Chapter Text
“The system’s down.”
Keith rolls his shoulders and winces when his neck pops in two places.
“Copy,” he sighs, rubbing a hand down his face. His knees ache in their crouched position and twinge as he pushes to stand. He’s been shoved behind a storage container on his haunches for the past hour, and Pidge’s voice through the comm system was almost startling after all the silence.
“The system covers cameras and low security clearance, but the sentries are powered independently,” Hunk’s voice explains through the channel. “We’ll have to open the safe door manually from the North wing of the cruiser, and we’ll definitely need cover for Keith and the pod.”
“Copy,” Shrio’s voice confirms. “There’s at least four hallways that converge by the pods; think you could block some of those, Pidge? The less sentries that wander in here, the better.”
“I’ll close the West and South halls, but the security on these doors is annoyingly airtight. It might take a minute.”
“Got it,” Shiro says. “Hesitate to report on any movement in the East corridor; I just sent Lance down.”
“Copy,” Hunk sighs.
Keith can detect his own fatigue in his teammates’ voices; they’ve all been on this cruiser for too long, and it’s hard to gather the motivation this far in.
Minut rustles of movement sound through the comms—clicks of a keypad, the whir of a bayard—a telltale sign that everyone is preparing for action, and Keith halfheartedly twists to the side, groaning at a deep pop in his lower back. He wasn’t built for stealth missions. They make him antsy, shoulders tense with dormant energy and fingers twitching towards his blade. He has an almost Pavlovian response to putting on the armor, the immediate giddy anxiety and the sharp kick of his pulse as soon as he zips up the skinsuit. But after an hour of no action, the adrenaline abandons him and leaves him wrung out, tired and annoyed at the dig of the quad plates into his hips. He isn’t quite as good at recovering the energy as he is at initially summoning it.
But he will, because he has to.
As per usual, the paladins are strewn across an enemy vessel, sentry ridden and teeming with reposing disaster. Keith prefers to come in guns blazing, but being a Defender of the Universe means being careful and methodical sometimes, so Keith has been here—no guns and definitely no blazing. Just peeking around a metal container of stolen resources, trying his best to assess the environment as they waited for Hunk and Pidge to access the system.
This Galran cruiser is a pleasure vessel—a genuine Earth-style cruise for wealthy Galran families to visit surrounding planets. Probably all expenses paid. Free food and entertainment. It couldn’t be much of a bother, if the copious amount of resource containers in the hull are anything to go by. All different colors and makes, labeled in a dozen different languages, none of them Galran. Most likely relief resources, intercepted on their way to struggling planets because the Galra had nothing better to do. Planets left scrambling in the aftermath, mouths left unfed, transporters of rebels captured or obliterated, but a Galran family will get to try genuine Olpivan produce and rave to their friends back home. So sure.
This particular vessel had been singled out by Allura for its revolutionary draw: a genuine Altean artifact recovered—stolen—in the aftermath of the war, pulled from the archives and up for auction. It was advertised in broken, vague sentences on encrypted holo networks, but was undoubtedly the reason the cruiser is twice the size of the warships Keith has become so intimately familiar with. The Galra collect Altean artifacts like sick trophies, proof of the power they held over the once superior kingdom, and the surfacing of a new piece after ten thousand years is unheard of. The pleasure cruise is a frenzy of powerful families scrambling for one more reminder of their ancient victory.
Blackmarket trade of Altean memorabilia is rapid and nearly impossible to track due to the sheer frequency, but Allura tries to keep her eye on it to make sure nothing particularly important is being passed around. Something about the description of this particular piece caught her attention, and the paladins are here on the high possibility that it may be a piece of dangerous technology. It was unclear if the Galra are aware of this and simply underselling, or if they genuinely have no idea.
Either way, it’s potentially precious technology that’s dented bruises in Keith’s hips and drained his enthusiasm, and Keith really hopes to drop the ‘potentially’, because the entire ordeal has been incredibly tedious.
It’s deceptively difficult to infiltrate and case a vessel full of passengers. Security is more lax, but they had to be a lot more careful about… everything. Just because the passengers were Galran didn’t mean they could be thoughtless casualties, which meant no damage to the ship if they could help it. They’d worked their way into the basement hull by no easy means, and Pidge and Hunk had taken a whole forty five minutes to inch their way to controls in the North wing. Keith only had to travel up one story to the East wing storage where the artifact was being held, and Lance and Shiro had been anxiously standing by in the pod hull, awaiting instruction.
“Ah… great,” Pidge’s muffled voice grits through the channel. Her keypad tapping becomes a bit more pronounced.
“Everything okay?” Shiro asks.
“Stupid cruise ship security… what do these people have to be afraid of?” Pidge whispers, voice floating further away like she’s left her helmet on the control center and walked.
“Hunk?” Keith asks, assuming Pidge is otherwise occupied.
“Seems like the system is on a reset schedule. Makes it so everything we did is only gonna stick until the program reboots. I’m surprised we haven’t seen the Galra do this before; it’s smart,” Hunk explains, and Keith hears a far away ‘and annoying!’ via Pidge.
“How long do we have until that happens?” Keith asks, jumping a few times in place to try and wake up his muscles now that he knows this might get busy fast.
“Twenty doboshes, give or take,” Pidge answers, voice no longer far away. “That shouldn’t be a problem for you and Lance, but me and Hunk are going to have to figure out how to expedite our exit.”
“Right, right,”—Keith can hear the exaggerated nod in Lance’s voice,— “and if—hypothetically—someone on the team wanted to know what that was in Earth minutes…”
“Lance…” Shiro chides, and Keith rolls his eyes. Over the past few months, Shiro has been trying his exasperated best at getting Voltron up to proficient code, hence the ‘copy’s muttered through the comms and Altean time system. He and Allura agreed that as a symbol of hope, they could employ some professionalism, establish some sense of routine.
Some aspects have their benefits; they seem more respected now that they’ve been trained on diplomacy, and missions like these go smoother with memorized comm etiquette, but some things just don’t stick. Like the Altean times.
Keith wouldn’t admit it, but even he is lost on the exact math of the system.
“It’s twenty eight minutes exactly,” Hunk answers absentmindedly, and Lance sends a kissy noise through the channel with an exaggerated ‘thanks’.
“Hunk, don’t indulge him,” Keith grits, shifting at a subtle buzz of movement behind him. He doesn’t bother to turn around; it’s familiar.
“C’mon Keith, would you rather have a partner who’s prepared or a partner who flies by the seat of his pants? Something tells me you’ll have a preference,” Lance rambles.
“Do I have the option of a partner with quieter steps?” Keith asks, looking over his shoulder to see Lance freeze in his path towards the shipping container, bayard in hand with a scowl.
“How do you always do that??” Lance whispers through his teeth, stepping the rest of the way until he’s next to Keith, back pressed to the container.
“You have a very obvious presence,” Keith says, leveling Lance with a flat look. Lance just narrows his eyes.
“Shucks, you know just what to tell a guy who’s on a stealth mission,” he deadpans, batting his lashes before flipping up his visor.
“Guys,” Shiro interrupts, his tone communicating all it needs to for Lance to sulk.
“Keith—” Lance begins.
“Don’t wanna hear it,” Shiro cuts him off, “sign off unless you need something.”
“Copy,” Keith replies.
“Roger Roger,” Lance says, voice high pitched and warbled as he gives a purposeless salute. They both switch off the channel after a final muffled sigh from their leader. The comms are only supposed to be used for relevant information now, which means Lance is off the channel more than on, and often drags Keith down with him by association.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Keith asks, alluding to Lance’s sign off—an obvious impression of some sort.
“B-1 Battle droids,” Lance says, pulling off his helmet and clipping it to his belt. The armor gives Keith horrible helmet hair, but it just seems to tousle Lance’s, leaving it sticking up on the sides, sweaty strands curling by his ear.
When Keith just stares at him blankly, Lance frowns. “Prequel trilogy, man,” he groans. Keith shrugs, and Lance grimaces. Keith’s lack of pop culture literacy never fails to irk him.
“You want the rundown?” Keith asks and removes his own helmet, quickly running a gloved hand through his hair before Lance can see how stupid it looks. Though Lance doesn’t really seem to be paying attention, scraping off a dark spot on his bayard. Maybe blood. More likely mud from the last planet they’d visited. The mud had been bright red. And sticky. Keith still has some on the soles of his boots.
