Chapter Text
“Any second now, Pidge! I can’t cover forever!”
Lance tries to not sound desperate as five more Galra sentries round the corner of the hallway, doubling their advantage over him and Keith. He’s in a protective crouch behind the wall, picking them off one by one through the sight of his blaster. Every time their metal bodies seize and drop with a noisy clank, more appear to replace them.
He glances back at Keith behind him, who is scowling down at the panel on a cell door.
“Got it!” Pidge’s voice rings through their comms, snapping Lance back to his task. He picks off another two, easy, while behind him he hears the plinking of Keith pressing a few buttons on the screen. Lance takes out another sentry, and Keith makes a bursting sound of triumph as the door slides open.
The whole Keith-is-part-Galra thing had certainly thrown most of the team for a loop, but Lance had to admit, it sure as hell had its advantages when it came to interfacing with their tech during missions
The win spurs Lance to pick off the last three sentries as he rises and backs toward the holding cell after Keith, trusting the sound of Keith’s footfalls to guide him.
“We’re both in,” he hears Keith relay to Pidge, both through his helmet and at his back. Lance sighs in relief when the door slides shut in front of them, cutting off the enemy– for now.
“I can’t hold them forever. You’ve got about… three minutes, maybe four before they manage to get past my communicator scramble.”
“You know me, always punctual,” Lance replies brightly, and he can feel Pidge’s eye roll from here.
The prison transport ship already left something to be desired in lighting, but it was even darker in the Galra holding cell; Lance’s eyes take a moment to adjust. It’s small in here, that much he can tell, and there’s a chill to the air that feels like an intentional measure of added cruelty. The air is stale, and with the sudden isolation from the chaos outside, his and Keith’s breaths feel jarringly loud.
As his vision swims into clarity, he can make out that pressed into the furthest corner of the metal walls is a huddled shadow.Her arms are wrapped around her chest, her knees drawn in toward herself. Even in the dark, he recognizes the features of her that are Galra. There’s an unnatural golden flash from her eyes, cutting through the dark, reminding Lance of the stray cats at dusk when the day’s heat retreated back home. She’s tall in stature compared to a human– even hunched over like this– but as she raises her attention to the paladins, he can see the sharp, malnourished cut of her cheekbones.
He instantly recognizes her from the mission debrief photos; an important scientist that had been leaking Galra information for years from the inside to the Blade before being discovered. She had been exposed by a Galra data interception nearly a year ago, and all contact from her went dark. She’d been assumed dead by the Blade, an unfortunate casualty, until Hunk and Pidge had managed to hack into some Galra prisoner files. They cross referenced their identities with the Blade membership registries, and just like that– they might have someone who had the kind of invaluable information about the inner-workings of the empire that could help them defeat Zarkon.
Keith, it seems, has had no issues adjusting his vision to the darkness. All valiant and hero-like, he’s already approaching her, holding out his hand to help her up. Lance scowls, but doesn’t comment now, not with the remaining minutes on their mission ticking down.
“Valka?” Keith asks. “I’m Keith. This is Lance. We’re here to rescue you.”
“Paladins,” she breathes in recognition. The relief in her voice is palpable. Lance feels it’s a little premature.
There’s a loud boom, and the ship shudders around them, making Lance’s heartbeat rise in his throat. Something feels off about all of this, has felt wrong since they flew over in Red together to minimize risk of losing a lion, yet he can’t think clearly enough to pin down why. The fog of adrenaline and pressure presses in, tells him to run now, analyze later.
“Uh, I think we might be a little short on time for introductions,” Lance says, readjusting his bayard.
“Hey, guys? Little problem,” Pidge’s voice rings in his ear, high-pitched in a way that affirms the bad feeling twisting around his insides.
Valka takes Keith’s hand and rises shakily, still oddly holding one arm and… something to her chest. A weapon, maybe? As she rises to a standing position, she favors one leg considerably.
"I figured out why they’re only sending sentries. All Galra life form readings have vanished from the ship. I don’t think they were ever there at all. I think… I think they set it to self-destruct.”
“Shit,” Lance hisses, rushing to Keith and Valka. “How much time do you think we have?”
Keith’s already gesturing for her to cast an arm around his shoulder, but when Lance motions for her to do the same on the other side, she makes no move to do so.
