Voltron Legendary Defender - Shining Like the Stars [75] [Sklance]

[scriveyner]

Title: shining like the stars [75]
Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender
AU: slts
Characters/Pairing: Shiro/Keith/Lance, Team Voltron
Rating: M
Length: 1570
Summary: Shiro woke to an empty bed. He laid on his side for a while, staring into the dimness of the quarters. This bed smelled richly of Keith, his scent was thick in the pillows and the blankets. Shiro buried his face half in the pillow and caught the barest trace of Lance's scent, and he could remember fading out into sleep, seeing the brown wisps of Lance's hair beside Keith's. Shiro smiled and stretched his arm across the empty bed, until the fingers of his hand dangled over the edge of the mattress.



Shiro woke to an empty bed. He laid on his side for a while, staring into the dimness of the quarters. This bed smelled richly of Keith, his scent was thick in the pillows and the blankets. Shiro buried his face half in the pillow and caught the barest trace of Lance's scent, and he could remember fading out into sleep, seeing the brown wisps of Lance's hair beside Keith's. Shiro smiled and stretched his arm across the empty bed, until the fingers of his hand dangled over the edge of the mattress. It was a hell of a time squeezing all three of them into one of these barely-full-size bunks, he'd have to talk to Allura about obtaining a larger bed. He had an inkling that Lance was probably a sprawler.

Shiro sat up and yawned and brushed his hair out of his eyes. The lights in the room came up when he sat up — he sat on the edge of the mattress and waited for his eyes to adjust, scratching under the tight tee shirt he'd worn to bed blearily. He had no idea how long he'd slept, his chrono was in his room, with the rest of his clothes. No slippers, either. Somewhere between awake and not he padded barefoot to the door and stuck his head out in the corridor.

It didn't count as a walk of shame if there was no sex the previous night.

Well, there had been sex but not in Keith's room, at least. Shiro made it halfway down the corridor toward his room when he realized that he was hearing something happening beyond the sleeping quarters and it sounded urgent. Without hesitation he bypassed his room and was in fact jogging when he made it to the corridor that held the entrance to the training room, where the worst of the commotion was occurring.

Keith was at the epicenter, ears flattened back and eyes wide and looking — well, not nearly as freaked out as he had been in the memory core but definitely not anywhere on a linear scale of comfortable. He saw Shiro arrive and even the fact that Shiro visibly flinched at his visage didn't seem to deter Keith as he flung himself at Shiro and manged to eel around his body and plant Shiro between himself and everybody else.

'Everybody else' — Allura, Hunk, Coran, Illianya and Rian, he didn't see Pidge nor Matt among them which was both good and bad, but there was a lot of arguing and raised voices and entire strings of dialogue composed of words he didn't understand. "Why do you look like that?" Shiro asked Keith, who was using him as a human shield, peeking out from behind his shoulder. He didn't know Keith to run from a fight, but if Keith had a tail (did he have a tail? Shiro wasn't certain and somehow it felt like a Lance thing to ask) it would be tucked firmly between his legs at the moment.

"You know why," Keith muttered.

"And you know what I meant," Shiro said. He didn't have time to say or process more because Allura had turned from her argument/conversation/dressing down to see Shiro there and she lit up.

"Shiro did you see," she said, pointing at Keith behind Shiro as if he wasn't fully aware of the fact that his boyfriend turned into one of the species that had imprisoned and tortured him for a year. "Isn't it wonderful? Keith can infiltrate the Galra for us!"

"Help me," Keith hissed, fingers curled into the back of the tee shirt Shiro wore, as if there was excess fabric for him to readily grip.

"Infiltrate? He's a spy, he's infiltrated us," Rian yelled from behind Allura. Coran had one hand on Rian's should like a disapproving father, but that one hand was keeping the short Altean in place like it was a massive weight.

"Dude, there is no 'us'," Hunk said sharply. "You were trying to kill him!"

