Chapter Text
Two years.
The marriage lasted two years and it comes as absolutely no shock when Shiro discovers the divorce papers, already organized into a neat folder and signed, on the home screen of his tablet. He doesn’t get upset. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t even consider calling Curtis’s name through the echoey house and asking what these are, or what this means. He doesn’t reflect on at what points things might have taken a turn for the distant between them, or what he did wrong, or if there’s any part of their relationship that can still be salvaged from the smoking wreckage. He just sits down with a sigh so quiet it could be the wind outside and traces his name onto the pages over and over.
Takashi Shirogane. Takashi Shirogane. Takashi Shirogane.
“Hey Shiro,” chirps Pidge’s voice through the video screen. “You look like you’ve seen better days.”
“Are you busy?” Shiro asks.
“Never too busy for you.”
Hunk’s restaurant is packed, but he sits down with them when he brings their drinks. Shiro takes a sip of his cocktail and splutters. It smells more strongly of vodka than of any of the other ingredients listed under its name on the menu.
“Divorce, huh?” Hunk asks, pushing the entire plate of mozzarella sticks in his direction. Shiro’s been on a diet since his lifestyle became more sedentary, but he figures tonight of all nights he deserves it. He grabs one. “Not to be rude but I can’t say I’m surprised.”
Pidge hums her agreement as she double dips into the marinara sauce. Hunk doesn’t even have mozzarella sticks on the menu, but he makes them without asking when he hears Pidge is coming by.
“I’m not either,” Shiro admits. It’s been a long time coming. Doomed from the start, if he’s to be completely honest with himself. While trying the whole If you get too worried about what could go wrong, you might miss a chance to do something great bit he’d somehow lost the patience yields focus along the way.
“Where are you gonna go?” Hunk asks. “Unless you’re keeping the house...which knowing you I don’t think you are.”
Shiro shrugs, mentally shuffles through his options. He does have them, but none of them sound appealing. Of course, neither does overstaying his welcome in a failed marriage. “Back to Garrison housing, I guess.”
“You could stay at Lance’s,” Pidge pipes up.
Hunk makes a face. Shiro can feel the echo of it on his own features and he tries to rein it in out of politeness, but he knows they’re all far too aware of why that’s probably not a good place for a recently divorced man to end up. He takes another long swig of his drink. The orange juice in it isn’t enough to make it not taste like rubbing alcohol, but Shiro thinks he probably deserves the burn.
“You’ll figure it out,” Hunk says. “Navigating a divorce should be easy after everything you’ve been through.”
It should be easy, and it is easy. Too easy. Shiro had thought when the time came that it would hurt somewhere. That he’d feel it as an ache in his chest or a rolling in his gut. At least for a few days, a few sleepless nights. But right now he mostly just feels the same as the nothing that he’s trained himself to feel for so long. Maybe he’ll wake up in the morning and it’ll all crash over him at once, tsunami-like and suffocating. But tonight the ache of old battle scars hurts more than his emotions. This isn’t an uncommon state to find himself in.
Probably why he’s down a husband. But that’s more than enough self-reflection for one night. He turns to his glass again.
“I’m gonna head back to the kitchen,” Hunk says. He eyes Shiro’s empty drink. “I’ll make sure we get another one of those sent out to you.”
He goes and leaves Shiro absently picking breadcrumbs off fried cheese in his wake. Shiro knows Pidge is eyeing him scrutinizingly, but part of him doesn’t want to hear what too-logical thing she has to say right now. He knows it’s immature, but immaturity is a luxury he’s rarely ever allowed himself in the past.
“You know,” she starts, and for the first time today Shiro’s stomach twists. “You could always go find—”
“Pidge,” he says sharply, and they both know that’s the final word.
The papers have barely gone through before Shiro has someone else in his bed. It’s not entirely like him, and he doesn’t really register how or why it happens. He’s never had the time for flirting and one-night stands before, but now he has nothing but time in between the 65 hours that he spends at his desk a week and sleeping.
The first guy is a young officer at the Garrison, and Shiro starts to wonder if it’s the uniform that does it for him. The way that the shoulders come so square and the cinch of the belt narrow at the waist. He’s Shiro’s type, except for the fact that he isn’t. It’s like watching the same comfortable movie on repeat. Like listening to a playlist full of the same song, a dozen remixes too similar to be titled something different.
But he has a mouth, and he has warm arms, and he’s into Shiro. Maybe that’s Shiro’s type.
It seems to be, because he’s gone and done in less than a week, and replaced by a doppelganger. Then there’s the refugee from planet Hylfa, humanoid enough that Shiro barely thinks about it twice before it’s happening. He’s never slept with an alien before.
Shiro’s never considered himself a hedonist in this sense. He’s always been vaguely aware that he has admirers of many kinds. He humbly tries not to phrase that as “people would line up to sleep with him” but these days that’s proving truer than not. It doesn’t feel right. Shiro has never had an interest in hooking up. But he’s also never had an interest in divorces. And he’s never had an interest in the coldness of his bed at night, or the deep dark hole in his heart that he’s become so practiced at ignoring that he manages to convince himself it doesn’t exist more often than he doesn’t.
