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The terms of surrender come on a Thursday.
Keith’s nursing a beer at a local bar on the outskirts of Plaht City—the kind of place Garrison grunts never go because it’s been claimed by truckers and bikers. Up on the TV, a special announcement goes up with breaking news about the alien threat. Everyone pays attention. He remembers when no one gave a shit what was on. All it’d ever been was background noise to pool games and flirting with the bartender.
Admiral Sanda looks the same. Maybe a little more haggard. It hasn’t been a great three years for any of them. “Humanity is facing the greatest threat we have ever known,” she says. “The Galra are technologically and militarily superior. But…” Even though this has to be scripted, she pauses like the words are caught reluctant in her throat. “We have been offered a reprieve.”
The energy in the bar is strange. Motionless but charged in the way air is just before a lightning strike, when the ozone seems to take up all the oxygen, and Keith has this feeling in his gut. He slaps down a $10 and gets up from the stool he’d claimed as his own.
Sanda’s voice chases him through the crowded bar. “Earth has twenty-four hours to meet the terms of surrender.” Keith never met her—was too far down the command chain even back when he wore the uniform—but her voice is all of his nightmares. Sanda made the official Garrison announcement about Kerberos. Petty, maybe, but he’s never quite forgiven her for that. “If we fail, we will all perish.” Fitting she’d announce the end of everyone else’s world. “Which is why it is critical to our survival to contact the Garrison if you have any information on former Garrison Cadet Keith—”
They track him down six hours west of Plaht City. A lucky shot takes out the gravity suppressor on his hoverbike, and he’s thrown as it nosedives into the mesa. He’s got just enough time to register how much this is going to hurt before he makes landfall.
Pain fades into blackness fades into dreaming.
Lights out was hours ago. Iverson looks the other way when they do sim runs after curfew. Probably he wouldn’t if he knew how often they end their training like this: racing across the roof of the Garrison’s sim test center, shucking uniform jackets as they go, whooping into the crisp night air. Keith’s going to win. Sure feet carry him through the rows of solar panels. The animal hindbrain of him is afraid of this game—of the predator at his back—but the rest turns the fear into wanting. Adrenaline makes the whole night feel sharper. Clearer. Better.
Before he can break through the last line, Shiro’s arm hooks around his middle and jerks both of them to a stop. Instinct sets him squirming. Makes a half-squeal erupt from his throat. Part of him wants to get away. The rest never wants to be let go.
Shiro knows that. Has always known that. “Got you,” he says, his panting breath hot on Keith’s ear. “I’ve got you.”
Reality compacts. Concrete grits under his boots as he runs. Lights out was supposed to be hours ago, but no one has the heart to enforce it. People have already started leaving candles on the fenceline.
Self preservation takes over his body. Makes him skid to a stop only a foot or so from the edge of the barracks’ roof. For a few thundering heartbeats, he regrets it.
Bile rises in his throat at the realization. Dropping into a crouch, he tucks his head between his knees and tries to breathe through the nausea. It’s hard. Each gulp of air makes him aware of the black hole yawning open somewhere in his ribcage. Breathing turns into sobbing. Tears stain his cheeks—hot and stinging—and he rubs at them with the heels of his palms. Curls further in on himself.
Grief makes it impossible to think past the physical sensation of being here. On a roof. Under a hundred thousand stars. Without Shiro.
Keith isn’t built to survive this.
Reality compacts. They’re tangled together in bed. All the sheets got kicked onto the floor an hour ago. It’s still too warm.
Shiro lets out a soft huff of complaint against Keith’s ear as he tries to shift Keith’s leg from where it’s draped across his hips. Useless. Keith’s the master of being dead weight. Eventually, Shiro gives in. It’s for the best. Still, he sounds vaguely disgruntled as he says: “Forgot how bad the cadet mattresses are.”
“We could’ve gone back to your place,” Keith says. But he doesn’t really mean it. This room holds their shape better than the stark officer quarters ever could.
