Me to Myself: Don't write another angsty Voltron fic, you've already written two, c'mon, man.
Also Me, to Myself: Do it!
Me, to Myself: ...Okay
I'm sorry. My faves get the angst. It's just the way it be.
This is set before Pidge finds her father!
*****WARNINGS*****
This fic mentions past torture and recovery, and deals a bit with concepts like PTSD. Please be careful if this has a negative effect on you! Also has a couple of swears, in case that bothers you.
Hope you enjoy!
...
Pidge can taste blood in her mouth. Sweet, sour. Coppery.
It's like that time in the seventh grade, when she was eleven, and she had jumped off the swing and landed all wrong.
"Okay-" she says. And nothing else.
She's tucked away in one of the corners of the room, all strange lighting and high metal walls. It's cold, too cold, maybe, for a human to be in. She can feel the cold seeping in through her suit, can feel it sinking into her bones.
That's not right, she thinks. Her suit is insulated. All of their suits are insulated. They're supposed to keep them warm in space. The room is nowhere near cold enough to compromise them.
She looks down. She thinks she's frowning. The world is blurry, but she's pretty sure that there isn't supposed to be any red on her uniform. She's pretty sure she's supposed to be green.
The red is expanding, spreading, and she's pretty sure that's a sign that something's wrong.
Her ears are ringing, jarring. The world is loud. She's staying out of the way, staying in the corner. Doesn't want to be a bother, sorry, sorry. People are all over the place, the dark browns and blacks of the rebel alliance swarming in, attacking, fighting. There are more people, now. Before it has just been her and… someone.
Someone.
There's a name, there, somewhere, but her mind is staticy and can't quite grasp it, can't quite hold on.
Can't remember. Doesn't matter. She doesn't think she could be of much help either way. Doesn't think she can even stand.
The colours are all bleeding together, browns and blacks and ghastly purples. She thinks she sees blue and red swimming through the colours like some exotic dance. She thinks she sees a flash of pink, a spark of white.
Then there is yellow. Warm yellow, that cups her face and supports her shoulders. She realizes with a start that she has been slipping, sliding, tilting out of alignment.
"'Pidge!" someone says, close. Maybe it's Yellow.
"Pidge!" Her name. Again. And again, more sharp, more worried.
She should respond. She should do- something. But her tongue is thick and heavy in her mouth, and her mind, usually so full of words, is sluggish and slow. She can feel a slickness on her neck, matting her hair, dribbling out of her ear. Maybe it's her brain, spilling out of every crevice.
"We're going to get you out of here, Pidge, don't worry, don't you worry, we're gonna get you out…"
Yellow has moved to press against her ear, to keep her all inside. Pidge tries to reach up, to hold onto the hand holding her, but something's not quite right and she doesn't quite manage.
Can't quite manage.
There is yelling, movement, people all around her. Colours, flashing colours. A mechanical roar, echoing through her brain. A voice.
A voice. In her mind. Powerful. Deep. Slow. Rumbling, vibrating her bones. Green.
The sound of growth, maybe. The sound of life.
There aren't any words, but its there.
"Peace, Paladin. You are safe."
Oh, Pidge thinks. She lets her eyes slip shut. She lets her head rest heavy.
She lets the whole wide world slip away.
"He beat you within an inch of your life."
Pidge snorts, thunks her head against the back of the couch. She throws a ball up at the ceiling, catches it. Hears the repetitive thump thump thump and tries to get lost in it.
She doesn't look Shiro in the eye.
"You're exaggerating. I was only in the cryopod for a few days."
"Katie," he says, and there's something like ice underneath that forced soft tone, something like fire, "that's not the point."
Finally, she turns to look at him. She's glaring, she knows. Scowling. The ball drops and no one catches it, and it rolls away to the corner of the room.
"Then what is the point, huh? I already told you, I'm fine."
The nebula outside the window reflects oddly on Shiro's skin, makes it seem something other, something alien.
"The point is, Katie, you can't keep doing this! This is what happens when you run off on your own to follow some miniscule lead about your father without telling anybody about it! If Hunk hadn't been able to hack into your computer and find your notes about Yaxon Marduk..."
