Chapter Text
“So anyway,” Pidge said, typing furiously, “that’s when Matt gave me the nickname Pidge. I didn’t like it much at first, but after he disappeared I guess I wanted it to remind me of him? Or something. It came in handy when I needed a fake ID, though. Pass me that hoojamaflip?”
Keith passed her the hoojamaflip and she immediately began to attach dozens of tiny wires to it.
“Why did you need a fake ID?”
They were passing time in the Green lion’s hangar before supper. Pidge had convinced Keith to take a break from flying around in search of Shiro; she wanted to finish working on her anti-gravity well gadget and had roped him in to be the person she spoke at while she did.
Pidge finished hooking up the device and flipped its on switch. A line of alien output spewed across her monitor’s screen. “Hmm,” she hummed, “interesting.” She stared fixedly at the technological gobbledegook. Keith knew better than to interrupt her, especially when she seemed to be getting close to something. He waited wordlessly for her to answer him.
Finally, Pidge sighed and responded: “I was banned from the Garrison. Iverson caught me sneaking into the top-secret data room trying to find info about Dad and Matt, and long story short, Katie Holt was blacklisted. I still needed to find them, though, so I had to get into the Garrison. And as Pidge Gunderson I could enrol.”
“...Right.”
They lapsed into a comfortable silence that neither of them felt a particular need to fill with words. Pidge squinted at the screen and Keith watched her, impressed at her concentration and the ease with which her fingers flew across her keyboard.
“Pass me that thingamabob?” Pidge gestured suddenly at the item in question, and Keith had picked it up to give it to her when—
Keith! Black’s voice was loud and startling. He dropped the thingamabob.
“Black?” A sense of urgency flooded him as Black’s uncharacteristic desperation swept into his mind. The need to act was so strong that he didn’t realise he’d moved until he was charging into the tunnel which led to her hangar, leaving a confused Pidge behind.
Keith! Hurry!
He felt the sense that something was about to happen running through him, like he’d stuck his finger into a live socket. Black’s feelings coursing through his blood. Urgency.
He didn’t know why he was running, but one thing was for sure.
The time was now.
Everything was ready.
A month had passed since he’d figured out that the ‘arrival’ the markings spoke of would occur on September 1st, 2414; a month where he’d planned and predicted with uncharacteristic focus, exploring further into the desert than he’d ever gone before, marking points on his map and triangulating coordinates, getting everything ready for whatever was going to happen. Because while the people who’d carved into the walls of the caves had had no understanding of what they were foretelling, Keith was convinced that the ‘arrival’ could only mean one thing.
Shiro.
His hunch was strong and the facts, few as they were, lined up, so Keith was prepared to stake everything he had on the possibility of getting his best friend (his only friend, his brother) back. Shiro had been gone for over a year, but once he was back… well, Keith hadn’t actually decided what he would do when Shiro was back, but he burned with the urgency of his instinct. And the energy’s pull, filling him with a preternatural certainty.
So now he was prepared. All that was left to do was wait.
(Keith hated waiting.)
After he’d checked his bike was ready for the fifteenth time, he forced himself to drink some water. You’ll be no good to Shiro if you’re dehydrated , he told himself firmly. No good in a fight.
He was expecting a fight. The Garrison, while they didn’t have his foreknowledge or reading on the presence beneath the caves, were a military organisation, and they had protocols for unidentified extraterrestrial craft. They would immediately try to control the situation, to cover it up, just like they’d lied to Keith about the Kerberos mission. Shiro would be put into lockdown. Trapped, for who knew how long?
Keith was determined not to let that happen. And with his preparations and plans, he was confident he could pull it off. Enter unseen. Rescue Shiro. Get the hell out of there.
It would work; it had to. If it didn’t, if the Garrison caught him and his attempt failed… well, it would be counted as civil disobedience, and with no Shiro or anyone else to fight his corner, Keith knew what the inevitable consequences would be.
So he was betting everything he had, even his life, on this. It was a long shot.
(It was the only shot he had to find Shiro, though. And it wasn’t like he had any other purpose to continue existing.)
Screw the odds. He had nothing to lose.
Keith!
Black was shouting in his mind. We do not have much time! Hurry!
Keith could think of nothing; his own thoughts were totally overwhelmed by the howling gale that was Black’s own consciousness, drowning him out like an afterthought. His legs and arms moved automatically as he sprinted into her hangar.
She was waiting for him, growling in rare impatience with her jaw on the floor and ramp lowered. Keith charged into the lion’s mouth without pausing, urgency crackling like lightning through him. Inside the cockpit, the mental tumult was even worse. Black was usually so controlled and self-possessed, but now… her emotions were uncontainable, discordant, battering at his sanity.
He grimaced and sat down. “What is it?”
Black was already out of the Castle, streaking through space at some multiple of the speed of light. Her reply was not spoken, merely a stream of her own alien awareness. And Keith knew.
The meteor streaked across the sky like the sweep of a paintbrush, leaving a brief glow that illuminated the night before touching down near the horizon.
