Chapter Text
Keith was beginning to feel like it wasn’t supposed to go this way was just the overarching motto of his entire existence, and that he should probably give up on expecting anything to ever play out like he planned, if he didn’t want a prevailing sense of all-consuming disappointment to be the most defining feature of the rest of his life.
Laser gunfire burst overhead, and Keith ducked further behind the cargo container for cover. All he wanted to do was go home. And, yes, he was 110% aware of the irony of that statement, because he was a Galra hunkered down in the middle of a Galra base and what he wanted most was to get back to his human friends and his Altean castle and the blanket he got from the weird giant weaver bird people on Storia 4, so he could pass out in his little bunk and sleep for a thousand years or at least until he didn’t hate the world quite so much, whichever came first. Ha.
Keith returned fire briefly with a gun he’d filched from a drone four hallways back. He didn’t know if the one shooting at him now was a robot or a living being, but well, this wasn’t the kind of mission where it mattered: you didn’t free a world from Galra control by leaving survivors to sound the alarms.
(Shiro is the only one who asks if Keith is all right at the end of these kinds of missions. The rest of them will check to see if he’s injured or if Red sustained damage or if his suit needs repairs, but when Lance or Hunk or Pidge comes across a living enemy in among all the drones and shoots back when shot at, Allura sits down and debriefs with them for a damn hour: you did the right thing, you did what you had to do. When Hunk hits something that sprays blood instead of oil after he guns down a whole corridor, Lance leans against him the entire night afterward, soliciting pity laughs from the yellow paladin for shit jokes about food goo and foot juice.
“You okay, Keith?” Shiro asks, and for some reason it’s always the metal hand on Keith’s shoulder—or maybe it just feels like it’s always the metal hand because Keith feels the weight of it even when it isn’t touching him; he didn’t make it but people who look like him did and Keith doesn’t believe in God but please God, he thinks every time, don’t let Shiro ever know.
Shiro isn’t stupid, but he is just this side of unbearably understanding, so every time Keith blatantly lies, “I’m fine,” their leader grips his shoulder once and then lets him go.
“All right. But you can always come talk to me if you need to.”
And the first answer to that is I always need to but the second answer to that is never.
Keith inevitably goes to his room. He takes off his paladin suit and his under armor and lays on top of the blankets in next to nothing so he can see his pale human skin is still in one piece. He doesn’t look at bruises, when he gets them. He spends at least the next four hours tapping his foot against the cold metallic end of his bed because the noise is nothing like the sound a sword makes when it enters flesh and metal doesn’t give like people do.
In the morning, he always showers away the little spots of blood that snuck under the edge of his visor and brushes his hair the exact same number of strokes as every morning and at breakfast Lance calls him a stone cold son of a—“Lance.” That’s Shiro. “Well, look at him. Unruffled. The most unruffledest. That’s not even normal, man!” That’s Lance. “And I was totally going to say ‘gun’—son of a gun, thank you.”
There’s a party. There’s always a party. It’s always in their honor, because they’re the heroes.
If Keith doesn’t smile, he gets picked on. If he smiles, he gets picked on.
There’s only… what? Thirty billion more planets to save?
He tells himself he can make it that long, at least.)
The comm in his helmet exploded with Lance’s voice, “Uh, hellloooo? Earth to Red Ranger! Come in, come innnn!”, and Keith was back, suddenly, back in the present, in the black hallway of the Galra base with the power cut, sweat rolling down his temple and the cautious footsteps of his enemy creeping closer to his hiding place. “Ground control to Major Tom!”
“That song sucks,” Keith retorted, not quietly; whoever was shooting at him already knew where he was anyway. A strangled noise crackled on the other end of the comm—either the sound effect to Lance’s pure and utter disgust or he’d actually started strangling someone, and Keith honestly wasn’t sure which was more likely.
“Oh hell no!” Lance shouted, which still didn’t answer the question. “You have a mullet—you do NOT get to hate on David Bowie!”
“Guys,” Pidge cut in, deadpan over the buzz-static of haptic feedback from her light keyboard, “is this the best time?”
“It’s really not,” Hunk confirmed before anyone else could get in a word in edgewise. If he didn’t keep up the momentum of the interruption, Lance would just steamroll right over it and go on snarking until he was unconscious. (Sometimes he would sleep-snark even after falling unconscious—Shiro told Keith that sass was Lance’s “defense mechanism,” but Keith felt pretty sure the distractions were not helping anyone’s defense.)
“Keith.” Shiro sounded a little winded, like he’d run the length of the base twenty times already. Probably had. “Your status report."
At that very moment, the Galra soldier who’d been steadily creeping closer decided to make his stand and plunged around the edge of the cargo container, gun drawn and spewing light bullets. The shriek of the lasers blasting by Keith’s head became unbearable feedback as it echoed from his helmet to the others’ and back again.
“Keith!” someone shouted over the din.
But Keith was gone—every reflex retuned for battle, every nerve sparking under his skin, and all there was fight, win, refuse to be killed. Keith lunged, closing the distance faster than his own eyes could follow. It was just like piloting. He moved his body the way he moved Red Lion: from somewhere safe, detached inside a steel shell, and just like battlefield debris in space, he didn’t even need to see to dodge; he felt it, the white-blue flame of the lasers passing just a hair on the side of safe distance. His stolen gun was a hindrance at this range, so he abandoned it in favor of his bayard, the shield crashing down on his enemy’s weapon with a savagery that never suited Keith’s size.
You fight like a Galra soldier.
Surprise, surprise.
Keith’s vision went yellow and red at the edges.