Above all else, he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. It’s not this, whatever this is. It was Curtis until it wasn’t. Curtis was handsome and warm and supportive. He knew about Shiro’s pain. He shared Shiro’s experiences of war, of stars, of loss. He was there in the middle of the night when Shiro woke screaming. He massaged Shiro’s shoulder when it ached under the weight of his prosthetic. He held Shiro when the pain threatened to make itself into the black hole that would suck him in if he didn’t have a hand to grab onto.
It wasn’t that Shiro didn’t love Curtis. Of course, he did. And of course, he had been happy with him.
But now he’s not happy, and with half a dozen other people. And why? Shiro could have it all. Anything he’s ever wanted. The beautiful men. An enormous house. A gorgeous family. All the friends he could ever hope for. Every flying record in the book, smashed and resmashed, by no one other than himself. Universe-wide glory and renown. Everything.
You know why , the voice in the back of his mind tells him, which he silences quickly.
“We need to visit Lance,” Pidge tells him the next time they get together.
Hunk frowns. “I just went—...well I guess that was three months ago now.”
“We all saw him three months ago.” Pidge sighs and taps her fingers against the tabletop. They’re in her family’s kitchen, and somewhere deeper inside the house, Matt is laughing uproariously. Shiro’s happy that someone is laughing. “You know it’s not good when we leave him alone.”
They all lapse into silence because they know. The shared guilt is palpable. The grief is still live and raw in all of them, like it will be forever. But Lance always has carried the heaviest burden with the least assistance.
“Man, remember when,” Hunk starts to say before trailing off with misty eyes, and Shiro instinctively tenses, because the statements that start like that are always the ones that strike him in the softest parts of his armor.
“When what?” Pidge asks.
“We were on that planet with the giraffe aliens? And—”
“Kellador?” Pidge supplies.
“Yeah, Kellador. And Lance spent the whole week complaining about how cold it was at night. And it turned out he’d thought the blankets they gave him were just curtains because they’d been hung to dry by the windows?” Hunk laughs. “I think I’ll always worry about him, no matter what had happened.”
Pidge chuckles too, but Shiro stays silent and muses on the idea of a boy who’s been to war and back but can’t keep himself warm at night.
“We should check on him,” Shiro says resolutely.
It must come out more grave that he intended, too much for the tone of the conversation, because they both do that thing where they eye him as if they think they know what’s better for him than he does for himself.
“Shiro,” Pidge says quietly. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”
“Not really,” Shiro replies, as casual as he can, though the bills from his psychologist would probably beg to differ.
Pidge rearranges her weight on her chair, and it creaks under her. “Anyway,” she says. “I don’t think it would hurt for us to drop by.”
Her mouth twists into a thoughtful expression.
“Maybe we should also call—”
Hunk clears his throat loudly, just in time for Shiro to grip the edge of the table.
He unclenches his fingers. Shakes them out. There’s a little dent in the table that he’ll fix up later, when no one’s watching. Pidge looks like she wants to say something to him, but probably for the sake of everyone, she just thins her lips.
They don’t end up going to Lance’s for another two weeks. In that time Shiro demolishes more than four bottles of red wine, entirely on his own. He chalks it up to stereotypical divorcee behavior. He’s going through the motions of pain because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself right now. It’s never been like this for him. Forward motion was always the answer, but without somewhere to move to, he has to give himself some other focus. Everyone has a pitying look for him, but he doesn’t have any sort of feeling left for himself.
One night he wakes up at 3 AM alone and thrashing. He knocks his glass of water clear off the bedside table, and the sound of it shattering on the floor has him shaking for hours.
His psychiatrist writes him a prescription for medical marijuana. He brings all of it to visit Lance, who laughs in his face when he sees it.
“You don’t think I grow my own here?” he asks. “Come on, Shiro. Have a little faith.”
Of all of Lance’s laughs, of course, Shiro knows this one too intimately. It’s a kind of laugh they share these days. It’s not one Shiro thinks Lance would’ve made when they first met.
They sit in Lance’s living room. His whole family lives here on the farm, but Lance has chosen to take over a small farmhouse apart from theirs. It’s more convenient for guests, he says, but they all know that Lance doesn’t invite people over often, if ever. The only reason they’re all here is thatbecause they’ve invited themselves.
Hunk brought food, and they smoke before setting upon it like they’ve never tasted fried chicken and mashed potatoes in their lives. The chatter is lighthearted through the meal, but in the careful way that it is these days. Topics are discarded before they’re even brought up. Every statement is meticulously trimmed. It used to strike Shiro as weird, for people who have invaded each other’s minds. Now it’s just how they talk.
“So when are you two getting married?” Lance asks Hunk and Pidge, half-joking.
But then there’s a lot of shifting eyes. A guilty look that takes them all down. Shiro’s too high to follow well, but the atmosphere invades his shifting consciousness.
“Actually,” Hunk laughs, two parts nervous and one part genuine, all parts dragging out his words too long. “We had Coran do a small ceremony a few months ago….”
“Hunk!” Pidge says, overloud. “We weren’t going to tell them!”
