Chapter Text
Pidge staggered into a purple-lit corridor, closing the blast door behind her and finally taking a moment to think and breathe. Subverting the AI core of a Galra dreadnought had gone somewhat more smoothly in the planning phase. Panting, she leaned against the wall and took stock.
The ship? Doomed. Apparently the Galra were properly paranoid about their own heavily automated ships being turned against them; their AIs were programmed to eagerly lobotomize themselves should the need arise. The thing detected her attack immediately, sent her a defiant “Vrepit sa!” and fried itself, leaving every regulated system on the ship to go wild and the engine reactor to melt down. Raging plasma fires spread quickly, barely kept at bay by Pidge’s new army of Galra robots abandoned by the suicidal AI.
Her escape route, the Green Lion? Presumably drifting in space near the other Paladins at the ambush site, where the uncharacteristically cautious Galra captain had jumped the ship back into hyperspace with Pidge still on board.
Her bayard? Still awesome, maybe a little more well-used now.
And her armor? Pidge quickly ran her hands over most of its surface.
“Not so awesome,” she said to no one. The body had eaten a few lasers but was mostly functional, minus the smoldering wreckage of her jetpack, while her helmet visor sported a rifle buttstock-sized hole. The evacuating Galra crew had not been so distracted as to ignore her on the way out. What remained of the HUD blared a warning:
“HELMET INTEGRITY FAILURE
MASK MATERIALIZATION OFFLINE”
“Great,” she sighed, running a finger across the jagged edge. “I should have bugged out the minute things went wrong. Stupid!” She began to pace across the hallway, mind running a mile a minute to no avail. “I could head for the hangar and hope there’s still a fighter left, but those things don’t have hyperdrives so I’d be stuck in space, and I don’t know how long their life support lasts but I can assume at least three or four cubic meters of air inside so that gives me about an hour but I’d only have a Galra transponder so I–“
“Pidge? Pidge! Aww c’mon, I thought it was working this time!”
Pidge froze in place. Lance’s voice, distorted but unmistakable, was coming through her helmet.
“Wha– Lance!?” she said and pressed down her helmet as though it would help. “Where are you? How did you get out here?”
“Buddy, you’re OK!” he yelled into her ears. “I saw the cruiser’s engines heating up, so I just had Blue dig in with the ol’ claws and we went for the craziest ride! Messed her systems up good but I think we’re back in business now.” He sounded quite proud of himself. He felt no need to mention that he had done nothing but sit in the cockpit and coo encouragingly to it while it self-repaired.
Pidge couldn’t decide whether to be amazed or horrified. She settled on angry. “You rode the ship through hyperspace? You idiot! Do you have any idea what could’ve happened?”
“…No?”
She clanked her forehead against the metal wall in exasperation. “Uhg, whatever! I don’t have time to explain how stupidly lucky you are, so just pick me up in the hangar,” she said.
“Uhh, that hangar? ‘Cause it looks a little like the aftermath of dinner at my dad’s place,” Lance said.
“What?”
“It’s spewing fire, Pidge. That goes for most of the ship, actually. Come on, just find a hole and jump out, no big deal, done it before! There are kind of a lot of them now. What did you do to this thing anyway?”
“Oh, that’s… more of a problem than it would normally be,” Pidge said with a glance to her shattered visor, becoming more and more aware of a ball of fear in her chest. If the fires from the engineering section had spread so far forward, then she was rapidly running out of options. “Umm, Lance, my helmet is busted. Like, all the way busted. I can’t.”
Lance opened his channel but didn’t speak, as though carefully mulling over his next words.
“I see,” he said sagely.
Pidge could almost see his fingers steepled beneath his chin and couldn’t help but smile despite herself.
“Arrg, this one’s gone too!” she said, kicking the sealed door of yet another empty escape pod launch tube. “What do you see out there?”
“Nothing… Nothing yet, I mean!” Lance said. The Blue Lion smoothly jetted left and right, scanning across the dreadnought’s purple hull, searching for a shuttle bay or docked escape pod or anything useful that wasn’t gushing plasma. “OK, OK, maybe the hangar is still an option!” he said, mustering as much optimism as possible. “I can have Blue ice out the fire, no problem.”
“It’s probably the fighter refueling lines burning, you won’t put those out,” Pidge said. The growing defeat in her voice caused a wrenching feeling in Lance’s chest. “Path’s blocked anyway.”
Lance sent his Lion flitting ever more frantically around the huge ship’s anvil-shaped bow. “Uhhhh, alright, don’t worry, how about–“
“Lance,” Pidge sighed. “Look, this thing is running out of time…” She leaned heavily against the airlock door. “You… need to think about getting to a safe distance.”
