Chapter Text
Biting back on the scream was easier then maybe it once would have been. The pain is equally sharp- Lance didn’t think the pain would ever quite dull. He always healed too completely for his nerve endings to get used to the sting of being sliced open.
He took a cool breath in through his nose and felt the burn of the cold air as it came in through his nostrils, sliding down the back of his blistering throat. His lungs didn’t quite inflate, as there was still unforgiving metal cutting him around the middle, so he couldn’t blame his body for that.
What he could blame his body for was the tremble in his trigger finger.
He closed one eye and took aim.
His team below were in a heated battle. They had stormed a Galra base, just the five of them, and were doing their best to make their way through the droves of droids and sentries and actual Galra soldiers who were swarming them so they could access the mainframe of the ship.
Lance had one job. One really simple job- He just needed to stay perched above the chaos, watch the other paladin’s backs and clear the way. He was a sniper, ultimately, when it came to battle formations. Easily a liability, but if he was good enough, he could be an asset.
Lance hoped beyond hope that he was good enough.
He took another steadying breath and pulled the trigger. Laser fire arced across the battle below to burn a hole through the forehead of a sentry that was holding onto and blocking their point of access. It dropped and smoldered on the ground as white clad boots stomped over it and advanced.
Now here was a problem- Lance had to advance with them with a spearhead buried in his middle.
He cursed himself again and looked down at where the barest bits of the metal glinted from underneath his flight suit. His blood was invisible against the black fabric, except for where it glittered wetly in the dim purple lights of the ship. He had to stay slightly hunched or else his chest plate would rest flush against his stomach and press it deeper into his body.
He hadn’t been expecting them to have a guard along the catwalk of the hangar, but nonetheless the guard had materialized from the shadows. In the scuffle that followed, his spear had found its way underneath the edge of Lance’s armor and lodged itself in the meat just beneath his ribcage. Lance knew a lot of very important organs lived there in that body cavity, and he certainly didn’t want to see them spilling out, so after he had let gravity send the guard to his doom down below he had used a few carefully aimed slices of the plasma utility knife (paladin suit standard) to detach the spearhead from the pole of the spear. The head of it crawled deeper into Lance once freed, as if it was alive and looking for a bloody nest to call a home, but at least Lance had freedom of movement and, as far as he was concerned, his wound was plugged.
Technically he should have alerted the other paladins to his injury. Technically it was a much discussed protocol, and Lance knew it.
But also technically if they didn’t secure this base, they couldn’t advance to the next sector of space, and if they couldn’t do that they would be leaving a whole host of planets to the Galra’s tender mercy. If Lance let them know he was hurt, Shiro would demand they pull back and if they pulled back?
It just…wouldn't be pretty.
Lance could fight through it. After all, the healing pods awaited. It hurt but it was temporarily survivable. He wouldn't jeopardize the mission over a stinkin’ booboo.
No matter how much he could feel the metal warming as it settled into the bed of his flesh.
Nah, he'd just crawl, hunched and quiet, on the catwalk. He wasn't even bleeding enough to leave a trail.
He watched as the others burst into the next room. Keith was first through the door, blazing with adrenaline, alive and red and ready. Pidge moved in just behind, a viper of a girl clutching her narrow green blade in front of her thin, panting chest. Hunk stood as a wall behind them, facing the enemies that gave chase, and he was a sandstone sun with a cannon hefted in his arms. And then there was Shiro, always leading from the rear, protecting their backs with the steel of his bare hands.
None of them glanced up, and Lance tried not to feel pathetic and blue. He gritted his teeth and crawled on.
It was slow going across the hangar. Lance could hear his team in the room beyond, the sounds of fighting and shouting and clashes of hollow metal. He was sweating and cold and the muscles of his legs were shaking but he swallowed it down. He was failing right now. He needed to get in there. He'd let himself fall behind.
To transition from the catwalk to the ceiling struts of the room beyond he would have to crawl through a short vent. The paneling took longer than it should have to move and reveal the vent- his fingers had gone numb.
Finally, finally the panel gave to Lances administrations and he threw his body through. There was a stab of pain that jolted the bone of his sternum and the world spun. Dizziness seized him and he would have collapsed if he wasn't already half horizontal in the slim passage of the vent.
