And so I'll build a bridge between us
Arcs of soaring rainbows
Strength of mother earth
For a brand new start.
~Poets of the Fall "Jealous Gods"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
El Monstruo Verde
Keith,
Hi! That's great news about the new medical clinic. You've accomplished so much. I'm proud of you.
Katie stared at the screen, contemplating her next sentence.
I don't know how to begin. You know me, I'm terrible at stuff like this.
I'm still on route for Titan. Long story short, Yrta was called away on an emergency. And Lance stepped in to help with the travel and installation.
You read that right. Lance McClain. Blue, Red Paladin. Does that make him a purple paladin?
I know, leave the jokes to Lance. He's still pretty funny, btw.
He's okay, I guess. I think he's been through a lot.
But I think he's okay.
I'm kind of confused. Like, I'm still considering moding the pilot's seat with an electrical charge so I can light him up like Clear Day fireworks. Just for old time's sake. Then I feel bad about that and just want to give him a hug. Do you think I can do both? Zap, then hug?
But I'm glad he's back in my life.
I hope he stays.
I haven't told Hunk or Shiro yet. I'm not sure how Hunk is going to respond. He took Lance's ghosting us as hard as I did. 'The Paladin Who Shall Not Be Named' was his idea. I hope he won't be mad at me for forgiving Lance so easily. Probably not mad; just annoyed, because…Hunk.
Maybe let me be the one to tell Hunk?
Lance, with impeccable timing, wandered into the living quarters looking for a snack. The man never stopped eating; how'd he stay so skinny?
See you on Titan. Please message soon.
Forever friends,
Pidge
"Messages?" said Lance, opening a package of peanuts. Katie debated informing him that the nuts were Yrta's and that the Galra coveted her Earthly snacks with bone-breaking avarice, but instead decided to leave him to his fate.
"Keith," she admitted.
"Yeah? How's he doing? You talk to him often?"
"Actually, yes. It's funny, but we're good friends, closer than ever."
Lance's eyebrow lifted and something shifted in his eyes. "Really?" he drawled.
"His humanitarian efforts and my work in agriculture overlap a lot." She chuckled. "He's really awesome, once you crack the emo shell."
"Must've took a pretty big hammer," Lance deadpanned, something still a little odd about his demeanor.
"You should talk, Mr-I'm-Gonna-Ghost-My-Friends-For-a-Decade."
"Touché." He held out the package. "Peanuts? Oh, wait, you don't like them unless they been pulverized."
She snorted. "You remembered."
He tapped his skull. "Mind like a steel trap." He did the pistol-fingers thing at her, handing off the line.
It was unoriginal, but she took her cue: "Rusty and illegal on 1,000 planets?"
He winked and sauntered off.
Lance stood on the exercise bike's pedals, driving his weight against the steep incline simulation. Seeing him on the bike, exercising for second time that day, Pidge had sneered. "Trying to outrun all those snacks?"
He'd nodded agreeably, because the real answer-he was burning off the remains of stupid, teenage angst-wasn't passing his lips. It's funny how one name, in the right (or was it wrong?) context could reduce a grown man to moronic boy.
His reaction to Keith's name, coincident with "close friends," fell firmly into the category of adolescent jealousy, ridiculous on many levels. First, because it was Lance McClain, not Keith Kogane, who'd walked out of Pidge's life so many years ago. She was grown woman and could be "close" with whomever she chose.
Second, because close, most likely mean "close," and not naked, sweaty and…Holy Crow he didn't need that image in his head.
Lance pedaled harder.
Of course, years before, Lance had moved beyond the worst of his stupid, unilateral rivalry with Keith. In light of his renewed friendship with Pidge, he'd hoped to find the courage to reach out to the rest of the Paladins, including Keith.
None of which kept his inner, angsty, teen self from reasserting himself on learning the Pidge and Keith were close. Was this because of all the Paladins, he'd have least expected it to be Keith? Hunk, he'd understand, as Pidge and Hunk shared a love of science and technology.
And Shiro…he'd given her a luxury hopper, the kind of transport that cost about twenty times the value of the McClain family farm.
Lance's first reaction to the news of Pidge's relationship with Keith had been petulance and insecurity. Am I competing with Keith? Because I've got no chance against Emo Pretty Boy.
