Shiro hunched over behind a wall, listening to the song of gunfire beyond. Pidge sat next to him, her wild amber hair in tangles, and a white flash drive held tightly in her fist. She had her free hand on her bayard, squeezing the handle.

Shiro placed his palms squarely on the floor and pushed up, risking a glance over their hiding spot. As soon as he showed his face, purple lasers shot over his head and into the opposing wall. He cursed softly, ducking back down and pressing his back to the cold wall.

"We're pinned down," he spoke into the comms, trying to remain calm. "Can anyone provide backup?"

"We're-" Lance grunted. There a distant explosion that shook the Galra base. "We're kind of busy here!" His sentence was further punctuated by an alarmed scream that belonged to Hunk. Keith swore loudly.

"Another Galra cruiser incoming!"

"Quiznack!" Lance shouted.

Shiro winced at their panicked voices. The supposedly sparsely guarded Galra base had turned into a war zone in a matter of seconds. Pidge had gotten some intel on her family from this location and had practically begged to organize a mission. Shiro only relented because the planet was nearby and they were running out of leads.

Shiro tucked his arms into his stomach as he risked another glance. Another laser singed his hair, colliding with the far wall. He wasn't sure he or Pidge could take much more of this. His armor was already compromised, bits cracked and blackened by the few lasers that had managed to connect. Pidge had suffered far fewer wounds, but she looked exhausted from all the running. Dark bags hung under her eyes and she held the flash drive so tightly in her fist Shiro was afraid it would break and they'd get out with nothing to show for it.

Another laser pelted into their hiding spot and Shiro winced instinctively. He glanced at Pidge, who met his gaze with steely determination.

"We're going to have to cut a path through them," he said. "You up for that?" Pidge nodded, pocketing her flash drive, and Shiro found himself envying her strength. Were he in her shoes, he would have liked nothing more than to avoid confrontation at all costs, just so they could get out without exhausting himself further. He gave her a smile. "Ready?"

"As I'll ever be," the bayard in Pidge's had hummed to life. Her katar burst into existence, the top crackling with electricity.

Shiro flexed his prosthetic arm, wiggling the fingers experimentally. There was a familiar whirr of Galra machinery before the arm burst to life in a shower of purple. He turned his attention to the sentries slowly advancing on his position and lunged.

The first sentry tried to meet him head-on, strike-for-strike, but Shiro was faster. He ducked underneath the wild swinging arm and cut a searing path through the metal, wires snapping and melting under his hand. The sentry collapsed into a pile of broken machinery.

Shiro leapt onto the next sentry, a laser from its gun barely missing his head. He met it, sinking his hand deep into its gut, his free hand yanking hard on the shoulder to pull it to his height. The action may have seemed gruesome, but Shiro held no sympathy for the machines. He had to get Pidge and himself out, preferably as uninjured as possible.

Another laser skimmed his side and Shiro hissed, phantom pain bursting from a wound that was no longer there. He gritted his teeth, trying to ward off the images of purple aliens sinking their teeth into his skin and pulling. Instead, he punched a sentry so hard its metal head went flying off, kicking its remains into its comrades and toppling them over.

Pidge darted past him, flicking her wrist neatly. The katar's line extended, embedding itself in the chest of a sentry. A surge of electricity followed; the sentry convulsed and collapsed, smoke heaving from inside. Without skipping a beat, Pidge jumped over the body and pelted forwards, Shiro hot on her tail. The other sentries clunked along behind them, fire from their guns whistling over their heads.

They took a sharp turn, Pidge taking the initiative with the map she had from the holo-pad at her wrist. She kept her gaze down, watching their progress. Shiro kept glancing behind them, watching the sentries behind them as they all tromped down an adjacent hallway. His shoulders slumped in clear relief. They'd lost them, at least for now. Now, all they had to do was escape.

But letting his guard down was Shiro's first mistake.

He was still turning his head, a smile on his lips and congratulations in order when Pidge cried out in pain. Shiro snapped to attention immediately, watching the enormous arm of a sentry sinking into her gut. Pidge flew backward into the wall closest to them, her head smashing hard against it. Her eyelids fluttered, cracks spidering across the surface of her visor from the collision. Shiro let out a horrified scream.

"Pidge!"

Pidge twitched at the sound of her name but didn't do much else. Horrible scenarios of the possible wounds Pidge could have suffered flooded Shiro's consciousness. He was only brought back to reality by the incoming elbow into his jaw.

He stumbled backward, lifting his head to meet the sentry, who stared him down the purple lights flaring from its lenses. Shiro worked his aching jaw, fixing the sentry with the hardest glare he could manage. His fingers trembled with rage, his arm sparking at his side. The sentry moved again to follow up with another attack, but Shiro caught it's arm and twisted.

