#a pre-sleep rarity... THERE ARE HUMANS IN MY BRAIN THIS TIME

[fisheito]

everyone gets a turn in the ridiculous skintight edmondsuit. or at least, .everyone SHOULD

[hulklinging]

Pidge and Lance with 127 or Nico/Victor with 65?

127. “What are you listening to?” Pidge and Lance. Sleep issues and friendship. 1607 words.

“What are you listening to?”

It’s Lance, teasing already apparent in his voice. Like they’re back in the Garrison, and he’s gonna make fun of his weird little communications officer for believing in aliens.

Pidge thinks back, wonders if she could redo it if she’d laugh more and tease him back, or if she needed to be as closed off as she was, to get them to that roof, so they could watch Shiro fall.

Pidge thinks in code sometimes, how one missing semicolon can make everything grind to a halt. And fate isn’t really her thing, but there were so many things that could have gone wrong, so many places a semicolon could have gone missing, and then they wouldn’t be here, in space, fighting a war. She grits her teeth, because that kind of thinking is an exercise in uselessness, and because she didn’t pause the recordings she’s listening to when Lance walked in, and now she’s lost track of what’s happening.

“Some of the files we gathered from the last mission are audio files,” she says. “I’m going through them.”

“In the middle of the night? Are they really that important?” Lance flops down next to her on the couch. He’s got headphones on too, although they’re not connected to anything. His sleep mask is pushed up into his hair like they’re designer sunglasses, and he’s doing a very good job of faking that ‘I just woke up’ air, but there’s deep circles under his eyes, and Pidge knows him well enough at this point to know he hasn’t managed to get any sleep yet tonight.

She doesn’t sleep much, which is an ongoing joke among her old Garrison team but is also a fact. And especially not in her room, with its bare walls and its tendency to resemble her old room back at the Garrison, when she wakes up all of a sudden, sometime between lights out and what counts for morning in the Castle. That’s the worst, because for a second she thinks she’s back on Earth, no closer to her family or to anything than she was before, and it turns her stomach.

So most of her sleep nowadays is stolen in power naps, scattered across the castle like she’s playing some long game version of hide and seek. She knows all of their nighttime habits, watches Hunk get up too early, pretends she believes his excuses about just wanting to get a head start on breakfast. She watches Keith sneak out like he’s still back home, still trying to avoid the teachers that will throw him out eventually anyways, disappear into the training room for hours on end. Shiro wanders the halls like he’s sleepwalking, and sometimes he sits with her and they talk about little things, stretching their few points of pre-Voltron connection into nights’ worth of conversations. If they talk about the people they’re both missing at night, not meeting each other’s eyes, then their performances of being okay ring more true around the rest of them.

Allura plots, when she can’t sleep. She pulls out old star charts and makes notes, crossing out civilizations and strongholds that fell before humans had ever learned the word ‘empire.’ Pidge sits with her sometimes too, dozes off to the sound of the pen-like thing Allura uses to record 10 000 years of missing history gliding across the paper.

Coram checks and double-checks every system, when something keeps him up. It’s rare though, to see the older man out and about. He’s a soldier still, at heart, and he’s learned better than any of them to grab sleep when he can.

Lance is less predictable, and also the most frustrating, when it comes to late night company. He wants Pidge to engage, and Pidge always feels like he’s asking her for something but never knows what it is. And she cares for all of them, for this weird floating family of theirs, but she still hasn’t found the right words to express that just yet, so she’s left like this, scowl stretching her tired face as Lance taps almost-familiar beats into the couch cushions and stares at her.

“What do you want?” she snaps, and she doesn’t mean to, but she’s tired and she’s trying to do something, and he’s making it harder. Even when he’s not speaking (a rarity), his presence is enough to make paying attention to something else difficult.

Lance shrugs, which makes her scowl deepen.

“If you’re bored, you can go bother someone else.” She twists her whole body in on itself, like maybe if she can’t see him she won’t be distracting by all of his fidgeting. “I’m working.”

A pair of hands reach over and pluck her laptop from her lap.

