Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ping.

Keith ducks behind a pillar and frowns. 

Ping.

A quick scan around the room shows nothing out of the ordinary. He flexes his hands and takes a deep breath. The noise isn’t coming from the Galra outpost he’s in, which means it’s—

Ping, his comm announces cheerfully once again, chiming directly into his ear. 

Right, okay. All communications should be automatically silenced unless it’s an emergency. He takes another glance around the room before pulling up the holographic menu screen from the bracelet at his wrist.

The alert wiggles, signaling a new video message. He taps on the icon and holds his breath. Few things are important enough to interrupt a mission, and none of them are good.

Keith forgets how air works for a second when he sees the message is from Shiro. Frantic, he waits for it to load, a data packet too big and too compressed to pop up immediately. But before it begins to play, a text message pops up.

It takes him three tries to read it, to process words and what they mean, but once he does, Keith lets his head thunk back on the pillar behind him and breathes in until his lungs ache with the stretch. 

Hey Keith, sorry about sending you a priority message. Hope it didn’t interrupt anything. It’s not urgent, just an update. Watch when you have a few minutes. Stay safe.

| | |

Shiro is hardly one to sugarcoat the truth, so Keith forgets about the mysterious video until he’s back on his jet, a newly defected Galran general in the cramped second row of seating behind him. 

He taps out a quick message to Lorin, the Blade who will be taking the general to a safehouse on a neutral planet, to let them know that the package has been acquired and is in route. And then he waits. 

And waits. 

The general reads during the journey, watches the stars, taps out mindless rhythms on the walls of the ship. A small mercy: he doesn’t try to make small talk.

Keith tries to keep himself entertained, thinking about what he’ll eat for dinner (cold space goo, straight from the tube) or if he’ll run into space turbulence on the way back to base (definitely, but probably the fun kind) and what the video might be (maybe Shiro figured out a way to make the Lions groom each other like real cats and caught it on video like he’s been threatening to do for ages, now). 

After minutes or hours but probably not days (no matter that it feels like days), they break atmosphere on an out of the way planet and set down for the fastest drop off they can wrangle. 

And finally, finally, Keith puts his route into the autopilot for the first leg of his journey back to base, settles back in his seat, and pulls up the video. 

Shiro’s face lights up the cockpit, a little pixelated, a little worn. But he’s got that crooked grin that feels like slipping into a warm bath, and Keith can’t help the way his shoulders relax at the sight. 

It’s been too long. 

“Keith ,” he says, voice rumbling with affection. “ I hope you’re doing okay.” He clears his throat.

“Maybe this isn’t news to you, but if it is, I’ll just rip the bandaid off: if you’re getting this video, I’m dead .”

In the video, Shiro’s still smiling. A joke, maybe?

But Shiro doesn’t sugarcoat, and he doesn’t joke about things like this.

“I mean, you probably knew that ,” Shiro continues, unaware of the bile rising in Keith’s throat, the way his vision is tunneling and his breaths coming in short and shallow. “ But this wouldn’t make a lot of sense to you if you didn’t know, somehow. And anyway, I wanted to be the one to tell you. That’s probably weird, sorry.”

Shiro waves a dismissive hand in the air, like none of what he’s said so far has been important. Like he hasn’t just destroyed Keith’s life. 

“I know you’re busy. If this caught you at a time where you’re not with us, you can ignore this. I’ve already asked Allura and Coran to bury me planetside. You’ll have to ask them where they put my body if you want to find out, though. I told them I wasn’t picky, just wherever is closest.”

Keith can’t bring himself to tear his eyes away from the video, where Shiro is leaning back in his seat. It must be at his desk in his quarters, on the Castle of Lions, he thinks distantly. He can’t bring himself to do anything but whine, high and long, in the back of his throat. Keening as his best friend talks to him so gently, voice soft and eyes shining with sincerity.

“Hah, sorry. I’ve done this video a couple times over the years, and it never gets less weird. But I wanted you to know, in case it’s … in case it’s important to you. To know. To hear me say it.

“So I want you to know: I love you. I’m so proud of you. Of your independence, and your tenacity, and the way you chase what you want. I’ve seen more of the stars than anyone else from Earth, except for you now, and you’re still the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Your life is my life’s best part.”

Shiro pauses to laugh again and ruffle his hair in a bout of embarrassment. “ Okay, that was cheesy, sorry. But true! And Keith … I didn’t want to go again without telling you that.

“Don’t worry about the ship, or the others. They’ll be fine. If you want to pilot Black, she’d love that. She’s always had a soft spot for you. And if you’d rather stay where you are, that’s okay, too. It’s a big universe. They’ll find someone else to take my place.”

Another pause, shorter but more fraught as the lines on Shiro’s face draw longer, more tense. “ You aren’t alone, Keith. You don’t have to shoulder everything. Just be careful out there, okay? Find the good stuff. Eat some good food for me.”

Blackness. Stars pepper the viewscreen again as the video closes itself, the transmission complete.

Keith screams.

| | |

Time in space is hardly intuitive, but Keith sleeps more than a few times between watching the video and tracking down the Castle of Lions.

He flicks away the notification that the Castle’s defenses have locked onto his ship. A moment later, the warning indicator fades and an incoming hail lights up the top corner of the viewfinder.

“Keith!” Allura exclaims once Keith accepts the transmission. “What are you doing here?”

Her eyebrows are furrowed and she looks haggard. Her hair is falling out of a messy bun and she’s in her paladin armor. The one she’d taken up when Keith left.

A second passes and her expression twists into a grimace that’s probably supposed to be a smile. “I mean to say, it’s good to see you, but this is unexpected.”

And Keith—Keith shudders as he realizes this is the first voice he’s heard since that video. Even his interaction with the Blade was only a quick message to Kolivan saying that he’d be stopping by the Castle of Lions before stopping at base, in a heavily redacted missive.

He clears his throat and blinks hard a few times before nodding. “I got a message from …” 

His voice doesn’t peter out. It doesn’t trail off. One second he’s talking, and the next it’s gone, the word is beyond him. Saying it, naming him, makes it true. 

Allura seems to understand. She smiles, brittle. “I’ll have someone meet you in the docking bay and escort you in. You’ll have to use the one on the side Blue docks in,” she says, smile dropping. “The other hangars took too much damage for us to open and close them easily just yet.”

“Sure,” he agrees. For the first time, he takes in the Castle with more than vacant recognition. 

There are gouges torn down the panels nearest to him. As his ship circles around, the damage decreases, but there’s little that’s left pristine. Burn marks and scuffs and dents litter the walls.

In the end, it’s Hunk who greets him once the hangar is repressurized and Keith hobbles his way out of the ship. He’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and grab extra food kits and nothing else on his mad dash to the Castle. His legs have nearly forgotten how walking in gravity works.

He reaches out to steady Keith once he’s on solid ground again, and Keith bites back the impulse to shove him away or collapse into his arms. Both seem like impossible fantasies.

“Hey buddy, you look, uh, like shit,” Hunk tells him, slinging an arm around Keith’s shoulders. “But we all probably do right now. How’d you hear about the fight? Last we heard, you were on a mission and planned to be dark for a while.”

When Keith stares mutely at him, Hunk just hums in thought before continuing on. Keith is pathetically grateful to not have to say it. “We’ve still got Shiro in medbay. He’s … well, he’ll be there for a while. But you can go see him, if you want. Sit with him a while. Pidge and Lance have been taking turns. Coran and Allura and I are mostly just bringing food down to Lance and Pidge. It’d be good for them to get a break, honestly. C’mon, it’s not far, you can sit down and readjust to being in gravity again once we’re down there. How long were you in that ship, man?”

He doesn’t answer, and Hunk doesn’t push. 

Together, they drag themselves to the medbay. At the door, Hunk gives an unhappy huff of breath but opens the doors anyway, soldiering on. Keith feels another rush of gratitude for him, and musters up the ghost of a smile. Hunk returns it, just as forced, before turning to Lance, who’s sitting on a chair surrounded by a nest of blankets, tablet in hand.

Lance’s eyes go wide at seeing Keith, and then he’s bounding up to his feet, all long limbs but with more coordination these days, bounding over to Keith and wrapping him in a bear hug.

“Hey bud, it’s good to see you! If anyone can wake Shiro up, it’s you. We can’t take him out of the tank, every time we do, if it’s not one alarm going off it’s another, but he’s holding his own as long as he’s in the tank. And the nanobots are doing wonders on him, his spine is back together and the reports say that the nerves are coming along nicely, so you can look over that if you want to hang out here for a bit and— oh, ” Lance stops his word vomit with all the grace of a toddler parking a semi truck. 

“Are you here for a while? Are you here for Shiro, or just Blade business? You don’t have to stay down here with us,” he tells Keith, glancing between Hunk and Keith. “I’ll be fine, I just got here, and Hunk’s been bringing us food, so it’s all good. Shiro’s in good hands.”

Keith is abstractly aware that his heart rate is above basal in the way the Himalayas are above sea level. His fingertips are tingling. “What,” he rasps. 

Lance shifts from foot to foot and looks at Hunk. 

Hunk picks at a hangnail and looks at Lance and Keith, and carefully keeps his gaze averted from the tank behind Lance. It’s quite a feat.

Tank is not the technical term for it. Pod might be better, or enclosed bed. It’s a hospital bed in a little tube, where the environment is carefully controlled for bacteria, temperature, chemical composition, and probably a million other things important to recovery and healing. But it also looks like if you took one of the glass-and-metal tanks you’d see in a bad sci-fi movie where they grow clones in amniotic fluid or whatever and put it on its side, and the universal translator had glitched in trying to translate the Altean word for it, so the Pidge had called it the tank, and the name had stuck. 

And inside that tank, a mask fitted over the lower half of his face to force air into his lungs at a steady rate, lies Shiro. 

Keith’s knees wobble, and he pitches forward, one step, two, hands slapping at the glass over Shiro’s abdomen to catch him before he falls because—

Shiro is breathing .

Alive and in a fucking space fishbowl on life support but alive .

“How?” he asks, swinging back to look at Hunk and Lance. 

Their combined looks of pity hit harder than any suckerpunch. Keith lets the looks slide off him though, all the fight drained out of him at Shiro being here, still. Not gone. Not again. 

After a few heartbeats, Lance squeezes Hunk’s bicep in a comforting little curl and steps in closer to Keith. “We were in a fight. I mean, obviously, you saw the Castle. A new sort of robot-thing, not Galra tech, but from one of their colonies, definitely. It was big and mean and fast. 

“Every time we formed Voltron we got our asses handed to us, so we split up. Shiro came in at the direct line of sight, distracting it. We brought it down, but not before it tore up Black pretty bad. Shiro and Black dropped out of the comms, out of the link. Hunk and I had to haul Black back into her hangar.”

Lance rolls his shoulders, shaking out the tension of the story. “Shiro was unconscious. Black did something, I don’t know. She had hooked into his helmet and suit, it looked like emergency life support. But we had to get him back here for more serious help. He died in the couple minutes it took us to get here. I’ve never seen Hunk move that fast. But the flatline went away pretty fast once we got him in the tank.

“He’s been there for the past, what?” Lance squints at Hunk, who shrugs.

“Week, maybe?”

“Yeah,” Lance agrees, “probably a week. We tried to take him out once, for Allura to check the damage, and another time for Coran to replace some supplies in the tank that Shiro’d used up. Both times something went haywire. We’re keeping him in there until he’s stabilized more,” Lance tells him. 

And that’s. That’s not was Keith was asking, but he jealously hoards the information anyway.

Shiro, alive, cared for, is better than any future he’s imagined in the past few years. Since Kerberos.

“I can’t open the tank?” is what ends up coming out of his mouth, quiet and plaintive. 

Lance’s hand comes up to rest heavily on his shoulder. “No, bud, not yet.”

Shame curls through him, fast as a viper. “Thank you. Both of you,” he says, and means for this, for taking care of Shiro, for being so kind to me, for keeping him alive for me, for carrying on as paladins when I couldn’t, when I needed something else to keep from going insane .

He’s not sure if Lance and Hunk get all of that, but they both deflect warmly anyway.

“We’re a team,” Hunk tells him. “We’re here for you. Both of you.”

“Here,” Lance cuts in, using the hand on Keith’s shoulder to nudge him toward the chair-and-blanket-nest, “sit for a bit, Hunk’ll get you some food, I’ll check in with Allura and Pidge, check back in on you in a little bit.”

“When did you get so, uh …” Keith gestures vaguely at Lance, not quite sure exactly how to phrase it. 

Hunk snorts, though. “Old?” he offers, like it’s something he’s been teasing Lance about for a while now. Which is. Fine. Cool. 

Keith is a little sorry he missed it, though. Seeing Lance grow up.

Lance just rolls his eyes. “ Responsible ,” he chides without bite. “Responsibility is hot. Being old isn’t. Anyway, Keith, just holler if you need us. Or, you know, use the ship’s intercom.” He drops his hand from Keith’s shoulder and strides out, Hunk on his heels.

And then Keith is alone with Shiro.

Keith has seen Shiro high out of his mind, the moonlight painting him in marble and silver as they laugh so hard their sides pull and stitch. Keith has seen Shiro taut with pain on a gurney, strapped down by the people who put him into space in the first place. Keith has seen Shiro numb to everything but his own terror, trapped inside nightmares made terrible for their truth.

Never has Shiro been like this . For a long, scrabbling moment, Keith tries to find any other way to describe how Shiro looks.

The man in front of him is broken.

Dark bruises bloom under his eyes, swelling making a mess of his scars, his features. His nose looks freshly broken and then reset. There are metallic braces along his limbs, like more than one has been fractured or worse. The mask keeping his breathing steady ides his jaw, but even that must be wrecked.

Scrolling through the tablet attached to the tank, Keith reads over the diagnostics and tests and updates on Shiro’s vitals from the pod.

It’s as bad as he thought.

A broken spine, spiral fracture in his flesh forearm, a relatively clean break in his femur from massive force, organ failure that has since been repaired, a punctured lung, blood loss. And what Keith began to suspect before picking up his chart: major damage to Shiro’s shoulder where it meets the prosthetic, where the metal had jammed up and into Shiro’s skin and bone and muscle, probably from him using it as leverage, stronger than his human arm. 

Keith keys in the approval the system needs to cut the arm off at the shoulder once tabbing through the system and finding no options to salvage the arm and no way to remove the arm to work on the shoulder. It needs to come off for Shiro to heal.

