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ecrivainescence · 8 years ago

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@constant-gesticulation hi cat! i’m your backup gifter for @voltron-ss. merry belated christmas/new year and stuff. you have been super patient. you rock. i hope you enjoy.

title: maurice

word count: 4668

summary: honestly, this is the silliest thing i have ever written, and it is one long exercise in suspension of disbelief. it contains mothman, dated cultural references, and a random shot of seriousness that did not make itself apparent until about midnight. also bonding, and poison ivy. and red bull. and shiro is allergic to everything.

The campfire stories were Allura’s idea.

“On Altea,” she said, “we told stories of creatures that wandered the night in the waving reed forests. They left wooden stick figures hanging from the waving reeds. They left rock cairns. And if you disturbed one of them you were damned. My father warned me away from them time and time again.” Her face was illuminated by the dim glow of the fire, and her hair was witchy-silver. Her voice took on the quality of an ancient story-keeper.

“But there were three young explorers who did not heed the warnings not to speak of the one that lived in the forest outside our city. She was said to be a malevolent old witch who never showed herself to the people, but who had a long bloody history. Her modus operandi was taking two victims at a time: one to kill first, and one to stand in the corner listening to the screams of the first, awaiting their own death.

“The three explorers were never again seen after the first day they entered the forest, but a year later we found their footage. One of them had accidentally disturbed one of the cairns, and after that things started to unravel. They wandered around in circles for days, lost in the forest, finding wooden stick figures hung from the trees, and being pursued by a being that cast rocks at their tent in the night. Eventually one of them disappeared, and the other two found nothing but a bit of hair and a couple of teeth and a piece of his tongue.”

“Hold on just a hot minute,” said Hunk, artfully constructing a double-decker s’more. “You��re just recycling the plot of The Blair Witch Project.”

“So what if I am?” sniffed Allura. “It was a good movie.”

“No movie retellings,” said Hunk. “It’s the Campfire Story Honor Code.”

Allura stuck out her tongue at him.

“I’ve got one,” piped Keith from his position on a stump across the fire. “It’s a good one.”

“Here we go,” muttered Lance. Shiro shushed him. Pidge leaned in.

Ignoring him, Keith proceeded. “Point Pleasant, West Virginia. 1966. The Scarberrys swore the thing they saw was not a man, nor a bird, although it bore some resemblance to both --”

“It’s Mothman again,” said Lance.

“Got a problem?”

“Oh, I have many problems,” said Lance, “and among them are Mothman, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and anything you found on Creepypasta.”

“Well,” said Keith. “You asked for stories. All my stories are about the dark underbelly of the American wilderness.”

“We’re twenty minutes from a Chick-Fil-A,” griped Lance. “That’s your wilderness.”

Hunk sighed. They’d been like this for days – tense, edgy, at each other’s throats. They weren’t always quite so flammable, but something about the close proximity of RV travel made them a powder keg: You spilled coffee on my notebook. You used my toothbrush. What do you mean you ate the last slice of beef jerky.

He expected Shiro to chime in a peacemaker, but then he remembered Shiro was already asleep in his bunk inside the camper due to being extremely fucking tired of everything. Not only was he in charge of driving, but the strange shift of their return to Earth had revealed a lot of unexpected things. Like that Shiro was allergic as hell to everything. Mangoes. Tree nuts. Certain types of sunscreen. Allura’s shampoo. In fact, they carried an Epi-Pen or six with them at all times and tacked a list of his allergies on the tiny refrigerator, ready in the case that he broke out in hives, as he’d already done thrice.

So yeah. Shiro was tired.

Keith and Lance had somehow gotten back to bickering.

“Lance left our food out for bears!”

“Keith almost abducted somebody else’s dog!”

“You helped!”

“At least I wasn’t the one who forgot to tell Shiro about the peanut oil in the chocolate chip cookies and nearly constricted his airway and then bludgeoned him in the head with a golf club!

“That was an accident, for starters,” said Lance, “and at least I didn’t knock down the world’s largest rubber band ball!”

“You can’t knock it down! It’s a ball! It rolls!”

“It rolled right over an eighty-year-old man.”