"Come on " Lance said and fought his failing body to get his legs up and under him.
The space called for an army crawl, but Lance simply could not do that. Instead he lay on his back and pushed himself along with his legs.
"Just like a backstroke, McClain." He told himself in a strained whisper. The clenching of his abdominal muscles shifted the spear head and Lance hated how much he could feel the unpleasant shape of it inside of him.
When he arrived where he needed to be and beat off the attached vent cover with his fist, he pulled his body out and onto a strut. It was pretty high in the air and the combined vertigo and lightheadedness (blood loss? Lance didn't think it was that bad yet) made Lance wobble as he found his feet.
Standing was a relief. The pain was lessened and he could hunch just enough that his chest plate didn't bump his injury. As he took in the scene below him, his stomach dropped.
The fighting was done. He was too late.
The other paladins stood around the room, checking the perimeter and guarding the door. Pidge was crouched at the motherboard of the ships controls, no doubt downloading the information they had come for- locations of every Galra base in this sector as well as the standard routes for battle ships and cargo ships alike.
Lance’s grip on his gun loosened. He bit the side of his cheek in frustration.
“Hey Lance!” Shiro shouted up to him. “Come on down here!”
Lance nodded and tried not to feel dread, but honestly the feeling almost dwarfed the pain in his stomach.
Almost.
It just sucked that he felt like he tried so hard and it was never, never good enough. Like, it was bad enough that he carried around this gnawing guilt that he wasn’t meeting expectations the way he needed to be. It would be one thing if he wasn’t even trying, but he was. He just wasn’t cut out to be a paladin, even at his best. He had decided a while ago that if he wasn’t going to excel, that he at least needed to serve others, fulfill his role. He would never be a hero the way the rest of them were, but he could support them. He could have their backs no matter what.
It’s just that this kept happening. Saying ‘no matter what’ and vowing it to himself was one thing, but actually executing it? Impossible. He had every intention of doing his job with perfection, but when the dice are down and his team needs him, he just. Doesn’t have the grit.
Lace rubbed his cheeks, already feeling them heat a bit with embarrassment at having come so late to the fight. He shut his eyes and stepped off the strut.
The ground approached fast, and for a moment he idly thought about letting it. The descent was jostling his ribcage and the spearhead was biting into him ever deeper and he knew Shiro had a lecture waiting for him just by the tone of his voice when he called his name.
Deciding with a sigh that going splat on the ground of some Galra ship somewhere wouldn’t exactly be serving anyone except himself, Lance activated his suits jetpack and brought himself to a hover, landing on the ground solidly and as safely as he could.
He took a deep breath.
“So was my shooting just spectacular or was it also pretty sexy?” Lance said, holding his rifle up over the still weeping wound in his stomach. The metal had buried so deep at this point that his flight suit almost concealed it, and if he didn’t call attention to it he could probably just make it back to the ship and deal with it himself.
Hunk laughed. “Call it whatever you’d like except for sexy, dude. Great head shot on that one sentry though.”
Lance preened. “Just all in a day's work.”
Number one rule of being a support for his team: Levity, Levity, Levity. Lance was naturally prone to it, so it was the only thing that came easy to him. Everybody else (except maybe Coran) let the seriousness of the war blind them to the fact that it was a war in space and they were all literally too young, except for Pidge who was actually still a child and really really too young.
Lance’s grandfather had been in one of the World Wars back on earth and he used to talk about it with Lance before his memory had started to fade and the dementia really set in. He told Lance that the number one thing that got him through some of the worst things he had to experience was that one of the other soldiers in his unit was constantly cracking jokes and making him feel like he had a friend, that he wasn’t alone among all the horror.
And Lance had always been a goofy kid. He couldn’t help it anymore then he could help anything else about himself. Loud, obnoxious, happy-go-lucky…He could count on two hands all the ways people have used to describe that particular aspect of his personality. Taking up the mantle of Voltron’s jester was really just an extension of who he was already destined to be.
A fool.
Lance smiled wide and sent a wink over to Hunk.
Even if he didn’t feel like joking all the time…
He skipped a step over to Shiro, where he had a hand on Keith’s shoulder.
