Work Text:
Lance! Lance, listen to me!—
The sound echoes through Lance’s waking moments: Shiro’s voice, Shiro’s desperation, from much too far away. His words obscured, blurred like radio fuzz. If only Lance had been able to get closer, listen better, do anything at all instead of failing. He doesn’t know what Shiro wanted to tell him, but the panic in Shiro’s tone sits heavy in his belly. Yet he tries to release the vague and undirected fear, because no one else seems concerned, least of all Shiro.
Things went dark there for a second.
So it’s nothing, right? Just a glitch in the void-thing that swept them all out of reality for a few moments.
Then the dreams begin, and life starts to get weird.
—Weird, as if traveling through space in giant robot cats to battle fuzzy purple aliens is perfectly reasonable and expected. Okay, it’s weird in comparison.
There’s something at the end of the path waiting for him, a distant candleflame drawing him toward home and safety and refuge and respite, something he wants more than anything, although he cannot name it. He must hurry—it will be taken from him if he doesn’t reach it in time—
He ascends out of the fog of sleep, clinging to the dream, wracked with inexplicable grief. He’s lost something he loved, something he needed, something that—never actually existed, he reminds himself. His mind’s just creating nonsense out of events in his life, like always, and in his life he’s scared out of his mind most of the time and homesick all of the time. So if terror and loss make an appearance once in awhile, it makes sense. “Dumb brain,” he mutters, bundling himself into his robe. He just needs to go to the dining room to put some breakfast in himself and chat with the team. Get his feet back on the ground.
He’s traveling through a forest of tall trees, all of which are evenly spaced apart from each other and all of which have perfectly straight black trunks. Once, only once, he looks too closely at the bark of one tree. What he sees in the swirling patterns there, he never wants to see again. He is careful to keep his eyes on the path ahead from then on. When he awakens, all memory of that one tree has slipped from his mind.
He wakes to nausea and a threatening ache behind his eyes, and all he wants is to go back to sleep. Is there such a thing as space flu? He can’t go back to bed, though, sick or not. They have a strategy meeting with the Blade of Marmora, in person for once, and everyone’s supposed to go.
The Blades arrive, and Keith keeps looking at him funny, until Lance can’t take it anymore and drags Keith by his elbow over to the side of the bridge. “Dude, what is your problem?”
“Nothing, just, are you okay? You seem a little—tired. I don’t know.”
“I’m fine. Don’t need you staring at me all the time.”
Keith’s face pinches tight, and he shakes Lance off his arm. “Fine,” he says, spine stiff. “Have it your way.”
“I will have it my—” But Keith’s acting like he can’t even hear him. “…way,” Lance finishes. His stomach is seriously killing him—he can’t even concentrate on the holo-map projected in the center of the room, where Shiro’s standing in the middle of a bunch of glowing dots meant to be planets, pointing out their next targets. They probably don’t even need Lance; after all, he’s here for sharp-shooting, not map-reading.
He backs up slowly, away from the group, but no one seems to notice him inching toward the door. When he gets out into the hall, he turns and flees back to his quarters. God, he needs a nap.
Every night he gets closer. The whispers in the brush grow louder as he moves deeper into the forest, and there are more voices now than when he began, and the whispers have morphed into deep, endless growling.
A few days later, Lance doesn’t feel like he’s gonna puke anymore, but that low-level headache is still thumping away, and he’s added a daily nap or two to his routine.
“Lance,” Shiro says, catching him in the corridor outside the bridge. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure,” Lance says, yawning. “I was just on my way to—”
“Take a nap?” Shiro asks, in a soft voice.
Lance isn’t sure he likes that. He’s not here to be fussed over, for fucksakes. “Yeah. Problem?”
“Seems like you’re sleeping an awful lot lately. I wanted to check in and make sure you’re feeling all right.”
Lance shrugs. “Kinda under the weather, that’s all. Space flu, maybe.”
“Space—Lance, I don’t think that exists. Can you tell me what’s going on?” Shiro reaches out to touch Lance’s shoulder, and Lance’s eyes follow the path of his hand. “I’m worried about you.”
“It’s nothing,” Lance insists. “Headache, stomachache, no big deal. Just gotta rest up.”
“Headache?” Shiro frowns. “Huh. Well, I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet any day now. I’ll walk you back to your room.”
Which is a little strange, but Shiro’s been acting even more the caring leader since the day he snapped at Lance, like he’s trying to make up for it. If it’ll make Shiro feel better, sure, he can walk Lance to his room.
At the door to his room, Lance pauses. “Hey,” he says, thinking maybe he’ll try to talk about the dreams.
“What is it?”
Lance looks at Shiro’s gentle smile, his worried eyes, the scar across the bridge of his nose; all the familiar parts of Shiro he’s seen every day for over a year now, except for when Shiro was…gone. Lance still hasn’t been able to shake the thought that something’s not right—it’s a subtle shift, like artificial gravity set a fraction too high. He decides against talking. “Thanks, Shiro.”
“No problem. Sleep tight,” Shiro says, giving Lance a little wave.
Every night he gets closer, and now the trees have grown together into a living wall along either side of the path, and brambles have sprung up behind him. This whole time, the path has been pushing him toward an end; even if he’d realized it sooner, he would never have been allowed to turn back.
There’s a light at the end of the path, all right—a bright thing dangling before him like an anglerfish’s lure, like a promise made to be broken. Shiro, standing just at the edge of the forest, shining like an angel, arms held out and smiling. Also known as bait.
Lance examines his options, but finds only one: to take the barbed, evil hook into his tender mouth and hope to tear himself free later. There is only forward, only Shiro, only whatever lies ahead in the gloom of something that passes for a foggy meadow, although it’s more of a swamp that’s pretending.
He is just a few steps away from Shiro when Shiro’s eyes widen, and he looks over his own shoulder, and freezes. “Lance,” he says, in a low, urgent voice. “Lance, listen to me. You have to go—you have to run—it’s not safe here.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Lance hisses, “there’s no way back.”
“I don’t mean through the forest. You have to wake up, Lance. He’s coming.”
“Who? Shiro, who are you talking about?”
“No time—please—you have to get out, you have to—aargh!” Shiro crumples to his knees, screaming as shadows swarm over him, clinging to him like wet fabric.
“Shiro!” He tries to run to Shiro, but his legs are turning heavy, numbness creeping up his thighs, and when he looks down, his body is changing into cold white marble. “Shiro, I can’t leave you!” Soon his heart will turn to solid rock and a stone heart can’t beat and he’s going to die here—
Shiro is shaking, crying, screaming— “Wake up, Lance, wake up, fuck, please, he’s going to—”
—He wakes up, sweating and tangled in his bedsheets. He must have been thrashing in his sleep. He can’t resist taking a peek at his legs: bare, skinny, hairy, normal. Not made of stone. His heart trembles in his chest, like a mouse that’s narrowly escaped a trap. The synthetic sunrise is just starting to light up his room, and he shoves his head under his pillow and tries and tries to go back to sleep. He needs to get back there—he has to save Shiro—but it’s no use. He’s forcefully awake, not even the slightest bit groggy.
Someone’s tapping at his door, and he drags himself out of bed to answer.
It’s Shiro again. “You all right? I heard yelling.”
“Yeah,” Lance says. “Yeah, everything’s okay.” The smile, the eyes, the scar: everything the same as always. Just a dream. Only a dream.
It’s what he tells himself every day from that point on, because it’s fine now—the bad dreams stop after that.
Until the moment Shiro’s fist slams into his chest, and a whole new nightmare begins.