Pyrrhus
When he gets to the training deck Shiro is already there, six feet one inch of white and black armor and his eyes as calm as ever. Like everything and nothing, when you look him in the eye. Like the quiet of the open universe.
Keith slides the door shut behind him, no hesitation. He's gotten much better at this.
"Hey," he says. "You just got here, right?"
"Yes," says Shiro. His hands are empty, though of course that doesn't mean he isn't armed, and his unruffled posture is a front, Keith knows, no way to really read into it. Shiro could train all day, shadow-boxing and laps and hand-to-hand, and he'd still be breathing easy when you found him. Legacy of his training, legacy of his personality, legacy of compartmentalization – of whatever the Galra did to him that he's had to cut off and hide out of sight, sanding down the edges so no one notices the gaps. Keith has never been brave enough to ask which one it is.
He wishes sometimes that he'd asked.
"Ok," Keith says, pulling out his bayard, letting it snik itself into his sword. A weapon from ten thousand years and ten million miles beyond where he started, and yet it notches into his hand so well. Better than that other weapon, purple light on steel, wrapped and hidden under his mattress. Better than the weapon he now knows is his blood.
"I was thinking running through sequence seven," he tells Shiro. "It's quick. There's that group meeting tonight – another meeting." He shakes his head, disgusted. "That's all they want to do, you know? Sit and talk. Scroll through computer screens. Like that will do anything."
He cuts himself off before Shiro answers. "I know, I know," he says. "Meetings are important. Strategy's important. But the group leader has to think that, right?"
Shiro says, "Yes." Keith feels the warmth ease itself into his shoulder blades, massaging out the tension there, calming his pulse. It's always been this way: Keith, outraged about something, a bad practice run or a suspicious look or Lance (usually Lance), ready to pull himself away from the group, ready to skulk in the dark of his room, but Shiro always finds him. Lets him rant, anger out over anger in, saying nothing, doesn't have to, only taking what Keith has and accepting it.
"So sequence seven," Keith says, dropping into a looser fighting stance. "We'll go one-on-one, see who lasts the longest."
Shiro nods. The huge white room's computers listening in as he says, "Start sequence seven, single fight."
It's always been this way.
-i-
Because no one ever told him otherwise, growing up he thought everyone lived in lonely houses with a parent only half-there at any given time. With no friends, no expectations, only a need to catch and hold his father's attention, Keith accepted all the man's foibles as facts. Beware electronics, that's how they listen in. Beware genetically modified food, that's how they poison you. Beware the outside, the far distances, things come from there and hurt you in ways that are never quite clear.
Spending day after day in the baking desert, looking for fossils, for strange marks in the ground. Ditching the tiny, unfriendly school as often as he could, the teacher's natter too much for him juxtaposed with all this empty space. But nothing, his dad said, was as empty as it seemed.
His dad gave him a strange dagger, jagged and marked with some meaningless purple sigil. "Keep this with you, but keep it quiet. Don't let them know," he said. Keith took it, solemn with the responsibility, ready to protect his father from all who would hurt him. He was about six at the time.
Chemtrails, government agents, little green men: Keith believed all of it because he thought everyone did, and because when he found (with an eight-year-old's staunch certainty) some evidence of some conspiracy in the newspaper or on their ancient flickering TV his dad would notice him, chuckle in his Texas twang (although Keith hadn't known it was a Texas twang then, they didn't live anywhere near Texas and as far as he knew never had, and his dad never talked about his past, what might have pushed him there to here) and tell him he was a clever kid.
"You see that?" he'd say, bent over some newspaper article Keith had circled in thick red pen. "You're getting it. The connections. They're out here, if you look. You get it, Keith. I raised you right."
It only took two days at the Galaxy Garrison to have this notion removed, in total. As it turned out his classmates had spent most of their childhoods at the mall, not out in the desert looking for extraterrestrials. Keith's reputation as a paranoid weirdo was permanently sealed after his first awkward attempt at conversation, the first night at the Garrison when all the nervous freshmen uncomfortable in their beige uniforms were gathered around their bunks to feel each other out – sealed in those exact words, actually, "This guy's a weirrrrdooo," coming out of someone in retrospect he's pretty sure was Lance.
