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It seemed like a normal day in the Castle of Lions– well, as normal a day as you can have in space. Everyone got up at the usual time, Lance with his usual dose of complaining at being rushed through his routine, and gathered in the dining room to eat breakfast and go over what Allura had planned for them. Apparently there was a cluster of systems that had all set off distress signals recently (relatively, given the 10,000 year time scale) that the Princess wanted them to investigate. Business as usual.
Until Keith swept into the dining room, disheveled like he’d just rolled out of bed fully clothed, and grabbed Pidge by the wrist.
“Woah, Mullet, anyone ever tell you to keep your hands to yourself?”
Ignoring Lance entirely, Keith said, “I need to talk to you.” His voice had that almost growly quality it got sometimes, but so far Pidge had only ever heard it come out during battle or, like a few days ago at the party on Arus, when he was pissed. Without further ado, he hauled her out of her seat and towards the door.
“Pidge!” Hunk sounded alarmed, so Pidge turned and gave him a reassuring smile and a ‘stand down’ hand gesture before Keith pulled her out of the room. They didn’t need to panic yet– sure, Keith could be… intense, but they were still teammates. If he needed to talk, she’d hear him out.
She expected to be led to the lounge or the Lion hangars. Instead Keith took her down to her own lab, shut the door behind them, and finally let go of her wrist when he plopped himself down in Hunk’s chair, arms folded tightly over his chest.
Pidge clambered into her own seat, taking the moment of stillness as an opportunity to study him. She didn’t know Keith very well yet and wasn’t the best at reading people in general, but it didn’t take an empath to see his pale skin and bloodshot eyes and determine that he was exhausted, like he hadn’t slept in a month, even though he’d seemed perfectly fine yesterday.
“Well?” she asked, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. Keith, as usual, didn’t mince words.
“I’m stuck in a time loop.”
Pidge blinked exactly once. “Oh. Well, that’s…” Possible, given their circumstances. For a moment she considered the idea that he was messing with her, but a single look at his face dispelled that notion– he was so grim, like a soldier returning from a mission gone horribly, horribly wrong. “Ok. How many–”
“This is the sixty-seventh loop,” he cut in flatly, like he’d answered the question before and was sick of it, which, yeah, that would make sense. Then she processed what he said and her jaw dropped.
“Two months? Jesus, no wonder–”
“I look like shit?” Keith finally cracked a smile, but it was thin and exhausted and vanished again a second later. “Sorry, but you always say that.”
Pidge leaned back in her chair, folding her legs criss-cross so that they wouldn’t dangle over the floor. “So this isn’t the first time you’ve asked me for help with this.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Keith shook his head anyway.
“And whatever I did before clearly didn’t work. So–”
Keith immediately began rattling off a long list of theories and attempted solutions they had apparently tried before. It was clear that he didn’t fully understand some of the things he was saying, but he recited them precisely nonetheless, and to his credit it did all sound like the ideas that were already racing around in Pidge’s head or things she would think up. It covered the basics– some kind of external attack, an anomaly in this section of space, a strange effect from a nearby celestial body– and also more advanced theories involving time and some esoteric stuff about quintessence that they’d probably gotten from Allura at some point in the loop.
“We even tried jettisoning Sendak at one point,” Keith said towards the end of the long, long list of failures, “and you’ve run every internal and external scan the Castle is capable of making.”
Unable to turn off her curiosity for even a second, Pidge asked, “How many is that?”
“Two hundred and fifty-two.”
“Damn.” Pidge rubbed her hands together, then curled her fingers and cracked her knuckles. “Ok, let me think for a second.”
Keith sat quietly and waited with unusual patience as Pidge ran over the list of solutions in her mind.
It was possible that– wait, no, that was on the list already. Maybe they could– nope, they tried that too. What if– no, shit.
Eventually she gave up. A headache of frustration was beginning to build, but she rubbed it away and stubbornly turned back to Keith, who was still watching and waiting with the same flat expression. Solemn, but distant, someone going through the motions of a terrible but familiar dance. Pidge’s stomach twisted in response, but she did her best to hide it as she started talking again.
“Alright, if none of that worked, then I think we need to go back to basics– we gotta know the rules before we can break them, right? So what are the rules of the time loop?”
Keith’s brow furrowed. “The rules?”
“Yeah, like– how long does it usually last before it resets?”
“Um.” She could see him doing the math in his head, eyes unfocused. “It’s not always the same, but I think around… fourteen vargas?”
Huh. “So it doesn’t reset at the same time every day?”
She didn’t miss how Keith swallowed at the question. “No,” he said quietly, but when Pidge waited for him to elaborate, he said nothing. As she was rapidly learning, getting Keith to talk often required poking him with the proverbial stick. Repeatedly.
“So what makes it reset?”
His eyes darted away. His crossed arms tightened, hunching his shoulders in, and Pidge’s stomach fully dropped as his mask finally fell away. This emotion Pidge knew intimately: fear, but not adrenaline-quick terror that sent you running. This was fear mixed with despair, the heavy kind that weighed you down like clinging mud, the kind she’d first felt upon being told about Kerberos and had been desperately trying to avoid ever since. This kind of fear felt like drowning, and Keith looked like he was letting himself sink.
The words were so soft they were barely audible. “It resets when someone dies.”
“Oh, shit.” It was the only thing she could think to say, and for some reason it made Keith chuckle, the sound utterly lacking humor. “Is it… the same person every time, or…?”
Keith’s voice slipped back into the almost robotic quality it had before when he was reciting their solutions to her. “Hunk has died three times. Lance seven, Coran nine, Allura twelve. Y-you… you’ve died fifteen times. And… and Shiro…”
“I can do the math,” Pidge said, throat tight, and Keith stopped with a clear sigh of relief. Purposefully ignoring the fact that she had apparently died fifteen times in different versions of this exact same day (and it very well could happen again holy shit) she pressed forward with her questioning. “Does it always happen the same way? Is it some kind of event we have to figure out how to stop?”
Keith shook his head. He still wouldn’t look at her, but that was fine with Pidge. Who knew what her face was doing right now. “It changes. Sometimes it’s a Galra attack, sometimes the Castle malfunctions, sometimes a wormhole goes crazy. Once it was a fast-acting virus.” He shuddered, and Pidge decided not to ask for details about that one.
“And you’re the only one who remembers the loop?”
A silent nod.
Closing her eyes, Pidge shoved a hand against the desk, making her chair spin. Assuming this wasn’t just some fluke or anomaly of space time, what was the point of the loop? Who was benefitting from making Keith watch them die sixty-seven times in a row? The easy answer was the Galra, but how? And why was it centered on Keith, as opposed to the people the Galra usually targeted, like Shiro and Allura?
Hold on. She opened her eyes again and lasered in on Keith. “Do you ever die in the loop?”
