Archive of Our Own

It’s taken a lot of time, tears, and blood, but Princess Allura of the Altean Empire and the Paladins of Voltron are starting to be names that garner respect throughout the galaxy, as opposed to the old standard responses of fear, bitterness, aching messianic hope, and Lance’s personal favorite, where have you been all this time and what do you mean, you’re it, we thought you were coming to save us. You can’t eat respect, though, and you definitely can’t patch up your leaking HVAC pipes with it, so sooner or later, the Castle has to touch down to resupply and make repairs.

Despite Voltron’s best efforts and some significant military gains by their allies, taking back enough to give themselves a little breathing room, too much of the galaxy is still under Lotor’s unpleasantly totalitarian thumb, and so ‘places to touch down’ usually mean ‘whatever scuzzy smugglers’ ports that the Galra have decided are too unruly, violent, or just plain gross to bother with, and will probably sell us the stuff we need in trade for whatever random shit we can dig out of dusty personal quarters on the Castle that’s for some reason valuable because nearly no one has seen an Altean in a million trillion years, much less a beautifully well-preserved 4th Dynasty Altean tea service or whatever’. There are a whole lot more Altean knickknacks kicking around the universe than there used to be, that’s for sure.

Lance still feels kind of weird about supplementing their cashbox this way, because it feels a little too close to grave robbing, even though none of the long-dead Alteans are gonna be using any of this stuff and the credits from that umbrella stand are going towards feeding his children. It’s not his people and not his place to say, though, and Allura agreed to it without a whisper of complaint  when Coran floated the idea a few years ago, nervous at how much of their provisions and parts came at the grace of allies who were already stretched too thin providing for their own people. He and Allura both put in a few vargas a week sorting through the stuff that the paladins scavenge, pointing out form and function so that Pidge or Hunk or Shiro or Lance (definitely not Keith) can give a better sales pitch.

They won’t go on the scavenging trips to the residential levels themselves, though, which Lance understands. He’s not sure about Coran — that man can spin your head around like a top when he wants to — but he knows that Allura had a few extended family members who had lived on the Castle, generals and diplomats, people she knew. It’s not like they’ve found any desiccated corpses or anything — the Castle cleaning robots had disposed of those long before any humans had came on board and Allura and Coran had woken up — but they’re still pawing through these people’s shit and just taking whatever.

Lance has taken to saying a quick prayer for the dead for every new personal room they enter. He tried just talking to the rooms freeform a few times, but that creeped him out so much that he had to go back to the scripted stuff, although he tries to choose ones as vague as possible, usually one of the eternal rest prayers picked clean of any purgatory references. The Alteans had their own gods and their own stories about what happened after death, after all, and he’s sure not trying to convert them in their afterlife. He’s just trying to be respectful; telling these long-dead people hey, we know that you were here, we know that you were people, thank you for not haunting our asses when we sell your stuff so that we can keep fighting the fuckers who killed you.

Keith feels no such moral quandary, apparently. Dude is all about the greater good, and as he’s pointed out many times to all of them, what good is all this shit doing just laying there, waiting for owners who’ll never come back?

“So when you die, we should ransack your room and sell all your stuff,” Lance had snapped the first time that Coran brought it up, annoyed at Keith’s shrugging indifference to any ideas about respect for the dead.

“Sure,” Keith had said. “I mean, I don’t think you’d make a lot of money off it because I don’t have a lot and I’m gonna die with all my valuable stuff on me, ‘cause that’s my sword and my bayard, but if you can retrieve the body, you can have those too. Probably don’t sell those, though, you’ll definitely get cheated.”

Xio has gone on plenty of Castle scavenging trips with them both. It’s a challenge to keep her out of the air ducts, much less whole wings full of new and exciting things to touch and smell and listen to and occasionally lick, and since she was gonna find a way to do it anyways, might as well do it supervised and help out a little while she’s at it.

She’s been to their favorite scuzzy smugglers’ port, too. Lance and Keith’s combined parenting style pinballs manically between wanting to encourage her independence and self-assuredness and wanting to cocoon her up in about fifty heavy blankets and never let her go anywhere, and sometimes that results in some weird compromises, like how her twelfth birthday present is letting her come down in the nondescript shuttle from the Castle to the port that Lance affectionately calls space-Tortuga and wait there with Keith and Lance while Shiro and Pidge go out to hawk whatever pile of shiny they’ve put together this time.

“You can leave as many nose smudges on the window as you want, but leaving the ship is not part of the deal, okay?” Lance tells her when she starts to look mutinously at the closed hatch, barely fifteen dobash after they touch down.

Xio had been all wide-eyed promises of good behavior back on the Castle, assuring them that just going down there would be so! much! fun! — “It’s really not,” Keith had told her, “there are so many smells” — but that resolution doesn’t seem to be holding up to the lure of the port itself now that it’s right there just beyond that hatch.

“Besides, we need your help to keep from getting bored while we wait for Shiro and Pidge, remember?” Lance continues. “Gotta be alert and ready to leave in ten ticks!”

That seems to do the trick, along with Keith’s running muttered monologue about how smelly and bad and loud and bad and crowded and bad it is out in the streets where all the smugglers and traders and guns-for-hire do their business.

A whole varga’s worth of balmera biology lessons later, though, there’s still no sign of Shiro or Pidge, and Lance is starting to feel pretty fucking cabin-feverish himself, stuck in a 12’x12’ shuttle cabin with a chatty, increasingly bouncy twelve-year-old and Keith, who’s just sitting there, happily cocooned away from all the bad smells with the ship’s engine running at a pleasant hum, patient and content, and possibly annoying Lance more than Xio’s grumpy restlessness.

Lance’s standard for ‘annoying’ gets rapidly reshuffled when Keith decides to entertain Xio with the story of the time that Lance had nearly gotten shanghaied after being stupid enough to drink something at one of the taverns here, which Lance feels is somewhat unnecessary, and then the story of the time that Lance had gotten mistaken for a prostitute, which is definitely unnecessary, and Keith will pay for causing Xio to point at Lance and laugh hysterically at the idea of him being handsome enough to make a living selling sex.

“Hey, I’m handsome enough for your dad,” Lance says, hurt.

“He doesn’t have to pay you!” Xio howls.

Then Keith actually starts laughing too, so in revenge Lance tells her the story of the time that Keith had nearly got bedded and wedded in one fell swoop to a local chieftain after accepting his invitation for “a session of swordplay” (“How the hell was I supposed to know that he meant sex?” Keith demanded. “If you want to fuck, just say so!”), and then about the time right after his Galra-fication when Keith tried to shave off all his fur, and then Keith tells her about Slav and the yupper, and Lance retaliates with another story, and all in all, her twelfth birthday present is less a visit to space-Tortuga and more a whole rolodex of embarrassing stories on her parents that Lance is 100% sure she’ll blurt out at some incredibly awkward time to someone who absolutely does not need to know them, because she thinks they’re hilarious so the Olkari ambassador will find them funny, too!

“In retrospect, we probably should have thought this whole birthday present thing out better,” Lance tells Keith when they get back to the Castle (three! fucking! vargas! in a shuttle ship!) and Xio immediately races off, probably to regale Maze with every single thing she just heard.

“Are you kidding?” says Pidge, who’d been the first person that Xio practiced her storytelling skills on, over the ride back. “You just gave her the best birthday present ever.”

*

As bad as the twelfth birthday incident is, it pales in comparison to the gift that Keith gives her on her thirteenth birthday. Hunk had assured Lance that he hid the knife/sword that the Blade of Marmora sent Xio as a baby gift somewhere so clever that not even Maze would be able to find it, but either he was wrong about Maze and she and Keith conspired, or Hunk is just really bad at hiding things and Keith found it himself.

Either way, Hunk doesn’t tell Lance that it’s missing, so Lance doesn’t think much besides, huh, Keith looks really hopeful about this one, when his boyfriend hands their daughter the rather badly-wrapped box that he definitely repurposed from his bulk stash of snack bars. Then Xio finally succeeds in peeling off enough of the packing tape Keith used and she screams in delight, and Lance looks over to find his excitable thirteen-year-old daughter holding a giant combat knife and he screams a little too.

“But that comes with lessons on how to use it,” Keith tells her firmly. “A weapon is a danger to you more than your enemy if you can’t wield it.”

“Keith, can we talk?” Lance says, tightly. “Now?”

“I’m busy, Lance, hold on,” Keith says, and turns back to Xio, who’s actually petting the knife, running her finger curiously up and down the blood gutter of the blade. “So I’m going to hang onto it until Allura and I think you’ve trained with it long enough to carry it around safely, okay?”

Xio looks unhappy at that, like she was planning on cuddling up to it tonight like her stuffed balmera, but she grudgingly concedes, handing Keith back the box after giving the knife one last pat.

Lance makes frantic eyes at Maze, jerking his head towards Xio in a gesture that’s hopefully more “distract her with another gift so I can talk to your idiot dad” than “I’m having a partial seizure”. Evidently Maze gets it, because she sighs heavily, rolls her eyes, and points to another box with a Keith Kogane’d packing tape job and says, “Hey, Xio, open that one next, it’s big,” and yeah, it’s big, Lance thinks as he drags Keith into the corridor, it came from Keith, so that box probably has a tank.

“What the fuck?” Lance hisses to him as soon as they’re out of immediate earshot.

“What?” Keith asks him, blankly.

“That knife was hidden for a reason, Keith,” Lance says.

“Yeah, to wait until she got older,” Keith says. “She’s older now.”

“She’s thirteen!” Lance says. “Barely! Just! By like, vargas!”

“So?” Keith asks. “She’s been training practically since she was a toddler, her fine motor skills are gonna improve but they’re pretty good for her age, and she’s been handling the weighted practice knives just fine.”

“Practice knives?” Lance squawks.

“Did Allura not tell you?” Keith asks.

“No, she did not tell me, which is apparently a running theme around here,” Lance says.

Keith shrugs. “You’ve never been interested in her martial arts stuff before,” he says.

“That’s because I thought she was, I don’t know, running around kicking stuff, not accidentally cutting her own throat!” Lance says, waving his arms wildly.

“She’s not going to accidentally cut her own throat, Lance,” Keith says, in the tone that means he thinks he’s being just super duper patient and reasonable.

“You just gave her a giant knife that transforms into an even bigger sword,” Lance hisses. “Do you not see why that’s a bad idea?”

“Yeah, that’s why it comes with lessons,” Keith tells him. “Don’t carry around a knife that you don’t know how to use, I learned that the hard way.”

Lance barely resists the urge to beat his own head against the wall until this entire situation goes away, but the only thing that’s going to do is leave him with a concussion while his daughter is running around with her giant knife/sword as his idiot knife-obsessed boyfriend looks benevolently on, why couldn’t Keith’s special interest have been rabbits.

“Did you really have to give her a gift that’s mostly for you?” Lance asks, meanly.

“What?” Keith asks, and Lance scowls.

“You love knives, now she has a knife, father-daughter bonding is great but maybe not at the expense of her safety,” he says.

“She asked, Lance,” Keith says. “I didn’t know what to get her, like always, Hunk said to get her another chewing necklace because she’d worked through her old one. Then she asked if she could train with my knife, and I remembered that the Blade of Marmora had given her one, too. I wasn’t being… She asked.”

“And you’re her parent, you should have said no,” Lance says tiredly.

“Why should I have said no?” Keith demands. “She’s excited about this and she wants to learn. Her climbs with Shiro are getting harder and she’s handling that no problem, Allura says she’s doing great with unarmed stuff, and they’ve already been experimenting with practice knives, because Xio wanted to do more than just unarmed.”

“She always wants to do more,” Lance says.

“She gets bored easy,” Keith agrees. “But I think it’s good. None of her physical stuff has a lot of fine motor work and this is fine motor work. And Allura said she’s following all the safety protocols that Allura set. She’s not gonna let Xio do anything actually dangerous. It’s just for fun. People learn stuff like this for fun all the time.”

Lance scowls, but his bad knee is acting up again, so he slumps against the wall and Keith slouches next to him, shoulder to shoulder, warm against Lance’s side.

“I wonder how many grey hairs you’ve given me,” Lance grumps.

“They’re not grey, they’re silver,” Keith says. “I think they look nice.”

“Did you end up getting her another chewing necklace?” Lance asks.

Keith nods. “Yeah. It’s in the box that you almost sat on.”

“I did, too,” Lance says. “What color?”

“Blue.”

“I got black.”

“She’ll probably wear them both at the same time,” Keith says.

“Well, blue and black don’t clash, so we’re good,” Lance says. “To be clear, I’m mad that you gave her that knife, and I’m also mad that you didn’t tell me that you were going to give her that knife.”

“I didn’t know I needed to,” Keith says. “I had mine the whole time I was a kid and it wasn’t a big deal.”

“None of your foster parents ever saw you playing with a giant knife and tried to confiscate it?” Lance asks skeptically.

“Well, okay, I hid it, they would have freaked out,” Keith clarifies. “But it wasn’t a big deal for me.”

“It’s a big deal for me,” Lance says.

“You didn’t get into fights as a teenager?” Keith asks. “Ever?”

