Guess who's back, back again? Also, I split this up into two chapters. SO everyone who thought I updated another chapter, I'm very sorry.
J.U.N.K
CH-002
KEITH
SYSTEM MALFUNCTION. SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.
The alarm blared and blared, red alerts glowing bright against the dashboard of the pod. Sweat trickled down Keith's cheek as he entered recalibration sequences, emergency recovery prompts, desperately trying to stabilize the spacecraft. No matter how many times he'd run through crash simulations and emergency drills, he could never shake the feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach when crisis arose for real.
The spacecraft rumbled beneath him, clambering and shivering as he went down, down, down. The engines were shot, and the left wing was blown off. The cabin was slowly depressurizing, and he was struggling to breathe. The alerts went wild as flames engulfed the pod, the fire swallowing pilot and ship entirely into its throat. Wind and air rocked him in his seat, aiding the gravity that sucked him to his doom.
When he thought it just couldn't get any worse, he realized there was someone standing on the moon. The small figure was comparable to the decrepit workshop, the only building on the moon, and Keith couldn't help but let out a miserable chuckle at the universe's spite at him. The shack was just like his home back in the desert, the only structure in a several miles' radius, isolated and alone and vulnerable.
And there was someone here, someone who had a life, and someone who was going to join him in facing a horrible, fiery death. He was going to lose the Blades. He was going to lose Voltron. He was going to lose everything.
This was his fault. He knew that the pod was faulty, and he took it out anyways. Stupid! he cursed himself. You're so quiznaking stupid! Now you're going to die here…
Flashing symbols on the dashboard caught his eye.
One of the engines was still intact.
He could manage at least one reverse thrust.
… or, maybe not.
With every ounce of energy and hope left, Keith rushed to switch flight assist off before slamming his fist on the control panel, the touchpad responding immediately as the craft roared, thrown into a spinning frenzy.
"Come on," he groaned as he felt the engine sputter. "Just slow me down a bit more," bitter encouragement spilling from his chapped lips as he gripped the controls with all his might, steadying the pod's extreme yaw as best as he could.
To his dismay, the ship tipped and dropped again, and Keith felt a light-headedness overcome his senses. The G-forces were going to kill him, if not the crash. In his dizziness, he felt his hand smack the control panel again, and instead of hitting something useful (which was pretty much everything else), he hit the laser cannon.
Hanging by a thread with useless stabilizers and dying engines, the ship lurched back from the force of the shot.
Before he could even take in what happened, Keith watched as fireworks of cloud of smoke and dust erupted from the surface of the moon, right where the person was standing before. His heart dropped. Did he just shoot at them?
Oh no.
"TOO LOW, TERRAIN. TOO LOW, TERRAIN," the female voice cried as the ashy ground came closer and closer. The details of cargo and freight pods appeared. He could read the sign on the front of the shack, GE Mechanics. Wait, he could read it? "PULL UP, PULL UP. TERRAIN, TERRAIN. PULL UP, PULL UP."
"Here we go," Keith grumbled, heaving the throttles back but bracing for impact.
"TERRAIN, TERRAIN. PULL UP, PULL UP. TERRAIN, TERRAIN. PULL UP, PULL—"
EVERYTHING WAS ACHING when Keith's eyes slowly opened. The glass of his helmet was smashed, and he could see through the dark, jagged glass to observe still, crumpled metal above him. He turned his head to the side, the biting stench of fuel filling his nose as he took tremulous breaths. The dust-filled air invited violent coughs to burst from his chest, and each cough sent waves of pain through his abdomen.
Even so, pain meant only one thing.
I… He breathed heavily. I'm alive…
Keith looked this way and that, realizing that he had been nearly crushed beneath the weight of the metal frame of the pod. His arms were free, and so he grabbed whatever remnants of the control panel and random edges of broken ship he could reach to pull himself towards the hatch.
He cried out when he felt a sharp sting course through his leg. Sighing with disbelief, Keith realized his right calf was stuck, buried and trapped underneath the wreckage of the pilot seat. Still, he could peer, though needing to squint, through the broken glass of the canopy to the outside world.
