"–three days, Keith, he's probably half-dead or dying, we need to–"

"Stay put," Keith growled. "Have faith in Lance. Lance at 50% is better than most people at 100."

"But he's–"

"He told us he would meet us here when he could," Keith said, his voice markedly quieter than before. "Lance isn't a liar."

"But I am half-dead," Lance said as he limped into the hangar with one arm around his cracked ribs, having caught part of their conversation after he'd gotten close enough.

"Lance!" Hunk yelled, getting up and running over to him with open arms before noting his state and retracting them before he could envelope Lance in a hug. Keith got up from his seat slowly, eyes jumping from one injury on Lance to another with an ever-increasing frown. "Lance, I..." Hunk's eyes started tearing up. "I know you told me to arm the explosive, but...you were too close, and I knew it, and you got hurt–"

"I asked you to do it, and I knew the risks," Lance said, clamping a hand on his friend's shoulder. "And I would've been injured worse if you hadn't."

Hunk went quiet for a moment as he worried at his lip. "Lance, I..." He looked into Lance's eyes. "I saw...you were ready to take the shot at the last guard, but you hesitated and pulled back. I...I thought I saw your hand shaking."

Lance stilled for a moment. "I couldn't take the shot," he said quietly, looking down, and his right hand clenched into a fist at his own helplessness. "I was afraid of hitting the woman behind him. But that's a shot I could have made ten times out of ten, a hundred times out of a hundred, and I..."

"They're getting worse," Hunk whispered. "The symptoms."

Lance looked over at Keith with a raised eyebrow, and Keith looked away apologetically before slipping into the other room. Apparently he'd been the one to tell Hunk.

"I thought...I thought you were joking the other day, Lance, and- I'm so sorry," Hunk said, his words wobbly.

And all Lance could do was nod, and even that simple act caused his head to throb and his entire body to feel impossibly heavy. "Lance, please," Hunk begged, tears lining his face, and Lance looked away because he didn't want to see his friend looking at him like that. "You need to get help so you can get better."

Keith returned with Coran just then, so Lance was spared from answering as the Altean man led him over to the table. He patted the metal surface, and Lance hopped up so Coran could start treating his wounds. "Goodness, my boy. You've done quite a number on yourself," Coran said, trying to make his words light, but he couldn't mask the weariness in his eyes.

"You did good, coming back to us," Keith said from the side, and Lance looked over at him. Hiking twenty miles through the wilderness under pursuit would've been no big deal for Keith. Lance had done as much on several missions. But he was losing his touch. He'd almost died, and it all meant nothing if he couldn't see his job through.

"It was too close," Lance responded before grabbing Keith's wrist and forcing him to look over. "I need to talk with you after this," he said, and even though he'd drawn Keith's gaze, he couldn't meet it. "Before..." Before the next name. It was what he'd decided from his conversation with Hunk, that maybe Lance wasn't good enough anymore to carry out his mission.

Because he'd been losing his mind for weeks, but he was starting to lose his body now, too.

Keith just nodded, didn't say anything or ask for specifics, and after extracting Keith's agreement and receiving medical attention, Lance felt that he was finally able to lay back and sleep.

--

"Hey, Pidegon," Lance greeted, and he tried to sound healthy and strong, but he couldn't muster up much strength. He'd slept for twelve straight hours after Coran had patched him up, but he was tired in a way that sleep alone couldn't fix.

"Lance," Pidge replied, and he could practically hear her bitten-down fingernails through the phone. She'd been worried for him, probably since the diagnosis but certainly throughout the past few days. "Hunk said you were injured pretty badly."

"Nothing Coran couldn't fix," Lance said, and it was true enough with one glaring exception. "I'm as good as new."

"You don't sound good," Pidge said quietly, and Lance couldn't respond honestly to that, could only sigh. "I mean it, Lance. You don't sound like yourself." She was quiet a moment. "My offer is still on the table, about setting you up with a neurologist friend of mine."

"I can't, Pidgeon," Lance replied, hating the way she sounded so cautiously hopeful. "There's something I need to finish."

"But afterwards?" Pidge asked. "After...the last name. Can you promise me that you'll see a neurologist then? It doesn't have to be my friend, it can be anyone, I just...I want you to get help, Lance, and if there's any chance at all that...if there's any chance, I need to know you'll take it."