He bites back a snarl. If Shiro can feel pain, he’s in a lot of it from the damage to the prosthetic alone. Everyone should know the approval code for medical procedures. Did no one else want to take responsibility for it? Was everyone too afraid of a Shiro without his Galra arm, a Shiro who wasn’t half-weapon?

“Shiro,” he says, as the tank gets to work, scalpels and gauze and tools he doesn’t have a name for melting out of the sides on long thin arms to cut away at Shiro’s arm and stitch the wound together with skin and nanobots. Again: “Shiro.” 

Just to say it, to hold his name in his mouth. “Shiro.”

| | |

Pidge finds him kneeling next to the tank deep in meditation.

He comes back to himself at the sound of her steps, the swishing of the medbay door opening.

The Pidge who comes into view in the corner of his eye is a shock. She’s taller, if not tall. Her hair is still short. But her face is more angular, the baby fat dropped away. She holds herself with the confidence of someone who is listened to when she speaks.

“Hey stranger,” she says, flopping into the chair that Keith hadn’t bothered with. “What’re you doing here?”

“Why do people keep asking me that?” HIs voice comes out rough, gruff with disuse and defensiveness. Where else would he be?

Pidge blinks at him. “Because we’re in a war in space and you were out of contact and we didn’t send out a distress signal or any news of our last fight?” Her voice is leading, like she’s trying to get a rowdy middle schooler to complete a simple logic puzzle. “We didn’t exactly broadcast that we’re a paladin down and there’s a new way to hand our ass to us. So we’re a little curious.”

“Y’all were talking about me?”

“It’s a small ship. Lance’s money is on you two have a soul bond, like twins but not incestuous. Hunk thinks you just missed us and got lucky. Allura thinks you’re on a mission and will give us a debrief about what you need once you get over the shock of Shiro being … unconscious, for a bit.”

“And you?”

Pidge snort tiredly and sighs, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “I think the Blades are spying on us, but,” she cuts across Keith’s instinctive protest, “I don’t care if that’s true. Although I would want to know what kind of tech they’re using, because it’d have to be good to get past me, Hunk, and the Castle’s latent anti-spyware.”

“There’s no spying going on, at least that I know of,” Keith tells her duly. 

“So again: why are you here.”

Keith thinks of the cramped seating on his ship, made smaller by his best friend’s voice. The constriction of his heart, the rawness of his throat when he’d run out of air to scream with and had to pause to breathe.

“Shiro sent me a message.”

“A message,” Pidge repeats skeptically.

“To tell me when he—” And again, the words won’t come, his voice paused mid-stride. He clears his throat, tries again, fails again. Pidge waits with a furrowed brow but doesn’t rush him. 

Keith gives up on saying it and shrugs instead. “He made a video to tell me. And I couldn’t … I needed to see. If it was true. If it was … if I could say goodbye.”

Pidge’s mouth moves silently for a second before she straightens. “He flatlined. He had a video set up to send to you if he died?” She whistles, half impressed and half appalled. “That’s some shit.”

“Yeah,” Keith says, not sure what else there is to say.

They sit together in contemplative silence for a few minutes before Pidge clears her throat. “Not that I’m complaining, or mad about it, by why did you come back, if you thought he was gone?”

“What?”

When he turns to look, Pidge is frowning and turning her personal tablet over and over in her hands. “Seeing him is one thing, but we all just sort of figured—well, you’re off being an intergalactic James Bond, right? And we missed you, but he,” and here she thrusts her chin toward Shiro, “always told us to knock it off when we joked about figuring out how to kidnap you and bring you back here, or trying to guilt trip you into coming back. We figured he knew something we didn’t.”

He chews on that, pushes through a reflexive hurt at not having known that the team missed him. Tells himself that he did know they cared, even if he doubted from time to time.

“He knew it was important to me,” Keith tells her slowly, considering his words before saying them. One thing the Blades have given him is an instinct for thinking before he speaks, a brain-to-mouth filter he’d never really honed before all this. “He probably just wanted me to have my space.”

“He’s given you a couple thousand lightyears of space, by my count,” Pidge snorts. “For what it’s worth, he always seemed happier after you called. We all were.”

Keith finds he has nothing to say to that.

He nods up at Pidge and goes back to watching Shiro breathe. 

| | | 

Someone, probably Pidge, has thrown a blanket over his shoulders at some point.

The Castle is always a degree of cold. They’re in the vacuum of space; Keith considers himself lucky to not be covered in a thin sheen of ice at all times.

Keith gets up slowly, taking care to stay wrapped up in the blanket ike an oversized bat, and checks Shiro’s chart on the tank’s tablet. The only update it has for him is that the removal of the arm was a success, and Shiro’s vitals remain stable. Fantastic.

Now if only there was an estimate of when he might wake up.

He sets a rule on the tablet to ping Keith’s comms if there are any changes to Shiro’s condition and sets out to find the rest of the team who seem to be raring to talk with him anyway.

The gang is patching up Red when he finds them, chattering and scraping away at peeling paint, taking measurements and tightening bots. 

It’s Hunk who spots him first. “Keith!” he calls, straightening up and lifting his arms in a stretch before bounding over to wrap him up in a hug. “Good to see you. We tried to drop off food, but you were asleep and we didn’t want to wake you up.”

“It’s fine,” he says, glancing around the hangar. “How is everyone? It’s … good to see you all.”

Pidge and Lance wrap up what they’re doing and come over to hug him next, and Keith allows it with enough grace that they give him searching looks, like they’re concerned he’s getting better at being on a team.

“The Blades are pretty tactile,” he says by way of explanation. “What are we working on?

“Red, right now. We finished up with Green and Yellow already,” Pidge tells him. “Blue is up next, and then we’re going to see what we can do about Black.”

“She’s that bad off?”

Lance rubs his hands over his face, smearing oil over the right side in uneven streaks. “The other Lions really only got minor damage. Black got thrown around pretty hard, but the real damage is something we haven’t been able to figure out yet.”

“The diagnostics are all coming up with surface-level damage,” Pidge tells him, “but she isn’t coming online. We’re getting reads by plugging directly into her data ports, not downloading it from her like we usually do.”

Keith frowns. “Is that why Shiro isn’t waking up?”

Allura walks up, head cocked, a mirrored frown on her face. “Perhaps. The swelling in Shiro’s brain has gone down, and while he would be in pain, he is not on the kind of sedatives that would keep him unconscious. But brains sometimes require more rest than science would suggest.” 

She shrugs at Keith and they stare at one another for a few long moments. “It is … good to see you, Keith.”

“Same,” he says. Shrugs. The tension from finding out that he’s part Galra hasn’t faded, not entirely, but she seems willing to make that her own problem, which is all Keith asks. He turns his attention back to Pidge, who’s clearly taking the lead on Lion tune-ups. “How can I help?”

Lance squawks excitedly. “You’re staying? For how long??”

“Uh, I don’t know. I don’t have an end date? We’ll … see how long it takes for Shiro to wake up.”

Pidge hums, clearly biting back something. But in the end, she just puffs up her cheeks, blows out a breath and gestures to Red. “We’re almost done here. Would you go pull the latest diagnostic scan from Blue? It’ll be nice to get that running and see what she’s already repaired herself, what we’ll need to do ourselves. Hunk can go with you and start popping open the panels and you guys can grab supplies for when the rest of us get over there.”

“Sure thing. After you, Hunk.”

| | |

It’s good to work on the Lions again, to be around the paladins and talk and hang out.

It’s also fucking weird.

Outside of his semi-regular calls with Shiro, which included the group half the time anyway, Keith has been running missions with the Blade, doing training with the Blades, or training on his own so he can hold his ground with the Blades. All of that doesn’t leave a ton of time to have casual conversation, much less conversation that Keith can actually keep up with. 

There are a lot of jokes Keith sort of vacantly grins through with the Blades, on account of not knowing what a kr’lotinar is and being too afraid to ask.

It’s nice to spend a couple days fixing up Blue, sitting beside Shiro and meditating or napping, eating with the team. The pace is steady, quiet, humming with camaraderie that he’s trying to fall back into step with.

But he’s not in step with them yet, and maybe that’s why he finds himself prowling around the Castle, trying to hunt down traces of his best friend.

Shiro’s room doesn’t offer many clues about the man. His place back on Earth had been cluttered, filled with knickknacks and snacks, pictures of his family and vacations and Keith. This is spartan. Even the dust finds little to cling to. Keith can’t bring himself to break the stillness of the room by digging into his files to see the other recordings Shiro had mentioned in the video.

The training room is a bustling place, so Keith takes to coming at odd times. When everyone is asleep, or running drills in their Lions. He trains, of course. Works out, fights the robots, works out again. At some point, he fiddles with the training deck’s system enough to access recordings of matches against the droids, and he watches Shiro’s late-night bouts for hours. 

There are other recordings from during the day, but they only prove what Keith’s suspected: Shiro goes light on his spars during the day, when the other paladins are watching. At night, shadows under his eyes, mouth set in a grim, sleepless line, Shiro is nothing short of devastating. Every movement is precise, deadly, utterly without hesitation. So different from the careful calculation of his pulled punches in front of everyone else, like he’s scared of scaring them.

It makes Keith ache.

And then there’s Black. 

Keith scrabbles his way into her jaw on a whim. She’s still not responding to commands or prompts, but her hatch is still open from when the team had to haul Shiro out. 

He brings a flashlight as a precaution, but he needn’t have bothered. Her track lights hum to life as he walks, illuminating the paths down to the engines, the life support systems, the two small bunks, the kitchenette and bathroom. He takes his time, and it’s not until the lights start to dim, changing from a warm purple to a strangely thick gray light that he admits that he’s biding his time. Avoiding where he knows he needs to go.

With a sigh, Keith makes his way up to the cockpit.

It smells like all their cockpits smell these days: like adrenalin, sweat, ozone and ash. Like their pilots.

God, it smells like Shiro. He tries not to sink to his knees at the realization and then gives it up as a lost cause when it happens anyway. 

The whine is back in his throat, building in pitch. For the first time in days, Keith lets it.

Lets it build, and crest into a long, high keen. He curls into a ball and covers his ears with his hands, his eyes with his knees, and lets himself cry. 

For Shiro, his best friend, that stupid, funny, brilliant boy who wanted to see the stars. For Shiro, the man who can decimate whole squads of soldiers but still tells the worst jokes. For himself, lost and alone in space, clawing his way into a family, into a legacy. For himself, alone, a ghost of the boy who wanted to eat the cosmos and who now just wants to rest.

Eventually, a humming starts at the nape of his neck. Half-sensation, half-anticipation. Like nails scratching softly through his hair. Keith sniffles and tries to wipe the snot and tears off of his face, tilting his head like he can listen hard enough to resolve the feeling into something that makes sense.

It takes him a few more stupid blinks before he realizes—oh. It’s Black.

Black is humming under his skin, a rumbling counterpoint to his own pitched breaths.

A spark flares. Pain and worse, pain and better. Opening his eyes in a dark room, a bright room, Shiro’s room back on base. Keith curled up on the bed, napping, while Shiro has his bi-weekly phone call with his mom in the background. Cheeto crumbs on the bed and sludgy coffee on the nightstand. The stars. 

Oh, the stars.

He falls up, up, up, into the sky. And the stars tumble over his fingertips. Red dwarfs, luminous giants, nebulae, planets, things humans have yet to name.

At the end of it—at the start of it—there is a roar. 

No, not a roar; the sound of the universe. The hinge of every orbit, the hiss and spit of every sun. Rumbling, grinding. Entropy in a single note.

Black-and-not-Black prowls at the heart of it all, watching, pacing. Her head swings toward Keith in a predatory slide. He is beheld.

“Shiro?” he asks. Something tells him that she is not here to entertain his sightseeing or philosophizing. Just as well; that’s always been more Shiro’s thing, anyway.

Black-and-not-Black prowls closer. And closer. And closer still.

He’d suspected she was massive, but this is a classification beyond that. Black, here, is a titan. An old god and an aspect of a god older still. Keith shivers but does not falter. “I just want him back,” he calls. “Please, I just want to know how to keep him safe.”

Something ripples. His entire being, maybe.

Keith sees Shiro on the training deck at the Castle, laying low a swathe of robots. 

Shiro, on his knees in the shower, cradling his head in both hands, eyes blank and lungs the mechanical bellow of a hummingbird.

Shiro, in Keith’s old quarters, flesh hand clawing at his metal arm.

Shiro in the arena, blood matted in his hair, dripping from his chin, mouth smeared with it, eyes burning, not human. A fissure between Shiro now and Shiro before.

Shiro, dead on the table, the Galra witch shouting to get his heart beating again, forcing him alive again through quintessence and sheer hubris.

Shiro, dead in the cockpit of Black, blood seeping out of his suit while Lance hyperventilates and tidies his limbs over Hunk’s back, and they take off running, getting Shiro to the medbay with their last reserves, still too late.

“No,” Keith chokes out. No time has passed, but he’s lived the minutes and hours beyond himself. “No, I don’t want to bring him back to that.”

Shiro, smiling wanly over what passes for breakfast on the ship as the others talk and laugh.

Shiro, one hand on Lance’s shoulder and the other on Pidge’s as Keith’s ship fades into the distance, headed for the Marmora base with no immediate plans to return. Lance’s mouth is set in a thin line. Pidge knocks her head against Shiro’s shoulder. Shiro offers Hunk a comforting smile.

Shiro, offering tips to Hunk as he dances back from the thwak of Allura’s bo staff as they spar on the training mat. 

Shiro, listening to Matt recount the time he and his father had spent on a backwater planet controlled by the Galra, not offering any of his own war stories in return. 

“That’s not … then what do you want for him?”

The stars shift, reform. Light, thick as silk, shifts until it’s sand whipping across the desert. A galaxy reforms itself into a house with a wraparound porch. Keith walks toward it, every step eating up too much ground.

Inside, there’s a small living area, a tiny kitchen. Down the hall, the bedroom door swings open. Starlight glimmers inside. 

On the bed, Shiro is dreaming. One arm is flung out toward Keith. His face is still scarred, his other arm still gone, but he looks younger than he has in a decade. There are no lines bracketing his mouth. Crows feet are beginning to fan out from the corners of his eyes.

Handsome. He’s so handsome, here in this crowded room. Keith can’t make out the shape of any one thing, but he knows instinctively that there is art covering the walls, tchotchkes tucked into every nook and cranny, clothes spilling out from the closet. He’s handsome here in his home, safe and warm and looked after.

