shining like the stars

17

"Hey," Lance said, leaned against the bars of the holding cell. "Hey, you. Purple face." He waved his hand through the bars at the two passing Galra guards – actual organic people, not those soldier-drones they had seen so much of already. "Your mother was a diseased bat!" Just like the last time they had passed by, the two guards seemed unaffected by Lance's words, although this time he won a small victory of the closest guard glancing in his direction.

The drones walked by every twenty minutes or so, roughly, on a looping patrol of the holding area. There was very little foot traffic otherwise, which had explained the excited reaction from the others in the cell with Lance when the Galra had dragged Shiro down the hall. Maybe once an hour two of the purple-furred Galra would patrol the halls personally, never really looking at the cells, just straight ahead as they walked.

Lance's original plan had been to cause enough of a commotion that one of the soldiers would come investigate, but so far they seemed immune to his taunting; but at least they seemed to be hearing him. With the way the other prisoners were reacting Lance thought for a while he was properly invisible. After observation, though, most of the aliens huddled up with like; or at least with those who could understand them. And with Lance's universal translator broken, not a one of them seemed to understand him at all.

He stared out the bars across the hallway to the other open cell, where Shiro hadn't moved since they brought him in. He still lay on his side, his back to the open bars of his cell, and the only movement that Lance could see was the occasional rise and fall of his chest as he breathed slowly. Lance rested his helmet against the bars and closed his eyes to try to think.

This wasn't getting him anywhere. Sooner or later someone would notice that they'd captured not just Shiro but another Voltron paladin and then they would have Zarkon all up in their business and he'd really be screwed. Lance banged his helmet against the bars and listened to the reverb with his eyes closed. It was a stroke of luck, no matter how small, that the Galra ship they'd been transported to was apparently so backwater that they didn't recognize the paladin armor. He had to capitalize on that.

He looked back around at the cell itself. The walls were mostly smooth – some parts were scored where prisoners of the past had gone mad, clawing, biting and doing other things to the surface, but never gouging enough from the walls to be useful. The bars extended directly from the ceiling into the floor, no holding or casing, and there was no lock to try to pick or force ... when a soldier came by to open it he did so by pressing a wall plate and the bars receded into the ceiling or floor.

Lance leaned his shoulder against the bars and pulled out his bayard again. In the dim light of the prison cell even the edge did not glow its brilliant blue, but instead stayed a muted color, as if signifying its low-power status. Lance groan and knocked it against the bars, then on a whim turned it and stuck it through the bars, pulling its sharper edge against the metal to see if it would do any damage. The noise was ungodly, several of the aliens nearest to Lance winced and clapped appendages over auditory processing holes, grumbling angrily in Lance's direction.

He wasn't really paying attention to the reaction, because he was staring at the bayard, recovering its bright blue color.

Lance withdrew the bayard back into the cell and watched the color fade out, and then stuck it back between the bars and watched it refill with color. He almost laughed. "A weapons jammer," he said in amazement. The cells had some form of jamming system which was messing with his suit, but the protections didn't extend to the hall where the Galra or their soldier drones might be called upon to discharge their own weapons. Plus, he was willing to bet prisoners were searched anyway so no one expected them to even have a knife, never mind a full-on plasma gun.

"All right then," Lance said as he transformed the bayard into a plasma rifle. It was awkward to hold through the bars, and he didn't have a whole lot of range or aiming capacity, but the fun was getting ready to properly start. "Jailbreak: 2.0!"

#

The sounds came from far away, muffled like they were pushed through water. Shiro ignored them, like he had been ignoring much of everything around him. The pain was the thing foremost on his mind, crippling in its intensity, the nerve endings of his right arm burning fresh with the new connections. It was too easy to get lost in it, and Shiro kept his grip tight around his arm, the seam of flesh and foreign metal fresh.

But ... it wasn't fresh, was it?

Shiro did not raise his head nor open his eyes, cheek pressed to the cool tile floor. His thoughts were scattered and it was hard to bring them into line, because they were neither coherent or linear, just a jumbled mash of sensations. He squeezed down hard on his arm, hoping that the shock of fresh pain would bright him further out of the past and into the present, and as he did so he heard his cell block open, all the way.

"No more," Shiro croaked, eyes still squeezed closed.

"Shiro!" the voice was unfamiliar-familiar, and fell in line with the mix of memories that didn't make sense, that existed outside of the witch and her chambers. He didn't have the strength to push himself up yet but he did open his eyes as he felt a soft hand touch his left shoulder. "Shiro, I'm here."

"...Keith?" No, the voice was all wrong. He felt the hand withdraw for a second then touch him again, just as gentle.

"No, Shiro. It's me, Lance."

Shiro squinted up at a person kneeling beside him. The armor and the face was familiar, Lance, yes – it was Lance. He knew Lance. Lance had a large plasma rifle held against his hip, muzzle pointed out toward the cell door, his hand on Shiro's shoulder. "Here's the point where I make a joke about damsels in distress," Lance said. "Except you're not a damsel and you're really in distress, so it's a stupid joke anyway." He put pressure on Shiro's shoulder, and Shiro realized dimly that he was squeezing it. "Do you think you can stand? An entire ship's worth of drone soldiers is about to make our lives very, very difficult."

Standing seemed like such a foreign concept to Shiro he couldn't even vocalize it. Before he could say no, he wasn't able to stand, Lance was pulling on his left arm, yanking him slowly upright. Sitting up the world spun and tilted sideways, and Lance caught him by his right arm, which sent a violent jolt of pain through freshly-built nerve sensors, and Shiro screamed in pain, left hand going to the seam and doubling over so much his forehead was almost touching the floor.

Lance released him and jerked back at the noise, and Shiro panted raggedly, cradling his arm. "Go without me," Shiro said, eyes closed again, slumped forward.

"Yeah, that's not happening," Lance said, and grabbed Shiro by the left arm, yanking him upright and trying to pull him to his feet, Shiro's arm pulled over his shoulder. "Do you have any idea what Keith will do to me if I leave you behind? It's scarier than whatever the Galra are cooking up, let me tell you." He staggered quite a bit once he got upright, because Shiro was anything but light. "C'mon, then."

Shiro raised his head and squinted, right arm dangling limp at his side as Lance slowly maneuvered them to the cell's exit. Across the hall, he saw an empty cell door, blown to smithereens, and a few destroyed drones scattered into pieces in the hallway. "Yeah," Lance said. "The entire population of that cell is going to make a lot of trouble for the drones, and give us time to get out of here."

"But," Shiro said, head hanging again because he barely had the strength to do one of these things. "The prisoners need to escape...."

"They'll be fine," Lance said, and pulled Shiro down the hall in one direction. "After all, this isn't real, is it?" He kept looking forward. "We're in your memory."

Shiro's entire body shuddered, and Lance kept moving forward, supporting Shiro with as much of his body as he could. "Yeah," Lance said softly at that response. "That's what I thought."