When they brought Lance back that day, he flinched from Zalyk for the first time. She had been reaching for his arm to help him up, just like the others, but she leaned back, a look of indescribable pain crossing her face. Lance realized immediately.
"Sorry! Sorry." It was a breathless gasp, his voice shaking almost as hard as his body. His drawstring pants were barely clinging to his hips, but at least it looked like they hadn't beaten him again. The wounds on his back weren't any worse than they had been before the guards dragged him away. No, today's torture had been...something different. "I'm sorry, I just... I can't s-see well, everything all too bright and, and w-weird, and you look...p-purple..." Shame in his voice, which wasn't fair, wasn't right. Lance couldn't help his instinctive reactions, and no could blame him, not even Zalyk, though she was unable to erase the pain from her expression.
"Lance." Sam was barely able to speak through the lump in his throat, which was now near permanent. He reached out and took the boy's face in his hands, then tilted his head up to look at him. Lance's eyes were unfocused, his head shivering in Sam's careful grip. He squinted, trying to make out Sam's face, but it was clear that he could not. "What did they do to you, sweetie? What did..."
"M-Magic?" Lance couldn't stop shaking. "Dunno, but...hurt. It hurt..."
He sounded deeply, horribly ashamed. Because he had screamed, and he hadn't wanted to. They had taken that away from him, too.
Sam held his face, stroked his thumbs over his cheekbones. Lance sighed and let his eyes flutter shut. He seemed more relaxed when he stopped trying to make sense of his warped and blurry vision.
"Was it like electricity? The magic?" Sam asked. With the way Lance's muscles were spasming, that seemed to make the most sense.
"Y-yeah. Kind of. But that wasn't the point, I don't think." Lance leaned his cheek more heavily into Sam's palm, his eyes still firmly shut. "I think the druid w-was… She said something about how Zarkon found the black lion, and I th-think it was like...she was trying to power up my bond with Blue. Make it work across greater distances, so I could call her. So she could come. And she also h-hurt me, so I would want to call."
He opened his eyes and looked at Sam, and his pupils were almost focused again. "But I didn't." His voice was hard and steady. Despite the weakness in his body, the horrendous pain that was still roaring through him, his will was iron-clad. Even his body had stopped shivering for the moment. "I won't let them use me to trap my girl. The bond is closed on my end, I'm sure of it. All of the magical energy let me, like...reinforce it. Let me do what I wanted to do in the first place."
Sam's breath halted in his throat. First there was pride. Then, overwhelming terror. "Were...were you able to keep that a secret from the druid? Or could she tell what you were doing?"
"She knew." Lance closed his eyes again, letting himself go limp as his momentary strength bled away. "That was why she stopped and had them bring me back here."
Sam swallowed. His heart was jumping in his chest, threatening to choke him. "But that means...tomorrow…"
"Yeah. They'll try again. Something different. Something that will just hurt, to try to make me do what they want me to do. I won't, Sam. I won't do it."
Sam let go of his face and leaned back. He felt numb. No. No. He couldn't stand it.
Zalyk stayed back, but Lance let Braxia pick him up. No one even considering trying to get him to walk, not even Lance, for the first time. They crossed back to the corner again, plodding through the sorrowful crowd of fellow prisoners. It was as solemn and griefstricken as a funeral procession. When Sam realized that, he stumbled and almost fell to his knees.
No. Lance wasn't dead. He wasn't going to die. The Galra didn't even want him dead.
Lance's team would come. His lion would come. They had to. No other outcome was allowed.
Sam sat down in the corner, reclining against the wall, and reached his arms up for Lance. Braxia lowered the boy into his lap, and Sam curled around him, holding him as tight as he dared. Lance was still shaking, ceaselessly, but it seemed to come in waves. It was as if residual electricity was bleeding out of his muscles, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Lance hid his face against Sam's neck and just lay there, panting.
"You're okay," Sam murmured, rocking him. He held Lance's head with one hand, fingertips scrubbing back and forth through his hair. "You're okay, you're okay, you're gonna be okay."
"Yeah." Lance shuddered and shook. Tears were leaking out of his eyes, but he didn't sob. It was purely a physical reaction to enormous pain. Emotionally, he was still holding on, if barely. "F-fine. I'm fine. It'll pass. It's...it's still not the worst, Sam. It's still not the worst."
Sam couldn't stop the high-pitched noise that whimpered from his lips. Yes, it could be worse than this. They could be mutilating Lance, opening more raw wounds, leaving him to fester and rot strapped to a rack or a table or a chair. They could be violating him in other ways, more intimate ways, ways that had the potential to ruin aspects of Lance's well-being for the rest of his life. Thankfully, the Galra had never shown any interest in those kinds of tortures, not that Sam could see. It could be worse, and yes, Sam fully understood Lance's need to convince himself that what was happening to him wasn't that bad. It was helping him get through this, helping him believe that he was capableof getting through this.
But this was enough. Lance was still holding on, somehow, but Sam could not, not anymore. Sam was no longer capable of viewing their captors as sentient beings with hopes and feelings and lives outside this prison. All he saw when he looked at them was the looming, amorphous shapes of monsters, dread horrors, ugly and putrid and warped beyond redemption. He wanted them dead. Every last one of them. If he could call Lance's lion personally, he would ask her to blow them all away without the slightest shred of doubt or remorse.
Sam couldn't stand this, not for one moment longer.