And every time he came home on break, the first couple breaks when he still bothered to come home, he told himself that this would be the time he finally confronted his dad for turning him into a laughing stock without any warning, as if it was normal, as if he was normal, his crazy old man. "It's all bullshit!" he'd say. "You're just sitting on your ass in this dump making stuff up."
But every time he came home he saw how his father had sunk that much lower into himself. The man was totally alone now in the two-room hovel in which Keith was (as far as he knew) born and raised. Totally alone with his crumbling newspapers and broken TV. And the sun overhead, chasing off shadow and cool doubt.
He wasn't an evil mastermind or an abusive father. He was pathetic. Eventually Keith just stopped coming home. Stopped answering the messy scrawl of his father's letters. Keith had a full scholarship to the Garrison, his scores on the flying simulator had been that high when he took the entrance exam, his instincts that certain for all that he had to scrape himself clean of his dad's obsessive garbage. He didn't need anyone else.
(And when, years later, no longer an outcast freshman but an exiled senior with nothing but his instincts left, he returned to the shack and found it dust-choked and broken-windowed, found it empty with no sign that his dad had been anywhere near it for months or more, he could only be angry at himself, if angry was what he was.)
But that last visit home, the one that convinced him it was a waste of time: that he could accomplish so much more just staying at the Garrison and using the simulator nineteen hours a day, sleeping in the empty barracks, if he was going to be faced with emptiness either way. The last visit, the one he'd never be able to shake.
His dad was so drunk – he'd always been a fan of his whiskey but the last couple of times Keith had been home the bottles were lined up along the window panes like sentries, keeping out his father's bullshit alien invasion – that his breath smelled sentient. The whole place, always dim and dingy, heavy stained curtains drawn to keep out the ceaseless sun, felt like a tomb. Keith spent the visit ignoring his dad, going over practice exams, running the equations in his head, trying to get a feel for them the way he had a feel for flying, knowing by now that he was meant to be a pilot and that pilots had to fly through the math like it was a second sky.
He'd already decided to head back to the Garrison early – friendless there as here but at least there had a flight deck – but the night before he was set to leave his dad came outside, where Keith was studying with a flashlight, swatting bugs, to escape the stench of the house. His dad wobbling, blotched face stretched with a rictus of concern; he was young to have a teenage son and he'd been handsome once, though you'd only see it now if you knew to look.
"Son," he said.
"What," said Keith, without looking up. "I'm busy."
"You jus'…if you're gonna go…"
"Who says I'm going?" Keith said, a little guiltily; he'd been planning on leaving a note.
"You jus'…you jus' can't go out there without knowing, son. They're out there – the ones who – you…"
Keith shut his book. "There's no one out there. There never was."
"No, now that's…"
"And even if there was someone out there," standing now, standing and towering over his whiskey-cramped father, when had he become the taller of the two? Remembering the days when he skipped school to find his father fossils and strange rocks, proof to ease his mind, "Even if there was, you've been hiding from them for as long as I've been alive and they've never come for you. So obviously they're not looking for you. They're not coming, Dad. Ok? No one out there cares you're here."
"That's the thing about it," his dad said, unhappy. "The ones you love, they always go. You can chase 'em all your days, Keith. You can break your hands holding on. But the ones you love will always hurt you, and there's nothing you can do."
Out in the dark of the desert, a million stars, watching.
-i-
They start off slow, light easy jabs, testing out the weight of their weapons. Keith has always admired how Shiro uses his Galra arm – "It doesn't hurt?" he'd asked once, and regretted it instantly when Shiro's face closed off.
But then Shiro – because Shiro and Keith, alone, can always talk – sighed and shook his head. Opening up again. "Sometimes I wish it did," he'd said. "Waking up, forgetting. Then feeling, not pain but something – foreign – it's…pain would be easier, honestly."
Physical pain is always easier, Keith thinks now. It's not nearly as complicated. It's merely the body's warning system, like the red screaming lights in his Lion.
Shiro rocks back on the heels of his feet, waits out the momentum of Keith's latest swing and then takes it for his own, charging forward, gearing up. Keith blocks the blow, feeling the metallic clang of his bayard against Shiro's arm. Hearing only his own quickened breath.