Most of the barracks are terrible, but Keith’s room is especially cramped and ugly. When he’d moved in, Shiro’d scowled and gone off to argue with the Quartermaster on his behalf. It hadn’t done shit. But Shiro’d come back with glow-in-the-dark stars in hand, and they’d spent that first evening plastering the ceiling with them, and Keith’d said against regulation, and Shiro’d kept a perfectly straight face as he’d said fuck regulation, and they’d both laughed until their sides ached.
“Nah, we’re fine here.” Shiro’s voice is soft in the dark, and his hand on Keith’s hip is a warm anchor. “The bed sucks, but I like the stars.”
Keith’s not going to think about how he’s started to associate the stars with Shiro. He’s not going to think about what it means that they’ve found a closed and common orbit with each other. He’s not going to think about any of it. Closing his eyes, he knots his fingers tight into Shiro’s tee shirt and whispers, “Me too.”
Reality compacts. The Milky Way spills across the sky with a brightness that hurts his bones. They took the hoverbikes out and raced into the desert against regulation and common sense.
Keith slams off the cliff. Fingers white knuckling the handles, scream caught in his trachea, world dropping out into nothing beneath him.
Out here it’s easy to let the world in and he feels so much. The piercing bittersweet of stars and the dry vinegar tang of desert are heavy on his tongue. More pressing—more real—is the raw sweet ache of Shiro. Sometimes, when they’re out here, Keith could swear he feels their souls twining together.
Mesa races up toward him, a sudden jagged shape in the dark. Keith hits the pedals and yanks on the throttle. Engines scream as the bike’s thrusters catch him a few feet above crashing. Adrenaline soaks him as he skims against the dust without impacting.
“You still with me?”
Laughing, Keith pushes the bike to its limits as he tries to catch up with Shiro. “You can’t lose me that easy, old timer.”
Blue light splashes up from their bikes onto canyon walls. Keith feels it like an echo of a memory. Somewhere out here, there’s more of this light and something that’s not the stars or the desert. It’s calling him.
“Keith!” Shiro’s voice is full of anchoring command. “Don’t get lost out here.” Because it’d be easy to lose himself out here, the way he almost had before Shiro found him and kept him. They race, neck and neck, and it doesn’t matter who wins. So long as they’re together, Keith is found, and for that alone he’ll follow Shiro through every dark space where the stars don’t reach.
Reality compacts. There’s a thunderstorm coming on. He stands on the sagging porch of his dad’s old shack and watches the clouds race up the horizon.
Leaning his shoulder against one of the columns, Keith watches as the rain finally breaks in a hazy sheet of silver. It’s a mile or so out, but the avalanche rumble of thunder hums in his bones. Gulleys will flashflood tonight. Maybe tomorrow there’ll be flowers as he takes his bike out.
Shiro would’ve loved to see this.
Almost a year into grief, the thought hits differently than in those first raw days. Reaching up, he closes his fingers around Shiro’s dogtags. Memories flood in, steady as the rainfall, and he lets them. Shiro’s bright laugh as he pushed back rain slicked hair after they got caught in a storm. Shiro dragging him into a one-armed hug as they looked out over blooming mesa. Shiro’s eyes, the same grey as the rain.
Memories hurt. It’s why he blocked out most of what he might’ve remembered of his dad, until all he can really call to mind is the image of his dad’s back framed in the doorway as he headed out for work. Keith never wants that to happen with Shiro.
Tightening his fingers around the dogtags, until he swears the words imprinted on them will weld into his bones, Keith remembers.
Keith lets it hurt.
Reality compacts. Dawn paints the horizon gold and purple. Soon the brass and the media will descend. For now, there’s just this small room with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the launch site. The Persephone gleams like a pearl waiting to break from its shell.
“I wish you could come with me,” Shiro says, sounding wistful in a way he never does.
Need drives Keith more than thought. Grabbing at the lapels of Shiro’s dress mess jacket, he lets their bodies crowd back into the same space like they never drifted apart. “Next time,” he says. Almost vows, even though there’s no way he can know he’ll be able to keep his word. “Next time we’ll go together.”