Machinery and metal snapped under Shiro's metal grip. He gave a mighty yank and with a sickening pop, the arm came clean off, wires sparking at the edges. He launched another punch and the sentry fell, crashing gracelessly to the ground. Its visor flickered once, then went sightless.

Shiro spun around, fixing his gaze on the small Paladin crumpled against the wall. Blood was marking a horrible trail down her chin, dripping steadily onto her armor. Shiro's stomach protested at the sight.

"Pidge-" his voice sounded strangled to his own ears. Shiro stumbled towards her, dropping to his knees with a heavy thud. He gathered Pidge into his arms and her head lolled, falling backward over his arm. Her eyes were closed, shadowed by the shattered glass of her visor. Her breath was shallow and quick, skin clammy and flushed a dull red.

Shiro pressed his hand to the impact point and Pidge let out a whimper. Blood bubbled up between her teeth, spilling out through her mouth. Shiro choked.

Internal bleeding, he thought grimly. Concussion too. Not good…

"Pidge," Shiro forewent the instinct to call the team to tell them of what happened, instead choosing to ensure Pidge's consciousness. She let out a quiet moan of pain and Shiro tightened his grip on her wrist. "Katie."

Amber eyes blinked open, fixing him with a tired stare. Her gaze darted all over his face, taking in every little detail. Shiro tried to hide his relief as he pressed his fingers to the underside of her wrist. Her pulse fluttered wildly against his fingers. It was far too fast to be considered normal.

"Yeah, yeah it's me," Shiro hooked his arm under Pidge's legs and tucked the other around her shoulders. He lifted her into the air and her arms twitched at the movement. She still hung limply though, resting her small head against Shiro's chest.

"It...hurts," she whined. Her voice was weak.

"I know," Shiro whispered. "I know, but we're on our way out. Where do we go?" Hoping he was in the home stretch, he set off at a brisk pace down the hallway. Not too fast that he jostled the Paladin in his arms, but quick enough that he would get out before she bled out internally.

"Dizzy…" Pidge murmured in his arms. Her eyes fluttered shut and she let out a shallow gasp.

"Hey," Shiro tried to keep the panic out of his voice. "Hey, don't close your eyes, okay? I need you to stay awake."

Pidge looked up at him, blinking slowly. "'M tired though…"

"I know," Shiro felt so anxious he was nearly about to throw up. He moved his feet as fast as he dared, the hallways flickering into that of a Galra prison ship, the instinct of get out Shiro, now while you still can growing stronger and stronger with every second. He fought off the sudden surge of adrenaline, knowing that now absolutely wasn't the time to let his memories get the best of him.

Run, Shiro, run.

Shiro gritted his teeth, glancing back at Pidge. Her head had lolled, shadowing her eyes with her visor. He couldn't tell whether she was awake or asleep at this angle.

"Stay awake, Katie," he spoke, glancing down the hallway. A familiar door stood at the exit. If all went according to plan, Keith would be waiting for them in Red just beyond the door. "You can't fall asleep, you hear me?"

Pidge hummed in response. Shiro's throat tightened. It was hard to breathe.

"You have new intel now," He tried to get her to start thinking. "Some more stuff on Matt and your father. You gotta stay awake so we can decode it back at the castle, okay?" Pidge's lips moved, mouthing her brother's name, but it was silent. Blood continued sickeningly down from her open mouth and she let out another congested cough. Instead of phlegm, though, more blood spewed from her lips.

Shiro bit down so hard on his lip he was afraid he'd break the skin and picked up his pace. The door was too far, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.

Run, Shiro, run.

"They need you," Shiro found himself saying next. Pidge lifted her chin weakly to stare at him, her eyes half-lidded.

"What…?"

"Matt and your father," Shiro said for clarification. Desperation he was trying to hide was now leaking into his tone as he met Pidge's gaze. "He needs you, Katie. He needs you to stay awake."

"Matt…Dad..." Pidge repeated her their names under her breath like a mantra. Shiro turned his body to shoulder the door open as they approached, dashing out into the open. The planet's air was thick and humid and every breath was hard to take in. It was like breathing in pure hot air and trying to use that as a substitute for clean oxygen.

Pidge let out a strangled gasp. More scarlet oozed from the corner of her mouth, matting in her hair. Auburn locks stuck together, strung by sticky blood. Shiro tried not to look at it and instead broke into a jog. While the air was reasonably breathable by human standards, when you were bleeding internally it was a whole different story.

Shiro activated his comms. "Pidge and I need immediate evac. Keith, where are you?"

"Busy!" Keith grunted. There was an explosion high above and a red streak went flying from into the air, colliding with the rocks with an earth-shattering boom. Keith swore through his choked cry of pain. Shiro glanced down at Pidge again. She continued to whisper her brother's name under her breath like a prayer.

"Guys, I need evac," Shiro pressed. His grip tightened around Pidge's legs as she coughed wetly. "Pidge is injured and isn't going to make it if we wait much longer."

