Catch the Stars ||Keith Kogane||

59

Harron insisted that she didn't need to talk business as soon as she woke up from a two-week coma. And maybe he had a point, but Trip wasn't one to listen to other people. She'd demanded every bit of information that he could give her since she'd fallen in combat.

193 Olympians had been injured the night of the move against Zarkon, ranging from skin irritation to...Braut. He was in the worse shape out of everyone who'd shown up for medical attention. Voltron had been going from planet to planet, fighting off Galra from the people that were imprisoned and working with The Blade. Shiro had been missing for as long as she'd been asleep.

And Zarkon? His rule was on the brink of end. According to The Blade's intel, he was on the edge of death. The plan had worked, or it would work within a little more time.

It was good news and bad. When she heard Olympian scouts had been sent after Shiro, she thanked Harron for doing it. Shiro was her friend, someone she'd spent more time with than she could remember at the moment. Not to mention the only person on the castle who understood half of what she said when she spoke about war tactics. She wonders, vaguely, how Keith is doing.

Keith...he couldn't be handling it well. Not that there was a right way to handle looking for your best friend who went missing.

Trip had been looking at the files on the 12 people who died during the swarming of Zarkon's fleet. Every face she saw she recognized at least a little bit. She'd slept through the funerals, where the commander was supposed to escort the bodies through the village to be burned, so she wanted to show that she was thinking of the lost soldiers when she reappeared in society.

"Harron," she says his name carefully as she flips through a file in her hand, "Which scouting squads do you have out there looking for Shiro?"

Harron had been leaning beside the door while watching her, and Haylie was in a chair beside the bed that Trip never wanted to lay in again. She slowly closes the file and looks up at her second. She had a few squads that were good on search and rescue that she wanted out there.

He grunts "I think....27, 093, 834, and 3741," he says with a headshake.

Trip shakes her head immediately, her mind reeling with the strengths and weaknesses of those scouts, "why not 298 or 458?" she asks, "their search and rescue success rate is the highest out of all scouts. And 27 should be working out there finding gaps in the Galra-run planets."

Haylie gives a chuckle, "someone's in trouble," she sings.

Trip sends a sharp glare in her direction. Now wasn't the time to be funny, they had to get things back on track. Haylie drops her smile and clears her throat when she sees the look.

"Sorry."

Turning back to Harron, her second was giving her an unreadable expression. For a moment, at least. And then he lets his large head tilt to the side.

"You were in a coma, we had 12 dead, and the black paladin missing," he tells her, "my mind wasn't on organizing by skills, it was on getting people out there."

"It should be on both," Trip informs him. Her fingers pressed to her thighs, cracking the overly stiff knuckles, "get me someone down here from Sectioning, I need to talk about setting up a search grid for Shiro. And swap squads 27 and 093 for the others I mentioned."

Harron pushes off the wall, his arms falling at his sides, "Neo, Heda." (yes, commander)

The door opens as she picks up another file on a lost soldier. She stares at the red stamp on the front that read "deceased" in Olympian. With an inhale, her body sways and she reaches a hand out to grab the railing of the bed.