Part 6 of my #sheith Dark Entity au!
c/w: heated argument at the end (which I hate writing arguments so don't worry we are suffering together)

***

It comes to a head on the planet Jarorc. https://twitter.com/Omnidolor/status/1383276583318822912

Honerva has finally made a move. Or at least the first move the Coalition can track since Olkarion. The few druids that remain alive and loyal to her have put a zaiforge cannon in the planet’s orbit and are readying to drain it dry of its quintessence,

it’s hull already glowing with energy, and if that’s wasn’t bad enough, the planet has several thousand aliens scattered across its surface with no military whatsoever to defend it or themselves.

Voltron dives in headfirst, grabbing the Empire ship’s attention as it readies its cannon, as enemy forces spew out of the massive ship. Their preemptive strike offers enough of a distraction and a delay that the Atlas and its MFEs can join in the fray.

The Lions are each flying separately, leveraging the numbers to keep the Empire’s attention versus actually trying to be a destructive force. Or perhaps that’s not right to say, as the Black Lion is dropping ship after ship from the skies.

“Keith!” Hunk calls out over the comm. “There are civilian towns down below; we should pull this fight further from here!”

“We do that,” comes the stern reply, “and we’ll leave a wide open shot for the zaiforge cannon to take. You’d be crazy to think they’re going to try to move that massive thing for the sake of a battle /we/ started!”

There’s some truth to his words, but it does little to settle the anxiety Hunk feels as he sees bits of scrap metal from the skies sprinkling the land below.

“Maybe if a few of us pull them away?” Allura tentatively offers. “Then at least the collateral damage won’t be as terrible?”

“There’s wide open space just a few clicks north from here!” Pidge frantically adds as she tries to shake two assailants on her flank.

There’s an uncomfortable silence over the line before Keith finally speaks. “Fine, but we need to keep the Lions central to form Voltron. Griffin, have your squad try to pull the main attack ships away.”

“Last I checked, we don’t answer to you, Kogane!” James grits out, though it’s more out of concentrating on the target he’s chasing rather than in anger.

There’s no denying the /growl/ that sounds over the comm line.

“The hell is your problem! This isn’t about who answers who, it’s about winning this thing!”

And then James does what could have been the worst possible act in that very moment.

“Captain Shirogane, sir, what should we do?”

And suddenly, despite the violent noise of the battle surrounding them, there’s a terrible, charged quiet in the air. It was plain to see the awkwardness that had been growing between the two leaders since the attack on Earth.

Now everyone waits with bated breath, but whether it’s in anticipation of Shiro’s answer or an explosion of Keith’s anger is debatable.

Then, finally: “We need to pull the battle away. All of us. MFEs, follow the Atlas as we head north. Slowly, so they don’t immediately realize what we’re doing. We can lure them if we’re careful. Voltron would be best at attacking the cannon, but from the inside. If -”

“Pidge, land on the bow of the ship,” Keith cuts in with a tone so heated it could melt diamond. “You and I will work to disable the ship from the inside. Lance, Allura, Hunk, keep up your attacks.”

“Keith!” Shiro cries out, but it’s hard to tell if it’s in shock, a reprimand, or both.

“Pull away from the battle if you want. But those people down below have a better chance surviving falling debris than a direct hit with the zaiforge cannon! You care so much for them, maybe consider evacuating them instead!”

The battle is so hot, the argument so contemptuous that the questionable choice of words doesn’t register to anyone on the line.

“Who exactly do we have available to conduct a large scale evacuation?! There’s got to be a couple thousand people down there!” Iverson cries out from the Atlas bridge, a bit disbelieving and a whole lot worried.

“There’s no way they’d fire the zaiforge cannon in a battle like this!” Another officer, one Keith doesn’t know, adds in. “They’d be sitting ducks waiting for a recharge!”

Keith ignores them all, or tries to at least. He’s rushing out of the Black Lion to join Pidge who is hacking the air lock when Shiro’s voice comes over his wrist comm. “Keith, please, I need you to work with me here - there’s no time to argue!”

His tone is soft and firm and it raises Keith’s hackles in an instant, a faint memory from a painful time before.

“Fine,” he bites out. “Allura, Hunk, Pidge, land bottom side of the ship, mid to front.”

