Life in the Castle of Lions isn't so different from being at the Garrison, Pidge decides. Sure, magic lions and giant robots and evil alien empires are a big step up from piloting a simulator and boring lectures, but some things stay the same; namely, Lance.
He's a great asset to the team, but only if you can keep him focused. He'll be deep in some fantasy scenario where he saves the day and wins ladies' hearts and a Galra fighter will dive at him before he notices. Sometimes he'll be too busy bragging to notice a sentry and one of them has to yank him out of danger. All too often Pidge finds herself and Hunk yelling at him to pay attention.
Most of the time, Pidge feels like she's babysitting.
"Lance!" she snaps, hearing the stress seep into her voice and echo through the comms. "Get moving! You're sitting ducks out there–"
"Okay, okay!" Lance yelps over the sound of laser fire and clanging metal. Keith's with him today.
Plugged into a Galra terminal, Pidge watches the enemy forces vanish from the map until only two colored dots remain in the area. She lets out the breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
"Area cleared," Keith reports. "We're okay, Pidge. Heading back to the rendezvous point."
"Geez, Keith, I had that guy–" Lance complains before the comms shut off, and Pidge suspects Keith must feel a little like he's babysitting, too.
Sometimes, though, Lance surprises her.
Shiro's started drilling them on weapons, just in case something happens to their bayards. He tells them they should be able to pick up anything they find in the field and know how to use it properly. He stresses the "properly" part, looking directly at Princess Allura. She ends up joining them for training, no explanations offered.
Keith and Allura can handle just about anything. Hunk discovers he's fairly decent with a staff, and it turns out that Pidge has a good eye for throwing knives. But Lance beats them all at ranged target practice. Only Allura comes close to besting his score. Keith trails behind him by a wide margin.
"Ah, could we have a sharpshooter on the team?" Coran says with enthusiasm, watching from the sidelines.
"There might be something there," Shiro says appreciatively.
But Lance doesn't notice the compliment. He's too busy crowing about beating Keith, who is rapidly losing his patience.
Their next mission, Lance takes off to a high spot, claiming he needs a better vantage point. Pidge doesn't like it. She can't see him. The comms are quieter than usual.
She thinks about hijacking a drone just to send up to check on him when a sentry falls in front of her, electricity crackling from its useless shell. She realizes Lance shot it down before she even noticed it coming towards her. That's never happened before.
"Nice one, bro!" Hunk says, flashing a quick thumbs up.
Pidge decides she doesn't have anything to add. She doesn't want to seem too sentimental.
They make quick work of the other sentries and finish the job. But Pidge keeps replaying the mental image of the robot collapsing at her feet, trying to make sense of it, even as they head back to the Lions.
She must look upset because Lance nudges her with his elbow. "Fighting really stresses you out, huh?"
Pidge considers the question. She doesn't mind fighting. She's surprisingly good at it. She doesn't like seeing the people she cares about in danger, but it's their duty as Paladins to constantly put themselves in danger. It's a conundrum.
Lance doesn't wait for her to answer.
"You're always looking out for all of us. Try to relax a little." He winks and hoists his bayard higher, striking a ridiculous pose that makes her want to laugh, but she doesn't. "I'll keep an eye on you."
Pidge wakes up to the feeling of leaves pulling away from her mind; a distant rumbling noise, almost like purring; a single word, echoing: Grow.
She balls her hands into fists, glaring at the ceiling. "What does that even mean?"
No one answers.
Whatever nebulous connection Pidge had with Shiro, the only other person there who knew her family, feels weaker than it used to. He's barely talked to her since his return to the Castle, but she can't take it personally because Shiro barely talks to anyone, preferring to keep to himself. If anything, he's started acting like he's their mission commander instead of their friend.
Even talking to Shiro about her plan to track down the rebels who took Matt feels strangely formal, especially once he calls Allura and Coran up to the bridge to review her latest findings with him.
"Well done, Pidge," Allura says, poring over her data with interest, Coran reading over her shoulder. "I had no idea any of these groups existed! What a promising lead."
"It's interesting, but how does this help the Voltron Coalition?" Shiro asks. "I know finding your brother is important to you, but growing the coalition is our top priority right now."