This stings at Shiro more than the original statement, because he knows it’s on his behalf. Well, his and Lance’s, if he thinks about it. But he’s the one with a distinct tan line still on the fourth finger of his left hand.
He appreciates that people try to be respectful. He really does.
“Congratulations!” he says, only moments too late, and Lance echoes him in a voice that was certainly not intended to sound as hollow as it does.
They’re a good couple. They’ve always been lowkey about their interpersonal interactions. They work well together because they work well together. They have a lot in common. They can keep up with each other in ways that no one else can.
Shiro contemplates these traits for the rest of the night, until the four of them are laying out on Lance’s deck with another joint between them, watching the faint stars that they can see past the light pollution. More than that, Shiro’s watching the come and go of spacecraft. From here they could be meteorites falling to Earth in a steady stream, a straight line from here to the heavens.
“Do you ever think about heading back out there?” Hunk asks.
“No,” they all lie in chorus.
“Yeah.” Hunk laughs. “Me neither.”
There’s nothing out there for Shiro.
There’s nothing down here for Shiro either.
His friends, sure. Hunk and Pidge, settling down. Lance, self-isolated, avoidant, grows his own weed and god knows what else. The Garrison, all the pretty uniformed boys it contains, his years and years of service recognized every single time he walks into a room.
Some nights he dreams about being at the helm of the Atlas. It feels like a wisp of something long forgotten in the deep cavity of his chest. Other nights he dreams of piloting the Black Lion. Of being inside the Black Lion. He can almost hear a scream of his own name, a plea for help and assistance in a voice that will echo around the back of his mind until the end of his days.
What they’ve lost, they’ve lost. There’s no jumping realities for Shiro. He knows how that one ends.
Shiro has the deep conviction that Allura would be upset if she knew that Lance wasn’t moving on, but Shiro’s never even attempted to tell him that.
He descends.
This week’s guy is different. He’s Galra, for one. Shiro had never really anticipated that, but there’s something in his eyes that caught his attention in the Garrison-adjacent bar that he ends up at after work. Shiro is immediately obsessed, in a way that sits uncomfortably with him. He lets the Galra fuck him into the mattress three times and on the fourth, he starts sobbing uncontrollably, out of nowhere. The Galra leaves in a rush, and Shiro never hears from him again.
Shiro’s never been a stay in bed all day kind of guy but a lot of things he’s done lately are strange. He wonders if he’s having some sort of midlife crisis at 31. It would explain a lot. People his age aren’t supposed to have gone through all the things that he has. No one is.
He leaves his personal communicator turned off enough times that Pidge shows up at his door.
“Can I talk to you?” she says.
No , Shiro thinks. But instead, he says, “Yes.”
As soon as the door shuts behind her, she goes to his closet.
“Hello?” he says, but she doesn’t reply. He wonders if her infinite intelligence has led to her somehow being able to read minds, and if she heard him thinking that he doesn’t want to talk, and so she’s not.
But if that was the case she probably wouldn’t be tearing things out of his closet either. Three pairs of jeans. Two jackets. Shirts. With her face scrunched up, she gathers an armful of his underwear and dumps it in a pile on his bed.
“What are you doing?” he asks her.
“We’re leaving,” is all the answer she gives him.
Shiro starts for the pile, but it keeps growing in front of his eyes.
“What? Where?” he demands. “I can’t. I have to—”
Pidge whirls on him, fight in her eyes. “ What do you have to do, Shiro?”
Shiro closes his mouth and stares at her.
“Go ahead!” she says, her voice rising like it only does when she’s furious. “Tell me! What is so important that you have to stay here, sleeping and drinking and fucking men who don’t give two shits about you past your title and your muscles?”
Shiro starts. He’s not like that. He doesn’t do that.
“I’m sick and tired of you and Lance moping around here all the time,” Pidge goes on, her voice dialing down despite the way she slams a pair of socks onto the pile of clothing. “It’s no fun when your friends all hate their lives. You were happier when we were in the middle of a war.”
“I have work,” Shiro tries.
“The Garrison knows you’re leaving. Dad told them you’re going on sabbatical, and they thought that was a fantastic idea.”
No. No. Shiro can’t leave. He can’t go somewhere.
“Pidge,” he tries, and his voice sounds like it’s been pulled across a grater.
She looks him in the eye.
“At the very quiznacking least, pretend you’re doing this for us,” she snaps. “Hunk and I, we’re—we’re going crazy here. And don’t even get me started on Lance. You know what it’s like.”
“Lance is coming?” Shiro asks.
“We’re going to get him next.” Pidge huffs. “He’s coming whether he likes it or not. And so are you.”
Shiro takes a deep breath. She knows him too well. Self-care is out of the realm of his abilities, but taking care of other people, at least, he can do. He knows Lance is in bad shape. Shiro doesn’t quite know where his self-respect has fled to, and Pidge’s words sting with truth. But all he can do now is support his team.
Fine then.
“Where are we going?” Shiro asks.
There’s an answer he dreads, but he thinks Pidge knows better than to say it out loud.
