shining like the stars

52

The summer sky was that perfect shade of blue, a color picked from a box of crayons and scribbled across the edge of the paper; bright and bold and nostalgic all at once. It was broken here and there by thick piles of cotton-white clouds that never seemed to scuttle across the sun, drifting lazily across the canvas spread out above. The smell of saltwater, of sunscreen and sweat, the distant cry of gulls circling overhead, the far-off echoes of laughter and chatter overwritten by the soft crest of waves; the familiarity made Lance choke up just a bit as he sat up on the board.

The shore was distant here; he could still see it, the familiar voices distorted and faded, out of reach. Lance leaned forward and started to paddle, but he didn't seem to be moving in the right direction; he didn't seem to be moving at all. The fear clutched at his gut as he felt the board rock under him; the still and bright summer day shifting from calming to quietly malevolent.

He leaned too far one direction, and slid off the board into the water, head ducking under the crest of a wave. Lance broke the surface, sputtering, and grabbed for his board, kicking his feet uselessly and trying to fight the swell of the current. He was still trying to get to land, land he couldn't see any longer. When the hand gripped him by the ankle and pulled, yanking him below the waves, away from the sun and blue sky and the white clouds, Lance didn't even have the strength left to struggle.

#

Lance came up gasping, flinging himself upright, expecting to encounter the tough fabric of the hab tents and instead finding nothing but deceptively cool air. He sat forward, hand on his chest, breathing hard, and taking a minute to center himself before he realized, belatedly, that he wasn't in the tent.

Panic, and adrenaline scrambled him to his feet. They didn't have changes of clothing with them, he'd slept in his tunic; and Lance felt exposed and vulnerable now. He turned in a complete circle before realizing he had no wall near against which to place his back, and without even thinking about it the bayard that stayed with them materialized in his hand. The edge of it glowed a faint blue, but it did not transform into his usual rifle.

The blue of the bayard's edge cast a small, bright ring of light around him. Before there was a dim light drifting in from the right; a heavy, purple color that reminded him uncomfortably of ships run off Galra crystals. It was enough to put him on edge, and he gripped the bayard tight in his hand and tried to will the rifle to appear, but no weapon did so.

The room was large and empty. He could hear water running in the distance, cascading, splashing down into a pool somewhere out of sight. It was warm here, uncomfortably so, and at no other noises Lance called boldly, "hello?"

His voice echoed, but no response came. "Keith?" Lance tried, taking a few steps forward. "Shiro? Hunk, man, this isn't funny, I thought we were done with the whole, 'drag your friend's sleeping bag out of the tent' shit, that wasn't funny when we were twelve and it's definitely not funny when we're on an alien world and who knows what is trying to kill us."

There was no response to anything he said, just the empty echoes back to him of his own voice, against walls too far for him to see clearly. Lance held the bayard over his head and wished for a moment for a brighter light source; or even to be wearing his armor with its own dim glow.

After another round of silence, Lance turned his head and tried to identify where the rushing water was coming from. Maybe there'd be better light there, maybe it would help him figure out where he was (in the temple, that annoying little voice that whispered in the back of his mind said, you're inside the temple, they took you here, and left you here...), and how to get back to the others.

The room was so large and open, even with the dim light of the bayard Lance moved slowly in case something unexpected would loom out of the darkness, a column, or a pit, or another type of trap. As he got closer to the water sounds, he did manage to trip himself on uneven tiles, and he pitched forward, landing on his hands and knees, his bayard falling to the floor. Its glow did not go out, and as Lance groaned, sitting back on his haunches, something unexpected happened.

Where he had touched the shiny black tile that littered the floor of the room, soft blue light to match his bayard spiraled away. It faded out quickly, leaving the room lit very faintly by distant purple light, and immediately by the blue light of his bayard. Lance looked at his hands, and very carefully touched the floor again, with both palms.

He didn't removed his hands when the blue light started again, and the longer it seemed he held his hands to the floor, the brighter the light got, snaking and spiraling away across tiles that held no design, tracing its way over distant columns until, for a moment, the entire room was lit in the same shade of blue. Lance lifted his hands and looked around; he was definitely inside the temple. "How the hell did this happen?" he grumbled, reaching over for his bayard.

The water sounds came from a fountain set square, centered in the far wall. There were some kind of barriers set up around it, undoubtedly by the aliens who organized the tour, but the blue lights skated past those barriers and up the spirals of the tentacle creature that featured in the center of the fountain. Water ran down its long tentacles; lit a now-fading blue by Lance's strange light.

"What is that?" Lance said to himself, drawn toward the fountain. The luminescent swirling patterns settled on the column that supported the fountain itself, and without hesitation Lance climbed over the barrier and splashed into the shallow, warm water of the fountain. The blue swirls seemed to have some coherent form here, and almost looked like words in an alien script, and when Lance's fingers brushed over the blue writing on the center column there was a strange spark of familiarity there, something he hadn't had enough time to put together.

Then the blue, swirling script turned amber under his fingertips, and Lance said, "oh, fu-"

#

"He's probably just wandered off somewhere to take a dump," Pidge said with a yawn, sitting cross-legged on the ground and rubbing her eye under her glasses. "I mean, we don't exactly have a sign-out system for potty privileges."

Hunk was even less awake than Pidge was, and he could only yawn in agreement.

"He couldn't have gone far," Allura said. "We'll split up and cover the temple grounds; and-"

"Uh," Keith said. "I know where Lance is."

Allura looked over to Keith, who had his back to them and the fire. "That's fantastic, Keith, where did he go?"

Wordlessly, Keith pointed back toward the temple – and when the other paladins turned around to face it, the entire front edifice was glowing a soft, muted blue. "That's not normal, right?" Keith said. "Because I bet Lance had something to do with it."

"No bet," Shiro said, and looked over at Allura, whose face betrayed no emotion. "C'mon," he said. "We've got to go help Lance."