What, did he smell or something? Because even if he did, he’d just fought off like three dozen sentries and he was doing her the kindness of saving her damn life and–
That’s when her arms make an indignant squeak.
No, not her arms, what’s in her arms. Lance stupidly realizes he might be about as observant as a houseplant as a little hand pokes out from a blanket in her arms, splayed toward Valka’s face like a dimpled starfish. At least when he looks over at Keith, his mouth is hanging wide open too. The blankets shift enough for him to see the soft, pudgy slope of an infant’s cheek, and he feels the panic start to rise anew.
Okay. Okay, they hadn’t budgeted for this. But hell, what of his life wasn’t a series of curveballs anyway? It wasn’t something they could dwell on right now.
“--Lance? Keith? Hello?”
He realizes Pidge is talking to them, and he shakes himself. “Sorry, Pidge. We hit a bit of a speed bump here, but we got it under control and we’re on our way out. How long?”
“Now ninety-six seconds. By my estimate. Could be less.”
“Jesus, to get all the way back to–? Yeah, let’s blow this popsicle stand.”
Pidge gets the memo, and the door opens on cue. Lance gives up on being a second support for Valka and the baby, since she can’t use one of her arms, but hangs close, blaster at the ready.
His heart hammers against his ribs, and as he shoots a couple more robotic sentries, he feels like they should have realized this was a trap sooner. Since when did they ever break into a Galra ship and not see a single one of them in the flesh? Hell, since when did prisoner intel appear out of nowhere?
It’s slow going, much slower than is going to be necessary to make it out alive. Valka is clearly in a lot of pain, teeth bared. Even with Keith’s help, she sags against him from the effort of being upright. In the brighter light of the hall, she’s pallid, lavender skin so pale it could rival the bright white of their paladin armor.
“You have to keep going, come on,” Keith urges Valka, both of them nearly tumbling over a tangled pile of robot limbs.
“Thirty seconds!” Pidge squeaks, and Lance feels true panic break free in him. An icy, awful sensation floods his veins, and he thinks he might be sick. This could be it, they could die here unless they made a new plan, stat.
“We have to run!” Lance yells, going to loop an arm around Valka’s waist. Maybe– maybe they could carry her or something. They can see the end of the hall from here, with the airlock containing Keith’s lion.
“Wait,” she breathes, chest heaving from effort.
“We can’t wait!” Keith cuts back.
“I’m not– I can’t–” she pants, then shoves the baby, holey blankets and all, into Keith’s chest.
Keith’s eyes are wider than a black hole.
“What?! No, we are getting you out of–”
“Twenty seconds! Move, you idiots!” Pidge interrupts.
“Her name is Cassia.” She brushes her hands through the downy hair on top of the infant’s head one last time, then falls back toward a wall, and Lance can see there are tears starting to spill over. Has Lance ever seen a Galra cry?
“Fifteen seconds!”
“Take her to Delion Three. Leave me behind, I won’t make it. Go!”
Keith is the first, as usual, to react, decisive and ready to do what needs to be done. He takes off in a sprint down the hall, arms clutched so tightly to his chest they look as though they disappear in front of his torso. A split second later, Lance runs after him, but he casts one more glance to Valka.
For a moment, time slows. There’s a haunting pain in her face as she collapses, more pain than he knows how to decode or understand. It reaches out to wrap around him, too, squeezing around his ribs and forcing the air from his lungs. They lock eyes, and–
The door to the airlock whooshes shut.
“Move it, dumbass!” Keith roars, yanking him hard away from the door.
Lance turns and dives after Keith into Red’s mouth. An explosive rumble roils at the end of the ship, then is followed by a heavy boom, then another, then another, working their way in toward them.
The baby is shoved into Lance’s arms as soon as they’re in the cockpit, and Red lights up in response to her paladin, humming to life under their feet. Keith slides into the pilot’s seat and punches it so hard into a dive away from the ship that Lance and their newfound charge are pressed up roughly against the back wall from G-force. The lion rocks with the force of three more explosions, and the cockpit floods with blinding light.
Lance numbly thinks about cracking a joke about seatbelts. He finds he can’t muster it.
* * *
Once they are safely away from the explosion zone, Lance’s brain shudders back to a normal pace.
Keith, being Keith, is of course doing everything perfectly as a paladin should. Getting them out of there, scanning for ships, contacting the team. Lance can’t help the shame that tugs at him that he can’t simply handle things in the way Keith does.