The sky was green. An ugly green. Scraps of the pod were scattered across the surface of the moon, and he couldn't see any signs of life. No water, no trees—it was an arid, dead moon.
Quiznak, Keith suddenly thought about whom he had shot at, what if I crushed him?
But Keith's suspicions quickly evaporated when he saw a hazy figure zoom from behind a cargo container to the cover of one of his broken, still smoking engines. He blinked, scrunching his eyes as if it confirm what he saw. He was so fast!
"Hey!" he cried out. "I'm, uh, real sorry for crashing into your home like this! I didn't mean to!" Despite his calls, the figure didn't emerge from behind the engine. "I'm not going to hurt you! You don't have to hide! Please, I need your help!" he groaned as he tried once again to wriggle free, "I'm—I'm stuck in here!"
Silence.
"Hey—"
BANG! Keith felt the rubble above him shudder from an abrupt force. He shot at me! he thought, appalled by such a dishonorable attack. The pod creaked and moaned, steel and polycarbonate glass bending and snapping, and before he knew it, his leg slipped free of its confines. Heart dropping with realization, he scrambled his hands and feet to crawl and crawl until he reached the canopy. He smashed the rest of the glass with his fist before clawing his way out onto solid ground, eternally grateful to any and all gods as his gloved fingers finally touched ashen ground.
Coughing, he yanked off his helmet as he lay face-down in the dirt. Where in the hell did I end up this time?
Another sharp blast, only about two feet away from his face, snapped at the ground.
"Gah!" Keith exclaimed before shuffling to his feet in a panic, charging behind some remains of the pod. "What the hell? Why is he shooting at me?" he thought aloud, peering out from his cover to scan his surroundings before another blast clanged against the steel of the pod.
His hand automatically reached across his waist for his blade, but he knew that a sword wasn't going to be of much help in this situation. Whoever wanted to kill him had the upperhand in this environment, with plenty of places for cover and even more space in between them. There was no way Keith could handle hand-to-hand combat over such vast land.
"Hey, you!" he exclaimed, back against the pod. "We don't have to do this! Let's talk this through. We can figure something out, you and me."
Another silence. Longer, this time.
A shard of the pod's wing was sliced into the ground nearby. It was closer to the engine, the hiding spot of his attacker, and Keith realized that if he was fast, he could get behind there and still be covered.
Taking a deep breath, he made a run for it.
Panting hard, chest aching, he somersaulted into a crouch in the shadow of the wing. He peered out for a moment. The engine was right there. If he just shortened the distance between them, then he would actually have a chance at overcoming the shooter. Shaking his head, hoping for the best, he sprinted again, drawing his blade into a blazing purple sword.
"Gotcha!" he exclaimed as he leaped into the air to pin down his perpetrator.
But he landed on the ground.
He was gone.
Huh?
Keith nearly screamed as a blast hit the engine, sourced from a cargo container right by the pod; practically where Keith had started. He growled with anger. How did he get all the way over there so quiznaking fast? The engine fizzled in front of him, sparks shooting from every crack and crevice. It was going to blow, and Keith needed to find somewhere to hide.
He rushed to hide behind a stack of crates, looking back in horror as the engine burst into a bubbling mushroom cloud of ash and fire, shrapnels blasting from the force and barreling into his armor. He's trying to draw me out! Keith realized. Blast after blast, he had Keith running all over the place, panting hard and dripping in sweat.
For a moment, the relentless barrage had stopped. Heart thrumming in his ears, eyes wide and alive with adrenaline, Keith cautiously stepped out from behind one of the pod's smashed ion cannons and into the open air. His feet were shaky as he moved step by agonizingly slow step, sword clenched tight in his sweaty palms.
Here goes nothing.
The shooter walked out in front of one of the other engines, weapon raised and locked against his shoulder as he regarded Keith quietly through the gun sight. He was small. The bulk of his clothing made him look bigger, but Keith could see the scrawny legs hidden underneath the cargo pants. As Keith traced his gaze over his attacker inch by inch, he noticed something dancing just by the shooter's neck—tiny flames licking at the dented metal of the engine.
