Chapter Text
The tool Coran used to examine Keith, scanning his head and shoulders, looked like a signalling baton, with a small screen and a long clear tube filled with floating glowing blue spheres. Keith sat as still as he possibly could and waited for Coran to finish.
In the meantime, he looked at Shiro, who was hovering beside Keith with his hands up in what was likely meant to be a calming gesture but all Keith saw was a goalkeeper ready to catch Keith’s flaming pieces if he exploded right there and then.
His skin itched and reached up to his neck to scratch it, only for Shiro to clear his throat and glare until Keith lowered it again.
“That’s got to hurt,” said Lance, whistling as he crossed the infirmary, and to Keith’s astonishment, he really did say it. His voice was distorted under what the gas mask strapped over his face, but Lance was unmistakeably speaking. Not a hint of a song in his voice.
Keith was impressed. It had only been ten minutes since Lance had belted the small yellow tank of aerosol fungicide to his hips and already it was a marked improvement.
“Unless you’re, you know, numb on the outside as well as the inside.”
“Which we all know he isn’t,” said Hunk quickly as if pinching out a light on a dynamite fuse. Then he stopped, eyes widening, and beaming with delight he pointed at his face. “I’m not singing!”
Pidge applauded from the other side of the unpacked treatment crate and returned to scrolling through the Wei-Brordi’s research on her laptop, but she was huffing into her mask with raspy breathing noises and smiling.
“Which he isn’t,” Lance agreed, testing the mask of the aerosol fungicide harness with a few experimental puffs to the back of his hand. “No matter how much he puts up the ‘I’m-aloof-and-fireproof- grrr-roll-of-thunder-hear-me-howl-I-was-raised-by-desert-wolves’ tough guy act. Here you go, Shiro.”
“Thanks, Lance.”
Keith held up his blackboard. IT DOESN’T HURT.
Lance frowned. “Keith, you look like you swallowed a bomb, like I could kick you and you’d fart the Manhattan Project.”
IT DOESN’T HURT, Keith emphasised, slapping the board with his hand.
Really, he almost wished that it did. Keith could see himself in the steel panels of the infirmary cabinets. The blood vessels under his skin glowed in angry red lines. They ought to have been burning with liquid fire, but all Keith felt was a prickling-crawling throughout his skin, as though he had sucked in too much air, a breath too big, and it all wanted was to burst out from him in a scream.
Scream, thought Keith, somewhat desperately, as Coran scanned him and hummed into his moustache, if only.
Gulping aerosol fungicide and tank strapped to his hip, Shiro returned to Keith’s side. He asked Coran, “Are we sure that we can’t use the healing pods for this?”
“I’m afraid not. The healing pods are designed to accelerate and facilitate the replication and replenishment of the body’s own cells. They’re for cellular regeneration, within limits.” Coran’s eyes flickered to the seam between metal and flesh in Shiro’s right arm with regret. The scanner let out an obnoxious bleep and Coran hurriedly returned his attention to the miniature screen. “But not surface infections. After all, we wouldn’t want them killing off your microbiome and disrupting your metabolic and hormonal homeostasis! It’d severely unbalance your brain chemistry, as well as ruin the efficiency of your digestive tract. And that’s your scan done, Number Four!”
Keith couldn’t write fast enough. WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?
“Quintessence disequilibrium. It’s a…hmm, unusual reaction to the Deathsong neurotoxins.”
“According to the Wei-Brordi’s research, the Deathsong works by boosting our quintessence levels. It actually might even be good for people in small doses,” Pidge read off the research papers with a tone of wonder, which Keith would have minded far less if she hadn’t paused on a photograph of an ancient mural depicting a Gallube-36 colonist flailing its fern-feathers and dying in burst of fire in orange paint. Nice. “Before the mutant version destroyed them all, apparently there’s evidence to suggest that the colonists might have been growing the mould for recreational purposes.”
“Wait a dobash,” said Lance, holding up a finger, “so what you’re saying is, we’re not just infected by space mould we’re infected by – “
“Space magic mushrooms, if the whole semi-telepathic hallucination thing wasn’t already a giveaway, but that’s not the point. The point is, Keith’s overreacting to it. The Deathsong’s supposed to siphon off the spare quintessence we make from the boost it gives us, but Keith’s making too much, even for the mould to keep up with. And, on top of that,” Pidge considered Keith with narrowed eyes and adjusted her glasses, “he hasn’t been singing.”
WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH THIS?
“Basically, the Deathsong’s trying to keep us alive for as long as it can whilst it farms us for quintessence. It’s making us sing and dance to burn off excess and keep our quintessence levels stable,” Pidge shut her laptop, “so that we don’t burn up with it.”
