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If the hippo has a name, Keith doesn’t remember it. Maybe it did, back when his dad first pulled it out of a festive paper bag with a ribbon on it and passed it to his grasping baby fingers. He’s heard somewhere that some companies name their plushies, that the tag will tell you the official name—the hippo’s tag is so old, though, that all the words on it have smeared and run through the various baths it’s had. Whatever the name was, once upon a time, it’s now a secret that only past-Keith and his dad, wherever he is now, know.
So, the name has been lost. And sometimes, when Keith is laying in bed late at night, he’ll hold the teeny little thing in the palm of his hand and think about how much bigger it used to seem. When he first got it, it more than filled his tiny chubby fingers. He must have been very small, he thinks sometimes, when he’s feeling up to withstanding the nostalgia—the memory of that birthday is only a few fragmented pieces that have the grainy quality of an old polaroid. He remembers getting cake all over the floor. He remembers his dad hefting him up to the sink to clean his hands. And he remembers being handed the hippo, after his dad produced it from the bag with the ribbon. Two handfuls of soft plushie that he immediately pressed to his face.
Lost name. Lost size… but the hippo, despite becoming small and nameless, is one of the most precious things he has.
That’s why, when he finds Pidge sitting next to the Galra crystal that Sendak used to hijack the castle and she’s crying, the only thing he can think about is fetching the little hippo from the pouch on his belt and handing it to her. So, he does.
It’s the last time he sees the hippo for a long, long time.
When he first hands her the plushie, Pidge is half sure that she’s hallucinating. It’s something out of a fever dream—the boy who was yelling at her about her decision to leave less than twenty vargas ago is now in front of her, silently reaching into one of the storage compartments clipped to his belt and producing the tiniest, rattiest, cutest beanie baby she thinks she’s ever seen. Judging by its little teeth, chubby snout, and tiny round ears, it’s a mini version of a purple hippo. Its feet are nothing more than little nubs, and one of them looks like it had to be sewn back on at one point. Pidge hugs it automatically to her chest, an instinct she didn’t know was still buried inside of her—she gave up her stuffed animals years ago. But she’s still raw and sad about the death of Rover, and her brain is telling her to hug the shit out of this little guy, so she does.
Keith smiles, awkward, and before she can wipe away her tears and thank him properly, he’s gone.
He doesn’t ask for it back. In fact, he doesn’t say a single word about it—not where it came from, or why he handed it over, or why in the vast universe he even had it. Did it come from someone else? Maybe Altea had hippos as well as mice, and just happened to mass produce miniaturized versions of them that just happened to look extraordinarily similar to beanie babies from Earth, and he found it in storage somewhere and… gave it to her? How likely was that to happen? Not very, she’d think.
Whatever. She’s not going to look a gift hippo in the mouth. She does try several times to get Keith alone to ask him if he wants it back, but between the Balmera rescue and the castleship haunting and all that jazz she finds zero time. By the end of it all, she figures that he’ll come to her if he wants it.
He doesn’t come.
So when she accidentally stumbles on Lance staring at the healing pod that housed him after the explosion, hastily wiping tears from his face, she hands the hippo over because it just, somehow, feels… right.
“Do you mind if I pass this along to Hunk?”
Those weren’t the exact words that Lance expected to come out of his mouth, but he rolls with it, because the beanie baby tucked in his jacket pocket—a solid reminder that Earth is still out there—also reminded him of the fact that Hunk hasn’t seen Shay in a few weeks (maybe a month?) now and he knows his big Hunk of a friend is getting lonely. It’s late in the evening, and the early-birds—Keith, mostly—have already turned in for the night. Lance was off to grab some food goo before bed, and then he’d spotted Pidge, and when he crammed his hands in his pockets as he talked to her he felt the plushie, and now he’s here, asking permission to give it to Hunk.
Except Pidge frowns as she looks up, like she doesn’t comprehend.
“Uh…” Lance twitches the hippo’s little feet back and forth. “This guy? Is yours, right? You lent him to me because I was feeling crappy?”
She still has an odd expression on her face, but after a moment she shrugs. “Go for it, I guess.”
“You won’t miss him?”
Another shrug. Lance maneuvers around to attempt a peek at her screen, trying to figure out what’s got her attention, but she wriggles away and shoves him with one foot, laughing. “No, now go away so I can work!” she chirps.
“Only because I’ve got places to be and babes to see,” Lance says with a grin, and saunters away. The babe in question is in the kitchen, staring forlornly into a bowl of bluish batter that will probably turn into something amazing. He jumps when Lance slams his hands on the counter to haul himself up onto it. “Hunk! My best bud!” Lance says cheerfully.