Pidge nods, adjusting her glasses. "So we've been approaching the coalition like we're starting from scratch. But everything I've found indicates this rebellion has been thriving underground for a very long time. They're hard to track down, but I'm confident that when I find my brother, they won't be far behind."
She sends a map of the galaxy to the main screen, highlighting all the planets where anti-Galra activity has been reported. The rebels have a strong presence on the outer edges of the galaxy. If they can join forces, it's a clear tactical advantage.
"Tapping into their resources means we might be able to end this fight much more quickly," Pidge explains. "We've all been looking at Voltron as a lifetime commitment. But if things work out, maybe it doesn't have to be. Maybe we – I mean, the five of us – can go back to Earth. Not soon, but someday."
Then Shiro says something odd. "Sometimes I forget how young you are, Pidge. Of course you'd want to go home."
Pidge flinches. His tone is sympathetic, but the words seem dismissive. Even if she is young, she's a Paladin, just like he is. "Yeah. Anyway. I've still got some leads to look into."
"Please do," Allura murmurs, looking strangely at Shiro, who doesn't seem to notice.
"Let us know what you find!" Coran adds brightly. "I'm certainly not opposed to moving up our timeline."
Heading out from the bridge, Pidge ends up behind Lance in the hallway. Right on cue, her heart rate increases. Lance is totally zoned out, hands jammed in his jacket pockets as he walks.
Pidge assesses the distance, then takes a running leap and yanks his hood up to jam it over his eyes. "Gotcha!"
Lance squawks indignantly, arms windmilling in an attempt to catch his assailant, but she dodges out of reach. The look on his face when he finally shakes the hood off and spots her makes the effort totally worth it.
She smirks. "Hey, goofball."
Lance pulls a long face. "I wish you guys saw me as something a little bit cooler," he grumbles, unsuccessfully trying to smooth his hair back down.
"What, like a ninja?" Pidge teases.
"Well, yeah," he says. He gives up on his hair. "I'd rather be a ninja than me."
"… why?"
Lance looks as if he's about to give a serious answer, but then he deflects. "You've never wanted to be someone else, Gunderson?" he says pointedly, eyes narrowed.
Pidge grimaces. "That's different."
"Mm-hmm," he hums skeptically. "Well, while you're here, I've been stuck in this one dungeon for literally days. Wanna help me out?"
"Sure, I've got time." She shrugs and follows him back to his room.
Though inelegant, the solution she'd devised for the Mercury GameFlux 2 is functional, and that's what counts. Lance had offered to store the bulky system in his room and invited them to stop by and play whenever they felt like it. ("My casa, your casa," he'd said generously, to which Hunk had pointed out it was actually Allura's casa and Pidge had added it was actually her game too, at which point a bewildered Allura asked what a casa was and why she needed one and they'd gotten way off track.)
They sit on his floor, legs crossed. Waiting for Killbot Phantasm to load gives Pidge plenty of time to observe that Lance is being unusually quiet. She may not be very good at reading people, but she knows Lance well enough to see that something is bothering him. Unfortunately, she doesn't know him well enough to have any idea what it is.
Pidge ends up talking more than usual to make up for his uncharacteristic reticence as she guides him through the dungeon map, trying to remember the walkthrough she'd once read.
"You know, this was one of the reasons this game didn't get a perfect review when it first came out," Pidge tells him, watching his avatar try to unblock the secret passage she'd pointed out. "It was undeniably groundbreaking–"
"Wall-breaking is more like it," Lance mutters, button-mashing furiously as he focuses on breaking through the wall.
Pidge grins. "Yeah, that. But it's also counterintuitive, especially since most games back then didn't prompt players to directly interact with the environment. Uncovering hidden sub-levels like this one usually summons a monster–"
"Now you tell me?" His party's being attacked by a flock of giant vampire bats. He'll be fine.
"–which sent mixed messages," Pidge continues. "Players would instinctually avoid the monsters, rather than seeing them as a marker for success, not to mention all the traps disguised as puzzles which were already notoriously challenging to solve. Some reviewers thought the whole thing was just so confusing, it wasn't worth giving it a chance."