“Although eventually all do seem to succumb to disequilibria,” said Allura, entering the infirmary just as Pidge clicked for another mural photograph, this time showing a parade of horrendous stick figures and artistic renditions of the last days of Gallube-36, which Keith really could have done without seeing. “What a terrible fate.”
Yes, what a terrible fate, and it was coming to Keith early because the universe not just enjoyed throwing curveballs at him, but aiming the pitching machine at him with malicious intent.
He wrote carefully, ignoring the bright glow of the veins he saw through the gaps in his fingerplates, SO I’M ALLERGIC TO THE MOULD?
“No, you’re not, but since there’s no point in explaining this in terms you won’t understand, yes, if it’s going to give you peace of mind, you’re ‘quintessence-allergic’ to the mould.”
“Which, ah, seems to be a common Galra trait,” said Coran tentatively, drumming his fingers on the scanner but, to his credit, he didn’t avoid Keith’s gaze, “hence the Wei-Brordi’s use of it in the past as a bioweapon, but, never mind, young paladin! It won’t come to that.”
Footsteps approached – softly, softly, as if Keith could explode at any moment, which was, as a matter of fact, true - and then a heavy hand rested on Keith’s shoulder.
“Keith,” said Shiro, and hadn’t Keith heard that tone many times before, in Keith, don’t press button when I’m in the anti-gravity simulator ever again or Keith, I may be on a special diet for the sake of science and the advancement of mankind’s endeavours into space, but, so help me God, could you please call the emergency number for a four cheese stuffed crust and the extra garlic dough balls, or most common and simple of all, Keith, wait. “Sing or die.”
Keith winced. Shiro was right. There was no arguing around this one.
And at least it wasn’t the actual singing he had a problem with. Just the helplessness of feeling that he wasn’t in control, that he was being sucked out into empty space with not even familiar stars to guide his way.
Nothing had changed really, he knew that - just his own awareness of how little he knew and that apparently he could catch fire from quintessence allergies as good as any Galra.
His nails bit into his palms.
“Maybe if Keith takes the medicine he won’t have to sing anyway?” said Hunk, lighting a flicker of hope which was crushed an instant later when Pidge shook her head.
“Not a good idea. The Wei-Brordi’s stuff will take at least a week to clear the Deathsong from our systems and that’s not even counting for any complications that could come up from our different physiologies. The treatment course suggests singing whenever the mood takes us, just to be on the safe side.”
“But in the meantime, Hunk is quite correct,” Coran held up the fungicide harness with the gas mask hanging off it like a mermaid’s purse, and grinned encouragingly through his own. “It’s time you took your medicine!”
Ten minutes of breathing musty fungicide vapour, with top-notes of alien Teflon and rubber, the tension that had been tickling Keith’s diaphragm eased. He didn’t feel as though on the brink of singing his lungs out of his own body.
When he said as much Shiro had chuckled, muttered, “I’ll make sure to add that to my Voltron Encyclopaedia of Horribly Painful Deaths in We Just Missed in Space. It’ll make a change from updating the Everything that Could Go Wrong with Airlocks chapter,” and gone to rescue Hunk, who had gotten between Lance and Pidge in an increasingly heated argument over unconscious gender bias and distribution of song themes. Allura and Coran had already returned to the bridge to send a message of gratitude back to the Wei-Brordi and begin preparing their next course of action.
Experimentally, Keith pulled down the mask, quietly cleared his throat, and opened his mouth.
…
Nothing.
Not even a soft plink of a note from a group-hallucinated piano.
He could feel the songs on the tip of his tongue. If anything, the urge to open voice and sing was stronger than when he had been gagging himself with his towel, and yet, now when Keith was actually trying, not a sound came out of him.
He looked across the room, hoping that the others hadn’t noticed his failure. Thankfully, they hadn’t, although Shiro caught his eye and raised his eyebrows until Keith replaced the breathing mask on his face.
Typical.
Just when it came down to ‘Sing or die’, Keith couldn’t sing at all.
The rest of the day - the hours of illumination prescribed to maintain the paladins’ circadian rhythm and baseline sanity – was spent hunting down Deathsong spore bodies about the Castle Ship and scrubbing down every contaminated surface with a fungicide gel that left it sparkling clean, smelling of heather (space heather, as Lance insisted) and glowing radioactive green for three minutes afterwards.
It was a diversion of sorts. Physical activity Keith could throw himself into always was, but ultimately it was repetitive and not distracting enough to stop Keith’s mind wandering back to his own predicament, especially when all the scrubbing did was draw everybody’s attention to the glowing red lines now crackling under the skin of his arms.
