Okay, I don’t pretend to be as jaded and impossible to impress as some of the guys on the crew, but I’m not exactly some wet-behind-the-ears rookie, either. I may be young, but I’ve interviewed dozens of stars — some of the most beautiful and powerful people in the world: entertainers, gangsters, politicians, you name it. But I’ve gotta admit, when I got this assignment, when I found out we were doing a retrospective on the Voltron Force, I was so excited I almost wet myself. Suddenly I was a teenager again, watching as a giant robot and five heroes saved the Denubian Galaxy, dreaming of what it would be like to pilot one of the lions, how it must feel to win a war in a gleaming prismatic avatar of Justice and Peace.
Of course I’d heard the rumors about the pilots after the end of the war. None too pleasant. But somehow the worst of them just didn’t seem real, not compared to the images in my mind. Not compared to the heroic truths I knew. We decided to start on Arus, at the Castle of Lions itself. Get some footage of the castle, sites of some key battles, stuff like that. Plus, that’s where Hunk was, and he’d remained by far the most accessible member of the Force, continuing the convention circuit and public life long after the disappearance of Lance and later, Pidge, long after Keith and Sven sequestered themselves on Pollux. We also had the most dirt on him. His very public depression and suicide attempts made for good copy.
We got a gorgeous setup. In a garden with the castle in the background, perfect weather, perfect lighting, I even got over my annoyance that Coran had insisted on us interviewing them both at once instead of individually like I wanted. Then they came out and we started the interview, and it became clear why. He wanted to be there because he was protecting Hunk. At first the thought seemed laughable. This old guy in the high-collared archaic coat of Arusian nobility was going to protect the strongest member of the Voltron Force from a gaggle of second-rate reporters? But that’s how it was.
I’m a little embarrassed at how long it took me to figure out they were sleeping together. I guess despite all my protests maybe part of me really did believe the rumors about Hunk’s preference for young boys and wasn’t quite able to link him sexually to a man old enough to be his father. I got reamed by my producer, later, for not trying to get any details on the nature of their relationship, but fuck him. He wasn’t there in that garish bright Arusian sun watching helplessly as reality invaded and dissolved the fondest misconceptions of his youth.
The trip to Pollux was miserable. I didn’t want to interview Keith, I wasn’t sure I could take it. He was the leader, the black lion, the valiant captain. The human face behind Voltron’s majestic visage. After seeing Hunk, I was afraid of what I might find. So I was glad when I found we’d be meeting with Sven first. I knew the least about him, had fewer illusions to be shattered. Honestly I barely remember his interview. He was calm, pleasant, but seemed far older, more worn, than he should have.
I’m still not sure what I felt during Keith’s segment. I’d braced myself for crushing disappointment, but that wasn’t what I found. He was a good interview, charming and intelligent. But behind his attractive smile was this endless sense of sorrow. I’d never experienced anything like it. Here was the heroic scale I sought — larger-than-life, capable of saving the galaxy, but all those epic feelings were of loss. I ended that interview feeling humbled and introspective, musing on wars and tragedy in the same way men far better than I have done throughout history.
I’d worried about the wrong one. It was the next, Pidge, that was too much for me to take. This wasn’t Keith’s glorious, noble melancholy; this was a kid, seventeen? eighteen years old? who looked like he’d seen the dawn of the universe and been dragged through every shithole created since. I remember muttering something about changing the lights, some excuse about them reflecting off his glasses, and then sitting there in awkward silence while my lighting techs tried to find some magic angle that wouldn’t betray the truth.
That interview broke me. We couldn’t get him to look anywhere but straight into the camera, and we ended up having to do mostly close-ups of his face despite what that face showed, because his hands twitched and jerked almost perpetually. He was clearly strung out, and his artificial smile and rote answers would suddenly lapse into nonsensical conversations with himself, then snap back mid-sentence. Our editing guys did the work of their lifetime piecing together a coherent segment out of the mess my youngest hero had become, but even with that we had to add some filler before we aired.
