Chapter Text
When he woke up for real, sometime later, Keith was starving and being jabbed by more than one set of elbows, but it was so warm he almost didn’t want to move. The moment was ruined when his stomach growled loud enough to make Dulsara jerk upright, ears at attention, so there was no point to putting it off anymore. Keith sat up gingerly, but nothing hurt. Someone had wiped the blood away from his ears. He felt sluggish, like his head had woken up but his body hadn’t quite made it there yet.
Something smelled delicious. No one was around, so Keith searched with his nose, sniffing out the source: under one of those Altean miracle-warmers, he found a plate of Hunk’s cooking, some concoction of food goo but with a clear strain of spices and chunks of something that smelled a little like the remnants of the not-cheese, melted perfectly over the top. A miracle Xerci hadn’t woken up already to liberate the meal from its long wait.
The other two woke up when Keith moved to nab the plate, Niresh blinking slow, then yawning enormously, needle-point fangs glinting in the low light. Xerci mewled at being so rudely awoken, but then stopped immediately in favor of sniffing hard.
“Want some?” Keith murmured, pointing with his spork. They were hungry, if that certain spark of concentration as they surveyed the food meant anything, but both Niresh and Dulsara shook their heads.
Predictably, Xerci chirruped and promptly smashed both fists into the goo and cheese at the edge of the plate. Keith mourned his clean sheets, but then dug in with barely less fervor. In the end, Xerci hardly got anything; Keith felt like he hadn’t eaten in a week, and he’d never been one for food goo, but hell if he wasn’t so hungry that this tasted like the most scrumptious thing he’d eaten since well before leaving Earth.
When everything was eaten, Keith took a very long, very deep breath. “What… happened?” he finally steeled himself enough to ask.
Niresh and Dulsara started speaking at the same time.
“I found a Galra ship.”
“Where did that thing come from?! What the quiznak was it anyway?”
Xerci cooed.
Keith felt like he might still be a bit too tired for all this, and barely repressed the urge to sigh. First things first… “Dulsara, watch your mouth. Your mom probably taught you better.”
Dulsara’s grin was basically evil itself. “Oh, she taught me a whole lot more than ‘quiznak.’ For example—” Niresh slapped a hand over her mouth.
“Yedgi taught you better than that.”
Her ears went low and her eyes slit, but Dulsara fell silent and fumed with pursed lips when Keith said “Okay, one at a time” and Niresh started speaking without even waiting for him to take another breath.
“When we got separated, back in the forest, it’s ‘cause the Fripiks wanted me to go see the Galra ship. I thought y’all were right behind me, but when I turned ‘round, nobody was there. They told me yah’d catch up… They wanted to see if we could move the ship fer ‘em ‘cause it’s made of a metal they can’t eat through. But after the fight was over, Hunk an’ Lance came an’ got me, so the ship’s still in the sand.”
Keith had so many questions. “How did a Galra ship get here in the first place? Allura said there’s no Galra activity in this entire quadrant.”
Niresh frowned. “I dunno. I think it’s been here a long time. It’s really, really old. I didn’t know if it would still work, but the crystal inside’s all blue and it still has lotsa power.”
“So you turned on the tractor beam to draw the monster off the castle? Clever.” His hand fit right between her ears, which folded soft as velvet under his palm when he ruffled her glassy hair. Her eyes closed as she leaned up into his hand. “But,” he flicked her ear, “if I told you to never do it again, would you listen?”
Dulsara crossed her arms. “Niresh ain’t never listened even one time.”
“Don’ confuse me with yerself, Dulsara Kes.”
“Anyway!” Dulsara griped. “I don’t care ‘bout where the Galra ship came from. Where’d that giant monster come from? You were in the healer for three days and nobody said a word about it!”
“’Cause you didn’t wanna ask none of ‘em,” Niresh needled.
“You didn’ ask nobody neither!”
Keith put a blocking hand right between their two growly faces. “Don’t even start it.” He yawned. “I’m too tired.” Xerci keened nervously, bumbling into Keith’s lap and burying his face in Keith’s pod suit. Keith didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed no one had bothered to change him into real pajamas. “I have to go talk to Shiro and the others. I’ll get the whole story there.” He needed to find out what actually happened at the end, how they got back into the Castle, what happened to the monster…
“We’re going too!” Dulsara insisted without warning, stiff and determined like she thought he might say no.
Keith blinked. “Okay?”
She wasn’t expecting it, maybe; her mouth fell open just a little, then she huffed and looked away, her cheeks belled out a bit. It made her fur look funny, jutting up in weird ways. Keith bit down his smile, or tried to, but he saw her pout fold into a scowl and knew he was caught.
Scooping up Xerci, who squeaked in delight, Keith crossed the meager distance to his closet. His paladin suit was gone, who knew where or what damage it was recovering from. Keith stared thoughtfully into his closet, weighing the alternatives. He looked down at Xerci, curled up very sweetly in the crook of one arm, nuzzling close and quiet and deceptively non-dangerous. “Can I trust you not to ruin everything I own?”
Dulsara leaned far over to poke Xerci hard in the dangling foot. “Say ‘yes,’” she commanded.
“Yes!” Xerci repeated obediently, sounding like he meant not a letter of it. Keith’s expression fell flat. That was… about as trustworthy as leaving Pidge unattended with alien tech. But… The other option was Altean clothes. Keith winced.
And winced harder when, a few minutes later, he finally, daringly pulled his red jacket on. It felt like coming home, but also like his home was in the imminent path of an oncoming tornado, category: toddler.
Speaking of, the kids were all in their pajamas too.
“Go get dressed if you’re coming.” Keith tried to hand Xerci off to Dulsara, but he wasn’t having a lick of it.
“Noooo,” Xerci crooned, sounding like he knew exactly what that word meant. (Hearing something ten million times would do that to you, Keith thought.)
“You don’t care about getting dressed?”
“I care.” Niresh laughed a little, a teeny-tiny dry sound.
“Hurry up then,” Dulsara complained, even though she was further from the door. “Let’s go.”
- - -
The hallways were strangely quiet, no one out and about. He stopped to look in on the training room, the kitchen, the dining room, one of Pidge’s mad laboratories, but no one was around. Is it that early?
But when Keith poked his head around the door to the lounge, he ducked back immediately, shushing the children.
“What?” Dulsara hissed.
The rec room was only mostly empty—except for Shiro and Allura, sitting strangely close together, pouring over the same holo tablet. Keith eased forward to peek around the edge of the doorframe, silently surveying. They weren’t saying anything for the moment, both of their heads low, locked on whatever showed on the device. They weren’t touching exactly, not quite that close, just closer than Keith had ever seen them in any of the team meetings. Allura’s hair spilled over Shiro’s Galra arm. Normally, he would have plowed right in, but there was something… strange in the air today, a brittle feeling that made him anxious, that made him feel like he might be intruding somewhere he wasn’t wanted.
Since when did Shiro get used to sitting that near to anyone he hadn’t known for years?
Keith stomped harshly on the uneasy hiccup in his feelings, the nervous, aimless anger that made his throat close and his stomach churn. Just because Shiro was his only real friend... He’d never had a monopoly, never been Shiro’s only friend, and Keith knew that. It was okay for Shiro to be close to Matt at Garrison; it was okay for Shiro to be close to other people anywhere.
Shiro wasn’t sick of him. Shiro wasn’t going to stop being his friend out of nowhere.
But they were sitting very close. And Keith hadn’t talked to Shiro much lately. He’d been stupid in the fight with the Robeast, hadn’t listened to a single order. And Allura was… Allura was smart, thoughtful, collected. She knew a ton about being a leader, got along with things that couldn’t even talk, even space mice, and she lost a lot, same as Shiro had and...
Well, Keith always tried not to get too comfortable. Shiro stuck around longer than his dad (Shiro came back), but there’s still no rule that said he had to stay forever.
“Is it… normal?” Shiro murmured suddenly, seemingly apropos of nothing, but Keith knew exactly what it sounded like when something had been eating Shiro up from the inside out for hours, days, when he didn’t think talking about it would do anything, but he’d run out of any and all alternatives. “What’s happening with the Black Lion?”
