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Keith is barely eleven the first time he turns to the stars to ask for answers. He’s almost fifteen when they answer.
“Why did you leave?” he had asked, teary eyed and desperate for his father. The star had only flickered in silence.
He never asks again, swallowing his tears as he’s passed from home to home faster than the seasons change. The star stays in his peripheral, always flickering.
September ends with a blazing heat wave and a door being slammed in his face. His stint in the detention center, bailed out or not, has done him no favours.
It's habit that has him swallowing frustrated tears as he storms off the porch. The hoverbike purrs under him, dust kicking high as he peels out of the yard, down the street, and out of town. The sun is setting but its heat still presses against his back, heavy and stifling.
He blames his tears on the force of the wind.
The sky is just turning dark when he peels across the desert to his destination. The shack is a silhouette on the horizon and the star, normally a beacon towards it, is missing.
Probably not dark enough, he reasons, and crouches low as he switches gears.
But it gets darker and the star doesn't appear. The shack grows and grows until he's coasting to a stop in the yard. Someone is already there, standing before the porch wearing an outfit he’s never seen. They turn at his approach, strange and otherworldly.
Keith cuts the engine, engulfing them in the silence of the desert. His own breath sounds loud in his ears. Slowly, palms out, the person raises their arms and removes their helmet. The face that appears is foreign, not human. Their eyes glow in the dark. There’s something distinctly alien about everything.
“Who are you?” he asks. Markings rise up over their cheeks. Their hair, bi-coloured, almost looks like fur. Claws, not nails, are visible through their gloves as they clutch their helmet.
“Keith.”
Keith is almost fifteen when the stars take him away.
––
Keith is sixteen when his mother, Krolia, he still calls her, is sent undercover. He clutches his blade–her blade, really–as he watches her ship disappear among the stars. He had offered it to her, jaw set and stubborn. Krolia gave it right back, snuck into its sheath as she hugged him goodbye. He only realized when he reached back in habit just as her ship was leaving base.
He watches until it becomes just another speck of light, lost amongst the mass of stars when he blinks.
Earth is out there somewhere among the stars and galaxies and nebulae. The sun’s light doesn’t reach them, far away as they are. Too young, too new. Keith wonders off hand what happened to Officer Shirogane. If he still thinks about the kid that stole his car.
He still has the card back in his rooms.
Keith scoffs to himself. Shirogane probably doesn’t think of him at all. He imagines the story they could have made about his disappearance. How some troubled kid got himself lost in the desert and they couldn’t find a trace of him. Or maybe they didn’t even care to.
Keith sighs and shakes his head. He flips his knife between his hands.
No use thinking about it.
He looks at where he last saw his mother’s ship. At the stars that glimmer, full of life. “Keep her safe for me.”
––
Seventeen brings a whirlwind of change. His first mission as a Blade brings him back to the outer reaches of the universe. Back to the Milky Way, back to the Sol system, back to Earth. And with a compromised ship, comms busted, navigation broken, and engine failing, it’s his only chance at survival.
He falls in the glaring light of sunset, barely able to coordinate his landing to some place familiar. The veins of the canyon are a beacon, somewhere sheltered he knows will be hard to investigate if he’s spotted.
Keith crashes amid desert brush and sand with the walls of the canyon towering above him. There’s a chill when he wakes, the sun long gone. His suit must’ve torn in the fall. A voice murmurs above him, but his head pounds and his vision blurs. All he sees are shadows.
He needs to get up, take stock. Find out what’s wrong and fix it so he can get home.
He can’t be found.
He forces his eyes open, squints through the pain and forces them to focus. The shadows solidify, take the shape of someone tall and broad. A man whose face lights up when Keith manages to focus on him.
“Thank god,” he sighs. And then, “Just hold tight, I’ll get you out."
Keith knows that face, the voice a dim echo of things that could've been. His heart pounds in his ears as his fingers find the release and he lunges forward.
Shirogane does nothing Keith expects when he's grabbed. There's little resistance as Keith throws them both out of the wreckage. He has both hands lifted when Keith pins him to the ground.
His eyes are wide but he doesn't look scared when Keith bares his knife.
“I know who you are,” Keith tells him. “I know who you work for. You're going to let me go and you're not going to tell anyone what you found." But Shirogane just blinks at him. He brandishes the knife a little more and Shirogane nods with barely a glance to it.
A moment, two, and Keith feels the adrenaline fading. He has to trust Shirogane will keep his word. He pulls away, wary, even as Shirogane continues to lay on the ground. Then he runs.
The stars above bring a certain level of melancholy, the tract of the galaxy stretching across the sky achingly familiar. They guided him, once upon a time. He hopes, desperately, that they’ll guide him again.
