I know some things that you don't.

I've done things that you won't.

There's nothing like a trail of blood

To find your way back home.

I was waiting for my hearse

What came next was so much worse.

It took a funeral to make me feel alive.

~Sixx:A.M. "Life Is Beautiful"

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Duet in D-Minor

Katie didn't come to this fight to lose. She never did. Her opponent had the advantage of height and reach. Nothing new. They always had that advantage. Her emotions were muddied, distracting—another point in her opponent's favor. Plus, she hated fighting in small, confined spaces. With more room, she could use speed and her small size to advantage. When physically weaker, it's never wise to let the enemy in too close.

But she'd had years of experience dealing with just this kind of combatant, in just this sort of setting. Only, Yrta, her usual sparring partner, would never pull her punches. To Yrta, the very concept of governing herself, even in practice, was offensive. Which was fine, because Katie didn't pull her punches, either.

But Lance would; Katie was sure of it. In her head she grinned, confident, but reminding herself of the dangers of confidence.

He stood just a few paces away, a sparring sword in hand. His stance ready, lanky frame relaxed, breath measured. He was once a competent hand-to-hand fighter, but it had never been his strength.

And he's going to pull his punches.

She shifted her weight, feigned left and lunged right, a lazy slash at his hips. He countered easily, and block the next four attacks. Good. He's not totally hopeless. She could work with this.

He responded in kind: striking high. She blocked, shifting her feet backwards, ceding ground. He pressed his advantage, but not too much. He's not stupid. Of course, she's always known that.

On his next slash, lower, reaching into the tight spot that she'd claimed against the wall, she brushed his weapon aside, dropped and whirled under his guard. Her sword, almost, but not quite caught him in the abdomen. He anticipated this and evaded the attack.

She had more room to maneuver again. Feet moving, she circled him, the euphoria of physical combat turning her blood to heated plasma. Or something else; something worse, something darker.

The other yawned and stretched, like an indolent cat eyeing a mouse. She slapped it aside. No need for that. Hopefully, no need for it ever again.

Of the same mind, she and Lance lashed at one other. The hard clack of swords beat an angry, uneven rhythm. They were playing, running through standard sword forms: head strikes, shoulders, ribs, torso. Repeat. Her heart skipped at his fluid movements, the interplay of long arms and legs and concentration in his blue eyes. Focus. She shifted the sword to her left hand, and they ran through the pattern several more times. Lance kept the sword in his right, though.

She saw the problem quickly. Breaking the pattern, she drove forward, under his guard, around, then followed with feints that weren't feints; then real feints, and under his guard. No punches pulled, she smacked his left calf hard. "Move your feet!" And then she was behind him. She reiterated the command with a jab to kidneys. She pulled that punch.

He grunted in pain, but moved his damned feet. He gave her a slow smile, no harm done, and attacked, hips swiveling with each lunge and retreat. Heat surged in her loins as she imagined those hips moving in another way. Holy shit, he's hot. Focus!

Sword back in her dominant hand, she met his attack with her own, and they fell into an easy rhythm. He lacked Yrta's dangerous intensity, but made up for it in intuitive tactics that compensated for his obvious lack of practice.

Sweat leaving velvet beads on both their faces and arms, they circled—a natural pause in the dance. They came back together in another noisy clatter, and Katie pressed hard, whipping past his guard, scoring a blow to his hip. Another to his left arm. He paid her in kind with one to the shoulder, though, as she expected, there wasn't much intent behind the blow.

They parted again, a pause in the brutal choreography. She didn't read people well, but her body understood with fluency the syntax of violence, the ebb and flow of engagement and retreat. In the passion of conflict, she could read the lines of his body, decode intent. He let out a soft laugh and she knew he was doing the same thing, breaking her down, piece by piece, decoding Katie Holt. Desire and fear made her head swim and a voice grumbled: This is why sparring with him is a bad idea.

Focus. Her next attack was languid, an advance that he fended away just as lazily. She swept her leg at his, intentionally missing. A warning. Again, he got the hint and shifted his stance to something less vulnerable. Grinning like a fool, she circled, a wolf looking for a weak flank.

A slow drip of adrenaline in her bloodstream, she sucked in a deep breath, feeling utterly alive.

How do you honor the dead? Like this, she knew. You honored them by living.

Earlier, she sat on her bed, taking a work break. Looking through his photos was voyeuristic, but it gave her a sense of where Lance had been and who he'd become. Paging back through the time, she found a cache of photos from school, his days at an agriculture college in New Mexico. With longer hair and a short beard, he had a rangy, rugged look, fitting the desert landscapes that were the backdrop to many of the images. Moving forward through the years, the number of selfies decreased. He was rarely in the images and photos. What did this mean? Was he becoming more or less broken?

