You got it?" Pidge threw the distracted question over her shoulder at Keith, trying to focus on her own delicate task of affixing thin wiring to the lid of a shoddy Altean toybox.
Keith practically rolled his eyes. As if he didn't know how to make an explosive, this girl talked. "Oh, I'm already done," he assured, turning the flame off of his plasma torch as he finished soldering the in the last trigger. He waited for her to finish off the box and bring it over, the two of them carefully sliding his half of the project into place and safely locking it in.
"After this it just needs to be armed, right?" Keith asked once it was done, looking over the small plastic crate to make sure they hadn't left it looking any more suspicious than they needed it to be.
Pidge nodded, pushing her glasses up her nose with a dramatic flare. "We're set," she confirmed proudly, tucking the box under her arm and turning towards the door leading out of her lion's bay to the outside world. "Let's go fuck some shit up."
It was early morning, and Keith and Pidge had work to do. Actually, everyone had work to, but today Keith and Pidge were doing their work together because the paladins worked on a rotation system for reasons involving no one being allowed off by themselves and Hunk and Lance's unfortunate habit of trying to call each other as field trip buddies at first opportunity. But either way today Keith and Pidge had work to do together, which as far as the two of them were concerned just meant today was going to be as efficient as a well-oiled motherfucker. The two of them were, if he understood the concept correctly, best bros themselves.
Their friendship, it can be noted, was based almost entirely on mutual suppressed rage. When the two of them were alone they could drop all pretenses about good cheer and politeness, freely complaining and gossiping and just generally being bitchy without any kind of worry about anyone's stupid feelings getting hurt. It was incredibly cathartic.
"Here looks good, right?" The two of them wandered into Fyrestone's red-tarred streets, finding a side road with less foot traffic on the sandstone sidewalks than the most of the area and even fewer passing vehicles. Pidge set the trap box down on the sidewalk, not quite in the middle of anyone's way but obvious enough to catch their eye. The reason the street wasn't very busy was because it was on one of Fyrestone's few steep hills, so all they had to do to find a vantage point out of sight to watch from was wander up the hill a little ways and hang out behind the low stone wall separating the walkway from the street.
And the other reason Keith liked hanging out with Pidge? Because they did shit like this together. Pranks were an endeavor Keith didn't normally deign to waste his time on, but a favorite pastime of the green paladin. And as they were no longer allowed to team up with her preferred partner of Lance because the two of them had no sense of scale and tended to wind up endangering lives ("Why does something always blow up when I leave you two alone?!"; "It's called friendship, Hunk, and it means we're doing it right!"), Pidge had been in need of a new partner in crime. Keith had mainly needed something to do with his time, and had agreed because hanging out with Pidge was as good of an idea as any other. As it turned out, rigging Lance's underwear drawer with that itchy space pepper was a blast and a half, and Keith had ended up her go-to coconspirator when she needed stress relief. And as Keith was fully aware of the absolute bullshit that was Pidge's life, any kind of mischief she needed to get into as an outlet for her bitterness and rage was all good by his standards.
They waited with patience, watching as passersby glanced at the box as they walked by it, a few stopping to poke at it tentatively before moving on. Finally they struck gold, an onion-skinned alien man stopping to pick the box up and inspect it curiously. Keith and Pidge held their breaths, watching warily as the man shook the box to listen to the slight rattle the device made against the inside walls. Pidge leaned forward over the side if the short wall, watching with heart-pounding anticipation as the alien lifted open the latch of the box's lid… And after the loud popping noise and burst of high-speed indigo, burst out laughing at the absolute bewilderment on the alien's ink-stained face.
The onion man blinked in confusion, box slipping out of his hands and falling to the ground like Elmer Fudd dropping a present from Bugs and looking around frantically as if the answer to what had just happened to him was hiding in the bushes somewhere nearby. This was of course ironically true, but he did not manage to look far enough up the hill to notice Keith and Pidge where they were trying to smother raucous laughter into silence under their hands. Keith nudged Pidge's shoulder, nodding down the hill. She nodded back and sucked in a deep breath of air to calm her laughter. Schooling her face into seriousness, she jumped over the wall and started dashing down the hill towards the confused alien.
"Oh, no!" She shouted, and Keith wished so desperately he could see what kind of face she was wearing for this act. "Oh no oh no, oh no! My ink!"
The alien man looked up at Pidge as she ran towards him, dumbly sputtering out "Uhhhhm?"
"The ink I need for my boss! I can't believe I dropped it, I can't believe it EXPLODED! Of course it exploded, I had the carbanoid nitrodioxicide in there with it! I'm such an idiot!" She grabbed at her hair dramatically, reaching the man and picking the box up off the ground to look inside like maybe there'd be some ink leftover she could still use. "Oh, nooooo…"
Keith hopped over the wall and started down to meet the just as the onion man was apologizing "Oh, oh goodness now, I am so very sorry for opening that…" He slugged out in a thick voice, holding his leafy hands up in an automatic defensive stance.
Pidge stood back up, looking like she had just noticed him for the first time now. "And oh God, look at your face! I made you BLUE! I'm sorry sir, I'm so sorry!"
The alien shook his teardrop-shaped head quickly. "N-no…" He dismissed awkwardly, but by then Keith was running at them and interrupted whatever he was trying to say.
"Fox! Fox, what happened to the ink?! It looks like there was an explosion here or something!" Keith shouted, doing his best to look mad and worried at the same time as he ran down to meet them.