Even if sometimes it felt like he was a caricature of himself…
The metal in his gut shifted with his skipping step and he cried out as he stumbled. He turned the cry into a whoop of victory as eyes turned towards him.
Even if it hurt him…
He came up besides Keith and nudged him with an elbow.
Lance was going to keep it together. He was going to be the paladin they needed even if they deserved someone better. He could keep it together. He just had to keep smiling.
“Lance.” Shiro said.
“Watch it!” Keith hissed. Lance realized belatedly that the arm Lance had nudged had a bright red bloody slice across the bicep.
“Whoa sorry, bro. Didn’t see your papercut.” Lance's smile was all teeth when he aimed it at Keith.
Keith huffed.
“Big wound or small,” Shiro was obviously still lecturing Keith over something. “Any wound is bad news. Even if you think you can keep going you need to report your wound so we can accurately assess our chances in a fight. You should have let us know when your arm started bleeding, Keith. We’ve talked about this.”
“I didn’t even feel it, Shiro!” Keith protested. “I-”
“I don’t care. As soon as you noticed, you should have said something. If I had known I wouldn’t have let you charge ahead the way you did.” Shiro said. “Speaking of which-”
Now Shiro turned to Lance, who was already fidgeting over the conversation topic.
“Keith shouldn’t have been able to charge ahead without back up. I appreciate the shots you did make, but we need to work on your hustle, Lance. Even a few minutes of scouting ahead and initial covering fire can make a huge difference. What took you so long to get here?”
Lance shrugged and avoided his gaze. “Oh, the usual stuff. Taking in the sights, putting bad guys in my sights…”
Lance angled his rifle up. “Pew, pew. You know?”
Shiro sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Keith was squinting at Lance in a way Lance didn’t like.
“I’m glad you wanted to be thorough, Lance, but you need to keep pace with your team. We’ll run some drills and work on it, okay?” Shiro gave him The Nod so Lance gave him The Nod back.
Shiro walked away.
Lance’s throat felt tight, the way it did when he was trying not to cry. His hands were trembling enough that his gun was clattering against his chest plate and it was sending tiny electric shocks of pain up his nerves from the triangular point of metal, a weakness pointing right to his heart.
And Keith wouldn’t stop staring at him.
“See something you like, mullet brain?” Lance snapped at him, maybe more savagely than he needed to.
Keith just blinked. “Are you alright?”
Lance hated when people asked him that. Like, does Keith even care? Why’s he asking?
“What’s it to you?” Lance bit out and turned to walk away.
Suddenly an explosion of black smoke plumed out of the corner. It ran up the sides of the walls, covered the floor and swirled around the paladins denying gravity. It was thick smoke, black as tar and moved like liquid. It was cold and smelled acrid, like something rotting or factory pollution.
“Druid!” Shiro shouted and they all turned towards their enemy, taking a defensive stance.
The smoke resolved into the shape of a cloaked woman. She loomed in the corner, her fingers hooked into a spellcasting stance.
She was the closest to Pidge.
Lance buried six shots in a neat little hexagon in the middle of her chest before she could move.
She didn’t go down though. She just screeched something hideous and raised a hand. Before Lance knew it, he was flying across the room. The druid caught him up, her fist clenched and raised. Lance heard Keith shout his name and then his awareness narrowed to the face of the druid in front of him.
She was ugly, like all of the druids were. It wasn’t that her features themselves were ugly- she would actually be quite beautiful if she wasn’t a druid. There was just something so undeniably corrupted about the visage-the way her skin had darkened to the bruising of a corpse, the zombified way the muscles of her face hung from her facial bones, the glimmering wet yellow of her sclera- it was repulsive, an inversion of natural laws. She had her face twisted up as she glared at Lance.
“Blue Paladin,” She said, her words slipping around her fanged mouth with a rasp, as if her vocal cords had once been cut. “I see that you volunteer for destruction.”
“Only if it’s mutual,” Lance replied with a cocky little quirk of his mouth. His rifle barrel rested against the soft and vulnerable skin beneath her throat. “You shouldn’t have let me this close.”
“You underestimate me.” She said as one of her fingernails dug into Lance’s temple.
