Love is Weak

Chapter 39 - Pain

Lillian

I was worried the whole flight back to the Blade base. Since Keith had gone through the wormhole, I had been experiencing this impending feeling of fear and doom. Part of it was my own fear that he wouldn't return, and the rest of it was what I assumed was a result of me and Keith's connection. Keith's fear was increasing, almost becoming painful, and that made me worry more.

When I landed in the bay, there was a group of agents standing guard with their weapons out.

"Identify yourself!" someone shouted as I made my way down the ramp of my pod.

"I'm General Kintanara, you dumbass," I said. My mask had been down the entire time, and my hands were up in the air so they knew I wasn't carrying a weapon.

Kiana broke ranks, yelling at everyone to put their weapons away, and ran to hug me.

"Where the hell have you been, Lily?" She shouted, both angry and happy. "We all thought we had lost you too."

I didn't answer any of her questions as there was a topic much more pressing than my disappearance. I winced as I felt a bit of pain in my gut.

Keith's in danger.

"We need to locate Voltron," I said, moving past the agents that hadn't yet dispersed. "Now!"

"Where have you been?" Kiana asked, keeping pace next to me.

"We can talk about that later, Ki. Something's wrong with Voltron, and we need to figure out what," I said.

That silenced her.

I barged into the control room where Kolivan and the rest of my unit was.

"Find the Black Lion," I ordered.

No one objected, and no one said anything. They followed my order, stifling their emotions of missing me because they knew they weren't supposed to show them.

When they found the Black Lion, they pulled it up on the screen, enlarging it so I could see. It had landed on an abandoned celestial body that housed an old Galra installation.

"Hack the base," I said with a bit of condescending annoyance.

This should be obvious.

Within seconds, Keith appeared on the screen. He was walking on some sort of catwalk.

Shiro emerged behind him, and my whole being filled with Keith's fear.

They began fighting each other, but it was hard to focus on everything that was going on. Keith's feelings of fear and insecurities were welling up inside me. When he felt pain, I did too, and there was so much of it. My unit was wondering what was wrong, and even as I knelt on the floor, I wouldn't let them take me to the Med Wing. I had to know what happened to him.

After what felt like hours, the pain finally went away, replaced with hope as Keith and Shiro fell through open space. I watched as the Black Lion rescued them, and Keith used some fancy Paladin magic to get back to Team Voltron to help in their battle with Lotor.

They formed Voltron and went in and out of the quintessence field, which, in turn, caused slices to appear where they had entered or exited different time fragments.

Eventually, they emerged by themselves without Lotor. We saw them use the Castle of Lions to prevent the time slices from causing all of reality to terminate.

And then after the explosion, Voltron disappeared.

"What happened?" I whispered.

Everyone looked just as fearful as I did.

I got scared. The feelings inside me were only of determination, and I didn't know if they were my own feelings or Keith's. This time, it could go either way.

"Watch that at all times," I said. "Never take an eye off of it."

"We're going to find them," Kiana said softly, putting a hand on my shoulder. "They're going to be okay."

I spent days in the control room staring at the screens, hoping that Voltron would return. I missed meals, sleep, and training sessions. Those days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months until Kolivan banned me from the control room and pronounced Keith dead. I knew he was probably right, that Keith was gone forever, and I needed to move on. It was, after all, what I had agreed to. If either of us were to have died, it was necessary to move on and forget what happened. That way I'd be alert for the missions to come.

But this was different. I was certain that I would have felt his death because usually death includes pain, and Keith and I had a connection unlike any other. But I never did. So I agreed with Kolivan. I needed closure. We held a departure ceremony for my young lieutenant, and then I spent more weeks in my bed, trying to understand everything that had happened. We had spent two years going through the quantum abyss together, and now he was gone forever. Suddenly, I understood why Keith had searched so hard for Shiro when we all thought he had died. Keith never wanted to believe it. He was afraid it was true. He knew something about Shiro's death had been suspicious too, and he'd been right. I had a feeling within me that said Keith wasn't dead. But if he wasn't dead, where was he?

I couldn't think about it.

I caught up on all my sleep, though I never felt rested. I rarely ate, never trained, and I had no energy whatsoever.

Everything was terrible.

Every now and then I would feel punches of pain or hope, but I didn't know where they were coming from if Keith was gone.

So I ignored them. The last thing I needed was to get my hopes up.