Chapter Text
Chapter One: Static
The mission should have been simple.
In and out. Secure the Balmeran transport convoy before the Galra patrol reached it, escort the civilians through the asteroid belt, then regroup with the Castle for debrief. It was the kind of mission they’d done dozens of times by now—routine enough that Coran had been humming while plotting the route, and Hunk had complained more about skipping lunch than about the possibility of enemy fire.
And maybe that was the problem.
Maybe they’d all gone in too comfortable.
Lance knew the exact moment it all went wrong.
He’d banked Blue hard to the left to draw a cruiser away from the convoy while Keith and Shiro cut through the center. The comms had been full of static and overlapping voices, alarms and shouted coordinates, but Lance had heard Keith—sharp and clipped, all focus and frustration—telling him to pull up, pull up, Lance, now—
Lance had seen the blast a half-second too late.
Blue’s shields took most of it, but the impact still sent the lion spinning. The stars became streaks of white and red, the controls bucking under Lance’s hands as warning lights flooded the cockpit. He got Blue steady again, but by then the formation was broken. One of the transport ships clipped an asteroid. Pidge had to abandon her own flank to cover the civilians. Shiro took a direct hit protecting Hunk. Keith went after a Galra fighter that should’ve already been taken out.
By the time they limped back to the Castle, everyone was alive.
Which somehow made it worse.
Because no one could point to a body and say that’s why we’re upset.
Instead, there was just the silence of the hangar as the lions settled onto their platforms. The heavy clank of metal. The hiss of cooling engines. The ache in Lance’s shoulders from gripping the controls too hard.
He climbed out of Blue with his heart still pounding and found the others already gathering near Black’s platform. Shiro was favoring one side. Keith had a burn mark across the shoulder of his armor. Hunk looked pale. Pidge was arguing with Coran about shield output, voice too tight.
Lance opened his mouth.
“Hey, so, funny story—”
“Not now, Lance,” Keith snapped.
It wasn’t even loud. That was the part that stung.
If Keith had yelled, Lance could’ve rolled his eyes, tossed out something sarcastic, pretended it didn’t matter. But Keith didn’t yell. He just looked at Lance with that exhausted, furious expression, like he didn’t have room left for one more mistake.
Lance’s grin faltered. “Right. Cool. Awesome.”
No one looked at him.
Shiro started asking Pidge for damage reports. Coran launched into an anxious rundown of the convoy’s losses. Hunk muttered something about the asteroid trajectory. Keith stalked away before anyone could stop him, jaw set hard enough to crack.
Lance stood there for another second, useless and in the way, before he quietly backed out of the circle.
No one noticed him leave.
---
He told himself he wasn’t avoiding them.
He was just taking the long way back to his room. He was just letting everyone cool off. He was just giving Keith time to stop looking like he wanted to tear the walls apart.
The Castle corridors were dim this late in the cycle, lit by strips of blue-white Altean light that made everything look colder than it was. Lance shoved his hands into his pockets and kept walking, boots too loud against the metal floor.
He could still hear Keith’s voice in his head.
Pull up, Lance, now—
He’d hesitated. That was the truth of it. For one stupid second, he’d thought he could get a cleaner shot. Thought he could handle it.
And Shiro had taken a hit because of it.
The thought made his stomach twist.
He cut down the hall that led past the training deck, planning to loop around through the observation wing, when he heard voices from inside.
Shiro’s, low and tired. Hunk’s, worried. Pidge, pacing by the sound of it.
And Keith.
Lance slowed automatically.
He wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. He’d tell himself that later, over and over, until it almost sounded true. But then he heard his own name, and his feet stopped moving.
“…not saying he did it on purpose,” Hunk was saying.
“He still broke formation,” Pidge shot back. “We could’ve lost the convoy.”
“We almost lost Shiro,” Keith said.
The words hit like a punch.
Lance stood frozen just beyond the half-open door, heart thudding in his throat.
Inside, someone sighed—Shiro, probably. “We all make mistakes.”
“Not like that.” Keith’s voice was sharp enough to cut. “That wasn’t a small mistake. He keeps treating everything like a joke, and one day it’s going to get someone killed.”
