2019 Voltron Whumptober Collection

31 Embrace

Word Count: 1,370

Lance was pacing.

And not the good(ish) kind of pacing where he was walking from one end of his room to the other because he was so bored he didn't know what to do with himself kind of pacing, no-

It was a bad kind of pacing.

A shocked kind of pacing even.

And it was scaring him to no end that he was just now realizing how pacey he could get with Keith in a cryo pod for a reason that shouldn't even be a reason.

He shouldn't have done that.

Shouldn't have risked his life like that.

Shouldn't have almost died.

And if Lance was being completely honest with himself, he was beating himself up over the fact that he should've seen the signs, should've realized pulling away from them was a bad idea, should've noticed that little group hug in the middle of the castle bridge the day he left for the Blades didn't mean shit.

Dios, he should've seen this coming.

But he didn't.

And instead, Lance was left to his lonesome, pacing from one end of the infirmary to the other, playing with his fingers, eyes wide as he fought to think of a way this could've turned out differently.

The rest of the paladins were too busy with Lotor, the guy metaphorically showing up on the castle's doorstep, with a limp and bloody Keith in his hands merely minutes after Naxela malfunctioned, Keith not answering his comms and the Galra prince nowhere to be found-

Well, surprise, surprise, they found them both in less time than it took it too to run down to the ship bay, weapons drawn, gazes stone-hard, demanding why Lotor was even there in the first place.

Of course, that was before everyone noticed the limp, bloody form the Galra prince had been holding.

It'd been a mass of running after that. A mass of running, and yelling and blood, so, so much blood, Lance didn't even know someone could survive for that long when the majority of their blood was coating everyone else's hands.

It was macabre, to say the least.

Fucking heart-stopping to say the most.

In those minutes before they scrambled to get him to a pod, bloody shards of shrapnel and the remaining pieces of his Blade uniform were forced away from charred flesh, Lance was questioning why they were even here, why Keith was bleeding out under them, unconscious, skin marred with burn marks, some sections of his body purple and ice cold from where his suit had come apart in space, face covered in red streaks much like the rest of his body. Nothing but a bruised and bloody, broken-boned mess.

During the mad scramble to save the teen, Lotor had explained (in an annoyingly calm tone mind you) that he'd stumbled across "the body" when he arrived, he was flying through the wreckage looking for any survivors that had been in the blast when he saw the ship crash into it, promptly shutting down the barrier and diffusing Naxela. But from the description that it had been a Galra cruiser that took down the shield, and that Keith was refusing to answer his comms merely seconds leading up to that, it wasn't hard to put two and two together.

Keith had done it.

Keith had ran his ship into the barrier of that battle cruiser, without a single word to his team, defusing the planet-sized bomb, and ending that fight for the universe, destroying his ship and himself in a bright spatter of blood and fire in the process.