A/N:

The team doesn't even know if Lance is alive, but there might be other answers they're too scared to get, too. Blue is in mourning, but is it over her Paladin? The team is falling apart, and they'll have to hear some things they don't want to in order to fix what's broken.

The team tries to hold themselves together with Lance gone.


The ultimate irony was that the team needed Lance in order to hold themselves together long enough to find him. Hunk had always appreciated Lance's support through the hardest times in his life, but he didn't think he'd ever appreciated Lance so much before. Now that he was hunched into a ball in a full-blown panic attack, he definitely appreciated Lance's absence.

Coran had found him like this, but the Altean was gone to fetch the other paladins. He was alone. Lance had never left him alone like this. When he'd started to feel anxious, he'd immediately wanted to go to the Blue Paladin. Lance had always been good at talking him down from a panic attack or talking him through it if it couldn't be avoided. But he couldn't talk Hunk through the fact it was his absence causing this.

It was that fact that had set Hunk over the edge into his meltdown, and he'd crumpled on the floor. He couldn't remember if he'd ever gone through something like this without Lance's voice counting a soothing rhythm for his breath when he was hyperventilating. Or asking him to explain what exactly was going through his head that was bringing him to the point. Or giving him assurances as he patted Hunk's back or fetched a glass of water. And how had he missed that it was Lance? It wasn't the support or comforting words that he needed to get him through something like this. It was the fact that Lance was always there; he always knew what to say. It was Lance.

"Hunk, buddy?" He registered that someone was talking to him, but it wasn't the voice that he needed to hear. "What's going on?" Shiro looked so concerned. Coran must have warned him that he hadn't been able to get through to the Yellow Paladin, but Hunk didn't have the emotional capacity to feel guilty about scaring the Altean so badly. He barely even registered Pidge and Keith watching anxiously behind their leader. "What's wrong?"

Hunk could barely breath let alone speak. He might be close to passing out if he didn't slow down his breathing soon, but he did his best to get a word out through his gasping. "L-la-Lance."

Shiro's eye softened and the worry lines in his brow smoothed out as he understood. "You're worried about Lance?"

Hunk nodded his head, then he shook it. That wasn't quite right. He was worried about Lance, but it was so much more than that.

"Okay, it's okay," Shiro assured him. "Just focus on breathing first then you can tell me. Just breath first. Slowly." The Black Paladin set his breath to a slow pattern for Hunk to follow. It was a pattern the Yellow Paladin was familiar with. It was the same one Lance talked him through each time. When he wasn't close to passing out, and he could finally gasp out what he needed to, Hunk ran his hands across his face.

"Lance," he gasped a shaky breath, "Lance alway-" It was still hard to talk, and Lance would usually shush him and tell him to wait until he was ready before trying to explain. But Lance wasn't here. "Helped me through this," he finally finished.

Shiro frowned. "He did?" When Hunk nodded in reply, the worry lines creased his forehead again. "Do you… Does this happen a lot?" It wasn't a lot, but Hunk didn't want to lie to the team, so he shrugged his shoulders. "Lance never told me anything was wrong."

"He promised-he promised not to… say anything." Hunk was doing his best to hiccup through his sentences.

"Yeah, he didn't. And…" Shiro hesitated with shaky hand across his mouth, "for me too."

Hunk rested his forehead against the cool floor. Of course. Shiro hadn't sounded like Lance comforting him; he'd been repeating him.

"You sounded like him," he admitted to the floor.

Shiro's voice was soft and brittle. "He talked me through some… some bad nightmares." Hunk nodded as he rolled onto his back. He wasn't ready to sit up yet.

"He used to do that for his sister."

"That's what he said."

The Black Paladin's shoulders were curled in tighter than Hunk had ever seen. His eyes had a dark and haunted look, and Hunk knew he didn't know how to do this without Lance either. He didn't even know Lance had been helping Shiro sleep at night. What were they going to do without him?

"What's going on?" Pidge asked as she stepped forward to check on them both. The bags under her eyes were as dark as Shiro's, and if Hunk was in any kind of position to scold her to take better care of herself, he would.

"We just miss Lance," he said offhandedly. It was a lie. Lance had always told him to be honest with how bad his anxiety would be, that the team would understand. He'd known about Shiro, so clearly, he'd known more than he said. So Hunk quietly admitted, "He always helped me through my panic attacks."

"Oh." Pidge blinked as she processed it. "I guess that makes sense," she sat down beside the two other Paladins, "but we are doing everything to try and find him."

