Chapter Text
When Lance awoke, everything was pain and darkness and burning.
He tried to breathe, but what seemed to be a smoldering hand had clamped down on his chest and refused to let any air inside. It was too late, however, because now his damaged lungs demanded oxygen, and hacking coughs were ripped mercilessly from him. Each one felt like someone was dragging barbed wire up his esophagus.
The sensation of his skin was unbearable. He was slowing being consumed by the heat from the inside out and the outside in, left here alone to smolder in a fiery hell. The taste of ash and blood was in his mouth.
Lance had been caught in an explosion before, but this…
This was what burning alive felt like.
Lance turned onto his side, hoping it would help relieve some of the pressure building in his body. Curling in on himself, his fingernails dug into the skin on his upper arms as his body shook in uncontrollable spasms. He coughed and coughed for what seemed like an eternity, and was only able to take a complete breath once he felt sure he had choked out all his insides.
The burning wouldn’t stop.
“…ello?” he gasped, only for his stinging throat to retaliate in another bout of coughing. Ok, breathe now, try pitifully calling for help later.
Lance pushed away all other thoughts inside his head and just focused on the in and out of air inside his smoldering lungs. He would not cough again, he wouldn’t.
After a few unsteady breaths, Lance released a choked laugh. I guess that one meditation class I took at the training academy wasn’t totally useless after all, he thought. Who knew?
Bracing himself, he rolled his head upward and tried to open his eyes, only to see….nothing.
There was nothing. Not a single thing.
The world – whichever one he happened to be on – was pitch black.
He blinked, squinted, then blinked again. Nothing changed.
Lance shut his eyes tight and moaned. “N-no, no no no…” This is just a dream, it has to be. This is only a dream. When you open your eyes again, everything will be back to normal. You’ll be back in your bed at the castle, where giant wormholes aren’t trying to eat you alive, and you’re safe and everyone’s safe and …. But opening his eyes didn’t change the fact that he was lying on the hard surface of some unknown planet, probably ten-quadrilion lightyears from where he should be. Opening his eyes didn’t instantly brighten the darkness he was surrounded by. Opening his eyes didn’t stop the incessant burning under his skin and in his bones.
Fumbling around with his free hand, Lance attempted to push himself off the rocky ground, only to intently fall back when his skin stretched in ways that it should never stretch and a consuming agony shot its way from his shoulder to the rest of his body. He gagged; the pain was so bad he thought he might pass out.
God, he hoped he would pass out.
Blue! he cried out with his thoughts. I-I need you, buddy….please, just come help me!
But there was no answer. He was surrounded by a void, both before his eyes and in his mind.
Lance didn’t understand. His lion had never ignored him before. Even when they were planets apart, when Lance truly needed him, the lion would always come. Not feeling the giant robot’s constant presence surrounding him was like missing some part of himself that he never knew could go missing. It was like the pain of losing a hand, though Lance might have preferred that to the emptiness he was now experiencing inside his head.
After what seemed like forever, the throbbing in his shoulder died down a bit, enough that Lance was able to roll again onto his back. He took several deep breaths, trying to understand what was happening. He remembered charging through the wormhole after their rescue of Allura – and man, what a great feeling that had been! They had faced the front of Zarkon’s forces and lived. They had even stood up to Zarkon himself! Well, at least Keith had, that glory-stealing jerkass.
But something had gone wrong. He remembered the wormhole turning from a healthy blue into something red and foul. He remembered being pulled in one direction, hearing everyone shout uselessly over their comms. It had felt like…well, getting pulled through a wormhole. Except maybe without the whole “squishing you into a singularity” thing, though given how Lance felt at the moment, it wouldn’t have surprised him.
After that, his memories were fuzzy and disjointed. There had been alarms blazing all around him. They were inside the console – inside his head. Something was very, very wrong. His lion wasn’t responding. He couldn’t do anything! Nothing! He couldn’t…
And then he was falling….
Lance gasped, coming out of the memory with a jolt and a sick lurch of his stomach. He turned over and threw up, emptying everything out of him until there was nothing left inside but bile and maybe guts, if he were lucky.
Great, now I’ve upgraded from coughing to full out blowing grits. Congrats to me.
When he didn’t feel like his stomach was fighting to climb its way out of his throat, Lance let out a long breath, and found himself laughing.
He laughed at the fact that he was on some unknown planet in some far-off corner of the universe, without his friends and without his lion. Laughed at the fact that he was too injured to move, and now, apparently, couldn’t even see. Laughed at the fact that he and his friends had dared to think they could fight Zarkon head on, and all be ok.
They weren’t ok. He wasn’t ok. Nothing would ever be ok again.
And so he lay there, waiting for either a daring rescue by his fellow paladins….or death, either by finally succumbing to his injuries or being found and put out of his misery by the Galra Empire.
He just prayed that one or the other would happen soon.
“Well, I think that’s about everything,” Coran said, bringing his head out from under the main operations panel and dusting his hands triumphantly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the castle in better condition, which is surprising, considering we’ve just been flung through an unstable wormhole of considerable…”
Seeing the solemn expression on the Princess’s face, Coran trailed off. Allura had said very little once they had determined that both of them were, miraculously, still alive. She looked guilty and crestfallen, staring at the floor as if she could see all the faces that had once been reflected on its shiny surface.
“Don’t worry Princess,” he said, trying to sound comforting. He was never good at this sort of thing. “They’re alright, I know they are. Just because you can’t sense the lions doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We just have to wait for their distress signals to reach us. We’ll find them. Well…the rest of them, I mean.”
Coran glanced over at Shiro, who was sitting a little ways away in the observatory lobby. He had been the closest and the easiest to find of the five paladins, however he seemed to be in the same low-spirited mood as Allura, if a tad bit more distracted.
“Shiro?” Coran said, concerned.
Shiro looked up from where he had been staring attentively at his robotic hand. “Um, what? Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
“Are you alright?”
Shiro blinked. “Yeah…sure. I’m fine.”
His expression softening, Coran walked over to the eldest paladin and placed a comforting hand upon his shoulder. “Best not to get yourself down too much, my boy. We’ll locate the others, don’t you worry!”
Shiro gave the older man a small smile. “Yeah, I know we will. I trust Allura to find them.”
Satisfied that his job was done, Coran marched away to keep working on….well, whatever Coran normally worked on, however he didn’t catch the smile as it slowly faded from Shiro’s lips. The black paladin looked back down at his hand.
“It’s not finding them that I’m worried about,” he said in a low voice, just as a few sparks of red power flowed over his hand, which gave a violent shudder. He closed it into a fist.
“I wonder what will be left of them when we do.”