(oh yes) he lives, dies, multiplies

by odoridango

Summary:

What even is the point about feeling guilty for dying?

Help him, he's alive.

Or: Shiro, in a series of conversations on the way back to Earth.

Notes:

In classic fic tradition I had one (1) idea and here I am how many words later. This is a Shiro essay thinly veiled as an id fic which I also stuffed full of tributes to the many cool fics, ideas, and speculations that spilled out over the seasons, including nods to other character backstory fics. Strap in and thank you for coming to my TED talk.

content warnings: Shiro has flashbacks and dissociates in the fic and could be said to have a passive death wish. He talks freely about his death as well. There is one section that also concentrates pretty heavily on animal death and the nature of eating and discusses cannibalism philosophically.

Eyes flutter open to the dull refraction of low lighting on a metal hull. Cell by cell, Shiro wakes. His eyelids, as if weighed down by coins; his limbs, deadened and without sensation; his mind, clouded still with the sizzle reel of a past life or two, lost among nebulas and galaxies, both a body and mind gone supernova.

Hello, universe.

Calibrate. His body, the machine. He used to know its every action and reaction, could gauge his condition from the moment he woke the way a world-class athlete might. Each involuntary twitch of muscle, any instance of paralyzing agony, filed away in his mind to be written down in a fastidious medical log at the end of every day. A tool, a means to an end, the bag of skin, bones, and blood that bound him to himself, to Shirogane Baek Byeolha Takashi and all that he entailed. A younger version of him might have settled into a nihilistic state of mind, wishing for some sort of release from the pointless physical world, dreaming of projecting himself up into the stars and cosmic dust to be reinvented into something new, away from the sterile smells and monotonous electronic humming of his hospital room.

Now older, he knows that sort of astral projection brings anything but relief. Dreams come true after all.  

It was that body that had savored the flavors of the miso, yudofu, grilled mackerel, and tamago kake gohan of his father’s homecooked breakfasts no matter where they lived; the crunch of the oddball kimchi-kamaboko-natto fusion pajeon, satisfying if ulcer-inducing tteokbokki, and gyoza his mother would make in large batches for him to eat after school; and the chewy and charred backyard-grilled squid that his grandfather would eat alongside his Friday night soju, offering him some even though he’d only been a middle schooler. It had been his legs that familiarized him with the streets of Kyoto, eventually carrying him on autopilot to the Lawson on the corner for midnight onigiri and senbei and to pay the bills, and to Kiyomizu-dera and Fushimi Inari Taisha on high school trips, where he’d stared at his half-curse omikuji and wondered if he should try to find a place to perform a pilgrimage of some sort because the kami might succeed where medicine was failing. His hands had plucked the shamisen and drawn the horsehair bow across the strings of kokyuu all made by his great-aunt and her buddies, a growing network of instrument workshops that were proud of their history, craft, and the sterling reputations that echoed even in Tokyo, despite insulting comments posted on review sites and ugly names occasionally spray painted across their doors.  

At home, his ears reacted to Byeolha, Takashi, Takkun, sometimes Taka-chan when his family was feeling cheeky, like he would forever be eight years old, frantically running through kanji flashcards at the dining table so he could catch up with his eventual peers, or twelve, listening to some of the rakugo routines his father and great-aunt liked. Shiro, his mouth had nicknamed himself when he’d washed up in the American desert, not just because hearing his first name spoken by strangers had become odd again, but also because he wanted to a keep a piece of home, still wanted to prove that he and his family were four-legged no more and had never been, even on different, irrelevant shores.

That body remembered the sweet rush of adrenaline as he soared through the sky, the sensation of his stomach falling out as he took the steep drop off a cliff on his hoverbike, the sharp, smug spike of accomplishment and satisfaction with another record broken. It anticipated the jab of another needle in his arm, the jelly-legged inability to stand under his own weight, the radiating headache that would swarm around his temples. And now that body is no more. The sense memories of his tongue, tread, and touch do not survive. Perhaps he was cursed from the centuries of uncleanliness the way gossiping classmates and nurses liked to say he was.

His fingers tingle as his body makes to realize, recognize. He will need to learn again how to be, today. The thin bedsheet slips off, one of the odd Altean artifacts saved in the belly of the Lion. Gingerly, he traces a finger across its surface, the nerves lighting up one at a time. It feels like a knit, but the fibers are somehow fused into a single mat bearing a metallic sheen, looks belying its softness and warmth. The shimmering, shifting pattern of reds and burgundies makes him smile.

It’s odd to stretch as he rolls out of the narrow bunk just big enough for him to sleep lying down. Keith’s offered his pilot’s bedroom up, but Shiro can’t bring himself to use it. His joints crack satisfyingly in a way they haven’t since his last growth spurt. Growing pains, growing gains, and his thoughts jumble about distractingly as he forces himself upright, stacks vertebrae atop vertebrae into humanity’s uniquely impractical bipedal alignment, shoulders above hips above knees, all in a row, his head perched on top like a bobble. He keeps going, doing the simple habitual calisthenics from childhood PT sessions and some light aerobics to get his blood pumping. It’s not that he doesn’t know this body – he does, he knows its mind after all – it’s that he’s comfortable in it until he isn’t.

Reduced stamina, but seemingly larger lung capacity and inhuman strength. Muscles too sore and easy to tire for their size, all their memory and reflexes altered or lost. Teeth a little too even and white, the wisdom teeth untouched. Skin too smooth and uncalloused, unworn and untorn, too thick. All fingers intact and straight, missing the dips and bends of the mishaps that broke bones or made him bleed. Fewer scars than he used to have, none that ache or keep him up the way they used to, when he would haunt the castleship halls until Keith found him, eyes wide open and abandoned by sleep.

It’s a constant between him and the clone, the one he’s begun to think of as Gorou. Keith finding them.

In the beginning of everything, whenever he and Keith wandered into each other at an unreasonable time in the arbitrary night, they would just plunk down and sit together right in the middle of the Castleship halls, exchanging quiet, speaking stares. Even a year felt too long apart, and Shiro just hadn’t known what to say or make of the fact that he’d dragged his best friend into some sort of intergalactic anticolonial rebellion that consisted of three other untrained cadets, an alien princess of still-mostly-unknown quantity, and her quirky if capable retainer. Back on Earth he’d watched Keith fly and thought wistfully of a day when they’d go on a mission together, perhaps with the Holts or another scientific unit that Shiro had flown with before, Pilot to his Command Pilot. Even then, he’d known it was a long shot. Shiro might have been a dreamer, but he’d prided himself on being a realist too, even if he always tried to stretch the limits of that reality. After graduating, Keith would need to keep working through his degree, then perhaps an advanced degree if he didn’t coterm, then clock in his hours in the air and the space module. At the very least there was a solid three to five years that Shiro would have to wait, and after Kerberos, there would be no promise that his body would hold out for so long. That he’d been able to swing Kerberos to his benefit at all had been a huge, desperate win for him, sensible or not.

But there they would be, sitting on a ten-thousand-year-old spaceship floor, having made it out to the stars together even if not under ideal circumstances. Shiro, selfishly, had been grateful that at least Keith was here, someone familiar and welcome amidst bloody nightmares and the many anxieties buried during the day.

“…so how’d you even take showers out in that cabin,” he’d eventually said, words tripping and sprawling clumsily out of his mouth. It was late, and he was tired, and all the social niceties he’d known before meant nothing in a brave, new, terrifying world.

“Come on, Shiro,” Keith had replied, rolling his eyes with all the viciousness and irrepressible southwestern twang of his fourteen-year-old self, “You saying I stank when we met again? There are these things called wells and groundwater, things I kind of needed to survive out there. You didn’t see the little lean-to out back? The well was a little behind it.”

“I was kind of distracted,” had been Shiro’s enfeebled response, held fast by an unreasonably emotional bout of déjà vu. “And it’s the desert.”

“Where you also lived for at least four years,” Keith had groaned, drawing the sound out into a raspy exhalation, rattling into a dry, flat chuckle. “Hey, you’ve been in space for a fucking year. I should be asking you how you took showers.”

“Easy,” he’d said, mouth loosened by familiarity and the pressure pushing up against his throat, burning in his eyes and lungs. “I didn’t. Captivity’s got to be good for something at least.”

He’d copped a belated jab to his side for his reply, Keith already laughing anyway, a little too loud and wild, too nervy and relieved. “You’re awful,” was all he’d said, not meeting his eyes like he knew all the secrets bulging and turgid inside Shiro’s fragile skin were just waiting for an excuse to burst out, meet air, and oxidize. There were times later that he’d looked at the unhappy lines carved on Keith’s face and thought that of himself too. You’re awful.

Gorou had been different. Confused, torn. Irritated and annoyed one minute, only to be unsure and contrite the next, unable to keep a hold of his emotions or grasp the reasons why he felt the way he did, Haggar’s interference at work. It had made him a little clingy, more prone to outright silliness, to revel in the feel of closeness when he could get it, moments where Keith would drift to his side and peer at him from the corner of his eye, checking on him. Honesty bloomed from his anxiousness, countering the erratic nature of his behaviors. And the more he’d tried to express himself, the more Gorou had felt like he was spinning out of control, missing something.

In a way, he had been. As Shiro feels out the contours of Gorou’s thoughts, and Gorou his, he realizes how unformed Gorou’s memories are. Swathes of feeling, painted with a broad, expressive brush, the details blurred and indefinite. Strongest and easiest to pick out are fear and anxiety. Shiro doesn’t envy that Gorou’s most intense emotions and memories likely come from his own recollections of the arena, timestamped hallmarks of the moments when Haggar gathered her source material. But packed right behind them is a yearning to connect, to make good, unplanned side effects of Gorou’s fractured awareness of his shortcomings. It’s realizations like these that make Shiro think, that of the two of them, he’s the selfish one.

He’s briefly grateful for the softness of the flight suit they gave him after he left the medical pod. It’s relieving not to have the weight of the paladin armor on him for now. They’ve got just enough spare clothing to swap their armor and undersuits out for sleep, and the stronger compression of this fabric helps manage the familiar, tickling, stinging pain-rush of sensation meshing over his skin when his mind and body don’t synchronize. He’s a marble rattling around in a mason jar, pennies in a sealed piggy bank, everything running on more than half empty, parts of him clinking around unhinged. The body is his until they remember that him and he are two different people; their souls clutch at each other but struggle to navigate the fit, flailing and uncoordinated still. He remembers the experiences Gorou’s body never had.

Really, for a person who expected his life to be close to over in his mid-thirties, he’s recovered remarkably. If he dies again, perhaps he’ll find himself living his life seven times over, to complete a cycle of nine. And this is not so different from before – once again fitted back together, a hyakki yagyou made of different parts and pieces of him. A monstrous fragility, a bloodthirsty and gluttonous spirit. Too full of yearning to stay dead. They could make a fable of him. He could even put being a ghost onto his resume, see if it sticks the way death did not. Perhaps all the unkind gossip was right.

