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After seven days stuck at the Galaxy Garrison in a strange stand-off involving the Paladins, Coran and Allura, Krolia, Sam and Matt Holt, and representatives of the eighteen Earth governments who sponsored GG, Keith needed a break in the worst fucking way. He was certain he wasn’t the only one who needed a break, so he decided to take matters into his own hands.
He found Shiro first – easy enough, since the two of them had rarely been apart since Shiro had been revived. Shiro looked tired and irritated, but he smiled when he saw Keith, and Keith felt some of the stress lift from his shoulders.
“Hey,” he said, smiling at Shiro, “Do you want to grab everyone and do something that’ll piss off a bunch of bureaucrats?”
Shiro gave him a look that was trying to be disapproving, but Keith could see his smile breaking through. “What did you have in mind?”
Keith grinned, “I was going to ‘requisition’ a vehicle from the lot and go for a drive in the desert. You in?”
Shiro’s face lit up at the suggestion, and Keith took his hand and pulled him down the hall. They found Pidge and Hunk in the lab containing the Altean tech that Allura and Coran had offered to let the Galaxy Garrison study. Lance was hanging out nearby, although he looked a little glazed over at the technical talk. When Keith gave a brief explanation of his plan, they were all on board.
They found the Alteans in the Garrison’s library. Allura had been making a particular effort to learn about Earth history and culture to help give herself steadier footing in the negotiations, and Coran and Romelle always stuck near her when they could. They all enjoyed the novelty of paper books, too, which had been long since outdated to most spacefaring cultures.
“But why would we need to sneak out?” Allura asked once the plan had been explained to her. She looked a little confused, “Wouldn’t it be less trouble to simply ask to borrow a vehicle?”
“Princess, sneaking out is practically a rite of passage for young people on Earth!” Lance said cheerfully.
“He’s right,” Pidge agreed, “It’s super-important. We might not have ever found the Blue Lion if Lance and Hunk and I hadn’t snuck out of the Garrison that night.”
Allura looked interested, though not entirely convinced. It was Shiro who spoke up next with the argument that won her over.
“Besides, we’ve been here a week and it’s been non-stop negotiations and politics. None of us have had time to just breathe for a bit and enjoy being home. If we ask to borrow a vehicle, they’ll want to know what we want it for, and probably try to send someone with us. A little bit of rule-breaking like this…” He glanced at Keith and grinned, “I think it’s just what we need.”
Every time he saw Shiro smile like that, Keith loved him a little more. Keith took Shiro’s hand, and Shiro squeezed his fingers.
“Actually, if this whole excursion is going to involve watching Yin and Yang there making goo-goo eyes at each other, I might just stay here,” Hunk teased.
Keith scowled at Hunk, but Shiro laughed, pulled Keith closer to him, and leaned down to give him a sweet kiss.
“Not actually an improvement over the eye thing, guys,” Hunk said.
Keith used his free hand to make a rude gesture in Hunk’s general direction, but he wasn’t actually upset by the teasing. He knew that it was a form of acceptance and support, the same way Hunk had teased him after he’d discovered his Galra heritage. Where the rest of the team had been walking on eggshells around him, Hunk had teased him and made jokes, and been the first person after Shiro to completely accept him.
Shiro broke the kiss and turned back towards the others as if nothing had happened, though he didn’t let go of Keith’s hand.
“Has anyone seen Krolia?” he asked, “We should definitely bring her, too.”
“I’m here,” Krolia said from somewhere above them, and Keith looked up to see his mother sitting on the top of one of the shelves with a book in her hand.
She’d spent a lot of time perching in high places since they’d arrived. Keith wondered if it was to keep people from noticing and staring at her quite so much (as the most obviously alien-looking of them, she attracted constant stares), or if she just got some amusement out of startling them when she dropped to the floor unexpectedly. Maybe both. Keith had certainly found it hilarious the first time she had leapt gracefully to the floor behind Iverson and made him shriek.
“Would you like to join us?” Shiro asked politely, “You must be as sick of being cooped up here as the rest of us are.”
She nodded, and looked over the group, “There are nine of us, ten if we include Comet. We should sneak out individually if we don’t want to attract attention.” Her eyes lingered on Keith and Shiro, still holding hands, and she smiled, “Or maybe in pairs. I’ll meet you outside.”
With that, she reached up, easily undid the cover on a ceiling vent, and slipped inside it, disappearing almost immediately.