“Not knife fights,” Lance says. “And my parents didn’t even let me near the stove after that one time, nobody was gonna give me sharp objects.”

“Yeah, because you were too busy drinking and working your way through half of Varadero,” Keith says. “Hunk told me what you told him, so don’t try to say that I’m wrong.”

“Not half,” Lance says. “A quarter, maybe. What can I say? The road to self discovery is paved with dicks.”

He groans. “And Xio’s gonna be a teenager soon, too. Fucking birthdays. Everyone gets older.”

“Yeah, that’s what birthdays are,” Keith says. “We should get back, Xio’s gonna think that we got bored and ditched her.”

“For the record, still pissed as hell at you,” Lance says. “But it’s pretty shitty to take back a present once you’ve already given it, so… Ugh. Fine. I’ll wait and see.”

“Okay,” Keith says. “And I’ll teach her well. I’ll make sure she’s safe. I promise.”

They both manfully ignore how loudly Keith’s back cracks when he straightens up, just like they ignore it when Lance’s bad knee wobbles and nearly sends him slamming back against the wall. Jesus, Lance is thirty-five and he already feels like he’s eighty, although he supposes that active combat for twenty years will do that to you, even with Altean healing technology; you can keep injuring and healing and re-injuring and re-healing all you want, but at a certain point your body just starts to break down.

Lance finally went ahead and got corrective eye surgery a few months ago, after he realized that he was piloting Blue more by feel and guesswork than by sight and told Hunk, who marched him down to medical that afternoon and patiently helped him sort through the overwhelming array of surgery options, and also threatened to chase him down and sit on him if Lance tried to make a break for it. Now Lance is probably looking at knee replacement surgery, too, within a decade if not less — he’d spent a week in a healing pod after that particular mission, but those fuckers had worked him over good, completely shattering his right knee, and it’s never been the same since.

Of course, they’re long gone, having practically signed their own death certificates when they first took that hammer to him, so Lance is getting the last laugh here, but he’s still not looking forward to surgery or the recovery time. Being bedbound sucks.

Xio apparently got tired of waiting for them to keep opening things, because she’s wearing both their necklaces when they get back, already absently working at one of the silicone beads with her molars. The big box remains unopened, although she’s stubbornly picking at the packing tape while Maze backseat tape-picks from her nest of blankets and heating pads on the couch.

“Try the top left corner!” Maze suggests.

“I have tried the top left corner, it keeps peeling,” Xio mutters around the bead.

“Having problems?” Lance asks as he and Keith settle back down with their kids.

“Uh, yeah,” Xio says. “I need a knife, but you said that I can’t have mine yet, and I listened and didn’t get it back out even though you left the box next to Maze when you left.”

I see what you did there, Lance thinks sourly, but he just makes grabby hands for Keith’s pocketknife and tells her, “The Blade of Marmora knife is pretty big to open a box with.”

“It’s not really a utility knife,” Keith offers. “Mostly just fighting — for stabbing, actually, when it’s in knife form, like a Roman pugio, but when it’s in the sword form it’s got more of a Chinese dao shape, which is for slashing and chopping —”

And we’re off to the races, Lance thinks, and resigns himself to some more bloodthirsty special interest spiels than usual, since Xio is hanging off Keith’s every word with a worrying glint in her eye, clearly cataloging the information in whatever part of her brain hoards things so she can repeat them back to everyone later in extremely specific and sometimes rather off-putting detail. Lance knows a lot more about the reproductive practices of balmera than he ever wanted to, and now he’s probably going to be hearing about single-edged vs. double-edged and the best knives for disemboweling rather than stabbing five times before breakfast, all over again, because Keith has gotten a lot more free and verbose with his passions over the years and Lance has already heard it all from him.

Ugh. Rabbits, Keith. Why not rabbits?

*

Lance is entirely prepared for

a) an immediate emergency trip to medical for Xio

b) an immediate emergency trip to medical for Keith or Allura

c) Xio deciding that knife fighting is actually very boring after all and that she’d rather get her kicks out of giving Lance heart attacks in some other fashion, like base jumping or paragliding in outer space

but as the weeks wear on and the knife lessons continue without incident, Lance starts to think that Keith was right and Xio can actually do this safely, although some part of Lance’s brain still glitches whenever he thinks of Xio and edged weapons. Allura does report that Xio’s taking the safety aspect of her new recreational pastime seriously, which is more than Xio had done when she’d taken up rock climbing, so Lance supposes that shows something that could be personal maturity if you hold it up to the right light and squint.

Shiro reports that she’s doing better on their climbs, too — if not actually listening to him then at least trying to, rather than just ignoring him to jump from rock to rock like a gangly mountain goat while he yells at her fruitlessly in the background. She’s still Xio, which means that Shiro has to go sit in a quiet room by himself every time they get back from a climb, but Lance is a little less worried when they go out that he’s going to get a call later saying that some local found his daughter splattered all over a cliff, and not just because Shiro assures him that he isn’t taking Xio on any climbs higher than 40 feet, max, and he will absolutely not allow Xio to climb rope-free, even though Shiro is a hypocrite who free climbs by himself all the time.

As reluctant as Lance is to add blade fighting to the list, he knows that the litany of physical stuff she grew up doing and still does has been a steadying influence on her — swimming with Hunk; climbing with Shiro; training with Allura and the Castle simulators; even flying with Keith, safely ensconced in the copilot chair with her own mock training yoke — helping her find her own ways to exist in a body that doesn’t always listen to what she wants, a brain always moving at a different speed or on a different track than everyone else.

They’re not making her do any of it — as Keith has said many, many, many times, it’s not therapy, it’s fun — but she’s a sensory seeker with a talent for finding new and exciting ways to terrify her parents, and if she wants to do something, she’s going to find a way to do it, no matter how many times anyone tells her she can’t.

Neither Xio nor Maze would have done well in an institutional school setting like he and Keith had been in, that’s for sure. Maze would have withered, and Xio would have beaten herself senseless and screaming against all the rules that just existed to be rules. But it turns out that growing up on a giant, technologically advanced but mostly abandoned warship with only adults and now Shiro and Allura’s newborn power baby Alric for company gives both of his crazy smart kids the opportunity for learning at their own speed, and they’re doing great. Xio’s speed just happens to include a lot more jumping off of things than most, that’s all.

Lance does go and lurk around a few of her knife lessons, just to make sure that Xio isn’t going to die if he doesn’t rescind the knife ban. Allura doesn’t always have a great handle on the differences between human and Altean children, and she grew up regularly pulling stunts that Lance isn’t sure he could have done as an adult in his prime, and Keith is… well, Keith. But they’re patient with her, slow, and Xio wiggles but watches carefully as they drill her on the basics that Keith had informed Lance she’d already learned with the blunted practice knife, over and over again.

Lance expects her to start yelling after Allura tells her to repeat the drill no. 2 for what must be the twentieth time, but Xio looks focused, calm, almost soothed, and watching Keith’s face as Keith watches Xio, Lance maybe gets why Keith gravitates towards edged weapons rather than guns. Out of context, sword drills are just rhythm, repetition, no loud noises and the steady weight of something heavy in your hands, the same thing over and over and over again until it becomes a song your muscles can sing in the middle of a battlefield, high and sweet over the smoke and noise and death that surrounds you.

“Still worried?” Keith guesses when he spots Lance lurking in the doorway of the practice room.

“Still worried,” Lance confirms. “But, okay, not as much as I was. Still scares the shit out of me, but — she really does like it. And you guys are good teachers.”

“I had to learn on my own,” Keith says. “It’s better to have someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“How did you learn?” Lance asks, curious. “I know you got a lot better with yours after we got to the Castle and we all started formal weapons training, but you seemed… pretty okay to begin with.”

“Lots of free time, lots of practice, and free internet at the public library,” Keith says. “And my foster dad when I was twelve was really into knife hunting, he showed me a little. His wife found out and made him stop, though.”

“Because you were an itty bitty baby Keith who shouldn’t have been learning how to take down 100-pound deer?” Lance guesses.

Keith snorts. “She said I creeped her out. One of the other kids told me that she thought I was gonna murder them all in their sleep or something.”

“Oh my God, you had the laser stare all the way back then, didn’t you?” Lance asks.

Keith shrugs. “They wanted me to look people in the eyes. So I looked.”

“At least tell me you’re not going to start her on the sword part of it right away,” Lance says, and Keith shakes his head vehemently.

“Knife first,” he says. “She says that she wants to learn swords, too, but those Blade of Marmora swords are pretty heavy because of the material, they’re made for —”

“— Chopping and slashing, yes, you’ve said,” Lance interrupts. “Many times. Vividly.”

“— and they’re meant to be primarily one-handed, too, so if we try to give her an adult-sized sword she’s just gonna drop it,” Keith finishes. “Because she got your noodle arms.”

“And your aversion to 95% of foods in the galaxy,” Lance shoots back. “Do you know how many times I’ve given her the scurvy talk? Lots, Keith. Whole fucking lots. And she just says “cool” whenever I talk about scar tissue reopening.”

“That is cool,” Keith says. “So we pick some more balanced stuff from her food list with her, and then we tell her to eat a lot of it so she can train with a sword.”

“Crafty,” Lance says. “I like it.”

Xio gives him a hard look when he tries to sell her on the idea later that day, but apparently the allure of sword fights is a stronger motivator than the threat of her teeth falling right out of her gums — which yes, Xio, really does happen, please eat something with vitamin C in it — because she considers it for a moment then bounces up to grab her food list off the fridge.

“I do get that this is hard for you,” Lance tells her as they go over the list, Xio agonizing over each choice. “I mean, I never want to see another grilled cheese sandwich in my life — no, I’m not taking it off the list, I’m just saying that I’m really sick of them — but I know you’d get all your food pumped in intravenously if you could, so. We appreciate it.”

“Food is hard,” Xio agrees. “But I want this. So it’s worth it.”

*

True to Allura’s words and Keith’s promise, Xio is a patient, diligent student for the next several months, which is practically decades in Xio-time. By month four, though, the discontent that Lance just knew was coming starts to bubble up to the surface, turning her snappish and impatient. It only gets worse with every practice hour she puts in, every drill she does practically at every waking moment, stabbing at imaginary opponents with an imaginary knife because Keith still won’t let her carry the real one around. Allura even reports that Xio nearly burst into tears the time she tried out one of the blunted practice swords and did in fact drop it within ten minutes of picking it up, which is alarming, considering that Xio’s usual reaction to things that upset her is less teary and more scream-y.

“Okay, fine, you can’t do swords yet, but what’s wrong with the knife you have?” Lance asks her.

“It’s not enough,” Xio says unhappily, and refuses to elaborate.

Keith is encouraging and positive with her, but when that doesn’t work, he reverts back to being kind of an asshole. (“I didn’t even get a sword until I was seventeen, count your blessings.”) Shockingly, doesn’t help temper Xio’s stubborn commitment to always do more, and Lance suffers through Xio’s increasingly bad mood and braces himself for whatever stupid thing she’s about to do next, because she always does, and being there to comfort her afterwards, because it always goes wrong, and just prays that it isn’t going to be something that gets her hurt.

It takes almost six months before she finally reaches the stupid, but when she does, she does it with style, because Lance comes back from a rare Maze planetoid outing to hear the entire story bubble out of a beaming Allura: how Xio had stolen her knife from Keith’s closet shelf and snuck into the training room for extra practice time; how, as she’d explained to Allura, she’d landed every stab wanting and willing and eventually ordering her knife to change into something better, something right, something that was enough; and suddenly with a pop and a shimmer, she’d found herself wielding what Keith excitedly informs Lance is something close to a kukri, a chopping, slashing, and thrust-ripping weapon that’s perfectly Xio-sized and therefore perfectly designed to give Lance the vapors.

“I didn’t even know it could do that,” Keith says proudly. “I thought it was only two settings, but maybe it’s closer to our bayards —”

“Maybe even the same technology!” Hunk says excitedly. “Or an older version of it — you did say that your knife was an antique —”

“I think you’re missing the point here,” Lance hisses at them both, as they watch Allura walk Xio through the basics of handling her newer, bigger weapon, “which is that Xio now has a small machete.”

“It’s not a machete,” Keith protests, “machetes are straighter and they’re from a completely different part of the world —”

“Fine, yes, kukri —”

“— the Gurkhas used it, so some people call it a Gurkha blade —”

Lance twitches.

“Hey, Maze, why don’t you take Lance off for some tea or something?” Hunk asks kindly. “It looks like he’s had a long day.”

“No thanks,” Maze says. “This is fun. I want to see if his forehead vein is gonna pop or not.”

“Why are you being weird about this again?” Keith asks him later that night, after their kids are asleep or at least pretending to be and Lance has triple-checked that Xio isn’t trying to sleep with her fancy new knife under her pillow.

“Excuse me?” Lance says frostily.

“The knife thing set you off for some reason, again, and I don’t know why,” Keith says. “Is it Xio?”

“Am I upset that Xio hasn’t even hit puberty yet and she’s already sweet-talking her psychic weapons into becoming more dangerous and thus completely ignoring all the safety stuff that you assured me she was taking so seriously? Yes, I am, I am upset, great detective work, really genius stuff,” Lance says.