Allura sighed. She put down the tablet they were looking at. “I wish I knew. I’m sorry Shiro, but my father’s team built them before I was even born. I know that the alchemy involved was centuphoebs beyond anything else Altea had developed at the time, but the bond between a paladin and lion… It was never explained in a way I could fully understand. I’m not sure it’s even possible to explain such a thing to anyone who hasn’t… experienced it for themselves.”
Shiro grit his teeth; Keith could hear it from all the way out in the hall. “Normally, I’d agree with that,” he admitted, “but I’m starting to worry that I’ve never experienced it myself. That’s twice now I’ve lost control of Black.”
Lost control of Black? What? When?
“Maybe I’m…” Shiro’s shoulders were taut, rolling in that almost imperceptible way that meant he was clenching his fists hard on top of his knees. “Maybe I’m not the right fit to lead Voltron.”
“Shiro, don’t—”
“What are we hiding from?” Dulsara “whispered;” that is, she made essentially no attempt to lower her voice at all.
Shiro turned around like a shot, so fast his bangs flared, shocked cat fur style, and Keith couldn’t even try to duck back behind the doorframe because they were so clearly caught.
The strange thing about Allura was that she was unpredictable, so utterly alien that everything he’d learned about reading human expressions was completely useless with her. He’d never felt she was an especially convincing liar, but the easy smile she let grace her face when she spotted Keith in the doorway betrayed not a single ounce of the worry Keith thought he ought to find there.
What had happened? What the hell had happened to shake Shiro—their bastion, the leader, the calm at the heart of the storm?
Not the right fit for the Black Lion? Who else could even dream of coming close?
“Keith, you’re awake!” Shiro was up and over the back of the sunken couch in a second, less talented at quickly hiding his strain but more genuine in his smile. “You feeling all right?”
Xerci didn’t seem to mind Shiro, eyed him curiously with his ears tilted forward even, but Niresh and especially Dulsara stood back. They hadn’t really met Shiro; he towered over them, sharp without ever thinking about it, in a way that Hunk never was, and Keith understood their hesitance. It was impossible to know how kind Shiro was just from the way he looked, especially with his weaponized Galra arm doing its quiet, almost unnoticeable yet ever-present humming.
But Keith wasn’t going to encourage them to get to know him. Shiro was generous and forgiving beyond all measure, so he agreed to Keith’s ridiculous plan of letting the children stay, but… but especially if he was worried about the team, if he was having trouble with Black, if he was struggling with trying to lead them, he didn’t deserve to be burdened even more. He shouldn’t have to go out of his way for a Galra ever again.
Shiro did a bit of an odd dance as he tried to look around Keith to the girls hiding behind him, but Keith made no effort to move out of the way.
“Where is everyone?” he asked instead, eyes sliding to Allura, already back to being engrossed in her tablet.
“The other paladins are working on the Red Lion,” she commented, too mildly, and a wave of her hand made an enormous holo screen bloom to life in the middle of the room. Keith watched Pidge tapping away on her laptop, coils of wires feeding from her modified ports to the hulking form of Red Lion in the background, where Lance held a spindly ladder for Hunk, welding away at a gaping wound in Red’s forearm with a blowtorch tipped by green-purple flame.
“Guys,” Shiro called. It wasn’t even loud, more like they were all in the same room, but Pidge and Lance’s faces still darted up immediately; the screen must have appeared on their end now too. “Keith’s awake.”
Keith had to look away. Pidge, Lance, and even Hunk, tipping back his welding mask, all wore looks so genuinely relieved that Keith’s stomach turned—flattered but uncomfortable, unsure how to respond to care he hadn’t earned.
“Aye aye, mon capitaine!” Lance saluted, wobbling the ladder precariously enough that Hunk nearly dropped the blowtorch right down on to Lance’s head. Pidge just rolled her eyes.
Allura closed the holo screen, and it was a quiet for the two minutes or so before the rest of the paladins arrived, while Shiro looked torn between scolding Keith and scolding himself, while Keith teetered between asking what happened with Black and feeling like he should maybe just turn tail and leave. Before he could decide, the rest of the crew piled their way into the hallway, squeezing around Keith and Shiro where they still blocked the door. Hunk waved gently to Niresh and Lance fluffed up Xerci’s hair as he passed, earning himself a surprised but not unhappy chirrup. Shiro looked even more confused now, since every paladin seemed to have somehow become cordial with their Galra guests but him.
“Are you coming in,” Pidge snarked at Keith, “or are we going to have another conversation about you without you?”
Another conversation… about him? Why did not that not instill any particular degree of confidence in Keith?
Still, he scooted into the room, taking up the one curved couch they all left deliberately empty. Dulsara didn’t intend to get comfortable at all; she stood beside the couch instead of sitting, arms crossed, her ears all the way back. Honestly Keith thought they’d just get stuck that way pretty soon. Niresh, meanwhile, settled onto the couch right beside Keith and Xerci. Her tiny feet were about a mile from the floor.
Originally, Keith just wanted to ask what happened at the end of the fight, but now what he’d seen (and overheard) made something else more pressing: “What happened to Red?”
If Shiro were any less benevolent, if he hadn’t just done the hard work of helping save Keith’s life, the look he shot the red paladin might actually have killed him. “What you did was extremely risky, Keith. You jeopardized not only your own safety, but the safety of your fellow pilots too.”
The problem was Keith didn’t actually know what he’d done, though somehow that still didn’t save him from sinking under the crushing guilt. Just the tone of Shiro’s voice alone made his shoulders hunch up around his ears. Niresh peeked up at him from under the shadow of her own, a little concerned maybe.
Keith cringed. “But what happened? I was kind of… out of it at the end…”
“What happened,” Lance growled, “is you becoming the backseat driver from heck and deciding you were gonna lead the whole team, which—by the way—absolutely none of us agreed on! And when it didn’t work, because hey, duh, Black Lion forms the head for a reason, you just straight up tore all of Voltron apart by sabotaging our mind meld from the inside!” He was breathing heavy by the time he finished, arms up and flapping.
“What?” Keith said dumbly. That was… impossible. He’d been out of it, but he hadn’t been that out of it, had he? He would have remembered trying to take control of... He didn’t even know how someone could take control of Voltron from inside the mental bond, so how was he supposed to have actually done it?! And he wouldn’t anyway! Shiro was the leader. Shiro was the pilot of the Black Lion and Keith respected—
When he tried to meet the black paladin’s eyes, Shiro looked away, a more terrible, honest confirmation than anyone else could ever have given. Keith felt like he’d been stabbed between the ribs, like his lungs were gushing air from open holes and he couldn’t keep enough breath in to go on living.
He hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t meant to. Shiro knew that, right, he had to; he couldn’t possibly think that Keith snatched control because he didn’t… because he didn’t trust Shiro as a leader, right?
(But then why had he taken control? Why else, except that somewhere, in some dark, horrible corner of his mind, he must have thought he could do it better?)
“It’s true!” Coran’s voice sailed into the room before he did, one finger already up and pointing. With an air of nonchalance that seemed particularly targeted, he added: “Why, a tribe of starving Kuttevins couldn’t have torn that bond apart as fast as you!”
“I didn’t—” He wanted to say he didn’t mean for it to happen, but they’re experienced paladins now; they’re pros at keeping Voltron together. Nothing short of a total mental collapse could have ruined their meld and he couldn’t pretend not to know that. “How could—”
Behind Shiro, Allura surveyed him more calmly than he expected, no harsh analysis of his failure, no demands for immediate improvement, just a strange, inscrutable stare with too few blinks to be human. There was no tell on her face, nothing specific, but she… She must be disappointed. They’d trained so hard under her watchful eye. They’d perfected forming Voltron. They’d followed her orders and learned to work as a team. They’d held together through fights before, except Keith just couldn’t stop ruining it, could he? Keith couldn’t stick to the plan, couldn’t be trusted to follow commands, Keith kept getting everyone else into trouble. Keith couldn’t play well with the rest of the team.