"He's-" Rian's retort was cut off by Illianya's very sharp tone, in a language that Shiro had never actually heard before this. Rian flushed a dark color and responded rapidly as well, and Allura ignored them both, still turned to Shiro with a pleasant smile on her face that was masking a serious eye twitch.

"I am a little disappointed that you wouldn't trust us with this information, Keith," she said to the tips of Keith's ears, the only thing visible behind Shiro's shoulder at the moment.

"I think we're all disappointed," Shiro said, and felt Keith's hands tighten on his shirt, then the soft press of what was probably his forehead into Shiro's shoulder blade. "But it's done now, and it's all out in the open, and nothing's going to change." There was a firmness in his words that made Allura nod her head, her smile moving from strained to a hint of genuine.

"Of course nothing's going to change, the Red Lion chose its pilot, after all." Rian made a derisive noise from behind her, and Allura's eye twitch returned, but she did not look back.

"Voltron's paladins come from many different backgrounds," Coran said, gesturing grandly with one hand. "It doesn't matter their background as long as they are all working toward the same goal!"

"Exactly," Allura said. Now she did turn, so she could look over everyone present. "Keith is one of us and has been from the beginning, regardless of his current look. Can I consider this matter settled?"

Hunk raised his hand. "Is someone going to tell Pidge? I'm assuming Lance already knows," he added, giving Shiro a very pointed look.

"I'll tell her myself," Keith said. He mostly emerged from behind Shiro, but he was back to his normal self and Shiro felt the tenseness run out of his shoulders at the pale skin and normal eyes. It would take some getting used to, to see Keith in purple. "She deserves to hear it from me."


#

The Castle of Lions did contain a library, a small room with many of the now-familiar consoles used to access digitally archived information. Lance had never much been for libraries in school or at the Garrison, but it seemed lacking to call a room a library without rows of archived material stretching throughout the space. It didn't leave much room for fooling around between the stacks if the room consisted of nothing but computer terminals.

He sat at one of the stations for a while, the navigation prompt lit up, hovering above the white, tilted platform of the computer. He still couldn't make sense of Altean even if he recognized the symbols now, knew what to look for to identify the script, so he didn't even know where to start. Lance propped his elbow on the edge of the terminal and put his chin in his hand and stared at the prompt.

Lance couldn't stop thinking about the man in black, with the yellow eyes.

He couldn't remember his face now, just the suit, the short dark hair, and yellow eyes —his mind had tried to superimpose Keith's face on the man in his sleep and now that haunted him, Keith's face on a different frame. It seemed important, and while he could easily call up most of the detail of his time in the memory core, the fact that this man's face was gone was really bothering him.

But, his lack of a grasp on the Altean language was a hindrance, and the last thing he wanted to do while trapped in a castle with sentient lion robots and actual freaking aliens was sit and study a language. Chin still in hand, Lance poked one of the holographic prompts with a finger and said, "computer, search memory core."

"Searching," the system replied in a pleasant, if unfamiliar, female voice.

Lance sat straight up, both hands going to the desk itself to steady him. "You take voice commands?" he said, startled, but the computer system did not respond, displaying a status symbol that seemed universal for 'please wait.'

"Accessing documentation on search query: memory core," the computer said, then displayed several results, again all in that Altean script. Lance squinted at them, then hesitantly touched the top result, the only one with a small picture attached. The article expanded along with the picture, but he wasn't able to read it. He squinted at the picture though, this memory core looked nothing like the one they had sitting in the training room, OR the ones he had seen planet-side on the moon of Eaphus. It was much larger, and wired in to ancient computers. "Huh," Lance said, and squinted at the picture. "Looks old."

There were a bunch of aliens clustered around in the frame of the picture, species that Lance had never encountered. "Computer, send all results to the Blue Lion," he said finally. She would process the articles and put them into a language he could easily understand, thanks to her translation matrix.

"Transfer complete," the computer said pleasantly. "New request?"

Lance drummed his fingers on the computer's desktop for a moment. He looked back at the entrance to the library, as if he expected someone to come bursting in on him any moment, then he sighed and turned around. "Search Galra," he said. "Half-breeds."

"Searching," the system responded.