Ay, amor, me duele tanto,
Me duele tanto
Que te fueras sin decir a dónde.
Ay, amor, fue una tortura perderte.
~Shakira "La Tortura"
CHAPTER FOUR
A Wee Drab of Reckoning
"Oh, baby, you are a thing of beauty," Lance purred.
Katie chuckled. "I know, right?"
The object of Lance's affection was Athena. The moment he laid eyes on the little hopper, he dissolved into giddy delight. "Shiro tricked this honey out with a Dyson engine, didn't he?" he said, bouncing around the cockpit, commenting on every control and feature.
"Girl, you know you want me get my hands all over you." He plopped down in the pilot's seat, hands poised over the controls.
"No!" said Katie, hurrying over, and smacking the back of his head. "Hands off, perv! That's no way to talk to my girl."
"You're right. This is one classy lady." He looked up, blue eyes bright with youthful joy. "Can I drive her, please, please, please?"
"No. Nobody handles Athena but me."
"Please, I'll love you forever."
He sounded so much like his teenage self, it made something deep inside her simultaneously laugh and weep. She turned away. "Out of my seat, now."
"As milady bids." He got up, bowed and held a hand out to her. Without thinking she took his hand and he settled her into the seat. "To space, my liege."
"Still a goofball," she said.
At her use of the teasing moniker, his expression turned inward and he stared out the cockpit window, out at the dingy, rust brown of the dock's interior. She watched his reflection on the cockpit window, seeing his ghost twin lift his left hand to chest height, then stretch and clench his fingers into a fist several times. Absently, he unsnapped the wrist strap and peeled off the fingerless glove, snagging the glove's strap onto his other thumb.
He rubbed his hand and spoke, his voice hoarse, "I miss this. Us."
"Me too."
Lance's eyes met hers with a short sideways look over his shoulder. He scuffed the toe of his work boot lightly on the floor, his posture that of an awkward defeated youth. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" From deep within her chest, anger and pain of rejection, compressed and repressed for years, began to expand. She tried shoving it back, but once out of the box, it refused to be stuffed back down. "For ignoring your closest friends for more than a decade?"
"Yeah." He glanced at her, looked away, and then met her glare levelly. "When I lost Allura—"
"We all lost Allura," she bit back, instantly regretting her tone. "We all lost her."
"I know." His attention moved to the cockpit controls, where, with his left hand, he flicked a thumb over the main status com. The screen flared to life and he began idly scrolling through the hopper's readouts. "But I was nineteen and…stupid."
Katie watched his long-fingered hand move in the light of the screen, realizing why he probably wore the gloves. The blue-green light bleached the brown from his skin, and brought out a livid scar, an ugly rivulet of raised flesh that ran from his wrist to the intersection of his ring and pinky fingers.
Watching his hand reminded her that she'd spent a Hel of a lot of time watching his hands in the past, because it was safer than watching his face. She panned up and fixed her stare on his back, between his shoulders and tried to assemble her thoughts into coherent words. This was a poor strategy as a traitorous segment of her brain started ogling the perfect geometry of his broad shoulders, which made the rest of her brain want to punch him in the kidneys.
Katie labored under the possibly false impression that she had acquired several versions of peopling-skilz upgrades since her Voltron days. Aside from punching the occasional xenophobe, she'd gotten relatively good at impulse control, and was markedly less likely to blurt things that were, as her brother Matt said, "obnoxious." She now had the coding to calmly ride out any emotional storm.
Sitting just inches away from Lance McClain, the man, the myth, the one-decillion-gigawatt irritation, she felt like her system had just been reset to factory settings.
"It's not stupid to love someone, Lance." Anger rose again, and sharpened her words. "Stupid is throwing away your friends like yesterday's bilge." He continued staring at the screen, and she pushed harder. "You could have at least spoken to Shiro. He lost someone too. He could have helped—"
"No! He couldn't have helped. That just it. No one could have helped—"
"Because you shut us out!"
Startled by her outburst, she pulled off her glasses and made a feeble attempt to wipe a smudge from a lens using her shirt. Twelve years. Twelve years stretched between her and Lance. He was a stranger now. What did it matter why he'd turned his back on her and the rest of the team?
"You're right." When she looked up, she found he'd turned to face her, but was staring at a spot on the floor, his eyes slightly narrowed, expression that of grim determination. "But that's not what I was apologizing for." He flicked a glance at her and away. "I'm sorry about your mom. And I'm so sorry that I didn't make it to the memorial."
The apology not only knocked her off balance, it thrust her back in time three years, when her mom had died in a freak accident when an out-of-control transport plowed through the greenhouse where she had been working. When a perfectly ordinary day became the date that dismantled and remade Pidge Holt.
His words reminded her how much she had hated him then.
"That hurt most of all," she said. "Where the Hel were you?"
"I didn't learn about the accident till like five or six months later."
"How's that even possible? Everyone else was there! Veronica, your own sister, knew."
"I was in a bad place." He turned his face away from her completely. "But I should have called as soon as I knew. I didn't because I was a coward."
"You're worse than a coward." What was worse than a coward? "Anyway, it wouldn't have mattered if you called because I wouldn't have answered." Her voice was getting too shrill for her taste. She reset and spoke with calm, tenor tones. "Because I fucking hated you."
Now he was looking at her, vaguely wounded. He nodded, accepting. His fingers thrust his hair off his forehead and she caught a glimpse of another pale scar on brown skin. "This was a bad idea," he said.