It's never been easy to beat Shiro in a sparring session. He's so good, so fast. He was the legend of the Garrison, the first thing you learned when you started – Shiro, three years ahead of them, set to graduate six months early, and already selected for the biggest mission of the century. The youngest official pilot in the Garrison's history, the youngest ever instructor, getting to fly to Kerberos in the place of people twice his age and experience when he was only three years older than most of the freshman class. Everyone knew Shiro. Even outcasts who spent all their time in the flight simulator, wishing, pretending too.
And Shiro has the momentum now, especially now, flying through the sequence's stances and holding off Keith at the same time. Only Keith is breaking a sweat.
"Come on," he says, teasing. "That all you got? You're getting old, Shiro."
Without speaking – so focused in the training ring, Keith tells himself, Shiro is always so focused here – Shiro throws a right-hook Keith blocks and a left-hook he doesn't. He falls back a step, jaw tingling, tasting the salt snap of blood.
Shiro snags his arm with both hands. Keith moves his point of balance and flips to break free. Almost drops his bayard in the process.
"Good one," he says, panting.
"Yes," says Shiro.
The first time he flew – really flew, not just in a simulator – he found himself in the isolation. Nothing but rush, nothing but movement: Hunk asked him once why he'd joined the Garrison in the first place, and he said it was because when you left the solid spaces behind the universe went quiet.
Alone with his Lion, in the gaps that Pidge said made up most of space. The comfort of being with another creature, not needing to speak. Reading each other's needs in the lines of the body, and offering.
Alone not in the way of his later childhood, dad muttering at the TV through a jawful of whiskey, and not in the way of the Garrison, where everyone paired off so quickly into friendships and dumb loyalties (yes, he does remember the time Lance and Hunk pulled the fire alarm, thank you, and he also remembers how Lance then built a snowman out of fire-retardant foam), and the one who didn't pair off, the weirdo, felt the lack. It's why he respects Pidge, maybe more than she realizes – Pidge, who came to the Garrison later with her own intentions and refused to be led astray.
It was the year before she arrived, skipping multiple grades into his and Lance and Hunk's because she was so freakishly good with numbers and languages and machines, that he met Shiro. Really met him, as more than an idealized figure chatting with other instructors in the hall. It was after a rough day of classes, he'd been called out on some stupid calculus mistake by an asshole instructor in front of his snickering asshole peers (to Lance's credit he did not laugh, but only because he was writing love notes to a girl in his aeronautics class. Hunk also did not laugh, because he was better at calculus than the instructor and had long since fallen asleep). Frustrating to fuck up, knowing they'd hold it over him for weeks – "Hey, Keith, did the aliens teach you how to solve for variables?" – when none of those morons could reach him in the simulator. Keith flew circles around them, Keith was better than the instructors and he knew it. And they knew it. He spent a lot of time scrubbing toilets for 'disrespect' infractions.
He dropped into the bathroom after class, not to scrub it, just to stare at himself in the mirror, hair at regulation-breaking length and uniform hidden under regulation-breaking jacket, because fuck their nonsense rules. A toilet behind him flushed, he tensed on instinct, but it was Shiro – one hundred percent regulation Shiro, down to the buzz cut at the back of his neck and the uniform tailored to fit his broad shoulders. Keith kept his eyes on his reflection in the mirror.
Shiro came up next to him, ran his hands under the automatic faucet. In the mirror Keith watched him glance over and smile.
"Hey, I saw you in the simulator yesterday," he said, leaving Keith scrambling to figure out how he'd missed Shiro watching him. "You looked really good."
"I'm sloppy," Keith said, a little sarcastic. It was all the flight instructors ever told him.
"Maybe a little rash," Shiro allowed, still smiling. "You just have to smooth down your instincts a little. Better than not having them at all."
Keith would wrack his brains in his bunk that night trying to figure out why the silence that followed wasn't awkward. Eventually it came to him: came as he remembered asking, "So are you nervous? About your mission?" just to say something. And as he remembered Shiro's answer.
