Red believes in equal exchange or nothing at all. Trust for trust. Joy for joy. Hope for hope. But she also deals in wrath, envy, even despair. Whatever Keith can offer her, she will match it, and needless to say, he prefers trading lighter memories, few and far between though they seem. However, Red shows no obvious interest in the memories themselves, but in the act of the trade, and when Keith settles into her cabin to think, her presence presses all around him, heavy and warm. Expectant.
At first, he ignores her needling. The dark bruise in the crook of his neck already prickles with every movement, and Red's prodding is nothing compared to that. Truthfully, he isn't sure what might compare to the Trials of Marmora and the assorted purple souvenirs he has returned with for its completion. So little in his life has been so grueling as Kolivan's challenge, so little has been so exhausting.
Leaning back into the seat, Keith turns his knife over and over in his hands, returning time and again to the insignia on the hilt. He's felt disbelief in his life before (his father gone, the Kerberos mission lost, the Blue Lion found), but the disbelief that fills him every time the blade transforms is a far different kind. This disbelief is not colored by awe or despair, or even skepticism, but a vague shade of peace mingled with the shadows of questions he is unprepared to pursue. After years of confusion and ignorance, years of pushing away the dwindling hope that he might find answers, he has them. Not all of them, of course, but more answers than he ever dreamed of seeing in this lifetime or even the next.
A wave of curiosity washes over him, a tightly checked answer to the What's next? that he asks himself. It comes from his lion. He rests the knife across his knees. "It's Galra," he says. "I'm Galra." It feels a lot like a confession.
Silence. The faint pressure lifts from his shoulders to prowl around the cabin. Even seated, he gets the sensation of pacing, tensing, and then a soft weight settles on his chest. Red, expecting more, but not taking it. Red never takes.
But just because Red never takes doesn't mean that Keith is ready to give. Or to receive.
Sometimes he appreciates Red's reliability, her give and take. He can count on her even when the rest of the universe is unsteady. The knife across his lap breathes hesitation into the cabin, though, and he knows that if he shares with Red tonight, she will not waver in her policy. Offering her the Trials of Marmora means offering all his anger. All his fear. And then Red will trade him anger and fear in kind.
He pinches the bridge of his nose and exhales. He's felt enough terror to last a lifetime. What's a little more? So he braces himself and lets Red in, laying the Trials at her feet. The weight on his chest lifts, taking with it a sense of security, but he pushes the Trials forward through his vulnerability, waiting for his lion to take them.
And she takes them with a reluctance he has never felt from her before, as if she too dreads the pact they make and the memory she must provide in return. Red hovers over the loose, scattered offering and hesitates to draw it close.
"I'm here," he tells her. I'm ready, I'm scared, just do it, he means. But it isn't until he adds, "Come on, Kitty Rose," that she pounces.
She's never burned through his mind so quickly. He gasps despite himself, hand scrabbling for the armrest to use as an anchor. The Trials rush before his eyes in sharp relief, jerking along at breakneck speed, and even though these are his memories, he can hardly keep up. Only when Red pauses to reflect his emotions back at him does he fully comprehend where she is in his memories.
The triumph of solving the first riddle of the Trial. The terror of watching Shiro leave him alone. The aching cocktail of regret and desperation and sheer smallness of seeing his father again, losing his father again. For the sake of a greater cause, perhaps, but Keith chokes on that loss in particular. That's a deeply personal memory, and though it's too late to draw it back now, it's probably closer to his heart than anything else he has ever allowed Red to see.
Curiously, she skims over the truth of his heritage with disinterest rather than surprise before drawing back, leaving Keith to steady himself with his head between his knees, knife cast aside on the floor. The cabin spins when he opens his eyes, and there's a ringing in his ears that's just soft enough that he only catches it during held breaths. Eventually, though, the world rights itself and Red's composed quiet returns.
