Then I went off to fight some battle
That I'd invented inside my head
Away so long for years and years
You probably thought or even wished that I was dead.
~Sting "Fortress Around Your Heart"
CHAPTER SIX
Bridge Building
Katie dreamed of Lotor again.
Lotor. Ridiculously handsome, space elf prince. Long, white, flowing hair, draped artfully down his shoulders. Pointy ears, flawless lavender complexion. Dramatic upswept eyes, blue irises in a sea of lemony amber. Evil.
It hadn't been a wet dream, although they sometimes were, leaving her feeling dirty and used. Lotor's intrusion into her dreams this time consisted of him standing around looking royal and stick-up-his-assy. She woke with a brain fogged by a miasma of longing, grief and disappointment.
The recurring dreams made no sense, and not just because dreams never make sense to the conscious mind. They defined logic because Katie's interactions with Lotor had been minimal. Then and now, he never crossed her mind in daylight.
And she'd never, ever crushed on him. Lotor was too perfect. Not the kind of guy she'd ever conceive of fucking. More like a gorgeous, porcelain figurine you put on shelf.
And…evil.
Lotor's only redeeming quality had been to temporarily put a roadblock between Allura and romance with a certain Paladin. But then he screwed that up by being…totally evil.
Head muzzy with sleep, she opened her eyes just a slit and observed that the other blast-from-the-past, Lance McClain, continued to consume space and oxygen in her little hopper. He was messing around with Athena's food preparator which, from a stockpile of raw elements, could generate pretty good versions of just about any meal. Not that she used it much; she wasn't domesticated enough to make more than spaghetti with meatballs.
She kicked off the sheets and rose, scrubbing bed hair off her face.
"Morning," said Lance.
Katie grunted and slunk into the lavatory, hit by the out-of-character superstition that Lance could see the fug of Lotor that clung to her.
She scrubbed her face and ran a brush through her hair. Vanity wasn't coded into her DNA, but she paused to study her face in the mirror, because she still had Lotor sludge in her head, and needed to stall before facing Lance.
The woman looking back at her was reasonably attractive. Not Allura pretty, but in the decade following Voltron, Katie had shed her childish contours for something approaching adult beauty. Like her brother, a touch of auburn livened up her sandy brown hair and she had a smattering of freckles around her nose. Her eyes—her best feature—were still almost preternaturally large. Glancing down, she was reminded, however, that her worst features were her micro-boobs. She snorted a small laugh. At least she wasn't beholden to bras.
She was, however, beholden to eating and something smelled good.
"This is one of Hunk's recipes, isn't it?" Katie said between bites. She was shoveling in mouthful after mouthful of scrambled eggs with salsa chile verde.
Lance, mouth also full, nodded. They were sitting on her bed again, tucking into the breakfast that Lance had prepared. The food preparator came with loads of recipes, but Katie typically didn't bother with anything more elaborate than cereal for breakfast.
"My hopper doesn't do anything fancier than cereal," he said, echoing her thoughts.
"Your hopper? What are you flying?"
"An ancient Troika." He pulled a face. "It's old, it's ugly and uncomfortable. Life support has two settings: freezing and flambe. But it's nearly indestructible."
"True. Yrta and I have had a couple of run-ins with Troikas. Athena outflew them, but her guns just scuffed them up a bit." She nudged him with an elbow. "On that tangent, what's our status, ensign?"
He gave her a mocking salute, punctuated by a wink. "All systems nominal, Captain. And two of the tagged ships diverged onto different vectors. There's just the one, but it hasn't approached us."
After breakfast, they each took a turn on Athena's compact exercise station and then settled into what would be their routine for the next several days. When Katie and Yrta traveled together, mornings also included a bit of sparring practice, but she didn't suggest this with Lance, because that activity felt too physical, too intimate.
Inveterate space travelers both, she and Lance alternated between him in the cockpit, her in the living quarters and vice versa, falling into a comfortable pattern that gave each the necessary emotional space required in an otherwise claustrophobic setting. Midday, Lance found her stash of peanut butter cookies and they shared a sugary lunch.
After lunch, Katie took the helm, continuing her day's work in the pilot's seat. Behind her, she heard Lance mutter smugly, "Yeah, that's right. I'm the god of sniping." Biting back an obnoxious comment, she shook her head and tried to focus.
Her goal was a network, a vast living connection like that of Earth's aspen trees, to be interwoven with Yrta's Quintessence soil matrix, providing instant feedback on soil conditions and plant health. The basic algorithm worked, but it was computationally awkward, and a cleaner solution still eluded her. She removed her glasses and rubbed her dry eyes, hoping, and also not hoping, for a flash of "flow."