“No, actually it rolled over his wife.” Pidge was fiddling with her ham radio setup, which she operated illegally on the go. No one knew what she was doing with all those wavy sound lines and static-y sounds emerging from her headphones. It was just what Pidge did.

“That’s hardly better,” said Lance. “You may be the resident ace pilot, but at least I’m second best at threatening the lives of the elderly.”

“Yeah?” asked Keith. “You’re awfully good at being second best.”

Hunk snapped to attention. The glint departed Lance’s eyes in an instant. “Well,” he said bitterly. “I can’t argue with you there.” He shrugged and turned, walking off into the darkness.

“Oh dear,” said Allura. “I’d better look after him if he’s going to walk off alone in the dark.” She hurried off.

“Not cool, man,” Hunk said into the awkward silence surrounding the campfire.

“I wasn’t thinking,” said Keith. “I just…fuck.”

“You really hurt his feelings with that one,” Pidge said quietly, her headphones in her hands, spitting static.

“I know,” said Keith. “Shit.” He put his head into his hands.

There was something about being on Earth that dragged Lance back into who he used to be. The inferior. The lost. The mildly spiteful. He’d almost fooled himself into believing that he was over it – that he was finally comfortable in his own skin, that he didn’t have to be the best as long as he was his best. But it wasn’t even the damage to his self esteem that really did it – it was that Keith had said it specifically to hurt. And out of nowhere. In the middle of a petty argument. That hurt more than anything.

He could hear Allura crunching leaves behind him, even though she tried to be quiet. Always looking after him. Always assuming he’d get himself into some sort of trouble. And what made him so bitter about it was the knowledge that, so often, he would.

“I’m calling it a night,” he said, changing course and heading for the camper. “You don’t have to babysit me, Allura.” He trudged back toward his cot and his thin blanket and his midseason finale of The Walking Dead. Allura touched his shoulder lightly as he passed by. He shrugged her off.

The next day, Shiro grabbed a six-pack (his secret stash), a fishing pole, and a tiny child’s beach chair decorated with clownfish, and made for the lake a half a mile away.

“You know I care about all of you,” he said, “but I’m going to go fishing. I’m going to sit in this chair, and I’ll happily skin the person who makes me move. So do what you want, but be prepared for the consequences.” He nodded resolutely and made his exit, Allura chasing after him to remind him to wear his hypoallergenic sunscreen.

Pidge turned to Lance. “I need a ride to the nearest store to get some radio stuff.”

“Okay,” he said, making for Shiro’s dad’s old pickup truck that pulled the camper.

“I need to come too,” said Keith, with heavy bags under his eyes. “I need some stuff.”

The nearest store was a WalMart twenty minutes away.

The first thing Pidge noticed was that it was nearly totally empty. There was but one cashier, and she was wall-eyed. The automatic doors creaked. The inside of the store played elevator music. “Meet back here in fifteen,” said Lance, and they wandered off in their respective directions.

Pidge wandered about the aisles looking for her extra wires and the little pencils she liked and the best instant coffee for all-nighters. Keith and Lance avoided speaking to each other except when absolutely necessary, picking out toilet paper and Cheez-Its and several pool noodles. Wrapped up in their own heads, they paid for their things and left the store, and only after the silent ride home did they notice anything was missing.

Pidge wandered out into the parking lot after finding them nowhere in the store, and swore loudly. The truck was gone.

“Hey!” called the wall-eyed cashier. “You gotta pay for that stuff!”

“Well, fuck,” Pidge said to herself.

It was in the personal care aisle that she saw him. She had downed a couple of Red Bulls at that point (okay, maybe four). So yeah, the world was starting to blur. And the aisles were starting to seem more and more like a mystical labyrinth, a trap for the weak-willed, a purgatory where one might wander for all eternity and never see the sun. Or, for that matter, a sales associate. But she swore he was real; he was not of this world, but he was real.

He seemed to distort the air around him, like he possessed a certain gravity. His eyes were in fact as bulbous and red as legend told, but he seemed to taste the air, too, with these gently waving antennae on his face. He was coated in downy gray fur. His wings were dark, iridescent, sharp like the edges of knives.