Like all his dreams aren’t sitting on a tarmac outside, Shiro wraps an arm around Keith’s waist and smiles. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Keith breathes. A blush is crawling up the back of his neck and he’s pretty sure he’s sweating a little under his own dress mess. Not that it matters. Not when Shiro’s looking at him like this.
Lips quirking into a half smile, Shiro ducks closer. Their noses bump. “Guess I have to come back, then.” It’s an awful joke, but Keith doesn’t have time to say as much before Shiro pulls his dogtags from under his shirt. They’ve only ever been something Keith’s seen in passing. Shiro makes a point of keeping them hidden. Most of the Garrison consider the beaten metal to be old fashioned and more than a little morbid. “Will you wear these for me?”
Keith knows what he’s asking. It’s maybe the most selfish thing he’s ever heard Shiro ask. Even more than asking Keith to let him go in the first place, because at least with that Keith never had the chance to say no.
The bittersweetness of it cracks something open in him. Over the last two years he’s let Shiro carve out a space in his ribcage alongside all the other things vital to his survival. Even when Shiro goes—even if Shiro doesn’t return—that space will always hold his shape. Fingers tightening reflexively, Keith says, “Yes.”
Shiro lifts the dogtags over his own head in a smooth motion. They chime faintly as he lowers them over Keith’s head. The chain is still warm from his body, and his fingertips are warmer still as they brush over Keith’s nape.
“I’ll come back for you, baby,” Shiro promises. His hands cup Keith’s jaw, guiding him and gentling him, until their mouths fit together just so.
It’s Keith’s first, and it’s nothing like he fantasized about. In the protective dark of his room, he’d imagined something clumsy and spit slick and bruising. That’s how the kids back at the home kissed, and it’s how he’s seen some of the other cadets kiss when they mean it. Shiro kisses him soft and sweet and sure, and Keith doesn’t have time to worry about how to move his lips or if it’s pathetic to rest his weight against Shiro’s chest.
When Shiro pulls back, Keith lets out a whine as he rises onto his tiptoes. Their noses bump again. Laughing, Shiro nuzzles against the arch of Keith’s cheekbone. “You’ll wait until I come back, right?”
“I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
Waking up comes hard. Least he thinks it’s waking up, because he doesn’t usually dream in the earthquake shatter patterns of a ship breaking atmo.
Nausea curls in his gut. Adrenaline kickstarts his system, and he rolls to the edge of the cot he’s been placed on so he can puke without choking himself. The contents of his stomach end up all over the beaten metal grating of the floor.
“Ew,” someone says. “Guess you’re up.”
Spitting out the last grimacing aftertaste, he tries to get an elbow under his body and shoves upward. Grit is what keeps him from collapsing back down. Just about every part of him hurts. Nothing’s felt like this since he got into a barfight on his twentieth birthday—two years after mission failure—and almost didn’t wake up. Keith squints in the direction of the voice, says, “Guess I am.”
Their laugh nearly covers the click of a handheld automedic turning on. “It’s gross, but I think this is a good sign.”
“Puking is a good sign?”
“Yeah, probably.” Whoever’s been talking to him finally moves close enough to be more than a blurry shape. They’re a girl. Unfamiliar, but she kind of looks like Holt if Holt’d been a girl, and about a foot shorter, and fueled by energy drinks and spite. Maybe itʼs the concussion but he thinks she’s even got the same glasses. “They brought you in with head trauma. Blood everywhere, unresponsive pupils, total dead weight. My mom was pissed.”
Each pass of the automedic reduces the ache in his limbs. Top of the line Garrison tech—experimental, unavailable to civilians, and effective. Combined with the jolt of takeoff and the sickening lurch of his bike getting shot out from under him, it’s pretty clear running didn’t mean shit.
“Are you with the Garrison?” he asks, even though he doesn’t think she is. No uniform, and she’s comfortable with the tech in her hand but not with using it on a person.
The girl scrunches her nose. “ No. I’m a sacrificial lamb. Same as you.”
Keith’s never met anyone who looked less like a sacrificial lamb, and he wants to tell her so, but he also wants her to keep healing him. “Do you know what they want us for?”
