Chapter Text
8.20.2126
System X9Y; Earth; Arizona, Galaxy Garrison
[11:45 PM] Hunk: Hey Pidge? Do you know what the heck is going on with Lance and Keith?
Pidge is actually in bed before midnight—for once—but when her phone lights up with that message, she’s awake and sitting up before she can even unlock the screen.
[11:46 PM] You: DON’T even get me started
[11:46 PM] Hunk: No, no. I really need someone to get started because
[11:46 PM] Hunk: I feel like I’m being kept out of the loop
[11:47 PM] You: Dude those jackasses are keeping themselves out of the loop
[11:47 PM] You: (Also are you planetside right now?)
[11:49 PM] Hunk: (Yeah, visiting the fam)
[11:50 PM] Hunk: what do you mean?
[11:50 PM] You: I don’t know
[11:50 PM] You: They don’t know (or I doubt they do)
[11:50 PM] You: No one else knows and it’s a disaster as far as I can tell
[11:51 PM] Hunk: Well, it was a disaster the first time so
[11:52 PM] Hunk: Figures
[11:52 PM] You: …
[11:52 PM] You: Hunk what do you mean
[11:53 PM] Hunk: Huh?
[11:53 PM] Hunk: I mean does anyone think it wasn’t?
[11:53 PM] You: Wasn’t what?
[11:54 PM] Hunk: Wasn’t a disaster when they were hooking up the first time!
[11:55 PM] You: wait wait wait all this shitty grammar is giving me a headache
[11:55 PM] You: Are you saying
[11:56 PM] You: That Lance and Keith were hooking up before?
[11:56 PM] You: And it was bad?
[11:56 PM] Hunk: Uh, yeah? It wasn’t good, I’ll say that.
[11:56 PM] You: When was this??
[11:57 PM] You: Was it during that road trip they went on a few years ago?
[11:57 PM] Hunk: I mean I assume they were hooking up then, too. But, no I mean the first time, on the castleship
[11:57 PM] You: They
[11:57 PM] You: Were
[11:57 PM] You: Doing
[11:58 PM] You: WHAT on the castleship????
[11:58 PM] You: ???????
[11:59 PM] Hunk: Ooooh shit
[12:00 AM] Hunk: You really didn’t know
[12:00 AM] You: HUNK
[12:00 AM] You: I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU
[12:01 AM] Hunk: Can’t believe ME??
[12:05 AM] Hunk: okay hold on
***
[12:06 AM] You: SHIRO
***
12:07am
Incoming Vid Call
Hunk Garrett
“Hey Pidge, so-”
“Okay so what the hell do you mean by keeping a secret like that from me for eight years? No, no. Eleven, if we’re counting all the time dilation and quintessence time loss—which I will, because someone should.”
She’s leaning forward over her laptop, arms crossed in front of the keyboard. She hasn’t bothered to turn on any other lights in her bedroom, and even she can see in the tiny preview window that she looks absolutely unhinged.
But she doesn’t care.
Because what. The. Hell?
“Well…” Under the mid-afternoon sun, on the other side of the Earth, Hunk sputters at her. He’s outside, so there’s clearly nowhere to set his phone, but he holds the device with one hand and she can see how he shrugs and gestures uselessly with the other one. “Well, you were keeping it a secret now!”
She raises her hands as if they’re itching to strangle someone. “But you were keeping the secret first!”
“But it’s not like you knew that, so you couldn’t have been getting even because you didn’t even know what you were getting even for! Why didn’t you say anything after you visited them out there earlier this month??”
Pidge sighs, rolls her chair back from the desk, gets up and paces, and then sits back down. She makes sure she’s in the frame before she answers, so Hunk can take in her sheer exasperation.
“I didn’t say anything,” she begins, “because while it was incredibly obvious, they didn’t say anything to me. And I guess I wanted to give them a chance to figure it out. Which I see now was way too generous.”
“Well,” Hunk starts, still a little flustered. “Back on the Castle of Lions, I never said anything because Lance asked me not to, point blank.”
“…Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well...” Pidge grits her teeth. “You know, we’re better friends than they deserve.”
Hunk laughs. “Maybe.”
Pidge isn’t quite ready to laugh about it. And she’s still curious. “How did you find out back then?”
“Our psychic connection, remember?” Hunk explains, tapping his temple. “The UST was always obvious, but the day we formed Voltron after whenever that tension was broken was, uh…”
Squinting, scanning her memories for anything that would satisfy that description, Pidge comes up with nothing. “How come I didn’t notice?”
“Because you were sixteen? And basically asexual?”
Pidge sighs—but she doesn’t say anything in response, because he’s not exactly wrong. She probably would have been a “late bloomer” anyway; and being an underage soldier didn’t lend itself to a typical progression toward sexual maturity. Hell, her cycles were fucked up for years after the war. Hormone stuff is weird.
For a long minute, she lets her mouth rest against her hands steepled in front of her. Hunk knows the way her brain works; in fact, he can probably see the way her eyes drift upward as she processes everything they’ve talked about. Then, she sits up straight and asks, “Anyway, so the question now is: how much shit are we going to give them?”
“Uh…” Hunk scratches self-consciously at a side-burn. “None.”
Raising an eyebrow, Pidge asks, “Pardon?”
Hunk shakes his head. “I’m not going to give them any shit. Not now, anyway. I wanna give Lance a chance to come clean.”
Alright… They are BFFs and she supposes that’s fair, but… “What about Keith?”
