The next morning, they didn't feed him. Again. Again, the guards stood over the prisoners, watching them eat until all of the rations were gone. Someone tried to palm a loaf, the shy Iykosian Lance had befriended, and she was whipped with the rod twice on the shoulders for her trouble. No one else tried.

"I'm fine," Lance told everyone. He was walking, though slowly. He went around the room and spoke to anyone who would listen. "I'm fine. Don't get hurt for my sake. Don't worry about me. I'm a paladin of Voltron. I can handle it."

Before long, he came to sit with Sam and Braxia in the corner and let himself be sandwiched between them. Sam wrapped his arm around him and pulled him in. He could hear the boy's stomach growling. It made him want to punch the wall, but he just held him tighter.

"This isn't the worst, Sam," Lance said, still putting a brave front up even for him. "I'm okay."

After that, instead of Lance walking around to talk to the other prisoners, they came to the corner to meet him. Everyone kept wanting to check on him and make sure he was okay. He asked questions, asked for stories. Mythology, children's tales, history, anything. It seemed to take his mind off things. He closed his eyes, leaning on Sam or Braxia, and listened. If the story ever started to flag, the speaker faltering, thinking he might be asleep, he opened his eyes and asked them to continue. And they did.

Sam learned more about his fellow prisoners and their cultures this way than he'd ever thought to find out for himself. He was ashamed he hadn't thought to get to know them before. But then, before Lance came, Sam had been too tired, too beaten down, too consumed with despair to look outside himself much. Lance seemed to gather energy from being around others, listening to others, so he reached out in ways Sam never had.

Lance drank a lot of water, trying to fill up his belly with something, anything. It helped, a little, or so he said. But that meant he had to relieve himself more often, which meant walking slowly to one of the commodes in the alcoves off the main communal area, painfully stripping off the full-body suit, then putting it back on when he was done. Sam stood outside the opening of the alcove, shielding him from the view of the rest of the room, but he couldn't help glancing in when Lance's back was too him. Lance was striped and bruised from his neck all the way down, past where Sam could see. No wonder he was moving slowly.

In the afternoon, the Galra took him away and beat him again. Lance didn't give Sam or anyone else a chance to try to step in front him. He stood up and walked to the door to meet the guards when he saw them coming.

"This isn't the worst," he said again, afterwards, leaning limply into Braxia's chest while Zalyk carefully massaged his arms and legs, stiff from being strapped in place for too long. He was shaking, exhausted and agonized. He had a fat lip and a bruise next to his eye from slamming into a doorway. The guards were not being gentle with him when they dragged him around. "It isn't, Sam. It isn't the worst."

He needed to believe it. The rest of them had to help him.

Sam sat facing him, gently running his fingers through his hair and forcing back his own tears. Lance refused to cry. Sam shouldn't either. He needed to keep up a positive face, needed to feed Lance's strength with his own. So he smiled, though he knew it was shaky.

"I'm proud of you, Lance," he said. "I'm so, so proud. You're so brave. So strong. We're so lucky to have you with us, even though I wish you were anywhere but here. I wish you weren't going through this right now, but since you are, I'm proud to be with you."

Lance closed his eyes. "Thank you."

No evening rations for him that day, either.

The next day, they made him bleed.

"It's still not the worst," he whispered to Sam. It was getting harder to agree.

There were not nearly enough blankets and pillows among the population for all of the people imprisoned here, but several had been donated to their corner. Lance was lying naked on his stomach, cushioned as well as they could do it, while Zalyk cleaned his cuts with a damp rag. All they had was water, no antiseptic, no soothing cream, but they did what they could. Lance had been beaten viciously from his neck to his feet for three days in a row.

This was superficial damage. Bruises, cuts. Sam knew the Galra could do worse. They wanted to cause pain, not damage. But they were causing a lot of pain. These cuts were unlikely to scar, but if they kept going...

And Sam knew they were going to. He knew they were going to keep doing this until they got what they wanted.

He sat there by Lance's upper body. Held his hand. Stroked his hair. "You're doing fine, son," he murmured. "You're doing a good job."

Lance glowed. It was the only word for it. Exhausted, starving, beaten bloody, skin so sore and swollen that he could barely stand the weight of cloth, he smiled up at Sam with a bright, beaming smile that still lit everything it touched, even now.

