Published April 22, 2017

Set between S1E5 "Tears of the Balmera" and S2E3 "Shiro's Escape."


"A Bonding Moment"

As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend. ~ Proverbs 27:17, New Living Translation


Keith found the training deck already in use: Pidge was combating the gladiator robot with her bayard. She noticed Keith's entrance but did not take her focus off of the fight.

"Can I go after you?" he called out.

"Sure," Pidge grunted as she parried an attack. "Give me five minutes."

Keith stretched on the sideline and watched while he waited for his turn. He figured one of them would beat the other shortly; but the fight drew on for several minutes.

It seemed that Pidge was good at evading but needed to work on her offense. Having such a small weapon put her at something of a disadvantage: though her spade could shock people into immobility or unconsciousness, it had to make contact with her opponent, which was difficult if said opponent was good at fending off her jabs. Her arms were so short that coming at the gladiator from the front put her in danger of being struck or simply held back by its longer arms. Her closest attempts came by circling around it and aiming from the back—but it always swiveled around to meet her. Pidge's grunts became more dismayed and frustrated. Keith fought the instinct to step in and help her. He held himself back with the knowledge that it was not a real fight, and that Pidge would not want help when she was trying on her own.

Finally Pidge used a different tactic: she shot out her bayard's grappling hook and tried to catch the gladiator's staff in it. She then started to circle around it, thinking to either disarm it or trip it up in the rope; but the gladiator lifted its staff over its head and jerked it in the opposite direction, pulling on the rope and causing Pidge to trip and fall on the floor. It then twirled its staff, freeing it from the grappling hook, and pointed the weapon's end at Pidge's head, indicating that she was defeated.

Pidge huffed. "End training sequence." The gladiator relaxed its posture and shut down, allowing Pidge to get to her feet. "Simulation failed," she grumped, echoing the stiff recorded voice of the Galaxy Garrison flight simulator. The realism of her imitation made Keith suspect she had heard it many times.

"I thought you didn't like training," he said as Pidge came over and opened a water bag.

"I don't," she said, poking a straw into the drink. "But I figured, if I'm going to be part of this team, I should get better at combat."

"You did well enough against Haxus and Sendak."

"Rover helped me beat Haxus, and we all pitched in to beat Sendak."

"Well, you reprogrammed Rover, didn't you? So that was still your doing."

"True," Pidge conceded, "but I couldn't do much against Sendak's giant robot arm. He picked me up like a flimsy action figure. I need to be able to stand my ground against different opponents. And I know we're going to be working as a team and helping each other out, but … I want to be able to hold my own if I have to."

"That's fair." Keith took off his jacket, indicating that he was ready for his turn. But instead of taking up his bayard, he drew his knife from the sheath on his belt. "First let's see how your bayard does against something its own size."

Pidge looked at the knife dubiously. "I don't think the Galra use weapons that small."

"Maybe not, but if you aim too high too soon, you'll set yourself up for failure. You need to work your way up to that point."

"You sound like Shiro," Pidge remarked.

That elicited a rare smile from Keith, who took it as a compliment. "He was the one who taught me to think that way."

Maybe hearing of Shiro's influence on him convinced her. She took up her bayard once more and followed him to the center of the training deck.

The two weapons were shaped differently, but the basic principles of thrusting and blocking carried over. Keith did not go easy on her, but he did not pummel her the way the gladiator had. And unlike the robot, he gave verbal feedback, pointing out her mistakes and good moves, and showed emotion, shifting between smugness when he out-maneuvered her, surprise when she went against his expectations, and approval when she out-maneuvered him.

After about twenty minutes they called it quits, since Keith still needed to train with his sword and Pidge had research to do. But they stayed on the deck to take a water break.

"How did you learn to fight so well?" Pidge asked curiously. "The way you took out those med-techs to save Shiro—and how you use your bayard as a sword—that's not the kind of thing the Garrison teaches in self-defense."

Keith was silent for a moment before he answered. "When I was in foster care, I sometimes got to go to summer camps and YMCA classes for free. I chose fencing a couple times, and martial arts whenever it was offered. I thought it'd help me stand up to bullies."