Feral. Reckless. Dropout. Crazy. Loner.
Keith looked down at his lap, but even there he couldn’t hide: Xerci stared back, tight-eyed, frowning, his bottom lip wobbling. Keith realized he was gripping the back of Xerci’s jumpsuit hard, transferring his tension straight into the kid. But jerking his hand away also spooked Xerci, who flinched in Keith’s loosened hold and lip-wobbled harder, threatening tears.
Keith could still feel Allura’s stare, a heavy weight on his shoulders, but it was Coran, not Allura, not Shiro, who stepped forward to deliver the unavoidable lecture. “You lost focus in this fight, Keith, and it put your team in danger,” he began, and there was something… off about his voice, like he’d nearly said a different name. His words sounded almost too familiar, as if he knew them by heart, was giving this same exact lecture for the two-thousandth time as he leveled an oddly practiced glare where Keith hid behind Xerci.
(But who would he have said something like this to before? Coran was Altea’s royal advisor, and royals were not irresponsible and impulsive.)
“You prioritized your own plan above the group’s decision-making so much that you actually separated your consciousness from your fellow pilots, destabilizing the paladin bond badly enough Red Lion could no longer maintain the combination. The public—” What public? “—are relying on you to lead by example, and instead you left your teammates adrift to throw yourself into the fight without a plan or guidance to any of the other paladins, tearing the mind meld apart and scattering Voltron to pieces. Just because you achieved the best case ending this time, doesn’t mean you’ll be half so lucky in the next fight.
“I’ve seen Voltron in some truly tough pleckeries in my time, but that was as rough as I’ve ever seen it! You didn’t listen to your comrades, you didn’t trust that they’d see eye-to-eye with you, and!” Coran paused, a strange waver of worry in his voice that Keith had never heard directed at himself before. “You disregarded your own safety without thinking about any of the people who count on you, not the least of whom is your dau—” The Altean actually jerked, peered around the room for a moment with a look so disoriented Keith worried. Coran had to clear his throat twice before he could begin again. “Not the least of whom are your charges,” Dulsara scoffed, “who need you to remember that no matter how many people you save, it’s not a victory unless you also come home safe.”
Keith bowed his head farther. He’d had worse tongue lashings before, all of them at Garrison, but this was the only situation in which he’d succeeded in achieving everything he needed to and yet still somehow came out feeling horrible, like he’d made the worst decision possible.
He’d saved the ship though. No one had died. Voltron was fine. Allura was still in one piece. None of the Galra children had gotten harmed. His injuries were already healed, no lasting damage at all. So why was everyone looking at him like he committed some… some heinous crime of something?!
“Just…” Lance actually shivered, wrapped an arm across his chest to clutch his elbow. “Don’t ever do that again!” he hissed. “I felt like my right arm was ripping itself off my body. I thought I actually lost it for a second, it hurt so flippin’ bad in my head!”
Hurt. Pulling away from the bond on purpose had hurt them? Hunk and Pidge nodded along to Lance’s comment, both them unconsciously clinging to their own right arms, fingers buried deep in their sleeves.
But the real impact, the real weight of what he had done did not set in until Keith glanced up at Shiro and realized.
The sensation of having his right arm torn off wasn’t a hallucination for Shiro. It was a memory.
It was a memory Keith awoke, a horror he’d forced right back into Shiro’s head, threw in his face without thought or care for what it might feel like, how it might haunt him… Keith’s eyes darted to the Galra tech arm, couldn’t help it, and a wave of nausea threatened to swamp him.
He’d hurt everyone. He’d hurt Shiro again, Shiro who kept suffering for him, for them all, without complaint. Shiro, who fought so hard to protect him. Why? Why was Keith nothing but a burden on everyone he cared about? Why couldn’t he just stop—
There was a sharp, quick little stab at the patch of skin exposed by the back of his glove. Keith glanced over to discover that Niresh had very intentionally jabbed him with one of her claws, her face a cross of concern and frustration. She didn’t say anything, but he could read the tension in the minute trembling of her ears. She—and all the kids, if how stiff Dulsara stood was any indication—were picking up on his distress and mirroring it right back.
Keith took a deep breath. Then another one, for good measure. There wasn’t anything he could do to take back what he’d done. Feeling bad about it wasn’t going to make it like it never happened. So just… He had to just put that aside. Now he knew better, now he knew what he could do to Voltron if he wasn’t careful, and now he knew what happened to the people left behind in a shattered bond. He’d try incredibly hard to never do it again. “I’m sorry,” he said, and it wasn’t even close to enough, but he didn’t know what to say that would be.
(Because he couldn’t promise he’d succeed, or that he’d never mess up their bond again. That he wouldn’t just do what he thought needed to be done. Even if it had been horrible, even if it had hurt, it had saved the ship. Saved Allura and Coran. Saved the children. And he couldn’t regret that part.)
“I just… saw the weakness and thought there wasn’t enough time to stop it as Voltron. There wasn’t time to explain; I had to go for it or the Robeast would have gotten in another shot. I didn’t want someone to get hurt.”
“Keith…” Shiro’s voice was the knife still in his lungs, still cutting. “You’re ‘someone’ too, you know. You got hurt. That’s not any better.”
“You fractured your skull in three places, to be exact!” Coran interrupted, and he’d rallied or was pretending he had, back to being just this side of terrifyingly blasé. “Which caused massive brain hemorrhaging! And you burst both your ear drums and bit through your tongue and your aorta and right lung collapsed from the pressure of the combined blasts!”
“You nearly died,” Shiro murmured, jaw tight.
On a theoretical level, Keith understood he was supposed to care about this, that the team was… staging some kind of intervention here, and he should probably be “coming to his senses,” but he couldn’t find it in himself to be that worried. A fractured skull, a collapsed lung? Kind of meaningless when their healing technology could keep people alive untouched for 10,000 years. He hadn’t died. No one had died. They’d won. That’s what matters. Keith felt a stubborn pout stealing over his face, but he was too unsettled to do anything about it.
“Besides,” Pidge jabbed, looking at Keith like he was a very slow, very stupid little bug she’d guided to safety ten times already today and which she was now seriously contemplating just putting out of its abject misery. How the hell she managed the look while standing at least foot shorter than him, Keith would never figure out. “We were sharing mental real estate, you know? If you hadn’t shut down the mind meld, you wouldn’t have had to explain. We would have all been on the same page, and we could have stopped it together!”
“I…” He didn’t know what to say. How could he explain the panic, the confusion, his complete terror at the threat losing something—so many things—important to him all at once? Allura. Coran. Their home. Their safe place. The only things they had left to them in all the vastness of space.
What was he supposed to say about the guilt of exposing the Galra children to danger they never deserved? How to convey the way their screaming sounded, echoing in his broken skull? The possibility of failing to live up to Allura’s conviction that Voltron would never fail?
I was afraid. I couldn’t hold on to the bond because I had things other than the universe to protect.
But when he tried to say that, what came out instead was: “I just did it without thinking,” because that was easier, smaller, stupider, and farther from the white-hot electric core of complicated feelings he had for everyone and for himself, hidden deep down where no one could touch it.
“Typical!” Lance snarled, throwing his hands up. Hunk patted the blue paladin on the back like he was somehow the one who needed consolation.
Shiro… stared at Keith in a way that frustratingly piteous, because he knew Keith was lying, like he might even know how much had gone unsaid. “Just swear you’ll work with us first next time, okay?”
Keith recoiled. He never made promises he didn’t intend to keep, and Shiro knew that, which was exactly why he was trying to pin Keith down here now, while they had him in such a compromised position. Where he couldn’t say no. “I’ll try,” he muttered, finally, all the concession he was willing to make. He would try. It was just… somewhat unlikely he’d succeed. (Keith aimed to be, above all else, at least a little realistic in his outlooks.)