“Sock it to me, sweetheart," Lance sighs dramatically, clapping a hand on Keith’s shoulder. Keith shrugs it off.
“Why can’t you ever ask for anything normally?” he grits out, and Lance shrugs, undeturped.
“Because it’s less fun that way,” he admits. “What do you want me to say?”
“Something normal? Sock it to me, sweatheart…” Keith mumbles to himself. What did that even mean?
Lance raises a questioning eyebrow in his direction.
“I don’t know? ‘Sure, Keith; what’s the situation?’” Keith provides.
“Am I a cop?” Lance asks, shoving his thumbs into his belt and popping a hip. “What seems to be the situation?” he parrots, southern lull in his voice as he waves a finger in Keith’s general direction.
“That’s a bit more spaghetti western sheriff,” Keith says, swatting Lance’s hand out of the way.
“I can’t say nothing.”
“Sure you can,” Keith assures, turning around to make sure the area is still empty.
It takes less than a minute of scanning the room for Keith to realize he’s waiting for Lance to ask again so he can actually go over the information. He peeks to the side to see Lance staring at him flatly.
“This is me not saying anything,” he explains, and Keith bares his teeth in a sardonic smile. Lance mimes zipping his lips and Keith turns his attention back to the hull.
“The only movement on this floor over the past hour has been sentries—no bathrooms, emergency exits, or purely trivial spaces anywhere that I saw,” Keith begins, consciously not watching as Lance activates and begins to adjust his weapon. Lance knows his way around his bayard like no one else on the team; seeing him work with it, clean it, cock it and fiddle with the pieces is impressive. Some depraved part of Keith finds it attractive. So, he listens to the noises of Lance popping off a dial and rescrewing it and doesn’t picture his hands working around the Altean tech even once.
“So, they’ve just got robots down here,” Lance gathers, saddling up right next to Keith until their shoulders are touching, finally satisfied with his weapon.
“Seems like it,” Keith says. Small victories, he guesses. It’s always easier to get this stuff done when they only have sentries to deal with. Real, living beings throw messy things like Galra wanting revenge for their dead and unpredictable combat and the ever looming shadow of morality into the mix.
“Make and model?” Lance asks, another familiar question they’ve worked into their routine.
“Definitely not the ones we fought on that grey planet,” Keith answers, and Lance shudders in memory.
“Menos mal,” Lance sighs, which Keith has gathered means something close to ‘thank God’, and yeah, thank God. Those sentries had been a little too hard to beat, and every day they don’t run into any more is a relief.
“Newer model, though,” Keith adds.
“Are the helmets pointy?”
Keith thinks about it. “Yeah, actually.”
“Ugh, those fuckers have built in scopes,” Lance groans, lifting up his bayard all over again.
“Scopes? Like—”
Lance hits the heel of his hand into a plate on the side of his gun, cutting Keith off as a circular extension springs out from the top of the weapon. A small scope. Keith looks up to see Lance smirking, pinching off a glove with his teeth so he could better position the lens.
“Built into their monitors… but two can play at that game,” he says, words mumbled around the glove in his mouth, and Keith forgets somewhere along the way to not look at Lance’s hands. Oh well.
“Hey wonder duo, you two still arguing?” Pidge's voice is barely audible from the helmets on their hips. Lance shoves his glove back on and dons his helmet.
“As if,” he says, “what’s up?”
“We finally figured out what the deal with the doors was. South and West halls are all closed, and we can open the safe door whenever you and Keith are in position,”
“Roger rog—”
“Don’t,” Pidge stops.
Lance makes a bewildered expression. “Stick in the mud.”
“This stick in the mud has complete control over how much intel you get about that safe room,” Pidge leverages.
“Jeez, okay. We’ll let you know when we’re ready,” Lance finishes, and Keith hears Pidge close their channel. “Tetchy.”
Keith scoffs and jerks his head to the side. “Follow me.”
The safe room is located in the back of the hull, most likely because it makes absolutely no sense to put it there. Keith has the sneaking feeling that all of these extra security measures are less to protect that artifact from outside threats and more to protect it from the passengers. It seems that for once, the Galra are taking precautions against each other.
Lance leads the way, bayard at the ready for anything unprecedented. Keith follows close behind, giving hand directions and whispering the rest of what he’s noticed. By the time they arrive at the safe door, Keith finally feels like he’s recovered some of his energy, and Lance is rolling his shoulders and bouncing on his heels, hyping himself up.
Keith looks sideways at Lance and the latter nods, reaching into his helmet and opening the comm channel.
“Alright Pidge, what’ve we got?” Lance asks.
“Why is her question normal?” Keith grumbles, glaring at his partner. Lance ignores him.
“Hunk here,” a deeper voice says through the channel, “Pidge had me look at the security footage while she was working on the system, but there really wasn’t much to notice. There were three internal cameras, two on the far side walls and one low down that rotates, but we covered those. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem like there are any defenses once you get in. No motion sensors or artillery. They must assume no one will get past the door.”
Lance sends Keith a look.
Keith returns the furrowed brow. The two of them share an equal distrust for situations like these, where things seem easier than they should. It was less of a relief and more of a pit in Keith’s stomach, because if they can’t find anything dangerous, it’s probably just very well hidden.
“But there is one thing.”
Lance huffs a humorless laugh and Keith relaxes a bit.
“Nothing too crazy?” Lance asks.
“Well, it could be nothing, but it could also, y’know, not be nothing,” Hunk replies cryptically. “There are vents lining the safe’s floor. Pidge thinks I’m being paranoid, but they’re in a weird place. Completely flush with the ground, and the system’s blueprints don’t show any vents traveling from your floor at all,” Hunk explains.
Keith finally unclips his own helmet, tired of standing close enough to Lance to hear from his.
“I haven’t seen any air vents down here; it’s most likely an unmanned floor,” Keith explains, doing a last minute once over of the hall they’re standing in. No aircon is another telltale sign of an area the Galra leave to the sentries.
“I’m definitely sweating more than usual,” Lance adds, and Keith knocks their hips together as an aggressive ‘hush’.
“I mean that’s usually a sure sign,” Pidge argues, and Keith can’t exactly argue. His skinsuit has definitely felt… more pleasant. “It’s definitely a bit odd, but I think as long as you keep an eye on them when you’re in there you should be fine.”
“If it was anything to be worried about, wouldn’t you be able to see it on the system?” Lance asks.
“Yeah well, about that…” Pidge trails.
Keith activates his bayard and lets the tip of the sword hit the floor with a *klink*, sighing. He really just wants to get this over with.
“We got into general security with little to no issue, but there’s a suspiciously guarded application I had to do some serious digging to even find,” Pidge says. “I poked at it a bit, but it’s insanely secure. From the look of things, it would take me another hour to even find out what it’s holding.”
“Awesome. What’s that mean for us?” Lance asks.
“Hard to say,” Hunk answers, “it’s possible they’ve gotten something hidden in those vents that’s super secret. Explosives, poison gas, you know,”—Lance is staring miserably at the air in front of him, and Keith just presses two fingers into his eyes, trying to squeeze away the inevitable headache—“fortunately, we don’t think any of that’s gonna happen.”
“Why not?” Keith asks.
“The application is completely separate from the rest of the system. Password protected too. Everything points to it being a manual precaution. Someone would need to manually open and activate it when they wanted it to be used, whatever it is. It’s so highly protected that it can’t even be automated,” Pidge explains.
“So… we’re good to go in the safe?” Lance asks warily.
“Unless for some reason whoever runs this system decided to open and activate that encrypted protocol at this moment for no apparent reason, yeah I’d say you’re okay.” Pidge’s voice is tinged with humor, but Keith is glad to see his own doubt reflected in Lance’s current expression. That seemed like the exact brand of unlikely that would absolutely happen to them.
“Copy,” Keith says anyway.
“The door will be opening in a few ticks; you guys have twelve doboshes,” Pidge says.
“Got it; copy,” Lance says, switching off his channel. “How many minutes is that?” he asks Keith.
Keith tilts his head back and forth in an attempt to look calculating. Is a dobosh a minute and a half or a minute and… a third of a minute…?
