Work Text
The memorial is all pomp, circumstance, and empty spaces. It’s midsummer and the horizon's just going dark, shot through with streaks of white exhaust from where James and his fellow MFE pilots had snaked their cruisers through the sky. The Garrison had enlisted himself, Rizavi, Leif, and Kinkade in a show of arms; the Paladins of Voltron may be down, but the Earth is still defended by its own.Just over Shirogane’s shoulders the Lions of Voltron stand cold and posed and hollow, their sightless eyes peering out at the crowd. The Garrison needs Shirogane—solemn, statuesque, and scarred—to shoulder the image, set the tone of Earth’s united resistance to whatever intergalactic oppressors should come their way.Shirogane, the face of the Garrison before Kerberos had taken his life and his arm, neatly slips into a role he’s played so many times before. They take care to keep the cameras far enough away to hide the bags under his eyes, distance masking the exhaustion that might bleed through his message of hope and resilience if they were to get too close. It’s far from effortless but Shirogane does everything in his power to make it seem like it is. It’s a long way from encouraging a class of high school students to try their hand at a simulator and having one of them steal your car rather than an alien warlord stealing your arm, James thinks. It’s something that's itched underneath his skin for weeks, for every hour that the person in question had remained still and silent in hospital bed. And so: the memorial comes to an end with the dying rays of the sun while James doubles back and sneaks into the Garrison Hospital after hours--and does so with a poor to middling level of success, depending on who’s asking. There’s no putting it off any longer. He does his best to shake Kinkade, Rizavi, and Leif to excuses of exhaustion. I’ve got a date with my bed, I’ll see you at 0600. It’s mildly effective at best. It probably would have been more believable if he’d said he was going to the sim instead of bed. But while Keith had unintentionally given him many things—the white hot thrill of lust, the sour sting of dismissal, a star on the horizon to chase after—a clear head was never one of them. Being a poor liar is one thing he and Keith have always had in common. Kinkade gives him a look that’s at once far too blank and far too knowing, bracketed by a shrug and a clipped, “sure.” Leif recounts exactly how many hours they’ve been awake, how long they’ll need to sleep to make a dent in their sleep debt, and the likelihood that they’ll accomplish catching up at all in light of all the work they still have to do to rebuild. Which is a considerable amount. Iverson, and Commander Holt, and Captain Shirogane have been everywhere, all the time, except for their own beds. James feels the pressure to keep up, to be the kind of leader the others are. The kind that Keith would be if he were awake, the insidious part of his mind whispers.(He’s seen the way Shirogane’s face falls into something small and pained any time he thinks that no one’s looking-and he’d be right about that were James not wholly determined to let his curiosity snowball into something that looks a whole lot more like self destruction than self interest.)“Going to visit Kogane?” Rizavi says, eyes sharp, a smile curling at the corners of her mouth. She has a sixth sense for any potential weaknesses and a seventh for which ones will make the best blackmail; Nadia Rizavi has Keith’s flair for trouble coupled with the ability to know just how many “yes sir's” will keep her toes on the right side of the line. Leif turns, head cocked to one side, considering; “Kogane? Didn’t the two of you used to fuck?” Kinkade lets out a rare, full throated laugh; James has never felt so betrayed. “Irrelevant, Leif.” “That’s not a ‘no’,” Rizavi says, bright, bold, and utterly terrifying. “I have better places to be,” James says. “Well,” Leif says, matter of fact, “if you’ve got a date with a bed there’s a 95.6 percent chance that it isn’t yours,” Leif adds. James decides in that moment that their friendship is cancelled. Rizavi just laughs. “I think that 4.4% is giving him more credit than he deserves,” Kinkade adds.His face burns, but he keeps his shoulders squared and stares them dead in the eyes, “with the flood of refugees none of us have slept in our own beds in weeks,” he says, turning on his heel. “Still not a no!” Rizavi yells at his retreating back. He hates that she’s right.//The first time he sees Keith again, there are four years between them and the Paladins of Voltron crash land on an Earth far different from the one they’d left. But; Keith’s frustrated scowl is so frighteningly familiar that for one blinding moment James almost forgets the angry scar on his cheek, the way his hair falls into his eyes more than it used to, the fact that there are Galra attack drones intent on blasting them off the face of the planet. It doesn’t last. It can’t.Keith had arrived in James’s life much the same way, slamming into Ms. Fincher’s homeroom with a thunderclap that left the door swinging and shuddering behind him. It wasn’t long before the first flurry of fists had followed. And kept coming. The last time he’d seen Keith, an ashen-faced Captain Shirogane had just pulled him from the jaws of the Black Lion. Shirogane stood, uncharacteristically hunched and unnervingly small at the bottom of the crater the Black Lion had formed on impact, looking like he cradled the entire world in his arms rather than carrying it on his shoulders. Through the crowd