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When Keith meets Katie, he doesn’t like her.
He doesn’t like any of the Holts much, really. Shiro is spending more time with his team than with Keith now, and although he understands that a trip to literal Pluto is a big deal and they have a lot to do, he can’t help but hold a grudge against the people who are slowly but steadily taking his brother away from him.
Matt acts like a child half the time, but from Shiro’s stories he’s apparently actually a genius. Somehow. The Commander, Samuel, makes Keith nervous but that’s how he is around authority figures – he can’t ever seem to be able to make up his mind whether to fight them or hide. Colleen is the mother – the wife – the female authority figure. She scares Keith even more than Samuel does – how can a single human being be so intelligent it’s kind of terrifying.
There’s a fourth Holt, too. Katie is… maybe a year or two younger than Keith? She apparently skipped a bunch of grades and nobody ever actually tells Keith how old she is, and he can’t guess ages for shit, so whatever. He’s pretty sure he’s older than she is, at least.
She’s… really smart. Like, duh, she’s the kid of Samuel and Colleen, those genetics don’t really leave any room for average intelligence, but where Samuel is a hematite marble– weighted, centered, magnetic – and Colleen is a laser – focused and precise and kind of scary – and Matt is a diamond even if he’s got some mud on the surface, Katie is a razor. She’s sharp but cutting, and it doesn’t matter what she runs into she’ll go right through it.
Keith doesn’t like her. He’s smart, but around this family he feels like a rock. He doesn’t know how Shiro does it. Matt and the Commander are friendly enough, but Pidge is prickly and easy to piss off and she has bite like nobody Keith has ever met before.
Shiro says that Keith doesn’t like her because they’re too alike. Keith says Shiro should go away and work on his dumb Pluto stuff.
*
When Katie meets Keith, she doesn’t like him.
Shiro is interesting, new and exciting and Matt likes him so he must be okay, but Keith is standoffish and doesn’t communicate and hardly seems to pay attention to anyone or anything. He glares too much and is way more competitive than he needs to be, and Katie does not like him.
Everyone else in her family thinks that Shiro’s brother is great and that Shiro himself is the pinnacle of human wondrousness. That last part isn’t too far off – Katie hasn’t met someone who could stand her whole family all at once for extended periods of time in years – but Keith is…
He’s annoying.
Keith is probably a little older than her, and the only good part about him is that he’s kind of short too – she’d been worried that Shiro’s brother would be tall on top of being irritating so thank Curie for small miracles.
But yeah. Shiro’s cool, but he means that the countdown is on for Dad and Matt to leave for Pluto and leave Katie grounded, and Keith will still be on Earth too and she doesn’t like him.
He’s smart, though. Shiro talks about him all the time, how he keeps setting new records in the flight simulators, how he’s almost as good of a pilot as Shiro is even though he’s younger and had virtually no training before the Garrison. Fine. So he’s a good pilot. Whatever.
Katie doesn’t like him. He’s a good pilot but he irritates her (like too many people on this dratted planet). She doesn’t know how he can be Shiro’s brother, how he can have any connection to Shiro at all – Shiro’s a good pilot and a nice person; it’s clearly possible. But Keith is stubborn and cranky and reacts like a feral cat, and he and Katie can’t agree on anything.
Matt says that Katie doesn’t like him because they’re too alike. Katie says Matt should go away and work on his dumb Pluto stuff.
Matt and Shiro go to Pluto. It sucks – Keith’s brother won’t be back for a year, Katie’s brother left her here on Earth – but it’s cool, too. She’s gonna build the coolest things while Matt is gone. He’s going to beat every single record in the flight sim, even Shiro’s.
And then they’re gone. Not in space. Just. Gone.
It’s a lie. Shiro’s too good of a pilot for that. Matt’s too smart for that. Samuel’s too analytical for that. It’s a lie.
But nobody will tell them what happened. Pilot error. Pilot error. Pilot error.
Keith starts acting out. He was never the calmest person, and that had been when he had his brother to keep him together. But Shiro is gone and Keith is mad. The Garrison won’t tell him where his brother is, and he is pissed.
Katie starts breaking in. It’s painfully easy. There are Garrison guards and officers who know her – cute little daughter of the commander of the Kerberos Mission – and they let her in with sympathy on their faces and guilt in their eyes. And don’t even get her started on the security systems. They might as well have just put a sticky note up with ‘Please Do Not Hack This’ written in neat cursive. Katie is done with being polite. Her dad and her brother are still alive, still out there somewhere, and she is going to find out where.