“No, I mean, are you upset because it’s Xio and not someone else?” Keith asks. “Would you be upset if it were Maze?”

“Maze can’t even hold a regular butter knife, the fuck is she gonna do with a kukri,” Lance snaps, but Keith just scowls and crosses his arms.

“Are you upset because it’s Xio and she’s… you know?” Keith clarifies. “How she is?”

“You know you’re gonna have to say one of the A-words eventually,” Lance says. “Maybe even both.”

“No, I don’t,” Keith says mulishly. “She doesn’t deserve to get saddled with that crap.”

“Yeah, because talking around it like we’re ashamed of her is so much better,” Lance snaps. “Great job at modeling self-love, dude.”

“She doesn’t have to have a label, she can just be how she is —”

“I’m worried about her because she’s my kid, dumbass,” Lance tells him. “Autistic or allistic, ADHD or not, ND or NT, I’m gonna worry about her. And yes, I am worried specifically because it’s Xio. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she doesn’t always have the greatest impulse control, and she does stupid, scary shit on the regular because she still thinks that gruesome injuries are things that happen to other people, even though she’s already broken five different bones and one time got a hairline fracture in her skull. Forgive me if I’m still slightly concerned about adding edged weapons — especially now that I know that she isn’t paying attention to safety at all! She’s just doing the same old Xio thing as always, she hasn’t learned anything, and she’s gonna keep pushing and pushing and pushing for more until she gets hurt! This is what she does!”

“She’s not doing the same old Xio thing as always,” Keith insists. “She’s pushing, but she should be, that’s how you get better, and she’s been really, really focused on this. It’s her thing.”

“Remember the days when you had panic attacks over her drowning in picnic coolers?” Lance asks. “That’s me right now — except worse! At least the picnic coolers we could control, all we had to do was not let her near them, but now she’s stealing knives and practicing without supervision and God knows what else!”

“Yeah, even I noticed you didn’t stop being worried,” Keith says. “But — Our kids are really tough, Lance. You should give them more credit.”

“I give her plenty of credit,” Lance says. “I don’t talk down to her, I try to be honest when she asks me stuff, I let her make her own mistakes — hell, I let her get away with all sorts of shit. But yes, weapons is where I draw the line, because she’s clearly not ready for this! I’m her parent, I want her to be safe!”

“But she’s not safe,” Keith blurts out, and then immediately looks like he wishes he hadn’t.

“Excuse me?” Lance asks frostily.

“She’s not safe,” Keith says. “She’s not growing up in Varadero. She’s on the Castle with us,” and something about how he’s saying that makes Lance look up, makes Lance actually listen—

“… You tricked me,” Lance realizes.

“Only a little,” Keith says, quietly.

“You made me think this was about learning for, for fun or motor skills or some shit!” Lance says accusingly. “You want her to learn for real fighting!”

“Self-defense,” Keith corrects. “If something goes wrong and we’re not there.”

“Where the fuck else would we be?” Lance snaps.

“Dead,” Keith lists out, “missing, stuck in a Lion, too injured… too late… She lives on a warship, Lance, she’s not safe here, neither of them are —”

“Maybe not, but they should think that they are!” Lance says. “They’re kids! They should think that they’re safe!”

“But they’re not,” Keith says, kind of desperately. “They’re not, they’re… not—”

Lance is expecting Keith to keep going, but Keith just looks sad and tired, rocking and clearly desperately searching for more words while Lance just stands there, furious, and the only noise in the room are the completely incomprehensible drawings Maze made for him, flapping softly on the wall in the breeze from the vent.

(“Modern art,” Lance had joked when they’d hung them up. To be honest, even though her fine motor skills are bad enough that she doesn’t actually draw things, Maze’s art freaks Lance out — way too much red in there — but Keith says he likes them, the swoops and scribbles of his favorite colors all layered on top of each other; sometimes spends entire vargas following the lines with his eyes when he can’t sleep, these sword-dances that Maze makes with paper and crayon instead of steel.)

The awkward silence stretches on for too long, long enough to make Lance jittery and start to space out. Words aren’t always a thing that happen for Keith, especially if he’s feeling any of those big feelings of his, and it’s not uncommon for him to just nonverbal out — and yeah, Lance understands now that it’s not Keith being manipulative, it’s just Keith being Keith, but he still hates it if it happens in the middle of a fight, the silence ballooning out with the thousand and one things that Lance’s brain rushes to provide that he just knows are a million times worse than anything Keith is actually thinking.

Just when Lance thinks Keith is done and Lance has gotta jet, though, Keith looks up at him and reaches out for him hopefully. Lance scowls and hops a little in place and considers refusing, but eventually goes, grumpily snuggling into Keith’s hold, because he’s never not wanted Keith’s hands on him, not once, not even during their whole cold war when Lance was pregnant with Xio, waking up in the middle of the night missing something that he only now recognizes in retrospect.

Lance does get it, that people sometimes need space, he really does, but he still hates distance, hates being kept apart from the people he loves. It terrifies him to think that they’re running around separate from him, where the world can kick them and hurt them and he can’t do anything about it.

And the people he loves — they’re not safe, cautious people, even the ones who pretend to be, like Hunk. If they were, none of them would be doing any of what they do, the fight that they got dragged into but still haven’t walked away from. And he promised himself that his children wouldn’t be eaten by this thing, too, but —

“She should know… how to protect herself. If we’re not there,” Keith says finally, haltingly. “How to protect Maze.”

“Maze doesn’t need protecting,” Lance says. “She’s the toughest of all of us. She knows how to survive.”

“Not if they come at her physically,” Keith says, slowly but picking up speed. “She can hide, try to talk her way out of things, but if someone finds her, there’s not… She can’t do a lot. She doesn’t move fast. If she couldn’t find somewhere to hide in time, she wouldn’t get away.”

“You’ve really been thinking about this,” Lance says.

“So fucking much,” Keith mutters. “Ever since Lotor retook the Mnenmite System. Every fucking night,” and yeah, Lance knows that Keith has been having a lot more nightmares lately, can hear him screaming through the walls sometimes.

Lance hadn’t realized it was that bad, but maybe he should have. Their escape from the Mnenmite System had been way too close, because Allura had wanted to stay and fight, give as many of their allies from other systems as they could a chance to escape, but they’d still had to leave some of them behind when the Castle and Voltron left, Pidge barely making the jump ahead of an ion cannon aimed right at them.

“Shiro must be going bugfuck,” Lance says instead. “And he has a baby, too. Jesus. Why didn’t I notice?”

“Because you’ve been focusing on this stupid knife shit and missing everything else,” Keith says. “And I think Shiro’s trying to hide it. Allura told me that our allies are jumpy right now and he doesn’t want to spook them by seeming unstable, even though he kind of is. He and Allura have a million different contingency plans for Alric if something goes wrong, but Allura talks to me, and yeah, he’s not… doing well.”

“Do you think there’s anything we can do?” Lance asks.

“Dunno,” Keith says. “Kill Lotor?”

“Yeah, okay, we’ll get right on that,” Lance says, and then, “Sarcasm,” when Keith frowns at him. “It’s funny, because we’re already trying as hard as we fucking can, and he’s still out there, gunning for galactic domination, and he just got a foothold on a major trading system that supplied a lot of our allies. Fucking fucking fucking fuck!”

“Pretty much,” Keith says, and they’ve both got to get some sleep tonight, they have a mandatory meeting tomorrow morning with Allura and some of the generals from the planetary consortium that’d lost the most ships in the frantic retreat from Mnenmus, but Lance holds onto him and Keith doesn’t say anything and yeah, Lance decides, he doesn’t have to leave for his own room right away; he can stay a little while longer.

*

The paladins manage to make it out of the meeting at the expected time, but Allura ends up stuck there for the whole day, trying to convince the generals that it’s not worth it to treat for peace with the Galra, no matter how decimated their navies are now, and the price they’ll pay for having dared to rebel in the first place is worse than having 40% of their fleet dead or missing. Keith and Xio had flying plans, but Blue and Red are both grounded after a nasty malware attack managed to get through the Castle servers, and Keith is with Maze, distracting and comforting her through a bad pain flare, so Xio is unhappily left at loose ends after being kicked out of Maze’s room for being too loud.

It works out great for Lance, though, because he can commandeer her to help him with a scavenging run on some previously unexplored apartments so he can baby his knee and not have to climb on stuff. He’s a little worried that it’ll devolve into one of the arguments they’ve been having more of lately, but when he asks, she just says, “Sweet, everyone else is being boring today,” and trots off to find a hover-cart.

The pace of their scavenging (“Grave robbing,” Hunk says unhappily; “Repurposing,” Pidge counters) has started to worry Lance. They’ve already worked their way through most of the royal apartments — and hadn’t that been a fun afternoon for Allura and Coran, sorting through all that and valiantly pretending that they weren’t watching a little piece of their home and history being broken off with every stupid knickknack thrown in the ‘sell’ pile — and then the diplomatic corps’, so they’ve started venturing further afield. The Castle of Lions is big, but it’s not that big. At a certain point, they’re just going to run out of stuff.

Coran had called it a stopgap measure when he’d first floated the idea; but wars take money, and this one isn’t showing any signs of stopping. They’ve all been so busy trying not to die since the rebellion started, hopping from victory to defeat to victory with their eyes on the next six months, the next year, and they’d thought that they had a future beyond it, if only they could reach it, if only they could flush Lotor out of whatever hole he’d scuttled into to hide — and then he did come back from what they thought was defeat. And he wasn’t defeated at all.

Xio and Maze and baby Alric may be symbols of a peaceful future or whatever, born in the relative peace between father and son, but the adults in their lives aren’t doing such a great job of delivering on that future. These days Lance wonders if they’ve all been betting on the wrong horse by assuming that their resources will last through a war that he’s starting to think may not even end in their lifetimes, if their lifetimes are that long at all.

“Are we ever going to go in that wing?” Xio asks, pointing towards the Castle Guards’ barracks as they pass.

“Nah, nothing left there,” Lance says. “I promise that it is actually, truly boring. Not hiding any gruesome corpses from you or anything.”

“You’d better not be,” she warns, but doesn’t try to bolt off to look for desiccated skeletons or whatever, which is good, because Lance wasn’t lying. There’s nothing left of the Guards who fought and died in her home, not even their stuff, because the Castle Guards’ barracks were the first the Voltron crew picked clean of weapons and tools and anything else that looked remotely useful for killing a Galra or surviving out in the field.

They’ve given away more of that stuff than they’ve sold — pirates sure as hell don’t need another EMP cannon but rural guerrilla fighting Galra off with crossbows and notched axes do sure as hell do — but they kept some of it, too. Pidge has a plasma knife that’s saved more than one life, stopping someone from bleeding out far from medical care, although Lance can say from experience that cauterization isn’t exactly a fun process. He still has a burn scar from Pidge’s knife low on his belly, an ugly brown-red blotch that cuts through his lightning-bolt stretch marks from carrying Xio, slowly silvering with age.

Lance likes his lightning bolts plenty, but he doesn’t like that burn scar. It’s not a good memory.

He’s not sure who the rooms that he and Xio eventually start looking through belonged to. The furnishings are nice but not extravagant, and there’s no weapons or symbols of status on display, not even pictures, although there is a holoscreen projector that looks like it was smashed in for some reason, maybe to protect the information on it or maybe just because this person didn’t want the Galra to have any part of their life, not one bit, not even the things they liked to look at on their walls.

“I’ll take closet and wardrobe, you take under the bed and on top of the wardrobes, and look for a wall safe,” he rattles off to Xio. “If it’s shiny, put it in the hover-cart, doesn’t matter if the texture doesn’t feel good to you. Alteans liked bling, they dropped money on it.”

“I know,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’ve done this, like, a million times. And don’t get distracted by playing with stuff, we’re here to work.”

“Deal, oh obnoxious one,” he says, dryly, although she kinda has a point. There’s a reason that he doesn’t like going on these trips alone, and it’s not just because all these ghosts give him the creeps. “Look, I’m setting an alarm on my external brain to remind us to leave.”

“Good,” she says. “Cuz I have stuff to do after this.”

“Stuff?”

“Stuff,” she agrees, and drops to army crawl her way under the bed.

Lance is on closet duty, but before he starts digging around he fires off a muttered, “Dale, Señor, el descanso eterno, y luzca para esta persona la luz perpetua. Descansa en paz. Así sea.”

“Why do you always do that?” Xio asks, slightly muffled.

“Do what, the prayer thing?” he asks, and she probably tries to nod, because there’s a thump and a muttered “Ow, fuck.”

“Respect, I guess,” he says. “I don’t know what happens to people after they die, but if they are looking down on me from a giant cloud or something, I want them to know that I cared that they were here.”

Xio wiggles out from underneath the bed, wild-haired and empty-handed.

“I don’t care that they were here,” she says. “I didn’t know them. Why do you care about someone you don’t know?”

“Because I care about people in general, I guess,” Lance says. “And when I die, I want someone to care that I was here.”

“I’ll care if you die,” she says, softly. “I’ll say your prayer for you.”

He has no idea what to say to that, just helplessly spills out, “I’ll say it for you, too,” and she nods.

“Maze, too,” she says. “And Dad. And everyone else.”