"Dana!" The two of them had long ago discovered aliens tended to regard he and Pidge as siblings, even when standing next to the other paladins. They said it was because of their similar physical builds, but Keith knew it was because the strangers could recognize the matching expressions of utter disdain pairing their faces. Either way he and Pidge had learned to use this assumption to their advantage, and she had coached him into a near perfect "Codependent siblings" act with her to suit their nefarious purposes. Nefarious, of course, meaning they usually used it when they were trying to escape the repercussions of their mischief. Pidge stared up at him now with watery eyes, croaking apologetically "I- I dropped the box I was picking up for my boss and when I came back looking for it…" They both turned their heads to look at the flustered onion man. "Th- the carbodium was in there, too."
"Damn it, Fox, if you don't get that delivery to him you'll be fired again!" Keith scolded. "You shouldn't have had them both in there at the same time! And you!" He directed his glare the alien. "What were you doing opening a random box in the middle of the street, anyway?"
The onion man shook his his head quickly again, sputtering out "I'm sorry, it was… I was just…"
"What are you gonna do now, Fox?" Keith ignored him, rounding again on his pretend sister. "Can we replace the ink? How much was the cost when you picked it up?"
She rubbed at her eyes as if to wipe the tears away, scrubbing at her face to make it look redder." I don't know, he just gave me a card to use and I already gave it back!"
Keith clicked his tongue. "We're just gonna need to try to replace it, we can't afford to lose another job right now."
"We can't afford to buy this much again, either! And the carbanoid nitrodioxicide was for work, too!"
"Are you serious right now?! Ugh, maybe if one of us picks up a second job…"
"You already have two!"
"A third job, then!"
"W-why don't I just give you the money for it?!" They both whipped their heads to turn back to the onion man, wide-eyed and flustered under their gaze. "I - it is my fault it exploded, I shouldn't have opened someone else's property in the first place, right?"
"Oh, no -"
"We couldn't possibly, sir, it's her own fault -"
"- we could never accept such generosity -"
"- and we can definitely take care of our problems, we don't need to bother you -"
"Especially when it's my fault you're blue in the first place, I should be the one offering you money..."
"P-please!" The alien held up his hands again, eyes darting back and forth in between the two of them as he fell backwards a step. "It's no trouble at all, just," he pulled some kind of wallet out of the pocket of his ink stained jacket, "please let me leave!"
Keith and Pidge both spoke at once, fervently trying to deny the offer with large gestures. The man's response was somewhere along the lines of throwing money at them and running away.
They stared at his retreating back for a moment, before looking down at the cards he'd handed them.
"Well, shit," Keith said after a while. "I didn't think the second part of this plan would actually work.
"Yeah, I didn't really either." Pidge agreed with drawn eyebrows. "We totally just conned that poor guy. That makes us awful people, right?."
"Awful, terrible people." They stared at the money. "We should probably like. Find him and return it or something, huh?"
"Yeah," Pidge agreed seriously. "We really should."
They used it to buy lunch instead.
To their credit buying lunch was, in fact, a large part of their information-gathering tactic for the day. They chose the most normal and nondescript diner they could identify, ordered enough food to excuse the two of them sitting there for the next several hours refilling their drinks like assholes(1), and listened.
"So why is it," Keith was asking Pidge, both of them keeping one ear open to the quiet din around them, "that we can understand everything everyone says to us on any planet, but I couldn't read this menu if I had a cipherkey?"
The bubbles Pidge had been blowing into her soda halted. "That's actually a pretty interesting question," she said, sitting up from where she'd been slumped over the tabletop. "Okay so you know that we have that connection with our lions where they're sort of in our brains? That's part of it. I haven't even come close to figuring out how this magitechnology the castle runs on works, but I know that the lions are translating any speech patterns we hear into recognizable ones" She pointed to her temple as if to demonstrate 'all in here.' "It even does the reverse, which is probably more impressive. They're constantly reading and analyzing the brainwave patterns of the speech center of the brain in everything around us including ourselves, sampling it and converting it into this sort of like.." Pidge's hands twitched and circled in the air as she fished for the right words. "...Translator matrix, so that when we speak what we THINK coming out of our mouths is our standard English but it's actually whatever the most prevalent local language is!" She paused. "Well, Allura said we all have awful accents in every language we speak, so I clearly it's not a perfect system."
Keith blinked stupidly, mind whirring as it tried to comprehend the explanation. "Okay, I think I get that. So why can't they just analyze the patterns of things we see, too?"
She shrugged. "I think it's because they can't connect the patterns they read in text with the patterns heard in speech. These things are supposed to have a full database with every language in the universe on it, but that's all ten-thousand year old data now, it's not accurate anymore." Pidge leaned back in her seat casually, taking a sip of her drink. "Same reason they'll translate Japanese but not Spanish, I imagine. English and Spanish are both romantic languages born from Latin, so the lions can't even tell they're different from each other. But when I had Shiro try some Japanese I could understand it, I guess because the origin was halfway around the globe so they have enough differences."
Keith had not actually thought Pidge would have an answer to his mostly hypothetical question, and couldn't help but be impressed. "And how much time did you spend deducing all of this, Agent Mulder?"
Her face twisted into the grimace of someone who could not be more disappointed with their life. "Only like, a day," she said morosely, as though the idea of a project that would take ten years of her life to comprehend was her greatest wish in this world.
Beside the table their waitress had come once again to loom over them with a stony glare. "Is there anything else I can get you?" The disgruntled Geruda asked with terse politeness, pouring enough water into Keith's still-full glass that a single nudge to the table would cause the careful bubble of water rising above the rim to burst and spill off the table into his lap.
"We're fine just chilling here, thanks," Pidge waved her off.