She does. “Nowhere. Everywhere. I don’t know. Not here.”
“Right.”
Twenty minutes later finds him in the civilian hangar. Being highly connected in the Garrison has its perks, because Pidge managed to push everyone else back on the departure list for them without even hacking into the system.
“Paladin privileges,” she and Hunk joke as they nudge Shiro towards the pilot’s seat.
“You want me to fly?” he asks.
Pidge and Hunk exchange a look. “What, you expect one of us to do it?”
So Shiro sits down at the controls. He runs his hands over them. This craft is new, and he hasn’t flown anything like it yet, but the UI has stayed pretty standard over the years. Not to mention the strange buzz of innate connection his Altean prosthetic gives him with a lot of crystal-powered machinery.
“I asked about taking the Atlas,” Shiro hears Pidge telling Hunk in the back. “They said if they get it airborne again ten thousand years from now it’ll be too soon.”
Shiro frowns. Feels the crease form between his eyebrows. Clenches his hands into fists around the controls and boots up the engine.
“Where are we going?” he asks, and it ends up sounding more like a growl than a question.
“Dropping by Lance’s,” Pidge replies. “Then I have a basic idea. You been to New Olkarion lately?”
Lance gives them the exact same sort of answers that Shiro did. It makes Shiro want to say something to himself about hypocrisy, or to Lance about empathy. But the parallels are too far away for him to draw right now and his head still hurts. He’s thinking about the Galra who left him crying into his mattress and leaves the convincing to Hunk. They’ve been best friends for as long as Lance has known how to put his hands on the buttons of a simulator, so if anyone can get Lance on this spacecraft it’s him.
It’s him, and he does. Hunk boards first, taking the seat in the back beside Pidge. Lance takes the hint and makes his way to the front of the pod, sighing as he sits down next to Shiro.
“I don’t get why we’re doing all the work when we’re the ones who are being dragged along on this trip,” is the first thing he says, in Shiro’s general direction, though it seems equally addressed to the universe at large.
“You’ll navigate for me?” Shiro asks, the machine humming to life beneath his hands again.
“I can.” Lance pauses. “I don’t know where we’re going.”
“New Olkarion!” Pidge shouts from the back.
Lance and Shiro make sidelong eye contact and shrug.
The first leg of the trip is uneventful. In fact, Shiro would compare it to life on Earth. He feels almost claustrophobic in this chair, in the same way he’s realizing now that he felt in his Garrison quarters. In the home he shared with Curtis. In the troposphere. But these thoughts don’t make sense. Being on the surface of Earth and being in the cockpit of a ship aren’t aligned occurrences. There’s little commonality between living a quaint quiet life of semi-retirement and seeing the stars stretch out beyond your windshield.
It was probably a bad idea to come here. Shiro’s been in too many cramped pods with too many different kinds of passengers. He thought he’d left manual steering between the stars behind.
“We should’ve used a wormhole,” Lance says after the first hour passes in near silence. Hunk has faint music playing on his tablet in the back, like this is some sort of 21st-century road trip taken for pleasure.
“Can we just enjoy the surroundings, man?” Hunk says. “Do you have any idea how much we would’ve loved to kick back and take a leisurely flight through space three years ago? You know how many Galra you would’ve killed to be where we are right now?”
But Lance is restless. Maybe feeling claustrophobic too. Shiro can’t blame him. If there’s anyone who knows how much the open, empty universe can take away it’s Lance.
Really, neither of them should’ve come. Shiro tries not to give form to the resentment that’s slowly heating to a simmer in the back of his mind, especially because he knows that Pidge means well. She has their best interests at heart, but she’s always been a bit misguided when it comes to her ideas about what that means for others.
Maybe they can get to New Olkarion, wander around for a bit, and then turn around and head back. Lance can return to his family. Shiro can return to his work. Hunk and Pidge can get back to the part of their lives where they think they know what’s best for everyone around them because they’ve found happiness.
Shiro knows what that’s like. He’s been there. Freshly-married and thinking that if only everyone could hop into a relationship, go off on a honeymoon, settle into a big house, they would find whatever joy they’re lacking, fill in the spaces of terror when they wake up to a dark house in the middle of the night with something less painful. Surely, if everybody just calmed down. Surely, if everybody just stayed where they were. They can all be happy if they try.
Shiro still spends his sleepless nights alone but it doesn’t matter.
They don’t make it to New Olkarion.
This was probably in the cards all along, thinks Shiro. More than that. It was probably planned.
Pidge complains about wanting to stretch her legs. She slinks up behind Shiro, pulls up the map and tells Shiro to land on a nearby planet. She sounds too smug about it, too self-satisfied, and Shiro is so caught up in wondering why that he doesn’t notice where they are until they’ve torn through the atmosphere in their fiery hunk of machinery.
The landscape spread out before Shiro’s eyes spears him through the chest when it registers. It’s too late to pull out of their dive. He lands roughly on the dusty, rocky surface and immediately begins making frantic preparations for departure.
“Shiro, stop,” Pidge says. “Get out of the ship. Don’t you wanna reminisce?”