of bodies jostling for space, to offer their help, James had caught sight of Keith, limp and pale, dark hair matted against his forehead with more blood than sweat. He hasn’t managed to get the image out of his mind for more than a few minutes at a time since. Something had stirred within him; something that he thought he’d long since sewn shut, that he’d stitched tight under the newest stripe on his uniform. (As it turns out, all the lies he’s told himself are just another set of rules to follow, keeping his mind from wandering down dangerous paths where he’s honor bound to meet a wolf in the woods.) Even with the odds stacked against him and the ghosts of old grudges lingering between them, James has never thought, even for a moment, that Keith wouldn’t wake up.He’s too stubborn for that.Keith has never backed down from a fight; not even when it was them taking out their aggressions on one another, Keith breathing hot and wet against the curve of his neck in the race to get off and then deny it ever happened. Not when he’d used his nails to carve lines into the sensitive skin on James’s back without apology; only once had James ever returned the favor of cutting Keith that deep. At night the Garrison’s hospital wing sits mired in dim, static silence. The low hum the machines dotting the ward and the rustle of doctors and nurses going about their rounds like a quiet, desperate symphony pulling those too close to the edge back to the land of the living. James boots are regulation; they’re also unbearably loud. The hallway stretches on longer than it ever has, each step a potential landmine, a dare to get caught. He’s not supposed to be here, but that--more than anything--feels like a fitting tribute to the person he’s trying to visit. The hall outside of Keith’s room is dim aside from the faint glow of the emergency lights lining each of the walls. James went against his natural love of rules and orders to find out what room Keith was in when the nurses were making their rounds. The hallway should be empty. It isn’t. James had--foolishly--assumed that Shirogane’s love of order and his objectively ridiculous schedule would leave Keith’s room as unclaimed ground. Neutral territory. After all, this was the same man who had accepted Iverson’s apology for strapping him to a table with a concise “you were just following orders.” But in the distant memories of a pre-invasion Earth, James remembers the whispers about Shirogane taking Keith out of the Garrison on non-regulation field trips; of seeing them returning return, sun-warm and caked in dust, affectionate smiles mirrored on each other’s faces. Because Shirogane’s order isn’t entirely Garrison regulation--his desire to do what is right and his devotion to Keith rigorously destroy any and all catechism in trial by combat. When James had lingered outside of Lance’s hospital room as Veronica visited her brother, he’d heard snatches of their adventures, had stolen some new evidence of how deep the their devotion to one another runs.Not for the first time, James wonders at Keith’s ability to pull someone from the path of order into some thorny, wild, and untamed forest of good .Shirogane’s frame dwarfs the chair that he’s folded himself into. He’s staring at the burnished metal wrist of his prosthetic, rapt; for one glorious, illusory moment, James thinks he’ll be able to slip away, pretend he’d never snuck a look at the nurses charts to find out when his visit might go unremarked, unnoticed. But James has always been good rather than lucky. He’s worked for everything he claims as his own. (Back then, back before Kerberos, James had mutinously thought of Keith and Shirogane as Moon and Earth, one just an asteroid pulled into the orbit of a planet already subservient to something bigger. He knows better, now. Five years can do that to a person. This time, he knows that they’re more moon and tide, pushing and pulling at one another, the rise and fall of the moon’s cycles, the waxing and waning of the tides, each of them certain and iron-strong as the bonds they've forged between them.Back then, in his worst moments, James had thrown poison dart thoughts at Shirogane’s flight partner and (ex)boyfriend. That maybe if he’d held on a little longer, a little tighter, the natural course of gravity would have drawn Keith into James’ orbit. But maybe James has only ever been the sand to Keith’s tide, slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces under the force of his stark, uncompromising drive, his brutal, destructive brilliance.) “If you came to see Keith, he’s asleep.”James freezes, caught.“But they told me he woke up today—Krolia and Kolivan,” Shirogane continues, voice small and just hesitant enough that James feels unsettled. He says those names like they should mean something to James. James wishes against himself that they did, he’s spent too long with Keith’s shadow slipping through his fingers to feel otherwise; he wishes that they were more than the vague flash of faces amidst the stream of intergalactic refugees; wishes that he were familiar enough with the contours of Keith’s life to know who those people are, what they mean to him. He still feels a vicious flood of relief at the news that Keith woke up at all. “Oh. Glad to hear it. That’s great.” James says, aiming for casual and just falling short. Any idea when he’ll be on his feet again? James thinks but does not ask. “It’s...god it’s a relief,” a pause. Shirogane tenses his prosthetic fingers into a fist and then flexes them before continuing. “They said he shouldn’t have survived the fall. That he wouldn’t have if he weren’t half Galra.” “He—what? When did he—” James stops himself because it turns out that there is such a thing as a stupid question. You don’t just turn Galra. You don’t just go to space and end up with a brand new set of DNA. That’s not how genetics work. Shirogane lets out a low, stilted laugh. “Well. You’re almost right. You can go to space and come back with new genetic data if someone takes your arm to clone you.”