“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.”

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.

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.

Moami

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!”

The Black Lion’s Scar

“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.

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.”

They all know that Lance misses Earth. His family is there, memories of a life that ended when he went to become a pilot, and he has nothing of them with him, no pictures like Pidge or even the tiniest note, no message or anything.

Keith has made himself forget what it’s like to miss someone, but this is different for him. It’s better not to remember if they’re dead. Lance’s family, however, is alive beyond the endless horizon of stars and burning gas planets.

When Allura sends out an order to one of the planets they’d liberated, asking for food and material, Keith goes to talk to her. He shuffles his feet when she smiles and asks, “Why do you want me to order that?”

“It’s not for me,” Keith says. The blush crawling up his face is too warm for any lies. “Just. Please?”

Two days later, Allura knocks at his room.

The same evening, Lance finds a small pot filled with earth on his desk. Within the earth, the tiniest three plants are just beginning to peek out in a flash of green. There is a note, Latin scribbled on it, and the dried petal of a pink flower is placed where a signature should be.

Lance doesn’t look up what kind of plant the Latin names belong to. He takes the petal and goes to Keith’s room, vision blurred with tears. Keith can barely open the door after a harsh knock before Lance tackles him to the floor, calls him an idiot in a cracked voice, how much did that cost you even, no don’t answer that, until Keith hugs Lance and lets him cry gratitude and the shy blossom of something new into his shoulder.

The tiniest plants grow into thick leaves a month later. When sixteen weeks have passed since Lance cried, a pale pink flower sits on the plant’s crown one morning, but it’s not noticed until noon comes around and two warm bodies move out of the blanket nest that’s not longer a bed for just one.

Shiro can’t count all the reasons why his bond with the team is unconditional in its trust, but there are three that come back to his mind every day.

His team looks at his scar, at the loss of colour and humanity in his hair, at the grotesque instrument of death where his warm hand used to be, and they see him as a leader, not a victim, not a fallen one.

Thus the first reason – they accept him.

His team made him earn their fierce loyalty, the trust of their purring lethal machines; they didn’t give him anything for free that he wouldn’t have wanted, but once he’d proven himself, they are there, always, by his side in battle and on the ground and through his nightmares.

The second reason – they give faith, and they take his.

His team may argue with him, drive him insane with worry and the urge to protect, but those four people and Allura and even Coran do something that the aliens took from him when they touch-carved his body into a weapon, when the human doctors strapped him down and looked at him like he was a monster.

The last reason.

When they fight, his words are not the law, but a guidance that the team tunes into the finest perfection.

When Shiro speaks a no about his own body or soul, away from battle and war, they take it as the no that it is, and nothing less.