Lance was quiet for a moment. "Okay, sure, Pidge. Once I've ended this whole mess, I'll talk to your friend. Are you happy?"

"Relieved," Pidge corrected, but there was sincere warmth in her voice. "I'm sending you Iverson's coordinates now – he's got a small island off the coast of Maine where he's been holed up for the last few days. Just...be careful out there, okay, Lance?"

Lance pictured Pidge in his head, the way her eyes light up when she rambled on about her latest scientific wonderment, how her glasses slipped a little farther down her nose with every wild hand gesture, and the creasing of her brow when she was confronted with a challenge she didn't yet understand. "Take care of yourself, yeah, Pidgeon?" The words were thick in his throat.

"I will," Pidge said, and they both hung up.

Lance looked up to find Keith leaning against the wall, one leg kicked up to support himself, arms crossed over his chest.

"Why'd you lie to Pidge?" Keith asked.

"I didn't," Lance said, setting his phone down next to him. "I said I'd see her doctor friend when all this is over." He hesitated before looking over at Keith.

"You don't expect to survive this last one?" Keith surmised.

"I have a job to finish, and I'm not going to let myself die before it's done," Lance said. "But...I mean, what else do you want me to tell you?" Lance asked, and even now, he saw a slight tremor run through his hands. He shut his eyes to block it out. "I can't...I can't keep this up much longer, Keith. I thought I had more time, but the tumor doesn't seem to have a hell of a lot of patience."

Keith didn't say anything, didn't try to refute what they both knew was true, and Lance appreciated that about him.

"You know my mom passed away a few years back," Lance said, opening his eyes and looking at the ground. Her loss had nearly been his breaking point; she was the one he'd thought of most often while in space. She was his tether, his support. And he'd only had a few years post-Voltron with her before she'd passed away. "And my pa...we never much saw eye to eye. My mom had always been our go-between, our translator. He'd tell me my aim needed work, and she'd tell me that he was proud of me, just that he couldn't say it."

Lance looked up at Keith. "I can't go to Veradera," he said instead of using the word home. "I can't risk putting them in more danger than they are already in just by association to me. But when I'm gone, I need you to give this to my family," he said, holding out a USB in his hand, and Keith stared at it for a long moment before kicking off the wall and walking over to Lance. He stared at it for another moment before reaching out and taking it from Lance's hand.

"I'm just hanging onto it for you," Keith said quietly. "Until everything's safe and you go and see the doctor you promised Pidge you'd see and you get healthy, and then you can take this back from me and go tell them whatever you want to say yourself."

"Sure, Keith," Lance said with a tired smile. "Just promise me you'll give it to them if I'm gone."

Keith just sighed but nodded, slipping the USB into one of his many pockets. "Are you sure you want to continue?"

Lance nodded. "I need to finish this, Keith. I've been wanting to put a bullet in Iverson since I first set foot in the Garrison, so that's not saying a whole lot, but I need to be the one to take him out."

"Okay."

"And..." Lance looked down at the ground, clenching his jaw. He hated this. Feeling weak, powerless. And as evidenced by the past few days, he knew he wasn't completely helpless, but he hated that he couldn't rely on himself anymore. It felt to him like the Voltron days of old, when he knew he had a talent for shooting but didn't have any confidence in himself. "I...need your help," he admitted quietly after a moment, still looking down, too ashamed to meet Keith's eyes.

Keith was quiet for a long moment. "You know that you never needed to ask, right?" Keith asked, and Lance exhaled. Not that he'd been afraid of Keith turning him down, just...it was such a Keith thing to say.

"I know that you're the one person who never required an invitation to join a fight," Lance said with a crooked smile, looking up at his friend, and he was surprised to see that although there was something in Keith's eyes that had clearly identified Lance as something to be pitied, there was also a bit of steel there. And that made sense with what Lance knew of Keith, because even back in their Voltron days, Keith had been the one person to have faith in Lance when Lance couldn't even put faith in himself.

"Then why'd you ask?" Keith replied, his mouth curved into a small smirk but a quizzical look appearing in his purple eyes.