The Galra had held this world (with its stupid name like Psch-Kosh or something) for 50 years. It was a tiny, worthless planet really, full of natural resources that only the natives could even use or value. The empire kept it just to keep it, another notch in the belt, another pit stop on the way to bigger prizes. There was only one Galra base to guard the whole thing because there was only one small inhabited island on the whole planet and before the Galra got here, its only residents were placid, arm-sized, talking stick bugs who said “Are you sure that…?” at the beginning of every sentence.
(“Are you sure that we need to liberate this particular planet?” Keith had asked.
“Keith!” Allura gasped. “This world needs to be freed!”
Are you sure?)
But all of that stuff was why Pidge picked this planet as their target, tenth in a string of recent conquests from the empire. Team Voltron was hunting easy prey, places where the Galra hadn’t had—you know—ten thousand years to become entrenched, places that didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of the empire’s brutal resource and slave grab, at the very outskirts of the empire, so that it might be years before the information of the liberations made it into the ears of the top brass back at the central hub.
Every planet they took, the empire shrank. Every planet they took, they got better at taking.
His sword clashed and rang roughshod against the Galra’s gun. How long had it been since this soldier fought anything but a training dummy? Fifty years of nothing but routine patrols and standardized exercises. What did the poor sap do to get sent out here?
The red bayard shredded the air like paper. Despite the unlit gloom of the hallway, Keith saw his opening and took it. He forced the Galra soldier back, at a bad angle; unable to look away from his opponent, the soldier’s boot caught on an uneven metal joint in the floor and he stumbled, keeping to his knees by reflex alone. Keith knocked the laser gun from his enemy’s hand even as the man was already lurching to his feet, but it was over—the bayard was at his throat.
“Surrender,” Keith snarled.
But Galra don’t.
Keith knew the claws were coming, but he’d stretched a bit too far, in a bad stance to dodge and the hallway was too narrow anyway. The first scratch glanced along his upper-arm, gouging a deep scar in the white metal; the paladin armor could take a hit but it wasn’t indestructible, and everything the Galra had was in his bare-handed blows now, lashing out again and again—a cornered tiger.
The soldier roared and, heedless of the sword that tore at his throat, threw himself forward, froth forming at the corner of his mouth, ready to rip Keith’s arm off or his throat out or just go straight through his body like a bullet with claws. In the plunging dark, the Galra’s eyes seemed to leave trails of burning yellow light wherever they moved. Keith got his shield up just in time to block a crippling strike, but the force of it sparked through his whole body and why? He knew they were too proud to give up, but this counterattack wasn’t pride, it was an all-out adrenaline-fueled desperation bid, and it had never been like this before.
There were no insults. There were no taunts about how the empire would consume every sentient planet in the universe, just fang and claw in the blackness, a relentless, unexpected assault. Keith raised his sword high to stop a downward swipe but he was a split second too late on the draw—the Galra’s hand slid along the blade and reached; his slashing grip crushed Keith’s visor. Deep-space glass pierced Keith’s cheek and the vision in one eye went black.
Someone was screaming his name but the comm kept shorting out into static.
The distraction cost him. The Galra soldier slammed into him like a Mack truck, hurling him down the hallway. Keith crashed to a stop against a wall, all breath forced out of him, barely avoiding rolling over onto his own sword. The Galra was on him again in an instant, before he could even get the shield up, and then they were scrambling in the darkness, Keith kicking and twisting to avoid strikes that left massive rents in the metal floor. He got enough space to get his knee up and rammed the Galra in the chest so hard he heard something give, but he might as well not have landed the blow for all the Galra acknowledged what must be unbearable pain. A clawed fist to Keith’s face ground the broken glass in further and he flinched—the very worst choice, the moment of weakness that left him wide open. He saw it, in the dim: the narrowing of gleaming gold eyes, the moment the Galra soldier spotted the open column of his throat, bared and defenseless. If he didn’t move he wouldn’t have a head on his neck anymore—now—if he didn’t move now—
When the blood ran down his hand from where the red bayard was buried in the dead soldier’s chest, it was warm enough Keith felt it through his glove.
He shoved the body off to the side. Off his blade. The exact noise it made would repeat in every one of his nightmares for months. Keith spent a long time leaning against the hallway wall, just breathing deep heaving gasps through his mouth, waiting for his spotty black-red vision to clear. It took a while before his ears stopped ringing enough for him to hear the others frantically calling.
“I’m here,” he finally answered, and just moving his jaw to talk sent blinding pain along one whole side of his face. The blood tickled where it was gathering under his nose and along his ear. He wished the chill of the wall could sink through his armor and into his superheated skin.
“Status report,” Shiro demanded, voice molten as the core of a star.
And, “Alive,” Keith huffed, head falling back against the cold metal wall again. “Tell Coran his visor upgrade was a downgrade and he’d better start running now.” Pidge, or at least he thought it might be Pidge, snorted in disbelief.
“No major injuries?”
“A couple scratches.” All he’d admit to. He didn’t need them running over like chickens with their heads cut off for something even a half-hour in the healing pod would solve.
Hunk “Hmmmm”ed over the line, because he absolutely knew a lie when he heard one, but they were all too tired to do anything more.
Finally, Shiro mustered enough breath to order, “Sound off, paladins,” in that particular tone of voice that never failed to trigger a pathological eagerness to please in his tiny space brood. “All areas clear?”
Keith was pretty sure he’d made it to the end of the area he’d been assigned in the original plan. He tried to call up the blueprints of the base in his head, but every thought swam and shifted the moment he concentrated on it. He joined in the chorus of affirmative answers somewhat less enthusiastically than some of the others.
“Injuries?”
