Lance hopped in the passenger seat and shut the door, nodding without looking over for Keith to hit the gas.

The truck lumbered forward for a few paces before gradually picking up momentum.

"Everything go okay?" Keith asked, his voice quiet and inquisitive but not too inquisitive. He'd wanted Lance to wear an earpiece. Lance had rejected his call on the grounds of not wanting to alert the federal government that he was working with anyone if things went south, but in reality, Lance just didn't want Keith to hear him slowly going insane if, in fact, he truly was going insane and had just tried to kill a completely innocent Federal agent. Thankfully things hadn't worked out that way.

"Routine," Lance said, still refusing to look over.

"And the fed?" Keith pried, which was a bit out of character for him and that told Lance something. That maybe Keith doubted him, doubted his version of the truth. Or maybe he was worried. Neither option was ideal.

"Taken care of."

"...Is he dead?" Keith asked, which was just a nicer way of asking Did you kill him? And that was equally odd for Keith, to go out of his way euphemism-hunting.

Lance still couldn't look over. He wasn't sure if Keith was disappointed in him. He knew the look because he'd seen it a thousand times. Less within the past few years, but more than enough when Voltron had been starting out and Lance had felt like he could only make mistakes, especially in the eyes of the all-perfect pilot Keith Kogane.

"He gave up a name, and then I killed him," Lance summed up succinctly, and Keith didn't say anything, just hummed to himself and kept driving, but the questions stopped, and Lance let himself relax a fraction of an inch and stared out the window as the night flew by in a series of guardrails glinting under the headlights and hills rising and falling under their beams. "Where are we going?" Lance asked after a few minutes, finally looking over at Keith, but now it was Keith's turned to stare straight ahead.

"It was too risky to head back into town. Did you know they've got you on the news now? Running all the time. Can't risk a positive ID." Keith nodded at the inky sky spread out through the windshield. "There's a safe house not far from here. Figured we'd crash for the night, stock up on whatever we need, and then track down your new mystery man."

Lance nodded, looking back out his window. "Sounds like a plan," he said, but the words felt hollow to him. Even killing the federal agent from before had felt hollow. He'd killed lots of people, the vast majority of them bad people who'd more than certainly had it coming, but he'd never killed one of his fellow countrymen before.

He'd also never been betrayed by one.

The hollowness was all he'd felt since...since that moment in the kitchen, he supposed, when he'd cradled his dead sister and dead nephew in his lap and wept at his inability to protect them, to shield them, to do his damn job and keep them safe and–

"Shit," Lance snapped driving the base of his left palm into his forehead as though he could remold the shape of his skill with enough brute force.

"What's wrong?" Keith asked immediately, looking over, eyes alert.

"Just a- fuck- it's this headache that won't fucking go away," Lance ground out, biting down hard with his teeth and trying to massage his knuckles against his temple.

"Hold tight, we're almost there," Keith said, and the engine gave a roar as he pressed down harder on the gas.

"Just a headache," Lance said, still massaging at his forehead and trying to ignore the small voice in the back of his head that told him he was weak, that he was letting himself get pushed around by a mere migraine. "Shut up," Lance snapped, thumping his fist again the armrest adjacent to the door.

"I didn't say anything," Keith replied, a note of wariness in his voice, and Lance shook his head.

"Not you. Just- forget it."

The car was silent for the remaining ten minutes of the drive as Lance fought off a headache and Keith stared off into the night, one elbow resting on the console and his left hand propped up on the wheel. They only passed two other cards, and at one point Keith spotted a deer out in front of the road and he slowed down, giving it a wide berth as he curved around it and continued on their way.

He pulled the truck to a stop in front of a cabin that had surely seen better days. It was less of a cabin and more of a wide shack. A few rusted cans littered the gravel driveway, and despite the darkness of the night, Lance could just make out a second structure closer to the water that likely housed a small boat or equipment of some sort.

Keith pulled the keys out of the ignition and hopped down from the truck. He kicked a few of the cans until he heard a small jangling sound, and he crouched down to pick up the can and shake out a key.

"That's some security system you've got there," Lance said as he stepped down from the truck and shut the passenger door.