The server turned around to leave them, the motion whipping her tail out behind her to bump one of the legs of the table as she passed, and Keith slapped the palm of his hand over the top of his glass just in time to hold it down to the shaken table enough to minimize the inevitable spill. He shook the water off his hand, and cleaned up the rest with his last napkin. The glass still was still too full to safely pick up. "Are you done with that straw?"
"Sure." Pidge flicked it at him.
He was just sticking it into his water glass and dragging out a long sip when the first useful thing all week finally happened. Behind them towards the back of the restaurant two people were coming out of a soft-swinging door, one of them wheeling out an empty dolly as they talked.
"You're here earlier than usual, D'argo. I thought you always did your Concordia deliveries first?" The old Geruda woman in a manager's uniform asked.
Keith couldn't see the other speaker from where he was sitting without turning his head, so he just listened. "Yeah, I can't get in there yet until my new visa clears. Forgot to renew the damned thing before I came here now I've been putting off going down to that godawful license center like a fool."
"You still haven't been there? Honey you better get comfortable, then."
"I know, I know, I'll be here for days. But I'd have been here for days anyway, so. Can't blame a guy for procrastinating, right? I'll do it after I hit Elzar and Zaahn's places and finish today's deliveries"
"Well good luck with that sweetie. I'll be seeing you here for dinner again then, I suppose?"
"Well, I don't know where else I'd eat!" D'argo laughed, and wheeled his empty cart out of the restaurant.
Pidge and Keith were looking at each other. "What are you thinking, Agent Scully?"
"You know what I'm thinking, Mulder." Keith said, eyeing the door. They scooted their chairs out from under the table almost in unison.
Keith pulled out the cards they'd gotten from the onion man, looking at them critically. "Do we know how much money is on these?"
"Nope," Pidge said, standing up. "Do you know how much our bill was?"
"No idea."
They paused. "Leave all of them here and hope instead of shafting that poor server we gave her a really, really big tip?"
"That was my plan," Pidge agreed. Terrible, terrible people, they were. The others should stop leaving them unsupervised, honestly.
They left to begin following their quarry.
Admittedly, following the delivery man to two separate restaurants just to to find the licensing center was probably unnecessary when such a thing as 'asking for directions' existed, but that's what the two of them did anyway. It was probably just as well - otherwise they might have gone into it tomorrow looking for a normal passport, which Elpis did not provide and politely shut down like a steel trap if you asked. What they DID issue was work visas, and not just to anyone, either. When it all boiled down to it, the only way to get into Concordia was if you had something to sell.
But on the plus side? Look who'd finally figured out how to get into the city, eh? Efficient as a well-oiled motherfucker.
--
In the foodservice industry, in which Keith spent far more months bussing tables than he would ever have liked, a customer who takes up a table for half the night and preventing anyone from getting extra tips via turnover and clogging up the waiting list is usually referred to as "an Asshole"
--
"So… Do we have anything we could sell?" Lance asked the table at large. The five paladins plus Allura had reconvened at a bar later that evening. The live music from the band and chatter of the patrons around them was loud enough that any of the six of them could only just barely hear each other speaking over it, so Lance had to raise his voice to add "Because I feel like we can't pose as merchants very if we have no wares."
"We really only have what's in the castle with us," Hunk said dubiously. "We only just got that greenhouse running again, it's way too early to try to sell any of the food we're growing there."
Shiro managed to sit in his chair in a way that made the other patrons in the bar all walk around him in a wide berth where they shamelessly bumped against and slid past the others. "How important is it that we actually sell anything? When we can get into the city we don't need to keep posing as merchants if we can find what we're here for, right?" He looked at Allura. "How likely is it that we'll be able to talk to someone important quickly?"
"Not good," Allura just shook her head grimly. "The royal line of Sheba has always been very clandestine in their support of rebellion. Even if we miraculously managed to find out way to a senator or chancellor or duchess, there's a chance they aren't connected at all; and the ones who are will be hard pressed to tell us such." She looked out the darkened window at the far wall. "And nevermind the fact that I don't even know where the palace is anymore - this city has grown so much larger than it was in my day, I haven't the faintest clue where to even begin. I'm afraid we have to be prepared to be in Concordia for a long while."
"So um, no offense…" Lance twirled a hand in the air. "But how important is it to stay here and do this, exactly? Can we just…" He waved the hand dismissively. "Give up and leave, maybe?"
The others looked inappropriately hopeful at this, but Allura once again shot them down. "Even if it's not through the royal family, if we're going to find whatever revolution against the Galra this galaxy has been building up, Concordia is our best bet. The fact of the matter is as much as I'd like to keep other people out of this fight, we can't do it by ourselves." She looked at them all, eyes circling the table to meet each one of them in turn. "We need allies, and this is city is our best bet in finding them. There's a reason this city is practically the universal center of the black market - Concordia is City of a Centillion Secrets, past, present, and future."
There was a few moments where no one spoke, the boisterous din of the bar filling their silence.
And then Shiro said with complete seriousness, "That's a lot of fucking secrets."
"Well," Allura clapped her hands together to call attention back to her, and cheerfully added, "On the plus side, we actually do have plenty of wares to sell! Might have some trouble getting them from the castle all the way into town to sell, but we have more than enough to last us however long we need!"
The paladins all stared at her, trying to decide if they knew what she was referring to. "Ancient Altean antiques..?" Hunk hazarded.
"Yes, actually," Allura flashed him a dazzling smile. "Ten thousand year old furniture should fetch a pretty good price, if I'm not mistaken."
Which did in fact sound like a huge pain in the ass to move into the city considering where they'd parked their damned ship. What did ancient Altean furniture look like, anyway? Like, credenzas and shit? Did Keith even know what a credenza was? He realized he did not.