“I knew you would come,” he said to Pidge, not looking. His voice was like rocks falling off the side of a mountain.

“How’d you figure that?” she asked, rubbing her eyes and trying to remember if this had ever happened on Red Bull before.

“You signaled me,” he said. “Did you not?”

“I don’t know, maybe.” Shouldn’t have played around with amateur radio frequencies. “But is that why you’re in WalMart? Really?”

“No,” he said in his rockslide voice. “I ran out of Kraft macaroni and baby wipes.”

“Mothman eats Kraft macaroni?”

“Please,” he said. “Call me Maurice.”

“Hmm,” Pidge said. “Nice to meet you, Maurice. You’re as intimidating as they said you’d be. I’m Pidge Gunderson.”

“I am pleased to make the acquaintance of yours as well, Pigeon Dungerson,” he said.

“Well, we’ll work on that later, I guess,” she muttered. “Say, Maurice. How’d you like to help me with something?”

There were several reasons this was a good idea.

1. Revenge. She’d only been buying deodorant and stuff, for fuck’s sake. She hadn’t just wandered off for two hours. She was sick and tired of getting left places – WalMart. Diners. Gas stations.

2. Keith and Lance were at each other’s throats more than was necessary, and it was screwing with Pidge’s flow. They always worked better together in times of trouble. Perhaps it was time to shake things up.

3. It was going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

“Okay,” she said to Maurice, who was munching happily on a Pop Tart. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I need you to stick close. I’ll lure them off by themselves, and then you can do your weird stun-tongue thing and drag them around a little bit. Let them freak out. Let ‘em scream a little bit. And then when they get their shit together and figure out a plan to get out of the situation, I want you to let them get away. Let them think they’ve done it themselves. And I’ll pay you in all the Pop Tarts you want.”

“We do not have Pop Tarts in my realm,” said Maurice, the air shimmering around him.

“I know, Maurice,” said Pidge. “I know.”

Keith apologized profusely when he arrived twenty minutes later to retrieve Pidge, but strangely enough she didn’t have anything to say about being stranded at WalMart. Keith put it down to one of her weird caffeine-drunk spells, given the aroma of Red Bull on her breath. He shrugged it off.

He was lacing up his boots and packing his field notes when he noticed Lance standing by awkwardly. “What are you about to do?” he asked.

“I’m gonna look around,” Keith said, trying to offer a little goodwill. “You can come if you want.”

Pidge, behind a nearby tree (and sporting some fabulous aviators) whispered into a walkie talkie: “Your move, Maurice.”

Around one in the afternoon, Shiro was working on his sweet Chaco tan when he remembered he’d forgotten his pool noodle. He tromped right back to the camper. Allura was just out of bed, wearing a t-shirt over her swimsuit and sipping a cup of the acidic black coffee that spewed out of the ancient coffeemaker.

“What’s that on your legs?” She asked.

“What’s what?”

“That,” she said, gesturing toward a strange yellow-pink rash that Shiro had not previously noticed.

“I guess that’s…oh. Oh no.”

“What?”

“Poison ivy.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be rather mildly irritating?”

“Not to me,” Shiro said. “Guess what else I’m allergic to?”

“Poison ivy,” Allura said, turning slightly green. “Oh. Oh shit.”

“It makes me swell up like a balloon,” he said.

“I’ll get the keys,” Allura sighed. He was already looking a bit puffy.

In retrospect, Lance would wonder if it was really all that surprising that as soon as they’d wandered far enough from the campsite that no one could hear them scream, there had suddenly been an insect man tall enough to sling one of them over each shoulder and haul them back to his weird lair thing. It was, like, the only thing that hadn’t happened yet in his short life.

The cave was not littered with the bones of small animals, as he would have expected, but instead strange paraphernalia of ages past. Hawaiian shirts. A gumball machine. A broken television set. Books and books and books. Star Wars miniatures. A typewriter.

It really wasn’t a cave at all. More of a large person-sized dirt burrow, or an adobe hallway.