She paused on an image of him and Veronica, taken around the time her mother had died. Veronica hugged her little brother, hanging on with unabashed abandon, and Lance returned the hug, but with a sad smile on his face, eyes vacant, and normally tan skin a sickly gray.

And she remembered….

All the other Paladins had attended her mom's memorial. Keith had returned a couple weeks later and helped Katie, Matt and Dad sort through some of Mom's stuff. Although she'd accepted Lance's rejection years before, his absence at the memorial drove a dagger in her heart. She hated him for not being there because she needed a target for her anger.

Veronica was also absent, apologizing profusely, vaguely citing a family emergency as the reason.

Even with her limited people skills, Katie could read that photo and see that Lance had been the "family emergency." A missing variable dropped into place and the Lance equation moved one step closer to being solved. Allura. Elda. The pressures of saving his family's farm. PTSD. One blow after another. Ashen-faced Lance was a man whose hope had been vanquished.

In the early days following her mother's passing, she'd been almost crazed with the need to find some way to memorialize her mom. Yet at the same time, she wanted nothing more than to run away from the grief, become someone else.

Run away, just as Lance had done.

How do you honor the dead? The first impulse, she knew, was proclaim their greatness to the universe, to infuse everything you did with their memory. Because there was no other way to keep them alive, and to move on, a betrayal.

How do you honor the dead? When you have a job and school? When reaching for their memory hurts more than pushing them from your thoughts? When you just want to curl up in a ball and die, but your father and brother need help sorting through your mother's belongings and deciding what goes to which charity? How do you honor the dead when every box of their belongings given away is a necessary act of erasure, the material proof of their existence scattered to the four winds? How do you honor the dead when your usually unbreakable brother and father are shattered and only you can get things done? When you literally have no time to cry?

How do you honor the dead when several months later, you finally have the chance to process what happened, to truly acknowledge the loss, and the rest of the world has already moved on?

You honor them by moving on because moving on is the only form of honor. You honor them by living.

Ow! Warning acknowledged; Lance moved his feet. It was a bad habit. Planting himself like a tree when pressed too hard in a fight. His calf stung where Pidge had struck. His girl wasn't pulling her punches. Probably a consequence of years of sparring with a Galra.

He had the advantage of reach and strength, but he'd always pull his punches. He didn't have it in himself to do otherwise. So, count that as advantage, Pidge.

Because his male ego could only take so much abuse, he reminded himself that he was the better pilot. And still deadly with a rifle. But Pidge was wearing his shirt, "Cryo Babies Cold Comfort Tour" written in icy blue on the front. It hung loose, fabric sliding over her body as she moved and he found himself envying the shirt and thoroughly distracted.

Plus, New Aleppo was always going to be there. No question she could take him apart if she really needed to. His gaze swept her body, followed the sexy, subtle curves, observed the way her feet shifted catlike; her posture strung tight, but motion fluid; the pitch-black intensity in her enormous brown eyes. It was there, whatever left a pile of bodies in an office. The thing that stood between a young woman, her beloved brother and oblivion. Fear and desire coiled in his brain, tussled for a moment, before desire won out.

His angel with the hands of the devil.

He lunged at her, driving blows in a hard, angry rain. Fighting her, but maybe fighting himself and all the stupid shit he'd ever done. She could take it; she had her own demons to take out against his blows.

Blood pounded. In his head and in his groin. Violence wasn't his mother tongue, but a dialect learned first through youthful stupidity, and then necessity. It tasted bitter on his tongue, but its bite was like that of dark-roast coffee; he'd developed a taste for it.

He must've done the tree thing again, because suddenly she struck another blow to the bruise on his leg. "Move."

"Yes, ma'am," he said sardonically. His focus softened as his mind went to a similar practice session with Allura. She was good, but technically, Pidge had now lived and fought longer. Pidge was sensei good.

He calculated. Her speed. Use it against her.

On her next attack, he made no move to evade her, stepping into her momentum. She caught herself, but was thrown off balance. He reached around and playfully smacked the back of her head.

She whirled away, a crooked grin on her face. "Good one, loverboy."

Then he paid for it. Her next flurry of blows would have cut ribbons from his arms, sketched bloody runes on his chest, and gutted him. He got in one lucky shot to her upper arm, harder than he'd like, but he doubted she even felt it.

Fast as a shadow chased by light, she snuck behind him, her legs tangled in his—because he was making like a tree again—and he was falling.

Breathless from the impact of body to floor, he lay on his side, wheezing.

"You good?" she said. To her credit she did sound worried.

"No. Broken."

"Cry baby." She bent, hand outstretched.