Lance frowned, kicking at the table a bit. "Okay, but if we're advertizing that it's ten thousand years old they'll probably check that out and figure out it's Altean. We might as well be painting a big sign on our backs saying 'Lookee here, we got us some Paladins!'" Which was a good point, if phrased in a totally weird sort of way.
"We can say we stole it," Pidge offered with no hesitation.
Hunk rubbed at his chin. "...Actually that's not bad."
"The castle did appear to have been already heavily looted when Coran and I took stock of it. It's not far out of reach to assume we're selling looted goods from when everything was still shut down." Allura said.
"The timing is a little too convenient though, isn't it?" Shiro argued reasonably. "A group of people show up with a ship we can't show anyone apparently full of Altean artifacts not even a year after Voltron has reappeared? Lance isn't wrong, it'd be a neon warning sign."
"Well that's not hard," Keith shrugged. "We can just say we stole it all recently - snuck in and looted the place while all of us were out distracted being Voltron." They left the place totally empty often enough that Keith was surprised it hadn't already happened. Well, they usually left either Allura, Coran or both behind to watch over things - today was Coran's turn to stay behind, as it were - but considering the Galra-related difficulties they've had in the past and the fact that it was only two people, Keith was sure that a person could sneak in and out without being noticed. "Maybe on Thuban 9, there was plenty of time for us to be robbed when we were there last month."
Even Shiro had to stop at that one. "...Actually... that could work. If we can be convincing… space bandits, I guess, and not show up in an obvious group of five we might be able to pass by with that."
At the words 'space bandits' Allura lit up like someone had just set a Christmas tree on fire. "We… we get to pretend to be space pirates!" She realized with the deranged glee of someone whose dreams have just come true.
"I, uh. I said bandits, actually…"
If she heard Shiro she made no sign of it. "I'm going to be so good at this, I've read all the great stories! Captain Bon Clay the Mimic Prince, Roronoa the Three Headed Razor Beast of Zou, Big Mam and her famous deadly tea parties…" She listed off like any one of them had ever heard of these people before and even knew if they had existed or were fictional. "Oh, I'm so excited, I wonder what kind of clothes we have left in the castle to dress up in!"
The paladins all exchanged weathered glances. With Allura that enthusiastic about the idea, they'd be hard pressed to talk her out of it. Looks like starting tomorrow they were going down to the license center in town and pretending to be space pirates. Or bandits. Whichever.
"Welp," Lance slammed a hand down on the table. "Now that that's all sorted, it's clear what we have to do." He flung an arm out behind him in an extravagant gesture towards the performing band. "There's a party going on around us, we've gotta join in!"
Keith huffed a short sigh out of his nose, his mouth occupied with trying to fight off a smile. Of course. Lance was hardly the type to throw away an open opportunity for a good time like this, wasn't he? They were lucky they'd gotten him to sit still and listen for as long as he had.
Lance was scanning the crowd of dancing aliens next to the band with unconcealed excitement, not even facing the table anymore as he called to them "So, who's joining me for a round on that dance floor?"
Hunk pushed out of his seat with noisy scrape of his chair. "You know I can't resist the chance to totally upstage you with my sick moves," he broke out a rather impressive pop'n lock maneuver to demonstrate. "No one ever expects the big guy to be able to move."
"Oh, you'd better bring it," Lance grinned. "Only way you're gonna look better than me out there is if you throw down all the game you've got, my friend."
"Says the guy who dances like a cartoon character," Hunk laughed back.
Keith was watching this exchange with only mild interest, perfectly content to observe until a hand was thrust unceremoniously into his face. He looked up to find his boyfriend beaming a hopeful smile at him. "Join me?" He asked in a cobbler-sweet voice.
Keith supposed if he'd thought about he'd have known better than to be surprised. Why WOULDN'T Lance expect Keith to dance with him? They were dating, after all, who the hell else was Lance supposed to expect to dance with him but Keith, right? Nonetheless, Keith was reluctant to agree. Dancing was the sort of thing that was only fun if you knew what you were doing or had the self-confidence not to care that you don't, and while Keith had no problem recognizing his strong points he knew anything involving a noisy room full of complete strangers was not gonna be in his comfort zone. "Uh," he flashed Lance one of those hesitant 'I really am quite fine thank you' smiles common to all people trying to sink into the background and blow off their friends. "I'd better not. You definitely won't be upstaging anyone if I go out there with you."
Lance didn't look put off in the least bit, smiling even wider and laughing "Like anyone actually cares. Come oooooonnnnn, come dance with me. We'll look ridiculous together."
And as charming as the bastard was, he really did make it sound tempting. Keith looked back out at the writhing mass of bodies undulating on the sticky tile floor and tried to imagine himself out there with them, another faceless moving body in a sea of sweaty drunks. A full shudder racked his body. "Sorry, I'm still gonna have to pass." It was strained, but Keith was determined to hold his smile. If Lance knew something was wrong he'd never go away and leave Keith alone, which was really definitely what he didn't want right now. "I don't even know how to dance, we'd just be stomping on each other's feet."
"Then we'll make sure to swing by Hunk and step on his feet, too." Oh, god. Lance's voice was hopeful and his smile was handsome and Keith really didn't want to disappoint him, but… Somehow the more Lance tried to convince him to go the worse Keith's anxiety got, until just the thought of stepping out there was enough to shorten Keith's breath in his chest.
"Lance…" Keith swallowed around the lump in his throat, kept any sign of strain from his voice as best he could. "I'd really prefer to stay here. If you don't mind."