“Man,” Lance said, looking at Keith, “I still can’t figure out how someone like you has a mom that cool.”
“She reminds me of some of the Galra I got to know back when Altea and Daibazaal were still allies,” Coran said cheerfully, “Skilled, with no false modesty about her talents, deeply loyal to the ones she cares about… King Alfor admired those qualities in the Galra. Krolia would have fit in well back in those days.”
Keith caught the note of admiration in his voice, and wondered a little at it. If Coran was developing some kind of crush on his mom, that would just be… weird. He firmly decided not to think about it.
He raised his voice a little and said, “Meet in the lot in twenty. If you’re late, I’ll leave you behind!”
Romelle didn’t know him as well as the others did, and actually looked a little concerned at the threat, but Allura put her hand on the other Altean woman’s shoulder and smiled reassuringly.
“Let’s go together,” she said, shifting her appearance. It only took a few subtle changes for Allura to pass as human – ears rounded, hair darkened to brown, Altean markings hidden – and Romelle copied her.
Shiro put his hand on Keith’s shoulder and gently pulled him toward the door, “Come on. They can sort it out.”
Shiro’s way of going unnoticed through the halls of the Garrison was completely different from how Keith would have tried it. Shiro didn’t try to sneak at all, he just walked confidently, as though he had every right in the world to be where he was and to go where he was going. The few people they encountered in the halls just moved out of his way, and Keith followed in his wake, just a step behind. It was an old and familiar pattern, easy to fall into again. Keith had followed Shiro through the Garrison like that many times when he was still a cadet.
When they reached the door and headed outside, though, Shiro took a step back and let Keith take the lead.
“Which one?” he asked softly, looking at the various parked vehicles in the lot.
Keith looked around. His eye was immediately drawn by the hoverbikes, not unlike the one he’d left behind on Earth when they first found the Blue Lion, but he dismissed the idea. Nine people and a wolf would never fit on a hoverbike.
“Over here,” he said, gesturing for Shiro to follow him to a parked jeep. Not one with anti-grav, but it would do.
The rest of the group found them in stages. Krolia, with Comet the wolf in tow, Allura and Romelle, Lance, Coran and Hunk, and finally Pidge. It had been exactly twenty-one minutes since he’d left the library, and Keith knew she had done that on purpose.
“You weren’t going to leave without me,” she said as she settled into the seat behind Keith.
“You’re pushing your luck,” he grumbled, but couldn’t quite keep from smiling as he said it.
“Well, if you don’t want me to hack the gate so we can leave without tripping a security alert...”
She opened her computer, a Frankenstein-esque creation of Earth, Altean, and Olkari tech, and typed a few commands. The jeep’s engine rumbled to life, and the gate to the compound opened.
“Alright, Keith, punch it!” she ordered.
Keith floored it, and they went screaming out of the lot with a squeal of tires and several yells of protest from the people who had been unprepared. But Shiro was laughing, and his mom was smiling, so Keith really didn’t care. If the team didn’t know that he drove like a maniac by now, that was on them.
“This thing got a radio?” Lance asked, leaning into the front to mess with the dashboard, “I feel like joyriding kinda demands music, right?”
“Oh, no, you’re not picking the music,” Hunk said, “I’ve heard what you sing in the shower, man!”
“They’re stone cold classics, Hunk!”
After a few minutes of good-natured arguing, they found a radio station that was playing music that the human members of the group could agree on. The Alteans were listening, somewhat bemused, and everyone got a surprise when Krolia recognized the song and started to sing along.
Keith should have expected it. His dad had always liked classic rock.
He turned off the road at the familiar dirt trail, slightly overgrown now, that would lead them out to the shack Keith had never quite thought of as home. Keith hadn’t thought of many places as ‘home’ in his life. The house he’d shared with his father, the Garrison (but only briefly, and not once Shiro had left), the Castle of Lions… the creature he and his mother had lived on in the Quantum Zone had felt like a home, now that he looked back on it. It would have been a prison if he’d been alone.
Home for him had never been about places, it had always been about people. About family. He’d never had so many people that he could think of as family before. It was nice.
He took one hand off the steering wheel and put it on Shiro’s knee, rubbing gently with his thumb. Shiro covered Keith’s hand with his own.
“So are you guys thinking of a spring or autumn wedding?” Pidge asked teasingly.