But of course the Garrison is not exactly appreciative of her repeated break-ins, both physical and technological, and Katie quickly wears out her welcome. So, of course she does the only reasonable thing and keeps doing it, just a little more secretively. Stealth becomes her middle name. It’s already obvious that everyone at the Garrison is an idiot – what in Lovelace’s good name made them think that the two remaining genius Holts would accept such a pathetic excuse as “pilot error?” – so it really isn’t all that much harder to keep breaking in like she owns this crummy place.
Iverson is a dumbass and she has no idea how he’s the one in charge, but Katie is getting more and more desperate with each day that goes by without anything concrete, and she’s slipping up. She almost gets caught.
Almost.
She’d barely made it out of the office, scrambling down the hallway and sliding around the corner into a side room just as the fussy, short-tempered secretary came into view, her obnoxiously loud high heels conveying her arrival long before she got there – the only reason Katie had made it out at all.
(Hmmm, it’d be great if Iverson would wear heels too. Then Katie would never get caught.)
She leans against the wall, flash drive clutched in her absolutely-not-shaking hands, and breathes out a sigh of relief. She hates close calls. But she hates the Garrison more.
There is a sound, a sort of shifting, and Katie’s eyes snap open as she realizes she is not alone.
They blink at each other. Then the pieces click and Katie says, rather obtusely, “You’re Shiro’s brother.”
He stares back. “You’re Matt’s sister.”
Then, at the same time, they both blurt, “He’s not dead.”
A beat of silence.
“Shiro would never let them crash,” Keith glares.
“Dad would never let it get to that point,” Katie counters. “But if it did, obviously Shiro wouldn’t crash. There’s a reason he was the youngest-graduated pilot, and a reason he got picked to fly to Pluto.”
“I know,” Keith says, rolling his eyes a little. “I can’t believe they chose such a stupid excuse.”
“Right?” Katie feels a breath of lightness in her chest. Nobody has believed her besides her mother. “They couldn’t think up anything better than –”
“Pilot error!” They say it at the same time.
Keith blows out a hard breath. “Nobody would listen to me.”
Katie shakes her head. “Me either. I mean, Mom knows it’s fake, obviously, but everyone else thinks it’s ‘grief, making me delusional.’”
“I hate that one,” Keith all but snarls. “I didn’t make up Shiro’s skill, it’s so freaking obvious that he wouldn’t ever have crashed.”
“You should have heard my aunts,” Katie exclaims. “They sounded like a bunch of hens, all clucking at me and Mom and trying to comfort us, but we don’t need comforting because they’re not dead!”
Keith is staring at her hard. She shifts a little, uncomfortable under the sudden attention. He speaks, finally. “What are you doing here?”
Play it cool. “Well, they wouldn’t tell us anything. So obviously I had to come find out myself.”
He blinks. His eyes are almost purple in this light. “So you’re breaking into Garrison files?”
“Well, yeah. It’s not like it’s hard or anything. I barely even have to try.”
He huffs a laugh. “I can believe that. The Garrison doesn’t stand a chance against you.”
That makes her smile. She decides to make the leap of trust and shared loss (temporary loss – they aren’t gone, after all). “Well, I don’t have much yet, but there’s some stuff.”
She holds up the flash drive. “Wanna see?”
They make for an unusual team, to say the least. In any other universe, they would never have talked. Grumpy awkward loner and cranky antisocial techie, their paths would never have crossed. But their brothers are missing, and they are going to get them back. Working together is just the easiest path towards that goal.
Keith helps Katie get into the Garrison, finding other ways into the compound if she can’t get in through the front gates. The security in this place is a joke, for the two of them. He keeps watch while she does things with computers that he didn’t even know were possible.
She finds a lot. Not enough of it is about Kerberos. But it’s clear that the Garrison is hiding something, and that is enough to keep them going.
They end up spending a lot of time together. They have to get the data, of course, and then Katie spends hours sorting through everything. Keith finds that he enjoys keeping her company. He sits and watches, or works on whatever things he has to do. When she takes a break he listens to her talk through her findings, she listens to him complain about the other cadets and the honestly garbage instructors, they argue about conspiracy theories and cryptids. They both love secrets, maybe a little too much.
Neither of them really have any friends, so it’s no surprise that “Katie” is the most-messaged contact in Keith’s phone (“Shiro” is below it, but Keith doesn’t look at those messages. He’ll be texting that number soon, he is certain). “Keith” is the top contact in Katie’s phone (she doesn’t open the chats with “Matt.” She’s waiting for new messages). It becomes normal for Keith to spend mornings texting back and forth with the girl not only to coordinate getting her past security. It becomes normal for Katie to look forward to getting in not only for the information. She enjoys Keith’s company, somehow. He enjoys hers too. She hasn’t the faintest idea how to fly, why going high and fast is the greatest thing in the world for him, and he understands essentially nothing about what she does when she sits down in front of a bank of screens and makes them tell her everything.
