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"Keith...wake up, buddy, you're drooling a bit."
The red paladin grimaced at the sudden voice, before jerking back, eyes blinking wide and searching around the room in alarm.
The hand on his shoulder patted him once and he turned in its direction, ready to spring to action at whoever—Matt.
It was Matt.
Whew.
Keith heaved a sigh, extending his knees from his chest and slouching further down the side of the heating pod. It was a shitty way to stretch, but it was a shitty way to sleep too, so maybe that evened it all out. His back was killing him, and his hips popped as they moved for the first time after hours on the cool, metal floor.
"Matt," he finally said, registering the older boy's words and swiping the back of his hand across his mouth. Yup, sleeping slouched against the side of a healing pod was apparently the perfect recipe for drool.
Matt chuckled, smile bright across his entire face.
"Dude, if you're gonna sleep, do it in a bed," he said, scratching the back of his neck lazily. "You know Shiro won't be happy if he wakes up and you haven't been taking care of yourself."
Keith narrowed his eyes, but while he couldn't protest in his own defense, he could see the bags under Matt's own eyes.
"I just took a nap," Matt continued, as if reading Keith's mind. "And dude? It's only like, one varga to midnight. If you're out now, you're not gonna make it through the whole night. I'll look after Shiro, you get some rest. If he does wake up before you're here I'll...knock 'm back out again."
Keith snorted at that. Shiro was only just recovered after three weeks of being missing, and had been in the healing pod for three days. He didn't really care about being the first person to see him, but he appreciated Matt's concern.
Pidge's brother had only joined their ragtag crew about two weeks ago, but he was already part of the family as far as Keith was concerned.
Pidge had her brother back, and while she made no small matter of announcing that they all still had one brother to find, Keith could tell she was relieved. Matt was quick to join her, Hunk, and Coran in their unintelligible technobabble. Allura was happy to meet another human, and wasted no time catching him up on the current situation and every strategy they had considered thus far. They were undeniably intellectual equals, and Matt wasn't shy about voicing his suggestions—even as she corrected him when he made incorrect assumptions about the physics of things like quintessence and teludav transportation, he was eager to learn the facts and develop new theories to fit them. Lance and Matt just...clicked somehow—whether it was their mutual understanding of one another's homesickness or their warped senses of humor, the two were so well-matched.
And Keith? They certainly didn't connect as immediately as Matt had with the others—he was happy to see the Holts reunited, but he didn't really see how or why he had to establish this connection with someone outside of Voltron.
(He knew it was a douchey way of thinking about things, but at least it was honest.)
Then a few days in, while he was engrossed in a level-three simulation, Keith heard the rapping of knuckles against the tinny surface of the door frame—not a typical courtesy among the paladins, who'd come and go as they please, often leaving a trail speckled with droplets of food goo (a crime of which not even Keith was innocent) and the occasional sarcastic remark to throw off whoever was currently engaged in battle (usually Pidge or Lance, but Keith had more than once been thrown off-balance entirely as he heard Hunk's voice cry out, "Ooh, you get 'em, tiger!").
At the timid sound Keith turned, almost forgetting to call out to end the simulation as he saw Matt. Thankfully he remembered before the gladiator took a cheap shot, and as it faded away Matt chuckled. Keith frowned, but he couldn't begrudge him the laugh—he was caught off-guard, and that was his problem, not Matt's.
"Uh...hey," he said with a little wave, hoping he'd regained his composure.
Matt stretched before lacing his fingers behind his head and walking forward. "Lance said you'd be here," he said. "And then he explained that there was some ridiculously awesome hologram combat simulation thing on this ship, and nobody bothered to tell me until now, which seemed a bit rude to be honest."
Keith raised his eyebrows. He wasn't certain which was more surprising, that Matt had been seeking him out, or that he was even remotely interested in the combat simulator. He seemed more like a brain—but that was a stupid judgment to make, considering Keith had known Pidge and Hunk for long enough to know the two lifestyles weren't mutually exclusive.
"You wanted to see me?"
Matt shrugged. "Haven't talked to you much, which I thought was kinda dumb. I mean, you're literally the ideal person to bitch about Shiro with, you've probably got a gold mine of embarrassing stories just waiting to be told. I know I got 'em."
Keith bristled. "Shiro's missing."
