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“Hold up. Hold the fuck up,” a voice echoes from the mouth of the cave just before Lance steps onto the ramp of this giant blue robot cat. Voltron, as Pidge calls it. He’s a little pissed that the dramatic moment had been interrupted, though any anger rapidly turns to fear when he sees Keith and Shiro pale in near-unison.
The source of that fear comes jogging into visibility a second later. He’s tall, taller than even Shiro, though unlike Shiro he’s not built like a brick shithouse. He’s got glasses, and more notably at least three guns on him.
“Adam,” Shiro says, half irritable and half in awe. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m coming with you,” the man, Adam apparently, says, shoving past Shiro and Keith and up the ramp. He stops, staring at Lance with an strange look on his face, then gestures him forward. “You seem cool,” he says, pointing. “I think we’ll get along great.”
xxxx
Adam easily becomes Lance’s second favorite person on the castle-ship (after Hunk, of course). This is primarily due to the fact that he’s a genuinely nice and caring person, underneath about a dozen layers of sarcasm and ask-me-if-I-give-a-fuck attitude. Secondarily, Adam speaks fluent Spanish, which means he and Lance can talk shit around other people without them knowing.
Lance, Pidge, and Hunk find out that Adam and Shiro are exes after nearly three months, while exploring the castle. They accidentally walk into an argument being held in at least three languages, at a decibel level well above what could possibly be healthy.
Keith, also present, continues to look effortlessly cool and bored and not at all shocked. “They nearly got married,” he says dully. “Before Kerberos. Adam thought Shiro was being needlessly suicidal, Shiro thought Adam was trying to stifle his dreams.” He flicks his eyes up to watch the fight briefly, with the same expression one would wear to watch QVC at one a.m. “It was soul crushing on all parts.”
“That explains... a lot actually,” Pidge says thoughtfully. “I thought they were just attracted to each other and angry about it.”
“Oh, it’s that too,” Keith sighs. “Come on, this will probably go on for hours.”
Lance and Hunk trade a bewildered glance and jog to catch up with Keith and Pidge, who are halfway back down the hall.
xxxx
Adam doesn’t fly a lion, because, as Shiro states in an uncharacteristically bitchy comment, he didn’t so much as follow destiny as tell it to go fuck itself and then go ahead and do what he wanted anyway.
So Adam doesn’t fly a lion, but he does go on every mission with them, because dude could kick ass. He either hitches a ride with Lance or Keith or takes one of the many Altean fighter jets Allura has left to his disposal.
His presence pisses Shiro off an unreasonable, almost hilarious amount. Lance has yet to see Shiro raise his voice at anyone else but Adam. He’s pretty sure if Adam wasn’t around, he would think Shiro was the most patient person in the universe.
It’s after the third mission they’ve had where Adam has managed to save Shiro’s life that the tension finally boils over. Shiro storms onto the bridge with a murderous expression that sends Pidge and Hunk rushing out of the room and Allura following, dragging Coran with her. Lance, like most bisexuals, lives for drama, so he ducks down below a console and pulls Keith with him. Keith doesn’t even seem to have noticed the thundercloud of bad vibes Shiro’s got brewing, but gracefully crouches down next to Lance.
“I told you,” Shiro growls, get right up in an unaffected Adam’s space. “To quit doing that.”
“Yeah, well,” Adam says, placing a hand in the middle of Shiro’s chest and shoving him a step back. “I told you not to go to to Kerberos, yet here we are.”
“Look around you!” Shiro hisses, waving his hands. “We are literally so far past Kerberos right now, it isn’t even funny.”
“Yes, thank you. I hadn’t noticed,” Adam says hotly, running his hands through his hair and then pulling. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Dick,” Keith whispers, and Lance smacks him.
“Don’t ruin this for me!” Lance breathes. “I haven’t seen a telenovela in ages.”
Keith rolls his eyes.
“I want you to stop throwing yourself into dangerous situations for me,” Shiro replies angrily.
“I’m not going to let you die, Takashi,” Adam sighs, leaning back against the window.. “What do you want me to do? I can’t go back in time and stay on Earth, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. And you know I can’t stay locked up here in the Castle while you run missions. I can’t change that fact that I left.” He pauses, looking exhausted. “So what should I do? I don’t know what we should do.”