His stomach dropped.
"RUN!" Keith cried out, voice coarse and desperate.
But the shooter could barely afford a glance back before the engine exploded behind him.
Keith shielded his eyes and face with his forearms as the debris-speckled shockwave swept across the surface of the moon. Losing his standing, he fell to one knee and watched as fire engulfed what was left of the engine.
Then, when the ash and dust settled once again, he saw the figure lying motionless on the ground. Absent even an ounce hesitation, Keith broke into a sprint and rushed to his side.
"Hey!" he choked out through coughs in the sooty air, collapsing to his knees beside the man. "Are you okay?"
The shooter was lying face down, shards of his helmet scattered around his head and his hand still tight around the gun's grip. Keith bent down, lending an ear to listen to the gentle breaths that escaped through the helmet's mouthpiece. Alive. He almost smiled. Keith realized the shooter's pants were shredded, as pieces of it lay floating about in the breeze and embers flickered on its threads. Suspicious of leg injuries, he tried to turn him over.
"You're gonna be okay. Let's just get you on your back," he said as he reached one hand under the stomach and the other to a leather-clad shoulder. Keith frowned as he felt bones shift underneath his touch. So skinny. Gently, he flipped the unconscious attacker over, and when Keith looked down to look for any injuries at the knees, he was surprised to see the legs. Or, whatever they were. Steel glistened in the light instead of flesh. Gadgets and switches ran up and down the sides of the calves, chunks of hefty metal crumpled together around the knees haphazardly. White lights blinked here and there, racing across wires and whirring in a frenzy of energy.
He was half robot.
Then he heard the shrill sound of a particle blaster charging in his ear. He turned to the sound, only for cool metal to press firmly against his forehead.
Many might have fainted right then and there. Luckily for Keith, he was, admittedly, a bit stubborn.
He took a deep breath, swallowing his fear in a gulp. "We don't have to do this," he said in the most calm voice a man could manage with a laser gun barrel pointed at his brains.
The shooter said nothing.
Keith pursed his lips in frustration. "Listen. I don't want to hurt you, so could you, please, put the gun down?"
What was the point in trying to negotiate with this guy? He should've just finished him off when he had the chance. He cursed himself for his fatal mistake:
He put the man before the mission.
Kolivan's words blared loud in his ears, screaming like the dying sound of his pod. "Love is the death of duty. The path of emotion is the path of destruction."
"Know thyself."
There was a silence, and Keith could have sworn that his heart was about to burst from anxiousness. Sweat dripped into his eye, and even as it stung him near to blindness, he knelt there, rigid and silent as the shooter's metal legs, as the gun at his forehead. He watched as he removed his helmet with his other hand, silver-white hair tumbling to the dirt. Irises pouring citrus, an electric hazel, barreled into his own, and the birthmark on the left cheekbone, just below the eye, proved itself to be strangely distracting. But the olive skin was glowing, tinted with a distinctly familiar type of life.
He wasn't a robot. No, she was human. And she didn't have any legs.
She chuckled, pink lips peeling back into almost earnest glee. "You look really stupid right now, did you know that?"
"He's human, Erin! As in, a real, living human, just like me!" Keith had to strain to see it, lest risking his head getting blown off, but the human girl was wearing the most surprised, elated expression that he'd ever seen. With cheeks puffed and blushing with energy and eyes alight like galaxies, she might've burst from excitement.
"I see that, Raeni," the female alien, Erin, said before offering the girl a glance, "you know, you can put the gun down now, right?"
"Didn't you hear what I just said? He's human. Humans have never reached out this far into space. There's no way they have the technology for that yet. Things can't change that dramatically in three years," the human girl, Raeni, spat, cocking the gun and keeping it aimed perfectly at Keith's head. "Who knows what this guy's doing all the way out here." Keith eyed her warily from his seat on the cold metal stool inside the shop. She dug her combat boots down into the ground, iron kneecaps twisting obediently under her weight.