"A little nervous," Shiro said. "I don't want to let anyone down with my 'lack of experience'." He laughed, and Keith did too – he'd heard the mutters from senior staff, how young Shiro was to be made lead exploration pilot, how green. "But mostly I'm excited. To be out there, you know? Farther than anyone's ever gone. And I'll be working with a great team."
"Lucky," Keith grumbled, because he did know. "My team is going to suck when they split us off."
"It was hard for me too, at first. Senior year team training, oh man."
"Something was hard for Takashi Shirogane?"
"Hey," Shiro grinned. "The mechanic they gave me never bathed. Close quarters with that guy? The worst."
They laughed again. Keith couldn't remember the last time he'd enjoyed a conversation.
Shiro said, "It can be tough, working with other people, learning to trust them. But when you find the right crew, everything is easier. Just knowing there's someone who has your back."
Keith, up till then, had been doing a very good job of not noticing Shiro's muscular back (did they sew him into that uniform?). He coughed. "I wish I could take a ship and just go. And never come back to any of this."
He felt Shiro's eyes on him, thoughtful. "Where would you go?" Shiro asked.
"Anywhere," said Keith. "Who cares?"
"Huh. Sounds kind of lonely."
"Fine by me. No one to care if I'm sloppy, that way."
"Patience yields focus," Shiro said. "You'll get there."
-i-
"Ahhh, shit," Keith says. Rubbing a bruise on his cheek certain to swell. "That was your fault, Shiro."
"Yes," says Shiro. Teasing him right back.
"Gonna have to do better than that, though," he says. "Come on, team leader. Come and get me. Come on!"
So Shiro comes for him, glowing purple to his shoulder. Keith closes his eyes, just for a moment, just to savor it. Shiro chasing after him for once.
He takes the fist to the gut and dives into the ripple of pain face-first. Physical pain is a real thing, he knows, a thing you can point to and say, see. This is happening. This is mine.
"You're mine," he tells Shiro, and lunges for him.
-i-
The week before the mission blasted off, the Galaxy Garrison held an assembly in honor of the Kerberos crew. It was the usual patriotic pomp – "A victory for man, a victory for Earth!" (As if, thought the sulky cadet who'd been taunted as being abducted by aliens for three years, any victory could be anything but one for man and Earth.) The crew sat center stage: the genius scientist and his baby-faced son, and – Keith let his eyes trail to the last man of the three – and Shiro, who looked so…so ready. He fit so well up on that stage.
After the assembly there was a party, cadets allowed out past curfew to mingle with their betters. Mostly they gathered in awed clumps to stare at Shiro from a distance. Hunk somehow put together a gourmet meal from the buffet table's offering of chips and dip and soda. Lance next to him (grumpy over having been bumped down to freight pilot in the last testing round, not that Keith knew or cared at the time) had spiked the punch and was guarding it fiercely.
Keith lurked in the background, dealing with the crowds for as long as he could, which wasn't long. All the nonsense chatter, all the small talk, what was the point? When he could be in the flight simulator, practicing his mission runs, getting better – no wonder he was the top of his class, for all his instructors' dislike, when he was the only one taking it seriously.
He glanced surreptitiously over at Shiro, to see how he was handling the fanfare (he couldn't really like people as much as he said, could he?) but Shiro was gone, and that was the limit for Keith. He slipped away, out of the overlit room, down the utilitarian halls to the flight deck.
It was off-limits for cadets after hours and he was expecting to have to pick the lock. But the door slid open at his approach and he found the simulator already thrumming in use. Just as the door closed behind him the machine slowed to a stop and the hatch popped up. Shiro climbed out, looked over and saw him and stopped, surprised.
"What are you doing here?" Keith asked. "Why aren't you at your party?"
Shiro rubbed the back of his neck with an embarrassed smile. "I was getting a little tired of cookies and spiked punch," he said. "Thought maybe I'd get a little more training in. It's always important to prepare. What about you?"
"I hate parties and people," Keith said, flatly. Shiro tried to strangle his laughter mid-way and it came out of him more like a hoot. It was such a ridiculous sound coming from someone as straight-laced and mighty as Shiro that it made Keith laugh too, which set Shiro off all over again.
"Hey," Shiro said when he could breathe again, "come up here. Try this out."