Why? Why couldn’t he sing anymore? Why was it now that when he pushed himself to sing that the music and lyrics wouldn’t come to him, when before the music had all but ambushed him as soon as he opened his mouth?
“You know what this needs?” Lance dropped his rag into a bucket into his bucket. “A cleaning song.”
Pidge groaned from behind the goo-dispenser. “Lance, no.”
“Or a slave-drudgery song.”
And there it was - an obliging plink!
An opening note, soon followed by an orchestral motif foundation of a dreary dirge meant for the unjust suffering of thousands building pyramids or dragging ships for hard-hearted overlords.
Keith stopped scrubbing and stared.
“Fungus, fungus,” Lance sang, slapping the gelled rag to the side of the oven between the words, “death to all fungus. We scrub every surface till there’s no more among us. Deadliness is cleanliness, and we know when it’s clean, because it’ll be mean, glowing green and gamma ray pristine – Hey!”
“How are you doing that?”
Lance frowned and shook off Keith’s hand from his wrist. The music ground to a stop. “Doing what?”
As silence slipped into the place of the orchestral backing again, Keith’s face burned (although not with real fire) and he found himself tongue-tied. What was he really asking?
He huffed into the mask. “Getting this singing stuff to work.”
“What do you mean ‘getting it to work’? It’s space mould biology, Keith. Wacky brain toxins. You don’t need to think about it…” Lance trailed off and looked at him closely. “Wait, are you serious? You were practically eating your towel to stop it before.”
“Well, now isn’t before, and I can’t get it to work.” Even though he could feel the music welling up behind his teeth. “I’m trying and it isn’t working. And, like Shiro said, ‘sing or die’.”
Lance sat back on his heels, rag in hand, silent aside from the early 80s sci-fi fantasy breathing noises from his mask.
Then a wide, wicked grin spread across his face.
“You can’t sing.”
Oh, boy, Lance was going to milk this for all that it was worth.
“I want to. I can’t.”
“You freely admit that I, Lance the Tuneful, your eternal rival and nemesis have bested you, Keith the Tuneless, in spontaneous musicality?”
“Bested me in letting space mould mess with our heads, but if it matters so much to you, yes!” Keith snapped and then instantly wished he hadn’t when the red glow of the veins down his arms flared quintessence-gold, and really did burn.
He dropped his rag with a hiss, clutching his hands together as a thin silvery line of that strangely clean-smelling smoke trickled up from between his fingers.
Lance’s smug grin instantly fell away. “Okay, okay! Sheesh, only you’d set yourself on fire over asking nicely for help like it’d actually kill you to be human for once.”
“Well, I’m not all human, so it probably would.”
“Lance shoots and scores own goal,” said Pidge from her corner of the kitchen and despite the pain under his skin, now fading to a dull throb that was eerily close in time to his heartbeats, Keith snorted.
Lance winced. “Okay, I’ll take that, but you know what I mean.”
It was tempting to say he didn’t, just to rub in - how much none of them really knew anything out here in space. Even Allura and Coran were ten thousand years out of touch. Space was dark and the stars were cold and all the stars did was watch with the detached distance of things that were dead and gone. Maybe it was time for a new definition.
‘Human’ – adj.: Being too small for the universe and never knowing enough about anything.
And then needlessly worrying about it. You never caught moose or cats having existential crises.
“So, what it is?” Lance had put away the smug grin in favour of studying Keith, mouth twisted, eyes narrowed, like a puzzle. He tossed the rag from one hand to the other. “You don’t have anything to sing about?”
Keith thought about it then shook his head. “If you can make a song out of cleaning, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Or maybe you shouldn’t underestimate my extraordinary talent for tapping into the harmony of the universe and the musical flow of the moment, Can’t Sing Keith.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Fine, fine, hackles down, O Mighty Swordsman.” Keith pretended that he didn’t notice the worried look Lance exchanged with Pidge behind his back. “What about backing singing? You could just follow mine or Pidge’s lead.”
“I – er – tried. Just now. With that cleaning song, but I just couldn’t…” Keith focused on his knuckles as he scrubbed the floor. He was getting tongue-tied with for words, let alone lyrics, “…go with the flow of it?”
“Oh. Oh!” Lance sat up straight and slapped the gel-rag in his right hand into the palm of the left. “I’ve got it. I’ve totally got it.”
“You have?”
“It’s so damn obvious!” Lance tugged down his own mask, pointed at Keith who regretted in an instant sounding so hopeful, and sang, “It’s you! You’re you! It’s you being all you!”
The band started up and all Keith could do was splutter as Lance stood, stepped back and twirled on the spot, coming back to face Keith again with the fungicide gel encrusted rag held out like a baton.