Dialing back the incline, Lance grinned, finding the funny in his reaction. It's like Pidge is Allura and Keith is Lotor. Lotor with a mullet. He snorted laughter and Pidge, in the cockpit, grumbled, "Some of us are trying to get some work done."
"How's Kav doing?" said Lance.
"Improving every day. He and Yrta are already back to turning every conversation into a battle." Katie said.
She and Lance were in their customary, end-of-day location. A video game, a favorite of Lance's nephew, was on her holoscreen. Lance sat just a few inches from her, having shrunken the literal distance between them in a few days. Katie wasn't sure how she felt about this.
Correction. She very definitely had an opinion regarding his proximity: she liked it. The real question, she thought, was whether she should like it.
"Yrta's angry about the accident. She says the dock's safety protocols weren't followed."
Lance's eyebrow climbed upward, his expression bemused and dubious. "'Safety protocols' and 'Galra' sounds like an oxymoron."
Katie, not liking his tone said, "That sounds a little bigoted."
He offered up an apologetic, crooked smile. "Un poco. I have Galra colleagues. I like them. But I, we, spent several years in the crosshairs of Galra determine to kill us. So, yeah, I have a hard time picturing what a Galra safety manual would look like."
Katie considered this and gave him a pass on the xenophobia. "Yrta and I didn't like each other that much, at first."
"No? What changed? Your interest in helping people?"
"Nope. We bonded over our shared distain for authority."
He laughed and nodded at the screen. "Two out of three?" Silvio's favorite game was a fighting game with characters drawn from the world of a popular medieval fantasy vid. Lance was playing an elf, and Katie, an orc. Katie's orc had flattened the elf in the first round. Lance managed, in the second round, a win, but only because he poked her in the ribs at a key moment.
"Do that again, and you're spending the rest of the trip, bound and gagged, in that cargo locker." She pointed at one of Athena's cozier lockers. Forced to play fair, he lost the last round.
"Round three and match," Lance said with a wink, "to the beautiful girl with glasses."
"Ugh, stop flirting!"
"I can't help it. I see a beautiful woman; I flirt."
"I'm not beautiful. I'm…adequate."
"Adequate?" Lance turned from the screen, frowning. "Who told you that?"
"It's a joke." Not a lie, not really.
"Jokes are supposed to be funny, Pidge." He ruffled her hair and she slapped at his hand.
He reached behind her and grabbed one of her pillows. In the process, he steadied himself with a hand on her shoulder and his chest pressed lightly against her back. He moved away quickly, but little electric currents had already started zipping up and down her spinal cord.
"You know what's missing?" He dropped the pillow near the foot of her bed and flopped down. With a loud sigh, he stretched his long legs and dropped them over her thighs.
"Muh-missing?" Her gaze dropped to his legs and her brain stopped working. She felt like a hopper entering Earth's atmosphere, all systems down and plummeting to explosive doom.
"Yeah." He laced his fingers behind his head. "Robots. Since when doesn't Pidge have robotic pals?"
Pidge was having a hard time thinking about robots. Fortunately, heart beats and breathing were autonomic functions because the desire module was the only part of her coding still running. Body heat from his legs sank into her thighs and moved into her groin. She lifted her eyes to the night lights across the room, hoping that ignoring his long legs would shut down the lust virus taking over her body. When that didn't work, she returned to his legs, imagining how, in two moves, she'd grab them and fling him, face first, onto the floor.
What did this mean? Nothing, right? He probably did this with his family, his sisters, totally "planetonic" friends. Right?
"I, uh." What was he chattering about? Robots. Right. "I thought maybe it was time to stop building friends and converse with flesh-and-blood people."
"Too bad. I liked Rover."
She gave him a crooked grin. "You like Athena better."
His teeth flashed in the screen's dim light. "I do. She's my dream girl."
His smile was worse than his damnable sexy legs. She looked down at the offending appendages. "What happened here. Another pirate?" She dared to touch a scar that ran across his knee.
"Nope. Nadia, Silvio and I were having a tree climbing contest. I lost…to gravity."
She giggled. "You fell out of a tree? You're an overgrown kid."
"I've been told that before. Probably why I get along with kids so well." He wiggled his toes, sending more electric pulses through her skin. "You ever think about it? Being a parent? Having kids?"
"Yes. Often," she admitted. "But…."
"But…?"
"Eric, my ex, wanted kids." She switched off the game, and checked Athena's systems, assembling her thoughts. "But he had this idea that I was going to stop working, and be a fulltime mom."