Matt lowered his hands from behind his head, only to raise them to shoulder-height in front of himself, as if asking Keith to pause.
"Yeah, he's missing for now. But we're going to find him—I did not spend months in a Galra prison, bust out, and drift around the universe looking for any scrap of information about that piece of ass formerly known as the 'Champion' just to show up a day late and a dollar short and meet all his friends but miss out on him."
Keith relaxed at his words, but couldn't help the amusement curling at the corner of his lips.
"'That piece of ass'?"
Matt's face blushed furiously red. "Did I say—I meant 'that asshole'. That's probably what I meant, being in space with alien metaphors and nobody human to bounce contemporary Earth colloquialisms off of—"
It was Keith's turn to raise his hands in a mollifying gesture, but he was still smirking. "Relax, man. If that was a secret, it's safe with me. But you do have a point—I do have plenty of dirt on Shiro, and I'd love to hear what you've got. Aside from a crush, that I do not need to hear about."
Matt bit his lip, but he denied nothing. Instead he collapsed in the middle of the floor, sitting cross-legged and pouting as his face gradually returned to its normal, pale complexion. Keith sat about a foot away opposite him, watching his companion closely.
"We are gonna find him," Matt repeated his earlier sentiment, but Keith knew it wasn't for his benefit. He saw the older boy's fists clench in his lap, knuckles ghostly-white against his pale skin.
"Between you, Pidge, Hunk, and Coran, we have four of the smartest people in the universe working on it," Keith affirmed. "We know he's out there. So until he's back, this is our time to say every embarrassing thing behind his back that we can."
Matt didn't meet his gaze, but Keith heard him exhale in a choppy way that might've been a laugh.
"I'll start," he offered. "When I got accepted into the Garrison, Shiro baked me a cake—the man who never touched a kitchen in his life prior to this moment, but he worked so hard on this cake. Iced it himself. Wrote 'Congratulations Kieth' on it. As in, K-I-E-T-H. Not even a big mistake, but like, I had to call him on it. It's my name, and I'm a piece of shit. When I asked who 'Kee-eth' was, he honest-to-God cried."
Matt sputtered an irrepressible laugh, the kind Keith had only heard him laugh with Lance's antics. Keith joined him, laughing until Matt raised a finger to his lips, ready to tell a story of his own.
Since that afternoon, the two made sure to regale one another with every embarrassing story they could think of whenever they got a moment alone. As Matt grabbed under Keith's armpits and hoisted him to his feet in the medical bay, muttering about having to be the responsible adult at the youthful age of twenty-six, he tugged Keith close enough to whisper a quick thought into his ear:
"Shiro made a fursona."
Keith immediately cried out in indignance, shoving Matt away with his elbow before turning to face him directly.
"No-you cannot just tell me something like that and then brush me off to bed!"
Matt just grinned. "G'night, kiddo," he said in a sing-song voice, pushing gently against Keith's arm, and the younger boy knew he lost. Once 'kiddo' was unleashed, Matt was done negotiating. "Part II of this epic tale will only be released after you have completed at minimum six consecutive hours of sleep."
Keith grumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets before turning around and glancing up at Shiro, still looking so peaceful in his pod.
"Can't believe you're a fucking furry," he muttered at last, a little smile forcing its way onto his lips.
Matt rolled his eyes. "Dude flies around in a giant lion suit as a career. So do some other kids I know, for that matter..."
At that Keith was gone, leaving Matt laughing in his wake.
For a moment he thought back to when he and Shiro had gotten high, started dicking around online, and used one of those character design Flash games to make and print out wolf-man versions of themselves. By the time they sobered up, they were both just concerned with how many swords they'd given Shiro and how Matt had somehow been painted in a rainbow gradient, a feature they couldn't manage to find anywhere in the actual game.
Good times.
Determined not to screw up his back like Keith, Matt tugged over a spare table and chair, setting the chair perpendicular to the angle of the pod so he could lean his head on his hand and just sit, looking at Shiro.
Absolutely not looking at that positively obscene, skin-tight suit he was wearing.
He had a tablet with him, and whiled away a few minutes playing some kind of Altean app that proved impossible to complete as a popup demanded his funding codes—probably something like a credit card number—in order to complete a transaction and continue the game.