“Bet you’re thinking, what’s that supposed to mean? It’s just Lance being a drama queen. But I’ve done my maths and seen it through, and, Keithy boy, it’s just you - being all Keithy you. See?”
The music paused, as though offering Keith the moment to pitch in with song. Sheepishly, feeling Pidge’s bemused gaze on both of them from her corner, Keith pulled down his face mask and breathed in through his nose.
He opened his mouth and choked as song, lyric, all his frustration and fear and everything, crowded up his throat. Smoke trickled up from under his collar and up his arms. Veins glowed.
Lance nodded, his theory proven. “Three things, Keith, three things from the top. One, you just don’t know when to stop. You’re always go, go, go and do, do, do. You don’t take the time to sort your head through, so when you start singing, you’re trying to spit out every single damn thing you could possibly sing about,” Lance flung out his hands, waved then closed them to fists at his mouth, watching Keith over his knuckles to make sure he had his attention, “at once.”
Spot on.
Keith had been struggling to find the right words because there were too many things, too many thoughts, too many things he needed to do or wanted to do or was afraid he couldn’t do, too much to sort through and pick out exactly what the right words were, especially through the thick haze of mounting exasperation and anger at his own self for not being able to solve it all alone.
A dozen different indignant, angry, confused, startled responses crowded his mouth.
Lance carried on. “You’re too impatient. I’m no Shiro replacement, but you’ve got to focus to the max. Find your zen locus, and chillax.”
“Yes!” Lance and Keith both turned to find Pidge lowering her fist with a triumphant smirk. “Hunk and I have a bet going on what words are going to get used before all this is over.”
“Two,” Lance went on, snapping his fingers so that Keith looked his way and the group-hallucinated band struck up, “listen to the water boy, you’ve got to loosen up. You can’t go with the flow until you’ve let it go. Shake out your feet and kick out your toes. Go with the dancing and you’ll be part of the show, but to come to point three, that’s the most important to know – “
Lance clapped a grimy hand on Keith’s shoulder and the music died away, leaving wheedling notes in his ears as Lance replaced the mask on his own face and took a deep, rasping breath of fungicide.
“Basically, Keith,” Lance patted Keith on the shoulder, “don’t overthink this. It’s easy. Your problem isn’t that you haven’t got things to sing about. You’ve got too much.”
Lance was right.
Keith wasn’t only thinking too much. He felt too much, and he didn’t, as a rule, bother naming what it was he felt, mostly because he couldn’t. He felt too quickly, to intensely, like caesium dropped into water, and by the time it was gone there was little point in working out what it was and no time to do so as Keith was caught up by the consequences.
Sadness, anger, guilt, fear. Sometimes he envied people who could so neatly slice up this ‘toomuchness’ into such manageably-sized parcels that they could be named. Then they could be dealt with piece by piece, burned away or shared out through simple communication like the most uncomfortably soul-bearing brownies the universe could invent.
Keith felt on a temperature scale, in lights of reds and blues, dark and shadows, and hots and colds, and Keith always, overwhelmingly, felt too much.
Mostly he had channelled it into speed, noise and chasing extraordinary heights, things that made him feel bigger than he actually was just so that the toomuchness would fit under his skin. Articulating what he felt had meant stopping and slowing down, and when Keith stopped and slowed down, people who should have known better caught up and then wouldn’t leave his caesium-in-water blast radius.
He looked at Lance and Pidge and wondered if it was safe to stop and slow down, and then remembered that they were paladins and that without them he wouldn’t have found a place where his toomuchness was right at home, pouring that energy into something bigger than all of them, namely Voltron.
Keith sat back on his heels. Damn it, he was overthinking this. He owed it to all of them and Voltron to sit down and focus. To sing or die, this wasn’t a choice. It was an order, demanding him to assess his priorities, face this crazy musical half-hallucinated reality and take responsibility as a paladin.
Keith huffed, something loosening inside him, and folded the gel-rag, setting it on the bucket edge. He tipped his chin at Lance’s slow progress of his patch of the kitchen. “Speaking of ‘too much’, you're doing too much talking and singing and not enough cleaning.”
“It’s called ‘being meticulously careful’ and ‘taking my sweet, unhurried, virtuously patient time’,” said Lance archly, turning his back on Keith to wipe slow, luminous green semi-circles along the side of the Altean oven. “And here I was helping out your poor stubborn mulleted soul when it’s too emotionally Raaaar to articulate itself in civilisation’s great gift that is music and lyrics.”
Something moved in Gallubean astrospace.