After confirming his and Lance’s (relative) well-being, Keith is explaining what happened in a rough voice over the comms, the faces of the other paladins, Allura, and Coran displayed on a holographic screen. Lance half-listens as their mission is recounted, but when the part comes up with trying to get to the lions, he needs to distract himself. He focuses on a closer examination of Cassia.
She’s certainly part-Galra, but she looks more human, too, than he’d expected. Her eyes are a sunset shade of gold, like most Galra, but contained in a human-like iris and pupil. Her skin is a soft, pale lavender, like her mother’s, with a shock of dark, downy hair on the top of her head that’s starting to curl at the back of her neck. The tops of her ears come to a soft point, not as drastic as Allura’s or Coran’s, but certainly far from the rounded shell of a human’s. Ten fingers, he counts as he checks her over for injuries, and ten toes. Her humanoid anatomy comes as a small relief, at least it’ll take some guesswork out of her care. She’s small, maybe the size of a few month old human baby, but Lance had no idea where to begin aging an alien hybrid infant.
Cassia fusses in his arms, clearly dissatisfied with his attention. This was usually the point at which he’d passed off his nieces or nephews back to their respective parent; Lance was good with kids, sure, but he was more of the fun uncle type who roughhoused once they were big enough and sneaked popsicles to them in the summer. There had always been someone else around to do the important stuff, or at least the promise someone more responsible would be home soon.
Lance tries to hold her to his chest to soothe her, realizing belatedly that he was still clad in full battle gear. Her nose crinkles, and she pushes at the hard armor– yeah, okay, fair enough.
As he carefully unclips the white and blue armor and slides out of it, down to the more forgiving skin-tight suit beneath, Keith finishes recounting the mission with an unceremonious, “So… yeah.”
Cassia gives another discontented squall, but settles into soft whimpers when Lance raises her again to rest against his now de-armored chest, tucking his chin over her head.
“Well this is… unexpected.” Allura speaks first after a beat, cautious. Lance can tell, even from here, she’s holding back. Maybe even a little freaked out. Lance does not like that.
“Right now,” Shiro says, “the safest thing for everyone is to get back to the Castle. We can work out a plan for it once we’re there. Hurry– the Galra may not have gone far, stay vigilant.” There’s a finality to it.
Keith agrees, gives a half-hearted “see you soon”, and the holo-screen retracts into nothingness. He checks something on the control panel, then turns to regard Lance and Cassia, expression unreadable.
“You’re both really okay?” Keith asks, tone just as guarded as his expression.
“Peachy,” Lance manages.
Keith’s eyes narrow, and Lance realizes quickly that this is not the time for sarcasm if he wanted to stay peachy.
“I checked her over, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Lance then says, hoping to alleviate some of Keith’s irritation. “She’s freaked out and upset, and, you know, same, but she doesn’t seem hurt at all. What about you?”
Keith rolls out his shoulders and neck, frowning, as though it was the first he’d thought to check in with how he felt. “Fine. I think. I should’ve recognized from the beginning that it was a trap.”
“Keith, man, come on. You had no way of knowing.”
“I convinced Shiro you and I could do this mission without the rest of the team. He would have recognized it immediately, there were signs, and if I’d only paused for one second–” Keith runs a hand over his face.
“Stop it , you can’t think like that. What happened, happened and… you know. It could’ve been worse.” He nudges the shoulder upwards that had Cassia perched on it, making a silent case for their win, however bitter.
Keith looks entirely unconvinced, and eyes the infant with so much trepidation, that under different circumstances it might have been funny to see him so afraid of a fucking baby.
“Right,” he mutters, then turns back around to focus on the controls, even though both he and Lance knew full well Red could take them home on autopilot at this point. “Let’s just– get back. And deal with this problem.”
The word problem hangs in the air.
Lance tries not to read into it, but feels himself returning to the word over and over again.
* * *
“A baby can’t stay in the Castle. It’s impractical,” Shiro states, arms folded. The metal fingers on the Galra hand twitch against his bicep as he speaks, glinting in the overhead lights of the lounge.
“It is our responsibility to assist any living being in need of help,” Allura counters evenly, although she doesn’t look particularly thrilled by the prospect either.
