Lance's bedroom door was propped open, so Keith stepped inside without knocking. "Hey, Lance, Coran said that he needed–"

Keith trailed off as he realized he'd walked into the middle of a conversation. Hunk was perched on the end of Lance's bed, elbows on his knees, fingers locked together as he leaned down to chat with Lance, who was lying on the floor with his legs propped up on the bed. They were speaking in rapid, easy Spanish.

Keith shifted awkwardly in the doorway as the two boys glanced up at him, their conversation stopping short.

"Hey," Lance said, waving at Keith without getting up off the floor. His hair was fanned out wildly around his head. It had gotten shaggier recently.

"Hey, uh, Coran needed you for something," Keith said vaguely. He glanced from Lance to Hunk. "You guys both speak Spanish?"

Lance flashed an unimpressed, narrow-eyed stare at Keith. "I'm Cuban," he said. "Did you even know that?"

"Uh," Keith said.

"Man, you're really not holding up your end of this rival thing. You're supposed to have a whole folder of information about me. I have one about you."

"You what?"

Lance shrugged, his shoulders shifting on the floor.

"He does," Hunk said. "I've seen it."

Keith flicked his eyes over to Hunk. "Are you Cuban, too, then?"

"What? No," Hunk said. "Most of my family is from Hawaii. There were a lot of Spanish speakers where I grew up, though. I picked it up."

"I speak Spanish, too," Pidge offered from the corner of the room. Keith hadn't even noticed them until then, wedged in the corner between Lance's desk and the wall, a laptop balanced on their knees.

"Are you Cuban?" Keith asked.

"I took Spanish in school," Pidge said without bothering to answer Keith's question. "I'm good with languages."

"It's great," Lance said from the floor. "You know how many secret plans we concocted at the Garrison with our secret language?"

"Not that many," Hunk said. "Also, Spanish isn't really a secret."

Lance's eyes narrowed. "Well, I tried to concoct plans. Not my fault you guys are wet blankets."

Hunk squinted up at Keith. "Hey. Do you speak Galran?"

"What?" Keith felt his shoulders rise like hackles. "No."

Hunk shrugged. "Just saying. That would be cool."

Keith stepped backwards out of Lance's room. The whole space suddenly felt too small. "Whatever. You should go see Coran, Lance."

With that, Keith half-jogged down the hallway, but not before he heard the unfamiliar words of their conversation start up again. He hunched his shoulders and headed for the training deck.

Keith was taking a break on the sidelines of the training room, sweaty and bruised, when Shiro walked in. He gave Keith a nod of acknowledgement as he stepped towards the powered-down gladiator bot. Before he could activate it, Keith stepped towards him.

"Hey, uh, Shiro."

Shiro turned towards Keith. "Yeah?" He scratched the back of his neck with his Galra hand. Keith's eyes flicked to the robotic arm for a moment. Something about it still made Keith's stomach flip over. He couldn't help but think about when Shiro had had two flesh arms, and what must have happened to him to change that.

"Uh." He flicked his eyes from the robotic arm back to Shiro's face. "You don't speak Spanish, do you?"

Shiro cocked his head. "No? Should I?"

Keith shook his head. "No, nevermind, I-"

"I speak Japanese," Shiro offered.

"Right," Keith said. Shiro had mentioned that before. Though Shiro had been born and raised in America, his family was Japanese and he'd spoken it growing up.

Keith turned to leave the training room, then stopped and, in a fit of something like impulsiveness, asked, "Do you… think you could teach me? Japanese? Sometime?"

Shiro watched Keith closely with his dark eyes. His face was impassive, but Keith knew him well enough to see the hint of confusion behind his eyes. Concern, too, maybe.

"Sure," Shiro said. "Is there a reason you're bringing this up now?"

Keith shrugged, a quick jerk of his shoulders. "I don't know. Lance and Hunk and Pidge all speak Spanish, and I guess Allura and Coran speak Altean. Feel like I should get on this bilingual train."

Shiro searched Keith's face, and Keith turned away. "Anyway. I should go shower."

"If you ever need someone to talk to, Keith…" Shiro started.

Keith nodded. "Yeah. I'm fine," he said, and pushed the door to the showers open roughly with his shoulder.