"It does the trick," Keith said with a shrug, dropping the can back down, and it clanked and rolled against the gravel before coming to a stop. "Nobody comes out this way anyway. I don't know why Shiro bothers locking it at all."

"This place is Shiro's?" Lance asked in surprise. He walked over to Keith, who had slid the key in the lock and was jamming the door knob up and down until the lock mechanism released and the door opened up with a loud screech.

"It's a fishing cabin he inherited from his grandfather or uncle or something," Keith said, shutting the door behind them. Then he walked a few paces to what looked to the dingiest kitchen Lance had ever seen and dragged a wooden chair that screamed "splinter fest" over to the door and jammed it under the knob before turning back to Lance. "You still got that headache?"

Lance winced as another violent throbbing pounded through his skull, and he put a hand out against the wall to ground himself.

"Give me a minute," Keith said, bounding toward the kitchen – which was really just an archaic stove, a slanted counter-top, and a plastic card table covered in a dirty sheet of gingham. Keith rifled through the drawers, sending plastic silverware scattering, and concluded his search after opening a cupboard that released a spider the side of Lance's thumb which immediately scurried toward a dark corner.

"Here," Keith said, starting to hand a bottle of pain pills over to Lance before second-guessing himself and pulling the bottle back, twisting it around as he searched for an expiration date. "Okay, so they're expired, but only by a year or two so–"

Lance grabbed the pill bottle from him, twisted off the cap, and took three.

"All righty then," Keith said, one eyebrow raised but offering no further comment. "One of the other charming features of this place is that there's only one bed and it's a twin, so."

"So, big spoon or little spoon?"

--

Lance laid on the couch with his arms crossed behind his head, his legs trailing off the end by at least a foot and his eyes boring into the ceiling. Compared to some of the places he'd slept, this was relatively comfortable. He had a cushion instead of rocks and crickets instead of distant gunfire. But there was no one waiting for him to come home this time.

Home. Funny how he'd started thinking of his own country as enemy soil. He wasn't sure that he had a home anymore. He hadn't really had one since setting foot in an alien lion, but this was...different. Back then, home hadn't been a physical place for him, it had been a group of people. And when he'd come back to Earth, sure, the Voltron crew had split their separate ways, but he'd found home in Veronica and Raphael.

That was gone now, and he couldn't get it back.

Lance rolled onto his stomach and pulled his phone out from his pocket. If he wasn't going to sleep, he could at least get to work. He entered a password before selecting the Clock app and pressing a small button off to the side that let him manually adjust the time. He slid the hour and minute hands around the circle until the time was set to 6:37. Then he clicked to add a new world clock and entered BabyBlue as the location. The searching icon appeared, buffered, and then the phone went black for a second before restarting, this time loading up the secret view on Lance's phone that held all his military-grade digital tools and apps.

He opened up one that had an icon of a carrot and created a new conversation. He typed in an ID he'd memorized and sent one word over the encrypted communication tunnel:

pidgeon

Lance was ready to switch over to a browser and start on some research, but Pidge began typing back almost immediately. The way this particular communication platform worked, only Lance could initiate conversations, and once he closed them out, the entire session was deleted and no one could send any further communication until he started a new session.

lance! finally!

can I call? he typed back. Even though the platform was secure, he didn't want to leave a message trace, and there was simply too much to say. He also knew that Pidge would get pissed at him if he called without asking, and when asking for her help, he found it useful to avoid pissing her off.

green for go

Lance pressed a button to switch over to voice, and he held the phone up to his ear. His eyes flicked toward the bedroom door, but he hadn't heard anything from Keith's direction yet, and he hoped that meant he was sleeping.

"Lance!" Pidge shouted into the line, and Lance pulled the phone away from his ear with a wince. Normally, he'd laugh with her and they'd trade a few jokes, but Lance couldn't tap into that energy at the moment. "Oh my gosh, you had me so worried, I started seeing you on the news and I couldn't get ahold of you and–"

"I'm with a friend," Lance said, keeping his voice quiet. He honestly didn't think Keith was asleep at all, and chances were that with his enhanced biology he could probably hear the conversation, but Lance didn't particularly care. He had nothing to hide from Keith. It was probably best to avoid mentioning him by name though.

