Voltron Legendary Defender - Shining Like the Stars [73] [Shklance]

[scriveyner]

Title: shining like the stars [73]
Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender
AU: slts
Characters/Pairing: Shiro/Keith/Lance, Team Voltron
Rating: M
Length: 2381
Summary: Keith laid on top of the tucked-in covers on his bunk, arm draped over his eyes. He'd changed out of the tunic, shoved it into the chute that he'd determined led to either laundry, or an incinerator, and flopped onto his bed intent on attempting sleep, or something. He'd thought about across and down the hall, the bed that smelled like Lance, or even further down, the bed that smelled like Shiro, but was too tired to do anything more than think. It had been a draining few days.



Keith laid on top of the tucked-in covers on his bunk, arm draped over his eyes. He'd changed out of the tunic, shoved it into the chute that he'd determined led to either laundry, or an incinerator, and flopped onto his bed intent on attempting sleep, or something. He'd thought about across and down the hall, the bed that smelled like Lance, or even further down, the bed that smelled like Shiro, but was too tired to do anything more than think. It had been a draining few days.

So, sleep.

He rolled onto his side and pillowed his head on his arm. Sleep was not coming easy, even as tired as he was. It didn't help he hadn't turned down the lights. Keith stared across the sparsely-furnished room at a curved, paneled white wall — then held out his hand toward it. Pale, unmarred, human. How long had it been since he'd even thought of himself as anything other than that?

Freak. Half-breed.

Monster.

The knock startled him more than he cared to admit, and Keith flung himself upright. He slid off the bed and walked to the door, touching the internal pad. "I thought you said you weren't coming back," he said, half irritated, expecting Lance's smart-ass response before the door even finished sliding open.

Keith did not expect for Shiro to be standing outside his door.

There was a moment of profound silence. Shiro wasn't looking directly at him, his gaze downturned. He was only wearing exercise pants, and his arms were folded. "Shiro...?" Keith said carefully, measured.

"Can we talk?" Shiro said after another long moment of silence. He had raised his eye finally to meet Keith's, and there was no masking the exhaustion there. It lined his eyes and pulled at his posture, taking him from a soldier and a leader to something far older, and worn down. "Please," he added, as Keith remained silent.

Keith stepped aside and let Shiro into his room. When the door slid shut behind them both, Shiro just ... stopped. He stood there, in the center of the room, his back to Keith and he didn't move again until Keith's hand touched the back of his arm. Shiro's skin was damp, his short hair spiked with the remnants of a shower.

"Shiro," Keith said softly. "I'm sorry."

His words made Shiro's entire body jerk. He whirled on his heel and stared at Keith, then backed up until his legs hit the edge of Keith's bunk and he sat down hard, leaving Keith standing with one hand still in the air.

Keith was undeterred. He dropped his hand to his side and curled it into a loose fist. He would force himself to say these words, and that would be that. If it affected the team, he'd leave. It was that simple. "Shiro," Keith said his name for the third time, and his eyes finally met Keith's again. "Maybe we shouldn't-"

"Don't." Shiro's voice actually seemed to crack around the word, and the strangled way he spoke it actually made Keith stop. He looked so tired, and Shiro tilted forward where he sat on the edge of the bed, rested his elbow on his knee and put his face in one hand. "I think I just lost Lance, and I can't-" his voice did that weird crack again, "I can't lose you too."

Keith sat down on the bed beside Shiro, tentatively. He didn't look over at Shiro, not yet. "You didn't lose me," he said. "If anything I was afraid I'd lost you, because..." he touched one hand to his throat, the echo of a flurry of violence, here and gone in an instant. "Because of what I am."

There was another long stretch of silence, punctuated only by heavy breaths. Shiro's forehead still rested in his hand. "I'm sorry," Keith said again, and this time looked over to Shiro. "I'm sorry for lying about who I am."

Shiro lifted his head, slowly. He didn't look to Keith just yet. "You didn't lie," he said finally.

"I didn't tell you," he said, and looked at his hands.