"Wait, what?!" Shiro could hear the panic in Lance's voice. "What happened?!"

"Sentry happened," Shiro said. "She's bleeding out internally and will die if-" He cut himself off. His heart skipped a horrified beat as he fully realized the implications of what he just said.

Pidge was dying.

Shiro felt like vomiting.

When they had first gone through the wormhole that took them to the other side of the universe, Shiro had made a promise to himself. He'd said that he wouldn't lose this crew like he had lost the last one, that he would do everything in his power to see to it that these kids got home in one piece. That they would see their families again, be able to live out the rest of their lives in peace. He had promised to protect them.

If Pidge died here, in his arms, he would have broken that promise.

Shiro's head swam as Pidge whimpered in his arms.

They were children, playing the part of soldiers. Pawns on a chessboard that would decide the fate of the entire universe. They were caught in a war that wasn't their doing, playing a charade that would end in two ways: victory or death. Like the Galra motto that every commander seemed so adamant about.

They were children. With a very real possibility of meeting an end out here, dying in obscurity. They wouldn't see their families again. They would never stand in the rain, see the boundless oceans, or experience the joys of just being a child.

Hot tears stung at Shiro's eyes. If Pidge died here today, then her blood would be on his hands. He was the one that decided ultimately to send them into this war. He was their leader, the one they turned to for advice and battle plans. He had sealed their fates as soon as he had come hurtling back to Earth in a Galra craft.

"I'm coming down for pickup," Hunk's voice, clipped and scared in a way Shiro had never heard before, brought him back from the brink of full-on panic. Pidge had shut her eyes again, her breathing speeding up. Shiro wondered how much had bled out, and wished he had some way of knowing.

The Yellow Lion descended from above. Streaks of blue and red in the sky above indicated Lance and Keith were still in the throes of battle.

Yellow landed with enough force to send dust rising in her wake. She knelt, leaning forwards with her maw opening wide. Shiro all but ran inside, breathing in the clean fresh air. It was a much-appreciated contrast from the stuffy atmosphere of the planet, and he all but relished in it on his way to the cockpit. Yellow rumbled, nearly throwing Shiro off balance, as she rose into the air. The doors slid open, revealing Hunk standing by the pilot's chair. He'd put Yellow in the equivalent of autopilot mode, trusting his lion to maneuver them safely back to the Castle.

"We need to get her armor off," Hunk said, wasting no time. He led Shiro to the back of the lion, where he had clearly set up some sort of sleeping situation. Shiro tried not to think about Hunk sleeping alone in his lion late at night and instead favored settling Pidge in the thick yellow blankets. The two of them set about removing the heavy armor, Hunk starting with the kneepads and Shiro pulling the helmet off as delicately as he dared.

Pidge flinched as the visor broke fully, glass tinkling into her face. Shiro brushed it off as best he could, wincing as a few shards cut her forehead and the area around her eyes. Hunk glanced up, in the middle of unstrapping all of the white armor pieces connected to her arms. Together, they hefted the chest plate over her head, while Pidge cried out as they forced her to sit up.

"I'm sorry," Shiro murmured as Hunk cut away at the flight suit around her stomach, practically ripping away the stretchy material.

Pidge's abdomen itself nearly made Shiro hurl. It was a wash of red, steadily growing darker towards the center, turning almost brown. The area around the wound was a sickening yellow, spreading the length of her side and disappearing behind her back. Hunk let out a sharp gasp.

"Oh," he said. "That's bad."

"How bad?" Shiro silently thanked Hunk's almost encyclopedic knowledge of what they had taught in the Garrison medical classes as he asked. He sure as hell didn't remember them.

"The impact point was here," Hunk pointed to the dark red stain on the left side of Pidge's belly-button. Shiro was relieved he didn't touch the wound; he was afraid if they did Pidge would scream, and he never wanted to hear a sound so painful come from her mouth ever again. "It seems like the longer she bled, the more staining there was. If we don't get her to a pod soon…" He trailed off, unable to finish the thought. He didn't need to. Shiro was already well-aware of the consequences, should they fail.

"Keith, Lance," Shiro spoke into the comms. "Pull back to the castle, now. This is an emergency and we'll need all hands on deck."

"Roger," Keith said.

"On our way," Lance chimed in. Their voices were both unusually grave, and the playful banter that echoed between them normally gone, leaving the comms silent.

Yellow landed in her hangar. Shiro gathered Pidge into his arms (he tried to ignore the way she whimpered, or the way the horrifying mark on her stomach twisted and grew ever so slightly with the motion) and followed Hunk down towards the med-bay.

Coran was already inside, having listened to the desperate exchange over the comms. He took Pidge from their care, shooing them from the room so he could work in peace. Shiro let out an anxious breath, realizing just how tense his shoulders were as the doors slid closed behind them.