“Shiro,” Keith whispers.

His eyes flutter open, a line creasing his brow. “Keith?”

“Hey, hey.” Keith goes to his knees at Shiro’s side and grabs his hand in both of his own. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“Mrmph.”

Keith laughs. “Yeah, I hear you.” He rests his forehead on their twined hands. “I hear you, Takashi.”

He looks up to see Shiro looking back at him. “You’re here. How are you … here?” Shiro looks around with dazed wonder. 

“I don’t know. We’re in Black, somehow. And also maybe another dimension?”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, closing his eyes again. “Sounds like her.”

Keith files away all of the questions he has about that for another time and focuses on the present problem. “Hey, uh, there’s no good way to say this, but you know you died?”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

Shiro rolls his head to look over at Keith and smiles. “‘S’nice of Black to let me talk with you one last time. Didn’t think I’d have that. Didn’t think I’d get to see you again. You know, I thought I’d forgotten how gorgeous your eyes were?”

“Uh,” Keith says, very intelligently if he says so himself. What the fuck. 

“Am I going to … fade, now? Always sort of thought I’d be reincarnated, but I guess becoming one with the universe is cool, too.”

“Fade? What? No! Shiro, no. You—” Keith starts, only to get cut off with an eye roll from Shiro and a snort. Asshole.

“You said I’m dead. So are you ushering me on? What’s next?”

Keith considers murdering his best friend for a not inconsiderable length of time. “No, dipshit, I’m trying to save you. You died for a minute, and the team got you on life support. It’s time to go back.”

“Back to what?”

“Back to …”

Keith swallows. What is Shiro supposed to be going back to? Back to more of what Black had shown him? Was that what Shiro thought, all that Shiro expected?

No. There’s more. There’s always a chance for more. “Back to me,” he chokes out. “Shiro, come back to me.”

Shiro smiles at him, and it’s a wrung-out, resigned twist of his lips that makes the bottom of Keith’s stomach fall out. “You’ve got bigger things than me to worry about, Keith. It’s okay. It’s my time.”

“Fuck you, there’s no time . You’re not supposed to die on me. I just got you back.”

Shiro squeezes his hand. “Baby, I was always going to die out here. There’s no making it out for me. You know that.”

“No! No, I don’t know that. What are you talking about?”

Shrio blinks, and blinks again. “Are you real?” At Keith’s nod, he swallows and presses on. “Then you know I’ve been planning for this since you found me. I’m not going to make it out of this war, Keith. I … I tried to hang onto Black as long as I could. Tried to be the line, to hold the center.” He laughs: an awful, aching, wet sound. Too much bitter and not enough feeling. “But I’m tired. I’m so goddamn tired. And there’s nowhere left in the galaxy for me after this is over. There’s hardly anywhere left for me now.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Keith …”

“No,” Keith tells him again. “No, you have to hang in there. For me. I’ll find a way for us. Please, just. Trust me, Shiro. Trust me one last time.”

The stars start to blink out around them. One, then three. A line that once was something like a bookshelf. The blanket covering Shiro dims and fades. They’re running out of time. 

“I trust you,” Shiro sighs. “I trust you. But do you want to put yourself through this again?”

Keith levers himself until he’s halfway on the bed and can push their foreheads together. “I’d lose you a thousand times if I knew you’d come back to me. But I”m not gonna lose you again. That’s an order, Shiro.”

“Okay. Okay, Keith,” he says, soft, awake . “I’ll try.”

| | |

Keith wakes up to an echo of that rumbling sound of a collapsing galaxy. It takes him a minute to realize it’s not a remnant of the … dream, but something vibrating through the Black Lion in real time. 

“Black?” he asks, rubbing at his head. Oh, this is going to leave a migraine.

The vibration kicks up a notch.

He stands on shaky legs and tilts his head up to eye the ceiling for lack of anything better to look at. “Yeah, okay. Well I’m gonna sit until I stop seeing double, and then we can work on what you need me to do,” he tells her and all but collapses in the pilot’s chair.

The lights blink, flashing over from that sickly gray to a deep indigo. The vibration rattles his teeth. The dashboard gleams with readouts, status updates, flight logs. 

Keith tilts his head back until it thunks against the pilot’s seat and closes his eyes. 

“Sure, good to see you too.”

Chapter Text

He wakes up to a frenzy of calls over the paladin’s comm link.

Lance is barking out “ Report , Black Lion, can you hear us?” while Pidge and Hunk shout over one another. Allura’s voice is missing, but that makes a certain amount of sense. She’s probably piloting the Castle—they’ve been moving fast, staying off the radar, buying themselves time before their next fight. 

Keith coughs, snapping upright and rubbing at his eyes. He’d definitely drifted off there for a second.

“I’m here, guys,” he rasps. 

The comms go dead for a second before exploding again in a chaos of chatter, questions about Black waking up, exclamations of surprise and disbelief, relief at finding Keith.

Turns out, he’d been in Black for two days. 

His muscles are sore with disuse and cold, his hair is an oily wreck, and his throat hurts from … whatever. Screaming, maybe. Crying, definitely. Keith picks his way gingerly out of the Lion and beelines straight for medbay. 

When he gets there, his heart sheds another scaly layer.

In the tank, pale and silent, lies Shiro. No changes to his condition on his chart, and no new updates from the the other paladins about his conditions. A waiting game, still. 

Keith does his best to hold himself together as he nods and excuses himself to shower and nap. They make plans to start work on Black, now that she’s back online, the next morning. 

He prays to whatever passes for a god out in the universe that he can drag his crumbling heart through it.

| | |

They patch Black up. Keith eats meals with the team, and trains with them.

He’s not the trainer Shiro is, but he offers tips and pointers where he can, explains the techniques he’s picked up from the Blades.

They play a giant game of capture the flag; Coran even manages to rope Allura into it.

He doesn’t let himself sit still for too long, to be alone for too long.

He’s afraid he’ll never get up again if he lets himself. 

| | |

They’re in a dogfight with a small Galra squadron, Keith slipping into Black like a comfortable old hoodie and twice as guilty about it, when the alert pops up in Keith’s viewscreen. Black sends a warm pulse in their bond, just shy of too hot. An affectionate nudge and a warning.

“Shit fucking fuck ,” he spits out, muting his comm before diving into the more colorful curses popular with the Blades.

“Anything wrong, Black?” Lance calls.

Keith unmutes long enough to reply in the negative before muting himself again to mutter threats to the universe and insults to Zarkon’s mother as he dives back into the fray. 

| | |

Black is the last Lion back to the hangars.

They’ve got all the doors and seals working again. Small mercies. But even so, Keith hangs back to make sure that all the other Lions are accounted for and all the paladins sign off without reporting any injuries before he runs final checks on Black, unharnesses himself, and stalks out of the hangar. 

The last alert from the med tank had come through over an hour ago, signaling that Shiro had fully stabilized and unhooked himself from the monitors.

Keith isn’t sure if that’s a good or bad sign. It has to be good, right?

He’s halfway to medbay when Coran announces over the intercom that Shiro has made his way up to the bridge.

Heart in his throat, Keith double times it up the stairs, ricocheting through hallways and lounges. The Castle is labyrinthine, but his muscle memory is reliable enough to get him there faster than everyone but Lance.

“—looked great out there,” Shiro is saying. Lance is hanging off of him like a limpet, slapping his back and tucking his face into Shiro’s shoulder.

Keith feels a bolt of jealousy that he quickly tamps down. Shiro deserves to be missed.

Shiro shoots Keith a kids, what can you do? look, a face they’ve traded back and forth a million times over the years when one of the paladins acts ridiculous, as Allura rushes in. She’s a few beats behind Keith, and probably only later than him at all because running through the Castle outside of an emergency is beneath her.

She strides up to Shiro just as Lance clocks her coming and slides out of the way. Without pausing, she wraps Shiro in a fierce hug. “We missed you,” she whispers, voice rough. 

“Back at ya,” Shiro tells her, hand running soothing circles on her armored back. “I was just telling Lance how well you all handled yourselves out there.”

Keith drifts to the side, hovering at the edge of Coran’s space, as Hunk and Pidge barrel through the door, tripping over each other in their haste to say hi to Shiro. 

“Ah, it’s good to see the kids all together again,” Coran says, wiping what Keith is positive is a fake tear from his eye. 

“It is. He up here for long?”

Coran raises an eyebrow and looks at him out of the corner of his eye. “A while. He watched the fight with me. I made him sit down for it, get that look off your face.”

Keith huffs but grins at him. “Thanks.”

“It’s good to see you back, too, you know.”

“... Yeah.” He swallows. “I know.”

“Good.” Coran slaps his hands together and strides forward. “Now that we’re all reacquainted, time for a good scrub, I think. You all smell wretched. Shiro can give me, er, well, a hand in the kitchen. Or maybe a good nose. You should still be resting, young man. Off you go,” he tells the group, making shooing motions. “I’ll see you in just a tick, once you’re cleaned up.” He nods encouragingly at Allura before absconding with Shiro with shocking ease. 

Keith does not want to be impressed. He resolves to be unimpressed. 

(He wonders if he should be taking notes on Coran’s paladin-wrangling techniques anyway.)

Dinner goes smoothly. It’s rowdy, as always. The food tastes only mildly better than the toothpaste-tube meals Keith uses for rations on longer missions, but he’ll take it.

As the kids bicker over whose turn it is to do dishes (which really means who will stack them and put them on the conveyor belt that automatically cleans and puts away the dishes) and Allura and Coran talk politics, Keith catches Shiro’s eye and tilts his head toward the door.

Shiro slumps in relief and nods, widening his eyes in a plea.

“Let me take you back to your room,” Keith says, loud enough to carry without cutting into anyone’s conversation.

Pidge glances up at them but doesn’t break her rant about chore rotation. Coran winks at him. Keith rolls his eyes and moves to the other side of Shiro, offering him a hand up.

They walk in silence to Shiro’s room. The further they get from the dining room, the slower they walk, the more Shiro leans into Keith’s shoulder.

“Okay?” Keith asks a couple minutes in. He doesn’t push further when Shiro only offers him a tight nod.

Thankfully, Keith had ordered the ship to clean up Shiro’s room after a few days in the Castle, tired of sneezing every time he came in here. How is there so much dust in space?

So when he bullies Shiro into sitting on the bed instead of on the couch, because he honestly looks like shit and will probably fall asleep before they can finish a conversation, it’s to fresh sheets and fluffed pillows. Shiro sighs, his spine popping as he relaxes.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

They stare at each other for a second before they both break off into giggles.

Keith sinks down onto the bed next to Shiro, careful to put himself on Shiro’s left side, where Shiro can easily reach out to hold or push or punch him if he wants. Like the end of an equation, Shiro tips into the motion, pushing their sides together, arm slipping around Keith’s waist so naturally that he almost doesn’t notice that he’s got an arm around Shiro’s shoulders, pulling Shiro’s face into Keith’s neck. 

“I meant it,” Shiro says at length. “You guys looked great in there. You’re good with Black.”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up. I thought you died. You told me you died.”

“Keith. I’m … sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“For what ,” Keith snarls. Because now that Shiro’s alive and in his arms and breathing, there is a list that Keith has been doing his best not to put together of things he’s going to gut Shiro like a fish for. Starting with, “For sending me a fucking goodbye video? For dying on me? For almost not coming back? For leaving me alone in this goddamn universe all by myself?”

“What?” Shiro asks, pulling back, straightening up. Keith almost pulls him back in, because distance is not allowed right now, but restrains himself at the last second.

“Why did you … when did you do that? Taping it. That wasn’t, you said it wasn’t the first. How long have you—” He cuts himself off, but the end of the sentence rings between them anyway. How long have you been planning to die?

Shiro closes his eyes. “It’s not like that.”

“Like what? Like you were planning to leave me? Like you don’t expect to make it out of this?”

“I don’t.”

It’s Keith’s turn to pull back. Even having heard it before, the words pull at his chest like gravity during a rocket launch. He can’t keep up with them.

“You know that,” Shiro is saying. Pleading. “Keith, you knew that, on some level. I’m not … I’m something else, now. I’m barely human. I can’t sleep through the night, I have to remember to pull every punch, I don’t know how to … do taxes , or what living looks like outside of a warzone, anymore. And now, with the arm, losing Black. Keith, don’t look at me like that.” Shiro’s voice is so soft. Cajoling. “I’m not making it out of this.”

His face twists up without his permission. The tears don’t fall, but only because he’s cried himself out these past couple weeks. “No. I don’t accept that.”

Shiro laughs. There isn’t an ounce of humor in it. “It doesn’t matter if you accept it or not, Keith. But it hurts less to roll with it.”

And he thinks—of that place in the stars. Inside Black. Shiro, cradled in a galaxy, at peace. A desert in the gaping maw of space.

He can work with this. He has to work with this.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Shiro asks, skeptical.

Well, fair. But two can play this game. “Okay, I’ll let you go, if that’s what you need. But,” he takes deep breath and forces himself to meet Shiro’s eyes, “you have to stay with me this year.”

Shiro raises his eyebrows. “That’s a tall order.”

“Not next to me. But you have to stay alive for one more year, Shiro. And I’ll get us out of this, or I’ll let both of us go. That’s my offer.”

“That’s a shitty offer. You can’t—”

“I can,” Keith cuts him off, clenching his jaw and sticking his chin out. Defiant and scared out of his skin. “There’s no me without you, Shiro. We’re it. It’s you and me. So if you’re going to let this war eat you alive, then I’m going to be there bleeding out with you.”

“Don’t put that on me,” Shiro rasps. He looks sick at the offer.

Good .

“Then you’ll have to stay alive to keep it from happening. One year, Shiro, and we’re out. I’ll get us there in a year.”

“Where?”

The disbelief is fair, but stings nonetheless. And Keith doesn’t have it in him to say. Some things are too good for words. Too precious to let the universe get hold of. 

He shakes his head. “I can see it, Shiro,” he says, because it’s true. Because he’s seen it with, if not his eyes, at least his soul. A way out for both of them. Peace, or something close enough to it. “You just have to trust me until then. Just enough belief to get us through the year.”

“I’d follow you anywhere. It’s just the believing that’s hard these days.”

“Then we won’t worry about belief. Trust me, then. Jump and see if I catch you or if we both go crashing down.”

