Note: This was written for a charity fanzine, Project: PALadins, and it was a marvelous experience. An earlier fic, Carrying the Team, was my first attempt at a story for the zine, but it went way too long for the requested word count, so then I wrote this one. But I quite like this little fic, too. Hope you enjoy!

"Hey, Pidge, whatcha up to?"

Lance's voice was bright and cheerful, and Pidge tilted her head, though she didn't look up from her laptop. She could practically feel the bags under her eyes sway with the movement. Lance didn't mean to make her headache worse, she told herself. That was just the way he talked. He couldn't possibly be aware of the fact that she truly, honestly wanted to squeeze him by the throat until he shut up right now.

Pidge did her best to push down the urge to murder, knowing it was unreasonable. "I'm fine," she called, raspy and irritated.

Lance let out a low whistle. "That bad, huh?" Instead of moving farther away, as her tone was clearly telling him to do, Lance got closer, pushing deeper into Pidge's crowded workspace to find her. "You sound like you need a break, Pidgey-Widgey."

"I don't," Pidge growled, trying to push him away with her voice.

"Nah, I'm gonna disagree with you there." Lance was still moving closer. He was having to shove past her various half-finished projects. Pidge could hear him moving things around, disarranging her careful mess as he tried to find her against her express wishes, and really, that was just too much. It was truly astonishing how Lance could be so astute in some situations, so attuned and sensitive to nuances of communication, and other times, like now, he could be so freaking dense.

Pidge sighed. She would just have to be more clear then. She stopped staring at her screen, trying to find the issue with her code, and raised her head to look in his direction. "Just go away!" she yelled. "If you mess up any of my stuff I swear I'll make it so only icy cold water will come out of your shower, and even Coran won't be able to fix it!"

That actually caused Lance to pause for a moment, deeply considering whether his continued defiance was worth the risk. But then he started moving closer again. "I'm not messing with your stuff," he said, strange confidence in his voice. He must really believe it was true, even though Pidge could hear him ruining things with every step he took. "My dad's workshop was like this, too, when he was in the middle of something. I know how to move around in a cluttered workspace without messing anything up."

Pidge did not believe that at all, but she bit her lip. She didn't want to encourage Lance to start reminiscing about his family back on Earth, even indirectly. Even when he shared some light and innocent anecdote, like this, if he thought about it for too long he had an unfortunate tendency to start getting homesick out of the blue. Lance was fragile like that. Pidge was willing to screw up Lance's life in a lot of ways to get revenge on him for his various misdeeds, but she didn't want to make him cry.

Her hesitation was her downfall. That and her fatigue. While Pidge was still biting her lip, trying to figure out how to make Lance go away, he finished the journey to her hiding spot. He leaned over a piece of equipment and smiled down at her. "Found ya." His voice was stupidly satisfied.

Pidge blinked up at him. "So you did. Now go away."

Lance's forehead wrinkled, a small frown pulling down his mouth. "You don't look so good, little buddy."

"I'm fine. I'm just trying to figure this out..." Her voice rose ridiculously high, and her scowl got harder. "And I don't need any interruptions, Lance."

"Yeah, Hunk said you were having problems with your code," Lance still didn't sound bothered by her obvious irritation. Like he'd been expecting it. Because he had, since Hunk had told him. Wow, Pidge's brain was working slow right now.

"He's nervous to bother you," Lance went on, oblivious. "But I said I would come anyway. So why don't you tell me what the problem is, huh?"

Pidge pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. "Not to be rude, but I don't think you can help me with complicated code."

"No, I get that. But a while ago Hunk told me about a thing programmers on Earth do. A tradition, right? You have a rubber duck with you at your workstation, and when you start having problems with your code, you talk to the duck. Like, explain it aloud. I know we were kind of in a hurry when we left Earth and didn't have time to prepare, so you probably forgot your rubber duck. So I figured maybe instead, I could be your rubber duck."

Pidge blinked up at him. She vaguely remembered hearing about that tradition in one of her programming classes, but she had always figured it was a crutch for the weak. She never needed to talk about her problems aloud. She just studied them until she figured them out.

But Lance was smiling down at her, and his face was open and earnest. Part of her was busy analyzing his expression to see if he was trying to pull something, but he really didn't look like he was. Pidge squinted at him.

"Don't you have anything better to do?" she asked after a long moment.

Lance, bless his cotton socks, had the audacity to look confused. "Something better to do than helping my littlest teammate out with her problems? No."

