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“Keith.”
The name still feels strange on Krolia’s lips, even after nearly four months on the back of a space whale with no one but her son and a small teleporting wolf for company. She never spoke it aloud over the past nineteen years, not even in the privacy of her old bedroom on the destroyed Lunill base, fearful that even the whisper of an Earthen name might be enough to send Zarkon back to the planet where her desert sweetheart and their child still lived without anything or anyone to defend them.
But there is no one left to hear her now, no one except the one person she’s always wanted to speak to.
“Yeah?” her son replies, glancing away from the little wolf in his lap and meeting her eyes with a frown. “Is...something wrong?”
He avoids calling her by her name, she notices. If she had stayed on Earth all those years ago he would have called her amai, and she will never hear herself called that now―but at least he refrains from calling her Krolia now that he knows who she is, so she supposes it’s something to be thankful for.
“No, not really.” She sits down beside him. “But I wanted to ask you about what happened after―”
She still can’t say it, even weeks after the vision she had of a much smaller Keith standing at Jacob’s grave. “After, well―”
“After Dad died, you mean?”
Krolia nods, feeling the breath leave her body all over again as Keith claps Kosmo’s tiny paws together in thought. “If you wouldn’t mind telling me.”
It’s been a quiet day, so they have the luxury to talk about it. Their Blade suits are drying by the fire, and they’re currently dressed in the plant-fiber shifts Keith helped her make; the new clothes are nothing more than two squares of rough cloth with holes for their heads and arms, but they’ll do. There’s enough food for the next five or six days, too―Kosmo proved to be an excellent hunting partner despite his diminutive size, and together all three of them managed to kill a beast even Antok would have had trouble catching.
Would have had. He’s dead too, Krolia remembers.
“I went to foster care for a few months, and then a children’s home when my placement didn’t work out,” Keith shrugs. “I wasn’t thriving there, whatever that means, so my social worker thought I might be more comfortable in a religious orphanage with a structured routine. So I stayed with the Baptists until I was around twelve, and that’s when Shiro adopted me.”
“The black paladin, right?” Keith talks about him the most, and she prays to every one of the twenty-three deities she tried following over the past two hundred years that she hasn’t gotten it wrong. “The one with the white lock of hair over his forehead?”
“Yeah, him and his boyfriend Adam. They took me in, and that’s when I started at the Garrison. It was only a few miles away from where I lived with Dad before the fire, so that was nice.”
Krolia blinks. In all the time they’ve spent together, Keith has never mentioned anyone called Adam before; he usually restricts his speeches about his own life to the time he spent with the other paladins and the lost Altean princess.
He’s opening up to you, she hears Jacob tell her, his accented voice drifting softly into her ears like the sweet-smelling smoke from their campfire. Ask him to tell you more, honeypie. Don’t let him slip away.
“Was Adam good to you?” she ventures. “Did...did you like him?”
Keith stares back at her, confused, as if what she just asked him made no sense at all. She watches her son mouth the words to himself, and then he seems to decide on an answer fit for her ears.
“He loved me more than Shiro did,” Keith mumbles. “He loved me more than anyone, except maybe Dad.”
The comment stings, but she accepts it with a placid face and tries again. “What was he like?”
Keith snorts.
“He’s Shiro’s polar opposite, ” he tells her, and this time there’s something like laughter sparkling in his grey-blue eyes. “They’re like―I don’t know, salt and sugar. Or air and water. They had literally nothing in common, but they loved each other like crazy.”
The question in her face is obvious, so he shakes his head and goes on. “Shiro left him, for that mission that got him captured. He won’t talk about Adam now, not even to me or Pidge, but I―I hope they’ll get back together when all this is over.”
“I’m glad you had them both, Keith.”
“Yeah.” Kosmo’s paws clap together again, and Krolia finds herself struggling not to cry at the sight of them. “So am I.”
* * *
It isn’t until seven phoebs into their voyage that Krolia actually sees Adam, or any glimpse of the six years her son spent with him before getting launched into space. She has had visions of the other paladins before, though―one of the blue one, Lance, hurtling down what looked like a laundry chute with Keith a few feet ahead of him, and two of the green one as a small child, plucking impatiently at someone’s sleeve and making faces at Shiro―but this is the first time seeing anyone else, and for a moment she’s not sure the person in front of her could have possibly raised her son. To start with, he looks a good decaphoeb or two younger than Keith is himself, all arms and legs and angles without so much as a hint of stubble on his face―and a second later, the calendar hanging a few feet to her left in proves that he is. One of the months is circled and covered with stickers, and someone has written “Adam’s eighteenth birthday” in large yellow letters across the whole page.