Shiro leans in until their foreheads knock together. They breathe, slow and deep, until their lungs pump in time. Keith can nearly hear Shiro chewing it over, and tells himself it’s a good thing that Shiro is really considering it instead of placating him.

Finally, Shiro nods, still pressed against him. “Okay. One year.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Not great,” Shiro tells him sheepishly. “I keep overcompensating for the arm. Whole side is a lot lighter.”

“I’m the one who approved the removal. So … I’m sorry, too.” Admitting it feels like a failure, somehow. A betrayal of Shiro’s trust. But he deserves to know. 

“Don’t be,” Shiro says firmly. “You did what needed to be done. I’ll never say no to mercy.”

“You don’t miss it?”

Shiro snorts. “Fuck no.” And that’s right, isn’t it? Keith thinks about the videos of Shiro trying his best to tear the prosthetic off with his bare hand, of the way his soul in Black was missing the arm, too. “But Coran told me they could probably make a new prosthetic for me with Altean tech now that it’s off.”

“Oh.” Keith kneads at Shiro’s right shoulder, tense with nothing to carry, and bites his lip. “Do you want it?”

He shrugs. “Does it matter? It’ll keep me going. I have to do that now, you know. For at least a few more months.”

“One year,” Keith says on a giddy laugh. This might all be going to hell, but they’ve got at least that much time. “We can survive one year. We’ve survived a ton of them already.” His laugh trails off into a harsh sigh, and he tugs on Shiro’s arm until they both go sprawling over the narrow bed, half on top of each other and curled up on top of the covers. “Let’s spend the whole first day of it sleeping.”

“Sounds like heaven.” 

| | |

There’s a lot of scut work to do. 

Keith cleans and polishes his armor every day, oils and whets his blade. Calls Kolivan and has a tense but not unpleasant meeting notifying him that he’ll be piloting the Black Lion for the immediate future, as Shiro is not available at the moment. Sits in on Coran and Pidge and Hunk tossing specs for Shiro’s new arm back and forth, all of them jostling to measure Shiro’s arm and debating tensile strength, oblivious to the way Shiro is tamping back on a grimace.

A week passes, then another.

He takes to sleeping in Shiro’s bed. 

The twisted sheets and whispered jokes and early mornings are hardly new, but they’re precious nonetheless. He and Shiro have had so few stretches of time together like this. 

Maybe it’s weird that they don’t fuck. The rest of the team thinks they are.

But this—face tucked into Shiro’s chest, listening to his godawful snoring, stuffed under every blanket from both of their rooms, every inch of skin they can manage touching—is something holy. Not better, but different. Something Keith needs right now.

Anything else feels like a jinx. Like he’ll press too hard and the universe will take that future out of his hands.

So they don’t press more than indistinct kisses on foreheads and cheeks and knuckles, and they only sleep together like this, twined tight and safe. And it’s the best night’s sleep either of them have had in ages every time. 

“Mornin’.” Shiro’s voice rumbles into Keith’s forehead where it’s pressed against him, warming him down to his toes.

“Mm.”

“Don’t you have dry runs with the team today? Time to get up.”

How is Shiro so immediately awake in the mornings? It’s cruel and unusual punishment. Keith takes back all his warm and fuzzy feelings. This is harassment. “Blugh,” he says. Excellent summation, self. Really got the point across.

Shiro laughs and hugs Keith tighter to his chest. He can be forgiven this once, Keith decides. “C’mon, up we go.”

“No,” Keith sulks, and shoves his face in tighter to Shiro’s body. He promptly gets distracted by rubbing his stubble over the thick hair coating Shiro’s chest, inhaling the sleep-deep scent of him. He brings one hand up to knead at Shiro’s pec and then squishes it more firmly against his cheek. “Your tits are amazing,” he tells him dreamily.

Then freezes. Maybe that was insulting?

It’s just that Shiro really does have, just, the best pecs Keith has ever seen, let alone had the privilege of touching. He sort of wants to live with his face smushed between them forever.

To his relief, though, Shiro just snorts and brings his hand up so he can squish the pec Keith isn’t holding against the other side of his head.

“You’re so fucking weird,” Shiro tells him, voice fond and bright with laughter.

Keith gracefully allows Shiro to hold him like that for a while, luxuriating in the warmth and closeness.

Twenty minutes later, showered and mostly clothed, he leans on the bathroom wall and watches Shiro rinse himself off perfunctorily. It’s all precision, impersonal even with himself. Keith wants to bite him, to drag him back into his own body again. 

Instead, he rolls his shoulders, grimacing as they click and pop. “Are you getting the new arm on today?”

“I guess.”

“You guess ?”

“Coran said we’d try it out today and make sure that it fits. Maybe run down to the training deck and make sure it doesn’t explode when I use it. It’s supposed to be … pretty big, I think.”

“Cool,” Keith says, instead of okay well fuck that, you sound miserable, because he has just under eleven months left to make shit happen before shit happens to them. That deadline does not include time for therapy.

Therapy happens around month fifteen, as best as Keith can figure. It’s a secondary goal. The first priority is to keep them both moving until then.

The Holts are already working on a ship to give Voltron a run for its money, if not quite in league with it. They’re sending Shiro updates every day, long video conferences going over blueprints, defensive and offensive capabilities, options for power and fire power. Shiro talks about it sometimes at night, when Keith is firmly shut down for the day. 

Hearing his best friend talk without needing to answer is soothing, and a good way to catch up with the parts he’s missed by being with the Blades for so long.

“Hey,” Shiro says, unfolding himself from the cramped shower stall, dried soap-powder puffing off him in a little wave. “See you at dinner?”

“Not if I don’t see you first. I want to get a look at what that arm does.”

“Sure thing. Good luck out there.”

“Yeah, you too.” He rolls onto his tiptoes to brush a kiss against Shiro’s forehead and makes his way to Black’s hangar.

It’s going to be a long day.

| | | 

“I wasn’t expecting something so, uh …”

“Big?” Shiro offers drily.

Big is an understatement. His new arm is gigantic. Imposing, not only in its size, but in the electric blue glow, the maneuverability. In the base of it, built like a cuff affixed to Shiro’s shoulder, attached to him.

He wants to rip it off on sight. 

“That’s a word for it.”

“It’s surprisingly sensitive,” Shiro tells him, like he’s trying to find the good in being part-machine, a unified weapon, once again. “And has a lot of dexterity.”

“Well, you can try it out on my ass later,” Keith says with a huff, peering down at the joins on the palm of the metal arm, prodding at it to see what weapons or features are hiding from a casual scan.

“Ahhhh?”

“GROSS!”

“My ears!!”

Right, he forgot the kids were in the room.

He’s about to snap at them when he looks up to see Shiro biting his lip in a futile effort to hold back a giggle.

The tension breaks. Shiro is the first to laugh, but Keith follows along shortly after. Pidge complains in the background, but Hunk and Lance just start loudly asking Coran for more information on the arm.

That night, Keith wraps himself around Shiro and bites his shoulder. 

“Ow! Are you a vampire now?”

Keith headbuts him in the same shoulder he bit. “Just keeping you here.”

“Consider me kept, bud.” His voice is soft in the darkness of the room, curling in close around them. He sounds exhausted.

Well, that makes two of them. Keith dozes off before he can ask him more about the arm, how it feels, what it’ll be able to do. The days have been long and getting longer as they prep for more pitched battles.

| | | 

Between long video calls with allies and potential allies, training, and the general monotony of space travel interrupted only occasionally by fights or fun, Shiro and Keith develop complementary tics. Shiro’s eye takes to twitching when he’s especially stressed. 

When Keith points out that he’s turning into a stressed old man, Shiro prods at Keith’s right bicep and says it does the same thing. They laugh helplessly and go back to planning out the team’s training schedule.

The Castle is closing in on Earth, stopping at a Galra outpost on the way there to pick yet another fight. They stop at the last populated planet before Earth and try to cajole, threaten, and bribe them into joining the alliance against the Galra. 

They spend a fruitless week there, and it leaves the team even more stir-crazy than when they landed. The planet’s inhabitants don’t seem to feel much urgency about the immediate threat of the empire. Zarkon’s reach continues to edge into this part of the galaxy, but slowly. They’re hoping that it’ll be enough to get a few defenses up and running on the ground on Earth (and in the sky) before the full fleet arrives, but that’s hardly insurance for other planets that might get caught in the crossfire, or in the lines of supply and retreat. 

It might be Keith’s imagination, but he’s starting to think his and Shiro’s hair is starting to salt and pepper. He jokes that they’ll match Allura soon as they walk out of another failed meeting, the seventh state on this planet that doesn’t see the use in working with them.

Shiro makes a scrunched face at Keith. 

“What?” Keith asks, keeping his voice down, bumping their shoulders together. They’re outside, walking to a pod cruiser that’ll take them back to the Castle, but it never hurts to be cautious. 

A shrug. “Just that, you know. I never thought I’d get to see what I looked like with gray hair.”

“Oh.”

This time, Shiro bumps their shoulders together. “Hey, did your dad have gray hair?”

“We’re not talking about this,” Keith says, too quick. 

“Oh?” Shiro jabs him in the ribs and grins. “Because he did? Because he was hot? Kind of a dil—”

“Takashi Shirogane, I will make your murder look like an accident if you finish that sentence,” he hisses. Shiro just throws his head back and laughs, booming across the mostly-empty street. In front of them, Allura and Lance both stumble and whip around to look at them. Pidge and Hunk are probably staring from behind them, too.

He rolls his eyes and slaps Shiro on the shoulder. “You’re so fucking embarrassing.”

Later, Keith will blame Shiro calling his dad a dilf for why he doesn’t notice the government agents hemming them in.

If they were on Earth, Keith would say that the agents threw a smoke bomb at them. It certainly does the trick; thick, cloying smoke that smells like burnt honey explodes out from a canister launched tidily at Allura’s feet.

The world goes sideways as Shiro punches into his side. Keith is reaching for his blade even as Shiro pulls him behind a nearby bench and wrangles Keith under him in a protective curl.

They both go prey-stil, listening for the crunch of boots.

Keith flips onto his back and winces. The join of Shiro’s arm glows a steady blue, refracted by the fog into an eerie beacon.

Shiro follows his line of sight and hisses out a curse.

“New plan,” he whispers into Keith’s ear, both of them still scanning, scanning for movement. “Get to the others. Pidge and Hunk should be a few meters back, they’ll need you more.”

There’s no time to argue. Keith pulls back to meet his eyes, nods once, and rolls out from under him. He’s running before he’s fully standing, dashing to the nearest clump of maybe-trash, maybe-art, just big enough and close enough for the two paladins to have hunkered down behind.

Shots ring out, like nails tapping on a thin sheet of metal. Whatever the weapons are, they drop the temperature around him by at least ten degrees.

He launches himself over the installation and grunts as a hand snaps out to grab him by the ankle and slam him into the ground using the momentum of his jump.

“You’ve been paying attention during training,” he wheezes once he’s got his breath back.

Hunk grimaces at him in apology but keeps an eye out the way they came. Pidge is peeping out from the top of the installation, keeping tabs in the other direction. 

Around them, the smoke is clearing in wisps of white and chill.

A shout. A thud. Pidge aims her bayard and adds to the cacophony.

Keith gets his knees under him and looks out, too.

What he sees doesn’t click, not at first.

One agent is held in the air, suspended by nothing, before being shot from a blast in the other direction—Allura or Lance. The agent is dropped as soon as the bolt hits, and a large metal hand detaches.

A cluster of agents spill out of the ally closest to the bench Keith and Shiro had ducked behind, chasing the arm as it returns to Shiro’s side. They’re in tight formation, blasters tucked under their armpits, sights up, filing out in two rows of three.

The arm doesn’t return to Shiro’s side.

Instead, it slingshots out again, driving hard into the first agent in the row with enough force to audibly crack their armor and probably part of their ribcage, if the crack that rings out is any indication. They go wheeling back into the person behind them, and the last person in the row is caught in the crush. The three are rocked off their feet.

The arm careens back toward Shiro, gathering power again.

Shiro, who’s running to meet it, dagger in a reverse grip. The arm slots back into place, hums, and zips out again, this time aiming for the other three, who have started to disperse—not fast enough. 

Keith doesn’t wait to see Shiro finish them off. He uses the distraction and Pidge’s cover to run to the other side of the street, where another group of six had converged on the street.

Four are down or dead from Pidge, Allura, and Lance’s shots. The remaining two are shouldering the wall of the ally they approached from.

He waits for another round of shots to close the last ten feet, crouches, and then springs up inside the guard of the agent closest to him. He gets one, two slashes deflected by the agent’s tac vest, but it’s still enough to get the right leverage to haul them out into the street. 

He doesn’t look back as two shots ring out, just focuses on the remaining hostile.

They go down almost too easily. He tries not to think about them being government grunts, sent out to attack the aliens without adequate training. They need to keep moving.

He turns back to where Pidge and Hunk were crouched. Hunk is up, blaster sweeping the area, walking backwards and urging Pidge on. Pidge’s lips are pressed tight together, but she’s still on her feet.

Further down the road, Shiro is standing, feet planted, shoulders squared. Keith catches his eye, and he tilts his head toward where Allura and Lance are posted up just shy of the nearest crossroad. He takes off at a jog to catch up to and past them, scouting out the way as Hunk and Pidge catch up to Shiro and he ushers them to meet with Allura and Lance. 

They leapfrog down the route back to the Castle, doubling back or going even further out of their way from time to time. What should have been a few minutes by pod becomes hours on foot. Keith stays in the lead, scouting and gesturing Allura and Lance forward, moving on as they cover any potential threats for Hunk, now supporting Pidge, as they catch up. Shiro will be bringing up the rear. 

In theory, they’ve told the team that anyone could hold the scout position, ideally Keith or Lance, and that anyone could hold the rear position, ideally Shiro or Allura. Shiro and Keith had glanced at one another and raised their eyebrows when Shiro had walked the team through emergency exit strategies, though.

The only way anyone else would be bookending the team was if one of them were bleeding out.

By the time they make it back to the Castle, miraculously having only encountered two more good squads, they’re tired, sore, frustrating, and covered in sweat.

Keith stands at the gate while Allura marches in, unstrapping her armor as she goes.

“Of all the wretched, vile, underhanded tactics to sink to, attacking us in the streets like we’re—” she hisses. Lance trots at her heels, grinning.

“Look a little less besotted, will you?” Keith snips at him as they pass him.