Shiro huffs and moves to lean next to Adam. The burning anger is gone from his expression, replaced with more low-level frustration and a deep sadness. “I don’t know either,” says Shiro, and he sounds almost choked up, which enough that Keith’s perpetually bored expression goes mildly concerned.
Adam sighs again and stands up. “Let me know when you figure it out,” he says, and brushes Shiro’s bangs away from his eyes with an odd little quirk of a smile on his face. “We’ll argue about it then,” he finishes, then leaves the bridge. Shiro stays for a while, staring off into space. Lance has plans to wait until the end of time for Shiro to move if it means no one will find out he overheard that conversation. Keith apparently isn’t as concerned, since he stands up, stretches, and says:
“Shiro, you are the epitome of gay disaster.”
“You’re amazing and you scare me like, an unreal amount sometimes,” Lance says, “but if you tell anyone we were here I cannot guarantee that the knowledge of this conversation stays between you and me.” He waves at Shiro’s shocked expression as he runs after Keith’s retreating back.
xxxx
Shiro doesn’t appear to tell anyone, not even Adam. To be fair, Shiro and Adam don’t seem to be saying much of anything to each other. Whatever sort of tension was between them before has been replaced by a lower-burning, thick in the air kind.
Lance, pretending to be oblivious, asks Adam if everything’s okay.
“Not everything can be fixed, I guess,” Adam replies. He ruffles Lance’s hair, and tosses him a weird laser thing that could be a wrench. “But it’ll get better.”
“Do you still love him?” Lance asks, ignoring the laser wrench and buffing out a scratch in Blue’s paint.
“Do you have plans to acknowledge your big gay crush on Keith?” Adam replies, suddenly on the offensive.
“Not— no,” Lance stammers, hoping he isn’t blushing. “I don’t have a— no.”
“Then mind your own business,” Adams mutters.
“Fine!” Lance says. “God, you suck.”
“Very well, thanks,” Adam replies primly.
xxxx
Shiro disappears. Adam refuses to even try to pilot the Black Lion.
“He wanted you to,” he says to Keith.
“I can’t ,” Keith shouts back.
“Then learn to,” Adam says, crossing his arms.
“Adam, at least try,” Allura pleads. She, along with everyone else, knows that Adam could pilot the Black Lion. Lance thinks he understands why he won’t.
“No, princess,” Adam says. “Keith, go.”
Keith closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, then turns on his heel and goes.
Keith makes it work, and Lance pilots Red.
Allura pilots blue.
xxxx
After Shiro disappears, Adam starts taking one man missions. Sometimes he’ll be gone for a day, sometimes for weeks.
None of them have heard from Adam in almost two months. In that time, Shiro has come back and Keith has left, leaving Lance holding together team morale by the shoestrings. Something is seriously wrong with Shiro, even though no one else seems to notice. Lance wishes Keith would come back. He wishes that he knew where Adam is.
By the time three months since they last heard from Adam hits, Shiro is nearly unable to do fight or pilot, his flashbacks have gotten so bad. They’ve barely heard anything from Keith, though they at least have proof of life. Allura, Pidge, and Hunk have been searching for any proof that Adam is still alive.
Lance, along with the rest of the paladins, finds out that the Shiro who came back is a clone when Adam makes his grand reappearance. Said grand reappearance consists of:
- Adam nearly crashing a Galra fighter into the Castle.
- Adam stumbling out of that Galra fighter half-unconscious with a gaping abdominal wound.
- Adam shooting the Shiro clone in the face with a taser.
Later, after Adam has gone through a few cycles in a healing pod, Lance tells him about Shiro calling for him in mind bond.
Adam smiles.
xxxx
Of course, nothing can ever be fucking simple.
Adam, newly free of internal bleeding, violently refuses to pilot the Black Lion. Keith, over space FaceTime, refuses even more violently.
“Do it if you’re not a coward,” Keith says, arms crossed.
Adam actually lunges at the screen. “Call me a fucking coward one more time, you evil little—“ he hisses. Hunk pulls him back into the chair.
