It’s not the lions.
Zarkon learns it after seeing them together, the brilliant formation of colour, when he watches their ferocious battle flight through the universe that belongs to him. It has never been the lions, at no point. Oh, he’d been a blind fool, but now he knows. He’d been one of them once, after all.
And then it’s so brutally easy to turn red into violet and violent.
All it takes is bleeding the crimson out of blue.
“Shut up.”
“You keep telling me that – “
“No, shut the fuck up.”
“ – but I don’t think you actually mean that.”
“I can’t believe this. I don’t believe this.”
“On the other hand,” Keith says, pulling off his helmet so he can pump some naturally oxygenated air into his lungs, “you probably do. Not that I care. Because I don’t.” He clears his throat and watches Lance scamper into the corridor behind the airlock. The door hums shut behind them. “Anyways, I’m starving, how long were we even up there? Allura can fix the tower next time, take Shiro with her and spend all day poking alien roof tiles that ooze all over you.”
Lance kicks his boots off. The frown on his face is a bit dirty because he’d insisted to take off his helmet and lick the tile slime. Keith hadn’t dared him. He didn’t have to, which is sad enough on its own but not surprising at all. Lance would lick anything that – he’s experimental with his body is what Keith means, but he doesn’t think about Lance that much anyways. Except he does.
“We’re eating in my room,” Lance says. He’s by Keith’s side, bare toes wiggling on the floor. Has to be cold. Maybe his spare pair of fluffy socks could help.
“Can’t, gotta change clothes. Scratched myself, it’s bleeding.”
“Then your room. You’re not getting out of this.” Lance is up in his face, pressing one long finger against Keith’s nose. “I’ll introduce you to the masterful work of The Princess Diaries, and you won’t be an uneducated heathen anymore. Well, less of one. Can’t believe it, honestly.” He pulls back, running a hand through his hair until it sticks up a bit because it’s gotten longer and Keith wants to know if it’s as soft as it looks now.
But this is a chance if he’s ever seen one. “Fine. You’re getting the food though. And this won’t become a – “
“It’s a date.”
Fuck. Keith stares, mouth dry and warmth in his chest, watches Lance flash him the fraction of a grin before he shoots off in a whirl of limbs and blue.
Maybe he should go clean his room. Or patch up the scratch on his leg that’s still bleeding, damn it. No day without trouble here. Keith picks up his helmet, and tries to remember whether he did use fabric softener on the socks when he last washed them.
Keith tries to believe that they don’t care. His team tells him every day how the purple glint in his hair doesn’t make him an enemy, that the golden ring flaring around his iris when he’s in battle couldn’t ever make them fear him.
And still, it’s only when Lance takes him aside by slamming him against the wall of his own room, pressing a finger on Keith’s mouth to shut him up, and staring at him like he could shatter with just too rough of a touch that Keith let’s go, and allows his mind a whispered ‘okay’.
“Nobody cares,” Lance says, voice so raw and soft that it cracks at the edge, “what you were born as. I don’t give a fuck if you’re human or Galra or something in between, and I don’t need to know. Voltron is all of us. Red chose you. She let you in, that ancient powerful thing let you into her everything because you have the mind of a paladin. Voltron found all of us and chose every inch of you, every goddamn string of dna. It wants you here.”
He takes a deep breath. “And so do I.”
Keith closes his eyes when Lance presses his first kiss to the corner of his mouth. He’s pretty sure that his eyes are golden right now, and his skin has to be a radiant violet all over his cheeks.
But Lance still wraps both arms around him when Keith slides their lips together once more, and Keith forgets the meaning of colour, time, or fear.
Nobody tells him that he needs to eat or sleep. It’d be hypocritical, none of them gets enough of anything these days, they’re all circling the castle like shadows of a broken behemoth. The magic is a vibrant hum in the castle’s veins, all of it flowing around its tragically temporary heart. Silence sits in corners and waits.
Keith has found a position for himself. He’s got a blanket around his shoulder, another underneath his knees so they don’t fall asleep, because no part of him can. The capsule that cocoons Lance thrums against his forehead. It feels impossible to move. He could grow into the sterilised polymer surface, just melt into its insides and curl himself into the empty shell that looks like shatters of what Lance was. Allura had said that there was hope.
They don’t believe it. They know it, want it so badly with all they have left, because without him the last piece that ties them after this is gone.