Lance snorts. “Not a chance. Allura insulting people makes my day.”

After them comes Hunk, one arm wrapped around Pidge. Her color looks better, but he’s still keeping her close. Keith nods at Hunk. “Hanging in there?”

“Fine,” Pidge bites out, while Hunk flashes him a tired smile.

They’ll sort it, alone or with the group in the morning. He knows Pidge hates close kills. It’s a lot to put on anyone, let alone someone that young. He makes a mental note to send Shiro after her for a pep talk at some point.

After a taut minute, Shiro comes into view, still moving like a tank. His shoulders are military-taut, his arm humming with the threat of violence and power barely leashed. His eyes are on a swivel, but his chin is cocked, daring anyone to get between him and the door.

Keith lets him come at his own pace.

When Shiro reaches the gates, Keith falls into step behind him, closing and locking the door as they pass.

They walk in silence around the Castle, checking the perimeter. At the bridge, they nod at Coran, who’s been pulled in from what was supposed to be his day off to man the pilot’s chair and alarms, just in case anything else goes awry.

“All good?” Keith asks.

“Oh,” Coran drawls, twirling his mustache. “Just enjoying the lovely scenery. You know, this might be the easiest fight I’ve ever been in.” He laughs and slumps more comfortably into his seat.

They make their way up to their room.

It’s not until they’re down to their undersuits that Shiro looks at Keith, coming back to himself. “You mind if I shower first?” he asks. His voice sounds like rust.

Keith notices for the first time the blood splattered over Shiro’s cheek, crusted and drying on his mechanical hand. Stippled on his armor.

“Yeah. I’ll grab something from the kitchens. We need to eat.” He turns around to head back out, chanting keep moving in his head. It’s that or fall asleep where he stands.

“Wati!”

Keith turns around again, pinching at the bridge of his nose. When he looks up, Shiro’s shoulders are hunched in, and he’s holding the wrist of his mechanical hand with his flesh hand.

The silence drags on. Keith, pettily, waits him out.

Can’t they just go to sleep?

Finally, Shiro clears his throat. “Can you help me? With this? It—takes two hands to turn it off.”

The fight goes out of Keith in a wave, receding just as fast as it came. He looks at Shiro again as Shiro mutters, like he isn’t aware that he’s voicing his thoughts, “I need it off. I need it off. It needs to come off. I need it off. I—” 

His voice cuts off, fading into harsh breaths through his nose, as Keith slowly lifts his hands to where the metal meets flesh and twists the near-invisible dial there. “System,” he says, trying not to speak too loudly, to spook Shiro, “disengage energy attachment.”

“Confirm?” a disembodied voice queries. 

“Con—” Shiro coughs, tries again. “Confirm.”

The blue light fades out. The arm drops into Shiro’s flesh hand.

He takes a step back so it won’t hit either of their feet and drops it on the floor. “Thanks.”

Keith watches him pace into the bathroom and waits for the shower to turn on before he heads to the kitchens. Just keep moving .

| | |

“Hey, where’s Shiro?” Pidge asks at lunch. “I didn’t see him at lunch earlier, and Matt just messaged me to ask if I’d seen him around. Guess he didn’t make their check-in today.”

Lance, lounging against a small mountain of pillows with his feet in Hunk’s lap, makes a questioning sound. “Maybe he’s working with the new arm,” he says, more interested in the complicated game on the tablet he’s trading back and forth with Hunk.

“Maybe. Hey, did you see the new updates to the coalition forces?”

That gets Hunk and Lance’s attention. Allura and Coran have been hard at work corralling their allies, and Shiro has been sitting in on meetings as the former Black Paladin. They’ve been mildly successful. 

It’s closer to a crapshoot than any of them want to acknowledge. Every commitment of more ships is a palpable relief.

Allura looks ready to jump into explanations, leaning forward and disrupting the sleeping mice in her lap in the process.

“No shop talk,” Keith reminds them. He’s got a book on the history of what loosely translates as the second Altean-Romulan war, but it’s on his tablet, so it’s not like any of them can see it and start ribbing him. “Does someone want to pick a movie to put on?”

This afternoon hangout was technically his idea. Time off to ease their aching muscles and team bond or whatever. He’d rather take a nap, but time together has been sparse outside of being linked up in their Lions. Even gym time has been staggered; Keith wakes up before any of them, Allura’s schedule is fucked from all her intergalactic meetings, Lance and Hunk are firmly night owls, and Pidge’s schedule is inscrutable.

Allura wins a lighthearted squabbling match, backed by Lance, who’s a sucker for romantic comedies. Hunk groans as the opening credits roll, but he’s also passing out snacks, eyes glued to the holo-screen.

“Dishes for a week Hunk’s crying in less than an hour,” Keith mutters.

Beside him, Pidge cackles. “I say it takes thirty minutes. You’re on.”

And it’s good. It’s a fun movie, and it’s nice to make a blanket fort and curl up under layers of ice packs and blankets and spend time with the team. It’s nice to come back to.

| | |

Shiro is still in bed by the time Keith drags himself out of the Voltron cuddle pile in the dead of night. Awake, staring blankly at the wall. A slow blink is all the acknowledgement Keith gets when he strips out of his shirt and pants and worms his way under the covers.

“Night, Shiro.”

There’s no answer. 

Keith sighs and pulls the covers around them both tighter. Tomorrow will be better. They just have to keep on moving.

Chapter Text

They touch down on Earth a few weeks later, the Galra hot on their heels (by space travel standards). A few days off, three weeks at most.

Lance, Hunk, and Pidge’s families are waiting for them at the Garrison. Keith nods them off and reminds them to be back in a few hours to start more extensive planning. He catches the nod Shiro sends Sam and Matt Holt. 

Matt jogs over to give both of them a hug, and Keith pats him on the back, glad to see him, glad Shiro has someone else in his corner, before he’s darting back to his sister.

“Your family not coming?” Keith asks after the crowd has dispersed.

Shiro just gives a sarcastic snort and a shake of his head. His family has always been more … cordially estranged than Keith can wrap his head around. He hasn’t honestly even thought to ask if Mrs. Shirogane knows her son is alive.

“You heading to your house?”

“Not yet. We’ll have time for that later.” Shiro raises his eyebrows, but Keith doesn’t deign to answer the unspoken question. No jinxes. “Want to get a jump on playing nice with the brass?”

“Absolutely not. Allura, Coran, let’s go meet Iverson. You’ve talked with him before. He can show us the new ship they’ve been working on.”

Iverson is as much of a hardass as usual, but even he looks like a proud father showing off a newborn when he gives them a tour of Atlas. He shows them the hangars, big enough for the Lions. The weapons systems, modeled after the Castle with a vicious flare that Keith’s only really seen on Earth for all his travels. The crew quarters, the common rooms, the medbay and triage stations and engine rooms and backup systems.

“She’s gorgeous,” Shiro says, voice rough with honesty. 

Iverson grunts and nods. “She’s a beast, no doubt. We’ve had some trouble getting the systems fully online—hoping you all might have some thoughts on that,” he says, nodding to Coran and Allura, “and working on the pilots and crew, of course.”

“Let’s stay after the strategy session this afternoon, go over who you already have and who you need,” Shiro tells him. It’s startling, in these moments, to realize neither of them are cadets anymore, and that Iverson isn’t their grouchy commander but their equal. He blinks at them as Shiro squares his shoulders and smiles his Charming Diplomats and Warlords smile. 

“We can do introductions and run drills in the morning and troubleshoot any issues that come up, then. Coran, we’ll come up with a list of people who might be helpful to you for tuning up the ship at the meeting today; take whoever you need.”

“Aye aye,” Keith snarks under his breath. Iverson shoots him a glare, but Shiro just grins and moves on to what documents they’ll need for the meeting later.

| | |

The meeting is dry as the desert and twice as grating. No surprises there.

Shiro stays late with Iverson and a handful of the higher-ups, including Sam Holt, to talk staffing. Keith slips out at his earliest convenience, leaving all of that in their mostly capable hands.

With the Blades, he’d been expected to think on his feet, vouch for the information he’d collected on missions during briefings and strategy sessions, pool knowledge. As the kind-of leader of Voltron, or at least the Black Paladin, he’s … sort of a grunt. No one aside from the team expects anything but firepower from him.

That has it’s advantages—he wasn’t asked to speak once during that meeting—but it’s also boring as fuck, and more than a little patronizing.

He says as much to Kolivan once he’s in his quarters and has set up a secure line.

“Being underestimated may prove useful,” Kolivan hedges. Even he sounds unconvinced.

At Keith’s unimpressed scowl, Kolivan folds. “It would be more helpful if they understood the best way to utilize your skills. I’ll admit that this is not what I pictured for you when you notified me that you planned to take a break from active duty.”

“It’s worth it.” Keith considers that for a moment and rests his forehead in his hand. “Or it’s going to be worth it.”

“Now that, I do believe.”

“How’s … my mother?”

A tension unspools between them, forcing distance all at once. Keith still has mixed feelings about his mom; he’s sure she has mixed feelings about him, too. Mostly, they talk when it’s convenient, and avoid each other when there’s too much at stake. It’s working for them. For the most part. 

He adds “maybe reconcile with Krolia?” to his mental to-do list for after the war. Even his mental note is half-assed and sloppily written. 

“She is fine. On a mission.”

“Right.” He sighs. “I forgot.”

“There’s been a decent amount going on.”

Keith taps a finger on his desk and scrutinizes Kolivan through the grainy video feed. His fur is as neatly cared for as ever, his jaw set in a heavy line. Serious, weighted with more blood and secrets than usual, but not breaking. Not yet. He does his commander the favor of not asking how he’s doing, the same way Kolivan is studiously avoiding asking him the same.

Kindness, Keith’s learned, is so often in the things they don’t say. 

“We’ve arrived,” Keith says instead. “We can talk through a more secure channel once you’ve made the arrangements. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

“Understood. We anticipate it will be late tonight.”

Keith grunts. He’s sleeping alone, anyway; they gave him and Shiro separate quarters, and it feels like a bad time to press their luck—or their ability to sleep while the other is working. “I’ll make time.” He pauses, straightening his shoulders and stiffening his spine. “Sir?”

“Speak freely.”

He nods but takes an extra moment to chew on his tongue. “This war. This push. I need it to be our last.”

“You know we can’t promise that.” Kolivan looks pitying. Like he’s explaining to Keith for the first time all over again that this is a war waged over generations, over lightyears. Beyond any of their reckoning. Steeped in enough blood and sacrifice that it could make and remake all the planets in this star system. 

He can’t listen to reason right now. Keith steels his nerves. “You can’t promise that. But I have to. I don’t …” He swallows. Distantly, he realizes his hands are shaking. “I don’t have years and lifetimes left in me.”

Kolivan orders his words carefully, methodically. “Is this about your family ? Your young man?”

“Only sometimes,” Keith tells him with a rusty laugh. “I thought it was, when it came up. But now I can’t stop noticing the cost. I don’t want to lose more than I can bear. I won’t—” Keith cuts himself of, rasping in a quivering breath. He needs to be careful, to not say more than what they can afford to have overheard. But: “I won’t be my mother, sir. I don’t give up what’s important to me. I don’t think I’d survive changing myself like that. And I wouldn’t forgive myself for it, either,” he says. Means I wouldn’t forgive myself like I can’t forgive her.

Maybe Kolivan hears it anyway. 

“I’ll start scouting out replacements for you. In the organization, and … likely candidates for your role outside of it.”

“I’d appreciate that. We … we haven’t told anyone else, yet.”

“Well I am the contingency person in all of this, I’m finding,” Kolivan says, wry.

“Thanks for making time.”

They nod at one another, businesslike. It should be a signoff, but Kolivan clears his throat before Keith can hit the end button. “We consider you family. I hope you feel the same of us. I will always, when possible, make time for you. So would many of us.”

“Yeah,” Keith says, blinking away a sudden bout of tears. “I know. I … you too.”

Kolivan’s the one who signs off. Keith covers his face with his hands and breathes through his teeth. 

One emotional breakthrough at a time.

| | |

Regris slips into the room at three a.m. local time with a whisper of cloth and a prickle of hair at the base of Keith’s neck. 

By the time Keith has turned on the lights and sprung out of bed and into a fighting stance, blade at the ready, he’s lounging in an armchair in the tiny living room area at the front of Keith’s quarters.

He nods to Regris, but doesn’t put the blade away. Sue him, he’s groggy and it’s god’s ass o’clock. Regris is going to have to work for it if he wants this to be a pleasant conversation.

Across from him, the Galra man smirks and settles back in the chair. “Are you planning to talk at some point, or just threaten me with that butter knife?”

“I can do both. Any troubles getting in?”

Regris snorts. “Are you really the best humans have to offer? Getting in here was an insult to my skills.”

“Unfortunately, yeah.”

“Huh.”

Keith sighs and finally tucks the blade back into its sheath, turning to grab a bundle of packets and a data drive from his desk before joining Regris in the living room. He dumps the whole assortment on Regris’ lap before he flops onto the loveseat perpendicular to Regris’ armchair.

“There’s the preliminary stuff. Specs, strategy; some of it’s redacted. You can ask for more information, but I’m not going to guarantee we’ll give it.”

“We?”

He tilts his head back until he’s staring at the ceiling and rolls his shoulder until it gives a satisfying crack. “I’m piloting the Black Lion right now. I have to choose a side to prioritize. I don’t think any of us wants this to be messier than it needs to be.”

Regris tilts his head, conceding the point. “Give me a bit to read over this.”

“Sure. I’m going to nap. Just wake me up when you’re ready.”

With that, Keith drops off into a light doze. He’s not much one for sleeping around people, but time in bunkers and jungles, on hostile planets and cramped freighters on the verge of discovery at every moment have given him a good sense of who he can nap around and how to wake up when even a trusted comrade so much as twitches the wrong way. 

So it’s a little surprising when he wakes up after two hours to Regris clearing his throat. There’s a tablet on his lap, a holoscreen projecting a document outlining the basic capabilities of Atlas in the air between them, and a stack of papers on the floor between his feet. 

“I have questions.”

“Nngh. Ask away,” Keith tells him, squinting up at the ceiling again. There’s a crick in his neck. Getting old sucks.

They run battle plans and contingencies for the better part of an hour, until a knock shatters the flow of the conversation.

Keith frowns at Regris. “Hello?” Both of their hands are on their blades.

“Breakfast time, making sure you’re up,” Shiro calls back. 

