It was the racket of her suit's alarms that dragged her slowly back to consciousness, the high shriek of suit-integrity-compromised and the insistent growl of environmental-hazard-detected grating on her ears and making her head throb until she swatted blindly at her wrist to turn them off. It took her three tries before she succeeded, replacing the harsh noise with blessed quiet and a faint crackling noise that she couldn't immediately identify. Her thoughts were blurry and muddled. Where was she? What happened?
Examine. Assess. Act. The hazy voice of an instructor at the Garrison, so long ago now, came back to her. Examine your surroundings, determine what you can about what's going on. Assess any threats and problems and figure out what needs to be done about them. Then do it. Survival 101, she thought that class might have been called. She couldn't remember now. But the drills had stuck, as they were supposed to do so they might someday save her life.
Drawing in a deep breath, she forced her eyes open. She was lying on something hard, surrounded by a chaos of twisted metal and torn cabling. Light streamed in through gaps, highlighting the mess, and small patches of wiring sparked and burned, the crackling she'd heard before. Wherever she was, it had been pretty thoroughly destroyed. Squinting against the smoke and glare, she studied the wall. Purple. Galra ship. But why was she on it? Why had it crashed? It wasn't a cruiser. In fact, it looked more like…
A shuttle.
Ice filled her veins as everything surged back from the depths of her mind in an instant. Zarkon. Her dad. The exchange. The hologram. The fight. And the shuttle, plunging toward the rocky surface as her dad tried desperately to pull it out of its fatal dive.
"Dad!" She pushed herself upright, gasping as the movement sent pain lancing through her leg and chest. She ignored it, grabbing at debris to pull herself to her feet. The cockpit. She had to get to the cockpit.
Twisted hull plates and collapsed bulkheads blocked her path, forcing her to clamber over and under, heedless of the sharp edges cutting her skin and leaving bloody smears behind and the deafening echo of of pieces crashing to the ground where she yanked them out of the way. "Dad!" She called again, whenever she could spare the breath. "Dad, answer me!" In the back of her mind, her brain automatically rattled off crash statistics, g-forces, survival rates, and for the first time in her life she wished she could turn that part of herself off as it filled her with sickening dread. Matt and Shiro had been further back, she knew, and wearing armor. If she was fine, they should be too. But Dad...Dad had been in the nose of the craft, and wearing a prisoner jumpsuit that would have offered no protection at all.
Squeezing through a gap, she glimpsed gray hair up ahead, purple fabric against purple metal in the blinding light shining through the rents in the hull. A thin form, lying still, too still amidst the shards of the windows and the remnants of the consoles and the crimson of blood.
No. No no no. He couldn't be. They were so close. They almost had him back. He had to be okay.
Metal caught at her suit, dragging her back, and she tore free with desperate strength, throwing herself to the ground beside the limp figure and pressing shaking hands to his neck, seeking the pulse point with fingers that wouldn't seem to obey. Her breath came in ragged gasps, the exhales frantic pleas. "No, no, please, come on, Dad, please, no-"
Her fingertips found the spot.
Nothing.
His skin was cool under her touch.
Pidge's anguished howl of despair echoed through the wreckage of the crashed Galra shuttle.