Afterward, Lance couldn't bear to put the black prison suit back on. It was too tight, pressed too hard on his wounds. They fashioned a crude pair of drawstring pants for him from a thin blanket and threads pulled from the corner, sewn with a needle worn from a splinter of bone. Sam didn't ask where the bone came from. He didn't want to know.

Lance was strangely invested in the sewing process, giving instructions on how to do it and leaning over to watch with an avid gaze. His arm was too cramped from the restraints to pull the needle himself. He was weaker, too, because of the lack of food, a constant tremor in his hands, his body. The Galra were quickly wearing him out. It had only been three days, but Sam did not know how long this could go on.

Lance curled up in a sitting position between Braxia and Zalyk, propped between two furry bodies to provide as much warmth as possible. Sam draped all the blankets they had over the three of them and slept nearby. Tried to sleep, anyway.

The next day, it was worse. Lance could barely walk even before the daily beating. They still hadn't fed him. When they brought him back and dumped him on the floor, Zalyk cleaned his wounds again, all the old ones reopened and new ones added, and Sam held his hand. Lance was dazed and silent, enduring the treatment as if he was still being beaten. His breath hitched when Zalyk hit a bad spot, but he didn't otherwise react. He was trying not to scream. Before, he had been willing at least to whimper and moan when he was with them. He was losing track of where he was.

"Still not the worst," he murmured when he came out of that state of shock, sometime later. Sam was holding him, then, unwilling to let Braxia do it. He needed to cradle Lance with his own arms, needed to listen to him breathe. "I still didn't scream."

"I'm proud of you," Sam whispered. "But you can scream if you have to. No one would blame you."

"Nope. Not gonna do it."

Still that stubbornness. Still that strength. Sam had to allow it.

The days began to blend together. Sam lost track of how many beatings Lance had endured, how many times he and the others had done their best to clean his cuts with only water and a ragged cloth. Lance grew weaker, but held on to his resolve, somehow, by the edge of his fingernails. He had already lost weight on the short rations of the prison, but now he lost more.

He moved very little, trying to conserve energy, and when he did, he got dizzy and had to close his eyes, swallowing against the nausea. He slept more and more, rolled on his side with his forehead pressed against Sam's hip or balled up in Braxia or Zalyk or Sam's lap. Sam spent every moment that he could at the boy's side, sometimes talking, sometimes stroking his hair, sometimes holding his hand, sometimes just sitting there. Their friends helped, too, offering the little comfort they could, but it was never enough.

Every afternoon, they came for him again. They beat him. They brought him back bloody and limp and dumped him on the floor. Lance suffered. And suffered. And suffered. And still, he did not scream.

One night, a new rumor started. A druid was coming. Someone skilled in torture and interrogation. They all knew why.

Sam missed being able to put his arm around the boy and pull him to his side without fear of hurting him. It was such a simple thing, nothing he had ever thought he would miss, but now he did. The Galra had taken even such simple comforts away from Lance, and it wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

The best he could do was lie on his back on a blanket and let Lance lie face down across him, chest to chest, Lance's legs trailing to the side and his face buried in Sam's shoulder. Sam held his upper arm with one hand. With his other hand, he petted Lance's head, over and over again. It was as close as he could get to a hug without putting pressure on his wounds.

Lance relaxed. His breath evened out. Sam knew he wasn't asleep, though, with the way he kept shifting, trying to find a position that didn't hurt. It didn't exist. It was too soon after the most recent beating for the pain to have receded or numbed.

So Sam told him a story, too.

"Your team is going to come for you, Lance. Doesn't matter what trap the Galra set for them, doesn't matter how they try to stop them. Your lion is going to tear through every obstacle, and everyone else will be right behind her. They'll come in here, shooting their lasers and swinging their swords. Katie will hack every computer system. Shiro will take down every guard. Keith and Hunk will shoot and fight. They'll never stop until they find you.

"They're searching for you right now, and they have been ever since you were captured. They miss you like crazy. You are a bright, beautiful presence in their lives, and having you gone is like missing sunshine. They miss your voice, your jokes, your laughter, everything about you. They want you back, and they'll do anything it takes to find you."

