Summary & CW: Angst, enemies (more like rivals/they had beef with each other) to lovers , he gets jealous, blade of marmora!keith, spy!reader, reader has hair long enough that can be put up, no use of y/n, second person
Pairing: Keith Kogane x Fem!Reader
A/N: Another piece out the Kiln! Thank you to the loml (@starkkat) for requesting this ilysm. Yall do not know this but before zuko and Jason, there was keith <3 10 year old me knew what was up when I saw him, cannot believe I’ve been down bad for him for 10 years omg. Anyway I hope you all enjoy this fic, it is VERY self-indulgent! (Also please don’t think too much about the timeline)
You were without a doubt going to kill Keith Kogane.
After the last mission with the paladins, a source of yours reached out with the a lead you’d been investigating for months. It felt as though the clouds parted and the sun finally shone for the first time in weeks. This comet had become the biggest pain in the ass since you lost it.
The next day, you approached Shiro asking for clearance to take a pod in order to handle a personal matter.
It wasn’t out of the ordinary for this to happen. The paladins went out on their own pretty often. With the little free time they had or on their own solo missions, they took the lions freely with the only requirement being communicating about where they went.
This mission though… this one was a little different.
Under no circumstance could Lotor find out.
Allura may have grown an affinity for the prince, going as far as making an alliance with him. However, the same couldn’t be said for the rest of you.
This was a man who tried to kill you, on multiple occasions.
She may have been ready to sweep it under the rug with the discovery of his Altean heritage, but you weren’t. This was the son of a dictator. This was a prince who once held a sword to your neck while his generals had a gun to your temple, sparing you nothing but a smile.
He was without a doubt, his father's son.
So with the slight possibility at finding the remains of the comet, you had to go. You weren’t convinced that Lotor had only made one ship with it. There had to be something else.
Shiro cleared you with no problem. The only concern now was having to remove the tracking tech on the pod. You covered your tracks and came up with a whole story, but with one look at where you were, it would fall apart in an instant.
Fortunately, after four nights of messing with wires and panels with your rudimentary knowledge of Altean, you managed to disconnect the location services of the pod. You left before anyone woke and shut down all comms on the trip on the preface of fear of interception. Travel took a little under a day.
The slight dilemma about the mission was where your “lead” was. It was in the Kexeresa system. There wasn’t much information about it. They were on the careful edge of rebel fighters and Galran empire, standing on a precipice ready to fall onto anyone’s side. The team hadn’t managed to get all the way out here yet. There were only eight of you, and the whole universe to save.
The pod landed on the outskirts of the city. Thankfully, no one was guarding the entry and exit of the planet's atmosphere. Making your way into town, you were grateful there weren’t many strange looks shot in your direction. The pros of being more on the back end is no one knew your face. And seeing as you didn’t have a lion or paladin armor, it made these missions less complicated than what you were accustomed to.
The man you needed to meet was in a bar. Stepping thorugh the entryway, you almost laughed. It looked like the Cantina from the Star Wars movies you watched back at home. It was almost comical how similar the layout was. The band was in the corner, the bar top was in the center, and the pale sandstone of the walls transported you onto a movie set you hadn’t thought of in years.
Nistos was toward the back, sat in a booth with a drink in hand. While not being Galran himself, he associated with many. The picture you’d found in the system did not do his appearance justice. He was horrific to look at, his presence disgusted you. He had a hooked nose with a sage green complexion and beady eyes that eyed up every woman walking past him.
This was either going to be a lot easier or a lot harder than you thought.
Taking a deep breath and accepting your fate, you searched for the restroom. There was only one way you were going to get the information you wanted, even if it mean sacrificing your dignity.
No one was here to witness it anyway, so was there really any harm?
Your legs carried you past the swinging door and you found yourself face to face with your reflection in the cloudy mirror.
This was going to have to work.
Immediately, you pull the hair tie and let your hair fall loose from where it was strung together on the back of your head. As your hair fell around your shoulders, your fingers teased at your roots, increasing the volume while making it a socially acceptable mess. Then you pulled down the hem of your shirt. Your grip teased at the neckline, stretching it to make it sink in a way only the pervert of a man you were going to interact with be tempted by. As your final act of abandoning any class you had left, the knife you stored in your boots went to your leggings; trimming them to a length you hadn’t allowed yourself to wear at all since departing Earth. But you had a mission, and that came first.
After cutting the strips of fabric off your legs, you glanced back at your reflection. She was every bit the tramp you needed to be tonight. With a deep sigh, you don’t dwell on it any longer and leave the last shred of dignity you had with the scraps of spandex in the trash.
You’d made it about twenty minutes into the conversation when you notice him. Your hair was twirled around your index finger and you let out your fiftieth high-pitched giggle when you study the shift in environment. It was getting darker out and the bar was getting livelier. Looking past Nistos' left shoulder, your eyes gravitate toward the mask decorated by three purple orbs lingering in the shadows.
It was a miracle no one notice him.
Your heart sunk to your stomach in an instant. It didn’t matter that you didn’t see his face. Based on the build and stance alone, you knew the exact expression that the mask would reveal. There was no one else in the universe that would attune himself to you in that way.
When he noticed that you finally found him, his head motioned the exit next to him.
You searched for an ounce of a lead for months and now that you find it, Keith thought he could swoop in? Nice try.
With a laugh that was far too flirtatious for your liking and for what Nistos was saying, you drape your left arm over his shoulder. Your hand falls behind his neck, out of sight, when you lift your middle finger toward the man who was for sure going to ruin this.
It took him five minutes.