If anybody knew, they would tease Katie for having a crush, ask Keith if he’s really working with her just to find his brother. But nobody knows (they would be in so much trouble if anybody knew), and it’s not like that anyway.
Yes, he enjoys her company. She’s an interesting person. He’s starting to see why Shiro liked the Holts so much – even though she goes way over his head sometimes, she doesn’t act high-and-mighty, and she doesn’t brush him off when he asks questions. She doesn’t avoid him just because he’s standoffish and more than a little awkward, and maybe a little too aggressive. She tells him what she’s thinking, and she doesn’t sugarcoat things. She has the same goal as he does.
Yes, she enjoys his company. He’s good – she’s finally starting to see why Shiro liked this guy so much, seeing how despite their differences, the brothers are similar where it counts. He doesn’t get offended when she pays more attention to her tablet than to him. He doesn’t get mad when she talks about what she’s thinking, doesn’t avoid her just because she’s prickly and a little too sharp-tongued and sometimes kind of rude. He doesn’t ignore her. He has the same goal as she does.
It’s weird, but they actually get along. Their brothers are missing, lost in space (but they’re going to find them), and before everything went to hell (hell is Kerberos, now, it seems, but Keith and Katie are willing to go to hell if it means getting Shiro and Matt back), they hated each other. But Keith is loyal beneath his distance, and Katie is fiercely caring underneath her disinterest.
Something clicks with them. Something, started in belief, in mutual “you know they’re out there too,” in not being the only one, something formed in dim hallways and clicking keys and sharp eyes and quiet whispers, something developed through secrets and discoveries and sneaking, takes root and grows. It works.
They work, together.
They just hope that it’s enough to find the Kerberos team.
Iverson may be an idiot, and the Garrison may be kind of a failure in terms of security, but Keith and Katie are, in the end, just two teenagers against a powerful institution. And the Garrison really wants to keep the real fate of the Kerberos mission secret. And even though they’re good, Katie is angry and Keith is reckless, and it’s only a matter of time before Team Find the Kerberos Mission falls apart.
Katie blames herself for Keith getting kicked out. She had been in Iverson’s office, trying to get past a particularly difficult firewall. Keith had been standing guard. Iverson had come back early from his meeting, and in a desperate bid to keep him from seeing her – and also probably because he had wanted to do this since the day “pilot error” came on the news – Keith had punched Iverson.
Square. In. The. Face.
Actually, Katie kind of wishes she could have seen it. Instead, she had clicked out of the screen, grabbed her flash drive, and flung herself out of Iverson’s window. It had hurt a little (thank Meitner the General had a first-floor office), but learning that Keith had been expelled from the Garrison had hurt more. Now she didn’t have an accomplice. It had been useful, having a partner to work with, someone who lived at the Garrison and knew all the ins and outs. It helped to have someone who believed her, who was just as motivated to find the Kerberos team as she was. He was also, although she didn’t want to admit it, a friend. A friend who had lost a promising chance at being a fighter pilot or space explorer because of her.
Keith argues with that point, though. He’d always wanted to punch Iverson. Giving Katie a few extra moments to get more information and get out had been worth it. Finding Shiro and the Holts would be worth it.
Keith isn’t much calmer than she is, but having a partner had done a lot to keep Katie a little more level-headed and clear-thinking. Without him – well. She never thought that she would miss Keith Kogane.
He’s not gone, obviously (no one is. She just happens to know Keith’s current location; she’s working on the others). There’s a shack out in the desert, and he’s got a maybe-legal-maybe-stolen hoverbike and a phone, and they keep in touch. But he’s not there with her at the Garrison, not helping her sneak past the guards, not helping her sort data or keeping watch for Iverson and his cronies.
And so it is absolutely no surprise that within three weeks after Keith gets thrown out of the Garrison, Katie gets caught.
She’s angry, both for her family and for Keith, and she’s on the edge of something big (it’s not the security that’s hard, it’s how freaking disorganized the Garrison is holy shit how are they even functional), and she’s not paying attention and then there are lights and voices and they have her and she fights like a wildcat but she is a teenage girl and they are big powerful guards and she can do nothing as she is “escorted” out and told not to come back.