“Sure. Of course,” James says on autopilot, because what do you even say to that? He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, and he certainly wasn’t prepared for that answer. Not for the first time, James realizes how much more of the universe Shirogane and the other paladins have seen. Have lived. But Keith’s Galra heritage makes more sense than it doesn’t; even back then Keith had flown like he’d had a one way ticket to the stratosphere, it’s less surprising than it should be that part of the stars have always claimed a home under his skin. Have always had some claim on him as one of their own.Shirogane frowns, then smooths out his expression with practiced grace. As exhausted as he clearly is, he looks every bit the Captain of the Atlas; “I don’t mind the company but you should come back tomorrow--when he’s awake,” Shirogane pauses and flexes his fingers like the holding the weight of whatever decision he’s about to make in the palm of his hand. “He might not say, but I know he’d...appreciate it.” James can hear all the insults he’d flung at Keith over the years in the gaps between Shirogane’s words, all the shots he’d fired when he’d felt the flame of his own brilliance held up against Keith’s supernova and been found lacking time and time again; can relive all the ways that he and Keith clawed at the edges of one another’s skin to make each other hurt. “I’ll stop by.” “Thanks Griffin. You flew beautifully today,” Shirogane says, offering a brief but genuine smile. Years ago, this would have made James’s decade; years later and they’re the words he wants to hear but not the person he wants to hear them from. “Thank you, sir.” Shirogane huffs a hollow laugh, “We’re not in a meeting right now. You can just call me Shiro, everyone else does.” He pauses and starts again, softer this time. “You don’t have to tell me but--what was he like? After Kerberos?” Shirogane’s new arm hums. He flexes his fingers again. James hears the question threaded between the ones Shirogane actually asks: Who is he without me? “Lost. Angry.” A magnetic mess. Like an imploding star, caving in on itself, taking anyone who dared to get too close along for the ride. There was only so long that he could last chasing the promise of Shiro’s ghost and everyone knew it, including Keith. “They made the new sim program a Kerberos rescue mission. I’m sure you can imagine how that went.” It goes without saying: badly. Other things go without saying, too. James notices how both of them avoid the obvious question: what makes you think I was looking? They both know the answer to that one. The arm of the plastic hospital chair crunches under Shirogane’s hand but his face remains calm, veiled. “Yeah. I can imagine.” They sit in silence for a few minutes. Shirogane does his futile best to rearrange the plastic shards back into the chair armrest that they used to be, stopping every so often to stare off into the distance, lost in some train of thought James has no hope of hitching a ride on. Not that that’s ever stopped him from trying. “You should go get some rest, Griffin. You’ve earned it. Who knows when we’ll get a reprieve again.” James has spent too many years at the Garrison working his way up the ladder of its hierarchy not to know a dismissal when he hears one. “Yeah, alright. You should too, Captain ,” James says. Shirogane flinches, just a fraction. He flashes James a tired, brittle smile. “Noted, cadet. ”James gives a half mocking, half serious salute before rising to his feet and starting down the hall. It’s not until he turns the corner that he hears it, the squeak of someone wheeling a piece of medical equipment through the hallway. “You should be in bed.” “I could say the same for you. Isn't it past curfew? People will talk. They’ll say I’m corrupting the face of the Coalition.” James has never heard Keith use that time before. Teasing. Affectionate.“Some rules are unnecessary. It's not like me being unable to sleep is going to change the course of the universe if I'm here instead of in my bed,” Shirogane says. “I'm sure Slav would have something to say about that,” Keith says, letting out the ghost of a chuckle. “Keith, why? Why would you tempt fate like that? Haven’t we been through enough?” Shirogane's tone is brash and bratty, a petulant sort of sulking that he'd never allow himself if he knew he had an audience. James hears the plastic chair bending under new weight, the sound of his breath catching in his throat. He should leave.He can’t. It's a slow motion car wreck of emotion where he's caught in the center and on the sidelines all at once.“I’m not tempting anything; he’s already on his way. Pidge says Matt told her he’s coming to look at your arm. And the Atlas.”“Wow. Apparently this is how the universe thanks you for saving it.” A snort, then, “we’ve had worse thank you’s.” Keith and Shirogane laugh together but it’s got an uneasy edge to it, like there’s a fuse only they can see and they’re watching the ember snake along, making its way closer and closer to the end. “You should call it a night,” Shirogane says.