––
The thing about celestial bodies is that they don’t respond.
They don’t spell out words in the sky nor do they whisper in his ear the answers to his endless questions. By eighteen, Keith has lost count of how often he’s asked how to get home. Of course, by eighteen, so much has changed, so much has happened, that home has become the last thing on his mind.
There’s a new request now, one that shouldn’t have happened but Keith can’t bring himself to regret.
Bring Shiro home safe.
Originally a thorn in his side, Shirogane became Shiro and Shiro became irreplaceable. The thorn grew roots so deeply embedded in every aspect of his life that he could scarcely breathe when they were torn away. A three month mission, an expedition Shiro was so, so excited for, reported back as lost due to a pilot error.
So Keith searches for answers that the stars refuse to give him and every night he begs.
Bring him home safe.
Don’t let the Empire find him.
––
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.
Shiro. Voltron.
War.
Then… Peace.
At least, a brief unavoidable stretch of it as he and Krolia navigate the quantum abyss. War lingers in the back of their minds, ever present as every flare washes over them and brings memories new and old. A future as unavoidable as the path they took to get to it.
But for the time being, trapped as they are, they settle. They live. They reminisce.
“Dad took me stargazing once,” Keith murmurs one night, prompted by a memory of the man that had washed over them both. Shoulder to shoulder, they lay in the grass and watch the strange, ever shifting sky. “He took us away from the city, to where the stars were brightest, and told me he had a secret.”
Krolia hums, a soft noise that prompts Keith to continue.
“He said, ‘Your Mama’s out there. She’s fighting to keep us safe from some really bad people’.” Keith points to the sky just like he remembers his father doing as Krolia sighs beside him. Then he smiles and huffs out a laugh before letting his arm drop. “I just thought it was his way of saying you were dead.”
There’s a pause, a moment where Krolia takes a breath and holds it. When she releases it, there’s a faint tremor that Keith wouldn’t have heard if he weren’t right next to her. “He didn’t even try to lie.”
Keith laughs through the lump in his throat. “No, he really didn’t.”
And it prompts another memory, and another, and another until the night is spent just talking about his father instead of sleeping. They talk until the stars that do show start to fade and with them, their ability to stay awake.
He falls asleep asking his father to watch over them.
––
The habit continues, as does the war, until it doesn’t.
The war ends with universal fanfare and then comes the relief efforts. Strangely enough, those don’t require the same amount of wishing upon stars that Keith is so accustomed to doing. Especially when he ends up visiting those star systems and they become less a nebulous object in the sky and more another home he helps to rebuild.
Twenty-six finds him back on Earth for a short time but not at the Garrison nor Plaht City where it’s become a nexus for interplanetary trade. He returns to the shack out in the middle of the desert. The place that Shiro found him after his fateful crash in the canyon. The place that his mother spirited him away from. The place that he grew up with his father in.
It’s run down, unusurpring after years of neglect, but Keith enters anyway.
The windows are broken, some floorboards missing, and there are holes in the ceiling that he can see the stars through. Keith sits on the moth eaten couch and tries to figure out if he’s been to those systems or not.
He’s not sure how long he stares but the approach of someone else draws his attention away. The steps across the sand are familiar, the weight on the porch bringing a smile to his lips.
Shiro always knew where to find him.
And it is Shiro that appears in the doorway, grinning as soon as he spots Keith.
“You found me.” Keith doesn’t try to keep the answering grin off his face. He takes Shiro in as he nears, the relaxed set to his shoulders, the easy tilt of his head, the gentle happiness that dances in his eyes. When Shiro sits next to him, they’re pressed together from shoulder to thigh.
“You’re back early,” Shiro comments, and Keith is. Barely a day early but early all the same.
Keith hums noncommittally and returns to his stargazing. He still hasn’t figured out if that location is a place he’s been to yet or if it’s even a place that he can go to. He wants to go. He wants to find out. He wants…
“What are you thinking?”
Shiro whispers like they’re sharing secrets, leaning close, closer, so his breath brushes across Keith’s ear. Keith closes his eyes. He doesn’t need to ask the stars for this. Hasn’t needed to for a long time.
He leans towards Shiro so their breath shares the same space. His whisper is just as playful. “I want to retire.”
“Oh? And where do you want to retire?” The grin is back, contagious, infectious.
“Anywhere, everywhere. I want to go there.” And Keith leans back and points through the ceiling. Shiro’s gaze follows, leaning closer so he’s nearly resting his head against Keith’s.
“And what is there, exactly?”
“I don’t know! But I want to find out.”
Shiro’s hand wraps around his and they both squeeze tight. “Sounds perfect.”