"It doesn't feel like it," Hunk complained. "It doesn't feel we're even holding it together."

"Hey, speak for yourself," Pidge snapped defensively. "I've been pouring over every bit of data we've gotten to find him." To find him. Neither of them would acknowledge that they didn't even know if the Blue Paladin was alive. Hunk couldn't handle that possibility right now. He would break down all over again.

"Pidge, you look like you haven't gotten any sleep," Shiro scolded.

"I'm working," she defended. Her expression was hard, but Hunk could see the second something important crossed her mind. Her face crumpled. "I have nightmares too." Shiro, always the protector, immediately pulled her small frame into a hug. Hunk wearily sat up and watched the smallest Paladin. "I keep just seeing that stupid footage, and I can't stop seeing it and hate that we watched the stupid footage," she rambled. "Why did it have to keep going?" Hunk had found that hard too.

They'd all gathered into Black to watch the cockpit footage from Blue from the battle they'd lost Lance in. When Black had started the video, it had showed a concentrated Lance. The video had gone from him shooting down ships, through the battle, and all the way through his trip to the battleship. But it hadn't stopped after his final words to Blue or after he'd ejected from the pilot's seat as if that hadn't been enough. Instead, Black had played the footage of Blue's empty cockpit as she drifted through space. And it played what they were saying about the battle. And about Lance.

"I keep just reliving it and reliving it, and it won't stop," Pidge gasped. "Did he hear that? Did he hate us? Why didn't we trust him? What if what I said was the last thing he…" She couldn't finish her last question and Hunk was grateful. He had to believe Lance was still out there and believing in them. If this is what the team was like with Lance gone… Keith was still standing awkwardly a step away from the group with the stiff boot Coran had insisted the Red Paladin wear after catching him icing his ankle after a 2am training session gone wrong; Pidge curled into Shiro's side with a haunted look in her glazed eyes; their leader was brought down to the floor with his guilt which was something they hadn't even seen after Matt and Pidge's father; and Hunk still wasn't recovered from his anxiety attack, and he knew it wouldn't be the only one about this.

They wouldn't be able to hold it together if Lance was gone for good, if they'd lost him in that last battle. All that was holding Hunk together at this point was the fact that Lance needed them to work together and find him. If he lost that drive, that hope, he didn't think he would be the only one unable to face that possibility.


Shiro knew he'd been asking for punishment. He knew deep inside it would only cut him deeper than he already was. It was going to be almost impossible to recover from all of the emotional torture he'd experienced, and he was only piling on the scarring on his heart until maybe it wouldn't work anymore. If he had PTSD before, what would he be like when they finally came out of the end of this? The idea that he couldn't stop the rest of the younger paladins from experiencing the same thing crushed him. The idea that one of them had maybe been suffering more than he realized made that pain a physical weight that made it hard to breathe.

It had all started with Allura. Shiro thought she was probably suffering as much as the rest of them, and he hadn't considered that she was connected to all the lions of Voltron. He hadn't understood how that might be a burden in a time like this until they found the Princess broken down on the bridge. Shiro hadn't seen the Altean Princess look as emotionally destroyed except with the news of her planet and loss of her father. Coran had been trying to comfort her, and he explained as well as he could.

The Princess was connected with all the lions which is how she could find them across space. That's how she could feel the Blue Lion's loss and grief. Allura hadn't thought the bond between the lion and paladin had grown that close in the time since Lance had found her in the cave back on Earth, so she had gone to the lion. She wanted to know if the Blue Paladin was gone, and if that was why she was mourning. As far as the rest of them knew, she never got an answer to that question. Instead, the Blue Lion had had her look for something to better understand the loss of the boy who piloted her. Shiro wasn't sure how that had brought her to the bridge and the castle's security system, but it had showed her what she'd never known she'd had. The footage showed her wandering the halls, asleep, that had once held everyone she'd known or going to the room with the lost memories of her father and time after time, the Blue Paladin would find her and bring her back. He would pull her from the memories that haunted her and tuck her in with a glass of water. She'd always assumed when she woke up that anything Lance had left behind had been Coran's doing, and it was Coran who had to explain all of this to the shell-shocked paladins because the Princess had no words to explain her loss.

It was a loss Shiro could understand. It was waking up cold and alone surrounded by memories you didn't know where haunting you until the person who provided the warmth and comfort that chased them away was gone. Some of the stories Lance had told him danced around in the Black Paladin's head, but now they only haunted him like the dreams and memories they had served to chase away. They were just a biting memory of the boy within them that he had failed.

