Chapter Text
Keith wasn’t stalking Shiro, and if anyone accused him of it, he would punch them.
Even if he was down the corridor from Shiro’s room.
But it had been about a week or so by Earth’s standards since the shuttle had landed with Shiro inside it, since they had discovered the Blue Lion and been dragged into this intergalactic mess, and Shiro had barely looked at Keith. All they had done was share a shoulder touch or two, maybe, and generic motivational speeches. They used to be close, but now…
Keith had always hoped that maybe they could be more than close, even as it choked him.
But now, even the strangers on the ship treated Keith more warmly.
Something had to be off. And they could fix this. Shiro always knew what to do. Once he realized how Keith felt, he would…
Well, something had to happen. He just had to work up the courage to step up and knock—
A soft hiss sounded from around the corner, and it took Keith a few moments to place it—long enough for brisk footsteps to echo through the corridor. Just as Keith remembered that was how doors sounded around here, a form rounded the corner—and Shiro was nearly on top of him.
“Keith.” The startled tone in Shiro’s voice, Keith realized, was the most inflection he had heard from Shiro since…
Since Shiro had left.
What should he even say? He couldn’t invite Shiro anywhere; they were all stuck on the same ship. But he had to say something to make Shiro see him again.
“Uh. Hey.”
Shiro paused, turning to focus on Keith. His smile was there, faint, but so… distant.
“Hello, Keith. How is your training going?”
Keith eyed Shiro warily. “…Fine. The Galra fight differently. But I’m working it out.”
Shiro nodded. “Then a good idea to adjust your own fighting style.”
He shifted his weight and hoped Shiro couldn’t see it. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to go get food; it’s about dinner time. You should come, too, if you haven’t eaten yet.”
That… was that an invitation to spend time together? As friends? Or was that logical but cool advice from a leader trying to make sure his team stayed at peak performance?
“S-sure.”
Shiro nodded and continued down the corridor, Keith slinking along behind him. The stride appeared purposeful and brisk, and Keith had never felt more out of place. The silence stretched on as Shiro made his way to the kitchen, synthesizing food goo. He apparently saw no need to say anything to Keith during the process, and Keith couldn’t gather the guts to say anything, especially once the others began to trickle in.
And once the others showed up, Keith had no desire to say anything at all.
They all began to file to the dining table, Allura and Coran chatting with each other; Pidge, Lance, and Hunk jostling each other good-naturedly. Keith shot a furtive look at Shiro. Unsurprisingly, he hadn't even glanced in Keith's direction.
Keith was alone. Again.
"So," Shiro began briskly. "How are you all doing? How do you feel about your roles within Voltron?"
A snort from Lance's direction. "What's with the annual review question? 'Rate your experience as a paladin from one to ten; describe a time when you overcame a problem as a team.'" Lance steepled his fingers together, mimicking a psychiatrist. "God, you sound like a stuffy guidance counselor."
Keith watched the interaction, somewhat numb, and went to choose a seat away from the head of the table, forcing his eyes away from Shiro. He couldn't have made it any clearer that today was about the team, and that he planned to hold everyone at arm's length. But then frustration spiked through him, and he detoured towards the chair next to Shiro.
Shiro was all he had. Keith wasn't going to just... just—
Shiro couldn't block him out. He just couldn't.
"We all have jobs to do, Lance, and mine is to make sure we all work together as a cohesive unit. The universe is at stake."
As Keith thrust a spoon into the green goo, Lance paused next to him, shooting him a bit of an annoyed look. Belatedly, Keith remembered his hero worship of Shiro, and that Keith had always had Shiro’s attention at the Garrison. Keith ignored him, and Lance eventually looked away.
"Yeah, yeah, I getcha." He leaned back in his seat next to Hunk. "I'm good being a leg. If we can just get more used to moving together, I think we'll be okay."
Shiro nodded, apparently not having noticed any of the exchange, and then turned to Hunk. "And yourself? You're an anchor of the team. How confident are you in your abilities?"