Keith leaned against the sink in the shower room and stared into the reflection in the mirror. He touched the sharp plane of his jaw, rough with the hint of stubble. In the room's blue light, his dark eyes flashed faintly purple. He'd always thought that his eyes were just black, that the purple shine he sometimes saw in them was just a trick of the light. But since he'd discovered that Galra blood trickled through his veins, he wasn't sure.

Keith had searched his face for hints of his mother countless times before. Kogane was his father's name. His father was half-Japanese, but Keith had always looked more Japanese than his father, with his dark hair and almond eyes. Keith had assumed that his mother must have been Japanese as well. He'd never seen pictures of her, and he had never asked his father about the woman he never mentioned, but Keith would sit in front of a mirror sometimes and map out the features he thought came from her.

But now. His mother was Galra. Or part Galra. Or something. The Blade of Marmora hadn't exactly been generous with details. Which of his features belonged to the Galra, then? His sharp nose, maybe. The rough angle of his jaw. His skin didn't look purple, but now, when he bruised, he sometimes wondered if the mottled purple-red skin would just… spread, instead of fading to yellow-brown.

He thought of Hunk asking him if he spoke Galran. Maybe he could learn Galran. It was part of his identity now, wasn't it? He wasn't sure how much he wanted to explore that part of himself. Knowing something about his past, a past that had been murky at the best of times, felt like walking on a narrow ledge between relief and disaster.

He splashed water on his face and closed his eyes. He should learn Japanese before he even thought about learning Galran. That was just as much a part of him. Maybe more so. And it was something that he and Shiro shared.

There were many reasons why Keith had been drawn to Shiro when they'd met years ago. The fact that Shiro looked like him, even just a little bit, was one of those reasons. Keith had always been thirsty for the things he didn't have – family, a history, a culture, a connection to something bigger than him. He hadn't often consciously thought about the fact that he and Shiro shared a culture, but in some part of the back of his mind, it strengthened his bond with the older paladin. In some far-off way, they were from the same place. They were family.

But now. Keith's fingers tightened around the lip of the sink. Now, sometimes, Shiro looked at him with eyes that didn't seem to recognize him. Of course, Shiro's reaction to Keith's Galra ancestry hadn't been as bad as Allura's. Allura still looked at him like an enemy, like he had somehow morphed into a seven-foot purple monster in her eyes, breathing down her neck. He avoided her as much as he could.

Shiro hadn't said anything when the Blade of Marmora told Keith that he had Galra blood. When Keith told the others, in a shaky rush as he explained what had taken them so long in the Marmora base, Shiro had said, low and firm, "This doesn't change anything. This doesn't change Keith."

And though Hunk and Pidge and Lance had asked him curious questions and prodded him with gentle teasing, they didn't seem genuinely perturbed by the reveal. And Shiro, on the surface, seemed to share their lack of concern.

But Keith had noticed the moments when Shiro jumped slightly at Keith's approach, when he shifted just a half-inch away from Keith when they stood near each other, the way his eyes sometimes slid from Keith's face as if he couldn't bear to look at him.

And Keith understood. He did. He gripped the sink harder and told himself that he understood. The Galra had done terrible, horrible things to Shiro. Shiro was still silently suffering from what the Galra had done to him in so many ways. If Shiro saw Galra in Keith, even subconsciously, it was no wonder that he was afraid. But it hurt. It dug deeper that any knife wound, tearing right into Keith's Galra bloodstream.

Shiro was more than just Keith's surrogate family. He was the only person who'd kept Keith grounded after he'd lost his father. For too long, Shiro had been the only reason Keith felt like he needed to stick around. Otherwise, who would miss him if he disappeared? Now, Keith had the other paladins, and Allura and Coran, and the entire universe who all needed him. But before that, only Shiro had needed him at all.

He pushed away from the sink. Maybe his mother was still alive. Maybe she was out there in space somewhere, fighting the Galra Empire from the inside.

He wondered bitterly what Shiro and Allura would think if he walked into the castle with his Galra mother in tow.

Keith jumped at the sound of someone knocking on his bedroom door. He'd been lying on his back, watching the light glint off the edge of his Galra blade. Since the Marmora trials, he'd been able to morph the small knife into a long, curved blade at will, and sometimes he practiced the action just for something to do.

