Chapter Text
Never in his wildest dreams did Shiro think he’d be rescued by another human.
Shiro had lost hope of even surviving this hell ages ago. He was certain he’d die in the gladiator arena. He had even made peace with the fact that he was probably never going to see Earth again.
He just kept fighting, trying to survive just one more battle, one more druid experiment.
And then one day he watched as a silent shadow sliced through two sentries like softened butter. Out of the dark came a person wearing all black. Before he knew it, the door to his cell opened and the person was reaching inside to drag him out.
“Come with me,” he’d said. Shiro didn’t even stop to think. Then they were running through the halls, his new ally slashing through every sentry with his sword. It wasn’t long before an alarm began to blare and emergency lights started flashing along the hallways. It urged him to move faster.
Either he escaped here and now, or he died on this alien ship.
They turned a corner and came face to face with a larger group of sentries, guns aimed straight at them.
Shiro instinctively froze, but his masked ally didn’t hesitate. They rushed at the first sentry, using their sword to deflect the first laser shot. They jumped to the side and used the wall rebound toward the enemies, swinging the sword wide to cut down three sentries at once while spinning in the air. They landed in a somersault and sliced another one at the kneecaps.
Shiro got his head back in the game just in time to be ready when a sentry came for him. He saw the barrel of the gun aimed at him and brought up his arm without thinking. Somehow, his body instinctively knew that the prosthetic could protect him. The laser bounced right off of it. Seizing his opportunity, he reached out for the droid, grabbing it with his powered-up hand and judo-flipping it, smashing it into the floor.
He and his ally made eye contact (somehow? through his mask?) and seemed to come to an understanding. The two of them made light work of the rest of the sentries.
They ran, taking what seemed like random turns through the ship. His ally seemed confident in their path though, so he trusted it.
Eventually they arrived at what must have been an escape pod. Shiro’s rescuer slid into the pilot’s seat, immediately pressing a button to close the doors behind them and plugging some kind of flash drive into the control panel. They launched into space, speeding away from the mother ship.
Shiro sank into a seat, realizing that at this point there was nothing else he could do other than pray that his savior was a good enough pilot to get them out of there.
He looked over at the other person, taking note of their appearance. They had the same shape as a human: one head on top, two arms, two legs. He couldn’t quite tell if they were wearing a full-body suit or if their body just looked like that. Did they have a mouth?
Then, Shiro realized that they had put the pod in autopilot and was now looking at a 3D hologram map. They scrolled past dozens of solar systems before finally starting to zoom in. It was the Milky Way.
Shiro held his breath as they continued to zoom in, scrolling past Neptune and Jupiter before stopping at Earth. His ally looked back at him for confirmation. “Earth. Home?”
“Yes! That’s my home!” Shiro’s heart soared as his ally set a course for Earth. He was finally going home. Was he dreaming?
The ally pressed some more buttons on the control panel and then a video call popped up. Someone who looked very similar to his rescuer was on screen, but they were broader and had a deeper voice. His rescuer and the other person spoke in a foreign language that Shiro did not understand, but did recognize.
They were speaking Galran.
The ship that Shiro had been held prisoner on had been equipped with a universal translator. Shiro didn’t have a clue how the technology worked, but he was able to understand everything that was said to him and vice versa. Shiro guessed that it worked based on proximity, because it didn’t always work when it came to Galra having a conversation down the hall or random shouts from the crowd during his fights.
The translator made it impossible to actually learn any Galran for himself, but Shiro did recognize the name they called him: the Champion.
The two masked people had a brief conversation in which they talked about the Champion and Earth.
Were they Galra? What if they were using him to find out where Earth was so they could enslave the rest of humanity? This may be an escape pod, but it was still a Galra ship.
The call ended and the ship’s pilot turned to look at him. Then, he took off his mask.
They were… human?
Shiro’s rescuer was a young human man with shaggy black hair and pale skin. He gave Shiro a small smile and said, “Hello, I am Keith.” In English.