Before the dust had even settled on that, Hunk interjected by literally raising his hand to speak. “About the Red Lion…” He fidgeted in place. Keith’s stomach dropped another foot. “It’s in pretty bad shape.”
Allura raised the holo screen again. The picture was closer to Red now and worse for it. Entire panels of Red’s outer armor were torn almost completely free, and his yellow glass eyes were cracked in multiple places. He was dim, completely powered down—by choice, Keith hoped. Enormous gashes ran along his front limbs, splits in the metal all the way into the dark corridors that made up the interior, wiring like severed veins leaking out everywhere. His left forepaw was almost completely disconnected, held in place currently by something like the space equivalent of scaffolding and braces. In the background, both Yellow and Blue stood vigil, eyes equally silent and dark, but solid in their presence.
Keith felt sick all over again. The tally sheet of his own injuries was meaningless, but seeing Red get hurt… A few days in the healing pod could fix a living being up like nothing happened; it looked like even days and days of work wouldn’t be enough to put Red back to his beautiful working form.
Hunk was still speaking. “We think it’ll be about three weeks of repairs before he can fly again, and that’s if we’ve got all the stuff we need on-board. Otherwise we’ll have to wait until after the castle’s hull’s been fully repaired up so we can find a trading port with the things we need. Kinda hard, finding parts for a 10,000-year-old mythical sentient cat ship.”
Keith flinched. “Kinda hard” was probably the understatement of the century. Who would even be making things compatible with the tech from a planet destroyed ten millennia ago?
Hunk winced too, as empathetic as ever. “It’ll be okay though. Totally. Coran said the lions have recovered from worse damage in the past.”
Coran looked ready to launch into that exact story, in all its gory details, but Shiro blessedly stepped in before that steam engine could leave the station, and instead started in on his own plans: “Red being down means you’re grounded until we can get him operational again, so as soon as you’re feeling up to it, you’ll be coming with me to investigate that Galra battlecruiser. We need to know how it got here and why. Allura and Coran are planning to finish up our diplomatic mission planet-side with the Fripik. Lance,” Shiro looked up, making Lance jump, “why don’t you tag along with them?”
“Oh, uh, sure?” Lance seemed a little surprised to be called on, peeking over his shoulder like there might be someone else there for Shiro to talk to.
“Hunk, Pidge, you’ll be on material-gathering duty. You two already know what we need to fix up the damage to the castle’s hull and Red, so do what you can to find what we can use here.”
Orders. A mission. Okay, Keith could handle that; it felt like moving forward. Not quite like forgiving and forgetting, but almost there. (All he needed, really. A goal to keep his eyes forward, so he could avoid looking back.)
“Uh, no!” Dulsara interrupted, so completely without warning that even Keith startled. She flung out a clawed paw in frustration. “I been quiet and let you do your yellin’, but I ain’t leavin’ this room without a real explanation! Why is nobody talkin’ about the monster! What was it? Where did it come from?!”
They weren’t talking about it because they already knew, because abominations appearing out of the void and wreaking havoc was just something they dealt with from time to time. Of all the things to be routine in his life...
“That monster was a Robeast,” Allura declared, and with a gesture, the holo screen which previously showed Red dissolved into a series of blue-light figures, one for every Robeast they’d fought, in all their gross glory, twitching and roaring silently, the fifty eyes of the chameleon from the Balmera roving aimlessly around the room. “They’re monstrous chimeras of flesh and machine, made possible by the quintessence manipulation magic of Galra Druids.”
Dulsara reeled back, shoulders pulling taut with offense. “What? That’s not possib—”
“Does the architecture of these transports look familiar?” The sharp-edged shape of the black and purple transports for the Robeasts manifested next, still as ominous in miniature as it was in reality, like some new hideous creation might burst free of it right here in the rec room.
“That’s a Galra transport, I know, but…” She faltered. “I never saw any kinda monster like that! I never heard of ‘Robeasts’! And Galra don’t have ‘magic’!”
“The empire is…probably a lot bigger than you know.” Shiro sighed. “I’m sure there are many things Zarkon’s hiding from his people.”
The fur on the back of Dulsara’s neck was standing on end, Keith could see it. “But why would the empire make monsters? There’s no one Zarkon can’t already defeat with just our soldiers. Nobody fights like Galra do!” But something seemed to dawn on her suddenly; her mouth fell open a little and she darted a stunned look around the room, at all of them in turn. “’cept you. ‘cept you all that keep destroying bases out of nowhere, an’ you’ve probably blown up a hundred whole fleets already with your robot! Are they sending monsters to stop you ‘cause you killed so many Galra? Maybe the emperor and the generals don’t want anyone else to die, so now they’re sending robot beasts to fight you instead?! In that case, you deserve it!”
“Did the people of this planet deserve it?” Keith snapped. “How many of them would have died if we hadn’t been able to stop that monster?”
“But the emperor wouldna sent a monster here at all if you didn’ land on this planet! Why is it always the Galra’s fault automatically? Who picked this world with no defenses as a landing place, even knowin’ you got enemies who can find you all the time? Emperor Zarkon didn’t make you land here and risk those weird Fripiks! That’s on you!”
“And what about Niresh, huh?” Keith bit back, before anyone else could get a word in, his own hackles rising. “She helped just to keep you safe and the monster tried to kill her for it.”
“Yeah, only ‘cause everywhere you go, bad things happen! Your war is following you, and you got me an’ Niresh an’ Xerci right in the middle of it!”
He just wanted Dulsara to understand. She wasn’t stupid; he knew she’d figure out what was right if she’d just stop and listen, if she just agreed with them. Why can’t she see—
“Don’t try to act like Zarkon’s blameless here! All he cares about is getting Voltron back for the Galra. Every single living being who doesn’t side with his quest is an expendable sacrifice. All the aliens on this planet, all the lives of the free people still left in the universe… they wouldn’t even register as collateral damage.”
“And how are you any different?” Dulsara actually snarled. “You say the emperor wants Voltron more than anythin’ else. That he’ll kill anybody he has to ta get it? You know that, and you still brought it here, to a peaceful planet that had nothing to do with your war, that’s allied with the empire even! I’m sick of your lyin’ all over the place!” She pointed sharply at Allura. Her hand was shaking a little though. “You wanted to make allies here, get ‘em to join your resistance even though you claim Zarkon crushes anybody who stands up against ‘im! So it’s okay to endanger people as long as you can benefit off ‘em? That’s no different from what you’re sayin’ about the emperor!”
Hunk’s face screwed up. Keith thought he might actually be offended. “Hey, I think the logic there is a little—”
But Allura interrupted him, threw a hand of her own out in front of his face to request silence. “You are right, Dulsara. We are one half of a war in which we cannot choose when and where we may be attacked. Our very presence in a galaxy is dangerous to all those who inhabit any neighboring systems. To blithely traverse the stars and take advantage of the kindness of our hosts to distract our enemies would be horrific indeed. But that is not who we are, nor how we ever endeavor to behave.”
Her dress made an eerie noise in the perfect quiet of the rec room as she crossed the floor.
“We are always, before all else, honest with every people who open their worlds to us—honest about the dangers we represent and about the future we are trying to achieve. Everywhere we go, we bring hope and faith that someday soon the free worlds of the universe will no longer have to watch their skies, fearing at any moment monsters might rain from their atmospheres, or that a cruel conqueror might seize all that they know and love. We reach out to others not only for allies, but to remind everyone we can that Voltron is no children’s tale—that we are here, and we are fighting not only for ourselves, but for them, for peace and for freedom.
“You must see the difference between us and Zarkon, between someone who believes the loss of thousands of civilian lives is justified simply to seek a stronger weapon, and the paladins of Voltron, who mourn every life claimed in our pursuit of justice. Our intentions are not the same. We are not the same.”
Dulsara was quiet. She chose to stare at the floor, instead of baring her throat by looking up at Allura. At last, she said: “Your words are prettier, but your war is still a war. A lotta people who didn’t deserve to die are going to die ‘cause of you. Is mourning ‘em enough? Just knowin’ that’s supposed to make me trust you? Even if the emperor is as bad as you say, just bein’ better than him still don’t automatically make you good.”