Blinking pale violet lights, a Galran space probe, scanning planets for resources and traces of intelligent life, had drifted silently into the system. Against the pale blue rockface of the moon Gallube-36, it was but a tiny speck of dark metal, indistinguishable from debris, and when the Castle Ship passed by it had been swallowed in the ship’s shadow.
The probe blinked and took a picture.
The starlit image of the Castle Ship was then beamed to the nearest Galra outpost, upon which the local commanding officer decided it was more trouble than he was prepared to handle and forwarded it on to another, and then another, and another, in a highly efficient chain of passing the buck until it finally came to a stop at Central Command.
“Sire.” Haggar bowed her head. “Voltron has been sighted.”
Later Lance would tell to all who cared to listen that the Castle Ship had been caught out by a glorified Galran speed camera.
The observation deck in the Atralka Wing was a quiet room. It was small without bright colours or decorations or the blinking artificial lights that after a while drove Keith mad with how indecisive they seemed. The walls were deep blue and curved and the windows stretched from the floor to arch over Keith’s head like a capsule, enclosing him in a bubble of stars. In the right frame of mind, he could imagine that he wasn’t enclosed at all.
What he liked most of all were the seats – three tiers of padded benches, steps really, curving around the room and dropping down to a small circular floor-space like a cockpit-sized amphitheatre.
He could tuck himself against the tier wall and the door of the room would always be at the edge of his vision. Nobody could come up from behind to surprise him and there was always a clear way out, and if he couldn’t sit still he could clamber about the benches with the stars still all around him until that energy burst flickered out again.
Keith was turning his knife over in his hands, making a horizon line in the stars with its edge, when the door opened and Shiro appeared.
Spotting Keith, he smiled. “There you are.”
“You were looking for me?”
“I was wondering how you were. Pidge said you’d gone to find some space to clear your head but it’s been a few hours.” Shiro cast his eyes around the room, taking in the benches, the curved glass of the ceiling, the bright blue lights from the Castle’s hull glowing softly in through the windows. “You’d think it would be easy to find some space on this ship. After all, there’s plenty of it outside of the Castle’s windows. Space.”
Objectively, that was true. “Yes, there is?”
“Only an airlock jump away.”
“Not funny, Shiro.”
“Really? Oh, well. You can’t say I didn’t try. Clearly, I was wasted on the audience.”
Keith snorted but he couldn’t help cracking a small smile, and Shiro took that as permission to step down the tiers to the bench below Keith’s, where he sat, hands on knees, looking up at the dark, shimmering expanse above them. “Lance mentioned you were having difficulties.”
Keith huffed. “’Pidge said’? ‘Lance mentioned’?”
“That’s what happens when a small group of people spend a lot of time together without much external stimulation. We’re each other’s news and weather. Around the tenth varga of illumination, it’ll be cloudy with a chance of Lance, with a twenty percent likelihood of Hunk.” Shiro glanced up over his shoulder to meet Keith’s gaze. “We’re just worried, Keith. None of us want to see a pile of ashes in Red’s cockpit.”
“But it’s not just me! This,” he held up his right arm and the glowing veins cast red cracked lines of light over Shiro’s face, “is happening to all of us – will happen to all of us if this medicine doesn’t work. It’s not worth worrying - ”
“But the rest of us aren’t genetically inclined to overreact to the Deathsong spores. Keith, I hate to break it to you but, right now, you are worth worrying over.”
“You know there are better things to be worrying about! Shiro, what are we going to do about forming Voltron? What’d happen if the Galra attacked, right now, and we go in there – “
“Singing and dancing?”
“Yes!”
Shiro stroked his chin. “Well, you have to admit, Zarkon would never see that coming.”
“I honestly can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”
“Well, I’m not entirely joking.” At Keith’s incredulous stare, Shiro went on. “The Princess thinks it’s possible that, if we need to form Voltron, thanks to the neurotoxin it may even be easier and better coordinated than usual – and from what I’ve gathered from our experiences, it doesn’t actually distract us from the tasks we need to do, but it would more than likely put off the Galra. Maybe even intimidate them if we get lucky with whatever choreography we dream up between us.”
It sounded plausible, maybe even reasonable from a certain frame of mind, if not utterly ridiculous.
The trouble with listening to Shiro was that Keith ended up listening, maybe even when he shouldn’t.
All too aware of the tight feeling of toomuchness creeping back when he had come to this room to dispel it, Keith breathed, but sucked in a mouthful of fungicide-infused air too quickly and, pulling aside his mask, burst into a series of hacking coughs.
“Are you going to survive until dinner?”
Keith reached out to put a hand on Shiro’s shoulder.
