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Growing warmth, the same as a burgeoning star, heats Shiro’s skin and gently leads him to the surface of his consciousness. Slow and careful, nothing more than a quiet tide, it rolls across him as he shifts beneath the comforter that has been pulled down to his waist.
Without the rush of war, the rush of his failing body, and the rush of a universe running out of time, it’s an unhurried kind of waking.
One that makes his core molten as his eyelids finally flutter open, the early morning light briefly stealing his vision with its honeyed glow. The same light bathes the walls of their bedroom and illuminates the floating motes in the air like fairy dust.
It falls across the bed in bars, tracking its gilding lines over the still sleeping form beside him.
Keith’s breathing is quiet, even, captured in the cadence of a deep slumber that moves his shoulders with careful ease.
Even on his side, with his back to him, Shiro can picture the exact way his face looks.
Free of wakeful tension and with his mouth slightly parted, he’d look like the blissful peace that he’d fought so hard to attain, and wholeheartedly earned.
That pursuit of equanimity had taken so much from them, by way of life and flesh, each and every one of the paladins wearing the reminders of their battles forever etched deep into their skin, but they’d done it.
After loss, and heartbreak, and back again, they’d finally done it.
Now the universe could know a peace unlike it had ever known, and Keith and Shiro had time.
As much as fate would allow him to take.
Carefully easing himself on his own side to the sight of Keith’s onyx hair and the exposed slope of his neck, Shiro can’t help but pray that fate gives him all of it.
Trailing down the tanned expanse of his skin, he memorizes the different scars that each tell a tale of the life Keith had lived. The life that Shiro had watched him live, and the life that he had lived beside him.
Some stand stark and pale, while others are darker, deeper, but he knows each and every one.
With a gentle finger, Shiro brushes a feathered touch along the deepest one at his shoulder, cutting just towards the edge of a cluster of freckles that pepper Keith’s skin.
The brush of fabric is loud in the otherwise silent room as Keith shifts beneath his touch, causing him pause as he considers the marks carefully. Pulling his hand back, he admires them, regarding them with reverence in the early morning light.
The first time Shiro had seen them had been in a different life. He’d been a teaching assistant then, completing his mandatory hours leading physical training while biding his time before he could find his way off Earth and out into the stars.
Shiro remembers the day in broken, fuzzy images, almost as if they’re old photographs.
Keith had been at the Garrison for a little over a month by that point, and was still hiding behind the chip that sat heavy on his shoulder, but that day, Shiro remembers the way it had slipped slightly, revealing the teen’s determined excitement when his opponent had hesitated just long enough for him to flip him on his back.
The move, while not necessarily regulation, had been swift and clean, knocking the breath out of the other student with a soft sound. After a stunned quiet that shifted Keith’s look back to careful composure, he’d looked up at Shiro in almost worry before reaching out to help the student up.
With his back set to him in silent retreat, Shiro’s eyes had been drawn to the handful of freckles that sat behind the strap of his tank top.
There had been many moments when he’d known Keith would do great things, if only he’d allowed it of himself, but it had been that moment when he’d realized Keith carried the stars at his back.
Humming to himself, Shiro shifts ever so slightly closer, admiring the soft rush of goosebumps that rise at Keith’s nape with the whisper of his breath.
The second time Shiro had seen them, he was a different person. Sitting at the helm of entirely different expectations, he’d lost his arm, and lost a piece of himself he wasn’t sure he could ever get back. Yet Keith had been there, a steady force in an ever shifting tide of events, and growing closer toward being the man Shiro had always known he would be.
He’d been there when he’d fallen from the sky, had been there through battles, had been there when he thought he’d surely be lost, so it only made sense for Shiro to have been there for Keith when he’d been in search of who he was.
The trials had been hard, leaving Keith bruised, bleeding, and with the weight of his past pressed heavy on his shoulders.
Shiro remembered how they’d sagged, pushed forward as he’d slipped the tight suit down far enough for him to examine the deep cut that had been carved for too close to the cluster, and too close to Shiro’s heart.
He hadn’t quite noticed the shift that had begun in his chest until the moment he’d watched the large Blade carve his knife into the meat of Keith’s shoulder. What had been a steady, infinitesimal movement of a fault line had shuddered and quaked, breaking apart within his chest as he’d seen the scarlet spread against his skin.