It began in the year after she'd said goodbye to the Green Lion. Maybe. Whenever she tried to pinpoint the moment when her brain got the upgrade, she hit a block of ghost code, a tantalizing memory that skipped just out of reach.
The manifestations of brain weirdness started as images superimposed over reality, visions that were often, though not always, prescient. A few months later, she experienced the first flashes of superfast, mental acuity, every possibility and outcome laid bare before her, her brain fizzing like a quantum computer. Assuming the images were hallucinations with a physical cause, a tumor or other abnormality, Katie had seen a doctor. But brain scan after scan had come back normal.
The episodes of brilliance, the "flow" as she'd taken to calling it, were handy, but at times, felt like cheating, and worse yet, like something alien had seized her mind, using her brain like a fleshy computer. Her ambivalence was lessened by the fact that the flow was flakier than Phyllo dough, manifesting randomly, often when she least expected it.
Like yesterday evening when an old man, his brown skin weathered by time, hair steel gray, had handed back her pillow. In that old and beautiful version of Lance, she saw someone more familiar than the current version, whose face reappeared when the image faded.
"Pow. Pow. Pow!" Lance's muttering got louder as he encountered a difficult section in his "work." Katie rolled her eyes.
"Trying to work here!" she yelled before snapping headphones over her ears. Quiznak's balls! The man was like a young adult novel mistakenly shelved in the adult section of the library.
"Why a cow?" said Pidge. "Why not a horse? Or a dog?"
"Because," Lance said, pitching his voice to the exasperated tones of a ten-year-old girl, "dragónes tienen cuernos. It can't be a dragon without horns!"
Pidge smiled, the soft panes of her face lit by the expression and the holoscreen's light. He had linked his image library with her com, and she was swiping through a series of photos of Nadia, Lance's niece and her pet cow, the former dressed as a knight, the latter, a dragon. "Poor Kaltenecker. She always looks like she'd rather be steak."
Lance chuckled at that. "She's one patient cow. She also played a triceratops in one of Silvio's school plays."
The cabin lights had faded to dark minutes ago, the only light now emanating from Pidge's holoscreen. As before, Lance sat on her bed, keeping a careful distance as if she were a shy forest creature. He had it on good authority—his sister Veronica—that he could be entirely too pushy. The last thing he wanted was to undo the progress he'd made rebuilding their friendship.
Pidge clicked on a video and a short battle between Lance and Nadia unfolded on the screen. Nadia, dressed in her knight's costume, attacked Lance with a wooden sword. He battled her with a broom handle for several minutes, until finally giving her a huge opening. She took it and whacked him in the leg. In the background, a male voice said, "Aw, that's gonna leave a bruise."
Lance crumbled to the ground, rolling on his back, moaning melodramatically. "I am slain."
Nadia stood over him, wooden sword at his throat and said, with a pretty good British accent, "Do you yield, knave?"
"I yield, I yield," Lance said to a chorus of laughter echoed by Pidge's.
"You look happy," she said.
He nodded, even now the memory warming his heart. "Ten years old and she was already kicking my ass. She's in her first year of university now."
Feeling her gaze on him, he met her eyes, seeing hundreds of questions in their brown depths. He hadn't expected this: this unexpected reunion; her crushing beauty married with familiar genius; the powerful upswelling of emotion and desire rushing through his body.
Talk to her, man. She was one of your best friends. She could be again. Maybe. Just fucking speak.
"I was good at it: looking happy," he began. "Sometimes, I was good at being happy.
Pidge watched him, her posture very still, and he realized she was being as careful with him as he was with her. He turned away, fixing his stare on a light above the food preparator. "At first, I really wanted to be something…better, to be a living legacy for Allura."
His fingertips pressed against the blue swoops of Altean magic high on his cheekbones, then he dragged them away, sweeping his fingers against skin as if the marks could be so easily erased. He'd tried—oh, how he'd tried! —in the intervening years; scrubbed and scratched in a futile effort to change blue to brown.
He studied his hands, giving into habitual hope of finding blue smudges on his fingertips. "It felt right, telling people about her and what she sacrificed. It gave me comfort, gave me…."
"…a sense of control over the uncontrollable," finished Pidge.
"Exactly." He slumped back against the wall. "But after a while, that's all I was. Allura's living monument. These marks," he gestured at his face, "defined me. It's like being a young widow in a culture where widows are expected to mourn and wear black for the rest of their lives.
"At nineteen, I thought the marks she left on me were the most romantic things in the world. Because I would love her forever, never love anyone else again. Because the universe expected me to suffer, to atone for not doing shit to save her."
