Lance breathed in a ragged breath.
In, out.
The soot fogged up his helmet, choking him up, but he still pushed onward. Step after step after step. In, out. His breathing was labored. His armor was dirtied. His limbs ached.
“Keith?” Pidge’s voice rang out over the comms.
Keith had come after Lance when the Galra had made the threat, when Lance dove down into that waste of a planet. At first, he’d been held back by Shiro. Keith was somewhere on this planet now, but Lance couldn’t focus on him. He had other priorities. Keith would be fine.
In, out.
Lance focused on his breathing instead, tuned out the outside sounds of the paladins calling for Keith and him. With each struggling step, his bayard illuminating the way, he dragged himself over to the cave home.
It’s curtains were drawn, and no light came from within. The only sign of life were the heat signatures his helmet picked up.
Fuck, the air was rough.
“Lance, your helmet is broken,“ Allura started.
Lance shut off the comms. Anything distracting him was preventing him from reaching /them./ He pushed his way through the curtain entrance.
There she was.
Huddling under a table in the corner was a small girl, a blue-scaled dragonling humanoid with bright red eyes. She was trembling. Lance got down on his hands and knees, crawling over to her.
In, out. His throat hurt.
“Hey,” he said softly, a rasp tickling his words. “I’m a Paladin of Voltron. I’m here to save you from the fires.”
The alien girl croaked out a whimper. She clearly didn’t recognize him, but her planet was a member of the coalition… fuck. Lance knew what he had to do.
He removed his helmet.
“See?” Her eyes lit up with recognition.
“Loverboy!” she exclaimed. Lance winced at his stage name, laughing outwardly to reassure her.
“That’s right, and I’m here to save you,” he agreed, reaching his arms out to her. Without the meager protection of his helmet, he was really starting to feel woozy. Still, that didn’t matter.
With shaking hands, he picked her up and began to walk outside the cave home and back to Blue.
This time, though, the trek was worse. He couldn’t see as well without his helmet, couldn’t recognize heat signatures or the fastest path back. Instead, he relied on lighting up his footsteps and retracing his steps.
That didn’t last long.
After 20 steps, Lance began to feel dizzy. He lurched, which caused the girl to make a series of clicks.
In, out. He patted her back and continued on.
After 50 steps, Lance started to lose the edges of his vision to blackness. He could feel the mucus in his throat fighting his inhalations. He fought back harder. He would have to reach a level of survival that went beyond what he could handle. To save her.
In, out.
Finally.
120 steps.
Lance fell to his knees.
The girl screamed.
Lance was only a football field from Blue. He had failed.
The girl scrabbled her claws at his armor, wailing, her cries embellished by the distant sound of crackling fire. Lance closed his eyes, listening to her pain, letting it soak in. He’d failed her, and this was his punishment, to lie prone and to hear her suffer. He had failed.
In, out.
He felt a tug to some hidden darkness inside of him.
“Lance!”
Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen.
Lance felt more than heard the pounding footsteps of Keith Kogane as he ran to his side, kneeling by Lance’s head and cradling it in his hands.
“Stay awake, Lance, I have an O2 mask and we can get the girl to safety—“
“Loverboy!” The girl insisted.
Keith’s head snapped up. Lance chuckled weakly, coughing at the end.
“What?” Keith asked.
“She knows… shows,” he muttered in response. Keith huffed a breath, fogging up his helmet.
“Oh.”
Lance coughed again, and Keith panicked, pulling a mask from his belt. “Stay awake.”
“Loverboy,” the girl insisted again, tugging on Keith’s shoulder.
Lance blinked slowly. The world was slow. Why was the ash now falling on his face in slow motion? Why was Keith putting the mask on so slowly?
In, out.
Lance blinked. The darkness came back. He closed his eyes.
“No, Lance, no.”
Lance wasn’t listening. It was more peaceful, here, to focus inwardly rather than on the voices out there. It was quiet and dark and cool. The fires couldn’t touch him here.
“Loverboy? Stay with me, please. Please.” The rawness in his voice made Lance’s eyes snap open.
“Keith? I’m really trying…”
Words were too difficult, though.
So Lance let his heavy eyelids fall, let the blackness rush in. He felt the mask press into his chin and nose.
“I know, Lance.”
Silence again.
In,
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How did you know you were gay?
ah, couple reasons i guess. some that only became obvious with like 15 years of hindsight, and only after pulling myself out of the deep dark pit of compulsory heterosexuality.
like. classic symptoms of lesbianism include shamefully staring at the floor when you pass the women's underwear racks in the department store, even though you're not quite sure why you're uncomfortable. that sort of thing.
i have memories from early elementary school of accidentally glimpsing down a girl's shirt at recess and then bottling up that feeling and refusing to think about it. any time i had a crush on a boy, it was from an extremely idealized and safely non-actionable distance. the one time i did have a boyfriend, it was just my guy best friend from middle school, we dated for barely a school year before i ended it and the most physical intimacy i was ever comfortable with was holding his hand when we walked to class. i went to a different school's prom because a guy i was kind-of friends with asked me, and spent the whole night uncomfortably avoiding eye contact.
basically i started questioning my sexuality towards the end of high school, when i noticed myself getting like. jealous about my guy best friend's girlfriends?? like. i wanted to date them. i wanted to steal them from him lmao. i thought girls were pretty and soft and nice and cute and i was too afraid of being a predatory creep to do anything about it besides have far-fetched daydreams, but there was no heterosexual explanation. like, i hugged a girl i thought was pretty one time and it did things to my brain. that memory got locked in for life.
i identified as ace/pan early on, but again- compulsory heterosexuality. the idea of being with a guy romantically or sexually was never actually appealing. i had just been told that was what i was supposed to want my entire life, and the movies do a great job of selling that fantasy. but really i was just a lonely depressed helpless romantic teenager that wanted to be loved lol.
a large part of why i identified as asexual was because i was so sex-repulsed by the idea of penetration, honestly? (which i have since gotten over, but specifically Only with girls. the idea of having sex with a man still icks me out, and my preference is definitely femme-presenting ppl) a bit of it was probably also because i hadn't unpacked gender yet either. it made it very difficult to actually imagine myself having sex with anyone ever lol. this is gonna sound so cringe to say, but reading gay smut did awaken things in me.
in conclusion, tldr, i just like to think about tits and kissing women sometimes, idk. thanks for coming to my tedtalk.
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