The key is the key.
Keith leaned back in his chair, exhaustion drowning out whatever triumph might have resulted from the information he had finally gleaned from half-mentioned stories and decaying records. It might not be enough to effect a permanent victory over their enemies, but it might save Voltron.
And with Voltron, Arus, and the people who lived on it that he cared for.
Even if one of those people could never know just how much he meant to him.
His eyes closed. He couldn't let himself cry.
I'm so ... lonely.
Haven't I always been?
"Don't do anything you'll regret, now. This is your ticket out, so don't blow it."
The other boy nodded, his head bobbing in the darkened alley. "But, skipper, what about you?"
"It'll be easier to pull you guys out of trouble if I'm watching from the outside." He swatted at a fly that buzzed too close to his ear. "I'll stick around until you all get adopted, or at least until I know you'll be safe at the orphanage." Adoption was a little much to hope for, he knew, but it never hurt to be optimistic. Just this once, he'd overlook the odds and pretend to this cherubic little boy that he would have a decent chance at a home and family again.
"Aren't you coming with us? You're not any older than I am. If I can't stay out on the streets, neither can you."
The war had made them all too wise. He'd thought this boy might be the one to spot that fallacy in his logic. "You don't need me anymore, as long as you're accepted at the orphanage. They'll give you what you need. They say children shouldn't be a part of war ..."
"But--"
"No buts," he said roughly. "According to them, I'm not a child. I'm the enemy. Besides, I can take care of myself. It's easier to look out for myself instead of me and four other kids."
"If you say so, skipper."
Keith closed his eyes. It's been more than ten years. I can still remember him.
He couldn't remember the boy's name, or at least not what name the boy had answered to before he'd entered the orphanage. The child had taken on a new name when the family that adopted him couldn't pronounce his real one.
Tracing languid, meaningless patterns on the surface of his desk, he tried to recall what his own original name had been. He couldn't.
Can't. Or won't. It amounts to the same thing.
He didn't want anything to do with the name he'd been given when he was a child growing up surrounded by a family, with a secure roof over his head and no worries about where his next meal would come from.
What's the use of a name if everyone who knew you by that name is dead?
"But, skipper, what about you?"
He clenched his fist. That was the closest he'd had to a name in those days. That boy had been the one to give it to him.
"You're like the captain of a ship. You're our leader. When my dad told me stories, they'd always call the captain 'skipper'. So can I call you that, if you won't tell me your real name?"
"Why the hell," he muttered aloud, "do people still call me that, ten years later. They don't even know him!"
"Call you what?"
Keith sat bolt upright in his chair, where he'd been slumped for most of the afternoon. "Lance!" he said. "I--I didn't realize you were there."
"Your door was open," the lanky pilot pointed out. He sat on Keith's bed, stretching out his legs. "So, what's this nickname of yours that you don't like?"
He shrugged uncomfortably. After all, Lance was one of the people who called him 'skipper'. That boy had been the closest he'd ever come to a friend since his whole world had collapsed underneath him. "I--It's nothing much, Lance. Kids used to call me 'skipper' when I was younger; it's just so odd that everybody seems to call me that. I never asked anybody to do it."
"Right. And that it's odd is enough to make you start swearing."
Keith sighed. "It brings up bad memories."
Lance was giving him one of his cynical looks. "Thought you had a nice little golden age for your childhood. Your school records certainly seemed to say so."
"Don't push me," he said, suddenly on edge. If Lance had checked his records at the academy, there was so much he could have found ...
Unfortunately, Lance seemed to take that as a challenge. "So? What was it, then? Anything to do with how obsessed you are with finding some obscure bit of Voltron's history?"
"I was busy." He glared. "That has no impact on my personal past."
"So that time you came over from the military school wasn't your first brush with danger, huh."
"Lance, I said, don't push me."
The other pilot shook his head. "All right. I'm picking on you. But when Pidge tells me not to drink your coffee because he's loaded it with tranquilizers, something's wrong. And you haven't been talking, either." Lance sighed and held out his hands in a gesture of defeat. "Every time I've met you this past week, and not about something to do with Voltron, you've been the listener. I've been taking advantage of that, and I'm sorry. Something's bothering you. Is there any way I can help?"
Keith felt the anger drain out of him. Somehow, it was impossible to be annoyed at Lance. Still, he could remember the last time he'd been fed tranquilizers without his knowledge. He'd had a violent allergic reaction, had spent the rest of the day in the hospital, and had not forgiven Lance for an entire week. "Did you at least tell him what kind is safe to use on me?"
Lance rolled his eyes. "Give me some credit. If I'm going to suggest that stunt again, I'm at least not going to make the same mistake twice."
"Hmph. If you looked at my records, you could at least have checked my medical history."
"I know, I know. I'll do it next time." They'd been over this before. Somehow, this kind of thing would always happen to them. Lance would start out meaning to do Keith a favor, and it almost always turned into a disaster. "But," Lance said, undeterred from his original goal, "you're avoiding the question. Honestly, Keith, what's eating at you?"
"I can't talk about it," he said, feeling utterly wretched. If there was anyone he wanted to confide in, it just could not be the object of his affections. "It's personal," he added, hoping that would give him some breathing room. Lance usually respected his privacy.
"And Miara wasn't? I seem to recall ranting to you about her several times over the past week."
Keith winced at the mention of her name. Even if Lance had more or less gotten over her, he hadn't. He was still jealous that anyone could have captivated his friend for so long.
"You can trust me," Lance said, reaching over to put a hand on his arm. "I won't tell anyone. I promise."
He sighed. There was no way he was going to back out of this one.
"Please?" Now Lance was almost begging.
"Well ... " Keith sighed again. He just hoped he could gloss over enough of the details so that Lance wouldn't actually know who he was talking about. "I suppose it started with a boy I met during the war."