Keith cringed back at the question, which was answer enough, but he still said, “N-no. Not yet. And I haven’t, uh, tried.”
The emotions that Pidge had been keeping at bay with problem-solving suddenly rushed in. Keith had spent the last two months watching all of them die over and over again and in any one of those loops he could’ve tried it himself. After sixty-seven tries she still couldn’t figure it out– what if she never did? What if Keith was stuck like this forever, living in a waking nightmare while the rest of the universe remained frozen, all because she wasn’t smart enough to fix it?
Keith, oblivious to her sudden spiral, kept talking, his voice dropped to a mumble. “I’ve thought about it, but I thought that– I thought, maybe, if this is some kind of Galra weapon or something, that if the person it's centered on died it might– I don’t know, explode or something? And then everyone–” He stopped and shook his head, his voice taking on a tang of bitterness. “Or maybe I’m just being a coward.”
“No,” Pidge said immediately. “You’re right. It might be. Hell, the Galra probably know from having Red for so long that she’s the pickiest about her Paladin– they might be trying to get you to…” She didn’t want to say it, so she just kept going. “I think you’re doing the right thing. We can figure this out.”
Keith sighed and finally uncrossed his arms to run a hand through his hair. It was a mess; he really must’ve woken up from the loop reset and came immediately to get Pidge, even though none of her previous solutions had panned out. The thought prompted another question.
“Why just tell me? Maybe the others have some other ideas.”
“Waste of time,” Keith grumbled. He pressed his free arm back over his chest, but left his hand free, closed into a gentle fist, his thumb moving repeatedly over his knuckles. “I always have to convince them.”
Pidge spun her chair again, staring up at the ceiling as it turned into a whirl of white overhead. “The others don’t believe you?”
She couldn’t see his face, but there was a hint of fondness in Keith’s voice when he answered, “You believe me the quickest. And,” he added with a huff, “I got sick of Lance accusing me of being psychotic somewhere around the twentieth loop.”
“That’s fair.” Pidge took a deep breath. She couldn’t say that she was less nervous after Keith’s explanation, but there was a new kernel of determination growing in her chest. For better or for worse, Keith trusted her with this, more than anyone else on the ship, even Shiro. She wouldn’t let that trust go to waste.
“Hey, Pidge?”
She unfolded one leg and braced her foot against the desk to make her chair stop spinning. “Yeah?”
Keith was back to not looking at her, his thumb rubbing at his knuckles so quickly she wouldn’t be surprised if he got a friction burn. “I didn’t want to freak you out or anything, but…” He hesitated, then clenched his jaw and muttered, “Fuck it, it’s not like you’ll remember anyway.”
“What–”
His eyes jerked up to hers. “If the loop resets again, I’m going to try it.”
“Try what?”
“Dying.”
Pidge’s tongue felt numb, making her stumble over her words. “Wait, Keith, you don’t have to– we can figure something else out, we can’t just–”
“I’m tired, Pidge.”
That brought her up short. The exhaustion was all over his face, obvious even to her, and at this point could she really blame him? If she were in his place, would she have lasted sixty-seven loops before jumping to this conclusion? Would any of them?
Keith’s eyes were desperate. “It’s the only thing I haven’t tried yet. Maybe I’ll come back, maybe I won’t, but as long as the loop is broken for the rest of you, I don’t care.”
Fuck. Pidge was so not qualified for this. She was fifteen years old. She was not qualified to be in space, fighting a 10,000 year war in a sentient spaceship, and she was not qualified to be talking someone out of a suicide attempt to stop a goddamn time loop.
But Keith trusted her. She couldn’t let him down.
Pidge pushed her hands up under her glasses and pressed down until she saw kaleidoscope colors. Then she sat up, forced herself to take a centering breath the way Shiro was always trying to get them to do, and planted her fists on the desk.
“Ok. We’re gonna fix this.” She steeled herself. “These catastrophic things that happen, is there any pattern to them? Anything at all?”
The emotion on Keith’s face faded as he pondered her question. After a moment, he responded, “They always start around the same time. Late evening, after dinner.”
“That gives us some time, at least.” She spun her chair again, then decided that it wasn’t enough and got up to pace, turning all of the facts around and around in her head like puzzle pieces. Keith watched from his seat, unmoving. This must be his record for sitting still– that they knew of, anyway.
Pidge circled the room. Most of her theories had already been disproved, and running scans apparently wouldn’t help. She was tempted to run them again anyway, in case Keith missed something that Pidge could’ve put together, but then again she hadn’t accomplished that in any previous loops, so it would probably just be a waste of time. Time she couldn’t afford to lose if she wanted to keep Keith from feeding himself to the loop.
Forgetting that she wasn’t alone, Pidge began to mumble out loud to herself. “It’s weird that the scans didn’t pick up anything. I mean, I’ve seen the list of things the Castle can detect, and pretty much any possible anomaly would show. So, whatever’s causing this must not be registering to the system as an anomaly, so it’s either being cloaked, or the Castle thinks it’s normal. Cloaking against everything the scans could see would be absolutely insane, so if we assume it’s not that, what would make the Castle ignore it?”
A bolt of adrenaline went down her spine when it clicked. She spun on her heel to face Keith, exclaiming, “That’s it! What if it’s the Castle itself that’s making the loop? Have we done that one yet?”
Keith blinked at her, bemused. “Uh, no, I don’t think so. But why would the Castle do that?”
“Dunno.” Pidge rushed back over to the desk and her laptop, fingers itching to dive into code. “But I’m gonna find out.”
From the corner of her eye she saw Keith’s mouth twist sideways. “And how would the Castle do that, exactly?”
“Dude, this place is huge, it’s alien, and we’ve barely seen a fraction of it. As far as I’m concerned it can do anything.”
“Except generate a decent particle barrier,” Keith muttered wryly, and Pidge was shocked into a laugh. Then she stopped.
“Hold on.” She turned, the wires needed to connect her laptop to the Castle interface still in her hands, and forced Keith to meet her eyes. “Keith, if this doesn’t work, promise me you’ll give me one more chance.”
He blinked at her again. “Pidge–”
“If it’s not this, then whatever’s causing it must be cloaked, and we can figure that out but you have to promise me that if the loop resets you’ll give me another chance to fix it before you–”
“Pidge!”
She jumped, Keith’s voice snapping her out of the word dump as it so often did. He was smiling at her, that same strange fondness she’d heard in his voice earlier now on his face. Maybe two extra months with the team had endeared them to him more?
“I will. Promise.”
Pidge let out the breath she’d been holding. “Good. Then let’s get to work.”
“This is taking too long.”
Pidge cracked her knuckles to cover up her annoyed huff. “It would go quicker if you would quit distracting me.” Then she cringed, immediately regretting her harsh words.