A trickle of his blood ran down and soaked into the skin of her nailbed. She licked her lips, as if sucking the last drops of sweet wine off and growled at Lance, satisfied. “Shoot me if you’d like, Paladin. You've shared enough with me, and I will hardly die from such a wound.”
Lance’s face pulled up into a sneer and his finger twitched to squeeze the trigger but before he could he felt the metal in his stomach suddenly turn cold, as if it had turned to ice.
The pounding of his heart was all he could feel.
“I curse you to be ripped open.” She said, and as she spoke Lance felt the metal in his gut grow frozen barbed fingers and latch into him, deeper and more permanent than before. “Either you will die or you will destroy the bonds you hold so dear. No matter what, Voltron will be undone by your hand.”
Lance blasted her head off.
Her body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, and Lance dropped to the ground. An unnerving chill was creeping through his veins as the spearhead became a parasite, the frozen metal fingers fusing to the bone of his bottom ribs and he was unable to fight it off any longer.
He screamed and screamed and screamed until everything went black.
************************************************
When he came into wakefulness, it was slow. It wasn’t the refreshed awakening that often followed from a bout in the healing pod, and his breath didn’t leave him in chilly puffs. However, he was cold. Cold to the bone, and unsettled.
He opened his eyes.
He heard arguing. He was in the medic room, the small room that was adjacent to the healing pod chamber. He was laid up on a cot. To his left he saw Hunk sitting in a chair, his head hung low, his waves of oaken hair falling in front of his broad, drawn face. To the right, Pidge and Allura were standing across from each other. The argument stemmed from them. Shiro stood by Allura’s side and Pidge stomped her foot.
“I just think it would be smarter to run some physical tests …” Pidge was saying.
“Absolutely not.” Allura said, her accent clipping the words close and tight. “I can see that it's entwined with his quintessence. It would be far too risky.”
Keith was leaning against the wall at the end of Lance’s bed, his arms crossed and his face in shadow.
Lance’s mouth was dry but he licked his lips and said:
“Okay, who pissed in whose cheerios?”
The outcry of “Lance!” was instant and then everyone was crowding around him.
Hands reached out and patted him, warm hands of all kinds- Allura's slender ones, Pidge's square and tiny ones, Hunks meaty solid palms.
"I'm so glad you're alive, dude!" Hunk said, voice and eyes swimming in tears.
"What even happened?" Lance asked, disoriented and still cold, still aching.
"You hid an injury." Keith was at the end of the cot, gripping the bed frame with knuckles turned white. He looked so angry his face had gone pale in places, and he trembled. His black eyes danced like hot coals in the base of a fire. "And then you took on a druid all by yourself and got yourself cursed ."
Lance felt a spike of irritation even as he processed Keith's words. He had been a liability, sure. He had jeopardized the mission and failed when faced with a stronger enemy, okay. That wasn't new- it was the same old song as always and it pressed into Lance like an old bruise. But getting a lecture from Keith of all people? That stung him to his core.
"As if you're one to talk!" Lance protested. "You hid your injury too! I just hid mine better."
Keith's face went slack and then the rage poured back in, splotching his cheeks red.
“It’s not a competition!” Keith gasped out. “You could have died !”
Lance wanted to say something dismissive. He wanted to pull his lip up in disgust and discount the idea that him dying was anything to be upset about. He decided that everyone else might find that alarming and out of character, so he took a breath to say something else, anything else, hopefully something funny and a little bit mean when-
His breath turned to a gasp
-his chest was wracked with pain. Black spots dotted his vision and he clutched at his ribs. It was all-consuming, a writhing he could feel beneath his hand. He took a few deep breaths but he took them too quickly. It hurt it hurt it hurt it hurt .
And then it didn't.
Slowly his awareness trickled back in.
Allura was holding his face in her warm, slender, elegant hands. She was saying his name insistently. He blinked and was able to focus on the shine of her opalescent eyes, the most alien thing about her.
"Sorry?" Lance said dumbly.
"You with us?" Allura said.
Lance looked around him at his teammates, faces blank with terror and helplessness. The pain had stopped up his brain with the slowness of a nightmare. He realized he was making his friends look like that. Damn, he needed to get it together.
"Yeah," Lance said. "I'm fin-"
Before he could finish the word the pain was back again, but worse. He was tearing apart. His ribs were going to separate and clatter on the ground in ugly arcs of white bone while his heart beat out puddles of useless red viscera.