Pidge feels air enter and leave her chest, feels it fill her up and leave her empty. She's always hated the cryopods, hated the way it left the whole world distant for the first few hours, left her unable to quite connect with reality. Waking up in the stark white feels like being placed in the middle of a noisy city after years spent in the open plains: overwhelming and too much.
She hates the way the cryopods make her feel weak. Make her feel human and fragile and capable of being broken.
Her fingers dig into her palms, but she can't feel them, not even when they break skin.
"I'm fine," she breathes.
She can't quite hear what Shiro says in response to that over the rushing in her ears. She doesn't bother asking for him to say it again.
Allura stops by every day. She tries to cover her intentions by asking for help breaking into some code or another and giving Pidge new technology to tinker with, but she can tell the Altean worries.
Pidge tolerates it. She knows that the woman has a big heart, knows that there is no ill intentions, knows that if she grins and bears it for a few minutes she'll be left alone to mess around in her room for the rest of the day without any more interruptions.
Still, the Altean keeps leaving her little "gifts" from the outside world. A flower from a planet they had stopped at, some of Hunk's experimental cooking, a strange origami-type thing that Lance had made that Pidge is pretty sure is supposed to be a crane.
They clutter around her room, getting lost in the mess. Sometimes, though, Pidge will catch a glimpse of them, and it feels like they're accusing her.
Why are you here? they ask. Why are you here and not with your friends?
Pidge wants to tell them to shut up. She wants to tell them to mind their own business. She wants to tell them she's fine, that she's just been busy. She's not avoiding them, really, really, she's not.
(They stare at her. All of them. They try not to, but she's sees the glances, the hidden looks. They stare at her, and it makes ants crawl under her skin.)
Coran visits too, but he's far more sneaky about it. He comes in late, or what constitutes as late in the timeless vasts of space, and checks in on her. He has a canny ability to slip in when she's sleeping, the only sign he's been there at all some hastily tidied up pile of clothes or the occasional misplaced tool.
One time she blearily wakes up as he's on his way out, a blur of blue and red in the strange half light. She keeps very still and very silent, keeps the rhythm of her breathing even, and hears him mutter into the quiet dark.
"You're a little off course there, Pidge, but you'll be fine. Give it time yet, Number Five, give it time yet…"
Her first time training after the… incident, she comments about how all her toes are still bruised, the accelerated healing of the cryopod not given enough time to fix them entirely from their previous mess of a state. She's thinking it might get her a laugh, but everyone just sort of stares at her- staring, staring, why can't you just quit with the staring!?- and she makes her excuses and leaves.
She's better off, anyways: the suit is pinching her feet, too tight on tender nails still only half grown back.
Sometimes, Pidge wishes that the cryopods didn't healed as well as they did. Wishes that she would have been left out of it all together, been allowed to process, to see all the bruises, to trace her fingers over all the newly healing scars.
Maybe, she thinks, it would help. Help her feel as if she had really gotten out, truly escaped. Because sometimes Pidge finds herself wondering whether or not this is all some dream, a pain induced hallucination where she's somehow saved when really she's still trapped in that hell hole of a place.
If she had had the pain and the marks, she could have her proof. This is real , she could have told herself. This is real. You're real. You're here.
Instead, all she has are her quickly healing toes.
At one point or another, she finds herself standing in front of a mirror. The only lighting is some distant glow from the hallway, and the shadows obscure her face, and for a second all she can see is gaunt cheeks and motley bruises, cuts bleeding profusely on her cheeks and blood dribbling down from her ears.
Panicked, her hands jerk up to check, but all her fingers find is perfect smooth skin. No rivets. No blemishes. No pain.
She's not sure whether or not she is relieved or disappointed.
It takes her a few days to realize something is off. That something has changed, as if she's walking into her living room and every piece of furniture has been moved an inch to the left. At first, she thinks it might just be the aftereffects from spending so long in the cryopod, her body feeling as if its been healing for months while her mind knows it's been days. Perhaps the disconnect is getting to her, leaving that strange wrongness under her skin, as if someone is holding her breath every time she lifts her foot to take a step.