Lance’s fingers tightened in his sleeves.
There was a pause. A long one.
Then Pidge, quieter: “So what, what are you saying?”
Keith exhaled harshly. “I’m saying Blue deserves a pilot who won’t freeze when it counts.”
Lance forgot how to breathe.
The corridor seemed to tilt under him, the floor dropping out all at once. He waited—stupidly, desperately—for someone to argue. For Hunk to laugh and say Keith didn’t mean it. For Shiro to shut it down. For anyone to say Lance was still part of this team, that he belonged in Blue, that one bad mission didn’t erase everything.
Shiro said, “Keith—”
But Keith cut him off. “If there was someone better, someone more reliable, we’d be idiots not to consider it.”
Silence.
Not agreement. Not exactly.
But not denial either.
Lance stepped back before anyone could see him. His heel caught on the lip of the doorway and he nearly stumbled, but he caught himself, turned, and walked away as fast as he could without running.
By the time he reached his room, his hands were shaking.
He locked the door.
Then he stood in the middle of the room, staring at nothing, while the words replayed in his head like a transmission he couldn’t shut off.
Blue deserves a pilot who won’t freeze when it counts.
Someone better.
More reliable.
A replacement.
Lance laughed once—thin and ugly and not remotely funny. “Okay,” he whispered into the empty room.
His voice sounded wrong.
For a long time, he just stood there.
Then he crossed to his desk, yanked open the bottom drawer, and pulled out the old training schedules he’d stopped using months ago. The ones from back when they first formed Voltron. Simulations. Reaction drills. endurance work. Hand-to-hand routines.
He spread them out across the desk and stared until the words blurred.
Then he picked up a pen and started making a new plan.
If Blue deserved better, then Lance would become better.
Or he’d break trying.
---
The first few days, nobody noticed.
That was the easiest part.
Lance had spent enough time being “the fun one” that people already expected him to wander in late, grin through meals, make stupid comments during strategy meetings, then disappear whenever things got too serious. Pulling back only looked like one more version of the same thing.
He started waking up three hours before the rest of the team.
The Castle was almost peaceful then, all dim halls and sleeping engines. He’d sneak into the training deck with a stolen mug of coffee and run combat simulations until his lungs burned. Flight drills until his wrists ached from correcting Blue’s turns. Marksmanship until the recoil left bruises in his shoulder. He asked Pidge—casually, like it didn’t matter—to unlock harder lion simulator settings, and when she asked why, he just flashed a grin and said he was “embracing character development.”
She rolled her eyes and did it.
Lance didn’t sleep much after that.
If he wasn’t in Blue’s simulator, he was in the gym. If he wasn’t in the gym, he was in the observation room watching recordings of old missions, frame by frame, cataloguing every mistake he’d made. Every hesitation. Every sloppy shot. Every moment someone else had to cover for him.
He started keeping score.
Missed opening on the convoy mission: one.
Late shield response on Thayserix: one.
Failed to hold formation during the Robeast attack in sector twelve: one.
A bad joke over comms when everyone else was trying to focus: one.
Every mark on the list felt like proof. A trail leading to the same conclusion Keith had already reached.
Expendable.
Replaceable.
Not good enough.
By the end of the week, he was exhausted enough that Hunk noticed him nearly falling asleep over breakfast.
“Dude,” Hunk said, nudging his shoulder. “You good?”
Lance jerked upright, almost knocking over his glass. “Yeah. Obviously. Why?”
“You look like you got run over by a cow.”
“That is weirdly specific.”
“My family had cows.”
“Okay, fair.”
Hunk frowned, still studying him. “Seriously, though.”
Lance shoved a spoonful of whatever goo Coran had made that morning into his mouth and forced a grin around it. “I’m just staying up late. You know. Being hot and mysterious.”
Pidge snorted from across the table. “You’re neither.”
“Rude. Deeply rude.”
The conversation moved on. Lance laughed in the right places and made a dramatic show of being offended, and by the time breakfast ended, Hunk looked only half-convinced.
Keith never looked at him once.
That hurt more than Lance wanted to admit.