The young, freshly founded federation has named their new timeline p.b., post bellum, and Keith wants to scream and vomit and tear their stupid horrible politics apart because there hadn’t been a war, just a massacre and they had managed to get out alive. They had lost Red. Keith had cried until his lips were red from blood he’d bitten out of them and his throat hurt so much he felt like dying all over again.
Then Lance hadn’t opened his eyes.
Fifteen days p.b., the radio station squawks somewhere in the castle.
“Get back here soon,” Keith hears his own mouth say. It’s dry again, his throat too. He talks for hours every day and if only so the silence doesn’t fill Lance’s healing trance and steals more pieces of him, because he’s lost an eye and his arm and Keith can’t bear to let anything else of him get away.
“Wake up. Wake up. You said – you said that we,” his lungs ache, he breathes, talks and talks and talks some more until it ends in sobs and the sixteenth day begins on the horizon. “We’d watch the stars from Earth, you told me that, do you hear me? You said you’d kill me if I die out there. With your own damn hands, you said, and now you’re making me threaten you with your own words, when I just want to tell you… come home. The – the stars are waiting, you hear? Your stars, Lance. They’re all waiting.”
It’s twenty p.b. and Keith sleeps with his cheek against the cocoon. The body inside twitches. A bruised eyelid opens, the blue iris below blinking into focus.
Stars, Lance thinks through a nebula of pain that’s swirling fucking everywhere. Guess I can’t leave them hanging.
Access code: Zarkon Alpha-Thanatos-Centauri-Four-Seven
Filename: K –
υπνος – deactivated
Project: Leo Omnium Leonum
Stardate 3398.4-01. Review of candidates completed. Sleeper agent has been chosen. Four months, male, half-human heritage expected to offer obedience and enough weakness to blend in with possible paladins. Family: now deceased. Preparations begin. Estimated time until completion: seventeen years.
Stardate 3412.8-17. Preparations successful. Artificial memories fully implanted. Transport of agent to planet Earth without detection of inhabitants. Search for information in garrison: no results. Retreat to deserted area. Waiting for signal of Leo-B.
Stardate 3415.10-20. K fully activated and in contact with inhabitants. Leo-B located. No attack until locations of all Leo parts known.
Stardate 3415.10-21. Contact to K lost: location impossible to detect, brainwaves still incoming. Excitement, fear, confusion have been recorded.
Stardate 3415.10-22. Heavy influx of emotions into brainwaves. Joy (?), heavy activation of amygdala and a human-only brain area that seems to encode bonds to other humans. Attempt to influence brainwaves without success.
Stardate 3415.11-03. Connection dead. No input. Unable to reconstruct.
[ edit: 11-03, 12:56 Galran time: Identity and configuration of all paladins known. Project K has failed. Attempts to re-establish connection are still made. ]
Access code: p-5392790078-gund-hol
Filename: hear me roar motherfucker
Project: K is short for kick your ass
Stardate PurpleIsSoLastSeason.
I’ll make this quick because Pidge will bite my head off if we spend any more time hacking into you cute little security system. Bet you didn’t think that we’d find this outpost of your empire, huh? Another free planet and a way to get into your computer net. Really weak firewall, btw, Pidge laughed for five minutes. Anyways, listen up, eggplant.
You’re not getting him back. Project K isn’t yours. He’s a person, he’s a paladin and he’s our friend now. And I swear, if you bastard so much as look at him again except through the window of his lion when he gives your pathetic empire a load of whiplash, I’m gonna come for you. And I’m bringing my pet.
His name is Keith, by the way, and I’m Lance. Remember that.
Stardate Red.
I’ll never stop hunting you. I’ll find you at the edge of the universe. And I won’t be alone.
See you soon, uncle.
– K eith
Keith finds him in the middle of the virtual star map. He’s sitting on the ground, legs crossed, fingers resting on his knees and it’s the first time Keith has seen Lance that quiet since he was unconscious five hours ago.
“So,” Keith starts carefully.
“Did you know that there used to be glaciers?”
“…what?”
“They were Earth’s largest reservoirs of fresh water. I think they were somewhere around the polar caps.” Lance doesn’t move. He’s usually throwing his hands into all directions when he talks. Keith misses it so much, doesn’t know what he’ll do if it never comes back. If Lance stays still and rigid.