It’s an odd command considering their schematics don’t show a way in, but afraid to upset their leader further, the three Lions follow the instruction to the letter..

Everyone can hear Shiro’s sigh of relief before he commands the Atlas and MFEs accordingly.

At the same time, Keith slips open a private channel to just the team. “You three, hold your positions in the Lions.”

There's a cacophony of noises almost immediately. Lance squawks in disbelief while Allura cries out, “what do you mean, hold?!”

“I’m asking you to trust me!” Keith shouts, clearly on his last thread of patience. It’s so uncharacteristically loud that Pidge recoils in shock. Catching himself, Keith takes a steadying breath before asking, almost pathetically, “...Can’t you just do that?” /For once?/

No one says anything for a long tick. Finally the door in front of them clicks and Pidge quietly mutters, “I got it,” right before it slides open.

In the end, no one answers Keith; he’ll take what begrudging acceptance he can get.

***

Of course it’s obvious to the Galra fleet what the Paladins are trying to do, so they send a swarm of soldiers to both locations. Admittedly they’re a bit surprised when the three Lions on the southern side make no effort to enter the craft.

They’re also surprised to find that the two Paladins on the aft-side completely wiped out the squad they dispatched there. Well, technically, it’s mostly just one Paladin.

Keith is /pissed/.

He knows what he’s doing is right. Knows without a doubt. But he has no data to share with the others to explain why - it’s just a feeling he has, a feeling he can’t explain. But he knows with an uncanny certainty that he can trust it.

The ship is going to fire the cannon. It is inevitable.

Between the unspoken fear that it gives him and the fury from having no one believe in his leadership /again/, it’s effortless for him to carve a path through the waves of drones the commander sends their way.

But when both he and Pidge reach the bridge, the commander and his officers are already standing there waiting, blasters at the ready.

The commander, some no-name Keith couldn’t care less about, just laughs.

“That eager to die, huh? Well, you’re just in time to get a first row seat to the annihilation of Jarorc! We’ll let you live long enough to see the aftermath, and just a little longer after that to watch your friends fall as well. Officers! Restrain them.”

The commander turns away. “Fire the cannon!”

Five officers begin their approach. One officer seated in the front pushes a button. Pidge calls out to him asking what they should do. There’s a burst of staticy words coming over the comm line. It all happens in an instant.

Keith hears none of it. Instead, he moves.

He throws his Marmora blade with impeccable aim; it embeds itself in the distant console, nearly removing the officer’s hand. With his bayard in sword form it’s easy enough to cut down the approaching five with no mercy.

He shouts for Pidge to check the zaiforge status screen as he rushes the commander, who opens fire. But the blasts are simple to dodge - he can easily see them coming and twists and turns to avoid each one.

And then the commander, too, is cut down.

The officer at the console flees.

Keith takes a split moment to catch his breath as he turns to check on Pidge - but Pidge hasn’t moved from her spot. Instead she’s blankly gaping at him, still as a skeleton.

“Pidge!” He barks in frustration.

The Green Paladin blinks as if waking from a daydream and almost-stumbles over to the console.

“Sorry, I - sorry,” she mutters while her fingers fly over the keys, studiously working to ignore the mess behind her. Then she curses.

“Fuck! The cannon is still activating - I can’t stop it!”

Similar curses echo over the comm line. “Oh no - oh no no /no/,” Hunk frets. “What do we do?!”

The comms from the Atlas bridge begin to light up but Keith ignores it.

He wretches his blade from the console and rushes back to the only door to the bridge, guarding it. “Hunk, Allura, Lance,” he calls over the open channel.

“Use your Lions and push up as hard as you can on the bow of the ship. We can’t stop it from firing, but we can at least fire it away from the planet!”

Through the noise, Shiro’s voice cuts through. “But we don’t know what else we might hit!”

“Then find us a better target!” The ship creaks as the viewport in front of them suddenly shifts upward - the other Paladins are tilting the ship as planned, although at a snail’s pace. He turns to his right. “Pidge, how much time until it fires?”

Pidge worries her bottom lip. “27 ticks and counting!” She types even faster. “Scanning the area, but the scans won’t complete in time to be sure! There’s no definite range on the cannon blasts!”

