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Lance wants to be a farmer. They’re sitting in front of Allura’s statue, and the admission comes out unprompted, quietly, like shame is dragging it back down his throat, and suddenly Keith is back in the first no gravity simulation in the Garrison.
Lance, the boy with stars in his eyes, the boy that refused to settle for anything but the stars, wants to be a farmer, and Keith really wants to laugh, because they just never stop finding out new ways the war has fucked them all over, do they?
What do the normal people do in a war?
It makes sense, if Keith is being rational about it: he doesn’t even know just how much they spent fighting, but he knows that it was far too long for people far from home, for people who had families and friends and lives waiting for them in another corner of the universe, too long for people who had never meant to enlist in the first place. Keith is not rational though, he is instinct and blows and fire, and he feels like throwing up.
He has never felt more alien.
They fight.
It’s not as though he actually expected them to scamper back into a ship the moment they had the chance, not immediately at least, but maybe he thought-
He doesn’t know what he thought, he rarely ever does, that’s kind of his whole thing, but still.
They’re tired, he can see that. They’re exhausted, but they know they can rest now, and yeah, in their place he would just lay down and breathe for the rest of his existence.
He is not in their place though. He never has been, and months ago, with a newly activated Blade in his hand, he might’ve believed it was due to the galra in him, but he knows better now.
And then what?
There are no winners in war, but when it comes to spoils, Keith certainly has the richest.
Altea is lost forever. The culture, the planet, the people, it all survived only through a castle and its two inhabitants for millennia. The team did what they could, but no wound heals just because you have stopped the blood flow. Allura and Coran only had each other. Coran doesn’t even have that anymore.
(Keith wonders what he’ll do now. He’s advisor to the dead princess of a kingdom long gone. Keith has been directionless plenty of times, but taking refuge in anger is not the kind of thing Coran does.)
Hunk is still the soft guy he started out as. It’s admirable, unbelievable even, how he still lights up the room by just existing. The war has made him jumpier, more skittish, and Keith doesn’t doubt he’ll have nightmares for the rest of his life about the carnage they went through. He has always been there for them though, has always wore his smile like both sword and shield, made sure they came back from the battlefield more human than monster. Watching him now, talking to his family, Keith can’t tell the difference with the way he acted around the paladins. He really was the best of them. He still looks better than he ever did; he walks less like there are weights around his ankles and more like there are clouds underneath his feet. His smile is even more bright, impossibly so, his eyes that little less haunted even while crying and hugging a series of Hunk-look-alikes, and Keith doesn’t need to know how it feels to have that kind of unconditional love directed towards him to know that he wouldn’t give it up for the world.
(That’s the kind of thing people fight wars for. He’s sure Hunk agrees.)
There’s no doubt as to why or how Pidge survived. They’re smart, cunning, resourceful, and fueled by enough spite to get rid of half the universe on a good day. They’re young though, were even younger when they got whisked away from their mother for a chance at finding the rest of their family. It had been what had drawn Keith to them in the first place: they weren’t there to be heroes, to do good, they just wanted their loved ones back. Keith could relate.
(They look better now that they ever did in space, but there’s a restlessness in the way they check all the exits of a room, in the way they angle their body to make sure they can keep everyone in their sights, and pure relief in the sag of their shoulders when they’ve made sure everyone is safe. It was easy to forget, in the middle of a war, that they were barely more than a child. They all were. Keith is sorry Pidge had to grow up so fast.)
Shiro is… doing his best, really. Healing. There’s not much else to do when you get the brunt of what it means to be a hero. He didn’t find respite even on Earth, and while he is moving on, forward, with the people who love him, Keith can still see an emptiness in his eyes that spells out “Adam”.
(Champion, Black Paladin, Captain of the Atlas. Keith wonders if his brother ever fails to recognize himself in the mirror. The body he lives in is not his own, and the mind is a flighty thing on the best of days.)
They’re all trying to build themselves back, to fall back into normal people’s “normal” and to remember how to live as just a human and nothing more. Keith has left them before, has been left himself plenty of times, but he has never, not when in the car on the way back to the orphanage, not after a flight simulation, not wearing a Blade of Marmora suit, never seen the division line between him and them so clearly. It’s less an invisible line in the sand and more an undeletable scorch mark on cement. He can still feel the fire.
What happens when the war is over?