“You’re nothing but a child yourself,” she objects, watching Adam pretend not to be keeping an eye on Keith and failing miserably. “How in Daibazaal’s name did you take care of him?”
Adam doesn’t look like Shiro and Keith, she notices. His features are finer and softer than theirs, his skin a good ten shades darker, and under his white tunic and trousers his body seems different, too: narrow in the shoulders and slightly broader in the hips, while most of his muscle seems concentrated in his back, arms, and thighs. It’s a body built for hard, repetitive labor, not for fighting, and suddenly she remembers Keith mentioning that Adam came from a family of farmers, and left that life behind to be a pilot only four years before he and Shiro adopted him.
“You look kind, though,” observes Krolia, momentarily forgetting where she is. “Where are you now, I wonder―now that Keith and your husband are gone?”
“Is your homework finished, baba? ” Adam calls over her, stirring the pot bubbling on the stove before taking off his apron. “If it’s not, just do the rest over dinner. Takashi’s almost here.”
The young man’s voice―nothing like her Jacob’s, or her son’s―stops Krolia in her tracks. It’s accented, like Jacob’s was, but the accent itself sounds entirely different; each sentence warbles like a line of song from start to finish, and all the syllables that would have been sharp on Keith’s tongue were soft and rounded on Adam’s. It’s not a child’s voice, certainly, but neither is it the voice of a man fully grown; it reminds her strangely of a teenage Thace coaxing her to skip training with him, and almost succeeding before Antok showed up and made them do three extra fitness logs as punishment.
“Why do you call him Takashi?” wonders her son, moseying over to the cupboard and pulling out a stack of plates. “It’s kind of weird, right? Everyone calls him Shiro.”
Adam laughs and answers him before Krolia can voice a reproof. “Everyone isn’t dating him, Keith. Or at least I hope not, because I’d have to throw hands if they were. But I’ve called him that since before we got together, so it’s not weird for me. Now eat your soup.”
Keith―already gulping down a bowlful of what looks like meat stew at the table―says nothing, and Adam goes back to the kitchen to prepare a second plate before checking the communication device in his pocket.
“They’re overworking him,” he grumbles, eating his own portion at the counter itself and then diving into the refrigerator for a box of vegetables. “Go ahead and finish, bandar. Takashi won’t be home until nine.”
Krolia remains in the little kitchen long enough to hear Keith make a stew-muffled sound of protest―and then the scene dissolves, reforming upon a tiny bedroom decorated in red and gold. Adam is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a sheaf of papers spread out in front of him, punching numbers into a calculation device and murmuring under his breath until someone’s warm hand reaches out to touch him.
“Sweetheart,” the someone says, and Krolia blinks back tears at the sheer adoration in the word―it had been one of Jacob’s favorite endearments, once upon a time. “You don’t have to do all this. I’ll write to my grandparents, and then everything will be fine.”
“The same grandparents who made your mother’s life miserable until she and your father disowned them? Really?” sighs Adam, raking his fingers through his hair before kissing Shiro’s palm. “We might be poor, but for God’s sake―that’s a last resort, Takashi. We’re not there yet.”
“Aren’t we? We barely made our credit card bills last month and the month before, and what with the doctor’s visits for Keith and the life insurance payments…”
Adam doesn’t look much older than he was in the last vision, which means Keith is still somewhere around twelve Earthen years old. The Galran equivalent to that time in a child’s life is affectionately called the hungry decade, and for good reason; the amount of food necessary to support normal development in early adolescence is nearly four or five times what Krolia eats now as a soldier still in her prime, or what Jacob ate when they were still living together. As she looks closer, she realizes that the papers in Adam’s lap are his household accounts, and that the portion of his earnings devoted to food seems to dwarf even the sum he and Shiro spend for their dwelling’s monthly rent.
You took care of Keith so well, she thinks, aching somewhere deep in her chest at the sight of two boys barely out of childhood fretting over the child she left behind. You loved him even when looking after him wasn’t easy, even when taking care of him meant you couldn’t take care of yourselves. Adam seems thinner than he was when she last saw him, and the worry lines in Shiro’s forehead are a little deeper; not knowing if they could afford to feed their adopted son has taken a toll on both of them, and on top of that they know nothing about Keith’s mixed-species heritage and seem to think that something might be wrong with him.
