Terminal Velocity • Voltron x Terminal List

IX

Lance's good luck and bad luck seemed to come hand in hand, and the bad luck always exponentially outweighed the good. He moved up the hierarchy in Voltron, but Keith left. He survived a mission that by all appearances was an ambush, but his platoon was eliminated. He made it back home, but his family was murdered.

A terrible storm provided cover and hid him from both the dogs and heat signature detection, but it left him half-frozen and without secure cover. He'd rigged together a temporary lean-to of sorts, but he couldn't start a fire for fearing of drawing attention to his position. He'd used his knife to cut his duffel bag into one main rectangle, which he had repurposed as a makeshift tarp and which he was currently huddled under. By the calls coming over the radio, the cops and feds and whoever else was on his trail were hunkered down for the night as well, albeit in far better accommodations than his own.

He wanted nothing more than to sleep for a bit, but he couldn't afford to do that. If his body temperature dropped too low, if he became hypothermic – sleep would become a prison just as deadly as anything else.

He noticed movement out of the corner of his eyes, and his head followed it, a soft smile making its way onto his face as he saw Raphael hunched over his action figures, flying them around and making noises, and Lance didn't think he'd ever seen a cuter kid.

Truth be told, Lance had always wanted kids of his own, sort of on a subconscious level. He hadn't really thought about all the steps in the way – finding someone to spend his life with, having the conversation, starting a family – but he'd always wanted to be a dad. Maybe because he'd loved growing up in a big family. Maybe because he'd never had a great relationship with his own father. Maybe for other reasons harbored deep in his psyche.

But after Voltron...after seeing war, participating in it...that wish, along with so many others, had dissipated and died. He'd thought of it as a reality locked to him, a vision he'd never be able to achieve, but then Veronica had come to him that day, and he'd met Raphael not long after. And Raphael had healed something in Lance, hadn't quite made him whole but had maybe made him a little less broken.

"What are my two boys up to?" Veronica asked, and Lance smiled to himself as Raphael rambled on a bit in the way all kids do before ending with, "I'm not a little boy anymore!"

"Welllll, you're only seven, so you're not exactly grown up either."

"Maybe you're not grown up yet, but you will be someday," Lance assured him, but it didn't do much to better his temperament.

"When I grow up, I'm going to be just like you, Tío Leo."

"Dashingly handsome?"

"Nooo, Tío Leo. I'm going to be a supersoldier, and I'm going to save everyone!"

"Nahh, you don't want that, bud," he said, picking up one of Raphael's toys, thousands of images flashing before his eyes of the wake of death and destruction he'd left behind. Galra with blank, unseeing eyes. Cosmic cities with their inhabitants lying in the streets after the Galra – or other insidious species feasting on their leftovers – had completed their pillaging, raping, and butchering. Earthly horrors too; children used like pawns and tools and weapons. Adults set on their own toxic grandeurs of power and violence at the cost of such children in addition to their fellow countrymen, their women, and their very land. "You don't want that," Lance repeated to himself after a moment, lost in the images until the radio crackled next to him.

"What exactly is it that we don't want, Commander?" asked one of the cops who had been hunting him earlier, and Lance's blood ran cold. In fact, everything in him was running cold; he wasn't sure if he'd fallen asleep or relived another waking memory, but the one thing he'd been able to discern was that he'd picked up the radio and transmitted the last thing he'd said, maybe more.