Chapter Text
Shiro. Shiro was back. They had found him and he was back, alive and breathing, albeit totally unconscious. He lay on Keith’s bed in the shack, sleeping off whatever drugs the Garrison had pumped him full of before Keith had knocked them all out.
Keith had almost passed out too. He’d looked at that table, at the person strapped down to it, and the recognition had hit him as hard as any punch. Something was – wrong – with the right arm, and there was a terrible scar on the face, dragging across the cheeks and over the nose, and the hair had gone white in the front, but.
But it was still Shiro.
And then, of course, Pidge and the infamous teammate tagalongs had crashed in, and there had been a high-speed hoverbike chase and far too many near-crashes.
Shut up and trust me. Pidge trusted him. Of course, Keith’s flying style didn’t quite lend itself to carrying five people on a max-three hoverbike, but details. Pidge trusted him enough not to ask any questions, not to push for information or stay at the crash site, even though only one of the three people they were looking for had returned.
Pidge trusted him not to say anything about who he really was, even as Keith stood there and watched Pidge look at Shiro with Katie’s eyes. Keith Kogane didn’t know Pidge Gunderson, so he didn’t look at the other, didn’t say or do anything at all. He didn’t quite trust himself, especially beside these two who had followed Pidge, who knew nothing about Kerberos or Shiro or the Holts or Katie or anything.
It turned out that Shiro didn’t either. He looked right at Pidge – at Katie, hair chopped short with her brother’s glasses instead of her own contacts, looking like the spitting image of Matt, and… nothing. That “I’m Pidge” had been the most painful thing Keith had ever heard. Katie had looked her brother’s best friend in the eye and seen no recognition. But Katie – Pidge – was nothing if not the world’s greatest liar, so only Keith saw the pain in his eyes as he introduced himself with a name that Shiro would not know. But Shiro didn’t know Katie, either. He didn’t know anything, didn’t remember anything. Keith’s brother had been gone for a year, and he seemed to recall nothing about that time, although with the arm, scar, and hair, it was pretty obvious that it had been nothing good. What was even more worrying was that Shiro didn’t really seem to remember much of anything else either. He knew Keith, and that was about it.
This was what they’d wanted. This was proof that the Kerberos Mission hadn’t crashed, or failed, or any of the other lies the Garrison had invented to explain the absence of Keith’s brother and two-thirds of Katie’s family. All the searching, all the sneaking and lying and the expulsion and the undercover, the time alone in the desert and in disguise at the Garrison – it was all worth it. Shiro was back. It had to be worth it.
The shack’s screen door skreeeched open and then shut again, and Pidge sat down at Keith’s left side. “Shiro’s still sleeping. Lance passed out on the couch and Hunk started snoring while he was building something,” the shorter boy said quietly.
They were alone. “I still can’t believe it,” Keith murmured. “That’s really Shiro, lying on my bed. He’s back.”
Pidge almost smiled. “Yeah. He is.”
Keith turned to face him. “We’re getting them back too. Shiro will remember something. He’ll know where Matt is, where your dad is. He can help. It’ll be easier to find them, now that we have Shiro. We aren’t done yet.”
Pidge leaned against his arm a little. “I know,” he said quietly. “I know.” He stared out at the desert, flicker-flashes of relief and renewed loss blurring across his face.
“We weren’t wrong,” Keith said fiercely. “We knew they weren’t dead, and we were right. Shiro didn’t crash the ship in space a million miles away. He’s asleep on my bed. He’s breathing. They lied, and now we have proof. And we’re finding your brother, and your dad. No one can stop us, not now, not ever.”
“They never could,” Pidge said, and Keith felt a surge of relief at the spark he saw renewed in Pidge’s eyes. Nothing had ever stopped Katie Holt before, and Keith was pretty sure Pidge Gunderson was just as determined.
They were still together, and they had Shiro back. Matt and Sam would be found soon. They had to be.
* * *
Sunrise came, as it always did in the desert, far too early. It was also possibly the most awkward morning Keith had ever experienced.
For one, his brother was wandering around the shack like a lost puppy. Shiro seemed to still be in a bit of shock – completely understandably so, honestly – and spent most of the morning going back and forth from the kitchen area to the living room area, one way and then the other like he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. Lance and Hunk watched him, back and forth like a tennis ball, while Hunk worked on something that Keith was pretty sure involved parts of his microwave and maybe one of the stove dials.
Also. Pidge was there, and he was working just as hard as Keith was to not act like they knew each other. For all their video calls back and forth, Pidge hadn’t been to the shack very often so that part was almost true. But it had been nearly a year, and they had the closeness that came from shared secrets and bonded determination, strengthened by a hatred of the Garrison and its lies that was only intensified by their relationship. Righteous indignation, or something like it.
Pidge was a good actor. He had to be. Pidge was made for secrets. Lance and Hunk had been practically living with him for months and didn’t seem to suspect anything. But Keith – Keith was very bad at people, and he wasn’t exactly a secret-keeping expert. For the most part he just told it like it was (not that that had ever earned him any favors), and generally simply tried to avoid people, which at least spared him from being stuck with the truth or trying to lie. But he couldn’t just leave his own house, and while at least he could be honest about his relationship with Shiro, it was very hard to stand there and act like he’d never seen Pidge in his life.