Not because Keith was obligated to. Not because Lance needed his attention.
But because before the mission—before the overheard conversation—Keith had always looked.
With irritation, sure. With disbelief, annoyance, occasional murderous intent. But he looked. Their arguments had a rhythm to them, a gravity. Keith had always met Lance head-on, like even when he couldn’t stand him, he still considered him worth reacting to.
Now Keith just… didn’t.
He treated Lance like background noise.
Lance told himself that was better. Easier. Less dangerous than hoping for something else.
It didn’t stop him from noticing every time Keith walked into a room and never once glanced his way.
---
Three weeks after the convoy mission, the team got sent to clear out a Galra outpost on a moon with unstable gravity and worse weather.
Lance flew Blue perfectly.
He hit every mark. Covered every flank. Took down two fighters before they got within firing range of Green. When Hunk’s shield output dipped, Lance swung Blue in front of Yellow without being asked and held the line until Pidge rerouted power. He followed formation so precisely Shiro praised the team over comms before they’d even landed back on the Castle.
Lance should’ve felt relieved.
Instead, all he could think was: not enough.
Because he’d still misjudged the terrain on descent. Blue’s right side had clipped a rock shelf, just barely. No damage. No one even commented on it.
Lance marked it down anyway.
One more mistake.
One more reason.
That night he stayed in the simulator until the room blurred around him.
Again.
And again.
Again.
He pushed Blue through canyon runs with engines failing, through asteroid fields with shield loss, through combat drills where enemy ships appeared faster than he could target them. He flew until sweat soaked through the back of his shirt and his hands cramped around the controls.
“Pilot fatigue warning,” the simulator chirped.
Lance ignored it.
“Pilot fatigue warning.”
He reset the course.
By the sixth run, his reaction time had dropped by .4 seconds. By the eighth, he was seeing double every time the display flashed. On the tenth, Blue clipped a canyon wall and the simulator flooded with alarms.
Lance slammed his palm against the console. “Again.”
The simulator obediently reset.
“Lance?”
He jerked so hard he nearly hit his head on the canopy.
Hunk stood in the doorway of the simulator bay, hair sleep-mussed, wearing one of his giant shirts and an expression halfway between concern and confusion. “Dude. It’s like… middle of the night.”
Lance forced a laugh. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Hunk’s eyes flicked to the display, to the mission timer, to the red fatigue warnings Lance hadn’t cleared. “How long have you been in here?”
“Not long.”
“Lance.”
“A little while.”
Hunk folded his arms. “How long?”
Lance looked away. “Couple hours.”
It had been closer to six.
Hunk let out a slow breath. “Why?”
The real answer sat sharp and ugly in Lance’s throat.
Because if he wasn’t perfect, they’d replace him.
Because Keith was right.
Because every mission felt like he was one mistake away from proving he’d never belonged in Blue in the first place.
Instead he shrugged. “I messed up the descent today.”
“You barely scraped a rock.”
“I still messed it up.”
“Everybody messes up.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t get to.”
Hunk went still.
The silence after that was awful.
Lance realized what he’d said too late and pasted on a smile so quickly it made his face hurt. “Wow. Dramatic. Ignore me. I’m just in my tortured athlete era.”
Hunk didn’t smile back.
“Lance,” he said carefully, “you know you don’t have to—”
“I’m fine.” Lance climbed out of the simulator before Hunk could stop him. “Seriously. I just wanted extra practice.”
“At three in the morning?”
“Dedication never sleeps, baby.”
“Neither do breakdowns,” Hunk muttered.
Lance laughed like it was a joke and clapped him on the shoulder as he brushed past. “Goodnight, buddy.”
Hunk caught his wrist.
Not hard. Just enough to make Lance stop.
“Talk to me,” Hunk said quietly.
For one horrible second, Lance almost did.
The words rose fast and hot: I heard Keith say Blue deserves someone else. I think maybe he’s right. I think if I stop moving for one second, you’ll all realize it too.
But Hunk was looking at him with too much concern, too much kindness, and Lance couldn’t bear the thought of hearing pity in response.