“You don’t know,” Lance says, gun hanging limp by his side. “You give me so much shit, and you don’t know either!”
“Shut up,” Keith says, and Lance is forced to listen as the safe door begins to creak.
Much to their surprise, the center of the safe door starts to unfold like a weird, mechanical flower, hinges pushing thin layers of black metal towards them and to the side like petals opening and falling away. It’s sort of mesmerizing, and Keith finds himself watching the process with his mouth ajar. With every circular metal plate, the gap in the center of the door opens until it’s wide enough for a large person to step through. The frame of the door is completely lined with the moved pieces, overlaid and facing outward like a rose.
“Wow,” Lance remarks, and Keith breaks out of his stupor, “I feel like we’re going into the chamber of secrets or something.”
“Let's hope there’s no giant snake,” Keith comments, picking up a foot to step into the safe.
“How have you seen Harry Potter but not Attack of the Clones?” Lance follows him inside and clicks on the light on his bayard, muttering a dramatic ‘Lumos’.
“I read the books,” Keith says. Lance huffs a laugh that Keith chooses to ignore.
From what Keith can see with the minimal light, the safe room is small, about half the size of his bedroom on the Castle. The walls are completely bare and unembellished. Seems all the budget went to the fancy door.
“This is dramatically underwhelming,” Lance says through his teeth, suddenly right next to Keith.
“Keep your eyes on those vents, Sharpshooter,” Keith reminds, hitting Lance in the shoulder plate. Lance grumbles something under his breath and rotates in place.
There are a total of six vents on the room’s walls, no bigger than Keith’s hand and definitely not emitting any air, if the sweat collecting on his temples is any indication. Weird, but according to Pidge not a huge concern, so Keith draws his attention to the pillar in the middle of the safe. It’s maybe four feet high of black metal and the only interesting looking thing in the room. The metal has been scalloped and blown like glass in thin, stacked layers, soldered to look like a flower. Similar to the door. It looks incredibly delicate, like if Keith breathed out too hard it all might shudder and wither away.
“Are you just gonna stare at it?” Lance asks, making Keith flinch. He turns to see Lance tapping his non-existent watch, bayard still pointing at the tiny vents lining the baseboards.
Keith doesn’t respond and takes a step closer, noticing a familiar blue glow emitting from the top of the structure. The Altean artifact appears to be tucked under three metallic petals, which are glowing a pretty purple from the light behind them. Keith gingerly reaches his hand over the structure and pinches a petal between his fingers.
“Oh,” he breathes, because the metal feels like silk between his fingertips. Like real flower petals, even though the material is so clearly metallic; it even makes an unsatisfying scraping noise as the petals brush each other. “Weird.”
“Bad weird?” Lance asks.
“No, just weird,” Keith answers, moving the last petal and uncovering the artifact. There is a moment where he just stares at it, confused. It’s undoubtedly what they are looking for—emanating blue light, white metal exterior, but Keith is slightly taken aback by the size. It’s a smooth sphere and barely the size of a billiard ball. The pillar it’s sitting in is far more impressive than the sphere itself, but Allura knows best. Keith hopes.
Now exposed, the artifact begins to pulse light and shudder slightly, and Keith pulls his hand back.
“We’re sure this thing’s not going to explode when I touch it, Pidge?” Keith asks. When no answer comes through, Keith closes and reopens the channel. “Pidge?”
“The signal might be blocked by the safe walls,” Lance says, walking up behind Keith to peer over the latter’s shoulder. “Please tell me that’s not what we’re here for.”
“Pretty sure,” Keith says, wrapping his hand around the object and exhaling when it doesn’t detonate.
“I’m gonna have some choice words for Allura,” Lance complains. His chin is practically on Keith’s shoulder now, and Keith inches away from the breath on his neck.
“No, you’re not.” They all respect—and maybe fear—Allura a bit too much to ever complain. Lance especially talks a big game about all the things he’s going to tell Allura, only to stutter over anything that isn’t ‘yes, Princess’ or a horrible pickup line.
“Let me dream,” Lance sighs. He hooks a finger in the gap in Keith’s thigh armor and tugs. “Grab it and let’s go. I have no idea how many doboshes we’ve got, and even if I did that wouldn’t help so—”
Keith blinks and stumbles a step towards Lance before righting himself.
“Right.”
He turns back to the pillar and grabs the artifact, uncomfortably aware of how Lance’s hand is still drifting somewhere by his hip. Close enough to graze his waist when he turns. And close enough for him to yank Keith back by his belt when the pillar suddenly begins to shudder and shift. As soon as the Altean tech leaves the metal, the petals start swelling, bubbling like heated glass ready to either pop or melt. The bubbled filigree is shaking like it can’t figure out what to do next, shifting into itself and then swelling back out into mutated petals. Keith and Lance watch on in tense uncertainty until the pillar suddenly rights itself, merging into a flush metal pillar in the blink of an eye. No delicate detailing, no floral configuration, nothing but a solid block of black.
“Okay,” Lance breathes out. He’s right at Keith’s back, hand still fisted in the back of Keith’s belt, making the buckle dig into his stomach. He seems to notice it all at once, quickly letting go.
“That was weird,” Keith thinks out loud, looking down at the artifact in his hand. It’s still pulsing with light, but it has stopped shaking. Lance scoffs.
“No kidding; so much for underwhelming.” Lance picks the sphere up from Keith’s hand and rolls it between his palms.
“Lance,” Keith chides, grabbing for it. Lance moves it out of the way.
“Did you ever have a fushigi ball?” he asks, cupping the artifact and waving his fingers so it jostles around. Keith is having a hard time breathing.
“What the hell is that? Stop.” He finally confiscates the sphere when Lance does something that looks too much like a wind up to throw.
“I used to see commercials for them when I was a kid. It was a magic ball—”
“A magic ball?”
“Honestly I don’t really know what it was, but you could do really cool stuff with it. I asked my parents for one but th…” Lance trails, and Keith looks up from the artifact to see him staring at something over Keith’s shoulder.
“What?” Keith asks, unhappy with the way Lance’s eyes are darting around.
“That wasn't there before, right?”
Keith turns around slowly, eyes scanning the dark room and landing on a small device that definitely wasn’t there when they walked in. It’s floating completely still a foot off the ground, oblong and solid white. About three times the size as the sphere in Keith’s hand. He whips around and pushes Lance out of the way, discovering another one directly across the room from the first.
Keith shoots his eyes around the baseboards, finding two hatched openings in the walls.
“You weren’t watching the vents!” Keith grits under his breath, rounding on Lance, who lifts his hands in surrender. His bayard isn’t even activated.
“I looked away for like, two seconds! With how fast these things showed up, it wouldn’t have mattered,” Lance argues, but Keith just groans. They both begin slowly inching towards each other, studying the devices.
“I hate you,” Keith says, grunting as they finally meet in the middle, their backs flush.
“What are they?” Lance asks, and Keith wishes he knew the answer. They’ve faced plenty of Galran tech over the years, and none of it has looked like this. The devices are entirely solid. No divots or cameras or barrels. Not even a seam. Looking at them is freaking Keith out in its looming vagueness.
“Explosive?” Lance tries again, speaking even quieter.
“Would they blow up their own artifact?” Keith questions, asking himself the question as much as Lance.
“Probably not. Weird, upgraded gun droid?”
“If it is, I wish it would just shoot us,” Keith says.
“Don’t tempt it—oh dios!” Lance groans angrily as suddenly, both devices split into four. Keith and Lance startle against each other in surprise, armor knocking noisily. The action had been too quick to even follow, somehow splitting and dispersing before Lance even finished his curse. Keith’s eyes are wide and darting, jaw clenching almost painfully as he realizes the devices now circle them, eight in total.
“How—?!” Lance asks, familiar exasperation punching out of his chest. Keith feels it in his gut: the general annoyance at missions in space where everything is impossible and new and illogical. Because space says so. He often misses the harsh logic of Earth.
“Pidge?” Keith tries one more time. “Does anyone copy?” No answer.
“Seems like we’re on our own here,” Lance says.