"Uhhh." Hunk just blinked. "I dunno about that. I'm just, you know, here. I'm a leg. And that's... cool. I'll try my best?"
Keith sucked his spoon and wondered why they were here doing this instead of Shiro talking to him about literally anything that had happened. Anything at all.
Was he just like the others to Shiro now? Had Shiro been forced to shut his feelings away during his time in captivity? Had everything he’d been through left him afraid to reach out? He couldn't even blame Shiro for that.
He could blame the Galra, though. The thought didn't give him much comfort.
While Keith had been musing, Shiro had been nodding, apparently listening intently to Hunk. And then he turned to Keith.
"Yourself?"
No difference. Keith gripped his spoon tighter, doing his hardest to meet Shiro's distant eyes.
"I'll follow you anywhere. You know that."
"I understand, but I need to know how you feel about being the pilot of the Red Lion and a member of this team."
Keith set his jaw. He'd never been a member of a team, not really. He could do tasks in tandem with someone else, but the kind of easy camaraderie there should have been always eluded him.
Shiro knew. They had talked about it at the Garrison, over and over again. He knew.
"It's fine. Red is easy to pilot, and Zarkon needs to be stopped."
Mostly so Keith could repay him for the scar on Shiro's nose, and the sinister gleam of his prosthetic arm. But sure. The greater good. Keith was good at working for a flag. America, Altea, it didn't really matter.
"And how do you feel on the team?"
Keith gritted his teeth. The first indication that Shiro knew who Keith was, knew about Keith's problems, and it was a callout rather than anything comforting. Why couldn't robot Shiro let him get away with this?
"We... don't know each other yet."
His fucking chest hurt. Shiro had to know what he was doing. Why was he trying to hurt Keith?
"Then let me know if there's anything I can do to help with that." Shiro turned from Keith, easy as anything, as if the interaction meant nothing, to Pidge.
They spoke for a few moments, but Keith couldn't hear them. Everything was static, an ongoing, shrill beep in his head. He lifted the bowl with hands that felt too big and forced the hot prickle against his eyes to stop.
He needed to be alone until he could speak to Shiro. Maybe Shiro had just been through a lot, or he didn’t want to show favoritism in front of the others, but Keith had heard everyone say that Shiro was dead for a year. He needed something other than a shoulder pat and a “nice to see you.”
He stood to leave.
As he did so, however, three sets of questioning eyes landed on him: Allura, Hunk, and Pidge. They glanced at him, then Shiro, and Keith's stomach dropped.
He couldn't have everyone knowing that something was wrong. He dumped his bowl, sorely tempted to leave anyway, to hide in the training room until his fists bled. But he needed to make an effort. He knew that.
Keith returned to his seat and sank down low, arms crossed. Shiro didn't even seem to have noticed, still speaking to the others.
"You have family back on Earth, yes? Do you want to try to get a message to them and let them know you're all right?"
Lance perked up. "Really? Can we? 'Cause Mami is gonna be out of her mind with me gone."
It dawned on Keith slowly, like milk curdling, as Lance prattled along, that there was something he hadn't told Shiro yet.
He swallowed. He hadn't wanted their conversation to go like this, but he supposed he didn't really have a choice.
"Shiro..." He pushed himself to his feet, uncharacteristically clumsy as he gripped the edge of the table. "Can I talk to you outside?"
Every eye on the room locked onto Keith, and for the briefest of moments, he wished he had run. Run to the training room, run to the airlock, run anywhere else but here.
Shiro stood. "If you'd like. What's the matter?"
Keith looked at his shoes. "Let's talk about it... in private."
Shiro, thankfully, didn't argue. Keith led them both out of the dining room and tried to quiet his heart. It had been less erratic when he first piloted Red than at the thought of telling Shiro that his only family was...
They were both alone, now.
"What is it?"
Shiro didn't seem to be concerned in the slightest. Keith wished he had even a fraction of that composure.
