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Lance was in an infirmary pod.
\-V-/
Keith came around as soon as everything was secure, and caught Pidge just coming into his quarters. “Hey. Good job today.”
Pidge turned around. “Huh?”
Keith was leaning through Pidge’s open bedroom door, looking tired. “You took the castle back. Basically by yourself. Must’ve been tough.”
“I ran away a lot,” Pidge pointed out.
“You won, though.” Keith’s hand came off the doorframe, and did something that might have been a casual wave or a very sloppy salute. Pidge hoped it was a wave. “Night.”
About five seconds too late, Pidge thought to blurt out, “We won.” Keith didn’t answer, probably didn’t hear him.
\-V-/
Shiro knocked half an hour later. “It’s me, Pidge. Can I come in?”
Pidge looked down. He had on boxers and a t-shirt, loose and boyish but not really enough to keep secrets over a long conversation. Then again, Shiro already knew. “Yeah, sure. What’s up?”
Shiro opened the door, politely failed to notice that Pidge was in his underwear, and said, “There was a second Galran who infiltrated the castle, right? Where did you leave him? We should probably lock him up, too.”
“You mean Axis? It’s… not a problem.”
“What happened?”
Pidge sighed. “He fell into one of the magic lightning bolt thingies. I don’t think there’s anything left to find.”
“Okay.” Shiro closed the door behind him. “Do you want to debrief?”
Thinking of the aftermath of every simulator run he’d ever done, Pidge stood at attention. “Sir. I know another captive could have been useful, but…”
Shiro did the short-breath-out-through-the-nose thing that he did sometimes instead of laughing. “Not like that. We should talk about mistakes, even for successful mission like yours, but that can wait. I just meant, do you want to talk about it?”
Pidge sat on his bed. “Not really.” Shiro grabbed the chair from his desk, sat opposite him, and watched him for a few seconds. When he figured out Pidge really wasn’t going to say anything, he sighed.
“While you were at the Garrison, did you ever take Combat Psych?”
Pidge shook his head. “I wasn’t on a tactical track, remember? They wanted me to be a Comm Officer. I filled my leadership requirement with Project Management. I think Hunk took some psychology.”
“So here’s how it is. Combat wears you down, mentally. Emotionally. People – soldiers, pilots, refugees, whatever – get through it by bonding with each other. So it’s always rough when someone has to operate, to fight, by themselves. And it’s hard to talk about it afterwards, because no one really gets what it’s like to be on your own like that.”
Pidge opened his mouth to say So why do you expect me to talk to you? But Shiro had fought alone, hadn't he, in his escape from the Galra and probably before then. Pidge kept his mouth open to say So why don’t you go first? and stopped again. There’d been that story about Matt and the gladiator fights, that he (or maybe she, that had been a very Katie moment) had been so glad to hear. “What do you want to know?” Which still wasn’t quite fair, Shiro wanting to know things wasn’t even the point.
“How about, whatever you were thinking about right before I knocked.”
Pidge remembered what that had been, and looked away. “It’s stupid.”
“You were the one at the sharp end,” Shiro said. “If it matters to you, it’s not stupid.”
“Rover,” Pidge sighed.
“Oh. Coran said something about that. The Galrans took it back over, right? Used it as a bomb.”
“No! That was a trick – maybe they had another drone or something. Rover was with me.” He looked down at his hands. “When I was fighting Axis, he sacrificed himself so I could win.”
Shiro blinked. “That’s a brave little robot.”
“It wasn’t brave, Rover wasn’t sentient. He was programmed that way.” Pidge curled his hands into fists. “I programmed him that way. I set his fitness function, set the relative priorities for preserving himself compared to helping one of us, and I didn’t even think.”
Shiro took a second to consider that. “Would you want to be someone like that? Someone who would sacrifice themselves to save someone important to you, if you had to.”
“I guess so. I thought I was, a couple times today.”
“Then I think you should honor that in someone else, especially if you taught it to them.”
