WHO: Shiro and Matt WHAT: Shiro and Matt discuss the Garrison WHEN: Backdated a few days ago WHERE: Outside their suite WARNINGS: Feelings of betrayal!
Matt had been hit with revelation after revelation, and his head hurt. At first he’d been angry -- about the Garrison, not about Keith’s genetics, that had just been a surprise more than anything else -- but then the anger had been followed by sadness and disappointment, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. It was probably just as well he wasn’t in his own world, he wasn’t ready to face the Garrison yet. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he was ready to go back and face the military that he’d been working for in Tumbleweed, especially since so much of his application and employment there had been based on his experience as a science officer in the military at home. He eventually ended up just sitting at the end of the hallway outside their suite, staring glumly out the window at the ocean. -- Shiro honestly hadn’t thought to give Matt a rundown of everything that had happened with the Garrison. Maybe he should have. But to him, everything was just so jumbled and had been a relatively moot point. He was sure that Pidge and Keith had gone through more with the Garrison than Shiro had. But he understood, all the same, why it was difficult news to hear. They had devoted so much of themselves to the Garrison and their mission, and in turn, the Garrison had not only lied about their deaths but made it seem as if they had brought the whole mess down on themselves. It didn’t take him long to find Matt after Keith’s warning. He sidled up next to his friend and nudged his shoulder against Matt’s. “Hey Mattie,” he said quietly. … Matt looked up, startled; he’d been so lost in thought that he hadn’t even heard Shiro approach. Before he realized it was Shiro, he started to try to school his features into something resembling a more neutral expression; then he stopped trying when he saw Shiro’s face, and frowned again, looking down and away. “Hey,” he answered. His emotions felt even more complicated now that Shiro was here; he wasn’t at all sure he was ready to talk about this. He just didn’t know where any of this was going to go, whether he would start yelling or burst into tears, or both. He had never felt as betrayed as he did now - not by Shiro, but by the Garrison - and it was a new feeling, this mixture of anger and disappointment and resentment coiling in his gut. -- It was so unusual to see Matt this open with a negative emotion. Shiro just wished that he could make it all better, but he knew that for Matt’s continued light-hearted nature, he had seen and experienced the grittier side of the universe, which went so much darker than what Shiro had anticipated they would ever witness firsthand. “Keith said that he might have been the bearer of some bad news,” Shiro said carefully. “Do you want to talk about it?” … Matt’s gaze flickered back up to him, a little surprised. Surprised first and foremost that Keith had told Shiro -- although when he really thought about it, it wasn’t that surprising -- and second, that Shiro already knew what the Garrison had done. For some reason, Matt hadn’t expected that. To be fair, Shiro had bigger, more pressing concerns -- like the Galra arm that was still attached to him, and which they had already discovered was booby-trapped. But Matt still would have expected him to be angrier about this, that it should have at least made Shiro’s list of concerns, if not the very top. Matt wondered if Shiro had simply absorbed the blame, accepted it, and that thought made him even angrier. “Do you think they even tried to find us?” he blurted out, without really knowing that he was going to say it. “Before they just started assigning blame?” -- “I don’t know,” Shiro admitted. He hesitated and added, “But I kind of doubt it.” To be fair, he didn’t know what the Garrison could have done. He didn’t know what information had been transmitted to the Garrison about their location, or the status of their ship after they had been captured. Maybe they had seen that the three of them had gone far beyond the reaches of where they should have been able to go. Maybe they had simply seen the ship deserted on Kerberos. But it was the cover-up story that made Shiro wonder, because they’d either known something had happened and had wanted to make sure that no blame ever landed on the Garrison at all for the mission being a failure or for something bad happening to Shiro and the Holts. Space was dangerous, and they all knew that. Missions failed all the time for all sorts of reasons. But it did sting that blaming him was the lie they had decided upon for this occasion, rather than telling any semblance of the truth. … Matt closed his eyes and rested his head against the window. He felt stupid; he supposed that was what it all boiled down to. He had grown up idolizing the Garrison, idolizing his father for working for them, idolized Shiro for being the pilot that would take them to the stars. They’d all risked their lives to go out into space - not just for the glory of the Garrison, of course, also for science and exploration and adventure - and naively, Matt had expected that the Garrison had been looking for them all this time. Or at least that they were grieving them, honoring their brave efforts in the name of humankind, the way astronauts were usually honored after death. But it still wasn’t even about wanting the glory or the recognition and having his hopes crushed. He’d put his trust in the Garrison to have their backs. To try to find them, and if they couldn’t -- there were a million ways they could have told the story that wouldn’t put the blame on Shiro for fucking up the mission. He might have even preferred to be blamed, himself - although that still would have made him angry. This just wasn’t the way the Garrison was supposed to work. He was angry on Shiro’s behalf, and he was angry on behalf of his father, who had devoted so much of his life - and given up so much, like time with his family - and now might be dead, and the Garrison didn’t care. Eventually, the only thing he could think to say was, “Doesn’t that make you angry?” -- “Of course it does,” Shiro said, although his voice was still quiet. His thoughts mirrored Matt’s in that this was an organization that he had trusted wholeheartedly and put so much of himself into, and it hurt to know that it didn’t deserve or maybe even respect that trust. It wasn’t even precisely that the Garrison had basically