“I haven’t tested this to see if it’s toxic yet,” Hunk warns, scooting the bowl away from Lance’s reaching fingers.
Lance whines. “Awww! Why not? Isn’t eating the dough the best part?” he says, even though he very well knows that it’s not dough.
“One—not dough, batter. And two—I’m not even following a recipe, I’m just throwing in whatever I find that smells okay and has chemical properties that sort of match Earth ingredients. For all we know this stuff is actually explosive.”
“Just as well,” Lance says with a sigh. The cold hard truth is that you shouldn’t trust anything in space until you’ve checked it three times for potential bombs. “Anyways, I’m here with a gift.”
And he plops the little plush right on Hunk’s head.
The way Hunk’s eyes light up is exactly what he hoped would happen. He grins as Hunk nuzzles into the little thing, both of their moods instantly brightening.
It’s been five movements, and Hunk still isn’t sure where the little purple hippo came from. Yeah, the first time it came around it was from Lance, but he would have known if Lance had a beanie baby on him when they blasted off. Or in their dorm room. And probably anywhere else, for that matter. And Pidge—he was all over her backpack in Keith’s shack, and unless there was a secret compartment somewhere, that hippo didn’t come from there.
Shiro, he knows, had absolutely nothing to his name after his brush with the Garrison went so sour, so the likelihood that it was his is… well, it’s low. But the chance that it’s Keith’s is even lower—have you met Keith? No way, José.
The best theory he has is that it somehow ended up at the space mall and then… someone… managed to buy it with the zero money they have.
Yeah, he’s got no clue how the hippo came to be. He’s not questioning it, though.
It’s become almost a game, between the three of them, to pass it around. It’s sweet—a way to brighten spirits and remind them of what they still have to look forward to… and what they left behind. Even if the little thing hasn’t seen Earth, it still has 100% Earth cotton in its veins (he checked) and it reminds them of their roots in a way nothing else does.
At least, it does to Hunk. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he hasn’t had a stuffed animal since he was little. He’s just glad to have something soft to squish close sometimes.
The night he accidentally meets Shiro in the kitchen at three in the morning, he has the hippo (he’s named it Hippolyta in his head) perched on his shoulder like Allura does with the mice. The instant he sees Shiro’s haunted eyes and the tremors in his hands, he’s sitting at Shiro’s side and sliding the plushie over.
It takes a moment for Shiro to realize what it is, and he picks it up like it’s a treasure. “Where did this come from?” he asks, his voice cracking a little. Hunk shrugs, getting up to make some tea. At this point he’s accepted that he’ll never know Hippolyta’s origins. If she helps Shiro feel better on a night when the nightmares are obviously refusing to unsink their teeth, then what does he care?
That night, Shiro cradles the hippo in his flesh-and-blood hand and thinks about how long it’s been since he’s held an item that was made for the sole purpose of comforting someone.
He had comfort items when he was little, like most kids do. A ridiculously soft blanket that he carried all through preschool, for instance. All of the pictures his mom had of him between the ages of three and six, he was carting that thing around. His mom still has it, assuming she hasn’t purged her house of all his old belongings. And he used to help with toy drives in his teens, at his mom’s insistence—she was adamant about helping those in need, a trait that she instilled in both of her kids at an early age. She liked to joke that Shiro became an astro-explorer because it was the only job where a pilot could help all of humanity as a whole, and secretly, Shiro tended to agree.
But despite that, it’s been more years than he can count since he’s held something this small and soft, something made for a child. His last few years have been mostly industrial metal and lightweight, sanitized plastics, followed by… well, followed by whatever a Galra ship entails. Certainly not stuffed animals.
But the odd thing is… he’s sure he’s never seen the hippo before, but it smells like something familiar. His nose unquestionably isn’t as sharp as many of the alien species he’s met, but he can still pick out a vague tang of… motor oil, maybe? And something that reminds him of old, soft leather. Its worn little face stares at him with its teeny, goofy teeth. He laughs to himself. Whatever this memory is, it’s a good one, even if it will only half-form in his foggy head. Maybe he’s just smelling his paladins and their hobbies on the little guy. Hunk would cover the motor oil, for sure. He’s not so sure about the whiff of leather, but what does he know? One of them probably has a leather bag or a necklace or something from Earth that they keep nearby.
He tells Allura about the hippo and the game the younger paladins have been playing, and the mice must have been listening in because one day he catches Chulatt squeezing under his door with the hippo clamped in its little mouth. He lets out a shout, trying to grab them before they get away, but by the time he makes it to the hallway the mouse is nowhere to be seen. It’s just as well.
