Chapter Text
When she was little she hated silence. Silence meant that Dad was (still) at work. Silence meant that Matt was out with friends or at extra curriculars. Silence also meant that mom was probably lying down in the dark somewhere with a headache, so even though she was ultimately free to do whatever she wanted, she had to tiptoe around like she was walking on eggshells.
This never boded well. Dad always made jokes that they should’ve named her Grace. He told the joke a million times over the course of his life, but each time he laughs like he’d just thought of it.
Now that she’s graduated flight school with flying (mostly flying, did they really need a physical portion on the entrance exam?) colors, she loves silence more than anything else. It’s so rare when she’s always around other people. Even in the still of the night when she has the privacy curtain closed around her bunk there’s noise. Lance and Hunk talk in their sleep. One night swear to god, they both got going and started talking to each other.
“BBQ spare ribs AND mashed sweet potatoes….”
“Hey, hey hey cut it out. I’m trying to score.”
“I don’t care if it’s extra. A side of greens too.”
“Don’t mind him ladies he’s an idiot.”
That particular incident happened on a night when she actually wanted to sleep.
Out here though, save for the occasional rustling of vulture feathers, it’s quiet. Tonight there’s a wind going, stronger than a breeze but not quite a full blown gust where there sand gets in her eyes constantly and she has to call it a night early. The breeze is long enough to send her hair flying every which direction and she has to keep an eye on her paper notes, but it isn’t so still that the still of it all drives her crazy.
And it’s just her luck that whoever is out there has an earful to say tonight.
“Blue. Red. Blue.” Something she can’t quite understand, and “Druid intuition.”
It sounds like garbage but it all gets copied in her notebook dutifully.
Ping. The sound of something hitting a boulder about thirty feet away catches her attention. Something in the back of her mind tells her it’s not a rat or a vulture, and it needs to be investigated. She sets the frequency to record and gets up to check it out.
It is neither a bird, or a rat, or even a tumbleweed. It’s a cylindrical metal container with rivets on either side. In the middle there is a small indentation. It’s making strange gurgling noises as she approaches. “What is that, a homemade pipe bomb?” she thinks to herself.
Before she can properly react, there’s a sound of pop fizzle and then finally a sharp bang like when the guard gives a 21 gun salute. She’s sat through thousands of them at this point, but he never gets used to the sound that goes in one ear and out the other leaving her shocked.
She’s thrown a few feet into the side of the ravine, and hits her head.
For a moment, or maybe quite a few moments the world goes blank.
She’s not exactly sure how long she was out. When she comes to, she does a quick visual check. Both hands, both feet. Fingers and toes can be accounted for later. When she rolls over and looks back to where the equipment is, she sees a man rifling through her things.
For a moment Pidge thinks she’s been caught by Garrison MP. Piecing together her own equipment using stolen parts, leaving base without authorization, conducting unauthorized field work, and now being found at the site of a bomb no less than two miles away from the garrison base? She’s pretty sure there’s enough there for a court martial.
Another second of analysis reveals that she hasn’t been. This guy has a sloppy haircut, ripped jeans, and some kind of biker jacket that would get him laughed off base even if he was wasn't on duty. No way this guy wasn't Garrison anything, let alone top brass.
“Hey!” Pidge growls through her teeth. She tries to rock herself up off the ground and onto her feet, but there’s a sharp pain in her head and she flops over, bent in half in pain. “Get away from that.” She tries to sound threatening, but it comes out pained and halfhearted.
She makes a second attempt to get up again. This time more carefully, making sure to not move to quickly.
The man rifling through her rucksack barely takes note of her getting up. He moves onto the laptop and tries to read the streams of data pouring in from the alien transmission.
She grits her teeth and runs over to him, ignoring the stinging in her leg and the pounding in her head. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” She lunges at him without thinking and takes him to the ground.
Before she can even start wailing on him with tightly balled fists that barely passed hand to hand combat in flight school he’s got them flipped over, dagger pointed at her throat.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“I don’t have anything worth stealing. Leave my things alone.”
“Oh man, you’re bleeding. Shit.” Just as soon as he wrested her back to the ground, she feels the weight shift off of her. He’s running over to his own rucksack and taking out a small box.
