prologue part one
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“You know, there can’t be that many humans in space.”
There are several simultaneous sighs in response over the comms. Keith doesn’t need to have the video feed open to guess the faces his team are making; the annoyance, the tired irritation and flat dismissiveness. He’s used to it.
He doesn’t care. If anything it’s amusing, actually.
“I’m only speculating,” Keith continues, casual. He ignores Red’s sharp pangs of warning in the back of his mind. “The movie references, the bomb, the attitude –”
“Do you ever shut the fuck up,” Pidge says icily, and Keith has no issue ignoring her, either.
“I mean, how many times would the Galra have come to the Milky Way?”
Pidge is no longer the only one telling him to stop. He counts two more voices but doesn’t let himself recognise whose, pretending it’s just background noise, because he’s damn right and he knows he is.
“We know four confirmed humans to have gone missing in space. Who’s to say it’s not –”
“Can it, Kogane!” Hunk shouts, and he’s much harder to ignore, if only because Keith wouldn’t put it past him to ram his lion right into Keith’s.
He shrugs and picks at a loose thread on his undersuit. He said what he needed to say, anyway. So. It doesn’t really matter.
Hunk’s breathing is heavy and carefully controlled, static over the comms, building up a tension that Keith can’t help but delight in, a little. He knows Hunk’s waiting for a response, maybe even an apology, so Keith takes his time in answering, poking idly at his dashboard.
(Keith has sat through Matt and Coran’s grief counselling just like everyone else. He knows how he’s supposed to handle this, how he’s been asked and trained to handle inner-team conflict. He has been presented with mindfulness worksheets and team building exercises. He knows the stakes. He knows that they are supposed to preserve the caricature of Voltron that they have left, continue animating the skeleton of the Coalition.
But then again, he sits in grief counselling in silence, because he has nothing to grieve yet.)
“Not my fault you gave up,” Keith says, faux-casual.
Many voices erupt at once, because it is the wrong thing to say. He knew it and said it anyway and watches the aftermath with a deliberate and defiant brand of ennui.
“You just don’t fucking get it, do you.”
No, Keith doesn’t understand. He will never understand the ease in which everyone has simply accepted what seems to be. He doesn’t understand how quickly everyone else gave up. He doesn’t understand why they are moving forward, why they are bothering, when Lance has not been returned safely to them, when they haven’t even found a fucking body, if that’s the route they choose to pursue. He will never understand why everyone has given up on Lance as if it’s the right thing to do and he will never forgive anyone for it, either.
So he says nothing.
But Hunk is used to him starting things and backing away, now, so he continues.
“Lance was my fucking brother, Keith. I don’t have a single memory in my life without him in it. I fucking –” Hunk’s voice shakes, and Keith can’t tell if it’s rage or pain. When he speaks again he sounds reedy, drawn out. “I won’t turn his memory into one of your conspiracy theories. I know it’s hard for you, I know you loved him –”
Keith shuts that line of thought down fast, bouldering over Hunk loudly. “So help me look for him.”
Keith’s words have no conviction. They have had this argument before and they will have it again, although every time they do, the patience for Keith wears thinner and thinner.
(Keith knows they are getting tired of him. He knows they are losing their affection for him the fastest and he know he is making it worse for himself but he can’t fucking stop because if he stops then that means he’s given up and he can’t give up not on Lance. Not on Lance he promised. They have never found a body. There was the tape of course there was the tape but Keith knows down to the very soul of him that if the roles were reversed Lance would never ever stop looking and who would Keith be if he stopped. He knows his family just wants to grieve and he is standing in their way but he cannot choose between Lance and his family he can’t.)
“...Alright, Keith,” Hunk sighs, exhausted. Keith squirms until he forces himself still. “Alright.”
They ride in silence for the rest of the flight. Keith remembers a time when flights this long almost guaranteed a game of some sort, or playful argument that lasted half an hour, then immediately wishes he didn’t. He busies himself with the mission bulletpoints from the pre-mission briefing to keep from falling down that trap.
The intel Kolivan passed onto them included a very convoluted amalgamation of Haggar and her operations. Maybe even all of them. Keith’s not sure, it’s mostly been Pidge and Shiro and Allura looking at it, decoding and puzzling it out. What Keith does know is that the mission they’re on now is one of confirmation, a tentative testing of the waters, to add credibility to the intel. The massive file has informed them that the base they are approaching has been abandoned for months; planet totally ravaged of its resources and left behind when the Empire could no longer had use for it like the goddamn parasite it is. If the intel is correct, then the base should be empty of everything except a few patrolling sentries, easy to take out, and rife with bridges for Pidge to build to more information rich systems.