“This is my collection,” said the strange red-eyed moth creature. “Please making yourself comfortable.” He paused for a moment, as if contemplating. “If you can.” For Keith and Lance were bound up together, back to back, in some sort of strange tense plastic-like material. Slightly slimy. Ominous.

“Listen,” said Lance. “If you’ll just untie these rope thingies, we can all sit down and have a chat, okay? A dinner party. A forum, if you will.”

“I cannot do that,” said the creature. “Do you like music?”

“What?”

“Music.”

“I mean…yeah. I guess.”

“Oh, good,” said Mothman. He walked his funny childlike shuffling walk over to a cobwebbed corner, and fiddled with something glinting in the low light. A moment later, scratchy music began to play. Upon further inspection, the object barely visible in the dimness seemed to be a phonograph. “It is the theme from an Earth show called, ‘I Am Dreaming of Jeannie,’” he said. “I have also the songs of Billie Holliday, and Milli Vanilli, and Back of Nickel.”

“You’ve been collecting Earth music, haven’t you?” said Keith.

“They sell Nickelback on vinyl?” asked Lance.

“I have been a collector of Earth things for many years,” said the creature. “Next I will show you my collection of glass jars. Perhaps my marbles, if you are careful. Or my many plastic shopping bags. And my most favorite thing,” he said. “Would you like to see my most favorite thing?”

“I suppose,” said Lance.

“Look.” He trotted out of a corner with a dusty cardboard box that, upon further inspection, contained dusty video cassette tapes. “It is my box set of all of the seasons of the Earth show ‘Friends.’”

“Very, um, nice,” said Keith.

“We were ON A BREAK,” said Mothman. He made a noise that sounded somewhere between a cough and an avalanche. “Ha! Ha! Have I done the Earth humor correctly? I have not had much time to practice on real people.”

“You know what, buddy?” said Lance. “Yeah. You did it right. Congratulations. You’re pretty great at Earth-speak.”

“Oh,” said the Mothman, clapping his hand-things. “I am glad.”

“If you would just…y’know…untie us, that’d be great.”

“You will be going nowhere,” the creature said in his strange gravelly voice. “For I will not permit it. You are to be my dinner. Yummy yummy. Human flesh.” The moth-creature-alien-thing waved his hands about his head in a manner that resembled jazz hands. “Was I convincingly scary?”

“I’m not ready to leave anyway,” said Keith. “I want to interview him.”

Lance raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Of course,” he muttered. “Of course you do. Of course you want to interview the flesh-devouring man-moth who has us trapped prone in his cave in the Virginia wilderness.”

“I’m just saying!” said Keith. “We are never going to get this chance again! We can get documentation! Nobody has ever had proof this definitive of the existence of Mothman. We can ask him about the Silver Bridge thing –”

“That was not my doing,” said the Mothman.

“You know what I’m talking about?” asked Keith. “You know about the Silver Bridge?”

“I am Maurice,” said the Mothman. “Please refer to me by my Earth name.”

“Okay, um…Maurice, then,” said Keith. “So what really happened that day?”

“I do not know,” he said. “It was a most unfortunate accident. I was at home all day. The one they spotted was not me.”

“Who was it, then?”

“My brother Jimmy. He was visiting from our realm.”

“Your realm?”

“My home. It is in another galaxy.”

“Well, what’s it like? What are your people like?”

“They are mostly what you humans would call ‘average Joes,’” said Maurice. “They are workers. They pay taxes. I am here to work on my thesis. I have taken a bit longer than the average of forty years to complete it.”

“Your…thesis?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is on the behavior of the bald Earthlings and their strange culture. I have learned of one ritual in particular that captures my imagination. You put our your right arm, and then your left, and then you turn your hands over, and then grasping your elbows…”

“You’re speaking of the Macarena,” said Keith.

“We could demonstrate it for you if you’d untie us.”

“Oh,” he said. “I will. Eventually. But for now the little one said –” He clapped his hands over his mouth.

“What little one?” asked Keith. “Are you working for somebody?”

“I have said too much,” said Maurice. “You will have to ask her. For now I will take my leave. I have to be gathering the flowers.” He waddled out of the cave at what was top speed, compared to his usual gait. “Do not be trying to be escaping,” he called backwards over his wing.