“Maybe,” Pidge said. “It'd be nice to think so, anyway." He thought about it for a bit, and it did make him feel a bit better. "Thanks, Shiro.”
“Any time, Katie.”
He flinched. “Pidge.”
“Oh, sorry…”
“’Katie’ or ‘she’ is usually fine, in private, just… not today, okay? Katie… wouldn’t have done so hot, with today.”
“All right.” Shiro stood up. “I remember the stories Doc and Matt told, though. I think Katie might surprise you. Good night, Pidge.”
“But…” Pidge said to the closed door. “But Pidge was the one everyone was counting on…”
\-V-/
Hunk was in the kitchen, hours later, when Pidge got up to use the bathroom.
On his way back, Pidge stopped and watched for a second: Hunk sitting at a table, with the lights turned down, steadily munching on a pile of fried tubers that had been supposed to last everyone all week. Pidge took a breath, set his face to neutral, and whispered, “Hey, can I have some?”
Hunk flinched, like he’d been caught doing something wrong. “Uh. Hey, Pidge. Sure, have as much as you want.”
Pidge hopped into the seat opposite, and munched on a chip. “Rough day?” It was an old code-phrase between the two of them, because there were some things you didn’t want the upperclassmen hazing you to know about. Just now, though, it made them both think about the actual day they had literally just had, and it set them both giggling.
“Yeah,” Hunk answered, once they were done laughing. “Couldn’t sleep, my brain wouldn’t rev down.”
“I wasn’t sleeping too well, either,” Pidge said. “I guess your part was rough, too?”
“Yeah. You know the Balmera, where we got the crystal? It’s alive, and there’s people living inside it, and they’re all under Galran control. I can’t stop thinking about them.”
When Hunk said he couldn’t stop thinking about something, he wasn’t just exaggerating to show how much he cared. “Have you taken your meds?”
“Before Coran and I set out,” Hunk said. “Well, I only took half of one. It wasn’t a great time to be puking, right?” He popped a chip in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Plus I don’t have a whole lot left, and there’s no way to get more. I figure I should save them.”
“The castle infirmary…” Pidge started to say.
“… probably has lots of medicine that works great on Alteans,” Hunk finished. “But unless I want to just start popping alien pills to see what happens, it’s not going to be much help for me.”
“Oh, crap,” Pidge said. In about four days, plus or minus a margin of error for the difference between Earth’s and Arus’ rotation, a package would arrive at a P.O. box in Armstrong, the town closest to the Garrison. It would be wrapped in nondescript brown paper, but inside would be Pidge’s next monthly dose of puberty-blockers.
“Yeah,” Hunk said. “So, saving up. Half a pill per battle. We can free the entire universe in seventeen more fights, right?”
Pidge managed to smile, but not to answer. Instead he said, “So, what do you do? When you should be asleep, but there’s something you can’t get out of your head.”
Hunk shrugged and grinned. “I do okay. I’m used to it, right?”
“No, really. I kinda need to know.”
“Oh.” Hunk munched more chips. “Well, company helps. I feel a lot better right now.” He smiled again, and Pidge blushed, dammit, and Hunk blushed back, and Pidge wanted to kick himself. Because “Pidge” didn’t really exist, he was a lie, the truth was a girl named Katie and Hunk never looked at girls the way he was looking now.
“So what terrifying stuff happened to you?” Hunk was saying.
Pidge – Katie – felt so guilty about lying about the other thing that she blurted out, “I killed someone. I mean… there was that battleship we took down as Voltron, that was probably a whole lot of dead Galrans per Paladin, but this was more like, we were face to face and he tried to kill me and I killed him instead.”
“Okay, well, that sounds really serious, and I want to help you work through it like a good friend, but first I’m gonna take a few seconds to be really really glad that enemy invader is dead instead of you.” Hunk closed his eyes, took a couple breaths (or maybe sighs) opened his eyes and made two pistols with his fingers. “Okay! Angst is go.”
