Chapter Text
After Shiro’s wedding, Keith disappeared.
Not from Krolia’s life. Her son is good, but no one is that good.
She drums her fingers on the table, playing the impatient tourist waiting for a shuttle to dock. If anyone were good enough to slip out of her sight, they’d probably live here on Taranis. There are two different sentient species native to this planet, the Tyen and the Lawafluye, both impossibly stealthy. Because Krolia’s life is never easy, they won’t stop murdering each other’s leaders. She’s supposed to be decolonizing this place and making reparations. Instead she’s solving a locked-room mystery.
Did the Tyen and the Lawafluye hate each other before millennia of Galra exploitation, or does the empire bear that blame, too?
Krolia gives the station a leisurely glance. The central hub of Vi Tyenaver is like so many other thousands of shuttle stations around the galaxy: tinny loudspeaker announcements bouncing off the metal surfaces, travelers rushing to catch rides or huddled around maps and schedules, a little hut off to the side selling something hot and deep-fried. Keith will stand out here, small, unfurred, unfeathered, unscaled, tail-less, wing-less, and crest-less as he is, but he’s damn good at vanishing when he wants to, and he would take smug pleasure in sneaking up on his own mother. Krolia can’t allow that.
She sips her beverage. Something hot and bitter from the fry shop, muddy and reddish. Its presence on the table next to her makes her look unremarkable, one more person waiting among hundreds of others. She won’t be drinking any more than she has to.
The Galra are not well-loved in Vi Tyenaver, or on the whole of Taranis, or anywhere else they once ruled. Krolia can’t blame anyone for that, but people get murdered with alarming frequency in Vi Tyenaver, and she’d prefer not to defend herself from any violent anti-imperial sentiment right now.
It’s been too long since she’s seen her son.
Keith will arrive on public transport from one of the busy routes, even if he has to go far out of his way to do it. He won’t rush off the ship. He’ll take his time so he can disembark in a crowd. He’ll stop to study the display of arrival and departure times, because it’s a good moment to stand still and surreptitiously take stock of the surroundings.
Ah. There he is. Not dressed like a Blade, which isn’t surprising. Keith rarely takes jobs that require the uniform these days. His kind of work is easier in street clothes, and today he’s draped in layers of black and dark grey, his hair long and loose, a small black bag hanging off one shoulder. From long years of observation, Krolia recognizes the shape of the blade under his jacket, but no one else will.
Found you, Krolia messages him. She watches him read the message and turn steadily until he sees her.
He smiles.
Krolia smiles back.
It’s been awful, witnessing her child sabotage his own life, but they still have this. This much, he permits her. He always smiles when he sees her and he always comes when she calls.
She requested his help with this one. It’s too damn complicated here, and she’s a public figure now, working in the full light of day. (On grim, cloudy Taranis, that’s not saying much.) But Keith has always had a knack for moving in the shadows, and he’s only grown more skilled in the years since his disappearance from public life.
After they’d sacrificed Voltron and Atlas to save reality, some last vestige of duty kept him tethered to Earth. Then Shiro married someone else, and Keith drifted off into the universe like gravity had never touched him. The other Paladins asked Krolia about him at first. What had happened? Where had he gone? Would he ever come back?
Keith didn’t want to be found. Krolia’s affection for the Paladins couldn’t outweigh her loyalty to him. She evaded their questions. She lied. She didn’t break, not even when Allura had taken her aside in private, her eyes glittering with anger and unshed tears, and said it wasn’t only Shiro. He was our friend, too.
As if Krolia didn’t know that.
She didn’t like to lose things, Allura. Krolia sympathized. But she’d made her choice a long time ago.
Eventually, as the years passed, Allura and the others stopped asking. Did they intuit that Krolia knew and refused to tell them, or did they assume Keith had abandoned his own mother? It didn’t really matter, since Krolia couldn’t discuss it. That was part of the unspoken bargain she’d made to keep Keith in her life. She wouldn’t speak to the Paladins about him, nor to him about them. It was a high price, but Krolia had paid higher.
She keeps her eyes on Keith, unwilling to let him out of her sight. He’s wending through the crowd, almost to her table now. He won’t have such a soft gaze for her when he finds out why he’s here.
His mother is a fucking sphinx.
Krolia takes Keith on a meandering stroll around the city, chatting about the bio gothic architecture and the local history as if all the grapevines twisted into cathedral spires aren’t blackened and dead from Galra exploitation. She’s a fount of information about Tyenaver culture—the tall, bat-winged species—and how it differs from Lawafluyed culture. The Lawafluye are the iridescent feathered lizard ones. Keith did his homework. He doesn’t need his mom to lecture him.
She’s less forthcoming on the subject of the mission. Every time he asks a question, she turns down some alley and exclaims over another narrow, ornamented tower constructed out of a lacework of black vines. The city’s full of alleys and towers. They’re losing their charm fast.