She’s not getting back in. The Garrison is made of dim lightbulbs, but now that Iverson has issued a direct order? They’ll never let her back, pity or no. Keith isn’t there anymore to help. The Garrison is determined to keep its secrets secret. Katie’s never getting back in there.
At least, not as Katie.
“Are you crazy?”
Sitting on the floor of Keith’s tiny desert shack, Katie taps another command into her laptop, her frown deepening as she glares up at the screen. “Up for debate. But I’m doing it.”
Keith rocks backwards in his seat, pressing his spine against the backrest of the chair. “You’re nuts. They already banned you. Banned me too, so I can’t help you get back in. They’ll never let you back in there.”
Katie pauses in her typing long enough to glance up at him with a smile that promises nothing but trouble. “They banned Katie Holt. If I’m not Katie, then I’m not banned.”
Keith lets out a sigh. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m determined.” Katie turns back to the screen. “I want my brother and father back. They don’t want Katie in there? Fine. I’ll just be somebody else. I’m going to find them.”
“I know.” There is no doubt in Keith’s voice.
Another pause; Katie puts her laptop down. “Shiro too,” she adds quietly. “I’m getting them back. We’re getting them back. All of them.”
“Okay, when you said you were going to become not-Katie, I didn’t think you were going to turn yourself into a boy.” Keith stares at the grainy picture on his computer screen.
Katie looks… different. Keith supposes it’s a good thing, that she looks weird even to him. Maybe she won’t get recognized. But she also looks a lot like Matt. Like, a lot.
She’s cut her hair. Without the weight, it fluffs out around her head, a wiry halo that probably is only slightly easier to manage than the long version. She ditched the contacts too, and Keith is pretty sure those are her brother’s glasses (same prescription, hopefully. Keith really doesn’t want to think about Katie wandering around the Garrison half-blind).
She looks weird, and different, and Keith is not very good with change but he’s trying to think positive. As long as nobody stops to consider the fact that this person looks like they could be a clone of the missing (not dead) Matthew Holt, everything will be fine. Katie can keep searching for information on Kerberos.
Except that now she’ll be undercover, always at risk of discovery (like, seven different discoveries, like this), and she’ll be alone. Keith can’t disguise himself, not like that. He can’t follow her back into the belly of the beast. Katie’s going back into the Garrison, long-haul and in disguise, and he can’t be there to watch her back. Sure, he got expelled partially because of her (really she was the excuse, not the reason), but she got banned because she’s reckless (and wow pot calling the kettle black but it’s true) and he’s not going to be able to be there to watch her back. He’s stuck out here in the desert. He has leads to follow, sure, and he and Katie are going to stay in contact, but…
He doesn’t like it. It takes a lot for Keith to get attached, but once he is he’s painfully loyal, and that loyalty has become fastened to Katie Holt. He doesn’t want to leave her alone to break back into the Garrison under disguise.
But after all this time he knows one thing: if anyone can do this, it’s Katie Holt.
Or rather, Pidge Gunderson. Weirdest freaking fake name ever, in Keith’s opinion, but the dissonant name and vastly different appearance, put together with Katie’s – Pidge’s – natural prickliness and disinclination for social interaction might keep people from looking too close and finding out anything they shouldn’t.
It’s still weird.
Katie – Pidge – smiles a little. “Not enough girls. I’d stand out. Now I’m just a short boy who doesn’t like people. I’m replacing you, Keith!” She laughs at his growl.
“Just don’t get any more involved with people than you have to,” Keith grumbles.
She snorts. “You don’t have to tell me twice. I’m not here for school, after all. I’m here to find the Kerberos team.”
He frowns. “You have to do well in classes too, though. You can’t have any problems. They can’t suspect you.”
“Do you really think I’m going to have any trouble with Garrison classes?” She’s got one eyebrow raised, and it’s weird to see a Katie-behavior in this new Pidge-face.
“No.” Silly to even think it. She’ll be fine. She has to be.
Even with the bad connection, she can see his anxiety on his face. She leans forward. “Keith. I’ll be fine.” Her glasses reflect the screen light. “I can do this. And besides, I’ve got you and Mom. Even if you two aren’t in there with me, I’m not alone.
“We can do this, Keith. We’re gonna find them.” She grins, feral. “Against us? The Garrison doesn’t stand a chance.”
Well. He can’t argue against that.
“Voltron?”
“Yeah.” Pidge shakes his head. “It keeps coming across the wavelengths I pick up. It’s obviously important, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
Keith shrugs. Pidge already knows about the weird things he’s getting out here in the desert. He can’t figure that out either.
More questions than answers. As usual.