He was fully prepared to keep going in this vein until Lance was able to sleep. Lance had talked at length about how amazing his team was and all the wonderful things they could do, so he had a lot of material to work with. He was surprised when Lance stirred, then sluggishly turned his head so he could speak.

"No." His voice was exhausted, but he sounded certain of himself.

Sam's hand stilled in the boy's hair. He had never suspected that Lance might object to any of this. Perhaps he hadn't heard him correctly. "No what, Lance? Your team won't come in, fighting and shooting? They won't do whatever it takes to get you back?"

Lance shifted, breath pausing as he forced down a moan. "No, I...know they will... But...you're exaggerating."

"Which part? You talked a lot about your team, so I feel like I know them pretty well."

"No. They're all...amazing. But me... I'm not sunshine."

Sam almost chuckled, but held himself still so he wouldn't jostle the boy. He started stroking his hair again, slow and careful. "Well, not literally, of course." Poor kid had to be pretty out of it.

Lance grunted miserably. "Not metaphorically, either."

Okay. Perhaps he wasn't that out of it. Sam frowned. "I think I know you pretty well, too. You've been here for a while now. You are most certainly metaphorical sunshine."

"No." Lance huffed out a pained breath and stopped trying to move, going still against Sam again. "I'm annoying. I mess things up and...and get in the way."

Sam instantly wanted to argue. Wanted to dispute that absolutely, tell the boy that he was not annoying, that he never got in the way. But he went still, listening. Lance sounded lucid, even calm. He didn't have a fever. The words were self-deprecating, but the tone was utterly factual. He truly, deeply believed this, and a flat rebuttal was not going to convince him otherwise.

It occurred to Sam that he had not yet observed Lance with his team. He had listened to him talk, and he had seen the way he was with the other prisoners, but he didn't know how he acted with his peers. Lance's voice could be loud, sometimes deliberately grating, and he did take pleasure in tweaking the guards. At least, he had before the daily beatings started. Maybe he was annoying with his friends, perhaps even deliberately so. He probably enjoyed riling them up to get a reaction out of them. He liked attention, always soaked it up—maybe he sought it in childish ways like teasing people and being comically clumsy.

But Sam still believed every single word he'd said about how much Lance's team missed him and how much they wanted him back.

"Hmm." Sam did not dismiss Lance's words. He laid his hand flat against the side of his head, holding him pressed to his shoulder. It was the closest he could get to a hug right now without aggravating his wounds. "I suppose that might be true. I haven't seen you with your teammates. Maybe you annoy them, maybe you mess things up. But that doesn't preclude you from also being sunshine for them, you know. Both things can be true simultaneously."

Lance was quiet for a long, long moment. "That sounds really smart."

Sam snorted very gently. "How many times do I have to tell you, sweetheart? I am really smart."

"Sure." Lance blew out a soft sigh and relaxed against him. "Still doesn't mean I'm metaphorical sunshine. Ever."

"I told you. I know you. You've been here for a while now. You are, absolutely and without a doubt, metaphorical sunshine. You can ask anyone here."

"You shouldn't believe everything you see. I've been trying really hard to be a hero."

"I know." Lance had been trying so, so hard, from the very moment he stepped in here. Everyone knew it. Everyone could see it. "You've been succeeding."

Lance went quiet again, but his breathing started to turn ragged.

Sam ran his fingers through his hair. His voice was as soft as he could make it. "It's okay. You're okay. Everything's okay."

Lance cried, very softly, turning his head to sniffle on Sam's shoulder. Not from the pain, the hunger, the fear, the degradation. He cried because Sam told him nothing but the truth, that he was a hero and he brightened the lives of everyone around him.

The next day, the druid arrived. The guards came to drag Lance away earlier than usual. Some prisoners tried to stand in the way, Braxia, Zalyk, Kiran, but were beaten back. Sam tightened his grip on Lance, holding him hard enough to hurt, but they tore him from his grasp. He jumped to his feet and followed after, cursing, only to slam into the bars when they shut the door.

Lance did not resist. Not even a little bit. He was limp in their hold, unable to walk, but he didn't try to fight back.

Sam sank down by the bars, his fingers buried in his hair, and pulled until his scalp ached and stung. He stared at the floor, his eyes burning, his heart afire. Not long after, they heard Lance's screams echoing through the halls.