A prominent Lawafluyed leader, Yuma, was found dead in a locked room last month. The same for a Tyenaver leader, Ah Sho Dwa Fe Le, who was rumored to be in the running for prime minister after the dismantling of the interim Galra government, only that murder was two weeks ago. Both victims were members of the Joint Parliament, the group negotiating with the Galra for the independence of Taranis. His mother hasn’t mentioned either case yet.
Eventually she leads him to the apartment she’s renting. The building’s obviously Galra construction, with sharp, clean lines, and it’s an eyesore against the ornate backdrop of Vi Tyenaver. But since they’re climbing fifteen flights of stairs, Keith feels grateful to have metal and concrete beneath his feet, rather than vines that look like they might reach out and snatch his ankles.
Kosmo materializes in the apartment after they enter. The wolf’s not much for shuttles or cities. He puts his head under Keith’s hand and Keith scratches behind his ears. Kosmo saunters off to curl up in a corner, already at home.
Taranis is a humid, foggy planet, every window permanently steamed. Krolia crosses the apartment to a glass door with its view obscured. She slides it open and gestures for Keith to join her on the balcony. There’s traffic and industrial noise grinding out of the city below, the air feels like a wet weight on his skin, and the ground is still pockmarked from bombardment and littered with debris, but traveling has taught Keith that even the worst places have something to recommend them, and this must be it.
All that particulate in the air makes for a glorious sunset. From this high up, nothing blocks the expansive view. The sky is red bleeding into orange, color so thick you could reach out and touch it. Not so different from the desert of his childhood, which she would know, of course.
So Krolia’s about to tell him something he won’t like. Keith pre-empts her, impatient. “Do you need me to kill someone?”
Krolia frowns. There’s no one listening to them out here, high above the ground and just outside the apartment Krolia sweeps for bugs twice daily, but she still doesn’t like to talk about the work in such blunt terms. Too bad.
“No. The opposite.”
Is that disapproval in her tone? Keith ignores it. The Blade no longer hands out assassination assignments, but he’s killed people before and he might have to again. Krolia’s killed her fair share of people in battle, and when you get right down to it, the war never really ended. The galaxy’s a complicated place. Sometimes judiciously applied violence makes it a simpler one.
“So I’m keeping someone alive, then? Who is it?”
“Did you bring a Blade uniform?” she counters.
A question for a question. He’ll never get anywhere, interrogating her like this. Just to be contrary, he says, “Do I need one?”
“Yes. Go put it on.”
“So we’re going now. To do some part of this mission you’ve told me almost nothing about.”
“I’ve told you everything you need to know,” Krolia says. “Diplomatic work like this is delicate. Appearances matter. Keep that in mind.”
“You want me to stand around and look intimidating while fancy assholes eat hors d’oeuvres. Got it.” Keith rolls his eyes. “You could have had anyone do this, Mom. I was two quadrants away.”
Instead of defending her choices, she says, “Before you change into your uniform, can I braid your hair?”
Suspicious. “This place has seen two recent high-profile murders—likely political assassinations—and… you’re concerned about my hair?”
When hurt flashes in her eyes, he knows he should take it back. Galra groom each other to show affection. She just wants to touch him. He forgets, sometimes, how to talk to people who care about him. The number has dwindled to one; he doesn’t get much practice.
Krolia’s not making a comment on how much time has passed since he last visited a salon (years) or on the way he cuts his bangs (a knife). Keith is capable of braiding his hair, but wears it loose most of the time. The length is useful. It’s better for skulking if it curtains his face.
And it hides the scar.
“It’s fine,” Krolia says. She steps back inside the apartment and Keith follows her, sliding the balcony door shut.
“No, do it,” he tells her. He sits on the couch and lifts his hair in his hands. “I want you to.”
She’s pleased, and he submits himself to her attentions—a wide-toothed comb through his hair and then her fingers separating the weight of it into three sections. Other than Kosmo, no one has touched him in a long time. Not even violently, since he ends fights before anyone lands a hit. Certainly not with affection.
It doesn’t matter. He’s been doing important work.
Krolia moves with tidy efficiency. She could take more time if she wanted, but Keith says nothing. If he’d grown up with her, she would have done things like this for him all the time.
She must be thinking something similar. Out of the blue, she says, “You know I love you.”
“Yes.”
“Keith, this mission… I hope you’ll forgive me. I had to make some hard choices.”
That’s nothing new. He clenches his jaw, then consciously relaxes it, not wanting Krolia to notice. “I thought it was just standing around during some talks? Should be easy, right?”
She hums in response.
It doesn’t bode well, Krolia bringing this up before the mission. But what’s he going to do, back out because it might be difficult and dangerous? The whole galaxy’s difficult and dangerous. There’s no escape.
Krolia ties off his braid and kisses the top of his head.