Then again, having all this family had its drawbacks, too. He glared at Pidge in the rear-view mirror, and she stuck her tongue out at him.
Shiro blushed bright red, and stammered, “I, uh… it’s a little soon to be thinking about that, isn’t it?”
“What are human weddings like?” Romelle asked, all innocent curiosity.
“Depends,” Hunk said brightly, “We’ve got so many cultures and traditions, usually people who want to get married just mix and match with whatever feels right to them. My cousin and her wife ended up doing a Jewish/Samoan thing, with a canopy on the beach. It was beautiful; everyone cried.”
“What is Jewish-Samoan?” Romelle asked, carefully sounding the words out.
“Oh! Jewish people are the people who are members of a specific religious tradition here on Earth. And Samoan people are the people who come from the island of Samoa, that’s where my family is from...”
Hunk started in on his impromptu anthropology lecture, and the group’s attention moved away from teasing Keith and Shiro. Keith looked at Shiro, who still looked a bit embarrassed, and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.
Keith didn’t think he was ready to worry about marriage just yet, while their relationship was still so new and they were still trying to feel it out. Maybe some day they would. Keith thought he kind of liked the idea of formally declaring to the world that he was going to spend the rest of his life with Shiro. For now, though, he just wanted this.
“Hm,” Allura said when Keith pulled to a stop in front of the shack, “That’s an, ah, interesting... structure.”
“You don’t have to be diplomatic, Allura. It’s a wreck,” Keith said, opening the jeep’s door and climbing out.
“So why exactly did you bring us here?” she asked.
“Because I don’t think anyone at the Garrison has any idea this place exists,” Keith said.
Even though the place was about as far from luxury as one could get, everyone seemed much more comfortable and relaxed than they had since arriving on Earth. No one was watching them, breathing down their necks, or asking them to explain what they’d done off planet for the sixtieth time. Keith had been the one to decide to do something about it, but they had all been sick of the constant scrutiny.
Hunk had come prepared with a duffel bag full of food and drinks raided from the commissary. He passed them out with a smile, like a culinary Santa Claus.
“If we get a campfire going, I got the stuff to make s’mores,” he said cheerfully, holding up a bag of marshmallows, “And shish kabobs, if we want something that’s more dinner than dessert. Or maybe silver turtles.”
“I have no idea what any of those are, but if you’re cooking them, they’re probably worth eating,” Coran said cheerfully. He looked at the bottle of soda Hunk had handed him and took a cautious sip. “Why, this tastes almost exactly like Drule tonic water!”
“Is that a good or bad thing?” Hunk asked, but Coran was too busy chugging the rest of the bottle to answer. “Okay, I’m gonna guess it’s good.”
While Shiro and Lance carried the remaining furniture in the shack outside to make seats, Keith got a small campfire lit, using some pieces of wood that had once been a fence. He sat down afterward, letting Hunk take over the fire, and smiled happily when Hunk and Pidge started arguing over the right way to toast marshmallows. (“Don’t let them actually catch fire! What are you, a barbarian?” “They’re the best like that!” “Only if you like to eat charcoal.”)
Shiro sat down behind Keith, and Keith leaned back against his chest, feeling the stress of the last week – of the last few years, really – drain out of him.
“This was a great idea, Keith,” Shiro murmured.
“I have them on occasion.”
“I’d go so far as to say you have them frequently,” Shiro said, pressing a soft kiss to Keith’s cheek.
Keith smiled, and tipped his head back to rest on Shiro’s shoulder while he looked up at the stars. He’d seen so many stars while in space, but they looked different from here on Earth. Maybe it was just the familiar constellations, or the way the atmosphere softened their light and made them seem to twinkle, but maybe it was just that he felt differently about them now.
“When I was a kid, I always wanted to go up there,” Keith said, “I was so sure that space was where I belonged. It was like I needed to be in space instead of on Earth.”
“And now?”
“I think what I really needed was to go to space so that I could come back. Because now… now I feel like this is actually home.”
Shiro nodded in understanding, and Keith relaxed into his embrace, more content than he’d ever believed he could be when he had been on Earth before. Sitting here in the cool desert night, with Shiro holding him, Hunk cheerfully cooking s’mores over the campfire, Lance and Pidge pointing out the constellations to the Alteans, and his mother letting Comet lick the remnants of a toasted marshmallow off her hands, Keith could honestly say he’d never been happier than this.
This was home.