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'So you said you're saving up for something?'
Katie Holt kept a list, a long, highly detailed list of everything she'd ever learned about her soulmate. Katie knew that he was born three years older than she, as when she was hardly a month old marker streaks began to color her arms and her chin and wherever he decided needed color on his own skin. Katie knew that he was partly Japanese and fully fluent in the language, teaching her simple words and phrases by the time she was seven, though she somewhat gave up after that. She knew he hated shoes being used indoors, that green tea apparently should never be mixed with anything other than honey, and olive green was his favorite color. Katie knew that he was brilliant, he was funny, and that his name was Takashi Shirogane.
And she knew that he loved the stars.
Takashi, as he insisted on being called- she called him Taka until she was eight, couldn't pronounce any better than that- was obsessed with space in general. Every drawing, every mark was in the shape of a scribbled star or sun or moon, and he'd write the two from head to toe full of astrology facts that he'd picked up from his school's library. Katie and Takashi would sketch out constellations on their wrists and feet, using pens and markers and creating their own shared corner of the universe. Katie knew that he wanted to be an astronaut even before knew what the word meant, knew that he, like herself, could spend hours gazing into the night sky, knew that space cut the space between them.
As they began to grow and Takashi came closer to achieving his dream of enrolling in the Galaxy Garrison, a prestigious academy that focused on astrophysics and the exploration of the unknown, the place where her father was employed as a professor, his ramblings- which became shared- grew staggered and developed into a halt.
Takashi had been quite for a number of days, and Katie hated when he was quite. The brunette bugged him for at least a week before he broke, purposefully tripping and scribbling and questioning until she was sure both of their arms and legs were stained permanently from ink. He had admitted that his family was thinking about their eldest son waiting a number of years until he was older, though when the words appeared on her left palm, Katie didn't trust them. She pressed him again; she'd known for years that Takashi's GPA never dropped below ninety-two and that he'd be accepted with quite open arms by the Garrison by his piloting skill alone, so waiting even a minuet seemed idiotic to her.
'It's financial stuff,' Came the neat print on a ring finger. 'That's all.'
Stupid. That was stupid!
She stormed downstairs the moment she read the phrase, pen creaking in a fist from the force surrounding it, leaning up to her father and demanding to know everything about the Garrison's scholarships. Over the next span of a month, she did her best to convince Takashi and his family to at least tour at the academy and to get a feel for things, though both Katie and Takashi knew that the visit would be an opportunity for the pair to meet. Over the same month, Pidge grabbed her piggy bank, the one she'd been collecting coins and cash and when counted, Katie found that she had just enough to get Takashi to join the Galaxy Garrison.
Perhaps she'd set him on a course to see the stars.
'You're awful, Katie.'
Katie's plan didn't send Takashi to space, didn't get them to meet at the Garrison.
They threw him and her family and even herself and unmet friends into the midst of the stars, painting them in the center of countless galaxies and systems and creating warriors out of them all. Her plan made her a guardian spirit of the forest, made her and him pilots of the universe's most dangerous weapon, made them saviors to countless souls on countless planets.
Her plan had her and Takashi chasing each other through the campus after she wrote 'Come find me' on her forearm, giggling like the pair of idiot that they were. It was a series of ducking under other professors and students, hiding around corners and in doorways until they collapsed in her father's classroom, reintroducing themselves with wide grins and breathless words. Katie decided then that the universe had made a good decision, because she thought how much she really liked the way Takashi smiled.
The smile was currently being used, though it was worn, and the same face had seen a multitude of battles and been to hell and back again. The pair sat atop the Black Lion's head, metallic and flesh hands intertwined with hair tangled together, eyes gazing up into the night sky above with grins plastered on. The two warriors, on the rare occasion all was calm and when even the mass space of the Castle became too crowded, snuck out onto the surface of whatever planet they were staying on, and took what fresh air and closeness they could receive from their soulmate.
"Hmm?" She prompted aloud after a loud snort, awaiting the familiar tingle on her arm. Sure enough, she felt Shiro exhale a heavy laugh next to her and regrip the pen he was holding and the sensation arrived on the back of her left hand, Pidge raising it to examine the writing.
'How long did you save that money?'
'It doesn't matter,' Pidge responded after she stole the writing utensil. 'I wanted to help you see the stars.'