”
Lance glances away, sheepish. “Fair point. But you’ve gotta—” Keith hears the zip of a cord, and suddenly Lance is gone from his side, hanging upside down by one leg.
“Motherfucker,” Lance says, breathless. His knuckles brush the ground as he hangs, breathing heavy in a bid to recover from the shock.
“How did you not see that?” Keith hisses, producing his Marmora blade. He glances out behind them, “they could have these rigged with—”
“Thanks for the warning, Mr. Night-Vision.”
“For the last time,” Keith huffs, “I don’t have night vision.”
“Yeah, whatever. Put that away, I got this.” Lance, still holding his bayard, forms a broadsword.
Keith only has a moment to be surprised at Lance’s steadily grown bayard arsenal, to admire him for holding the most versatility out of the lot of them; the mechanism holding Lance up starts to wail and flash red, a siren illuminating the vegetation around them in a sweeping motion.
Lance slices the cord and hits the ground shoulder-first, popping up a moment later. “What is wrong with these people?!” he cries, hopping on one foot to get the rope loosened and off his ankle. Once free, his hand slaps to Keith’s shoulder to hustle them along. He reforms his blaster, adding, “we are quite literally heroes!”
“Just go,” Keith replies, half wanting to shove Lance.
Just because they’re on the same side doesn’t mean he can’t be positively pissed. The frivolity of putting themselves in danger, for the sole purpose of gazing briefly upon the moon, strikes him then, and though Keith gets the urge to scold Lance, he remembers the line under Lance’s eye when the moon was swept away, and becomes adamantly, shamelessly, in favour of the act.
“Oh, fuck,” Lance says, “oh, shit, Keith.”
“What?” Keith asks, following Lance’s gaze back the way they came, only to be confronted with the sight of one of those reinforced trucks on their tails, catching up steadily. The fight just about goes out of Keith.
“Do we start climbing trees?” Lance cries, eyes blow wide and panicked.
“No! Just—” Keith looks around wildly, willing himself to come up with something, anything.
He grabs Lance by the arm and then jackknifes left, pulling them into even thicker foliage. Keith’s hand slips down along Lance’s arm, meaning to release him, but their hands connect securely, Lance clinging tight to Keith as if in desperation. Keith moves to let go, stressed over the inefficiency of running tethered to one another, only Lance says, “I can’t see anything.” His voice grows tight, and he adds, earnest and small, “don’t let go.”
Keith readjusts his grip, holding tight and navigating them through the forest as best he can. Lance stumbles; Keith keeps right on pulling him. They don’t have the luxury of catching their breath. Keith can already hear their pursuers on their tails, an engine rumbling not-so distantly behind them.
A clearing appears before them and Keith thinks, optimistic beyond his understanding, that’s it. He tries to remember how far Coran said patrols went, where the locals tended to end their hunt of foreigners, and tries to tell himself that they must be well out of that range and no longer worth chasing.
They burst into the clearing, and Keith skids to a stop, Lance propels past him and then skids to a stop, held back by their joined hands. Headlights shine back at them, bright and unforgiving, and Keith swallows over his panic, taking one step back and considering their options.
“We’re fucked,” Lance breathes, huffing heavily. “We are so fu—”
“Not helping,” Keith bites out, squeezing Lance’s hand for emphasis and thinking, nonsensically, bizarrely, I will not let go.
“This way?” Lance asks, pulling on Keith’s hand to strafe them right, only for another truck to promptly pull up there.
“We’re fucked,” Keith realizes, recovering his breath and letting Lance’s hand slip out of his, “you’re right. We’re fucked.”
Something whizzes past Keith’s ear, then, and following its path to a tree behind them, Keith sees a dart. Lance has his bayard out, and Keith draws both swords, but he can only pray his reflexes will be good enough to dodge any more stray darts; it’s practically impossible to see past the bright glare of the headlights ahead of them.
“I can’t fucking see,” Lance grits out, blaster up to his shoulder, one eye squeezed shut so he can see down the sight.
Another dart shoots past, from behind them this time, passing Keith and landing somewhere beyond the light of the headlights, and when Keith turns, finding another set of headlights there, Lance drops to a knee.
His hand is pressed to his neck, on the tiny sliver of skin exposed where the neck of his flight suit ends. The feathered tail of a dart sticks out from between his gloved fingers, and ripping the projectile out, he says, “they’re darting us.”