Mostly, he just looked at Shiro and thought. This actually managed to help the hours pass, though his head gradually shifted from leaning against the base of his palm to being cradled in the crook of his elbow as he crossed his arms and slouched further. If his eyelids started to droop, he didn't notice. If he started to snore, he didn’t hear.
If Shiro's pod opened just as Matt was faceplanting into his tablet, arms thrust completely forward and eyes darting around in REM cycles beneath his thick, wild hair, he just might have slept through it.
Shiro was dizzy and confused as he stumbled from his pod, but he managed to stay upright. The world was warping, eyes looping out of focus of one another for a few moments.
When the ground was solid beneath his feet and the world stopped doing its damnedest to make him hurl like Hunk after a barrel roll, Shiro took a deep breath and continued to step forward unevenly.
He glanced at the table—there was Pidge, snoring low and peaceful against some device or other. He smiled softly, feeling his heart bubble to see her waiting there for him. They'd probably been taking it in turns, but he didn't mind any of them taking care of their sleep deprivation during their shifts, no matter how eager they were to see him wake, because damn these kids needed to sleep. He definitely wasn't about to wake her up, not when her sleep schedule was by far the worst among the paladins.
His stomach churned. He knew he should probably wait for someone to come, or for Pidge to wake up, but right now he needed something in his stomach, anything, even a bowl full of otherwise inadvisable alien goo.
As he stepped into the hallway, he could hear voices approaching from the kitchens, and felt excitement buzz within himself—it would be nice to reunite with the others, even if it delayed breakfast a bit. He wondered how long he had been out—and, to some degree, he wondered why he had been placed in the pod to begin with. Lance had been just as disoriented after his time in a pod, so the loss of information didn't bother him too much, but he would like an update.
"And he told me that shit right before he expected me to just leave, can you believe that?"
A sigh. "I'm not surprised, man, I grew up with that dude. Was probably the one who introduced him to the concept, you should've seen his DeviantArt. Anyway, you know he's probably asleep himself, by now? He could be the third arm of Voltron, when it comes to sleeping he's as bad as the two of—Shiro!"
Shiro beamed tiredly as he watched Pidge and Keith round the corner. Wait, Pidge?
"Hey—" He froze. Pidge was lunging forward, Keith paused to smile before he started forward—
And Shiro turned and bolted.
"Shiro—what are you—?"
He could hear the two paladins on his heels, but even fresh out of the pod he was fast enough to reach the medical bay before they did. He paused in the doorway, then stumbled forward again to the table, slamming his cybernetic hand onto its surface to catch himself. There was a skidding sound as Keith and Pidge froze in the doorway, but neither would interrupt the scene they saw before them.
"I'm up, I—" The snoring figure's shoulders jumped before his head shot up in surprise. As his gaze traced up Shiro's arm, across his shoulders, to his shocked expression, Matt's eyes widened to match Shiro's.
"Matt," Shiro sputtered, eyes shining. He didn't seem certain what to do with himself; he pushed himself from the table and raised his hands as if preparing to embrace Matt, but he was frozen in shock.
"Shiro." Matt was blinking away tears as he launched himself upright and threw his arms around Shiro's neck. His trembling shoulders suggested he had more tears than he could will away, but so did Shiro, who finally closed his arms about Matt's back and drew him up until he was balancing precariously on his toes, but safely suspended in Shiro's embrace nonetheless.
"How did you—"
"Shhhh," Matt urged, his cheek pressing into Shiro's neck. "Shut up, Takashi. Missed you. Found out where you were. And then you weren't here, you bastard."
Shiro laughed gently. Neither was moving anytime soon, so Pidge cleared her throat loudly.
"Hey, I know my brother only weighs like, three pounds, but you just got out of the pod, Shiro. You should be resting, the flirting can wait."
Both men burned bright red, and Shiro set Matt down after a moment, before setting a hand on his shoulder for balance. He was feeling out of it, but he had been distracted.
"Get everybody," he asked. Pidge nodded, pressing a button on the wall that had been labeled with a sticky note in Lance's messy scrawl: 'Don't Wake Daddy'.
Within a few minutes, the remaining four members of the team, plus four eager mice, were pressing in around Shiro, taking his vitals and asking him questions and telling him stories and offering jokes and food and hugs and just, in general, making him so glad to be home.