“Shiro,” he coughed, “if I don’t make it, I want you to lead – “
“Okay, enough of that,” said Shiro a little too loudly and Keith grinned, his point made. Shiro turned in his seat to face him, his Galra arm gleaming pale blue from the ship lights coming in through the windows, with the same determined expression as when he had promised to get Keith into the harder levels of the mission simulator that were beyond Keith’s access rank. “Somehow we’re going to have you singing before the food’s on the table.”
Keith aimed for a lighter tone. “Or Voltron won’t have a right arm anymore.”
“No, Keith,” Shiro rose, standing on the lower bench so that he loomed over Keith with his hands on his hips, “you’re more than our right arm. You’re more than Voltron’s sword.” His eyes fell to the luxite knife on the bench next to Keith’s hand. “More than a blade. You know that, don’t you?”
Keith laughed and something bubbled, swelled and, in that quiet space he had finally made between all the strands of his thoughts and feelings, it finally popped.
“Isn’t that just what I’ve always been?”
And, lo, there was a quiet plink!
Shiro’s face split into a huge, relieved grin. “You’re singing!”
Keith had sung.
Keith was singing.
The plink! was followed by a softer reprise of the song Lance had sung in whilst they had cleaned the kitchen, and underneath the elation that he wasn’t going to die Keith felt a stir of stubborn resistance as the music tugged.
Lance had told him to go with the flow but going along with anything without putting up a fight went against every one of Keith’s instincts. His hands moved to his mouth on reflex before Shiro shot him a look and, realising what he was doing, Keith lowered them to his knees.
“Come on, stubborn.” Shiro offered his hand, and the piano wove between the notes of the violin as though chivvying it along, giving it handholds for its tune to latch onto. “You can’t sing lying down.”
“Yes, I can.”
But he took Shiro’s hand and let himself be hauled off the bench, down to Shiro’s tier, and then shoved into that flat circle of space at the mini-amphitheatre’s centre. Shiro settled back on the lowest tier of benches and folded his arms, all ready to watch whatever show the Deathsong had in store.
Keith bunched his hands into fists. Bring it on, space mould.
The piano and violin flowed, pulling at Keith with their tune. He took a deep breath, filling out his lungs, let his ribcage expand and feel light with air, like a swimmer bracing for a plunge into water.
He faced the stars, ignored the reflected red tracery of his veins in the glass, and let go.
“All my life I’ve wanted answers,” the music was quiet, Keith’s voice was exposed, “all my life I’ve been searching for something I couldn’t describe.”
The window under his palm was cool and steadying. Beyond it, space - dark with the shadows of the Gallubean system’s planets not so far away, reminding him gently that a moment of musical embarrassment was nothing in the face of the vastness of the universe.
“I thought it could be freedom, but from what, I could never decide.” Violins followed his tune, louder than before, but then they faded again as though to give his voice some space. “Gravity, the lies of people, or being a blade that could never hide.”
Keith’s face in the window was pale blue under the ship lights, but with the thin red glow from the quintessence burning up under his skin it could have passed for a troubling mauve. He forced himself to look. Accept.
“All my life I’ve been a blade, all my life I’ve been labelled ‘Handle with care’.
Don’t get too close – the kid’s edges are bare,
As though the bite of my blade was all I could share.”
Shiro made a small noise from where he was seated, something indignant and sad. Keith wanted to stop and tell him that it was alright, that there was nothing Shiro could do about the times from before they met, but the music was already moving on, drawing the song from his lungs and his head like pus from a wound.
It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. Singing, it was just screaming that made sense. Melody threaded the lyrics together, shaped his breath, and where words failed to mean everything he wanted the music in his ears conveyed it instead.
He could feel his head clearing like skies of rain. It crystallised clear as the view of space before him that he wanted, for once, to be heard, to have this known, and it was easier this way. Words with Keith had always left room for misunderstanding, but with song that room was filled.
He closed his eyes and the music called for a wry smile. “They wanted to box me out of sight. They said, Keith, there’s no place for blades outside of a fight.”
The luxite dagger was in his hands, dark with a deep purple sheen and deeper blue whorls. He held it up to the window.
“But my knife was my questions, and my questions were me. I had ‘disciplinary issues.”
The music dug deep and plucked at old wires, barbed and tangled, and Keith was nine, he was twelve, he was fifteen, he was eighteen, written off and thrown out of a back door by the scruff until he was tall enough that they had to stop throwing him, his feet touched the ground and he could say that he walked out on his own two feet into an empty future instead.
“There was no helping me.”
He turned and caught Shiro’s gaze, held it. Solid, warm, dependable Shiro who had come crash-landing back to Keith from an alien gladiator arena but, in Keith’s books, may just as well have come back from the realms of the dead. The first and only one of those who left who had ever returned as they said they would.