"Keith?" Shiro's voice filtered through the door. Keith sat up and slipped the knife under his pillow, even though the blade wasn't any kind of secret anymore.

"Yeah?" Keith called.

Shiro opened the door and stepped inside. He gave Keith a half smile as he shut the door behind him.

"I thought we could start on those Japanese lessons, if you wanted," Shiro offered.

Keith glanced at the glowing clock on his bedside table. Pidge had tinkered with some of the castle's clocks so that they now showed an approximation of Earth time beside the Altean time, and though the paladins had slowly been slipping into the habit of using Altean time measurements, there was a still a certain comfort in familiar Earth time.

"It's almost eleven at night," Keith said.

Shiro shrugged. "I couldn't sleep, and I saw the light on under your door," he said. He looked almost sheepish.

"I'm fine, if you're worried about me," Keith said.

"I didn't say you weren't fine," Shiro said.

Keith searched Shiro's face for meaning, but couldn't find anything. He hadn't been close to falling asleep, anyways. Fighting the Galra Empire at all hours hadn't done anything to improve Keith's already dismal sleep habits, and it wasn't uncommon for him to fall asleep well into the a.m., or not at all.

"Yeah. We could do some Japanese lessons," he said.

Shiro eased himself onto the bed next to Keith, although he kept a conspicuous distance between the two of them. Keith's bones ached for the times when he'd sat with his shoulder pressed against Shiro's in the desert, looking out into the endlessness of the sky they didn't know they'd someday visit together.

They sat in awkward silence for a long moment, until Shiro said, "I've never tried to teach someone a language before. Where do you want to start? My name is Keith, maybe? Would that be useful? I-"

"Shiro, are you scared of me?" Keith blurted out, unable to contain the hot energy that seemed to crackle in the distance between them on the bed.

Shiro froze. His eyes went wide and shaky, the way Keith had seen them when Shiro fell into the dark flashbacks of his time with the Galra. Immediately, Keith regretted his question.

"I'm sorry," he said quickly. "Nevermind. You don't have to answer."

Shiro closed his eyes and let his breath out in a long, slow stream. "No," he said finally. "It's okay. I'm sorry."

He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. He twisted his right hand, and the light glinted off the metal with the same violet shine as Keith's blade.

"I'm not scared of you, Keith," he said, his voice low and quiet. "I know you would die before you let something hurt me, before you let yourself hurt me. But…" Shiro let out a huff of breath and his shock white bangs fluttered. "My brain isn't entirely mine anymore. It's afraid of a lot of things that I wish it wasn't."

Keith swallowed around something big and heavy in his throat. He looked at his own hands, slender calloused fingers and trimmed fingernails. He could almost see, in the double image of his imagination, the thick purple skin and ragged claws of Galra hands. He clenched his fingers into fists and said, "I know what that's like. Not getting along with your own brain. I… do a lot of things that I wish I didn't do."

Shiro reached out with his left hand, his real hand, and gripped Keith's shoulder firmly. The touch felt like coming home. It unknotted something in the center of Keith's chest.

"I know," Shiro said. "You've always been fighting yourself, Keith. I've watched you do it. But you've gotten so much better. So much stronger."

Keith looked up and met Shiro's eyes. Dark, narrow eyes, like looking into a mirror. Keith saw his features in Shiro's eyes, not in the Galra's.

"You've changed so much since we've become paladins, Keith. You've become stronger, and happier, and more in control of yourself. I'm proud of you."

Shiro's words were like honey, warm and soothing, a balm on the wounds that Shiro's distance had carved into Keith's insides. "Thanks, Shiro," he said.

Shiro smiled, then closed his eyes again. "I'm jealous, too. I'm… so tired. I'm scared of my own memories. Of what the Galra did to me. I need your strength, Keith." His hand tightened on Keith's shoulder. "So if I ever seem afraid of you… Please know that it isn't the real me."

It frightened Keith, a little bit, to hear weakness in Shiro's words. Shiro, who'd always been the strongest person in Keith's life. He reached up and squeezed Shiro's flesh hand. He tried to press his own warmth, his own strength, into Shiro's hand. "I will."

Shiro smiled. He shifted on the bed so their shoulders were pressed against each other, comfortable and familiar.

"I think My name is Keith is a good place to start," Keith said.