"I'm sorry." He stared at Shiro's shoes now, not knowing how to say this, and then it all came out in a rush anyway. "I... when you were gone, your dad got sick. And I called every week, but I didn't have the money to go to Japan. I couldn't—he just—" Keith squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them again. "He passed away, Shiro. He's gone."
Keith's nails dug hard into his palms, and he told himself he had no right to cry over someone else's parent.
Even though he already had.
"Thank you for telling me," Shiro said, and there was a little bit of gratitude in his voice, but nothing else. Keith finally lifted his eyes to see Shiro's face, still calm. "Is there anything else?"
Keith waited for a moment. Then another. Shiro's face remained impassive.
"Anything el—? Your father is dead!" He hadn't meant for his voice to rise the way it had, but his mouth seemed to have taken on a life of its own. "He missed you, he always believed in you! He listened to me cry over you and cried with me—Shiro, who even are you?"
"I'm still myself," Shiro said, still calm, then paused. He looked as if he wanted to say something, and Keith found himself torn between wanting to know what the fuck it was and dreading whatever Shiro might share.
"I understand that I may seem strange to you. That I've changed. The Galra had to operate on me to save my life.” His face stayed the same as if he were listing dinner options. “Removing Hanahaki disease is always risky, but I ended up healthy in the end, if different."
Everything collapsed in Keith with a suddenness that left him wondering if he was actually falling. He wildly wondered who. Why. When. Had Shiro been so far gone that he might have died?
"What?" Keith asked helplessly.
"What?"
Keith heard the words echo, and for a moment, he thought that it was only a reverberation—but no, that voice hadn't been Keith.
Shiro had clearly heard it as well. He took two strides towards the door and pulled it open swiftly. Lance tumbled out, ear first, with Pidge and Hunk close behind.
Keith could barely bring himself to notice, let alone care. He realized that he had gripped the wall, that he had to keep gripping it to stay up. This wasn't right. It wasn't fair.
"You had hanahaki?" Keith asked quietly.
Before Shiro could answer, Lance picked himself shamelessly up off the floor. "Why would it make you different?"
Pidge answered before Keith had to.
"The procedure to take the flowers out of the lungs removes the person’s emotions,” Pidge said quietly, staring at Shiro with an expression that mimicked the horror unfurling in Keith’s chest.
Once Pidge finished speaking, his eyes slid to Keith, horror now mingled with… grief? Sympathy? Keith’s throat tightened; if he hadn’t known better, he might have thought that Pidge had known about Keith’s own bout with the disease. But Pidge had never met Shiro before; how was that possible?
Shiro didn’t seem to have noticed. “It does, but it saved my life.” He turned to Keith as well. “I do regret that I had to hide it from you, back at the Garrison. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
Reality seemed to have vanished from underneath Keith’s footing. Shiro didn’t have feelings, not anymore, and when he did, he had loved someone else so deeply that it had almost killed him. A twofold rejection for Keith. Shiro wouldn’t be returning his feelings anytime soon. Never had, never would, never even could.
Keith’s heart burned. He knew he was in a lot of pain, but it was distant. Keith could feel it, but as if he were outside of his body.
“And it’s gone, now?” Keith asked distantly. “How… maybe the pods can fix the side effects. I’ll get Coran—”
He couldn’t think about the Garrison. The whole time he’d thought that he and Shiro had been growing close, like that, the entire time Keith had been coughing up flower petals of his own and hoping that one day he would have the courage to tell Shiro, Shiro had been in love with someone else. Someone stupid, absolutely idiotic, for not returning it.
But Shiro shook his head at the suggestion. “I don’t think so. I’m not broken, or hurt, or sick. If the pods put me back in the state I was in before the surgery, then I would be at risk of developing it again, and I can’t put you in that position.”
Keith shook his head violently. “This doesn’t have anything to do with me. I can deal with seeing you love someone else if it means that you can feel something!”
“It has everything to do with you, Keith,” Shiro said, sounding mildly surprised. “It was for you. I would have told you about the sickness otherwise, back at the Garrison. And besides, if I died, that would leave the Black Lion without a pilot.”
A bomb went off in Keith’s soul and decimated everything.