He holds his arms out for a hug, suddenly desperate for contact, but she says, “No,” and stomps over to the bank of wardrobes near the window, so Lance lets her go, wrapping his arms around himself instead and trying to push down the wild roar of feelings crashing through his head into something smaller, something more manageable, because he so doesn’t have time for this; he never does.

“He killed my friends,” Xio says, suddenly.

“What?”

“Lotor,” she says, her back still turned to him. “Their parents were our allies, and he kills our allies and their families when he captures them, so he killed my friends. He’s a bad person. I want him dead.”

They may pretend to be men-and-nonbinary-person of the people or whatever, but outside of vacations and missions, the political demands of their position mean that the paladins of Voltron mostly socialize with higher-ups, hobnobbing with the people who have the power to actually make decisions about things like food shipments and troop deployment, so most of Xio’s playmates over the years have been the children of said higher-ups. Safe people; true believers who enthusiastically embraced Voltron and not just quietly tolerated them.

They’d spent a lot of time in the Mnenmite System in the last few years — always on business, but long enough for them to get to know the people who called it home, and it had been safe enough that Lance had thought nothing of Xio getting social time down in the capitol city of the main system world. And if she was having fun with the children whose parents Allura was trying to sweet-talk into spending more money on the defenses on the outer worlds in their system… Well, even better.

Of course Xio made friends down there — this loud, garrulous girl, who doesn’t always pick up on what’s being put down but loves her people anyway, with a possessive, consuming devotion that’s all too familiar — but she hadn’t said anything until now. The only thing she’s talked about these last few months is blades. He hadn’t realized.

“I want him dead too,” he tells her. “Is that why you’ve been so interested in blade fighting lately?”

She nods, then shrugs and clambers up onto a side table to fish around on top of a wardrobe.

“I just like it, it’s fun,” she says, voice slightly muffled. “But I don’t want any more of my friends to die, or you, or Dad, or Maze, or Allura, or anyone else, and now if I have my knife, I can do something. I can kill bad guys.”

“Whoah, no killing, you don’t have to do that, that’s what the adults here for,” Lance says, alarmed, but she just rolls her eyes, jumps down, and presents him with a box full of what upon inspection are probably hairpins.

“Valuable?” she asks, hopeful.

“Could be,” Lance says. “Or could just be sparkly bobby pins, who knows, put ‘em in the cart.” She deposits them carefully into the hovercart, next to a vase and what might be a handgun or a hair dryer, he’s not sure. “And you’re not just doing the whole knife fighting thing because your dad does it, right?”

“I do tons of stuff that he doesn’t do. He doesn’t like climbing, but I do that with Shiro because I like it,” she says. “It’s fun that Dad likes knife stuff too, because we can talk about it and not get bored, but I’d learn it anyway, even if he hated it like you do.”

“Who says I hate it?”

“Maze,” she informs him. “She said you were angry that I changed my knife.”

“Not angry,” he corrects her, “worried. The new knife is very… big.”

“Yeah, it’s awesome,” she says, excited. “I need more upper body strength to use it really well, but I’m climbing a bunch with Shiro and he said that would help, and I’m still practicing with the old one so I don’t forget anything, even though it’s for hooking and stabbing, and slashing is more fun.”

“Fun,” Lance mutters, “slashing is more fun,” but hey, he’s got opinions on different rifle configurations for his bayard, and they’re not all just about utility.

“I’m being safe,” she protests.

“Somehow I doubt that,” he says. “Or do I have to remind you of the Tetherball Incident?”

“I was a kid,” Xio says dismissively. “I don’t do that anymore.”

“Um, who stole their knife back from their dad even though they were explicitly told not to?” Lance asks. “Oh wait, that was you.”

“Allura told me that you almost shot your foot off one time when you were learning gunslinging tricks,” Xio counters. “I stole my knife back but I haven’t hurt myself once and I’ve been doing this forever now, so I’m being more careful than you were and you shouldn’t lecture me.”

Her birthday is coming up again, he thinks as he watches her pick through some long-dead Altean’s junk drawer. He’d have to check his calendar to be sure when, but his external brain tablet pinged a reminder for him yesterday to start thinking about gifts, and he’s been rolling the thought around in his head like a marble ever since, although he’s still coming up with fuck all.

She’s going to be fourteen. What the hell do you get a fourteen-year-old, anyway? His family’s gifts had all been practical, mostly just replacing stuff that had gotten worn out, but Xio doesn’t have hand-me-downs except the ones that she begs off the adults around her, and he can’t think of anything she needs that she doesn’t already have.

Pidge had been fourteen when they’d all ended up in this galaxy, fourteen when they’d first climbed into the Green Lion and turned their guns on a Galra. They’d all thought that Pidge was sixteen back then, just a really small sixteen — what dumbasses, Lance thinks — and then when they did find out, Pidge was so smart, so steady and well-spoken, and Green had chosen them, and they’d all thought that it didn’t matter — and maybe it didn’t, with Shiro barely hanging on and Keith fighting with Red and Lance out to lunch half the time, meds withdrawal hitting him hard as he just frantically tried not to spin out and crash, at least not in a way the others could see.

Lance had been sixteen when he left home; seventeen when he left his planet. He’d thought that he was so old, an adult already, and then Blue found him, and he actually had to become one.

“Hey, want to learn how to shoot?” Lance asks abruptly. “Round out your skill set?”

Xio looks at him in surprise.

“Keith and I talked, and I’ve been thinking, and… Maybe it’s a good idea just to learn the basics,” Lance says. “Just… in case.”

“In case we don’t get away in time?” Xio asks.

“Yeah,” Lance says. “In case we don’t get away in time.”

“I don’t like blasters as much as knives,” Xio says. “But if you think it’s a good idea, I’ll learn. Are you gonna be the one to teach me?”

“Do you want me to?” Lance asks, and Xio frowns, considering.

“I think you should,” she says. “Because you’re the best shot on the Castle, and I like knives more, but I still want to be the best.”

“Is there anything you don’t want to be the best at?” Lance asks.

“Cooking,” she fires off, “poetry, algebra, growing plants, fixing tech stuff, building tech stuff, meditating —”

“Yeah, okay, thanks, got it,” Lance says hurriedly, because he doesn’t need an inventory of every single thing Xio has ever tried and not liked.

She huffs and crouches down to investigate a cabinet next to the bed, pulling out one of the hairpins she stores in her hair when the door stays shut after a hard yank. Lock-picking was one of the disreputable skills that Pidge taught her that she did like, and she does a worrying — but occasionally useful — amount of it.

Xio has a vague handle on the idea of privacy and a firm grasp of the idea of personal property, but there were still a lot of doors popping open that definitely should have been closed in the weeks following Pidge’s lesson until Pidge pulled her aside and explained that disreputable skills were disreputable because one uses them on one’s enemies, not one’s friends (even though Pidge has broken into plenty of Lance’s shit over the years), and while a certain level of mayhem is healthy and keeps people’s brains young, like sudoku, it needs to be carefully rationed out in a safe and discerning fashion.

“One mayhem a day,” Pidge had told her.

“Three mayhems,” Xio tried to counter, but Pidge bargained her down to two mayhems and one mischief a day, max, with possible wartime rationing and an exemption clause to be invoked if someone really needed a mayhem-free day, that someone usually being Shiro.

Keith keeps a mayhem tracker on his String Board of Executive Functioning. It’s typically pretty full, but it’s been light lately. Nobody’s had a lot of patience for unexpected problems these last few weeks, and Xio and Maze have accepted the wartime rationing with unusual grace.

Xio succeeds in jimmying the lock and pokes through the cabinet’s contents with a frown.

“Why would someone lock these up?” she asks. “It just looks like a bunch of weird junk.”

She reaches out to touch one of the shapes and then jerks backwards as it starts glowing and shaking violently.

“Locked up right next to the bed?” Lance asks. “Probably sex stuff.”

Xio gingerly dangles a six-pronged… something between thumb and forefinger, examining it against the light.

“This seems complicated,” she says doubtfully.

“Well, Alteans have different set-ups than humans, and I’m guessing they tangoed their way across the cosmos, too, lots and lots of different species,” he says, coming up behind her to examine her find, and yeah, a lot of that stuff is either incomprehensible or just plain silly looking, but a few of the things there…

“Hey, why don’t you finish up in the other room?” Lance asks. “I’ve got this covered here.”

He shows up that night at Keith’s door for their parenting after-action report with a box he’d found at the bottom of his closet and repurposed, which he shakes enticingly at Keith when Keith opens the door.

“I talked to Xio, and you were right, I should have given her more credit, she’s taking this really seriously,” Lance says. “Also, these are for us. Can be. We should test them out.”

Keith peers into the box with a frown and then raises his eyebrows.

“I’ve never been apologized to with a box of sex toys before,” he says.

“First time for everything,” Lance says. “And anyways, the sex toys are mostly a timing coincidence. Can my box of delights and I come in?”

“Box of ‘delights’ — box of weird alien sex shit,” Keith mutters, but he stands aside to let Lance and his box march past.

Keith might have misgivings, but two vargas later, Lance is congratulating himself on his absolutely brilliant, amazing, wonderful idea and his equally amazing and wonderful boyfriend when there’s a sudden loud banging on the bedroom door and Keith practically levitates off the bed, his fur standing on end like someone had thrown water at a cat.

“Ohmygod what,” Lance mumbles, wild-eyed, visions of Lotor suddenly appearing on the event horizon competing with the very visceral awareness that Keith had forgotten to turn that vibrating thing off; but it’s not Shiro’s voice that comes through their door, but Xio’s.

“Quit having sex, you’re LOUD and I want to sleep!” she yells, muffled by the door.

“Put on headphones!” Lance yells back.

“I DID, I can still hear you!” she yells. “I can hear you everywhere in our suite!”

“Then go sleep in the window room!” he yells.

“UGH!” she yells back and presumably storms off to sleep dramatically in the window room, which she likes anyway, since it’s got a divan that’s apparently the perfect texture for rubbing and chuckling kind of creepily while doing it.

Regretfully, it takes a while to coax Keith back into bed — “But what if Maze can hear us,” Keith hisses, ears flat against his skull and eyes wild and somewhat crazed; “Look, if knowing your parents sometimes have sex could kill you, I would have never survived to adolescence, I have five siblings and the walls in our house were about an inch thick,” Lance says irritably. “She can put on headphones, too” — but Lance finds the controller for the vibrating thing and has a lot of fun with that while he waits, so it’s not a complete wash.

“What was everyone shouting about last night?” Pidge asks Lance when he stumbles into the communal kitchen the next morning. “I heard you all the way down the hall.”

“Without saying too much: Alteans made some really, really nice sex toys,” Lance says, “and Keith and I apparently enjoyed them a little too much, because we interrupted Xio’s beauty sleep and she felt the need to tell us that. Loudly and disruptively.”

Pidge looks at him askance. “Okay, I don’t care about a lot of the things we scavenge, but please tell me you didn’t steal some dead person’s dildo collection.”

“First, that is very phallocentric of you,” Lance says. “And second, absolutely not, ick. I found some examples and the Castle fabricated ones for me and then I put the examples back,” while loudly and profusely apologizing to the dead person whose cabinet full of sex toys he and Xio had been rifling through, not that Pidge needs to know that.

“Good,” Pidge says, “because there’s utilitarian and then there’s…. that.”

“Exactly,” Lance says. “I think even Keith would draw the line at grave robbing sex toys. And if he wouldn’t, I don’t want to know.”

*

Despite Xio’s commitment to mastering every single thing she sets her mind to doing except if she finds it stupid or boring within the first fifteen ticks of starting it, Lance wouldn’t say that the initial shooting lessons go particularly supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or, you know, well at all.

Making the decision to get back on his meds after Xio was born definitely helps with things like listening to Shiro and not crashing Blue into the side of the Castle any time he tries to fly her, but they don’t do anything with hyperfocusing, and Lance really, really, really likes guns, okay? Not in a creepy way, and not even the kind of gun forms that Hunk favors, the big blasting cannons with recoils that would probably knock Lance over if he ever tried to use them, but rifles are Lance’s jam, the way they narrow the world to a single shining point, like nothing even exists outside the target, even his own body, and Lance just becomes an eye, a shoulder, two hands, and the exhale out when he pulls the trigger.

He’s learned little tricks to not get so focused during actual combat situations that he forgets everything around him — if he hadn’t, he’d be long dead by now — but the Castle’s shooting gallery is somewhere that he’s used to unwinding in, setting an alarm on his external brain and then just taking that time to slide down into that focus-space.

As fun as it is for him, it’s apparently not well-suited for teaching purposes, because Lance takes Xio down to the gallery, lets her touch and lift and take apart and then reassemble the rifle he’s going to use, gently shoves her into a proper stance while explaining about things like recoil, and then he goes to demonstrate, and when he swims back up he finds Xio completely ignoring him, practicing her knife forms in the corner, since she apparently got bored, bored, bored watching Lance just stare at things! And shoot them! Which was the whole fucking point of this exercise! I’m not going to give you a gun and just let you start blasting on your first day!

