I was trying to sleep?

But I'm not asleep while this happens. I can feel my body laying in my bed and I know I'm still awake. Even as I feel and hear all that's going on I am conscious and awake. And very very tired.

It starts with an itchy feeling and the idea that bugs are crawling all over my body. I will this away by telling my self it's not real and my voice splits into many. They are all trying to find a way to get me to sleep.

They speak in my voice but are not me. They start arguing whispering "shut up! Shut up!" An old greying man starts chanting "shut up! shut up! Shut up!" The old man is creepy so I decide he is a bird. "Hey bird!" I think "if you go away I'll give you this bread!" He continues to chant. My voices offering various forms of bread and snacks to the old man "I'll give you these bread husks?" I think. The old man shifts into a mixture of a vulture and a shoebill bird with silvery feathers his crys of "shut up!" Become bird calls. He perches comfortably close And takes the bread husks from my hand. he flys away calling "shutupshutpshutup" with bread husks in his huge beak.

"That was weird" I think, as I think this my words become written in my head as fancy typed words. Every thing I thought would come up speach bubble style a half second after I thought it. I found this unnecessary so I would cut off the type mid sentence and the words would turn into a clear syrup, like corn syrup. Full of translucent bubbles. Annoyed I eventually get the syrup words to stop before they start and I try to sleep.

I'm on a bit of race track where the cars are only fast moving bits of light with zooming sounds, like on a time lapse of a street. There is a football announcer excitedly talking gibberish over everything it's too loud and there's a pressure on the top of my head. So I re-adjust how I'm laying.

There's a pressure across my nose and to the left and I'm on a diagonal slanting white plain. There are noses that I think are mouths dotting the landscape. There are women's voices whispering unitelligable things all around me. Then they find the word "buy". They all whisper "buy" joyously. This gets old fast. I shift my body again.

The pressure is around my entire neck now. And I'm Surrounded by ugly angry goblin dwarves. They are exiting an ornate hole and shoving me. Shouting in a garbled language I don't understand. I shift position.

I'm back on the race track the announcer is still loud, the pressure on the top of my head is back. I shift quickly.

I'm once again on the white grey-scale plain of noses. They are whispering incoherently again. I figure this is the best I'll get. They find the word shoe. I fall asleep to the voices filled with wonder at the concept of the word "shoe".

I wake up not much later and , with all the doneness in my soul, say "what the fuck"