A bomb went off in a two-mile radius from where you were, the bar evacuated within seconds. You came to find out later that it was in fact an abandoned warehouse, so no one got hurt.
Well, no one except Keith.
Once you’d been rushed outside, you saw him slip behind the building. Nistos had already high tailed away from you, leaving you no choice but to stomped in the direction of the ravenette. Before he had the chance to turn around, your palm met the crown of his head as you smacked him.
“What could that have possibly been for?” His words came out modulated, the Marmora mask disappearing as he finished the question.
“You motherfucker.” The words were spit out like venom off your tongue.
He merely crossed his arms. “What’re you doing here? I thought you guys were planning for Lotor’s crowning.”
“I was following a lead.” You managed to grit out, teeth pressed together. It was truly mind boggling how you never managed to be in the same orbit as him without some fight breaking out.
“Really?” he deadpans, “that was following a lead?”
His eyes roam over you, and you finally see it. The tick in his jaw, the way he swallowed too hard, the purple of his eyes darkening to match his pupils.
“You’re kidding.” Disbelief was mixed in with your tone. His eyes flicker back to yours and defensiveness pools into his posture.
“Oh my god, you so were. You were jealous of that piece of shit.”
Even in the darkness of the night, you can see how his cheeks tint to a pale pink and he remains silent. He knows there’s no winning this battle. You may be comfortable with sacrificing some dignity, but Keith wasn’t.
“What lead were you following?”
The desire to tease him hadn’t entirely left your system; unfortunately, there were more pressing matters.
A part of you missed this. You and Keith knew each other back from the Garrison and to put it simply, you hated each other. You were the most competitive duo in your class. After one bad decision and going out with the group, you found yourself swept across space with them.
Playing nice with Keith was probably the hardest part in the beginning. It was a long road of bickering, cursing, and full on war. It was months before you could be in the same room together without a snide remark. You still don’t really know when it happened, maybe it was at the mall, or maybe it was when Shiro disappeared but slowly, he turned into someone to lean on. One night the line between distaste and something more blurred. Neither of you mentioned it, not to the paladins, and definitely not to each other.
There wasn’t much to tell anyway. The only things that changed were that he slept in your bed occasionally, he let you near him at times when it all got too much, and you traded kisses in the dark and acted like nothing happened once morning came.
It was a quiet type of change that no one caught on. But you never missed it. You never missed how his body turned to yours, how he sought you out after a mission, how he always patched you up. How he held you on the nights when nightmares truck him.
He joined the blade and you couldn’t hold it against him, not really. Not when nothing was ever going to come of you two. Not when the fate of the universe rested on your shoulders.
“It was about the comet.” The answer came out oddly soft and he perked up. He was never going to forget that mission. It haunted all of you. “I got some chatter from a rebel fighter that Nistos was working with some Galran generals to transport a rare type of metal. He’s been bragging about it at the bar for a few weeks. I looked up some of the intel and when I checked the receiving port he was talking about, it didn’t exist in Galran records. So then I found the generals involved in the contract, and Acxa signed off on it. Lotor may have Allura and the paladins convinced but I’m not sold yet, there’s something more we’re missing.”
It was frustrating sometimes. The three moons on this planet managed to light up his face just right, reminding you of all the nights he held you in your room. He was staring down at you so intensely, you were tempted to look away. There was so much more you wanted to say but couldn’t.
How could you look at him and tell him that you were happy he was here? That you were happy he found you. How could you look him in the eye and tell him that fighting with him tonight was the best thing that happened in weeks? Because being with him was better than any lead you could chase.
All he does after processing the information is nod, a small simple thing and he looks away.
“Let me get you back to the ship. I should probably say hi to the others.”
There’s a new cut on his neck. The scab was fresh and pink, fading at the edges ready to scar. Before you could stop yourself, your nails were tracing the top of it that peaked from the top of his suit.
“Where did you get that?”
His breath hitched in his throat. It had been so long since someone touched him this gently. As if he could break instead of something to break.
“Training session gone wrong,” he whispered. The night was loud around you, panicked voices from the bar, officials checking out the warehouse. It was almost necessary for this to be quiet, reserved just for you.
You hummed in reply, dropping your hand to your side once again.
“I missed you.” He whispers again, dropping his forehead to yours. You weren’t sure when the proximity between you shrank and he was millimeters away, yet you couldn’t push him away. It was almost as if your body wouldn’t let you.
His confession landed somewhere you didn’t want to think of as it cut right through you. You missed him too, it was impossible not to, but he left. He made his choice and you couldn’t follow. A small thought in the back of your head always wondered what would have happened if you asked him to stay. If you fed into that selfish desire to keep him with you in the walls of the castle. Maybe something might've come of you two. Maybe he would still hold you at night. Maybe you could look at the dip in your mattress and not be haunted by the fact he no longer comes home.
It's difficult to stomach the fact you barely talk anymore. He goes on month long missions and then calls get missed, words are lost in translation, and next thing you know it’s been three months since you’ve seen him.
“I missed you too Kogane.”
And with that, you just let it exist. You let the small confession of two young adults with a burden none should bare lay between you, because there was nothing to be done. You were going to have to miss each other until the war was over. You were going to have to love him from a distance because you were in too deep. You lost too much of yourself to this war to give up here, to ask him to come back to you.
So as a final act of love for now, you give yourself this gift. You steal this small moment from the universe behind a bar, allowing yourselves to hold each other one more time. Because unfortunately, there’s always a chance it may be your last.
A/N: Can't believe i'm writing a voltron oneshot in the year 2026 omg
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