No. No, Shiro does not want to reminisce but he also can’t make the desperate jump off the surface of this planet without letting on how there’s a free-bleeding wound somewhere under the thousands of band-aids he’s slapped on top of it. Even as Lance stands and looks around, asking where they are, why it’s important, Shiro can only stare out at the landscape with dull, tired eyes.
This doesn’t have to be a big deal, he reminds himself.
“Doesn’t look like there’s too much going on here,” Lance says, still prodding for answers that Shiro isn’t giving him.
“There’s some fauna on this planet, but not much else,” Pidge replies. She doesn’t even make an attempt to pretend that she’s stretching.
Shiro’s mind finally catches up to him. “Why would I want to reminisce about a place where I almost died?”
He stands in the doorway of the craft, frowning at his surroundings. It’s gray rock and low gravity, as far as he can see. How did Pidge even find this place? How did she know it was on the way to New Olkarion? How long had she planned this?
How many more stops like this does she have up her sleeve?
“I don’t know,” Pidge says. “You looked pretty cozy by the time I got here.”
He hadn’t felt cozy. But he didn’t feel as terrible as he knows he should have either. There had been a certain kind of peace he’d found in that moment. He’d long since been aware of his impending mortality. The fact that it wasn’t going to come about exactly as he’d planned had been no obstacle to the sense that he was doing as he was intended to. He’d thought, at the time, that all his affairs were in as much order as he could possibly ask them to be. He had never presumed he would live to see the end of the war anyway. And after the resonant thrum he’d felt rock his body when the Black Lion had found another pilot, he had felt safe in letting his wounds darken his vision.
He hadn’t felt cozy. But he’d felt hopeful. He’d felt proud. He’d felt fond.
The memory makes him sick.
“You doing okay, Shiro?” Lance asks, interrupting Pidge’s quiet explanation of how she’d found Shiro here after the Lions had gotten separated by the wormhole, years and years and years ago now.
“I’m going to go sit down,” Shiro says.
It’s space sickness. It’s a low-pressure atmosphere getting to him. It’s been too long since he’s been off-planet. It’s a million and a half things that make Shiro queasy.
This isn’t the last memorable planet they land on.
Lance gives up ‘navigating’ when he realizes that his systems are being controlled by Pidge’s typing somewhere behind him. They’ve probably been zooming in the opposite direction from New Olkarion since the moment they took off, and Lance gives a frustrated huff as he clears the console in front of him with a swipe of his hand. Shiro takes his instructions straight from Pidge. It feels like he was manhandled onto a roller coaster without being warned of its high speeds and steep drops beforehand, like the rickety track and the negative Gs have been conjured up in front of him from out of nowhere.
They poke around Daibazaal for an hour or two. They fly by Altea and pretend they can’t hear Lance’s barely-contained sobs. They go to the planet where the Kral Zera’s flame used to burn bright and violet over the mountains and find it cold, desolate. They’re being tugged through their emotions on a leash by Pidge and Shiro can’t say he appreciates it.
But he does learn to accept it.
At some point he resigns himself to his fate, and instead of worrying over where Pidge’s voice is going to direct him to steer, or what he’s going to say to Lance, or if their next stop is going to knock all the breath out of him at once, he starts to look at the stars.
Shiro has always loved the stars.
But then he’s torn out of admiring them by the frantic beeps of an incoming call on someone’s communicator. It’s not his own. It’s coming from the back. There’s a shuffle, and then Pidge’s voice.
“Took you long enough to get back to me,” she snipes.
Shiro and Lance look at each other. Who? Lance mouths, and there are a million names on Shiro’s tongue that he wants the answer to be. Matt. Her mother. Romelle. Coran. But the acidic pit in Shiro’s stomach gives him reason to believe it isn’t any of those.
“I’m great,” she goes on. “How are you? No, never mind, don’t answer that.”
Shiro can hear her fingers flying over her keyboard as she talks. He somehow gets the idea that despite her casual tone and the non-urgent subject matter, she isn’t just saying hello.
She laughs at something whoever is on the other end says.
“Yeah, well,” she replies, with more than a trace of playful snideness. “You’re the expert on avoiding your feelings, after all.”
Something prompts her to laugh some more, but her fingers tapping away sound almost menacing beneath the sound of it. Lance has turned in his chair to watch Pidge talk, possibly hoping for some morsel of a clue as to who’s on the other end, but Shiro keeps his eyes on the stars.
“No, I just wanted to make sure you’re still alive,” Pidge says. “I worry about you....… Nah, nothing much. The usual. You? …Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Don’t be a stranger though, alright? Miss you! Bye!”
The sound of her tossing aside her phone is overlaid with a quiet, triumphant hiss of, “Got him!” that Shiro assumes wasn’t meant to be heard by anyone other than Hunk.
There’s a sinkhole of dread in Shiro’s gut. That could’ve been anyone, Shiro reasons again. There’s no connection between this current moment and whoever was on the other end of the phone. There’s no reason for Shiro to feel as though he needs to be on the defensive.
Pidge wouldn’t do anything to betray his trust. Pidge wouldn’t do anything to hurt him.
“How are you doing on fuel?” she asks Shiro.