“Actually, she’s the one who has a point,” Hunk tells him while Lance is busy sulking over a pot of his favorite tea in the Kogane-McKlane common room later. “I mean, gun safety, definitely, that comes first, but she’s gonna end up handling live ammo if you really do want to teach her to shoot and not just look like she’s shooting.”

“Yeah, but this is Xio,” Lance protests. “You really want to just hand her a blaster and tell her to go to town?”

“Hey, I was pretty worried when you got your bayard,” Hunk says, “and you turned out fine. You’re not dead, you didn’t maim yourself, you even specialized and got really good. I don’t agree with Keith on a lot of things, but he’s right, you’re being weird.”

“I’m not — Wait, you were worried about me?”

“Uh, yeah,” Hunk says. “You would have been too, if you’d ever seen yourself try to parallel park. Plus Allura told me about the foot thing. Xio got all that impulsiveness from someone, and it wasn’t Keith.”

“Yes!” Lance says. “Exactly!”

“You were the one who agreed to teach her to shoot,” Hunk reminds him.

“Yeah, I thought it was a good idea, but then I saw her actually holding the gun and my entire brain just went NO,” Lance says. “Deafeningly. With fireworks. I was wrong, she can learn when she’s older, she doesn’t need to know this stuff now.”

“I dunno, dude. She’s doing okay with blades. Allura’s really proud of her, and Xio hasn’t cut off any fingers. I checked.” Hunk sighs heavily. “I’m not saying we should start training Xio as a soldier or something, it’s just a good idea for her to learn —”

“— How to defend herself, yes, I know,” Lance says irritably.

“Just in case,” Hunk says. “You know we’d all die before we let Xio or Maze or Alric get hurt. We’re their first line of defense. I just don’t want us to be their last.”

“Do you know what Shiro and Allura’s contingency plans are for Alric?” Lance asks. “Keith said they had a bunch, for if something goes really wrong, but he never said what they were.”

“Don’t know,” Hunk says. “Shiro’s the Black Paladin and Allura pilots the Castle, so if their plan is for someone to take Alric and run, it’s probably Coran. Maybe they’re going to put Alric in a little baby escape pod and jettison it to whatever planet’s closest. Between you and me — I bet none of the plans are very good. We don’t exactly have a lot of options.”

“Keith and I only have one plan if things go FUBAR, really,” Lance says. “Fight, try to win, or at least win enough to let everyone else escape. Die if we have to. I’m not sending my kids to go live on some planet, not after what happened in the Mnenmite System, so they’re on the Castle if shit goes down.”

He snorts. “Wish I could pack them off to Earth, though. Xio would love it. So many cousins to talk at about knives and petrified space whales. And my Aunt Sonia thinks Maze is the shit.”

“Dunno what Cuba would make of the furry purple alien suddenly appearing on their shores,” Hunk says.

“Lilo & Stitch made it work,” Lance says.

The lessons keep going badly, though, even as Keith keeps telling him how well she’s doing with her knife stuff. Lance knows that Keith’s not doing it to be mean or smug, he knows that Keith is just genuinely proud of her and trying to share it with him, but it’s driving Lance a little bonkers nonetheless, because it feels like just another thing that Keith is carelessly perfect at, even though Lance knows by now that Keith isn’t carelessly perfect at anything, much less anything requiring a modicum of social interaction.

Now that she’s sure that he won’t eat her or dissect her or whatever godawful thing she’d been afraid of when she first came to live with them, Maze has started to sidle more towards Lance than Keith — after all, Lance thinks a little meanly, Keith can’t do her nails and gossip with her; Lance does have his uses after all — and he and Keith have fallen into the gentle gravity of two people who’ve been teammates for over two decades, and lovers and then parents for almost a decade and a half. But this last year, Xio has been a constant fight, and the days where she and Lance manage something like peace between them are starting to be outnumbered by the days where they can barely be in the same room together without someone starting to yell.

Lance carried her inside his body for nine months, he made her and then he gave birth to her, you’d think that would count for something, but apparently not, considering that it’s Tuesday and he and Xio have just hit the fourth screaming fight that week about how he won’t let her do anything! and He sucks! and his personal favorite, Even if Lance is the best shot her dad should teach her because then she’d actually learn something!

“God. How am I worse at this than Keith?” Lance despairs as he flings himself dramatically in Hunk’s lap, who just calmly shifts his tray of fiddly little tech pieces to Lance’s stomach so he can keep working.

“Because you let your overwhelming anxieties and neuroses come in the way of actually teaching her things?” Hunk ventures, squinting at some tiny gear thing.

“I’ve taught her all kinds of things!” Lance protests. “Every day! I taught her a whole separate language!”

“She was a baby and you just talked at her,” Hunk says. “Doesn’t count. Look, you know that she just connects better with Keith sometimes.”

“Yeah, I already know I’m the second choice when it comes to which of us she likes more, you don’t have to rub it in,” Lance mutters.

“She doesn’t like you less, you’re just not as easy for her,” Hunk says. “You two can be more… explosive.”

“Oh, really?” Lance says sarcastically. Hunk gives him a look, and Lance flops back down, beating his head a little against the couch cushion.

“I don’t even get why! It’s not like Keith doesn’t have a temper,” he says, frustrated.

“Dude, I’ve met your family,” Hunk says. “Everyone yells, so you yell, and Xio yells, and that’s normal for you, although maybe not exactly the most functional. Whereas, I dunno, he’s never actually talked to me about it, but I get the sense that Keith was yelled at growing up, you know? So if he gets overloaded or pissed off at any of the kids and thinks he’s going to blow up or freak out, he just leaves. But you and Xio, you bait each other and you both always fall for it and then come complain to me.”

“Does she complain about me to you?” Lance asks.

“Oh, buddy,” Hunk says. “You have no idea.”

“Are you and Shay ever gonna have kids?” Lance asks him. “Adopt, I mean. You seem to be handling this dad thing better than me, and God knows this galaxy has plenty of orphans.”

“Probably not,” Hunk says. “At least not any time soon. I love being a god-dad, and you and Keith have made the whole parenting in wartime thing work, but Shay and I are both so busy, we’ve barely seen each other outside of video chats these past months… and I don’t know if I could handle it,” he admits. “It’s bad enough with Xio and Maze and Alric.”

“What, keeping up with them?” Lance asks.

“Worrying about them,” Hunk says. “Speaking of which, do you want me to god-dad up, take over Xio’s shooting lessons? It sounds like you guys… uh, aren’t really working.”

“If you have the patience, sure,” Lance says, a little meanly, but Hunk just chuckles.

“Of course I have the patience,” he says. “I’m best friends with you.”

*

Busy as she is with Keith and now Hunk, the sudden Xio-sized gap in Lance’s schedule means that he has a lot more free time than he used to. In all honesty, he’s not sure that he likes it. A spare moment from time to time is one thing, but living at the breakneck pace of parenting two children on top of active combat has left his adrenaline system pretty much always set to go, and anyways Lance has long-seated associations of copious free time with Bad Things, because faced with the prospect of unstructured, unsupervised boredom, Lance has a tendency to do all sorts of stupid shit, even now that he’s hypothetically an adult, and he really doesn’t need any more self-administered stick-and-poke tattoos.

“And you lecture Xio about her decisions,” Pidge had said when he had grumpily recounted this to them. “Wow.”

“Hey, I said I wasn’t going to give myself any more,” Lance had countered. “That’s maturity. I’m mature.”

He tries to deal as best as he can. He puts in more practice time on the shooting range (although only when Hunk and Xio aren’t there), drilling with his bayard in the usual rifle configuration. And then, after some thought, he moves on to smaller blaster configurations, close range weapons, practicing over and over until he can manage the Mozambique Drill on 90% of his targets, even fast-moving ones, and then he keeps practicing, because he wants to get to at least 95%.

In the time he doesn’t spend on the shooting range, Lance hangs out with Maze and looks after baby Alric so Shiro and Allura can do their Princess and Black Paladin thing. Xio was born in a time of relative peace, or at least a lull in the awfulness, and Keith and Lance got so much time with her as a baby — as Lance predicted, Keith barely even put her down before she started walking — but Shiro and Allura are spending Alric’s infancy running from crisis to crisis, with barely enough time to drop a good-morning kiss on his head before they’re off to deal with intelligence reports or midnight bombing raids or whatever.

Lance doesn’t mind being Chief Babysitter, not at all. Alric isn’t the easiest baby Lance has ever met, but no baby can top his littlest sister Maivi for fussy, and anyway it’s nice to deal with something as straightforward as the demands of an infant, which really boil down to food, cleanliness, sleep, and comfort, all of which Lance is able to give him.

Maze is less enthused about Alric. She doesn’t view him with the suspicion and distaste that Xio does, who acts like babies are somewhere between zoo animals and organic airhorns and avoids them accordingly, but Maze isn’t rushing to cuddle him, either.

“Look at how cute he is,” Lance entreats her, holding up Alric, who helpfully blows a milky spit bubble and then dribbles it all over himself. “He’s so fat!”

“He’s very… bald,” she says, doubtfully. “Is that cute on your world?”

“Definitely,” Lance says. “Human babies are fat and bald and cute. But you were cute too. I mean, still are cute!”

Maze reaches out to gingerly poke Alric with a claw, and then she startles back and puts her hands over her ears as Alric’s face scrunches up and he starts to wail.

“Not cute!” she yells over Alric’s screaming.

Even with Alric to distract him, Lance still spends most of his time in a bad mood, which he can tell Maze is picking up on with her usual worrying sensitivity to any kind of conflict, like a particularly traumatized weathervane. He’s vaguely aware that you shouldn’t complain about one of your kids to the other, but if he tries to hide it, he’ll just make Maze even more anxious, since she’ll convince herself that he’s mad at her — so Lance just sulks around and pretends that he’s pissed about all the meetings they’ve been having lately, and he is pissed, spending those meetings bored and scared shitless by turns, so that’s not even a lie.

He doesn’t tell Maze that last part, though. He whines about how long the meetings are, how self-important all the generals and rebel leaders act, how Lance can barely contribute because he’s got about twenty minutes’ worth of aural processing on a good day and they use it all up just doing introductions — but won’t tell her how terrified all these people look, the desperation in their voices when they talk about territory lost, territory gained, territory lost again.

They thought they’d beaten Lotor back, but he’d just been regrouping. All the adults are running scared now, especially after what happened in the Mnenmus, but Maze shouldn’t be too. She should think that she’s safe here with them, even up until the very moment when she isn’t, because that’s what being a child means — knowing that someone is there to protect you from the things that go bump in the night or bang in the stars, knowing that you don’t have to worry because someone is worrying for you.

Lance isn’t going to take that away from her, not when she’s just gotten used to the idea that it’s possible to live without always being afraid. Maybe she fears for them, and that’s shitty but unavoidable, with the lives her parents lead, but she should never again have to fear for herself, and Lance is more than willing to die for his children, to defend their bodies with his own; he can defend their minds too.

*

Lance is sans baby Alric today, since Allura had a spare afternoon to actually socialize with her infant, so it’s just him and Maze, chilling and dishing on the latest crop of generals and staff tromping through the Castle. Lance keeps Maze well away from all the jumpy soldiers who visit, for very obvious reasons, so she mostly knows them through Lance’s hilarious and witty anecdotes to which she occasionally adds her own catty commentary, which is the best, even though it makes him randomly laugh in the middle of very serious meetings because he can’t stop thinking about her scathing criticism of the state of Representative Ningo’s tentacles.

By her glazed eyes, though, he can tell that she’s not feeling the Altean telenovelas, which is an irredeemable breech of taste and he will convince her of the error of her ways, since he can attest from experience that all fourteen seasons of The Flower King’s Ten Thousand Years of Yearning are a great time-wasting distraction for getting through anything, whether bedrest or daily pregnancy-related sobbing sessions. Lance owes The Flower King and his bumbling romantic escapades a lot.

“But he’s being so stupid,” Maze argues. “Why doesn’t he just give the baby to a courtier to raise instead of secretly keeping it with the nurse in the other part of the castle?”

“Because he loves it?” Lance guesses. Maze makes a face of distaste.

“Well, that’s not very practical,” she says. “Can we watch something else? Or just turn it off?”

“And what, sit in silence? You can meditate on your own time, but my brain does not have a snooze button,” Lance says.

Maze rolls her eyes. “So you knit or tat or whatever, and I’ll read to you.”

“But secret love babies!” Lance protests, and then relents when she looks completely unimpressed. “Fine, what are we reading today?”

“I’m reading A Hat Full of Sky,” Maze says, “I guess with commentary, because you’re here. You left your knitting in the top drawer over there, under the window.”

Lance winks and gives her finger guns, but then winces when he gets up to fetch his… well, it started as a hat, and Maze narrows her eyes.

“Is your knee hurting?” she asks.

“It’s not hurting,” Lance lies. “Just a little unsteady.”

“Mm,” she says, clearly not buying it. “You should get it replaced. They can do that here. With anesthesia and stuff.”

“And stuff,” Lance agrees, and she smiles one of her tiny Maze smiles, sad and mocking all at once. She’s got horrific medical PTSD, can’t even walk into medical without completely shutting down and then nightmares for weeks after, and yet she’s recuperating from her fourth surgery since she got here, going under the laser and the knife to desperately try to correct some of the damage that was done to her. She’s spent most of these last few months in bed or on the couch, working her way through all seven of the Harry Potter books and then Narnia, Lancre, Tortall, Avalon, and very nearly The Rats of NIMH before Pidge pointed out what it was about and Lance had hurriedly stolen Maze’s tablet and deleted the entire trilogy off of it.