So Keith climbed the narrow ladder to the simulator's entry hatch and popped in, maneuvering around Shiro's bulk in the narrow space (they definitely sewed him into his uniform, holy shit) to plop down in the pilot's chair. The screen in front of him was paused on a program he didn't recognize.
"Test run for Kerberos," Shiro said from behind him. "I stopped just before the dodge through the asteroid belt. I heard you're the best pilot in your class, Keith. Want to give this one a shot?"
Keith heard the click of the hatch door closing; the simulator went dark, the computers and dials lit up in red lines of light. He felt Shiro pressing against the back of his chair.
"Bring it," he said. Shiro reached past him and hit a button. The simulator darkened further, the screen dissolved and showed crowded space, the beat of engines kicked in from below and they were off.
The first run, Keith crashed into an asteroid within ten seconds.
The second run, he lasted three minutes before shaving off both wings in a tight turn.
The third run – conscious all this time of Shiro behind him, watching, making little noises of caution or encouragement – he did well, so well, spun up on one wing to dodge an asteroid, gunned the engine through narrow spaces, cut it abruptly and used the sudden shock to drop under and around, and he could see the other end of the asteroid belt, he was almost out, he was there, and then from fucking nowhere a tiny little nothing of a rock he'd overlooked in avoiding the giant ones nicked his fuel tank and everything erupted. Amid the clanging of warning sirens the view on the screen went red and then blank. Failure.
"Fuck!" he shouted, and banged his fist on the consul. "I had that!"
Shiro's hand came over his, flattened it out against the metal. "Take it easy," he said. "You saw your mistake, you know what you have to fix. Knowing is the most important part, Keith."
He was at Keith's side now, hardly any room there for both of them, his hand still on top of Keith's. "Once you know, you can act," he said, dark eyes reflecting Keith.
Keith, who was wondering where all the air in the simulator had gone. Wondering so hard he almost missed Shiro's lesson, and his chance. Almost.
Shiro's mouth, of course, was as powerful as the rest of him, Keith was pretty sure he was going to choke on the guy's tongue and pretty sure he didn't care. The stillness in the small space. The taste of him, like explosions in space: soundless scattering of matter in the void. His big hands so careful as they went under his clothing – Keith a problem set to solve, Shiro who always had the answers. Keith heard nothing, was nothing, but the sensations Shiro made of him. He arched again and again in Shiro's fist and made a needy little gasp that sounded nothing like him. And Shiro in his kindness set him free.
-i-
A rush of fists, a flurry of footwork. Pushing each other across the training deck, pushing and then coming after. It is almost – almost – easy to be here. He can almost – almost – forget. Everything a challenge, every step, every hunch.
No shame. Certainly no mockery in Shiro's eyes. It's a tough sequence.
So tough – Keith tells himself – that it explains the doubt in Pidge when he'd explained the modifications he'd wanted her to add. "I've run through the whole thing by now," he'd said, "it's too easy. There's no point."
She'd looked at him, opened and closed her mouth. "Ok. But I don't think…"
"If you don't want to do it I'll ask Hunk," he'd snapped. But Pidge at the core is a master of tech and code. Someone who straps bombs onto flight pods just to see if she can. So of course she ultimately agreed to upgrade the training deck – they were complicated modifications Keith wanted, unique in some ways, a true test of what she could do. She did them, and even password protected them so that only Keith could access the changes.
Which – he tells himself – is why Lance was so jealous when he found out. "Dude!" he'd said. "What the heck? That's – that's really, really weird."
"Make your own training deck," Keith said, lightly, untouchable. Knowing Lance never would. Reading the look in his eyes as anger because why would there be fear? Lance just wasn't strong enough.
Once you know, you can act. You can find yourself in the empty space he makes for you. Shiro, too focused for his wisdom, and Keith just trying to keep up.
With Shiro he is always just trying to keep up.
They blamed Shiro for the disaster on Kerberos, of course. He was the young upstart pilot, who had no business being so willing and so affable and so damned clever. Keith watched the news reports with everyone else, he went through the debriefing statements, read that pilot error had undoubtedly caused critical systems failure that cut off contact and left no hope for the crew's survival.