“That's true,” Allura began again. "What you are saying is true, but—”
“Just stop,” Keith cut in, surprised at himself and yet not, because... how to explain it? There was something written on Dulsara's face that he felt only he could read, something in the way her jaw clenched tight, her ears pinned down safe and low against her head, how her eyes looked downcast even without pupil or iris—it was on a different face, but the expression, the feeling driving the expression, was one he knew deeply, harshly, personally.
For all the pointed and important things she said out loud, there was something even more important to her that she hadn’t said at all.
"What is it," he asked, "that you really want to hear?"
There was a long beat of silence. He could feel the combined weight of Hunk, Pidge, and Lance's confused gazes on him. Niresh tensed beside him; Xerci tucked in close under his chin like a tiny wall against the rest of the world. Dulsara didn't say anything for a long time. In fact, she didn’t seem to know what to do with herself; she stepped away from him, then back, then sat down a few feet away finally, her feet still an inch off the floor, hands tight around her knobby knees.
"I don’t want..." She struggled, her voice as torn as the scarred hull of the Red Lion. “I don' want to hear about ‘mournin’ casualties’ like your fight’s so much bigger than all the people involved in it. Like people are jus’ Reni cards—some made to be sacrificed in order to succeed. You're tryin’ to say there's a war with two sides and one of ‘em's bad and one of ‘em's good, but it all… It all sounds the same to me. Your Voltron fights for peace? For who? Not for my maman. Not for me.”
She locked eyes defiantly with Allura. “In a fight, all anybody cares about is winning. Your giant robot ain’t a guardian—it’s a weapon. I don’ wanna to hear about your justice or your hope. You want me to believe yer the heroes? That you really do want a universe where we all live happily ever after? Then prove it—prove my maman’s death wasn’t meaningless to you. That the Galra aren’t meaningless to you. That your freedom ain’t reserved just for the people you like.”
“We would not—” Allura started, but Keith had had enough of listening, his own retorts burning on his tongue.
Not like he really understood her better than anyone else in the room; just because he was also Galra didn’t mean he’d experienced anything close to what she had, that he knew any of the things she’d grown up knowing. But… But still. Her story wasn’t unfamiliar to him: both orphans living with people who couldn’t—maybe who wouldn’t—understand them, fish out of water, caught up in a war they had nothing to do with, resenting their circumstances, maybe even resenting everyone around them, who’d never know what it felt like to be hated for the actions of people they couldn’t control.
“You know we’re not like that. You’ve been here long enough to understand that Allura means what she says. None of us would be here if we didn’t believe we’re doing the right thing.”
“Just ‘cause you think it’s the right thing—”
“Are you afraid of what it would mean to agree with us?” Shiro’s sudden interruption made just about everyone jump.
Dulsara actually clawed a hole into the couch cushion. “I ain’t afraid of nothin’!” she spat.
Shiro stepped a little closer, to stand next to Allura. Keith didn’t like it, too many people lurking over them, but Shiro continued as gently as if Dulsara hadn’t spoken, so really this wasn’t the right time for Keith to be weird.
“I think I’d be afraid,” Shiro said. “When someone tells you that something you believe in with your whole heart is wrong… that’s pretty scary. Even worse when it feels like everyone else is pushing you to change sides. But that’s not what we’re trying to do, I promise. No one’s asking that of you, okay?” He glanced up to meet Keith’s eyes, and it felt a little bit like a warning.
Then Shiro stared at the top of her head again, the mess of curls falling all around. “And you’re right. This fight’s not the kind of black-and-white where one side’s perfect and the whole other side’s entirely evil—being around you guys is making that abundantly clear to us.”
“Y-Yeah!” Lance managed to squeeze in. “Just because we hate Zarkon doesn’t mean we, like, hate all Galra or anything. You guys are pretty cool, at least.”
Keith didn’t know what to feel about that, didn’t know how to get too near that idea without getting burned, so he put it very carefully in his Things to Think About Later mental folder, the one he somehow managed to avoid ever coming back to in time.
Shiro was nodding along to Lance. (So was everyone else, for that matter, even Coran, though not really Allura.) “Exactly, Lance.” Shiro smiled in that sad way he did sometimes that softened his whole face. “It’s not an all-or-nothing situation. You can still see some good in us without turning your back on the Galra or your mother. Acknowledging that Voltron is aiming to help the universe isn’t an insult to her memory. We’re trying to do what’s right. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.”
Keith saw the moment Dulsara’s face crumpled, beyond tears, just lost and miserable and raw. “But I…” she sobbed. “But I don’t know what to do!” Keith had never been a big hugger—not because he disliked it, really, just that besides his parents and Shiro, no one had ever seemed very interested in hugging him, so it didn’t occur to Keith what he should do until, from his other side, Niresh pushed him hard enough to knock him into Dulsara so he sort of had to hug her, had to open his arms to not fall on her at least, and she ended as close as she could get to him with Xerci still squashed in between. Niresh made a little noise of approval behind him, even though Dulsara didn’t actually return the gesture, just stared up at Keith with that same desperately seeking expression, adrift in space.
“I know the empire sendin’ that monster was wrong.” Her breath hitched. “It only wanted to hurt people, no matter who… I know there’s things going on that I don’ know about; Niresh’s been tellin’ me, but I didn’t wanna listen… You protected Niresh even though yer ship got hurt ‘cause of it and you say that you’re just here to guard people, but I… I don’t want to fight the Galra! I don’ wanna see anybody else get hurt! Even if there are evil Galra, there’s lots of people just doing what they’re told to do by the emperor! Just like my maman! I don’t want to watch you hurt my people, even if… you are the heroes.”
“Oh,” Allura breathed, “no, no we would never ask that of you. Our fight against the empire is ours alone, and we would never put you in a position in which you had to participate, not on purpose. Or if you’d prefer… If you would prefer to be away, we could find another place for you to—”
“But I’ll still know. Even if I leave, now I know there’s a war. That you’re gonna be out here all the time, killin’ people like my mother.”
“Then maybe there is something you can do,” Shiro said, slow and thoughtful, like he was forming the plan at the same time he was forming the words. “Help us learn the difference. Help us understand the empire the way you do, so we fight only who we need to and people like your mother don’t get hurt anymore.”
“How can I help? I don’ know what you—”
The tension making Allura’s spine rigid began to dissolve. She closed her eyes to take a deep breath. “The Galra were steadfast allies of Altea before the war began, and we know much about Zarkon, but 10,000 years have passed since we last had any close connection with the Galra themselves. I’m sure there are many things you can teach us about what it is like to live in the empire and how we can distinguish between Galra who are loyal to Zarkon’s cruel cause and those who are serving with… less fervor.
“The Galra people who are alive today are very different than those we knew in the past—you and your companions are proof enough of that. I know that we have no right to ask anything of you, nor to involve you any further than we already have. But if you would find meaning by aiding us in this way, we will accept all assistance with gratitude.”
“I…” Dulsara wavered. This was still not what she really needed to hear, Keith realized. More options, more possibilities, more what-ifs, still no answers, nothing safe or simple.
“Just stay with us,” Keith said. “When we’re doing something wrong, tell us. Stop us if we’re going to make a mistake. When there’s a safer way, a way that’s better for everyone, just say so. Fight for the Galra, from here.”
Then, in such a whisper that Keith doubted most of the others in the room could even hear it, Niresh murmured: “Not everybody loves the emperor. My papan got made to join the military ‘cause of our line. Some Galra are prisoners too.”
“Fight for the Galra…” Dulsara tried the words out, tentative. After a moment of hesitation longer, she looked up, her brow furrowed, her mouth a resolute line. “Will you really listen to me, when I tell yah to stop?”
“We’ll listen,” Shiro answered without pause. “You have our word.”
Dulsara sighed, not exactly relief but something almost like it, letting pent up steam escape. “All right. I’ll stay with you—to protect the Galra.”