The interview ended when I asked him if he knew where we could find Lance. We’d had no luck despite tracking down dozens of rumors that led our crew to some of the wealthiest and least savory corners of the galaxy. For the first time in the interview, he looked away from the camera. He looked straight at me, and whispered, “Tell him there are no second chances.”
Then those tired eyes of his filled with tears that just wouldn’t fall. He stared at me through watery eyes and filmy glasses until I finally couldn’t take it any more and looked away. The whole crew packed up and we left, and he was still sitting there staring at exactly the same place, as if I’d never broken contact, his eyes still wet and his cheeks dry.
We got back to the ship and took off, and I locked myself in my room and sobbed like some little kid. Then I slept for about 15 hours. When I woke we were entering Earth space and I had a message from one of my best sources. “Confirmed. Lance is on Djhira. Main continent, Lonnos, Elrath Hotel.”
My only explanation for what I did next is that somehow when I woke up, I was a different person than I’d been when I went to sleep. Somehow this had become so personal, it was all that mattered. I went through our gear, took a small recorder and the interview disk and put them with my personal belongings. Made up some excuse and while the rest of the crew went back to the studio, I found a flight to Djhira.
My contact met the flight, drove me to the hotel and pointed him out to me at the bar. I almost turned around and left right then. He looked like nobody. Some random, cheap, strung-out, skinny whore standing at the bar waiting for someone to come up and put a price on his ass. Then, while I was paying my source, the bartender set an Old-Fashioned in front of him with a double shot of something brown, pointing to someone at the other end of the bar. Lance didn’t look in that direction, just got this odd little smile and lifted the glass like it was something precious. He didn’t sip it like he should have, or shoot it like I half-expected him to. He drank it... like water on a hot day... slowly, in long, smooth swallows.
I don’t remember crossing the room, but suddenly I was standing next to him as he closed his eyes and set the glass back on the bar with a lazy grace that apparently no amount of drugs could take away. “You’re Lance, right? From Voltron?” God, I sounded like I was about to ask for his autograph. Apparently he thought I sounded like I was about to ask for something else.
He met my eyes slowly and quirked his lips into something like a smile. “Do you want me to be?”
I was completely unprepared for his voice. It was roughened by abuse, and so full of ... awareness, of double meanings, of irony... I found myself telling more of the truth than I intended. “No.”
He laughed, and there was more of that irony, that painful sense that he knew exactly what he was. “That makes two of us then.”
I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Um, actually, I’m a reporter with VH-1. We’re doing a retrospective on the Voltron Force, and I’d like to interview you.”
“I don’t do interviews.”
Most people have the same way of saying that. God knows I’ve heard it enough. They sort of close off and look away, negating the question and your existence with finality. He didn’t say it that way. It was insolent, challenging, almost like… a dare. Shit. I was out of my league and I knew it. I’ve never been exactly quick. I can read people fairly well, but I like to have my lines scripted, and I knew it was going to take more than that to get the interview he was, obliquely, offering. “I think I’m going to need a drink. Can I buy you something?”
“Sure.”
“What would you like?”
An indolent shrug. “Whatever you’re having.”
Shit. The ball was quite firmly in my court, and watching me trip over myself and fall flat on my face in a botched attempt to return it was only going to keep him entertained for about another ten seconds. I signaled the bartender and ordered two Cahiers, straight up. That earned me two raised eyebrows, one skeptical from the bartender, the other, I hope impressed, from Lance. Hey, one thing about reporters, even the young ones, we know how to drink.
The drinks came and I took a larger sip of mine than I normally would. Lance was looking at me, knowing I had the next line, if only I could think of it. I did have a decent budget, maybe I could buy his time. “What would it take for you to give me an interview?”
He looked disgusted, and maybe a little disappointed. “I told you, I don’t do interviews.”
This time it sounded final. Sure enough, he stood up to leave. Suddenly I was filled with what I can only describe as panic. I don’t know why, but I needed to talk to him, needed this last nail to be pounded into the coffin of my youthful naivete. Maybe when I left Earth, I’d convinced myself I needed to find Lance so he could restore my childish images, but now I understood that I’d known he would destroy them, and needed that. I reached out and grabbed his arm. “Wait!”