It wasn’t quite midday yet, but several vargas had passed, and there was nothing for Keith to do but pace a hole in the floor while Pidge crawled through the Castle’s systems.
Still. It probably would go faster if he would stop breaking her concentration.
“There’s gotta be a faster way to do this,” Keith insisted. Pidge’s fingers twitched over her keyboard, and she had to remind herself that Keith had a valid reason to be antsy to keep her tone in check.
“Look, the Castle isn’t registering this as an error on its own, so I’m just looking for it myself, and it’s not like I’m an expert in Altean coding and engineering. We’ve been up here for, like, a week and a half. Time loop notwithstanding.”
Keith pivoted on his heel and paced back towards her. “Can we at least narrow down the systems we need to check? I don’t think that the door systems are going to be generating a time loop, you know?”
Pidge paused, tilting her head thoughtfully. Narrowing it down wasn’t a bad idea– and she had an even better one. “I’ll do you one better.” With a few key strokes, she pulled up a map of the Castle, layered in a gradient of yellow, orange, and red.
“What do you mean?” Keith asked, circling the desk for the first time to get a look at her screen.
“Whatever is generating the time loop must require power, right? So if I compare the power distribution map of the Castle today,” she hit a few more keys, “to this one from yesterday, we might be able to see if something is drawing more power than before.”
Bracing an arm on the back of Pidge’s chair, Keith leaned in, squinting at the screen just like Pidge was. “How many levels does the Castle have?”
“I think the scientific term would be ‘too fuckin’ many’.”
Despite the tension that had been steadily building in the room over the last few hours, Keith laughed. “It’s the world’s longest game of spot the difference.”
“Let’s start at the bottom,” Pidge decided, paging all the way to the bottom layer of the Castle on both maps. “Most of the machinery is down there, anyway.”
Indeed, the lowest levels of the Castle were bathed in deep reds and oranges, the engines and other machines sucking more power from the Balmera crystal than any other part of the Castle. The two of them spent several minutes staring at the images in silence, carefully comparing the swirling colors, until Keith huffed a big enough breath to ruffle his bangs.
“There’s nothing different on this level. Go up one.”
Pidge considered the images for a couple of seconds longer, then paged up to the next level.
And the next. And the next. And the next. There were a few spots that they paused on and debated back and forth over whether that shade of orange was lighter or darker than the one on the other screen, but it wasn’t until they hit level nine that they spotted something that was actually different.
Keith saw it first. “Look,” he said, pointing to a spot in the far back corner of level nine. “This section was yellow before, and now it’s red.”
The difference was stark. The area had gone from deep yellow, perhaps verging into orange, to bright fire-truck red, brighter even than the engines on the lowest level.
“What part of the Castle is that?” Keith asked, but Pidge was already pulling up the Castle blueprints.
“Here.” She tapped the screen where the colors converged on the other two images. The outline of the machine was unfamiliar– a collection of circles, each angled and drawn a different way, like they were about to start spinning and lift the ink right out of the page. She tilted her head, trying to read the sideways notes in the margins, but of course, they’re all in Altean.
“What is it?” Keith’s fingers began to drum against the back of her chair.
Pidge shrugged. “Dunno. I haven’t been to level nine yet, and it doesn’t look like anything Earth ships have. We might have to ask Coran.”
Keith winced at the suggestion. Pidge huffed.
“Look, I know you don’t want to talk to anyone else about this, but I don’t know everything. All we have to do is ask him what that part is. No need to get into the details.”
She watched as Keith took a long breath in and out. One thumb was back to rubbing over his knuckles. “Sorry,” he said after a moment. “It’s just– apparently there was this Altean disease, way back when, that made people think they were reliving the same day over and over again. So if I mention it to him he kinda… freaks out.”
“I can imagine,” Pidge responded wryly. “Like I said, I’ll just call him and ask about the part. I won’t say anything about the loop.”
He still looked reluctant, but he nodded, and when Pidge reached for her tablet, he stepped out of the frame, returning to his prior pacing where the camera couldn’t see him.
Coran picked up on the second ring. “Hello there, Number Five!” he said, cheerful as always. “What can I assist with?” His eyes bounced all over the screen– probably looking for Keith after this morning’s dramatic entrance– and Pidge tilted her chair to guarantee Keith wouldn’t be spotted.
“I was going over some of the Castle blueprints, and I don’t recognize this part.” She held the tablet up to her laptop, tapping the part in question with one finger. “What is it?”
“Oh, that’s our trusty chronometer! Very reliable little machine, almost never breaks down.”
Pidge raised her eyebrows. Chrono was promising. “What does it do?”
“It negates the effects of time dilation, of course. It’s been standard in all long-distance vessels for nearly twenty thousand decaphoebs now. Does Earth not have them?”
“We haven’t really gotten out far enough to need them,” Pidge answered automatically as her mind spun with the possibilities and implications of a machine that could somehow counter time dilation– but now wasn’t the time. Pun intended. “Thanks Coran, that’s all I needed.”
Before she could hang up, Coran held up a finger. “Ah, just a moment, Number Five. Have you seen our Red Paladin anywhere? He caused quite a stir this morning.”
Pidge, conjuring up every ounce of nonchalance in her body, waved the question away. “He just wanted to know if I could program a custom simulation into the gladiator. I haven’t seen him in a couple of hours.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Keith’s shoulders slump in relief.
“I see.” Coran’s expression was inscrutable– to her, at least. “Very well. Please do call if you have any more questions.”
“Will do.” She ended the call, looked up, and did a double take at the sight of Keith heading for the lab door. “Woah, hey, where are you going?”
Keith cast a vexed look over his shoulder. “To shut that thing down. Obviously.”
Pidge leapt to her feet in alarm, and only stopped herself from rushing after him when she saw every muscle in his body tense up. That couldn’t stop the words rolling off of her tongue, though. “We can’t just shut it down! We kinda need it running unless we want our timeline to get even more fucked up.”
He glowered, a look that said my timeline is already fucked up, and Pidge winced.
“Look, just give me a little bit to look at the code and figure out why it suddenly decided to start looping. We still have time, right?”
After a moment, Keith gave a reluctant huff and stepped away from the lab door. Pidge let out the breath she’d been holding and slumped back into her seat.
“Thank you.”
Keith just shook his head and started pacing again. He was practically vibrating with agitation, and it was only going to get worse the closer they got to loop-reset; she needed to work fast, before his famously limited self control ran out.
So Pidge cracked her knuckles and got back to her laptop to dive into the chronometer’s system.
Naturally, it was one of the most complex things she’d ever seen in her life. “Jesus,” she muttered aloud as she scanned through the read-outs and function reports, “Altea was absolutely fucking insane.” The only response was the impact of Keith’s boots on the floor.
