"Paladins! You must leave now! The witch has arrived!" Allura cried into the comm. Lance cringed at the loudness. His head was ringing from a shot to the head. He grimaced and clutched his stomach which had been hit with a sword of some sort.
"Come on team, get to your lions!" Shiro screamed. Lance ran to blue and jumped into the wormhole where the rest of the lions were waiting for him. Then out of nowhere a purple lighting hit the wormhole.
Lance felt the buzzing energy hit him. It felt like a pleasant tingle, until it burned. Lance screams were joined with the rest of the paladins. It hurt like hell. Lance thought that his skin was burning off. Then as suddenly as it had appeared it left. Lance panted in his seat wincing as the movement caused his wounds to bleed more.
"Is..everyone..okay?" Shiro asked in between breaths.
"Yeah."
"I'm fine."
"Um...I threw up.."
"Lance?" Shiro asked. Lance gulped and willed himself to speak.
"I got hit pretty bad," Lance said ignoring the tense silence that followed. "During the battle, not the lighting thing that just hit us, I mean. I'm bleeding pretty bad." Lance chuckled darkly. "I should be fine we just have to get to the castle soon."
"Okay Lance try not to move too much," Shiro said finally. "And we're talking about the whole 'not-telling-anyone-about-getting-injured-in-battle' thing."
Lance nodded weakly, not trusting his voice. When they arrived in the hangar Lance fell forward out of the pit and landed in someone's hands. He blacked out.
==time skip==
It was cold for a second as Lance fell then the cold was replaced with warm hands. Lance looked up to see Hunk's worried expression. Then the comfort he felt changed into confusion.
"Lance? Ua hanaʻia kēia mea." Hunk whispered. What? Lance had no clue what Hunk was saying. He vaguely remembered Hunk telling him his first language was Hawaiian but why was Hunk speaking in Hawaiian? Nobody spoke Hawaiian here.
"Um..I don't know what Hunk here is saying," Pidge cut in. "But I think he's trying to tell you about the curse." Lance tilted his head in confusion. "Remember the weird lighting that hit the wormhole? It was a curse from Haggar. It reverts us to our first language. So whatever language you learned first is the one that you speak until Coran figures out a way to reverse it. So Hunk's speaking in Hawaiian. Shiro's speaking in Japanese. Thankfully Keith learned English first but we still have three people speaking weird languages."
"Actually I know a little bit of spanish," Keith cut in.
"Okay so how long will it take Coran to fix this?" Lance asked. They stared at him in confusion. "What?"
"Umm..Lance what are you doing?" Pidge asked. Lance stared at her.
"What are you talking about? I'm talking to you." Lance said. Until he looked down and saw that he wasn't actually speaking. Shit. He was signing. Fuck. Lance was deaf. So the first language he learned was sign language. Then his family and neighbors pitched in to get him a special surgery that cured his deafness (that's not a real thing but it's fanfiction so why not) but Lance still knew sign language.
"He'ōlelo hōʻailona" Hunk said loudly. It didn't help the other paladins. Finally Lance just sighed and grabbed a paper and pen.
The first language I learned was sign language. Lance wrote. Pidge 'oohed' and clicked her tongue. "Oh, I see. Wait why did you learn sign language? I thought your first language was spanish?"
I was born deaf. I got the surgery. I'm not deaf anymore. Lance wrote out quickly, his messy scrawl making it hard for Pidge and Keith to read it.
"Oh. I see. But why didn't you tell us?" Keith asked. "You let us assume this whole time. Didn't that bother you?"
I don't like talking about it. Bad memories. Lance wrote. And Lance subconsciously hunched in on himself. Being born deaf in Cua resulted in a lot of unwanted attention and Lance hated it. He hated having to look behind him everywhere because he couldn't hear footsteps approaching him. He couldn't hear the taunts that were thrown at him but Lance could read lips and he knew what they were saying. And it fucking hurt.
"Oh. I'm sorry." Keith said awkwardly. He hadn't meant any offense to that but it looked like Lance was really uncomfortable with the subject so Keith decided to change it.
Lance hated this. He hated how he couldn't speak normally. It brought back a lot of repressed feelings that he felt when he was still deaf. The feeling of being helpless. And though Lance could still hear he still found himself jumping at the slightest noise. Were they going to beat him up now that they knew he used to be deaf? Did they think he was weak?
"Okay well Coran said that he wanted us to meet in the common room after you were informed of the curse," Pidge said. "So let's go." She reached out to Lance but Lance flinched away from her hand like it was going to burn him. Pidge tried not to show her hurt. After a second Lance realized what he did and reached out for Pidge who accepted it hesitantly.