Hunk gave Shiro a glance but didn't say anything. Instead, he chose to walk down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen, likely to cook up a storm to relieve some of the stress.

Shiro, on the other hand, plopped himself down at the opposite side of the door and waited.

"Pidge."

Pidge tilted her head ever so slightly to show she was listening as Shiro approached. It had been a full week since the incident, and Pidge was already hard at work decoding the intel that she had downloaded from the Galra base. She'd gone straight from the med-bay to her mess of a room, leaving no time to confront what had happened back there.

Shiro wasn't going to have any of it.

He had to talk to her, talk about what happened and how they could keep away from such a situation in the future. It wasn't a topic Pidge couldn't avoid forever, and Shiro knew that she knew it as well as he.

"We need to talk."

Pidge lifted her eyes from her laptop, fingers still clicking away at the keys. The white flash drive was sticking out of one of the USB ports, glinting with a calming teal light.

"I'm kind of busy Shiro," she said, lifting one hand off the keyboard to gesture around her. "So if we could just have this conversation later-"

"Katie."

Shiro's use of her real name made Pidge's shoulders slump. She moved her laptop off of her legs and set it on the pillow, glancing up meekly to meet Shiro's gaze. His expression softened and he gave her a reassuring smile.

"Can I sit?" He asked.

"Go for it," Pidge lifted her hands in surrender. Shiro sank down onto the edge of the bed, almost half hanging off of it. He kept his hands in his lap, observing Pidge. He tried not to think about what had happened, the awful red bruise spreading across the length of her stomach, mottled and yellow. She'd nearly died. Coran said she had lost more than half of her blood by the time they finally got her in a pod.

That had scared Shiro more than anything. The fact that if they had waited even a moment longer, they would have been on the search for another Green Paladin right now. Perhaps even heading back to Earth to deliver the body to the Holts and give her a proper burial.

"You scared me back there," Shiro said. He tried to adopt his normal fatherly tone, but it came out weaker than he had intended. Pidge glanced at him and Shiro met her gaze. He couldn't sugar-coat things. Not this time. Not after what they had just been through. Shiro was going to lay his emotions bare for Pidge to see, and let her pick and choose what she wanted to discuss. "You could have died. You were very close to it."

Pidge pursed her lips. "I know."

"I understand what happened wasn't your fault," Shiro continued. "But you have to understand that there were some real consequences there. You can't just avoid talking about this, you have to come out and be able to talk with the rest of us openly about-"

"It's what we do though," Pidge cut across him. "Isn't it?" She tilted her eyebrows, clearly asking him a question. Taken aback, Shiro could only gape at her like a fish out of water.

"What?"

"We're soldiers, Shiro," Pidge splayed her fingers across the soft green blanket underneath her. "Things like this are bound to happen. Like when you almost died and Lance called Blue and Black to him to save you. I'm not the first to almost die. I won't be the last."

Shiro swallowed. Lance had said something similar after his own near-death experience. He understood his place in the universe. It appeared Pidge was starting to see it too. A child soldier, a small part of something much bigger that was out of her control.

They were so, so young...

Instead of responding, Shiro leaned forward to pull Pidge into his arms. She let out a quiet squeak of surprise that was muffled by his shoulder as Shiro cradled her close to his chest. Their ragtag space family was being torn and tested at the seams every single day that they fought the Galra. There were new twists at every turn, new variables added to the equation every time they took up the mantle of Paladin and worked together to form Voltron. There were always going to be risks involved.

Shiro just wished all of them weren't quite so deadly.

Aghh another chapter done! I hope you guys enjoyed this, it was fun to write! (Also I totally forgot Friday happened lmfao so sorry for the late update)

The specific kind of internal bleeding Pidge is suffering from is called Cullen's Sign (there's some pretty graphic stuff in the images, oof and I know that technically, bruising that severe isn't supposed to show up for 24-36 hours. I took some liberties with it though, considering how hard Pidge was hit (it was enough to crack her visor, after all) it's not far off to believe severe bruising would have occurred in between the thirty minutes to an hour it took for Shiro and Hunk to observe the wound.

I hope I wrote Shiro okay! He and Allura are the two points of views that I have the most trouble writing. I just can't get Allura's speech pattern right, and Shiro has a sense of justice/leadership that I can't replicate fully. I hope it was okay regardless!

Next chapter we cover Keith! Should be fun, right?

Thank you so much for reading! The feedback so far has been incredible, and I love all of you!

GriffTalon: YESSS! The art is so good! Unfortunately, I can't really link back to it on Fanfiction because the formatting is a bit strange :( I love Langst so much, and the lack of dynamic between him and Shiro makes me sad sometimes. It's hard to believe that these kids are fighting in a war and that's something that the show captures especially well in s7.

Myherogal22: ! Thank you so much! 3