Shiro spends a surprising amount of time with her, talking about books and getting her into what he assures Lance is age-appropriate manga (who knew Shiro had been such a loner as a kid, with books instead of friends? Actually, maybe that’s not surprising) and she’s infected Allura and Coran with Pottermania, running a tiny Earth book club from her throne of ergonomic pillows. Last week Xio made her a paper crown that says ‘Book Club Queen’, which had made Hunk squeal, and then he made Maze pose for about a thousand pictures, which she suffered through with dignity while Lance and Xio made weird faces in the background.

Keith was right, though. She won’t be moving fast any time soon, if ever.

“Hey, you’re good with gifts,” Lance says instead. “What do you think we should get Xio? I think her birthday’s coming up soon.”

“Two weeks and five days,” Maze informs him.

“Of course you know the exact date,” Lance says. “What would we do without you?”

“Forget a lot more stuff,” she says. “Xio wouldn’t shower as much unless Hunk started reminding her or something. But I don’t think Keith or Xio would really notice even if you did miss a bunch of things, so you’d probably do okay.”

“Yeah, well, I never want to find out,” Lance says. “You know we’re never gonna leave you behind, right? If something happens, something goes wrong — we’re coming to you, first thing.”

“I’ll slow you down,” she says, matter-of-factly, although she’s picking at the corner of her blanket instead of meeting his gaze.

“Couldn’t give a fuck,” Lance says. “Don’t care, doesn’t matter, you’re my daughter and your safety will always, always come before mine, got it? Same deal for Keith.”

She nods, but she’s still picking at her blanket, so maybe she really hadn’t known that. Jesus, he doesn’t know what’s worse — that he has to have this conversation, or that she hadn’t known that they wouldn’t just leave her to die the way the druids in that lab had.

“So,” he says, brightly. “Birthday ideas?”

She gives it due consideration, frowning.

“Xio likes getting stuff sometimes,” she says, “but the only thing she’s been excited about lately is her knife, and you can’t have my idea.”

“You’re going to get her a knife-related present, aren’t you?” Lance asks, sourly.

“If you don’t want to know, don’t ask,” Maze says. “Does Keith have any ideas?”

“Considering the quality of his last one — if he does, I don’t want them,” Lance says.

“Then do something with her, I guess,” Maze says. “Go somewhere. We’ve all been stuck on the Castle and it’s really boring. Even I’m bored. Xio’s been going crazy. Please take her somewhere else.”

“Is this a present for her or for you?” Lance asks.

“Her,” Maze says, unconvincingly.

“I don’t believe you one bit,” Lance says, “but that still might actually be a good idea, so thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she says. “Now pass me my tablet, please. And I want more juice.”

“Your word is my command, Book Club Queen,” Lance says, hamming it up with a flourish even though she just rolls her eyes and holds out her juice cup. “Allow this noble knight Sir Lancelot to fetch you your goblet of… uh, space juice stuff.”

“You’re not my knight,” she informs him. “Hunk is my knight. Keith is my marshal.”

“And I’m what, your horse?”

“You’re my court jester,” Maze says. “You hop around and make silly noises.”

“But I’m your favorite court jester, right?” Lance asks hopefully. “I outrank Coran?”

“Yes,” Maze says, “you’re the best,” and Maze Doesn’t Do Hugs, but she does do fistbumps, and when he holds out his fist, she very carefully brushes her knuckles against his, smiling.

*

The smell hits them as soon as they clamber out of their nondescript shuttle, carried by the breeze through the open-air docking bay, a mix of piled trash, the fetid river, and the slightly burned smell of patched and repatched exhaust ports on spaceships that probably should have been junked decades ago but have been kept going through spit, prayer, and stolen parts.

“Told you it smelled bad,” Keith says.

Xio scowls and adjusts the scarf she’s wrapped around her mouth and nose, and Lance snorts out a laugh at father and daughter in their matching bad-smells scarves, Keith’s wrapped around his ears as well, although he’s left the headphones at home in deference to the possibility of being shanked.

Maybe Lance isn’t giving space-Tortuga enough credit. Back when he’d first floated the possibility of bringing Xio here to Keith, Pidge had assured them that it had gotten a lot safer since the last time that Lance ventured out into the streets, or at least more organized under the fist of the local crime boss/warlord/“leader” that Allura really hates treating with but has to put up with in order to secure safe passage for people and goods between disparate rebel planets if they don’t feel like beating themselves against Lotor’s new blockades, and just from looking around the docking bay, it seems like Pidge was right — the bay is cleaner, for one, less chaotic; Pidge had to clear port authority to dock their shuttle; it has a port authority now; and some of the docked ships are even sporting flags and emblems that Lance recognizes, legit trading vessels from real corporations, although some of those are definitely fake and other unmarked ships are clearly smugglers and pirates who aren’t even making an effort to look above board.

“Hey, you wanted to go to space-Tortuga, the smell is part of the experience,” Lance says as Xio helps them load up their hovercart of Altean junk.

“You know this place has a real name,” Pidge says.

“Yeah, but space-Tortuga is so much more fun to say,” Lance says. “And kudos to you if you can pronounce the real name, because I sure can’t.”

Pidge makes a sound like they’re trying to cough up a hairball, and Lance points at them and says, “Exactly. Thank you for proving my point.”

“I want a blaster too,” Xio tells Keith, who’s arming up with the nondescript blasters they brought in place of their very distinctive bayards.

“Hilarious,” Lance says. “Absolutely not. Keith and I have the blasters, you push the cart and stick close to us, that was the deal, remember?”

Xio mutters something probably derogatory but doesn’t argue, grabbing the handles of the hovercart. “Are we ready? Can we go?”

“And you’re okay sticking with the shuttle by yourself?” Lance asks Pidge, who shrugs.

“Yeah, sure. I’ve got a new book cued up on my tablet and I’ll shoot anyone who tries to steal parts off the ship,” Pidge says. “But there’s a lot less random crime under Boss Soh, ‘cause he knows that if people don’t feel safe docking here, he makes less money. I’m not worried.”

“Alright, fine,” Lance says. “Off to hawk our junk! And this time, Keith, do not help.”

“Allura did say it was a reproduction,” Keith argues.

“Yeah, but that guy didn’t know that,” Lance grouses as they make their way out of the dock and off towards their usual dealers. “Yo, Xio, slow down, the cart isn’t gonna explode if goes under twenty miles an hour!”

Oh for fuck’s sake, he thinks as he spots the distinctive shape of the knife sheath under her jacket, although at least she’s had the presence of mind to wrap the pommel so it’s less temptingly shiny. Whatever; Lance doesn’t feel like starting another fight on today of all days, especially when Keith will probably back her up, even though he’s the one she keeps stealing it back from. If she wants to hold onto it like a good luck charm, fine, as long as she doesn’t pull it out, and there’s only so much trouble she can get into with both of her parents watching her like hawks.

Probably less because of the quality of their merchandise and more because Lance makes Keith stand behind him and scowl instead of haggle, they clean up pretty well, making more than enough credits for Lance to feel okay about eyeing some of the wares of the street vendors in the market they cut through on their way to that take-out place that Pidge recommended and assured them wouldn’t give them all food poisoning, even though it’s probably just going to be Lance eating it and Keith and Xio lunching on their sufficiently sensory-friendly snack bars.

A lot of the wares they pass are just random junk, ill-smelling food, or mass-produced crap that looks nice but will fall apart in about ten ticks after someone’s stupid enough to buy it, but there’s quality stuff sprinkled in too, and Lance slows down in front of one vendor whose merchandise kind of reminds him of the beadworker that he bought his rosary from, so many years ago.

“Hey, distract Xio for a tick,” Lance mutters to Keith, but Xio is plenty distracted already, eyes wide with wonder and her head swiveling from spectacle to spectacle so fast Lance is kind of worried she’s going to give herself whiplash, and Lance trots over to the stand that’d caught his eye.

Upon closer examination, most of the stuff that the vendor tries to tell Lance is genuine, hand-polished stone is neither genuine nor polished, dull synthetic stone that’s probably one good hit away from shattering, but there’s one pendant that he likes, a wire-wrapped polished black stone with a slice of druzy that feels heavy enough to be real when Lance picks it up, and doesn’t crack when he discreetly taps it on the stand. As much as she loves her chewing necklaces — she wears both pretty much constantly, blue and black layered together — Xio’s not big into jewelry for the sake of jewelry, but he thinks she might like this one, enough different textures to be interesting to stim with and pretty enough for her to wear out in public without Allura wincing, as opposed to some of the other interesting things Xio gets her hands on.

The vendor quotes him an absolutely outrageous price, but Lance haggles him down to something way more reasonable, and he hands over his credits and quickly pockets the pendant before Xio notices what he’s doing, although he probably didn’t need to worry, because when he turns around both Xio and Keith are examining a stall of banged-up weaponry with interest while the vendor glares at Keith and twitches every time Xio picks something up.

“Xio, come on, stop waving things around,” Lance calls.

She glares at him but puts down the dented blaster to the vendor’s obvious relief, probably because xie knew the thing was in horrible condition and might actually explode if fired.

“Come here, help me with the cart,” Lance tells her — partly because he’s got visions of accidental dismemberment dancing through his head and also partly because their stupid cart really is stuck between two stalls whose owners are looking increasingly pissed off at him — and she makes a face but trots over, immediately freeing the cart with one almighty yank, which is just great for Lance’s ego.

“You really have been working on your upper body strength,” he tells her.

“You’re just old,” she retorts.

“Considering that Allura is literally hundreds of years old, I think your concept of old is a little skewed,” he shoots back absently, but he’s distracted; he can’t quite put his finger on it, but there’s something wrong about the street around them. Are there more people here than there were before? They’re not buying anything, either, they’re just… there.

Staring at Keith, Lance realizes. Even with his bad-smells-and-sounds scarf, Keith is still pretty visibly Galra. He gets nasty looks wherever they go, but Lance was less worried for him in a place like this, even out of his distinctive Red Paladin get-up. There’s usually some mixed Galra floating around in a smugglers’ port like this one, but Lance hasn’t seen a lot of them this time.

Actually, he hasn’t seen any.

“Xio,” Lance says, low, “Xio, listen up, you need to go right back to the shuttle right now, okay? No, forget the cart, don’t argue, don’t stop, just go,” and she looks frightened and mutinous both, but she takes off just as the crowd closes in around Keith, cutting him off from Lance.

“Hey,” a woman says. “Galra. Hey.”

Keith doesn’t look up; why would he? He’s not Galra in anything but blood. And then she pulls her blaster out of its holster and shoots him right in the side, and that sure gets his attention, yelping and crashing sideways into the stand he had been standing in front of, his blaster skittering away down the street.

“Mnenmus wasn’t enough for you?” she demands. “You had to come sauntering down here? Like you own us? Like you’re safe here?”

“Whoah, hey —” Lance starts, but the crowd drowns him out, yelling and jeering; he’s trying to shove through, get to Keith, because this is bad, this is so fucking bad, he knows what crowds like this do — but someone elbows Lance back, nearly slamming him into the wall, and someone else actually shoves him so hard he has to catch himself on a stall, his bad knee twisting painfully.

“I’m not Galra,” he hears Keith say, “I’m not with them, I just look like them, I’m —” but he doesn’t get a chance to finish, because the woman just blasts him again, right where she’d hit him the first time, and Keith cries out and doubles over, curling protectively around himself.

“Come on, enough,” Lance tries to shout through the crowd, “please, he’s not with them, he’s the Red Paladin, haven’t you heard of him? We’re fighting against Lotor! We’re not on his side!”

But she doesn’t hear him, or she doesn’t care, because she blasts Keith a third time when he tries to lunge for his own blaster and then takes aim right between his eyes, and Lance is on the wrong side of the street, the wrong side of the crowd, but he has a few ticks, he can make it to her before she pulls that trigger, he can —

— and then Lance steps wrong and his bad knee buckles and he falls, slamming his jaw against the pavement so hard that the hit reverberates through his entire skull, hard enough that his teeth snap and he can feel something start to bleed, and his blaster goes flying out of his hand, where someone kicks it away.

This woman is going to kill Keith, Lance realizes. He’s going to watch his boyfriend die right in front of him, barely ten feet away and useless, still sprawled in the street, but at least he’s not going to watch his child die, too, at least the mob won’t finish with Keith and turn on the girl who came with him, at least, at least, the woman’s blaster aimed right between Keith’s eyes and her finger halfway up the trigger; please look at me, Lance thinks, please, Keith, turn your head, I’m here and I can’t save you but at least you’re not dying alone, I’m here —

— And then Xio bursts out of the crowd, necklaces swinging wildly as her curved knife darts out in the same smooth thrust and rip she’s practiced against invisible enemies a thousand times, and the blood spray nearly hits her in the face as her knife opens the woman up and her intestines fall out onto Xio’s feet, and the woman’s shock is enough for Keith to kick her down and roll and put his own knife right through her eye.