So, the Black Paladin had gone to his bond. He had gone to his lion. Deep down, he knew it would not comfort him like he wanted. It was the sinking feeling that the worst was yet to come, that they were all waiting on something the lions seemed to know. He had hoped Black would tell him what it was, why Blue wouldn't tell them if Lance was alive, or what the burn through the bond really was. It was a burn Shiro couldn't trace back to a start; he only knew he had noticed it when they didn't know what Lance was doing and tried to locate him to help in the final fight.

Instead of answering, Black had showed him another video. This time instead of being something Blue had recorded, it was something Black had seen. It was Lance comforting the head of Voltron during the loss of his Paladin. Shiro had been choked up. If he hadn't understood the point of what Black showed him when the video started, he did now. It was shameful to realize he hadn't considered how badly the team dynamic would have been destroyed in his absence. And it was mortifying to realize he wouldn't have considered Lance mature enough to consider Black's feelings like he had. Shiro couldn't honestly say he'd thought about all of the things Lance had comforted Black about, and he was Shiro's lion. It was humbling and painful, and he had left Black in resignation. The cockpit had gone dark at the end of the video clip, his lion unwilling to talk. The barrier had been raised when he left.

Shiro understood. There was someone else he had to talk to first, and he didn't know how the team had avoided it this long. They all knew they had unanswered questions, but they had been avoiding them. Shiro just didn't know how much more this was going to scar him.

He'd called the team to the hangar door but had no idea what he was going to say to them.

"Hey, what's going on?" Pidge called before reaching Shiro. She had Hunk in tow with her, and the Yellow Paladin looked nervous at the hangar Shiro had called them to.

Keith came limping down the hall with his boot and a scowl "Why a team meeting? I was trying to talk with Red but her barriers up. She won't let me in." He crossed his arms while his gray eyes flashed his eyes in annoyance. Shiro was used to how the Red Paladin's anger always rose up with his frustration. They'd known each other too long.

"Black too. I'm guessing the lions won't let us in until we talk to her." He opened the door to Blue's hangar.

She sat in stoic imitation of her time on Earth. Shiro understood the feeling of being watched Lance had talked about then. It felt like the Blue Lion was trying to bore a hole through the team with her gaze. Maybe that was just in Shiro's imagination.

No one said anything, and that didn't really surprise Shiro. If he couldn't think of anything to say, and he was the one who brought everyone here, what did he expect the rest of the team to do. There was a reason they had all avoided this place, and he was the one asking to bring it all to the top now. That terrified him, so he had no idea what everyone else was thinking.

"Hey Blue," he called out tentatively. "I was just talking to the Black Lion." She didn't move; no one moved. "I know that Lance tried to comfort Black while I was gone, and…" He wanted to glance back at the team for support but the idea of facing them scared him more than going on alone. "... and I know it's your bond that would have been why he did that. So, thank you."

If he'd been expecting anything, nothing happened.

"What are we doing here?" Keith demanded.

"I should be trying to find Lance," Pidge also objected. Hunk was silent, and Shiro was worried he was close to bringing on another panic attack in him.

"Allura coming in here made her break down in tears," Keith added. "What do you think's going to happen?"

"What I think," Shiro snapped, "is going to happen? What I think is that we should have come in here to begin with. What I think is that we all have been avoiding this. What I think is that we're scared to find out what Blue is keeping from us." Shiro had circled to the side to glare at the team. "What I think is that we need to know why all the lions are so… so… mad at us."

Blue eyes flickered to life and that rage, that rage that had been burning through the bond silently, that rage that they had all ignore, simmered to life. It was her rage, and all of the lions of Voltron's rage, and their disappointment. This was something the team had ignored in favor of piecing their dynamic back together in hard times. And this was the thing that ended up breaking them apart.

If they'd thought what Blue had shown them at the beginning of this journey back on Earth was overwhelming, they had no idea what was coming. She opened her mouth in a roar that wasn't triumphant but broken. She'd always been the friendliest lion and most open but they hurt her Paladin. Her Paladin who had brought them together and kept them together. So, Blue showed the team what they needed to see to move forward and understand like she did from the beginning.

The video started with a fresh-faced Lance beaming in the cockpit of his lion.

"Allura says we need to bond with our lions. Shiro mastered that flying lesson, and I don't want to get left behind. So, let's talk!" The Blue Paladin looked so excited. Saving the universe was still something new that he could beat Keith at. His smile changed throughout the videos.