Keith opens his mouth to respond, but the devices begin rotating, faster and faster until they blur into each other and become a solid smear of white light. Like when you turn a fan up to the highest setting and the blades disappear into a solid disc. One group of four seem to rotate perfectly around Keith, while the other has Lance at its direct center, which is effectively purposeless; they are maybe six inches off from each other.
“Oh,” Lance says, standing up straighter, “is that it?”
Keith doesn’t let his guard down as fast, but he’s hard pressed to relax, studying the glowing rings around them and figuring this must be some new attempt at trapping them in one place. It seems inane, as the objects are rotating no more than a foot off the ground, but maybe the Galra didn’t account for… jumping?
But as if they were answering Lance’s question, the devices begin to stretch upwards as they spin, until the field of light towers feet above their heads. Keith cowers back into Lance, shrinking downwards as the circles close in, only a foot away from the both of them now. The blur of light is easily seven feet high. Okay. Maybe the possibility of jumping was considered.
If it’s possible, it seems that the objects start spinning even faster, and Keith and Lance both crouch down on instinct. The movement is emitting a whirring noise at this point, and the glow from the blur starts to become more obvious.
And then two of the objects collide, sending sparks of white light out and offsetting the circles. Keith and Lance duck and shout as one of the devices unlatches from the field, flying past their heads and making a booming clang somewhere they can’t see.
Keith’s gut feeling has rocketed past annoyance and is now resting somewhere closer to his throat, sharp and panicked as the force fields jump and shudder around them, sparks still flying. It’s apparent that losing a piece is causing problems; the two circles are in an erratic, confused dance, sputtering against each other and fusing the next second, like the devices aren’t sure which original group of four they belong to. It has unaccounted probability written all over it, and Keith isn’t thrilled to be in the middle of it.
“What’s happening?” Lance asks, and Keith realizes he has to shout over the whiring around them. Keith jumps as two devices graze each other, a grating scrape echoing around the safe.
“They’re running into each other,” Keith shouts back, pulling back his legs when he notices the fields are still trying to close in.
“What?” Lance asks.
“There’s one group for you and one for me—” Keith sucks in a gasp as two more objects collide and one wobbles in air, jutting out into the middle of the field inches from his side. Lance grunts as Keith accidentally knocks their heads together, “—but we’re right next to each other.”
“And now they’re both trying to close in on the same space,” Lance says in understanding. Keith nods, which Lance can’t see but can probably feel. “Is there a course of action here, or—”
Lance doesn’t get to finish his question, and Keith doesn’t register more than a painful cracking noise and the sudden crushing bend of his spine before he and Lance are shoved impossibly closer. He opens his eyes to near darkness, blinking away black spots in his vision from the force. His hands reach out blindly and meet solid metal, on all sides, above and below. Lance is scrambling similarly, grunting as his head connects with the roof of the confine.
“Wha—” Lance groans, legs shifting and kneeing into Keith's side. Keith squirms out of the way and meets another one of Lance’s knees with his hip. “Stop moving!” Lance begs, grabbing blindly for Keith’s shoulders, fingers digging into the gaps between his armor.
“Get your knees out of my side,” Keith grits, squinting to try and see better in the dark.
“I’m trying, just hold on,” Lance says, shifting loudly until he and Keith are seated hip to hip, facing opposite sides of the enclosure. It’s a tight fit—Keith’s thigh plate was making an indent in his quad—but they are generally out of each other’s way. They both exhale.
“We’re in a box,” Lance says obviously.
“Thanks for that; I wasn’t sure,” Keith deadpans, hiking a leg back to kick at one of the walls. His boot connects with a loud *klang* but the wall has no give, and pain shoots up his shin, sharp and stinging.
“How are we in a box…?” Lance continues, and the fact that Keith doesn’t have an answer just annoys him further. He kicks at it two more times for good measure. The general space annoyance gut feeling was back, all of the agitation with a lot less of the adrenaline. He continues to kick at the thick metal wall, and Lance winces with every loud clang.
“You’re going to break your leg,” Lance says, and Keith shoots him a glare. His eyes are already adjusting to the dark; he can make out the shape of Lance’s face only a few feet away from him. He sets his leg back down begrudgingly, studying their enclosure.
At each of the four corners sits one of the white, oblong devices, now entirely still. How the walls materialized, Keith is lost on, but he couldn't be bothered to try and figure it out.
“So much for not being able to close in on the same space.” Lance says, staring at the devices bitterly.
“I doubt this is what was supposed to happen,” Keith says, palming around the walls for some seam or opening. Lance bends out of the way uncomfortably as Keith reaches around him. Much like the interior walls of the safe room, the walls of the box are entirely smooth. Keith slumps back against the wall in defeat.
“What do you mean?” Lance asks.
“Do you think one of these boxes is meant for two people?” Keith asks, leaning forward a few inches to prove his point. Even shoved completely against Lance, Keith is flush with the wall against his side. The top of his head grazes the roof, and his knees are hiked up and knocking into Lance’s. Leaning forward lessens the already small space between them, and Lance raises an eyebrow in agreement.
“So, the fields just freaked out against each other until one won out and closed around both of us instead of whoever it was meant for.”
Keith hums in confirmation, craning his neck forward so he can remove his helmet. Lance does the same, setting it on his lap. Keith runs his palms around the cool metal, squinting against the beginnings of a migraine. He tosses his helmet lightly up, opening his eyes when it doesn't fall back into his hands. Lance is staring open mouthed at where Keith’s helmet had just been.
“Your helmet just disappeared,” he says, and Keith balks at him.
“What?”
“You tossed it up and it just like, vanished,” Lance gestures with his hands in the air nonsensically, and Keith can’t do anything but stare at him.
“Why?” Keith asks stupidly, turning his attention to Lance's helmet, very much visible sitting in his lap.
“I don't know? Wait—” Lance reaches forward, pulling off one of his boots and tossing it into the air. Keith watches as it vanishes the second it leaves Lance’s hand. “Don’t let go of anything,” he concludes.
“Wha—why would,” Keith mutters. Right. Sure. A stabbing pain behind his right eye joins the souring annoyance in his gut. It’s accompanied by a sudden sinking feeling when he realizes he hasn’t seen the entire reason they’re here in a while. “Where’s the artifact??”
Lance reaches into his chestplate and pulls out the sphere and Keith relaxes a bit. The glow it emits lit up Lance’s face considerably, and Keith can see the tension in it. His hand is tight around the artifact, knuckles white.
“Don’t let go of it,” Keith says, looking meaningfully at Lance. Lance looks up and nods, squeezing it between both of his hands in his lap like he's scared someone might grab it from him. “That’s probably why this… does that. So we’d let go of the artifact and they’d be able to recover it while we’re still in here.”
Lance nods again thoughtfully, staring daggers at his hands. Keith breathes in deeply and cringes at the way he can feel one of Lance's shins against his diaphragm as it shifts. He takes another deep breath and pauses. Something about breathing this easily feels wrong.
“There has to be an opening in this somewhere,” he concludes, eyes raking the interior all over again. Lance looks up curiously. “The air isn't thin,” he explains, and Lance takes a deep breath of his own.
Keith does his best to twist around in place, searching the wall behind him.
“Here,” Lance says, and Keith turns back around to see the former holding the artifact up to the far wall, illuminating two tiny slits in the metal.
Keith leans closer, ignoring the uncomfortable press of Lance's ribs into his own. There’s a thin veil of particles emanating from the slits, almost like dust floating next to a clear window, except it’s moving quickly into the box. Keith’s brow furrows; is the box somehow feeding them oxygen? It could be a trick of the Altean light, but the spray looks tinged pink. Keith leans further and breathes in, immediately feeling his head spin and going into a coughing fit.
“Jesus, man!” Lance exclaims, shoving the artifact back into his chestplate and cupping a hand around Keith’s neck.
“There’s something coming out of that,” Keith tells him, coughing again, “gas.”
“Gas??” Lance exclaims, letting go of Keith and covering his mouth and nose.
Keith picks up Lance’s helmet and shoves it towards him. “Put on your helmet.”
Lance stares at him. “What about you?”
“Mine vanished into thin air,” Keith says, breathing shallowly. “Just put it on.”
“And what, just let you die?” Lance asks, and Keith rolls his eyes. The Galra try very rarely to flat out kill them in situations like these. It would be stupid, when there is information to be tortured out of them.