Beside them both, Niresh sat up straighter; her expression as reserved as it ever was in public, but a pleased part eked through, a tiny, loose upward curl of her mouth.
Allura was far less reserved in her relief; she beamed at them so brilliantly even Keith could see how much of a weight Dulsara’s decision lifted from her shoulders. “Xerci,” the princess said, leaning forward even more so she was closer to his view, hands on the knees of her skirt. “Will you help us too?”
Xerci cheered nonsense in response, no filter on his volume level yet. How in the world his father kept him quiet enough to avoid notice by visiting fleet ships and commanders, Keith had no idea. "Help!" the boy declared, though whether he knew what it meant or was just imitating was anyone’s guess. He bumped his head happily against the underside of Keith’s chin. “Help! Kee-ith!”
Everyone else stared quizzically, eyebrows raised. "Key-ith?" he saw Hunk mouthing in the background, to Lance's shrug.
Somewhere Allura was saying: "You mean Keith, right?"
"Keeith!" the boy proudly crowed again, reaching up to squash both his stubby hands onto Keith’s cheeks. It was cute. Even sort of cute how Allura's gaze softened like warm butter, her bottom lip actually wobbling a little.
But Keith wasn't in a place to notice those things right now. He wasn’t in a place to notice anything happening in reality, really—too far gone, backward as if through a wormhole, time and space blurring around him until there was only the soft, half-breathed chuckle of his mother in his ear, in the early morning, still too cold to poke his nose out from under the thread-bare cover. "Kee-ith," she whispers, "my little one, wake up. Wake up."
He couldn't. It's lucid dreaming; he knew it wasn't real, not anymore, but still he couldn't focus his eyes, couldn't see past the fall of her hair in the pale morning light, the soft gold (Gold? Is it? Or some other color? What’s memory, what’s imagination, looking back?) of her eyes luminous against the reflection of the pre-dawn horizon in the old mirror, and she smiles like the moon rising. "Wake up, Kee-ith. There's so much to learn today."
It was like biting into bitter fruit, the taste of his own eagerness thick and cloying in his throat; how exciting the world had seemed from the safety of her hold, how interesting the sharpness of the sunlight, the swirls of the red earth dust, the path of a rushing lizard between the rocks—how much more alive the world had been, in memory.
Xerci badly burbled the name, and his voice bore no resemblance to Keith's mother, but his name echoed in the same way, two syllables where there should be only one, sounds where there should be silence, feelings where there should be empty space—
Xerci patted both his cheeks, a little too hard to still be cute. "Like Keeith!" the Galra boy announced, to be met, very naturally, by Lance's face scrunching up, lip curling, brows pinched.
“Ooh,” Coran cooed too. “You really have taken a shine to our red paladin, haven’t you, scamp?”
"It's just a phase!" the blue paladin insisted to the whole room. "He'll grow out of it!" Pidge snorted, ducking her chin into the high collar of her shirt to give her at least a little plausible deniability in case Lance ever tried to claim she actually did laugh at his jokes. (A snort is not a laugh anyway. There's ostensibly enough difference to make the claim, at least.)
Kee-ith, two sounds. He hadn't heard his name said like that in years, not since his replacement parents made him write down the spelling in English and told him very plainly that he was saying his own name wrong, that it was "Keith," one syllable, over and done, and that it meant that he came from the woods, even though he had never seen a "woods" and didn't know if his parents had either.
Only Shiro seemed to notice Keith’s shaking. “Something wrong?” he asked, low enough that no one except Allura noticed over Lance’s bombastic insistences that soon Xerci would see the error of his ways and come to idolize the clearly superior blue paladin.
“No, I…” Keith stopped. He felt like he was swimming, everything moving by him just a little too quickly. If it weren’t for that fact that he knew healing pods were literally perfect healers, Keith might wonder if some of the brain damage wasn’t still lingering around. “I’m fine.”
Shiro had that flat look on his face which meant he was trying to tell Keith with his eyes alone how absolutely obvious that lie was. But Keith was immune to that look, having seen it so many damn times before.
Shiro opened his mouth to get the final word in, but Allura beat him to the punch: “If we’re all in better agreement now, I think we should get back to work. The repairs on the castle must be completed as quickly as possible, in case we need to seek parts for Red Lion’s repair. And our conversation with the Fripik still isn’t finished. Coran, Lance, and I may be able to enlist their help in procuring more resources to fix the damage.”
“I’m game,” Lance offered, to nods from Pidge, Hunk, Coran and, reluctantly, Shiro, darting one last look at Keith to let him know he wasn’t off the hook in the slightest.
Allura clapped her hands together, pleased by the uncharacteristic lack of dissension. Her bracelets jangled. “Dulsara, Niresh, if you’re sure in your decision to stay with us, then I’d like to extend the invitation to you as well. If you are interested in learning more about the universe and life on other planets, I would like to help you see it.”
Dulsara glared across Keith to Niresh, a silent conversation passing between them. Keith couldn’t tell what, exactly, they argued about, just that Niresh resoundingly won by turning on some of the fiercest puppy eyes Keith had ever seen (and he used to know Matt Holt). Finally, Dulsara surrendered, with conditions: “Fine, we’ll go. But only if Xerci can come too.”
(Maybe she thought that would be enough to convince Allura to rescind her invitation. Ha. She just didn’t know Allura very well yet. Galra soldiers might not surrender, but Altean princesses never back down.)
“Of course,” Allura nodded along, though she working very hard to disguise a sudden bout of shifty-eye. Couldn’t blame her: the thought of tiny aliens around Xerci’s curious paws again was nerve-wracking. But Lance and Coran could probably keep an eye on him. (Or he might learn a valuable lesson about not gnawing on anything that fit into his mouth if he bit into a rock alien down below…)
Coran straightened up and waved for attention. “Right then, let’s get a move on, shall we? This old castle won’t repair itself!”
Pidge flailed. “That’s not true and you know it! Just the other day you were teaching us all about—”
Though he tapped both Dulsara and Niresh’s ankles with his boot to get them moving, Keith was barely on his own feet when Allura stopped him.
“Would you… mind staying a moment more? There’s something I’d like to speak with you about.”
Lance halted in his tracks. “Waitttt, what? What could you possibly want to talk about with Keith of all people?” He said it like the very idea of having a whole conversation with Keith, let alone a private one, was unthinkable.
Keith would have been offended if he weren’t so busy being terrified. What could Allura possibly want to talk about? Options flew left and right through his mind: she was going to punish him for his stunt with Voltron, she was going to order him to take over Lance’s cleaning shifts with Coran, she was going to force him to listen to Shiro’s lecture on self-preservation and sane use of flight equipment for the ten-hundred millionth time, she was going to ask him why in the world the children were so attached to him.
No, worse. Someone had suspicions. Someone had brought suspicions to her and now she was going to confront him while everyone else was distracted—Hunk or Pidge knew, they knew and they’d told—
“That,” Allura was busy drawling, stone-faced, to Lance, “is none of your business in the slightest.”
“Oooh,” Pidge needled, catty and evil. “Allura’s gonna talk to Keith in private! On a scale of one to strawberry jam, how jelly are you, Lance?”
Hunk’s offended, “Uh, technically jam and jelly are completely differ—” was completely swamped by Lance’s screeching.
“I am not jelly! I am the least—I am the complete opposite of jelly! I’m like… concrete! Dry concrete!”
Keith had no idea what was going on anymore. Actually, that “anymore”? Probably superfluous, because he’d never any clue what was going on on this ship from day one. Nothing out of the ordinary here folks, just move along.
Somewhere in the background, Pidge sidled up to Shiro, all smooth like, her bushy eyebrows two orange caterpillars dancing on her forehead. “Allura’s gonna talk to Keith in private,” she stage whispered, mouth poking out from behind her hand. “On a scale of one to ‘dry concrete,’ how jelly are you?”
“That’s creepy,” Shiro deadpanned, cuffing her collar and gently dragging her toward the door, followed by Lance and Hunk, still bickering amongst each other, even though they weren’t at all talking about the same thing.