Pidge spent the next half an hour crawling through the reports. They were all in Altean, of course, but numbers couldn’t lie, and she had Altean numbers down pat. Eventually she found what she was looking for– a sudden spike in power draw, and a corresponding timestamp for that morning, just after midnight.
Now to the coding logs, to that time stamp, and…
“Huh.”
Keith stopped pacing. “Huh what?”
Pidge leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. Buried in the hundreds of tiny lines of code was a combination she had never seen before, a string that was nothing more than gibberish, but that the system had accepted as a command.
“Pidge.” She jolted, suddenly aware that Keith was standing right on the other side of the laptop screen, watching her with that intense gaze. “What is it?”
“This command is weird. I mean, it could be some obscure Altean coding technique that I haven’t run into before, but based on normal Altean coding, it doesn’t make any sense.”
He immediately circled the desk. “Show me.”
“You don’t know anything about–”
“Just show me!”
With no small amount of exasperation, Pidge pointed out the strange chunk of code. Keith glared at the screen like it owed him money.
“You said it doesn’t make sense?”
“Yeah. It should just be a meaningless string of nothing, but for some reason the system accepted it as a valid command.”
“And you think this is what made the chronometer start looping?”
“It could be,” she corrected. “The timing fits, and I don’t see anything else off about–”
“Wait, did you see that?”
Pidge let out an annoyed huff. Hadn’t anyone ever taught Keith that it was rude to interrupt? “See what?”
“It’s like the numbers were glitching– look!”
She followed his pointing finger back to the command. The numbers looked normal, like they always did– until one of the symbols in the center flickered.
“There! Did you see it that time?”
“Yeah, yeah, I saw.” It flickered again, then the one next to it, like the screen was shorting out but only in very small, particular spots. And whenever they flickered, there was some kind of weird shadow or after-image behind them, just for a second. What color was that? Pink? Magenta? “Ok, that’s weird. Let’s see if I can figure out where this command originated.”
She put her hands back on the keyboard and started typing away again. This time Keith stayed behind her, watching as she traced the command backwards. It had gone through several different systems on its way to the chronometer– the healing pods, the airlock controls, the gladiator, the food goo machine, the gravity generators– and everywhere it went it left behind flickering bits of code, flashing pink as they tried to itch their way off of the screen.
“What is this thing?” Keith asked quietly after spotting the fifth chunk of flashing code, and Pidge chewed the inside of her lip.
“It… looks like some kind of virus.” She didn’t need to explain to him how bad that was– his solemn silence said it all. “But I’m not quite back to the source of that command yet. Give me a few more minutes.”
Even as she continued to trace the command, Pidge’s mind raced through possibilities. How had a virus been introduced to the Castle? They’d only been on a handful of planets, even counting Arus, and interacted with even fewer people. Maybe it was that Nyma girl, when Lance (in his unending genius) took her for a tour, but how would scavengers like them have gotten their hands on a virus advanced enough to trick the Castle?
Finally, she found the system the command had come from, and her eyebrows rose.
“It came from the crystal interface?”
Keith’s jacket rustled as he shifted on his feet. “I thought the Balmera crystal just provides power.”
“It does, there’s no reason for it to be giving orders to the rest of the ship.” She opened up the code for the interface, only for her fingers to freeze in shock.
Almost all of the code had been replaced by glitches. Every line shook and jittered, scattering pink across the screen in a dizzying pattern, and they weren’t just glitching– some of the numbers and letters themselves seemed to be twisting into messes of sharp lines and awkward gaps.
“That’s… not normal, right?”
“Not even a little bit. How the hell do you get a virus into what is essentially a giant power socket?”
Keith breathed in sharply. “Sendak.”
“What about Sendak?” Brow furrowed, Pidge started typing again.
“He had that corrupted crystal, remember? What if the virus came from that?”
“Hm. That makes sense, actually. Since it’s the power source, pretty much every system in the Castle is hooked up to the crystal interface in some way or another.” She hit a few more keys, only to scowl as an error message popped up.
Of course Sendak wouldn’t make this easy on her– assuming he even knew that the crystal would have this effect. It seemed unlikely, since he had intended to fly the Castle himself, but maybe it was some kind of failsafe or contingency, in case his take over failed.
“So how do we fix it?”
Pidge tried a couple more commands, only to be shut down each time. A sound of frustration left her throat before she remembered that she had to speak in words to answer Keith’s question. “It looks like I’m going to have to go down to the crystal interface and purge the virus manually. Then we’ll probably have to reset the chronometer too.”
Keith nodded solemnly and cast a glance towards the lab door. “Shiro’s going to be outside,” he said, with that uncanny certainty. “Let me talk to him.”
“Whatever you say,” Pidge mumbled as she gathered up her laptop and the many cords required to make it interface with the Castle. She certainly wasn’t going to try to lie to Shiro.
Keith was spot on. When Pidge was finally ready and they opened the door Shiro was on the other side, leaning against the opposite wall with a worried expression on his face.
“Keith,” he said, straightening up. His eyes flickered briefly to Pidge, took in the laptop and the cords, and flicked back. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Keith responded firmly, though he also refused to meet Shiro’s eyes. “Everything’s fine.” With that, Keith attempted to walk past, only for Shiro to immediately catch his elbow.
That was his plan? Pidge thought with no small amount of exasperation. He really thought that was going to work?
“If there’s something wrong I need to know about it,” Shiro was saying to Keith’s back, since he still refused to turn, hiding his face from both of the other Paladins. “You can talk to me. You know you can.”
Keith’s back heaved. For a moment Pidge wondered if she could still get to the crystal interface if she slipped away down the other end of the hallway, but before she could attempt it Keith turned.
“Ask me tomorrow.” His voice dripped with a raw desperation that kept both Pidge and Shiro frozen in place. “If you remember, ask me tomorrow, alright? I promise I’ll explain everything.”
Shiro held his gaze, brow furrowed as some battle raged in his mind. Then he nodded and stepped back, reluctantly letting go of Keith’s arm. “I’m going to hold you to that.”
Keith gave him a wobbly smile. “I hope so.” His expression flattened again when he made eye contact with Pidge. “Let’s go.”
Pidge very pointedly did not look at Shiro as she passed by, and thankfully he didn’t try to hold her back, but she felt his eyes following them all the way to the end of the hallway, where she turned left to head to the crystal room.
“Hey!” she exclaimed when Keith grabbed her arm and dragged her to the right instead. “Where are you going?”
“The armory,” he responded, all business once again. “I need my bayard.”
“What? Why?” She stumbled along as best she could, only narrowly avoiding tripping over the cords dangling from her arms.
“In case something happens. Trust me.”
More questions were on the tip of her tongue, but then again, Keith was the one who had been living this day over and over again. So she shut up and trusted him.
While they were in the armory, she took the opportunity to grab her own bayard and tuck it into her hoodie pocket.