She’d try to grab her things and run, but she doesn’t think she’d make it very far. Her head is throbbing. Since he’s pointed it out, she looks down to her calf. The stinging turned out to be something a little more substantial. She’s not sure where the wound exactly was, because the entirety of her lower leg was covered in blood.
“God you have fucked all of this up,” he says in an exasperated tone.
Yes this whole thing is totally fucked up. She was just doing her nightly thing when all of a sudden-wait. She’s fucked it up?
“That bomb was supposed to scare you away, not wreck your leg,” he says like that’s a more than adequate explanation. “If you’d stayed up here, and it detonated back there you’d be fine. Scared but fine.”
Pidge bores holes into his skull with a deadlock stare.
“It’s so hard to actually get anything accomplished when you’re out here every night doing your homework or whatever.”
“I assure you it’s more than ‘doing my homework or whatever.” Pidge bites out.
“Well whatever it is it’s getting in my way. Here hold this,” he hands her a roll of bandages and then takes the canteen attached to his hip off his belt. He pours water over Pidge’s wounded leg. “You’re lucky this is just a cut. I don’t think there’s anything inside.”
“People planting BOMBS out here is getting in my way.”
Keith pours some antiseptic from the kit over the open wound. He’s careful to not use too much. This guy’s got access to Garrison medical supplies. No telling when he’s going to get his hand on another first aid kit. “Gimme that bandage.”
He doesn’t even wait for her to respond before he’s plucking it out of her hand. “I can’t find any more detail on the mission. I have to be out here. The desert is big, just go somewhere else.”
Keith notes the prick of tears in the corner of his eyes. “Mission?” No, it really couldn’t be….But then again this guy looks like that other guy that was on Shiro’s ship. “Kerberos?”
Pidge eyes him up and down while he’s wrapping his calf in gauze.
The stranger’s eyes light up. “That’s what all this is about. I knew I recognized some similarities in your field notes.”
Pidge kicks the stranger away with the ball of her foot. She finishes wrapping the rest of the bandage herself, then realizes she doesn’t have anything to fasten it with.
“Need one of these?” The stranger smirks and hold a fastener in his palm.
She swipes at it but he’s too fast, and closes his palm. “What do you know about Kerberos?”
“I think months of secretly gathering intel at the risk of being court martialed is worth more than a bandage pin,” she quips. Sure this guy could just as easy switch the flip back over and pull the dagger out, but he's pissed her off to no end. She wasn’t going to roll over because he happened to be armed.
“Okay tell me what you know about Kerberos,” He tosses the pin. “And I’ll give you a ride back to the Garrison.”
A thick silence grows between them.
“It’s at least two miles. Gonna be hard on that leg.”
“Fine, whatever. I’ll tell you what I know.”
She does, and it’s almost the complete truth. Voltron, Red, Blue, and Druid intuition. There isn’t much more other than a list of coordinates where their leads turned out to be false. A whole lot of nothing. And, a whole lot of a guy named Zarkon getting pissed. It’s not like he can really do anything with the intel. She doubts anyone’s tech can compete with hers. Even the Garrison seems lost by comparison.
It’s not pumping her ego. She wanted to put more faith in the Garrison, but they’re just so lacking.
After she finishes, he helps her to his bike, and he drops her off one fourth of a mile away from the barracks.
“I’m picking you up here again tomorrow night. 9:00. If you’re late I’ll be mad.”
She decided as soon as she hoisted her leg off the bike she wasn’t going to show.
Pidge didn’t even hit the desert that night. Her leg was giving her hell, in the ache and sting kind of way. Not in the scary gangrene kind of way. She’d already bullied one of her acquaintances in nursing school to look at it. She was good enough at everything except for chemistry, so Pidge took care of it in exchange for moments like this. This was not the first time she’d seriously messed something up alone out in the desert, but it was definitely the worst.
Pidge didn’t even want to hit the desert that night. Lance was on night patrol until 1:30, so that meant she only had to share the room with Hunk. It meant there was a distinct possibility of getting ten hours of sleep tonight if she went to dinner now, crammed in her homework, and hit the pillow immediately at 8:00.
