Keith is ruining everything he touches, which is just typical, Lance shouldn’t even be surprised, but here he is and not any wiser than before. Fine then. Everyone else can have fun without him. He doesn’t care about enjoying his free time, no sir. Why would Lance care to relax, that’s ridiculous, it’s not like he puts himself in mortal danger every day by trying to save the galaxy’s ungrateful –

Shiro says it’s an attitude problem. Lance had considered telling him to kindly fuck off, but he values his health and also, Keith had given him grin number sixteen that conveyed ‘coward, I knew you’d chicken out’ without actual facial expression. So now Lance sits here, alone, with an implied attitude and nobody understanding why he won’t join the fun.

It’s their first free day in months, and of all things to do on a sunny day on their recent planet of residence, Pidge had decided to take all of them for a ride. Horseback riding, to be precise. Lance had immediately vetoed – they’re not even horses, anything equine has four legs and not six and doesn’t come elephant-sized with fur ranging from sky-blue to suspicious translucent – but nobody cared for his opinion.

Keith holds one of the animal’s reins while Pidge climbs on its back. Pidge is cooing soft words all while trailing upwards on the complicated framework of tasseled wool on the horse’s flank, but Lance knows that the whispers aren’t what keeps the animal calm. It’s Keith.

Watching him has become a habit, Lance won’t deny that. It’s too mesmerising to see how all the horses had crowded around him as soon as the natives had led the paladins onto the far-stretched meadow where the herd resided. Shiro had talked the natives into giving them five of the animals for the day after hearing that some of them were tame, and Hunk had been so excited that even Lance had stopped his protest. He did refuse to ride along, though. He’s just gonna sit here and wait for them. Alone.

A lot of people are afraid of horses, okay. That’s fine.

Or it would be, if Keith wasn’t totally ruining his plan right now. As soon as Pidge’s up on the horse, Keith takes another one by the reins and shouts something at Shiro. Pidge’s eyebrows fly up, Hunk tilts his head, and Lance can’t see what emotion goes over Shiro’s face but he turns his horse, and the three of them ride off. Without Keith.

Who now strides over to Lance, a baby-elephant sized horse in the colour of seaweed following by his side. Lance freezes. Oh god, no. This can’t be.

“Listen up,” Keith says. He’s stopped before Lance, one hand resting by the horse’s neck, fingertips barely just touching and he’s not even holding the reins, fuck, Lance is going to die. He’s afraid and fascinated and so in love that it hurts in his chest like a salvo of bullets. Keith then does something that keeps Lance from runnning away – he smiles.

“No idea why you’re scared, but I could see it from all the way over there and I’m not gonna let you ruin my free day with that sad face of yours. This is Sal’njeh, which is a nickname I made up because the actual names they give those poor things are ridiculous and should never be spoken out loud. Now make some space with your damn thighs, I wanna sit.”

Lance can’t move a single muscle. He lets himself be pushed aside by Keith who squeezes onto the same bench, the seaweed monster happily nosing into Lance’s hair and holy space he is going to die. He’s going to get eaten and his mother will cry and Keith will never know how cute he is when he smiles at animals like they’re the only good in this world –

“She likes you,” Keith says casually.

“I’m.” Lance closed his eyes sometime around when the horse’s nostrils flared with warm breath over his face. “She won’t. Kill – kill me?”

“Nah. Vegetarians, peaceful, love humans cause they think we’re foals that can’t walk and gotta sit on their backs. Look…” Keith nudges him gently, and Lance takes a deep breath before cracking an eye at him, taking in Keith’s smile. It’s almost shy, like he’s nervous about something. “It’s our free day. You don’t have to sit around all alone. We can just stay like this, if you’re not too afraid.”

Lance doesn’t know what to say for a moment. The horse seems to find his face boring now and has moved to nibbling at Keith’s pants. “If… if you keep its teeth away from me. And hold the reins. Then that’d be, uh, fine I guess. To sit here.”