Lance gave him a considering stare, long enough to make Keith want to twitch under the attention. He didn't, keeping his back straight and managing not to break eye contact long enough for Lance to drawl out a low hum and shrug, "Suit yourself." He turned his attention to Pidge, sitting hunched low in her chair on the other end of the table with her face in an ECHO screen. "Pidge, you're up!" He declared cheerfully, not giving her the chance to say no before he was grabbing a thin wrist and yanking her out of her chair.
"Wha-? Hell no, Lance!" She was shouting as he dragged her towards the dance floor.
"I just got rejected by my OWN BOYFRIEND, Pidge! You have to use your magic Little Sister powers to comfort me in my time of grief," Lance insisted passionately, pulling her into a tango stance and marching off in grand style.
Despite her continued protests Pidge quickly ended up giggling, aforementioned Little Sister magic letting her easily adapt to the phenomenon that was a ridiculous teenage boy trying to make her laugh. Keith watched the two of them spin in extravagant loops and twirls, apparently making no effort to avoid colliding bodily with the other dancers and not minding in the least bit. In fact Pidge might be doing it on purpose. Pidge was kind of evil like that. You know, in the good way? Fun evil.
When Keith tore his eyes from the two of them to search the crowd for Hunk, he found him leading Allura onto the dance floor, both of them laughing as they sashayed their hips into the crowd. Keith didn't even bother looking at where Shiro had been sitting to look for him, having watched from the corner of his eye as Shiro stood up and headed towards the bar practically the instant Lance had said the word 'party.' He was still there now, sitting with his back to the bar so he could keep a parental eye on the dance floor, liquor glass still full and no fewer than three Geruda girls flocked to his side and trying to pull him into polite conversation.
Deciding that sitting alone at a table for six was an invitation to be paid attention to if nothing else, Keith stood up and edged his way over to the side of the room to lean his back to a wall. He didn't mind the bar scene in general, but he wasn't much for this kind of boisterous atmosphere. Bars should be quieter, he felt. How were you even supposed to talk to each other over this band? It was impossible! A good bar had a set of the same regulars sitting around the scattered tables and a cheap electronic dartboard, and if you didn't want to make conversation with the stranger you're playing billiards with you didn't have to and it still counted as being friendly. This place? The exact opposite. It was an anxiety-inducing kind of bad, and Keith was about as comfortable here as a balloon in a cactus patch.
The air was thick with smoke and the smell of liquor and writhing… he wanted to say humanity but there were only like, four humans in the crowd out there and the rest were aliens so… People...ity? Peopleness? Fuck it, it was gross either way, and he couldn't breathe. Keith wanted to step outside for a breath of fresh air, wanted to leave outright and go back to the damned castle, actually, but could hardly leave without everyone else. Even just getting himself outside was practically impossible just for the simple fact that he'd have to weave his way through the crowd to get to a door, and the thought of that many strangers all outnumbering him like that was more trouble than it was worth. God, this place was a fucking deathtrap, is what it was.
The second that thought occurred to him Keith realized how easy it would be to kill someone in this room. This many people in small poorly lit space, with the perfect level of background noise to cover up any suspicious sounds? It was the perfect ideal. A person could sneak up on someone completely unnoticed, slip a shiv in their side or a wire around their neck and quietly dragging them off to the side of the room where the body would be dumped to the side, unnoticed for hours. It'd be even easier to poison someone - drinks were abundant and unguarded, and before he thought about it Keith's head was automatically swerving back to where Shiro was at the bar, relieved to see his drink still all but untouched even fifteen minutes later as his friend tried to politely extract himself from what looked like horribly awkward small talk with an ever-expanding flock of girls of a now largely diverse variety of species.
Keith looked back towards the band again, scanning the crowd in an almost desperate need to search out the others. Allura's hair caught his eyes in a flash of silver-pink under the lights, hand in hand with Pidge and so far perfectly unmurdered. He even found Hunk and Lance not too far away from them, apparently engaged in the promised dance battle. And oh my god was Keith glad he hadn't gone out there now because they looked ridiculous.
They were having fun, Keith told himself firmly. They were all having fun and enjoying themselves without worrying about how they were obviously letting their guards down because they were fine. They were fine and everything was fine. They had Keith and Shiro still alert and watching for trouble, and there was, above all, no actual reason to suspect someone in the room was currently plotting their deaths. There was no reason to be worried. Keith told himself this again, sure he had almost managed to convince himself. There was no reason to actually worry about anything, and who was that coming near him with a drink in their hand, he swore to god if someone tried to interact with him right now they were getting a bayard in their FACE.
The stranger's eyes widened at the malignant aura Keith had sharpened into a glare, and they swerved around him to try to chat up some more receptive patron further down the wall.
Somehow the brief flare of rage had been the exact distraction he'd needed. Keith hadn't managed to calm down and relax, not by far, but he'd managed to break out of that toxic train of thought. Keith just needed to… to stay calm and keep his eyes open, and everything would be fine.
--
Everything was not fine.
Over the course of the probable two hours Keith had spent with his back to that wall, he had not only utterly failed to cool his head, he had actually managed to grow more tense and miserable, wound up tight as a tripwire ready to blow. Leaving the bar, the walk back to their podships, the subsequent drive back to the castle - nothing had eased the tension starching his nerves and spine. The others all gave him a wide berth, able to tell how out of sorts he was with himself and thankfully able to recognize his need for space, and when they got home Keith was left to wander the empty hallways of the castle, finally alone.
