Lance didn't think much of getting separated from the others at first. The swamp planet they were on reminded him of Dagobah from Star Wars, and he was caught up in his Luke Skywalker fantasy for half an hour before he realised that he could no longer hear anyone else's voice through the mossy underbrush. His radio was on the fritz from slipping and falling into some mud earlier, which, frankly, he was glad no one else saw. It was now only working in fuzz and patches.
Looking for a tiny escape pod in the dense swamp was going to be a nightmare. Especially when all they had to go on was a heat signature. The entire swamp was a boiling, gassy mess. From space, they traced the arc of descent as best they could and landed where the lions could remain on solid ground. Between the murky ground and the low-hanging vines, speeders were out of the question. The rest of the job was on foot.
Lance stopped and slowly turned about. The grayish-green swamp oozed and steamed around him, giving off odd, exotic scents and even weirder noises. He could hear bats or maybe birds flapping overhead, and the scuttling from the tree-crabs slowly climbing up every trunk. They freaked him out at first until he realised that they weren't doing any harm, and they were kinda cute when you picked one up and it waggled its little claws around helplessly. They did give him an awful sense of vertigo, though, for when he stood still and peered into the distance, all the tree-crabs slowly climbing higher and higher made it look as though he was sinking. Or the swamp was rising. Or both.
But back to business. Lost. Not lost, just... on the lookout. Just a matter of yelling through his muddy comm enough times to get someone's attention. Besides, he could still feel the presence of Blue not too far off. Lance liked the comforting bond they shared, and the magical feeling of being connected to the giant semi-sentient ship.
"-ance? -ere tryi- t -ind you."
"Yeah. Copy. Anyone? My comm is a bit broken. Do you hear me?"
"We... -ound -ere the ship cra- -ou can co- … -ere?"
Well, that solved that problem. Once again, Lance could dust his hands, claim credit for a job well done and do little-to-none of the work. He turned on his heel to climb back over a sunken stump and trudge his way back towards Pidge and Shiro.
Lance hoisted himself up onto the root system, crushing a few unlucky tree crabs along the way. He regretted the crunching sound they made under his boot as he slung his leg up and tried to swing his weight over the edge. That's when his foot got caught.
Lance overshot and fell, nearly headfirst to the other side of the dead root system, and he didn't fall cleanly. With his foot jammed above his head he was now hanging upside-down, his shoulder resting on the wet and soggy roots poking out of the groundwater.
"Hey guys? Can you come get me? I'm stuck. My foot's caught in a jam."
No response. Lance sighed. He guessed he kinda was less important than those refugees they set out to rescue.
"-ust -eave hi-"
"OH FUCK YOU, KEITH"
Great. No one was coming. It wasn't too bad, hanging upside down in a rotting tree in a swamp. No sirree. Plenty of intertwining branches and vines to look up at overhead, plenty of tree crabs to crawl up your legs and keep you company and creepily fall on your face when they slip on your plastic armor. Yep. Peachy.
Lance noticed, as he looked up at his leg caught in the root-jam, that he had a small gash in the side of his leg, a tiny trickle of blood now flowing up his body. He wondered how long that had been there, or if it happened when he tripped.
Without any sunlight, Lance couldn't tell how much time had passed and his leg had long-since gone completely numb. He was starting to get a little dizzy, honestly. The edges of his vision were going black. Or maybe it was the mud on his visor. Or maybe it was the long, black slithering body emerging from the dark and tangled roots of the swamp with liquid motion and terrifying silence.
Lance tried to panic, but he could barely stay conscious. He tried staying still, but the creature just kept emerging and getting longer and longer. It was black and snake-like, but it was as wide as a basketball and impossibly long and its blunt, rounded head had only a single large eye. Unblinking, the eye stared at him. It swayed back and forth on its neck, a hypnotic motion obviously meant to distract its prey. And then, peeling back from the eye were eight horrific tentacles forming an alien flower of Lance's death.
Lance screamed as loud as he could, and the creature tensed and shot into action. It wrapped itself tightly around him, constricting him, choking him, squeezing whatever air was still in him out. He couldn't fight the creature's sheer size and weight while it brought him closer and closer to its horrifying eye-mouth.
Lance could feel the slime drip on his skin and see into the hell-depths of that swamp eye and this was how he died. Just let go. Just pass out. It'll all be over-
In a flash of red that was far too close to Lance for comfort, the creature's head fell cleanly off and tumbled down into the swampwater. Immediately after, its body went limp and fell all around lance, the sudden loss of muscle control and the weight of the creature freeing his foot from the ancient roots. The body of the snake-creature still wrapped around Lance pushed him deep under the muddy water and Lance was splashing and choking and fighting to free himself from its ropey corpse.