Keith lets out the air in his lungs. He breathes, gathers courage. “I see. Can I sit? I brought food.”
“Not hungry,” Lance says sharply. His voice softens then. “Okay. Whatever.”
Keith doesn’t ask twice. They’re side by side, two bowls of some oatmeal-mash and a bottle of water that Keith puts down in front of them. None of them touches it. Lance is looking up at the virtual image of the earth, and Keith looks at him and tries not to choke on the sob that’s stuck in his throat.
The electric blue of the projection shimmers when Lance waves his hand around. The earth turns around itself, a steady and slow path through the surrounding stars and their darkness.
“You have to eat.”
“They didn’t take their of their glaciers,” Lance says. “Past generations, I mean. Maybe we could have seen them one day then. That would’ve been cool, don’t you think? Glaciers. Huge blocks of ice that you could drink. They didn’t, Keith.”
Keith closes his eyes, and fuck this, he takes Lance’s hand and presses his face into Lance’s shoulder where he’s still healing and pink flesh starts to grow over the wound that he’d taken when all of them had almost died. “We saved some,” he says and it sounds pathetic, because it is. He looks at him again.
“Nine billion.” Lance whispers every syllable to the stars over their heads. “Nine billion lives.”
He’s crying now. His voice cracks, and Keith can’t bring himself to care. “We evacuated five million. And Zarkon isn’t – not anymore.”
“Neither is Earth.” Lance trembles, his shoulders a furious shiver under Keith’s touch. “But what’s a single planet to the life of an entire galaxy? What are we to them, except endangered and homeless and alone? We’re all alone out here, and they don’t care.” And Keith looks up at him, grabs Lance’s hands to wrap them in his own that are cold as ice too, and finds a wounded animal where Lance should be staring back at him. There are dark rings carved under his eyes, a scratch across his cheek, tears that look like they dried hours ago.
Lance stares at him, a second, two more. He watches how Keith cries. His eyes wander over Keith, seem to drink him in with the bandages around every damn inch and the bruise on his cheekbone, and Keith doesn’t pretend not to be broken because he is. Everything fucking is.
Then a whimper rises out of Lance, and he falls, collapses into Keith’s arms with painfully digging nails. Keith lets him, catches whatever he gives, closing his eyes and hearing Lance scream.
“A planet to save a galaxy, a planet to lure him in and one attack to kill all he has, and all that we ever were!”
“Mine,” Lance says, and his mother tells him no. It feels like his entire world is breaking apart, all good forgotten and all bad streaming down his cheeks in tears, because he can’t have it. Lance is three years old and he wants that toy, he’s ten and yells that he wants a pet and not another brother, he’s eighteen and says “I want to be a pilot, and this time he ignores his mother’s no.
"Be careful what you wish for, treasure,” his mother says sometimes. Her mouth smiles, but her eyes are dark with worry. “You may get it one day.”
Voltron is his life now, and the paladins are his family. All but one. Lance tries everything. He hides and lies to them and himself, learns to grin wider and laugh louder and builds his walls from bolts and ice. And still, he thinks and begs to the stars: I want him to stop hating me.
After one mission, Keith almost crushes him in a hug. Lance stands there, listening to his own treacherous heart beat, fingers gripping tight into Keith’s back.
“Don’t you dare die on me.”
Lance can’t stop through words from coming put. “Look who doesn’t hate me anymore. They all fall for my charm in the end. Lost your heart to me, huh?”
There’s a ridiculous, tiny flare of hope in his chest when Keith suddenly pulls back. “I don’t hate you, idiot. I haven’t for a long time.” He’s laughs, lets go of Lance to pat his back.
“So to you, I’m- ”
“God, you’re a friend, alright? Just like all of them. You’re my friend now.”
“Yeah. I – yeah. I am.”
Lance closes his eyes and listens to Keith’s steps growing quiet. When they’d first become Voltron, Keith had looked at him with a blaze of heat, and a blood-curdling storm of emotion had swept Lances’s mind into chaos of what, how can he, he’s infuriating, don’t get hurt, mine.
Careful, he thinks.
Too late. His mama had been right.
It’s three days until Pidge wakes from the coma, and Lance returns from the alien planet they spent their free time on with a bandaged thigh. Shiro is the first to see, when all of them are in the training room exhausting themselves with weights and sparring so they don’t have to think about the scar tissue healing on Pidge’s waist where there’d been a bullet wound days ago.