"Nope. Floor and I are getting acquainted."

"Get up, you're drooling on the nice hardwood."

He took her hand, but yanked her down with him. She let herself—obviously—be dragged down, and she sprawled near him, grinning triumphantly.

"You're good," he said. "Real good."

Her laughter made his heart sing. "I know, right?" She flopped onto her back, arms outstretched. He did the same, staring at the snarl of wires and ducting on the ceiling. He fumbled and found her hand, then regretted it, because she let him tangled his fingers in hers, and the touch fueled battle lust.

It had been about two months since he'd last had sex. He was horny anyway, but horny and in love was a prescription for blue balls. Time for more "me" time in the lavatory.

In love?

Yeah. He grinned and tried to think unsexy thoughts. "You know what else is missing?" he said.

She rolled her head to face him. "Missing?"

"The mess."

Her face scrunched up. "Did you hit your head?"

"Your room in the Castle of Lion always looked like a technological junkyard that had been put in a blender." Lance wouldn't call himself a neat freak, but Pidge's chaos had made him kind of crazy.

He could tell she contemplated hitting him. Instead, she laughed. "You should see my apartment in Carver City."

"Worse?"

"Waaay worse." She stared up at the ceiling, offering up her profile, aglow with laughter. "Fortunately for Athena, weight limitations mean I can't do much collecting in space."

He leered at her. "You've collected me."

"Ugh, Lance." Still laughing, she smacked him in the torso with the practice sword. "Such a dork."

The definition of masochist must've had his photo next to it, because he hit her back, gently, and said, "Two out of three?"

Later, he sat on his bunk, working. According to the datapen's counter, he had written 1500 words. He rewarded himself by not writing any more words. Pidge was in the cockpit, quiet as a space mouse, working. How'd she do it? Focus?

He closed the scoping report and studied, for the first time in years, the background image on the screen. His face, brutally young, and Allura's smiling into the camera. The photo taken on their first date years ago. Taken by Pidge's robot pal, Beezer.

Allura was so fucking beautiful.

Yeah, sometimes, it was still a gut punch, the loss. Grief wasn't a constant, but instead a series of waves, ebbing and waning in intensity. Often, absent entirely. And then, out-of-the-blue, returning in a tsunami.

The worst part was the act of not feeling grief. Because the alternative was the guilt. He knew Allura's fate wasn't his fault. This guilt was what replaced grief when he started to move on, when an hour, then a day, then weeks, months, and finally years went by without mourning the loss. Moving on felt like forgetting, and there was no greater sin.

That's why the photo stayed on the pen, when really, others should have taken its place. He'd never had the heart to replace it because removing it felt like a betrayal.

Zahra had, after a fight. In a fit of jealously, she had deleted it from his datapen. Fortunately, he'd had a backup.

Pidge, he knew, wouldn't ever delete it. She understood; she'd loved Allura too.

When Allura died, he had bound his identity into hers, convinced that it was in the service of honoring her. He didn't understand that instead of honoring her, he was engaging in a destructive, but natural form of denial. Committed to sustaining her legacy, he had cast his body and soul onto the bonfire of memory, a fire to banish the ugly reality of death, in the process reduced his identity to ash.

That was no way to live, and definitely no way to honor the dead. Especially, since it eventually led to resenting her for making him into a shell of a man. He'd always love her, but if she came back today, he wouldn't be in love with her. He wasn't that kid anymore.

With a flick of fingers, he pulled up Pidge's photo: laughter sparkled in her eyes like bubbles in champagne. She was beyond beautiful. Smart, funny and a total bad-ass.

And…scared. Of him. Even he misread situations sometimes. But this…this he'd figured out. To him, she was safe harbor, the place where he belonged. But she had never ghosted him. And she didn't have a rep for panting after every pretty face that crossed her path. A reputation he deserved, at least in his younger days.

There was time, just a few years ago, when he was pretty much one disappointing sandwich away from a mental breakdown. His many misadventures had chewed him up and spat him out. He'd been shot, stabbed; shot and stabbed; beaten; almost dead, dead and left for dead more times than he could count. He'd looked into the abyss and when the abyss beckoned—"Join us, it'll only hurt for a second, then peace"—had almost taken the invite. He'd come back from an addiction that had nearly pulled his cells apart.

Now? Now he had his shit together. His demons would never be entirely exorcised, but he had the weapons to keep them at bay. And the rash idiot who fell into infatuation every day ending in "y?" That moron was gone.

He just had to make Pidge see him for who he was now. Had to show her that they were better together than apart.

With no hesitation, Lance moved the first date photo to archive, and then replaced it with the present, and he hoped, the future: Pidge's face.