AHAHAHAHA I LIVE!!!! Thanks to all the nice people who encouraged me during my little writers block/motivation slump period! Have a chapter with plenty of Shance and Pidge being a geek! :)
Ch.1 Ch.2 Ch.3 Ch.4 Ch.5 Ch.6
Shiro was internally screaming. Very loudly. His head was actually ringing at this point, with Black laughing like crazy in the back of his mind. He was currently pacing his room, face redder than Keith's Lion. Lance was Azul. Lance was a cat. The very same cat that had calmed him from a nightmare and slept in his bed on his chest. Black very kindly told him that he should calm himself before he overheated and fainted. He kept pacing, half sure there were marks from his shoes on the ground from the rate at which he was going, back and forth in an oval. He stopped pacing and hid his face in his hands with a groan.
He was not handling this crush well at all. At first, during the whole Balmera incident, he'd just been worried over a teammate, but then he'd felt something flutter in his heart when Lance had come out of that coma to shoot Sendak. And then it slowly evolved from there into a full blown crush with every laugh, every smile, and though he'd tried to push it down, it never worked, and eventually he'd wanted to start pulling a Keith and punch every alien Lance flirted with in the face out of pure impulse and spite. Which was why he hadn't wanted Lance on Kolkar at the alliance meeting, because he didn't know if he could handle seeing Lance flirt with another alien again. He didn't think he'd be able to stop himelf from bitch-slapping someone with his activated arm if he saw one more damn sentient being actually flirting back with the gorgeous Blue Paladin.
He smacked his head into the wall at his own thoughts. With a sigh, he decided to go work off some of these emotions at the training deck, then go check on Pidge. He rubbed his forehead, and headed out.
Pidge dashed about the room, setting up testing areas and hooking up wires to Green, her laptop running a hundred codes a minute as she processed the pollen, and Lance was exhausted just watching her. So, he settled for sprawling lazily across the warm keyboard of the laptop and purred at the heat spreading through his fur, and fell into a sort of half-asleep state, ears pricked and listening to Pidge babble to herself in Science mumbo-jumbo.
“Okay Lance! I need you to step into this scanner real quick.” Pidge explained, motioning to one of the weird metal boxes that were open at both ends, and was hooked up to the computer. Lance grumbled and got up from his napping spot, moving towards the box and stepping through, moving slowly as Pidge instructed him. Pidge hummed and sent the results to Coran, who was using a tablet to communicate with the youngest Paladin from down on Kolkar, and began flipping through a microscope with the pollen on a slide. Lance stood nearby, ready to shove Pidge aside in she accidentally breathed it in. Wait, hold on a minute. Lance jumped down, padded over to where she'd left her packet of surgical masks with Green, and started nudging it towards his tiny teammate.
Pidge looked up, and grinned. “Oh yeah! Thanks Lance. I almost forgot to put one of those on. Good thing Coran worked it out when I told him I needed something like this. The replication part of the ship is fascinating! I'll have to see how that works later...” She said cheerfully, then slid on a mask over her mouth and nose, testing her breathing for a minute before nodding and going back to the slide, Lance staying close by on the little table.
“Hmm… yeah, looks like this was made to specifically alter genetic structures into it's most primitive form, and I guess the most primitive form on Kolkar is some sort of feline-esque creature.” Pidge muttered, stepping back from the microscope and beginning to pace back and forth in front of Lance, who was now lying on the table, tail twitching idly as he watched her move back and forth.
“But, thanks to Blue and her Quintessence, plus you not being from Kolkar, it just edited you into a cat by tearing apart your current- at the time, at least- cellular structure and rebuilt it from scratch… Lance, dude, holy shit. How are you even alive?!?” Pidge yelped, turning to her fluffy companion and scooping him up, shaking him in astonishment. Lance hissed, disliking the sudden movement. His ears pricked up when he heard the door slide open and Shiro walked in.
Pidge whirled on him, trapping Lance in her arms and leaving his hind legs and tail to dangle free, the cat himself looking very uncomfortable by this. “Shiro! Man, you won't believe this! Lance shouldn't even be alive! The pollen doesn't just change your DNA, it completely strips it down and rebuilds everything from scratch!!! His entire cellular structure was rearranged in less than an hour 'cuz he got covered in so much pollen! Blue's Quintessence merely made the change happen faster because he couldn't feel it, which I guess was Blue's primary objective when she did it, but it also kept him alive! If a normal human went through that, they'd be dead!” Pidge trilled, as Shiro steadily got paler and paler at the news.
“Uh… lucky Lance, I guess?” The Black Paliadin asked, somehow keeping the shudder out of his voice. Pidge let Lance go and turned back to her computer, quickly typing out notes. Lance grumbled at her and trotted over to where Shiro had slid against the wall to sit down and process the information. He jumped into Shiro's lap and mewed questioningly, worried at Shiro's pale face and shaky breaths. He was immediately cradled in two arms, and a face was buried into his fur, again. They really had a thing for his fur, didn't they?