“Yeah, not happening.” The sudden steel in his voice almost startled her.
“Just strategically speaking, losing one Paladin versus two Paladins and a Lion isn’t a good–“
“Pidge! Friends don’t let friends explode!” Lance said. The mental calculations Pidge had already started to estimate the yield of the immanent explosion ground to a halt against this unassailable logic. “That’s an extremely important friend rule,” he added. She was too dumbfounded and too touched to respond for a moment, which Lance took to mean he had won. “Besides, I have a new plan that’s at least, like, fifty percent better than exploding. Are you still by that launch tube?”
“Y-yeah?”
“About how long is it?”
Pidge peered through the hatch windows into the long, hexagonal tube. “Umm, probably twenty meters.”
“Great!” he said. Pidge didn’t follow. “Remember the EVA training course at the Garrison?”
“Of course I do and that doesn’t matter because I don’t have a working spacesuit, idiot.”
“Just listen, ok? So, remember that unit we had on vacuum exposure?”
“Yeah, it was the most horrifying class I’ve ever taken! The pictures they… Oh God. You cannot be serious,” Pidge said as she realized where Lance was going with this.
“Oh, come on! With that pre-breathing thing they showed us you could last like, fifteen, twenty seconds out there!”
“Lance, that is insane,” she said, taking a step back from the door.
“Well you can be insane or you can be exploded!” Lance yelled. “Pidge, you have a shot. It’s not like you to give it up,” he said with an uncommon tender concern.
Pidge stood with her head bowed and fists clenched, frustrated with herself. “…I’m scared,” she said quietly.
Lance paused incredulously for a moment, pondering how dumb smart people can be. “Well duh, genius."
Pidge rolled her eyes, the tension suddenly broken. “Uhg, I mean specifically, about this. I think about it more than I should, knowing all the ways a spaceship can fail, what happens to you when it does…”
“Hey, bud, it’s alright. Everybody’s got something like that,” Lance said. “I mean, even me. Every time I leave the Castle, I have to try hard to not think about getting stuck in space. Alone. Forever.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.” Pidge said. “I kind of thought the only thing that really bothered you was Keith.”
“See? Now please get ready to jump into space before that happens for real.”
Pidge felt another distant, rumbling explosion through her feet. “OK! OK…” she said unconvincingly.
“Don’t worry man, I’ll be right here, ready to gallantly rescue you.” The Blue Lion rushed into view at the end of the lanch tube, its enigmatic face peering through at Pidge. Its mouth yawned open, revealing a throat hatch that looked terrifically far away. “You’ll be safely in my arms in no time.”
Pidge leaned to the window and gave the vehicle a scathing glare she dearly hoped Lance could see. “That’s supposed to motivate me? I think I might take my chances with the explosion now.”
“Just shut up and start breathing!” Lance said sternly. “I’ll talk you through.”
Pidge squared her shoulders and took a long, steadying breath. “Alright, let’s do it.”
“In! Two, three, four. Out! Two, three, four…” Lance counted out what he hoped was the correct beat. Pidge took great gulping breaths and exhaled violently on his time, attempting to maximally oxygenate her blood and buy a few more precious seconds of consciousness.
“Alright, switch! Short breaths!” Lance called out. She began panting rapidly and hovered her shaking hand over the door control. “Ready?”
Pidge gave the Lion a sharp nod.
“You got this Pidge! OK, last set, big inhale!”
She braced herself and filled her lungs.
“This is it! Big, big exhale and GO!”
Pidge let out a great, shuddering breath to completely empty her lungs and prevent them rupturing in the vacuum. Gritting her teeth, she slammed her fist into the control panel and a maelstrom of escaping air roared around her as the doors split open, making her wince as her ears popped painfully. The temperature dropped precipitously with the air pressure. By the time she pushed off the edge of the gravity plating and into the weightlessness of the tube, the roar had dulled to a whisper, and then to the most complete, profound silence Pidge had ever experienced. The sound of her galloping heart and the blood rushing through her head seemed thunderous.
Two seconds… she counted.
Given her well-practiced zero-g maneuvering, Pidge’s kickoff was flawless and sent her sailing straight down the smooth walled corridor, and she kept her eyes fixed on the blue glow from the Blue Lion’s mouth even as they began to sting when her tears started to boil.
Four seconds…
Pidge was astonished that, so far, the experience was merely intensely uncomfortable. She felt her tongue and nose begin to fizz, but as she approached the midway point making good time, she was exhilarated.
I can make it! she thought. Six seconds, half-way, just stay focused…
Deep in the immense rear section of the dreadnought, every surface in the engineering control room glowed orange-hot.
