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As soon as she’d learned about Green’s abilities on Olkarian, Pidge had been expecting the jokes. From the moment vines had taken down enemy cubes, she’d been waiting for the day that Lance (she knew somehow that it would be Lance, though Hunk was a possibility) would either make the connection himself or realize that she had renamed a few of her lion’s abilities. If he heard her refer to the shield as “blockin out the haters” or her jaw blade as “a knife!”, he would love it, and he would latch onto the references to a nightmarish degree.
In the end, all it takes is a single child at a parade. The little girl comes running up, shouting, “Mommy, Mommy, I want to see the vine lady!”
“Miss Keisha?” Lance asks behind her.
“Oh my fricking god,” Hunk mumbles. Even Keith chimes in with, “She frickin dead.”
Pidge ignores them, taking the flower crown that the little girl is offering her and thanking her before returning to the liberation celebration.
What’s happened doesn’t truly sink in until they’re back in the lounge after the mission, the parade, and a debrief.
“I need to sleep; I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Pidge says, getting up with a yawn.
“I dunno ‘bout sleep, it’s summertime,” Lance mutters. He’s practically asleep on the couch and has been complaining about being tired since they got back to the castle.
“Uh oh, she callin me,” Hunk mumbles, getting up to follow Pidge toward the paladins’ rooms.
“I will kill you.”
“Are you not even worried about it? Wait no! I’m a bad bitch; you can’t kill me. Come on; that was good!” Lance shouts at Hunk’s retreating back.
“Hey man, we all die. You either kill yourself or get killed,” Keith mumbles. Lance, flopped on top of him, nods sagely.
“Keith, that’s no way to think of it.”
“No, it’s… it’s a joke. From vine? Did you… right, you were in space when Vine died.”
“The true Galra torture was the fact that you missed out on Vine compilations.”
“He probably would have missed them anyway. He’s a millennial physically, but I think he’s mentally a generation or two up. So Shiro, Vine was this social media platform— you know what social media is, right? Okay so Vine was like YouTube, kind of, but you only had six seconds…”
Pidge gives up on convincing them to leave her alone, hoping that they can get it out of their system tonight. She retreats to her room, followed by Lance’s laughter, Shiro’s confusion, and Keith’s mild exasperation.
They don’t get it out of their systems in a night. The next morning at breakfast, Pidge, half asleep, takes out a box of cereal and finds it full of yellow alien fruit.
“Well, when life gives you lemons,” Hunk says from across the table, completely straight faced.
“Sorry, Pidge, that’s on me. To make up for it, do you want a… blue bar?” Lance is holding out one of the breakfast bars Hunk had made the day before. They’re not even blue. She takes one anyway as Lance says, “They’ve got all your daily nutrients, like zero grams trans fats, and oh my god cholesterol.”
“I hate you both.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t hear that, Pidge. I’m too busy mmm blockin out the haters, Vine Lady.” Hunk has spoons over his eyes. Pidge closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. If she’d learned anything from Matt’s antics, it’s that encouraging them will only make it worse.
“It’s okay, Pidge. Why don’t you just relax; we could turn on the radio? Would you like am or fm?” Shiro asks, and that’s it.
“You too? How do you… You were in space for like two years! How do you know vine references?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, weather boy,” Lance says. “But seriously, come on, calm down, it’s relaxation. Chill out; stop screaming.”
Keith joins them in the kitchen then, and Pidge hopes for a respite. Surely Keith, focused, serious Keith, wouldn’t have joined this bandwagon. Surely he’s still sane.
“Can I please get a waffle?”
Pidge gives them all a long-suffering sigh, takes her not-blue breakfast bar, and retreats to her lab.
When Hunk comes into the lab around lunch time, he’s riding a hover pad, carrying a ladle, and asking, “Would anyone like some stew?” Pidge just follows him up to the kitchen where, sure enough, a pot of stew is simmering on the stove. Lance is there, too, rummaging through the fridge and muttering, “I still haven’t found ma berries.”
“Welcome to my kitchen,” Hunk says, spreading his arms wide to indicate the whole space, “We have bananays, avocaidi…”
“Fre sha va ca do,” Shiro adds.
“And I’m just cooking pizza,” Lance says, popping up from the fridge holding a metal plate. Pidge is convinced that she’s somehow slipped into a hell dimension, but at this point, there’s nothing to do but embrace it.
When Hunk sets a bowl of stew in front of her, Pidge asks, “Is this a chicken?”
A few things happen at once. Hunk’s face breaks into a huge grin as the faces of Shiro and the Alteans collapse into confusion. Lance cracks up. Keith, without changing his posture or expression, responds conversationally, “No, this is a crayon.”
“I’m… I’m calling the police,” Lance manages, laughing through the phrase.
“420, what cha smoking?” Hunk asks, and when Pidge looks over to roll her eyes at him, he’s added 420 ticks to the alien microwave. That’s enough to break her, and she joins Lance in his laughter.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on,” Allura says, frowning slightly, “I… Shiro, do you understand any of this?”
“Pidge… Pidge is the Vine Lady! We’re honoring her new title,” Lance says. “Vine may be dead, but it lives on in our hearts and our compilations.”
“They’re short videos from Earth,” Shiro explains to the confused Altaeans. “For some reason, Lance has a bunch of them saved on his phone and showed me some last night so that I could talk to Pidge using them.”
“I think it’s time Allura and Coran started speaking our language. Shall we take this stew into a room with a TV?” Hunk asks.
The vine references slow with Pidge’s acknowledgement of them, but they never stop completely. The next time she rambles to Lance about how beautifully constructed the lions are (because really, they’re a masterful blend of science and magic that she can’t even imagine fully comprehending; King Alfor must have been a genius), he tells her to, “Go be a furry somewhere else.”
When he comes back into her lab with a glass of water an hour later, she slaps it out of his hand, exclaiming, “You forgot to make it super swaggy!”
At training the next morning, Shiro adds a command to “Cha-cha real smooth” between push-ups and jumping jacks. Beside her, Pidge hears Keith mutter, “Baloney fudging mustard! My life is being ruined by the internet.”
The morning after that, when Shiro tries to hurry them to their morning workout, Hunk mutters, “I don’t know why you in such a big time rush.” That becomes tradition whenever they’re being hurried somewhere. After a battle, when they’re tired but need to go celebrate with the newly liberated planet, it even becomes a sort of code asking Allura or Coran to stall for them for a bit.
In the end, the references make things easier. It’s hard to be scared out of her mind in a battle when Lance responds to a command by shouting, “Anything for you, Beyonce!” It’s hard to worry about Keith diving into something that’s bound to be a disaster when Red racing across her viewports is accompanied by Keith’s voice shouting, “I’m a giraffe!” In a way, they really do feel like a language unique to the Voltron paladins. More than that, they’re a little piece of Earth, and a subtle reminder that no matter how overwhelmed anyone is, there are four other people who are just as confused, and two who are trying their best to understand.