shining like the stars

75

Shiro woke to an empty bed. He laid on his side for a while, staring into the dimness of the quarters. This bed smelled richly of Keith, his scent was thick in the pillows and the blankets. Shiro buried his face half in the pillow and caught the barest trace of Lance's scent, and he could remember fading out into sleep, seeing the brown wisps of Lance's hair beside Keith's. Shiro smiled and stretched his arm across the empty bed, until the fingers of his hand dangled over the edge of the mattress. It was a hell of a time squeezing all three of them into one of these barely-full-size bunks, he'd have to talk to Allura about obtaining a larger bed. He had an inkling that Lance was probably a sprawler.

Shiro sat up and yawned and brushed his hair out of his eyes. The lights in the room came up when he sat up — he sat on the edge of the mattress and waited for his eyes to adjust, scratching under the tight tee shirt he'd worn to bed blearily. He had no idea how long he'd slept, his chrono was in his room, with the rest of his clothes. No slippers, either. Somewhere between awake and not he padded barefoot to the door and stuck his head out in the corridor.

It didn't count as a walk of shame if there was no sex the previous night.

Well, there had been sex but not in Keith's room, at least. Shiro made it halfway down the corridor toward his room when he realized that he was hearing something happening beyond the sleeping quarters and it sounded urgent. Without hesitation he bypassed his room and was in fact jogging when he made it to the corridor that held the entrance to the training room, where the worst of the commotion was occurring.

Keith was at the epicenter, ears flattened back and eyes wide and looking — well, not nearly as freaked out as he had been in the memory core but definitely not anywhere on a linear scale of comfortable. He saw Shiro arrive and even the fact that Shiro visibly flinched at his visage didn't seem to deter Keith as he flung himself at Shiro and manged to eel around his body and plant Shiro between himself and everybody else.

'Everybody else' — Allura, Hunk, Coran, Illianya and Rian, he didn't see Pidge nor Matt among them which was both good and bad, but there was a lot of arguing and raised voices and entire strings of dialogue composed of words he didn't understand. "Why do you look like that?" Shiro asked Keith, who was using him as a human shield, peeking out from behind his shoulder. He didn't know Keith to run from a fight, but if Keith had a tail (did he have a tail? Shiro wasn't certain and somehow it felt like a Lance thing to ask) it would be tucked firmly between his legs at the moment.

"You know why," Keith muttered.

"And you know what I meant," Shiro said. He didn't have time to say or process more because Allura had turned from her argument/conversation/dressing down to see Shiro there and she lit up.

"Shiro did you see," she said, pointing at Keith behind Shiro as if he wasn't fully aware of the fact that his boyfriend turned into one of the species that had imprisoned and tortured him for a year. "Isn't it wonderful? Keith can infiltrate the Galra for us!"

"Help me," Keith hissed, fingers curled into the back of the tee shirt Shiro wore, as if there was excess fabric for him to readily grip.

"Infiltrate? He's a spy, he's infiltrated us," Rian yelled from behind Allura. Coran had one hand on Rian's should like a disapproving father, but that one hand was keeping the short Altean in place like it was a massive weight.

"Dude, there is no 'us'," Hunk said sharply. "You were trying to kill him!"

"He's-" Rian's retort was cut off by Illianya's very sharp tone, in a language that Shiro had never actually heard before this. Rian flushed a dark color and responded rapidly as well, and Allura ignored them both, still turned to Shiro with a pleasant smile on her face that was masking a serious eye twitch.