"It's not like you could've at the Garrison," Shiro's breathing didn't sound so loud or irregular any longer, and Keith exhaled slowly. "And there's not really any good time to just announce something like that." Shiro rubbed his hand over the bottom part of his face and sighed deeply. "I really fucked up with Lance, I think," he said.

It took a few moments to process the second half of his statement, because Keith was too hung up on the first. Shiro didn't hate him? That wasn't right, that couldn't be right, and he pushed it aside after circling it and looked at Shiro again. "What happened with Lance?"


#

"You retrofitted the entire cockpit?" Pidge said, sitting in the open cockpit of the Galra fighter. "This all looks Galra to me." The entire console was lit in a faint purple glow, alien figures hovering above the virtual navigation system. "It looks very Galra."

"That's the point." Matt was leaning against the side of the cockpit, one arm hooked over the side. He waved his hand over one of the floating displays, and with a ripple effect the control system turned into a familiar teal, although the base still remained black and purple. "It's easy enough to do an overlay for video communications," Matt said. "Remember, full black helmets? They're easy to map under a protocol. It's the background that sells things."

Pidge let out an impressed noise. "So you vid-chat with Galra and they assume you're an elite fighter wing? And then you bullshit your way right through, that's amazing." She put her hand on the side of the cockpit and leaned forward. "I bet you do a mean impersonation."

Matt clicked his tongue, then straightened a little. "Vrepit sa!" he said, and Pidge actually laughed.

"Amazing."

"Yeah," Matt said. "Kinda interesting the things one picks up in captivity." He leaned forward and waved his hand over the display again, changing it back to purple.

"Matt," Pidge said. He shook his head and smiled at her.

"That's behind me now," he said. "And Shiro, too."

"Do you think Dad's still alive?" she asked, and Matt didn't even hesitate. He nodded his head sharply.

"I'm certain of it. He's tough, Kat, tougher than us. I just wish we had better resources to try to find him, and the other prisoners." He pushed away from the edge of the cockpit, balanced on a small ladder. "Well, maybe not as tough as his kid the paladin," Matt said in a teasing tone, as Pidge stood in the cockpit.

She seemed to take his words in a stride. "Want to see her?" she said. "Green?"

"Your lion is named Green?" Matt said.

"Well of course she is, she's the Green Lion," Pidge retorted. "I'm the Green Paladin and she's the Green Lion. That's the way it works." She climbed out of the cockpit carefully.

"Yeah," Matt said. "I suppose it is, huh?"


#

Lance sat in the common area. The ship had clicked over to its night cycle and dimmed the lights, not beyond the ability to see but it left him sitting in partial darkness. Good. Just like his mood. He stuck out his legs and crossed them at the ankle, then folded his arms tight over his chest, and closed his eyes.

Hunk wasn't in his room. Lance had knocked futilely for a good two minutes and got no response, so he was either so deeply asleep that he didn't hear the knock, or he wasn't in his room at all. Lance had looked at the doorway right down from Hunk's, but he didn't cross the hallway, or hesitate in front of it, nor knock on it. He left, and headed for the training room.

Lance wasn't the sort of person who voluntarily exercised, even for training drills. However, he wanted to find a place that no one would find him to let him just think and process things. The training room turned out to be a bust because the young, fractious Altean that drove him up the wall was in there doing kata, and Lance Did Not Need That At All. So he found the common room dim and empty and settled down on the couch.

This was doing absolutely nothing for his mood, so he let out a loud sigh and opened his eyes again.

Lying on the couch, shuffled back together, was the deck of cards he and Hunk had been playing with days earlier. Lance eyed the deck, and after a moment picked up the card and started shuffling them.

Shiro loved Keith. Lance knew that, he didn't have an excuse for getting as angry as he did, but it still simmered under the surface and he hated it. He flipped through the cards a few times, shuffled them again, and then set them back on the couch cushion. He owed Shiro an apology, if nothing else.

"Lance?"

Shiro's voice caught him off guard, and he froze in place. There was a heartbeat of fear in him, but that passed faster, because he wasn't afraid of Shiro, and he sat up straight and put his hands on the edge of the couch, between his legs, and tilted forward. It took him longer than he expected to find his voice again, but when he did, he called simply, "in here."