"I just..." Lance couldn't really find the words for it. Keith had been helping him this whole time, after all, and Lance couldn't remember if he'd really asked before this point. "This is big," he said after a moment. "Emilio Perrello, the sicarios, Simon Thorn...nobody really cared altogether too much about them. But Iverson is an important figure in the military. This is going to be ugly, Keith. And if anyone finds out you're associated with what's about to happen–"

"The Blade barely concerns itself with Earth matters," Keith said with a shrug.

"But Earth's your home," Lance said, brows furrowed. "Even if you spend all your time in space, Earth is still special to you in its own way. I don't want to make this planet a place where you don't feel welcome just because I dragged you into this."

"You didn't drag me into this," Keith said, his face hardening. "The people who killed Veronica and Raphael and those who arranged for it to happen did. They brought this on themselves."

Lance looked down, clasping his hands together and squeezing them tightly. "Thanks, Keith."

"Always."

--

Police blockades had been erected on all the main roads leading toward the coast of Maine. Lance had ducked into the back of the truck, hiding in a secret hollow compartment when there was danger, and Keith did his best to move through the blockades while evading suspicion by way of a fake ID.

"You have to be friendly," Lance whispered from the back the second time they got pulled over.

"I am friendly," Keith complained.

"You're scowling."

"You can't even see me."

"You're scowling so hard they can see it from Daibazaal."

"Be quiet, you're the one who's a domestic terrorist and an international fugitive," Keith remarked plainly, which had proven to be the most surefire method of winning an argument under the present circumstances. "Get down, we're approaching another blockade," he said, and Lance nodded.

He shoved some fishing nets out of the way and pulled up on a panel that had been cut out from the floor. Once he had enough room to slip in, he did so, doing his best to pull the nets back over the compartment before he shut it.

"Hi there, officer," Keith said after coming to a stop, and to his credit, he sounded marginally less unfriendly than before. "Do you know why there are so many roadblocks up today?"

"License and registration," the officer said, ignoring his question, and Lance heard Keith shuffling around as he retrieved the requested paperwork from the glove compartment.

"Sure thing," Keith said, and there was a long pause while the officer looked over the documentation. This was the most difficult part for Lance; from his hidey hole in the back, he had no idea whether or not the officer was suspicious of Keith's fake ID, and if an altercation transpired, he wasn't in a good position to react quickly. All he could do was stay still, stay quiet, and trust Keith.

"Mind telling me what you're heading up north for?" the officer asked, and her voice gave away no indication of whether or not she believed Keith so far.

"Fishing trip," Keith said. "Meeting up with a few friends. Hoping to get out on the water early and play poker until late."

"Can I check your vehicle?" she asked, and Keith hummed.

"Sure thing, Ma'am," he said, and despite the gravity of the situation, Lance had a hard time trying to hold in his laughter, as the persona Keith had chosen fully utilized his Texan roots in an attempt to sound charming. "Help yourself. Bit of a mess in back, though, I do apologize."

Lance tensed as the door near him opened, and he held his breath as he heard things before shifted around. He counted to forty before the door shut, and he exhaled in relief.

"Let me just run your license and plates, and then you'll be on your way," the officer said, and her footsteps faded after a moment. Keith and Lance stayed silent.

Her footsteps returned a minute later, and Lance tensed, one hand on the compartment door in case he needed to jump out and make a run for it.

"Everything checks out," the officer said, presumably handing the documents back over to Keith. "Good luck out there. Heard not much has been biting lately."

"As long as I catch more than my friends, I'll be satisfied," Keith said, and the two exchanged goodbyes before Keith slowly drove past the barricade and gradually built up speed. "You can come out now," he said, and Lance popped open the compartment, taking several deep breaths as the air supply in the hollow part had been limited.

"Good job," Lance said, and Keith just grunted. "No, really. I thought you were about to ask her to accompany you to the rodeo."

"If there were one in town, I would've," Keith remarked, surely accompanied by a roll of his eyes, and even though Keith couldn't see him, Lance pressed a hand over his chest in mock hurt.

"I, Keith, am wounded. You would take a stranger to the rodeo when I'm right here, fully ready to get my yeehaw on?"

"You lost your rodeo privileges when you insulted the Lone Star state."

"That's hardly fair," Lance complained with a grin as he leaned back against the fishing nets. "How far to our destination?"

"We've still got about an hour," Keith said after a moment. "Get some rest, if you can."

