i’ve found that all our actions and deeds are done one of these ways.
out of love, because our soul craves and desires it;
out of necessity, because our mind and body require it;
or lastly out of spite, because we were told that we can’t, won’t, shouldn’t ever; and we raised our heads, teeth bared in a grin, and said:
watch me conquer.
This. Is. Beautiful. Thank you so much, I want to look at this for fifty hours and then a hundred more. I adore how you painted them.
And he knew that he was loved
When this one didn’t try to make him adore this one more than anything, more than his own breath and the earth beneath his feet
But instead
Took his hand and asked him about the rainforest of his mind
Put this one’s lips on his shoulder and begged to learn about the night sky of his blood
Whispered a plea and wished to dead gods for him to see the twitch of his own muscles that could bear a roar of war-storms underneath
Instead of asking to be loved
This one leaned against him and spoke: I want to know how you love yourself
And when he could only answer that he had forgotten
This one watched, silent, just to say: May I stay and see how you remember yourself?
He thought about it, quiet, in the dark, and said: Yes. And then we can love me together, and you too, just as much.
What if Keith really is part Galra, born and raised among them, human blood from distant relatives in his veins, a rare mutation that made his Galran parents have a human-looking child?
What if Shiro’s arm was crafted from steel and real Galran flesh, in a dark room with almost gentle touches from the witch, pressed to his body where his own pulse used to beat and where magic now haunts his new metal-breathing skin?
What if Keith is an orphan for a reason?
What if his last memory of his parents is their whispers of “safe, my sweetest child, you will be safe” as they push him into a capsule, the glass locking over his face before the tiny ship launches into space, and a witch’s magic floods over the face of the only two people he ever loved?
And what if Keith’s first reaction to Shiro’s new arm wasn’t shock, but a flood of recognition –
– because the energy that now pulses in his leader’s veins is what Keith used to call home.
It begins after a battle that leaves the red lion’s cockpit torn open, and a piece of debris from a Galran ship stuck where Keith’s stomach would have been.
Would have, almost, just a second later, death deathdeath, Lance thinks and pushes him against the wall of the corridor when they’re supposed to be leaving for their rooms to recover, but he can’t, can’t go to bed, not when Keith’s eye is swollen and his jaw is bruised black-purple (Galra darkness blooming on his skin, no, no) and he opens his mouth to say something to Lance.
“Shut the fuck up,” Lance growls.
Keith watches him. He’s in sweatpants and a loose shirt, his uniform was burnt through from the explosion and he’ll need a new one because somehow he crawled out of the cockpit before the piece of debris could – before it –
Keith reaches, touches his cheek, says his name: “Lance”, like it’s something strange and sweet on his tongue, sounding like a miracle that he breathes out.
“You could have,” Lance chokes out, “you almost. I hate you, you can’t just…”
“But I didn’t, right? I didn’t.”
God, and Lance wants to slap him, grab his collar and scream his pain-roaring heart out at this boy, because they all need him and his lion and the carefully hidden protected smile that he’s given them the first time when Lance accidentally called their team his home, the night where Keith had taken his hand and squeezed it before running off to his training.
Lance lets his knees give in. Keith slides down with him, back to the wall, legs sprawling out around Lance until he’s wrapped in them, until Lance can crawl against his body in the cold corridor and press his ear to Keith’s sharp ribcage. There’s a heart beat, too fast, but loud. It’s there, clear and wonderful and Lance closes his eyes so he can cry into Keith’s shirt.
Keith puts a hand into his neck. “Lance.” His nails are blunt, small pale half-moons that Lance wouldn’t ever be brave enough to kiss unless he gets permission. “Lance.” Another hand is around his waist, grips him so tight that he could bruise, wringing a sob out of him that he made the last time when his little sister –
But Keith isn’t like her yet. His breath is soft against Lance’s forehead, and he says his name, over and over again, until Lance looks up at him and he stops.
“I’m alive,” Keith tells him quietly.
“I know.” Lance reaches out. He grabs Keith’s hand, putting his fingers right where Keith’s bayard rests during battle, where it’s now empty and healing from the angry red burns. “And I swear I’ll fucking keep you that way.”
“So if you’re bisexual, why aren’t you with a girl?”
And it had been going so well. A cascade of ink splotches all over Hajime’s notes when he clenches his fist, snapping his pen clean in half. The other members of his group project are staring, but not at him, their eyes are at the guy who’d asked without any shame and loud enough for the rest of the tiny study room inside the library to hear.