He lets his eyes wander over the readouts and gauges, and of course, she would know to ask that now. They’re not concerningly low, but low enough that it should be a thought. If Shiro was on any other sort of trip, he would open a discussion about where to stop in the next few hundred light deca-phoebs, ask Lance to scope out a planet and direct them there, but he has the creeping feeling that Pidge already has a place in mind.
“Alright,” he answers tersely, partially to call her bluff and partially to let her know that he isn’t in the mood for whatever game she’s concocting.
She bulldozes. “There’s a planet coming up in the next system. V9-038X. It’s fourth from the red dwarf sun. It’s the orange one, you can’t miss it.”
Shiro doesn’t even know where they are anymore. They’ve skirted enough galaxies to be considered out in the boonies. Shiro’s never been to this particular sector, not in the days of war or liberation, and he doesn’t recognize the stars or the planets that slide smoothly by outside the display. The only thing that keeps his anxiety of open space from rearing its head is that he knows Pidge would never steer them somewhere she didn’t know they could get out of.
The opposite side of that coin is that they’re at her mercy. If they don’t stop on V9-038X for fuel and rest, there’s no way of telling where else they could next find themselves in a reasonable place for that. Pidge could easily hold them hostage on this shuttle until they run out of oxygen or agree to her terms.
It’s easier to let himself be manipulated into taking the craft down to the landing bay that Pidge directs him to on the planet that she had very accurately described as orange. It’s not large, and the gravity is low, the atmosphere incompatible with their respiratory systems. The traffic on and off the planet seems to be mostly made of junk ships and pirate cruisers, unregulated and obvious even from a distance. With a concerned glance back at Pidge, Shiro has to wonder for the nth time where Pidge has forced them to come.
There’s the distinct air of the kind of backwater seediness you only find on far-flung planets like these when Shiro disembarks in an unattended parking hangar. He’s sure to lock the ship up tight, but he also flings a nearby adolescent Galra leaning against a building a few GAC to “keep an eye on things”, imagining, at the very least, that it may stop that particular individual from jacking their ship.
Pidge has her phone shoved nearly to her nose as she follows whatever directions it’s spitting out. It almost reminds Shiro of Hunk’s tinkering, following Fraunhofer lines out into the dusty yellow desert, but this time there’s almost certainly not a lion at the end of Pidge’s wandering footsteps. The Lions haven’t been seen in years, and they’re definitely not out here.
Shiro prays that whatever is at the end of Pidge’s single-minded search is just as rewarding and not at all painful, but his faith in that belief is shaky at best.
Possibly sensing his building distress, Hunk pats Shiro firmly on the back as they walk.
“You good?” he asks.
Shiro shrugs. “Have I ever been good?” He tries to make it sound lighthearted but it’s more dirgelike than anticipated.
Hunk slides him a sidelong glance as he dodges a bustling merchant pushing a cart full of balgusfruit along the narrow corridor of the underground thoroughfare they’ve entered. There’s artificial gravity here and it’s set to a higher degree than Earth’s. Shiro already feels exhausted.
“I know Pidge can be kind of annoyingly single-minded about stuff like this,” Hunk says, “but she’s doing this for you. You know we all care, right?”
“Yeah.” Shiro frowns. “Yeah, of course I do.”
But he also knows that there’s something going on here that everyone seems to be in on but him, and that knowledge adds twenty pounds to his shoulders. He has a lot of qualms with that, mainly that he’s an adult who can take care of himself and he doesn’t need other people forcing what they think is in his best interest on him. But Shiro knows that he’s too understanding to be truly angry about it. He knows that they’re trying their best, and they’re doing it for him .
Though there’s always the possibility that something may come of this that Shiro can’t forgive.
Their winding path among beady-eyed merchants and rag-draped panhandlers eventually leads them down through the corridors of a dirty tunnel system to a narrow alleyway. Water drips from the ceiling to form a murky puddle at the end, and there’s only one door, if you could call it that, under the dingy bare lightbulb that hardly lights the space. The doorway is barred by a heavy curtain, and the sign beside it gives notice that on the other side is a bar.
Lance stops Shiro with a hand on his chest just before they duck through the door after Hunk and Pidge. The look he’s giving him is shrewd, almost judging, and he’s frowning when he says, “You’re an adult. Act like one.”
Yeah. Yeah, they’re definitely all in on something, and Shiro has the most unshakable, horrifying feeling that he knows what it is. As he follows the others inside, he physically shoves down his nausea with a closed mouth and a swallow.
The saving grace, perhaps, is that he is just as shocked to see them as Shiro is to see him.
In post-war recountals Shiro has heard laughing stories told about the night he crashed burning against the Earth’s hard desert. How Lance and Pidge and Hunk had watched him from high above, on the Garrison rooftop. How they’d seen the flare of the distracting explosives, and how, staring through Pidge’s binoculars, Lance had shouted something ridiculous and rude like, “I would recognize that mullet anywhere!”