“I’m good!” Pidge announced, which, if you asked Keith, was totally unnecessary, because she’d developed a system of remote control energy bombs and hadn’t had to go near an enemy since.
Hunk laughed in that way that meant he was ducking his head, smiling but not happy. “Um… I might have twisted my ankle a bit ‘cause it’s really dark in here,” a grumble, “thanks Pidge—”
“You’re welcome.”
“—and there’s like… a million pipes sticking out all over the place, but I am so fine! Totally fine.”
Lance hadn’t even managed to say anything and Keith already felt annoyed. Keith could feel the smirk. “Another flawless victory for the blue paladin. I know, I know, you can say it, I’m astounding. Who’s an unstoppable liberation machine? This guy!!”
His mouth was unstoppered, more like.
“Good to hear, Lance,” Shiro said, and because Shiro was some kind of intergalactic miracle worker, that actually shut Lance up.
Allura sounded off next, no small degree of pride buoying her words: “The castle’s defenses held beautifully. No damage sustained.”
Shiro breathed, “Any POWs?” in a military rote, but low, expectant—he asked because it was a routine, comforting habit, even when he already knew the answer.
“None,” Keith reported.
And, “Typical,” Lance muttered, barely audible over the comm. But when it was his turn to give his answer, he had to say “None” too. (Also typical.)
“Casualties?” Shiro’s voice was heavy, solemn, tired. Keith could see the falling slant of his shoulders without needing to see him at all. Shiro was a good person. They tortured him and he still didn’t relish their deaths.
There was a long moment of silence. Pidge finally said “16,” two-thirds of the base’s living population right there, but she did have bombs and she didn’t have to see their faces. (Their eyes are full of light and they fade—just a little, just enough to notice—when they die.)
“Two for me,” Lance said, a little too loud.
Hunk stalled. “I think… there were maybe one or two? I took out a lot of drones with my bayard and it’s kind of hard to tell after…”
“Three,” Keith said. And Shiro didn’t report his own, but he didn’t need to, because the mission briefing from Pidge’s hacked info listed the exact number of Galra personnel living on the base. There were three or maybe four that hadn’t been spoken for, but Keith knew what happened to them anyway.
Keith looked down at the dead man, crumpled heap barely the shape of a person in the dim. There were a whole lot more bodies going just as cold right then. Then Keith looked harder, squinting against the dark even though his night vision was good. The armor on the Galra soldier he’d killed looked odd. It definitely wasn’t standard. It was very light, barely qualified as armor at all, which might have been the only thing that kept Keith’s sword from glancing off—the only thing that kept Keith alive. Still, strange. He tried to think back to the other two soldiers from earlier. Their armor had been normal, hadn’t it?
“Hey,” he spoke through the comms, talking over whoever else was already speaking. “The armor on the Galra in your areas—does it look standard?”
“Who has time to look at that?” Lance griped. "Stop checking out the enemy, Keith."
But Shiro answered as seriously as he always did on missions: “Yes, it was standard.”
“Weird,” Keith mumbled, mostly to himself.
Pidge couldn’t let a mystery sit without proper examination, of course. “What’s weird? Did you find something new?”
“Looks more like someone’s regular gear was in the laundry."
“Ha!” Lance crowed. “You got scratched up by a Galra in pajamas?”
Keith didn’t even dignify that with a response, which he felt constituted a remarkable show of personal restraint. Silence—or as silent as a line could really be with six people breathing heavily over it—reigned. The hallway smelled like blood, both Keith’s and the Galra’s, the scent starting to cloy as it clotted on the steel floors.
“That’s it then?” Hunk asked, at the exact time Keith thought it. “Can we go back to the castle now, pleaseee?” The castle. Where Shiro would ask if he was okay. Where Keith would say he was fine. Where he would think about nothing until he could think about anything else again.
“Pidge, do a last sweep for lifeforms. If they have any more prisoners, we don’t want to leave them behind.”
“Roger!”
On the other end, Keith listened to the metallic hum of her machines, but then there was… something else, a tiny noise in his hallway, and he went rigid just as she sucked in a huge breath, then he was hissing over the top of her shout:
“Be quiet, I heard something!”
“—detecting three more Galran lifeforms in your area, Keith! They’re right down the hall from you!”
He was on his feet before he even thought about getting there, and the pounding pain in his cheek went dull again as his heart sped up, one more rush gearing up for the fight. The bayard hummed in his hand, but he’d let the blood sit too long; it wouldn’t all shake off when he flicked the blade.
“Keith, hang back,” Shiro commanded, the comm crackling with the force of his voice. “We’re coming to you now.”
But Keith was already half-way down the hall, his stride silent but sturdy. Shiro didn’t need to come here. Hunk and Lance didn’t need to come here. They were the kind of people who needed to be debriefed when they killed monsters. And Keith was… Well, he wasn’t.
There was only one room at the end of the hall, the door tightly locked. The red bayard punched through the dark steel bolt like air. Keith ripped through the doorway and into the pitch black room, his shield an eerie glow puncturing the dim. For a long moment, nothing moved. There were no soldiers standing at the ready to trap him, guns drawn and charging. There wasn’t anyone there at all. Then he took another step into the room, and the black thing he thought was a pile of rubbish in the corner recoiled from him. He heard a sound like—a sound like—
Whimpering.
Keith’s stomach bottomed out and then violently rejected its bare contents back up his throat; the bile burned as he fought to swallow it down. He couldn’t tell if his knees turned to stone or if they were a half second from giving out.