Black rumbles and groans around him, discontent, matching the faint sense of Gorou’s indignation sparking in the corners of his mind. It’s a good reminder to not get so maudlin, so self-absorbed. Gorou wasn’t so much a monster as he was manipulated. And as grateful as Shiro is, he doesn’t think Black always understands the magnitude of their actions. They did what they thought what was right, but they aren’t human. Compressed and constrained, he’d been made to stare into an abyss of beautiful nebulas, pinwheeling galaxies, and stars that would never run out of fuel, isolated, shut away so that no one could hear his pleading, unable to help or touch or comfort, neither himself nor anyone else. Never had he ever hated himself so much, his helplessness, the nagging feeling of failure even in death, the sensation of giving into something, of giving up without a fight when he’d promised himself he wouldn’t lose control again, would never let anyone decide the course of his life. Digging his nails into his thighs did not make him bleed. Running towards a horizon line that moved ever farther away, the same vista glittering mockingly overhead, did not tire him. In the place that was there, and not here, he’d wandered an infinite dimension stalked by Black’s bonechilling presence, the sensation of a thousand eyes and a million grasping hands, void nipping at his heels, all of it confined in the ambivalent, eternal silence within a metal raiment. He did not dream, he did not hurt, and yet he would come back to himself in panic, in shivering, teeth chattering uncontrollably.

Your name is Shirogane Baek Byeolha Takashi, he would say to himself, professional and announcer perfect, rolling staccato syllables around on his native tongue, you are twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven now. You were born in Toronto. You are a pilot and astronaut, in the JAXA chapter of the Global Aerospace Investigations Alliance, attached to the Arizona branch of the United States Galaxy Garrison. You are the Black Paladin and the leader of Voltron. It didn’t matter how many times he said it, removed from the continuity of time and human scale, he remained nothing. Unrecognized. Unseen. Back to the riverbed perhaps no ancestor of his had actually seen, back to hiding the family heirlooms and records, to worrying about fingerprints and allegiances. Back and back, until he would be reduced to the fine powder of pulverized, atomic dust.

Through it all, Black did not speak to him. How the others understand their Lions, he does not know, but this is how he knows the form, the extent, the grasping stranglehold of their love. And it is a love, though its true nature remains elusive.

Wandering unmoored into the cockpit, it’s the feel of the space wolf’s fur that reforms him. Luxuriously dense and thick, yet silky fine along the oddly dry nose and surprisingly chubby cheeks, the wolf nudges texture and feeling back in his hand, nosing and rubbing against Shiro’s calves and fingers. Shiro dispenses with his affections freely, stroking along the wolf’s back and petting the soft, fine-furred and twitching ears, playfully fluffing up the ruff around the wolf’s neck.

When he looks up, it’s to see Keith looking back at him, limned in the light of Black’s controls, gentle smile on his face. Images of Keith in the cockpit overlay each other; in that silent place he would sometimes sense the other paladins through Voltron’s connection, but none came through so clearly and distinctly as Keith. His voice would streak into the sky like a fifty-year comet, rare and precious, and Shiro would most often see him clutching at the controls, forehead resting on the dashboard, brought bowed and silent in the aftermath of another mission, breath whistling shakily through his lungs.

Seeing Keith there made Shiro feel many things at once. Pride, for the leader he could see Keith becoming; warmth and gratefulness, for offering him enduring friendship and still honoring the wish of a dead man; but most damnably, guilt, for asking it of Keith in the first place. For not thinking of what it might to do to him, of what he was really asking of him. How it would hurt him. For being selfish. For being awful. For being dead after all.

“Hey,” Keith says, and it hurts to look at him, the mature broadness of his shoulders, the firm line of his jaw, the scar Shiro carved into his cheek, it hurts to look and see the years that he missed. Sands pouring into the flipside of an hourglass and he misses the rotation again and again. With Gorou the ache was dulled and misdirected, almost panic-inducing, but Shiro knows the cause. And so, he smiles back.

“Hello, Keith.”

In Gorou’s chest, their heart flutters.

 

***+***

 

There are few things Shiro has more experience with than compromise, and with his body most of all. His disease has no name or diagnosis, even after years of being poked, prodded, swabbed, and biopsied. It’s his genes, his inflammatory response, his brain, his cells, his anything, just him being his own self. It’s a debilitating kind of uniqueness that’s played an outsize role in his life ever since the first time his arm spasmed and stopped responding to him in the middle of a football game.

Since then, pain has followed him across oceans, across borders, into the Garrison and into space, drained his energy, made him weigh his choices; if I spar today I won’t be able to get the groceries, if I push through these three days of finals then I’ll just stay in bed on Thursday, if I can last through this battle I’ll finally take a break and not train until tomorrow afternoon. Disease changes what people think he’s capable of, who people think he is. Disease was part of what prompted the decision to move back to Kyoto, where he went from being just Byeolha and Takashi to being Shirogane-kun the zainichi returnee, frequently absent from class, and according to the classroom gossip that wasn’t nearly quiet enough, probably destined to become yakuza. Stumbling over kanji, keigo, and the proper etiquette was alienation enough. Common knowledge was not at all common to him.

How his classmates found out about his family history, he never knew – perhaps overheard from muttered conversations among teachers and staff, warnings they received from their parents when they asked for more information at home, or just having his name listed weirdly on the class rosters, which his teachers sometimes did. And his family didn’t hide their comings and goings from the dowa districts where grandfather and great-aunt lived, so it was perfectly possible for word to get around. He’d seen the neighbors whispering in clusters sometimes, though they clammed up when they noticed how hard he was staring at them, sheepish and stuttering.

It made him appreciate how his parents had sat him down at their worn dining table in Toronto to talk about how his mother had been extended an offer at Kyoto University, how his father’s company was thinking of moving him back to Japan to help expand the Asia Pacific practice, and how they’d been weighing the move back to Japan for a while now to have more of a support network during treatment cycles. They’d been blunt about their desire to live close to the dowa districts, near the rest of the family, had been clear about how moving might impact his social life and mental health. They’d wanted him to decide.

And he’d decided they would go to Kyoto. Where his mother would get to do groundbreaking research, and his father could accept a more prestigious position with better pay, where they would be closer to the family that Shiro had never met in person. And just like his parents told him, things were hard. In the wake of severe episodes he’d drowned in stiff hospital linens, detached and estranged from his body, barely aware and unable to move even if he tried. The endless rotating door of vitamins, medication cocktaills, acupuncture, and all sorts of different diets and folk remedies made him cranky and unreasonable, affected his moods and sometimes gave him the feeling that he was being spun away from his component parts like blood in a centrifuge, no longer able to even properly assess or monitor his physical state, treated like an experiment, a toy, all his free time eaten up by appointments. He’d wake up in the night and hear his parents talking quietly about finances, leaning on each other and sharing a bottle of hard liquor, sometimes crying into each other’s shoulders or worrying about him. Other times he’d overhear them arguing in whispers about who did the house chores, who could come home early, who was more committed to the family or needed to take more responsibility, do better. 

I am the one who needs to do better, he would think every time he tried to pack away his frustrations and anger, because his parents were doing their best, he was doing his best, but he couldn’t stop wondering why, why him, why his family, why, and he’d spill over anyway, pushing over the furniture in his room, ripping apart his school notebooks, and in a particularly heated moment, almost burning all his books on astronomy and astrophysics along with his future aspirations form. What the hell is the point, he’d thought, sobbing into the pillows he’d strewn about.

Occasional counselling wasn’t enough to stop him from periodically sinking into the soul-sucking exhaustion and guilt that sank into his pores and left him hollow, but most of the time he liked living and found his life to be full just the way it was, tried to appreciate every moment that he had. He grew to love the sense of history permeating the city and seeping into every centimeter of its architecture and culture, and the way his parents would point out the changes on the street corners where they used to play. He didn’t regret getting to meet his grandfather and great-aunt and growing closer to them, getting to learn his family’s stories beyond Korea and Japantowns and language exercise books. It grounded him to see and experience the country that his parents had grown up in, if not always related to, a way to anchor himself and his place in the world.

Perhaps most irritating was the way the society tried to mold him and his family into something else, how it couldn’t recognize multiplicity – always bent on an order, on what should and should not be done or said. It wasn’t like most places didn’t have societal expectations, but he found them particularly inflexible and rigid in Kyoto, completely governed by the politics of politesse. He knew he and his family were not what others liked to say they were, but sometimes he couldn’t tell if what he was fighting was real, or if he was just resisting something intangible, a bedtime story that frightened him. It was one of the things that made him miss Toronto, the hustle and bustle of all sorts of cultures and peoples flowing in and out, plain and unmistakeable. If he stood out, it was in the same way that so many other immigrant families did, something he could understand, however unfair it could be.

But the shape of things here constantly fluctuated, the line between being a safe or dangerous body, invisible until it was seen, changing person to person, eastern Japan to western Japan, never really spoken of or discussed unless among his own family, taboo. His mother voted in local election rounds, nothing else. His family’s house was closer to his grandfather’s place at the edge of a dowa district, a reflection of the way his father sometimes seemed split about staying or going away, away from the bounds of being burakumin, away from the rude notes left in Shiro’s desk and shoe locker, away from the confusion between identity undefined and assimilated, melting away into the hustle and bustle of the city. How strange it was to wait at the densely packed street crossings in Kawaramachi, to visit Toronto in the summers to see his uncle and cousins again, to walk the streets of Tokyo and Sapporo on family trips, to drift in Seoul for a memorable two weeks, and feel his image shift – in the crowds he was no one of note, just another body, another Korean-Japanese boy journeying on his way someplace else.

Disease or no, being in Japan taught him that he would have to define his body and his life because this image was moldable, could be reinvented and remade. In the wake of each episode, he worked diligently at physical therapy to get back to typical fitness as soon as possible, then picked up a sport to help manage his anxiety and keep his muscles in good shape. Hapkido wasn’t an option, so judo was his deliberate school club of choice. Practice required a partner, which meant people had to see him, touch him, and acknowledge him, and if anyone was actually childish enough to refuse partnering for randori, they’d reveal that they were an antiquated dick on their own – and then he’d get to grapple them into the mats anyway. As a plus, his participation was proof that no one could say he wasn’t healthy enough to participate during sports period and festivals and force him on the sidelines. He was good at it too, enough that he’d started winning semi-final rounds and had begun to explore jiujitsu. It helped that the judo club’s advising teacher was from Hokkaido and had zero tolerance for denigrating speech or trash talking, especially when he thought it related to some snooty Kyoto thing.

He crammed doubletime to catch up when he had to be away from school, and by the last year of middle school he’d derived an unholy glee from seeing his yearmates’ faces each time his scores made it into the top three of his grade. Kill with kindness; be beyond reproach. People couldn’t spread credible rumors about him when he was courteous to teachers and classmates, helped facilitate group projects even if he was picked last, and kept up his academic and sports performance – it didn’t fit the image. Crash and burn he would and did, but in the process, he’d learned to manage his time and energy to squeeze everything he could get from his body, enough to know that he could figure out a way to make it do anything. If they wanted a wreck, he would show them something magnificent.

Shiro never wanted to be a figurehead or a hero, just wanted to spend what would inevitably be a short life doing what he wanted. He wanted to be a person, like anyone else, with the leisure of having choices, and he wanted to choose exploring deep space. With the aggressive mission plans of the postwar period, having a shorter life span is an accepted occupational hazard for astronauts; Shiro just expected to push that hazard to its limit. That confidence and belief in his own death was a vanity that reflected back on his leadership, just like Gorou’s desire to be a paragon, a paladin fighting for something good and right, reflected back on his.