The next night it was her turn for night patrol. Not that she minded. Most cadets were assigned night patrol once every two weeks. Pidge gladly picked up a few extra shifts in a month for several reasons. First, she was rarely asleep by 2 or 3 am anyway, regardless of the 6 AM wakeup. Next, it kept suspicion off her. Gunderson was a quiet guy with very few friends, and lots of time to pick up extra tasks. Finally, it did afford her extras. Visits to the nursing students without a report being filed, Hunk making her a weighted belt she could smoothly wear under her clothes to meet weight requirement.
So by the time she is able to hit the desert three nights later, after the initial incident, she nearly shrieked when she saw him on his speeder exactly 1/4 mile away from base. “I told you I was coming the next night.”
“And I never agreed to that,” She spat back.
“We need each other’s intel,” his gloved hands twist on the accelerators with annoyance.
“You never gave me anything useful. Just blew me up, extorted me, and stole my field book I might add.” She meets his tense brown stare and doesn’t blink.
“I would’ve had it back to you two nights ago if you hadn’t flaked.” He tosses the field book back at her.
She catches it against her chest. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” She spits as she tucks her handbook into the side pocket on her bag.
“Come on, it’ll be….” He furrow his brow as if he’s trying to think of something else to say. “The best date you’ve ever been on.”
“I don’t think you’re using that word correctly.”
“I don’t even really know what it means. I just think you’re supposed to say stuff like that to make girls get all flustered,” He retorts.
“I’m a dude,” she insists. What the ever loving fuck was this guy’s issue.
“Whatever. You’re gonna be so upset when you miss this.”
“Miss what?” Pidge knows she’s being baited. But, if this weirdo isn’t trying to murder her, and might actually have a lead on something she’d be so mad at herself if she missed it.
She did take a spare moment to make sure she was armed today. Garrison cadet issue extendable close combat baton. Nothing that can really compete with a bomb or a dagger…She could clobber the shit out of him if he somehow couldn’t reach for his knife. “Fine,” she breathes through her nose and pinches her glasses. She’s even more pissed off now hearing her words of compliance. “You have to tell me your name though, so I at least know the name of the guy whose gonna exploit my insecurities and murder me in the desert.”
“It’s Keith.”
She nods.
“Now who are you? Other than, nosy Garrison clone?”
“You can call me Pidge,” she says as she hikes her leg up over the bike.
Keith scoots forward. “Fake name too. I like it.” He starts the bike and it lurches forward with a boom and a jump. They take off due north, towards the dunes.
They ride for a few minutes Pidge’s hands are firmly grasping the far edges of the seat. It’s better than holding onto him and being any closer than they have to be. The roar of the engine cuts off everything going on in her head. She can’t hold a single thought in when it’s combined with the scent of burned oil. She wishes she’d brought something with her, a scarf or something she could pull up over her mouth and nose like Keith’s got. Sand gets into her teeth and her nose and the whole thing is miserable.
“You should probably hold on to something other than the seat.” He yells as they approach the dunes. “Gets messy round here.”
She refuses, because although he didn’t specify, it means “hold onto me.” There are no cargo racks or anything else to hold onto on the speeder.
“Don’t cry when you hurt yourself again,”
As if almost on cue, a few minutes later, the clouds of sand clear from in front of them, and Keith’s confronted with a choice. Hit the large boulder in their current path or make a jagged turn at almost 70 degrees. Of course he makes the latter.
Pidge goes flying and Keith isn’t doing much better. The front of the speeder ends up buried in sand, and he’s thrown halfway over the handle bars so that his forehead almost touches sand. Quickly, he rights himself, revs the engine, and throws the bike into reverse without so much as a cursory, “Are you okay?”
“I would love to not get hurt at least once, when I’m around you,” Pidge growls between clenched teeth. “Or better yet, not be around you.”
“I tried to tell you,” Keith replies in an uninterested tone as he watches the sand shake off the front end of the speeder. Suddenly, enough of the gray brown sand has been thrown off and it goes in reverse. “Get back on.”