A single wide golden eye cracked open to look at him and then slammed shut again, and someone let out a desperately crushed sob; the heap curled even further in on itself, hands clasped over ears, faces buried in knees. He dropped the red bayard. Its clanging as it hit the floor was loud enough to hide a frightened yelp, but the sound of the weapon falling was audible over his comm.
“Keith, are you all right?!” The Galra flinched at just the sound of the voice.
He couldn’t really—he couldn’t really breathe.
“Fuck,” he managed at last, and for a long moment that was all he could say, the horrified mantra repeating in his head amid a litany of we’re the good guys, we’re the good guys, we’re the good guys.
“What is it?” Pidge’s frantic question must have been loud—the Galra flinched again—but to Keith, it was distant, a million miles away, and he struggled to form any semblance of a response.
“There are children,” he heard himself say, at last. “There are children here.”
“More prisoners?” Allura tried.
“No.” Keith didn’t know how he managed it. “They’re Galra children.”
Silence fell abruptly, this time a total stillness. No one even breathed over the line. Pidge shattered the quiet with a string of curses so vehement Lance actually gasped.
“We’ll be there in a second.” Shiro’s clipped voice was the gladiator’s tone, the soldier’s brutal efficiency he defaulted to when he couldn’t take what was going on around him, when his easy-going façade crumbled because they made him the leader but that didn’t mean he had a damn clue what to do, and the fear cloaked in cold, pragmatic calculation kicked in. Defense mechanisms: Engage. Defeat.
These monsters spread throughout the galaxy like a plague.
A blade unsheathed in the trembling hollows of Keith’s heart. He spun around on his spot and forced the heavy door closed again. “No.” He didn’t even know what he was saying. He didn’t know what he was doing, even as he watched his own bloody hands dragging the largest container on his side of the room over to barricade the door. “Stay away!” he warned, through the helmet but loud enough to make the sobbing from the children redouble.
(There are some bad days, when the Galra hit too hard and too fast, and afterward it’s like Shiro is all made of metal; it’s like every muscle is coiled and ready to snap, and Allura changes her earrings because even a glint of purple from the corner of his eye can make him lash out. Since he came back from the Galra, sometimes Shiro just screams, and the first time it happened Keith was there, the second time it happened he was there, the slow, even voice counting backwards from ten, but—but now, when Shiro heaves in breaths that shudder his whole shoulders, when a glowing fist puts dents in the castle wall, Keith goes to his room and locks the door.
Because Shiro deserves to be comforted by someone who isn’t lying to his face.
Because Keith’s not good enough at hiding his feelings to hide when he’s afraid.)
“Don’t come here!” He barely recognized the snarl of his own voice.
“Keith?” Soft and slow from Allura, like when she tried to convince the feral Qwezeni not to bolt. “Please stay calm.”
Somewhere on the other side of the base, Hunk panicked. “Dude! They didn’t do anything! Don’t hurt them!” The translator still broadcasted in his helmet. Keith knew for a fact Galra could practically hear a pin drop at a mile’s distance. “Stop!” Hunk repeated, pleading so loudly Keith couldn’t even make out what Lance screeched from the other end.
Those words were the last straw for the children. The littlest one burst into ear-piercing wails and after a second of failing to quiet him (like silence somehow made them safe), the other two couldn’t rein their own terror in anymore, so a chorus of shrill, gut-wrenching fear rose from both sides, directly into his ringing ears: the children’s howls crashing against the horrified shouting of the paladins, who thought… did they actually think he was going to…
“Keith.” Shiro’s soldier’s voice sliced through the rising wall of noise. “I know you hate the Galra—”
Hate the Galra? He didn’t—of course he did—
It was too much. His bleeding head spun. “SHUT UP!” he roared, and before he knew what happened, his damaged helmet hit the floor and was crushed beneath the heavy heel of his boot. The wires of the comm spewed sparks that skittered over the sheet metal. The children cried even louder, and for a moment he was disoriented, because the timber of their voices changed but he couldn’t figure out why—another stomach-turning jolt when realization finally came: of course. Of course. The translator was hooked to the helmet.
There weren’t words enough in any language to describe how much of a mess this was. (He was.)
Keith had no idea what to do, what would happen from here on out, but he couldn’t even think over all this noise, over the ear-piercing, high wails, so at least he had a passable short-term goal: stop the crying. Just one breath at a time. Slow down, just… slow for a second.
Patience yields focus, wasn’t it?
Keith took a long, deep breath and then another. He felt his heart-rate start to even out. The universe wasn’t ending. It was just three kids, not a galactic crisis.
Except it was three kids in a base where every adult they knew had just been violently killed and left in piles on the floor. Which ones were their parents? God, it was three kids and their parents’ murderer here with his hand out while someone screamed in his ear about hating their entire race, and Keith felt sick again when he finally figured it out—that last one, the last Galra in the hall, no armor? Not even a soldier on duty. That was the babysitter. That was the babysitter and he’d fought like hell made flesh because he’d thought Keith was coming to kill their children.
Don’t hurt them!
Keith’s not that kind of monster.
He knelt down. His muscles screamed because everything under his skin was wound tighter than carbon twine. Every strand of the kids’ fur stood on end. He reached out a tentative hand and tried to move closer without startling them, pretty idiotic when he knew just how sensitive their senses were. “It’s… okay,” he mumbled ineffectually. It was really not okay. “You’re safe.” Mostly true. “I’m not going to hurt you.” More than I already have. He knew the words were meaningless to them, thanks to his stupid stunt with the helmet, but he hoped the calming tone carried across the newly-reinstated language barrier.
It… didn’t seem to be working at all. Keith was able to shuffle closer, but probably only because they were too terrified to move. He crept forward inch by aching inch until he could he could reach them if he stretched his hand out a little farther, though he knew better than to touch without warning. Even little Galra probably had fangs.