“Then do it!” Keith shouts.
Keith and Adam may have a bit of a love-hate relationship. Adam treats Keith the same way Lance’s eldest brother Marco treats Lance, which is to say affectionately horribly. But without Shiro around to mediate, Adam and Keith have been just plain horrible.
“No!” Adam screams. The whole room goes quiet. Adam, no matter how bitchy he got, never yelled. By the time everyone has regained their bearings, Adam has disappeared.
Lance finds him sitting outside Shiro’s empty room an hour of searching later. His head is leant back against the wall and and there’s an Earth phone that Lance has never seen before dangling in his hands. Lance sits down next to him.
“I can’t believe you have a charger and you’ve never told anyone,” Lance says.
“Of course I have one,” Adam scoffs. “I have a PhD, it’s not like I went ‘hey, let’s go find out what kind of bullshit Takashi got himself into this time’ and then forgot a charger.”
“Still—“ Lance begins. “Wait, you have a PhD? Since when?”
“I never,” Adam sighs, ignoring Lance. “I never thought he would end up dead. Takashi did— that’s why he wanted to go to Kerberos in the first place. But I never thought he would die.”
“You know what Allura’s been saying,” Lance replies. A very large part of a small part of Lance’s mind is wondering if he’s ever heard anyone but Adam call Shiro by his first name before. The rest of that small part is stuck on the PhD.
“Yeah, well,” Adam replies, looking at the phone. “I’m not ready to deal with the aftermath of getting let down.”
On the phone is a picture of Adam and Shiro. Shiro is half-smiling and Adam smirking, because neither of them can smile with teeth for some reason, but they look happy. For the first time, Lance can almost picture Shiro and Adam and ShiroandAdam.
“I’m not getting my hopes up,” Adam repeats to himself.
xxxx
One minor consequence of Adam not getting his hopes up is that he is totally unprepared for the opposite.
It doesn’t matter at first. When Keith comes back two years older with a dog, a mom, and an Altean, priority shifts to taking down Lotor. When the dust settles, Shiro is alive, Lotor is gone, and the Castle has been blown to hell. Adam stares at Shiro’s unconscious form with such a look of open, shattered heartbreak that they silently agree to give him a minute.
“What happened to Shiro’s arm?” Hunk asks, tilting his head like a dog.
“I cut it off,” Keith says nonchalantly.
“Huh,” Pidge says. “Cool.”
xxxx
It takes almost three weeks for Shiro to regain consciousness. Lance feels awful for him, since immediately upon awakening, he is set upon by an Adam that has had almost three weeks to stew in his righteous fury.
“You were dead!” Adam yells. Shiro, still laying down, winces. “Actually dead. What the fuck, Takashi!”
“Adam-“ Shiro starts.
“God, I fucking hate you. You had to die, didn’t you,” Adam continues. “Anything less isn’t dramatic enough. I swear—“
“God, you’re amazing,” Shiro murmurs. “You’re so fucking pretty.”
Adam, in the space of three seconds, makes an inhuman screeching sound, tries to pull his own hair out, and crawls on top of Shiro.
“Wow, okay,” Pidge says, just before Hunk covers her eyes.
“Gross,” Keith mutters.
“I think it’s nice,” Lance says.
“Alright, let’s give them some space,” Allura says, clapping elegantly to usher them away.
“They’re the ones who are sucking face in my lion, but fine I guess,” Keith bitches, but it’s fine, because that means Lance gets to cuff him on the back of the head. Hard.
xxxx
“We’re taking it slow,” Adam says while snooping around in Lance’s lion. It’s Adam’s turn to be with Lance in Red. Krolia is in there too, though where she’s dissapeared to is beyond Lance’s guess.
“Oh really,” Lance deadpans, thinking about the incident in Black’s cockpit, and turns to raise an eyebrow.
“Emotionally,” Adam amends thoughtfully.
“Disgusting,” Lance scoffs.
“Excuse me,” Adam says. “I will tell Keith. I’ll do it.”
“No you won’t. I have just as much on you as you do on me,” Lance says.