He unwrapped the dagger he'd had stashed under his bed for three and a half years and sat there staring at it. The sigil on its hilt still meant nothing to him. He'd been toying with the idea of asking Shiro. He went through the debriefing report one more time, searching for and finding conspiracies between the words.
Then he went to class and his instructor told him to stop staring out the window unless he wanted in his ignorance to fuck up in the clutch like that smart-ass Takashi Shirogane. Keith broke the instructor's jaw and two ribs before they managed to pull him off.
Expelled from the Garrison, missing Pidge's arrival by one month, he returned to the shack in the desert and found it empty of everything but dust and empty whiskey bottles. He started wearing the dagger strapped to his waist, suspecting his dad might have been right all along. He slept badly at night, despite the stillness. Voices in the desert called to him.
He went out again and again to search.
Now, across an unthinkable distance, he faces Shiro and narrows his eyes. Shiro matches his posture, face a blank. They could go like this for hours. Frequently Keith has.
Piloting his Lion isn't flying – it's something more. Just as forming Voltron isn't becoming one the way Shiro says, it's really becoming nothing. Just an extension of Shiro's body.
And Shiro comes for him again, and he dodges, dodges, fighter pilot in the asteroid belt, watching for the impact.
They've never talked about what happened in the simulator. Just haven't had the time. Finding Shiro strapped limp to that gurney (his heart plummeting to his stomach and then jerking up to his throat, not even seeing the mecha arm at first for the terror and relief: Shiro, Shiro, all the universe connected after all) started them off on a break-neck pace, all of them, Lance and Hunk and Pidge and Princess Allura and Coran. When the universe is at stake other things get neglected. And if Keith still feels tightness in his groin every time Shiro pulls his helmet off, it's an easy cost to cover. There's always time, Shiro told them once, when they weren't sure they'd be able to fend off the robeast du jour before the castle's particle barrier failed. "There's always time to find a solution, and if there isn't you make it," he said, roared it actually, Shiro who'd gone through hell and had alien tech roosted in his body and never, ever, let them see when he was afraid. Shiro who led them to victory again and again. Shiro.
There will be time later to talk about it, Keith tells himself. Except…
"Fuck," he says as Shiro sends him to the floor with an elbow to his back and a quick jump free. "Fuck! It isn't fair, Shiro."
Shiro pauses, listening, and Keith hurls his bayard down, disgusted. With himself, mostly, and his fantasia. "You said there'd be time, Shiro. If you don't have it you make it. You're the leader. You said."
"Yes," says Shiro.
Keith, without his bayard, raises his fists.
Then Coran's voice interrupts them with a click of the intercom. "Keith! Keith, are you there? Hello?"
Muffled in the background he hears Lance, "Is he there again? Is anyone gonna talk to him about this or…" before being drowned out in a sea of shh's from the other paladins.
Coran says, "Keith, listen, we need you up here right away. Pidge took a look at the Black Lion's tracking systems and she thinks she can reverse-engineer…"
But Keith has stopped listening. There are always plans and they always fail.
"Looks like we have to call it for now," he tells Shiro.
"Yes," says Shiro, who can be nothing but understanding. Some things were too difficult to design even for Pidge.
"They're all desperate," he says, not sure why he's bothering to explain. Is this Shiro capable of caring whether he comes back or not? Sometimes Keith wonders.
"I'll see you," he says, and before Shiro can answer raises his voice and calls, "Halt program."
With a flicker of muted coding the familiar skin shuts off. Keith averts his eyes; he hates this part, when Shiro ceases and the base of the droid – featureless and thought-less like all the training droids in the castle – comes back into view. Hates most of all that he's lost the comfort he once took in silence. No casual chatter could be worse than this.
He turns his back. The droid stands where he left it, gazing blankly at him, another mindless machine with blank eyes. Keith doesn't bother to fully shut down the program. There is nothing so patient in all the universe – it will wait for him until he gets back.
AN: Pyrrhus: 5283 Pyrrhus is an asteroid in Jupiter's orbit. Also the name of a Greek general from whom we get the phrase 'Pyrrhic victory.'
It's been two years since I last wrote fanfic and somehow this site is still in beta? Anyway hope you enjoyed I'm going back to my original fiction exile now.