In the early morning, she drinks awful substitute space coffee with Keith. It tastes horrible, but the two of them have both been addicted to caffeine for years and it's the only thing that prevents the withdrawal jitters and headaches.
At least, for her. Keith says that coffee actually calms him down and helps keep him focused. Weirdo.
They sit together in the commons, Pidge working on reorganizing her laptop- which had been messed up ever since Hunk had gone digging in there in order to find out more about...Yaxon- and Keith messing around with one of those strategy games Allura had given him to play with. They sit in silence, and that's normal, all of this is normal, but-
But-
But now that silence is heavy and loaded, weighing down on the small of Pidge's back. Keith doesn't hold back if something's bothering him when it comes to other people, or at least he never has before, and it makes her uneasy.
It makes her more uneasy for the fact that she can't think of a single way to put things to rights. No jokes to crack. No snark to share. Just awkward heavy silence and unpleasant coffee substitute that has somehow gotten even worse and now tastes like ash on her tongue.
He's angry at me, Pidge thinks, but for the life of her she can't figure out why.
The days go by, the tension disguised under a mask of normality. She wishes something would give. She wishes a crack would appear and everyone would stop tiptoeing around her. Or maybe she just wishes she could stop tiptoeing around her own mind.
At night, her sleep is restless if its present at all. She wakes up at odd hours, random, heart in her throat and sweat on her brow. She gets up, works out, forces herself to do a set of pushups, a set of sit ups, anything, anything. She wonders the halls, silent, a ghost. Pads down to the vast expanse of windows that overlook the neverending horizons of space and watches them pass by, heads back to her room.
Keith's door is always shut, but sometimes she sees thin rays of light creeping out from the gaps.
She never knocks.
There's a sort of plastic essence to her lab space, growing every days she leaves it unattended. If they were on Earth, she knows, there would be a thin layer of dust over all her things.
Space is cool like that, she supposes. Don't have to deal with any dusting.
Still, there is a type of stillness that can settle over things if you leave them long enough, a kind of feeling that emits from entities that have travelled through the times unchanging and untouched.
Hunk's noticed, she's sure. Noticed that she hasn't been in half as much, that most of her little personal projects have been temporarily abandoned. Perhaps if it was someone else, she would be worried he would try and take over some of them, but she and Hunk have an understanding where they leave each other's work spaces well alone unless explicitly asked.
She'll get back to them. She will. She just needs time.
It unnerves her, maybe, just a bit, that it's taking her so long to get back into it all. Usually, after a mission, she'll be back to her work in a matter of a day or two. She has people depending on her, a team who relies on her technical expertise and a father who needs to be found. There's no time to be wasted procrastinating.
And yet-
When she finally finds herself sitting at her make-do desk, computer in front of her and fingers poised on the keys, she can't quite bring herself to type up her new found knowledge that she's gathered from her most recent…. expedition. The urge to delve into every ounce of information she figured out is simply not there.
She tries. She tries. Tries to remember what she had read on the big motherboard computer before getting caught, before the blow to the head made the world go topsy turvy. Tries to remember what the alien had said, the mad taunts that had flung down from above along with the physical blows. Tries to connect the dots, figure it out. It's a puzzle, c'mon Pidge, it's a puzzle, you're good at puzzles…
But she can't.
She can't.
I just need to start with something new, she thinks, I can come back to all that later.
The thought invigorates her, and she begins her search for a new lead to find her father.
She keeps searching for the rest of the night.
"We're going to be interrogating Yaxon Marduk next week," Matt tells her. They're playing video games in her room, sitting side by side on throw down pillows while their characters work in tandem on screen to beat the boss. She's pretty sure they've already played this level before, but she doesn't particularly mind, so she doesn't bring it up.
Pidge glances at him from the corner of her eye before refocusing on the game, makes her character do a completely unnecessary yet totally fabulous flip.
"Already?" she says. Her mouth is suddenly rather dry. She licks her lips.
"Should have done it ages ago, if you ask me," he grumbles, eyes far too furious to be simply frustrated from taking so long to win a video game, "but we had to let the guy's home planet put him on trial first."