“Hush, hush,” he tried, because that seemed like the thing you did with upset kids, only it just made them shiver so hard he could actually watch the tremble travel from the tips of their ears to their boot-clad toes. Definitely not working.
So Keith tried the only other thing he could think of, remnants of memories dredged from the dark narrow well in the back of his head where he dumped every good thought and feeling he ever had for his mother after he found out the truth, planning very honestly to never examine them again.
It wasn’t supposed to go this way.
There was this noise, a low, rumbling noise like far-off thunder in the desert, that she would make sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, when he cried, when she told him his father was too busy trying to save the universe to come home that month either. He remembered it exactly, thrumming constant like a heartbeat close to his ear, safeguard against all the world.
Keith had no idea how to make that noise. He tried anyway, hunched over near the floor, barely balanced, humming in the pitch dark.
Which turned out to be… a colossal failure. It came out sounding more or less like the time Lance insisted on teaching him how to roll his Rs and it took Keith eight tries to realize that Lance wasn’t interested in Keith learning Spanish—just in listening to his mortifying attempts. Keith wasn’t even sure the children had heard him over the sobbing of their own terror.
He coughed and tried again, and this time the sound settled lower in his throat. That was… a slight improvement? Now it sounded like someone attempting to imitate the rumbling noise from Keith’s memory based entirely on a very bad description of it that they heard once, several years ago, while they were very solidly drunk. But it did at least seem to register as an imitation—the biggest of the children opened first one eye and then the other, peering over the protective curve of her (at least he thought it was a her?) knees. Her fur was matted and streaked with tears, and he barely stopped himself from jumping when he realized a little bit of blood clumped in her fur too from where the claws she’d clenched over her head had cut her ears.
Keith tried the noise again, but she looked more confused than anything else, not the magic cure-all effect he was aiming for. Was making that noise even possible for a human being? Keith struggled to remember what his mother looked like when she hummed to him, but it was always when he was most tired, when his eyes were clouded with disappointed tears. (He tries to remember what his mother looked like and there’s nothing at all really—a smile, a soft hand, the tilt of her chin to press him closer when he hung his head over her shoulder—what color were her eyes? What color was her skin? Aren’t you supposed to know those things about your mother? About yourself?)
Maybe he could… Maybe… Keith turned to glare at the cargo container he’d wedged between the manual latch on the door and the far door jamb. No way would anyone get in unless they blasted a hole—or punched one, if Shiro got here first—but Keith should still have… another three minutes, give or take ten seconds. He knew how fast the others were; he could pace them down to the tick by now.
There was time. He wouldn’t get caught. He’d hear them coming.
He needed to quiet the children down. He needed to convince them he wasn’t there to kill them. That he wasn’t the enemy. (He was, except of course that he wasn’t. Confusing.) He didn’t want to do it this way really, but the universe had never given two Quiznaks what Keith wanted. The brave child of the bunch was still watching him, shaking between her hiccups. Who the hell would care what he wanted anyway when the good guys just collectively orphaned three toddlers after bombing their home? It’d be the absolute least he could do.
So Keith took another deep breath, counted ten seconds, and became a Galra. He didn’t have much experience at this, had done it a grand total of three times in the six months since he found out the truth (once in a panic, once in front of a mirror, once in the middle of battle), but the frightening thing was that it was easy.
When it first happened, he’d expected pain, like being burned by the quintessence, like his body rearranging itself piece-by-piece, like his pale skin splitting, incisors bursting from his gums, but it wasn’t like that at all. It didn’t hurt in the slightest. It was almost instantaneous, like… like stripping out of your work clothes at the end of the day, and only realizing once they were off just how uncomfortable you’d been. It felt like his human skin was a size too small. Like getting over a flu and suddenly being able to smell and taste and see straight again.
It felt right, right from the start. (That was the scary part.)
In the dark bunker, Keith shook his head; when his ears came in, it always felt like he’d worn his helmet too long, that strange relief of brushing hair in directions it didn’t normally go. His ears flicked once and then pinned back, away from the wailing.
The one child who was watching him gasped. The other two jerked their heads up at the sound and then couldn’t stop looking, confusion washing over panic.
Keith tried the low, thrumming noise again and this time it came out perfect, solid and easy and familiar. It echoed in his head, bridged the space between reality and memory, and something thick welled up in Keith’s throat that he had to push down to keep humming. The middle child immediately picked up the strain, cries giving way into the blessedly quieter noise. She rumble-hummed, high and tiny, and then it came from the other two as well, one after another, and Keith was startled by the difference in the tone, by how much nuance just a sound without any words could have—
He said It’s all right.
They said Help me.
Keith closed the distance at last, infinitely slow stops and starts, hand open, keeping himself low. He touched the top of the middle girl’s head finally, feather-light, careful of his claws. She winced back but she didn’t run or scream. She just watched him, lamplight eyes enormous and sheened over by lingering tears. He could hear their heartbeats now that the shouting had died down, now that he knew what to listen for: they were terrifying fast, like hummingbird wings, but maybe ever so slightly slowing as he listened. He smoothed down the hair between the girl’s ears. The littlest one tried to get closer to him but kept getting pulled back by the bigger girl. Keith kept up his low, comforting thrum and counted exactly two minutes, the longest he dared, until their breaths were no longer heaving and the crying subsided into trembling hiccups. He patted the closest girl one more time.
There. Not too shabby, right? That was pretty passable comforting, if Keith had to grade himself.