“Oh.” He debates for an entire nanosecond before telling him, “well come on in. See for yourself.”

Regris’ does a confused frown, no doubt because he made sure the room was secure when he came in. But Shiro doesn’t need luck; he scans his half of Keith’s set of dog tags at the door and beeps himself in.

Shiro sticks his head in to smile at Keith and clocks Regris. The smile drops, and he steps fully in the door, making sure to wait until it’s fully closed behind him before nodding in greeting. He doesn’t say anything.

It takes an embarrassing few seconds for Keith to realize it’s because Regris and Shiro don’t know each other, or what they’re allowed to talk about. “Uh, Shiro, the Black Paladin, meet Regris, Blade member.”

“Former Black Paladin,” Shiro hastily tacks on.

“The Champion,” Regris notes.

“Former Champion, too.”

“Then you are now?”

Shiro frowns at that. “I’ll be piloting Atlas for a little while. But that hardly feels like a title,” he says with a modest little laugh.

Piloting Atlas , he says. Keith sits up straight in his seat. “What? Since when?”

“Uh, some time around …” Shiro looks at his hands like the night’s events will be written in his wide palms. Finding them empty, he shrugs. “Recently? Tonight? After we figured out the crew and Coran figured out what we’ll need to do to make sure the engines don’t give out during battle, I wandered around it for a bit. And she just sort of. Said hi.”

Keith winces. The Lions don’t exactly say hi , and they’re old enough to tone it down. From the look on Shiro’s face, it was less a friendly chat and more like a psychic blitzkrieg. Shiro catches the wince and snorts. “Yeah, like that. But I’ll be able to do it, now that I’m back up an arm and can handle the neural load.”

“Was that an issue before?” Regris asks. Shiro startles, like he’d forgotten they had a nearly seven foot tall Galra spy in the room. Ridiculous man.

“Apparently, several people tried. Some were more successful than others.”

Well, that’s a diplomatic way to phrase it.

“Fair enough. As I told Keith: we’ve been baiting Zarkon to join this fight directly. We have evidence that causes us to believe he’ll be there.”

“Fantastic,” Shiro says, expression unreadable but tone glib. “So we’re passing you information so the Blades can slip in if necessary?”

“Something like that.”

Shiro shrugs. “If Keith trusts you, I trust you. What do you still need to know?”

Regris studies him for a moment, then glances at Keith. “Would you rather I discuss this with him?” he rumbles. Fucker is biting back a laugh but.

“God yes,” Keith tells them both. “I’ll take another nap.” To Shiro, he adds, “I was catching him up on how the Blades can work with us, and what we’re working with. Have fun.” He pats the empty space next to him on the two-seater until Shiro drops into it. 

Keith curls into his side, until he can use Shiro’s shoulder as a pillow, and dozes off the rhythm of the conversation. 

| | | 

The team spends the morning running drills in their Lions and set a patrol schedule. Allura, as a foreign diplomat and also a force to be reckoned with, is the only one excused; she’s thrown to the wolves instead, sitting in on (and taking control of) several more strategy meetings and planning sessions.

Keith runs the rest of them through their paces until noon and makes them break for a long lunch. There’s no use in being more exhausted than they need to be.

The day blurs into two.

He’s sure he meets the crew of the Atlas. He thinks Lance’s sister might be on it. They probably have  … names, personalities. Pidge assures them they’re competent enough to stand a chance.

But there isn’t much sticking in Keith’s brain that isn’t directly related to Zarkon, to this fight, to getting out of this alive.

When the Glara fleet arrives, the air turns electric. Every nerve in his body sings.

Here is a secret that Keith does not tell Shiro: they are both weapons made for war. It wasn’t the circumstances, the kidnapping and alien DNA reveals and Lions that made them into soldiers. They are simply men capable of unimaginable violence, and the competence to enact it. 

Shiro makes him want to temper this fact about himself. Shiro also makes him want to embrace it. 

All the blood between them is holy. That not all of it is theirs is a miracle.

Keith doesn’t tell him any of this because it is kinder to let Shiro believe he was made for a softer life, and because Keith needs to believe they can both be happy in that kind of life.

But fuck if he doesn’t love this, too.

| | |

“Green, fighters on your six. Blue, get into position. Red, Red , do not give chase.”

Keith’s throat is raw from three days of pitched battle. Skirmishes followed by breathless respites. Adrenaline crashes and the kind of deep sleep only possible when you’re too tired to care when you’ll have to jump into your ship again. 

“Black, what ,” Lance is shouting into his ear.

Keith raps Lance on his helmet and grins like a knife. “C’mon,” he mutters. “Just a little closer.”

Lance groans but guns for the largest ship in the galley.

The lines of ships have thinned; they’ll need to move fast if they want to cut off the possibility of a Galra retreat.

Keith claps Lance on the shoulder and jogs to the emergency hatch on Blue’s belly, strapping himself into a jetpack.

He’s wearing his Blade armor, mask pulled up and space-ready. A comm on his wrist clicks twice; Blades are in position. 

The emergency hatch opens with a sucking, yawning roar. He kicks off the lip for momentum and engages his thrusters, leaving a singe on the Blue Lion’s door.

Shots zip by, targeting the Blue Lion. Lance gets off a couple shots of his own, aiming to flank Zarkon’s command vessel while Yellow holds the front and Red and Green shut in on the sides. It won’t hold, but he only needs people distracted long enough to get on board and cause some chaos.

Regris and another Blade are already at Keith’s designated entrance point by the time he comes into view of the pod bay in a dusty corner of the ship. A charge is set, attached to the weakest point in the door. 

He clasps Regris’ hand, no time to attach himself to the hull of the ship too. The charge blows on the other Glara’s signal, silent, and Regris throws Keith through the ensuing hole before the smoke has been sucked away.

Keith adds to his moment with short bursts of his jet pack and clears the room. No hostiles yet.

He holds position until both Blades are on board, letting the mystery Blade get to work on opening the pressurization chamber while he shoulders the door. Across the ship, other teams of three have blown other doors, snuck into other hatches. There might be enough alarms blaring from the Lion’s attack that the smaller alarms go ignored or at least deprioritized. If they’re very lucky, someone will think it’s a ship error and reset the alarms.

If they’re not lucky, troops will be sweeping the hallways any second now with orders to kill on sight.

The pressurization chamber unlocks and they pile in. A blast of air and atmosphere, and then they’re back in gravity and slinking through the ship.

Two hallways in, they run into their first patrol. The soldiers are on alert, but it’s unclear if they’re looking for anything specific or just aware that they’re in the death throes of a war. 

Either way, Keith and Regris share a nod. Keith goes left, Regris goes right. The soldiers are dead before they can raise an alarm on their comms.

The Mystery Blade takes an earpiece off of one of the fallen soldiers and plants it in his ear. They make a go motion. Keith takes point, smaller and faster than the other two. He stops only to make sure they’re still on the most direct course, and pauses only long enough to take care of one of the increasing number of patrols. 

The other Blade squads aboard the ship are working on wiping out the engines, defense systems. Someone somewhere is probably locking down bunks to keep sleeping soldiers from joining the fight, others spacing or destroying the food supplies in case the Blade’s mission fails and Zarkon successfully retreats. 

Keith and his squad are making directly for the bridge. For Zarkon.

They run into another patrol. Regris takes a hard hit to the ribs and grunts; must have been bad, then. Another patrol gets the drop on them and nearly lands a killshot on Mystery Blade. They deflect in time, and Mystery Blade sprays a wound sealant on their shoulder.

The three of them drive deeper into the ship.

A rumble comes from underfoot, rising until the ceiling shakes. Over his comms, still set to receive Voltron’s line but not transmit any noise out of it, Lance cheers. “Is that Atlas?” Hunk asks, while Pidge starts swearing a blue streak over the line. Allura shouts something about it working just as another tremor hits and Keith spots a larger Galran squad running down the next long stretch of hall.

Keith tunes out everything but the next fight. He slides in low and hamstrings one soldier with his blade, shooting at a second with a blaster in his free hand. Overhead, Regris wrestles one to the ground while Mystery Blade knifes the last one in the ribs in rapid succession. Keith shoots the one he slashed earlier while Regris finishes with his target.

They duck into the nearest service hallway to catch their breath, and Keith takes the chance to tune back into the Voltron channel.

Atlas had scored a few hits, joining the fray after having gotten caught up with a Robeast ripping through their on-planet defenses.

He relays this update to his companions and gets a terse nod in reply.

“Right on schedule, then,” Regris says, checking his wrist for the timer he runs religiously on each mission.

“Video is down on the ship,” Mystery Blade cuts in, cupping his hand over his stolen comms piece. “They’re trying to reboot the system.”

“Good luck with that,” Regris mutters. At least one Blade team would’ve been tasked with gutting the internal surveillance systems, and Blades don’t a gutting by halves.

“After you.”

“With pleasure.”

Keith slips out of the service tunnel as quietly as he can and signals the all clear.

Three more hallways left.

They shoot two more guards before a second team of Blades melts out of the shadows further down the hall. Regris whispers a passphrase to their leader, who follows with their own code and gestures for the groups to merge.

One hallway left, and the ship heaves again, this time nearly throwing them off their feet with the force of it.

“ It can ram things, now? ” Someone is asking on the Voltron channel. Keith smirks. Atlas must be cutting in range, taking advantage of its size compared to everything but Zarkon’s ship to bully its way in close. Shiro’s always been the asshole who goes for brute force in a delicate situation.

Keith tenses and looses his muscles, slowing his breathing. One hallway the door, the bridge.

The new Blade commander adjusts their grip on their blade; they wear it long, almost a broadsword, while the two others in their group have shorter daggers. They straighten, and the group splits to opposite sides of the hall and staggers their marching order. 

Mystery Blade tucks in behind the commander, using them as a first line of defense once they reach the door. Keith and the other Blades pick off guards while Mystery Bade untangles the door’s defenses. There’s a moment of utter, crushing stillness as the last of the guards gurgle and choke, and then the door is sliding open and blaster fire rings out into the hallway.

Another rumble and pitch. “ Retreat, ” Allura is calling. “ Atlas, bring up the rear, we can’t hold them off. Back to staging area three. ”

“ Yellow, tow Green back to base, get in front of Atlas for cover, ” Lance barks. Keith feels a surge of affection for his team, all business, no shake. They’ve been growing up without him. They’ll keep growing up without him.

He gets a running start and barrels his way onto the bridge, ignoring the zing of pain in his thigh from a lucky blast, and leaves the guards to the Blades.

Because there, there , with his own gravitational pull, one hand on the commander’s chair and another waving to emphasize his orders, is Zarkon.

Around them, the Galra are dashing around like ants after a picnic spread. Picking up orders, relaying positions, calling out hits and losses. There’s bloodlust in the air, thick and congealed. At the bridge’s breach, they’d all looked up, but already most of them have gone back to work. Some, nonessential personnel most likely, have picked up their weapons and joined the fray. 

The emperor alone stands stalwart and unmoving.

“To whom do I owe the pleasure?” he rumbles. 

Keith doesn’t bother to answer, just rolls out of the way of a guard’s punch and presses in until he’s in range of Zarkon himself.

Zarkon strikes in a blur of pain. The blast catches Keith on his calf, but the slam of fist that follows hits him squarely on his chest. There goes a collarbone , Keith thinks, dazed. 

He lengthens his blade to parry the next hit, dancing out of the way of a third.

The fourth he lets catch him on the forearm of his offhand, darting in to land a jab with his sword at Zarkon’s knee. It sinks deep and he twists, cutting at tendon and muscle even as Zarkon turns his punch into a hold and throws Keith across the room.

The console he lands on cracks dangerously underneath him, but nothing splinters or skewers him, so Keith counts it as a win and slithers back to his feet. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees blood dripping down the ramp into the command pit. A Blade falls, snarling. The blaster fire is coming slower now. 

Keith circles Zarkon warily. The emperor doesn’t seem in a hurry to close in on him, just watches with a smirk, like he’s watching a funny, if trite, action movie.

Well, one way to handle that. 

Keith unholsters his blaster and shoots.

The shots ping harmlessly off the cybernetic armor encasing nearly every inch of him, but it annoys Zarkon into action nonetheless.

This time, it’s the emperor who moves, pulling out the Black bayard and forming it into a wicked looking dagger as long as Keith’s forearm. “Enough,” Zarkon spits, and slashes at him. 

Zarkon jolts. A blade is sticking out of his shoulder. The shoulder shifts, and Regris’ head pops up, Blade mask cracked but holding, blood smeared over the front. Zarkon’s strike goes just wide enough for Keith to duck under and in.

He shoots up, aiming for Zarkon’s head and neck, while he shrinks his blade into a dagger and wedges it under the join of armor on the emperor’s chest.

Zarkon brings one hand up to unseat Regris and swats at Keith with his other.

It connects. Of course if connects, this close. Something slick and hot bursts in his side.

Regris grunts and goes flying, Zarkon twisting to get enough momentum to send him bowling into another Blade. Keith uses the opening the motion gives him and pushes up and in with his blade, forcing the dagger to extend into a full sword, cutting up and up and up—

Fists come down on Keith’s back, and he fights the black dots dancing in his eyes to heave , to rend, and then—

The sword is buried in Zarkon’s throat. 

He crumbles, like any man does, to his knees, and then in a slump on the floor.

There is noise in the background. Dim shouts, the last of the fight on the bridge. Updates on the retreat in his comms. 

Keith listens to none of it, lets himself process none of it.

He shrinks his sword down to a manageable length once again and hacks at Zarkon’s armor. 

Hands come down to cover his. Mystery Blade, panting and covered in gore. They try to gentle Keith’s hands, and when that doesn’t work, they growl in warning. 

But this isn’t bloodlust. This is business. “Help me get this off.”

After a beat, Mystery Blade does. 

It goes faster with two people. Absently, Keith notes that his left hand isn’t working like it should, the wrist swollen and bright red, the forearm fractured.

Finally, Zarkon is stripped of his armor. Keith shifts his dagger into his good hand, and starts to carve.

Mystery Blade watches him work silently, until he’s nearly finished, then gets up to look after the other Blades left. He’s not sure how many there are, or if they’re convening on the bridge. He thinks someone might be making an announcement to the ship, the fleet, announcing that Zarkon is dead. But noise is hard, and he can tell that there is a lot of it but not much else. 

Work complete, Keith stands. The world tilts dangerously for a second as his blood pressure surges, and then comes back to baseline.

