Keith can at least claim that this wasn't planned, which might earn him forgiveness one day. It's his fault that he insisted on chasing the pattern, yes, but everything else? Definitely beyond his control.

It started with their landing, when Allura dropped the Castle of Lions atop a new distress signal. Another planet overrun by Galra, they assumed, but the scanners said otherwise. Just a happy planet of little purple aliens with horns that curled back over their ears and then forwards again, like ribbed fishhooks. Their planet was called Erasmia, they were Erasmians, and more startling than anything, they had not sent a distress signal, despite being the only sentient life on the planet.

Less startling by far, but possibly more unsettling in an insidious, crawl-beneath-the-skin-and-fester, hover-like-a-bad-dream sort of way, was their warning. For all their friendliness, their excitement about hosting new lifeforms, their enthusiasm for alien contact after years of isolation, they had one rule: do not enter the forest. They meant the hulking purple affair just outside their honey-hive hut village, several shades darker than their skin, and hundreds of feet tall. Lush, dense, it was more like a jungle, and the Erasmians said that whoever went in never came out. Maybe long ago, it was a blessed place, but time has not been kind to it; now it cannot be cleansed, and if anyone is fool enough to go inside, it is no one's fault but their own if they should go missing. The forest is for the dead, and no one else.

Keith didn't see the pattern then. The distress signal was the first inkling that something was wrong, and the forest the second, but this made for a coincidence, not a system.

Then an Erasmian went missing the day after Allura's alliance talks began, with a distress signal going up that same morning. The Erasmian leaders denied sending this one, too, and the pattern gnawed at Keith, insistent upon being noticed. He was rusty, though, with months between that moment and his long year spent alone in the desert, searching for the lions at the peak of his investigative skills. So he let the nagging feeling go.

But now it is a pattern, because every other day, an Erasmian vanishes, a distress signal goes up, and the paladins of Voltron have stopped asking if the Erasmians sent it, because the answer is always no. Someone has to be sending it, though, and the missing Erasmians have to be going somewhere, and when these two things keep happening on the same nights, it can't be coincidence.

The only trouble is that everyone notices the signals, but only Keith has actually seen the Erasmians disappear under the light of the twin moons. And he has no proof, which means he needs to get some. This is a task made exponentially harder when, tonight of all nights, another signal is expected, Lance refuses to go to bed.

Lance claims he slept late this morning and now has energy for days, energy enough to take out Zarkon if he "just brought his ugly mug close enough in the next few hours or something," and that means he's haunting the bridge tonight just like Keith does every night.

It's supposed to be Keith's quiet space up here. Sometimes the mice swing by and tug on the laces of his boots, but usually, he's alone with plenty of time to think, and the view when he's perched on his console lets him see the track the missing Erasmians take into the forest, shambling off and vanishing in the blink of an eye. Lance, however, makes a better door than a window, and his constant motion means he's blocking the view of the village every time Keith blinks. By now, the Erasmian could have disappeared, and he would never know, because Lance has been flitting in and out of the way all evening.

"Are you sure you're not tired?" Keith asks again, for what feels like the twelfth time. It's only the second, if he gets really honest with himself, but calling it the twelfth makes it more pressing, and if he doesn't get his evidence tonight, they're going to leave the planet before he can. That's pressing.

"Extra sure," answers Lance, flopping into Keith's console seat and kicking up his feet toward the console proper. They end up on Keith's knees, and he lightly pushes them off when he spots a glob of food goo ground into the treads. That doesn't need to end up on his jeans, even if Coran does have some sort of secret for washing it out. Lance doesn't seem to mind, and just chatters on about all that he could do with this boundless energy, which Keith is beginning to think comes from some kind of space coffee that Coran has been hiding from them for a reason. Half-listening, he considers how bad it would be for Pidge to get her hands on such a thing, and comes to the conclusion that she would either find a way to remotely hack into Zarkon's central command at a distance, ending the fight then and there, or she would craft three new Rovers and a training bot to fight the language sim in her stead before caffeine crashing in front of her laptop in a vent somewhere. Either one is a possibility, really.

Lance prods him suddenly, startling him back to the present. "Earth to Keith. You there?"

"Miles away, actually," he admits. Now that Lance is slouching in the chair, he can actually see the Erasmian village, quiet in the dark save for the ring of watch-fires around each cluster of houses. Lance follows his gaze, frowning, then gives him another nudge. It's a "talk to me" nudge, something Keith is only just starting to get used to. Usually, he shares the bulk of his feelings with Red and lets the rest roll off his back as best he can, but Lance is sharp and only getting sharper. Of all the paladins, he's getting to be the best at catching the subtle shifts in Keith's mood and drawing it out of him. Surprisingly, this is when he's at his quietest. Keith sometimes wonders if he's the one filling the silence at these points only because Lance isn't.

And so he explains the pattern, explains what he's watching for, and then he advises Lance to go to bed. "We probably missed it," he says, "and there's no point in staying up if we did."

"But maybe we didn't miss it, and if we went now, then we really would." Lance's face splits into a grin that doesn't quite reach his eyes; he's sympathetic to trouble in all forms, no matter who's in the thick of it, which is why Keith wishes he would call it a night. Otherwise, Lance will get invested, and when he gets invested, he has a penchant for also getting hurt.

No dice, though. Everything about Lance's demeanor swings around. He unfolds himself from the chair and stands by the window with his arms crossed over his chest. Keith joins him momentarily and jams his thumbs into his pockets. Standing in total silence is nearly worse than trying to see around Lance while he flits around the bridge, if only because it's so far out of the ordinary.

So at first, it's a relief when Lance taps his finger against the glass and says with complete, unshakable confidence, "They're disappearing into the forest right through there." No questions, just a plain statement. Except Keith never got around to explaining exactly where he'd seen the Erasmians vanishing, and when he looks away from his own section of the forest, he sees a limp purple body sliding into the undergrowth, dragged along by its feet.

"We didn't miss it," Lance breathes.

"No shit," Keith replies, swallowing hard. "We've gotta go."