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English
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Published:
2018-05-16
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1,248
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1/1
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Angry Kid

Summary:

Fine. Fine. He could survive again. He could chanel this shit into something useful.

Fucking fine.

Notes:

/second place winner on tumblr @ghostboy11 for writing giveaway I did, asked for Lance snapping and I took it further!/

Work Text:

Contrary to what most people might think about Lance, he’d been a very, very angry kid growing up.

The facts were there, easy to see, if you understood his past, knew it from start to finish.

Yes, he had a family, a mother who adored him and siblings that looked up to him as the eldest of the bunch. He had aunts and uncles that sung his praises whenever he came up in conversation. He’d had birthdays that were more like block parties, everyone he knew coming out to celebrate him for the day, to ruffle his hair and take far to many smiling photos.

He was so, so very loved. But that hadn’t always been the case.

His mother, Maria, met him when he was seven, as his fifth foster home in the course of only four months.

Every family before her had asked for him to be reassigned, their reasons point blank: he was too much. Too mad. Too wild.

Too broken.

They made note of how he was obstinate, quick to fly off the handle, ready to break and tear and destroy every nice thing ever given to him.

They noted how the other kids in the house were afraid of him after the first few days. How couldn’t they be, when all he would do was smack and screech at them.

Reading his file told Maria all she needed to know; a birth home steeped in loud voices and quick to strike fists. There were even a few photos from the night he’d been moved from that home, filling in the spaces that the written file wouldn’t touch. A thin chest, thin enough to see the outlines of the bones underneath, littered with bruises and welts and scars from god knows what.

Maria knew that when someone so young had never been shown kindness, had been told in so many little and big ways that they were in the world to survive, not thrive, that all they could be was mad.

So, she took him in, just her in the house she had inherited from a great aunt, and she showed Lance how to thrive.

Showed him how to breathe through the bursts of rage that threatened to overtake him. Showed him that there would always be food in this house and it would never be hidden from him. Showed him how hitting and screaming only got across so much in a conversation.

She was patient. She was kind. And she showed Lance how to thrive. She knew it was taking, knew Lance would be ok, when she asked him if he wanted to be her son forever and he burst into tearful laughter.

Lance was not thriving in space. All of it, everything they did, was a means of surviving. But still, he tried. God did he try to do the right thing all the time. Tried to remember the breathing exercises and DBT lessons his mom had gone through with him for most of his adolescent life.

He did his best, but sometimes, like right then and there, Lance remembered how his first foster parents had quietly balked at how mad he was. How angry of a kid he had been. How angry of a kid he still was -

He shook his head, as if to clear the thought from it, his eyes set on the gladiator right in front of them. The last mission had been...bad. A close call that had everyone on edge. That was how they found themselves here, a constant flow of gladiators spilling onto the training deck, trying to be ready so nothing like that would happen again.

Just because he felt angry, didn’t mean he had to ever act on the emotion. If he could just breathe through it, just take that second to-

“Lance, focus please!” Shiro’s tone was firm, authoritative, but not condescending.

It still sent a prickle down Lance’s spine and he had to grit his teeth against the familiar pang of rage that threatened to bubble in his chest.

He was trying to focus, he really was. But his nerves had been on edge since the fight and he hadn’t had a chance yet to really just sit down with himself and fucking breathe-

He grunted as the gladiator in front of him smacked him hard and sent him reeling back.

“Lance, man, come on. Just focus for a little longer.” Hunk’s voice, normally only laced with hints of panic during simulations, had an edge of annoyance to it.

That prickle down his spine from earlier had suddenly turned into a full blown snaking touch of electricity and Lance felt himself go cold.

Fine. Fine. He could survive again. He could chanel this shit into something useful.

Fucking fine.

He’s only able to faintly realize that the bayard has morphed from his normal blaster to something similar to a club, big and mean and weighted perfectly for destruction.

He knew that the bayards took the form of a weapon most suited to their paladins. He didn’t know they could change in a time of need though.

His vision zeroed in on the gladiator that had hit him and suddenly it was just the two of them that existed in the entire universe. When Lance got like this, found himself trapped in a cold, icy rage so deep in his bones he knows it’ll never really be gone, time had a tendency to move strangely.

One moment, he was pulling himself up from the ground.

The next, he was raising his arm, his muscles tense, and swinging his newly formed weapon onto the gladiators head, the metallic crunch the only sound cutting through the cloud over his senses.

This was when things dragged on, when time seemed to freeze with him, and he watched, detached, as he raised his arms again, bits of shrapnel flying off the gladiator’s body as he hit it.

Again and again and again and again and again he did this.

The only other sound that cuts through the ice around him is that of his own, labored breathing.

As soon as the feeling had come, it was gone, leaving him empty and raw and tired .

His body felt like jelly the moment he let his bayard hit the ground at his feet, bits of broken metal ad wiring strewn in front of him like some sort of cyber-punk murder scene.

He knew that in a few more minutes, shame would creep through his veins, disgust at his own outburst over too many things finally piling up and crashing out of him. But for now, with his eyes fixated on the damage he had caused, at the enemy he’d been able to take down all on his own, Lance was numb and it was all he could ask for right then and there.

There was a reason the Red Lion had chosen Lance when Shiro had gone missing.

Keith was temperamental, hot headed, brash, and quick to react with his emotions. He was a whirlwind of a soul, something Red loved the feel of.

But Lance...Red had chosen Lance because he was angry. An angry kid who knew when to quell his rage and when to let it burst from him like an erupting mountain. Knew how to direct it to something that deserved to be ripped apart, to be crushed under a club shaped weapon.

Lance was an angry kid and Red loved him for it.