Pidge has been at the Garrison for four months – well, four months as Pidge Gunderson. And… still nothing. Or at least, not enough. No folder with This Is the Location of the Kerberos Team printed on it. They knew it wouldn’t be easy, but it’s frustrating. And it doesn’t help that Keith worries about Pidge every day, and that they can hardly ever talk, Pidge’s time taken up with classes and training and breaking into restricted areas to try to find his family. If Pidge gets caught, Keith doesn’t know what will happen. He’s not even sure he would know if it happened – if the Garrison is willing to cover up whatever happened at Kerberos he’s certain that they wouldn’t be above making one nosy teenager disappear.
It’s stressful, even moreso with the pictographs he’s finding in the desert, and the messages coming in from deep space that Pidge has been picking up.
Keith has a feeling that they’re getting into something bigger than Kerberos, but he doesn’t know what, exactly. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to stop, and neither is Pidge. Neither of them are the most cautious of people, and when people they care about are in trouble, even less so.
*
Keith is laughing and Pidge is mad. “Shut up!”
He just keeps laughing. “You – you go undercover and disguise yourself and enroll yourself in the Galaxy Garrison after they threw you out and banned you, you’re breaking literal legal rules and hacking into everything the Garrison has, you’re running so many risks every single day and who the hell knows what they’ll do if they catch you, and you’re complaining about your team?”
Pidge growls. “’Cause they’re annoying! I swear, the pilot doesn’t know what half the controls do or the definition of moderation – and he never shuts up about how good a pilot he is – and the engineer is even more high-strung than I am and also has literal motion sickness why.”
“Probably doesn’t help that they’re stuck with you for communications.”
“Shut up! I’m only in that category because it made it easier to steal the transmission equipment to track Voltron.”
Keith rolls his eyes, blurry through the bad connection. Someday Pidge is going to hook him up some better internet. Even desert hermits deserve good wifi. “Fine. Just work with them enough that they don’t focus on you too much.”
Pidge blows out a breath. “Trust me, they have plenty to focus on. We are an awful team. I’m doing fine in solo assignments, though, so the teachers don’t care about me,” he adds quickly at the flash of concern on Keith’s face. “It’s fine. I’m fine. They’re just obnoxious. Also, they apparently want to be friends with me or something, because they keep trying to hang out with me.”
He’s not doing a very good job at keeping Keith from worrying. “I’ve been driving them off, it’s fine, jeez Keith! They just think I’m an asshole, they aren’t suspicious or anything. Calm down, man, I’ve got this.”
Keith backs down, albeit reluctantly. Even if he’s worried, he trusts Pidge, just like Pidge trusts him. Pidge won’t get caught by Iverson if Keith doesn’t get himself killed out alone in the desert. It’s their unspoken deal.
“Look, Keith,” Pidge says, a little more seriously. “Everything’s fine. My team is crap but I don’t care. I’m not here for school. I’m going to find out what Voltron is, and you’re going to decipher the pictograms, and we’re going to find them. This won’t get in the way. We’ll find Shiro, and Matt, and Dad, and then we’ll burn the Garrison to the ground and you and Shiro will move in with us and I’ll start sleeping again and you’ll stop stressing about stuff and everything will be fine.”
Pidge isn’t the most eloquent person in the world, but even with the crummy internet the point makes it across. Keith sighs, leaning back a little. “Okay,” he says, simply, quietly. “Okay.”
Their families are counting on them. They can do this.
Pidge is on the roof, screen turned up against the glare of the setting sun, when the radio bursts into static and the star bursts across the sky.
It takes only seconds to understand. That is a ship, it is not of Earth origin, and it has something to do with “Voltron.”
Pidge has to go.
Of course, nothing ever goes according to plan, and now Lance and Hunk are tagging along. Pidge doesn’t have the time to tell them off, so he lets them come along. Who knows, maybe having witnesses will be a good thing. Keith’s totally going to kill him though.
Even though they’re all running, scrambling across the sand and shale towards where the star-ship landed, Pidge takes four seconds to send Keith a message.
He fires back almost instantly. He saw it too, from his shack out in the desert. He’s on his way.
Pidge doesn’t want to get his hopes up. It could be anything. But after all this – after Kerberos, after the lies, the images in the desert and the words on the wavelengths, after all the work Pidge and Keith have done – after everything, this can’t be a coincidence.
They crest the hill and see the swarms of Garrison vehicles surrounding the crash site, see Keith’s hoverbike tucked behind a rock formation, and Pidge allows a moment of hope.
Hang on. We’re coming.