"Don't mindher, yeah? She's a lil'…" the male alien spun his finger in the air emphatically.
"Gage, I'll point it at you, instead."
"Case n' point."
"So," Erin sat down across from him. He couldn't recognize her or Gage's race. With Erin's fiery red bangs, Gage's mohawked, generously gelled teal hair, and their shared feline eyes and noses, they resembled giant, biker cats with complete sets of leather-clad fingers and studded steel-toed shoes. "I take it that you didn't crash land into our humble little moon to get something repaired from G.E. Mech, eh?"
"That wasn't my original intention, but I guess I need some help now, at least, from the state of my pod," Keith sulked before looking out of the window of the shop. Who was he kidding? The rubble from his craft was beyond repairable. "I guess—"
"Who do you work for, kid?"
Keith was taken aback. He hated being interrupted. But he wasn't going to express that hatred towards strangers. At least, not today. "Huh?"
"Your getup is whack," Gage snickered. "Are you, like, n'assassin, or sump'm?"
He frowned. Keith rather liked his Blades uniform. But before he could open his mouth to protest, the weight of his past actions suddenly came crashing down like boulders. He couldn't reveal his affiliation to the Blade of Malmora, hell, he couldn't reveal the Blades at all. Crashing on an inhabited moon was proving to be more trouble than he'd originally imagined. What could he do?
"No, no, I… uh…" Think, Keith, think! "This is just something I have to wear for, uh…" he managed a smile, "... my martial arts… training?" He wanted to hit himself. Good one, Keith. You should've just told them you were a quiznaking tulip.
The sound of metal crashing to the metal floor made him jump. Raeni had dropped her gun in surprise, a grin stretching across her cheeks. "Oh my gamma, you do martial arts?" she exclaimed, suddenly buzzing like the energy gun. "I've always wanted to learn! Can we keep him, Erin?"
Keith felt the blood drain from his face. What did she take him for, a stray puppy awaiting adoption? "Uh—"
"Oh, can it, Raeni," Gage whined. "You, of all people, don't need martial arts training. Besides, why do martial arts when you can just hit the gym like me?"
"Please, don't ever ask me that again."
The quarrel between the two reminded Keith of his friends, especially the daily ones he had with Lance. It was only then did he realize that he missed his friends. A lot, actually. Perhaps more than he'd care to admit. But then he remembered his training. Afterall, it was the mission before the man. He needed to find the Blades first. Then he could worry about friends, emotions, and everything else that came secondary to the mission.
"I was hoping," his lips followed his thoughts, "that you could help me get back home?"
"Where do humans live a'gin?" Gage asked the human girl, who, at least to Keith, had probably the most un-human name he'd ever heard. 'Raeni' sounded more like the name of an artificially intelligent virtual assistant than the name of a person.
"Earth, and it's billions and billions and billions of lightyears away," she turned to him, eyebrows lifted with ridicule. "You might as well have asked for us to hand you the Milky Way on a silver platter."
It took nearly all his strength for Keith to refrain from snapping at her. "Before I crashed onto this moon, I was actually out, uh…" Come on, think! "... running errands," Ugh, "and I just need to get back to my crew as soon as I can. Our base isn't too far from here."
Raeni's expression softened. "There are more? More people?"
"Y-Yeah," he said, watching her eyes widen with wonder.
"So, should we drop ya there?" Gage asked.
"NO!" Keith exclaimed, his stomach plummeting only a moment later. A drop-off meant sudden death, unnecessary bloodshed; a slaughter of these three on the spot just to maintain secrecy. Even if the Blades came to him, a similarly haunting scenario would likely play out. He didn't want to betray the Blades, but he didn't want innocents to die for his endlessly reckless decisions. But judging by the alarmed expressions before him, Keith understood the inappropriacy of his tone. "I mean, that wouldn't be the best idea."
"Can you man'ge to get n' contact with yer base?"
"No, my comm's jammed from the crash," he lied through his teeth. The pod didn't have comms, in order to prevent outside parties locking onto their frequencies and intercepting confidential information. As a Blade, he didn't need them either. He was capable of following a plan to the T without any assistance. At least, that's what he was supposed to be capable of.