The last of Pidge’s hacked Galra robots calmly manning their stations had finally died, slumping into the consoles and melting onto the floor. Absent the superhuman hand of the dead AI or the robot operators, the complex web of electromagnetic fields which confined the ship’s antimatter-catylized fusion reactor started to unravel. The pressurized plasma reservoir began to waver and sputter, allowing tiny gaps in the field to release lances of superheated deuterium and pepper the vaulted core chamber with holes before finally collapsing entirely.
In microseconds, a column of incandescent plasma ripped through hundreds of meters of snaking corridors and ducts along the path of least resistance toward space and into the emitter nozzles of the main engines. A gout of stellar fire 8 kilometers long erupted from the starboard engine for a fraction of a second, melting it into white-hot slag. The entire starship lurched forward.
The side of the launch tube slammed into Pidge like a two-million ton truck. Her suit’s kinetic sinks barely saving her from instant death, she ping-ponged between the hexagonal walls, leaving her with a ringing concussion and a handful of cracked ribs. Pidge reflexively gasped with the impact and her lungs burned as they attempted to pump nothingness. Spinning violently, she fought against the pain and disorientation to grope for the inset magnetic rails along the walls and regain control of her movement.
NO! No no no no! Where? How long…?
At last, her fingers found purchase. Momentum wrenched her arm and tore them away again, sending her drifting away from any handholds, but she’d managed to arrest her spin well enough to function. She twisted her torso to rotate herself despite the protestations of her grinding ribs, searching desperately through her blurred, doubled vision for the Blue Lion’s glow. However, she saw nothing but a stark starfield at the end of the tunnel.
He got… thrown off? Oh God, Lance, help…
Pidge floated in place and stared into the void for agonizing seconds. Her vision began to tunnel and the pain in her body had started to become distant when the Blue Lion’s face once again rushed into view. The last dregs of Pidge’s wits made a final play as she unhooked her bayard from her belt, aimed as well as she could through her darkening eyes, and loosed its magnetic grapple. The green chevron and its trailing cord zipped off down the tunnel, passed the threshold, and sailed into the Blue Lion’s open jaws.
The grapple clanged uselessly against its entirely non-magnetic hull. At the very brink of unconsciousness, Pidge could feel only a dim sadness.
Oh… I guess I’m gonna die now.
Barely cognizant, distant thoughts and memories passed her by: a boy with round, over-sized glasses smiled down at her; a gray-haired man beamed at a gleaming spaceship shrouded in vapor; a tall, graceful woman wept in the dark in front of a glowing screen; something she had to do, someone she had to help; friends, gathered around a glowing map of unknown worlds.
Some self-preserving hindbrain reflex compelled her hand to grip a familiar handle.
There was a sudden tug.
His feet braced against his Lion’s bottom teeth, Lance yanked on Pidge’s grapple hard enough to knock the wind out of himself when her limp body collided with him. He crashed into the Lion’s palate with his arms wrapped tightly around her.
“Blue, NOW!” he screamed.
Its huge jaws snapped shut, its claws retracted, and four foot jets flared into action, carrying them all away from the self-immolating dreadnought at incredible speed. In its fractured bowels, the bottled sun in its reactor tore through its magnetic chains. A miniature star expanded, vaporized the rear half of the ship, and just as quickly imploded, shredding the vast dreadnought’s remains into ribbons and scattering them into space. In the impromptu airlock of the Blue Lion’s closed mouth, sound and gravity finally returned as the chamber pressurized with a rising hiss and gravity plating hummed into life. The both of them thumped onto the floor.
“Pidge!? Pidge! C’mon buddy, I got you, you’re alright,” Lance said desperately, cradling Pidge in his lap. "I'm sorry, that was such a bad idea but it was all I got! And I know this is the sort of situation where I'm supposed to say your real name and it brings you around and stuff but I don't actually know it, so, PIDGE, come on!"
For a terrible moment she was still, then suddenly convulsed and took in a rattling, wheezing gasp.
“Yes! That’s it buddy, you got it, breathe…” Lance’s wavering voice continued to croon assurances and encouragement as she took more painful breaths and opened her bleary, bloodshot eyes. Pidge looked up at him through her shattered visor.
“Hhhh… Lhansh…?” she managed to croak. As oxygen restored her mental faculties, Pidge was able to take note of all the ways in which she felt horrible. Aside from the splitting headache and aching ribs, she could taste and smell nothing but coppery blood from her ruptured capillaries, her vacuum-dried tongue was leathery and cracked, and every inch of skin on her head and neck was developing a purple bruise.