“Did you get hurt?” Shiro is immediately by Lance’s side, pulling up the leg of his shorts, his eyes shining dark with panic. “What happened? The planet is supposed to be friendly, they welcomed us into their town – “
“You fucking idiot,” Keith interrupts roughly. His worry is anger, always is.
But Lance slaps their hands away, even Shiro’s (it hurts a bit less than when it’s only Keith’s), and grins for some reason. “Relax. It’s only a tattoo.”
There’s no training after that, because Hunk is there too and demands to see and Shiro starts a scolding about responsibility and being able to go into battle, but then Lance carefully peels off the bandage – and Keith turns around. He leaves without looking back. Lance wouldn’t want him to see. It’s not his right. They’re a team, but he isn’t Hunk, not a friend, isn’t the faithful leader either.
Two weeks later, Keith realizes that it was just the beginning. Hunk is buried under an avalanche of rocks, still in his lion, and they only get him out because Lance systematically freezes the rocks and they splinter them apart bit by bit. It’s a quiet night after that. Keith should be glad, which he really is, but knowing that Lance sleeps in Hunk’s room that night has something dark and ugly growl in his chest. He shoves it back into his stomach. He has no right. Lance leaves the next day and comes back with a bandage on his arm.
After that, Shiro. Nobody knows what happened, but they find him after three days in the spaceship that had kidnapped him. Everyone on board is dead. Shiro doesn’t speak for a week. It takes a month for him to laugh again. Lance’s new bandage is on his lower back. Pidge says it’s the first black one.
And a month after that, he and Lance don’t talk anymore. Keith doesn’t apologize. It was the right thing to push Lance out of the way, take the knife to his chest instead. Barely past his heart, Allura had said. You almost died, I hate you, I hate you, Lance had screamed when Keith had woken up with blood in his mouth and hope in his chest. He doesn’t know how to fix this, can’t bring himself to regret. But they’re a team, fuck this, he goes to Lance’s room and knocks and sure thing, within a few sentences they’re yelling at each other.
“All of you,” Lance roars at him, grabbing his collar and slamming Keith against the wall so hard that his muscles protest, “you have to stop almost dying! I hate this, and you – you of all people, you’re strong, fuck, that’s why… why I put us together, you’re so – look. You need to understand what I feel – that I, you.”
Keith is still motionless against the wall when Lance steps back to pull his shirt off. He hoists up the leg of his pants, whirls around, “fucking look at me.”
Never has Keith obeyed faster.
The serval cat on Lance’s thigh is a vibrant green, the spots on its fur shaped like the silhouette of cells. On his arm sleeps a golden tiger, giant paws crossed peacefully, the claws out and sharp. Across Lance’s lower back is a shadow, a lion in ink-black with stars gleaming on almost real fur, eyes soft and head high with pride. And –
“God,” Keith breathes when Lance turns around, and he drags them into a kiss that’s raw and desperately final.
Over Lance’s heart, curved like the crescent moon, lies a red jaguar.
Keith enters the kitchen at five-thirty in the morning. The computer in his room had told him that he’d slept for six and a half hours, which Keith deemed enough. He’d left the bed, got dressed, roughly pushed his hair into a mess of two hairties around each other on the back of his head. Then he’d tucked the blanket back around the softly breathing human bundle in his bunk and went off.
The thermos flask on the table steams when he screw the lid open. A rich flood of spices curl into his sleepy mind, cardamom and cinnamon swaying with the scent of raspberry that Keith has been associating with wide grins and darker-than-his-own hands for months. He drinks the tea slowly, hums at the taste.
There’s a note when he lifts the little dome covering his breakfast.
‘eat up. don’t think you can trick me, i’ll know if you skip breakfast and put it back into the fridge.
the sunrise is gonna be beautiful today.’
Keith allows himself a smile, shy even with nobody watching. He eats everything, recognises the burnt edges on the sunny-side-up egg that speak of Lance’s clumsy fingers trying his best. Hunk cooks far better than him. Keith would never tell.
He finishes his meal and looks outside at the sky. The sunrise is just starting, and Keith remembers the note. There’s crimson and royal purple crawling at the horizon, and Keith’s feet move. He’s at the highest level of the castle after a few minutes, the glass dome above his head giving a breathtaking view of the cosmos. Keith exhales, inhales, repeats it. His muscles tense. He begins.