Fortunately, none of them were very good at sitting still, and before the sun was high the five were in the desert canyons, following the signals from Hunk’s contraption. It was a little weird. Keith had only ever been down here alone, or a handful of times with Pidge, aimlessly tracking back and forth as the singing came and went, never quite with a direction or clear purpose. Shiro was quiet, but Keith couldn’t even worry about him properly because Lance apparently never shut up, and Pidge wasn’t backing him up because they didn’t know each other. Also, Pidge was completely lost with Hunk, nerding out over whatever nerd thing Hunk had built with Keith’s microwave’s guts. He really hoped the mechanic could fix it when they went back, Keith kind of needed it. The stove too.
Hunk’s thing worked surprisingly well, though, and soon they were through and to the pictograms, and before Keith could quite explain that they signified something important about this day in time, Lance touched something and then they were all falling.
A lion. A giant robot lion spaceship.
(A lion that had sung to him for months, drawing him out into the desert under the stars but never quite letting him in. Keith wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but now was not the time to split hairs.)
Lance, it turned out, was the worst pilot. Keith doubted this lion ship thing’s judgement, just a little. There was a lot of yelling and Shiro looked like he might pass out for a bit, and then they were passing Kerberos. Just a little rock drifting in the void, a moon of a tiny planet billions of miles away from Earth. Insignificant.
So significant.
Fortunately, Shiro’s memory did seem to be coming back, in pieces at least. Unfortunately, aliens were a thing. And they were not friendly. Dodging angry alien laser fire in a giant robot cat spaceship was not something Keith had ever expected to do, but weird things happened in space, it seemed.
Then the wormhole. Keith was sure Pidge was absolutely geeking out, somewhere beneath the confusion and wonder and faint traces of terror. He just wanted to know where it went.
This was something he’d been made to do. They were meant for this.
The Blue Lion passed through the wormhole.
* * *
For all the theories and cryptobiology and exoplanet science and sci-fi nonsense, they really weren’t prepared for the aliens.
Well. First things first. They weren’t prepared for a newly-returned Shiro, plus some white hair and minus most of an arm (and most of his memories? That was also concerning), they weren’t prepared for the giant robot Lion, they weren’t prepared for the wormhole, they weren’t prepared for the strange planet, and they definitely weren’t prepared for the aliens.
The giant robot cat spaceship (?!?!) had come out of the wormhole in a solar system with stars in no constellations Pidge recognized and landed on a planet he had never seen an image of, not even from the most advanced telescopes or the farthest-ranging rovers. The gigantic alien castle – or at least, that was what Pidge was pretty sure it was – was also unexpected, or at least as unexpected as anything could be at this point.
The identity scan had been very concerning. Pidge had held stock-still and hoped to Sagan that it wouldn’t say anything, hyperaware of Keith’s eyes burning on him from a few steps away, but nothing came up. The castle let them in.
Princess Allura was… something. Lance, of course, made a fool of himself within the first thirty seconds, but at least she was less hostile than the Galra in the ship before the wormhole. “Fire on sight” was not a great introductory method, Pidge thought. The princess’s… advisor? – the orange one – was very enthusiastic, to put it lightly. That they were the last of their species was a thought to consider later, when they weren’t having new information thrown at them at the speed of light. And boy was there a lot of information.
The radio waves had been right. “Voltron” was real. It was the most powerful weapon in the universe, and the blue robot lion spaceship was a part of it. Pidge couldn’t help but think how odd it was that the Blue Lion had waited for months while he and Keith wandered in circles just outside and only let them in when Lance arrived, but the discovery of more Lions made it make sense.
The Red Lion. Instinct, impulse. Fierce. An Arm. That was Keith to the core. Too bad it was in the possession of the unfriendly category of aliens.
The Green Lion. Intelligence, wit and stealth. Another arm, but a dagger instead of a sword, a shield instead of a fist. Pidge liked the idea. The Lion ship was hidden away, the only one the Galra never found in ten thousand years of searching. Pidge felt a spark of pride for the robot.
The Blue Lion had brought them here, and Black Lion had been in the castle from the beginning. Lance was to take Hunk in the Blue Lion to where the Yellow Lion was still holding out, and Shiro would take Pidge to the Green Lion’s location.
Pidge felt prickles of excitement at finding his own Lion ship, and a stomach-twisting mix of joy and anxiety at being alone with Shiro. He knew the older, but Shiro didn’t know him. Or at least, didn’t remember him. Technically Shiro didn’t know Pidge Gunderson at all, but they had spent enough time together that he should have recognized Katie Holt even with all her hair cut off. He knew Keith, but not me. It was the first time Pidge wished that his disguise hadn’t worked so well. Amnesia or not, Shiro was even less likely to remember Katie Holt if Katie Holt wasn’t currently Katie Holt.
Keith was very much not into the idea of letting his two most treasured people go off on their own, especially when he’d only just gotten one of them back, but there was no way for him to come. The tiny pod they were taking to the planet only carried two. Keith’s Lion was waiting on a Galra ship, he had to wait here for the others to get theirs first.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Pidge murmured as the two watched Shiro test out the controls of the spacepod. They were still pretending they didn’t know each other, after all. Keith could be worried about his brother, but expressing extra interest in the tiny communications officer he’d never met would be strange.
He couldn’t bring himself to care. “You too,” Keith whispered back. “Stay safe. Come back.”
“I promise,” Pidge said, and Keith watched the pod seal and take off, trying not to think about how Shiro had promised to come back, too.
It had just taken him a year to do it.