“Then find something large enough to stop it, like an uninhabited planet!”

“Keith,” Allura’s voice cuts in, “you can’t be serious-”

“If you can think of a better plan that can be executed in the next 22 ticks then I’m all for it,” he grits out. There’s no pride in his plan, only the impending grief of failure if they don’t do /something/.

Pidge types a bit more, then reluctantly adds, “.. One of Jarorc’s moons is devoid of known life and could take the blast,” she quietly, hesitantly tells, “but it would be completely decimated as a result. Approximately 2.1 degrees northwest of our current location.”

“Paladins! Adjust course!” This time, the Paladins don’t push back. The view in front of them pans ever so slightly up and to the left. Then the whirring cacophony that had been building the background crescendos;

a bright burst of violet energy explodes from the main cannon of the ship, so powerful it knocks the ship /back/ in recoil, and the blast flies forward.

Straight into the distant moon hanging bright in Jarorc’s sky.

An explosion so immense the noise is indescribable. The air /vibrates/. The sky briefly turns a bloody magenta.

And then silence. The sky becomes blue once more.

The moon is gone.

“A direct hit,” Pidge almost whispers.

Another pause, a moment of silence for what they have just done, for the destruction they’ve just wrought.

“You did it, team,” Keith reverently says, still staring at the sky, neither pleased that the plan succeeded nor wracked with guilt. “Life on Jarorc is safe.”

It doesn’t feel like a victory.

***

The battle doesn’t last much longer.

A varga later, Keith is bringing in the Black Lion to its proper hangar on the Atlas.

He had gone down to Jarorc with Allura to meet with the planet’s leaders while the rest of the Paladins brought supplies into the town that suffered beneath the fight.

Jarorc’s people are a mess of emotions: grateful to be saved, despondent at their loss, worried for what ecological changes will be wrought in the moon’s absence.

Praying the impact will not be catastrophic.

The Atlas leadership had also joined in with the talks, and in those moments they put on a united front - Voltron, the Garrison, the Coalition. Yet Keith knew with a sharp certainty that they were anything but, especially from the side glances Shiro kept giving him.

And when they all finally return to the Atlas, Keith riding solo in Black -

- (again) -

He’s not surprised to see Shiro enter his hangar just as he’s about to land.

Annoyed? Yes. But not surprised.

Keith’s had time to calm down from the battle but he’s still feeling a bit raw about it (okay, a /lot/ raw about it), mostly due to the man who now stands at the base of his ramp, hands on both of his hips.

“Care to explain what that was all about, Keith?” The words are as calculated as they can be, spoken calmly, an icy exterior hinting at the turmoil lurking beneath.

“Which part, Shiro?” Keith scoffs in turn, ripping his helmet off and holding it under one arm.

Once upon a time he’d cower under that look of disappointment - never again. “The part where you nearly let the Galra destroy Jarorc? Or the part where you actively tried to undermine me in front of the entire Coalition?”

It’s obvious the sharp remarks catch Shiro off guard - he looks completely stunned before responding, some of his collected exterior splintering. “I wasn’t undermining you, Keith; I was trying to keep you from making a mistake!”

“What mistake? Jarorc is safe because of me!”

“Their moon is /gone/.”

“You think I don’t know that?!” Their voices are growing louder and louder; the engineers in the hangar scurry out the door as quietly as possible. Keith holds his arms wide in a sweeping motion.

“You think I wanted that to happen?! I just didn’t want people to die, Shiro. A missing moon is way the fuck better than a missing habited planet!”

“It wouldn’t have come to that if you hadn’t spent such a long time arguing! We’re supposed to be a team!”

“No, /you/ just want me to follow your lead, like always,” Keith hisses, stalking forward, stopping only inches from the Atlas Captain.

“All those phoebs you kept pushing and pushing for me to be the leader, and both times I’ve been, you’ve done nothing but try to keep me from leading. You can’t have it both ways!”

Any sort of reply sticks in Shiro’s throat - it’s the first time either of them have brought up the times when the clone had taken Shiro’s place.

“Keith, that wasn’t me - you can’t blame me for what happened then -”

“And I don’t!” Keith’s vision starts to become uncharacteristically blurry; he stumbles back, a hand pressed to his forehead; it feels like all of the pain he’s suffered in silence since their journey to Earth is bleeding out of holes in himself that he can’t patch.