“In a war? We’d be doing the child a disservice by keeping her here, anything can happen at any time. This ship is the number one target in the whole universe for the Galra. We’ve placed a target on her.”
“ Especially in a war. This is the best protected ship in the galaxy, all the paladins of Voltron live on board. She deserves to be reunited with her family. We’ve helped plenty of people with that in the past–”
“Adults. Who knew the risks and made the decision to trust us.”
“Can we not be trusted?”
There’s an awkward silence following Allura’s question. It goes unsaid that someone died today. Plenty more have died before.
Lance is still holding Cassia and in half-armor. She had mercifully fallen asleep, although Lance finds himself wishing she hadn’t, wanting for anything to busy himself with that wasn’t this conversation. The other paladins are sitting with him in a ring around Allura and Shiro’s argument (which had quickly taken to standing), looking equally uncomfortable. Pidge fidgets with their sleeves. Hunk’s eyes dart between Shiro and Allura. Keith is still in his full armor, engaging in a staring contest with his boots.
“Well– how far would we have to take her?” Hunk then asks, clearly casting about for a compromise.
“Delion Three,” Lance pipes in.
Coran frowns from behind one of the couches, leaning his weight into his hands on the back of the seat. “Delion Three?” he echoes contemplatively. “I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”
Lance shrugs. “I mean, it’s a big universe, right?”
Coran is already crossing the room and fiddling with something on a table. A few seconds later, a large celestial map is projected overhead, slowly rotating around an unseen axis point. He punches something into a holographic keyboard in Altean. It makes a distinctively negative double beep.
Stroking his mustache thoughtfully, Coran emits a hum. “It would seem that there are no records of Delion Three. Nor Delions One through Ten, nor a Delion star, nor a solar system, asteroid field, quasar, black hole, comet… ”
“Well, the map is ten thousand years old, right?” Pidge addresses this to Allura, over Coran’s rambling. “Maybe it needs updating.”
“Maybe,” Allura concedes doubtfully. “However, it’s matched with the other current maps we’ve referenced. The Alteans may be ancient now, but they were well-traveled. We could cross-check with the maps you’ve obtained from the Galra systems?”
“There’s no… I don’t know, Google Universe for this sort of thing?” Hunk asks.
“I’m afraid not.” Allura says this in a way that betrays that she has no idea what Hunk is talking about.
“... nebula, cluster, neutron star, or circumstellar disk,” Coran finishes brightly, oblivious.
“Can’t we– ask around or something?” Lance then asks. Cassia shifts against him and makes a snuffling sound– he’d almost forgotten she was there, the air was so thick. “See if anyone’s heard of it? Maybe it goes by a different name or something.”
“We can try.” Allura nods.
Shiro is quick to add, “But if it doesn’t uncover anything fast, we need a plan B. A planet that might not be hostile to taking in an orphan Galra.”
“No.”
Everyone turns. It’s Keith, the first time he’s spoken since they got back. His eyes have lifted from their staring match with the floor, dark and intense in a way that grips the room’s attention.
“No,” he repeats. His voice is hard and raw and dangerous; Lance’s hair stands on end. “We are not– dropping her somewhere. Like she’s cargo.”
Something pained flickers in Shiro’s expression, and his arms fall to his sides. His voice softens. “Keith, nobody’s saying she’s–”
“Her family’s on Delion Three? So we find Delion Three.” Keith stands now, and the set of his shoulders are so rigid that for a moment, Lance wonders if this is going to come to blows. “Can’t be the hardest thing we’ve had to track down, right?”
Allura’s lips press into a thin line. “No. But, Keith, it might not be as easy as–”
“We fucking find Delion Three . End of story.” Keith glares at her, then Shiro, then Lance (what the hell had he done?!) and storms out of the room.
They remain silent for a moment after he’s gone.
“Sounds like we have some research to do,” Shrio finally sighs. “Pidge, do you think you could modify the Galra maps to interface with the library records…”
Lance zones out almost immediately, numbly staring down at Cassia sleeping tight to his chest. Her mouth is pulled into a terse frown, and she’s curled into a defensive ball, her tiny muscles tense and jumpy. Her fist curls and loosens in the fabric near his shoulder, and she keeps shifting while making a low, whining noise, like she can’t get comfortable.
He’s not who she wants right now. Who she needs.
All he can think is that she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand , and it’s all his fault she’ll never feel the safety of his mother’s arms again.