Shiro’s always resisted the idea that his disease is his identity or that it’s what defines him, but being confronted with Gorou, he’s starting to realize that he did it more than he thought – identified himself in opposition to the requirements his disease dictated, motivated himself with a mixture of spite, determination, and the need to know that his story was still his to write. Gorou was given memories with just enough emotional heft to convincingly create the impression of Shiro and hold up continuity, but nothing with much nuance aside from the mission objectives and intel Haggar had programmed into him, along with whatever artifacts she’d managed to record with Shiro’s arm. He’s daunted by Shiro’s expectation of strife, how the lack of muscle pains and contractions, bouts of motor control loss, and debilitating paralysis have left a void instead of relief, all those symptoms magically wiped away like Shiro’s disease never existed. Like he never needed to struggle at all. Still no diagnosis, just the sudden remedy, as if Haggar’s mass reproductions of his body simply confirm: yes, you are what they say you were, just you. Incorrect, cursed like they say, the lesson on which a fable turns, it is your unique self.

Shiro wakes in the night with no grounding, no sense of location or that he is an entity at all, damp with sweat and frozen motionless as if he were suspended, eternal. At random moments of the day cycle he is struck with a sudden anxiety, wondering if he is just being tricked into dreaming his days away in an illusion of reality. His right hand is still clenched around the bayard like it was in that final battle and the fire still consumes him sometimes, stops him from sleeping, from smiling, from being gentle like he wants to be. Though still quickly exhausted and sluggish in movement, there is an easiness to inhabiting Gorou’s body that is eerie, too familiar and too comfortable for a space he doesn’t quite think of as his, until misalignment strikes with a vengeance. Well-worn stretches and fighting forms strain and twinge his muscles as if it were the first time, because this body fought and recovered in a different way. Gorou borrowed less from the early martial arts training he never received and relied more on enhanced strength and physical capability, a bruising style so different Shiro’s surprised no one said anything sooner. Each time he cools down or changes, Shiro is confronted with the truth that this body is one his parents would not be able to identify. Gone are the myriad moles that speckled his inner thighs, the oddly textured skin on the creases of his elbow and knees that were a legacy of severe preteen eczema, the old burn on his belly from a barbecue mishap that never quite faded. Even his belly button doesn’t look right.

Each difference is a constant reminder of what Haggar and the Empire have put him and his body through, this body with its no-pain no-bruise no-signs no-Shiro identity. Then he realizes how odd it is to feel anything at all, outside of the eternally frozen astral plane, hyperfocuses onto the texture of the closest sensations until all else drowns out, rolling that haptic feedback around in his mind like a crumbling sweet on his tongue, still too buried in unreality. The astral plane is an ever present lure that promises oblivion, the bliss of unfeeling stagnancy, threatens to drag them back to the void of the Lion’s mouth each time they doze or close their eyes, stars bursting on the back of their eyelids.

Under their fingertips, a foreign warmth.

“Hello, Shiro,” Allura says softly, softly. She holds his hand, tender, still smelling of ozone as she settles onto the bedside stool, a sign that the space wolf has recently come and gone. The low lighting is a warm, dusky burgundy that makes her otherworldly eyes pop. As he sits up, she stares at him, through him maybe, ready to pull him apart all over again, worrying a lip and urgently looking over the rest of him.

“Hey Allura,” he croaks, voice cracking, and she passes him a hydration pouch, puts a straw in it for him. It’s like the straw stabs him too, this Shiro stuck in bed again, Gorou incapable again, but he tries to ignore it. He got past this feeling as a child, as a teen, and as a struggling adult, so he runs through the facts once more – it’s just your ego talking. It’s okay to need help, because no one can do everything on their own. It’s okay to take your time and forgive yourself, because you are recovering and getting better every day. And it’s true – he’s only bedbound today because he severely overtaxed himself the day before helping take inventory on three of the Lions, the space wolf his steady companion. He always makes sure to compensate the wolf with plenty of ear and belly rubs. 

Sipping his water slowly, he takes stock. Sore, but not in pain, the lack of it strange as always. Tired, but not exhausted. Alert, if bedraggled. In contrast, Allura is drained of all decorum, hunching over his hand with her elbows and knees drawn close. Gone is the upright spine, elongated neck, the poised, calculated arrangement of limbs and expression. Her customarily tidy updo is fraying, unraveling into flyaways and long, trailing strands. Slowly, she draws her gaze down and away to their joined hands, dry, chapped mouth pressing into a tense line. Her grip on his hand only grows tighter.

It’s not the first time she’s dropped her princess persona around him. Leading the most powerful weapon in the universe and being one of the only surviving representatives of one’s people are not easy burdens, and he used to be able to help carry the load, if only in matters relating to Voltron. He appreciates getting to meet the Allura that Coran dotes on so much, the one that likes pretty things and playing with her mice, who is cutting and clever and full of ways to diplomatically pull the rug on all sorts of unpleasant personalities. They’d found themselves becoming fast friends when the first bumpy, impatient weeks of training spurred them to debrief regularly at the end of each day cycle, one-on-one. As full of idle conversation as they were planning, the debriefings were an opportunity to level with each other and speak their thoughts freely as leaders of the same team, working towards a mutual goal. They traded facts about humans and Alteans, agonized over teambuilding, poured over maps and strategies together, and sometimes just flat out complained about the obnoxious people they’d met that movement. They workshopped Allura’s speeches together and gamed negotiations to anticipate roadblocks and form rebuttals. He’d seen her flush off successful agreements and despairing over disastrous diplomatic flubs. When Allura gets fired up, she’s intense like nothing else, all passion and charisma, something Shiro finds similar to Keith, if expressed in a more controlled way. But the debriefings hadn’t survived his death, and he’s never seen Allura so careworn.   

A tear drips down her cheek, a hand immediately flying up to meet it in surprise. “Oh,” she whispers, breath hitching as more tears travel down, working her way up into a proper silent cry. She sniffs loudly to unsuccessfully try and keep the snot from dripping out her nose. Their fingers twine together. “Oh, Shiro. I thought I was going to have to bury you too.”

He leans toward her in vain, too far to offer any other physical comfort aside from holding her hand as tightly as he can. In the eye of history her hurts are old and numerous, but for her, they are all still fresh and bleeding, her culture, her family, her first love, and the many other loves he must know nothing about. This war is her inheritance and her legacy, chews up and spits out her heart every day.

“It’s okay,” he soothes, “It’s alright. You saved me. You saved us. All of us are here, and we’re okay. I’ll be up before you know it, we can plan a drill for the next time we end up planetside.”

Allura’s laugh is rude, a hiccupping, braying thing, and combined with her fatigue it makes it sound like she’s wheezing. “You’ll have to wrestle planning duty away from Keith and Krolia first,” she guffaws, wiping at her cheeks and reddening, running nose. “I believe they may not have too much else to do.”

“You can always delegate,” he says primly, squeezing her hand. “Don’t wear yourself out. You look exhausted.”    

She scowls at him. “Leave me be, Shiro,” she says crossly, thwapping him on the thigh. “You know as well as I do that we’ve nothing to delegate aside from organization of the next Monsters & Mana game, and that’s all Coran has to keep him occupied. As for everything else….well.”

“Well,” Shiro repeats.

“Stop that,” she says, lips breaking into a grin. It subsides quickly, leaving her in a sigh, and she plucks out all the small pins anchoring her hair together. Curls tumble down messily around her face as she shakes the intricate loops loose. “I suppose I’m restless. So much has happened so quickly. Naxzela, the Kral Zera, Oriande….and then the rift and Lotor…” She pauses for a moment, eyes watering, running a hand through her hair, before sniffing and carrying on. “And now we’ve nothing to do but travel for phoebs! Heh. I’m at loose ends. Hm.”

Blinking rapidly to stem a second bout of tears, she clenches her eyes shut, exhaling slow. As if using the air to push herself back into shape, her back straightens bit by bit, and her shoulders shimmy a little, shaking herself awake. Eyes open; return to form. “In any case,” she says brightly with a pat to Shiro’s hand, “My current responsibility is to talk to you. How are you feeling?”

What a question. Aside from coping with and managing the many upsets and discomforts of unbelonging to a new body, he’s relieved to see the team again, grateful to witness how much they’ve grown. It’s all shadowed by the guilt that Gorou feels, compounded, the truth of that constant phrase, “It wasn’t you, Shiro,” because it wasn’t. Knowing and seeing are not the same as experiencing, and Shiro wasn’t even there, still stuck in that unending plane of star-studded black, space madness brought to physical form, pressing down upon him from all sides. Failure circles Gorou like a starving buzzard, crushing him with the disappointment of knowing he let the team down and almost killed them. How could he have driven things to such extremes, how could he have wedged the team apart like that, how he could have pushed Keith away? He is nothing like the model paladin he wanted to be.

Shiro too, is displaced. Not really Black Paladin anymore, not really a team leader, possibly not even part of the team. He watches them talk and realizes how much he’s missed, how much has changed. It’s clear to him that these aren’t the reluctant teens he first trained with on the Castleship. Lance especially, has grown a great deal, level-headed, tactical, and easily able to read a room and assess the team’s needs. He and Keith still squabble, but nothing like they used to, and they naturally settle into a back-and-forth dynamic that suggests how closely and frequently he and Keith must have worked together. Hunk is more assertive and now deploys his down-to-earth nature with a specific type of diplomatic aggression, while Pidge is sharp as ever, if a little less impulsive and more contemplative, worn down by complexities she used to never think about. Allura now sinks in and out of melancholic moods, more jaded and cautious than she used to be, optimistic out of necessity rather than want. Even Keith’s reserved nature, as recognizable and familiar as he will always be, has taken on a more colorful form, that wild passion clearer than ever but banked, belying a deeper stillness that remains unsettled all the same.

Shiro wasn’t the one who guided them here. Gorou did. And when they ask him if he remembers that time they landed on the Coalition planet and the local greeting was like the macarena, make laser noises before looking to him to a response, a clear inside joke that he doesn’t know well yet, he understands that who they’re really asking and looking for is Gorou. Shiro is the one who has been left behind. He is the one who has not grown with them.

Truthfully, Shiro feels irrelevant and spare. A little forgotten, interrupted. Like an unfinished character, a manuscript trailed off only to be finished by some other pen.

Another challenge, he’s told himself, cold with sweat in the dark, jittering enough to have the space wolf come find him, whining quietly as it plops its head in his lap. Do it again. Reinvent yourself.

It’s something only he can solve. For now he side eyes Allura, just so she knows she’s not really getting away with such an unsubtle diversion. “I could be better,” he says truthfully. “It’s a lot, physically and emotionally. Still absorbing everything, getting used to being around again. But mostly, I wanted to understand what’s happening with me. In me. Keith said you moved my spirit?”

He’s still baffled by the entire experience even though he’s the one who went through it. Contemplating the existence of a spirit, a soul, and its separation and distinction from the body and the concept of personhood, is not something Shiro had ever planned to do. It’s exactly why he’s an engineer. To make things more complicated, Allura’s actions imply that the soul is something that can be manipulated, something with some sort of substance and mechanics. In a very real way, he empathizes with Pidge and Hunk’s frequent frustration with alchemy and its complete resistance to any sort of human understanding.