It didn't help. Being back in the castle and under barriers wasn't helping Keith feel any safer. Everything was too big and too empty with too many dark spaces, and every shadow Keith looked at he swore he saw movement in. He felt like - he felt like he wasn't alone. Like there was something or someone on this ship with them, watching and waiting and laughing as Keith pulled his hair out of his scalp trying to tell himself everything was actually okay. Every wall and ceiling panel he passed Keith wanted to pry off its screws, the fact that he didn't know how this ship was built or if there was a hollow space big enough for a person or bomb to hide driving paranoid suggestions into his brain and God, how had he ever thought of this place as safe? This castle wasn't safe, it was TERRIFYING. This place was supposed to be their home; it was sadly the closest thing to a home Keith had ever had and that was only because of the people that were in it and if Keith lost any of them…
Keith remembered Kerberos. Keith remembered having only one person in this life who had ever cared about him and then losing them. And Keith remembered subsequently losing all of his shit and getting kicked out of the Garrison, left to wander the desert alone and chase conspiracies because he hadn't had anything else left in the entire world because Shiro was dead...
His feet had automatically taken the turns Keith needed to find Shiro, walking so quickly towards the bridge the panic-fueled stride was nearly equal to a full run. He only relented when he heard the sound of Shiro's perfectly alive voice from the other side of a corner, slowing down to stop and peer quietly around the wall to see Shiro and Coran talking about tomorrow's plan for the license center. Well, that was two people who were alright, but Keith was still certain something was wrong somewhere. Allura, he realized, if Coran was here where was Allura? And Keith was set off down the dark hallways because he was suddenly sure she was in danger and the only way Keith would be able to convince himself she wasn't was if he saw her with his own eyes.
She took longer to find than Shiro did, and Keith realized with a bit of horror he had no idea what the princess did with her free time. It took a full, miserable half of an hour before he stumbled across her, and he only had by following the sound of her merrily singing to herself as she rummaged through a trunk of old costumes in a small theater stage that wouldn't have looked out of place in an elementary school gym. Keith didn't have time to be relieved to see her well, just kept right on walking past the cluttered room and tried to calculate which of the last three paladins would be easiest to get to from here.
Pidge was perpetually the easiest person on the ship to find, right at home in Green's bay tinkering with a computer in the silent company of her Lion and pet robot. Hunk he found in the newly revived greenhouse trying to figure out Altean soil pH levels, which only left Lance whom Keith no longer had any real difficulty locating at any given time.
The problem was that if he wasn't already with one of the others, he was probably in his own room. His own room with the automatic door, and since Keith couldn't see or hear through it that meant he'd have to actually like, step close enough to it for it to open instead of standing here staring at it imagining all the possible ways Lance could be dead on the other side. Or even worse, alive and happy to see Keith, because he'd already wasted nearly an hour as it is and who knows what could have happened in that time he needed to get moving again and check on Shiro and the others and he couldn't do it if he was frozen here.
Keith nodded to himself. Opened the door. Confirmed Lance was in there and safe long enough to hear his boyfriend pull off his headphones with a startled "Huh?" and marched back into the hall to resume his sentry. Right, that'd do, this room was clear, time move on.
Coran was still near the bridge but Shiro wasn't, which of course wasted more time than Keith had to spend looking for him. Looking for all of them, it turned out, because Allura had moved while Keith had been hunting down Shiro in the hallway and then sneaking out of said hall before Shiro noticed him and Keith had to explain why he was stalking everybody. Pidge was still in the same place but Hunk had wandered off to the kitchen and Keith was wasting so much time wandering around the castle looking for everybody he'd never be in the right place when something bad DID happen, and why couldn't his stupid friends just hold still and stay in one big panic room where Keith could keep an eye on them?! Something was coming, something was here and lurking in the wings and Keith couldn't do anything but chase his shadow in circles and none of them were safe, nowhere in the entire universe was safe, from here to Earth or anywhere as long as the Galra still existed, any moment of any day of the rest of their lives Keith and all of his friends could suddenly all be killed, wiped out so fast none of them even knew what was going on until it was all nothing but the endless black void of death and there was nothing he could do stop it.
When he passed by Lance's door again it was still open, and Keith hurried past it only to realize he hadn't heard any sounds from within and therefore failed to confirm Lance was actually still alive. Fuck. Fuckity fuck, please don't let Lance notice him, Keith could not deal with that right now. He doubled back enough to peek his head in the door, and of course came face to face with the concerned visage of his boyfriend asking "Keith? Was that you here about an hour ago, too?"
Nope. Nope, can't deal with this, not gonna. Keith turned around and started walking away as quickly as he could without making it look like he was freaking out, berating himself and trying to figure out how to get by Lance's door unnoticed on the next pass. Lance was apparently having none of this, though, chasing him out into the hall calling "What the hell? Dude, Keith, you gotta tell me what's wrong with you."
'What's wrong with you?' the words repeated in Keith's head, first in Lance's voice and then echoed in the memory of a frustrated foster mother days before he'd been shuffled back into the system and moved to a new house. What was wrong with Keith? Hadn't that always been the question, his whole life?
The sudden onslaught of despair that simple question brought hit Keith like a semi to the face; abrupt and life-shattering in a way that made his feet stop dead in the middle of their panicked flee. Which unfortunately seemed to Lance like he had stopped to wait for him to catch up, so he could reach out to grab Keith's shoulder and ask "You've been acting a little weird for a while, is something up?"
The touch was unwelcome in a way Keith had never had the displeasure of experiencing before, the harmless grip like a cold stranglehold around his throat. Keith slapped it off of him by the wrist with immoderate force, stumbling forward a couple of steps from Lance as he turned to snap out "Can't you ever just fuck off and leave me alone?!"