So he tugged his hand free and grinned.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
Then he left Hunk standing alone in the simulator bay.
---
The next mission was worse.
Not because Lance made a mistake.
Because he didn’t.
The Galra had set a trap in the ruins of an abandoned Altean relay station, and when the ceiling collapsed under Blue’s landing path, Lance reacted before anyone else. He yanked Blue into a sharp roll, dropped below the falling debris, and looped back around in time to catch Pidge’s warning about hidden cannons in the eastern ridge. He covered Shiro’s blind side. He hit every target.
He also took a direct blast to Blue’s left flank because he stayed in formation half a second too long, trying to keep Keith’s route clear.
The impact snapped him sideways so violently his shoulder slammed into the cockpit wall. Pain shot down his arm, white and blinding. The breath punched out of him.
“Lance!” Shiro barked over comms.
“I’m fine,” Lance gasped, because that was easier than admitting he couldn’t feel two of his fingers.
Blue wavered. Lance dragged her steady again.
“Your shield levels just dropped twenty percent,” Pidge said. “Fall back.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“Lance—”
“I’ve got it!”
The words came out too sharp. Too desperate.
Silence crackled over the comms for a second. Then Shiro, firm and controlled: “That’s an order, Lance. Fall back.”
Lance obeyed.
But shame burned hotter than the pain in his shoulder all the way back to the Castle.
Because he’d slipped.
Because he’d let them hear how badly he needed to stay useful.
Because he still hadn’t done enough.
---
That night, Keith found him in the gym.
Lance was halfway through a set of one-armed pull-ups—his left shoulder strapped tight beneath his shirt, every movement sending sparks of pain through the joint—when the doors slid open and Keith walked in.
For one absurd moment, Lance almost smiled.
It was instinct. Old habit. Some stupid, hopeful part of him that still lit up whenever Keith chose the same room he did.
Then Keith’s eyes landed on the bandage peeking out from under Lance’s sleeve, and his expression hardened.
“What are you doing?”
Lance dropped from the bar and landed lightly on the mats. “Wow, hello to you too.”
Keith didn’t rise to it. “Your shoulder’s injured.”
“It’s barely a sprain.”
“You took a hit in Blue six hours ago.”
“And now I’m doing pull-ups. Keeping up so far?”
Keith stared at him. “Are you insane?”
“Depends who you ask.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
The gym fell quiet around them, the hum of the overhead lights suddenly too loud. Lance grabbed his water bottle mostly so he’d have something to do with his hands.
Keith stepped closer. “Why are you training on an injury?”
Lance took a drink to buy time. “Maybe because I want to get better?”
“At tearing your shoulder apart?”
“At not screwing up.”
Keith’s mouth flattened. “You didn’t screw up today.”
Lance laughed under his breath. “That’s generous.”
“It’s true.”
“Cool. Good to know.”
Keith frowned. “What is your problem?”
The question landed harder than it should have.
Lance set the bottle down too fast, plastic cracking against the bench. “My problem?”
“Yes, your problem. You’ve been weird for weeks. You’re barely sleeping, you keep disappearing, you snapped at Shiro on comms today, and now you’re here trying to train through an injury like you’ve got something to prove.”
Lance went still.
Something cold slid through him.
Like you’ve got something to prove.
He looked at Keith and wondered, wildly, if Keith could hear himself. If he had any idea.
Probably not.
Keith folded his arms. “Well?”
Lance smiled. He could feel it stretching wrong across his face. “Maybe I just finally took your advice.”
Keith blinked. “What?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Lance turned to leave.
Keith caught his arm.
Pain shot through Lance’s shoulder, sharp enough that he hissed and yanked back on reflex. Keith let go immediately, startled, but the damage was done—Lance’s entire arm lit up with agony.
Keith’s eyes narrowed. “How bad is it?”
“I said it’s fine.”
“Lance—”
“Why do you care?”
The words came out before Lance could stop them.
Keith stared at him.
Lance stared back, chest heaving, pulse pounding in his ears. He could feel the whole conversation tipping into dangerous territory, but he was too tired to pull it back. Too raw. Too angry.