Next thing I knew, there was this hugely sharp pain in my arm and I looked, in some surprise, to where it was held against the bar by a too-thin but frightfully strong hand. Lance, for a moment, seemed equally surprised by his violent reaction, then he let go. “What?”
“What?”
“Why should I wait?”
“I want to talk to you.” I was losing him again. “Not an interview. No crews, just... me. I want to talk to you.”
Some of my desperation had to be showing. He smiled bitterly. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that drunks make terrible conversationalists?”
“You’re not drunk.”
“Not yet. Why?”
“Because...” I didn’t really know. “Because I interviewed the others, and I just need to. Please?” He took a deep swallow of the Cahier (one that would have set me coughing with watering eyes), but like I said, I’m pretty good at reading people. I didn’t miss that it was to hide emotion when I mentioned the rest of the Force. “The others, they’re all-”
He cut me off abruptly. “I don’t need some scum-ass reporter to tell me how they are.”
I held up my hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry. Can we get a booth?”
I noticed at the time that his smile was awfully cynical, but I guess either I was too relieved that he was actually talking to me to really wonder why, or I assumed that was just how he smiled. In any case, he agreed. I used my company account to buy the whole bottle of Cahier, and we took it to one of the slightly more private booths along the edge of the room. On the way over, I activated the small recording device I had on me at all times. I was absolutely sincere when I said I just wanted to talk to him, but I’m still a reporter, y’know?
So I was pretty proud of myself when I got him to admit that the infamous porn videos featuring the Voltron Force were real. They’d achieved sort of urban legend status. Everybody had heard of them, but nobody really believed they existed. I hadn’t believed it, until this. He just smirked. “Oh, they were real.”
“Bullshit.” I was a little surprised by how easy he was to bait. “If they existed, they’d be everywhere. I know programs that were offering millions for a copy, none surfaced.”
He fortified himself with a long inhale on one of the oddly fragrant cigarettes he was smoking (I didn’t recognize the smell, and didn’t bother asking what was in them), and a deep swallow of Cahier. “Allura had good business sense. Only a few were ever made, then offered in silent auction to carefully selected bidders, who all knew exactly who they were bidding against. It became a prestige to own one. Those tapes brought in billions. Then the war ended, and Sven married Romelle. Bandor nearly wiped out the Polluxian economy to reacquire all the tapes and destroy them.” For some reason he seemed to think that was funny.
An hour later, I knew three things. One: my vaunted newsman’s tolerance was nothing compared to his. After finishing my glass of Cahier, my world was fuzzy around the edges (hey, there’s a reason it’s the most infamous legal distillation in the galaxy); he’d finished four. Granted, his eyes were fairly glazed over and his speech had slowed into this mesmerizing cadence that, if anything, accented the intelligent bitterness I’d detected there earlier, but if I’d had that much Cahier, I’d’ve needed hospitalization. Two: (and here’s where it gets unpleasant) I hated him. He’d taken me by the hand and led me into the space of his self-loathing. From a distance I might have pitied him, but he didn’t allow it, he forced me to be right there with him, hating ? which just made me hate him all the more. Three: (from unpleasant to downright sick) loathing or not, I wanted him.
I don’t mean I found him attractive, because frankly, I didn’t. But it was getting harder and harder (pun intended, I guess) to sit there across from him and watch him gesture carelessly, the motion emphasized by the exotic cigarette dangling between his fingers. I was absorbed by those long, thin hands, his wickedly curved mouth and dangerously, artificially bright eyes. He exuded sex. I felt that if I licked my lips, I could taste it in the air, but god I wanted more than a taste.