“Hah, yeah,” Lance said, leaning closely over her. “What did I tell you, huh? Safely in my manly, heroic arms in no time!” he crowed, trying to restore his usual bravado for his own sake as much as hers. Pidge still noticed his shaking arms and watery eyes. Ordinarily, Lance’s stupidity would be grounds for retaliation, but since every movement of her torso was agonizing and any snark would be unintelligible, she just allowed herself to curl closer and steadily wheeze into his shoulder. Lance sat quietly, supporting her body and head to allow her to recover and his own heart to slow down.
“Alright, up we go,” he said after a short while and lifted her. The movement caused Pidge to let out a quickly muffled cry of pain. She whimpered softly as he carried her through the throat hatch, a sound Lance decided was completely unnatural and should not be allowed to ever happen again. “Sorry buddy,” he whispered.
“Mmm,” she responded with her eyes screwed shut.
Lance had to crouch down to get them both into the tiny emergency quarters situated in the Blue Lion’s torso, just behind its neck. He was thankful that Pidge was so small, as he didn’t want to imagine the guilt (and later berating once she was better) of dropping her in this condition. He gingerly slid her into the cramped, padded alcove that was supposedly a “bed.”
“Huh, at least you fit in this thing,” he said.
“Mmmf, shuddup,” she mumbled. “Wadder?”
“Huh? Oh! Just a sec!” Lance said and started rummaging through the cabin for a water ration. Pidge weakly grabbed at the bag once he brought it near, which he completely ignored in favor of lightly lifting her head and bringing the plastic straw to her mouth. She halfheartedly rolled her eyes at him and started gulping it down. “Are you… alright?”
Having replaced some of her lost moisture, Pidge spoke normally, albeit raspy and soft. “I’ll be alright,” she said, slightly turning her head to him. “Helmet off, please?”
“Here, don’t move.” Lance tried to jostle her as little as possible in pulling it off her matted head. He rolled the ruined helmet over in his hands. “You weren’t kidding, this thing is trashed.” He looked back to her with an earnest smile that Pidge was pretty sure she’d never seen before. “You did good, man.”
“That was a fiasco. I completely destroyed that ship and if you hadn’t done something incredibly dumb and followed me, I’d be dead.”
“Well good for you that I’m so dumb, then,” Lance said. Pidge chuckled weakly, prompting another wave of racking coughs. “Hey, easy, don’t die now after all that!”
“Uhg, I’m OK. You should… eugh… go see where we are and try to contact the Castle,” she said, bringing her hand up to massage her aching head.
“Uhh, yeah, right,” Lance said, standing up and thumping into the low ceiling. Pidge contained a laugh for fear of more coughing. “I’ll start the transponder. They’ll pick us up in no time!” he said and started toward the cockpit.
“Lance?” Pidge called out, rasping. Lance poked his head back through the door.
“Yeah?”
“I probably have a pretty bad concussion, so once you’re done… could you, umm, stay back here so I don’t fall asleep? I guess… Keep me company?” she said sheepishly.
Lance gave her a somewhat hurt look. “Of course, dude. I wasn’t gonna just leave you back here, c’mon! Be right back.” At this, Pidge made an attempt to smile.
“And Lance?”
“Yeah Pidge?”
“…Thanks,” she said, turning away. “Just… thanks, for all of that.”
“Anytime, bro,” he said with a cocky smile. “S’what I do.”
“Uhg, just go.”
Lance fell heavily into his pilot seat, flicking on the Blue Lion’s emergency transponder. He took a moment to lean back wearily and let out a long, uneven breath.
“Hoooooo man,” he said to himself, running his hands through his hair anxiously. “Too close, too close, too close. Way, way too close.”
You almost got her killed, you hack! he thought. Lance let the memories of Pidge floating limp in space and whimpering on the floor punish him for a while as he flipped a few more controls.
But! She’s OK. We’re gonna get home and put her in that healing tube thing and it’ll all be OK, Lance thought, trying to calm himself and relax his completely wired body.
Except for how you told her to jump into space and almost let her die there. That won’t be OK.
He took another breath and looked out his Lion’s windows into space and his own slight reflection.
“Alright Lance, chin up, lighten the mood. Pidge wants you to keep her company and that’s what you’re good at. Not, y’know, daring rescues and life-or-death decisions under pressure. It’s just as important, just not as… whatever,” he said. His self-assurances rang hollow, but as he always did, he decided to act as if they and everything else were great, carry on, and hope for the best. Lance hopped up from his seat, put on his best nonchalant smirk, and made off back down the neck corridor.
This opportunity wouldn’t go to waste; Pidge was about to have the greatest six-to-twelve hours of quality buddy bonding time of her life.