Work Text:
a smattering of
stars. warm, sure, in the dark. dim,
dull, in light. phosphene.
I.
Keith is barely eleven the first time he turns to the stars to ask for answers.
He clambers out of his second story window, and onto the roof of his foster home. There, sprawled out flat on his back against steel which still burns hot through his clothing from the mid-July sun, he squeezes his eyes shut against the glow of the moon.
“It’s not fair,” he mutters, pressing the heel of his palms into closed eyes, pushing harder, deeper until the pressure becomes uncomfortable and a field of stars blooms from his palms. “You promised me that you wouldn’t leave, Dad.”
*
His father took him out into the desert once, years ago. Out to a tiny shack with a single room, and threw a threadbare blanket out across the sand in front of the house, long after the sun had set. The two of them looked up to the night sky, to the stars and, pointing up to a point somewhere in the middle of the milky way’s faint glow, far beyond a distant star, his father said, “Your ma is up there, keeping us safe.”
With wonder in his eyes, Keith rolled onto his side and propped his head up on one tiny fist and asked, “Do you really think so?”
“Yeah,” his dad said, nodding. “She protects the both of us, so that I can protect you .” He turned from the stars himself before reaching out to poke the tip of Keith’s nose with his index finger, the punctuation at the end of the sentence.
*
“You said you’d protect me, Dad, you said you would stay.” Keith is babbling now, and the pressure from his hands is more insistent, the flashes of light behind his eyelids grow brighter, more demanding with each passing second. His palms are wet, tears leaking from the corner of his eyes.
Keith peels his hands from his face, and takes a shuddering breath in before he lets his eyes open, just enough to see the twinkling of a distant star. He doesn’t recognize it, through the hazy blur of lights that settle in the edges of his vision.
“Why did you leave?” he asks the star, rubbing his palms against the fabric of his pajama pants. “You’d promised to take me to the zoo for my birthday.”
It flickers, but does not answer.
II.
Keith is almost seventeen, and out of his room long after curfew, when he finds a quiet stairwell marked ‘DO NOT ENTER.’
The door makes no noise when Keith pries it open with eager fingers and a single-minded determination to find out what lies behind it. He holds the push bar in when he closes it, so that when it clicks shut behind him it is silent. Keith finds himself encapsulated in darkness, and it takes him a moment of groping blindly through the air before his fingers find purchase on the hand rail. With his other hand, Keith fishes his comm from his pocket, activating the little flashlight that is built into it, and shines it up the length of the stairs to guide his ascent.
At the top he finds another door, labeled simply ‘ROOF ACCESS’ in white across a red background. Keith guides his light around the edges of the door, and, pleased to find no alarm system in place, he pushes through the door in a single swift movement.
The roof of the Galaxy Garrison is as he expected, dull and unimpressive in its sprawl, but it is blanketed by a deep, inky black night sky, dotted with stars. Keith lets out a low whistle and makes his way to the edge of the asphalt. He’s hardly settled in when a high pitched ding sounds out from his comm device is tucked into his jacket.
It’s a message from Shiro.
> lights out was 45 minutes ago, cadet
Keith turns his head and tucks a smile into the shoulder of his jacket before he replies.
> my lights ARE out officer shirogane
Shiro’s speech bubble appears, and it takes several minutes before the response comes through. A photo of Shiro and Keith’s hoverbike keys resting in his palm.
> and you’re not there with them. I’m only on planet for another month...thought you might wanna go for a ride
Keith thrills at the thought, and his fingers tap out an affirmative in the blink of an eye, promising to meet Shiro outside of his room. He’s halfway across the roof, bound for the door again when it hits him.
A month.
Shiro leaves for Kerberos in a month.
Keith pauses, hand wrapped around the edge of the access door, and turns to face the moon. It’s not Kerberos, hardly a fingernail as it hangs above the horizon, but it will do.
He asks of it, “Can you bring him home safely?”