Pidge ground her teeth at the descriptor, but at least he hadn't called her "cute." She hummed through her nose. "Okay. Say I take you up on this very weird offer. You're just gonna sit here and listen as I describe very complicated, very obscure coding issues that you have no clue about at all?"

Lance smiled brightly. "Yeah!" He took this as an invitation and trotted around to sit beside her, cross-legged and straight-backed, still weirdly cheerful about the entire thing.

Pidge eyed him askance, then looked back at her laptop screen. Well, anything was worth a shot. "Okay." She cleared her throat. "So, I don't know how much Hunk told you, but what I'm working on is a program to organize the information we get from the scanners. The castle actually has a lot of really good, really powerful sensors and scanners, but they used to be manned by, like, hundreds of people. Now we're down to... Seven. Two, when we're busy training and Allura and Coran have to do it alone. And sometimes it's just Coran. It's a lot for one person. Too much."

Lance nodded seriously. His smile had faded, but not disappeared. "Sounds like a really important project."

"It is." Pidge blew out a breath. "It's too much to analyze. We could be missing all kinds of important information. Distress beacons get top priority and come through anyway, but what about resources? Inhabited planets? We could be passing potential allies left and right and have no idea. And we could really use some allies."

"Yeah. So the coding is hard because there's so much to sort, right?"

"Well, sort of. The real problem is..." Pidge cleared her throat. She hadn't realized how parched she was getting until she started talking.

Lance's eyes flashed with concern. "Okay, hold on a second."

Pidge raised her eyebrows at him.

He held out a hand. "I'm listening. I'm definitely listening. But I'm not kidding when I say that you look really rough. You need to eat and drink. I'm sorry, if I'd realized how bad it was I would have brought a tray with me."

Pidge softened completely. Wow, he really was sincere right now. And he wasn't even telling her to go to bed, like Shiro or Hunk would if they found her like this. At least he understood that she wouldn't be able to sleep until she solved this or just keeled over.

"How about this instead?" Lance got up into a crouch and turned around, his back to her with his hands reaching behind him. "Climb on. I'll give you a ride to the kitchen, and you can tell me about the code while we go."

Pidge tried to think of a reason to refuse, but she couldn't. She had already decided to talk to Lance like he was a rubber duck. Might as well do it while he carried her. "Okay."

She climbed on, wrapping her arms around Lance's shoulders and her legs around his waist. Lance stood up, holding her in place with very little effort. It was usually Hunk who gave the piggyback rides, but she was reminded that Lance was a leg, too. His strength was different, not usually quite so physical, but he wasn't weak by any means.

"All right." He picked his way out the way he'd come in, and sure enough, he really hadn't ruined anything. At least not that Pidge could tell from a cursory inspection. He had shifted things aside to make a path, but they were all intact.

Pidge sighed, chest heaving against Lance's back. "Okay, so the real problem with the code..."

She talked. Lance listened. By the time they got to the kitchen, she hadn't had a flash of revelation, but she felt like she was on the thread of something. She continued to talk while Lance set her on the counter, then went about fetching her a plate of food goo and a glass of water.

Lance sat next to her on the counter while she ate, still listening as she talked between bites, sometimes setting down her water glass so she could gesture with her hands. He nodded and made interested noises, even sometimes asked a clarifying question to prove that he was paying attention. Then he gave her another piggyback ride back to the workshop.

And halfway there, she figured it out. She froze for a moment, thinking furiously, then... "I got it. I got it!" She kicked her heels against Lance's legs as if she was spurring a horse. "Hurry up, hurry up, I wanna get back!"

Lance looked over his shoulder at her, eyes wide and eyebrow raised. "You figured out what to do?"

"Yes!" Pidge leaned harder into him and pointed forward with her arm straight, excitement surging. "Take me back, mighty steed!"

Lance whooped and ran, thundering down the hall. "All right! Let's go!"

Back at her laptop, she sat down and started typing furiously while Lance danced on the floor beside her, almost as excited and eager as she was. She wanted to laugh and tell him to sit down. She had figured out what direction to go, but this wasn't a magical fix. It was still going to take at least a couple hours of coding to actually finish the program.

But she was on the way. Talking to Lance really had helped, despite her initial doubts.

She paused her typing and looked up at him. "Hey."

Lance stopped dancing and looked back, breathing hard. He was grinning like an idiot. "Yeah?"

Pidge hesitated, then said it in a rush. "If I run into a wall like this in the future... Would you be my rubber duck again?"

Somehow he beamed even brighter, utterly delighted just to be asked. "Of course, little buddy. Anytime. Anytime at all."

Pidge smiled back, then looked to her laptop.

It was good to be on a team.