They’ve been in space for months upon months now, and the hippo plushie has become something of a meme. The Alteans joke about Hippolyta, the mice move her around, and Pidge is a junkie for the thrill of sneaking her into places that she shouldn’t be—tucked into the towel Lance takes into his shower, sitting in a ladle in the kitchen, tied to the end of a lock of the Princess’s hair (she had to use Coran as a distraction for that one). The only person who doesn’t get involved is the original owner—Keith himself.
She doesn’t figure this out until Shiro goes missing.
It’s late at night, as it always seems to be. Space can be unforgiving, she knows. The darkness seems never-ending. Her eyes are tired of trying to pick out details in the one video she’s managed to find of Matt. A pixel is a pixel, and not all of them hold secrets. Her limbs are exhausted—her heart is heavy. They had a hard mission today, and she wants nothing more than to just go to her room and cuddle one of the fuzzy little creatures that she snuck in from that one time she got stranded in a debris field.
She’s not sure why she detours on her way to her room, but she does. That’s where she finds Keith, nowhere near his usual haunts. He’s pacing, which he does a lot, but this time is different because when he catches her eye he immediately stops, tucking his fists against his sides and leaning against the wall in a way that’s decidedly not natural.
He’s rubbing the thumb of one hand across his knuckles, over and over, a repetitive gesture. He’s nervous. Or scared, maybe.
“Hey,” he says, his voice soft and filled with the echoes of the way he yelled at Allura at the diplomatic dinner earlier. He sounds uncomfortable raising it above a whisper, like he’s afraid that she’ll flinch away.
“Hey,” she says back, leaning on the wall next to him. “What’s up?”
The shrug he gives her says ‘nothing’, but the tense set of his jaw screams otherwise. It takes him a few moments of awkward silence to actually say anything. “I’ve been…” He coughs and starts again. “Do you remember the little stuffed animal I gave you?”
“Hippolyta? Of course I do.”
“I… what’s Hippolyta?”
And it jumps on her. They’ve been passing his hippo around for MONTHS, they’ve played games with it, they’ve even named it—and not once have they stopped to consider that its proper owner is the odd man out.
How naïve has she been?
She feels her face fall.
“Hunk thought a good hippo name was Hippolyta. Because of the pun,” she says quickly. Keith’s brows curve downward, and he mouths an ‘oh’. Pidge’s heart seizes in her chest. “Did you… want her back?”
His arms cross over his chest and he looks away, turning his head so he’s staring down the hallway. His foot taps. He shrugs. “Not if you still want… her, I guess. I’ll see you at breakfast.” And he’s gone.
Pidge closes her eyes, summons Hippolyta in her mind. The well-worn feet, the little pills of lint on her tummy, the leg that was sewn back on, the unreadable tag… all of her. She was very well loved, before Keith gave her up. She must have been ten years old, probably more. She is the only personal item besides his knife and bayard that she has EVER seen in Keith’s hands, the only thing he owns that isn’t an item of clothing or a weapon.
She’s made a mistake, letting Hippolyta drift like this when Keith needs her.
That’s when she makes up her mind. She is going to find that hippo before daylight breaks in Kaltenecker’s room even if it means a sleepless night.
…Which, of course, is easier said than done. Where did I last see it? she thinks, raking through her memories. A few moments of concentration and she recalls a disheveled blue paladin, a little purple butt nestled in the collar of his breastplate after a training session that Keith walked out of.
She wakes Lance by cracking the code on his door, marching into his room, and snapping one side of the headphones (her headphones) on his ear like a bra strap. He shoots up satisfyingly fast.
From there, she’s sent to Allura. She’s a little more cautious about waking a princess, but as she gently knocks she finds that there’s nothing to worry about—Allura is already wide awake. Yes, she had Hippolyta, she says. But she was only in her possession for a few scant hours before Platt got ahold of her.
Together, they deduce that the only reasonable turn of events is that Hippolyta was traded for the one thing the mice can’t resist—food scraps. The likely culprit? Hunk, in the kitchen, with his apron.
She’s on a hunt now, barging into Hunk’s room much the same as she’d done with Lance. The only problem there is that unlike Lance, Hunk is not in. Sniffing the air, she follows the scent of bubbling sauce until she comes upon the kitchen.
He’s standing at the space stove, drooping over it really, stirring a pot or two to prep for the next round of diplomacy. They’re supposed to reach another system tomorrow, and the plan is much the same as the one today—beat the Galra back, establish another sect of the coalition, and move on.