Air. Precious air. And-
"Keith! Oh, way to go, dude! I bet you did that on purpose!"
Keith was knee-deep in the silty water beside Lance, panting and sweaty. He steadied his feet in the mud and leaned over to offer Lance a hand.
"What? Yeah. I mean, I told Shiro we couldn't just leave you there and wait for you to find us. So I tried to find you myself."
Lance blinked, wiping the filth and mud from his visor before accepting Keith's help.
"Come on, Lance. We found the escape pod and from what I hear, the refugees are still alive. We should head back to our Lions now."
Lance narrowed his eyes at Keith. That guy always loved to just rub his superiority into him, didn't he? But he didn't say anything, and he followed in Keith's footsteps, his boots squelching with mud every step of the way.
–
Back at the castle, Lance was in his room and tearing off his muddy armor with mild disgust when he remembered the cut on his leg. It wasn't long and it wasn't deep, but of course dirt and debris had gotten into it on an alien planet. Lance considered just ignoring it, but after that encounter with the eyeball-snake and the tree-crabs, he was pretty sure that he'd become infected with some horrible alien disease. And there would be slime involved. And he'd turn into a brain-eating zombie. Lance had seen the horror movies. He knew what was coming.
Lance put on a T-shirt and some sweatpants and made his way down to medical bay.
Coran nodded in agreement. "I see, Lance. I'll set you up to take a quick nap in the healing pod, just to make sure you don't have any infections from the cut. Wouldn't want the greatest warriors in the universe dying of a fever!"
"Or becoming a zombie!"
"That too, I guess."
Coran pressed a few buttons on the comm and the healing pod hissed and opened. Lance stripped off his clothes down to his boxer shorts and climbed in. He heard the familiar suction noise as the pod closed fully and, after a moment, nothing. He was unconscious.
–
When he awoke, Lance felt a bit queasy, like he typically did coming out of the pod. Something about going from floating stasis back to gravity and light and air was highly disorienting. He stepped out, his legs a bit jelly as always, and went to go pick up his folded clothes nearby.
"Yo Coran, how long was I out?"
Coran waved the air casually, "Not more than four hours, lad. Yer as healthy as a zarlac!"
Lance lightly brushed his fingertips over his leg where the wound used to be. Gone. He was safe. No brain-eating for Lance McClane.
At dinner, Keith was telling the rest of them about the size of the monster that had nearly swallowed Lance whole. It was embarrassing hearing him talk in great detail about finding Lance dangling upside-down in a swamp, covered in mud and about to die before Keith chopped its head off. The food goo made Lance's mouth go incredibly dry.
"Yeah, yeah, we get it, Keith. Ha-ha, near-death experience for Lance. Keith's an awesome hero. Great job for you."
"You're welcome, Lance."
Ugh. Fuck that guy.
That night Lance dreamed, of course, that he was back in the swamp. The water was higher, up around his thighs, and hot. The trees were bigger, denser, looming overhead and the tree-crabs were swarming all around him.
And the creature was now in front of him. Behind him. All around him.
It was in the water, slithering and slipping and impossibly long, dragging its body from muddy knoll to deep under the mire. It reared itself up and turned its giant eye on him, staring unblinking at Lance's pathetic, tired, muddy body.
Lance tried to swallow but found that he couldn't. He tried to scream, but his mouth was sewn shut. He was scraping and clawing at his face to open up his mouth, and more than being terrified, he was hungry.
"Feed."
The creature whispered to him, though from what mouth, Lance could not say.
"Feed."
He heard it all around him, inside his mind.
"Feed."
Lance felt helpless to obey. He reached into the murky brown waters and his hand touched a tree-crab. He brought its wet and snapping body closer to his face, as the snake-creature slowly coiled itself around Lance.
"Feed."
The creature was starting to constrict now. Lance was choking. He couldn't eat the crab even though his brain told him to. His arms and hands and mouth no longer worked, and the snake creature was angry.
"FEED."
Lance awoke in his bed, gasping and sweating, the sheets spiraled around his body, and wrapped around his neck. He wrestled with the blankets and threw them off. He sat up in bed and shivered, feeling the single bead of sweat slowly run down the middle of his back. He felt the ghost of the cut on his leg from the swamp. Fully healed, without even a scar.
He didn't feel hungry at all.
It wasn't the first night's dinner, or the second, or even the third that he noticed that he was starting to lose his appetite slightly. If something wasn't right, Lance just shrugged it off. Goo was goo. It was always gross. It was always bland. It's not like he had the luxury of a burger or a pizza pretzel out here in space. Fuck. He'd trade blue for a cinnamon roll right now. Sorry, Blue.
Aside from the occasional flashback to the swamp nightmare, Lance was fine. He maintained his daily skincare regimen; he maintained his weekly Pidge-bothering regimen, and him and the team were plowing through missions with no contest.