Lance and Keith summoned grimaces and raised their hands as far as they could to wave, considering they were tied up. They didn’t stop smiling at the creature’s back until he was well out of sight.

“Okay,” said Lance when it was clear they were alone. “We’re going to have to work together to get out of this.”

“I haven’t seen Lance and Keith for a while,” said Hunk, surrounded by a stack of novels, knee-deep in one that had to be at least 500 pages. “You wouldn’t, um, happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Pidge. “Nothing. None. Zip.”

“You were awfully intent on paying them back,” Hunk said, “and now, funnily enough, they’re gone.”

“I think I should reapply my sunscreen.”

“Pidge. Come on. Where are they?”

She sighed. “It’s kind of hard to explain. But they’re safe!” she added hastily, when Hunk turned slightly green. “Relatively, anyway.”

“Explain now,” he said, putting his chin in his hands.

“Okay,” she said, and began her sordid tale.

When she reached the end, Hunk put his face in his hands. “I cannot believe,” he said, “that you invited Mothman to kidnap your teammates.”

“Maurice,” corrected Pidge.

“Maurice may be responsible for many deaths, my friend. The Silver Bridge! Car accidents! Oh, god, they’re probably already dead! I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to Lance’s mom –”

“The collapse of the Silver Bridge was caused by a faulty eyebar and you fucking know it,” said Pidge. “Maurice is a nice guy. All he wants is Pop Tarts, I promise. And he’s probably an extremely valuable contact for Voltron, and an opportunity for insight into parts of the universe yet uncharted –”

“Take me to them,” said Hunk. “Now.”

“Ugh. Fine.”

Usually, Allura loved riding her high-tech portable deployable solar-powered motorcycle, courtesy of Coran – the wind in her hair, the sun on her face. The sweet taste of fresh rural Earth air. But right now, her hair was whipping Shiro in the face as he rode behind her, arms locked around her waist.

He was still pretty swollen and itchy, but at least he now had a prescription for some medication that was supposed to help. And at least nobody had said much about the Galra arm.

And at least, said that small, wicked part of her mind, he would still need someone to rub calamine lotion between his shoulder blades.

As a pick-me up, she’d bought him a huge tin of fudge from a roadside stand that also sold beaded bracelets, snow globes with Mickey Mouse in them (probably stolen), and little figures of tiny naked fairy babies with flower crowns and chubby cheeks.

It was this fudge tin that was digging lines into her back as she pulled up to the camp site. She parked, stood and stretched her back good and long, and then looked up as Shiro shuffled up next to her.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Where in quiznak is everybody?”

Keith and Lance managed to accomplish approximately nothing.

Lance was proposing a strategic top-speed ground roll all the way back to the camp site when Keith, who was the one facing the mouth of the weird dirt burrow, began screaming. “Hunk! Pidge! Run while you still can! Before Mothman devours your flesh!”

“Excuse me,” said Mothman, appearing suddenly out of nowhere with a crack, antennae quivering. “But I have told you that is not my name.”

“Nice work, Maurice,” said Pidge, entering the mouth of the burrow slightly sweaty and out of breath. “It’s not your fault they were too stupid to figure out a way out.”

“Wait,” said Lance. “Hold on just a hot fuckin’ minute. You know him?”

“Yeah,” said Pidge. “You make all kinds of friends when you get stranded in WalMart.”

“You set him on us,” said Keith.

“I did you a favor,” she said, “and you would be wise to remember it the next time we stop at a QuikTrip. Before you, you know, forget me.”

“I mean,” said Hunk. “She kind of has a point.”

“The idea,” Pidge said, “was that you were supposed to figure out a way out together and realize that you’re a great team and you need to support each other.”

“So you organized this as a lesson in teamwork? You let us be kidnapped by a giant insect-man in the Virginia wilderness so we could learn?”

“No,” she said, looking at the pile of bubble-wrapped teenage boy on the ground. “That was just a bonus. This is also revenge for the five different times you’ve left me at…let’s see. Waffle House, a gas station, another gas station, that one weird fruit stand, and WalMart. But you weren’t supposed to get hurt or anything. You were supposed to figure out a way to get out. Together. Since you’ve been making our lives miserable with your fighting.”