Putting back on his human look was like putting back on his jacket. He braced himself for renewed fear and bewilderment, but they all just stared, maybe too worn-out from their tears to work back up into a panic again. A moment of calm (or close enough to calm that Keith would count it) stole over the room. It was dark and there was no mirror, but he double-checked himself anyway. His hands were pale again, no claws, no fur. His ears were small and rounded. His canine teeth were just normal human sharpness. Safe.
And either Keith’s timing was perfect or the rest of Team Voltron was just that predictable, because there they were, far off, growing louder: three, no, four sets of footsteps pounding down the hall toward him. He felt the children tense again. Please no more screaming…
Just shouting in the hall instead. That was definitely Shiro pounding on the door, hard enough to shake the cargo container, though not enough to dislodge it. Behind him, Lance spoke so fast Keith could only make out every few words, mostly things like idiot and why me. The huge gasping breaths punctured by loud, unhappy noises must have been Hunk. Probably ran all the way across the base at full tilt to make it there so quickly.
In the kind of calm more frightening than rage, Shiro said, “Keith. What’s going on?” Then a sharp metallic scraping drowned out anything else being said; the black paladin was trying to cut his way into the room with his Galra arm, and Keith was wrong about the kids being too tired to panic.
The littlest one barreled into Keith’s back, almost knocking him over from his crouch, scrabbling with tiny claws, and even if the other two older children were cautious enough not to trust Keith just because he could look Galra, they still made their desperate rumbling hum, instinctively seeking reassurance.
“Just open the door, dude!” Lance shouted on the other side. “What the heck is even with you?”
Keith wondered if the other paladins’ translators were close enough for the children to understand again. “Shut up,” Keith finally grumbled, voice only as loud as it had to be to carry through the door. “You’re scaring them.”
Every noise outside in the hallway stopped. Then he heard Pidge, with a pinch in her voice Keith didn’t know how to name, say: “Scanner says they’re all still there.” A massive crash that might have been Hunk collapsing against the hallway wall echoed through the bunker room, along with a muffled sigh of relief. Lance made some kind of hissing noise like a deflating balloon, not really out of the ordinary for him, Keith thought. All that hot air had to go somewhere.
“Can we come in?” Shiro sounded like Shiro again. Some of the muscles along Keith’s spine that he hadn’t even realized were still wire-tight unwound a little. The smallest Galra’s claws pin-prickled into his skin, and he suspected the translators were in range, with the way those claws tightened at Shiro’s words. Keith could imagine what the scene outside looked like perfectly: Shiro leaning on the door, one hand ready to rip it open, Lance pulling at his hair and insulting Keith, Keith’s lion, Keith’s mullet, and the last ten generations of Keith’s family, Pidge with her eyes glued to her portable scanner…
The Galra children weren’t even coping well to his being there. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if the room suddenly flooded with humans. But… not like they could all just sit in a pitch black alien base for however many weeks it took the kids to adapt to them. They had to leave sooner, rather than later. His face was still sort of bleeding.
Keith weighed his options. Who had been least personally traumatized by the Galra? No, that answer was none of the above. Who would be least uncomfortable and least noisy trying to handle unfriendly alien children? “Hunk can come in,” Keith said, finally.
A moment’s hesitation, then, “Okay,” Shiro conceded, although it came out like a question more than anything else, a little surprised. There was something underneath the word that Keith couldn’t place—like someone gave Shiro’s voice a rough shake before they let it go. The tiniest stagger. Parsing out the meaning was impossible for Keith. Reading people was harder than reading books, so he gave up long ago.
In the hall, he heard Hunk’s confused whisper: “Me?” but the broad paladin seemed to be collecting himself. Keith stood very slowly, so the littlest Galra had time to scramble back and into the other two, still huddled together. Then he crept back across the room and dragged the container away from where it was lodged, just enough for the door to slide. He pushed it open a crack, hoping it was too dark for them to see the gaping cut on his face.
Shiro and the other paladins stared at him like staring at a ghost, and he really had no clue what their problem was. If anything, he should be the one glaring at them, after their joint freak out over the comms that practically left him deaf. A deep furrow formed between Shiro’s brows, and Lance was doing that thing where his eyes narrowed to tiny, suspicious slits, but everyone stepped aside to let Hunk through.
“Slow,” Keith warned, and Hunk literally tiptoed through the doorway, shoulders up around his ears. Keith shoved the door closed behind him in an instant. The yellow paladin couldn’t see anything at all in the darkness, but his visor wasn’t in pieces on the floor, so he lit the display up and peered cautiously into the room.
“Here.” Keith knelt down again a few feet from the Galra children.
Hunk breathed deep. “Whoa.” He squatted down too, for all that was worth, but the children refused to look at him, clutching each other and rumbling like tiny thunderheads. “Umm…” Hunk whispered from the side of his mouth. “Why are they purring?”
Purring. That’s the word. Keith thought there had to be one he was forgetting. But why did humans have a word for a noise they couldn’t even make? People were weird.
“They’re scared,” Keith muttered, off-hand now. “Is your translator on?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Where’s your—”
Keith pointed to the carnage of his helmet, blood-stained and shattered. Hunk tilted his head as he tried to make out whether that was actually a dirty boot print on the remnants. “I guess Coran will get a second chance at redesigning…”
“Worry about that later.” Keith turned back, moving so he was close enough for Hunk’s translator to pick up his words. “Hey,” he called, trying to be gentle. He knew the translator worked because three pairs of ears swiveled straight toward him, which caused Hunk to make an immediately stifled noise that sounded suspiciously like “Eee!”
“We won’t hurt you,” Keith continued. “You’re safe.” He wondered what those words sounded like, translated into Galran. He wondered what he’d sound like, if he spoke Galran.