"It started with a boy I met during the war. I don't know if you could call us friends. We weren't together for long. But he was so innocent. I didn't want to see him turn into a cynical brat like me ... So I faked a letter to the orphanage, hoping they'd take him in. He made it; it wasn't even all that long before a real family adopted him, too. He was just so sweet. But I never saw him again."
Lance groaned. It had been a longer story than he'd anticipated. He had to admit, Keith had been some actor to hide any indication of a life on the streets during the time he spent at the academy. For as long as Lance had known him, he'd never been anything but a model student.
Well, a model student who'd somehow gotten into a really bad scrape at the beginning of the year, he allowed. Keith had only admitted to losing his temper and accusing the Galaxy Garrison of inhumane acts during the war that had only ended two years previous to the incident. He hadn't explained how he'd been so badly injured, or even what the accusation was. Lance had later learned from Sven that another cadet had died, most likely killed by Keith in self defense. No one had told Keith about that part.
There were bits of the story that didn't make much sense, and he hadn't wanted to press for details. "I liked him. He was the only one who was nice to me. Everybody wanted something out of me, wanted me to take care of them, but not him. Maybe I should have listened to him and tried to sneak into the orphanage, too."
He'd asked why Keith hadn't done that, naturally.
"My parents were the enemy, and I carried their blood in my veins. The soldiers said there was evil in my blood. I couldn't ..."
Lance sighed. Trust Keith to talk himself into believing that he's worthless. For some reason, no one had ever managed to talk him out of the idea that he had tainted blood. Lance suspected that part of the reason was simply because he'd never mentioned it to anyone else. He'd taken it as a simple fact for so long that when Lance had challenged it, he'd actually looked confused.
He was fairly certain that the war Keith had mentioned was the one that had more or less wiped out the Mharn people. The other pilot had refused to mention any names, even of the city he'd grown up in, claiming that he could no longer remember. But it had occurred at about the right time, and Keith could pass as Mharn. He'd seen those people in cheap movies, even if they hadn't been mentioned in his textbook.
It also reinforced the idea that Keith thought he was inherently tainted. Mharn carried magic in their blood. It was one of the things that hadn't endeared them to Galaxy Garrison. He wasn't certain how their magic worked, but he definitely had heard the rumors flying around about how Mharn would drink blood before working their sorcery. Blood probably had more to do with it than simple genetic inheritance.
There was, of course, the other problem, the one he had a chance at resolving. Keith had somehow developed a major crush on some boy he'd met at the academy. Lance wasn't surprised. But Keith wasn't giving any clues as to who it was. All he had to go on was that the boy had called him 'skipper'. Thinking about that had triggered an onslaught of memories, starting with that other boy, so long ago.
"But that doesn't leave out anybody!" Lance muttered. Everyone he knew had developed a habit of at least occasionally referring to Keith by that name.
"How'm I going to set him up with somebody if I don't know who that somebody is?" Lance said, throwing his hands up in the air. "Really, Keith. If you're going to be hung up on some guy, you could at least make an effort to find him and say hello once in a while."
There had been zero communication on Keith's part outgoing from Arus to anyone on matters other than Voltron. Sure, they were all used to being out of contact with family and friends for extended periods of time, but even he had looked up a couple of the guys from his class, just to catch up on things. They'd simply been on Arus too long. But Keith hadn't so much as glanced at anyone not on the Voltron team in years.
"Well, he did seem pretty afraid that I'd hate him for liking another boy. Maybe he's worried about being rejected."
Lance sniffed at that. The notion of Keith as too chicken to speak his mind struck him as singularly unlikely, but then so did the idea of Keith spending several years as a tramp on the streets.
The alarm sounded, and Lance sighed. Somehow, Lotor always managed to interrupt him when he was just getting into the thick of something.
One of these days, he decided, I'm going to make Lotor pay for this.
Keith gritted his teeth as he was slammed against the back of his chair. The fight wasn't going well, even though it had barely started. Apparently, not only had the robot been repaired, but also enhanced. They'd already formed Voltron, but that didn't seem to have helped as much as it should have. And Keith kept getting an itchy sensation just behind his left ear, as if there were something there.
"What does it take to stop that thing?" Lance's voice growled over the radio. "Last time, a blow like that would've sent it reeling!"
"That's the problem. They've wised up to our attacks. We're going to have to do something new--DUCK!"
But the right arm was caught in a pincer. Keith didn't have time to wonder where the pincer had come from before something wrapped around the rest of Voltron's limbs, effectively immobilizing it.
"I can't move!" Pidge said, frantic. "Nothing's working!"
He tried his own controls; Voltron merely ignored them.
This isn't normal.
Screams and yells rang through his ears, then stopped abruptly. "Lance!"
There was no reply. "Team, come on!"
Still nothing. "Wake UP!"
The key. Use the key.
There was nothing else to try, he decided. He pulled his right glove off and placed his palm over the black lion's key.
Coran's voice came in from castle control. "I've lost all communication with everybody else, Keith! Are you still there?"
He switched his communication link off with his free hand, then focused all of his attention on the key and closed his eyes.
'The price is your blood,' a booming voice echoed within the confines of his mind.
"This I know," he said softly. "If blood is what you need, take it."
A deep chuckle rose from the depths of the black lion. Then something sharp bit into his hand, and he bit his lip to keep from crying out in pain. It hurt like nothing he'd ever endured before.
Voltron snapped alive, and Keith knew the low thudding in his ears came from the beating of the steel heart within Voltron's chest.
Blood and steel. Iron's grip ...
He opened his eyes and turned his attention to the robot, which was now circling warily, like a predator unsure of how much resistance its prey could yet put up.
Well, this prey isn't dead. Not by a long shot.
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