Over the next few weeks they had no planned strikes again the Galra empire, so it was back to an intense training schedule. Allura had been pushing them hard, and the last round of robeasts sent by the empire, while defeated, were proof that the team had no real room for error.
The days were taking their toll on the team, but Lance was starting to feel like he was kinda taking the brunt of it. Early mornings, heavy training and no rest days meant that his body had little time to recover from each session. He tried to eat. He really did. But that nightmare was always present in the back of his mind, the gross wriggling crabs startlingly visible when he closed his eyes and imagined. But the days wore on, and Lance, though he wouldn't admit it to himself, he was falling behind.
In the training room, Lance was facing off with Shiro and Pidge against three training bots armed with swords. Shiro lept to the side to tackle one and disarm it, grabbing the weapon for himself. Pidge shot her grapple at the far left and managed to trip the middle. Lance... Lance just stood there.
"Lance! Get moving! Take them out!"
Oh yeah! He shook off the fuzz, activated his bayard and fired at the tripped bot. Pidge whipped back her grapple and helped Shiro down the third. Lance caught up and fired a bolt of plasma straight into its chest.
He was working up a sweat. Getting his head in the game.
He went two more rounds with Shiro and Pidge, but his reaction time was getting sluggish. He nearly clipped Pidge's shoulder with cover fire.
"Lance! Watch it, Mr. Hero!"
"Sorry."
Pidge had to duck and roll to avoid Lance's sloppy shots.
"Um, hello? I'm not the enemy here! What's wrong with you?"
Lance let his bayard drop and it deactivated. His arms were surprisingly heavy after only three rounds. His brow was dripping with sweat.
"Is something wrong?" asked Shiro, concern on his face.
"I think I'm just... having an off day." To be honest, Lance couldn't quite figure out what was wrong. He'd been having off days for several days now, but the slight funk he constantly felt just wasn't enough to warrant paying attention to. Maybe he was just getting sick.
Well, there was a solution to that...
–
"Yo, Coran!"
""Yo" to you, Lance." Coran waved from the lounge, sipping his tea.
Lance dragged his body into the lounge, trying not to look too tired and sore.
"Yeah, I think I wanna go back in the pod, man. I think it missed something. I'm just not feelin' all that hot."
Coran paused for a moment, then shrugged. "If you say so, lad. I read your summary chart when you got out last time. Said you were fine. But we can do another pop just to make sure."
Barely an hour later, Lance got out of the pod feeling much the same. Maybe he was a little hungry now? That must have meant something. His appetite was back and he'd eat and he'd be fine now. No more problems. None.
That night, the swamp creature returned to Lance's dreams. Its eye boring into him in its hypnotic stare. It whispered to him again, its ominous tone hovering in his mind.
"Feed."
–
More than anything else these days, the quiet nausea, the exhaustion and crankiness, the hunger was setting in. Every day, Lance was eating and eating and when he went to bed he perpetually craved more food.
His reaction time was slightly better, but he now had to ignore the constant pangs of hunger his body would send to him whenever he made even the smallest psychical exertion. Forming Voltron took all of his concentration, and after a battle, Lance was always famished. He'd stumble into the kitchen and collapse onto the floor with a bowl of food- fork optional. Even Hunk looked at him with a bit of pity, but Lance noted with private thanks that he shrugged it off and just let Lance do his thing.
Now Lance found that his stomach constantly had a rolling, lurching feeling in it. As if every move he made caused him unnecessary existential dread. And for a confident and plucky and handsome hero like Lance, that was just impossible! This was getting a bit out of hand, but no one really commented on it if he just kept the effort up, pushed through the sweat and supported his team-mates. He had his off-days, but, hey, maybe he was getting better?
"Feed."
What did it want?
"FEED."
Lance couldn't ignore the nightmare. He couldn't ignore the constant hunger he felt, and the panic slowly returning to him, day by day. He didn't want to say anything, but he was starting to get worried. The hunger gnawed at him, but moreso, the fear of what it meant: What if the hunger never let up? What if this was the beginning of something... something much worse?
He was becoming a zombie.
First food goo, then his team mates. No other explanation.
He would eat ravenously, and the food would just go nowhere. It was never enough. It was never enough. He worked out, but his body was slow and dull and his brain was full of cotton. He tried forcing himself to keep up with the others, but inside he knew something was happening. And he was hungry. Always so hungry.
"You're a growing boy," cooed Allura, patting him on the back. "Eat some more protein."
Lance just couldn't bring himself to tell her that he was worried his hunger would never go away.
At least he had the excuse to eat his feelings.