It may have been a trick of the starlight, but it looked as if Shiro’s eyes were glistening. Keith could have laughed. The sappy sentimental fool. Trust him to be won over by a few violins.
But Keith didn’t laugh. He looked straight at the man who had changed his life and let the neurotoxins work their magic where Keith’s words had never felt adequate.
“Nobody dared til I met you.” Piano flowed and rippled, it sounded like rain if rain could fall upwards. “Nobody dared to see
Nobody ever took me out of myself
Dared trust the blade in me.”
Later Keith would deny using his knife as a prop in his impromptu musical, so just as he most certainly did not eye his reflection in its blade, he also did not spread out his arms, turn on the spot, and hold the knife to the stars above him, as though ready to fight the universe rather than defend it.
None of that happened outside of this moment.
“They failed to see and realise, that when a blade is taken up and recognised,
A blade doesn’t know how to compromise,
It gives its edges, its weight, its steel,
It gives a friend its all…”
Keith lowered his arm. The music had risen in a crescendo only to die at the last minute again. Echoes of the violins remained. All it did was make him stupidly aware of his breathing and Shiro listening, watching as the music cracked him open and gave voice to all that Keith had wanted to say but never found the courage or the words for.
“My life,” he swallowed, his mouth dry, “would have been a whole lot different,
If I had never met you, so for everything you’ve ever done for me, just a blade,
I can only say,” his voice trailed but not into silence, “‘thank you’.”
“Oh, Keith.” Shiro wiped his eyes with a forefinger and surged up from the bench, cracking his knuckles. “Okay, I think it’s time to add some baritone.”
The music swept Shiro into the amphitheatre circle and it really did sweep with the determined swirl of an ocean wave, pulling feet into the tideline.
“You’re more than just a blade, Keith.” Keith scoffed but Shiro stepped in closer and this close Shiro was so believable. “You’re more than Voltron’s right arm. If nothing I say can convince you, then maybe something I sing will do the charm.”
Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t. Cellos played. Keith wanted to believe.
“You said I’m like a brother to you.” All the aches and the pains of the trials of Marmora flrefly-flickered between them. Keith listened and Shiro sung. “Now let me say my part. I don’t think I’m as good, or strong, or brave as you believe me to be, but I can sing this from the bottom of my heart.”
Shiro’s hand landed on Keith’s shoulder and the tough was gentle and warm.
“If I could have a brother,” the prosthetic hand landed on Keith’s other shoulder, gleaming in the corner of Keith’s eye, “ I would wish for no other.” Shiro gripped both his shoulders and Keith felt as though he was here, anchored and grounded into reality, like a solar wind could blow by and it could never hurt him.
“You’re my brother,” the stars glittered, the music glittered, there was even a mischievous sort of glitter in Shiro’s eyes, “from a…possibly purple mother.”
Keith scowled on reflex but the music was light with a softly affectionate hook and it was nothing less than sincere, sung, just as Shiro had said, from somewhere deep and close to whatever he held at his core, truths.
Buoyed up by fondness that was in equal parts touched with exasperation, elation and relief, he met Shiro’s gaze. “Trust you to make this song even cheesier than before.”
Shiro smirked. “But you do trust me.”
“I’ll always trust you,” it sprang from Keith like a fundamental law.
“So trust me when I say that you are and can be so much more,” Shiro stepped back and it struck Keith too late that the music had manipulated them into standing side by side, perfect for something suspiciously like a line da –
His feet moved of their own volition, and suddenly they were both sliding to the left, arms out, coming to a perfectly coordinated stop then stomp of their right feet, as though part of a choreographed routine that they both just knew.
Ah, right. They were doing this then. Dancing.
“You’re my brother from a purple mother.” Shiro didn’t seem in the least bit fazed by the jazz-infused routine they were pulling off somehow in a space that wasn’t remotely large enough. When they both slid again, this time to the right, Shiro was smiling as they stomped. “Sometimes when it’s too dark to see beyond despair -”
“All my life I’ve wanted answers,” Keith’s voice rose over Shiro’s and the band like something taking flight, and the two tunes came together as though they were always meant to. “All my life I’ve searched for something I didn’t know the questions to.”
“- I can count on you to have my back.” Shiro offered his left fist. Keith bumped it with his own then seized Shiro’s forearm, kicked off and cartwheeled across Shiro’s shoulders to land lightly on his other side. “That you’ll be right there.”
