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Keith’s first breath is full of desert air. The wind whips through the open windows of his father’s house as his mother screams out in her agony. Childbirth is a painful thing, even for a woman born half a universe away. He’ll never remember the first breath he drew in, or the way his mother laughed at the sound of his disgruntled cries —
He’ll never remember it on his own but he might see it some day, sitting on the back of a space whale and exploring the Quantum Abyss.
Krolia’s first breath was full of desert air. A different desert than her son, but a desert none-the-less. She has often wondered what kind of life he led, if his experiences mirrored her own, if Tex was able to take care of him. She has longed to know him and see him grow, to hear his first words and witness his first steps.
The Empire took her son away from her in a thousand tiny ways. In a thousand more, the Empire brought him back.
The Keith that comes to her so many long years after his birth is a battle hardened creature. She once wished that he wouldn’t be raised as a soldier, but he was forged into one anyway. Her son — a Paladin of Voltron, a guiding light for the galaxy, a Blade of Marmora with her luxite dagger strapped to his waist.
He is so much like his father: stubbornly determined, kind eyed, and even the way they stand is similar when she looks at him in the right light.
Worse than that, he is so much like her: determinedly stubborn, sharp like a knife when he wants to be, furious and devastated at every turn.
Krolia will never give up until the Empire has fallen.
Keith will never give up either. He is, after all, his mother’s son.
She gets her wish to know him better — see’s flashes of his life and tries to memorise every inch of him.
Keith sees his birth. Screaming storms and desert wind and the creaking of his father’s house around them as his mother yelled and his own first fledgling cries echoed across the world.
He sees his mother and father meet and fall in love — sees tender touches and foreheads pressed together, his hand on her shoulder and his eyes too kind for comfort, so kind you could drown in them if you weren’t careful.
He feels the grief of her leaving and her desperate wish to stay.
He feels every ounce of love she’s ever felt for him.
Keith sees his mother on a Galra warship — and knows in the strange way these visions manifest themselves that this is her first posting as a cadet — which flies through space to spread the glory of the empire across the stars, to new planets that will soon be enslaved and crushed beneath the boot of a thousand soldiers. He learns that he is his mothers son, because she never quite fit in either, because she was at odds with every other member of the crew and she made the kind of reckless decisions that got you in trouble sometimes.
He sees violet water lapping against blue sand and knows it instantly as home. They stand together on the shores of her memory, and without asking Keith knows that if he turned around he would see a small village and a house on a sand dune. He knows without asking that in that moment she is devastated, because her first love — Akhila, a cat-like Galra with a bright smile and the kind of strong shoulders that made her look as sturdy as a boulder — already left for basic training. The odds of seeing this childhood love again are slim. The world is wide and the universe is wider, and there are many ships a Galra Soldier could be assigned to. All Keith can do is watch his mother, sixteen and hurting, watch that great love fly away.
He is his mothers son.
Krolia sees Keith run through the desert a thousand times.
He is young at the start. Four and finding his sand legs, sturdier and faster than the average human child. At that age Tex is there at a moments notice to sweep him off his feet and back into his fathers arms. Tex’s fingers tickle Keith’s stomach until the child bursts out in the loudest laughter Krolia has ever seen, and it makes her smile for hours after she sees it.
He is older in the middle. He runs away for the first time a week after his father’s funeral. Away from the foster family who has taken him in. He hopped a bus and didn’t pay the fare. He got out to the desert because he was faster and stronger and more resourceful than the average human child, because a kid like Keith needs to be clever and resourceful if he is going to survive. He runs away and runs back to the desert, back to the burned down husk of his father’s house and the small shack nearby, the only structure left standing in Tex Kogane’s domain.
Krolia is relieved when after a litany of Keith running on his own, he starts to run with someone else. The sweet-smiled boy who takes him out on hover-bikes is sturdy shouldered and kind around the eyes. He makes Keith laugh again, not as loudly as he used to, but genuine enough to offer his mother some comfort.
On the space whale, time moves strangely. It is protracted and stretched out. Alternatively, it is compressed and moving too quickly for comfort. Two years is two years too many. It will never be enough — never enough to make up for all the time that they have lost.
Keith would trade a lot to have had this forever. To have grown up knowing the weight and warmth of his mothers love, to have never been alone.
They sit in their makeshift camp and by their makeshift fire, and there is a swelling certainty in his chest that feels like confidence, as if a missing puzzle piece has slotted itself into his chest and he is finally whole.
Keith has seen his mother’s life, met his grandparents in her memories, and now he feels as if he can truly claim her. Now it feels like she truly exists.
Objectively, he’s aways known she was real. Someone had to birth him, and his father told him as many stories as he could — but the woman who existed in those fairytales was always a woman that Keith had no true claim to. It was the woman his father loved. The woman who left Keith behind. His fathers memories and his father’s love, his mother’s knife in his hand like a promise.