“It’s probably just a tranquilizer,” Keith says, pointing to the slits. “It's pink.”
“Ah,” Lance says. Unfortunately, the two of them are at a point in their lives where pink sleeping gas in a Galran cruiser is something they've encountered before. Twice.
Lance wrinkles his nose and coughs for the first time. Keith shoves the helmet into the other boy’s chest.
“Put it on,” he pushes, letting go only when Lance wraps his hands around it.
“Do you know how creepy it would be if you pass out and I just have to sit here with your unconscious body?” Lance asks, and Keith makes a face.
“Would you prefer that we were both unconscious??” Keith asks back, because the desire to knock them out even though they were already trapped probably means the Galra know the box isn’t impenetrable. And as much as Keith would prefer to be the one awake out of the two of them, Lance is the one with a helmet.
“How much you wanna bet they’re only pumping enough gas in here to knock out one person?” Lance asks. “If we both breathe it in, we might not even pass out.”
Keith thinks about it. It’s possible, but it’s also possible that in their aggressive hatred for the paladins of Voltron, the Galra would be thorough.
“The second you start to feel lightheaded, you’re putting the helmet on,” Keith says, and Lance nods. Keith tries to believe him.
✧
It had been maybe five minutes before Keith practically had to shove the helmet over Lance’s head. They’d both started blinking sluggishly around the same time, and Keith felt a little bit out of it, but Lance’s head had lulled forward into his chest, and Keith had had to smack him to get it back up.
“Why aren’t you passing out?” Lance asks, moping.
Keith shrugs, clenching his entire body against the cottony feeling in his brain. His tongue feels weirdly swollen in his mouth, and it’s getting harder to keep his head up.
“Alien metabolism,” Lance mutters, and Keith glares.
“Don’t have it,” Keith says, aggressively rubbing his face to keep himself awake.
“You could,” Lance says.
“Maybe I’m just better than you,” Keith says back, and he frowns when it comes out slow.
Lance chuckles and pats Keith’s shin. “Sure, buddy.”
Keith stares at Lance’s gloved hand as it hooks around his shin armor, inches from the skinsuit by his knee. His cheeks feel hot. He blinks slowly and swallows. It’s getting warmer in the box by the minute.
“Check it again,” Keith says, eyes still locked by his knee. Lance lifts up the artifact to the gas vents for the third time in the last few minutes.
“I think that’s it. Nothing else is coming out,” he relays, removing his helmet, and Keith breathes out in relief. His eyelids are starting to feel heavy, and he didn’t feel like mustering up the decency to ask Lance for a turn with the oxygen.
“That’s one less thing,” Keith says, trying to breathe in deeply and failing. The air still doesn’t feel thin, but he’s just enough out of it that fully expanding his diaphragm is work. His breath catches when he tries a second time.
“You good?” Lance asks, and Keith looks up to meet his eye, eyes closing and opening in a long blink. His eyes might’ve opened at different times. Like a frog.
“Mm,” he says, and he frowns because he’d definitely wanted to say an actual word. Up from under his fringe, Lance looks concerned, leaning slightly forward so his elbows invade Keith’s leg room.
Keith squints against Lance’s hands grabbing the sides of his face and lifting it up. A strand of hair lands between his eyes.
“You gonna pass out? I was serious about that freaking me out,” Lance says. Keith tries another deep breath and gets a better grip on this one, lungs filling and flooding oxygen to his brain. He exhales through his mouth, making an audible noise that makes Lance’s fingers twitch on his temples.
“Just gimme a sec,” he says, eyes closing. The hair on his forehead is starting to tickle, and he tries to blow it out of the way, but the air catches on a cough.
One of Lance’s hands shifts to brush it away, fingers running through Keith’s bangs and carding them back. Keith frowns, opening his eyes to peek through his eyelashes at the other boy. Lance pulls his hands away as their eyes meet, splaying them awkwardly on his thighs. Keith takes another deep breath.
“Good?” Lance asks.
Keith nods. “Yeah. Fine.”
“Okay.” Lance props his feet up on the wall across from him, crossing his arms around his helmet. He’s staring at his lap, and Keith is suddenly lucid enough to feel the beginning of tension between them. He plants his hands between his legs, caught and far away from Lance.
It’s been happening more often in the past few months, bouts of uncharacteristic silence coated in something unspoken. Teasing jokes of Lance’s that settle oddly, so they’re left just looking at each other, the back of Keith’s neck shivering. Casual touches lingering a second too long. Fingertips brushing armor, friendly shoves done with splayed palms instead of closed fists, burning skin left behind where Lance touches him.
The gradual change has been odd, but it’s easy to walk away from. Easy to ignore. Blips in missions and training sessions and crew dinners that Keith writes off as pent up energy or the heat. He’s gotten good at recognizing it early and shutting it down. If he’s being honest with himself, they both have; Lance is as much of a part of it as he is, and equally as aware. Which is weird. But only so weird if it never goes anywhere.
Normally, Keith would be taking the necessary measures by now. Shutting down the conversation with a stinging remark, shaking off the tightness in his muscles and spending a half hour on the training deck, simply walking away; it was never difficult. But Keith is rapidly regaining his mental footing to the press of Lance's legs into his side and the obvious diversion of his eyes, nowhere to go and nothing to say.
They sit there for a minute or two, and Keith presses himself further into the wall, head resting against the cool metal enough to slightly lower the heat in his face.
“Do you think the others got out?” Lance asks. He’s holding the artifact up to his face, inspecting it as it illuminates the slightly damp sheen of his skin. They are both sweating, layers of thick armor and kevlar doing horrific wonders in the enclosed space.
“Maybe,” Keith answers, and Lance looks over at him, resting his cheek on one of his palms. The Altean light from the artifact is unflattering as ever, casting harsh shadows on Lance’s deep set eyes. Like when you held a flashlight under your chin to tell scary stories at camp. Keith has seen it in movies.
“I think we can get out of this. Without them, I mean,” Keith continues.
“Yeah?”
“They wanted us drugged for a reason,” Keith argues.
Lance sighs dramatically. “Okay, I guess you can try kicking it again,” he says. Keith glares at the sarcasm, hiking a leg back. Lance grabs it, hand straining against the back of Keith’s knee as he goes for a kick. Their eyes meet, Keith’s frustrated, Lance’s bewildered.
“I was joking,” Lance says.
“Can’t hurt,” Keith says, eyes flicking down to Lance’s hand, still on his leg. Keith isn’t sure if it’s the forced proximity of the situation, or if it's the fact that he’s already hot and tired and on edge, but the constant touching is making him feel a bit wild. Lance is touchy by nature, but Keith typically makes an effort to keep enough space between the two of them that it can’t ever really become an issue.
“Uh,” Lance begins, and his hand just travels higher, fingers digging into the skin between Keith’s armor, skinsuit thin enough that Keith can feel the indents of his nails, “yes it can. Like literally. It can and will hurt your leg.”
Keith doesn’t have the mind to argue that it doesn’t matter. “You can let go of me,” he says instead. Lance lets go, but slowly, and only once Keith’s foot is fully settled on the ground, gentle and unnecessary in a way that’s making Keith want to piston his legs back against the metal just to get out of here. This quiet closeness isn’t good—for this weird recent shift between them—because the energy seems to bounce off the walls, caught with nowhere to go. He runs his hands across his face and doesn’t think about it, doesn’t look at Lance.
A clang of metal sounds outside the box, and Keith breathes out in relief at the distraction.
He and Lance go still as the faint sounds of voices follow the bang of the safe door opening.
“Ah, perfect.” The quiet warble comes from Lance’s helmet, automatically translating the Galran into English. Keith shoots his head towards the helmet, almost colliding with Lance’s as he does the same.
“For prototypes, these ended up working quite well,” a voice says, and Keith has to focus to block out the original language he can hear outside the box to focus on the translation. It’s easier when the helmet is on your head and the processed speech is all you hear.
“We’ll see how they hold up,” a deeper voice says, “just be careful with this one.”
A second later, Keith and Lance are jostled in the box as it’s tilted on one of its edges. Keith slides sideways into Lance, barely concealing a grunt of discomfort.
“Ow,” Lance whines. Keith slaps a hand over his mouth.