Hunk makes a face that is half exasperation, half pity and levels it directly into his phone camera. “Please. Do you know how long it took him to actually tell me about the breakup?”
Pidge makes a face back at him. “But that was bad news. Isn’t this good news? Why wouldn’t he want to share?”
“Well…” Hunk shrugs. “Because it was a disaster last time, and he hates admitting to being wrong, so if it’s a disaster this time…”
“Then why wouldn’t Lance say anything?”
Hunk looks troubled. “Maybe it’s just messy now…”
Pidge scans Hunks face and takes in his troubled look.
“You don’t have much faith in them figuring this out, do you?”
Hunk squints at her, now. “I mean. Do you?”
Pidge feels her mouth slide into a half-smile. “Honestly Hunk, the way they look at each other now is…”
She’s thinking of the way Keith looked at Lance, specifically. Yes; the moment she’d taken in that there was something going on between the two of them was when Lance had hugged Keith and then stared up after him in a way that could only be described as “longingly” as his spaceship twinkled into orbit. But before and after that…
Pidge isn’t about to wax poetical about her second family, but Keith definitely looked like he was about to start writing love songs.
“I may throw up,” she finally says, holding her hands out toward the screen. “But it’s really sweet. I think they’ve got something real.”
Hunk offers her a look of skeptical hope. “Well. I mean, that would be great. If it is! If it works out.”
“Still a lot of ‘if’s from you, huh?”
“I… will try to withhold judgement,” Hunk says.
“I make no such promise,” Pidge replies.
***
[12:26 PM] You: SHIRO
[4:05 AM] Shiro: Uh, hi Pidge?
Some people think Pidge doesn’t sleep at all. She does. Just usually not in eight-hour increments. She must be in a REM cycle when Shiro sends that message, though, and she impatiently grabs her phone when she sees it.
[4:16 AM] You: DID YOU KNOW ABOUT LANCE AND KEITH
[4:19 AM] Shiro: Did you know it was 2am out here when you first texted…?
[4:24 AM] You: Yes and the fact that it’s 6am your time now is why I’m still caps-locked 4 hours later because I need you to WAKE UP AND POUR THE TEA, THE COFFEE, AND EVERY HOT BEVERAGE YOU’VE GOT
[4:31 AM] Shiro: Well, okay. If you’re talking about the two of them getting together
[4:32 AM] Shiro: I’d say it was pretty obvious during that call a couple days ago.
[4:33 AM] Shiro: They didn’t say anything specific but they weren’t exactly trying to hide it.
[4:34 AM] You: No Shiro
[4:35 AM] You: No I’m not talking about whatever those fools are doing now in the year twenty one twenty six
[4:35 AM] You: I mean during our Voltron days
[4:36 AM] You: (Also are you joking? Lance was absolutely trying to hide it.)
[6:28 AM] You: sorry fell asleep
[6:53 AM] You: Shiro
[6:59 AM] You: Shiro you’re killing me.
[7:27 AM] Shiro: If the question is did I know about them the first time around, the answer is no, not at the time.
[7:29 AM] You: But you knew before they got together this time.
[7:47 AM] You: SHIRO
[7:53 AM] Shiro: I knew about it after the fact but only because Keith told me. In confidence.
[7:54 AM] You: Oh good, then I really was the last one to know.
[7:55 AM] You: And now I have to feel bad for being a nosy asshole
[7:57 AM] Shiro: I didn’t say that!
[7:58 AM] You: No, I did.
[7:59 AM] You: Whatever, I’ll just say that I’m happy for them and hope they don’t screw it up this time like they apparently did before
[8:07 AM] Shiro: I don’t think they will.
[8:08 AM] You: No? Have you talked to Keith about it?
[8:11 AM] Shiro: Not yet. But I’ve seen it coming for a long time. I plan to give him at least a little bit of crap the second he fesses up.
[8:12 AM] You: lol Hunk’s gonna do the same thing to Lance
[8:12 AM] You: Me on the other hand, I’m going to troll them endlessly until one of them cracks
[8:16 AM] Shiro: Well, have fun with that…
***
And she does.
Not too much fun. Because she meant what she said to Hunk: she thinks this is probably the real thing for both of them.
But for a couple of weeks, she sends Lance the occasional email about cute nerd girls she can introduce him to—something she has never done before, because 1) she knows very well that that man-whore does not need help in that department, and 2) no way was she ever going to inflict Lance on her coworkers. Only after several decidedly uninterested and disappointingly non-flustered responses from Lance does she “accidentally” send one of those messages to Keith, followed a couple minutes later with:
[email protected], September 5, 2126, 11:47pm
RE: Introduction?
Oops, sorry, that was supposed to go to Lance.
This is the reply she gets from Keith, in a new email thread:
[email protected], September 6, 2126, 6:45am
[Subject]: I will cut you a deal
If you stop fucking with us, I will refrain from telling you in excruciating detail about the way we spent last night.
[email protected], September 6, 2126, 7:23am
RE: I will cut you a deal
Duly noted.
(Seriously, I’m happy for you guys. Even if you punks are the worst for keeping so many secrets.)
((Shiro already knows by the way. And Hunk suspects. Can you get your boyfriend to put him out of his misery?))
She doesn’t get a response for days. It's a long enough period of time that she starts to wonder if she’s truly overstepped and Keith is going to ice her out the way Lance had done all those years ago. But the response she ultimately gets is worth the wait:
[email protected], September 17, 2126, 9:01pm
RE: re: I will cut you a deal
Thanks, Pidge. Really.
Do you know Lance’s ring size by any chance?