Both of them reacted to Keith's words with the same wide eyed surprise, Lance backing away and holding his hands in the air with a placating wave. "S-sorry, man," he still sounded like he was worried more than anything else, and Keith couldn't deal with that, could just not fucking deal with any of this clearly or that wouldn't have happened in the first place, and he turned to flee off into the halls.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, what had just happened there? How was he such a bug-fucking moron to have just let that happen? As if Lance didn't get to see enough of Keith's bad sides all the time as it was, now he was going to figure out that Keith was out of his mind, too, had managed to brilliantly show off his paranoia and violence and total inability to deal with human interaction all in one fell fucking ten-second span because Keith was just that magnificent and Lance didn't deserve to have to deal with all of this, Keith didn't want to deal with his OWN bullshit he couldn't shove the burden that was Keith's entire fucking personality on Lance, too!
Keith wasn't quite running anymore but hadn't slowed down to a walk, either, striding through the hallways like a man with a mission when he in fact had no idea what he was doing or where he was going. He couldn't go back to following around the others now, the fear of being seen by one of his friends in this state now greater than the irrational terror that had been propelling him to check on them. Six counselors, doctors and psychologists over the span of six schools had all unanimously assured him the feeling that someone was out to get him was imagined, but the other fear right now, the fear that one of his friends was going to see him right now and realize what a fucking crackpot he was, was very real. Fuck. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to do and he didn't know where he was going but he had just realized his teeth were sunk into the tender webbing between his thumb and forefinger and oh, shit, when had he started biting again?
The paranoia-born hyperawareness, at least, was enough to alert him when he was about to barrel face-first into someone as he rounded this next corner. Fight-or-flight reflexes activated, the first thing Keith's instincts told him when he saw Shiro was to kick him in the nuts and run. Naturally, this was not an actual real life option, which resulted in Keith standing there frozen solid and doing his level best not to move any part of his body even the slightest bit, breath halting in his throat and eyes stilled ahead, staring at Shiro's neck.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Shiro seemed to be taking assessment of him, but as Keith was still staring at his collarbone and concentrating on not breathing or twitching for reasons he could not actually explain, that was rather a guess. And then the black paladin sighed. "Come on," he said tiredly, turning around and walking back down the way he came without checking to see if Keith was following.
Keith did, if for no other reason than because he couldn't manage to think of anything else he might be able to do with his body. He shook his hand out as if the act was all he needed to make the bite marks stop hurting, a brief thought dedicated to hoping his friend couldn't see them before remembering he was still wearing his gloves, so. No he could not. At least there was that.
Still nowhere near being in his right mind, Keith didn't even consider the question of where they were actually going or why, just followed mutely and focused his efforts on not running out of here at top speed and hiding in an air vent. Even unthinking as he was, Keith still managed to be completely unsurprised when they reached the training deck. It was a good thing he didn't stop to wonder why they could be there, because he wouldn't have had the time to. Before the door was even closed behind them Shiro was turning to throw his body into a strike that Keith was only able to dodge because of the hypervigilance animating his strained guard.
The moment Shiro recovered from his momentum he swung his arm into another attack, Keith stumbling a step back in the second it took to grab his bayard for an awkward block. If he had wanted to counterattack he didn't have the chance, because Shiro had used the haphazard stance Keith had taken on to block him to grab his wrist, yanking Keith forward off his balance and then using the grip on his arm to throw him onto his back. Keith's shoulders hit the floor with a painful snap that nearly knocked the wind out of him. He twisted blindly on the floor, rolling to sit up on one knee and then snap forward into his own attack straight from there without pausing to actually stand up in between. Shiro parried it with the sickening metallic ring of his arm sliding against the steel of Keith's sword, ducking low under the blade to pile-drive a hard shoulder into Keith's solar plexus and bowling him over so effectively Keith ended up a few feet away on the floor, clawing at the tile as he choked on his own heaving coughs.
Shiro was not, in any regards, holding back right now. Well, that wasn't strictly true - Shiro was only holding back as far as not activating the white-hot plasma of his cybernetic arm and frying Keith's hand off like a hot knife through butter. Other than that small leeway, however, he was doing no one any favors, coming at Keith like one or more of them was possessed, not giving the red paladin enough space to gather any thought in his head beyond their fight. Keith didn't even notice, so perfectly absorbed in the thrill of combat as he was. Didn't notice that his mind had cleared of tortuous whispers, didn't notice that he wasn't afraid. Barely noticed the pain in his shoulders and feet and… inner torso organs, holy SHIT do not let someone hit you in the solar plexus. All that pain only registered in his brain after a few minutes of frantic blocking and dodging (and beatings), until Keith finally got his bearings enough to cool down and plan his offence.
At some point, Keith did start to notice things again. He noticed first that Shiro had started over-relying on that fancy arm and would occasionally leave his left side wide open during an attack. Then, the slightest gleam of manic desperation in Shiro's eyes, hidden under the controlled precision of his attacks. Noticed finally that that his own shortness of breath was only the familiar heave of physical exhaustion now, that somehow under the pain of his increasingly worn and battered body he was finally loose and relaxed of the tension that had been wrecking him for hours.
Both of them were slowing down, thinking more in between their attacks and putting more space between them as they grew more exhausted. Eventually Keith realized that nearly an hour of time must have passed by now, and somewhere in the process of the two of them just sort of getting tired and giving up on the fight to sit down on the floor, he decided he was probably okay now. He didn't really feel anything else besides okay, either, but that was fine, too. Keith was empty, and exhausted, and completely relieved to feel that way.
The two of them sat in silence for a while, letting their breath return to normal and stretching out various newly sore limbs. "So," Shiro eventually threw out into the room in an inappropriately fatherly tone, "feel better now?"