“You made yourself pretty clear,” Lance said, voice low. “Blue deserves better, right? More reliable. More skilled. So what does it matter if I wreck myself trying to get there?”
Keith’s face went blank.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Lance wished immediately that he could take it back. Not because it wasn’t true, but because Keith’s expression—shock first, then something almost like horror—made Lance feel skinned alive.
“You—” Keith stopped. Started again. “You heard that?”
Lance laughed once. “Yeah. Turns out Castle walls aren’t that thick.”
Keith looked like he’d been hit.
For one second, Lance hated himself for how satisfying that was.
Then he hated himself more for still wanting Keith to say something that would fix it.
Keith scrubbed a hand over his face. “Lance, that’s not—”
“Don’t.” Lance stepped back. “Seriously, don’t. I really don’t have the energy for whatever version of this ends with you pretending you didn’t mean it.”
“I was angry.”
“And?”
“And I said something I shouldn’t have.”
“But you still said it.”
Keith opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Lance’s chest tightened.
There it was. The part Keith couldn’t deny.
Because it had been true enough to say.
Lance nodded like that settled it. “Yeah. Thought so.”
He grabbed his towel and headed for the door.
“Lance.”
He didn’t stop.
Behind him, Keith said, rough and urgent, “I never said you were expendable.”
Lance kept walking anyway.
Because if he turned around, Keith might see exactly how much that sentence mattered.
And Lance couldn’t survive that tonight.
---
When the next mission came, Lance volunteered before Shiro even finished the briefing.
It was a rescue operation on a mining colony near Galra-controlled space—small, remote, and under active attack. Sensors showed civilians trapped in the lower tunnels after a cave-in. The colony’s distress call had cut out halfway through transmission.
Shiro was assigning teams when Lance stepped forward and said, “Blue and I can handle tunnel support.”
Pidge looked up sharply. “Those tunnels are unstable.”
“Blue’s the smallest lion after Green. I can fit where the others can’t.”
“We don’t know the structural integrity,” Coran added. “One wrong move and the whole mine could collapse!”
Lance shrugged. “Then I won’t make a wrong move.”
Keith’s gaze snapped to him.
Shiro hesitated. “Lance—”
“I can do it.”
Something in his voice must have convinced them, because after a long pause, Shiro nodded. “Fine. But you stay in constant contact. If the tunnel structure shifts at all, you pull out immediately. Understood?”
Lance smiled. “Crystal clear.”
Keith didn’t smile back.
And for the first time, Lance thought maybe Keith understood exactly how dangerous that was.
He went anyway.
Because if there was a chance to prove Blue didn’t need replacing—
he was going to take it.
Even if it killed him.
## Chapter Two: Fault Line
The mine was a death trap before Lance ever entered it.
Blue crouched at the mouth of the collapsed tunnel, metal paws braced against fractured stone while seismic readings flashed across Lance’s display in frantic red lines. Dust clouded the cockpit windows. Somewhere deeper underground, another support beam gave way with a sound like thunder, and the whole mountainside shuddered.
“Lance, report,” Shiro’s voice crackled over comms.
Lance scanned the tunnel mouth. “Opening’s too narrow for the others. Blue can squeeze through if I angle her shoulders.”
“Can you do it without bringing the whole thing down on yourself?” Pidge asked.
“Wow. Love the confidence.”
“Lance.”
“Yeah,” he said, quieter. “I can do it.”
He rolled Blue forward before anyone could argue.
The lion flattened low, armor scraping against rock with a shriek of metal. The tunnel walls pressed in tight enough to make Lance’s skin crawl. Blue’s shoulder clipped a hanging beam and dislodged a shower of stone; Lance winced, corrected, and pushed deeper into the mine.
His breath fogged the inside of the cockpit.
The civilians’ emergency signal blinked weakly on his screen—three hundred meters below, trapped beyond a collapsed chamber. Every aftershock shifted the path. Every shift made the tunnel more unstable.
“Readings?” Keith asked from the surface.
Lance almost answered automatically, then remembered himself.
“Bad,” he said. “Ground’s not holding.”
“Then get the civilians and get out,” Keith snapped.