Yet just as Shiro reaches out toward him, Keith stands tall, fierce. “But you seem to blame me for it, or at least have been taking it out on me! What the fuck did I do, Shiro, that made you suddenly want nothing to do with me until I fall out of your line?!”

“You didn’t do anything!” Shiro chokes out, his expression crushed.

Keith’s hand clenches at his side, the swirling emotions in him turning to stone.

“Then the least you can do is backoff. I can’t help that the Black Lion chose me, Shiro. You want to be the leader so badly, then take her back!”

The older man flinches. He can’t deny that it… hurts… that his connection with the Black Lion is broken beyond repair.

But he never wanted her just so he could be the leader, and he can’t let this conversation go any further off track. “This isn’t about leading, Keith. It’s about working with others; I thought we were past this!”

“‘Past this’?” Keith mocks snidely.

“Oh, you mean me having an opinion, not just blindly following you or the Garrison? I didn’t realize that all those phoebs you were setting me up to be Voltron’s leader it was just so I could be a puppet for you.”

Shiro gasps, wide eyed. “I-”

But Keith doesn’t want to hear it.

His face darkens. “You know I never even wanted this. You /know/ that. Yet here I am trying to keep people safe, but you were undercutting me the whole time.”

“Keith, you were putting the village below at risk!”

“Hardly! And what’s worse, losing a town or losing a planet? Though maybe it /is/ the latter, considering you went well out of your way to come all the way down here to yell at me for it, despite no one dying.”

“You weren’t listening! And then you deliberately defied orders to have your team infiltrate - I know you didn’t send everyone in!”

“And if I had, there would have been no way for us to move the cannon in time - /like I had foreseen/. Maybe if you actually listened to me for once, we could have stopped the canon from firing in the first place.”

He stalks up to Shiro once more, face uncomfortably close - his eyes dangerously gleaming yellow. “You don’t like my methods? Then fly the damn Lion yourself.”

A pause, a stifling, breathless moment. Then the fight leaves Shiro, his shoulders slumping.

He opens his mouth to say something but suddenly his eyes widen instead. "Keith...?"

The abrupt change in demeanor catches Keith off guard, even more so when Shiro gently touches his fingertips to the skin just above Keith's lips.

Keith stands stiffly still, uncertain, before Shiro pulls his hand back.

The tips of his fingers are covered in blood.

Immediately Keith brings his own hand to his face and sure enough, he's got a hell of a nose bleed going on.

Surprised that he couldn't taste it, really, with the way it's pouring freely. It's a fine complement to the crushing headache he has to match.

He pulls away sharply from Shiro when the older man reaches out again. "Don't," he bites out.

Shiro immediately pulls his hand back as if burned, gaping soundlessly. Keith takes it for the sign it is and brushes past him toward the door.

The argument is decidedly over.

And just like with Jarorc, it doesn’t feel like a victory.

“Keith,” Shiro calls softly, sadly. The last few words he doesn’t want to say but now the protocol of being Captain demands it. “...You know I’m going to have to write you up for this.”

“Put it on my tab,” is Keith’s final reply before he storms out, leaving Shiro behind once more.

The older man takes a slow, shaky breath, the sound like a maelstrom in such an uncomfortably quiet space.

His body is trembling from the fight - much like the way it did at the end of his last argument with Adam.

Fuck, how did he let things get so bad with Keith, that that’s even a valid base for comparison?

Is it even possible to go back?

Shiro looks up at the Black Lion, the silence between them deafening.

/Help/, he pleads.

He hears nothing in return.

***

It’s an unspoken agreement that when Allura, Hunk and Lance return to the Castle they immediately rush toward Green’s hangar -

- they had heard how faint Pidge had sounded at the end of the fight. And indeed when they arrive they find her still sitting in the pilot’s seat, shell shocked and unmoving.

Allura reaches her first, the other two close behind. “Pidge, are you alright?’

“What happened?” Lance adds softly, a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Keith, he…” She swallows before turning to them, her expression a myriad of emotions and none of them good.

“When he was taking down the bridge? He moved… like Macidus.”

(A/N: end of part 6!)