Shiro stared at him with wide eyes. “You’re human too? Why didn’t you say so? How did you get here?”
Keith paused for a moment before responding. “Yes. I am human.”
Shiro never thought those words could instill such fear in him.
There seemed to be two possibilities. First, that Keith was an alien trying to pretend to be human so that Shiro would trust him. The second was that Keith was a human that didn’t speak much English and may have even been raised in space. It wasn’t unusual for a human to not know English, but being raised in space was impossible. Wasn’t it? Unless maybe he or his parents were abducted.
Either way, there was nothing he could do about it right now. Shiro decided to continue observing Keith before he made a plan. If Keith was good, then he had nothing to worry about. If Keith turned out to be evil, then Shiro would have to kill him before they arrived on Earth. He decided to watch and try to figure out how to pilot this thing just in case.
Keith was a strong fighter. If he had any chance of winning, he’d have to catch him by surprise. Shiro needed to be friendly to make him let down his guard.
“I’m Shiro, [by the way],” Shiro told him. Shiro was his name then. Now Keith could stop calling him the Champion in his mind.
Keith never thought he’d need to speak Human.
He was raised at the Blade of Marmora Headquarters, surrounded by other Galra. Galran was the language he grew up speaking with everyone around him. It was the only language he needed in a universe controlled by the Galra Empire. It was the only language he learned to read and write.
He was a hybrid though. His mom had fallen in love with a human and she insisted that her half-human child learn about his other heritage. She told him about the desert, their primitive but charming technology, and the strange animals that lived on Earth. She also taught him what little Human she knew.
Her memory was only so reliable though. She taught him what she could, but the longer she was away from Earth, the less she remembered. Luckily, they also had a data drive of a few songs that his father had given his mother. They learned as much of the Human language as they could from the songs. Music was not a thing that Galra created. To them, it just sounded like words and strange noises. Keith, however, was able to understand music in a way that no other Galra could. He didn’t know the meaning of half of the words of the songs, but the beat and the tune added layers of emotion that only he could feel.
He would listen to the music while training by himself or when he was alone in his room. Sometimes the tune of a song would stick in his mind and play through his head all day without physically hearing it.
It freaked Antok out whenever he felt compelled to start drumming with his fingers and sing along to whatever song was playing in his mind. He couldn’t stop his human urges the same way Regris couldn’t not wrap his tail around the leg of anyone he sat down next to.
And now, against all odds, Keith had to use the small amount of Human language he knew to communicate with a human as part of a mission. Any Blade could have freed Shiro and sent him home in an escape pod, but Kolivan thought that the Champion could be useful. He wanted to gain his trust. The fact that he was human made Keith the obvious choice for the mission.
The escape pod was hurtling through space at a speed that Shiro didn’t think was possible. There wasn’t much to talk about with the language gap, so the two of them were pretty quiet.
Then, Keith stood up and got something out of a cabinet.
“Edible gummies?” Keith asked, holding it out to Shiro.
Shiro couldn’t stop the way his jaw dropped. There was no way. Was he actually offering him edibles??
Keith tilted his head and tried again. “Apple Jacks?”
Oh. “You mean food?” Shiro asked. He took the offered packet and sure enough, there was a ration bar inside the packaging. “Thanks Keith.”
Edible gummies. Apple Jacks. Where the hell had Keith learned his English from?
Keith’s vocabulary was more random than he thought. He decided to just start talking about stuff and see what he understood. Maybe they could figure out which words they both knew.
“You [fight really well] Keith. [How long have you been in space?]” Shiro said.
Keith had no clue what he wanted. “Anything you want?” he asked. “Anything you need?”
“[Um, no thanks.] I [just] want to go home.”
“Okay. You got it. Yes go home,” Keith said. “Earth,” he clarified, just to be safe.
Shiro smiled at him. “Yes, Earth is home.” Then he started to say a lot more words. “Hey, [so] I’m going to [talk a bunch to try and figure out what words] you [do and] don’t know. [I’ll start with a recap.] I’m Shiro. I’m a human from Earth. I [fly planes and space ships]. I was [kidnapped by] the Galra [and held prisoner for a long time]."