“I’m just saying, jelly is far superior—”
“—probably wants to tell him he’s grounded forever. Hey! Maybe now I can get promoted to an arm!”
And then they’re gone, and it’s just Keith, the Galra children, and the Alteans. Actually, didn’t that just mean all the aliens were left? Coran cleared his throat as loud as he possibly could.
“Uh,” Keith said, very intelligently. He may or may not have been attempting to use Xerci as a living shield from this entire conversation. Too bad the kid didn’t seem inclined in the slightest to protect him.
“Coran, would you mind escorting the children back to their room?” Allura suggested, in that royal manner in which everything she said was rote law and not a suggestion at all, no matter how pleasantly it came across. Keith maybe, just maybe, clung to Xerci a little tighter.
For his part, Coran was more game than Keith expected—he’d brought the children’s food trays to their room this whole time, but other than that, it didn’t seem he’d made much of an attempt to befriend them. (Only logical, really, with the whole “Galra blew up my planet” business.) Seeing him approach without a second’s hesitation, hands out and face open, Keith felt a little… overwhelmed. Not a happy feeling really or sad, just… Allura and Coran were incredible people. If they were testament to what all Alteans were like, how much harder to stomach that their world no longer existed, that what he was had a hand in unmaking all of what they were.
Xerci fussed when Coran pulled him from Keith's hold, long before Keith was ready to be divested of his fuzzy purple shield, but Coran had a good handle on the kid, expertly balancing him on his hip with a steady little bounce that Keith was just starting to learn how to do. The girls looked between all of them for a second before moving closer to Coran—not close enough to touch the Altean, definitely not, but close enough for him to know they’d follow. Dulsara grumbled about it under her breath every step they took, but Niresh waved just a little to Keith on their way out.
And then only the two of them remained, Allura focused on him and Keith not quite able to meet her eyes, staring at her shoulder, at the wisps of her white hair spilling over the pale sleeve of her dress in a way that felt so much more familiar than he knew what to do with.
It was quiet. He had no idea what she wanted, so he had no idea what would happen or whether she somehow expected him to start. If that's what she was after, they’d stand here all night, because Keith had absolutely nothing.
Then, finally, like water boiling over in a pot, Allura unlinked her fingers, smoothed down her skirt. "Keith," she said, "Shiro and your fellow paladins were right to scold you. You put yourself in incredible danger and badly damaged the Red Lion in a risky maneuver that could have cost us all of Voltron if you had failed."
Keith flinched. Just more of the lecture, really? Well... could be worse. (She could have said she was throwing him and all the other invading Galra off her ship because there was something horrific about the Galra now outnumbering the Alteans on board.) A lecture was livable, at least.
"So…” She continued, suddenly reluctant. “So, of course, when Shiro tells you that you must never do it again, please understand how earnestly we all hope you won’t ever risk your life so heedlessly."
She saw the moment he opened his mouth to argue, always chaffing under the auspices of other people's authority. "No," she chided, "let me finish. Let me begin, honestly. Shiro is not wrong in wanting you to value your life more highly. You are a paladin, one of an exceedingly small number of warriors chosen by beings whose very existence makes freedom possible in this universe. You are not replaceable, Keith. You are important to the people who need Voltron, and... and to us, your friends.”
She seemed to brace herself. "But.” The word hung heavy in the air. “But even if I know all that is true, I still... want to thank you, Keith. Your selfless actions saved the Castle, the children, and Coran and I. You risked everything in order to protect what was important to you, even if it meant going against the will of all your fellow paladins."
Not where he expected a lecture to go. What is she trying to…?
"Your conversation with Shiro and the others isn’t over. I’m sure you’ll soon face more scrutiny for what happened. Everyone was... badly shaken by the failure of your mind meld. You all know now, that the only other person who has ever seized control of the Black Lion and disrupted the paladin bond is… is Zarkon.”
Keith felt the blood freeze in his veins. He hadn’t even thought about—That’s twice I’ve lost control of the Black Lion—he hadn’t thought—he’d put Shiro through the same pain as Zarkon had, not just the arm but everything: stolen his lion, left him helpless—If it was me, what I’d want most is the power to make my own choices—not normal, nobody else had this problem! Because who else was like—
“I’m nothing like Zarkon!” Keith shouted, too loud, too fast, too insistent.
But, “I know that!” Allura barked back, teeth bared as she took a step closer without thinking about it. “That is not what I was trying to say at all! I meant the very opposite!”
What?
“What I was saying is…” She got quiet again, consciously unfurled her clenched fingers. “What I wanted to tell you was that no matter how your actions are received by your fellow pilots now, when I saw what you had done, the only person I could think of was the original red paladin.”
He was stunned. Keith had never heard much about the original paladins; they hadn’t even known until it was almost too late that Zarkon was once the head of Voltron. Allura never shared anything at all about the others, outside of how they’d been so much better at bonding and beating the enemy than their new team was. Coran said more about them than Allura, if only through his occasional inscrutable anecdotes, and even then, nothing specific.
It never struck Keith as particularly odd until this moment; ten thousand years was a really long time ago. But even so, wasn’t it a little strange? Allura surely lived in the castle that housed the lions. She must have known the original paladins—she clearly knew a lot about how they had trained and fought together. So why wouldn’t she share that information left and right? Why had she never told them anything about what the previous paladins could actually do with Voltron, instead of letting her new bunch flounder their way through battles, suddenly discovering new powers without any warning?
“I can see your thoughts written on your face,” she murmured, and the way she smiled was utterly indecipherable to Keith. “You’re suspicious of the fact I’ve never talked about the paladins before.”
“Well, it’s kind of ancient history now anyway, I guess.”
“For you.” Her hand looked dark, closing slowly in the pale fabric below her heart. “But not for me. Ten thousand years passed for the rest of the universe, while I slept frozen, outside of time… For me, your ancient history is recent memory. Ten thousand years have gone by since the previous red paladin lived, but I… I stood beside him in this very room less a year ago. I still remember exactly what he said and how he sounded on that day. It’s hard to talk about people you’ve lost when the rest of the universe has had ten millennia to mourn and no longer cares.”
“Allura…”
“It’s all right. I’ve shed all the tears we have time for. I just thought that if I didn’t say something I’d be doing a disservice not only to you but to him as well. Your stunt was dangerous and foolhardy—but it was also exceedingly brave. My father, the original red paladin, was,” she huffed a laugh, “impulsive and prone to charging in. But he was also, beyond any person I have ever known, ferociously courageous and unwaveringly loyal. Keith, you are an honor to his legacy, and I am so grateful that you are here with us.”
There was just a black hole where Keith’s thoughts should have been, complete and total system collapse. He managed several starts to almost-thoughts like Hu- and Wha- and No- but it took a long time for Keith to muster up actual words, let alone in a tone of voice comprehensible to any translator in all of space. “Your father?” he choked finally. “King Alfor was the original red paladin?”
The glimmer on her face wasn’t just unshed tears; Allura was pleased to catch him by surprise. She took the last two steps so they could stand eye-to-eye. It felt, somehow, like being fixed under the watchful eye of the woman in the dying gold light of the vision.
“I take it you never checked the Red Lion’s prior flight logs?”
Keith might have shaken his head. Maybe he managed that much.
Her face was soft. The scales under her eyes rose with the smile that folded the edge of her eyes. “My father was pivotal in the design and construction of the lions, but believe it or not, even he felt his leadership style was a bit too reckless for something as important as Voltron. He was perfectly suited to the Red Lion’s fiery spirit, as deeply dedicated to his allies as he was wondrous in battle. And yet… somehow always managing to earn himself a new lecture from Coran or his fellow paladins—or worse, Mother. In times like these, watching you be scolded for just such a rash but splendid show of courage, you reminded me very much of him, Keith.”
How was he supposed to… react…?
No one had said something that nice to him in years, not since Shiro realized how uncomfortable direct compliments made him, when he was nine and still mixed up “Thank you” and “I’m sorry” every other time. Her words burned somewhere in the pit of his stomach, tossing and turning so badly he swallowed reflexively to keep his feelings down. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, fingers furled up, then limp, then fidgeting for something to hold. He pressed his thumbs. Keith felt… embarrassed, nervous, afraid of the expectations hiding behind that praise. Reeling and laid open.