“We’re part of the bargain. We—my mom and I—are going to be joining their scientific development team.” Rocking back on her heels, she presses her tongue against the inside of her cheek. Like she’s thinking over if she wants to tell him the rest. Apparently she lands on yes, because she puffs out a breath before going: “No one said, exactly, but I heard one of the aides say you were going to the Champion.”
Coverage of the Galra has been sparse. Mostly based on hearsay. But he’d seen enough to know this invasion is led by a warlord, known solely by the title of ‘Champion.’
“Shit,” he says.
“Shit,” she agrees.
Back on Earth, when he’d gunned his bike out into the desert, it hadn’t felt like running. Whoever the Garrison was looking for, it couldn’t be him. Keith isn’t the key to saving humanity. If he’d died in those first few days of the Galra threat looming in upper atmo, no one would’ve known or cared or mourned.
Even now he can’t think of why an alien warlord would want him. Then again, he can’t think of why an alien warlord would want a teenage girl and her mother either.
Keith eyes her as she focuses the automedic on his sprained wrist. Head trauma or no, he’s not imagining the Holt resemblance. There’d been a girl and a woman who’d stood on the tarmac near him during the launch. Gambling on that memory, he says: “You’re Katie Holt.”
“Took you long enough,” she says, which is as much of a confirmation as he’s likely to get.
“Huh.” Keith flicks his gaze away from her and toward the reinforced beams of their holding cell. He’s pretty sure this qualifies as a cargo hold on official schematics. Nothing could be less reassuring. They didn’t even rank a proper holding cell.
After Katie powers down the automedic, he takes a full stock of his body again. Most of the aches have reduced to what he’d call manageable. All that’s left is the exhaustion of enhanced healing. Good enough.
“Did you and your mom come up with an escape plan?”
Katie doesn’t quite meet his eyes. Instead she fiddles with the automedic. “Not… exactly. It’s not that we couldn’t. It’s just—” Everyone will die if they succeed.
This is so far out of his depth. Keith wishes—for probably the millionth time—that Shiro were here. Unconsciously he reaches up, fingers already curling around the space where Shiro’s dogtags usually rest. The space is empty.
Sometimes the dogtags slip around on the chain. On automatic, he skims his fingertips up to grab the chain. Instead, he encounters a thick band of cool metal.
Exhaustion numbs him. Nothing processes, not at first. He keeps touching, feeling around its rim for a latch or seam or lock. There’s nothing. The metal is light, flawless, and doesn’t yield or bite into his neck no matter how he yanks at it. Worst is the way it almost seems to hum beneath his fingertips. All the pieces click together.
A collar. They put a fucking collar on him.
Keith snarls. Clawing at the collar is futile but he can’t bear to leave it alone now that he’s found it. Even if it doesn’t hurt, they hunted him down like a wild animal and collared him.
“Would you—” Katie starts, dropping the automedic and reaching for him with both hands. She flinches when he turns on her. To her credit, she stands her ground anyway, even takes a step forward as she snaps, “Stop that!”
Surprise quiets his hands and his snarl. People mostly stopped challenging him after. Viewed him as too feral to bother with. Katie’s staring him right in the eye with her mouth twisted into a scowl.
It’s brave of her, so he tries not to notice the unfocused glitter of her eyes behind her glasses. They’re close enough now for him to see she’s very young and very afraid.
After a moment, she groans. “They brought you in with it on. I tried getting it off, but the tech’s beyond me without my tools.” Slender fingers—callused by hours with sparks and wires—touch the edge of his collar. Too close to vital spots, and he wants to snap his teeth at her but doesn’t because it’d be cruel to scare her more. “Pretty sure it’s Galra.”
Keith leans back. She lets him—and the collar—go. They eye one another warily. Neither of them ask the obvious question of why the Galra would want him collared before handing him over to their Champion.
“Did they—” Keith stops. Swallows dry enough that his throat clicks. “Did I have on dogtags when they brought me in?”