“Well, yeah, I know I had to, and I know it’s better this way, but still. He was all, ‘I’m a Galran soldier, you’re just a child, raaar,’ but in the end he knew I was killing him and he was scared.” The final act of it had been Rover, but that didn’t matter. Rover’s code was a weapon Pidge had aimed at the Galrans days ago, and now Katie had to live with that. “His name was Axis.”
“Weren’t you scared? I mean, I’m not really a good judge of what’s supposed to be scary, but…”
“Oh, yeah, of course. I was terrified.”
“So, that’s the whole reason it’s wrong to try and take over the universe, right? Because whoever wins, the loser has a name and they know they’re going to die and they’re scared. And even the winner has a name and they think they’re going to die and they’re scared. And you’re probably a better Paladin if you know that. See what I mean?”
Katie thought she did. “It’s just, now I’ve decided to stay I have to actually be that person.” Namely, Pidge. “The person who’s going to do all this stuff, and be in these battles, and I don’t know if I know how to be that guy.” Or any guy. Keeping up the lie felt more and more impossible.
“Yeah, me neither,” Hunk said. “I never even wanted flying duty, did I ever tell you that? I wanted a shipyard job, maintenance or design or something.”
“No,” Katie said, “you didn’t tell me that. Nobody at the Garrison ever admitted they wanted anything but a flying position on a fighter. I was faking, too.” Well, she had wanted to fly, she would have wanted to fly even if it hadn’t been the best way to get an opening to look for Matt and her dad, but she hadn’t wanted a fighter. “Heh, imagine if we’d requested transfers, to be teammates with a cargo pilot. Some other nerds would be stuck out here instead of us.”
“Instead of me, maybe,” Hunk said. “You weren’t on the roof that night because you were teammates with Lance, though.”
“I guess not,” Katie admitted. “Sorry we dragged you into this.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m not. Who cares if I’m scared?” Well, he did, or he’d be asleep instead of trying to eat himself calm. “We get to do something really important, here. I am so in.” He yawned, and Katie had to yawn, too. “I’m gonna go try and sleep aga…” He trailed off, staring. And blushing. “Um, Pidge?”
It occurred to Katie that letting Hunk see “Pidge” in “his” underwear, stretching luxuriously, was not a good move for Operation Don’t Let Hunk Get A Doomed Crush On A Fake Boy. She lowered her arms. “Um, sorry. Yeah, I’m gonna go back to bed, too. Maybe it’ll stick this time.”
“Uh, right.” Hunk was pointedly not looking at her now. “Thanks for hanging out, though.” He was packing up the chips, which they had not finished, yes! “Hey, you know, if there’s ever anything you want to talk to me about, you know you can trust me, right?”
“Yeah, of course!” Where had that come from? Of course she could trust Hunk. Well, she couldn’t trust him not to touch her stuff, or eat her food, but for big things, yeah, obviously.
“Good night, Hunk.”
“G’night! See you at training tomorrow!”
\-V-/
Pidge was in her dreams. They were both in civvies, Katie in a dress like she’d worn at home and Pidge in the sort of shirt and shorts he’d worn after hours at the Garrison. The green Paladin armor was hanging on the wall between them.
“Keith says you did a good job today,” Katie said, as if Pidge didn’t know that.
Pidge nodded. “Hunk says he’s glad you’re okay,” he said back, and though Katie had already known that she was glad to hear it anyway. “You should try flying with us next time. It’s seriously fun.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “My hair wouldn’t fit under the helmet,” she said, because of course she still had her long hair.”
“Oh, yeah?” Pidge said. “Try it.” He tossed her the Paladin helmet.
“Why do boys have to be such brats all the time?” she griped, and tried the helmet on. It fit, and then she was in the Green Lion’s cockpit. She remembered this. Of course she remembered this…
\-V-/
The alarm went off. Pidge woke up. She was still tired, but she grabbed her glasses off the nightstand and rolled out of bed. “All right,” she said. “What’s next?”