“Sorry, I don’t have her,” he says, rubbing one eye with a yawn. “Coran took her on his perimeter check. Tucked her right into his breast pocket… ‘n her little eyes just peered out…”
He yawns again, and Pidge manages to convince him to wrap up this batch and get to bed. Then she’s off again, raising her wrist to get a look at the castle schematics that she downloaded onto a chip in her bracelet.
Coran didn’t use to do a perimeter check. The only person who ever used to do that was Shiro—it just seemed to make him feel better, knowing that all the airlocks were secure and everyone was where they should be. No one on the castle realized how used to it they’d gotten until it stopped—and just like that, Coran stepped up. He’s been doing it ever since, a sweep once a night just to make sure that everything is right.
The route is easy enough. A subtle curve around the outer shell of the ship, closing up with a pass through the command center and the sleeping quarters. The question is—how far has Coran gotten and can she catch up?
The answer to that is a resounding no. She’s a little out of breath as she slides into the hall with the paladin’s rooms, to find Coran stepping out of Lance’s. He raises a conspiratorial finger to his lips, mouthing ‘Hippolyta’. His front pocket is empty.
Pidge waits until he’s out of sight before she enters Lance’s room again and pounces on him.
“Pidge, would you leave me alone already? What the hell could you possibly need?!” he yells, after a good minute of flailing. She crossly points at the far corner of the bed, where Hippolyta is sitting demurely. “Ugh, why do you even want her so bad?” Lance asks, rolling over and snatching the hippo up. He stares at her accusingly. “And you! How did you get in here?!”
“Coran. Now hand her over, I need to give her to Keith.”
“You’re going to give Keith… ray of darkness, emo McMullet Keith… a stuffed animal? Oh, do I ever want to see this. He’s going to laugh you out of the room.”
It’s been such a long night that Pidge finds herself snapping, “Fine, then you can give it to him!”
That wipes the smirk from his face. “Pidge! I was kidding! Wait, no don’t—”
She’s merciless. It’s not until they’re both standing in front of Keith’s room that she finally lets go of his pinky finger.
Keith is still fully dressed when he answers the door. He looks from Lance to Pidge, face unamused. “What?” he demands.
Lance huffs, holding out the fist with Hippolyta trapped inside. He’s pouting, but he still manages to say, “I know it’s not your thing, but this little gal will help you sleep now that everything is… y’know. All screwed up. Just don’t you dare make fun of her, got it?” It’s cute, the way he get’s protective. Pidge elbows him, and he sighs dramatically, making it more clear that he’s trying to hand something over.
Keith reaches forward, expression neutral. That is, until Lance finally unclenches his fingers and the little hippo falls into his hands. That’s when Keith’s face lights up.
“Oh thank god, I though she got lost…” he says, turning to Pidge, who shrugs like she didn’t just chase the little thing through half the castle. She’s not expecting him to hug her, but that’s exactly what he does—just wraps both arms around her shoulders and pulls her against his chest, grip a little too tight like he’s trying to disguise the way he’s shaking.
He laughs against her ear and she hugs him back, letting him feel the small relief of getting a piece of Home back when everything else is off-the-charts miserable. “I didn’t mean to keep her away for so long,” Pidge says. Then she pulls back and gives him a light punch on his shoulder. “If you wanted her back, why the hell didn’t you just say so?”
He shakes his head, grinning, and Hippolyta looks right at home nestled in his hand. He pulls her close to his chest, his thumb stroking her little head the same way he’d been stroking his fingers earlier. “I missed her so much,” he says. “But I just… figured you needed her?”
“Nah. She helped, but I think she deserves to be back with you now.”
“…Thank you,” he says, and it nearly looks like his eyes are misting up. The great Keith Kogane, emo McMullet, is about to start crying over a stuffed animal.
Lance, still standing beside them, appears to have forgotten how to shut his mouth.
“Come on, let’s get you back to bed,” Pidge says, taking pity on him.
He nods, slack-jawed, and the moment Keith’s door slides shut he leans over and whispers, “What the frick, Pidge?”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you, Hippolyta was his,” Pidge says cheerfully.
Lance stares into the distance. “…I think I’ve misunderstood something very important about Keith,” he says. Pidge can’t help but agree. “And you… you knew how much she meant to him?”
“Well… not so much,” Pidge admits. “But I just thought that maybe… even though we’re missing Shiro…”
Lance is nodding before she even finishes the words. At least Hippolyta is back where she’s supposed to be, even if their Black Paladin isn’t.