“You gonna help me?” a soldier asks, and then the box is lifted straight up and carried a few feet before being rested on a new surface.
It must be some sort of cart, because Keith can tell they’re moving—but without much urgency. The Galra are probably resting easy, assuming their paladin is knocked out inside.
After a few minutes, the cart stops, and the box is unceremoniously picked up and dropped back on the ground.
“Where is the last one?” a new, third voice asks. There is a drawn out silence where no one speaks, and Keith and Lance exchange a confused look.
“This is the last of them,” a soldier says, voice uncharacteristically timid.
“There are five paladins. Five. You’ve brought me the fourth box.”
Keith swears under his breath. So much for the others getting away. Four boxes means all of them were accounted for. Figures.
“We went to every location they were in before the protocol was initiated. We only found four boxes.”
Manual program wouldn’t be randomly opened his ass. They’d known Voltron was coming.
“You’re telling me one got away,” the third voice says, and Lance shudders at the displeased chill of the officer’s tone.
"It seems so, sir.”
There is a prolonged silence and then a huff of annoyance.
“Could there be two in one box?”
“Doubtful, sir. There was a field assigned to each paladin's heat signature. Besides, they are grown adults of their species, are they not? The boxes are small.”
“So are they. They are almost Altean in build. Make absolutely certain we’re truly missing one.”
There is an exchanged ‘Vrepit Sa’, and then the Galra Keith assumes is a higher up exits the room. The two soldiers remain.
"Could two paladins fit in one?” one soldier whispers to the other, sounding skeptical.
“Just size all the boxes down to make sure there isn’t; if each only holds one paladin, they will shrink down comfortably.”
Shit.
Keith and Lance exchange a panicked look before shoving themselves into each other's space, torsos leaning forward and twisting at an uncomfortable angle as the four walls squeeze in all at one. The metal bangs against Keith’s skull, and he gasps at the pain, jaw immediately colliding with Lance’s shoulder.
There is a murmur of Galran outside of the box, but Keith can’t hear a translation, waiting in painful silence as the soldiers leave the room, seemingly confident that there is no way two paladins could be occupying one now shrunken box.
“Fuck,” Lance breathes out as soon as they hear the metallic sliding of the door closing. Keith’s spine feels like it is moments from snapping in their new position. They’ve both turned towards the middle of the box in their rush, backs rotated uncomfortably.
“We have to move,” Lance continues, palming around the walls and blanching at how easy it is to feel all four sides. “Jesus.”
Keith plants a hand on the wall by Lance’s legs and twists himself around as Lance does the same. They move slowly and with difficulty, bulky armor knocking and bones grinding against each other until Keith is grunting in frustration.
“Why is it so fucking hot in here,” he grits, yanking off his gloves and throwing them to the side. They vanish into the air. He can’t find it within himself to care.
“Wait,” Lance shifts and his knee prods into Keith’s ribs, “sorry—put your leg through—yeah there. Now take this arm around…”
Keith untangles his arm from Lance’s right leg and finds himself finally sitting, arms by his sides and legs mostly comfortable. He and Lance are facing each other, chests and faces as far apart as is possible in their confinement as their legs tangle by their sides, knees practically at their ears. One of Keith’s legs is stuck under one of Lance’s, while the other hooks over Lance’s right thigh, foot resting by the taller boy’s hips.
Even with their backs pressed against the walls, there’s maybe six inches between their navels, chest plates tapping with their heavy breathing.
Fuck.
Okay.
It’s somehow darker than before, and impossibly hotter, and Keith is starting to feel like he might be burning up. He reaches up and starts unclamping his chest plate.
“What are you doing?” Lance asks, and his voice is so close, breath on Keith’s cheeks echoing around the small space.
“There’s no room and it’s hot. I’m hot,” Keith sounds off even to his own ears, voice thin and baseless.
“Okay,” Lance says, not moving. He’s just watching Keith, which shouldn’t be anything of note since there’s nothing else to look at, but Keith is uncomfortably aware of it.
In the minimal space, Keith manages to remove the armor and hold its pieces in front of him, letting go so they vanish. He breathes a sigh of relief afterwards, one less layer of armor keeping them a few more inches apart.
“That freed up some space,” Lance remarks before doing the same. Keith stares at his lap, lost heat returning when he can’t even do that without looking at Lance’s legs, hugging his hips, feet hooked in the gap between his lower back and the wall. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries very hard to think of anything else.
✧
It’s been another ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Maybe more. The majority of their armor has been removed and vanished safe for the plate of thigh armor that holds their bayards and only source of light.
It had taken very little time after removing their chest plates for Lance to realize his helmet had disappeared along with the artifact sometime in their shuffle, and it had taken even less time for Keith to ream him, arguably unfairly.
But the tension from the argument has settled, and now there’s only the familiar, fizzling kind—the kind that was making Keith feel sort of nauseous.
Shedding their armor made for a lot more room, but it also means that when one of them shifts, thighs and chests moving and brushing, there is nothing but the thin skin suits between them. And it's a lot. Less uncomfortable by way of lack of bulky armor between them, but so much worse in about every other way.
Lance’s practically bare legs are shoved against his sides, and his shoulders haven’t stopped cowing, sending him closer and closer to Keith as time passes. Keith’s nose is inches from Lance’s neck; he can see the sweat beading and rolling down it. Keith can feel the sweat on his own back, hot flashes lighting up his skin as the air only gets more and more humid around them. His eyelids feel heavy.
The situation started out a bit absurd, but the last few steps have made it all feel like a weird dream that he’d wake up from feeling sort of guilty. The weird, unprecedented situation, the increasingly cramped proximity, the pulsing heat in his gut that’s simultaneously telling him to get out and get closer. He’s been staring daggers at the nearest corner for what feels like forever, distracting himself by listening to the sound of his own breath and not getting caught on Lance’s.
“Uh, Keith?” Lance says into the dead silence, and Keith swears that his voice results in a sensation of actual physical pain somewhere between his eyebrows.
“What?” he asks.
“Can I?” Lance asks into the silence, tapping his chin on Keith’s shoulder. Keith is clenching his jaw so hard it hurts. “Sitting up is so uncomfortable.”
Keith wants to yell at Lance and tell him that there’s no way he needs to do that—as if this is all some big trick he’s playing on Keith to drive him insane—but he’s seen Lance try to sit up for a while now, too tall torso making it so he has to bend his neck forward at an awkward angle. Resting his head on Keith’s shoulder will definitely be more comfortable.
“Sure,” Keith said, because if it was anyone else, it wouldn’t be a big deal—and there’s no reason that Keith wants to bring any attention to that Lance is different from anyone else.
“You can do it on mine too,” Lance says, jaw moving against Keith’s shoulder as he speaks, “it’s much better.”
Keith slowly angles his head down, resting it in the junction by Lance’s neck, eyes traveling down to the partially unzipped back of Lance’s skinsuit. Something like a hiccup catches in his throat, and there’s a sting of heat somewhere lower.
“Your skinsuit is unzipped,” he says, voice almost catching. It’s undone halfway down his back, muscles poking across tanned, heated skin that Keith can’t get himself to look away from.
“Yeah, uh, it’s really hot in here,” Lance says as an explanation, and Keith hates that he can hear some of Lance’s own awkwardness in the answer. Like he’s embarrassed that Keith might be looking at him.
And as he tends to do when he’s embarrassed, Lance seems to panic a bit. Keith swallows a gasp when he feels Lance’s fingers pinch at his own zipper. “I can do yours.”
Keith feels like he might be on fire, heat pooling on his tongue and settling in his gut, skin rippling as Lance guides the zipper down. Past notches in his bowed spine and so much bare skin. He stops and plays with the zipper—nervously, Keith’s mind provides—pulling it up a few inches and down again.
“Are you even hot in here?” Lance asks, voice hiking up. Keith can feel it on his clammy skin as Lance speaks, inexplicably running a finger down Keith’s spine and making him breath in sharply. “You’ve got goosebumps.”
Keith’s cock twitches in his skinsuit.
“Lance,” he cuts sternly, grabbing Lance’s free arm with both his hands and squeezing. Lance freezes, hand by Keith’s back stuck in place. Neither of them move, bodies still against each other.