"It's funny. I think you'd be a great mom, but I don't…" He shook his head. "I can't see you up to your ears in diapers."
"I'm not sure that's a compliment," she said archly.
"I see you as warrior mom. The mother who marches down to the school and rips the principal apart because your kid got bullied."
A bubbly laugh escaped Katie, possibly a little more bubbly than usual because—legs, his legs! "Exactly! I know I'd love my kids more than life. I'd…die for them. But…." She sighed. "I'm not much of a nurturer." Because there's something wrong with me.
"Now, see I," said Lance, pointing at himself, "I'd be a great fulltime dad. As you've noted, I'm half kid myself. And I've had lots of experience—with Nadia and Sylvio and my cousins. I could handle diaper duty, and in between, I'd have plenty of work to do on the farm.
"And then, when the kids are old enough, we'd all head for the stars. They could do school in space; life is the best teacher anyway." At this, Katie nodded in agreement. "I know it's not easy, parenting. Mom says there were times she considered dumping us all at the zoo and running away to join the circus."
"It couldn't have been easy, raising you."
"Hey!" His face fell with fake indignation. "I had some help being awful. You know Ronnie." Ronnie being Veronica's nickname.
"Your poor mom," Pidge agreed with a smile. Her stomach did a gymnastics move that vital organs shouldn't do and her fingers twitched with the urge to send him crashing to the floor. Except she really didn't want to hurt him. She just needed him to stop touching her this way, making her stupid and horny, and giving her pointless hope.
He spared her any more agony by sitting up and tossing her pillow at her. Standing, he yawned and stretched. "Night."
"Night."
She wasn't certain what had just happened. It felt like a beginning, an inchoate negotiation. Whatever it was, it made her unaccountably happy, so she stuffed the conversation deep inside herself, like wound dressing, against rawest parts of her broken heart.
Mom,
Wow! Did my mother just tell me to have sex? With Pidge?
Hang on. I have to pull my jaw off the floor. JaJaJa.
It was the morning after his confession; Pidge was still speaking to him—Holy crow, she still seemed to like him-and Lance was feeling downright cheerful.
Yes, you are right. She is muy linda. She's even prettier in person. Check out the photo I attached!
This wasn't the first time his mother had nudged him in Pidge's direction, though definitely the first time she been quite as forthright about sex.
Several years before, she had shoved an agricultural journal in his face, page opened to an article written by Katie Holt PhD. "That's your friend from Voltron, yes?" She pointed to a small photo at the end of the article. "She's grown up pretty. You should call her, ask her out."
"Mom, Pidge is out of my league. Women like that don't go out with guys like me," he had said mournfully.
His mother, armed with the ferocious, no-nonsense love of a mother, had no patience for his self-pity. "Lo siento," she had said, "pero olvidé los globos." Was today your pity party?"
Lance paused, wiggling his fingers over the input. With maturity came a newfound respect and friendship with his parents, especially his mom. He had always been a bit of a mama's boy; his smart, sassy mom was probably why he gravitated toward strong women like ants to a picnic.
Do you want to hear something cool? Pidge speaks Spanish fluently! And not the sorry Spanglish I speak. She has a Castilian accent, all lispy and soft, you know what I mean?
Okay, here's where I admit it's sexy. I think she speak Titan pretty well too.
Should he say more? He didn't want to get his mother's hopes up. More like he didn't want to get his own hopes up.
I don't know what to do about this. I messed up. Bad. It's a small miracle she's speaking to me at all, after ignoring her all these years.
What I'm saying is: I'm taking it slow. It feels like there's something more than friendship between us, but Pidge has always been hard to read.
Hard to read? Shakespeare translated into Sanskrit (and he wasn't exactly sure what Sanskrit was other than "dead language") would be easier to read than Pidge Holt. Lance's usually reliable ability to comprehend even the densest body language failed with Pidge. For instance, yesterday, when she'd gone from kiss-me to "Nope" in a matter of seconds. And then, later, when he'd pushed "touchy" too far, realizing too late, that sprawling all over her made her uncomfortable.
I'm really happy to be her friend again. Maybe you can light a candle for me, for guidance, at Santa Gaia's altar?
Love,
Lance
Translations-
El Monstruo Verde: The green monster.
Muy linda: Pretty
Lo siento,"pero olvidé los globos: I'm sorry, I forgot the balloons
Thank you for reading!