“That is essentially what I did, yes, though it is a bit more complicated than that,” Allura confirms, nodding. Releasing Shiro’s hand with an affectionate rub of her thumb against his fingers, she settles in her stool, crossing one leg over the other. “What I know of alchemy is probably now very out of date, but my suspicion is that Haggar used a Galran technique as a foundation for the programming that was embedded in your prosthesis. It is likely a ritual similar to the one the Blade of Marmora probably uses to establish ties between their agents’ life forces and their blades. Depending on its use, the ritual can create quintessence bonds and channels, not just tethers. To make matters worse, since the programming was driven by the prosthesis, it constantly drained your clone’s quintessence for power. By the time Keith brought him back to the castle, he was in very bad shape.”

Diverting her attention to the bedsheets, she smooths out the wrinkles before continuing carefully, articulating each word with precision. “Haggar had also designed the quintessence bond between herself and the clone such that it could not be used against her. A significant portion of the clone’s remaining quintessence actually bore her signature.”

Sweat is beginning to gather at Shiro’s temples, and Gorou is clawing at him from the inside, where dread and the desperation for answers war against each other. Their heart seems to be throwing itself against their sternum, drumming away loud enough to echo in their ears.  “Allura, help me put together the pieces here. What does that mean?”

She looks earnestly into his eyes, lacing her hands together in her lap. “The clone was designed to have diminished quintessence production; he doesn’t create enough quintessence naturally to live on his own. Without regular infusions of quintessence from her side of the bond, he couldn’t survive,” she says, hands clenching together rhythmically, full of tension with nowhere to go. “Likely, it was a one-sided connection to prevent him from affecting her quintessence reserves. So if she activated the programming first and drained the large majority of his quintessence…”

“She wouldn’t have to do anything, he’d die, and there’d be no way to track her,” Shiro finishes mechanically. He stares at her for some seconds, before tipping his head back and letting it hit the wall with a thump. “Wow. Quiznak.”

“Nicely put,” Allura mutters darkly, brows drawing together and kicking her dangling foot in agitation. “I would respect her ingenuity much more if it weren’t used in such loathsome ways. In fact, had I not entered Oriande, I may not have been able to conduct the transfer. Transferring and manipulating quintessence is perfectly within the average alchemist’s means. However, to perform more elaborate and detailed quintessence procedures you must be able to detect and direct natural quintessence flows and distinguish between different quintessence types on a more granular level. Quintessence is actually quite easily altered since it’s a form of life energy, prone to picking up the characteristics of its environment and changing in nature and affinity. If we were to envision the universe through quintessence flows and types alone, it would be extremely diverse and colorful. Coming out of Oriande, I’d felt like the world had opened up to me, so vibrant and full of life.”

“Do you think Haggar has gone through Oriande before, to be able to do things like this?”

“I couldn’t say,” Allura says with a regretful shrug. “It’s just as possible that the effects of the rift mutated her abilities. I can only speak for myself, and it would have been extremely difficult to extract you from the Black Lion if I hadn’t been able to separate out and identify your quintessence signature. Especially since Black….” She hesitates, pursing her lips.

Shiro sits back up, leaning in with his arm as support, voice lowering. “I’ve been wondering about that for a while. Is Blue not like that?”

Tentatively, she shakes her head, ever cautious about revealing information regarding her father and the politics of the past. “I…in truth, my father never told me much about how Voltron was created,” she says. “So when it comes to the Lions, I can only speculate. Alchemy’s a tricky business, despite extensive studies and research. General rules about how quintessence behaves have been established, but the mechanisms behind them are often unexplained, and there are plenty of exceptions. Partnering with Blue…” She fidgets a little as she thinks, index fingers tapping against the backs of her hands. “It feels so natural, like all my gaps are filled in. It’s what anchors me when we form Voltron. In comparison, Black feels…deeper. Heavier and denser. Your spirit was tangled up in theirs, submerged and hidden, and Black resisted any attempts to change that at first. In fact, if Black hadn’t recognized my intentions eventually and guided me to you, I’m sure my efforts would have failed.”

“I remember that,” Shiro murmurs. The paladins, glitching in and out of the plane together between one blink and the next; the sudden, piercing shout of Keith’s call, never giving up like he promised, and then Keith himself, all too real, pleading with him for help. Allura, blurring into vision in the astral plane, coalescing from a cloud of space dust and starlight. Running to him, gripping his hand. Black’s shadowy tendrils beginning to swirl all around them, plunging the world into darkness. Keith, dear Keith, Keith who always stayed and never left his side, calling for him, telling him to fight and not give up. Keith, who wants him there, wants him alive. How could he refuse?

Combing restless fingers through her hair, Allura watches his expression carefully. “The clone was dying by the time Keith flew back to the Castleship. Without an additional, constant quintessence source, he wouldn’t survive.” She averts her gaze as if she can sense Gorou shuddering in their shared body’s chest, their hand clenching tight in the bedsheets. “In truth…that was the primary reason for the transfer. We wanted you back, Shiro, believe me, and we would have found a way, but had the circumstances not been what they were, I would not be able to condone moving your spirit into a body that already had its own. You would have been safe with Black. But I…I wanted him to survive too.”

Tears spring unbidden to Shiro’s eyes, Gorou’s heart leaping. “I can understand if you are angry with me,” Allura continues, reaching out to grasp Gorou’s hand once more, “But knowing he was under Haggar’s control and seeing how much of his behavior made sense after that…we’d faced so much together. Accomplished so much together. I couldn’t imagine how the team would function without him, everything was just so uncertain. Despite all my doubts, I’d still hoped he was the friend and leader that I’d known. I’ve grown tired of seeing people turn away. If there was at all a chance…I wanted to take it. And perhaps that was a selfish thing, but it’s what I chose.”

“Thank you,” Gorou says, sniffling. Unwilling to let go of Allura’s hand, he swipes his arm across his eyes, Allura laughing quietly as she’s dragged along for the ride. “Thank you for believing in me,” he says, prompting several startled blinks and a quick once over. “I’ll do my best not to waste this second chance.”

Allura’s radiant as she breaks into a gentle smile. “No need for thanks,” she says, and shakes their conjoined hands twice like they’re meeting for the first time. “I just wanted my good friend to be able to stay around, maybe go on some more adventures together. And there was no guarantee the transfer would work out, so you should thank yourselves as well. Considering your situation…?”

“Gorou,” he supplies.

“Yes, Gorou,” Allura agrees, nodding. “There was a chance Shiro’s spirit would be rejected, as there always is for these types of procedures, spiritual incompatibility, quintessence incompatibility, and so on. But there were a couple factors in play that I felt would mitigate that chance: your genetic material could be assumed to be almost identical to Shiro’s, and it seemed likely that there would be some overlap in memory. Shiro’s spirit should have therefore seemed familiar to some degree. I could not predict how your spirits would react to each other, but I was hoping that from a quintessence standpoint, your broken quintessence bond would respond to Shiro’s presence and reform, bringing your spirits closer in sync and ensuring mutual survival.” Abashed and rueful, she rests a hand on his knee. “I’m afraid what we have now is an unprecedented situation. There have been studies on quintessence bonds, temporary spirit sharing, and supplementation of naturally low quintessence production, but not all these conditions at once, and certainly not concerning two spirits in one body.”

Gorou sighs. “We’re so special,” he deadpans, a clear inside joke for Shiro’s benefit.

In moments like this, Shiro can see where he and Gorou are alike, trace the web of causality and the branching effects of his and Gorou’s choices, the changes they could have made if they were different people, more different than they are now. He reflects Gorou too –  Gorou was created to replace him, but now here Shiro is. This body is Gorou’s. Who replaced who? Gorou’s life isn’t gone, but it’s only partially actualized. Sometimes, sitting in Black all by himself, he concentrates on the seam between them with a climbing desperation, feels out every nook and cranny and every sharp shard with the dawning realization of being a thief, an imposter. Who are they to decide how someone’s life should be? Who are they to decide what person has more value?

Knowing and feeling Gorou’s remorse and private devastation at what Haggar wrought is a blessing and a curse. Both Gorou and Shiro feel an obligation to act somehow, to clear the air and provide the full story, although Shiro wonders just as frequently if they actually owe anyone anything at all. The events are still so fresh, so personal and invasive that neither of them necessarily feels ready to address anything yet, much less the minefield that team dynamics have become. At the same time, there is a bubbling frustration and anger that Shiro bears, a small voice that wants to shout about how Gorou could create divisions in the team like that, how he could drive Keith away by targeting all his weakest spots, how could he be so irresponsible. But Shiro is also intimately familiar with the feeling of not being in control. He knows it’s not Gorou’s fault. The frustration and wishfulness in thinking that those things wouldn’t have happened if he was there is just self-gratifying, self-absorbed, hurts Gorou and sends them into a spiral of pointless what-ifs. But part of him wonders about it anyway, leaves him and Gorou silent and brooding, licking their wounds.

In truth, who knows how long Shiro would have lasted, with his impending mortality still on the table? Who knows what he would have thought or decided? There’s no guarantee he wouldn’t have gone down that same path. After all, he’d burdened Keith too. Shiro had always seen leadership potential in Keith, but Keith had never expressed a desire to be a leader. He only ever said that he wanted to crew a mission together someday. Shiro had continued encouraging him, perhaps pointlessly, but in the end, in that cave with the possibility of his death on the horizon, he’d forced his expectations on him. I want you to lead Voltron, he’d said, not thinking about how acquiring the position as a consequence of Shiro’s death would affect Keith, how airing the sentiment in an urgent situation would hurt Keith and change their relationship, or how Black might react to such a statement. In his own selfish desperation, he’d as good as made the decision for Keith, exactly the thing Shiro hated having done to him the most. He didn’t even follow up and try to train or prepare him for such a position like he should have. He’d relied on Keith too much, taken him for granted when he should have concentrated on improving himself. He’d hurt him. And when he was dead and gone, he’d kept hurting him. You’re awful. He was always going to leave.

Sometimes Shiro thinks Allura should have just left him there on the astral plane. Sometimes he doesn’t feel like it was worth it to come back, but he only needs to see Keith’s face to flush in shame at the thought, Gorou chiding him in the background. It wasn’t their combined spirits rejecting Gorou’s body. He and Gorou didn’t have trouble reconciling at all – they recognize the same ugliness in each other, call it laziness or call it lack of initiative, the inability to confess or admit or own up to themselves. That rejection was because Shiro wasn’t sure if he wanted to keep fighting, to return and live. Even when already in lockstep with Gorou, the two of them relying on each other to survive, Shiro still selfishly hesitated. And Shiro sees now the consequences of that indulgent wallowing in his decisions. He should have been stronger, more decisive. More transparent. He persists in thinking that if he’d been better, things wouldn’t have ended up like this, even though he knows it’s stupid. What is even the point about feeling guilty for dying? It’s okay to need help, he’d always told himself, but only to quell his reactions, not because he wanted to ask for it. Help him, he’s alive. He’s here, but he doesn’t know what to do.

In comparison, Gorou has regrets but doesn’t regret that Shiro is his anchor. They owe their mutual existence to each other. His thoughts and feelings rise like a dense, gentle fog, cradling Shiro, and his body responds. When he decides to put those responses in action, Shiro gives him free reign. It’s unspoken that Shiro has the larger portion of the timeshare out of quintessence ratios if nothing else, and possibly, only for now – Gorou is, in his way, recovering too. It’s nothing so masochistic as wanting Shiro’s presence in his body to atone, but rather, the chance to atone at all. The chance to continue, to see what’s next. A relief at still being able to peek beyond the curtain, to be something more, with Shiro, as Shiro, as a part of them. Gorou truly is the better of them. He is the one looking ahead, head held high, while Shiro cowers. 