Normally, Lance would have protested, saying that if Keith wasn't sleeping then he wouldn't either, but he wasn't much in a state to object. Instead, he closed his eyes, and he dreamed of Veronica.

--

"You know, I missed you," Veronica said, hands clasped in fists around the chains of her swing.

After Lance had returned from Voltron, he'd spent a lot of time reconnecting with his family, and a conversation with his twin sister was long overdue. He'd been avoiding her since coming back, only making light, superficial conversation. He'd been afraid that she of all people would see something in him, something dark and foreign, something that would scare her, would tell her that new Lance wasn't the same as the old Lance she'd grown up with. But she was his twin, and he couldn't run from that eventuality forever.

In the interests of privacy, they'd left the family house and had returned to the playground they had frequented in their youth.

"I missed you," Veronica said, shoes scraping against the ground as her swing oscillated gently, moving no more than a foot in either direction as she kept the toe of one of her shoes anchored in the dirt. "Like crazy."

"That's reassuring to hear," Lance said, yelping when he earned a smack on his arm from his twin. "Okay, yes, obviously I missed you too."

"You were here one day, and then just...gone the next," she said quietly. "No note, no explanation. And call me crazy but...it didn't particularly feel like they wanted to find you all that much. The Garrison, I mean. Keith disappears and it's the end of the world because he's this uber talented kid, but you disappear and..."

"Just one less cargo pilot taking up space in their program," Lance said, a smile slipping onto his face and falling just as fast.

"Yeah. That's what it felt like from the Garrison, but you know that you were always more than that, right?" she asked, and Lance just sighed, caving in on himself a little bit.

"Sometimes I think so, and other times I'd be absolutely sure you're mistaken," he answered.

"What was it like?"

"What, space?"

"Yeah, and...all of it. Being out there, away from home."

A dozen adjectives cycled through his head as he thought of the beautiful scenes that Earth couldn't replicate, of fascinating creatures and strange animals and foreign terrain. "Scary," he said after a moment. "When we first got out there, we were so young, and there were so many times we almost died, but...it sort of felt unreal, at first. Like a game. Like this one time I got stuck in the airlock – if I would have been ejected, I would've frozen to death in the span of seconds. And that was just one example, pretty early on, and it just sort of became one of those running jokes, you know? 'Remember that time Lance almost got sucked out of the airlock?' And I sort of get it, you have to laugh about some of that stuff because if you don't, it'll really sink in, how close you came to...not existing, all of a sudden, but...and it wasn't just the one time, it was all sorts of different ways...scraping your way closer to death inch by inch, trying to ignore the marks on the ruler..."

"You were all kids," Veronica said, her voice gentle. "Of course you weren't mentally prepared for the very real possibility of your own deaths."

Lance stared down at his hands, which were laying limply over his legs as he leaned against the chain to his left. It wobbled against his weight and changed the angle of his swing a bit as it started twisting side to side. "Can you imagine what it's like...to kill someone? And...more than that...to find out you're good at it? Because that was...more disturbing to me than constantly facing death. Facing the fact that I had the capability and skill to inflict death. And that...it was a casual expectation, like a job. Clock in at eight, clean the pods, kill some people. Do it again. Every day. Always more people to kill. Never being able to just...relax, because then the alarms would start going off, and it would be back to the lions, back to more killing."

Veronica didn't say anything, but she reached over to take one of his hands in hers. "I imagine it would be pretty scary," she said after a moment. "And that I'd probably be afraid of myself."

Lance nodded, his hair falling into his eyes. He hadn't cut it lately, hadn't really been taking care of himself. For so long, getting back to Earth was all he'd ever wanted, and yet now that he was here, he felt...utterly void of purpose. He'd already saved the universe. What more could he possibly do?

"But, Lance...I'm not afraid of you," Veronica said after a moment, and Lance's chest hurt. "I'm not afraid of you or what you've done, even if you're afraid of yourself."

"But I hurt a lot of people," Lance whispered. "Even if they were part of the enemy. They were just marching on someone's orders. They had families just like we did. Just because they were from alien species doesn't erase that. And..." He squeezed his eyes shut. "We would fire at their ships, right? Just like a video game. Acquire target, launch missiles, target destroyed. And it was so easy to do that, it was just hitting a button. But how many Galra died because of that? That wasn't the same as using my rifle because it wasn't up close and personal. We didn't have to feel accountable for those deaths because we didn't look them in the face. But each of those ships must have held hundreds of Galra. Hundreds of people gone, just like that."