Pidge glances at Lance out of the corner of her eye. Monsters aside, he's already gotten through the bulk of this level on his own. Ordinarily that would be cause for gloating, but today it's like someone has put him on mute. She wishes she knew the right thing to say to snap him out of it.
"Hey, it's probably none of my business, but is everything okay, Lance?" she ventures.
He shrugs, without turning his attention from the screen. "Eh, just having an off day. I'll be fine."
Tentatively, Pidge puts a hand on his shoulder. He looks up at her, startled. "Want me to take over?" she offers.
Lance gives her a small smile and passes over the controller. And then he surprises her: "You know, sometimes I wish I were more like you."
Pidge fumbles with the controller, nearly triggering a Game Over by careening into an endless pit of despair, but recovers before he seems to notice.
"I mean, you never seem to get sidetracked by dumb stuff," Lance says. "It's like nothing gets to you. I don't know how you do it."
Pidge has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
"I'm very focused when I have a project?" she says. "Right now, finding my family is the biggest project of my life. While we're busy saving the universe, my dad and brother are still out there. But if I can't find them soon, that might not last much longer." She pauses, the words catching in her throat. "Compared to that, yeah, not much bothers me."
Lance flops onto his back, propping his legs up on one of the Altean capacitors powering the GameFlux. "Okay, so basically you're unflappable because you're preoccupied. Got it."
While true, it sounds kind of bad when he says it like that. "Being preoccupied is good," Pidge grumbles. "It means I don't have time to second guess myself."
He gives her a sidelong look. "What the heck do you have to second guess yourself about, Pidge? I mean, yeah, sometimes your technobabble sounds like total gobbledegook and you know way too much about this game, but you're one of the smartest people I've ever met. You know everything."
Pidge manages to stay focused on the screen as her party fights off another round of monsters, keeping her face neutral. It'd be embarrassing if he saw how much something like that meant to her. Gobbledegook aside.
There are still so many things she doesn't understand. She thinks of the voice she's been hearing in her dreams, telling her to grow.
"Being smart doesn't mean I actually know everything, you know," she says dryly.
The next dungeon looks like a simple puzzle room. Moving stones to hidden panels will activate the switch to open the gate, and all she has to do is find the right stones to move. Pushing one stone triggers cracks in the floor, so it's obviously a trap. The next one seems safe. A few more moves bring her to the end of the puzzle, the final stone locking into place.
The gate to the next level unlocks and raises. She punches the air. Lance whoops in excitement, sitting up so quickly he nearly kicks the capacitor over.
"Level 9!" he hoots, high-fiving her. "We did it!"
"We did it," she echoes, grinning widely.
Allura pulls Keith aside on his way to the training room. "Keith. Can we talk?"
"Sure," Keith says, a little surprised. "What's up, Princess?"
"Do you want to go home?" she asks.
Keith considers the question. "I don't know. Right now, being here feels more like home than Earth ever did. I never really felt like I fit in there." He smiles wryly. "Maybe it was the whole being part alien thing. Who knows."
"Sometimes, I feel out of place here, too," Allura confides. "The Castle is technically my home, but it isn't the same…"
Keith nods, listening. He isn't sure why she's talking to him instead of someone like Shiro, who's actually good at knowing what to say to people, and he has a feeling he may have said too much already. He may not want to go back to his own planet, but at least he could, if he wanted to. Allura's loss is more than he can imagine.
Allura touches the wall of her ship. "I suppose I should be grateful to still have this much," she says, looking around. "War demands sacrifices of us all. Do you think it's juvenile to think about going home when so many cannot?"
"… not really," Keith says. "I think it's normal. But the way I see it, home doesn't always mean going back to the place you come from. Sometimes, home just means being with the people you're close to."
"I see. Thank you. I appreciate your input," Allura says. She smiles at him, but her smile doesn't quite reach her eyes. His gut tells him that something has her worried about them leaving, specifically. It's really none of his business. If she wanted him to know more, she'd have told him.
"If we do go back to Earth someday, I hope you'll come with us," Keith finds himself saying. "It wouldn't feel like home without you."
He excuses himself abruptly, continuing towards the training room.