For a moment, the cabin feels lonesome, like Red has retreated. Keith slides down in his seat and puts a hand flat against the dashboard. "I did my part. Come back?" He doesn't ask out of the desire to see Red's memories. No, he is rethinking just how much fear he can take in his life right now. But Red has never wavered before, and if she can relive the troubling portions of his past, grounding him, then he will do the same for her. There is no caveat to this, no second-guessing. Just simple responsibility coupled with the unshakable desire to exist together. There is no turning back now. The time for that came and went in the moment he opened the airlock to earn her trust. They chose each other.
So Red comes creeping back into the cabin, filling the space with a soothing warmth that Keith reads only as an apology for what's to come. "When you're ready," he says, shutting his eyes.
But instead of blitzing through again, Red eases him down slowly. She begins with a name.
Cassidia. Cass.
Then Keith is struck by a burst of pride and affection so strong that he is nearly pitched from Red's memory. Visions flick past, blurry stills that shine with color, particularly with bright scarlet and streak of sky. He knows those colors. Every time he and Red set out for the emptiness of space, he wears them.
Red does not need to speak for Keith to understand that he is seeing a guarded glimpse of his predecessor. She is Altean, with cherry bright marks at the corners of her eyes, like Allura and Coran, and her pointed ears glitter with a row of silver studs in each lobe, little lines of starlight. In some scenes that Red supplies, Cass is loose, relaxed. Keith knows very little of Altea, but he doesn't have to be an expert to understand that these frames show Cass with her people, wholly in love with her place among them.
There are other moments that Red provides, though, sharper moments. Flashes of the other paladins appear with their faces smudged out, their backs against Cass's and their weapons raised against a common foe. Red's pride takes on a fierce, even violent edge before being suddenly swept away in a wave of stuttering fear.
Here the memories coalesce into a stream. Motion and sound arrive, and though dimly aware that he is in Red's cabin, Keith still flinches at a series of explosions that erupt behind his back, as if they can still hurt him. Red wants him to watch, though, so he steels himself. For her.
He recognizes the ship's interior. Its structure has changed a little with the advent of better engineering and ten thousand years, but not so much that he cannot recognize the cargo bay of a Galra ship. He also recognizes the height from which he looks down at the scene; this is distinctly, immediately Red's memory, played out through her eyes alone.
She is not moving. She tries, but a stifling ripple of magnetic interference has locked her limbs into place, making her helpless even as her paladin fights for her life below.
Cass's fighting style strikes Keith as reckless, and he shares a faint flare of approval with his lion. The numbers of the Galra have yet to overwhelm her, and instead of fighting the group head-on, she twists between individual soldiers, using them as shields against their fellows as she works her way to the outside of the cluster. Along the way, she doesn't touch her bayard, instead trusting in her raw Altean strength to throw her foes into one another, blocking the way. Only once free of the throng does she draw her sword and defend herself, which has its own wild abandon to it. Cass does not pause to consider her options, but slides fluidly from one strike to the next, making it up as she goes along. The life-or-death nature of the fight makes it necessary, but there's a practiced air to her carelessness, as if she cannot fight any other way.
But even a capable warrior cannot fight numbers, and a reckless warrior rarely fares any better. For every soldier Cass cuts down, two more, three more, four more take their place. She is surrounded in half the time it took her to free herself from their midst, and no closer to Red than before. The bayard gleams, throwing up showers of sparks with every robotic limb severed, but behind the glass of her helmet, Cass has taken on a pale cast.
The scene slows. Red's doing. Keith feels her waver, and waits for her to collect herself. They will see this through to the end, as they do.
Perhaps for Keith's benefit, or perhaps for her own, Red skips most of the fight, skimming ahead to the worst of it all and leaving the details in the dark. Unadulterated dread rises in Keith's throat, almost choking him, and he can barely bring himself to look at the carnage in the bay. The cargo has been destroyed, as have the soldier drones. Not a single space is free of debris save for the ring around Red's feet, guarded by her particle barrier, which sputters from electromagnetic interference that Red still, still cannot fight. But Cass is not inside that ring.
The worst of the devastation is against the doors that lead deeper into the belly of the ship. Entire pieces of the infrastructure have been ripped out and thrown into a colossal heap of mangled metal, still smoking from whatever destroyed it. At the edge of the mountain, Cass's hand curls around her bayard, now in its compact state, and suddenly her voice is in Keith's head even as it crackles over the comm and into the cabin.
