Catch the Stars ||Keith Kogane||

38

Trip had never been challenged before. She had never even seen one happen with Litarra, but had heard that it only happened once before no one questioned him again. No one ever told her who it was, not even Haron. She had started to question if it had actually happened, if a challenge had ever happened, until now.

Braut had never liked her. Respected her? Maybe at one point he did. But he had never liked her. It was clear when they were younger and training together on orders from Litarra, his blade always swung a little too close to her neck. If blood was drawn, he would get a smile on his face and back up like he had just handed Litarra a prize. Like he had given him reason to be rid of her.

The smile always fell when Litarra gave her instructions on how to improve.

His dislike for her had finally settled on the mission that ended with Litarra's dead body. That was the day a lot of people decided not to like or respect her, and it had taken a year to earn what she had. But Braut had never come around. Not that she blamed him, his leader had died on her watch. She didn't blame anyone for the whispers about her in the bar.

"So..." the room had been tense and quiet from every angle until Pidge spoke up, "are we allowed to ask what exactly a challenge means?"

Trip, who had taken to sitting on the edge of Allura's pedestal while the princess steered the castle, looks up. She didn't even have time to answer the question before someone else put in their two cents.

"She told us," Keith says from his chair, looking unbothered and almost asleep, "someone wants to take her position."

"Yeah but how?" asks Hunk, tapping his feet on the metal ground nervously, "a chess match? Cooking competition?"

"A fight, obviously," Keith answers again with a sigh, "it's Olympia. Everything ends in a fight. Even their parties."

Trip looks back down at the ground. He was right. It was part of the culture, part of how almost everyone there grew up. Ignoring the portion of her life that she spent in a cell, the violence of Olympia is all she's ever known. Parties end in drunk fistfights, funerals end in battle cries, and challenging authority means using a blade. It's just how it is.

Though she wished it wasn't. Sometimes, like now, Trip wished her people were more civil about their disputes. It was something she'd always wanted to break but had never had an opportunity to.

"Any active soldier on Olympia can challenge the acting Heda," She explains, trying to think about how to explain this without sounding as...brutal as it is, "the winner takes the throne and the loser..." Trip shrugs, realizing that it was cruel and there was no other way to explain it, "dies a shameful death."

Keith scoffs, not turning his eyes away from the moving sky outside the castle they were flying in, "why am I not surprised?"

She ignores him entirely, pretending like he wasn't there instead of humoring him with even a glare. She'd almost forgotten how much Keith truly hated her people's ways. Even if she wasn't the biggest fan of their traditional methods at times, she understood that it was how things had been for years. A lot of people on Olympian didn't know any other way. They had been born and raised by survivors of Galran raids. Forced to have daggers as their first toys and their first steps towards the battlefield.

Lance waves his hands through the air like he was brushing away the problem, a smirk on his face, "I bet Trip's beat these challenges a hundred times!"

She gives him a blank stare, "I've never been challenged before."

His confident expression falls, his shoulders slouching, "oh," but he regains his momentum as quickly as he lost it, "but that means no ones questioned you before, right! So the people are on your side!"