“They’re so tiny,” Hunk breathed, as if the kids weren’t huddled right there, listening to every word. Not that he was wrong—Keith hadn’t seen them standing up, but he doubted any of the kids was over his waist, and was that normal for Galra children? He got momentarily lost in trying to remember the series of height marks his mother made on their doorframe each year—then Keith shook his head to dispel the distraction. There were more important things right now.
In Keith’s silence, Hunk picked up the strain, reining in his normally buoyant enthusiasm in favor of steady comfort. “Yeah, it’s okay little guys. We’ll protec—” The reality of the situation seemed to sink in for Hunk at exactly that moment. Keith watched his face stumble from puzzled to dawning horror to abject misery, his eyebrows and smile sinking in perfect time with each other. The only ones these kids needed protecting from were the paladins of Voltron. Hunk looked at Keith, eyes wide and white, his lip wobbling, and guilt churned in Keith’s stomach. Hunk was gentle and friendly and easy. Stupid Keith. Should have thought... If there was one person in all of space who least deserved to feel horrible for something he could never have predicted, for carrying out his mission the way he had always been encouraged to…
Keith wanted to say… something to reassure Hunk maybe, but he’d never been very good with words and anyway, what would he say? “Don’t worry, we only murdered their parents; I’m sure we’ll be able to make it up to them soon.” That’d go over like a castle on fire.
So he turned his attention back to the children instead. “You can’t stay here anymore. You have to come with us.”
The long moment of quiet filled up with traded stares between the children. Finally, the biggest girl opened her mouth, fangs a little white glint in the darkness, and asked “W-Why?” Her voice was hoarse from crying, huskier than Keith expected.
The worst question possible. Hunk’s bottom lip quivered even worse. Keith skirted the issue as best he could. “Your home’s been destroyed. It’s not safe here now.”
The middle child managed to eke out: “Where is Yedgi? Where is my maman?”
Keith didn’t know what to say any more than Hunk did. The thought of lying—of convincing the children someone else killed their parents—was disgusting. But who would come with them after finding out they’d done? “They’re gone,” Keith finally admitted, all his breath leaving his body with the words, eyes barely able to lift from the floor. But the children just looked lost. Maybe the Galra didn’t have that saying? “We’ll explain everything as soon as we can, but right now we have to go.”
They’d probably have to drag the kids out kicking and screaming—in fact, he could see Hunk bracing for it. Keith shifted carefully to block the door, in case any of them got the idea to run, and the second the paladins made the barest sign of stepping forward, both girls were on their feet, almost too fast to track. The middle girl, for all that she wasn’t much bigger than the smallest, got the tiny child on his feet too.
Now, with the threat of immediate harm taken off the table, a fierce, if wavering, glint formed in the older girl’s eye, her bottom lip jutted out, and it was the most bizarre form of déjà vu the universe had ever concocted because Keith’s mother’s voice laughed in his ear, “Was there ever a more stubborn creature in all the known worlds than you? If your lip poked out any farther, a flagship could land on it!”
“Well I don’t care!”
“That, I think,” (and, in retrospect, how wry), “is the story of your very young life.”
“I don’t want to go!” If they weren’t already in the corner, Keith knew the oldest would have been backing away. Her fur began to prickle again, ears sliding back. Beside her, the other girl fought hard to keep the little one from toddling into Keith’s grip. Keith breathed through his nose. He had no right to push, no right to expect anything but noncompliance from the children. But he was tired and wounded and worried, and if they could just get back to the castle, Allura could do all the explaining for him, because she was dignified, diplomatic, experienced… good with everyone, even stick bugs.
Keith got hold of the littlest Galra finally and reeled him in, despite the biggest one’s growling protests. The little boy folded against him like wet paper, boneless and very clearly beyond his limits. The moment Keith got a solid arm around him, his eyes were already drooping, completely worn out from the roller coaster of terror and bewilderment. The middle girl (and Keith tried very hard not to think of them as Small, Medium, and Large, but not like he knew their names, so it was proving a real struggle) looked totally adrift. She stared at the tallest from the corner of her eyes then back at the paladins, then back at the other girl, all in a loop. She knew something wasn’t right. She knew not to trust strangers, but she wasn’t that much bigger than the tiny boy and he could see how afraid she was to resist.
Could Keith feel any worse about himself? Actually, he probably shouldn’t ask.
“Please just come along.” Keith sighed into the tiny head pressed against his chin, rewarded with an ear flick to the eye. “We’re really trying to help.”
Medium wavered for a second before taking a few shuddering steps forward.
“Hunk, can you take her?” Keith whispered, trying, probably failing, to be delicate. The yellow paladin’s eyes bugged out of his head for a second and Keith could hear the words “What do I do?!” being beamed directly into his brain, but let’s be real, one of the two adults in the room right then was a sane and logical individual who made sound decisions and weighed the consequences of his actions before he took them. And the other adult in the room was Keith.
“O-Okay,” Hunk muttered to himself. “I can do this.” Then he opened his arms and smiled as disarmingly as he could—which, Keith had discovered for himself, was terrifyingly disarming; you could not be upset when Hunk was grinning at you. Keith had tried.
Still, Keith had to nudge her in Hunk’s direction before she’d go. Hunk didn’t so much hug her as put a few fingers down on her back so lightly she wouldn’t have dented even if she was made of aluminum foil, but his beaming smile softened and she didn’t try to bolt, so Keith was counting it as a win.
Then only one remained, and without her allies, the tallest of the children (really a misnomer—she just barely, barely reached Keith’s hip) was bereft, growling pathetically and puffing up every lock of fur. But she had her claws out and forward, and that part was no joke. Keith stayed put. The boy was basically asleep in his arms, dead weight; he’d weigh Keith down if it came to a struggle.