Lance’s grip tightened around the controls.
Get out. Like it was that simple. Like he hadn’t already decided he wasn’t leaving until he’d done this perfectly.
Blue edged into a wider cavern. Broken mining equipment lay scattered across the floor, half-buried in rubble. A support tower leaned at an angle that made Lance’s stomach drop.
Then he saw them.
A cluster of miners huddled behind a collapsed transport rig, emergency lights blinking around them. There were eight of them. Two looked injured. One of them was clutching a child against their chest.
Relief hit Lance so hard it almost hurt.
“I’ve got visual,” he said. “Eight survivors.”
A chorus of voices erupted over comms—Shiro giving new coordinates, Coran asking about injuries, Hunk already talking through the fastest way to get them out. Lance barely heard any of it. His focus narrowed to the cavern in front of him, to the precarious angle of the support beams overhead, to the weight of the mountain hanging above Blue’s back.
He guided Blue forward slowly, opening the lion’s jaw hatch so the survivors could climb into the emergency compartment one by one. The child went first, crying silently, face streaked with dust. Then the injured miners. Lance kept his voice light as he directed them.
“Easy, easy—yeah, you’re doing great. You too, little guy. Blue’s nicer than she looks, I promise.”
The kid sniffled. “She has teeth.”
“Only for bad guys.”
That earned him the faintest hiccup of a laugh.
By the time the last miner climbed inside, sweat was running down Lance’s spine. Blue’s internal stress monitors were screaming. Another tremor rippled through the cavern, and somewhere above them, rock split with a sickening crack.
“Lance,” Pidge said sharply, “the ceiling just lost twenty-three percent structural stability. Move. Now.”
“I’m moving.”
He turned Blue toward the tunnel entrance.
The cavern collapsed.
It happened so fast Lance barely had time to react. One second the tunnel mouth was visible ahead, jagged and narrow but clear enough to reach. The next, the support tower gave way and the ceiling came down in a roar of stone and dust and darkness.
Blue lunged forward under Lance’s command, but a slab of rock the size of a shuttle smashed into her hindquarters and drove the lion to the ground. The cockpit lurched violently. Lance’s shoulder slammed into the armrest, pain exploding down his already-injured arm, and the side of his head cracked against the console hard enough to fill his vision with white.
Then everything stopped.
For a moment, there was only ringing.
Static hissed over the comms.
Lance blinked against the blur in his eyes and tasted blood.
“Lance?” Shiro’s voice, faint and distorted. “Lance, respond.”
He swallowed. “Blue’s pinned.”
The words came out rougher than he meant them to.
Dust drifted through the cockpit in pale clouds. Blue was half-crushed beneath the collapsed ceiling, front half free but rear legs trapped under tons of rock. Warning lights strobed across the controls. Hull integrity down twelve percent. Rear shield emitters offline. Internal temperature climbing.
The emergency compartment behind him was full of terrified civilians.
“How bad?” Keith asked.
Lance pulled up the damage report and didn’t answer for two full seconds.
Bad enough that if Blue forced herself free the wrong way, the remaining supports would snap and bury all of them alive.
Bad enough that if Lance waited too long, the tunnel would collapse on the team trying to reach him.
Bad enough that he could already hear Shiro preparing to tell him to evacuate the civilians and abandon Blue.
And Lance—stupid, stubborn Lance, who’d spent the last month trying to prove he deserved to keep her—couldn’t bear the thought.
“I can get us out,” he said.
“Lance,” Pidge said, “don’t you dare make a move until I finish scanning—”
“I know Blue’s frame better than your scan does.”
“That’s not how physics works!”
Another tremor rocked the cavern. A crack zigzagged across the wall to Lance’s left.
“Lance.” Shiro’s voice had gone dangerously calm. “Status.”
Lance wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand and stared at the numbers.
If he shifted Blue’s weight forward and fired the right-side boosters at half thrust, he might be able to wrench the lion loose without taking the entire tunnel down. Might.
It would also put the heaviest point of impact directly under Blue’s cockpit.
Which meant if he got it wrong, the rock would come down on him first.
His pulse steadied.
Good.