A gentle hand cradles his cheek and interrupts the reverie they’ve sunk into, nudges Shiro to lift his chin from where he’d unconsciously let it dip towards his chest. “To all of us, you are indeed very special. You are unique,” Allura says solemnly, shifting to sit on the edge of the bed, thumb stroking slowly, delicately, along the bottom of edge of his scar. “I do not want to risk losing either of you. This may be an unusual situation, but you are not alone. We will face this like we have faced many other things – together. If things change in the future we can handle them then, but for now…if you do not feel right, if you are uncomfortable or unwell, I want you to tell me. Coran and I will make sure that by the time we are back on your planet, you can greet your loved ones with confidence.”

With a nudge of Allura’s hands they collapse together, heads resting on each other’s shoulders, Shiro’s arm loosely braced around Allura’s waist. They remain there, all their weight held up, suspended.

“Thanks Allura,” Shiro says, hand rubbing softly across her lower back. “For everything. There’s no other princess I’d rather serve.”

“Why, thank you, Shiro,” she replies haughtily. “But how many princesses do you even know?”

“Well, my home country has one, but it’s more of a symbolic and diplomatic title. The imperial family doesn’t really govern anything anymore,” he says, deliberately rolling his head on her shoulder to crack his neck, something he knows she hates. Allura flinches like she’s about to throw him off, but settles for a generous, hard pinch to his side. “Ow. It’s not like I know her personally.”

“Even if you did, I don’t loan out my paladins,” she says, prompting a grin from him with a strong, pointed squeeze to his biceps. “I still find this ‘country’ concept of yours so odd. All of you are from different ones?”

“Sort of,” Shiro says dryly, wondering how he’d even begin to explain geopolitics to a princess from a planet with only one large landmass. “Pidge and Keith were born in the same country the Garrison is in, where we were all working or attending school. Lance’s country is a little over four vargas’ flight time from there. Hunk and I would need to take flights over ten vargas long to get home.”

“Goodness!” Allura grabs his arms and backs away so she can look him in the face, crestfallen. “That long? Your homes are so far away!”

“Yeah,” Shiro says softly. “I don’t know how that will end up working. Depends on how things are on Earth, I guess. At least Sam was able to bring messages from the others home.”

Gorou hadn’t recorded a message. He’d stalled Sam out until he couldn’t keep waiting, because he didn’t have anything to say. Thinking of Shiro’s family had only intensified the headaches and sense of vertigo he’d been suffering with the Kral Zera on the horizon, and he’d done his best to avoid the topic at all costs.

The first couple months of fighting in the arena, it had been hard for Shiro not to think of his family, to think of what they would be told about his absence, what they would think. Perhaps they would just accept it, given the discussions they’d had when he was offered the Kerberos mission. He’d tried to remember what he stipulated in the last revision of his will, redrawn just a couple weeks after the engagement was called off. Did Adam still think of him sometimes? Did he look at the sky and feel vindicated somehow, bittersweet and sorrowful? Or did he miss him or regret breaking up, the way Shiro sometimes did? Did his father ever use their telescope and wonder if he was unknowingly gazing at the same black patch that contained his son’s free floating body, too small and far away to see? Did his mother have difficulty working, contemplating all the ways black holes or gravity could bend and distort time and space and how maybe, this might not have come to pass? Would his parents pick up any signs that would let them know he was still out here? Did Keith remember his lessons, his advice, his friendship? Those maudlin and melodramatic thoughts were all he had to comfort himself. He wanted to be missed and mourned. He wanted to be someone who was remembered, if he couldn’t be saved. In the arena, in the vastness of the universe, he was nothing. But at home, surely…?

When was the last time he went home? When was the last time he hadn’t fretted about accomplishing something? If not passing his health checks, then getting approved for mission considerations, then having to improve his standing with the higher ups to apply for missions, then the agony of transitioning his student visa to a work visa with the proper timing, so he wouldn’t have to keep having nightmares about landing back on Earth only to be detained by immigration officials for deportation. And then and then and then. Five years passing by in a haze of low grade urgency, always saying, I miss you, but never making the time.

His parents, his grandfather, and great-aunt on the PADD screen, compressed down to digital squares, paling in comparison to the real thing, to the fabrics under his fingertips when he comes in for a hug, the smell of wood and pungent stains and finishes, the familiar odor of aged paper and cedar from his grandfather’s paper and fabrics shop. The night before the launch to Kerberos, he’d called them but the connection was poor. Their voices kept trailing off, distorted and broken into metallic echoes and screeches; their faces would freeze, expressions held in rictus. They’d valiantly held onto the line for an hour, and at the end, with very little conversation achieved, Shiro had sent them a link to a livestream where they could watch him leave the planet again, if they had the time. Space imposed on top of space, half a world away and watching someone go beyond the sky, beyond the atmosphere, disappearing from the Earth. Now, deep in space and out of their sight, he’s jettisoned his body altogether, just another space removed.

“I hope I get to see my family,” Shiro says, voice quivering, resting a hand over Allura’s and grasping it tight, knowing she will understand. “And tell them something other than ‘goodbye’.”

***+***

Don’t look.

Yearning, want, hate, all binds up to push back against the gaze that presses intimate against his skin, imploring even though he does not know the question or the answer. As many times as it takes, but he does not want it to happen one time more, he does not want Keith to see him, does not want that invisible expectation to settle on his shoulders and around his neck and squeeze, those eyes that make him ask himself how many times more will he question what he knows and what he thinks and how many times more will he retreat. His right hands are demanding, and it freezes his blood when Keith turns to him with a shy turn of mouth soon to morph into disappointment and hurt, when Keith frowns and cringes away from his answers, when the anger rises and the port of his arm burns because he is shaken and uncertain, because he is doubted, he wants to be paladin but returns to his room to sink his head into shaking hands and unsteady breath because he can’t remember and the fog that separates how he feels from how he thinks and acts thickens by the day, until he sees no way out.

Don’t look at me.

Lance trails after him with uncertainty painted on his face and he’s been doing well, keeping up the morale, not asking too many questions, but Shiro still does, Shiro still asks the questions and there’s a new set of eyes on him now every time he settles, rigid, into the seat at Black’s controls. Like a target painted on his back a keen stare follows him when he leads, as if there were jaws hovering above his unprotected nape and claws ready to sharpen themselves upon his spine. Black may let him in, may let him fly, but they are vast and unknowable, predatory and curious. Distant. He is but a mouse, a tiny, pitiful, mewling thing to them. He turns, but Keith is not there. He hated the uncertainty but he misses the asking. The attention and the care. He wonders how Keith is doing until the cold vertigo conquers the feeling of loss and loneliness, warps him until he is spat back out on the bridge talking strategy with Allura, not quite sure how he got there but unable to express the thought with his mouth moving with things he never planned to say. Lance approaches him after they save Olkarion, asking him what he was trying to tell him; his vision fragments briefly when he says, truthfully, that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

His emotions warp while he feels them, his dreams are unsettling and vague. He makes decisions but doesn’t know why, spend his nights sleepless and his days reeling, unspooling. He knows he lost something good but he can’t read between the lines. His tongue is lead; he cannot speak.

Look at me.

He is but one of many, imposter – he feels the despair of Keith’s eyes on him once again; ugly and misshapen though he is, the satisfaction and delirious joy rings through, a piercing wail bouncing in his skull as he charges ahead. Insidious pressure balloons, chokes him to the margins while his body moves without him. He scrabbles uselessly against the invisible tether that swings his arm forward and hits Keith across the face so viciously his helmet flies away. A moan of anguish lies trapped in his chest, a dead thing like the rest of him, the rest of all of them, all his questions come to nothing, the context ripped to shreds. As many times as it takes, but he wants not one time more. The violet takes over, leeches from him the violent passion, the loving desperation, he’ll make sure Keith only looks at him the one way for eternity and he can’t feel his throat go raw when his arm consumes itself, he can’t feel the sob that wants to crawl out because he was never going to be a paladin, or a hero, or someone good or worthy. All he can see is the violet soaked into his vision, into the arm trying to carve a bloody path through his best friend’s neck, that lights up the tears in Keith’s eyes when he tells him he loves him, that beckons him when he falls into the void of space.

Look.

He’s got that ambient album playing, the one that prompted Adam to talk about his great-aunt’s beachside home in Peru and how he wanted to take Shiro there one day, so he could sample the freshest ceviche firsthand and see how he liked it against sashimi, so he could explore the riches and bounty of another kind of unexplored deep, hidden beneath the waves. Maybe they could go to the fancy Peruvian-Japanese place where Adam’s cousin held the reception to renew her vows. Shiro remembers the way Adam would study him carefully as he brought up the topic time and again as if it were a joke, attentive, testing.

Normally it’s easy to sink into the methodical beats and synthetic textures, but today it makes him uneasy and frantic, fixating on how his chest rises and sinks rapidly with his overloud breaths, heart fluttering alongside the terror that surges with each seizing tremor. He’s freezing, wrapped only in a thin blanket that does nothing to shield his sweatsoaked skin from the draft coming in from the kitchen. The white noise of his straining breath, the wind through the leaves, birdsong, makes him think of hospital wards and pneumatic machines. He meant to close the window this morning after letting in some fresh air, but the spasms started before he could get out the door. He barely had enough strength to drag himself into the bedroom to at least have the comfort of a mattress instead of a tile floor.

There is no one else to close the window. He is by himself.

Who knows how much this could set him back? Sam has been advocating for him, out of pity, out of glory, and he knows that all things considered he should never be on that shuttle but with every scrape of air that crawls out from the underside of his ribs, with every spasmodic and uncontrollable twitch of his fingers, he wants it, to be more than just this. More than a broken body and a half-baked man – what he becomes will define him. Indignantly, he thinks he’s already risen early with the proof, but he’s still waiting for that fist to come punching down; he could be kneaded into something else yet. He’s been outrunning his sentence since he was a child, since he was born, either cursed or just unlucky or both, but he can’t regret anything because to regret implies he had a choice to do anything else. To be everything or be nothing.

This new apartment doesn’t even smell like him, definitely doesn’t smell like Adam, still too clean and polished and cold, and he’s alone and in pain, like he’ll be alone and in pain in the years to come. His experience has always run counter to fiction: he is not the one of the endless protagonists repeating the mantra that pain is a sign of living and endurance. Pain is exhausting, wrings him out and turns him inside out. Every single nerve is raw and exposed and he can’t move or ask anyone for help, can’t cry or eat or sleep and he’s so tired that he closes his eyes for just a brief moment, wills the wet that lines his lashes to recede, wills himself to hang on for only a couple weeks, months, years longer, that there will be a blessed end.

There’s a quiet tumble of the lock and a click of the door, and when he steels his jaw against the next muscle spasm Keith is there. Wordlessly, Keith reaches into his backpack and gently shakes out a familiar, worn Pendleton blanket he’d found at an idle trip to the thrift store after one of their canyon runs. He’d made a face at the label but quietly confided that it looked just like the blanket his father had told him was passed down in his family, just with a different color scheme. He never said what happened to the original. Soft wool is soothed around Shiro’s shoulders as he bites down on a groan of pain and tries to conceal the uncontrollable full body jerks of the next round of spasms. Ever steadfast in his refusal to shy away, Keith tucks the corners of the blanket in around Shiro’s shivering form, swaddling him with comfort and steady hands. Fingertips skim lightly across the lifeline etched in Shiro’s palm, wrist to thumb, sliding into a tender hold that clasps in place as Shiro’s bracelets beep in distress. Lips pressed into a bloodless line, Keith’s stare is viciously gentle and merciless.