Someone like her, who grew up on the Garrison periphery, knows what this implies. What it means. She hunches her shoulders. Not like she’s afraid, but like she doesn’t want to hurt him the way she’s about to. “No.”
The universe always finds one more thing to take.
It takes three aides and two hours to get him into the wedding clothes provided by the Galra. He wonders if it’s a test: are they evolved enough from the primordial ooze to figure out this series of delicate fastenings and gauzy fabrics.
“You look wonderful,” one of the aides says. Competent hands twitch the last of his skirts into place before she steps back. “The colors suit you.” Maybe she was chosen for her ability to sound sincere.
Biting the inside of his cheek, he looks down at the layers of shimmering chiffon. What he’s been provided is a wedding gown—something no one has chosen to comment on even as they cinched him into it with whisper-thin silver chains. Its beautiful in an alien way. Skirts eddy around his legs in a thousand shades of navy and indigo. Jewelry chimes faintly with each shift of his body. All of it makes him feel like he fell through nebulae.
If it weren’t for the electrostim shackles they’d put him in and the bruises they’d put on him, no one would be able to tell he’s an unwilling sacrifice.
Like she can hear his thoughts, the aide reaches out and rests her hand on his forearm. “You know, I am sorry,” the aide says. Quieter this time. “No one should be sold to purchase our planet.”
“Sorry didn’t stop you.”
“No, it didn’t.” The aide retracts her hand. Pushes her glasses up the slim bridge of her nose. Looks across the room to where several Garrison officers and aides are clustered around a PADD. One side of her mouth twitches into a grimace. “I would do it again for my family. But that doesn’t mean I’m not sorry.”
Honesty’s always had a way of disarming him. Fact is he knows the math of this situation. One orphan against the whole of humanity. There was never any version of the equation that didn’t end with him here. So he offers: “I’ve survived worse.”
“The Kerberos Mission,” she says. It’s not a question.
No real way to answer, because everyone knows how he burned out. Most promising cadet of his year going down like a comet in atmo. “Yeah, well, I survived.”
Across the room, a door opens and more officers pour in. Seems like most of the Garrison brass have turned out. If this goes badly, Earth will be functionally helpless. Keith thinks they know. Nervous energy clogs the air.
“Shit,” the aide mutters. One neat step, and she’s all but blocked him from view. No one cares yet. They will soon. Both of them know it, and the aide’s hands are unsteady. “I thought there’d be more time.” Beaten metal glints in her palm. “Katie Holt requested I return these to you.” Blood thrums in his ears as she reaches up—like she’s getting ready to adjust the drape of the dress’s train—and loops a chain around his neck.
Dogtags settle against his sternum. Instinct makes him try to move—to reach up and touch them. Electrostim hums. Keeps him motionless. But if he focuses, he can feel the tags growing warm against his skin and the words he’d memorized like liturgy.
“Is he ready?”
“Almost,” the aide says. Quick fingers tuck the dogtags beneath his bodice, smoothing the line of the gown in a way that’d be too familiar if she hadn’t just given him back a piece of his soul. “There.”
Like her words were all that’d been holding them back, Garrison personnel surge around them in a breaking tide of humanity. Keith isn’t surprised when the aide lets herself be pulled out with it. What she did is a court martial offense. Maybe one day he’ll be able to thank her for it. For now, he waits in the eye of the hurricane.
They’ve lowered the electrostim lock on his muscles. No one tries to take the shackles off. Keith takes the reprieve anyway. It’s not like their assessment of him as a fight-or-flight risk is wrong.
Like a stormfront causing new pressure systems, the Admiral steps forward and scatters people in her wake. Navigating the apocalypse has taken a lot out of her. Or maybe itʼs just that he’d expected the source of his nightmares to be taller. “Our savior,” she says. It comes out remarkably bleak.
“Something like that.” Without the electrostim hum in his body to keep him still, it’s pure instinct to reach for his newly returned dogtags. They’re warm against his fingertips, even through the thin layers of his bodice, and he feels something settle.
“Are you ready?” the Admiral asks. It’s the first bit of kindness she’s shown him.