"Was he convicted?"
Her voice is monotone, distant. On screen, her character leaps on top of the monster and stabs it straight in the head. Something in her stomach is churning unpleasantly.
Matt smiles maliciously.
"Yeah. He's going to be in alien jail every day for the rest of his miserable life."
The characters are cheering on the screen, high fiving. Pidge watches them, watches as the little tables pop up over their heads and begin to tally up the points.
Slowly, carefully, she says, "Hmm."
Places her controller down. Says nothing else. Watches the points tally up and up and up...
Suddenly, her brother is on his feet, giving a frustrated cry.
"Dammit! God fucking dammit-"
His controller is tossed across the room, and he's standing so quickly that he knocks over their drinks, sending cold liquid seeping into the carpet, sinking in her toes. She finds herself scrambling to her own feet, hand reaching for a bayard that isn't there, heart thrumming a mile a minute and eyes wide, wide, wide.
"Matt! What-!?
He heaves a breath, makes eye contact and quickly looks away. His brown orbs are pained, though, and the scar on his cheek shines in distinct relief with the lighting of the room.
Sometimes, Pidge forgets that her brother isn't simply that goofy nerdy researcher she grew up with, that he's actually part of a rebel alliance, that he's seen things and done things and experienced things that he doesn't want her to know, that there are secrets between them now, broken parts and broken times they'll never get back.
This isn't one of those times.
He places a hand on her shoulder.
"Nothing- It's nothing. Don't worry about it. I'm being an idiot. I-"
He turns. Walks away.
"Play without me, okay? Just keep- just play without me."
But Pidge can't, she can't : she goes over to the corner and picks up the controller. The batteries had been knocked out, and she fumbles with them, trying to get them where they belong.
Her hands shake the entire time
Her avatar is celebrating on the screen, cheering because she's gotten the most points, because she's won.
Why, then, does it feel as if Pidge is losing again and again and again, piece by piece by piece?
Later, Matt will come slinking into her bedroom with a couple of books tucked under the crook of his elbow. Seeing him appeases some of the misery curdling in her stomach, and she eagerly grabs one of the novels and lets it carry her away.
Occasionally, she'll sneak glances at her brother. He's been crying- the red rims under his eyes have always given him away- and there are some new bruises forming on his knuckles. Sometimes, his eyes will drift off the page and to the wall in front of him, tracing the ridiculous sketches she still has hanged up there, scanning them as if they could give him the answers of the universe.
She wants to say, "I'm sorry."
She wants to say, "You've been crying. Why?"
She wants to say, "You never used to punch things when you were upset before."
But she doesn't, she doesn't. She just turns the page.
If she's going to be honest-
If she's going to be honest, something not right is going on inside of her. At this point, she should already be planning her next data gathering, her next mission, her next location to scout to find her father. At this point, she should have her information organized about her latest expedition and gone through with the follow up, confirming that she'd be present at the interrogation, maybe even pressing for it to be moved up to an earlier date.
But Pidge doesn't want to think about that.
If she's going to be honest, sometimes Pidge wakes up in cold sweat, something like a scream caught in her throat and half remembered terrors already scurrying away to the dark corners of her mind. She never really remembers anything, just cackling laughter and clamps becoming vices on her toenails, pulling and pulling and pain. Just the glint of a knife as it traces around her ear, the croon of such curious little specimen you are, the feeling of blood matting her hair, dripping down her neck. The feeling of armour underneath her hands as she pushes away with some sort of feral desperation, an urgent need to make space between her and the blows.
But these are just- fragments. She gets up. She walks around.
If Pidge is going to be honest, which she isn't, the only thing that puts her back to sleep is a hazy memory of flashes of colour, of blue and red and yellow and pink and white, circling close, circling home. A voice, powerful, low, a lion's roar echoing through her brain…
It makes the pain ease, it makes the whole wide world slip away, if just for a little while.
She falls asleep on the sofa in the commons, some adventure novel Matt has loaned her still opened on her chest. She wakes up some hours later to the soft rumbling of the engines, and blearily blinks as she reaches for her glasses.