She shrieks, and her hand flashes out and punches Lance in the shoulder. It’s a slower reaction than it should have been, and maybe it has been a couple of days before she’s gotten anything resembling a good sleep, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that Lance is being an asshole.

“Give that back!”

Lance lets out a whine at the hit, but is now standing and holding the laptop over his head. She growls, and stands up only slightly unsteadily on the couch, practically climbing him to get her computer back.

“No, wait- ow! -Pidge, this is an intervention! Ow, not my fingers, I’m the sharpshooter I need those!”

“Should have thought of that before stealing my shit!”

Pidge gets her hands back on the laptop just as Lance loses his balance, and then the two of them tumble back down onto the couch in a mess of limbs and wires. Pidge makes sure to give him an elbow to the ribs as she’s detangling herself, and takes great pride in the muttered ‘quiznak!’ this earns her.

“You’re a terror.”

“Thanks,” she says, and goes to plug her headphones back in. 

“Wait, Pidge! I really did come here for a reason.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, trying to channel the disbelief that Shiro always emitted when one of them tried to pull something. It’s a work in progress, but once perfected she will be unstoppable.

“Yes?”

Lance grins, any pain from the last few minutes instantly forgotten. His sleepmask is hanging halfway off his head, and he looks ridiculous. Pidge loses her Shiro-stare to a giggle, and Lance, performer that he is, strikes a pose that turns the giggle into a full-out laugh.

“Okay, fine. What do you want?”

“You like heights, right?”

Damn her and her curiosity.

Shiro is headed towards the observation deck when he hears something strange.

He’s cutting through one of the big dark and empty rooms that must have been used as some sort of hall, back when the Castle was bustling with people. He knows his way, doesn’t bother turning the lights on. The unknown noise makes him tense, arm lighting up for the briefest of moments before his brain catches up to his anxieties and he recognizes it as a snore.

He looks around, confused. There’s nothing in this room, not that he can see. Then he looks up.

There are little balconies scattered around the walls of the room, and in the one closest to him, he can make out a mess of blankets and pillows. It takes him a moment to find the right door that will lead him up to the balcony, and he takes great care to tread lightly on the stairs, because regardless of who it is in this makeshift nest, Shiro’s sure they deserve the rest. 

He finds Lance and Pidge, their matching bedheads just barely sticking out of their pile of blankets. Pidge’s laptop is closed and tucked carefully away against the wall, which means either she fell asleep before Lance did or for the first time since they left Earth, Pidge let herself fall asleep on purpose. It’s her snoring he heard. He hadn’t known she snored, which makes him think that she usually never lets herself sleep this deeply. Under the snoring is the soft sound of waves, which makes sense. Lance can’t sleep in the quiet, and sure enough, his headphones are resting on a pillow near Pidge’s laptop, the recording they got at the last planet they’d stopped at with an ocean trickling through them.

“H'lo?” Lance murmurs, one eye cracked open and staring in Shiro’s general direction.

“Just me,” he whispers. “Go back to sleep.”

Lance nods, and then rolls over, and pats the space next to him. Shiro suspects there might be some stripped rooms throughout the castle, for them to have this many blankets and pillows, but he doesn’t think Allura will mind. 

“Lots of room,” the boy says. He’s right, too. “No claustrophobia here.”

Then he turns onto his side and pulls at a corner of a blanket until he’s buried again, only leaving enough of his face uncovered that he won’t suffocate.

Shiro wonders what it was that gave it away to Lance, why he struggles with sleeping in his own room. Or maybe he just guessed, like how he guessed that Pidge’s fear comes from waking up alone.

It’s not a bad idea. Shiro had tried sleeping in some of the bigger rooms, but he felt too exposed. Here, tucked away like this but with so much open air, he might actually have a chance of sleeping for longer than a few hours.

“Not today, kiddo. But thanks.”

Lance smiles, and Shiro leaves as quietly as he came. He’ll let Hunk know that they might miss breakfast, and to set some aside for them. Sleep had been too scarce, of late. They deserved the rest.