"They would have killed you if they'd had the chance," Veronica reminded him, and Lance just let out a broken laugh.

"I know. I know! But...I just..." He fell into distressed silence. "I just wanted to fly," he murmured. "I didn't want to go out and kill anyone. I didn't want to find out that I could."

"You did what you had to do to survive. And Lance, you may have killed some people, but think of all the ones you saved."

"I don't think that those really cancel out," Lance said, and they both went quiet because they knew Lance couldn't be convinced otherwise, not at this current moment in time at least. "You know what the really sad part is?"

"Besides everything else you just told me?" Veronica asked, and Lance looked over to find one of her eyebrows raised.

"Shooting things was apparently the only thing I was good at out there. The one singular thing I could do to help the team."

"Lance, I can tell you without a doubt that that is absolutely not true."

"But it is," he said, looking down as his swing swayed back and forth, the chains letting out a rusty squeak. "Everybody else had something to offer. Shiro was a natural leader, Keith was an absolute beast, Pidge was a genius, Hunk was an engineer and a cook, and I...I could shoot things. Shoot things and annoy people."

"Lance–"

"I'd show up to help the others, but I was always in the way, somehow. Shiro couldn't allow any distractions, Pidge didn't want me messing up her shit, Hunk gave me busy work out of pity – 'Here, uh, hold this wrench for a while, will you, Lance?'"

"And Keith?" she asked after a moment.

Lance sighed. Keith, Keith, Keith. A mystery to him, even now. "Keith...didn't want friends, for a long time. Didn't want conversation or a sparring partner. I think he was angry, and he wanted to stay angry. But...he changed, gradually. And then he left, because of me. Because he knew I was too useless to have a spot if he stuck around."

He kicked his feet at the ground, stirring up a little cloud of dirt. "And when he came back...okay, well, he was in this weird dimension thing called the quantum abyss and...I think he aged like two years in that dimension, and so when he came back, he was...different. It felt like he'd become an adult and he still saw all of us as kids, and that...hurt, a little bit. I felt childish next to him, and it felt like the only way I could earn his respect was in the only language he understood, so I tried to get even better at combat. I spent hours practicing with my rifle. We started sparring a little bit so I could work on close combat. And I guess it worked. We became friends, eventually, and I got even better at killing things as a result. But it felt like that was when my childhood really ended, because I couldn't afford to be immature anymore or else I'd have nobody. And now..."

He tilted his head back so he could take in the bright orb of the moon. How many moons had they touched down on in the universe? How many had they flown past? And yet somehow, this moon, Earth's moon, his moon, still felt humbling in its own way.

"And now there's nothing for me to kill," he said, dropping his hand from Veronica's and letting it come to a loose clasp around the swing chain. "What am I supposed to do now?"

"You have so much more to you than just that," Veronica said, and Lance couldn't bring himself to look away from the moon.

"Do I?" he asked, his voice flat.

"Of course you do," Veronica said, and to her credit, she didn't hesitate. "You have this thing about you, Lance. A sort of charisma or something, an infectious energy. The power in our house would go out for the night, and you'd start singing out a song while collecting candles and flashlights and get the kids in on it so they wouldn't be scared. When you were gone, there was no one who...none of us could do that, Lance. You've always been someone in my life who can snap me out of my thoughts, and...it was tough," she said, looking down, eyes a bit glassy. "Tough trying to be strong enough for myself and the kids. I don't know how you do it, Lance, now or then or ever. They didn't really understand what was going on, they overheard Mamá talking about it a little bit but they thought you were still at the Garrison, they didn't understand why we were all so devastated, and..."

She wiped at her eyes, bringing a smile to her face. "I just know that if it had been me in and space and you back here on Earth, you would've been able to help them more, could've spun them some sort of fantastical story and kept everyone's spirits up. And that's one of my favorite things about you, Lance, how good you are with kids. Not just our family, but kids in general."

"Yeah, there weren't a lot of toddlers out in space," Lance remarked dryly, and Veronica went oddly quiet, causing Lance to look over. "Ronnie?"

"Lance, I..." She bit at her lip before casting a glance over her shoulder as though suspecting that someone had followed them. "There's something I haven't told our parents yet, and I'm not ready to, okay, but..."