“Come with us peacefully,” Keith warned, and if he put maybe a little more growl into his own voice than strictly (human) necessary, well, not like he really meant anything by it. “Or we’ll make you.”
Utterly scandalized, Hunk hissed “Keith!”, his hand actually over the other Galra girl’s ears like that would keep her from hearing. “You can’t just say stuff like that!”
“Well I did.”
Large stood her ground for another minute. Inside the room it was dead quiet, but outside in the hallway, someone—never mind, Keith knew exactly who—kicked the wall and said “Man, what’s going on in there? This waiting is killing me!” The threat of reinforcements seemed to be the final swaying point. The girl grit her fangs and put her claws down.
Keith didn’t try to touch her, even when she approached him, painfully sluggish, and stood beside him. He just moved to pick up his bayard from the floor, desummoning it, clumsy with one arm still full of sleeping kid. The biggest girl followed him like he’d put her on an invisible tether, but with a shifty look to her eyes. He could almost see the plans brewing between her ears. She was going to run for it the first chance she got.
Keith was actually a little impressed. She had guts at least, even if she was a bit short on commonsense. There was a saying… There was a saying about talking pots and the colors of kettles?
But her ideas of escape seemed to collapse when Hunk peeled back the cargo container and the door and Keith finally ushered the girls out into the hall. Shiro, Lance, and Pidge were all arranged scant feet from the door, and it was one thing to hear others outside and another thing entirely to come face-to-face with Shiro’s muscles, Lance’s gun, and Pidge’s calculating stare. Keith felt, more than saw, the girl slump beside him, all the fight going out of her.
Shiro’s eyes darted around each one of the children and then away. He met Keith’s gaze for about a half second. The black paladin looked… uncomfortable. Like he had something to say. Keith wasn’t such an asshole that he’d tell Shiro not to talk, but this was so far from the time for it that Keith couldn’t be anything but relieved when Shiro backed down, a literal half step back, his human hand settling somewhere near the elbow of his metal arm. Weird gesture, from him. Everything was weird today.
Up to and including Lance, whose face when he saw the children did some sort of bizarre gymnastics and cycled through way too many expressions for Keith to even begin trying to parse out. The pattern seemed to trend toward badly suppressed manic grins, whatever that meant.
And Pidge. Pidge’s stare, directly at him, froze Keith’s boots to the floor for a second before he could recover and before the glow from her portable scanner obscured her eyes behind her visor. Was that anger? Resentment? What made her narrow her eyes like that, like she’d stared at a bug in her script that refused to be resolved? Like she could see right through him? Holy Quiznak on a stick, did she suspect—? That was the absolute last thing Keith needed right now, couldn’t even handle it, so he turned away, trying to look cool and calm and collected. (There’s nothing to see here.) Without a single word, he started off down the hall, hoping to dead-arm any attempts she might make at conversation.
But the moment of distraction cost dearly: he’d forgotten about the body in the hallway, the children’s dead guard, and they were almost upon it before the scent of the blood brought Keith’s attention back.
“Cover their eyes!” he hissed to Hunk, and even though Hunk responded in time, there was nothing to be done about the blood in the air. Under his hand, Keith felt the tallest Galra girl breathing in deep. Even as a human Keith smelled it; to her, it must be overpowering, overwhelming, utterly recognizable. He tensed his arm around her shoulders, ready for the fight—
“AGHH!” Hunk shouted. “She bit me!” And it wasn’t the oldest but the one in the middle; Hunk reeled back, clutching his fingers, and the middle girl was free, a purple and black flash barreling down the rest of the hall before she jerked to a halt like a marionette at the end of its strings.
“Yed…gi…” she breathed once, standing over the dead guard’s body. “YEDGI! YEDGI!” Keith had never heard an animal being tortured before but he knew, knew to the core of every bone in his body that it sounded like this, her howl rising into decibels that make his head pound, every wet scream tearing at her throat—then Lance crashed past him without warning, and it was like looking at a different person, the way the blue paladin whipped the screaming child up off the floor in half a heartbeat, her kicking legs out behind him, arms pinned against her sides so she couldn’t claw, a hand clapped over her eyes well out of the way of her gnashing fangs.
By some unspoken, mind-meld understanding, the measured pace Keith initially set became an all-out sprint, first Lance then Hunk, blustering apologies through tears, then Shiro and Pidge, all of them dashing toward the lions. Keith moved to follow them, but at his side, the older girl had gone dark, a machine with no power source, completely non-responsive.
She was frozen, barely even breathing. The screams of the other girl echoed down the hall, but she made no noise at all.
Keith shoved her. Keith did what he had to do. He shoved her hard down the corridor, keeping her upright by the strength of one arm, an awkward, halting pace but close enough to a run if he refused to let her fall, and he made sure she couldn’t see when they passed the bombed-out shell of the main hall, where Pidge’s toy left the pieces of 16 people.
Beneath his hand covering her eyes, the Galra girl wept silently the whole way.
Hunk had taken back the other girl by the time Keith arrived. He wasn’t even touching her now, just hovering nervous hands above her shoulders like that somehow fixed anything.
They left Red and Yellow behind (who was still alive to steal them?) and marched the children into Black Lion. There were no seats or belts for more than one. Shiro took it slow. Still, Keith felt… unmoored. That first weightless, terrible moment stepping out into the stars: ship, castle, solid ground falling away. Adrift in an endless space.
All around them, the lion rumbled.
It’s all right.
It’s all right.
It’s all right.