Just in case.
The crystal hummed quietly to itself on its pedestal, its light casting the room in dim, soothing blue. Pidge relaxed upon stepping inside, relieved that everything seemed normal, but Keith was a line of tension at her back.
“How long will this take?” Keith asked as she approached the pedestal.
“No clue,” she replied. She set her laptop down on the floor in front of the main interface, then began plugging in various cords and wires. “Hopefully not long, without interruptions.”
Keith grunted, his footsteps ringing against the metal as he took up pacing once again. “I’ll keep an eye on the doors. You do what you gotta do.”
Pidge’s stomach dipped— Keith didn’t think they were safe here, and his instincts were rarely wrong— but she shook it off and focused on getting the last wires plugged in correctly. If she was quick enough, maybe whatever calamity the time loop had in store wouldn’t come to fruition.
Altean code, like a lot of other Altean things, was labyrinthine and complicated, but also far more flexible than any system they had on Earth. Purging the virus from the system wasn’t going to be the hard part. That would be actually navigating the series of commands to start the process and ensure it went through every affected system, not just the crystal interface.
While Pidge sat cross-legged on the floor and pecked away at her keyboard, Keith’s footsteps kept a steady back and forth rhythm behind her. She got through the first command, though it took some effort with the infected code glitching and leaving pink smears across the screen, then the second. She was about to begin the third— the one that would actually start to purge the virus— when Keith muttered a curse.
“What is it?” she asked, not daring to turn her head in case the glitching code messed up her command.
“Just keep working,” said Keith, to her infinite frustration, and the tempo of his pacing changed, getting quieter. Wait, was that a second set of footsteps under his? She hadn’t heard the door open, so how could someone else be—
Clang!
The sound of metal on metal echoed through the room and Pidge leapt three feet into the air. She hit the enter key on her command, then finally snapped her head around to see what the hell was going on behind her.
Seeing it didn’t help that much. A familiar white and gold robot had materialized in the room, one of the gladiators from the training deck, which she didn’t even know could manifest outside of that jurisdiction. More alarmingly, Keith had his bayard locked against the gladiators staff; as she watched, the robot whipped the staff around to disengage the block and swung at Keith again, faster than she’d ever seen it move during training.
Keith dropped and rolled beneath it, taking a swipe at the gladiator's legs as he went, his expression one of deadly focus. It sprang away to avoid his blade and Pidge suddenly remembered how to speak.
“Keith! Do you need—“
“Focus on the crystal!” Keith shouted back at her as he blocked another swing from the gladiator.
With a curse of her own, Pidge turned back to the screen. The purge had stopped, some kind of confirmation pop up obscuring the loading bar. She impatiently cleared it away with a command that should stop any more pop ups before glancing back at Keith. Still holding his own, but breathing hard.
Her laptop chimed. The bar had finished loading, and now there was yet another box, which she was pretty sure was requesting the Altean equivalent of an admin password. Thankfully, she had Coran’s memorized.
A sickening thud tore her attention away from the screen again. When she twisted around Keith was on his knees, one elbow keeping him upright while he hacked up a lung. It must have gotten a lucky hit in, but his other arm still held his bayard aloft to block the oncoming strike the gladiator was winding up for.
She calculated the odds of a one-handed block holding up against the gladiator's current settings in milliseconds— not good— and made a decision. Before she even made it to her feet she had her bayard in hand.
Just as the gladiator began to bring its staff down, the bright green cable of her bayard snapped around it. Even with her feet braced it still dragged her forward a few inches, but it couldn’t follow through on the strike, and Pidge took that moment where it strained against her to activate the electricity.
The robot froze as lightning arced off of its metal skin. Keith staggered upright, and with a single grand flourish, cleaved the gladiator in two; just like on the training deck, it vanished into cubes of blue light, leaving Pidge’s bayard to hit the floor before retracting back to her hand.
“Are you ok?” she asked, just as Keith said, “Did you purge the virus?”
She looked back at her laptop. The final confirmation screen had appeared, but to her alarm, it was beginning to fill with the glitching magenta of the infected code.
She rushed back to it with a curse, which quickly became a string of curses as she frantically typed in commands. Everything else vanished, her entire focus dedicated to finishing the purge before the virus took over, and with only a few untouched inches of screen remaining, she hit enter on the final command.
The crystal pulsed a deeper blue over her head. The quiet hum got louder, like a CPU fan revving up to run a chunky program. There was the slightest hint of a magenta flash, then everything returned to baseline, leaving Pidge to fall back onto her heels with a deep sigh of relief. She didn’t even want to think about what that virus could’ve done to her only piece of Earth tech.
“Pidge?”
She jumped at Keith’s voice. He’d come closer in the intervening seconds, now standing only a couple of feet behind her. Adjusting her glasses to replace a nervous fidget, she answered, “Y-yeah, the virus should be gone now.”
“Are you absolutely certain?”
Any other time she would’ve bristled at the implication that she hadn’t done it right the first time. But he sounded so tired.
“Let me double-check.” Pidge pulled the laptop onto her knees and started typing, but only half of her attention was on the screen. “Are you alright? I thought I heard you get hit.”
Keith made a disgruntled sound. “I’ll live.”
Which was not what Pidge wanted to hear, but given the circumstances, was probably the best she would get from him. A quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that he was still standing, that there was no blood, and though the pain was clear in the tight clench of his jaw, he wasn’t about to collapse on her.
“Ok, I finished the system sweep. I’m not seeing any more of that funky code anywhere, so I think I got it all. Now we just need to reboot the chronometer, which should be easy now that we don’t have rogue gladiators trying to bash our heads in.”
That didn’t even get a snort out of Keith. He just stood there as Pidge awkwardly began gathering up her wires again, still watching the doors with one arm pressed against his side.
She bit back another question and straightened up. “Alright, let’s go.”
Keith moved like they were on a mission, checking the hallway outside of the door before letting Pidge through. It made the hair on the back of her neck prickle— he was treating the Castle like a battlefield, hostile territory, far too similar to how she had felt the night of Sendak’s invasion.
Pidge cleared her throat. “Head for the elevator, we need to get to level 9.”
Keith obligingly changed his path. “Do you know what we need to do to reboot the chrono-thing?” he asked, not even looking over his shoulder at her, his head on a permanent swivel.
“Chronometer. And I’ll figure it out when we get there.”
Surprisingly, that was what got a sound of amusement from him. “Sounds like my kind of plan.”
Maybe it was naive of her, but Pidge was expecting the rest of this ordeal to be fairly simple. The hard part was over; with the virus gone, all they had to do was stroll on down to level 9, reboot the chronometer, and hopefully the time loop would resolve itself.
Given Voltron’s previous track record, she should’ve known better.