Off to the side, he could distantly hear a strangled gasp. Lance, maybe.
“That doesn’t make any sense.” He struggled for breath, awkwardly overfilling his lungs and then forcing it out. “You can’t have unrequited feelings for someone who loves you back.”
Another horrified, shocked noise from beside them, but Keith didn’t even care about their audience at this point. Shiro blinked, a frown of confusion creasing between his eyebrows.
“What are you talking about? You had other lovers. I didn’t resent you for them, but…”
Because of course they had to go into the details of Keith’s sex life and love life in front of the rest of the team. But what fucking ever; this was way more important.
“I was waiting to—for you to—” He took in a deep, ragged breath. “Whenever I tried, you said—said ‘when I’m serious’ or—but I was always serious! They were just… I was si-ick of being alone!”
Oh fuck; he was going to cry. He couldn’t. Everyone would see and they already knew it was Keith’s fault that Shiro was like this now—
“Ah,” Shiro said quietly, expression still unchanged. “I didn’t know. I believed that your offers were casual and didn’t realize what they meant. I’m sorry for any hurt I may have caused you.”
“No, you’re not,” Keith managed, voice shaking. “You’re not even capable of being sorry, not anymore.”
Keith lifted his hands to his face, hiding in his hair. It was his own fault; he had held back and waited. He should have proven himself when he had the chance. It was a familiar self-flagellation, one that he had ritually returned to in the time Shiro had been missing, and he sank back into it with equal parts agony and relief.
It was over for them before it had even started.
“I’m going,” he said quietly, pushing past Hunk and making to march down the corridor and away from this mess.
But a hand, shining and hard, caught his arm.
“Keith, please. I’m not a robot; I can just think logically now. I still value our friendship. These things can’t be changed, so all we can do is accept it.”
Keith couldn’t even make words come out for a good few seconds.
“Accept it. Right. Sure. I’ll just… skip right to being okay about this.”
“Do we have any other option?” Shiro asked, sounding like he thought he was being reasonable. “Loving you would have killed me. I fought it when I realized what they were doing, but afterwards, I realized the practicality of it. It’s for the better.”
Tears finally overflowed to run fast and hot down Keith’s cheeks. Every breath was agony.
“Let go of me. I want to go.”
“Keith, please. This won’t get any better if we ignore it.”
Keith whirled, tears glittering as they scattered. “What do you want to do, huh?” He had clenched his fists even tighter now, though the sensation of nails in his palms was the least painful part of his body right now. “You want to talk about it? You want to set up a five step plan for me to get over this the way I got over every other person leaving? I know it’s not your fault, but fuck, Shiro, you were all I lived for and now I need—”
He caught sight of Lance’s shocked face and nearly threw up right there. He had never wanted to show this much of himself to these people. They’d never understand what Keith had lost. What Shiro had lost, too.
“I need time.”
“You haven’t lost me,” Shiro said with surprising gentleness. “Just because I don’t feel how I did anymore doesn’t mean I still don’t value our friendship.”
“You haven’t had a conversation with me for more than five minutes until right now,” Keith spat back acidly.
Shiro blinked, as if confused as to why this was a problem. “I haven’t had a free five minutes until right now.”
“That’s right. You’re saving the universe now,” Keith said, voice thick, pulling Shiro’s hand from his arm. “I guess I am, too.”
“That’s not a bad thing, Keith,” Shiro urged, and the nausea only worsened in Keith’s gut.
“Yeah. It’s great. Saving a planet full of people who never wanted me.” He wiped his nose messily on his arm. “You know, you’re right. There’s no point getting upset about it. The only thing that’s different about this terrible fucking day from any other is the giant space lions, so I’m taking Red out. You go back to saving the universe.”
“I wanted you, Keith,” Shiro said firmly, and hearing him say this, now, when Keith couldn’t do anything about it, hurt worse than anything he could ever imagined. But he pulled back. “I still do. Be safe. Remember that we all need you.”
“Whatever.” Keith stormed away, thunder rolling in every footstep.