“Keith reciprocates your feelings,” Krolia says making Lance jump and Adam cackle.
“Yes, Mother Keith. That’s what I’ve been saying for months now, right Lance?” Adam says gleefully.
“What?” Lance says hysterically.
“Keith is oblivious,” Krolia says to Adam. “He gets it from his father.”
“I love you,” Adam says. “If I wasn’t like, stupidly gay and terrified of being legally related to Keith, I’d marry you so hard.”
“Thank you, Adam,” Krolia says smoothly. “But Shiro has been through enough without me… stealing his man, as you would say?”
Lance falls over laughing. Adam rescinds his marriage proposal.
xxxx
The next person to ride with Lance is Keith. More accurately, the next person to ride with Lance is a weird body-swap Keith, who fidgets around and can’t look Lance in the eye.
“Shiro wanted to fly Black for a while,” Keith says, when Lance asks. “Well, Adam wanted Shiro to fly Black for a while.”
“They’re the worst,” Lance sighs wistfully. “I’m so happy for them.”
Keith makes a face, but stays silently looking out the windshield. Lance puts a hand on his arm, and he flinches.
“You good?” Lance asks.
“Uh,” Keith says eloquently.
“Dios, you’re hopeless,” Lance sighs, and kisses him.
xxxx
It’s a few days after the final battle with Sendak that Lance is well enough to leave his hospital room to go to the rec room team Voltron has taken over. Everyone, including their families, is there. Lance is so glad to see his family he’s able to ignore the very loud conversation Shiro and Adam are having about each other’s reckless decisions.
“Uncle Lance, why does that guy have a floating arm?” Elena, Lance’s youngest niece asks.
“He lost his arm in an accident,” Marco says, placing a broad hand on her head and steering her eyes away. “It’s not our business.”
“He’s not scary like the other guy,” Alejandro says, pointing at Adam.
“No, he’s not,” Lance agrees, smirking.
“He’s scary too,” Elena says, pointing to Keith, who sees her and looks terrified.
“Aw, no,” Lance says. “Keith isn’t scary. Keith, come say hello.”
“Hi,” Keith says warily, with a look on his face like a deer in headlights when confronted with the entire McClain clan.
“ Lance ,” his mom says sternly.
“What?” Lance replies.
“You run off to space and find yourself an alien boyfriend. Dios mio,” Luis says.
Keith is so red. It’s great.
“He’s only half alien!” Lance exclaims. Luis throws his hands up and walks away.
“It’s nice to meet you, Keith. I’ve always prayed Lance would find himself a nice person. Maybe I should have asked that they be a nice Catholic, but you seem lovely,” Lance’s Mom says. Keith, impossibly, goes redder.
“Oh my god, Mama,” Veronica sighs, facepalming.
“Mom,” Marco says. It’s such a Mom thing to say that Lance can’t really be mad.
“What?” Lance’s Mom says. “He could be in a screaming match that’s interrupting my family reunión but instead he has a nice boy. I am allowed to be happy.”
“C’mon Keith, let’s go say hi to Pidge’s family,” Lance says, grabbing Keith’s hand.
“They seem nice,” Keith says dazedly.
“Nice, yes,” Lance says, and flops down next to Matt, pulling Keith with him. “But also fucking crazy.”
“Maybe,” Keith smirks.
“Hush,” Matt says, absently smacking Lance in the face. “It’s getting intense.”
Matt and Pidge are watching Adam and Shiro. Pidge actually has popcorn, which she passes over Lance to Keith.
“Fine!” Shiro yells. “Marry me then!”
The whole room goes quiet. Pidge silently hands Matt a dollar.
“What?” Adam hisses.
“You heard me,” Shiro says stubbornly.
“Yes, I’ll marry you, but only for tax benefits,” Adam says after a tense moment. Shiro grins.
“Adam!” Lance reprimands.
“Ugh,” Adam says. “And also because…” he shoots a pained look at ceiling, Lance, and Shiro in succession. “...I like, love you, apparently,” Adam mumbles.
“You didn’t have to say it,” Shiro says smugly. Adam groans. “I love you too.”
“I know,” Adam says, and kisses him.