But there was very little he could do about it. Sam held the limp child in his arms, rocked him, stroked his hair. Sang to him lullabies and old songs he dredged up from two decades of fatherhood, memories that had been almost buried and lost under the weight of his own imprisonment. Called him all the endearments he could think of, told him over and over how proud he was of him. When Lance seemed fully lucid and aware of himself, the shaking finally fading to a mere shiver over his shoulders that came with intervals of stillness, Sam asked him to surrender.
"You proved yourself, honey," he told him. "You held on as long as you could. You didn't cry. You didn't scream. You were so, so brave, and so, so strong. You are a hero beyond doubt, beyond question. I admire you more than I can possibly say, and I'm so glad that I got to meet you, that I get to be with you now. You held on as long as you could, dear, and you don't have to do it anymore."
Lance shifted against him, uncomfortable, but he lacked the strength to move. "Sam..." A pained whisper.
"No. Listen." Sam pressed Lance's head to his shoulder. Ducked his head to hide his face against his hair. Squeezed his eyes shut and whispered only for him. "You did all you could, sweetheart. I'm very, very proud of you. Your team will be too, as soon as they learn what you've done, how incredibly strong and brave and heroic you've been all this time. You did all you could, and no one can ask more of you. No one. But this is enough. It's enough, pumpkin. I don't want you to find out what the worst is. I don't want you to go back to that druid tomorrow. I don't want them to beat you again. I don't want you to have to be strong, not anymore.
"So undo it. Whatever you did to try to block your bond with Blue. Undo it. Call for her. Scream if you can. Get her here, no matter what it takes. It doesn't matter if this place is a trap, if this whole planet is nothing but weapons and enemies all waiting in ambush. Your lion and your team will tear through all of it to get to you. I have faith in them, and I know you do too. Stop trying to protect them, stop trying to protect me, stop trying to protect everyone around you, and please, please, please, sweet child, let yourself be protected instead."
"Sam." Lance's voice was high and thin with distress. It was closer to a wail than a word. He shook harder and curled up tighter into Sam's chest as if he was trying to hide there. "Don't...don't ask me that..."
"I'm sorry, son. I'm sorry, sunshine." Tears pushed at Sam's eyes, that awful, aching pressure like a headache that wouldn't go away. He had been sitting with his legs straight out from his body, Lance sitting in his lap with most of his weight on Sam's right thigh. Now, Sam got the soles of his feet against the floor and raised his knees, bending forward over Lance to fold his body around the boy in a flimsy little pocket of protection. It didn't work very well, with how lanky Lance was and how average Sam was, but he did his best. He wished the kid was smaller or he was larger, so he could cradle him better.
Sam caught his breath. "I'm sorry to ask this of you, sunshine, but I can't help it. I can't watch you being hurt like this anymore. We have to end it. Please. I'm begging you. Please."
"I can't!" Lance sobbed, now. For the first time. His back was bowed and trembling, and his battered hand, circled with weeping sores around his wrist, clenched in the fabric over Sam's stomach. "I can't, Sam, I can't... I can't be that. I can't be the reason..."
"What, Lance?" Sam asked in as soothing a voice as he could muster, sweeping his hand continually through Lance's hair. "You can't be the reason that what?"
"I can't be the...the r-reason...that someone else gets hurt, that any of my team...gets hurt..."
Ah, of course. Sam's heart felt like it was being squeezed in a giant fist. "I'm sorry," he said again. It was pushed out on a gasp. "It's selfish of me to ask this, sweetheart. Pure selfishness, because I can't stand to see you suffering like this anymore. But please...try to imagine it from their perspective."
Lance sniffled against his chest but lay still, listening.
Sam blinked, trying to gather his thoughts. Black spots winked in and out in his vision. He was having trouble breathing, but he had to get this out. "What if...what if it was someone else here? One of your teammates, here in this prison, in Berav'iv, while you were safe at the Castle of Lions?"
Lance made a pained noise and stiffened against him. Sam cooed sympathetically and petted his hair. "I know, honey, I know it's hard to think about. But please try. What if... What if it was Hunk? Your best friend? Or..." He could barely stand to contemplate this himself. He forced it out anyway. "What if it was Katie? Pidge?"
Lance's shaking hand pulled at the front of his shirt, hard. If he'd had any strength left, he might have torn the tough, prison-grade material. Sam huffed out a breath and kept caressing his head. "I know. I know, sunshine. It's horrible. But if you were safe, and your teammate was in prison, being tortured. If you knew it was a trap, and all of hell was waiting to devour you. When the signal came, would you still go?"
He already knew the answer. Lance did too. He made a high, unbelieving noise, both agonized at the scenario and indignant with Sam for talking him into this corner. Sam released a breathless chuckle, more in relief than humor, and held him a little tighter.
"I'm sorry, sunshine," he apologized again, because someone needed to apologize to this boy. Someone needed to apologize until they were blue in the face. "I'm sorry I made you think about that. But do you understand, now? Why I ask you to do this? Why your team would want you to?"
Lance breathed harshly for a few moments, in and out. Then he nodded into Sam's chest, still tense and upset, but acknowledging the truth. His voice was harsh, too. "Yes."
"Okay." Sam blew out a breath and pressed his palm against the side of his head. "Good."
"That was cruel." Lance's tears wet his neck, and Sam's heart stuttered in both agony and tenderness.
"I know," he whispered. "I know, sunshine. That was cruel of me. But I'm glad you understand."
Lance heaved another breath, then relaxed against him, giving in. "When they take me back to the druid, I'll call for Blue."
"And she'll come," Sam said. Confidence sparked in every cell in his body. Lance had convinced him of this over the weeks. He knew without question, without doubt, that Lance's people would come for him.
But the next day, they didn't take him back to the druid. They broke his legs.