Keith closes his eyes and curls his fingers tight around Shiro’s dogtags. He thinks of kind grey eyes, of soft kisses stolen in the moments before the launch, of mourning an empty grave. There’s nothing left for him on Earth.
Nothing except a few billion people relying on him to save them from the warlord they call the Champion. “Yes,” he says. “I’m ready.”
Galra hold weddings in the command bridge. Or, at least, Galra hold weddings in the command bridge when it’s part of a shotgun alliance.
The Galran flagship is seamlessly disorienting. Earth doesn’t build ships on this scale. When the Galra had loomed in atmo, blocking out the stars, Keith hadn’t really appreciated how fuckall big they really were.
Now there’s nothing to do but appreciate as he stands on a dais that’s been arranged in front of the bridge’s viewfield. Everything about the ship’s design is pared down to the extreme, lit in bruised shades of purple and magenta, and he’s adrift in a way that isn’t entirely due to head trauma. The head trauma isn’t helping, though.
Bodies crowd the room—Galra and Garrison alike—and the weight of their combined gazes makes his skin crawl. They stand in loose clumps, scattered around the dais. Only the Holt women stand alone. Katie gave him a wobbly smile and a thumbs up when their eyes met.
Despite her support, Keith feels pinned between the expectant crowds at his front and the dizzying tumble of stars at his back. No one has explained what the ceremony will consist of. Instead, he’s been left to stand and be stared at.
Awareness pricks at the back of his neck. Not quite a warning—the sharp bitter he’d gotten used to at the start of a fight—but something like recognition.
There’s a Galra approaching him. Male, and built on a scale that makes the architecture seem reasonable. They’re at eye level with one another, even though Keith is standing on the dais and the Galra is not. Size alone wouldn’t mean much. Not all Galra are soldiers. But this one is. Obviously so, down to the battle ready set of his broad shoulders in heavy armor. When he steps within the starlight bleeding in from the viewfield, his right arm gleams metallic. Prosthetic, Keith notes distantly, but no less deadly looking for it.
Reluctantly, Keith drags his gaze up to the Galra’s face. Humanoid, more so than most of the Galra he’s seen. Made up of high cheekbones and a firm jaw and a straight nose, and he’d be handsome in the human way if not for the eerily golden eyes and the brutal looking fangs digging into his full lower lip.
Dredging up his courage and his pride and his spite, Keith lifts his chin and says, “Champion.”
The Champion smiles and reaches up with his organic hand. Two fingers nudge under Keith’s chin before skimming down his throat. All the way down to where the dogtags rest. Claws rasp over him, leaving a tremble in their wake, not quite snagging the delicate fabric of his bodice. It should read as a threat. It does read as a threat.
But even as all of that registers, he’s drawn back to the tilt of the Champion’s mouth as he breathes out a quietly desperate: “Keith.”
For a teetering second, Keith feels the world fall apart around him. Instinct makes him step back, and his heel catches on the edge of the dais. Any more and he’ll fall. What he means to ask is how did you know about me or better yet why did you ask for me, but what comes out is: “How do you know my name?”
Maybe it’s his imagination, but he thinks the Champion’s eyes dim. He doesn’t imagine the way the Champion’s hand withdraws. “It’s not important.”
Part of him wants to argue, but then the Galra meets his eyes again. Keith swallows, and tries not to think about how no one’s looked at him with this intense almost reverence in years. Not since—
“Shiro?”
Big hands come up and cup his cheeks. One cool and metallic, the other warm and lightly furred, both careful as they coax him into tipping his head up. Their noses bump as the Champion—as Shiro—leans down to rest their foreheads against one another.
A sob chokes Keith at the familiar gesture. Whatever scraps of preservation instincts he still possesses says he needs to pull back. Instead he curls his fingers around the nape of Shiro’s neck, feeling the gain of velvet soft fur and the familiar whorl of a cowlick. “Shiro?” he asks again. Something that could be hope or could be ruination claws to life in the empty spaces of his ribcage.