He drops the dart, then pitches forward. Keith manages to catch Lance before he can face plant, one arm up and under Lance’s, holding him up and meeting his eyes in thinly veiled desperation. Meeting Keith’s gaze with lidded eyes, Lance slurs, “go, Keith. Run.”
His eyes roll back, snap to Keith, and then his lids flutter shut. He slumps forward against Keith, his forehead to Keith’s shoulder.
Keith half drops Lance to the ground, as gentle as he can be while scrambling to his feet. He glances down once, guesses Lance is breathing, and then turns both blades in his hands, assessing steadily approaching soldiers. All taller than Keith by at least a head, and stockier, too, broad enough that he worries, briefly, for his safety. Keith sets his jaw and steps back, so that Lance is positioned safely between both of his feet.
The first impact is a hand to his shoulder from behind, and without thinking, Keith chops through it. He leaps ahead, trusting the diversion to keep Lance safe, and raises one sword high above his head with the intent to cleave right through the soldier in front of him. Only, Keith never makes contact; he’s plucked right out of the air by the collar, then slammed face-first into the ground.
Keith hardly registers the pain; he gets back to his feet and raises his blades again, swinging and connecting solidly with the torso of the figure nearest him. Before he can get another lick in, his ankles are slapped together, a heavy bolas winding tight around them and taking him to the ground. Keith grits his teeth and cuts through it. He’s had worse.
It doesn’t matter that Keith gets to his feet again.
Before he can make any move, he’s raised high and thrown to the ground again. The toe of a boot connects solidly with his ribs when he moves to rise again, and the action sends him rolling away from Lance.
One of his hands is empty; Keith only has his luxite blade left, and he clings tightly to it, even when a boot lands on the jets of his suit, forcing him deeper into the dirt. The blade gets kicked out of his hand, pain blossoming hotly through Keith’s hand; he bites back the cry that rises. His arms get wrestled back behind him and bound tightly, cord biting into the flesh of his wrists.
“I think this is luxite,” comes from somewhere above him, but he hardly hears it; his eyes fix on Lance’s prone form.
He’s being dragged away by the neck of his cuirass, heading lolling and heels leaving long, dragging tracks in the dirt. His palms facing up, empty, limp.
Keith squirms, testing the binds on his wrists. “Let him go,” he grits out, “leave him.”
A hand lands on Keith’s head, shoving his face further into the ground. A soldier crouches in Keith’s sightline; Keith looks past, keeping his gaze firmly on Lance. “This isn’t a negotiation.”
Keith jerks violently, trying his damnedest to get a hand free, an ankle, but the action just gets his legs bound tighter, and the continued wriggling gets him lifted and dropped to the ground again, pain blooming out of his nose this time. Keith tastes blood on his lips, but still, writhes unceasingly, even as he’s hoisted up into the air. “He’s—he can’t give you anything!” Keith tries, the severity in his voice giving way to desperation. He falters, then pushes on; “he’s useless!”
Guilt beads on Keith’s spine and slides low. Vaguely, Keith is grateful that Lance isn’t awake to hear the barb. Keith can picture Lance’s face, knot between his brow and eyes burning with hurt, is that what you really think? written plainly across his face.
“And you think you aren’t?” This voice is rough, and earns raucous laughter somewhere behind Keith.
He keeps right on staring helplessly at Lance, as he’s propped up against the edge of an open cargo hold, wrists bound before he’s thrown in. He hardly moves, and Keith worries the dart’s poison did more than just knock him unconscious.
Keith is quelled when he’s carried closer, thinking he might, at the very least, be transported to God knows where in the same vehicle as Lance. He’s jerked abruptly away, and thrown unceremoniously into the back of different transport all on his own. Unpainted metal meets him on all sides.
The doors slam, casting Keith in sudden silence. The light that reaches him spills in from two small reinforced glass windows on the doors, his little prison illuminated only by other headlights.
Keith gets to his feet, clumsily, pressing his face to a window and trying to get a visual on Lance, just to confirm he’s not getting tossed around. The transport lurches forward, then, and Keith slams into the door and then falls back, staring helplessly up through those windows. He keeps right on staring out of them, willing Lance to open his eyes; above them, the moon peeks out and washes everything pearly and blue.