I’m so grateful you’re here with us.
“T-Thanks,” he said finally, half-choking on just that word alone. It seemed to sit there in the air, a solid, useless lump, pathetically incapable of encompassing the staggering depth of his gratitude. “Um, really,” he added, which didn’t help in the slightest.
Still, Allura understood. She shifted aside, balancing a folded, nonchalant hand on one hip. The slow smile on her face tinted with faint amusement, half her mouth curling up as if the other side couldn’t decide whether or not he was serious.
He felt… itchy. Antsy. Like maybe he could out-run the obnoxious blush on his face only if he left immediately and didn’t stop sprinting for the next ten hours. “I think I’m just… gonna go…”
“Yes, of course,” Allura agreed, though she gave no signs of leaving. “I’m sure we’re holding everyone else up by now.”
Keith made it all the way to the door on his own before she stopped him, her voice like a hand, holding him gentle but fast: “Oh, since you really haven’t checked your ship logs, I suppose it’s up to me to remind you of this too: the Red Lion has only ever had two pilots in all its millennia of existence. Zarkon must certainly have delighted in holding my father’s lion captive, and I’m sure he immediately tried to force it to accept a new paladin, loyal to the Galra Empire, but instead the lion waited 10,000 years—for you. I don’t think, even if we’d had the choice of the whole universe, we could have found any being more suited to the role of red paladin than you, Keith. The Red Lion may be grounded for the moment, but I am sure—absolutely sure—that he is as proud of you as I am.”
Some things Keith could handle and some things he couldn’t, and that was very, very squarely in the “cannot manage” category. He turned away completely, hiding his face with the desperate hope she wouldn’t see how violently red he’d become. What in the world had he actually done to deserve this? Threw himself in the line of fire like an absolute idiot with no regard for his team, and now a princess saying things like “I’m proud of you”?
Keith wished the lounge came with the same features as the training deck, so the floor could literally swallow him whole. He couldn’t even make his feet work right to leave, because how could you just leave after someone said something like that? He had to say something back, right, he had to, but his tongue was lead, nothing came to mind, all he got when he tried to put into words how incredibly much her words meant to him was just a stream of nonsense, and he wasn’t quite far enough gone to start babbling, even though he was terrifyingly close. He might actually have shook in his boots, just a little.
Finally, sounding far too self-satisfied for her own good, Allura took pity: “You are dismissed, paladin.”
Keith hadn’t left a castle room so fast since the time he ran from the possessed gladiator.
In fact, he was in such a hurry, he completely missed Shiro, tucked in the very corner of the otherwise empty hall, nearest the door. The black paladin jogged five or six steps to catch up with him, and even when he caught Keith’s elbow, all that forward momentum carried them two bumbling steps more, swung Keith around in a clumsy circle until he was standing front and center before Shiro like a line-up at Garrison, too confused to be embarrassed yet.
“Shiro?” His voice, still choked-up, stumbled over itself in surprise.
The black paladin stared at him—at Keith’s blotchy face, bitten bottom lip, chin crinkled as he battled to school his face into any expression other than overwhelmed, eyelashes wet with tears he fiercely fought to keep from fully forming—with a look so concerned that Keith only felt even more overcome, growing increasingly bewildered by the silent second.
Why was Shiro still here? Why was he lurking outside? Why was his brow furrowed deep enough to wrinkle his scar?
“Keith, are you all right?” Shiro demanded. Why did his voice sound so much like grit in the turbine of a hoverbike?
Keith felt like he was still caught in their whirl, head not done spinning, unable to quite grasp a hold of the big picture here.
His throat was bound up tight. Keith swallowed hard to get the words out: “’m fine.”
The wrong thing to say.
(There’s yellow light coming in under the door, but his room is all dark today. Outside, in the hall, his replacement mother speaks too fast. He hears things through the metal but the sounds keep getting to his head too late to understand them. Everything blurs. The world tilts sideways. Keith fights to keep his eyes open. The medicine they’ve been giving him lately keeps making him sleepier and sleepier. Keith has to take the shots even though he isn’t sick. “I’m sorry Shirogane,” Ania says, “but I’ve told you already, Keith isn’t feeling well enough to spend time with you today. You need to leave.”
“I apologize professor, but are you sure? He was running circles around us yesterday; he didn’t seem ill at all—”
Their shoes are squeaking on the floor. It’s too loud. Everything’s too loud. Keith paws at his doorknob in the dark. It’s the day before Shiro doesn’t come for two days in a row. Shiro can’t leave now. Three days is a long time.
There’s another set of shoes, his replacement father’s. The footsteps are like rocks smashed against Keith’s head. His eyes shut and it takes a long time for him to get them to open again. “I hate to pull rank, cadet,” Neuhahn murmurs. But it’s sharp, like a small knife. “You’ve been given an order though, and I would hate to write you up for disobedience. Thanks for checking on him, but today’s just not a good day. We’ll let you know as soon as Keith is feeling better, all right?”
Shiro’s uniform makes a strange kind of shrr-shrr as he shifts. As he steps back.
Keith pulls harder at the doorknob, until the handle finally gives, and he gets one arm out clumsily through the crack in the doorway and then one shoulder, until he stumble-slithers his way almost into the hall. He has to cling hard to the door, still half in the dark, to keep from falling down, because his legs are like Playdoh stretched too much.
The hallway light is agony, ten thousand times brighter than normal, but he can’t get his eyes to squint right so they just make tears of pain instead.
“’m fine,” Keith slurs. “Pleas’ let me play wi’h Sh’ro today. ‘m fine.”
But through the blurry white haloes of the overhead lamps, Shiro looks confused, then scared, then angry. The angry face looks exactly like how they practiced, like Shiro showed him over and over in a row until he could understand.
“His eyes are dilated. What did you give hi—”
“You’ve received an order, cadet,” Neuhahn repeats, before he turns and leans down to catch Keith under both arms, pulling him up straighter, guiding him backward into the lightless room, blocking his swimming view. The sway of Neuhahn’s long coat, too white, too fast, makes Keith’s stomach do strange movements inside.
Ania moves toward Shiro. Her voice is very, very even: “Keith is not feeling well enough to play today. It’s time for you to leave.”
The wall of his black room is cold against Keith’s face. Their shadows all move away, along the line of light beneath the door.)
Shiro’s other hand, the metal one, came up to grip Keith’s arm. He searched Keith’s breathless, gutted expression desperately. For what? For—
“What did Allura say to you, Keith?”
Why would he ask that?
“If she said anything that made you uncomfortable, tell me now. I heard her compare you to Zarkon.”
Why did he look so anxious? Uncomfortable about…? Shiro’s hand gripped Keith’s arm too tight.
“Even if she’s Altean, she should know that who your family is has no bearing on your loyalties to this team or how we feel about you. Voltron needs you. You’re our red paladin, no matter what.”
My loyalties. My family? Has no bearing on how we feel about you. Keith stopped breathing.
“We’ve all agreed, there’s nothing wrong with you being—”
“Don’t!” Keith howled, flinching out of Shiro’s hold. Every dim glimmer of warmth and wonder he’d gained, the first tentative touches of pride—you are an honor to his legacy—turned to dead ash and acid under Keith’s ribs. He couldn’t keep any air in. His hand clenched in his shirt over his chest, and there was no wound but he could feel it: everything spilling out, everything falling apart.
The aching line of light beneath the door. Footsteps, walking away. The whole world sliding sideways into the darkness.
Shiro knew. Shiro knew Keith was—
“Don’t,” Keith begged. “Please don’t say it.”
He staggered out of Shiro’s reach, one step, then two, then he couldn’t stop, not even after ten hallway doors shut behind him, not even after the air in the corridors went still and lifeless and centuries-untouched.
Keith ran until he couldn’t run anymore, directionless and destroyed.