The moment the elevator settled on level 9 her datapad started beeping. Keith hit the button to keep the doors shut as she dug it out of her cargo shorts pocket, watching her with that grim soldier expression again. “What is it?”
She squinted at the tiny screen, then nearly dropped it as her eyes bugged out of her head. “Holy– open the door, we gotta move!”
“What’s happening?” Despite the question, Keith still let the elevator doors open and followed close behind her when she darted out into the hallway. “Pidge! What’s going on?”
“The chronometer’s overloading, that’s what’s going on!”
Keith immediately stopped asking questions. They took the next three hallways as quick as they could— or as quick as Pidge could. She wasn’t sure which of the many doors that lined the hall was the one they were looking for, but thankfully, she didn’t have to be. Halfway down the long hallway, one of the doors had an ominous golden glow seeping through the seams.
Keith skidded to a stop at it, a few feet ahead of her, only to give a low growl of frustration. “It’s locked.”
“Not for me,” scoffed Pidge. Hoping she wouldn’t need it, Pidge deposited her laptop and tangle of wires onto the floor, then quickly keyed in the override code that Coran claimed would unlock any door in the Castle.
There was a click, a hiss, then both of them were throwing their arms over their eyes as blinding light poured out of the opening door.
Pidge opened her eyes slowly, a slit at a time, blinking away sunspots. Through the intense glow she was just barely able to make out the source of the light: a machine split into layers of metal plates that spun around each other at an unnerving pace, filling the room with an angry buzzing sound as well as the light.
“Is it supposed to be making that noise?” Keith asked.
Unsure if it was rhetorical, Pidge answered, “No idea,” and dared to start approaching what she could only assume was the chronometer. Keith was right on her heels.
The air grew warmer as they got closer. By the time they reached the control console Pidge was sweating buckets, and looking directly at the chronometer was like staring into the sun.
“What now?” Keith asked, half shouting to be heard over the buzzing. He had one arm up to block the light while Pidge squinted at the console.
“Give me a second!”
The console screen was flickering; not with the foreboding purple of the virus, more like it was shorting from the sheer amount of energy the machine was guzzling up and spitting back out again. Pidge had to wait and hit buttons between the flickers, on top of trying to decipher what the screen actually said.
“Ok, ok I think I got it.” If she was interpreting the little pictographs correctly, then… “If I hit top left, bottom right, bottom left, then center, it should do a full reset. But—“
“But what?” Keith had a grimace on his face as the metallic humming and whirring got louder and louder, the heat more intense, and Pidge had to continually swipe sweat from her forehead before it reached her glasses. A couple more minutes and the console would be burning her fingerprints off.
“But,” she yelled back, “if we shut it down with this much power going through it, it might just release all of that energy outward.”
Keith scowled, visibly grinding his teeth. “What does that mean?”
“It means a big fucking explosion!”
For a second it felt like everything stopped. Keith was staring at her, first blankly, then with that scary glint in his eye, while Pidge mentally ran through all of their other options.
Coran and Allura would’ve been getting the same alert that Pidge’s tablet received. They were probably on their way down right now, and unlike Pidge, would actually know how to shut this thing down safely— if that was even possible at this point.
Her stomach dropped as the very metal beneath their feet trembled and gave, just a tiny bit, but even that amount made her blood run cold beneath the oppressive heat of the light. If they didn’t do something soon, it could tear the entire Castle apart.
Keith clenched his jaw. “Show me again.”
Pidge, still lost in her calculations, said, “Huh?”
“The shut down sequence. Show me again!”
“Uh, ok.” Her fingers moved automatically. She could think of a way out of this, she just needed a second— “Top left, bottom right, bottom left, center.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Keith take a deep breath. His voice dropped, almost too quiet to hear, but she thought she caught the words, “Sorry, Pidge.”
Then, with a grunt that could’ve been effort or pain or both, Keith stooped down, grabbed Pidge around her waist, and tossed her over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes.
“What the fu— Keith! Put me down! What the hell are you doing?!” She kicked and flailed, and Keith let out another sound when the tip of her sneaker drove into a spot on his torso, but his grip on her never slipped as he carted her across the room— back towards the door.
“Keith! Don’t you dare— we were supposed to do this together!”
His voice was strangled when he responded, “I’m not watching you die again.”
The next thing she knew she was on her ass in the hallway, watching the door slide closed. Pidge scrambled back to her feet as quickly as she could, but it wasn’t quick enough to stop the door, so instead she threw her momentum into her fist as it slammed against the metal.
“Keith, you’d better open this door right now or I swear to God I will tell Shiro about every time you snuck out of bed to go to the training deck!”
Predictably, there was no response. Fingers shaking, she went for the door control, only for the interface to suddenly crackle with blue arcs of electricity and go dark.
“Fuck!” Of course he had to go and break the door control— he probably stabbed it or something equally stupid with that stupid knife that he was always carrying around— she might be able to circumvent it somehow if she could find a place to hook up her laptop, but by the time she did Keith might’ve already been blown to smithereens.
With the ringing in her ears and the increasingly loud buzzing from the chronometer, she didn’t hear the footsteps until they were almost on top of her.
“Pidge, what on Altea is going on here?” The Princess was using her scolding voice, like she’d found Pidge and Keith playing a prank, and despite her determination to keep her shit together, Pidge heard her own crack.
“Keith’s in there. He locked me out.”
“Well that wasn’t very smart of him,” said Coran, who sounded much more appropriately alarmed. “The chronometer is pumping more energy than a small star! It could explode any dobosh!”
Shiro’s tone was clipped and to the point. “Coran, can you get this door open?”
Voices were all Pidge had to go on; she couldn’t move her eyes away from the door and the blinding light shining out from around the edges.
I’m not watching you die again.
A tremor ran through the floor, the walls, rattled up Pidge’s legs and through her torso, making her vision blur as her eyes shook.
“Get down!” someone shouted. A hand grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her to the side, away from the door, just as the pieces of it tore out of their bindings and slammed into the opposite wall. A strange rushing sound filled her ears, something like wind and water and a gas leak all at once, and searing white light erupted from the doorway, a crashing wave of luminescence filling the hall.
Pidge squeezed her eyes shut and clung to Shiro’s metal arm…
She bolted upright in bed with a strangled gasp. Her heart was thundering against her ribs, her breath sawing in and out far too fast, and her eyes pinged around the room like pinballs for a solid fifteen seconds before she saw anything with them.
She was in her room. In her bed, in her pajamas.
With shaking hands Pidge fumbled for her glasses and slid them on. Everything seemed calm, normal, not like the Castle was being ripped asunder right from underneath them.
Was it all a dream? A freakily realistic nightmare?
“Man,” came Lance’s voice from the hallway, groggy and confused. “Was it just me, or did yesterday feel weirdly short?”