"Sorry about that," she rasps, and Red's translation is shaky; he can hear the underlying Altean in weak, jagged notes. "Thought I was clear. Can you come get me?"
They all know the answer. Paladin and lion alike are trapped. They spend some time in total silence save for Cass's labored breathing and weak struggling. She is pinned down by the debris, her legs crushed by the weight above. Suddenly, Keith is glad that this is not Cass's memory; he doesn't know if he could bear sharing that pain. He doesn't know how she does it.
Did it.
Even as he realizes that this is a memory long past, even as he remembers that Cass was the Red Paladin of Voltron, Red's anguish catches him unawares, bringing hot tears to his eyes.
He is right. Cass is–was–reckless. She forces herself upright as far as her trapped legs will allow, and even as he follows her line of sight, she whips the bayard along it. Straight for the cracked, flickering control panel across the room. Altean strength is a marvel, because the bayard sails without slowing, and Cass's coordination is a miracle, because the weapon hits its mark exactly. A red light comes to life overhead, blinking on and off as a precautionary alarm begins to sound. At the bay's edge, the shuffle of locks and pistons grows into a roar. The airlock begins to open.
"Here's the plan!" Cass shouts, though Red can hear her no matter what. "That door is gonna open and carry everything out in about ten tics. Me, you, this scrap pile, everything. And then you can come get me. We can get away from Zarkon. All right?"
Keith knows it won't be all right, and so does Red, but there's still a desperate hope in them both that somehow this will work. And for Cass, that hope is more than enough. She seems to sense Red's terror and doubt in the final tics, and smiles anyway, thumbing her nose before sealing her helmet again.
"You'll catch me. Rosie, you always do."
The Altean is not precise, given the way that Red stammers over the translation, but Keith can hear the echoes of his nickname for her with heart-wrenching clarity. It doesn't matter that he adopted it from Hunk, albeit in private. It doesn't matter because it's his name for her, Cass's name for her, it's a name that spans centuries and she has clung to it all this time.
And then the universe drops out from beneath him as he watches Cass get sucked into space, even as Red is held back by the magnets and her own emergency measures that can't be overridden without her paladin. Red's loss finds all the fragile crevices in his chest and splits them wide open, stealing his breath and setting fire to his spine. His head swims as he sees glimpses of Cass spiraling out into the void, laid over with a translucent shadow of him doing the very same thing.
There are only two differences amongst the overlapping, overwhelming grief. The first is that while this is Red's last glimpse of Cass, it is her first glimpse of Keith.
The second is that she could only save one of them.
Just like that, the memory is gone and Keith is back in the cabin. He sucks in the deepest breath he's ever taken, curling his hands around the armrests to keep them from shaking. He is one part human, one part Galra, but after that, he may as well be one part despair and one part rage. The fury is residual, he realizes as he waits for Red's emotion to work through his system and fade away. It is residual, and it is inward. Red blames no one but herself for Cass's death, and guilt-ridden, Keith silently promises to make an effort to float freely through space with far less frequency than he has been as of late.
After sharing so much, they share silence. Keith's heart slows to a crawl, and Red's warmth creeps back into the cabin, coloring the air with a heady mixture of apology and regret.
For the first time, these things are freely given.
Keith almost doesn't comprehend it at first. Searching for the absence of something is harder than finding the thing itself. The sense that something is missing crawls under his skin, insistent and wary, and then it suddenly dissipates as he realizes that Red is not waiting for him to offer a memory in kind. Tonight, they've traded hearts, and there is nothing more they can ask of one another. Nothing more they should ask.
Still he closes his eyes and presents her with one last memory for the night. There is smallness again, this time created by the legions of stars all around, by the cold kiss of space, but there is also a touch of peace and ease as he floats by. The universe is grander than any dream he could possibly harbor, and out here, he should be scared.
But then Red's muzzle looms before him, eyes burning, and in the scant seconds it takes for her to catch him for the very first time, he is home.
Judging by the way she drops her head to her paws, the cabin lights dimming, so is she.