Slowly, Keith answered in a nod. "I do, thanks." He said in a voice that sound tired and quaky to his own ears. He turned his head to look at Shiro, exhausted on the floor and staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. "How about you?" Keith knew Shiro was more stressed than the lot of his other paladins combined, and could hazard a guess as to how thrilled he was about this entire Elpis operation on whole.
"Yeah," Shiro answered in something like a beleaguered sigh. Of course, the thing Shiro himself had decided was the most stressful part of his own evening bordered on hilarious to Keith, as he complained offhandedly: "I'm just so bad at dealing with girls, Keith." Because Concordia and the Galra Empire combined did not leave Shiro half so discombobulated and weathered as being popular with teenage girls did.
Keith didn't quite laugh, instead snorting in amused surprise. "Kinda sucks that you're straight, then."
"It really does," Shiro agreed mournfully. "If I could switch teams I would."
"Then you could date Coran," Keith offered helpfully.
Shiro didn't hesitate for a second. "Don't think I wouldn't. Take that mustache for a ride."
With a comment like that, Keith didn't really have any choice on how he might like to respond; he burst out laughing.
--
When Shiro went to bed shortly after that, Keith had a pretty good idea as to what he should do right now. Which was, of course, to go apologize to Lance for stalking him and then flipping out on him.
So if course Keith found himself in Red's bay instead. It was, upon reflection, without question the closest thing Keith had to a 'safe space' in the entire universe. And it was here that he was best able to think with a clear head.
It had been a while since he'd had an unprovoked attack like that. Keith had a couple of fits like this since coming to space, but for the most part they had all been in more predictable circumstances like after the castle had turned on them and that time Keith had spent eight hours floating alone in space in his dark, comatose Lion. This one felt… A little out of the blue in comparison. He couldn't write it off as a fluke after last night's little mini attack as well, it had clearly been the buildup for tonight's Paranoia Extravaganza. He'd had times like this more sporadically and often back on Earth, when his life had been a stressful string of foster homes and schools and daycares and any other kind of place the system could think to shove a kid who doesn't belong anywhere.
Stress. His brain caught on the word, letting the concept roll around in his head. Was he stressed out? What had happened yesterday that had set him off? He'd spent the whole day distracted and frustrated and then… And then he and Lance had sex. Which at the time had felt like rather the opposite of stressful, actually, so it seemed pretty counterintuitive for THAT to have been the trigger. Of course it had been immediately afterwards that he'd freaked out, but it hadn't been because he'd been thinking about the sex itself, it was because…
It was because he'd felt lonely after the fact. It was because he had felt lonely and he hated it, hated feeling weak and helpless and irrational and all day Keith hadn't been able to focus on what they were actually supposed to be doing for barely more than a minute because everything about Elpis touched on Keith's every nerve and he'd managed to spend the entire time he and Lance were in town together being annoyed by him and Keith hated that about himself, too. Look at how quickly and easily he and Pidge had figured out what to do today: all they'd had to do was sit a table and eavesdrop for two hours and they'd gotten more than a combined six people had the entire day before!
Ever since they'd started dating just being in the same room as Lance messed up Keith's head. It made him feel nervous and vulnerable and scared, and yeah it was usually all in a good way that Keith found kind of thrilling but… But that didn't mean it actually was good. Keith didn't even feel in control of his own emotions anymore. When they were together he was intoxicated by Lance's presence, giddy or nervous or horny and usually all three at once. And when they were apart Keith was STILL usually thinking about him; wondering what Lance would have to say about any random stimulus Keith came across, or remembering one of those accidentally charming things Lance was so good at waylaying Keith with, or even just wishing Lance were around, usually with the idea that Keith would really like it if they were touching right now...
Lance was a distraction. Even if Keith was fairly certain Lance wasn't any worse for his mental health than Keith himself was, there was no denying he was distracting Keith from what was really important.
Zarkon.
The war they were still fighting, he was now certain, and the guilt about his newfound ability to completely fucking ignore it had been the root of today's…episode. Here Keith was, drafted into space on the most important mission in the entire history of the universe, and he couldn't get his head out of his ass and focus on a simple reconnaissance mission because he was too busy mooning over his boyfriend. God, Keith was such a fuck-up.
So then what was he supposed to do here, break up with Lance? Keith didn't want to do that. Well, a tiny part of him would be very relieved to do so, but that was the same part of Keith that generally liked to suggest the solution to most of life's problems involved running away to Mexico and hiding under a rock, so Keith was pretty good at ignoring it. Breaking up seemed like the correct thing to do in theory, but in reality Keith still had to spend time with him and therefore still wouldn't stop thinking about him. All it would really mean is the loss of things like cuddling and sexy make-out time and replace them with loneliness and needless pining. So that sounded pretty stupid.
On the other hand: two hour paranoia-fueled panic attack. Also, space war. Hm.
Well, either way, Keith was also pretty sure of one other fact: the middle of a now undercover mission was an absolutely terrible time to break up with your boyfriend. So he could safely put this decision on hold for a while. Maybe it was even for the best that he not decide immediately.
Keith looked up from where he was sitting, leaned against one if his lion's legs, peering up at her unmoving metal face. "And you," he said whimsically, "just do not give any kind of shit what I do as long as we still get to go outside and fight things."
A hum purred through his brain that if Keith were forced to describe he might call "the satisfaction of mutual understanding." Or maybe just the words "damn straight." Either way he smiled - at least here was one relationship he was pretty confident he couldn't screw up.
Speaking of which, Keith rocked himself up to his feet. He should probably go apologize to Lance. Whatever he decided later on, Keith wanted the time he and Lance did have together to be as enjoyable as possible, which involved a certain amount of manning up and not acting like a bitch.