"Ronnie, what is it?" Lance asked, angling himself toward her. "You can tell me anything, you know that?" Sensing her reluctance, he spread his arms wide. "I just told you that I near about murdered half the purple fuzzies in the universe. Please, Ronnie. Trust me with this, whatever it is. I...I need you to." Lance had opened up a gaping vulnerability in front of her, and the only way he felt they could walk away from this stronger was if she shared something, anything, with him, too, so he didn't feel like the only person that wasn't okay.

Veronica exhaled deeply. "All right. But...you can't tell anyone, Lance, okay? I mean it."

"Not a soul," Lance promised, sticking out a pinky, and Veronica let out a small huff of laughter before shaking with her own pinky to seal the deal, then grabbing his hand in hers and squeezing.

"I'm pregnant," she whispered, and the moment she saw his eyes go wide and his mouth start to open, she slapped her other hand over his lips, effectively silencing him. "No! Yelling!" she whisper-shouted, and Lance lifted up an open hand defensively.

She narrowed her eyes, squinting at him in suspicion before slowly removing her hand.

"I! Need! Details!" Lance whispered back.

"I don't have a whole lot to offer," Veronica said with a small chuckle. "It's still very early on."

"But you met a boyyyy?" Lance asked, leaning forward, and Veronica laughed, slapping him on the arm again, and this time he completely ignored the slight sting due to his absolute fixation on the drama unfolding before him.

"Okay, yes, I met a boy," Veronica said. "Who Mom and Dad very certainly do not know about," she added, poking at his shoulder. "And will not find out about, not from you anyway."

"I already pinky promised my soul away!" Lance protested. "Why the accusations? You wound me."

"I'm just warning you," Veronica said. "And I don't need to resort to threats, right?"

"Right."

"Perfect. So, anyway, yes, I met a boy, and, well..." She pushed at her swing a bit. "Well, you had just come home, and I...had a lot of feelings about it, and I probably got ahead of myself and jumped the gun..."

"He didn't force you into anything, right?" Lance asked, voice turning cold rather abruptly as his hand on the swing chain clenched into a fist.

"No! Gosh, no, Lance, nothing like that," she said. "I'd just been planning on waiting, and...I don't know, with you coming back, the timing felt right. Something like that. And I don't regret it, but we should have been more careful, I mean obviously, because now I'm...you know."

"How far along are you?" Lance asked gently, having relaxed after she'd clarified the situation.

"Six weeks," she said, rubbing her right hand in a circle over her stomach even though Lance couldn't really make out any discernable change. "And no, I haven't told him yet. I wanted to make sure first, so I took a test, and then two or three more tests..." She said, rolling her eyes and chuckling.

"But you're happy?" Lance asked to confirm, and a small smile lit up her face as she looked down.

"I am. I really am," she said softly. "I just...you know, it's not what I would've asked for, but it's what I got, and...I want to be a mom, Lance. I really do. I didn't know if I wanted to, before, but..." She grinned. "Remember when we were little, and you said you'd grow up and have a hundred kids?"

Lance gave a small laugh, but the thought of his past declaration made him sad in a way. He was happy for Veronica, truly, but...he'd always wanted a big family, but he knew without a doubt that he was too broken to have one. He'd killed how many Galran fathers, Galran sons and daughters, so what right did he have to hope for the same for himself?

"I remember," he said after a moment, and Veronica took his hand back in his own.

"Well, between the two of us, we're one percent on our way. You should know that I'm counting on you for at least the other ninety-five, give or take."

"Okay, just be sure to let Mom and Dad know that I'm out impregnating half the universe," Lance said with a snort, and she laughed alongside him. "But when exactly do I get to meet the baby daddy?" he asked, and she stuck out her tongue.

"I hate that phrase, it sounds gross. But I'll you meet him after I tell him, okay? I think he's going to be really happy. We were talking about getting married, after all, so this is pushing things ahead of schedule a bit, but...ugh, I'm just so excited!" Veronica said, latching onto his swing's chain and pulling him to the left.

"Have you started thinking about names yet?" Lance asked, and Veronica hummed.

"I've just been kicking a few ideas around, but I was thinking if it's a girl, then maybe Raquel, and if it's a boy, then..."

--

published 10/08/22

5442 words