AN:

Voltron fic whattttt

Disclaimer: I do not own Voltron: Legendary Defender

I'm baaaaaccckkkk home! And honestly, I'm ready to not be back home anymore. I literally just got in the other day and already want to go back to school— how crazy is that!

A little bit about this fic: I got this idea off Pinterest (bc I'm original) and felt like giving it my own take. The idea is a little weird and confusing, so be prepared for a shaky story line! Not that you aren't used to that from me! :D

And without further ado—

Chp 1: Grateful Solidarity

"This would go a lot easier if it was at least in English!" Keith shouted to his empty room, slamming his backpack onto his black desk chair, sending the object spinning. The collided with his simple, black desk, a few books falling off the built-in shelves.

Keith growled, muttering under his breath as he stomped across his room towards his beat-up radio. It sat patiently on top of a grey filing cabinet of old projects and papers, antenna standing proudly. Keith smacked the "on" button with more force than necessary, the soft fabric of his fingerless gloves making a sharp sound against the cheap plastic of the device.

The rapid beating of a double bass and the electrifying first notes of the lead guitarist's intro were almost enough to sooth Keith immediately. He took a deep breath with his eyes closed and listened as the bouncy Latin pop stampeding rhythmically through his brain became a dull melody in the background of the musical chaos that is heavy metal.

He plopped down onto his desk chair, sharing the space with his full backpack. Keith tugged a few heavy textbooks out of the spacious bag and dropped them delicately onto the desk, rummaging through the drawers of his desk for his charcoals. Finally finding the tin of dark pencils, he grabbed one of his many nearly filled notebooks and flipped through it to a blank, white page.

He passed several basic and partly-done works, which were slowly filling all twelve of his sketchbooks. One was of two feminine hands tightly intertwined; his lesson for attempting this sketch being on how to rotate objects in space. A close-up eye that belonged to someone who had clearly been crying recently was a lesson in colour. A huddle of faceless bodies standing close as if posing for a picture; a lesson in proportioning and comparative measuring.

All of these lessons were passed with flying colours and relative ease, for Keith. But this time was different. For this assignment, Keith's technical art professor was demanding his students to learn how to put emotion on a page.

This confused Keith. This confused Keith for a lot of reasons. For one, this was a technical class in charcoal and pencil sketches. Technical things were your easily measured criteria having to deal with space, angles, lines, shades, colours, etc. Technical things were not usually emotional, up for interpretation, suggestive or implicative. They were facts. Stone cold facts.

The second problem was how sincere the teacher wanted the project to be. If he just wanted the students to draw a sad person or a happy person, it would be a simple task. Too simple of a task. And we can't have that.

No, the teacher wanted them to only illustrate difficult to describe emotions. Hope, for example. Sonder. A couple of other words that Keith was 99% sure were all made up.

So not only were they doing something non-technical, they were also doing the most difficult version of that non-technical skill as possible.

But wait.

It gets worse.

Keith sucked at non-technical skills.

Keith had no idea what he wanted to do.

Keith was screwed and may drop out of college and save himself the student loans.

Groaning, Keith violently chucked a balled-up scrap of doodles over his head at the art covered wall his desk was set against. He just couldn't draw emotions well. And he definitely couldn't draw indescribable emotions well.

Keith was good at technical things (spatial reasoning, ratios, proportioning, colour balance, highlighting), but when it got to the other side of art (emotional significance, metaphor, deeper meaning, inspiration, BS like that), he fell a little flat.

Tell him to draw something that will showcase his talent with reflections or double images, and he'll draw a pretty nature scene reflected across a glassy lake, or a towering figure being followed by its own creeping shadow.

Tell him to draw something that will showcase his talent with manipulating space and angles, and he'll draw the head on image of a long and narrowing road lined with skyscrapers, or a simple still life at a strange, unexpected angle.

Tell him to draw something that will showcase his talent with colour and he'll draw his roommate's side of their shared room (bright oranges, clean whites, earthy beiges) being contrasted with his side (soft greys, solid blacks, harsh reds) or he'll draw racks of paints having fallen over to create a huge puddle of colours on the floor.

Those were things he could do. The way he presented his work was often on the cliché side (romantic nature scene in front of a lake to show skill with reflections? A little too literal. Mess of tipped paints to show talent with colour? A bit too obvious.) but he could pull them off nonetheless.

The things he could not do were as follows:

1. Make a "story" with his art.

Honestly, wasn't it the job of the enjoyers of art to apply their own meaning and understandings to the art they saw? It didn't really matter what the artist's intention was, as long as the art was beautiful enough for someone to care to think about its story

2. Using emotion in his art.

He wasn't very good at drawing people with different emotions, to start with. But drawing someone sad, drawing a sad art piece and drawing a piece intended to make people sad were all, apparently, completely different things.