Keith can feel something settle, and he bites the inside of his cheek in frustration. Nothing has ever gone this far, far enough that one of them has to bring attention to it. Far enough that Keith can feel Lance get awkward, because they are so close that he can feel the tensing of his shoulders and the uneven way he exhales. Keith sees the looming acknowledgement in the way Lance pulls his hand back, in the way he zips up a few more inches of Keith’s skinsuit, in the way the silence stretches between them like a thick, taut cord.
Keith feels vulnerable and embarrassed, but there is nowhere to go, so he keeps his chin on Lane’s shoulder, and Lance does the same, and they let the silence buzz around them until it’s almost bearable.
“Sorry,” Lance says quietly, and Keith cringes. They can still ignore it if there isn’t a conversation, if Keith walks away from it and convinces himself it was all his own mania and nothing mutual while Lance does the same. There can’t be a discussion.
Keith doesn’t respond.
“Do you want me to zip up my—”
“Shut up,” Keith interrupts, squeezing his eyes shut. No discussion. He can’t confirm or deny anything. Things are still nebulous enough that neither of them can walk away with any answers. It’s best that way.
“Okay.” Lance must’ve been holding his hands in the air, because Keith feels them fall and brush the side of his torso. Keith tenses. “Sorry,” Lance says again, lifting his hands awkwardly by his side, trying and failing to find a place to rest them. Keith grabs them with his own and slams them down on the ground.
“Stop moving,” he says, and it sounds embarrassingly desperate. It feels like Lance has stopped breathing, and it takes Keith a few seconds to realize he has too, chests eerily still against each other. Keith exhales and watches in vague horror as Lance reacts, shoulder blades pinching closer together in a tense as his hands twitch.
Something deep in Keith’s gut is twisted so tightly it’s almost unbearable, and he has to untangle himself from Lance and shove himself back against the wall to attempt to sober himself.
“You okay?” Lance’s voice asks. His voice seems to boom around the walls, whispers still not subtle enough in the proximity. Keith looks up through his bangs and avoids Lance’s eyes desperately as he answers.
“I’m fine,” he says, and Lance nods.
Keith pulls his hands away, dragging slow fingertips across Lance’s own in an attempt to be subtle. Lance makes a small noise in the back of his throat, and Keith grinds his back molars against each other. There’s an unfamiliar desire to cross his legs against whatever this feeling is; the few inches between their noses and the gradual awareness that whatever this was felt unbearably mutual and the knowledge that Keith could slide his hand above Lance’s shoulders and drag it down the bare skin of his back, knuckles counting the rises in his spine.
“We—” Keith says, ignoring the downward flick of Lance’s eyes that he probably imagined, “we have to get out of here.”
“Okay,” Lance says, voice tight. He shakes his head and tears his eyes from Keith, running a hand down his face. “Okay.”
“I’m gonna kick it again,” Keith says.
Lance groans, and that breaks some of the tension. “No, you’re not,” he retorts, leaning back against the wall so his neck bends awkwardly.
“Then do it with me; twice the force.”
“Twice the broken bones, Samurai,” Lance mocks, and Keith ignores him, grabbing onto the quick change of subject like a lifeline.
He plants his eyes on a small Lance-free area and brackets his hands on the wall opposite him, scooting back his feet to shift their position.
“Woah, what are you doing?” Lance asks, cowing out of the way as Keith’s leg slips out from under his hip, knee bashing into the spot next to his ear. “Hey!”
“If we sit side by side again, we can try and push it open,” Keith explains, unfocusing his eyes to best ignore how close he keeps getting to Lance’s face.
“I already told you, I’m not kicking i—woah.”
Keith’s forehead knocks into Lance’s as the latter wraps a hand around Keith’s left thigh. They both groan in pain.
“Lance,” Keith says, traitorous eyes flicking back to his face, because Lance’s index finger is practically branding the sensitive skin inches from Keith’s hips.
“Sorry,” Lance repeats for the nth time, sounding properly mortified. His fingers dance awkwardly in their place, and Keith’s eye twitches. “Just, stop moving.” He guides Keith back down and presses their legs flush together, hand pulling away like it’d been burned.
Keith stares expectantly, wordlessly asking for an explanation.
“Do you think just one of us is tied to this?” Lance asks, and Keith shifts. Lance shoves their legs together again. Keith glares into the darkness.
“Stop doing that,” he says.
“What if one of us disappears if we’re not y’know… touching?” Lance asks. “You were moving, and I was like ‘wow, for once we’re not like, shoved together in here’, and then I remembered what those soldiers said about our heat signatures and—”
“What??” Keith interrupts.
“They said the devices—the boxes are tied to our heat signatures. And everything completely disconnected from us in here has, poof, vanished. If this box is mine, and you completely disconnect from me, are you going to vanish out of here?”
Keith blinks a few times, processing the theory.
“I—I don’t know,” he admits. He settles back against the metal, thinking back through the time he and Lance have been in the box, and if they’ve truly always been connected at some point. It doesn’t seem unlikely.
“That’s why I grabbed you… like that. Sorry. It’s dark, and I can’t really see where I’m—” Lance clears his throat, “—grabbing.”
Keith feels his cheeks heat. “It’s fine,” he says, and they both sit there in thought, ignoring the remaining tension as it fizzles out.
“What if that’s how we get out?” Keith asks.
“That’s a horrible idea,” Lance fires back.
“Do you have a better one?”
Lance scratches the back of his head. “No? That doesn’t mean that we try to vanish one of us out of here though. They can’t keep us in here forever, right? Is there a problem with just waiting it out?”
Keith fixes Lance with a silent look. They’re shoved against the opposite walls of the box, hands tucked away from each other, a ticking time bomb of stuttered sentences and wandering hands the second they get too close. He knows, and Lance knows, and the look leveled between them communicates that; there is no use playing dumb about it. It’s an odd feeling, to occupy that space together for once, both aware and making decisions based on it, but now isn’t the time to dwell on it.
Lance sighs, dropping his chin into one of his palms. “We have no idea where that stuff goes. What if they just shoot it out into space?”
“They must’ve put this in place to get the artifact back; they wouldn’t vanish it out into space,” Keith argues.
“What if it’s vanished into a super tiny box?” Lance mimes a square with his fingers. “We can’t fit in an artifact sized box.”
“Neither can our armor. They had to account for something else getting out.”
Lance winces, obviously uncomfortable with the idea of going through with the vague theory. Keith isn’t the biggest fan of it either, but he’s drenched in sweat and shading loaded looks with his teammate and it’s all getting to be a bit much. Stupid decisions seem a lot more appealing when the alternative is another, arguably more detrimental, stupid decision like letting his more private feelings towards Lance win out when they’re stuck in an honest to God impenetrable metal box.
“There’s so many ways it could go wrong,” Lance says. “What if it doesn’t work the same on people as inanimate objects?”
“Why would it work differently?” Keith asks. Lance starts bouncing his leg where it’s flush with Keith’s, jostling their only connection. Keith stares at their legs and considers just disconnecting them.
“I have no idea how teleportation works. What if it takes our bodies but not like, our souls?”
Keith shoots his eyes back up. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Lance shrugs. “It’s a thought.”
“Here’s a thought: leave the crazy space theories to the people on the team who actually know what they’re talking about,” Keith says, suddenly anxious at the idea of vanishing out of the box and leaving his soul behind. It’s stupid, but inane enough to make him feel a bit weird.
“Ouch. Just trying to throw out some stuff to think about; don’t act like you know any better,” Lance complains, crossing his arms. Keith knocks their legs together.
“Of course I don’t; neither of us know anything about this stuff,” Keith assures, “but that’s just… horrible.”
“I think not knowing should mean we’re definitely not trying anything,” Lance says, leaning forward against his knees to really look Keith in the eye. Keith bites the inside of his cheek.
He feels his stomach turn at Lance getting this close and frantically tells himself that there has to be a failsafe in place for larger objects getting out. Anywhere but here had to be better. He stares at the singular point where their thighs meet, and before he can budge, Lance seems to latch onto his thought process, grabbing his ankle.
Keith kicks Lance’s hand away.