He talked on until there was nothing left of my idyllic misconceptions of the Voltron Force, or of the war they had won. When he talked about it, though, I could almost understand why they ended up the way they did. It only rarely occured to me, when I was that naive teenager, that they were pretty much the same age I was. I mean, I guess it did, everyone made a big deal about Pidge and his age, and I _knew_ how young they were, but somehow it never occured to me what it would be like to be a teenager and one of five people responsible for the protection of an entire galaxy. To me, Voltron was invincible, it never occured to me that they faced death on a daily basis. The direction they took... well, think of it in these terms: you know how sometimes when you’re in pain, sometimes you’ll cause yourself a greater pain somewhere else, just because that’s the only thing strong enough to give you some relief?
Besides, they were living a life of extremes. Everything was out-of-scale for them. While I was figuring out a career path, they were saving the universe. While I was discovering that if you drank too much beer, you puked and felt like shit the next day, they were discovering powders that could set you into flight as surely as a robot lion. While I was getting laid for the first time, they were exploring the depths of sexual deviancy. Proportionally, it all made sense. And as he said, you reached a point where you had to go to extremes in order to feel alive. I found I could forgive the others, but not Lance. Not when it was clear how responsible he was for dragging the others down. God, I was sickened by the whole recital.
I was slightly surprised to discover that of them all, Hunk, whom everyone knew to be a former alcoholic and drug user, and everyone suspected to be a pedophile, was the only one who never involved himself in the more tawdry aspects during the war. And after a while, I started noting what he wasn’t talking about, and the proverbial light bulb flickered to life above my head. “You and Keith were lovers, weren’t you?”
He gave me a sour, irritated look. “I told you-”
“No.” I didn’t let him finish. “Not like that. I mean outside of the porn, whatever kinks and needs you all had. You were lovers.”
Anger flashed for a second, but then he just slumped back into the booth and looked away. “Yeah.”
I felt some anger myself. What the hell had Keith seen in him, that he would let Lance do to him what he had? “What happened?”
He downed the rest of his glass and poured himself another. With a slight shrug, the irony returned to his voice. “The war ended. I left. When the party’s over, you’ve gotta go home.”
“You didn’t go home.”
“Sure I did. What is home, if not a place where you belong?” With a self-mocking smile, he gestured expansively to the bar. As time passed, it had filled up, and was now smoky, lit patchily by the clutter of neon advertisements that caught the tacky, glittering clothing of whores, both those who got paid and those who did not. A couple nearby exchanged gaping open-mouthed kisses and groped each other. At another table, a woman chattered away to another, oblivious to the fact that the other was passed out cold, her cheek pressed into a puddle of saliva that still trickled from her open mouth. Predators and prey circled the room. “Welcome to my home.”
His tone clearly substituted that last word with “hell,” and it meant exactly that. And he meant it when he said he belonged there. After everything he’d told me, I wasn’t inclined to argue. Especially not after having seen the scope of Keith’s sorrow, and worse, the completeness of Pidge’s destruction. You want to know the truth? I was glad he was suffering. I was glad he hated himself so completely and spent so much of his time in pursuit of the misery disguised as euphoria that made him feel alive. And worse, he was so fucked up and sick that he was glad too. And none of this stopped me from being so horny for him that I was drooling in my shorts.
I reached across the table and grabbed his cigarette, taking a small inhale. It actually had a relatively pleasant taste, though that may have just been because my mouth was slightly numbed by the Cahier. “I love what you’ve done with the place.” I deadpanned. I was feeling pleased with myself ? I’m not usually that clever. His eyes glinted above a dangerous smile and my cock twitched in response. It was out in the open now, and inevitable. His hand stretched across the table, but instead of taking the cigarette he took hold of my wrist, leaned forward and drew my hand to his mouth, inhaling deeply on the cigarette held between my fingers. Then he tossed back the entire glass full of Cahier. I managed to keep my jaw from hitting the table and he stood, grabbing the bottle in one hand and gesturing to me with the other. “You’ll have to lead. I don’t know where your room is.”