“Hey, baby,” Shiro says. There’s a gravel to his voice like he’s holding back a purr or a growl or both. One side of his mouth tips up. Itʼs a familiar smile, tender and a little self-conscious, though the glint of fangs is new. “Told you I’d come back for you.”
Keith thumps a fist against the center of Shiro’s chest. “And you died.”
“And I made you a promise.” The smile fades into something softer. Shiro’s thumbs smooth over Keith’s cheekbones in soft arcs. “Death couldn’t stop me. All it could do was delay me for a little while.”
“I mourned you for three years,” Keith chokes out. Even now he can feel the weight of that grief, so much that he was never entirely sure he’d survive it, and his bones ache with it. “Do you know what it was like? I waited for you knowing you’d never come.”
Growling low in his chest, Shiro pulls Keith up into a kiss that’s almost bruising in its intensity. Fangs nip at his lower lip, not hard enough to draw blood but enough to make him gasp with pained arousal. An arm—the organic one from the way the claws snag on his skirts—catches him round the waist and anchors him in. They don’t separate. Not really. Their panting breaths mingle as Shiro murmurs, “I was always coming back for you.”
Most of the ceremony passes for Keith in a blur. The dais lowers, putting the two of them on equal footing and forcing the realization that Shiro is now a good two feet taller than he had been as a human. No vows are exchanged. Instead, a slender Galra reads off the terms of surrender and the few concessions humanity has bought.
After all of it, Shiro draws him in again with a hand at the small of his back. Its width spans the entirety of his waist easily, a warm brand against his bare skin and a reminder of how different things are.
Keith’d know the raw sweetness of Shiro in any reality though. He rubs a thumb over the armored bracers, noting the slight dings and scratches in the metal, proof that it’s been used for its intended purpose. Later—when they’re tangled together in a bed with the stars glowing overhead—he’s going to coax out the last three years.
Someone coughs. The slender Galra from earlier, his expression managing to be equal parts deferential and sardonic. Hell of a combination. “Not to interrupt, but I believe everyone would feel better if you complete the mating ceremony.” After a moment, he gestures to where Admiral Sanda is staring them down with mutiny in her eyes. “The humans, especially, given that we do not accept their surrender until the conclusion of the terms.”
Chatter bubbles up in the wake of this unsubtle reminder. Like sheep reminded of the wolves at the fold, the Garrison representatives tighten the ranks.
“We’re not done?” Keith feels something prick at the base of his spine. Not a reaction to the Garrison—who’ve been full of nervous energy since the first sight of alien warcraft—but the Galra who’ve begun to perk up.
One of Shiro’s fingers hooks in the collar at Keith’s throat. Tugs, slow but firm, until Keith obeys the silent command and looks back into his eyes. It’s the first time Shiro’s touched it, or even acknowledged it, since all this began. Now he tugs it again. The metal seems to hum, like a circuit’s been completed. “Do you know what this is?”
“A collar.”
The blunt answer brings another reluctant half smile of Shiro’s lips. “Yes. Part of the ceremony is that I remove it.”
Resisting—barely—the urge to thump Shiro’s chest again, he hisses, “Okay, get it off me.”
Shiro withdraws his hand and holds it up. “The collar is keyed to my quintessence. Removing it means I have to use this.” Slowly, the prosthetic begins to glow. Dim at first, focused in the joints and the tips of his claws, but gaining power. Almost lavender in the burning heart of it. “Itʼs the only way to sync the quintessence properly.”
Quintessence shouldn’t mean anything to Keith. On some level it doesn’t, even as he feels the word echo down to his bones. Distantly he wonders if itʼs what he feels when he’s out in the desert or when he kisses Shiro.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Shiro has never lied to him.
Keith swallows around the whimper caught in his throat and nods. “Okay,” he says. His eyes remain fixed on the white-hot metal. Somewhere along the way his pulse kicked up to a trembling thunder at the thought of that going anywhere near his skin. But Shiro has never lied to him, and Shiro has never hurt him, and Shiro has crossed the universe to come back to him. “Okay.”