But really, he should know better. Keith’s never been one to accept a dismissal when he hears one. Especially not when he thinks it’s unearned.
“Only if you do,” Keith fires back. “One of us is still recovering from crash landing on the Garrison."“And the other is still adjusting to having his consciousness transplanted into the body of his clone,” James hears the chair groan again. “Wait, I forgot we’re not talking about that.” “ Keith .” Not talking about what? James thinks. While it sort of explains Shirogane’s comments from earlier, it brings up more questions than it answers. “No. I waited for weeks for you to be ready to talk about this, and now--now I’m not sure that I’ll ever get a second chance if I keep waiting. So, if you’re going to keep torturing yourself then I hope you know I’m going to keep doing whatever I need to do to save you.”James can’t tell if Keith’s speaking louder than he should out of passion or if the ward is just that quiet but either way, it’s clear: he’s not supposed to be here; he isn’t supposed to hear this. He doesn’t want to hear this. But he stays anyways, around the corner, just out of sight. “As many times as it takes…” Shirogane says, so softly that James barely hears him.“You remember that.” “I remember a lot of things.” “Oh.” “And most of them mean I owe you an apology.” James can imagine the furrow forming between Keith’s brows as he says, “you really don’t.” “You can’t...you can’t keep throwing your life away to save mine, Keith.” “I think that’s my decision. So stop being an idiot. We don’t need two Lance’s on the team.”“ Keith.” “Tell me I’m wrong.” Silence, then: “what about the other people who love you?” “ And what about the people who I love? What about the person I’m in love with?” James stops breathing.“Ke-” “No. You’re going to shut up until I get to say this. And until you hear it. No more fleeing to Pidge’s lion. No more telling me things when you think I’m asleep and then pretending they never happened when I’m awake,” Keith says. James can hear him shuffling closer to Shirogane. “I made you a promise, just like you promised you’d never give up on me. And I believed--believe you’ll keep it, so, believe that I’ll keep mine. As many times as it takes, Shiro. Whatever it takes.” “Keith, I…” James hears some shuffling, the squeak of wheels, and a hush of words that’s too low for him to make out.“Shiro...please…just. Please ,” Keith says. It’s the first time James has ever heard Keith plead with someone. “If you--if you’re gonna say no because it’s not what you want, okay. If you’re saying no because you think you don’t deserve it, after everything you’ve been through, then do us both a favor and shut up.” For a moment, all James can hear is the sound of his own breathing.“...Are you sure?”“ I’ve never been more sure of anything, or anyone in my life.”The rustling of fabric, noises his heart knows but shudders to name. “I...I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” Shirogane says. And James doesn’t need to see what’s going on to guess what he’s referring to. He needs to leave but his traitorous body stays fixed to this spot of wall, this patch of hallway where he can watch and hear whatever delusions he still harbored die a slow and inglorious death. “I should fine you for taking so long, then.” “Do you have a suggestion for repayment?” “I can think of a few.” “Will you come to bed with me,” Keith asks all in one breath, “I don’t want to sleep by myself tonight." “...okay.”And James can hear the chair shift as Shirogane rises to his feet, can hear the click of their footsteps receding into the distance, can hear the sound of his own heart--beating too fast and breaking all at once. It’s a delayed splintering, something falling apart only to realize the final blow had been struck years earlier. He goes to bed alone. He’ll visit Keith in the morning.