"You really think that? That you could have changed things?" Pidge shook her head, eyes wide with sympathy. "Lance, it's not your fault."
"I know that. Now. Back then…back then I decided that my fate was to be alone and celibate for the rest of my life." He offered her a wry smile.
A hint of sardonic humor twinkled in her eyes. "And how's that working out?"
His eyes met hers. "Well, I'm not celibate."
"You're not alone, either." A pretty blush reddened her cheeks, but she didn't look away. "You still have your friends."
I'm not sure I deserve them. He didn't speak this aloud because it was self-pitying and probably a little manipulative. "Having my dead girlfriend's memory tattooed on my face didn't do my love life any favors."
Pidge's eyes narrowed, expression disbelieving. "You were engaged to Earth's hottest pop star."
He barked a laugh. She had a point. "Women view these marks in three ways. Most see them as a reminder that they'll forever be compared to a dead space princess. Some think I'm a project, the broken guy who only they can heal. And the rest, including Zahra," he rolled his eyes, "think I'm half Altean and 'Oooooo,' exotic."
Pidge snickered. "Lance McClain. Exotic."
He nudged her gently with his elbow. "I can do exotic." This was good; Pidge giving him grief like the old days.
"By your own admission, you barely do 'happy.'" She nudged him back, but with a lot more elbow. "Exotic is waaaay over your paygrade." She turned back to the screen, swiped a few times, landing on an embarrassing selfie of him staring mournfully into the camera. "Is that why you blew us off? Because we reminded you of Allura?"
"I blew you off because I was an immature asshole. And a drama queen. I blew you off because it felt like every conversation, every interaction was about me and Allura. I wasn't Lance anymore. I was Lance the sad boy whose girlfriend died."
"I didn't see you like that," she said quietly.
"Neither did Keith, or Shiro, or Hunk. And if you did, it was only because that's all I let you see." He sat up and lean forward, elbows on his knees, his eyes wet. Holy crow, I'm not crying.
"I think," he said, speaking past the lump in his throat, "I needed to figure out how to be Lance again."
The holoscreen made a quiet snick as Pidge switched it off.
Katie sat motionless, unsure of her next move. Aside from a reflexive tendency to smack people, she'd never been overly touchy, preferring to limit physical contact to close friends and family. And even there, the matter was confusing, as she was functionally illiterate when it came to reading people. She never quite knew when or if she should initiate contact. Usually she just waited, hoped perhaps, that someone else would do the initiating.
Also, there was the matter of what she suspected was a growing sexual tension between the two of them. She trusted Lance to know that "No" meant "No." But his sudden raw vulnerability reduced her iron-clad armor to rust and she didn't trust herself not to do something stupid.
I just got him back. We can't ruin this with…sex.
Wait? Sex? This is Lance. He's not into you. Never was; never will be. He flirts with everyone. He flirts with Athena, a quiznaking spaceship!
Nevertheless, Katie knew that touching him had the potential to EMP-fry all her programming.
Another part of her brain, however urged her to do something.
Cautious, she slid over to him, and set her hand on his back. Warm, lean muscle under her palm sent tiny flicker of sexual attraction up her arm, and she froze, startled. It's just a hug, just a hug.
Feeling awkward, but plunging ahead regardless, Katie leaned into him, arm over his back, and face against the back of his shoulder. When he shifted his weight in her direction, but didn't do anything more…alarming, she relaxed, enjoying the familiar shape of Lance at her side.
A memory, tactile and visual, archived deep for years, surfaced and hurled her back more than a decade. The space mall. On the back of Kaltenecker the cow. Her arms around teenage Lance's waist, face pressed like this against his back. Here and now, Lance's body heat scorched through her shirt and she thought, He didn't have this much muscle back then.
Nope! Reboot before Stupid-Teenage-Crush-Virus crashes system.
In just under 30 hours, the Lance-shaped scar on her heart, cleanly healed and faded, had torn and started to bleed. In just under 30 hours, she'd discovered just how much she missed his friendship. But no way in Hel was she letting him into her heart again! She breathed out a sigh and started calculating square roots in her head.
Lance's warm touch, his fingers gently squeezing hers, broke into her math calculations. He gusted out a long sigh, then sat up. "Thanks."
"For what?"
"Being a friend." In the murky darkness, he was nothing more than an amorphous silhouette, but she could feel his gaze on her, like a gentle brush of fingers on her skin. Squeezing her hand again, he rose and climbed into his own bunk. "Goodnight, Pidge."
Next couple of chapters are more action-y. Thanks for reading!