He realized distantly that he was screaming again.
Now when he came to, he was wrapped up in a wet, rocking hug from Hunk.
"I'm sorry guys." Lance got out, feeling exhausted and apologetic.
" You don't have to be sorry." Keith snarled from somewhere out of Lance's line of sight.
"Tell us what happened!" Pidge demanded, her thin voice sharp in her panic. "We can't break the curse unless we know how it works!"
"What exactly did the druid say to you, Lance?" Allura asked, pulled Hunks arms away from where they were wrapped around Lance's face.
Lance tried to remember. He was almost afraid to speak, afraid that that terrible pain would rack his body again.
But he had to try. His team was depending on him for this, and he'd risk the pain if it meant he could get the white fear off of their faces.
Lance cast his mind back.
"She said I was going to be ripped open?" Lance said hesitantly, knowing how it would sound and hating it.
Silence for a beat, and then Allura shook her head.
"No." Allura said. "I can tell this is a curse, and curses have conditions. You can't just curse someone to die, there must be a triggering event. What else did she say? Think back- you've already triggered it twice while we've been sitting here."
"She said I'd die or destroy the bonds that I hold dear." Lance said, feeling the coldness of his body through his bones. It sat like oil on his stomach. "That Voltron would come undone because of me."
Allura’s frown wrinkled her pretty face.
“What could that ever mean?” Her brow gathered together and added to the pulling of her face into a valley of worry. “Bonds?”
She spoke low, almost to herself.
Hunk took Lance’s fingers into a crushing grip. “You could never hurt Voltron, Lance!”
Lance shrugged noncommittedly. Right. He didn’t believe Hunk, but what was he to say?
"Of course not, buddy." Lance patted his friend's hand. "I'm Voltron's biggest asse-"
The pain hit him again, pulling from his core, cold and relentless. His spine twisted, the animal of his body trying to escape, but the horror was inside of him, sawing at his bones with blunt, icy fangs.
Lance came back to himself laying sprawl armed over his cot, panting to heave air into his lungs. His face was wet with tears.
Allura was snapping fingers above him.
"Lance, think . What did you do just now?" She asked.
Lance thought, his mind muddled. What was he doing? He was doing something that was causing this. He was to blame for this. He deserved it…
"Stay with us, Lance." Allura slapped his cheek gently. "Don't sleep."
"Mhm?" Lance responded, rousing himself. " ' ight."
"Okay, that's enough." Lance suddenly found himself bodily lifted. Keith grabbed him around the shoulders and lifted him off the bed. His face was inches from Lance's. "I need you to figure this out right now. Come on , Lance. You can figure this out."
Keith's face was twisted up in a snarl, his words harsh, his lips red from the blood of being bitten. Lance expected his grip to be bruising, but it wasn't. His hands were rough and warm and firm, but he held Lance with care.
The contradiction of Keith and caring cleared his head.
He'd wanted to say that he didn't care if he died, but he didn't. He'd told them he was fine, but he wasn't. He told Hunk that he was an asset to Voltron, but he knew he wasn't.
"Oh." Lance said, staring right into Keith's desperate eyes. "It's cause I'm lying."
Keith let him go. "Lying how?"
"What has that got to do with bonds? Or destroying us?" Pidge asked, rational even in the face of supernatural curses and emotional men.
Lance took a readying breath. Something was dawning on him. "I want to try something."
They looked at him expectantly.
He said "I'm a ten foot tall purple platypus."
He waited. They waited. Nothing happened.
"Is now really the time for jokes, buddy?" Hunk asked.
Lance didn't respond. Instead he said:
"We're all flying on a giant hot dog and the castleship was never real."
Nothing again.
Despairingly, finally he tried:
"I think everyone in this room is very ugly."
Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
The others were staring at him as if he'd lost his mind.
He closed his eyes and very, very quietly said:
"I'm Lance McClain, and I think I'm great."
Immediate freezing pain.
When he was released from the hold of the spell, Lance beat a fist weakly, petulantly against the bed. He grit his teeth and tried not to cry.
"It's my emotions." Lance choked out. "I can't lie about my emotions."