You’ll forgive me if I pass over some details. There was the burning amber drink, his glittering, too-knowledgeable eyes, numerous scars and a couple tattoos decorating a body that looked frail, but was anything but. When he offered me a small, blue pill, I took it, and laughed with him as I swallowed though I didn’t know what we were laughing about. And when I realized I was experiencing something more than the usual post-sex lethargy, that in fact I couldn’t really move my limbs and my mind was clouded and my eyes dropping closed against my will, he was there, leaning over me in the bed with that same bitter smile I hated so thoroughly, holding my recorder in front of my eyes.
“Let’s see, where’s that erase?” He hit the button, and shrugged. “Sorry, but I told you, I don’t do interviews.”
The anger was muffled, and my voice came out in a pathetic mumble. “Y’fuck.. Whadja do t’me?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just a sleeping pill. Sweet dreams.”
He looked so smug, fading in and out of view as the drug took over my body, I dug into my new-found loathing and forced the words out because somehow, instinctively, I knew they’d hurt him. “Gotta m’ssage f’rya. From Pidge. Says th’r are no second chances.”
His eyes flew open wide with a stricken look of panic and all color left his face. Suddenly he was right in my face, his hand gripping either side of it with a force that would have been painful if I was feeling anything at the time. “He said what? You shit!”
I couldn’t answer, my eyes were closing and I couldn’t make my mouth move. I barely even noticed when he backhanded me across the cheek, screaming “Wake up!” though I had an ugly bruise to show for it the next day. That’s the last thing I remembered.
When I first woke up the next morning, I was capable of no more than lying there with my eyes closed wishing for death. Apparently they mean it when they tell you not to mix alcohol and sleeping pills. I felt like shit, and the throbbing pain in my face didn’t help. It did, however, remind me what had happened the night before and give me the willpower to sit up and open my eyes.
The room was trashed. Overturned furniture, broken mirror, a couple holes in the wall, glass everywhere from the mirror and the bottle, which was also smashed. My belongings were scattered. Then, to make everything that much worse, my stomach quite suddenly revolted. Unwilling to risk a barefoot dash across a glass-strewn floor, I simply leaned over the side of the bed and puked for what seemed like forever, swearing the whole time that if I ever saw him again, I’d kill him.
I had a nasty scare later, once I’d recovered enough to start cleaning up a bit. I couldn’t find the interview disk. It was only the irrational urge to look everywhere that allowed me to find it, in the hotel player. Apparently he’d watched it. I didn’t really care, I was just glad it was still there. This whole thing had been the hugest disaster of my life. It was going to be bad enough trying to explain my disappearance and the bill for the trashed hotel without losing my job, I couldn’t even imagine what would’ve happened if I’d lost the disk as well.
When I went to pack my recorder, it was full. I was ecstatic. The stupid fuck, I thought, had hit the wrong button, hadn’t erased it after all, and at this point I was more than willing to use any sound bites at my disposal. I pulled out my headphones so I could listen to it all on the shuttle back, since I really remembered very few details of the night before.
I was wrong. Once on the shuttle, I started listening to the recording. It started out “but I told you, I don’t do interviews.”
Then my own voice, muffled and unclear. “Y’fuck.. Whadja do t’me?”
He had erased it, but for some reason it started recording again. I almost turned it off, but I had nothing better to do on the flight, and figured listening to the room get trashed might be reasonably entertaining.
“He said what? You shit!”
My cheek throbbed in self-pity at the resounding *smack.*
More verbal abuse heaped on my poor, unconscious, drugged self. Then, “No. Fuck you. Hunk didn’t die. I’d’ve heard if he was dead, you shit.”
I don’t know quite how he decided I’d told him Hunk was dead, since that wasn’t anything even close to what I’d said. There was some random noise, some muttering, then silence for a moment. Then the disk started.
“Hunk! Told’ja he wasn’t dead, you fuck... Jesus, Hunk, lay off Nanny’s cooking!” That last was tinged with a great deal of affection, but the fear I’d seen in his eyes when I delivered Pidge’s message hadn’t yet left his voice.