It’s the same stare that Krolia fixes him with when he thrashes himself awake in the Black Lion. It’s strange to see reminders of Keith in her, when Keith has always otherwise been singular, individual, to him.

“Bad dream?” she asks, tone even, returning her attentions to the dismantled set of Imperial armor scattered across her lap. A hint of Keith’s accent is ever present in her English, planted right alongside the elongated dipthongs, unvoiced stops, staccato enunciation, and unexpected chirps, chuffs, and growls borrowed from Standard Galran. The lack of armor does nothing to diminish her bearing, limbs poised and ready to move at a moment’s notice. Sprawled by her side is Keith’s wolf, tail swishing idly.

Echoes of screams and chants are still fading away when he rubs at his forehead, grinding the heel of his palm into tired eyes. No point in hiding it, who knows what he was doing in his sleep. “Yeah. You could say that.”

Nodding, she studies a nasty grouping of scratches set in the right pauldron. “A bad memory,” she corrects herself, more statement than question, and buffs at the scratches with the rag in her hand.

Shiro’s reminded that out here in space, time moves in ways and at scales that are almost inconceivable – not just the theoretical, quantum stuff, but the easy fact that Krolia could be centuries old with the life experience to match, and that she spent a probable amount of it as a first-class spy honing a highly specialized skillset including assassination and deception. Keith, on the other hand, for all his stealth and physical prowess, can barely trick his way out of a paper bag, but then, Shiro’s always liked that about him.

“How is Krolia?” he had cautiously asked Keith when still bedridden, worried and trying to get a temperature check of how things were now. Gorou hadn’t had the time or capability to ask before, and it had been two extra years for Keith already. Time, again, slipping through his fingers, or lack of thereof. I missed you, I hope you’re okay, how are you now? he wanted to say, but instead: “How’d you find her?”

Even with the vague ask, Keith managed to understand what he meant. “A Blades mission, actually,” Keith admitted, “I think Kolivan might’ve set us up.” He sighed and grasped the hand that Shiro offered for comfort, squeezing, spreading open his single palm with both hands and running his fingers over the lines there like old times, like he could see the future.

“I spent two years on the back of a space whale with her. I was angry for a lot of it,” he said quietly. Wandering fingers came to a rest in a loose grip around Shiro’s wrist, thumb rubbing over Shiro’s pulse, back and forth, back and forth. “And sometimes I still don’t really know how I should feel about it. Having her here.”

As their friendship had progressed, Keith had slowly begun to offer little facts about his early life with his father, sparing and precious gems that signaled his trust. The family blanket. Periodic stories of a small house, mostly off the grid, planted in the nowhere middle of the desert. Sliding down the firehouse pole. Maps and star charts, gathering the pads and fruit of prickly pear. Homemade pickles, tart and crisp, and piles of smoking wood and maguey leaves for the barbacoa pit out back. Blazing headlights in the dusk and a makeshift sidecar. Thunderstorms and desert floods. Never had Keith spoken of his mother, aside from the fact that she was out of the picture. His hurts were voids, empty cavities, suggestions of negative space.

The sole exceptions were the rare moments Keith gave him the privilege of meeting his father. It had only happened twice – a lonely headstone in a sea of other headstones, more ash in the earth. Shiro would become like that one day too, though distantly he held out the hope that his remains might be one day be compressed into something interesting by geological forces. A visit took a couple days of planning and preparation: a contemplative hoverbike ride out to the desert to pick flowers and prickly pear fruits and pads, a quiet hour or so in his and Adam’s kitchen to make the nopales stir fry and cactus pear lemonade that were seasonal hallmarks in Keith’s childhood. They would walk to the cemetery area set aside for the local firefighter precincts, where Keith’s father was settled on the fringes. The sad, monochrome uniformity of grey slabs dotting the flat, gravelly earth was disturbed by the sudden eruption of bright magenta blooms with saturated purple centers, lovely even among a dense forest of thin, white spines, sprouting from small, stout cacti. Keith had planted them, brought them from where they had lived on the kitchen windowsill. The colors had reminded his father of his mother, he’d said, with a bitter look in his eye. The lemonade and stir fry would go in front of the gravestone, and Keith would stay for about an hour.

Those were possibly the chattiest hours that he’d ever spent with Keith. Everything he’d never mention on the average day spilled out in front of that grave, with nothing but sun baked earth, his father, and Shiro to hear him and keep his secrets. That he thinks his childhood with his father was the happiest time of his life. That he can’t help but feel abandoned, his father rushing off to save some other family while leaving his own son behind, not thinking of the consequences despite being a foster kid that grew out of the system himself. That he didn’t have a birth certificate until he entered the system and his social worker got him one, a social security number, and a state ID. That he wonders about the mother he never knew, why his father never talked about her or had photos of her, just hung onto that one knife – and how when he was younger, he would fantasize that she would return for him one day, sweep him away way from the rough and neglectful hands and unhappy faces, before spiraling into a corkscrew of anger and hurt, knowing that would never happen because he’d already been left behind.  

Shiro had been angry, watching Keith’s forlorn face and frustrated fists, hearing the ache that made his quiet voice hoarse when he said he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to find out who she was, if he ever wanted to know why she left. Keith was, without a doubt, a good person and his best friend, and didn’t deserve to feel unwanted. That his father hadn’t applied for a birth certificate implied several things – that possibly his mother was undocumented, or didn’t have complete identification herself, especially considering that Keith’s father likely worked closely with law enforcement as part of his day job. But knowing that didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t there when Keith needed her.

To her credit, Krolia seems to care for Keith and values having him close. She has a look on her face sometimes when she watches Keith from afar, sorrowful and distant. At times she moves towards him, reaching out, only to abort the intended gesture and keep to herself. She calls him by name, doesn’t call herself his mother or him her son, but he sees them holding hands sometimes, studying each other’s faces like they’re trying to memorize every centimeter. They spar and exchange lessons on Galran and English vocabulary and grammar as a way of bonding, but the sessions are stilted sometimes, end with hushed and heated conversations until the next time they stand together at the edge of a field camp, shoulder to shoulder and utterly silent. Meanly, he wonders if she thinks leaving was worth it. But if Keith doesn’t have a problem, he won’t have a problem. He’ll follow Keith’s lead on this, like any good friend would.

And the thing is, personal issues aside, Krolia is professional, likeable. If only for Keith’s sake, she’s been nothing but helpful and direct, and Shiro recognizes her determined earnestness as the kind Keith used to brandish – the kind with something to prove. When Keith’s busy marshaling the team in the morning and afternoons of the daytime cycle, she and the space wolf keep him company. She’s a needed voice of experience and resourcefulness when they’re planetside, offering clever suggestions and tips from her own wealth of knowledge. During team meetings, Krolia is meticulous about when and where she contributes her opinion, never undermining Keith or Allura. Even so, her words have a sense of measured confidence and steadiness that Shiro would have been sorely relieved to have on the Castleship in the early days. She wins brownie points with her stronger familiarity with human culture, occasionally surprising them with a recognizable idiom, movie reference, or classic tune.

Nowadays, Shiro’s continued uncertainty around her is more about what she knows, what she’s seen. Older than any of them, their lives like a flash in the pan in comparison to her, high ranking not just in the Blades, but also in the Imperial Army while undercover. Shiro hasn’t said anything aside from making oblique references in nighttime talks with Keith, but he’s long regained most of his piecemeal memories of the arena. Not all fighters were prisoners, rebels, or dissenters from oppressed planets. There were Galra too – those who asked too many questions, saw what they weren’t supposed to, or resisted too often and too fiercely, with many imprisoned having multispecies parentage, either themselves half-Galra, or their parents of Galran descent. It had seemed like the crowds taunted those fighters most cruelly, cheered most loudly for their deaths, and they were favorite targets for druid experiments, either never seen again or reappearing in the arena completely changed in limb or organ or myriad other torturous ways. Sharing blood was criteria for punishment, for some sort of undefined and unconquerable failure. As time passed he came to understand the arena as an horrific Darwinian experiment, where prisoners were pitted against each other so the Galra could understand and evaluate the peoples that were being, or would be, consumed by the empire. And ironically, as the control population, the Galra in the arena were the most expendable. Later, he’d wondered how many of those he’d seen disappear into the bowels of the arena complex were Blades.

What was it like for Krolia to decide to have a son knowing all the possible consequences, and then leave him behind knowing this? To return and participate, for whatever motives, in a state that could and would hurt someone like Keith? Shiro’s not proud of what he’s had to do to survive. How did she justify it to herself? What did she have to do to endure and persevere in her missions? To not get caught? And what he wants to know most: how does she cope? With what she left behind, with her regrets? With herself and her work?

Shiro and his team were unceremoniously thrown in the middle of an intergalactic war that really had very little to do with them or their planet for the time being, with no real historical or cultural context. He and the paladins still don’t really know the true span or reach of the Galra Empire, or why the Galra expanded beyond their homeworld in the first place. Allura and Coran cannot offer any knowledge of current conditions or how their history had evolved to the current state of things. The Castleship libraries are full of holobooks, but given its purpose as a battleship, the vast majority of the content is made up of philosophical and military treatises, all matter of alchemical, astronomy, engineering, and medical nonfiction monographs and reference books, as well as several heavy cookbook series. In comparison, the fiction section is small and specialized, designed for the escapist. Notably, despite the Alteans’ reputation for diplomacy, few books focus on the history of different planets, much less cultural studies. Given the context of the war, as well as Zarkon and Alfor’s vaunted friendship and paladin ally status, the lack of books focusing on Daibazaal and Galran culture seems particularly glaring. When Galra are included, they are cameos in the fiction section, often one-dimensional archetypal figures – unsophisticated mercenaries, musclebound thembos of the one-night stand variety, cardboard villains, and easy plot fodder.

And as much as Shiro trusts Allura, he has plenty of questions about the war that she might not be willing or able to reliably answer. He is an accredited pilot, astronaut, and astronautical engineer, not a soldier or member of the military. Certainly, effects from the last war draft of engineers and pilots linger – joint ventures among military, academia, and private enterprise to control and secure localized 9G communication satellites and the space station outposts near the Moon and Mars had resulted in accelerated, specialized education programs modeled on military hierarchies to feed the war machine. But Shiro isn’t direct Garrison personnel anyway, not even a US citizen. As much as Shiro supports the overthrow of an imperialist government in principle, making critical decisions while lacking information has never sat well with him. The way this conflict is personal for Allura and Coran is different to the way it’s personal for him, or even Keith for that matter.

He’s approached Coran before, curious about what he’d seen as Alfor’s advisor, and how close the Alteans and Galra had really been. While Coran preferred to be informal and foster camaraderie, there were moments of calm where he really shined, exhibiting the keen consideration and analytic sense beneath his jovial personality that must have made him indispensable.