They were shots of Lance sharing his thoughts with Blue in her cockpit; the bags under his eyes slowly growing darker as he admitted to falling behind on his skin care routine. They were clips of Lance trying to talk with Hunk or Pidge in the labs, helping Coran clean the castleship, telling jokes over dinner. They were moments of Lance forcing Pidge to go to bed. Then him checking on her. He had Blue help him track her sleep cycle so he could wake her up before she had nightmares. In the first couple videos, she snapped at him. In the later ones, he ran. They were tapes Lance comforting Hunk or Shiro and promising not to tell the team. There was Lance taping the bruises from a sparring match with Keith. He was rambling to Blue to help ease her worry because it helped Keith calm down. If he wasn't wearing the boot, Shiro would be afraid he'd run. As it was, the red paladin looked like he was going to throw up.

No one looked too good. If they'd been burning with curiosity about what had made Allura cry, they were burning with something much worse now. It wasn't like they had intentionally hurt Lance, Hunk was his best friend and Pidge was his teammate back at the Garrison, but that made the shame worse. Blue played the stories of home Lance told the curious Coran or reminded Hunk of when he was panicking or distracted Shiro with. They were the stories they always teased Lance about his family from, and they were the stories Lance told Blue crushed him to tell. Because he was scared that he wasn't going to make it home to see his family again. He was scared he wouldn't survive space.

The Blue lion wasn't mourning her paladin; all the lions were mourning something bigger. The death of their bond as a team. Because they hadn't noticed the insecurities he admitted Blue or the ways he helped them. They didn't know about his low confidence or waning hope. And they didn't know why he hadn't told them.

"-that's because I would do anything to protect this team…" Lance beamed at his lion through the hazy blue glow of the video.

"I'll be okay. As my mom would say, usually after I got into something that earned a good smack with la chancla, I just need to 'clean up, get some sleep, and start again fresh tomorrow. Everything will look better in a new light.' And of course, so will I." He shot her his signature finger guns with a wink.

They could finally see what they had missed before. His arms were tucked defensively into his sides as he flashed his signature finger guns, and his stiff smile didn't reach his eyes. The confidence was a mask for the hurt uncertainty. Because how could Lance know they good he contributed to the team if they hadn't even seen it themselves?

They didn't even know if they realized that too late.


Despite the team's guilty realization of their lack of understanding Lance, he didn't doubt them. They may have caused him pain, but they hadn't done it intentionally. They may have brushed him off and found him annoying, but he knew they were his team and that they cared about him. He knew he sometimes had his doubts about himself, that he sometimes considered himself the weakest link, but he believed it was only in his head. It was only the dark whisper he'd learned to fight off with a boast and a smile.

They would have told him he was useful and a valuable member of Voltron if he had gotten up the courage and asked. They would have comforted him if he told them he was insecure. They would have taken what he said seriously and without judgement if he'd confessed his problems. He knew they would because they were his friends and together they were Voltron.

At least that's what he tried to convince himself over the silence.

It had been too quiet since he was captured by the Galra, and talking to himself had been something he actively avoided. Because with no one else to talk to, he said the worst things to himself. The things they'd done to him weren't on the same level as the things they'd shown him. His armor had been discarded days and days ago, and he'd already reconciled himself to the scars that would never fade from the skin he'd worked so hard to keep pristine. That was something he would have thought would have been harder to do, but he'd found out a lot about himself and the things he was willing to give up from the Galra.

He would have never been able to imagine the things the Druids could do with their magic. The time he'd been convinced he was back home with his family and everything with Voltron had been a dream had been one of the most painful things. They'd been so satisfied with his tears and wailing after that one, and he'd hated them for it.

He hated them for their threats and their promises. He hated them for how hard it was not to tell them what they wanted to know. And he hated them for the silence. He needed to see the team again, to hear their laughter, and talk to them again. He was tired of arguing with the dark thoughts he was left with, and after a month in captivity, he was starting to believe them.

The team really wasn't coming to save him.


A/N:

Okay everyone, this is the end! I know it was left open and vague, but so was just about everything about this work. I'll probably go back and tweak things through this, but I wanted to get this posted. It's been 90% finished for over a month, and I wanted to just get a draft posted for anyone who's been waiting. Season 3 was released between the posting of Chapter 2 and this one, but my goal was to leave this vague enough that it could fit in after Season 2 without making it's own specific details. I wanted a lot of what was happening to not be set in stone with the details. I mainly just wanted the characters to work through their team dynamic and apparently did that by hurting Lance.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, definitely let me know. This has just been hovering as unfinished for too long. Thank y'all!