"Ah, yes, I assumed that much when you both dropped off the radar around the same time," Pidge said, and there was a clinking of metals in the background as something she'd been tinkering with fell off the table and rolled away. "Are you okay?" she paused before realizing that it wasn't the best question. "I mean, I saw...I heard about Veronica and Raphael...Lance, I'm so sorry."

"Yeah," he said, switching from lying on his stomach to sitting up straight with his back against the couch. With his feet planted on the ground, he felt ready to get up and take action, even if he hadn't slept in at least two days.

"Really, Lance," Pidge said, her voice soft. She'd been over to visit Lance once or twice on the rare occasion that she'd been able to pry herself away from her research. She'd met Veronica on numerous occasions. She'd played with Raphael. Raphael had drawn a picture of Pidge in her lab coat. It was hanging next to her workbench, probably not two feet away from her this very moment. "I...I can't...I don't have the words, but...when I heard the news, I..." She swallowed, the sound audible over the line, and there was the rustling of paper. Perhaps she'd turned Raphael's drawing over so it wasn't staring back at her, or maybe she'd pulled it closer to let her eyes trace over every line.

She cleared her throat. "And then I saw that they were trying to pin it on you and that is obviously the farthest possible thing from the truth, like are they really that stupid? Absolute fucking morons, you helped save Earth, not to mention the entire fucking universe, and you come home to keep saving people and then they try to pin this on you?"

"Just another military guy that came home and snapped," Lance parroted hollowly, recalling the way some of the news stations had tried to spin it. He hadn't checked the news feed in several hours. He wondered what new narratives they were spinning up now.

"I can't believe how wrong they are on this. Like, your Commander isn't even backing you up. Although to be honest, Iverson was always a son of a bitch."

"Something's going on, Pidge," Lance said, and the piece of paper burned in his pocket. "This goes farther up than any one of us knows. I'm going to uncover the whole thing, and then I'm going to destroy it."

Pidge was quiet for a moment. Perhaps the bloodlust in his voice had scared her off. She'd always been a bit more hands-off, both with Voltron and even now as she tinkered with projects for the Department of Defense. Pidge made gadgets and trinkets and tools and toys. She didn't kill people. She just enabled others to kill people, and more efficiently at that. But Lance didn't have her scientific mindset. For him to be of use and of value, he'd had to get his hands dirty, and he'd never stopped.

Despite her clear discomfort, Pidge cleared her voice and tucked the misgiving away. "How did this start, Lance? And who all do you know to be involved as of right now?"

Lance gave her a quick recap of Griffin's supposed suicide and of the incident at the medical clinic, but he stopped short of going farther, of recounting how he'd entered the door of his own house to find Veronica and Raphael – his home – murdered, bleeding out, eyes unstaring–

"It's okay, Lance," Pidge said after he'd fallen silent for a period of time. "You don't...you don't have to relive that again, not for me, okay? I...saw the news, and I got ahold of the police report, so I already know most of what happened..." She trailed off for a moment before hurriedly continuing. "But I'll follow up on the medical clinic, see if they made any progress there. And...you said there were guys that attacked you at the medical clinic, right? But then...they just sort of vanished? I mean, I can look into it and I'm not saying that I doubt you or anything, just..."

Lance blinked hard, forcing his mind to shut out the blood, all the blood, and get back on track. "I have one more name for you – Emilio Perrello."

"Emilio Perrello? Who's that?"

"Don't know just yet. Was hoping you could look into him if you've got the time. But he's connected to this somehow."

"How'd you find out about him?"

"Got his name from the fed who was working Griffin's case and the clinic incident. He was on the take, and this guy was the one paying him off."

There was a quick inhale on the other end of the line. "Agent Pelios?" she asked quickly. "Lance, he was found within the past hour, dead in his apartment, bullet hole in the center of his forehead, the work of a professional. I think whoever was above him – Emilio, or whoever – took him out before he could talk."