For the rest of the ride Pidge’s hands are almost clawing into Keith’s shoulders. It’s like she’s some kind of desperate koala hanging onto the world’s worst eucalyptus tree. She makes some kind of dissonance induced peace with it in her mind. Shoulder are safe. Shoulders aren’t as bad as flinging her arms around his waist.
After about twenty more minutes of exploring the dunes, Keith kills the engine without another word. He gets off the bike and gets into his rucksack. He removes a compass from his bag , and turns from the speeder’s due north direction. They walk a few paces northeast, and then he announces. “It’s here. Might’ve gotten covered by the wind.
Both of them scramble to their hands and knees and start clearing away sand at the location he’d gestured to.
Handful after handful of grainy dry sand, and then Pidge’s fingers hit something hard. “Is this it?”
“Must be.” And they dig around it faster revealing a piece of pitch black stone. Pidge would estimate that it’s almost a meter tall and two meters wide. It’s covered in strange writing. They don’t look like symbols, but they also do not look exactly like phonetic language. From a cursory glance she can’t detect any pattern like repetition in the writing. The writing glows purple blue in the moonless sky of a new lunar cycle.
“A lot happens out here during the day when you’re in class,” he says as they lock eyes. “What do you think it is?” Keith asks.
“I don’t know the writing is unlike any language I’ve ever seen before. And it looks so smooth. Like it’s not a piece of some larger thing.” Pidge runs her hands along the script. It makes her fingers tingle. It feels like licking a battery only in her finger tips.
“I thought that too.”
“But I don’t see any seams or cuts indicating something is inside. Can we move it somewhere? It’s not safe out here.”
“Not with your little arms. I already tried this afternoon.”
Before Pidge can eke out a barbed response, they’re blinded by spotlights. She can hear rough masculine voices yell, “Stop, hands up.”
“Garrison,” Keith hisses he turns his head in every direction trying to identify something, but can’t. “You’re a lot of trouble you know that.” He takes his knife from his belt and holds it in one hand. “Just follow my lead. You were kidnapped. You know, vulnerable smart shrimp.”
She feels the knife at her throat. Yeah. Like that explains it.
“I’m going to kill him if you’re not careful,” he barks at the garrison officers. He drags her to her knees and keeps the knife pointed there the entire time.
The yelling from beyond the spotlights stop for a moment.
“That’s what I thought,” he says in a low voice that’s somewhere between a whisper and normal talking.
He takes another device off his belt and throws it downward. It whips up sand from the ground causing it to pour into Pidge’s mouth and nose. In the near distance he can hear the sound of the bike revving up then riding away.
Smart. Vulnerable. Shrimp. The three dumbest words ever uttered in sequence have become some kid of mantra that Pidge can’t let go of. “Look I don’t know how to tell you this any other way. I was kidnapped by that guy,” He couldn’t have taken her with him. That would’ve been even more stupid. Still she didn’t think that highly of the guy to take the bureaucratic portion of the fallout.
“You were found at 22:30. Campus is closed at 22:00.”
“Well we were pretty far away from the Garrison campus. It takes awhile to get out there,” He says coolly.
“So exactly what happened Gunderson.” The officer, Sargent Pearson, hates Pidge. He constantly reminds her that she barely passed physical requirements, and that her team has failed three of the last four flight simulations.
“I was walking out to the rec area.” There were a few basketball courts on the edge of the barracks for downtime. “From my dorm Block N, so I wasn’t using the designated path. It was shorter to walk along the back side. Then, next thing you know there’s a hand over my mouth and the crazy guy is grabbing me.”
Pearson looks him up and down a few times. Pidge holds his gaze, and he’s unable to find any immediate holes in the story.
“So just why were you out there?”
“If I knew I probably could’ve avoided being abducted at knife point. He was crazy, talking about an obelisk out there, and some guy named Voltron. I was scared to death.” Smart. Vulnerable. Shrimp.
After another 45 minute of interrogation, Admiral Rader barges in and tells Pearson he’s badgered the poor boy enough. The interrogation ends with little consequence to Pidge.
But not before Pearson barks over his shoulder, “Gunderson, you’re expected at first simulation at 07:00 tomorrow. And, you’re on night duty for the rest of the week.
“Yes Sir,” he replies weakly.