Earth has never been kind to Keith. It took his father, and then it kept chewing him and spitting him out in every foster home in the country, again and again, until he was “too old” and “too angry” and “too difficult to manage” and they had just given up on him.
Then there had been Shiro. Good, kind, understanding Shiro, with his calm words and accepting eyes, who saw the fear behind the anger and the longing he caged behind his teeth, who gave him a chance at a new life without expecting nothing in return, who brought him a brother and Adam and Matt and hope. And then Shiro was gone too, and Keith said fuck all and destroyed everything Shiro had built for him. After came the shack, and the months spent fearing and plotting and agonizing over he was still sane.
Space had been everything he could’ve ever hoped for. It gave him back Shiro, firstly. It took a bit of tug-of-war, but he won, eventually. It gave him Voltron, a family, even if it looked a little odd like puzzle pieces that were smashed together more out of stubbornness than design, but they made it work. It gave him Cosmo. It gave him his mom. It made him the Red Paladin, it took a boy with only piloting skills to his name and made him purposeful, a defender of the universe, made him brave and strong and meant for something. It made him mean something.
There was the bad too. The attrition with the team, before they found a status quo, the clone madness, seeing his brother’s spirit say that I’m dead, Keith, becoming the Black Paladin, watching as his lion became a lion, never getting used to the way Black was stillness trying to tame his chaos where there used to be supporting fire and blind trust, roars over adrenaline, giving up leadership halfway through to join the Blades, whatever you call what happened with his heritage, Naxzela, having to look at the people he cared about most in the universe without being close, hoping against hope that he would get another chance to see them, dealing with the fallout when that wasn’t possible.
(Thinking about Thace still hurts. He never mastered the emotional detachment that had guaranteed the survival of the Blade of Marmora through the centuries. He still beats himself up for all the comrades he couldn’t save. He mourns the silence in his mind, when he sought it for most of his life, doesn’t hear a rumble answering his thoughts and thinks Red, with the kind of ache he reserved only for missed opportunities, yearns for something, even Black, anything to make him not feel so alone. Sometimes he can’t do anything but crawl at the surface when you went away, Keith, maybe you should’ve stayed away and I should’ve abandoned you just like your parents did. They saw that you were broken, worthless, I should’ve seen it too and it’s both drowning and being buried alive. His shortcomings as leader still haunt him. Keith might try to kid himself into believing that he’s just like the rest of them, but there is a very specific reason why there was only one ship aiming to crash against the shield of a planet-turned-bomb. He hears you fight like a galra and thinks yes.)
What do you think?
This is not his place. It has never felt like home, and whatever remains Keith could’ve found of it are long gone. It’s less about his blood and more about him, and he can’t return to a peace he has never known. Keith knows fighting. Keith knows war. They may have won, but there are corners of the universe where conflict still rages. Voltron may have served its purpose, but his Blade uniform still fits. He cannot allow himself to stay still lest the fire in him destroys everything around.
They keep fighting.
The paladins fought to protect their home, and to one day return to it. That was their purpose, their reason. Keith can’t say anything about purpose anymore, but he knows there is nothing here for him, and there is always need for soldiers in a war. He’ll be good at it, too. Outside of Earth’s atmosphere, where the only thing keeping them together is a common cause, he won’t have to worry about fitting in. It might just be enough to make him feel like he belongs.
The others will understand. There’s a chance they won’t be happy about it, Shiro especially, but they won’t stop him. His mother will be right beside him. Kolivan will be Kolivan in that unreadable way of his, but he’ll take him back to his ranks. There will be the daily check-ins, then they’ll become weekly videocalls, and then they’ll become texts every once in a while, until not even those will come through. They’ll ask him when he’ll be back every single time, and they’ll occasionally remind him to visit until it’ll be too bothersome. Keith knows how to make people lose interest. It’ll be good for them. He is a living reminder of what they went through, half their teammate and half their enemy, all of him a soldier that never got out of the battlefield. It’s the best thing he can offer as a thank you for all they have given him.
What else is there to do?
He’ll savor this for a bit longer. He’s always been that bit selfish, holding his knife tight in his hands so that the other kids wouldn’t take and his cards tighter against his chest so that no cadet could come close. At one point it simply became something he was instead of something he did. He’ll bask in this for some more time, and then he’ll call Kolivan, request a pickup, put the suit back on and go back to the real world.
It’s for the best.
The was has already taken everything else.