“So I pretty much almost got you killed.” The words that were muttered into his back had his ears flicking back to make sure he had heard correctly. “I am so sorry, Lance. This is all my fault… I made you feel bad enough that you ran off and got caught up in all of this… I should have tried to be more considerate of your feelings and listened and been more encouraging… maybe then you'd still be human and not...” The leader of Voltron let out a shaky breath. Lance mewed and wriggled until he could nuzzle Shiro's face, purring up a storm and trying to convey that it wasn't his fault.
Blue rumbled in agreement, though she did also add that he should have included Lance in more missions than he did. Overprotective much? He huffed at her for that. There was no way in Hell, Heaven or high water that Shiro felt the same as Lance. Nope. Nu-uh. No way. Blue laughed, saying that he was certainly funny if he believed that. Lance lashed his tail and told her to hush, grumbling under his mental breath.
Suddenly, Coran burst into the room, half dragging Allura and a vial of purple shimmery liquid. “We've figured it out! Pidge! I need some help with this, but I believe that if we create a batch of this that's diluted for human use, we can cure Lance! If we manage to figure that out, then Allura can use her ability of Quintessence manipulation and reverse the change!” The excited Altean trilled loudly, Allura nodding in agreement as she pulled out of her Advisor's grasp. Pidge looked up and nodded excitedly. “Perfect! I was just running calculations on what exactly would be needed to dull down any pain felt during the reversal process.” She chirped, pushing up her glasses and grinning. She looked over at Shiro, who was looking much better now. “Shiro, hold onto Lance for a minute while we set everything up?” She asked, smiling at the nod the Black Paladin gave her in response.
Both man and cat watched in fascination as Pidge and Coran talked biology and schematics for diluting the antidote, as apparently that plant, called Felisiviny, had turned plenty of unwary Kolkarians into a cat like creature called a devecias, which were like a cross between a lynx and a tiger and a German Shepherd with scarlet macaw feathers along its ears and tail, along the jaw fringe too. Then, Shiro and Lance were dragged to the med pods, where Coran programed one to the proper dilution percentage, fed in half the vial, and pulled Lance from a reluctant Shiro's arms and started up the med pod.
Allura got ready, as the antidote had to be breathed in, and Lance was set at the bottom of the pod. He looked up, mewing in concern. “We'll see you soon, buddy. Don't be afraid. Allura will fix you right up, okay?” Shiro soothed, giving Lance one last head rub before standing back and letting the pod seal shut. Lance yowled and put his paws up on the glass, panicking as purple mist flooded the chamber.
“Allura, now! For as long as you can, just picture Lance as his normal human self.” Coran instructed, as Allura glowed with the golden light of Quintessence. She held out her hands, and focused on Lance. Pidge secretly hit the mute button on the pod, because she knew this was gonna hurt, and she didn't want to be haunted by Lance's screams. Shiro tapped his metal fingers against his arm, worried and pale again.
It was a mere 12 hours before Allura gave out, her powers still relatively new. She panted and slumped to the ground, wheezing and exhausted. “I- I have done what I could, but manipulating two similar streams of Quintessence that are deeply entertwined is harder than it first seems.” She explained, as Coran helped her to her feet. Keith and Hunk had wandered down during this, and everyone waited with baited breath (and Hunk with an extra pair of boxers for Lance) as the pod opened up and spilled purple mist.
Shiro was the first one forward as a human shape fell out of the pod and into his arms, Hunk right next to him and draping a blanket over the shaking form that was clutching onto Shiro like a lifeline. Shiro inhaled sharply as a soft, fluffy shorthaired chocolate colored tail with lighter brown stripes brushed against his leg, and pointy cat ears flicked up and heard the noise he made. Lance, human yet with cat ears and a tail, who stopped shaking and went limp, unconscious. Shiro really hoped he wasn't blushing right now, because if it wasn't the cutest thing he'd ever seen in his life then he might as well shoot himself out into space this very second.
“Oh dear. Perhaps I did not untangle the knot of energy as well as I thought I did.” Allura murmured from the back. The shocked silence was broken by Pidge and Hunk's twin cooing noises and Keith's “Holy quiznak, what the hell-”. Shiro really wished the universe would give him a break here.
Black laughed.
// *RISES FROM THE ASHES OF WRITERS BLOCK LIKE A PROUD AND BLOODSTAINED WARRIOR* I LIVE~! Also I come bearing Shance and cat eared Lance :) So uh, how is Lance gonna react to all of this? I dunno, you'll have to wait and see ;)
It's windy outside, and tonight i can see the stars. Orion, the North Star.
I'm reminded of a younger me, talking about stars with my best friend. She used to be very fascinated with stars, and some of that fascination rubbed off on me. I loved the infinite vastness and darkness of the universe, but I was never in love with space the way she was.
I once gifted her a canvas of an astronaut I painted.
Everything is hazy, but I recall snippets of conversations- about how utterly unquantifiable the universe was, about the beauty of stars, about vague, half-formed dreams of becoming astronauts, about a child's fascination with learning science.
See, the thing about being childhood friends is that you never realise when things change- when you change. I know neither of us are satisfied yet with the people we've become, but I'm still happy with our progress and the fact that we could undertake this journey together. But sometimes I wonder when we lost that child inside of us- when she stopped wondering about space or when I never again had my shy convictions of becoming an author. Maybe it was somewhere in between realising science was actually harder than middle school or accepting people saying that writing was for those far more passionate and unstable than me.