And if the intel is correct about this base, then it is likely correct about others; others like the giant citadel in the Qelrn nursery star where Druids are supposedly born, others like the factories in twelve different galaxies where all Empire sentries are assembled, others like the almost immeasurably massive fortress built inside the most powerful star in the known universe. Places that, when hit, would not only cripple the Empire, but destroy it.
But of course they have to kick around this stupid abandoned shell of a base, first.
“Cloaking on,” Shiro announces as the base starts to blip on their radars.
Keith listens without argument. He’s pushed enough today.
He’s bored on the mission, as he expected to be. He takes the lead in the beginning, but it takes him all of fifteen minutes to wipe out the sentries scattered throughout the base and then his part of the mission is basically done. He’s not trusted to go digging around in files, not anymore. (Not after the tape. Not after taking down the Empire stopped being anywhere close to his first priority. Not after he became a Liability.) So he stands off to the side as everyone else crowds around the control centre of the bridge, swinging and slashing his sword around with no real purpose. He wonders if anyone would notice if he just got in Red and fucked off.
Probably.
Sighing to himself, he sits heavily on the floor, not bothering to soften the impact and knowing the hard clang of his armour will leave a bruise. It’s a dangerous path to go down and he knows it, but he allows himself to think about what it would be like if Lance was here, on this mission and alive. Lance would be with him, probably. Neither of them have ever been able to maintain interest in hacking and computers and coding and everything. If Lance were here Keith would be allowed to explore the ship, since they'd be a pair. They wouldn’t find anything interesting but Lance has a way of making mundane things interesting. Keith wonders if they would have fun or if they’d spend the whole time arguing.
He smiles slightly. Both, probably.
He hates their new normal. He hates it so much. He knows that they don’t have the resources to look for someone who’s very likely dead. He knows Pidge was never allowed to just up and leave and look for her family in the beginning, and it’s no different now. He knows that tactically, the smartest thing the Empire could do with Lance would be to kill him. He knows that and he’s not stupid enough to think Haggar and Zarkon and whoever the fuck else would mess that up, keep Lance alive, allow him the possibility to escape and reform Voltron.
It had been Lance to point that out, actually. Quietly and on the observation deck, one night when Keith couldn’t stand the sound of his muffled sobs through the thin wall connecting their rooms any longer and dragged him there to help mellow him out. The conversation had rolled around to the time Allura was taken, somehow, and Lance had confided in Keith that he was so angry in Keith’s and Allura’s insistence that she be left behind because he knew that they would kill her.
“It’s the fastest way,” he’d explained, chin hooked over his knees and halfway haunted look in his dark eyes. “Voltron is a team or nothing kind of deal. There is no four paladin Voltron, there is no wormholing without the Altean heir to run it. Yeah, they could torture us for information, but why bother? Why expend that energy? You kill just one of us and we’re fucked forever. You could take Voltron out with one lucky shot.” He’d shuddered. Keith feels bile rise at the back of his throat even now, at the memory, at the surety in Lance’s voice when he said it, like he knew one of them was going to die and it was only a matter of time. It freaked Keith out then and makes him nauseous now. He doesn’t like the idea that Lance knew, that he prepared for it.
The train of thought makes him want to crawl out of his skin. He hates that his mind always goes here. He scrambles to his feet and stumbles out of the bridge, like he can outrun the memories, leave behind the fear in Lance’s face. He’s down a random hallway and swiping cobwebs and dust from his hair before he realises what he’s doing. He stops, smack in front of a giant window in some forgotten hallway, pressing the heel of his hands to his eyes hard enough to see stars.
“I can’t keep doing this,” he says. He breathes deeply through his mouth for several moments. He still feels hugely twitchy, like sparks are just under his skin. He looks out the window and finds a random star, staring at it until he’s cross-eyed, until it blurs and blinks around the edges.
There is too much he doesn’t know. There is too much that has been left up to speculation and it kills him. Keith has always been hellbent on figuring things out -- his heritage, the Garrison secrets, the mystery of the Blue Lion. He has always busied himself with finding the truth and damned the consequences. And there have been consequences. There always have been and they have always been painful. He has always had to choose between truth and comfort.
He takes one final, deep breath, imagining the air flowing into his lungs and sinking into his bloodstream, and steels himself. He pulls out his comm and messages Kolivan. (Even now, even after Keith has long since left the Blades and will likely never return, Kolivan has a soft spot for him. Maybe it’s the way he had the answers Keith needed and Keith trusted him. Maybe Kolivan just needed a reason to be soft after so many years. But Keith is grateful for it nonetheless.)
He opens the file Kolivan sends him, no questions asked, no hesitation. The intel that he has not been expressly kept away from but that has not been openly provided to him, either. He watches the video, with the mysterious figure who speaks like Lance and walks like Lance and squares his shoulders the same way Lance always has, and Keith starts his search.