Shiro can relate to that right now. There’s no mullet in sight, so it’s more of a spiritual sister of that infamous moment. Rather than just a hairstyle, there’s a million and one things he zeroes in on in the dim light of the hazy bar. There’s the strong line of a proud spine. There’s the oil slick spill of dark hair, long and silken and tied over a shoulder. There’s the fair stretch of unblemished neck, the hard cut of a defiant jaw. The general demeanor of someone who’s grown from their hardships, forged into steel. And all of it is like a neon sign, proclaiming the identity of the man who owns it.
Shiro’s lungs ice over in his chest. He can’t expand or contract them, and the oxygen feels like it’s been punched out of him. The frost spreads to his heart, making his blood ache in his veins.
He watches, like in slow motion, like in zero gravity, as Pidge makes her way straight for the bar stool beside the most beautiful patron and clambers up onto it.
The man looks at her, and Shiro watches the moment he registers the company manifest as a full-body jolt. It’s not often that someone can pull one over on him, and something about it makes Shiro feel marginally better about this entire shitty situation.
“Hi,” Pidge says.
“How did you—” Keith replies.
Then he turns, slowly. He catches sight of Hunk hovering nervously beyond Pidge’s shoulder, wringing his hands. Then there’s Lance, an eyebrow raised, taking in Keith’s appearance. And finally, Keith’s eyes alight on Shiro.
They stare at each other, unblinking, uncomprehending, for a long moment, and Shiro rounds the corner on the realization that there isn’t going to be any “being an adult” about this, despite Lance’s instructions. This isn’t the table at Allura Day. This isn’t within the jurisdiction of their unspoken ceasefire. They’re dead in the middle of their own personal Cold War here, and it shows clear in the way Keith straightens his shoulders, trims his mouth into a firm, thin line, and turns back towards Pidge.
Two can play at that game.
“Tracked your phone,” Pidge replies casually, brandishing her own. She hops off the stool and grabs Keith by the wrist. “Come on. Let’s catch up.”
Together the party makes its way to a sheltered booth in the back of the bar, but not before Keith snags his drink off the counter and pulls it along with him. They all slide in, and Shiro makes sure he’s sitting as far away from Keith as he can.
Hunk notices and raises his eyebrows, and in the name of attempting civility, Shiro ignores him.
Shiro had never quite understood it himself, except in some quiet, petty way in a part of his mind he tried his hardest to ignore, but people had always used to talk to him about “winning” the breakup. Especially in the aftermath of Adam, sometimes Matt would creep up behind him on the shuttle and give him a firm thump on the back and say, “How do you think Adam feels on Earth right now while you’re all the way out here?”
It’s a flimsy consolation prize, Shiro has always thought. You lose a human being. You lose a part of yourself that loved that human being. No one “wins” a breakup. Even if you come out happier, even if you emerge with your heart fully intact, even if everything was unarguably mutual, there’s still a loss. Something had to break, or there wouldn’t have been a relationship in the first place. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about making healthy decisions.
It’s not like Shiro and Keith had ever dated, and so there was no breakup to ever win. It’s not like Shiro and Keith had ever been anything beyond a few passionate kisses and a love that would draw them over and over again to the brink of death.
But somehow, right now, Shiro gets an irrational, spiteful tickle from the way Keith has bags under his eyes. From the way he refuses to look at Shiro for more than a second at a time, like he’s afraid not to acknowledge he exists but also scared to give him too much attention. From the way he’s sitting with his shoulders hunched over in the corner of a filthy dive, completely by himself.
If Shiro’s suffering, at least he’s not going about it alone. At least there’s someone else here who’s been beaten down as much as he has.
(But there’s a struggle to not notice how the individual lines of his face still gather to create something far superior to anything else Shiro has laid eyes on. God , is he beautiful. Shiro rubs at his temples.)
No one stops to exchange pleasantries. That might be their way on Allura Day, small talk that makes all their scalps itch, a sense of weird distance that pervades their conversations. But here in this dark bar surrounded by alien creatures who aren’t bothering to hide their stares behind their drinks, it doesn’t seem like the time or place for how are you s.
They already know how each other are doing, after all. It doesn’t take Pidge’s intellect to figure out that the end of the war still has them reeling.
So instead, Lance goes for the throat.
“Keith, what are you even doing out here?” he asks. “I thought you were working with the Blade.”
Keith’s eyes are already averted, but he seems to withdraw even further into himself, his shoulders curling and his overlong bangs swinging down in front of his face. He mumbles something into his drink, hoarse and clipped.
Pidge leans in. Hunk’s expression twists into a frown, and Lance’s laser-eyed vision is locked on his face, serious and unbudging.
“ What ?” Lance says.
“I’m…,” and then an inaudible string of choppy, unconfident syllables.
This time even Shiro abandons his pretense of casual indifference to draw in closer to the circle of heads with their ears angled towards Keith. Why is Keith out here on a planet even more remote than Earth? Sitting in a seedy bar, unkempt hair puffing out around his face, circles under his eyes and a sunless pallor in his cheeks? Unwilling to talk to them openly about how he came to be here?
“Keith, speak up,” Pidge snaps.
His eyes go steely. His teeth grit behind the snarl of his mouth. His hands tighten into twin fists on the tabletop, and his brow buckles under the strain of his emotion.