It feels like only a few minutes passed when the automatic door to the dome plateau slides open. Keith stills mid-motion. His foot comes down to the floor a second later, heel landing softly where it was kicking at invisible enemies just moments ago. Lance doesn’t hesitate. He walks over, hands around a mug of tea, and Keith feels warmth crawl through his chest when he recognises the shirt that Lance is wearing as one of his own.
“You ate,” Lance says when he sits down.
“Yeah.” Keith lets him settle, then finds his own place against Lance’s shoulder, forehead carefully nestled into his neck. Lance is warm still, his skin singing with not enough sleep. “How many hours?”
“Four after you went to bed, one during your training. Allura awake yet?”
Keith mumbles a no. They sit together in silence until the sun warms Keith’s face. When Lance reaches for his hand, his fingers are hot from the mug, chapped and battleworn. His thumb finds rest where Keith’s pulse beats.
In half an hour, they’re paladins again. Until then, Lance watches the morning sky, and Keith breathes by his side.
“Lance, have you seen my – oh what the fuck. Tell me you didn’t.” Keith pinches the bridge of his nose. This is not his responsibility. He has not been trained to deal with this. The proper reaction would be to turn around and walk away. He should leave Lance’s room and ignore how he’s perched on the floor, cooing to a bundle of something in his arms until a moment ago.
“I have no idea what you mean,” Lance says, trying for innocence in his voice and failing spectacularly. “Nothing suspicious is going on. You should just leave again and not say anything.”
Sadly, Keith hasn’t been proper for a day in his life.
“What is it this time?” The door slips shut behind his back, and the fishy-looking pile of blankets in Lance’s lap jolts at the sound.
“Uhm,” Lance tries weakly. “Surprise?”
Keith forces himself to take deep, slow breaths. “Tell me it’s not carnivorous. Please tell me it doesn’t grow up to be bigger than three meters.”
Lance’s face brightens. “Don’t worry, I looked it up! They’re omnivores and really friendly and this one was abandoned and screaming for its mama, seriously Keith, do you expect me to leave a baby behind? He was crying, okay, and I’m a strong and resilient man but we all have our limits -”
Keith interrupts him by slumping down on the floor before him and reaching for the blanket. “You can’t keep bringing orphaned animals with you,” he starts, but his rant doesn’t even gain any heat because a tiny furry paw wiggles out of the blankets and touches his hand.
And the bundle moves, Lance coos softly – “Don’t worry, he’s not gonna hurt you, he looks really grumpy but is actually pretty chill if he cares for something” – and Keith’s heart leaps in his chest.
“It’s so small.”
“Mhm. Don’t tell Allura until we’re away from the planet. I’ll take care of her, I promise.”
“She’s – it’s a girl?”
A warm smile curves Lance’s mouth. He cradles an otter-like creature in his arms, tucked into his blanket, letting it suckle on his thumb. The Shtarwott is barely bigger than Keith’s hand, his finger looking gigantic when he strokes its (her?) grey fur. It was white cloud-spots all over, like a reverse snow leopard, with six legs and three black eyes and Keith is utterly lost when he watches the gentleness of Lance’s fingers holding that small head.
Keith swallows. “Fine. I won’t tell her. Just, just don’t let her distract you.”
Lance tilts his head at him. He squints, studying Keith’s face for a moment, before a grin spreads over his face. “Aww, are you jealous? Don’t worry, you’re still my favourite.”
“Oh shut up. Did you feed her yet?” Keith is already up on his feet before Lance can even open his mouth. “Yeah, thought so. I’ll go find something. Make sure she’s warm, and don’t think that you can skip out on training because of this.”
Lance’s smile could illuminate the entire castle. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Like I’m gonna miss out on kicking my boyfriend’s ass.”
“You’re such a loser,” Keith tells him on his way out. He ignores Lance’s laughter, just quietly saves the sound in a nook of his memory that’s tiny and fragile still.
When he comes back later, food goo and some fruit and meal worms (stolen from one of Hunk’s experiments) in his arms, Lance has curved his body into a circle on the ground, the cub awake and gnawing at his ear.
“I know,” Keith sighs. He sits, takes the creature, and tucks the blanket around Lance before pulling out a worm. “He’s kind of great.”
Moami 