“Keith—”
Keith lunges. Lance shoves a flat hand onto his chest. Keith pushes it away. Lance grabs him around the back of the neck. Keith twists under Lance’s arm. Lance wraps his hands around Keith’s forearms, yanking him forward. Keith scoots his legs back, folding onto his shins.
“Let me go,” he says. Lance doesn’t respond, thumbs pressing painful indents into Keith’s pulse.
They both stare at each other for a beat, breathing hard from the tussle. Keith quickly takes inventory from his toes to the top of his head, realizing they aren’t touching anywhere besides the brand of Lance’s hands. He presses himself roughly against the wall and rips his arms away, elbows cracking against the metal wall behind him when his arms come free.
And then Keith feels his entire body drop. Hard and fast and tight, like his body is being siphoned through a long funnel at a hundred miles an hour, viscous and malleable, reordered and twisted apart and back together. The feeling persists for a split second before his body hits cold metal flooring. He gasps and wretches his head up, immediately regretting it when a rush of vertigo hits him, eyes seeing double.
“Oh my god,” he groans, pushing himself up on shaking hands and falling back onto his jaw. There’s a retching noise coming from behind him, and he rotates his head to see Lance on the ground beside him, up on his hands and knees, pushing to stand. Lance stumbles to the corner of the small room they’re in and vomits. Keith winces, folding upwards onto his knees.
“We were definitely not supposed to do that,” Lance grits angrily, hands braced on the wall next to him.
“I don’t know; I feel like I still have my soul,” Keith says flatly. Lance turns and glares at him.
“Literally how are you making jokes right now,” he groans, “I feel like all my organs were just turned inside out.” He punctuates the end of the sentence with a dry heave into the corner.
“At least we’re out,” Keith says, managing to stand straight up for about three seconds before his knees buckle.
“Woah,” Lance says, lunging to wrap his arms around Keith’s shoulders to keep him upright. “You might’ve left your equilibrium behind, man.”
“I’m fine,” Keith lies, staring at the floor. He feels steadier on his feet already, but the longer he stays upright, the more his stomach turns. He retches, and Lance flinches, grimacing.
“Do I need to hold your hair back?” he asks, hand inching to Keith’s nape.
“Shut up,” Keith grits out.
“That was a serious question,” Lance clarifies, looking at Keith warily. Keith’s stomach gives another roll, and he shoves down his pride before nodding and folding over, vomiting onto the floor.
Lance’s hand is gripping his hair tightly behind him, and he pats Keith’s back lightly. “Ew.”
Keith rolls his eyes, standing.
“Good?” Lance asks. Keith nods, wiping his mouth.
There’s a bad taste in his mouth, but his knees are holding now, long enough for him to get a look at where they are.
It’s another small, dark room, not unlike where they’d found the artifact. The floor is littered with their discarded armor, surrounding a large metal box in the center of the otherwise empty space. The box looks even smaller from the outside, just past half of Keith’s height when he approaches it.
The box is all white, glowing blue light lining the corners and sputtering oddly, like a bulb about to burst.
“It’s Altean,” Keith concludes, and Lance gives an interested ‘huh’ somewhere behind him. The make is indistinguishable from the tech on the Castle, and Keith frowns. Why Alteans designed shrinking boxes is beyond him, but why the Galra have them is more concerning.
“Why did it kick both of us out?” Lance asks, saddling up next to Keith. They’re both still swaying a bit from the effects of the teleportation, and their hips bump a few times before they just give up and lean against each other.
“It’s possible that these four weren’t a group to begin with,” Keith says, gesturing to the devices at the four corners of the box.
“Like some of them could be locked onto me and some on you?” Lance guesses, and Keith nods. “Could explain why it looks ready to fall apart.”
It really does. The flush edges of metal are rattling oddly, and the visible light around the corners keeps brightening and dimming.
“Good thing we got out when we did, huh?” Keith says with a dramatic sigh, shrugging.
Lance looks over at him, eyebrows raised. “Yeah, I’m not giving you this one. That was such a stupid thing to do.”
“What if it would’ve exploded on us, Lance?” Keith pushes, sarcastically serious. Lance just scoffs and shoves him, forgetting himself. Keith feels himself start to keel over and grabs at Lance, only succeeding in pulling them both to the ground all over again.
✧✧
All of the paladins make it back safely to the Castle after a short tussle between Keith and Lance and the ship’s guards. It had been clear that they were relying on the boxes to do their work for them, as Keith and Lance’s sudden appearance out of their confinement had caught their very small faction entirely off guard. They’d managed to incapacitate the threat and contact the Castle from the ship and get intel on how to free the rest of the team from Allura, who’d known exactly what they were dealing with. They’d even brought the artifact back in one piece, escaping the cruiser with no casualties. Keith was still feeling the effects of the teleportation, and Lance had thrown up again in the escape pod, much to Hunk’s dismay, but they were otherwise unscathed.
And now they’ve gathered in the lounge as Allura handles the artifact and gives them some much needed explanation.
“They were originally made for trapping small animals. Either for rehabilitation purposes or extracting species for research,” Allura explains, rolling the artifact in her hand.
She places one of the mice on the floor off her shoulder and presses a button on the underside of the artifact. It floats down to about an inch off the ground, hovering until it's close to the mouse before splitting into four small balls. Keith watches with an uncomfortable sense of deja vu as the balls begin to spin and stretch before forming a small box around the animal. Allura lifts the box with her hand, and presses three fingertips on the top. The walls of the box dissipate, and the four spheres roll back into one. The mouse squeaks good naturedly.
“And the human sized ones?” Shiro asks warily. It’s clear that the entire experience had rattled the team, as they’re all staring at the artifact with varying levels of distaste.
“We never developed anything large enough to hold an Altean,” Allura says. “It’s clear that the Galra discovered what the device could do and engineered larger versions for their benefit.”
“What about our stuff vanishing out of it?” Lance asks.
“Yeah,” Pidge begins, “I know I had my bayard when it first closed in on me, but the second I set it down, it just disappeared.”
“Oh, well in the case of capturing animals, the goal was always to disrupt the habitat as little as possible. The device locks onto an animal’s heat signature and relocates anything else back outside.”
Keith finds himself annoyed that there is a sensical explanation.
“And here I thought it just made metal pillars look pretty,” Lance says under his breath. Keith had entirely forgotten about the weird event with the pillar with everything else that happened on top of it, but Allura seems to know what he’s talking about.
“It definitely succeeds in that field as well, and not just with pillars” she begins. She sets the artifact flat on the couch, and within a few seconds, the cushion begins reshaping itself, puffing out into what looks like a weird, blue bush. “It’s meant to create a camouflaged environment with its surrounding material while it’s in waiting. Typically, that would be fauna of some form, but it can make flowers and greenery out of anything.”
“Huh,” Keith says. When he shifts his eyes over to Hunk and Pidge, they’re practically drooling at the piece of technology.
“As for how the two of you got out, I have to say it’s impeccable luck, as the final versions of these cannot be escaped from the inside. We have a Galran engineer’s faulty practice to thank for today's success,” Allura says cheerily, and Keith gives a half smile, along with Lance.
They didn’t tell anyone that the reason they’d been able to escape was because they’d been caught in the same box. Keith doesn’t fully know why, but he’d lied when Allura asked on their return and said that their boxes had just… come apart, and Lance had done more than back him up.
Fibbing about it had seemed like the quickest fix at the time, as Keith was stupidly sure in the moment that if he told anyone he and Lance had been stuck in a confined space together for the entirety of the mission, his face would turn bright red or they’d somehow know that Keith hadn’t felt entirely normal about it.
But now, with the fact that Lance had lied right behind him, they’ve inadvertently admitted to each other that there’s something they’d rather not talk about, which is almost as bad as just talking about it in the first place. They’re hiding it from everyone else, but it’s a blatant, bold-faced acknowledgment to each other, which is making that unspoken something continue to buzz between them, even out in the open.
Keith listens as Lance agrees with Allura, dragging their unnecessary lie further, feeling the distance between them on the couch poignantly, and he wonders if this weird undefined thing between them will ever go back to being entirely vague.
He doesn’t think so. He wraps his arms around his torso and meets Lance’s eyes for a split second and watches as Lance’s fingers twitch nervously, and he isn’t sure how he feels about that. He breathes out unevenly and decides that it's a problem for another day.