Keith saw its path and knew where it must have landed. Closer to the Garrison than he’d anticipated. He swore. He’d have to move the explosives, and the closer to the Garrison’s sensors he got, the riskier his plan was going to be. It would be hard to make it in and out unseen.
Still, there wasn’t a moment to lose. He swept his hair back and tied his old red scarf over his nose and mouth to prevent anything getting in them. After checking again that his knife was secured to his back, he mounted his bike, and with the practised ease he’d learnt from Shiro he gunned it.
Minutes felt like seconds and soon he’d hastily moved the explosives (recklessly, as they were powerful for stuff he’d made from pharmacy chemicals) and was flying through a canyon to get to the other side.
When he judged he was almost at the crash he slowed to walking pace, although he didn’t dismount, and pulled out his macrobinoculars to see what was going on. He rounded a bend, bike practically silent beneath him, and it came into view.
The Garrison was laughably predictable. Anything they didn’t understand was a potential threat, and this crash was no exception. They’d swiftly surrounded the site and put up an isolation dome; Keith watched as personnel came back and forth, like insects around a carcass. He paused briefly on an officer, clearly in command. Could it be…?
He increased the magnification and his suspicions were confirmed. Admiral Sanda.
After Kerberos, she’d been the one to give the broadcasted address and subsequent press conferences, which Keith had watched from his shack. They’d reeked of lies.
Yes, lies, because this was proof enough, even without the other clues, that something more had happened than ‘pilot error’ (Keith still prickled with indignation on Shiro’s behalf). Something greater than the Garrison was willing to admit had disrupted the mission, and this crash site was evidence.
Sanda had lied.
Keith’s jaw set. It’s time.
Cold fury and intent burned in his veins.
He detonated the explosives.
“Keith!” Allura’s voice. Tinny through the comms. “Keith, what’s going on?”
“It’s Black,” he managed to say, despite the storm raging across their bond. “She’s– we’ve—”
They were going fast now, so fast that the Castle was falling behind, but what if it’s not fast enough? Keith wasn’t sure who the thought came from, but time was short, shortening by the microsecond, and if they wasted even a moment—
Black shuddered to an instant halt, throwing Keith against the flightwheels. The starlines faded back into stars, and there it was, in front of them.
A small, desperate wreck of a shuttle.
“Keith?!” Allura again. They must’ve wormholed to catch up. “What’s wrong?”
Keith/Black’s own panic was swept away as Black’s sensors picked up on the signs inside the craft. Life readings, faint, but there.
We were in time.
Keith’s breath huffed out and his instincts and Black’s senses were telling him the same thing and while it seemed to good to be true after all this time it clearly was so—
He smiled in relief. “We found him.”
The instant he saw the transports leave, he was running.
It was too exposed for his bike here, so he’d ditched it behind one of the largest boulders that was hopefully still close enough for him to be able to carry a semi-conscious man to. The coast seemed relatively clear then (the Garrison was laughably predictable in its reaction to the explosions, he mused again) so he’d bolted for the isolation dome.
Its layout was pretty basic and followed the standard schematic, so he charged straight into the central passage.
His feet pounded, and his heartbeat thundered, and his breath came in adrenaline-fueled pants, and he was totally in the moment, totally focused. Now or never, pulling out all the stops to save Shiro. He was sure that that was what he was doing.
He finally (it felt like ages had passed although it could only have been a few seconds) reached the end of the tunnel: the bulbous isolation chamber itself. Inside were three med-techs, all surrounding a table.
A table with some on it.
Someone who was strapped down and unmoving and seemed familiar.
Was that… had his instincts been right?
Keith’s heart crashed in his ears.
The med-techs were turning, surprised, reminding him to think later, act now, and he shifted his weight to a more stable stance as they advanced with shock morphing to open hostility. His arms came up in that instinctive guard, his eyes narrowed, seeing them move, and they were upon him.
The self-defence Shiro had taught him was far more effective than the standard course everyone had received at the Garrison. It was easy to deck the techs in quick succession, sending them sprawling, and his adrenaline roared for more. But he had a purpose for being here.
He scrambled over the unconscious bodies to reach the man on the table.
All his work, his instincts, the energy source’s signal, his hopes, the risks he’d taken— everything had led to this moment. Who was it he’d done it all for?
Oh thank God, it was Shiro.
He’d found Shiro.
Keith’s heart did something strange as he realised it, and his emotions became something confusing and distracting, so he compartmentalised himself and focused on the job.
He put a hand under Shiro’s chin, hoping the touch would wake him up. It didn’t (of course it didn’t– they would’ve sedated him) and the skin was cold and clammy beneath his fingers. Now that he saw it clearly, Shiro’s face was different. A harsh scar cut across the bridge of his nose, and his hair… some of it had changed colour. How had…
Not important, he told himself, and tried to refocus. Any minute now the Garrison would be back, and his opportunity would be gone. He could barely believe that this was real, after so long, and his voice was barely above a whisper as he spoke aloud, as if to confirm that this wasn’t a dream.
“Shiro?”