“Ah yes, I worked with many a good Galra soldier and scholar, though I’m afraid that was not the common situation at the time,” he’d murmured, stroking his beard, which had been curling outrageously in the humid heat of the hydroponics farm he’d been working on. “Earnest people, very eager to learn and dedicated. They were always looking for ways to improve their lot; Daibazaal was quite fractious then. Lots of fighting over energy and resources you see, folks with the lion’s share ruining the homes and lives of those without. Not a lot to go around. The Galra who were able to make it off-planet were predominately mercenaries, a handful of specialists and engineers here and there. They knew how to build a good, efficient ship, they did. But it got them a certain sort of reputation, one that unfortunately lingered.”

He’d nudged a small, budding sprout, plump leaves barely peeking out of the container, before shifting to the side to check on his system setup, pH strips in hand. “I would say that the average Altean on the street never had the opportunity to meet a Galran. It was quite industry and sector dependent. When a story gets told enough times eventually it’s just assumed to be the truth. It’s very hard to shake that. And Allura, she’d just begun getting more engaged in political and civic affairs beyond diplomatic visits and showings, exploring how she’d establish herself as a politician. Up until then Uncle Zarkon had mostly been a friend of her father’s and a fellow paladin. Quite simply, she might have thought him an exception, right up until the war broke out.” Dipping a strip into the flowing water, the head instantly turned purple, and he’d wiggled it in Shiro’s face with a wry smile.

“Quite a doleful story, wouldn’t you say?” he’d said, and never mentioned it again.

Knowing the full history of the war alone would give Krolia the advantage in a game of intelligence. And not only does she likely know who he was as the Champion better than anyone else on the team, she also knows the shape of the board from the inside when it sometimes feels like they’re still stumbling about in the dark. Despite his anger about Keith’s experience in the Trials, there were many times after where he’d been grateful that it was Ulaz who extended a helping hand and set of coordinates, that the Blade had agreed to ally with them. Still reeling from slowly returning memories and suddenly bearing the shiny, new title of team leader, Shiro had deliberately tried not to think about the odds of a five-person mecha lion squad and their two-person Altean leadership succeeding in overthrowing a however-many-lightyears large galactic Empire. He was already suffering enough anxiety, thanks.

So he carries on with the assumption that his misgivings are a possibly justified product of his pettiness and self-consciousness, but he’s a vaguely functioning adult, dammit, or at least, trying to be one. And today, like any other day, Krolia’s greeting him cordially and lending a sympathetic ear while he’s still bedbound and not very useful. He half-heartedly shimmies himself up into a sitting position against the wall; he’s got no image to maintain and at this point he should get to be undignified if he wants to. His eyes follow the motion of Krolia’s hands; her claws seem well kept. Shiro wonders if it’s natural or if Galra have a penchant for manicures, he’s not seen any Galra make use of their claws in combat. There are no callouses on her palms, despite frequent use of the knife that she and Keith now share between them. It might be a Galra thing, because Gorou’s body doesn’t have any either. If he’s lucky he’ll never have to moisturize again. In the back of his mind, Gorou laughs.

“What do you do,” he asks finally, raking his hand through messy hair, “With bad memories?”

The space wolf turns to nose at Krolia’s hip, purring. She gives it one, long, obliging pat, before burying a hand in its ruff and turning her head slowly to look past the open door, towards the cockpit where Keith must be. Shiro matches his breathing to the slow cadence of her blinks. The ability to wait has always been one of his greatest skills.

“Some soldiers,” she says eventually, petting the wolf again, “They will not admit to their bad memories. Some will talk in confidence to a close one, or comrades who will understand. But sometimes there is no one to understand. Just those less distant to you, those more distant to you, and your own thoughts.” A short huff through her nose, as the wolf begins to knead lightly at her thigh. She meets Shiro’s stare with a wry tilt of the mouth, a look that is all hers. “There is not much flexibility in victory or death.” 

“Even in the Blades?”

“Knowledge is a different story,” she says, practiced, like she’s had this conversation before. Maybe she has, persuading some wavering soldier to turn against the Empire. Her claws drum on a cuirass, right next to the unmarred slashes of the Imperial symbol, tap, tap, tap. “Interpretation and action based on knowledge are what is important – we must build on what came before, understand to break down. In that sense, all Blades are the same. To the Empire, we are all traitors, we all wear the same mask of loyalty. Many of our members have struggled with this, so we work to speak and be closer to strengthen ourselves. Not just for our survival, but because we are the only ones alive to understand each other.”

Scratching the four lines of the Marmora armor into the cuirass creates a squealing noise that drives the wolf to scramble to Shiro’s side and shove its unruly head under his arm, ears folded back in whining dissatisfaction. Shiro coos at the wolf instinctively. Krolia makes another huffing noise, her own ears swiveling.

“So you’re saying that I should find someone to understand me,” Shiro murmurs, giving the wolf an obliging scritch under the chin. “And if there is no one to understand?”

An eyebrow jumps up into her hairline, but if she has doubts she doesn’t say them. “Then you build on what came before and you settle with yourself. Or perhaps,” and here she pins him with that look of Keith’s again, so kind but so cutting, “You make it so that someone does understand.” Krolia does not smile, but her face is open, almost welcoming. “From what Keith has told me, and what I have seen in the past weeks, the team respects you highly. And any Blade, myself and Keith included, has made ugly decisions. For the sake of the bigger picture we do not always make the choice that is right, though we may break our protocols when it is advantageous to do so.”

Shiro can’t help but chuckle; defiant rulebreaking has long been part of Keith’s toolkit, and by the sound of it, Krolia’s too. The slight curl to her lip seems satisfied.

“If your bad memory is known,” she says, stacking the armor to the side, “Then you can speak it. If you speak it, it will be understood, and understanding builds strength. The first Blades were narrators, storytellers, archivists, record-takers. They understood well that victors are the ones who tell the story. But because stories inform what is perceived to be the truth, it was all the more important to collect all stories from all people, including those who lost, who fled, or stood aside. It was to expand the truth. ‘Shall the speaking make it so’.

“The team will hold your confidence. And should you choose to speak, so will I. After all, you do not hold a monopoly on arena experience.” He almost gives himself whiplash staring up at her, jaw slack, unsure if he should ask desperately for more details or just be grateful for the support. Ears flicking in amusement, she stretches fluidly as she stands and offers him a firm nod. “I will let Keith know you are awake.”

As if to bar him from following her out the door, the wolf flops over Shiro’s legs and pushes its face into his belly, purring again. The vibration rumbles through him, comforting in its familiarity, and the absurdity of it all makes him laugh. Gorou’s contemplative moodiness seeps into his own chagrin and hopeful relief that there really might be someone to understand, the conflicting emotions sinking in gut deep to curdle and sour. If making a memory known is the first step, both of them have already failed it. Another one of his greatest skills, also a greatest weakness, is omitting and concealing the truth.

 

***+***

At six, he’s told that he has a progressing neuromuscular disease in the simplest terms possible, and if he hurts or feels tired or can’t feel his legs or arms he needs to tell someone so that the nice doctors can help him feel all better, okay?

At nine, his family moves from Toronto to Kyoto, and he’s learning new things all the time. Tim Horton’s is replaced by Mister Donut and a rainbow of conbini, Family Mart, Seven Elevens, Lawson’s, Ministop, Daily Yamazaki, and he can’t find a poutine place anywhere, so Go! Go! Curry becomes his favorite thing to eat when he comes home from a stint at the hospital. There’s no more hapkido class or weekends spent wandering Rouge National Urban Park, because he’s busy learning all the local grocery stores, the bus routes and subway lines, and the way to school and back, punctuated by hanami at Maruyama Park, and a trip to Arashiyama to see if they can catch a glimpse of the macaques. There’s a lot of slang and idiomatic expressions he doesn’t understand, all sorts of confusing customs and requirements in school that he doesn’t get – the shoe locker, cleaning up when the bell rings, school clubs, the teachers’ talk of testing into a good middle school that does nothing to ease Shiro’s harried peace of mind. History and literature classes are a particular sort of hell, most of the references flying over his head with little national or cultural immersion or mythology for him to rely on.

His great-aunt drops by one week in a surprise visit on her way home from Gion, an old shakuhachi and repaired kokyuu in hand for him. “To keep your fingers nimble, but no pressure,” she says, serious. Shiro’s posture straightens instinctively; his great-aunt is the cheerful sort but she’s pragmatic and full of good advice, no-nonsense. She pats his cheek gently, smooths back his hair. “Call me for pointers anytime. Ryuusei made no bones about why he moved back to Japan with you and Haneul. And I’m glad to get to know you too, in person instead of through those damned PADD screens. But it can be tough. Ask your Oo-Oba questions when you have them, Byeolha. She’s happy that you’re here.”

His mother makes an effort to cook more in Kyoto, and they try the cabbage and daikon kimchi and anchovy soup base from all the markets they come across so they can find a favorite, though in the end, they both think late grandmother’s recipes are still the best. They still indulge in yakiniku night once every two months, bring some of the grilled meat and side dishes with them whenever they visit grandfather, switching to a rotation of different stews in the wintertime. For his part, grandfather makes sure his parent’s cups are full whenever they’re over and stocks up on Shiro’s favorite snacks. Sometimes, he has an entire pan of sumptuous mac and cheese ready for them, made from a recipe he got from an American soldier when he worked in the Yokohama army bases in his youth. It’s a rare treat and a favorite birthday special of Shiro’s, and something his grandfather makes to cheer him up. Grandfather listens to Shiro’s grievances with an attentive ear, makes sure to visit him when he’s down in the hospital or freshly ensconced back at home, freely dispenses with hugs and affectionate nudges to his cheek and shoulder.  

The dowa projects are rough, like his parents told him. His great-aunt’s place is deeper in a district than his grandfather’s borderline apartment, and while he sometimes sees yakuza-looking types milling around her workshop, they don’t seem to be causing any trouble for her. In fact, they seem to be customers. Aside from them, his great-aunt’s and grandfather’s neighbors are friendly enough, second and third generation folks learning their way through Kyoto just like him. It’s comforting to know he’s not alone in that, especially after a somber, spine chilling visit with his mom and grandfather to Mimizuka where pickled noses rest, unrepatriated even after hundreds of years, no acknowledgements or admissions of guilt. He’s scared to dig deeper, to learn more about why and how his family came to Japan and why they stayed, but his mother holds his hands and strokes his hair, hugs him close, tells him that she knows how it feels and she’ll be here. His father scoops them in for a group hug, and he wonders how he felt when he grew up here, having his own town and social classification being taught back to him in the name of moral education, both his mother and father learning that their country was not what it was promised them to be, wonders what their dreams were and if they achieved them. His parents never ask if he hates living in Japan, and he doesn’t bring it up either.

At Christmas, the homemade strawberry shortcake and bucket of KFC chicken are the same, but instead of ice skating at Nathan Philips Square and watching the Cavalcade of Lights, they wander around Umekoji Park, take a short, quiet skate at Viva Square surrounded by all sorts of couples, and settle in for a quiet meal at home. The osechi meal a couple weeks later is raucous and vibrant, with a bigger spread than usual and more family to share it with, which means more alcohol. They hold it at great-aunt’s place because she has more room, and she has warm amazake to share. She plays him recordings of her and her workshop troupe out on the mikoshi of the three big matsuri, telling him, “Join us up there next year Takkun, there’s no better introduction to Kyoto!” Wrapped in thick coats, they step out into the snow at midnight, but compared to Toronto winters the cold snap here is nothing. The journey to Shiro’s first shrine visit is filled with the bickering of his family, unashamed as they wander tipsily through the dowa projects out into the wider city and back.