Keith had no clue what this guy was trying to say.
Shiro continued, ignoring the blank look on Keith’s face. “[Now,] I am [on a space ship] with you. [Thank you for saving] me. You are [also] human, [which really surprised me. But] you don’t [speak very much English, which is making communication difficult right now.] You gave me [food, but] you [called it] edible gummies and Apple Jacks. [That was really weird.] Apple Jacks are [a kind of food.]" He emphasized that last word, food.
“Apple Jacks are food?” Keith asked.
Shiro perked up. “Yes! This is food,” he said, pointing to the ration bar. “[How about water? Do] you know [water? Drinks?]”
Keith did not know water. He took a guess at what Shiro was trying to say and got out a hydration pouch. “Red Bull?”
Shiro threw back his head laughing. “You’ve gotta be fucking with me, man. How the hell do you know what a Red Bull is but not water?”
Keith suddenly looked sort of uncomfortable. “I don’t fuck you.”
“You know fuck?” Shiro couldn’t help but ask. Keith nodded.
Against his better judgment, he started listing all the curse words he knew to see if Keith recognized them. Keith’s swear vocabulary turned out to be rather extensive, but Shiro didn’t know how it was possible that Keith knew shit, ass, and bitch, but not damn.
Maybe Shiro had died and this was some kind of prank set forth by the afterlife.
Keith knowing all the curse words reminded him of when he was a kid and thought it’d be funny to learn curse words in other languages. Wait a second. What if English was Keith’s second language and a different Earth language was his first?
“Do you speak Japanese by chance?” Shiro asked. “Mandarin? Korean? Spanish? German?” Keith looked more confused than ever so he gave up. Even if Keith did know another Earth language, it wouldn't change their predicament because Shiro wouldn’t understand it at all.
Shiro sighed, leaning back in his seat.
He came up with another strategy. He tugged at his shirt. “Shirt.”
“Tee?” Keith asked.
“Yes! Like Tee-shirt!” He ignored the fact that his shirt wasn’t technically a T-shirt. He tugged at his pants next. “Pants.”
“Jeans.”
“Yeah!” It was like Keith didn’t know the basic words for things, but knew some random variations or slang of them. It was possible that Keith’s vocabulary was far more extensive than he realized, but none of the words he knew were used in everyday speech. How does that even happen?
He tried to continue finding words they both knew, but lost momentum after a while. He was exhausted, and figuring out how to communicate with Keith was basically a lost cause.
They were going to crash.
The warning systems were going haywire. This little pod was designed to travel only between larger spacecraft. It didn’t have any of the proper instruments to enter a planet’s atmosphere. Keith was doing everything he could to slow their descent, but it would be a rough landing.
Then there was the other issue.
Somehow, Keith needed to warn Shiro about what was coming.
Shiro was alseep right now. He’d been asleep for most of the trip and Keith didn’t blame him. Galran prison camps and gladiator arenas were hell. He deserved all of the sleep he could get. It also had the added benefit of reducing the amount of time that they were left in awkward silence.
But he needed Shiro to brace himself for impact. So, Keith did what he needed to do and shook him awake.
“Shiro,” he said, gesturing to the warning lights and the window showing that the pod was starting to burn up. “I hits Earth. You don’t cry. There’ll be tomorrow.” He smiled to reassure him.
Shiro was going to die, wasn’t he?
A year(?) of torture and now, when he finally returns home, he is going to die a firey death. Keith didn’t seem too concerned, but who even was he?
There was nothing Shiro could do but face his imminent doom.
Keith turned back again from where he was still attempting to fly the crashing aircraft. He smiled softly. “Shiro,” he soothed. “You don’t cry.” For the record, Shiro was not crying. Keith then pointed at himself confidently and said, “I’m a literal legend.”
Yeah. Shiro was definitely going to die.