Voltron One-Shots

Love the Lost Ones (Plance)

They mostly left him alone in the beginning. Now, after the torture and the neglect, they're forcing him to fight.

His body shook with the strain of holding himself up, and his legs cramped under the weight of the iron shackles encasing his neck and hands. The chains were connected to rings on the neck shackle and trailed to his wrists, where the metal met another set of rings.

Lance kept his head down as guards led him to the battle arena. He closed his eyes and let his feet travel the now familiar route blind. He was no stranger to the arena. He'd been there before to watch his fellow paladins fight their own monsters. Even though the battles have unusually stopped and Lance hadn't been there in quite some time, he had no trouble remembering the path.

His mind flashed to the last fight he was forced to witness. Pidge stood on one end of the arena, her skin-tight prison outfit stained and dirty, her cropped top hanging off her petite frame in tatters. Her brown eyes were dull with dark circles surrounding them, and her hair a matted mess.

Lance had caught the eye of Shiro, who sat a few stands in from of him and to his left. The older boy's face was stone, but his eyes betrayed the fear he was feeling for the youngest paladin. A guard sitting next to Shiro knocked his gun into Shiro's head, and he looked ahead, not looking back at the Cuban again.

On the opposite side of the battlefield was Grinder, a rocklike creature notorious for grinding his opponents into the ground and a ruthless warrior.

The fight ended in Pidge being taken off the field unconscious and bleeding everywhere, and Grinder picking up pieces of his shattered body.

Pidge had held her own, calculating the right times to strike, and she succeeded in breaking off chunks of Grinder's body piece by piece with a dagger she was granted to use. But she was eventually overpowered by the huge earthen monster and fell victim to Grinder's famous move.

Lance didn't know if she was even alive, anymore.

The sound of clanking metal caused Lance to open his eyes, and he squinted against the bright light of the arena. Galrans were screaming and cheering, their cries so loud it shook the stands. The shackles fell away from tan hands, and then from a tan neck until finally Lance was free from his personal metal prison.

The two Galran guards roughly seized Lance's upper arms and shoved him into the boiling hot arena. Lance stumbled on weakened legs and fell to the ground with a thud, sweat already forming on his skin in beads.

I'm not going to be able to survive this fight. I haven't eaten in days. What if it's Grinder?

Dark thoughts tumbled through Lance's mind until his entire being was consumed in dread. The roaring of the crowd drilled into Lance's head and pulsed between his eyes. Again, he squeezed his eyes shut and shakily pushed himself off the ground, memories of Pidge's fight emblazoned in his brain. His ocean eyes snapped open with a fiery determination, and anyone in the first rows of the crowd couldn't ignore the steel in his gaze.

I'm fighting for her. I'll win this for Pidge.

Lance's chest heaved up and down as a gate to a shadowed tunnel clanged open. The crowd's cheers reached a new crescendo, and it drowned out even the beating of Lance's own heart.

He scanned the crowd, searching for the friends he's afraid to lose; maybe seeing them will give him the strength to fight.

A shock of white hair stood out of the purple and Allura's colorful orbs met his own. They were cloudy, but cleared when she saw it was him. Her royal presence hadn't gone away, and any Galran who sat near her and her guards kept their distance, but her body sagged and her face, neck, and what little of her chest was exposed was covered in strangely shaped scars and burns. Allura offered a small smile and blew a strand of her hair out of her face.