Pidge never considered Lance and Hunk her friends.
Classmates, sure. Maybe even acquaintances—being tied to them as a teammate leads them to spend plenty of time outside of the mandatory school hours together. The association is a nuisance at most. Lance is loud, snarky, and bold. He begs for attention that puts Pidge’s plans at risk time and time again. Hunk is the wild opposite. His cowardice and paranoia twinges Pidge with irritation and seeps anxiety into her late night ventures to collect data.
Can’t they stay put? Can’t they function well? Lance’s starry eyes are always fixed on some ridiculous prize—one day, a girl’s attention, another, Keith Kogane’s scores. Pidge doesn’t even know Hunk well enough to learn his aspirations. He seems keen on a meticulous line of mechanical engineering that his shaky hands and scattered brain disagree with. It shouldn’t matter to her. So what if Pidge got stuck with a lousy team? They are a means to an end. Once she gets to space, they’ll be long forgotten.
The two idiots Hunk and Lance will be long left behind.
But for now, they tear up Pidge’s free time like unfed, scavenging vultures. Lance keeps dragging her to late night parties and snarking about the stick up her ass every time she slips away. Hunk will peer over her shoulder whenever she monitors the Garrison’s radio transmissions in their shared dormitory. When she shut her laptop in a hurry, Lance cackles that he interrupted her porn. Iverson lashes out at them because of their inadequacy and Pidge ends up on the receiving end of his fiery wrath despite holding up her end of the team.
It’s tiresome. It’s frustrating. She has so much work to do, so much, and now she has been dumped with what? Babysitting two near adults? Entertaining them?
Her brother and father are out there, somewhere in the vast reaches of space, unreachable and untraceable. Dead, maybe. It’s been months since their disappearance. Should they be anywhere near their spacecraft, their rations will have run out by now. The power of several crucial ship components will have died. They, along with Takashi Shirogane, will be left with nothing but their suits and minimal oxygen. Tools that aren’t meant to keep life sustained in outer space.
They must be dead.
It’s very probable.
The paths of different events all vary. Their ship might’ve exploded, leading to an immediate death. There could’ve been a collision or an issue with pressure levels or a fire or a power outage. Or they might be just fine, without signal, and on their way back. They might’ve gotten a disease or entered a warp in space-time. They could’ve made contact with extraterrestrial life. Or, god forbid, the Garrison has abandoned them, leaving them stranded with malicious intent.
No matter what, their chances of survival are low.
It pains Pidge to think of. She doesn’t even have the privacy to cry herself to sleep at night about it. Her eyes remain rubbed raw and hugged by dark circles that grow more sallow and sunken by the day. She ignores the missing posters her mother has put up for her. Have you seen Katelyn Holt? She turns the other way.
Pidge tunes out the whole world. Chatty Lance and nervous Hunk, angry professors and egotistical commanders, worried family members and the suspicious police. Her old dog who must’ve picked up on the emptying house. Her high school that she ditched for good. Her name, gender, and identity.
Pidge tosses it all away. She will get to space. She will find her family.
It’s only when she’s tumbled into the back of a sentient robot lion with her team, a stranger, and pilot Takashi Shirogane does she realize how big of a leap towards her goals she’s taken. This is her chance. Lance dangles a golden ticket in front of her and she snatches it out of his hands. Pidge watches the ground go distant as he pulls the lever in the Blue Lion.
She never would’ve thought that it’d be Lance and Hunk, her idiot teammates, who’d bring her here.
It’d do her some good to be grateful. But here they are, goofing off, and—what’s this Voltron that everyone’s talking about? Pidge doesn’t have the time for such a large responsibility. If the princess could point a swift finger at her and call her a paladin, then she could find any new pilot for the Green Lion because Pidge is shackled to another commitment.
No one else thinks the same way. Lance and Hunk are staying. Shiro, her main lead, is staying. Keith, who had many angry words for her announcement of departure, is also staying.
She’s the odd one out.
She’s going to be searching all by herself in this unknown space.
All alone…
Then, the Castle gets attacked. She’s staying. Lance gets injured. She’s staying, guaranteed, but she’s not sure why her heart cries for him; she barely knows him.
Hunk’s lips tremble in the aftermath. His hands clench and unclench and he paces with no direction. Pidge pats him on the back while they wait for Lance to wake in the pod. Her sympathy bleeds towards him too.
It’s hard to explain—she hasn’t had friends before. Matt is her friend, but he’s her brother and he’s not even here. He’s missing.
Pidge knows that’s what this is: friendship. This is the olive branch, no matter how ridiculous looking and shaped, that she’s been neglecting for the sake of putting work first. She thought there’s no room in her life for friends, not now for certain and not friends who are so…distracting.
But Hunk ruffles her hair and gives suggestions for her prison detection program. Lance makes jokes that have actual humorous value—Pidge catches herself laughing at a few, to her dismay and his glee. They watch her back in battle. They vouch for her in discussions and they race around searching for Samuel and Matthew Holt without her having to explain the depth of her desperation. This thing is new—this lack of loneliness. This genuine camaraderie. Pidge finds herself wondering if the two of them would’ve given her this much heart and vigor had she opened up to them at the Garrison. She thinks, yes. They would’ve been there for her the same, whether on ground or in space. And she would do the same for them.
Because they are friends.
For my dear friend elli's (@bluemantics) event. Prompt: Garrison Trio