He catches the eye of the nearest Blade. “Safe to use one of their pods?” he grits out. His mouth tastes like iron.

The Blade shrugs, says something. Keith nods and starts toward the nearest docking bay.

The cockpit is tight. It’s a fighter plane, fast enough for what he needs. He sits with his dripping cargo and reprograms the ship’s communication system to broadcast a surrender code, then takes off.

His hearing comes back with a low ringing that makes his molars ache.

There’s no chatter from Voltron anymore; already landed, probably, and switched to a non-emergency frequency. He hails it anyway. 

“Red to team, anyone copy? Red to team, anyone copy?”

“Buddy!” Lance calls, straight in his ear. God, that’s loud. “You there? You made it out? We’re doing checks on the Lions, and Allura is still on patrol. We’ve got a few dogfights left out there, but mostly they’ve scattered. Allura’s switched to a different channel between me and Atlas. We’re trying to figure out why they’re running but—”

“Where’s Black?”

“Uh, good to hear from you too?”

“Blue.”

“Oooookay.” Keith can picture Lance’s eyeroll and the way he’d rub his hands like he’s washing the whole conversation off. “He’s on Atlas, coordinating with the crew there still. I can go get him for you?”

“Nah. Are you docked in Atlas now?” If Lance is determined to say names and locations, Keith might as well, too. In for a penny.

“Yeah, The Castle took a lot of damage yesterday, we kept her grounded today while the engineers worked on her.”

“Do me a favor?”

“Anything, yeah.”

“I’m on a Galran ship. Make sure I can dock.”

The pause lasts so long Keith is briefly convinced his hearing has gone on the fritz again.

Then, Lance’s voice comes back over the line, exasperated. “Allura is about to come back, we’re calling it except for the regular patrols for the day. Get back before she does, we’ve got the bay for Blue open. You’ll have enough room in there.”

“Am I a dirty secret now?” Keith asks, grinning.

Lance snorts. “Dude, you’re on a Galran ship. Nothing says bad news and possibly a stupid-deadly bomb like an enemy ship broadcasting surrender codes. Even I know that.”

“Well, thanks for the trust, I guess.”

It doesn’t take long to get to Atlas; they’ve been fighting closer and closer to Earth’s atmosphere, in tight quarters. Atlas has been stationed just outside of the exosphere for the last few days, a titanic sentinel that could almost be a star if you were looking at it from the ground.

Keith slides the jet into the bay without any problems. He figures Lance let the Atlas crew know, if only because he isn’t shot out of the sky on approach.

The crew practically leaps out of his way as he stalks through the halls. It’s not a particularly fast stalk. He can hear his breath rasping, the pain in his side and arm and thigh blooming like a fresh spill of blood in water. But he drags himself through the walkways single-mindedly.

The bridge on the Atlas is a wide open room, with consoles ringing the outer edge, a small table bolted down near the door for emergency meetings, and floor-to-ceiling view screens. People mill around in the usual hurry up and wait pattern after a mission dies down. 

When Keith walks in, the whole room goes still. 

Shiro straightens from where he’s hunched over the table,  glancing at the crewmember next to him who’s staring at Keith, gaping. They point, and Shiro follows the finger, turning around to see—

Right, well.

He walks up to Shiro and holds out the heart. Shiro’s hands come up on instinct, cradling it in both palms. It’s Galra sized and gummy with dark, deep iron blood.

The same blood that, Keith realizes, coats the seat of his suit, running in thick rivulets down his legs. His hands are covered with it, and shit , he’s definitely brushed hair out of his face, too. That, plus whatever is wrong with his side, and the wound on his thigh. 

Well, it’s a mirable he’s been able to stand long enough to scare the crew, he guesses.

“Uh,” Shiro says, looking from the heart to Keith and back to the heart. 

“You were wondering why the Galra were fleeing.” He waves to the heart with a flourish.

Shiro’s eyes widen in understanding. “So this is … his …” 

“Yup.”

And then Shiro does something Keith will think of with fond disgust for the rest of his life. His mouth drops open and he licks his lips, leaning forward with the focus he reserves for salty chips and chocolate ice cream.

Shiro is about to eat Zarkon’s heart in front of almost everyone they know.

“Right,” Keith cuts in, snapping a hand out to grab Shiro’s flesh wrist. It’s the one immediately holding the heart, the metal hand mostly just cradling underneath, and the only one he has a chance of moving. “With me, Shirogane.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, dazed but finally tearing his gaze from the meat in his hands. “So this means—”

“A few months early, even,” Keith says with a grin. “Now just for cleanup.”

He turns to the crewmember that had been talking with Shiro. “We’re going to go handle this. If anyone hails either of us for something other than the literal end of the world, I’ll carve yours out, too.”

Shiro does that weird nose-huffing-laugh thing at that, but doesn’t tell him to be nice. Instead, he falls in behind Keith, who marches them to his room at time-and-a-half.

Once the doors close behind them, Keith whips around to grab Shiro’s jaw. The motion pulls at his side and he hisses but ignores it. It can’t be too bad if he hasn’t passed out yet. “Do not fucking eat that, Takashi. You know that guy was swimming in weird space viruses.”

“Hnn,” Shiro splutters. He smiles, caught out. “Okay, you’re right, you’re right! But you. You dug his fucking heart out,” he whispers. He sounds so endearingly pleased.

“It’s not exactly Christmas,” Keith tells him. But he doesn’t take his hand off Shiro’s jaw. He feels predatory, capable. He’s given Shiro something no one else could ever think to give him, could ever know he needed. And Shiro—sweet, thoughtful, charming, all-American-boy Shiro—loves it.

Shiro squeezes the heart in his flesh hand, wringing out more of the oozing blood with a repulsive sucking sound. When the organ stubbornly refuses to be crushed to satisfaction, he switches it to his metal hand.

The vessels pop and break. The left ventricle splits like a rotten fruit. He keeps going until it is sausage in his hands, comically mundane.

Blood pools between their feet. The heart drops to the floor and Shiro steps on it with an almost childlike curiosity. It squelches pathetically.

“We’re going to have a house, Shiro,” Keith tells him when it looks like Shiro’s brain is back online. “It’s going to be dusty, and small, and in the middle of the most nowhere I can find. We’re going to get a dog and then you’re going to talk me into getting another one. Horses, if we feel up to it.” 

He feels Shiro swallow against his hand, but he doesn’t interrupt, so Keith continues. “We’re going to fuck off. If the soil’s right for it, we can grow some vegetables. I want to pick tomatoes from the garden and eat them with you. I want you to do that disgusting this where you just throw some salt on them and eat them raw.”

Shiro sniffs, his eyes suspiciously shiny. “I can’t ask that of you.”

“It’s not for you. I’m so tired Shiro. I’ve spent so long setting myself on fire to keep the engine running. I want out. And I want you with me.”

“ Keith .”

They crash together, too much tongue, stinking of blood and adrenaline and sweat. Shiro turns them to get Keith pinned to the wall, and Keith hisses through his teeth as every bruise and fracture screams through his body at once.

“ Keith ,” Shiro says again, reproachful this time. “Medbay.”

“Fuck, yeah.” He takes a moment to eye Shiro. The blood coating his arms and smeared around his mouth. “Ugh, we ended up with Zarkon blood in us anyway. Gross.”

Shiro gets an arm around Keith and opens the door. “So we’re agreed that that guy was probably, like, doused in space STIs, right?”

“I feel like no one takes me seriously when I tell them you’re a nasty goblin freak,” Keith complains. 

A passing crewmember shoots them a deer in headlights look, because of what he said or how they look, Keith doesn’t care. He just shoots them a sunny smile and keeps walking.

| | | 

“He wants the arm off,” Keith tells the doctor checking on his morphine drip. 

Apparently, he’s suffering from “a troubling amount of wounds,” including, but not limited to, three broken ribs, a really-just-a-graze blaster wound in his thigh, two broken molars, a sprained wrist and elbow, and is down quite a bit of blood. Not too shabby for a fight with an immortal emperor.

Shiro grins sheepishly from his post in the rickety chair at Keith’s bedside. They’d walked in and been immediately triaged to the front of the line. They’re both hooked up to IVs. While Keith’s is a fun cocktail of everything they could safely throw at him, Shiro’s is just some super strong antibiotics for the Zarkon incident.

Watching Shiro haltingly admit that he’d gotten a dead emperor’s blood in his and the Black Paladin’s mouth had been a highlight of Keith’s life. Definitely in the top ten.

“It can wait until someone has time,” Shiro tells the frazzled doctor.

She blinks hard at both of them. “That’s, uh, a bit beyond my expertise,” she tells them faintly.

Keith shrugs. “Well, we’ve got approximately, uhhh, five months to make it happen.”

“Has anyone told you that you’re annoyingly sober when you’re on pain meds?” Shiro asks him. 

“You. Repeatedly.” 

It’s an old argument. Shiro had his wisdom teeth removed and embarrassed himself spectacularly once, and now he’s mad that he can’t watch that trainwreck from the other side. Keith takes delight in lording this over him.

The doctor shifts on her feet. “Well, I’ll send a request over to a specialist for a consult. We don’t get a lot of requests for prosthesis removals.”

She takes her leave quickly after that, rushing on to the next patient.

They don’t get to enjoy the quiet for long. A few moments later, Pidge is muscling her way into the small room. She’s tailed by Hunk and Lance. Allura, Lance assures them, plans to come soon, but is still doing final checks on her Lion and running a debrief with the commanding officer on duty.

At some point, Shiro ducks out to shower and Hunk and Lance wander off to find food. Allura comes in and steals Shiro’s seat, watching Keith silently while he listens to Pidge break down the half of the fight he missed, where Green got pretty beat up. She has a broken collarbone from the impact, but nothing else too bad. 

When Keith breaks off to raise his eyebrows at Allura, because seriously, she has not stopped watching him for ten minutes now , she offers him a tentative smile.

It’s sort of shit, as far as olive branches go. But that’s honestly one of her best qualities. He smiles back, and does his best to show her he means it.

Sometime around ass o’clock in the morning, Keith is released from the infirmary with strict orders to rest. They need the bed more than they need him to be under surveillance, so off he and Shiro go.

There is still a tacky pool of blood just inside the door. Keith laughs when he sees it, bracing himself against the pain in his ribs and holding onto Shiro while he does.

“Hey,” Shiro says once Keith’s got his breath back. “Earlier, you said we’ve got five months left.”

“Yeah?”

Shiro cocks his head.

“I asked you for a year.”

“Oh.” It’s soft, like it just slipped out. Keith squeezes at his bicep and smiles inquisitively. “I guess I just didn’t know that you meant it so much. Or what month it was. I … Thank you.”

“I always wanna keep my promises for you,” Keith tells him, pulling him closer in. “And it’s March, by the way.”

“Wait, you know that? Then … how old are we?”

Keith guffaws and puts his hands on either side of Shiro’s face. “How are you real.”

“You don’t know either,” Shiro accuses.

“Do too! Just.” He splutters. How do you not know?”

“Gladiator fighting in a Galra arena will do that to you,” Shiro says, dry as dust. The solemn expression is cracked through with a smile instantly. “Also, I never figured out what a dobash was, let alone how to translate space time to Earth time.”

Keith closes his eyes and rests his forehead against Shiro’s chest. “How are you like this. You literally do math all day. Space is just a billion equations in a trench coat.”

“Yeah,” Shiro tells him patiently, “but space math is for fun and time math is depressing.”

He sighs. “We’re going to sleep now, Shiro. We’ll have a joint birthday party tomorrow and I can surprise you with your age.”

“What if you lie to me?” Shiro asks, already herding them both to the bed and taking off Keith’s shoes for him.

“Then you can suffer about it. Or ask someone what year it is and go from there, jesus h. christ.”

The last thing he hears before he drifts off is Shiro giggling while he strips down to his briefs and the rustling of the bed as he climbs in after him.

Chapter Text

The morning the arm is removed, Shiro screams awake in a cold sweat.

Keith, wrapped around him, grunts at the sudden noise and thrash, but doesn’t disentangle himself.

“Sorry,” Shiro says once he’s come back to himself.

He’d said, once, that stillness helped. Keith gets it: without movement to keep track of, his brain can focus on more than sheer survival. It used to make Keith feel hunted, small as a rat huddling under leaves, praying the silence will be his salvation..

Now, he feels more like a predator, waiting for its prey to tremble itself into complacency. Except instead of violence, he wants to bite Shiro back into his body, pin him here in the peace and safety of their bed.

Most days, it’s enough.

So he ignores Shiro’s apology and asks the question he hasn’t let himself voice in weeks. “You ready?”

Shiro heaves a breath and buries his face in Keith’s hair. He nods wordlessly.

The arm is heavy, heavy, heavy between them.

| | | 

Allura takes the news neatly. “So you’re leaving again,” she says. She presses her lips together and taps out another in an endless stream of the space version of emails.

If Keith were a betting man, he’d say that she’s half-hurt, half-relieved.

Well, he is a betting man, and Allura is both of those things. She’ll be under an added strain, shouldering the Lions and the team and the alliances without two of the original members of her team. Without Shiro, who’s become one of her best friends. 

The tension between them hasn’t completely died down, though. And she has to have known that Shiro was a stopwatch racing toward his own finish line.

He doesn’t forgive the team for not doing anything about it, but he does get it. There was a universe on the line.

Shiro is the one to tell the kids.

Hunk cries and hugs both of them, holding on until even Shiro’s boundless patience is tested and he starts to fidget. Pidge assures them that she and Matt will stop by or call with updates, new blueprints for them to look over, and invite them to test out new tech. Lance grouches and groans while holding back tears while Allura looks on serenely.

Keith tells them he’ll send along their address once they’ve decided on where they’re going, and warns them that he’ll make them into mulch if they give it to anyone outside of the room. Like fuck is he going to let the Garrison interrupt their retirement with some bullshit emergency.

Kolivan beams when Keith tells him that he’s officially out. The search for another paladin is well underway, he assures Keith. He promises to reach out to Allura in the coming days to coordinate candidates and chances for them to see if they mesh with Black.

Peace looks good on him, Keith decides. Kolivan seems lighter, smiles easier. He doesn’t demand Keith stay with the Blades; he doesn’t need every body he can get anymore.

Keith tells him the Blades can reach out any time they’d like, although he doesn’t promise to always answer.

“You never did,” Kolivan says with a rueful laugh. “And your mother?”

