#oh and a guy you thought was dead is either alive and mangled horrifically or still dead. its a schrodingers mirror cat (bat)

[thegreatyin]

reading about the ambitions i didn't take and apparently 3 whole ass masters can die? two of them in nemesis?? anyway what im saying is going forward im wholeheartedly imagining every fallen london ambition to somehow be canon and happening at the same exact time so this can just be the WORST fucking week for the bazaar ever

[sparklebitch]

Captive Pt.2 (langst)

Part one is here.

Anyway back to my usually morbid shit. The fluff is over guys.

Trigger warnings posted in the tags.

"Well look again!" Keith's panicked voice rang out through their helmets. Shiro shook his head and turned his lion back in the direction of the castle.

"Keith," he said wearily. "He's not there" Keith continued flying over the surface of the planet.

"He has to be here somewhere!" his voice cracked as frantically searched through the window in front of him.

"Keith..." Hunk said softly. "We should turn back. If he was still here we would've found him by now"

"We're not giving up on him" Keith said through clenched teeth. He was griping the controls so hard his knuckles were turning white.

"No one's suggesting that," Hunk said calmly. "I'm just saying that we should go back to the castle and regroup. We can send out alerts to everyone that's sided with us, and then we can keep searching somewhere else. We're going to find him, Keith. We're not giving up on him" Keith let out a quiet sigh and then nudged the lion upward, toward the castle.

"Okay"

~   ~

It wasn't until a few weeks after Lance had disappeared that they finally found a trace of him. An encrypted message arrived on the ships screen.

"What the hell is this?" Shiro asked as he walked into the room. It was on every screen through the ship.

"I'm not sure" Allura said, rapidly tapping at the controls. Nothing was changing. "I can't figure out how to decode it, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get it off the screen" she said, perplexed. Suddenly the door burst open and Pidge, Hunk, and Keith ran in.

"What's going on!?" Pidge asked loudly.

"Is it him?" at Keith's words, the room fell silent. No one knew the answer to that question. It hadn't crossed their minds.

"I- I don't know" Allura slowly backed away from the computer, shaking her head. "I don't know"

Pidge and Hunk went to work right away, trying to decipher the message. It took a while, almost three days, before they did. It was a series of coordinates with a message. "The Blue Paladin waits for you"

"That's ominous af" Pidge said, staring at the message wide-eyed. Keith bolted upright in his chair. He had stayed with Pidge and Hunk the entire time they were decoding the message.

"Let's go get him!" he said urgently. Hunk and Pidge frowned slightly and glanced at each other. Shiro sighed. "What? You finally deciphered the message. Now we have to rescue him!"

"Keith, can I talk to you for a minute" Shiro said, pulling Keith out of the room. "Listen," Keith shrugged out of Shiro's grip.

"No, you listen!" he exclaimed. "Lance has been out there for weeks-! Waiting for us! We finally know where he is, so why are we still sitting here!?"

"We have to think about the lions, this is obvious a ploy to get us to--"

"Screw the lions! And screw Voltron! Who cares about all that!? We're not Voltron without Lance!" Keith screamed. Shiro dropped his head into his hands. He wanted so much to run off and save Lance, but as the pilot of the black lion he had to think about the big picture. If whoever took Lance got possession of one or all of the lions, it could mean the end of the universe.

"Obviously we all want to--"

"But it's not obvious!" Keith interrupted loudly. "It seems like I'm the only one who still cares about Lance! I mean, at least Pidge and Hunk worked on deciphering that message, but where have you been? You've been off worrying about getting people to join Voltron. And you've probably been looking for someone to pilot Blue, haven't you?" Shiro's cheeks burned red. That was all the answer Keith needed. "That's what I thought..."

"Wait Keith," Shiro caught his arm as he turned away. "I haven't given up on Lance. I just... I have to make tough decisions as the leader of Voltron. You have no idea how much I want to just run in there and save Lance, but we have to think of the consequences. They're just waiting for us to show up and bust down the doors to save our friend. They'll either capture us or the lions. We have to think logically about this" Keith laughed humorlessly.

"The leader of Voltron?" he asked. "Good luck getting any of us to follow you when you let our friend suffer in whatever place he's in" with that, he walked back into the room where Pidge and Hunk were.

The three of them rushed to the hangar and tugged on their armor and coming up with a plan.

"It should take about two hours to get to this place if we hurry, which I assume we will" Keith nodded sharply. "What's the plan? Do we have a plan for when we get there?"

"Find Lance, and don't die" Keith said with a shrug. "There's not much else we can plan before we get there"

"Do you have room for one more?" Shiro asked sheepishly, ducking into the room. Keith eyed him. "I'm sorry for what I said before. You're right. We're not Voltron without Lance" The corner of Keith's mouth turned up as he nodded Shiro over to them.

~   ~

"This is very obviously a trap, we all know this, correct?" Pidge said as they walked up to the old rundown building that the coordinates had led them to.

"Yeah" Shiro said. "But it doesn't matter. We have to save our teammate" he glanced at Keith apologetically. Keith nodded. Shiro had come, that was enough for him.

The four of them crept through the front doors, bayards out and ready. It was only a minute before they realized that the entire place was abandoned. There was no one there.

"Okay, now it feels more like a trap" Shiro frowned and continued to very cautiously move forward. The only sound was of their hushed footsteps and the creak of the boards beneath their feet. The four of them soundlessly roamed through the entire building, not seeing a soul. Then they came down to the last room. It was a splintering wooden door, partially hid by a cabinet that was slid in front of it. Hunk and Shiro worked quickly to move the cabinet aside whole Keith and Pidge lifted their weapons in preparation. Shiro swiftly kicked the door in. Shiro was the first one in. He stopped abruptly, blocking the others from entering.

"Shiro, move--" Keith glanced sideways at Shiro's face. It had gone completely pale.

"What are you guys--" Hunk and Pidge pushed past the other two, barely making it two steps before freezing in horror.

Lance's body laid in the middle of the floor. His lifeless body was crushed and twisted into unnatural shapes. There was dried blood on virtually every part of his body.

"Oh, fuck" Pidge said faintly. Hunk doubled over and threw up on the floor. Pidge began hyperventilating and then fled the room. Shiro's hand flew up, covering his mouth in horror. Keith stared at Lance's mangled body numbly.

His blood-filled eyes were aimed at the ceiling, his mouth partially open, like he had died with a scream in his throat. "Wh- Wha--" Keith's brain wasn't comprehending the scene in front of him. His friend was dead. And he had died horrifically, by the looks of it. Lance had suffered. He felt pain because of them. Because they were too late. Based on the state of his corpse he hadn't been dead for long. Maybe a day.

If he had continued to look for Lance the day he disappeared, would he still be alive?

What if this was all his fault?

Was he the reason that Lance died?