Fine.
Maybe that was fair.
“I can do it,” he repeated.
Keith’s answer came instantly. “No.”
Lance froze.
The word was sharp enough to cut through the static, through the pain, through the awful thud of his own heartbeat.
“You’re not moving until we get there,” Keith said. “Do you hear me?”
Lance laughed breathlessly. “That’s cute, but unless you’ve figured out how to teleport Red through solid rock—”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Lance.”
Something in Keith’s voice almost broke him.
Not anger. Not annoyance.
Fear.
Lance shut his eyes for half a second and hated how much that mattered.
Behind him, the emergency compartment alarm chimed; oxygen levels were dipping with the damaged filtration system. He swore under his breath.
“No time,” he muttered.
“Lance, wait—”
He killed the comm.
Then he wrapped both hands around Blue’s controls and whispered, “Come on, girl. One more time.”
He rerouted power from the rear cannons into the front stabilizers. Blue whined in protest, engine pitch climbing. Lance ignored the pain in his shoulder, the pounding in his head, the way one eye wouldn’t focus right. He lined up the angle, watched the seismic numbers flicker, and made the choice.
“Boosters. Half thrust. Now.”
Blue surged.
For one impossible second, it worked.
The lion lurched free by inches, claws digging into broken stone as she dragged herself toward the tunnel mouth. Rubble slid from her back in a crashing wave. The survivors screamed in the compartment behind Lance. Blue roared, systems straining, and Lance thought—wildly, stupidly—that he’d done it.
Then the left support column snapped.
The cavern came down.
Rock hammered Blue from every side. A boulder smashed through the outer plating near her rear flank. The cockpit pitched so hard Lance was thrown sideways against the restraints, stars bursting across his vision. Something in Blue’s leg assembly shrieked and failed. The lion collapsed to one side with a sound like tearing metal.
Alarms detonated through the cockpit.
CRITICAL STRUCTURAL DAMAGE.
COCKPIT BREACH WARNING.
PILOT INJURY DETECTED.
Lance sucked in a breath and almost blacked out.
Pain tore through his ribs every time he inhaled. Warmth trickled down from his hairline into his eye. The display had cracked across the center, splitting the cavern feed into fractured lines of static and light.
And through all of it, the comms came back to life with Keith shouting his name.
“Lance! Lance, answer me!”
Lance fumbled for the controls. “I’m—” He coughed hard enough to see spots. “I’m here.”
“Do not move Blue again,” Keith said, voice ragged with fury. “Do you understand me? Don’t move.”
Lance turned his head just enough to look behind him.
The emergency compartment still showed green.
The civilians were alive.
Relief hit so hard his hands started shaking.
“Got them out of the collapse zone,” he said, because somehow that felt important to report. “Told you I could do it.”
No one answered.
It took Lance a second to realize why.
He looked down.
Blood was dripping off his fingers onto the console.
A lot of it.
Huh.
“That’s… probably not ideal,” he mumbled.
“Lance.” Shiro now, tight and commanding. “Stay awake. Keith and I are almost there.”
Lance blinked at the cracked display. The tunnel feed wavered in and out. He could hear Blue’s engine sputtering, wounded and furious, but the lion was still trying to move. Still trying to protect him.
“Sorry,” Lance whispered to her.
His vision tunneled.
He pressed a shaking hand to his side and came away with more blood than he expected. The cockpit lights smeared into blue-white streaks. Somewhere very far away, Pidge was saying something about oxygen loss and dropping vitals, and Hunk sounded terrified, and Keith kept repeating Lance’s name like if he said it enough times Lance wouldn’t disappear.
It was weirdly comforting.
Lance let his head rest back against the seat.
He hadn’t meant to take it this far.
That was the stupid thing. He hadn’t gone into the mission planning to get crushed in a mine. He’d just wanted one perfect success, one thing so undeniable that nobody could look at Blue and think she deserved someone else.
Instead he’d nearly gotten himself and eight civilians killed.
Maybe Keith had been right all along.
The thought should’ve hurt more than it did.
But Lance was so tired.