Lance didn't say anything, and he could hear the gears in Pidge's head as they started turning, eventually reaching the only conclusion she could draw from his silence.

"Lance? You...you didn't...kill him, right?" Pidge, to her credit, didn't sound scared, just shaken and a bit disappointed. "I mean...you weren't even sure he was involved, not until...Lance, how did you even verify that he was involved? Did Ke- ... did your friend confirm?"

"He's part of this, Pidge," Lance reminded her coldly. "I told you. I'm pulling the rug out from all of it. Anyone who participated in setting up my team to die, in murdering my..." He clenched his jaw. He couldn't avoid saying it forever. He would try, if it would make it untrue, but there was no turning back the wheel of time. "Murdering my family. All of them, every last one."

"Lance," Pidge said quietly. "I know...I know you're angry, and you're hurting, and what was done to your team and...your family...it was wrong, horribly wrong, but..."

"There is no other way for me," Lance responded. "The system is refusing to do its job and mete out justice. If nobody else will do it, then I will and I must. This...this is all I have left, Pidge."

"That's not true," she said, her voice wobbly, and there was a rustling of fabric on her end as she sank down beneath her lab table, legs crossed and pulled against her chest. "Lance, you have me, and Hunk, and Shiro and Coran and...your friend," she whispered. "You have all of us, okay? So- so, you don't have to do this. We'll...we'll figure this out. We'll make things right, and–"

"You can't," Lance interrupted, and his eyes wandered over to the kitchen with its old gingham and rickety chairs. He stared at the floor, and Veronica stared back at him. "Not without spilling more blood or erasing the blood that's already been spilled." And behind her, a smaller figure, one Lance couldn't face, not right now. "See what you can find on Emilio Perrello, and I'll send along what I pulled from Pelios' hard drive in case there's any info there. I'll call you tomorrow."

He hung up.

--

"Someone slept in," Lance said pointedly as Keith peeked his head out the bedroom door at 6:00 AM.

"I didn't want to wake you," Keith said with a slight huff. "Besides, I still got up at 4, I just had to lay and stare at the ceiling until now."

"That makes two of us," Lance said. After talking with Pidge, he'd laid back down and stared at the ceiling for a bit, then turned over and stared at the ground for a bit and repeated until the night had worn away. It wasn't that the couch wasn't comfy enough (although there was one particular spring intent on piercing his side no matter how he rotated). It was just that he couldn't sleep, plain and simple. There was too much to do. Too much to mourn.

Too much to avenge.

Keith nodded to himself, quiet for a moment before looking up. "Want to go on a run?"

--

When they'd been in Voltron, Keith had had the advantage over Lance in...well, pretty much everything except sniping. And it wasn't that Keith had gotten worse; if anything, his missions with the Blade had made him even more formidable. But Lance had been training too.

He stood at the cabin, arms crossed over his chest as he took in several deep breaths and started laughing when he saw Keith rounding the tree line. Keith's expression immediately soured, but he still finished out the lap, coming to a stop a few feet from Lance and giving himself a chance to catch his breath.

"You...got faster," he said between breaths, and Lance shrugged. "Or your legs got...longer, and they're already too fucking long. It's unfair."

"Unfair, coming from a biologically superior half-Galra specimen?" Lance asked with a snort. "And it's not that my legs got longer, it's just that I never had a chance to use them with Voltron. Not much purpose to running around when I was just going to be sniping from a distance."

Keith looked up at him, mouth half-open with a question that he abruptly decided not to ask.

"What?" Lance pressed. "Whatever it is, just say it."

"Did you like working with Alpha Platoon better than Voltron?"

That wasn't at all what Lance had expected him to ask, and he took a moment to think, rubbing at the back of his neck. "I...they're kind of too different to really compare like that, so–"

"Voltron was always holding you back," Keith said, his voice quiet and his breath already fully regained thanks to his half-Galran set of lungs. "But with Alpha Platoon, all your talents could be properly utilized and you weren't trapped in someone else's shadow."

In my shadow. Lance heard Keith's unspoken words. It was why he'd left Voltron for a period of time, after all. To let Lance escape from his shadow, if only for a little bit. "What about you and the Blades?" Lance asked back instead, and Keith's eyes widened almost imperceptibly.