He breathed deeply. Now what?
"It's fine, you can just take one of our pods," said Erin.
Well, that was easy. "What?"
"Yeah, wha'?" Gage repeated.
"You do realize that we only have one pod, Erin?" said Raeni, leaning against the rusted tin of the table. "Were we always this broke?"
"Seven years in this shithole and ya still didn't get that?"
"Well, what else are we gonna do?" Erin threw her hands in the air. "Poor kid needs to get back to his buds. Besides, they're humans. They're one of the most docile races in the universe," she turned to Keith, "and I trust you won't cause us or anybody else in this galaxy any trouble, right?"
"Of course. You have my word." The lies kept on coming, and he suddenly didn't know whether he was enacting the duty of a Blade or opposing it.
"Shake on it, pipsqueak," Gage hacked up saliva and dark gray fur before spitting it into his palm and reaching his hand out to Keith. He felt bile rise in his throat at the sight of it. You've gotta be kidding. "Your word don't mean nothin' till you shake on it."
"R-Right," Keith managed before hesitantly clasping the male's hand in an unexpectedly tight grip, the furball slushing into his gloved—he thanked the universe for that small kindness—hand.
"Better keep your promise, Keith. A handshake in this galaxy means everything," Raeni explained, leaning forward, "especially if you spit on it."
APPARENTLY, their only pod wasn't in the best shape. It would be a while before Gage and Erin would be able to make the necessary repairs before sending Keith on his way. After all that had happened after deciding to take a faulty pod out, Keith was much obliged for their considerable time and effort. Needless to say, he inwardly swore that he'd never fly a shitty pod again.
Raeni had asked to help them out. The response was clear with a hefty guffaw from Gage, followed by a 'Quiznak, that's a good one, Raeni,' and a 'Not this time, sweetie' through Erin's apologetic smile. Despite the pleas of the girl, who was acting like a child who was denied a trip to the theme park, Gage and Erin had slipped through the store's scratched up glass door, leaving him and Raeni in their dust. When it closed shut, the rusty bell above it tinkled. The silence that followed the solemn sound was almost unbearable.
He forgot that socializing wasn't his forte.
Keith looked over at the girl. The frustration of betrayal on her face, red on her cheeks and taut in her brows, was so potent that for a moment Keith thought she might've cried. But instead, she took a deep breath and puffed out her chest. Like a bird trying to look bigger.
He'd been correct. Now donned in a pair of fitted, black utility shorts and a cropped turtleneck that stuck stubbornly to her ribs, her tininess was more evident that ever. It was difficult for him to fathom how this same girl had almost killed him with her perfect aim, superhuman speed, and undeniable skill in combat, allowing her to corner him—Keith—into surrender in the first place.
But now, she just looked like a pouty, petulant teenager who must have been unbearably annoyed with her foster parents. She turned to him, eyes darting across the floor as though she couldn't bear to look at him directly.
"You like microwave pasta?" she asked.
"We…"
"... you can't possibly…"
"When are we… tell her?"
"... can't, Gage!"
Listened a little closer.
"Sev'n years, Erin. Sev'n years!" Gage's voice was unmistakable. It was softer than before.
"So what do you suggest we do?" Erin's voice cracked. "Tell her the truth, just like that? Do you even know what that means?"
What could it possibly mean?
"'Course, I do. It's just… I can't lie t' her no mo', ya know? You saw how jumpy she was when she found tha' boy. She's meant to be wit them, wit her kind, just like you n' me. She needs 'em."
"I know."
"You know that we can't keep'her here forever.
"... I know."
SORRY that this was posted so late, you guys! I just got swamped with work at school, and now that I'm on summer break, I think I can bust out more chapters. How was this POV? Is Keith kinda on character, or is he OOC? What do you think of Raeni? The narration? The flow?
Let me know how I did in the reviews, guys! Don't forget to fave and follow, I really appreciate it!
Thank you so much!
~AVA