The moon offers no response.
III.
Keith turns eighteen in the dim light of a desert sunset.
He’s spent the better part of a year in his father’s old desert house, the same one he’d stargazed in front of all those years ago. It’s dusty where the sands seep in under door frames and gather in window sills, and there’s no running water inside, but Keith learns to call it home after the Kerberos mission fails.
The headlines read ‘Pilot Error,’ but the official Garrison report, swiped from Iverson’s office before Keith disappeared into the desert, reads ‘unknown.’ This alone is enough to push Keith into a frantic search for answers. He spends weeks scouring the folder, stamped with ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ across its front, for some kind of answers. At the very bottom of the stack of documents is Shiro’s Garrison headshot.
He hangs the photo on the wall alongside a map and a thousand tiny sticky notes.
Somehow, Keith finds the caves after months of hunting for answers, and it feels like he’s moving in the right direction. Although he doesn’t understand the paintings on the sandstone, he understands that his gut pulled him here, so it must mean something.
He pieces the puzzle together, bit by bit. A blue, mechanical cat on the wall, surrounded by a field of stars, and symbols that seem to equate to something. It takes him months before he realizes it’s a date, and while Keith doesn’t yet know the meaning of it, when the day comes, he waits with bated breath. He sits on the jagged edge of a canyon wall and watches the vast expanse of the desert horizon for a sign until the sun sinks deep enough behind the horizon that the sky above him is a deep purple.
He is weary when he finds his way back into the caves. He runs the pads of his fingers across the illustrations he’s seen a thousand times, before letting his index finger rest on the biggest star, palm spread across the center of it.
“What does this mean?” Keith hisses, pressing against the wall. When he’s met by silence, he hits his hand against the star, “Come on .” He hits again, harder this time, and a jolt of pain shoots through his wrist and up his arm. “Why won’t you fucking help me?”
Somewhere outside, he hears a crash.
IV.
Keith is twenty, and he sees his entire life written in the stars.
Adrift on the back of a creature he doesn’t know the name of with a mother he’d believed long dead and the dog he’s always wanted by his side, Keith learns about himself as they inch slowly closer to the quantum abyss.
“Dad took me stargazing once.” Their fire has long since grown cold when Keith speaks to his mother in hushed tones, from where he’s stretched out beside her under the stars. “Out in the desert.”
Krolia hums her acknowledgement, but doesn’t move.
Keith presses on, “He pointed to the sky and told me you were out here, fighting and protecting us.”
“Oh.” Krolia’s words leave her in a sigh, barely above a whisper.
“I thought he was kidding,” Keith’s voice catches, thick in the back of his throat. “Well not a joke, but I thought you were dead. I thought he meant you were in heaven or something.”
There’s silence for just a beat before Krolia speaks again, and even she, as emotionless as she can sometimes seem, sounds choked up at the thought. “Your father never was good at lying.”
Keith’s laugh is watery. “No, he wasn’t, was he?”
There’s a little sniffle beside him, and Keith reaches a hand out to grab at hers, intertwining their fingers together.
“I’m glad you’re not dead, Mom,” he says. “And I’m glad I got to meet you.”
Her only response is to squeeze his hand tight in her own, and Keith fixes his eyes to the dark sky overhead. It’s filled with unfamiliar stars, ever changing as they move through the abyss, and Keith reaches up to point to one.
“Do you think Dad is protecting us like you did?”
His mother chuckles beside him, but doesn’t answer.
V.
Keith is 21, bound to the other paladins by time and circumstance, when he begins to question their purpose.
Too long—days, maybe a week—spent with arms linked in the void of space, and Keith is afraid. For the first time in a very long time, fear settles itself deep into his heart, tugging at the edges too roughly as it makes itself known. Years of adventure, of fighting, of anger have him strung out, vulnerable to the critiques that his friends throw his way, and he activates his jet pack, desperate to escape.
