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When it comes to choosing a partner, Pidge had high hopes for Keith. He has fast reflexes, the ability to do multiple things at once, and he's good at thinking outside the box. At the Garrison, he was the only one of them selected to be a fighter pilot.
But he sucks at Revengifyance.
"Come on, Keith!" Pidge grits out. Killbots are converging on from both sides and she thought Keith had her back.
"They're too fast!" Keith complains.
"You have speed boost."
"It's not working!"
"Probably because you're not pressing the right buttons," Pidge says under her breath.
She saw what Keith did at the beginning. Skip the tutorial, take no time to customize controls, how does he even know how this game works?
"Why don't you pull up the tutorial?" Shiro chimes in from his place on the couch. "It can't hurt to see the controls again."
"There's nothing in there that's helpful. Revengifyance is a roleplaying game, not a combat game. The entire combat system is secondary. It's just a bunch of button mashing."
"Keith, I'm dying here!" Pidge says as she executes a circle-double-triangle combo just to prove him wrong and dismembers the entire handful of killbots that was getting in her space.
"What was that, then? You look fine to me."
"Another wave is approaching!" Her only regret with this seating arrangement is that Keith can't see her roll her eyes. "Just use your combination attacks."
She reaches over and presses the right and left side buttons on Keith's controller simultaneously, causing his player's sword to erupt suddenly in a blaze of light and incinerate two of the killbots around him. The controller vibrates and Keith holds it away from him, suddenly impressed with its innate power. "Oh. That's how it works," he says.
"Yeah." On the split-screen, Keith's doing fine, but Pidge's character died out a while ago when she had to divert her attention to help Keith.
Keith destroys a few more robots using the same method, but then he sets down his controller and gets up.
"Where are you going?" Pidge cries out.
"Your character is dead already, there's no point in continuing on."
"You're supposed to win for the both of us. Or at least keep going until you can revive me," Pidge whines.
"I didn't know you could do that."
"I did it to you thrice."
She sighs. Maybe Keith wasn't interested in the first place. He's gotten older recently. He has so much to do, leading Voltron, and he doesn't seem to hang out with her, Hunk, and Lance much. If he doesn't want to, there's nothing she can do about that. She doesn't understand what's so horrible about having fun, though. She hopes she never gets to an age where she stops partaking in the glory that is the Killbot franchise.
---
"Mind if I play?" Shiro asks from the sofa. He's been so quiet, Pidge nearly forgot that he was there.
"Sure, Shiro. You sure you aren't too old?"
Shiro's face screws up as if that idea is preposterous. "Too old? I'm 25. I don't know if there is such a thing as 'too old to play video games.'" He grabs the second controller and clicks through the setup. The game starts with his character and Pidge's at the ready.
"If not too old, then too busy. Keith didn't seem to have any interest in playing."
"Well...Keith is...Keith," Shiro says as he slashes through the torso of a robot, "Sometimes he's a little short-tempered. You know he doesn't mean it."
Pidge dodges a blast then slashes right back. "I know, but it just seems like he doesn't have any interest in me lately. We used to be good friends." She flashes back to the days they used to spend collecting rocks in the desert. Or when Keith would join their Monsters and Mana games on Earth.
"He's got a lot going on. Just give him some time. He'll come around." Why does Shiro always defend Keith? She knows Keith's the Black Paladin, but that isn't an excuse to push everyone away. Even if he is busy with leadership stuff, she's busy too. Who fixes the engine when it breaks? Usually her. Occasionally, it's Hunk.
"I just thought he'd like to play a video game. I had to give an arm and a leg for this thing." She then looks over at Shiro's arm and realizes that exaggeration might have been in poor taste, but Shiro doesn't take offense.
"Maybe you can find something else that he likes?"
"I don't know." Pidge likes sparring, but she uses the trainer bot more often than not, because the software it uses is more unpredictable than humans, and unlike her friends, it doesn't tend to hold back. She doesn't know what Keith likes besides that; he's always either sparring or trying to spend time with Shiro. Other than that, he's a mystery.
Later, Keith reenters the room and sits down next to Shiro. He says nothing, instead choosing to watch the movement of Shiro's hands on the controller.
Shiro's good. Pidge knows it by how long they've survived, and from the way he's watching, Keith knows too. "How did you do that?" he asks Shiro after a particularly efficient attack, and Shiro tells him something she can't hear over the game's volume.
They're sitting close. Too close. There's no way Keith would put a hand in Shiro's lap unless--yep, they're dating, quiznak, they're dating. She just craned her head over and saw Shiro's lips pressed against Keith's hair. Yes, they are.
That explains so much. Is it really a surprise, though? She does her best to focus on the game and not make it awkward even though she's screaming internally. They can't know that she knows.
"Goodnight guys!" she says normally once they wrap up the game, claim their victory, and power the TV down, and she tries not to hurry off to bed.
What a day.
Keith apologizes for being dreadful at the video game the next day, and it's sort of excusable because he didn't grow up with them, but whatever. When Hunk and Lance return, she would rather see how they stack up.