–
When Lance started complaining in his Blue Lion, Shiro started to get annoyed. He told him to pack a snack or eat before they left, but Shiro didn't understand. Lance was pushing as hard as he could, saving the innocent people of entire planets and fighting evil armies took a lot out of him and god damnit, he was going to eat his own arm if this mission didn't end quickly. Shiro told him to take better care of himself and go to medical bay if he was feeling sick.
As the weeks wore on, Lance was starting to lose his mind. Poison. It must have posioned him. Cancer? Hypnosis? Why was he suffering? Why didn't anyone notice or care?
Was he just... making it all up in his head?
He felt like he was losing weight, but every time he stepped on the scale in medical bay, the scale read the same. He'd even gained a pound, which never happened on his skinny body.
But he felt so tired and hungry all the time. Everyone just called him lazy and frankly, Lance was starting to feel incredibly hurt.
Was he so unhelpful all the time that they couldn't notice when he was really sick? Was he that useless to the team that they didn't know the difference when he was helping or not? He kept trying to tell everyone that he was not ok and they just... patted him on the back and told him to feel better. It was infuriating. Was he just the Lance who cried wolf one too many times?
Lance's stomach was grumbling again. He put down the book he wasn't readng and hauled himself up from his bed, ignoring the dizzy spells that accompanied him now when he got up too fast, and made his way down to the kitchen to get himself some goo.
He'd made it down the hallway, he was in the common room, but the dizziness was getting the upper hand. Just a few more steps. He just needed a wall or something to lean against. Oh, wow, the floor was really close-
"Watch it!" Keith caught Lance in his arms, gently lowering him to the ground. "Hey. I hear you're really not feeling well lately."
"I am not weak, Keith!" spat Lance, while at the same time he couldn't find the strength to move out of Keith's arms. The nerve of that guy.
"Do you want me to bring you some food?"
Lance was annoyed now, and annoyed was at least better than the constant self-pity he'd be wallowing in for two months. Annoyed gave hime something to focus on.
"No, Keith, I'm not a baby. I don't need your help and I'll get it myself. Just... gimme a sec."
Nobody understood. Nobody cared. Nobody could see it. Lance was dying. He was was dying of zombie cancer, and no one would believe him until it was too late.
It was all that eyeball-snake's fault.
The next morning Lance was trapped in bed. He was shivering, sweating and he knew he needed to vomit, but he couldn't move his body. Get up, he told himself. Get up. Move. You're gonna horf.
Maybe it wasn't so bad. Maybe it would pass if he just stayed still long enough. Maybe he could just go back to sleep until his stomach settled. Nope. Nope. Not gonna happen. Lance managed to lean over the side of the bed before he let loose. Something wasn't right. It really, really wasn't right. Lance looked down at the vomit and froze in horror. Those were specks of blood in it. Something really wasn't right.
He needed everyone to see that he wasn't well. Lance leaned out and grabbed his helmet off of the bedside table, he placed it on his head and flipped the comm on to connect to the castle's systems.
"Guys, I need you to get in here. Please. It's an emergency."
Not a few minutes later everyone was in Lance's room and everyone was mildly disgusted by what they saw.
"Aw, Lance, ugh!"
"Gross, dude!"
"You can be proud of it, but you don't have to SHOW US."
Lance tried to calm everyone down, but he was just feeling so dizzy, his words weren't forming well in his head. He had to tell them before it was too late. He looked over his friends, trying to determine who would be the most delicious if it came to it. He decided on Hunk. He was meaty.
"You guys, I'm sick. Please. I've been feeling like crap for two months now. It's why I've been slacking in training, and I'm not as good of a shot in my lion anymore."
"Oh really? I hadn't noticed much-"
"Can it, Pidge." Shiro gave Pidge The Look, and Pidge let the easy jab go.
"Guys, I'm... I think I have zombie cancer."
Everyone stared at Lance.
"No, Listen. Ever since we got back from the swamp planet, I have been feeling like utter crap. I've TOLD you all, but you just think I'm a lazy shit. I'm not! Maybe I try to duck out of work sometimes, but this is real! I'm hungry all the time and I have- I have these awful dreams that are telling me to eat. And I'm just hungry. I'm so fucking hungry all the time. I'm honestly scared. I don't want to hurt you guys."
Lance looked around at the varied states of concern and disbelief on their faces.
"Look! There is BLOOD in my puke!"
Coran sniffed. Hunk raised an eyebrow.
"Dude, I'm not gonna get any closer, but that red looks like the berry dessert we had last night. Maybe you just got some food poisoning?"
Fuck. Was no one on this ship sane except him!?
"Fine. Nobody believe me. If I die, it'll be all your fault. And If I'm becoming a zombie, I'm gonna go bite Keith first!"
"Why, so we can both be zombies together?"
"..."
"Alright. That sounds cool, I guess."
Fuck that guy. Not taking him seriously at all.