“Okay.” That’s all Keith says. He takes the reins again and starts talking about horses on different planets and riding and somewhere along the way, Lance touches the seaweed horse’s fur. He only does it with his index finger, strokes it along the animal’s back, but Keith’s smile goes a bit wider at that. Lance allows himself to feel warm and kind of okay for a little while. They’re free, for now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Keith finds him on the hill before the house. The others are inside, waiting for answers, an explanation, but Keith touches Shiro’s shoulder and looks at him. They talk. Keith can’t begin to describe how much has changed, how he’s been searching while Shiro had been through unspeakable things that left his skin ashen and hair white and cost him flesh all over his body.

He still reaches for Shiro’s hand. “Let’s go inside,” Keith says, wants to pull him off that hill and somewhere safe, but Shiro flinches away from him. “What?”

“I’m not me anymore.” Shiro looks at the ground, left hand curled around his metallic wrist, knuckles clenching tight enough to lose all blood. “This hand isn’t mine. They put it there, I don’t know what it does, and if I’ll hurt people.”

Keith watches him for a long moment. Then, he says: “That’s stupid. Typical Shiro-thing to say, but still stupid.” This time he doesn’t give Shiro a chance to react. Keith snatches his hand, the cold and sharp-edged one, gripping it as hard as he can.

“Seems like I can still grab you and pull you out of things you don’t belong in. So I guess it works for a hand, meaning it’s yours and it’s you.”

He doesn’t wait for Shiro’s reaction. “C’mon,” Keith says, “they’re waiting.” When he turns to stumble down the hill, Shiro follows without a word, but his fingers squeeze Keith’s hand carefully. The metal is warm now.

Voltron’s Bond.

It’s Pidge who initiates the whole thing without even wanting to.

They’re all exhausted. The team building exercises did nothing for them, they still can’t assemble Voltron again, dinner tastes like slimy slippery goo and it’s so quiet except for the sound of their spoons against the bowls that Pidge can’t bear with it anymore. “I’m done for today. Night. I’ll be in my quarters.”

Everyone looks up, but nobody does anything to keep Pidge from leaving the table. They just watch, young eyes dark and tired, as a thin frame disappears through the door, outworn and hunched over like all of them.

Hunk is the next to stand up, five minutes after. “Pidge’s right. I’m done, too. See you guys tomorrow.” Then he stomps off. The silence around the table thickens, and it’s no surprise to Allura that the rest of the food stays untouched until one after another, the boys get up and nod at her.

It’s Keith next, quiet and with gritted teeth, fists curled by his side. It’s Lance, not even cracking a joke at her, worrying his lip between his teeth. And after he’s stacked the rest of the bowls and mumbled a quiet “thank you for the training today”, Shiro follows after them, having stayed for over an hour since Pidge vanished.

The night has fallen over the planet when Coran steps to stand by Allura’s side. She’d been watching the virtual model of the galaxy, counting planets that needed saving, but turns her head to him. “I don’t know how to get them to bond. They’re so young. They’re scared, and I can’t make their fate easier.”

Coran tilts his head and, for some reason, smiles. “You should see this.”

And she really should. Coran leads her to Pidge’s room, at the very end of the corridor, the door carelessly open. Allura prepares for a lecture about safety in one’s quarters and underestimating the enemies’s stealthiness, but Coran simply points into the room… and Allura can’t help but smile, too.

In a pile of blankets and pillows, the five paladins of Voltron are asleep.

Pidge lies in the middle, legs stretched out long, glasses somewhere on the floor because Hunk’s big hand cradles that fragile jaw and pulls both close against another. They had been drawn here, one by the other – Keith next, legs tucked to his own chest and curled up so tightly that he’s a tiny fraction of his usual temper and red-hot wildness. His nose touches Pidge’s back, and the strong arm around his waist that belongs to Shiro seems to be what holds him together. And there’s Lance, wedged somewhere by Shiro’s hip, head on his stomach and Shiro’s fingers calm in his hair.

Allura turns and closes the door again. She says good night to Coran, walking to her room in silence. She thinks about the paladin’s slow breaths. She thinks about Pidge’s fingers gripping Hunk’s shirt, Shiro’s fingertips reaching against Pidge’s back just below where Keith looked vulnerable. She thinks about Lance, looking in place, belonging, safe.

“Bonding, huh,” Allura whispers to the stars outside the castle. “I see.”