Keith mumbles something under his breath that sounds a lot like his name as he shifts again in his sleep. Moving back, Shiro tries to ignore the ache that spreads across his sternum as he remembers the third time.
They’d both been different then, carrying mirrored responsibilities as the heads of Atlas and Voltron, but Shiro had carried the added weight of his pride.
Not in himself, but in Keith.
In the years that had passed, he’d found his family, found himself, and found the future Shiro had always known he would. Keith shined brightly, diminishing all else around him because how could anything else compare?
A son of the stars, Keith was otherworldly. Something he’d been reminded of as he’d traced over the freckles carefully with shaking fingers.
It had been meant as a goodbye, breathed like desperate pleas in the dark and lit by Earth’s moonlight before what they had both been certain would be an end.
No, the end.
Looking over the marks now, safe at the beginning they’d salvaged from what they’d saved, he can’t help but smile.
Shiro had collected a lifetime’s worth of constellations. He’d danced along Ursa Major, traced the lines of Andromeda, and even chased Centaurus, but none of them had ever compared to the cluster that sat on Keith’s shoulder.
Breathing in a shuddering sound, Shiro reaches out to trace the freckles that marked his tanned skin, eyes catching the warm glint of the early morning sun on the metallic band around his ring finger.
It was all too fitting how they seemed to form Lyra.
With as many times as Keith had faced down the universe and death itself just to bring him home, he was everything that Orpheus could have hoped to be.
Made of his own mythology, he was strong, and he was there, and he was his.
Leaning in, Shiro brushes a kiss at his shoulder, letting his lips hover over Vega.
A small hum vibrates against his lips as Keith presses back into the the pressure.
“Morning,” he mutters low, voice thick with sleep as he turns his head over his shoulder, eyes still half closed against the sunlight lighting their room in search.
“Good morning, baby,” Shiro whispers, answering his silent inquiry with a slow, unhurried kiss. It warms him, heat feathering through his veins as Keith rolls over and presses his palms to his chest.
Moving his own to trace the sides of his neck and cup Keith’s face between them, Shiro opens into the kiss if only for the sheer fact that he can.
Time passes, unrushed and unwavering, as they press close, timing their morning lit kisses to the cadence of their shared breathing.
When Keith finally pulls away, his eyes are the universe.
“So, what are we going to do today?” He asks.
It’s a simple question. Blaise and unassuming in its nature.
Boring, almost.
Boring in a way that neither of them had thought they’d ever get to have.
It makes Shiro’s lips pull wide around his smile.
“I was thinking,” he starts, reaching a hand up to push a bit of Keith’s hair from his eyes, “a late breakfast, because we can.”
Pressing close once more, Shiro kisses his forehead.
“Waste the day on our bikes, because we can,” he whispers, brushing a kiss at the tip of Keith’s nose.
“Grab food at our favorite diner, because we can,” Shiro continues as he shifts, dragging his lips across his cheek and the raised line of his scar. His hum is velvet as he tries to turn his head, his smile rubbing along Shiro’s skin.
Rumbling with a small laugh, Shiro pulls away to look at him.
Really look at him.
With eyes bright, Keith’s smile is still soft and sleepy. He looks happy. Well and truly happy in a way that makes Shiro burn.
“Bring you back home and get you back into bed—”
“— because we can?” Keith cuts him off, laugh husking with the sleep that clings stubbornly to his voice.
A gold line of sunlight shimmers across his face as he shakes with his mirth, and Shiro swears he sees Cassiopeia in the faint freckles that stretch across his nose.
Unable to stop himself, Shiro kisses him once more, reveling in the way this kiss is sun warmed and gilded as Keith’s hands burn at his nape and pull him closer.
“Because we can,” Shiro confirms, brushing the words over Keith’s lips.
“I think I like the sound of that,” he breathes in reply, scratching his fingers into the hair at the base of Shiro’s skull.
Brushing his knuckles along the flat of Keith’s jaw, Shiro admires the way the metallic shine of his ring dances across his skin.
“Good,” Shiro whispers, trapping the words between them like a promise, “because we’ve got all the time in the world.”
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