Now, he has parts of her that Tex never touched, parts of her that exist just for Keith.
“Did you ever see her again?” He can’t help but ask it, hand on his hips, gazing out at the distance as they stand on a cliffs edge. “Akhila.”
Krolia is quiet for a long moment, and part of Keith already knows the answer to his question. They have been in shrouded places in each others minds, pulled into a dozen different memories and left to reel with the knowledge left behind.
“No.” Krolia tells him. “She died. Long ago. I think I always knew she would. She was too soft for military life.”
Keith remembers what it felt like when he heard the news of the Kerberos mission failure. He remembers the sting of hearing and seeing those words painted everywhere: pilot error, a burden placed on Shiro’s Atlas-strong shoulders, a black mark on his theoretical record. He had been furious when they told him Shiro was dead, when no one would humour his assertions that he knew Shiro was alive.
He remembers, too, the day that Shiro disappeared again. The Black Lion empty in space, a cockpit that should have held Shiro holding nothing at all. They all told him Shiro was gone then too, and still, he wouldn’t let the prospect sit.
He can imagine his mothers pain.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds rough. He can hear his own memories reflected in the rasp of it.
“I’m sorry, too.” A beat “I still pray for her.”
Keith starts praying for her too — he prays to Gods he has never known before, follows after his mother and fumbles out the words to alien psalms and prayers. Krolia has told him all of the stories and all of the legends by this point. The Desert God and the Sky God and the Stone God, and all the mothers that breathed life into the universe. She has told him that the Sky God is a lion, and in his minds eye he sees the Flash-Bang-Brightness of Black’s eyes when they glint against a setting sun.
“Your father always wanted a dog.” Krolia tells him.
She is sitting by the fire and throwing pieces of raw meat for the wolf to catch from the air. The wolf woofs at her words, a low sound, as if to reprimand her for comparing him to something as innocent and guileless as the puppy Keith’s father had always wanted.
“We had one.” Keith tells her in return, knowledge traded backwards and forwards. “She was a rescue mutt named Ripley.”
Krolia smiles, sharp and triumphant.
“Alien.” She says, declarative.
“No, it was just a normal earth dog.” Keith says. It is a joke, obviously. He says it dryly, distant sarcasm buried beneath the blandness of it. It is only because she has learned so much about him in their time here that she can see it for what it is.
“You’re a brat.” She tells him, and he has to hide his smile in the ducking motion of his head as he bends down to pet the wolfs strange blue fur. She sees the smile despite his efforts, but she doesn’t call him out on it.
Krolia used to hide her smiles from her mother too. She used to hate the idea of letting her mother know that Krolia thought she was funny, or letting her know that she was right.
She aches for her mother now. She wants to take Keith home and show him off. Pick him up and show him to her mother, and say: Look, look at what I made, look at what made me understand you better than anything before. Krolia understands now the weight and burden and sadness that can come with motherhood, and the way that a single smile from your child can make every ounce of pain worth it.
“Shiro had this thing.” Keith tells her out of the blue one day. “This feeling he described to me once.”
Keith is laying on his back, looking up at the strange sky that paints the world above him on the back of the space whale.
Keith knows that he talks about Shiro too often, but he also can’t help himself. Krolia has already seen Shiro painted across so many of his memories, and has likely already discovered the way that Keith feels about him. She will know without needing to be told how badly Keith misses him, how worried Keith is about him, how lonely he feels in a world without him near.
“What’s the feeling?” She asks, a prompt, when his silence lingers for a second too long. She’s good at that —pulling information out of him when he wants to give it but isn’t sure how.
He swallows and thinks about what Shiro once told him during a night like this, as they lay beneath the stars.
“He said — he said that the first time he went to Japan he felt a lot of different things at once. He felt like an outsider, he felt like a failure for not knowing every detail and not understanding every word his grandfather said to him. But it felt right too, like he had discovered this intrinsic part of himself he had been lacking before. He wasn’t born there, but he belonged there, it belonged to him and it hooked under his skin and into his heart. It wouldn’t let him go.”
“That’s a feeling a lot of the Galra can understand.”
He nods.
“I think I’m still looking for the kind of belonging that hooks under my skin.” A voice low and distantly sad. “I thought I would find it all in the stars — the places I belonged. It’s been pulling at me since I was old enough to understand what stars were. And I have, I mean… I find pieces of myself everywhere. In the Blades, here with you, but I’m still…”
“Looking for home.” Krolia says, and her voice is distantly sad as well.
He pushes himself up on his elbows to look at her. “Yes.” He tells her, rough.
“My father used to tell me,” Krolia starts, with a voice that tells him she’s about to share a story. “That while the world I was born on was home, it would never be our homeland. The Galra have spread across the entire universe, we’re sturdy and solid people, and we have populated many worlds but —” She trails off for a moment, and Keith’s heart is already beating hard in his chest, “— but it’s Daibazaal that bonds us, the memory of the land that holds us all together. You and I, Keith… we’ve never set foot there, but our hearts know it’s name and part of our souls will always belong to that long-gone place.”