“Hey,” he slurred into the comm, not sure who he was talking to anymore. “If Blue’s really messed up, just… don’t let them replace her, okay?”
There was a sharp inhale on the other end.
Then Keith, voice breaking around the edges in a way Lance had never heard before: “Shut up. We’re not doing this. You hear me? You stay with me.”
Lance smiled weakly at the ceiling.
“Bossy,” he whispered.
And then the tunnel wall exploded inward.
Red and Black tore through the stone in a spray of debris and dust, claws and blade cutting a path straight to Blue’s side. Lance barely had time to register the shape of them before Keith was out of Red and running across Blue’s foreleg, helmet gone, face white with panic.
The cockpit hatch jammed on the first try.
Keith swore and forced it open with both hands.
Light flooded in.
“Hey,” Lance said, because Keith was there and Keith was looking at him like the world was ending and Lance didn’t know what else to do. “You found me.”
Keith’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Up close, he looked wrecked—dust-covered, eyes too bright, breathing hard enough to shake his whole frame. He took one look at the blood soaking Lance’s side and went visibly colder.
“Don’t move,” Keith said.
Lance huffed a laugh. “That’s, uh. Kind of all I’ve got right now.”
Keith climbed into the cockpit anyway, careful and frantic at the same time, hands hovering like he didn’t know where he was allowed to touch. “Shiro!” he shouted over his shoulder. “I need a med kit now!”
Lance watched him with detached fascination.
It occurred to him, distantly, that Keith was terrified.
Not angry. Not annoyed. Not fed up.
Terrified.
For him.
The realization hurt more than the broken ribs.
Keith finally pressed a hand over Lance’s side to stem the bleeding. The pressure made Lance gasp. Keith flinched like he’d been the one injured.
“Sorry,” he said immediately, voice shaking. “I know, I know, just—stay awake.”
Lance swallowed. “Didn’t… do a great job proving myself, huh?”
Keith went completely still.
Then, very softly, in a voice that sounded like it was being dragged out of him: “Lance, what the hell have you been trying to prove?”
Lance looked at him.
Really looked.
At the fear in Keith’s face. At the raw guilt. At the fact that Keith’s hands were trembling where they held Lance together.
And suddenly Lance was so tired of pretending he was okay.
“You said,” he whispered, “you’d be better off with someone else in Blue.”
Keith’s eyes shut like the words physically hit him.
“Oh my god,” Shiro breathed from somewhere outside the cockpit.
Lance hadn’t even realized the others were there.
He heard movement—boots on metal, Hunk swearing under his breath, Pidge going eerily silent—but his gaze stayed fixed on Keith, because Keith still hadn’t looked away.
“That’s why,” Lance said, the words slurring around exhaustion and pain. “I just thought if I got good enough fast enough maybe you wouldn’t have to.”
Keith made a sound Lance had never heard from him before—small and wrecked and horrified.
“No,” he said immediately. “No, Lance, that’s not—”
Lance’s vision blurred. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay!”
The force of it echoed through the cockpit.
Keith was crying.
Lance stared at him, dazed, because that didn’t make sense. Keith didn’t cry. Keith got angry. Keith shut down. Keith picked fights and ran himself ragged and stared at walls like he was trying to outlast them. But tears were sliding down his face now, cutting clean tracks through the dust, and his voice shook when he said, “You are not replaceable.”
Lance’s throat tightened painfully.
Keith gripped his hand—hard, desperate, like he needed Lance to feel it. “You hear me? Not to Blue, not to the team, not to me. I was angry and I said the worst possible thing and I am so, so sorry, but you do not get to turn that into proof that we’d be better off if you died trying to earn your place.”
The cavern had gone dead quiet.
Lance could hear his own ragged breathing. The hiss of Blue’s damaged systems. Hunk trying and failing not to cry somewhere behind Keith.
Lance looked at their hands, at Keith’s fingers laced through his and streaked with blood.
Then he laughed weakly, because the alternative was crying and he didn’t have the energy for that.
“Bit late for the motivational speech.”
Keith made a broken noise that might have been a laugh if everything weren’t falling apart.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “I know.”
Then Lance’s vision finally gave out.