The lights didn't increase when Shiro slapped the wall panel as he entered the room; to both of their surprise one of the walls actually shimmered and went translucent, showing the some of the side of the castle-ship and most importantly, the starfield beyond. "Whoa," Lance said, eyes torn from Shiro's form to the new vantage point outside the castle. "Now that is trippy, we're sideways."

"The internal gravity of the ship is oriented to flight mode," Shiro said, as if Lance hadn't been present for Allura's deeply boring explanation on the difference between castle mode and ship mode.

"Yeah," Lance said. He nodded his head a little, then looked over to Shiro who was now fully dressed; or at least wearing a tee shirt that was probably a few sizes too small and his exercise pants. Lance wasn't going to stare because he knew what was under that tee shirt, but man it did cling to Shiro in very attractive ways. Shiro was doing his level best not to look at him, so it was up to Lance to take the initiative. "Shiro, I'm sorry," Lance said. "I overreacted."

That, if nothing else, got a reaction. He held out his finger as Shiro jerked his head up and stared at Lance. "I'm not gonna repeat it," Lance said. "I don't want anyone on this ship to get a recording of that, I have an image to maintain-"

"Why are you sorry?" Shiro asked, bewildered. He was still standing a decent ways away, so Lance couldn't quite read his facial expression in the dim light of the common room. "I'm the one who crossed a line..."

"You didn't," Lance had been thinking about it for the past hour. "You never did anything I said not to, and we were both thinking about Keith, we had just been talking about him. You just opened your mouth about it." Lance rubbed his hand over his face and sighed.

Shiro walked over to the couch and, after a moment, sat down next to Lance. "I'm still going to apologize," he said. "I'm ... not used to this."

"No kidding," Lance said, but there was a laugh at the edge of his tone. He was looking out at the starfield beyond, now, and to Shiro's surprise, leaned into him. "This relationships scares me a little," he said finally.

"Do you want out?" Shiro asked.

Lance shook his head. "No. It's just ..." he waved his hand in the air. "It's a lot."

"It is a lot," Shiro agreed. "And it is scary. It scares me too."

"Really?" Lance pulled back a little and stared at Shiro, looking for the lie in his words. "You're scared." It was less a question than a statement.

Shiro very tenderly rested his hand on the back of Lance's neck. "It's my first time with all this," he said, tracing his fingers over the scarring flesh there. "I'm not afraid of fighting the Galra, or flying Voltron, or anything like that. But this? This petrifies me. I keep expecting you, or Keith to look at me and see what I really am."

"A hero," Lance said, and leaned into his shoulder again.

"A monster," Shiro said, his eyes on his prosthetic hand.

"You are the furthest thing from a monster," Lance said. "Same with Keith. So what if he can turn purple? I bet that makes his dick wicked different, that'll be fun. But you're still Shiro and he's still Keith."

"Hey!" Keith's voice was faint and a little irritated. Lance leaned back on the couch and looked toward the entrance.

"Are you eavesdropping?" Lance yelled. "You asshole!"

Keith popped his head through the door. "I wanted to make sure that you weren't crying your eyes out," he said.

"That's it, I'm going to punch him," Lance said, and started to get up, but Shiro's arm shot out and wrapped around his waist, keeping him seated. "Ah, c'mon," he said.

"This is gonna take a lot of work," Shiro said finally. "Are you sure you want to keep doing this?"

Lance looked at Shiro, and then over to Keith who was now standing awkwardly in front of the door. "Well, yeah," he said. "Of course I do." Lance watched Keith walk around the long way and climb down onto the couch, sitting down on Lance's other side. He looked over at Keith, and then back to Shiro. "We just gotta keep trying, right?"

"Right," Shiro agreed, and Keith nodded. Lance looked back to Keith, who got a strange expression on his face based on the look Lance was giving him.

"...what?" he asked Lance.

"I wanna see your furry dick," Lance said, and Shiro gave a small chuckle as Keith just looked scandalized.

"Absolutely not."