#and then I spent half an hour editing out all the shippiness

[orukamachi]

Voltron: Grass

So earlier this evening/yesterday (for me) I sent the minific prompt ‘grass’ to the Voltron Think Tank and they put together the most incredible piece of collaborative fic I have seen in literally years.

Well, while they were about it I went off and wrote my own response to my own prompt and had a nap and a sandwich and it turned out very different. I’m trying to rustle up some confidence in my work because when I write I write a lot. I write. A LOT. And never publish. So here’s a step towards changing that.

Alternative title, maybe: Catnip

They’d almost grown used to it already. The constant attention, the prying, the medicals, and years before that, the absence of daylight and clean air as they had been raised to know them. Since their return to earth, triumphant in its own way, they’d still not quite been set free. The Garrison had hounded around them, closely followed by the military, not only of the USA but of a number of exceedingly shady international organisations. Shiro even pointed a couple of figures out, saying ‘I know that guy,’ but not recalling exactly where, except that it hadn’t been before Kerberos.

Keith was put into quarantine. Shiro very nearly killed the man who made the order on the spot, putting the boot in with an unfamiliar feeling he later identified as revenge. Ultimately they both agreed to be kept under observation, if only to prove that there was not one stinking thing wrong with either of them. Just that one of them had a hyper-advanced prosthesis that could – and did – cut through his observation cell wall, and the other occasionally flickered out of focus and back like a chameleon having an acid trip. Normal things. Normal side-effects of being lied to and lied about for years on end.

Katie – and that felt strange, to hear people calling her Katie – had been sent off home as she was listed as a minor, and she’d kicked and screamed the whole way because she’d just spent seven years in space and had hit her legitimate twentieth already and there was no way in HELL she would swallow child treatment. But she went in the end, because her father and brother were going, and she really, really did miss her mom. Then Lance and Hunk had run home to their mothers with all the dignity they could muster, but had sprung back into formation just as quickly, Hunk with his mother in tow and Lance bringing an entire airplane full of old friends and relatives who filled up the Garrison’s every empty space with noise and clutter, and provided just enough distractions to let the Paladins cleave together, hold each other up the way they’d learned to do, even if two of them could only press their forehead to the glass in greeting.

Samuel brought Pidge back to them. She’d cried when she’d met her mother again, but cried more for being made to leave her new brothers behind. They scooped her up like a doll, their most precious treasure, And she posted a message through to Keith’s vacuum-sealed cell, a note to say that his hut and his gravbike were still out there, amazingly untouched, buried by the shifting sand, and that she and Hunk were going to fix it up, and then some. Hunk winked. Lance groaned. More days away from the beach.

Shiro was released. Keith wasn’t. The Holts and the McLain clan occupied the director’s office a little more pointedly. Hunk’s mother made an awe-striking appearance. A decision was made.

Keith was released. Shiro collided with him like a planet plunging into a star, whispering something only Keith could hear, until the words became nothing but sounds with no meaning.

In four months, they had barely seen a week’s daylight between them.

The big press event was on. The world turned its eyes on them, watching and listening as they answered – very carefully – public questions – also very carefully vetted – in front of a field of cameras and microphones, smartphones they didn’t recognise, all of it tech that seemed strangely out-of-time for them. None of them were really focusing. Lance and Pidge were leading the talk. As time passed, they huddled in together, Keith flush up against Shiro’s right arm, Lance scooting so close up against his left that Pidge, between them, was sitting on their laps. Hunk at the far end like a buttress against them overbalancing, right arm hooked around Lance’s waist, bringing him down as he kept leaping up to pick a fight with the press, repeatedly knocking Pidge out of her seat. She shunted Shiro over to make room, muttering Altean expletives.

Shiro let his eyes unfocus and gaze away into the far distance. The hall had one wall of fold-back panels, now completely open to the elements as people crushed in to hear this first interview with the much lauded heroes of the year. Somewhere out there, a patch of something shimmered in the heat.

“You see…?” he murmured.

“I see,” Keith replied. “You want it?”

“I want it,” Shiro decreed.

He stood, trailing Pidge as he went, and the rest of them followed like a train of ducklings, never letting go of one another as Shiro carved his way through the crowd, people jumping back and falling silent as he strode towards them, eyes fixed on the far horizon and each of his Paladins solemnly matching his pace.

The sun hit them like scalding water and each of them gasped in the unfamiliar heat, the impossible brightness of it, hands brought up to shield their eyes as Shiro dragged them on and on, a flotilla of cameramen following their every step. It was barely a hundred yards. It felt like miles.

It was a lawn.

It was ten yards square.

With a stupid foot-high chain-link fence.

With a familiar feeling of synchronicity, and an odd sense of reverence, they each stooped to take off their footwear and stepped over the barrier, as they had done in so many different ways before, and then hit the ground like tired children, exhausted from too much running around.

It was cool, cushioning, and prickly. It was heavenly.

Grass.

“Say the thing, Lance,” said Shiro, as he knelt on the turf, dug his fingers into the roots and brought his head down low enough to smell the damp soil.

“Fooorm Voltron!”

“Maybe the other thing?”

“Oh, sure-- Disengage.”

“Right. Right. Everybody just… disengage.” The four of them watched fondly as Shiro lay down smack dab in the middle of the manicured lawn, sprawling in the wonderful, unique scent of planet Earth, rolling like a cat, flexing his back as he stretched out, turning his face to the heavens and seeing a familiar moon in the mid-morning sky. Earth, and the Moon, old friends reunited.

They joined him. It was wonderful. Cameras flashed nearby, and they didn’t give one damn between them. And they wondered how they’d forgotten grass of all things. Keith remembered the heat of the desert sun, Hunk had longed for the mountains of home, Lance had openly cried for rain, And Pidge – well, she had never missed nature before, but now that she’d realised, it hurt all the more.

Shiro cried. Not really crying, just letting years and years of confinement and fear escape as tears and roll away into the soil. He didn’t make a sound, but they could all feel it in the minute shudders he valiantly tried to hide.

“Salt’s bad for grass,” Hunk said to the sky.

So Shiro laughed instead.