This is a very incomplete list, but because someone is blaring Latin pop at full blast, Keith cannot concentrate on labeling his inadequacies in art.

Keith surrendered the charcoal pencil that he had been twirling between his fingers and dropped his face into both hands. Releasing a loud groan, he leaned forward so that his forehead rested against the desk, hands still covering his tired eyes. His eyes burned. And when he closed them for too long, they watered. Also, his temples were aching.

"Hey man, are you okay?" a soft voice eased through the screaming metal music, the pounding Latin pop and the colourful language Keith was stringing together in his head against someone in particular. Keith turned to face his roommate, Hunk, who was standing in the doorway of the room with a concerned expression on his kind, dark face.

"I'm going to kill my soulmate," Keith deadpanned, turning his face back into his hands. He heard Hunk snort and cross the room to drop his bag and heavy kitchen knife kit onto his bed under the window.

"You're so lucky your soulmate doesn't listen to music," Keith added glumly, too lost in his self-thrown pity party to realize how insensitive he was being. He heard a heavy sigh from across the room and felt an icy pang in his chest, his face heating with embarrassment. "Sorry."

"No, no, don't apologize," Hunk muttered casually as he smoothed the already made bed, easing out invisible wrinkles in the handmade quilt. He let out a self-deprecating laugh bubbling out of him. "It must get… irritating, for you."

"No man, I- I'm sorry, I really am. That was a dumb thing to… I didn't mean…" Keith babbled, reaching over to turn down his music. He began to nervously fiddle with a string on his gloves.

Keith was thankful that the fast Spanish song in his brain was turned way down all of the sudden, probably in response to his sudden retreat in the music battle. Keith didn't even have it in him to be triumphant at his success in quieting his soulmate's music. He edged from his side of the room towards Hunk's, stepping onto his roommate's soft cream rug.

"It's okay, I just…" Hunk let out a shuddery breath. "I want to know what she hears. What she likes. What she dances to. What she sings to. What she listens to when she's sad, or happy, or nervous. I just want to know. For so long, I thought I didn't have a soulmate… and when I found out she exists, and couldn't find much information on her, I just… I want to know…"

"Look, it… it might not be that she's deaf—" Keith offered tentatively, knowing where his roommate was going with this time-worn conversation. He eased into the upholstered, orange and white chair on Hunk's side of the room.

"What other explanation is there?" Hunk scoffed bitterly. Keith fell silent, feeling like an insensitive jerk.

"Come on, you know what they say! Maybe she doesn't like music, maybe her culture doesn't celebrate music, maybe—"

"They say it's 23% likely to be those kinds of reasons. Because, even if she doesn't like music, or her culture doesn't support it, she's bound to hear something musical at some point. She's bound to find some sound beautiful and relay it to me." Hunk rubbed a hand against the back of his head.

"And everyone knows that the rest of that percentage— it's, what 77%?— is the likelihood that the soulmate that doesn't hear music is deaf." Hunk's eyes widened considerably when he said this and he shook his head, letting out a nervous laugh. "I sound horrible. I sound like the most terrible thing to happen is to have a soulmate that's deaf. It's not that, it's never been that."

"I know it's not that, of course it's not that!" Keith agreed adamantly, hating how tortured his friend looked.

Hunk was easily the nicest, most accepting and most generous person that Keith had ever come in contact with. There's no way he could harbor any kind of hatred— or even a dislike— for anyone. Especially if that hatred or dislike was based on a disability or something else that a person couldn't control.

"I just… sometimes, I just…" Hunk looked so bone-tired. He looked weary and stressed. It added a good twenty years to his face, which held bruised and baggy under-eyes and an uncharacteristically turned down mouth. Keith hated himself in that moment.

"Hunk," he said as warmly as he could managed.

He reached over to put his small, gloved hand on one of Hunk's large ones, which were both still fiddling with the white and light beige blanket. "They're making so many advances these days. There's a huge chance that your soulmate will be able to receive the care and the technology she needs to be able to hear again."

"You don't know that. And even if she can get it, it's synthetic. It doesn't bring back hearing all the way and it's not real—"

"But it's a start." Keith interrupted firmly, squeezing his friend's hand. He felt a wave of warmth wash over him as the large hand under his own squeezed back.

"It's a start," Hunk agreed with a watery grin, that slowly melted into a serious expression. "Keith?"

"Yeah?"

"Promise me that, no matter how angry you get at your soulmate, no matter how loud she plays her music— please… Please never regret having her. Never wish her deaf. Never wish she'd stop listening to music."

A grave look like that being on Hunk's normally perky, friendly face got Keith's immediate attention. The artist nodded before verbally swearing to obey the simple request. The pair stood for a few more moments, the feeling of solidarity being enough for now.

AN:

Thanks for hanging in there guys, feel free to let me know what you think and how I can make this chapter better! Have a good one!