“Well, we didn’t.”

“I am sorry I have bound you too tightly,” said Maurice. “I forgot that humans do not possess fine razor sharp hairs on their hands capable of cutting through my biological web goo.”

“Whatever you do,” said Lance, closing his eyes as if in pain. “Do not ever mention biological web goo again. And do not tell me what part of you it comes from.”

“Oh, just my nose.”

“I guess it could be worse,” said Keith.

“So you’re basically tied up in alien moth snot,” said Hunk.

“Maurice,” said Pidge. “How do you feel about Spaghetti-Os cooked over a campfire?”

“I would most enjoy it!”

“You did some nice work today, bud. I have seventeen boxes of Pop Tarts with your name on them.”

Pidge held out a fist for him to bump, but he met it with a high five. “Okay,” she said. “I guess we’ll have to work on that.”

When they got back to the camp site, Shiro was lying under a blanket inside the camper, watching Gilmore Girls season two, and Allura was already pacing with her hands on her hips, ready to scold. “Where in quiznak have you been?” she demanded in her best Mom Voice.

“Off making friends with the local cryptids,” said Pidge. “Meet my friend Maurice.”

“I am so fortunate to be included in the bald Earthling ritual burning of the marshmallows,” said Maurice.

Allura was taken aback. “Um,” she said. “I don’t believe I’ve met anyone of your species before. But I suppose it’s nice to meet you. And you,” she said to Pidge, “will explain later.”

“Oh, that is alright,” said Maurice. “I am sure we will be able to do the bonding over bald Earthling pop culture. I am rather partial to Bruno Mars myself.”

Pidge and Maurice sat around the campfire long after everyone else had retreated to the relative civilization of the RV. They toasted Pop Tarts, downed yet more Red Bull, and traded stories about their respective worlds, current events, and pop music.

“Well,” said Allura warmly, observing from afar. “I think everything’s finally all worked out. We’re bonding, we’re learning about each other, we’re exploring the great American wilds, we found Mothman…”

“Oh fuck,” said Shiro. “I think this fudge has nuts in it.”

“Oh no,” said Allura. “Oh, no. Oh no no no. How allergic did you say you were to nuts?”

“Severely,” said Shiro.

“NURSE HUNK! EPI-PEN! NOW!”

As Hunk thundered around the camp looking for the first aid kit, and Pidge continued teaching Maurice bawdy British rugby songs, and as Allura issued commands while Shiro panicked (“My face is swelling! I can’t feel my face!”), Lance turned to Keith. “So,” he said. “Is Mothman everything you hoped he would be?”

“I mean,” said Keith, shrugging. “He’s a little anticlimactic. I don’t know how I’m supposed to work this into a book about the dark underbelly of Mother Nature. And besides, I didn’t find him. Pidge did.”

“Pidge always figures everything out first,” huffed Lance. “Sometimes I wonder why I bother comparing myself to you when she smokes us both.”

Keith hung his head. “I’m sorry I said that stuff before, about you being second best,” he said. “I don’t really think that. I was just being an ass.”

“Oh, it’s alright,” said Lance. “I’m used to you being an ass.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not trying to be,” he replied. “I just am that way. Even when I’m thinking totally chill, benign thoughts, I somehow manage to bitch people out. I don’t really like that about myself. Actually,” he said, “sometimes I’m not sure I like myself much at all.”

“Yeah, well, then we make a great team,” said Lance.

“We do, though,” said Keith.

“Would you like yourself more if you managed to solve Bigfoot first? I know Mothman’s out of the game, but other mysteries remain. I’ll come with you, of course.”

“Well, duh. I’ll need witnesses and a cameraman and stuff.”

“I still can’t feel my face!” Shiro yelled in the distance.

“No, no,” said Pidge to Maurice. “You’re talking about rugby league. It’s different from rugby union.”

“This fudge really is exceptional, though,” said Allura.

“Pound it,” said Lance, offering a fist. Keith met it with a high five.

“Okay,” said Lance. “We can work on that.”

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