“It’s not just you,” Hunk agreed, sounding just as baffled. “I don’t remember anything past lunch.”
“What’s the date on your tablet?”
Heart in her throat, Pidge scrambled out of bed as Hunk’s answer came through the door.
“Uh, fourth day of the movement.”
The time loop was on the third day of the movement.
Both of the boys looked up when her door opened.
“Hey, Pidge, did you— hey, watch it!” Lance sputtered indignantly as Pidge barreled past them without a word, beelining for Keith’s door. When she reached it she put the same amount of force into her fist as she had with the other door, enough to make her knuckles smart and redden.
“Keith, are you in there? Open up!”
In the ringing silence that followed, she heard Lance mutter, “Why are these two besties all of a sudden?” Luckily for him, Pidge was too busy holding her breath to answer.
After a few seconds that felt like an eternity, she hammered on the door again. “Come on, Keith, please tell me you’re in there.” She’d give it another thirty seconds, and if he didn’t answer, she’d hack her way in. Whatever she had to do to find out if he was still here, still breathing, not blown to pieces before the loop was broken.
At ten seconds remaining she felt her throat close up. They hadn’t known each other long, but Pidge couldn’t stomach losing anyone else to this vociferous universe they lived in. He’d trusted her— she couldn’t have failed the team already.
At five seconds, she gave into frustration and slammed both of her fists against the door. There were exclamations from behind her, in more voices than just Lance and Hunk, but before anyone had the chance to make the mistake of approaching her, the door slid open, leaving her hands hovering in mid-air.
And there was Keith, disheveled and disoriented, a haunting expression on his face that she couldn’t begin to decipher.
“Keith!” It left her in a gasp as she threw her arms around his torso and squeezed with all the force of the adrenaline rushing through her veins. “Thank God!”
“… Pidge? Are— are you…?” His voice was painfully soft and audibly trembling. “You remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course I remember.” She pulled back, for both of their sakes, and swiped her hands under her glasses to catch any sneaky tears that might have escaped. “You did it, we broke the loop.”
He just stared down at her, dazed. Probably in shock. Understandably; who knew what that explosion had felt like on his end?
“Keith?” Shiro’s voice. When Pidge turned she found him only a step away, still in his sleeping clothes like everyone but Keith, concern written on every inch of his face. “What’s going on? You said you’d tell me.”
Keith’s breath came in sharp, and that seemed to be the thing that made it all click into place. Pidge stepped to the side just as he staggered forward into Shiro’s chest.
“Woah!” Shiro exclaimed, arms automatically coming up to encircle him as Keith planted his forehead against his shoulder. “Woah, hey, it’s ok. What’s happening? Talk to me, bud.”
Keith just snaked his arms around Shiro’s middle and clung to him. Silence fell over them, thick and cloying, as the other three paladins all looked to Pidge for the answers.
She was given another few seconds to think by quick footsteps coming down the hall; the Princess and Coran, the former in her nightgown and the latter barely looking where he was going as he tapped feverishly on a tablet.
“The energy readings are coming back as normal, Princess,” he muttered while Allura took in the scene. “There’s no sign of overload anywhere.”
Her eyes quickly zeroed in on Pidge. “Pidge, would you kindly explain exactly what is going on here?”
All eyes back to her, including Coran’s. She gulped and juggled a few different responses in her head before giving up on tact entirely. “Well, the short version is that Keith was stuck in a time loop.”
Everyone reacted about as she expected them to. Shiro sucked in a harsh breath and tightened his grip on Keith, holding him closer to his chest like he could protect him.
Hunk’s jaw dropped with a dismayed cry of, “Oh, man, now we have to worry about time travel too?”
Allura and Coran both stared at her blankly, like they were processing the words she’d chosen and trying to assign their own meaning to them.
Lance, blunt as ever, put his hands on his hips and asked, “What the heck does that mean?”
Pidge opened her mouth. To her surprise, Keith spoke first.
“I was reliving the same day,” he said, his voice cracking and wobbly, “over and over again.”
Coran’s eyes practically bugged out of his head. Pidge instinctively moved between him and Keith, holding her arms out as if she could stop him from getting closer. “No, Coran, it’s not what you’re thinking. We figured it out. The chronometer was malfunctioning.”
“The what?” asked Lance, Hunk, and Shiro all at the same time.
Words tumbled from her mouth like white water rapids, jumbled and messy. “Sendak’s freaky crystal infected the Castle with a virus that got into a whole bunch of systems including the chronometer so it started a time loop but for some reason only Keith could remember the previous loops so we had to go down to the crystal room to purge the virus and then to the chronometer to restart—“
“Pidge!” Cried at least three people, perfectly cutting off her run on sentence. A second long pause followed while the others tried to process all the information she’d just dumped on them and she tried to get her breath back.
Lance was the first to finish processing, and in true Lance fashion, took a majestic leap to conclusions.
“So you’re telling me that Keith was getting a free vacation that none of the rest of us even knew about?”
“What?” Pidge exclaimed. “Where did you even–”
“Think about it!” Exasperation was taking over faces in rapid succession, but Lance, oblivious as ever, continued, “If you’re in a loop, you can take as many days off as you want and no one would ever know!” Then he snorted and folded his arms over his chest. “Now that I think about it, Keith probably didn’t even realize he could do that and spent the whole time on the training deck–”
Keith pulled himself away from Shiro, turning to face Lance with a snarl. The effect should’ve been ruined by red edging his eyes, but somehow the threat of unfallen tears only made the overwhelming emotion on his face hit that much harder; hard enough to stop Lance mid-monologue.
“I watched you all die!”
Utter silence flooded the hallway. No one was even breathing, except for Keith. His chest was heaving, his fists clenched so tight his knuckles went white.
“Every single day,” he continued, dropping words like bombs, “I watched one of you die. For sixty-seven fucking days. Does that sound like a fucking vacation to you?”
They were all shell-shocked, even Pidge. She’d known this already, but while they were in the loop, Keith had been all business, exhaustion and frustration only occasionally slipping through the cracks of his soldier-mask. She hadn’t given herself the time to consider what was underneath it.
“I– I didn’t–” Lance stammered.
Allura stepped in with a soft but firm, “That’s quite enough.” For once, Lance looked relieved to shut his mouth. The Princess cleared her throat. “Let us reconvene to the lounge. Pidge, will you be able to explain what happened?”
Pidge swallowed back her own emotions and straightened her glasses. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”
No one argued with her orders, even though most of them were still in their pajamas. Hunk went to Lance’s side, both of them looking shaken and a few shades paler as they started down the hallway, the Alteans close behind.
Before budging an inch, Pidge cast a glance at Keith and Shiro, then immediately wished she hadn’t. The expression on the Black Paladin’s face was nothing less than devastated, and Keith’s fire had guttered out as quickly as it flared. Now he turned back to Shiro like a drowning man clinging to something in the hopes that it could save him.