Hajime knows that the question is directed at him. He could just sock the guy in the jaw, never liked him anyways, he’s the kind of person who leeches onto a group for the assignment and all he contributes is his name on the final presentation they’re handing in. The room is silent. Nobody says a word.
The guy snorts and leans closer. “C’mon. You got the choice, after all. Aren’t you making it harder for yourself? Nothing against gays, they’re great and all, but you don’t have to go the hard way. And isn’t your boyfriend gay anyways – “
“It’s not a choice.”
“What?”
They all watch him when Hajime rises out of his chair. Midnight-blue ink falls from his hands and smears on the floor when he takes a step, another, slowly rounding the table past his group members until he’s in front of the guy.
On the other side of the study room, sitting with some psychology post-grads even though he’s only in his bachelor yet, Tooru looks at him with soft eyes of amber and fire.
“I said,” Hajime looks down at the guy, and speaks, “that this isn’t a choice. You should know better than to say that attraction and love are something we have control over. But if you really want to be that asshole, I’ll tell you. And then you’re going to get your stuff and leave, because the only thing that annoys me more than your disgusting attitude is your inability to remember a single law that we’ve discussed in the sixteen hours we’ve been working on this project and you’ve been sitting there like moss on a rock.”
Someone whistles behind Hajime’s back, sharp and impressed. He ignores it, but a grin slips over his mouth when a group member mumbles “Thank fuck, someone said it, the bloodsucker’s getting wrecked.”
Hajime clears his throat, and fuck it, he allows himself to grin in a way that Tooru likes to tease him about because he looks like something with fangs and claws that hasn’t hunted down a decent prey in a long, long time.
“You could give me the world and everything on it to choose from and I’d still only want him.”
The silence breaks with a shout across the room. “I love you too, but it’s still your turn to cook tonight!”
“We’ll cut a new pair of lips into your skull,” the aliens had told him. “A bit deeper each day. A bit more each night. After every fight, boy, until we can see your neurons trembling behind that pathetic human flesh.”
They had kept their promise. For each night in the arena, another press of steel against his skin, a bit of blood smearing across his nose for his gladiator kills. When he escapes, he can still feel the metal scrape against bone for the first time in the night before.
One day, when they’re molten together as Voltron and flying home from a mission, he tells them through the connection. Shiro says it like this: that for each life they made him take and thus for each time he survived, they put a cut to his nose, widened the wound. The team is quiet after that. Shiro hears their hesitation, begs in his mind that they won’t ask.
“I’ll be more careful,” Keith finally says. “I won’t wave my sword around anymore when – I mean, it could remind you of – cause it’s just a bigger knife, right?”
Shiro doesn’t correct him.
How could he possibly tell them that the aliens hadn’t used a knife, because it would have been through Shiro’s skull in days?
They had taken a sharp wire, and they had touched it against the bridge of his nose in brutal softness until the skin just reddened, until the flesh deepened a millimeter, the tiniest brush of steel against him.
A wire had been their instrument and Shiro the bow to play it with, because one cut for every kill had to be done, and there were countless, endless, a myriad of lost lives that could only be painted on him with something as thin as that.
Lance has no idea how Keith’s parents died.
Keith doesn’t talk about it, the team doesn’t ask, and it’s one of the few unspoken taboos in the sarcastic quickfire that Keith and he ricochet between each other on the ground, in space, between training sessions and unmentioned touches of shoulders.
It’s a routine mission, and the last thing Lance hears before his lion is taken down and the pretty aggressive allies of Voltron’s arch enemy drag him into their base is a static-garbled wail of his own name. It becomes the only thing he clings to, that skewed echo of his five letters in Keith’s voice, as the aliens bore things into his skin and brain and try to reach his mind.
Two days later, he’s in Shiro’s grip on the floor of the castle, Pidge screaming and Hunk crying and Keith, eyes blown into liquid darkness with angry tears smeared on his cheeks. There’s a cracking burst of noise every other moment – oh, that’s Allura, firing at the aliens who’d tried to hold a paladin and didn’t think about the consequences.
Lance stares at the ceiling of the castle. Someone (softtinyhandsPidge?) touches his wounds, rubs wetness against them, a sting of antiseptic in his nose. Keith is there. Keith, Lance tries to say, ends up spitting blood.