“No, don’t!” Hunk’s fingers are wrapped around his ankle, too tight as he tugs at Keith’s body, trying to pull him back close to where the others are watching with wary eyes, hands linked.
“Why, Hunk?” Keith’s lip curls. "Are we even really friends?”
Hurt flashes in Hunk’s eyes, but Keith ignores him, moving his gaze to a point just past Hunk’s head, to a tiny cluster of stars millions of light years away.
“Is there anything holding us together besides some messed-up series of coincidences?” Keith spits. “I mean, what are we? Some chosen saviors? Do you really believe that?”
The stars glitter before him, mockingly, and Keith feels compelled to ask of them, “What are we even doing out here?”
He looks back to Hunk, whose eyes are tired when he responds, “We’re doing what we have to.”
+I.
At twenty-six, Keith is finally, blessedly, alone.
Nearly four years since the war ended, and he has done enough to keep him busy for a lifetime. Humanitarian efforts with the Blade of Marmora, helping Allura and Lance in the establishment of New Altea, and facilitating the creation of lasting treaty and alliance between the Galra Empire and the Coalition have wrung him dry. Keith has seen the universe this way, seen civilizations rise and fall, has done so much more than he ever could have imagined for himself, but there’s something missing.
He’s so young still, but so tired, already.
Planet side on Earth for a few short weeks, he ascends the hidden staircase to the Garrison roof for the first time since he was seventeen. Here, for the first time in almost a decade, he sprawls out beneath the desert sky, toes pointed to the heavens.
He tracks constellations with his eyes, tracing the familiar shapes and trying to recall how many of those stars he’s seen burn up close, how many had worlds destroyed by war and death, and how many he has helped to rebuild.
And suddenly something—some one— pops into his field of vision, blocking the stars with a tuft of white hair and a broad grin.
“You’re being loud.”
Keith sucks in a sharp breath, shock coursing through him as he jolts upright. He allows himself a moment to process the surprise, before he’s turning to the source of the statement.
“Shiro, what the fuck!”
He looks good—great even, and Keith lets a little puff of air out between his teeth. Shiro is smiling down at him with his hands tucked into his pockets, and christ has Keith missed him.
“You’re always so loud when you think.” He laughs. “It’s like I can hear you across the Garrison.”
“How did you find me?” Keith narrows his eyes, and pulls his knees up to his chest as Shiro sits down beside him. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, just slipped out after dark from his room in the Garrison’s guest quarters and moved through the halls undetected. Or, well, he thought he was undetected.
“This is where you always went to think,” Shiro replies, leaning in to bump his shoulder against Keith’s. “You spent a lot of time here before the Kerberos launch, so call it a lucky guess.”
“I couldn’t keep anything from you back then, could I?”
“No.” Shiro’s response is simple, the words gentle. “So you’re up here on the roof, alone. What are you thinking about?”
A million things run through Keith’s mind at once, but he says, “I think I’m going to retire.”
“You’re twenty five, Keith.”
“Twenty six.” He nudges Shiro with his elbow. “But I’m tired. I’ve done a lot in the last ten years, Shiro.”
“ We’ve done a lot,” Shiro agrees. He waits for a response, silence electrifying the air between them before he presses on, “I’ve thought about retiring, too. The ATLAS isn’t doing much these days, and I have a lot of places I’d like to go. Things I’d like to see.”
The truth hangs heavy from his words, unspoken but acknowledged when Keith murmurs, “Never thought you’d get around to retirement, Old Timer,”
Shiro is so earnest when he speaks that Keith’s heart aches with it. “Me neither.”
They sit in silence for so long that the stars start to blur in Keith’s eyes. Shiro is warm beside him, pressed thigh to thigh.
“So, retirement, huh?” Keith finally says, turning to Shiro and tearing his eyes from Orion’s bow. “Do you really think there’s something more for us out there?”
Shiro’s gaze meets his, lips quirked up in a smile.
“I know there is.”