Nope nooooo. Not going here. Noooo make it stop

Fly Red they said. It'll be fine, they said. It's not like you're going to die... yeah right. Lance had shown them. He'd showed them real good... by dying... aaaaand coming back. So did it really count still? At least when Shiro died, he'd become one with Black, and he'd got a shiny new body. All Lance got was darkness and a while shit ton of awkwardness between him and Allura... no, scratch that. A whole lot of awkwardness between him and everyone... which might just be why he'd been marooned on the same quiznakking planet for the last phoeb, it felt like a phoeb... he didn't really know, it probably want, but he did know that he was stuck with no signs of rescue and no way off. Hot on the heels of Lotor's defeat, Sendak had reared his ugly head. Without the castle though, this whole defending the universe thing had become a whole heap more dangerous... and slower... way slower. The plan to return to Earth was now on hold... which he was bitter over. He felt shunned by the team, like a puzzle piece that had some how been shoved in the wrong box. Thanks to Sendak, they'd made Olkarion their temporary home. Earth still just as far away as it'd been since they first came out to space, and Lance hated it. He wanted to go home. He wanted to sunbake. He wanted to eat ice cream and go surfing. He wanted to see all his family. He wanted to hug his mum... instead, he was stuck with a busted arm, a badly healed leg, what felt like a chest full of broken ribs and a persistent cough that never really left... and then there was that whole other thing that happened. Forming Voltron, he'd had a bad feeling, an almost sick feeling. But he'd been getting that every time he was floating space lately. Sendak had sent a squad to attack Olkarion and to undermine the coalition. So they'd suited up, kicked some Galra arse and formed Voltron, only, something had happened. Red had panicked and a blast had blown them apart. Thrown into an uncontrollable spin, Red had bounced off Green, Pidge screaming at him over his incompetency... and right into a closing wormhole Lance honest had no idea how wormholes actually worked, but he found his comms cutting out as he was hurtled into some distant corner of the Galaxy. He hadn't been able to right Red in time. His lion had crashed, the ground around him an ashen mess when he'd come too. If that had been all he'd had to deal with, he would have found a way. Despite seeming mostly ok, after a very brief and painful check, Red was offline and his body... it wasn't great. He might have... kind of... maybe eaten some weird herb that had survived the fire. In his defence, he was starving,. The planet was like 90 percent gravelly sand, and rocks, with like a handful of weird purple trees. Other than that one herb, he hadn't found anything other than the trees... and eating their bark wasn't working out well... So, he'd eaten it. He didn't think things through, and now he was paying the price for the tiny one bite meal. It felt like his stomach was dissolving, a constant fever left him hallucinating... or he might have hit his head. He wasn't great at this whole trauma thing... Trust him to crash land on the part of the planet without edible vegetation. Now he stuck. Waiting for someone to come rescue him, which was no longer as easy as pulling up Red's signal on the castle's holoscreens, opening a wormhole and just hopping over. Nope. Due to distance, they might not even be able to find her signal. She'd crashed so hard she'd gone off line, there might not even be a signal to find... Yeah. He'd had more than enough time to over think absolutely every possible outcome, and even his stick drawing of Pidge agreed with him that he was completely screwed. Stick Hunk had been a little more encouraging, at least he hadn't mocked him for eating bark, not like Pidge had. Allura wasn't talking to him. Keith and Shiro were off training together. Romelle was making googlee eyes at Keith, so she was no go. Coran... stick Coran. His buddy. Coran was the only one he could talk to, pretty much because he hadn't figured out what Coran would be doing if he was stuck in this situation. He'd get sad, then determined, then angry, then sad, then run around trying to cheer everyone up... but with them all doing their own thing, it was hard for Coran to get through to them all... so Coran mostly just sat on the wall he was drawn on and watched Lance sleep. Being alone meant a looooot of sleeping, and a lot of sleeping in. It wasn't like he'd had a bed time on the castle, but he still liked to get enough sleep to keep away the bags under his eyes. Being stuck out here alone meant his usually beauty routine had hell. It took a lot of work to keep himself looking as good as he had, and now all the persistent blood and grime on his skin had ruined his hard work... it was enough to give him a headache... or it would have done if the pounding in his head would ease off for two damn ticks. When he got back to Olkarion, he was taking a varga long shower, followed by another varga soaking in the bath, and then he was sleeping for a whole movement. No matter what anyone said. * Keith was angry. He was angry with himself. He knew things were shaky with the team, and he could feel something was off when they'd formed Voltron, but he'd been too focused on everything else to realise their bond was too shaky to hold. All it'd taken was one blow to send them flying. One blow to send Lance flying from his sights. One blow for Pidge to crash back to Olkarion. He and Black were communicating on a much deeper level, and he'd completely forgotten the others weren't there. Pidge had landed bad, breaking her wrist on impact. If that had been him and Black, he was sure Black would have been able to right herself before she hit the planet's surface. Down two Paladin's, they hadn't been able to stop the battleship and go after Lance. The wormhole vanishing before he could make it there after they'd destroyed the ship, and now Lance was lost out there... wherever there was. The team was in a bad way, and as the leader it fell on his shoulders. He'd left them when they'd needed him. He'd been gone for two years and he hadn't even realised his brother had died. He'd fallen for all of Kuron's lies. He'd left his team with the clone and now the dynamic was completely wrong. He'd thought that on the return trip to Earth they'd have time to all sit down and talk, but the universe had kept them here, and that talk had never happened. After what happened with Shiro, he couldn't lose Lance too. They'd come too far... though Lance had barely spoken two words to him since he'd come back, and when he did, his smile never reached his eyes... not like it used to. Something was very much up with Lance, and he'd wanted to talk about it, because he felt it went further and deeper than just things with Allura not working out and the abuse he took from Shiro. Shiro had apologised to Lance, but being hit and constantly blamed by the man you'd idolised had to hurt. If this had happened before he'd left to find his mother, he'd never have been able to find the words to have the conversation that needed to be had, but being with her... being with her meant he'd been able to work through things he couldn't before. Shiro had been a substitute for his father. He'd loved him in away he hadn't understood. A frustrating kind of love that wasn't quite romantic, so he hadn't known what to call it. Now he understood. He was his dad in Shiro. He wanted Shiro to be his dad, because his dad had left him and Shiro had promised he never would... but Shiro wasn't his dad. They were completely different and relying on Shiro didn't mean loving his father any less. No. Shiro was his brother. Shiro had reached out his hand when he was lost and guided him. He was truly grateful to have him in his life, and now understood that the love he felt for him was that of a brother loving a brother. Staring down at the star chart spread across the length of the table, Keith was looking at the section circled in red. Pidge and Hunk had put their heads together, and after movements, this was the area they felt Lance would be in. The only problem was that even pushing Black, it would still take just over a movement to get out there. He'd have to stop regularly to let his lions core charge back up, and once he got there, there was no guarantee Lance would even be in the area. There was also the constant threat that Sendak would come back to finish the job. If he took Black by himself and left Hunk, Pidge and Allura to guard Olkarion, they could very well be hurt without him... but if they went with him, they couldn't form Voltron... looking up to him, Allura and Shiro both stood straighter, Shiro doing the talking for the pair "Keith, talk to me. What are you thinking?" "I was thinking we can't afford to split our forces, we can't leave the Coalition or the Olkari without protection, but we are not leaving Lance out there. Not when he could be hurt and he's been alone for so long" "No ones saying we leave Lance" "If I take Black, will the Rebel forces be able to help here?" "Pidge has already contacted Matt. He's aware of the situation" "Do they have anyone in the area? Anyone closer than we are?" "No. That section of space is abandoned. Zarkon drained the resources, he massacred the races there. Ryner and I were discussing it this morning" "So... we need to move" "Keith, we'll handle this. Black can move faster than any of the other lions right now. We've finally found where he is, so bring him home. Take an Olkari team with you. They can provide medical assistance" "No. If something goes wrong, you'll need their help. I'll take Yorak..." "Will that be enough?" "It's going to have to be" "Alright. We'll have everything prepared here for when you return. Bring him home" Pushing Black as hard as he dared, Keith reached the quadrant of space in just over 8 quintants. Despite the star map, it seemed even sparser out here than dots had indicated. Each planet a fair distance from the other, and all a cold dull grey... somewhere he'd never live to be stuck alone. He'd never had problem with being alone before Voltron, but now... now they were family in a messed up kind of a way, and Lance... for all his annoyingness, bad flirting and even worse joke, Lance was the one who kept everyone going. Always trying to help. Always wanting to help, and always encouraging in his own way. Opening his comms, Pidge appeared on the screen "Keith, how's it going?" "I just reached the quadrant. I think Black can already feel Red, but we're still learning about this. It might take some time" "Alright. He's probably kicking back and lazing off..." "Or he could be serious hurt" "Keith, this is Lance. I'll bet you GAC he's just lazing around" Why was it that Pidge irritated him so? He'd never had a problem before with her before, but now her sassy personality seemed much more immature, her banter almost malicious in some instances? And her constant dismissal of Lance was cruel.