“No. No, no,” Keith shakes his head, cradles Lance’s face with nails digging into his jaw like a painful thread to reality, and Lance is awake, can’t die, won’t.
“Not you too. Promise, you fucking – you have to, I’ll make you – please. Tell me they didn’t break you. Not you too. Not you. You’re not them, you hear me, you’re not breaking.”
That’s how Lance learns how Keith’s parents went.
It’s the same day that he swears his first oath.
He swears, with Pidge’s fingers patching him up, Hunk stuffing a blanket under his head, Shiro gripping him like he could vanish, and with Keith’s trembling forehead by his shoulder, that he’s not going to become another broken bond.
Tooru is wrist-deep in cabbage and contemplating the concept of thirst when someone starts yelling.
His first reaction is, well, nothing. The neighbourhood that his grandmother lives in isn’t exactly juvenile; yelling is something that occurs regularly when Margret calls for her husband Hans to come to dinner already, and invite that nice boy who’s watering old Miko’s plants while she’s in the hospital, will you? (Her chocolate cake is really good though. Tooru has been over at M and H’s place every day for the past week after taking care of his grandmother’s beloved plants, e.g. tugging weed out of the ground and watering, so much watering, because summer is hell in this corner of the country.)
So when someone (male, judging by the low rhythm to the voice) shouts into grandma Miko’s garden, Tooru ignores the rude interruption at first.
Seconds later, someone steals the straw hat off his hair.
“Hey!” And now Tooru is up on his feet, dirt streaking his face when he wipes off too much sweatiness, and he’s so ready to give someone the scolding of their life about disturbance of Sunday peace and annoyance of innocent grandkids when – oh. Hot damn.
“Hey,” the someone says. It really is a guy, and Tooru puts a hand over his brows like a visor to drink in a nice gulp of that. The man can’t be much older than Tooru, sixteen-ish, so technically he’s a boy, but nobody Tooru’s age should look that good in loose grey running shorts and a tank top with a cartoon sunny-side-up egg on it. Also, nobody who’s barely seventeen should have calves that pretty or arms that Tooru wants to fling himself into with a faint sigh. He’s got short hair, seems even sweatier than Tooru and fuck, he’s one of the guys who look unfairly gorgeous after physical activity and oh, those are nice brown eyes…
Still, Tooru clicks his tongue and frowns at the guy. “Is there any reason you’re screaming at me like I just murdered someone?”
“Yeah.” It’s more of a grunt than an actual word .Tooru gives him a raised eyebrows. “Are you going to tell me?”
“Mhm.” A moment of awkward silence spreads. Tooru shifts from one leg to another, and rubs along his neck when he finds the boy staring at him without any inhibition. “Uhm. I’m waiting? Is there something on my face, or – “
The boy blushes. Oh no, Tooru thinks, he’s cute too, why can’t he be just attractive or adorable, I’m gonna sue –
“You’re drowning them.” Before Tooru can say anything else, the boy snatches the watering pot out of his hand. “That kind of cabbage doesn’t need as much water. Also, you should never water plants when it’s the hottest time of the day. It’ll take away even more liquid from the earth. Do it in the evening. This garden is beautiful, please take care of it.”
Tooru is kind of speechless. His mouth is gaping, most likely making him look very stupid, but the guy just ducks his head before pushing both the hat and the pot back into Tooru’s grip. “I could help. Is Miko your grandma? I, I live around here. The garden is really wonderful. I take care of my parents’, I know a lot.”
“Uh. Uhm. I… guess? Sure?” Tooru needs a moment to get his famous smile back. “Just hop over the fence.” Then he grins. Once the guy is in the garden (and god do those calves look nice when they push that body over an obstacle), Tooru puts a hand by his hip and tilts his head. “Some help and company would be nice. I’m Tooru, and you can water my buds anytime if you’re not yelling at me while you do it.”
The boy blinks at him. He’s quiet for a solid fifteen seconds, and Tooru fears that he’s overdone it until a slow, sharp grin twitches on the guy’s mouth. “Looks like you can use the help. Anyone would be scared of such terrible pick-up lines. I’m Hajime. Now watch and do what I do, and maybe that’ll help your brain think of a better way to ask me for ice cream after this.”
This is so fucking badass
This is the kind of art that you never forget, a way of painting that leaves you with silence on your tongue and terrified beauty in your hands.
Moami 