“What the... No. No fucking way. Hunk, you fat fuck. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Where is he? Where the fuck is he!? You fucking asshole!” Well, you get the idea. That’s when the trashing of the room commenced. Lots of yelling at Hunk, mostly fairly indistinguishable. I caught “chance” and “forgive” once or twice,and there was some “he”, but I don’t know who. Lots of loud crashing noises, the shattering of the mirror sounded particularly impressive. I had to turn down the volume on my headphones. I was just about to turn them off, having decided that the rest was probably just all more yelling and thumping, when suddenly everything was silent.
I turned the volume back up until I could clearly hear the sound of the t.v. broadcasting the interview — the beginning of Keith’s. At first I took the odd background noise that started up as some kind of distortion, but before long I figured out what it really was. It was Lance. Crying. Not out loud, just these breathy, gasping sobs. Every once in a while it sounded like he was whispering something, but the microphone wasn’t sensitive enough to make out the words.
When Keith’s segment ended, he looped it back and watched it again, then again, and again. He didn’t stop until another sound intruded ? me, groaning on the bed, probably the early stages of waking up. I had to rewind three times before I made out his mumbled words. “Fuck... I miss you, Keith.”
Then the disk stopped, and I heard the door open and close. My eyes filled with tears as I hit “Erase”.
**************
Epilogue - Lance
**************
The cramp sent waves of exquisite agony through me, doubling me over in the empty bathtub and forcing another round of dry heaves. I had nothing left in me to expel though. I was empty, dried up, hollow, except for blood that was, at the moment, only a little bit tainted. Even the last time I took a piss all that came out was a thick, dark orangish trickle that burned and dribbled onto the toilet seat.
The heaves finally stopped and I pressed my face against the cool ceramic tub, hoping the relief would give me the willpower to hold out just a little longer, though my hands were already shaking and reaching, seemingly of their own accord, for the needle placed nearby. Then another wave of pain hit. My body thrashed under this one, the side of my head cracking into the wall of the tub with enough force that I saw stars and felt a lump rise almost immediately. It left me gasping and mewling. Oh gods, yes! The pain was good. It made me feel alive. I controlled it, and I was its slave. I’d messed some with cutting, but that was nothing compared to this glorious agony. Withdrawal was becoming a drug. This kind of intensity could wipe out anything, maybe even the memory of your eyes. I left so I wouldn’t poison you anymore, and you could be happy. Why did your eyes look so sad? I wondered vaguely if the hitching sounds that rose from my throat were from laughter, or if I was crying.
I didn’t know where I was. I know I’d been fairly near Arus, determined to get there and kill Hunk, or at least beat the shit out of him. But since the odds of me managing to beat him up were fairly nil, I was leaning toward killing him. Pidge had gone back to him, had risked everything to take a step I was too cowardly and guilty to even contemplate. I believed it would work. I thought Hunk loved him enough to take him back, that they could have a second chance. But now I had no idea where Pidge was, and there was Hunk in that interview, sober and complacent and fucking Coran.
Of course, before I got there, I realized how fucked up it was that I was going to kill Hunk when the whole thing was my fault anyway, and that Hunk had far more right to take a pound of my flesh than I did his. So I turned around, but I’m really not sure how far I got. What hotel, what planet? I didn’t even know how often I’d gone through this new grotesque ritual, shivering and sweating naked in an empty tub, purging myself of everything then shooting up and starting over. Weeks? Months? I don’t know. Maybe it was just this once.
The nausea starts again, and I can’t take anymore. Clumsy, shaking fingers close gratefully over the syringe and I squint, trying desperately to make my hand hold still enough to get the needle into a vein. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2...
Ice rushes through my veins, fire racing in its wake, and I whimper happily. Awkwardly, I get to my feet and lurch into the other room. I want to ride this one out from the comfort of bed, then maybe I’ll go get something to eat. I’m just sinking into the soft pillow when it starts. Oh, gods yes, this is my favorite. You’re here, and there’s none of the blame I deserve in your eyes. You smile at me. I smile back, just because I’m happy, and you come closer and put your arms around me. I enfold you in my arms and hold you close to me, smelling your hair. I’ve never felt more alive.
-end
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