“I’m looking,” he says, voice low, deliberate, and through the clench of his teeth, “for Allura.”
Somehow, the silence and stillness at the table seems to echo, or bleed into itself like a bell tone.
“Keith,” Lance says, and his voice cracks across the syllable. “Allura’s dead.”
Keith’s forehead is deeply furrowed, his frown chiseled into his face.
“I know. I mean—we thought she was.”
Pidge is leaning all the way forward in her seat, her mouth hanging open, her eyebrows drawn low. Hunk has something like all the sadness of the universe in his eyes. Lance’s expression is almost severe in how carefully unfeeling it is. His frown sits uncomfortably on his lips.
“What do you mean?” Hunk asks.
Keith presses the palm of a hand to his face and rubs at his forehead like that will erase the way he’s twisted and scrunched all his features.
“Do you remember,” he says hoarsely, “how I found the Blue Lion?”
Shiro’s mind takes him back through time and space to waking up with sand in his mouth and blood under his fingernails but on Earth and alive and seeing the rising sun with his own two eyes . He remembers standing in front of a boy who had spent too long living in a dilapidated shack and his painstakingly-made corkboard, completely with little post-it notes that read, in the scrawl of a hand that had been awake for too many hours, It’s killing me when you’re away.
“The weird energy,” Lance says.
“Yeah,” Keith replies, and his voice is strained, stretched thin like putty. “The Lions’ quintessence, I guess. I could feel it. I knew where it was.”
Hunk laughs, something small and nervous and jittery. “But, I mean, the Lions left, man. They’re gone.” He looks around the table, tapping his fingers against each other. “I can’t be the only one who’s tried to call mine back, right? They’re gone for good.”
“Mhmm,” Pidge agrees, but she’s still looking at Keith like she expects him to get to his point at any second.
“I think they’re still out there,” Keith says, more towards the tabletop than any one of them. “I can feel them.”
Eyebrows raise all around, but Lance is staring Keith down with the concentration of a cat on its prey.
“And...I feel Allura too. Her life force is still connected to the Lions. I think….” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I think she’s out there somewhere.”
It feels like the entire universe had quieted, muted, focused down to the single point of their table in the back of a loud bar.
Lance’s chair legs squeal against the tile floor as he pushes back from the table and stands. He mumbles some excuse before he’s tripping over himself to get towards the door. They all watch him go in heartbreaking silence, and then Keith sighs and buries his face in his hands.
Shiro’s chest aches. Fuck, does it ache, worse than the phantom pain of his arm when it was first removed.
Your team is hurting , some unhelpful voice in the back of his head reminds him. He tries to combat it with they’re not my team anymore but joining to create a single war machine over and over and over does nothing but cement your bonds with some people, forever. Shiro knows he’ll never escape.
“I didn’t want to tell you guys,” Keith says into the softness of the heel of his hand. “Not til I knew for sure.”
“No, Keith,” Pidge says. “This is really good news.”
But her voice is flat.
It’s not that it isn’t good news. Because it is, if it’s true. But that’s the problem. It’s too good. There’s no way. They all witnessed Allura’s departure. They all said their goodbyes. She had left, had given them their universe and every other universe and all of reality. The rawness of it still stings like it had happened yesterday, and there’s a foolhardiness in thinking that a group of pain-riddled, lost 20-somethings could really know the way to recover all the things that have been ripped from their lives like sloppy amputations left to bleed.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Keith says, voice hoarse, in the bitter way of someone who has done just that too many times.
They won’t. Shiro knows that they won’t. They’re too old and too tired to deal in flimsy counterfeits like hope.
Hunk is still looking towards the door that Lance disappeared through, his mouth stretched into a deep frown, his eyes endlessly downtrodden.
“I’m not the one who told you guys this,” he says, “but he’s spent months locked in his house just staring at himself in mirrors, waiting for his marks to turn out to be magic or something . I’ve caught him so many times.”
Shiro’s heart, already crushed to bits, shatters again.
It doesn’t feel fair.
It doesn’t feel fair, and it isn’t. Not when the heart that held firm at the center of their lives was destroyed, like the cracking of a Balmeran crystal at the center of a battleship. Not when the person who could always draw a smile from any of them can’t muster a smile himself. Not when one of them is staring mournfully after his best friend, asking if anyone wants to go back to space. Not when one had to pry all of them out of their misery only to get them here. Not when Shiro himself is living his days in a dim haze, feeling lower than the floor of this bar.
Not when the brightest light in Shiro’s entire life is sitting across from him, facing the table, looking like the universe has beaten even his diamond-hard spine into submission again and again and again.
Your team is hurting , the voice in Shiro’s head repeats, and how could he let it get this far? These are the people who have had his back no matter what. How come he hasn’t had theirs? How many times have each of them saved him?
“Keith,” says Shiro, and there’s something hard in his own voice that surprises even him, that makes the others at the table perk up in a way that feels satisfying to watch. “What do you need to find her?”
Keith raises his head, slowly, and for the first time, truly looks at Shiro.
“I need help,” he says simply.