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Shiro asked him once, years later. Years after the war ended and the empire’s armies were dismantled. Years after Voltron was retired and turned into a monument on New Altea. Years after vows were spoken and rings were exchanged and a house was taken by the sea where gently lapping waves lulled them to sleep at night and they woke to small faces giggling beneath the covers in the morning. “Why did you let me in?”
Keith looked up from scrambling eggs with their son, who they’d found as a toddler wandering the ruins of a far off world. Shiro was sitting at the table with their youngest in his lap, an unexpected daughter courtesy of Keith’s hybrid physiology. The snow white stubble covering his cheeks glinted in the morning sun as he steadied the sippy cup in her tiny hands with his Olkari hand and gazed expectantly at Keith with a contented smile tugging at his lips. Keith added grated cheese to the eggs and quietly considered the question.
Looking back, he supposed it was his dad’s death that derailed his life and sent him barreling towards Shiro like a runaway freight train. It was the guys at the station who broke the news to him. They called his dad a hero. Everyone did. Maybe they thought it would make him feel better, proud or something. It just made him feel angry, like his dad cared more about complete strangers than he did his own son, like he’d run into that burning building just to get away from him.
Keith hated him for it. He hated his dad for abandoning him more than he’d ever hated his mom for leaving. She’d never been a part of his life. Her absence didn’t rob him of breath. Anger seethed inside him no matter how hard he tried to swallow it down and it made him feel horrible. Wrong and monstrous. All twisted up inside. How broken did you have to be to hate the person you were supposed to love the most. He’d never even cried. Not once. The hatred he felt towards his dad was nothing compared to how much he hated himself.
The social worker said the funeral would give him closure, as if that were a real thing. As if putting a wooden box in the ground would somehow knit his broken pieces back together when he’d never be whole again. When the space inside him that used to be filled with his dad’s presence would stay empty for the rest of his life.
Just get over it. That’s what they kept telling him, the social workers who had a dozen other kids to worry about, the group home administrators who didn’t have time for his bullshit, the teachers who knew where he came from and wrote him off as a delinquent, and the kids who despised him for being unwanted, as if it were a disease they could catch if they got too close. Just get over it already, like it was easy, and maybe it would’ve been if he wasn’t so broken. If he could get past the anger twisting him up inside. It was the only thing anyone ever saw when they looked at him.
Until Shiro showed up that is. The way Shiro looked at him. It wasn’t pity for once. Keith knew what pity looked like, that moment of clarity in someone’s eyes when they suddenly realized how unnatural it was to be completely alone in the world and were exceedingly grateful it wasn’t them. This was different though. The way Shiro looked at Keith when he told him about the Galaxy Garrison’s pilot program was compassionate and genuine. Almost as if he actually cared what Keith thought. It made Keith feel… exposed, vulnerable, as if Shiro could see him, really see him, see Keith underneath all the shit that always seemed to drive everyone else away.
And Keith was just suddenly supposed to believe that he was special, that he had talent, that he was worth something. Fucking James. He never should’ve let that little bitch goad him into flying that simulation program. Now Shiro was talking about his future and how he needed to trust in himself. If he could just do that, he could go to the stars. He could be great.
He stole Shiro’s car just to prove him wrong. He kept telling himself he was doing Shiro a favor by warning him off. There was nothing great in him. He was broken. A bad seed headed for a bad end. The sooner Shiro figured that out, the better it’d be for both of them. He expected the cops would show up and haul his ass off to juvie sooner or later. Instead it was just Shiro who tracked him down to a shack in the desert where another house once stood. A house full of history and stories and laughter that died along with the man who used to live there.
“Are you gonna turn me in?”
Shiro simply smiled that easy smile of his and glanced at his car, covered in dust but otherwise undamaged. Keith just needed a way to get out to the shack where it was quiet and he could… hide. Honestly though, who even drove a car with wheels anymore. What a dinosaur. “I read your file,” he said. Of course he did. Regular kids had memories, foster kids had files. “I’m sorry about your dad,” he said softly, it even sounded like he really meant it.
“Why?” Keith asked sullenly, pitching stones into the dirt from the porch. “It’s not like you were the one who sent him into that building. Everyone said it was too dangerous to go in, but you couldn’t tell him anything.”
“Sounds like you and he may have that in common,” Shiro said, his lips quirking wryly.
“I’m nothing like him,” Keith said bitterly, scowling at Shiro as he took a seat next to him. Then he sighed and did his best to swallow the anger that always seemed to bubble up whenever he mentioned his dad. “He was a hero,” he said, but the words meant nothing to him. He was just repeating what everyone else always told him, like a robot.
“It’s okay to be angry with him you know,” Shiro said softly. “It’s okay to be angry.”
Keith could feel the color rising in his cheeks as he averted his eyes. It wasn’t the words, it was that Shiro had seen through him so easily.
“It doesn’t make you a bad person,” Shiro continued gently, “but you can’t keep bottling it up. You have to allow yourself to have feelings, or you’ll never be able to move past them. Because you know, your dad didn’t go into that building thinking he was gonna die, he went in thinking there were people inside who needed help and that he was gonna have a hell of a story to tell his kid when he got home.”
Something shifted inside Keith then, and he broke down. It was as if Shiro’s words had finally untied the knots binding up his tears since his dad’s death. He cried. He cried for a long time and Shiro just held him the way no one had in six years. Not once did he mention closure or catharsis or any of that other bullshit most adults spouted to make themselves feel more in control of their own emotions, as if grief were something you could place on a time-limit. He just kept repeating “I’ve got you,” and held him until Keith was ready to let go.
Somehow it was easier to breathe after that. Keith was still angry, but he didn’t hate his dad anymore. He just missed him. He and Shiro stayed up talking late into the night, talking about things Keith had never talked about with anyone before, because no one but Shiro had ever bothered to ask before.
Keith blinked and looked up. He could still feel Shiro’s eyes upon him when he turned the burner off on the now thoroughly cooked eggs. He gave his son’s head an affectionate tousle and smiled at the babbling toddler in Shiro’s lap and thought about all the twists and turns his life had taken to lead him to this very moment. Finally comfortable in his own skin and at peace with his past, while the person he loved more than anything watched him with the same easy smile as the day they first met.
Why did he let Shiro in?
“You knocked.”