Pidge's surprise was quite mild. She had not known that Keith was an orphan. Yet she did not ask all the questions people usually asked—How old were you when your parents died? How long were you in the system?

Instead, the question she asked was one that could be addressed to anyone: "Did you know a lot of bullies?"

Keith shrugged. "You find them in pretty much any situation with a lot of kids kept together." He had encountered a fair share, in schools, group homes, camps, even some of his foster families.

"Did the Garrison have that kind of power structure? I mean, in the student body—the only bullies I saw there were Iverson and his cronies."

"There were some cocky upperclassmen while I was there. They had more bark than bite." Keith looked at her curiously. "You really never ran into any bullies?" He would have thought that someone as small and geeky as Pidge would be targeted as either easy prey or an object of envy.

"I was there for less than a year, and I didn't really mingle with people outside of class. I only enrolled so I could get the information I needed to find my dad and brother." Pidge paused while they both sipped from their water pouches. Then, possibly to deflect the conversation from the topic of her own family, she said, "I'm glad we don't have bullies in this team."

Keith raised his eyebrows at her. "Are you forgetting our first day of training?"

"Well—at least Allura meant well. She wasn't mean to us just for the fun of it."

"Bullying isn't just done for fun."

"Why else would anyone be mean to someone?"

"Sometimes it's just … flaws in their personality. Or something to do with how they grew up. Some kids do it to release their anger about other things in their lives. And some do it because they're afraid and want to feel like they're stronger or more powerful." He felt like a hypocrite, trying to justify these things that he knew were wrong.

The way he talked about it, with earnestness and almost uncharacteristic insight, piqued Pidge's curiosity. "How do you know?"

Keith wished he had not said anything. She looked at him so unsuspectingly, and they were finally getting along. But he did not want her to imagine something worse than the truth, so he answered reluctantly, "Because … sometimes I thought the best way to avoid being bullied was to be the one bullying people."

"Oh." To her credit, Pidge's expression did not change much. She was thoughtful, considering and wondering, the way she often was when receiving new intelligence. "Is that why you got kicked out of the Garrison?"

"Not exactly. When Shiro went missing, I didn't feel motivated to do the work. And when they blamed the Kerberos mission failure on him …" Keith could feel the old anger and frustration, which even being reunited with Shiro could not erase. He clenched his fists in his lap, letting the emotion pass over him. "I couldn't stand sucking up to them."

Pidge nodded, understanding. "I know what you mean. I almost blew my cover because I couldn't keep my mouth shut when they badmouthed my family."

Keith had been meaning to ask for details about that. "Why did you hide the fact that you were related?"

"Oh—I snuck into their offices to find out what happened on Kerberos that they weren't telling us. Iverson caught me and banned me from the school."

"Wow."

"Yeah." Pidge smiled, with a mischievous excitement in her eyes. "If we ever bring Voltron to Earth, I can't wait to see his face when he finds out I was under his nose the whole time. It'll be even better if I've found my family by then."

Keith smiled too, imagining Iverson's reaction to finding out who the "defenders of the universe" were: the girl he had banned, the punk he had expelled, the engineer with motion sickness, the cargo pilot who had barely made it into his class, and the pilot he had scapegoated and presumed dead. All things considered, they were a perfect case study of underdogs.

Pidge stood and picked up her bayard and their emptied water bags. "Thanks for the training session."

"No problem." Keith got up and held his bayard so it turned into his sword, and started walking to the center of the training deck.

"Keith?" He paused to look at her. She seemed a little bashful, trying to smile, but faltering under nervousness. "I'm glad you're on this team." He had said something to that affect to her, when she decided to stay with them.

Her frankness caught him off guard. "Uh, thanks. … I'm glad you're on it, too." His smile was tentative, but it made hers widen with happiness. He smiled with something like affection as she left the deck.

Throughout his life, Keith had been shunted from one new environment to another. Since he had to get to know a new set of people each time, Keith had always been sensitive to moments of fun, cooperation, or mutuality. He called them "bonding moments." Most of them were little interactions—kind gestures, conversations, but they were what make him feel confident in the strength of a relationship. It was hard to establish good one-on-one relationships within in a group of people, so even objectively short or insignificant moments felt like they mattered.

He hoped he would have time and space for more moments like these.