Not So Human

Chapter Fourteen

When Lance woke up, he didn't recognize the room he was in. His vision was too blurry to see past his hands, anyways. He could tell there was someone in the room with him, but he couldn't tell who they were

"Who's there?" he called warily.

"Is that really a question, Lance?" Haggar's voice scratched his way into his foggy brain.

"I was hoping it was some gorgeous alien that wanted to date me," he mumbled. "I got stuck with you, instead."

Haggar gave the blue paladin an annoyed look, raising her hands up to his chest. She created electricity and let it shock Lance in warning. He merely grunted, but it was enough to shut him up. 

"We were thinking you would make an easy target in the arena," she suddenly said. "You're one of the weakest on your team - your presence in the arena could be an easy way to remove a paladin of Voltron from our enemy's side."

Lance tried to ignore that her comment about him being weak stung quite a bit. There was a part of him, one with very low self-esteem, that thought that it was true. If he had been able to fight back when he was taken, he wouldn't be relying on his friends to come save him. 

"I won't die," he countered instead. "I bet the other arena fighters are all weaker than me."

TIME SKIP

By Lance's second week of fighting in the arena, he was wishing his friends would come and rescue him. The fights were nonstop, and the people he went up against kept getting stronger. He was exhausted and getting weaker, and he hated that he couldn't do anything to help himself escape. 

His current enemy fighter seemed to be a smaller version of a monster Voltron had fought. It's long mechanical arms kept firing lasers at him. He struggled to dodge them as they fired on after another without any kind of pattern.

Lance started to feel the weeks of endless activity catch up to him, and the monster finally managed to hit him. The blast pushed him backwards. His head smacked against the floor and his eyes closed semi-permanently. 

The next thing he knew, he was inside the Red Lion, a splitting headache growing as his friends yelled out to him. His lion gave everyone else a signal that he was there before flying back to the castle. His eyes closed again, passing out once more.

8/6/18