“This can’t go on,” Shiro murmurs, sitting down on the carpet beside him and picking up one of the bills. “Forget how expensive it is, he’ll make himself sick if he keeps eating so much. He’s a little small for his age, but not―not so far behind that we’re spending three times as much as usual on groceries.”
“But he can’t handle it if he eats any less,” Adam says anxiously. “He gets all lethargic if I pack him a lunch the same size as yours, and I don’t care if it’s not normal―he’s way healthier than he was when we adopted him, so we’re going to stick to what we know works. His vitamin levels are finally somewhere near what they should be, and I’m not going to undo all that progress now.”
“So what should we do? I’ll have to wait another year for the Kuiper mission, so unless we can double our teaching hours we’ll be in debt by Thanksgiving.”
“I do have a family I can write to, you know. And some things I can sell, if it really gets bad.”
Shiro purses his lips. “All right. But don’t do anything drastic without talking to me first, okay?”
Adam laughs and pokes the dimple in his cheek. “Of course I won’t, love. Now leave me alone for a minute so I can call my aunt, and you go make sure that Keith hasn’t let the roast burn.”
“You left Keith in charge of dinner?”
“...Uh, maybe?”
At this juncture, Krolia hears her son calling from the kitchen. “Adam? I found a roach in the garbage, can I use the―”
“Do not touch the blowtorch!” shrieks Adam, pushing the bills aside and dashing out the door with Shiro at his heels. “I mean it, you little monkey―leave it alone, we’ve already had two fires since August!”
“Oh, no,” observes Shiro, now fully out of sight on the other side of the wall. “The trash can’s burning.”
“Keith!”
* * *
When Krolia opens her eyes again, Keith is standing over her with Kosmo in his arms.
“You were out for a while,” he tells her. “Kosmo got worried and woke me up so I could check on you. Are you okay?”
“Mm. Right as rain.”
“Was it a vision again?”
“Two, this time. I think I met your Adam.”
His lips tremble at the mention of his erstwhile guardian’s name, and for a moment Krolia cannot fathom why. “You did? Was it in the past, or in the future, or―was he okay?”
“The past, you were younger―but he’s safe on Earth where you left him, isn’t he? Of course he’ll be fine.”
“I’ve had visions where he wasn’t,” her son whispers, holding Kosmo closer and sitting on the ground at her side. “He was hurt, there was so much blood …and then a bunch of burning buildings, and Shiro sitting with his head on my shoulder and crying for him. I keep having them, and they―they haven’t stopped. Like it’s a warning.”
Krolia puts a hand on his shoulder.
“He’ll be all right, Keith. This place...it shows us all the futures that might happen, not just the ones that will, so there’s no point in driving yourself mad trying to figure out which is which.”
He nods. “But if you see him again―you’ll tell me, won’t you?”
“I will, sweetheart.” The word slips out like it’s the easiest thing in the world, but Keith doesn’t seem to mind―and neither does he object to her touch on his sleeve, as if some part of him remembers that she gave birth to him, and held him close for two precious months before she had to leave him behind. “I promise.”
* * *
When she does see Adam in her dreams again, he is nothing more than a corpse in Shiro’s arms. His skin and clothes are covered with blood, just as Keith had mentioned, and she can see her own stricken face hovering behind Princess Allura’s as she kneels at Shiro’s side―and then the vision fades, leaving her restless and queasy beside the rough bed where Keith and Kosmo lie curled up together in a ball.
“What did you see?” he asks her, shaking with fear and hope as she rubs the sleep out of her eyes. “Mom?”
It’s that word, more than anything else, that completely strips her of the strength she would need to tell him the truth―so she lies, drawing on what little she knows of her baby’s heart, and the laughing, bright-eyed paladin she strongly suspects he has already given it to.
“I saw your wedding,” she says instead. “Adam and Shiro―they both gave you away. I was there, too, and Lance.”
“Who―who―” Keith stammers, his pale cheeks bypassing pink and turning maroon as he scrambles out of bed. “Was it―the one I was marrying, it was―”
She nods.
“You’re going to be okay, my il’yashe, all of you. Now go back to sleep, I’m here.”