“I’m still searching but I don’t feel so lost, knowing that I’m searching alongside you.” Keith turned and Shiro did the same, so that they faced each other across the floor, eye to eye and song to song, pale silver smoke rising from their necks and shoulders and the angry red-gold in Keith’s veins fading along with its itch. “I’m your – “
“ You’re my – “
“ – brother from a purple mother, although if she’s mauve or lilac, we’ve yet to really discover,” they sang together, arms out and open wide as though to catch the other if they fell, and the sound from the hallucinated band was big and brassy. “We’ll always be there for each other.
“The universe is wide and its nights are forever,
But you’ve got my six, and I’ve got yours.
If you’re ever in trouble, we’re not friends of fair weather.
Your troubles are my troubles,” closing the remaining distance, they grasped each other’s hands, “we’ll fight our fights together.”
Shiro’s eyes flickered to Keith’s arm and widened when he saw that the red lights in his skin had faded.
He had time to mouth, “It’s working!” before the music caught them up again, but this time it didn’t push, pull, or demand. It eased into something gentler, curling around them, steady and safe.
Maybe it was the adrenaline or his poor breath control, but Keith felt light, too light on his feet and definitely lightheaded, but also light in his chest, as though something heavy and stuck there too long had been finally dislodged.
When the music let him pause to catch his breath after reaching for notes longer and higher and stronger than what he was used to, Shiro sang on.
“Keith, it doesn’t matter what colour is your mother.”
They pulled each other in close by their clasped hands. Oh, there was no use denying that, in the long run, it did matter, but, in a way, Shiro wasn’t wrong. The shadow it cast at the back of Keith’s mind was smaller, the purple elephant in the room shrunken during the course of the song.
It was difficult for Keith to be afraid of something that he had sung and danced over and Shiro – Shiro wasn’t afraid. Shiro was singing and dancing too, laughing over the terrible lyrics, over Keith’s mystery heritage, right along with him.
“You’re still the man you were before, and that’s my brother.”
Coran had vaguely hinted that he was saving recordings of the paladins singing from the Castle CCTV. Maybe, just maybe, if Keith worked out how to do this subtly, he could get hold of a copy of this sappy and awful song. Just for those days when things were again too much, to laugh over.
Keith sucked in a breath for what he felt as a tickle under his skin as the final verse and with their clasped hands between them, they sung.
“This bond, this connection, it’s not blood that we share.” A flicker of movement in the corner of Keith’s eye, a shadow in the doorway - but Shiro didn’t react to it. Perhaps Keith had imagined it. They were hallucinating music after all. He put it out of his mind and joined Shiro for the final few lines. “It’s the knowing that in the universe we could be anywhere -”
“And I’ll find you,” Keith promised, gripping Shiro’s hand harder than he maybe should in a dance and not a fight, but that was the trouble with anybody he ever cared about – he could never hold onto them hard enough to stop them from slipping through his fingers.
He looked up, met Shiro’s eyes. “I’ll always find you.”
“You can count on me,” they sang together, and Keith’s line rose high, holding onto ‘me’, drawing it out into something silvery and embarrassingly pure, but he had stopped caring two verses ago. Shiro’s line, lower, grounded everything together.
“To be,” Shiro pulled Keith into a hug and Keith put his arms around him, “there.”
The observation deck was small and close and full of stars. The music floated.
All traces of the crackling fire threatening to burn up Keith from inside had vanished.
He closed his eyes and smiled into Shiro’s shoulder. “Don’t disappear.”
Plink!
Shiro started as the spotlight, hot and chalky white, dropped down on him.
Keith hadn’t noticed. He stood still and stiff, frozen, the spotlight falling on the back of his head.
The music came creeping back, slithering and uncertain, just for Shiro.
A spotlight moment for Shiro. Keith wouldn’t hear a single word of this. He wouldn’t even know it was happening.
Shiro looked into the darkness beyond Keith’s head, outside of the spotlight boundaries, at the dark that wiped out the room and the stars, and the lyrics tumbled from him like a confession. “I don’t want to let him down.”
Plink!
The spotlight was gone. Shiro blinked and the room, Keith, the stars and space all around them, everything was as it should have been.
He tightened his grip and hoped that Keith hadn’t noticed anything amiss. “I’ll always be right here.”
Plink!
Light flashed down, bright and cold, and Shiro sighed, closing his eyes.
“I hope that I won’t let him down.”
Lance stepped back from the doorway. He had heard enough. Keith had sung and he wasn't going to die. Now their rivalry could resume as normal.
Retreating down the passage, Lance tried not to think about a home that was very far away, of the voices that called him ‘brother’, the arms that pulled him in close to remind him where he was safe, welcome and cared for, and the family he had left behind on Earth.
Lucky Keith to find his family up in the stars.
Lucky, lucky Keith.