He lays back down on the ground, lets his head rest against the cool ground and feels the wolf shift to lay against his side. He swallows, and when he closes his eyes he imagines a purple rocky world, an expanse of desert and powerful winds. It’s a hook in his heart.
He imagines the blue sands of his mother’s world.
He imagines the red expanse of the desert around the shack.
When a quantum wave washes over them there is a heart stopping moment when all deserts and all worlds are one, mingling together in their minds. Krolia sixteen and watching her love fly away. Keith seventeen and watching his. Krolia falling in love with a man on Earth, surrounded by red sand, because of the way he smiles at her. Keith falling in love with a man on Earth, surrounded by red sand, because of the way he smiles at Keith and the kind words he says.
There is unity in the moment, balance that feels very much like a blow when it fades.
“I’d like to see your home someday,” He tells her, “I’d settle for that, if we can’t have the homeworld part.”
“You can. You will. I’ll bring you there.” A beat of silence. “I’d like to see your home too.”
“I don’t think I have one anymore.” He tells her, because his fathers house is gone and the shack was never more than a stopgap. His bed at the Garrison was always something that had been held over his head. No foster home ever felt like home to him either. The Castle of Lions had been close, before he started to feel like a ticking time bomb whose very presence was antithetical to the purpose of Voltron.
“Home is where the heart is, not just the place you lay your head.”
Looking up at an alien sky, he thinks again about Shiro’s smile. Shiro’s hand on his shoulder. Shiro’s voice rough in his ear. The way that Shiro is like a hook in his stomach that won’t let him go.
Home is where the heart is, and Keith’s is in the Black Lion.
There are times when the Abyss shows them beautiful things. It allows them to glimpse the things they wanted to know about each other
The Abyss shows them painful things too.
Krolia catches a glimpse of Tex’s funeral, and grieves him.
But worse, she catches all of those glimpses of Keith’s life after. More than just him running. The first time she sees the way that one of his foster fathers used to hurt him, she feels sick and angry, furious. She knows the mans address now, a gift from Keith’s memory, and she says this:
“Someday, I’m going to kill that man.”
Keith is pale faced and stony silent. He is grim and seconds away from running again, it seems. She stops him with a hug, and he allows himself to be enveloped by her, sitting stiffly in her arms near the fire.
“It’s okay,” Keith tells her, sometimes. Or, “It isn’t a big deal, really.”
But she knows it is. She knows the intricate ways that the dark corners of his childhood still hurt him. She has heard the way that people spoke to Keith when he was young: a problem case, and they called him worthless and stupid and a burden so often that Keith had started to believe it. He still believed it.
Krolia tells him every day how wonderful he is. She does it in small ways. She smiles at him and praises his work. She cares for the space wolf alongside him and mentions over and over again how good he is with the animal. He learns to accept compliments and eventually, he doesn’t stiffen up when she hugs him anymore.
“You’ll have to get in line.” He tells, her, once. “If you want to kill him. I think Shiro has dibs.”
It’s a joke, almost. He is learning to joke about things. She thinks of Takashi Shirogane fondly. The tall man with the kind eyes and the soft touch. The man that Keith loved with all of his heart — from her outsider perspective she thinks that Shiro loves Keith too, but she doesn’t say it. She doesn’t think Keith knows how to accept that kind of love yet, and he definitely isn’t brave enough to go asking for it. He still doubts himself too much, he still thinks that Shiro could do better.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind the company.” She says, instead of anything else.
Keith spent a long time living in shame. Shame and fear. Shame and grief. Shame and the uncanny certainty that everyone was right: he did not belong, not anywhere and not with anyone.
Except maybe he does belong, somewhere and with someone. He feels strangely at home sitting on a space whale and traversing the Quantum Abyss with his long lost mother. He knows things now about distant cultures that apparently he has a claim to. He knows his grandmothers name and how his birth-screams sounded from his warbling fledgling infant lungs. He knows that he is a quarter Korean and a quarter Cochití on his fathers side. He knows that his mother was born on a planet called Ulmota 2-11 and that she wears a vial of its pale blue sand around her neck — until she doesn’t, anymore, until the day she unclasps the chain and re-clasps it around Keith’s neck instead.
Somewhere along the line he sinks into a strange kind of comfort. His edges are being slowly but surely smoothed down by a mother’s touch, the luxury of it something that he only could have imagined before.
Keith’s first breath is one filled with sticky hot desert air, air that him and his mother shared, panting and crying in that same golden moment. Now they breathe in the muggy greenery of the space whale, once again in perfect time with one another.
Home is where your heart is, and Keith is his mother’s son.
His heart, then, will always rest in a thousand different places.
Lions, deserts, the twinkling stars above.