"That's...different."

Lance just gave a small nod and stretched out his arms, turning back to the cabin. "Ready to track down our new friend?"

Keith said nothing but padded after him.

--

Lance repeated the same process from last night and logged into his encrypted communication platform, once again starting up a new session with Pidge.

any info on the name I gave you?

Once again, only a few seconds had passed before Pidge started typing, then stopped, then started typing again.

call me

Lance raised an eyebrow and looked up at Keith before calling Pidge and putting it on speakerphone.

"Lance," Pidge said, sounding more worn out than normal, and Lance felt a bit guilty about asking her for such a quick turnaround on the information, but he couldn't go after the target without her help. Every second he wasted was time his enemies could be destroying evidence or cleaning up shop.

"Hey Pidgeon," Lance said, looking up at Keith. "You've got both of us, I've got you on speaker."

"Hey, kiddo," Keith said, a rare smile gracing his lips.

"Hey, Keith," Pidge said, immediately abandoning the whole 'your friend' pretense in favor of greeting him directly. She already sounded a bit less tired at mention of his presence, but Keith was just like that. He'd been all hot and fiery in his youth, but his time with the Blade had stabilized him, and his time with the Black Lion had made him a leader. "Where are you guys holed away at, anyway?"

"You know I can't tell you," Keith said, "And yes, I'm fully aware that you could figure it out with some tech magic, but for your own safety, Pidge, please don't."

Pidge sighed heavily. "I know, I know. But...I want to help."

"You already are," Lance said. "What did you dig up on Emilio Perrello?"

"Plenty." Pidge cleared her throat. "He works for some shady-ass company called Capstone Industries. I don't understand exactly what they do, but they're a private sector company that seems to offer services to the military and other private interest groups. They have their own in-house special ops-esque task force, and there's a lot of activity from their company around buying up patents. Emilio Perrello is the Vice President, recently promoted, and he reports up to a guy named Simon Thorn."

"And how exactly are they tied to what happened?" Lance asked.

There was the soft rustling of papers and Pidge flipped through research. "That's the thing, there's some pretty high-level clearance required to access the records I need. Not saying I can't do it," Pidge added with a bit of challenge in her voice, "just that it will take time. All I know at this particular moment in time is that they partnered with our military on some sort of pharmaceutical venture. But I need to dig deeper and figure out what exactly they were selling and what it does."

"All right," Lance said, clenching the hand that wasn't holding the phone into a fist. "You work your way, I'll work mine. Where can I find Emilio Perrello?"

Pidge hesitated for a moment. "He's got a rental property down in Florida. From some of the documents I was able to pull, it looks like Capstone Industries is close to a deal with some company called Nubellum Pharmaceuticals. Emilio is supposed to be hosting some party to seal the deal. I'll send you the address."

Lance looked back down at the chat, read Pidge's new message, and committed the address to memory. "Got it."

"And, Lance..." Pidge started, her voice uncharacteristically hesitant. She was no longer talking as a researcher and a scientist but as a friend. "There's...something I need to tell you."

"Okay?" Lance asked, looking up at Keith with a furrowed brow. "What is it?"

There was a long pause from the other end before Pidge sighed. "I'll...tell you later, okay? ... Bye Lance, Keith."

"Bye Pidgeon, and thanks," Lance said before hanging up. The chat message with the address, as long as their previous messages, disappeared.

When he looked up, Keith was watching him with an expectant expression.

"How do you feel about the Sunshine State?" Lance asked, and in response, Keith just swung his keys around his index finger.

"The only thing I'm waiting on is you, princess."

"That's not what you said after our run this morning," Lance responded offhandedly as he got up. He kept his eyes from sliding too far left where Raphael was watching him from beneath the kitchen table. He followed Keith to the door, hesitating when he passed Raphael, and slipped the bottle of pain relievers into his pocket. He hated relying on drugs to fix his own weakness, but he couldn't afford the distraction if his headache came back. He couldn't afford to be at anything but his best.

--

published 09/26/22 (mm/dd/yy)

4346 words