“Yeah,” Keith says after a handful of seconds. He’s already decided on this, but saying it out loud makes it real. “Let her know she can visit any time she wants. We’d be happy to see her.”

The Garrison takes the news with all the grace of a bird leaving the nest for the first time. Which is to say: Keith tells Iverson and the other top brass that he’s fucking off and taking their golden boy with him, they scream threats at his retreating back, and he refuses to contemplate if they’ll fall or fly without them.

It’s not his problem anymore. Now, he gets to rest.

| | |

They fit Shiro for a prosthetic arm. Low-tech. Just the shape; a hand, a wrist, an arm. Nothing wired into his nervous system. No weapons.

Keith and Shiro stare at it in puzzled silence for a long time once it comes in.

“You know,” Shiro says eventually, “I didn’t realize with was an option.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s … nice?”

“Very,” Keith agrees. Because it is a nice gesture; the Garrison paid for it, and prosthetics aren’t cheap. And it is a nice prosthetic, too. It matches Shiro’s skin tone for now, although that’ll change soon enough as they spend time in the sun again. It’s carefully made, heavy enough to be present, light enough to not be bulky. It checks the boxes.

“I’ll try it on?”

“I’ll help.”

And it’s good. Some days, Shiro seems more confident wearing it. Others, it’s banished to the closet, under the bed, tucked out of sight. Those days, Shiro has Keith pin the empty sleeve of his shirt to his chest and squares his jaw, daring anyone to ask about it.

It makes warmth sing through every nerve in Keith’s body. 

Healing looks a hell of a lot like fighting, he’s learning.

| | |

Wind scrubs through the yard, finding little purchase on the sandy red dirt. 

Two hoverbikes sit side-by-side under an open garage next to a worn-down truck with guts spilling out of its hood, like a tired tongue panting for water in this desert.

A dog, Kosmo, runs up to the fence Shiro and Keith had spent the better part of a week putting up. She lopes along it in a burst of energy before making her way back into the house where a mountain of toys teeters, on the edge of bursting out of their basket. She grabs a stuffed cat off the top gently, so gently, and brings it to a sunny patch of floor, curling up around it to nap in the late afternoon heat.

Wallpaper is peeling off the walls. They keep arguing over what to do—paint it or wallpaper it again. The argument is more fun than doing it, they’ve found, so the yellowing roses stay.

And in the bedroom, Keith strips Shiro out of his clothes with an aching slowness. There’s time.

He’s trying something new today. New to both of them.

Settling in has been an uphill battle. There were the frantic weeks of moving, realizing they don’t have a single mug or spatula between them. They’d needed to adjust to down time, and not reaching for a dagger or blaster every time they heard a noise they couldn’t quite place. 

They’d had to problem-solve on the fly. Old shirts for potholders. Sharp bouts of phantom pain from Shiro’s arm that ibuprofen can’t exactly help with. Days where he can’t get out of bed. Days where Keith’s hip would give out on him. Days where Keith couldn’t get out of bed.

And then there was the time.

Hours and days and weeks of time stretching out in front of them, one after another after another.

Shiro deals with this by attacking the garden, planting and weeding and pruning and watering. Not much grows, but he seems to take satisfaction in the flowering cacti and hardy succulents. Goes on runs and tussles on the floor with Kosmo and Keith.

Keith deals with this by indulging his curiosity. Knowledge or death wasn’t an idle creed.

He reads everything. History books, mystery novels. A lot of romance novels.

And then … embarrassing things. He doesn’t mean to hide them from Shiro, exactly, but he does ask him not to open packages addressed solely to Keith. Shiro never really did that in the first place, but it’s nice to have the assurance that he won’t decide to one day, either.

He gets his hands on cowboy history, which he’d sort of figured was pretty gay but wow was really gay. Books about gender, which he’s sort of planning to leave on Shiro’s side of the bed by accident. Maybe it’s nothing, and maybe the way Shiro loses all brain function when Keith pretends he’s a girl or at least not a man is just a sex thing, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

And it’s sort of when he’s going down that rabbit hole that he reads the words “stone butch” and draws an absolute blank on what that means. Stone Butch Blues is as good a start as any, and it’s … good. Heartrending. Heavy and light at once, like a story told and retold in your blood.

And he’s thinking about it one day while Shiro does, in fact, eat tomatoes raw with only salt on them and Keith cuts up more for him to devour and Kosmo tries to get her paws on the counter to see what’s happening. And he’s thinking about cutting perfect slices for Shiro that Keith would rather die than choke down and he sort of. Goes offline for a second.

It really is just a second, and then he’s back to bullying Shiro about his food choices and slipping Kosmo a treat for being such a good girl. But the thought is seared into his brain. The key is turned, and now he knows what is behind that door. 

A stone butch doesn’t want to be touched, or maybe doesn’t want to get off, and that’s not. That’s not a bad thing. And Keith went to high school, thanks, and was on the internet before he fucked off to space. He knows the other side of that is called a pillow princess , and that it’s supposed to be a bad thing.

It’s so hard, to navigate sex in this quiet, in the shattered peace of their lives. For every reason, but the one that’s a ragged gash in Shiro’s leathery armor the most.

Shiro doesn’t get hard often these days. Keith doesn’t care. Shiro does.

But Shiro is licking tomato juice and salt off his fingers and smiling up at Keith, eyes squinched almost close with the pleasure of it, and Keith wants to give him everything. Wants to wrap him up, warm and safe, fuck him until he comes and doesn’t feel like he has to provide for Keith, be a leader and a soldier and a man of the house or whatever. Wants him to know he doesn’t have to come for Keith even if they are fucking.

Keith wants Shiro to want to eat his heart and Keith doesn’t want to eat Shiro’s heart in return. 

So, okay. Plan. He needs a plan.

Because Shiro is usually the one to take the initiative in bed. It’s honestly meant, earnestly given. Keith knows this. 

But Shiro also shies away from compliments. The first time he’d asked if Keith would like him to wear something special, his face had been redder than the time he’d accidentally eaten one of Hunk’s ghost peppers, and he’s been sweating twice as hard from the nerves.

It starts with compliments. The normal ones at first, and then increasingly specific, intimate ones.

Once Shiro lets those go mostly unchallenged, he starts on pushing for the initiative. 

That’s a resounding success. Some days, Shiro goes easy. Others, he fights him for it, tussling and shoving and pinning until they’re damp with sweat and grinding on each other like teenagers desperate to get off before they’re found out.

And then: today.

The bedroom. Stripping Shiro slow and sure. Settling him on his stomach on the bed, pillow under his head and his hips and more in easy reach for if either of them cramp up.

Sunlight turns the room butter-warm. Keith warms up lotion in his hands, and works it in broad strokes up and down Shiro’s back, along the ridge of muscle to either side of his spine.

“Uhm … Uh, Keith?” Shiro’s voice is slurred already. Tension is draining from his back, impossible to hold with so much pressure and skin. Touch-starved, one of the books had said.

“Hm?”

“What, hmmmm. What’s this?”

“A massage, Shiro. You know, the thing for your muscles. Good for you.”

“Hm. Yeah, but … ‘m naked.”

Keith moves on to the knots that hide just under Shiro’s shoulder blades. “You are. We’ll deal with that later.”

“Is this, like, some kind of doctor kink? Masseuse kink? I’m not mad about it but—”

“Shiro,” Keith cuts him off, kind but firm. “Shut up and enjoy this.”

“Mm.”

Keith works his way up Shiro’s shoulders, his neck, then back down to the small of his back, the swell of his ass and the plush of his thighs.

God, Keith wants to build a monument to Shiro’s thighs. Corded with muscle and padding out with fat in their retirement, they take up half the bed. He’s seized by the embarrassing urge to lick them and then remembers, hey, he can do that if he wants.

Shiro giggles as he pauses to lick a broad stripe up the back of both thighs, subsiding into a delighted gasp as Keith bites at the crease where his ass meets his thighs.

He sits up and admires the sheer mass of him before going back to work.

It feels good to work Shiro over like this. Kneading him out like bread, measured and careful. An investment in a meal, a table, a life. Keith tries and fails to ignore that he’s sporting a semi from this alone.

Shiro’s noises don’t help.

Moans and grunts. He leans up on his knees to get better leverage at one point and spots a small patch of drool staining the pillow.

“That’s it sweetheart,” he says, grabbing the lube this time and slicking up his fingers. “Just stay relaxed for me. There we go.”

“That is … mmh, not your dick.” Shiro’s voice is muffled by the pillow and adorably indignant.

“Fuck off, I’m spoiling you.”

“Taken you every day this week, don’t need any prep,” he sulks. “If you—” Shiro shifts until his face isn’t smooshed into the pillow. “If you want to spoil me, put your dick in my mouth before you fuck me.” Even the demand is too relaxed, a kitten playing at having claws.

How’s he supposed to say no to that?

Keith shuffles up, keeping a hand on Shiro’s spine to keep him in place, keep him from being helpful. He settles with one knee on the pillow and slots the other under Shiro’s shoulder, sliding a hand under his chest to help him move and twist enough to make the position work.

Shiro opens his mouth and sticks his tongue out. “Mm?” His eyes are closed.

“Gorgeous,” Keith praises, running a thumb over Shiro’s lip, stroking it over his tongue in a lazy circle. “So handsome, sweetheart.” Keith rubs his wet thumb over Shiro’s cheek, smearing his spit over the rough stubble there, and feeds him his cock.

It slips in easy as sin. Shiro’s mouth is wet and wanting.

When it’s halfway in, Keith stills. Shiro likes to fight through his gag reflex most of the time, but today feels like a day for indulgence. 

Instead, Shiro licks gently at the tip Keith gives him, sucking softly. Keith pulls back a bit until Shiro is tonguing at the head, just under the crown.

Keith pets at Shiro’s hair, runs a steady hand over his cheek, his nose, across his eyebrow.

“So good for me,” Keith says. Mostly to ground him, anchor both of them here. It’s not enough to get him off, but it feels like molten gold pouring down his spine anyway.

After a few minutes, Keith pulls back. He pets Shiro’s hair again when he whines at the loss. “It’s okay baby, you’re so good.”

Shiro blushes and buries his face in the pillow again. “Go away.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying! Easy there,” he says, straddling Shiro again and slipping reapplying the lube. Too much lube, enough that it drips down Shiro’s ass, over his balls. He takes a second to rub his thumb along the cleft of him, smoothing it along the hair there.

He traces the same pattern with his cock, drawing it out until Shiro whines and tries to spread his legs further, only to be hemmed in by Keith’s knees bracketing his thighs. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, just relax.”

His cock slips in without effort, without discomfort, sinking home in one smooth thrust. Shiro stays loose under him, sighing in contentment when Keith bottoms out.

Keith shifts his hips a little, adjusting, focusing, before he leans forward, one hand tracing up the line of Shiro’s back, up his shoulder, over his arm until he can thread his fingers through Shiro’s, pinning him there. He flattens his free hand on the bed for leverage and lets himself stretch out on top of Shiro.

Shiro grunts at the sudden weight and then rumbles deep in his chest.

They grind like that, Keith working himself over Shiro’s back, in him and on him, mouthing at his neck and biting at his shoulders before he thinks, fuck it, who’s here to make fun of us for having hickies, and bites at Shiro’s neck, too.

“You feel so good around me. You’re so loud like this, sweetheart. So wet for me.” Shiro keens at the praise and melts even further into the mattress.

In this position he can’t tell if Shiro’s hard. It doesn’t matter. Shiro is grunting softly every few thrusts, rolling with the motion of Keith’s hips with the little leverage he has. The sun has slipped low on the horizon, painting them in amber. 

“Shiro, Shiro. I’m going to—where do you want me to?” Keith’s too far gone to know what his voice is doing, but it doesn’t matter. Shiro is under him, pliant, exactly where he wants to be. Is Keith’s, only Keith’s, and wanting only for Keith. 

Shiro pants into the pillow and shakes his head. Keith rubs circles into Shiro’s hand with his thumb. He gets like this, sometimes, when it’s good. Beyond words and unwilling to try.

“I’m gonna fill you up, sweetheart. Just squeeze my hand twice if you don’t want that, baby. Just,” he nuzzles in behind Shiro’s ear, licks along the line of his undercut.

His thrusts speed up, until Shiro is making encouraging little noises in the back of his throat.

Keith grinds in deep and stays there when he comes, serious about filling Shiro up, about giving it to him.

Shiro squeezes his hand twice, hard, when he shifts to pull out.

He pauses. “No?”

“Mm-mm.” An emphatic head shake.

Keith laughs. “I’m crushing you.”

The only answer is Shiro’s satisfied hum.

“D’you want me to?”

Another double squeeze. Not a day he wants to come, then.

This stupidly endearing man. Keith relaxes against him, mouthing at his shoulder and blissed out on the smell of sex and Shiro and satisfaction.

He rouses at a crash at the bedroom door once dusk settles. “We should get up.”

“Mm-mm.”

“Take a shower.” He lays an open-mouthed kiss on Shiro’s shoulder.

“No.”

“Feed Kosmo.” A nibble on his ear.

“Hmm.”

“Clean up before the kids come over.” A kiss on his neck.

“Absolutely not.”

“No?”

“Lance and Pidge are going to act like they’re in a hovel of a saloon no matter what.”

“True.” Another kiss to his neck.

“Allura will wrestle with Kosmo and ask about the wallpaper with so much confusion we’ll be too embarrassed to tell her the truth, and we’ll have to bullshit an explanation about it being an honored traditional decoration in Earth homes.” A squeeze at Shiro’s hand.

“Oh, definitely.”

“Hunk will just take over the kitchen and bitch at us about how gross our food is.”

“It’s a little gross,” Keith concedes. It’s a lot of beer and frozen pizzas with a sprinkle of fresh produce. He won’t apologize for that, though. Step fourteen of his retirement plan is to get Shiro to gain weight. A beer belly is going to look so good on him.

Keith is a man of luxurious tastes and precision planning. Hunk can deal.

Shiro just huffs into the pillow.

“I’ll make a deal with you.”

“Historically, those have served me well.”

“Let me get up to feed Kosmo, and I won’t make you shower until you want to. You can be jizz-covered in peace until everyone gets here and we have to pretend to be adults.”

Shiro lets out a loud, long sigh. “Only because Kosmo is such a good girl,” he relents, pulling one of Keith’s hands to his mouth so he can brush a kiss across the knuckles.