tried to frame him. It was that he had thought they were all on the same page on what they wanted to achieve and what was acceptable and ethical to do to achieve those things. And apparently they weren’t. He wasn’t vain, but he had thought that he and the Holts were more than just assets to the Garrison. He had thought they were people too. … Being this angry and upset was exhausting. It was not just this, which made it even worse. Matt had spent a long time pushing aside fear and worry and grief and a million other emotions, just because he hadn’t had the luxury of being able to let himself feel all of it. He hadn’t been able to afford the time or the weakness, because if he slowed down or dropped his guard for even a second, it might have gotten him killed. He’d already been struggling with that a little bit since arriving in Tumbleweed, more than he’d let on, using the same coping mechanisms of cheer and humor and distracting himself with work. But his pride in his work was all tied up in his pride about being a member of the Garrison, and now that was gone. He didn’t know how to distract himself from it now. “My dad devoted so much of his life to them,” he said, tiredly. “I spent my whole childhood idolizing him, and the Garrison. If we’d known they would do something like this… I don’t even know what my life would have been like. It might have been totally different.” He didn’t know if that was what he wanted. Maybe it was. -- “Our lives would have been completely different,” Shiro agreed. Shiro likely would have never left Japan. He would have never met Matt or Keith or any of the other paladins or Allura and Coran. He would fundamentally not be the same person he was today because the entirety of his life had been spent trying to get to space. But he also didn’t see any point in regretting all of that. There was no point. They couldn’t change any of it now. “But now you know,” Shiro said quietly. “You didn’t go your whole life blindly devoted to them, so when you get back, you can make a difference, Matt. You can shut the Garrison down. You can make them change everything. You’ll have a lot of sway when you turn up on Earth alive and with more knowledge of space than any other human being.” … Matt envied Shiro his surety in that statement, the calm confidence that Matt would be able to make everything right. Matt would have liked to believe it, but he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. The whole thing smelled, and Matt really didn’t know what the Garrison’s reasoning had been behind the coverup. From the way Keith had talked, it sounded like he thought maybe the Garrison knew about the Galra and was somehow in league with them. Matt found it hard to believe that they would do that on purpose, but it was less hard to believe that somehow they’d been infiltrated and -- what would the purpose of an infiltration be? To send humans to the Galra camps for entertainment and labor? The idea of it made him feel sick. If it really was something like that, it wasn’t going to be as easy to take on the Garrison as Shiro was making it sound. “Keith said something about how they acted when you got back,” he said, instead of responding to anything that Shiro was saying. “What happened?” -- Shiro faltered for a moment and rubbed a thumb in between his eyebrows trying to refocus his thoughts. His memories even from then were somewhat chaotic -- probably because of a concoction of trauma, adrenaline, and the drugs the Garrison had given him. “I crash landed near the Garrison,” Shiro said, “and I tried to warn them what was happening.” He was sure that he had come off a little deranged, but he had been, to be fair. He had been really scared, not entirely sure what was happening, and he had been expecting some relief at being home -- and that had never happened, obviously. “They put me in containment and when they saw the arm … They had me put on under until they could ascertain whether or not I was a threat,” Shiro paused. “And around then, as far as I know, is when Keith showed up.” … The reasonable part of Matt’s mind could understand why they might put someone who had crash-landed on Earth, wearing a Galra arm no less, into containment. Putting him under sedation seemed a little excessive, but not entirely outside the realm of reasonable process. The problem was that Matt just didn’t trust that the rest of that process would have continued to be reasonable, because Shiro was also the pilot they’d blamed for the Kerberos mission failure, and having him back -- telling a different story -- might have presented a problem for them. How big the problem was depended on how much that story was covering up. “So it probably won’t be that simple,” he said. “If or when I get back.” Anger was taking over his other emotions again, which made him feel a little more energized to do something rather than sit and sulk, but it didn’t make him feel like he was any more in control of his emotions, or thinking any more clearly. -- “No, it won’t be simple,” Shiro agreed. The Garrison had a lot of resources. But they’d also used many of those resources to promote the important work that the Kerberos mission had been doing, and it was going to look weird when the people from that mission kept showing back up with a story that didn’t match the Garrison’s. At the heart of it, though, Shiro figured that Matt just needed to be angry right now. Planning for futures that might never happen wasn’t going to help that. Matt likely felt betrayed and, unfortunately, there wasn’t really much either of them could do to fix that at the moment. “They fucked us over, Matt,” Shiro said, tired. “But we’re surviving in spite of that.” … Matt glanced over at Shiro. He was angry about a lot of things, at a lot of people, but Shiro wasn’t one of them. It was discomfiting to realize that the number of people he could trust -- from their Earth, at least, but possibly anywhere else too -- were starting to be few enough that he could count them on his fingers. Although, that wasn’t quite true -- he trusted some more of the rebels. But they weren’t likely to be any help to him on Earth, in any fight against the Garrison. They would be distrusted by the Garrison and by the world just for being alien. “I just thought getting home would mean being done fighting,” he said, also tired. “But that’s obviously not the case, so… it is what it is, I guess.” He hoped he was going to remember this when he got back to their universe, so that he would be prepared to face whatever happened when they got home. --