"Yeah, it was." She went back to purging the glasses of smudges and didn't look up as his footfalls indicated he'd left the cockpit. "Just go," she said softly. "Run away, coward. It's what you do best." Behind her, a storage bin clicked and hissed as he collected his things. Scrubbing furiously at her glasses' lenses, she attacked the smudge as if it were the infuriating stew of emotions—disappointment, anger, and heartbreak—that she'd thought banished years ago.
Athena's hatch swished open and shut and Katie gulped back a sob. "Stop it," she muttered. "What's wrong with you?" Why did she even go along with this idea? What had she been hoping would happen? Keith's right. He's an asshole.
"Pidge." Something thunked on the floor behind her. "Pidge, look at me. Please."
Lifting her attention from the glasses in her lap, she studied his ghostly reflection in Athena's window for a moment, counting to ten just to be ornery. She shoved the glasses back on and rose to face him, armored with cool indifference.
His brown face with its sharper adult angles was softened by the youthful vulnerability in his expression. "I don't want to lose you again. Not like this. I know I messed up—bad. But I want to fix it." His travel bag at his feet, he stood in the cockpit's doorway. Her efforts had made the lens's smudge worse, because for an instant she saw two Lances: one thirty-something, broken and world-weary; the other, teenage, and filled with youthful optimism. Both were adorable and infuriating.
Yrta is right. He is dangerous. Just not in a rapey, ship-stealing way.
In the days of Voltron, he'd always thrown her off balance. And Katie hated being off balance. He could go from zap-him-with-a-bayard-obnoxious, adolescent antics to breathtaking bravery and kindness in a matter of minutes.
Was he still that guy? Because there weren't enough motion sickness meds in the universe to compensate for the way that guy could tilt her emotions back and forth, up and down.
She didn't recall the Lance of old being much for apologies, though. Neither was she, then or now. The times when she had offered up a heartfelt apology for something "obnoxious" could probably be counted on one hand. Her chest tightened with anguish, thoughts turning to her mother and a million and one apologies that could never happen; so many lost opportunities.
Is that what this was? An opportunity?
"I don't know you anymore," she said.
"We could fix that," he said. "I mean," he rubbed the back of his head, "that's not a pick-up-line, or anything creepy."
"Why?" She smiled dryly. "Because Pidge Holt, girl geek, isn't worth a pick-up-line?" Like Lance, Katie's first defense was humor. Her effort netted a chuckle, and he rubbed a hand over his face. "Holy shit," she said, "Did I just make Lance McClain blush?"
"Congratulations. Yeah, you did." His slow smile was accompanied by a hopeful light in his baby blues.
Shit.
Her equilibrium shifted as though under the effect of a faulty grav generator. He could still screw with her emotions. Kicking his skinny ass off Athena and out of her life for good would be the safest course of action.
Except Katie "Pidge" Holt wasn't in the habit of taking the safe option. If she had been, teenage Katie would never have hacked off her long hair, run away from home and joined Galaxy Garrison as boy cadet Pidge Gunderson, a decision that culminated in her becoming a Voltron Paladin.
Had she taken the safe option, she might never have gotten her father and brother back.
That was the excuse, anyway, that she gave herself as she walked up to Lance, removed her glasses and slipped them on his face. She gave the right earpiece two taps and watched him expectantly.
His focus shifted away from her. "Whoa. You turned them into a HUD!"
"Linked to Athena." She gestured toward the pilot's seat. "You can take my girl out. But mind your manners and have her back by nine."
"Interesting."
"What?" asked Pidge.
"Those three ships departed just as we did. They're on a similar vector."
"It's a busy spaceport. Lots of ships coming and going, Lance." Pidge leaned toward the screen, tucking a lock of brown hair behind her ear. "Should we be worried?"
"Probably not. We're on a busy shipping lane." He scanned the readout on the glasses' HUD. "Just occupational paranoia." Sandleman's Station, with its soft-boiled-egg-in-space aesthetic, was a slowly receding from the view, replaced by onyx-black space and a smattering of stars.
"Maybe. But tag 'em anyway." Her mannerisms were vintage Pidge, cool and efficient. "Chloro-bots are worth a fortune on the black market."
"Aye, Captain." His hand twitched with the urge to ruffled her hair. He refrained, however, because she probably hadn't completely forgiven him and he liked his hand where it was—attached to his wrist.
Indecision moved in her brown eyes before she reached out and squeezed his shoulder. "Don't worry, farm boy. I'll protect you from the scary space pirates."
He grinned and put his hand over hers. "I'm counting on it."
Her gaze fell on his hand, and she cocked her head slightly to the side, expression turning studious. He took the opportunity to find hazel motes of green in her brown eyes. A guy could lose himself in those beautiful eyes.
"How did this happen?" she asked, her fingers tracing the scar on his left hand. "Flirt with the wrong girl?"
"I met the wrong end of a pirate's blade."
"There's a right end?"
"Pointy end in pirate," he said. Her shoulders rose and fell with a small laugh and she favored him with a wry, closed-mouth smile. His long absence hung between them, a half-burned bridge. But in their shared laughter, the smoke cleared and he felt absurdly happy. The smudge on the glasses' lens couldn't obscure that fact that she was gorgeous.
"Um," she patted his hand awkwardly, "I've got work to do. The helm is yours."
As she started toward the living quarters, he stood. "Your glasses." Though he longed to put them on her face, an excuse to touch her, he held them out instead.
"Thanks." Their fingers brushed and he felt an undeniable frisson of tension pass between them. "Don't break my ship."
"Yeah, about that…is she armed?"
Pidge paused in the doorway, her pretty face bemused. "According to interplanetary law and treaties, it's illegal to arm a civilian passenger ship."
"So…armed?"
"To the teeth. Baby's got bite."
Time for a bit of angst. Thank you for reading my story!