The sudden explosion of violence makes the crowd freeze for one crucial tick, and Lance launches himself upright and shoves people aside and grabs Xio and Keith, nearly tripping over the guts still laying tangled in the street, and they all three take off, even as Xio goes from shocked to horrified and starts screaming and struggling in his hold.

They weren’t far from the shuttle dock. They can make it, he tells himself, just go, don’t think, just go, don’t doubt, just go — he can hear shouting somewhere behind him as they run, dodging wildly through the crowds, he and Keith are practically carrying Xio at this point — “You can melt down when we get there but go, just go!” he snarls at her, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference, she’s so, so gone by now — and Lance nearly falls two more times, Keith barely catching him, even as Keith chokes out a bitten-back cry with every pounding footfall — and Lance has no idea how they manage to get back to their shuttle in time, but they do, frantically pounding on the hatch until a startled Pidge opens it for them and Lance pushes Xio in and then Keith and himself.

“Go!” Lance snarls at them and they open up the throttle, roaring out of port without even pretending to radio port authority, but that can be Pidge’s problem to figure out, Lance decides, because Keith is in the corner, curled around a wound that smells like cooking meat, and Xio is still screaming. Lance tries to let her go, because Xio is so much worse when she’s trapped, because Keith is staring at them from that corner with wide and haunted eyes — Lance can handle a screaming meltdown, he wants to scream himself, might actually start screaming himself, Keith almost died and Xio— Xio— but she throws herself so hard against the side of the shuttle that it actually rocks a little, slamming her head against the metal and then again, and that’s blood, that’s a lot of blood, so there’s that plan out the window, and Lance is breaking all the rules but this is worse than he’s ever seen her, so he grabs her and drags her away from the wall even as she’s screaming at him now, fighting and yelling “No!” over and over, and slams her head into his forehead so hard he sees stars, and Lance holds onto her as hard as he can, with as much pressure as he can, and just repeats, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” because she’s bleeding and the whole shuttle smells like smoking meat and Lance has no idea what else to do.

Pidge apparently bypasses port authority and their guns no problem, because they get back to the Castle in what Pidge later informs him is less than twenty dobash, although it feels like vargas, days, years. Xio has calmed down a little by the time they dock in the Castle, enough that Lance thinks it might be safe to let her go, and she immediately scrambles out of the shuttle, not even waiting until Pidge turns the engines off. Keith tries to follow her off, managing a few limping steps towards her, but she actually flinches hard away from him, looking at him with an expression that could only be described as abject horror, and then turns and flat-out bolts away, past a startled Hunk and Maze, out of bed for once to welcome Xio home.

“Hunk, please go after her,” Lance begs him, “please, I don’t know if she’s safe but I don’t think she can handle either of us right now,” and Hunk nods and takes off, albeit at more of a fast walk than a run, frantically pulling up Castle schematics on his datapad as he goes.

Keith tries to follow, but Pidge cuts him off, with a firm, “Medical. Now.”

“I’m fine,” Keith mutters, “I’m fine…”

“You are not fine, you were just barbecued and we can all smell it,” Lance snaps, “leave before you freak out Maze,” who’s already starting to look a little spacey, fur standing on end, and Keith shoots him a hateful look but lets Pidge lead him away, leaving Lance and Maze alone in the shuttle bay with Xio’s knife abandoned on the floor of the shuttle, still streaked with nothing Lance wants to think about.

“Not good?” Maze asks, timidly.

“So fucking not good,” Lance chokes out and limps over, knee throbbing by now, to grab Xio’s knife off the floor — and he wants to throw this fucking thing out of an airlock, but instead he just wipes it clean on his shirt, because his shirt’s got enough of Keith’s burn goop on it that he’s going to shove it into the incinerator as soon as Lance can stop shaking.

“What happened?” Maze asks.

“I think Xio killed someone,” Lance says, numbly. “Sort of. It was a tag-team effort.”

“Were they a bad person?” Maze asks, and Lance looks over in surprise at his eleven-year-old daughter, who’s just regarding him calmly.

“She was trying to kill Keith,” Lance says. “The woman that Xio killed. Sort of killed. Xio hurt her really badly, but Keith was the one who actually killed her.”

“Then good,” Maze says. “If she was going to kill Keith, I’m glad she’s dead.”

“It’s that simple for you, huh?” Lance asks.

“Yes,” Maze says, but her mouth is starting to tighten with pain, and he can see it now, the way she’s leaning hard on her right hip, trying to get some of the weight off her spine, and hey, being a parent to at least one of his children, he can do that right now, even if he still wants to scream or cry or do he doesn’t even know what.

“Time to go back to bed?” he asks, and she nods, wincing. “Wow, you did a lot of walking today if you came all the way to the bay from the common room. Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to carry you. But you can lean on me if you need to.”

He gives her his hand and she grabs onto it, yanking hard on his arm as a counterweight, and he doesn’t say anything even as her claws dig uncomfortably into his skin.

“There’s a hoverchair,” she says. “But it isn’t — I wanted to walk, so it’s in the corridor.”

“Hey, race ya,” he jokes, but she just gives him a narrow-eyed look and holds onto him tighter, even though he smells like shit and death and blood right now and those can’t be great memory triggers for her, and they hobble off together across the shuttle bay.

“It’s okay if you’re upset,” Lance tries as they walk.

“I’m not upset,” she says. “My back just hurts.”

“It must have been pretty scary, us coming in the way we did,” he tries again, but she just scowls and digs her claws into his wrist.

“I’m not upset,” she repeats. “Xio did good. I’m not upset.”

By the time they reach the hoverchair, she’s practically pulling his arm out of the socket, trying to keep her balance — fuck it, they’ve all been avoiding it, Maze especially, but they should just go ahead and get her a cane or crutches or whatever, she’s not gonna be less messed up if they pretend that she’s fine — and when she finally manages to clamber up into her pillow nest on the hoverchair, they both sigh in relief.

“I’ll go back to the suite, you should find Xio,” Maze says.

“What, ditch you?” Lance asks, even though he really does want to ditch her so he can take a shower and burn every single thing he’s wearing. “Nah, can’t do that. Besides, Hunk’s with her, and… I don’t think she’d want to see me right now. I’ll go back with you.”

“Do you want a ride?” she asks, patting the seat of the adult-sized hoverchair next to her. Lance snorts.

“I’d love one, but I don’t think we’ll fit,” he says. “It’s okay, Maze, just enjoy your chariot.”

“I’ll squish,” she insists. “We’ll fit. Xio rides with me all the time when I use these.”

“You let Xio onto a thing that flies?” Lance asks as he gingerly sits down next to her, trying to squeeze his hips in and wondering what the weight limit is on this thing.

“She’s not allowed to fly them,” Maze says as she shifts the joystick and they start gliding forward. “I let her fly one but she went too fast and crashed it into a wall. Now I’m the only one who’s allowed to fly them, and I only let her ride with me as a passenger.”

“I bet she just loves that,” Lance says.

“She can deal. And I do go a little fast sometimes,” Maze admits as they zoom towards the suites. “Don’t tell Hunk.”

*

Hunk and Xio aren’t in the suites when Maze and Lance return, though, or in the kitchen, or the common room, or any of the other places that all the Voltron crew cluster around within this cavernous ship, largely leaving the rest of it to its ghosts. The Castle automatically locks all the kids out of anywhere dangerous, like Pidge and Hunk’s labs and the armory, and when Lance messages her, Allura informs him that Xio isn’t on the bridge, either.

Not being able to find his kid in this hulking warship has been a recurring nightmare basically ever since she was born, and normally Lance would be freaking out right now, but Hunk is with her, and Hunk takes this god-dad thing seriously, Hunk is flat-out a better dad to her than Lance is, and right now, Lance just feels…

Well, not a lot at all, actually, because the alternative is his hell-brain replaying that scene over and over and over again, in excruciatingly vivid detail with IMAX surround sound and Keith’s face crystal clear as the fucking cherry on top; and Lance sees a million ways out now, every single choice they could have made to avoid ending up here, but it’s too fucking bad, because he didn’t see any of them until it was too late and what happened happened anyway, no matter how many times his brain rewinds that reel.

Instead he focuses on Maze, getting her resettled into her nest on the couch and bringing her a fresh cup of juice, although she doesn’t ask for it and accepts it with a too-knowing grace, and then she asks him to read to her, even though she can read by herself just fine and she’s probably just giving him something soothing to do, but whatever, he’s pathetic, it’s been established, he’ll take this lifeline now and feel terrible about his own child having to comfort him when his brain is less of a California forest fire roaring over houses and melting roads and little forest creatures running for their lives and — what?

“I said, I want Harry Potter y la orden del fénix,” Maze says patiently. “I stopped at chapter 33.”

He nods and scrolls down to that chapter and starts to read, even though the type is blurring a little on the screen and he keeps messing up the word order and forgetting the first half of sentences, and eventually he realizes that Maze is reading over his shoulder, murmuring along with him, guiding him along, and that’s just — fucking great. That’s just fucking great.

Harry and his friends have just gotten to the Department of Mysteries when Keith sidles into the room, smelling more like antiseptic than rump roast, although the combination is enough to make Maze go wide-eyed and Keith hastily beat it to the far end of the room, away from Maze and her scent-based triggers.

“What happened to your shirt?” Keith asks, and Lance looks down and realizes that he took it off at some point, although he couldn’t say when even at gunpoint.

“It had your burn goop on it,” Lance explains. “Why aren’t you in a pod?”

Keith looks down, picking a little at the edge of the antimicrobial bandage slapped onto his side.

“It was just a graze,” he says. “She wasn’t shooting to kill, she was just… shooting to hurt. I’m fine.”

“You know, of all your stupid script phrases, that’s gotta be the one that I hate the most,” Lance says tightly.

Keith shoots him a glare with something uglier than the usual anger underneath, and Lance is ready to make his excuses to Maze and drag Keith off somewhere and have it out over this whole afternoon, because Keith almost died and Xio basically killed someone and Lance was just useless, he couldn’t protect either one of them, he can’t even read a fucking children’s book without his daughter helping him — but then Hunk calls Lance on his mini-tablet and he turns away from Maze to quietly take the call.

“Is she okay?” Lance whispers. “Is she safe?”

Tiny video-Hunk nods.

“She’s… Well, she’s not okay, but she’s more calm,” Hunk says. “But I think it’s turned into a dad-dad situation now, not a god-dad.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m the best choice for that,” Lance says. “I’ll hand you off to Keith.”

“No, no, don’t do that. She doesn’t want to be around Keith right now,” Hunk says. “She really, really doesn’t want to be around him. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it sounded like… Did Keith kill someone? Right in front of her?”

“He did,” Lance says. “Yeah, Jesus, he did. I mean, the person was trying to kill him first, but — yeah. After Xio gutted her. Father-daughter bonding from Hell, am I right?”

Tiny video-Hunk just stares at him.

“Fuck,” he finally says.

“No kidding,” Lance says. “Okay, I’ll come to you guys, I guess. Can you make sure Keith actually gets real medical attention and not just a bandaid? Ignore him if he tries to tell you he’s fine, he got double-tapped and then blasted again somewhere else and it’s a miracle he’s not just on the floor by now.”

“I’ll get Shiro on it,” Hunk says.

“Thank you, thank you so much,” Lance whispers, and Hunk nods and disconnects the call, leaving a blinking dot in the Castle map for Lance to follow to Xio, and as horrible as this day has been, when he sees where she is Lance kind of wants to laugh.

He follows the dot to the rooms he and Xio had ransacked, the bedroom where Lance had found his box of delights, making it there with a strategic combination of determination and leaning on a lot of walls. She and Hunk are sitting on the bed when Lance gets there, and Hunk looks up, although she doesn’t.

“Can I come in?” Lance asks.

Hunk looks to Xio, and she nods, and Lance steps in — well, limps in, really, and Hunk frowns at him, but Lance shakes his head and Hunk shrugs and lets it go.

“Hey, Xio, I gotta go take care of your dad, but Lance is here, okay?” Hunk tells her gently, and she nods, curled up with her knees pulled up to her chest, as Hunk leaves.

“Can I sit?” Lance asks.

“You should,” she says. Thank God, at least she’s talking to him; at least she’s talking. He can work with talking. “You could fall again.”

“You saw that, huh,” he says.

“I saw everything,” she says. “I didn’t go to the ship like you said to. I came back.”

“I know,” Lance says. “I’m not mad that you didn’t listen to me. Well, okay, I’m a little mad, but you not listening to me literally saved Keith’s life, so… Thank you, I guess.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Why’d you come here?” Lance asks.

“You already said your prayer here,” Xio says. “So it’s empty.”

“Empty for what?” he asks, but she just presses her face harder into her knees.

“Xio, what happened,” he tries, “that shouldn’t have — You never should have had to —” but Xio shakes her head violently.

“I’m not sorry,” she says. “She was a bad person. She was going to kill my dad.”

“She wasn’t a bad person,” Lance blurts out, then amends that: “At least, I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“Then why did she want to hurt him?” Xio demands.

“I don’t know that either,” Lance says honestly. “But from her accent… She sounded Mnenmite. Maybe she was just trying to hurt someone who looked like the people who hurt her people.”