Freezes when she realizes someone has thrown their comforter on her. The colour, a bright sky blue, tells her it was probably Lance.
It was nice of him, she supposes. Especially with how cagey and uncomfortable he's been around her since the… incident, looking guilty whenever she enters a room and quickly finding excuses to leave. Shiro tells her it's because he had apparently known that Pidge's lion was missing from the hanger for almost an entire day, and had simply assumed that she was doing modifications somewhere else. Shiro tells her the other teen feels guilty, feels as if he could have stopped a lot of pain if only he had thought to mention it to somebody. Shiro tells her to have patience, that he'll be back to normal with time.
Pidge isn't so sure.
She traces her fingers across the softness and thinks about how to thank him without saying any words. Or maybe-
She's surprised when her eyes sting. She swallows, screws them up tight, reaches up with her thumbs and presses into them, so hard that splotches of colours appear beneath her closed lids. She thinks about how she should go to the interrogation and stand front and center, be steadfast and straight spined, chin held high and eyes calm. She knows Yaxon Marduk, studied him. The first couple of days of her capture hadn't been so bad, she had been able to make some observations, learn what his ticks were. She could help-
She ought to help.
She lets out a wet breath, presses her knuckles to her mouth.
Breathe. Breathe.
Keep it together, Holt. Steady on.
It ends like this.
They're sitting at the dining table, the whole team, and people are idly chatting and talking, passing food from one place to the next. Keith is rolling his eyes at something Lance has said, Allura is telling a story of some political scandal a thousand years ago to an interested Shiro and Matt. Coran and Hunk are talking mechanics, trading notes on what they can do to help the Castle's engines manage more jumps.
Before, the scene would be far more chaotic. There would be more flying food, more ridiculous jokes, more insults and snarks and massive arm waving.
She wishes someone would start that up again. Tiptoeing, tiptoeing. Everyone is tiptoeing. She wishes someone would decide to stop tiptoeing, would decide to stomp.
Pidge has never been very patient.
She clears her throat. Awkwardly.
She doesn't mean to. Too late now, she supposes.
"You need something, Pidge?"
Shiro meets her eyes, picks up the pitcher and offers to refill her cup. He's smiling, relaxed.
Her throat is dry, but she shakes her head.
The pitcher gets placed back down. In her lap, her fingers have knotted tight. In her chest, air compresses into a tiny bullet that refuses to come out.
This is hard, Pidge thinks. It's harder than hacking into an alien robot. Harder than learning how to fight despite her smaller stature and size. Harder, even, than learning to fly a massive mechanical lion.
But she's never been one to turn down a challenge.
"He pulled off my toe nails. With metal clamps. And he wanted to cut off my ear. To study it."
Coran slowly puts down his utensils, a sigh of a breath escaping his lips. Keith is glaring, but at his own fisted hands, not at her. Allura is smiling softly, encouragingly. Shiro is leaning forwards, intent, steady. Hunk is reaching out to hold her hand. Lance, for the first time in what feels like years, is looking right at her, eyes calm and focused.
"Ah," says Matt. Just that.
And so Pidge does the talking.
She wakes up curled into a ball in a nest of blankets by her lion's paws. Outside, stars are shining brightly, making half moons of light shift along the walls. Her mouth still remembers the smile it had given but a few hours ago: shaky, brave.
Somewhere, she can hear the soft snores and snuffles of her friends. She's sure, if she sat up, she would be able to spot them, but the atmosphere is too calm to break the stillness. Instead, Pidge lays there, blinks slowly at the galaxy passing them by.
She feels a bit embarrassed for interrupting dinner. She feels a bit bad that her team felt the need to camp out with her by her lion. She wonders when she fell asleep: she can't seem to remember.
But more than that, she feels like herself. She feels whole. She feels like Pidge.
Her brother, somewhere to the left of her, snores and shifts in his blankets
Echoing in her mind, there's a voice, as calm and alive as a forest in the brand new dawn of morning, and it is telling her sleep.
Pidge lets herself close her eyes. She lets her head rest heavy.
And the whole wide world slips away.
...
Thank you for reading!