There’s a heartbeat pause, and then Shiro reaches for his throat. Instinct makes Keith jerk, and the whimper caught in his throat finally claws its way out. “Steady, baby.”
Part of him wants to snap back that he is steady. The rest knows it’d be a lie. He’s only still on his feet because of the arm curled tight around his waist and the fingers he’s dug into the chinks in Shiro’s armor. Instead he says again, “Okay.”
But Shiro doesn’t bring the claws back. Some of the gold recedes from his eyes. For the first time, his irises are revealed and they’re the same gunmetal grey they’d always been. Ducking closer, he brushes his lips along the hot arc of Keith’s cheekbone. “Trust me,” Shiro says. Quiet, gentle, commanding.
“I do.”
Metal hisses. Ambient heat licks at his neck. Time slows to a crawl. Releasing the collar isn’t a single definitive cut, but a pattern that chimes and hums with each successful pass. Keith can be patient and pliant. Breathe slow. Bask in the heat on his skin that’s just short of painful.
The collar hits the ground with a faint clang.
Cheers go up. Keith almost wonders if the ceremony is over. The humans seem to think so, at least, but Shiro’s still holding him bruisingly close.
After a moment, Shiro inhales shakily and pulls him even closer. Their size difference makes him pull Keith half off his feet. It’s a little like the first uncertain days of their friendship, when Keith’d still been too scrawny by half and Shiro’d always been pulling him into hugs. And like back then, Shiro only relaxes when Keith’s arms wind around his shoulders to return the hold.
“Need to mark you,” he says. His arms tighten around Keith’s body in a way that can’t be read as anything but possessive. “Thought I could control it but I... I need to mark you.”
This must be why the Galra have stayed quiet and watchful. Keith swallows, skimming a hand over the short hairs at the back of Shiro’s neck as he thinks it over. Marking could mean so many things. Branding, tattooing, or even another collar. It’ll be permanent, for Shiro to sound this wrecked about it. When he looks up and their eyes meet, there’s no mistaking the desperate animal need in Shiro’s eyes. It knocks the breath out of his lungs. Even in those heated moments before the launch, both of them desperate to make the thing between them real, it hadn’t been like this.
Shiro looks like if Keith denies him, it’ll ruin him.
Most things in Keith’s life have hurt, though, and he’d lived three years with battered dogtags as the only sign he’d ever been loved. Nudging his nose against Shiro’s cheekbone, he whispers: “Mark me.”
Kisses press against his temple, his cheekbone, his jaw. Down and down and down, even as he’s hitched higher in Shiro’s arms. When his toes leave the floor, he shudders as want hits him low in the gut.
“Shiro.”
“Got you,” Shiro says, chasing the words with another kiss. Muscles flex as he rebalances Keith and nips at his pulse point. “I’ve got you.”
Pain punches through him as teeth break skin. The bite centers on his left side, in the soft jointure between his neck and shoulder, deep enough to leave a permanent scar.
And honestly, permanence isn’t a concept he’s familiar with.
Too many things that are supposed to be permanent aren’t. Family is permanent, but he remembers the line of his father’s back better than the man’s face. Marriage is permanent, but people take off their rings and never put them back on. Love—
By now, he knows better than to believe in permanence for good things. Death is permanent. Grief is permanent. Scars are permanent.
The two of them—they’re going to be permanent. Maybe that realization makes him smile, or maybe it’s just his brain frantically pumping out hormones to dull the pain into something more bearable. But either way Keith’s happy.
Happier still when Shiro finally pulls his teeth out and presses a bloody kiss to the wound, sweet in a way the bite couldn’t be. “I love you,” he says. “I love you.”
Keith cups Shiro’s jaw in his hands. Velvet soft fur rasps under his palms as he pulls his husband in for another kiss. The crush of their bodies reminds him of the dogtags, still tucked beneath his bodice and pressed into the skin above his heart. It’s been three years, all to be on an alien warship tasting his own blood in his husband’s mouth. “I love you,” he says. Breathes it into the whisper of space between their mouths. “It’s good to have you back.”
“It’s good to be back.”