“That’s stupid,” Xio mutters.

“Yeah,” Lance says, “yeah, it really is.”

“Am I a bad person?” Xio asks suddenly.

“What?”

“She wasn’t a bad person,” Xio says. “She wasn’t a bad person and I killed her, so that makes me the bad person.”

He could try to argue with her, explain that it was Keith who dealt the killing blow, but she knows that, she’s probably going to have nightmares about that — she grew up with the knowledge that both of her parents were soldiers, but there’s knowing and then there’s knowing — and, well. She may not have been the one to put a knife through that woman’s eye, but the injury that Xio dealt her wasn’t the kind that you walk away from, either.

“You’re not a bad person either,” he says instead. “You were protecting your dad. You did the right thing. The world isn’t… It’s not just the good people versus the bad people. There are some really, truly bad people, like Lotor, but mostly it’s just a lot of people trying to survive and protect the people they love.”

Then he remembers what’s still in his pants pocket. “Hey, brought you this,” he adds, handing over the pendant he’d bought before everything went to shit. “Smooth, rough, shiny, and wire loops. Thought you’d like it. And if you don’t, that’s okay —” he hurriedly adds, but she accepts it, running her fingers over the smooth stone, the slash of druzy at its heart.

“Are the Galra bad people?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Lance says. “Some of them aren’t, like the Blade of Marmora people, or Keith, or Maze. Being Galra doesn’t make you bad, but the Galra who fight for Lotor… I don’t know if they’re bad people, but they’re choosing to do bad things. You understand the difference?”

“He killed my friends,” she says. “And maybe he killed that woman’s friends, so she tried to kill my dad, and I killed her. I did a bad thing.”

“For the right reason,” Lance says. “It doesn’t make you a bad person. You were just protecting him, same as we try to protect you. Like we’re trying to do with the whole galaxy.”

“You kill people,” she says.

“Yeah, I do,” Lance says. “Sometimes. People who are trying to hurt me, or my family, or the people we’re charged with defending. But I don’t do it because I like it, I do it because I want my people to be safe. I want you and Maze to be safe, most of all. Just because this happened this one time — it’s not your job now to protect us adults, okay? It’s our job to protect you. Always will be.”

She digests this, turning the pendant over and over in her hands, tracing the slash of druzy, the curling wire wrapped around the black stone.

“I’m not sorry,” she says finally. “It’s not my job and I did a bad thing but I’m not sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry, I want you to be safe,” Lance says. “Just promise me you won’t do anything like that again, okay?”

“I won’t,” she says, but he can tell that she’s lying.

“Can you do a hug now?” he asks, instead.

She nods, and he pulls her in, crushingly close, blinking back tears that he doesn’t have time for, because it’s not her job to comfort him; it’s not her job to do so, so many things.

“I’m sorry I held you down on the shuttle,” he whispers into her hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you, but you were hurting yourself. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she whispers back. “You were protecting me.”

He holds onto her as long as he can, but eventually she starts to squirm and he lets her go.

“Suckiest birthday ever,” he jokes. She nods dramatically.

“The WORST,” she agrees, and he laughs wetly.

“So, suckiest birthday ever, definitely need a re-do, what do you want to do for Birthday 2.0?” he asks.

“Not space-Tortuga,” she says, and he shudders.

“No,” he says, “definitely not.”

She stares at him for a moment, considering.

“I want to fly Red,” she says, finally.

“Uh,” Lance says, “I don’t know if she’ll let you.”

“She will,” Xio says firmly. “If I tell her it’s my birthday present, she will. She likes me.”

“Then I guess we’d better go tell Keith that he’s being replaced,” Lance says, and she hesitates. “Unless you don’t want to see him right now? That’s okay. He’ll understand.”

“No,” she says after a moment, “I should. He got hurt. I want to see that he’s okay.”

Lance groans his way off the bed and limps to the doorway, more than ready to get out of this room and go rejoin the land of the living, but Xio pauses at the threshold.

“Can we say your prayer?” she asks him. “For that woman?”

“The eternal rest prayer?” he asks, and she nods. “Sure. Spanish or Universal?”

“Universal,” she decides, “in case she won’t understand Spanish.”

“It’s not a prayer to the person, it’s a prayer to God,” Lance tells her. “Asking Him to give them peace after death.”

“Does God speak Spanish?” Xio asks.

“I hope so, that’s what I’ve been talking to Him in for all these years,” Lance says.

“Then Spanish,” she says.

“Spanish it is. Repeat after me,” Lance says. “Dale, Señor, el descanso eterno —”

“Dale, Señor, el descanso eterno —”

“Y luzca para ella la luz perpetua —”

“Y luzca para ella la luz perpetua —”

“Descansen en paz —”

“Descansen en paz —”

“Así sea.”

“Así sea.”

“Do you have my knife?” she adds. “I want it back.”

*

“You’d think this thing would come with instructions,” Lance gripes.

“It probably did,” Keith tells him from the bed, where he’s watching Lance standing sans pants in front of the mirror trying to puzzle out his new knee brace. “You probably just lost them.”

Nobody has wanted to be alone today since Lance and Xio got back from the abandoned apartments. Xio is in Maze’s room right now, having requested some space from her parents which Keith hastily gave her, and he and Lance are in his room, eking out as much time as they can together before they have to fall asleep.

Maybe he just won’t sleep tonight, Lance thinks, or he’ll sleep on the floor, or something else that maybe won’t trigger Keith’s hypervigilance insomnia. Anything to be able to hear him still breathing after a day like today.

“How’s your side?” Lance retorts.

“It’s good,” Keith says. “Like I told you, she was shooting to hurt, not to kill — and Shiro chased me down and made me get into a pod while you and Xio were talking,” he grumpily admits.

“We’ll break you of your aversion to medical attention yet,” Lance says.

“I don’t have an aversion, I just can’t tell when I need it,” Keith says. “Why are you even putting that on right now? You don’t need a brace in bed.”

“I just wanted to try it out, but I’m putting this right back into Castle storage, because it was clearly made for some other kind of alien,” Lance mutters. “What the fuck, how many straps does this thing even have?”

Keith snorts and hops off the bed, crossing to Lance, and then goes to his knees right in front of him.

“You really think this is the best time for that?” Lance asks, but Keith just smiles a little, brushing his forehead against Lance’s leg like a cat, and then presses a kiss to the medial side of Lance’s knee where the damage had been the worst, his MCL almost completely severed by a few angled blows from the sharp side of the hammer.

“Come on, give it here,” Keith tells him, and Lance stares down at him stupidly for a moment before Keith clarifies, “The brace.”

Lance hands it down to him, and Keith does it up easily, his hands warm and sure against Lance’s skin as Keith patiently threads all the straps where they need to go, adjusting it when Lance tells him too tight, too loose, and finally sits back on his heels, looking pleased.

“How’s it feel?” he asks, and Lance shifts his stance experimentally, testing to see if his braced knee will hold his weight.

“Good,” he says. “More stable. I don’t think I’ll eat it if I step wrong now.”

“You’re still gonna get a knee replacement,” Keith informs him. “But this will hold you over a little while longer.”

“Come on, I already got eye surgery done, what do you want from me?” Lance asks. “Do you have some secret burning desire to fuck a cyborg?”

“I want you to be safe,” Keith says, and then amends that to: “I want you to survive as long as you can.”

“Please get up here,” Lance begs. “I can’t come down to you, please come up,” and Keith’s barely upright before Lance is kissing him as hard as he can, kissing him as hard as his fear, and Keith clutches at Lance, too, but eventually the kiss gentles into something less desperate and maybe a touch sad.

“Remind me, why did we ever think this was a good idea?” Lance asks. “Bringing a kid into a world like ours. Jesus. What were even thinking?”

“We thought the world would get better,” Keith says. “It will. We’re going to make it better for them.”

“The better it gets for us, the worse it gets for you,” Lance says. “Do you think those people would have cared if they knew you were the Red Paladin? I tried to tell them, but I don’t know if they heard me, or they just — I dunno. Wanted to hurt someone.”

“I don’t know,” Keith says.

“Maze probably shouldn’t go anywhere for a while,” Lance says. “You either. Or at least not in civilian clothes.”

“It’s not like she’s going places anyways,” Keith says. “Do you think people can tell that Xio’s part Galra?”

“She’s not purple, but who knows,” Lance says. “I’ll ask Allura, or Coran, they’re better at telling who’s what in this galaxy.”

He hesitates, then adds: “You were right, about this whole knife thing. I really, really wish you weren’t, but you are. I’m sorry for giving you so much shit about it. You were just trying to keep her safe.”

“I really, really wish I wasn’t right, too,” Keith says. “You know I’ve been scared for her too, right?”

“What?” Lance asks, because…

Well, no, he hadn’t. Other than the nightmares, Keith has seemed so blasé these last few months, a far cry from the wide-eyed rocking terror of Xio’s infancy. Lance had thought that Keith was pushing Xio because Keith was letting his own passions run away from him, because he didn’t really understand that children were supposed to be children or what a normal childhood even was, because he didn’t even care — and he’s been so angry at Keith, Lance realizes now. Angry at Xio, angry at Lotor and this stupid endless war, and so, so angry at Keith, for acting like combat training for a thirteen-year-old was just normal, like all of this was just fine.

“I’ve never stopped being scared for her,” Keith tells him. “Never. But I — I thought growing up made you safer. It did for me.”

“When did you start teaching yourself with your knife, anyway?” Lance asks. “You never said.”

“Ten?” Keith says. “Eleven? I was pretty clumsy before that, so probably not younger.”

“I don’t want to know what precipitated that, do I,” Lance says.

“Probably not,” Keith agrees.

“You know, one day I will get to the center of your little onion of trauma,” Lance informs him. “You have layers, but I’m patient.”

“I don’t think there is a center,” Keith says. “I think it’s just me.”

“And now Xio has her very own trauma onion,” Lance says. “Trauma spring onion. No, fuck it, definitely full-sized onion. When we agreed we weren’t going to lay our traumas on our kids, I didn’t think that meant we were going to give them worse ones.”

“Well, I survived,” Keith says. “Maze survived, and she’s got more trauma onions than all of us put together, Shiro included. Xio will —”

“Do not fucking say ‘she’ll be fine’,” Lance warns him. “I’m gonna ban that word from this ship, just you watch me.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Xio will survive, too,” he finishes. “Even if she does have a trauma onion now.”

“Well, you have more things to bond over,” Lance says. “All three of you can make a club. Get buttons made. ‘Shit Made Me Grow Up Too Fast’.”

“We can invite Pidge,” Keith agrees. “Dunno about Shiro. Does nineteen count as an adult?”

“If it doesn’t, then we all belong to that club. Can I stay here tonight?” Lance asks. “Not to sleep, I know you can’t do that, but — I dunno, I just really don’t want to let you out of my sight right now.”

“Having people stare at me doesn’t help me sleep either,” Keith says. “But I don’t think I was gonna fall asleep tonight anyway. We can just hang out.”

“Mercury Gameflux II?” Lance asks hopefully.

“That fucking thing,” Keith mutters, but follows Lance out into the common area and grumpily settles in as Lance plugs in the precious game console that he and Pidge keep stealing back from each other after Hunk whipped up an adaptor.

“Yeah, I have a feeling we’ll have a Xio-and-Maze visitation soon anyway,” Lance says. “And Xio has good taste, unlike you, so she can take the burden of playing with this magnificent feat of game engineering off your hands.”

“It’s a video game console from the 90s, Lance,” Keith says. “It has, like, four games, and one of them glitches. It’s not a magnificent feat of anything.”

“Ding dong, you are so wrong,” Lance says, but hands Keith the second controller and then hops onto the couch and snuggles up right up to him, warm and beloved and safe for now, even though it limits Lance’s elbow maneuverability and he takes his video games from the 90s seriously.

“Ready?” Lance asks, but Keith seems distracted, his ears perked up like he’s listening to something — and yep, now that Lance is paying attention, that’s the sound of faint conversation from Maze’s room, so he and Keith probably have one game before they get piled on by their children, which is great by him. If nobody’s sleeping tonight, then at least they’re all not sleeping together. At least they’re together, period.

“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Lance asks, curious.

“Not really,” Keith says. “But it’s still a good sound to listen to.”

“I’ll cut you slack if you run into any walls,” Lance assures him.

“Yeah, okay, sure,” Keith says, clearly not paying attention already, and Lance snorts and flicks the console into life, more than ready to chase away the dark shadows of sleep with something bright and loud, and if Xio decides that she wants to come out and play and probably kick his ass — that’s good, that’s great, even if she’s just playing to stave the nightmares off. Tonight she can worry about beating him at Rainbow Road, and her parents can be the ones to worry about defending the universe, and tomorrow —

Meetings, and meltdowns, and a mayhem counter that’s probably about to go off the charts, and they’ll handle it as it comes, trauma onions and all, and somewhere in the middle of it all, he and Keith are going to figure out how to give their children a better world than the one they have. And that’s a promise. Maybe it’s one that Lance can’t give, but he doesn’t care; he’s giving it anyway.

They’re the goddamn defenders of the galaxy. They’ll find a way.