Keith ignored the strange exchange and followed closely behind the two with Hunk trailing next to him. They arrived in the common room to see Shiro, Allura and Coran talking to each other. Coran was straining to understand what Shiro was saying. He turned and smiled warmly when he saw the rest of the paladins enter.
"Ahh, Lance. Thank goodness you're all right. Those were quite the injuries you acquired." Lance chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, ignoring the pointed stare he received form Shiro.
"はい、私は怪我について話すと言った。" Shiro said in a huff. Lance just stared. What did he say? "ああ、そうです。あなたは私を理解できないのですか？"
Lance shook his head, Shiro sighed angrily. Coran jumped in holding a strange device. "Right, well, as Number one was probably saying, I have a device that can translate whatever you say into one desired language, We used it when we went to new planets. Here--" Coran put the blinking box on Shiro's larynx and pressed a red button. The blinking light turned orange and stopped blinking. "Try speaking now."
Shiro raised his eyebrow but nodded. "Umm...hello?" his face lit up when he realized that everyone could understand him. "It works!"
"Right, well here you go," Coran said, shoving the blinking box on Lance and Hunk. "There. Try it out."
"This is weird," Hunk said slowly. His face lit up into a bright grin. "But cool."
"Yeah you're right," Lance said testing his voice machine. "This reminds me of those damn ear boxes I had to wear back in Cuba." Lance laughed.
"What're you talking about Lance?" Shiro asked. Lance froze.
"I....I had to wear these special boxes so I could hear before I got the surgery for deafness." Lance mumbled. Shiro looked surprised but it didn't look like he was going to hit Lance so he dropped out of the defensive position he didn't remember forming.
"Oh.." Shiro said. "Right well now that we can all hear each other, Lance!" Lance jumped when he heard his name. He looked up sheepishly and expected Shiro's hand to hit him but instead was greeted with a worried expression. "Why didn't you tell us you were injured when you got hit? Coran said that you had been bleeding for a good twenty minutes before you informed us of the injury."
Lance shrugged. "I'm used to dealing with injuries on my own," lance said ignoring the question states he got from his teammates. "I figured that the mission was more important that a graze. I could manage."
"But...we're your teammates!" Pidge yelled. "You have to tell us stuff! Like the whole deaf thing! I get that you probably didn't want to bring it up but we want to know stuff about you. We're supposed to be close to each other!"
"We are close to each other, Pidgeon," Lance said softly. "I just didn't see any need for you guys to know about that."
"Well what would you have done if something hit your head and the implants in your head broke?" Pidge snapped. (What I mean is that the surgery is special mechanical implants in your ears that act as the ear so you can hear. Just so you're not confused.) "How would we have been able to help you if we didn't know you were deaf in the first place?"
Lance shuddered at the thought of becoming deaf again. He had already been in that hell once, he didn't want to deal with it again. "I get what you're saying but that didn't happen--"
"But what if it did?" Shiro cut in. "Would you have told us?"
"No, of course not," Lance huffed. "What if we in the middle of a very important mission?"
"You're more important than any mission!" Keith snapped.
"Yeah but I mean, missions are like actually important. If I screw one up then that's it. It's over. But if I got injured then you could just replace me. See what I'm saying?" Lance said waving his hands around in the air to emphasize his words.
The team just stared. What the hell was Lance talking about? Did he think the team wouldn't care if he got injured? Why did he think he'd just get replaced?
"Lance...that's not true," Pidge said. "We would never replace you. We need you."
"What?"
"We need you. You're very important," Shiro said, throwing a signature worried-dad-face™. "You do know that right?"
"I...I mean...of course I do!" Lance said after a solid ten seconds of hesitation. Shiro frowned at the pause that was just a second too long. "It's just I thought that Voltron was more important than any one person. Isn't that what you guys have been saying?"
Shiro swallowed the lump in his throat. "Lance we never meant to make you feel insignificant compared to Voltron," Shiro reached out to Lance. Lance flinched away from Shiro's hand and covered his face with his hands. Shiro stared at Lance in horror. "Lance...I'd never...you know I'd never....I would never hit you...you know that right?"
Lance slowly brought his hands down, trembling slightly. "I...yes I do. I'm sorry. It was just a reflex. That's all."
"But he didn't even make a move to suggest he would hit you. He wasn't even yelling?" Pidge said, not understanding what had made Lance flinch like that. "Unless you trained yourself to protect your face...Lance were you bullied as a kid?"
"I mean yeah," Lance said with a shrug. "I was deaf for half of my life Pidge. Of course I was picked on. I just find that when people are talking to me gently they're about to hit me. I swear I know you'd never hit me, Shiro."
"I'm sorry that you had to go through that," Shiro said softly.
"It's okay," Lance chuckled. "If they ever made comics about us, it's be one hell of an origin story."