Pidge looked away, feeling like she was intruding somehow, and quickly followed the others to the lounge.
Pidge’s next few hours were full of explanations and code, showing Allura and Coran exactly where things had gone wrong and helping them ensure that the virus was gone for good. She was glad for the distraction— in the slow moments the hushed, subdued atmosphere of the Castle was too much.
But it couldn’t last forever. The Alteans were much more practiced at checking the systems than she was, and eventually Coran shooed her away with an order to, “Get some rest, for the Ancestors’ sake.”
Her feet auto-piloted her towards her bedroom. She wasn’t sure where the others were, or if she wanted to talk to any of them, anyway. Lance would be moping over his blunder, Keith and Shiro would be secluded away somewhere, and Hunk was probably stress-cooking away all of their Arusian ingredients.
It was supposed to be over. They’d broken the loop, Keith hadn’t had to sacrifice himself to do it, and the virus was gone. Yet the weight of it lingered.
Pidge paused just outside of her bunk. It had hardly been ten minutes but already she was sick of moping and brooding. She needed a distraction, something to do, something to fix, even if it required breaking it herself first.
So she didn’t go into her bunk. Instead she went three hallways over, to an out of the way closet Coran thought none of them knew about. It was chock full of old Altean electronics, little things that no longer had a purpose in a Castle inhabited by only seven people but might still be useful for parts. And they were; Pidge had already raided it twice before.
The thick scent of dust met her nose when she opened the door. Gadgets and trinkets of all shapes and sizes filled the tiny room; she didn’t know what most of them were, and she may or may not figure out the purpose of whatever random thing she chose by the time she was done with it, but that wasn’t the point. So she didn’t pay very much attention to what she grabbed, just the first handheld thing on a shelf near her eye level, before turning back towards her room where her tools were.
They hadn’t been in the Castle long, but Pidge’s bunk was well on its way to being the sanctuary she needed from the headache-inducing aesthetic of Altean architecture. On night one she’d tracked down the light controls and switched everything to a warm glow, and already the desk and a good portion of the floor were covered in scattered electronics and robot parts.
Plopping herself down at her desk, Pidge finally examined the item she’d been carrying. It was simple: a round metal pedestal no larger than her palm, supporting a diamond of impossibly thin glass.
The wiring inside the pedestal was compact but deceptively complicated, as so many Altean things were. She picked through it methodically, laying each part out on her desk beside her, memorizing where each thing belonged as she went, until she reached the heart of the little machine, which she pried out with as much gentleness as she could muster.
Her stomach swooped a little at the sight of it. It looked like a miniature chronometer. The loose plating clicked quietly as she turned it this way and that, wondering how similar it was to the bigger one on Level 9.
About an hour later (judging by the ache in her slouched shoulders), Pidge finally thought she understood what this machine was.
And it gave her an idea.
To her surprise, it didn’t take that long to track down Keith and Shiro. They were just around the corner from the bunks, standing at the end of the hall, discussing something in quiet tones.
Keith stopped talking the instant he heard her footsteps. His head snapped up, all of his muscles going tight like he was bracing for something, then went lax again when he recognized her. Shiro watched it all with obvious concern that mirrored Pidge’s own.
But she didn’t let it show. She strolled up to them, keeping her offering carefully hidden behind her back. “Hey, Shiro, do you mind if I borrow Keith for a second?”
Keith’s brow furrowed, confused, but Shiro smiled a little. “Sure.” He shot a glance at Keith and laid a hand on his shoulder, a ritual Pidge had seen them perform more than once. “I’ll be on the bridge if you need me.”
Pidge waited until Shiro’s steps had faded entirely before meeting Keith’s gaze. He had his arms crossed, as per usual, but he looked a little more relaxed. Maybe.
“What is it?” he asked. His voice was softer than it had been the whole time they were in the loop; soft and tired, and there were exhausted shadows under his eyes. She had to make this quick.
“I want to show you something.”
His face did something Pidge couldn’t interpret– what she wouldn’t give for decent social skills right now– but ultimately he sighed and nodded, so she took what she could get.
His confusion was practically audible when Pidge led him back to his own bunk. She could feel his eyes on the back of her head, but she kept her own stubbornly forward as she marched across the room and plonked her contraption onto the desk.
“Uh, Pidge? What is that?”
She took a deep breath. Even after all of this, she didn’t feel like she knew Keith that well. Maybe she was overstepping. Maybe he would hate it. But she’d made it this far– might as well finish.
“Well, it was an Altean alarm clock, I think. It has a time-keeping component, anyway. But the important part is this.” She tapped the blunt point of the glass diamond, and slowly a green light spread from some invisible place in the center, until the whole diamond was filled with a gentle glow.
Now she turned to face him, though she kept her eyes focused on the wall somewhere as she continued, “It can switch between the colors of the Lions,” because if the Alteans were anything it was on theme, “So I figured out how long the Castle’s day cycle was and set it to switch colors when the day ticks over.”
Keith was a fuzzy shape in the corner of her eye, but she could still tell when his head tilted to the side. “Ok, but… why?”
She shuffled her feet, bit her lip, still couldn’t make eye contact. “The loop always started when you woke up, right?” Keith stiffened, and Pidge pushed the rest of the words out as quickly as she could. “The idea is this thing will change colors automatically everyday, so when you wake up you can just look and see that the color is different than the day before and know that you’re not in a loop again. You don’t have to use it, I can always take it back to my room and take it apart, I was just bored earlier and I thought it could be more useful this way than as a stack of parts, but if you’d rather–”
“Pidge.”
She snapped her mouth shut with a clack of teeth. For a moment silence reigned in the room, and Pidge couldn’t tell if it was a good quiet or a bad quiet. Until she finally convinced herself to sneak a glance at his face.
He was smiling. That fondness was back, softening his eyes, and his voice was utterly sincere when he said, “Thank you.”
“Oh, uh…” Somehow, this reaction hadn’t occurred to her. She hadn’t prepared her script. “Sure. No problem.”
“Not— not just for this.” His eyes dropped and went sideways, now him avoiding her. “For everything. For helping me. And— believing me.”
For reasons she couldn’t have explained to save her life, Pidge felt her throat tighten up. “Y-yeah. Of course.”
It was stilted and awkward and it was clear that neither of them knew what the hell they were doing, but that was ok. They understood each other anyway.
Even so, Pidge needed to cut the emotion in the air before she started tearing up like an idiot. Rocking forward on her toes, she added, “Coran is adding some more fail-safes and firewalls to the chronometer, so this shouldn’t happen again.”
“If it does,” there was the fond smile again, “I’ll know who to call.”
Pidge smiled back. “Yeah, I guess you will.”