At fourteen, instead of testing into a prestigious high school, he tests into JAXA’s specialized accelerated funnel program for GAIA, the Global Aerospace Investigations Alliance, dreaming of all the celestial movements his mother ever told him about. The assignment sweeps him away to Tokyo, closer to JAXA headquarters, but he tries to call home at least once every week, overwhelmed by unbelievable urban density and near constant sensory stimulus, which certainly doesn’t help his anxiety. He barely holds off a panic attack the first time he rides on the Yamanote Line. If he calls on a weekend his great-aunt and her musician buddies sometimes crash in with a rousing, drunk rendition of minyou, and it always makes him laugh.

At least once a month one of his parents will lament the militarization and acceleration of STEM programs, a product of the last world war and an unspoken complaint that their son is so far from them so young, but mostly, they ask for him to be careful, and to take care of himself. They’re doing their best not to smother him, and they get copies of his regular health checkups at least, since he’s a minor. At Obon leave he makes sure to get home on time so everyone can watch the Daimonji together. His grandfather especially, frets about him being labeled as some sort of North Korean sympathizer, the way his mother was accused by wary labmates of trying to steal and spy on Japanese achievements back when she had first started working as a research assistant, during her master’s. All Shiro can do is reassure him; his classmates haven’t said anything rude to him yet, and Tokyo, on the surface at least, doesn’t care much about who is and isn’t from a dowa district, if only because they don’t know Kyoto’s city map like he does.

He’s not thrilled himself that to be an astronaut he needs to enter an overtly siloed program like this, with so many pointless rules to chafe against, but he’s got limited time to achieve his goals and he doesn’t want to waste a single second, even if he’s got to change his habits to manage his disease. He regulates his own diet, sticks to a concrete workout routine in the absence of club activities, picks up more music and more hobbies and finds ways to distract himself from getting too far into his head. He can understand his family’s fretting – he gets lonely too, rides the subway endlessly to explore the nooks and crannies of the city to find a familiar corner that will welcome him, gets lost sometimes trying to figure out what he’s trying to be and where he’s going.

Too young and driven to want to go to Nichome or any café meetups while his comings and goings are closely monitored, online forums become the next best thing, giving him a supportive audience full of empathy and advice. He exchanges a couple kisses with curious, discreet yearmates, questioning in the same way he is, exchanges a little more with the ones who come back to him. Being gay feels not like a surprise, but like something natural, something he needs to settle into, another eccentricity to match all his other so-called eccentricities. To him, it’s just how he lives. He likes the closeness that comes of fumbling around in the twilight dark, the intimacy of being skin to skin and looking into someone else’s eyes, likes that sense of being part of a hushed, enclosed, quiet world more than he likes any other part of sex, but he’s in no rush. The fact is that his life will be a short one, and it might be for the best that he’s got no significant other to irritate or worry over him. The stars are a surer shot than a romance. But if someone who feels right comes along, he won’t turn them away. He might be on a deadline but he’s as far as he’s concerned, it’s all the more reason to have it all.

His dorm manager says he’s one of the more mature ones, that he feels like he can rest easy when Shirogane-kun’s there to help with events or activities, but Shiro hasn’t grown more or less than anyone else. He’s still wandering to the observatory, to the rooftops, looking to the sky to see what comes through the artificial halo of the city. He chases star showers, marking them on his calendar and eventually joining a casual club of research scientists who like to watch every eclipse and streaking comet. In the wake of these cosmic events he’s filled to the brim with wonder, the awareness of how small he, his body and his very cells, is, and it’s a comforting thought. Just another one of many, just another reason to get out there and see the rest of the universe for himself. In the end, his favorite part about the program might be the week-long intensives at the space center on Tanegashima. With the rise of kofun in the distance, the island feels old and wise, imbued with ancient presence even with rockets shooting towards the sky, into space. That’s what feels most familiar to him.

When he’s sixteen his mother and grandfather take him on a rare trip to Seoul to meet an estranged branch of the family and hear the will of a great-grandaunt. Her genealogy research hobby was the impetus for the entire extended family to reunite in his mother’s teenage years. Shiro’s apprehensive and excited in equal measure, unsure what to expect, but hopeful. Despite the subdued attempt to manage expectations, he’s surprised by the strangeness of the visit, the sensation of walking through a dream. Things are at once familiar and completely foreign. The speech is neither the language of his workbooks nor the words exchanged between him and his family, but the chatter he hears in the dramatic romcoms the family watches together, or the original versions of the pop songs that blare on the radio, divorced from him. The food is delicious, but slight shades off from the homecooking he’s used to. They whirl through museums, castles, and gardens, his grandfather’s voice a constant, gentle backdrop of abbreviated history and fun facts, his mind reeling over the sheer amount of things that he doesn’t know. Accumulated, all this should make up his cultural inheritance…or should it?

Meeting his far-flung relatives face-to-face, they examine each other closely in a game of spot-the-difference. Each new introduction requires a considerable amount of time, trading life stories and backtracking to their spots in the family tree, attempting to figure out how they’re related and meant to address each other. He’s never had to figure out how to phrase his own origin story before. His mother is formal and polite, the way she would be with any stranger on the street, his grandfather genial but distant. The reading of the will is to the point, almost sterile, and they walk away with several notebooks full of scrawled, handwritten notes on their branch of family history and a safety deposit box full of heirlooms going back several generations, to when a however-many-greats grand uncle traveled to Japan for labor. As they all sit down together for the obligatory meal, there’s another round of mutual scrutiny. Do they look more different than they do alike? Do they look like a family? Everyone stuffs their mouths full so they won’t have to talk about anything aside from how good everything tastes.

At nineteen, he pilots a short mission to the GAIA space stations, resupplying them and picking up a couple specialists to take into orbit around Venus for readings and the deployment of a new rover. He’s the youngest to ever do so on account of his high aptitude tests, and the news splashes across international headlines. Knowing his mother, she’ll spot the oddity there – the mission is a hybrid one, and resupply would typically be left to the highest grade of cargo pilot. Over tense video calls, he tells his family what’s kept behind closed doors – he’s on the brink of qualifying for the next steps of the program, rotation to the United States, then Russia, and the hybrid missions are an assessment. A test to see if his skills translate out of the sim, regardless of his disease, and to see how he recovers. As ever, his spite ensures that he passes with flying colors and his rotation to the USGG, the United States Galaxy Garrison, is confirmed, along with a position as pilot on a space exploration first, a mission traveling to Saturn and its moons Titan and Enceladus.

The mission assignment has him requesting leave and visiting home at Chuseok in tears, babbling to his father about all the planets they used to look for through their balcony telescope, to his mother about the missions he’d so long ago read about in his astronomy books. His father hugs him and laughs and says that he’s just living up to his name, and he’d always loved stories about the rabbit in the moon, the cowherder and the seamstress, but Byeolha, will they ever let you actually finish that astronautics coterm of yours? His mother ruffles his hair, says that their Byeolha is a hard worker and can do anything he wants. After all, black holes and other deep space phenomena are where space, time, and gravity bend. When he wakes the next morning, there’s an omamori on his bedside table.

There’s a noisy moon watching party the next day at a Gion teahouse, a luxury secured through his great-aunt’s connections in the arts. Pampas grass is artfully displayed in a centerpiece; the table is groaning with taro dishes, udon, soba, roasted chestnuts, tsukimi dango, yuzu wagashi in the shape of small bunnies, and all other manner of sweets and goodies, equally ready for guests that haven’t eaten dinner and guests that want to skip straight to dessert and drinking. There’s a ridiculous amount of people, her instrument makers’ union and all their families, and they’re constantly shoving cups of shochu and sake into his hands and winking at him, he’s been in space and he can’t drink alcohol, whoever heard of such a thing? He ends up more than a little tipsy with a shakuhachi at his lips, playing along in a small ensemble singing up at the full moon looming large and bright in the night sky. It’s funny, he’s seen the moon from the viewing window of a shuttle, seen how it’s nothing more than a pitted, lonely satellite of igneous rock and dust, stripped of all poetry, but here with family and friends, looking up from a balcony below a rolled up bamboo shade, it’s something magical and spellbinding, limning everything in radiant blue. He falls in love with the cosmos all over again.

The minute he comes back from leave, he’s put in training immediately, and it’s not until his formal transfer to the States in the new year that he’s introduced to the rest of the US-based crew, including Dr. Sam Holt and his family. He unofficially turns twenty on the shuttle, his parents’ omamori tucked next to his heart when he’s in the cockpit. When he returns he’s a celebrity, something of a household name, and the USGG uses him as an exasperated recruiting tool once he’s healthy enough to return to work. He loves sharing his joy of flying and adventure with the students as a teacher’s assistant, but he’s not fond of a dog-and-pony show, tries to give as few statements as possible, doesn’t accept personal interviews.

He pesters GAIA administration to see if this is something the USGG is even allowed to do, seeing as he isn’t being additionally compensated for public appearances and has more important things to accomplish, like finishing his degree. He doesn’t mind sharing the space exploration gospel, the curiosity and willingness to ask questions, but he doesn’t like how it makes the pressure cooker environment of the USGG seem glamorous. The States rotation is even more militarized than the JAXA program, and the pilot tracks promote infighting. There’s less dorm management and supervision, a lesser emphasis on learning the technical material compared to the cachet of topping sim charts. Not to mention, unlike Tokyo, this particular USGG post is away from the urban landscape, with few outside distractions and outlets for cadets, increasing the volatility of the cohort. With the immediate mission assignment and constant march towards completing his coterm, Shiro barely knows anyone at the USGG beyond a professional level himself, aside from Dr. Holt and his family.

GAIA HR’s response is that he currently functions as a USGG contractor and must follow any typical USGG policy, which includes a section stipulating that his likeness can be used for promotional and recruitment purposes. In other words: suck it up. He also needs to develop better relationships with the higher ups; the re-entry from Saturn was extremely rough, and despite successfully preventing a crash that would have resulted in a loss of life and samples, he knows he’s being scrutinized, his records and supply missions once again reviewed. They’re thinking of putting him on temporary probation while they re-assess his fitness. It makes him want to scream. Yet another reputation, yet another seething abscess growing fat off him, exploiting him, filled with untruths and rumors. Instead of going off in the nearest higher-up’s office, he takes his temper out on the gym mats and high-speed trails out in the desert wilderness, a desolation that he empathizes with more and more with each passing year, practicing risky, frustration-fueled stunts to remind himself of why he’s here in the States, of what he has to lose. And bitterly, he continues trotting himself out to local schools.

Three months in, he finds a much maligned wunderkind with the sharpest piloting instincts he’s ever seen hiding in a middle school classroom. The punk then proceeds to steal his car and drive off into the desert sands, and after gleefully assuring the annoying, unsupportive teacher that he’s not angry, he goes to the bathroom and collapses in loud belly laughter where no one can hear him.

His name is Keith, and in the time between twenty and twenty-five, he becomes Shiro’s best friend. He celebrates when Keith makes it into the USGG pilot program, helps hook him up with some of the resources he’d himself relied on when adjusting to education in the States, debates with him on his specialization while they’re racing among cliffs and ravines, trying out daredevil tricks. A sometime amateur astronomer thanks to childhood years spent under the open skies of desert scrubland, Keith avidly sends Shiro news on the latest astronomy discoveries on his PADD, followed simply by a long chain of exclamation points. It’s as if he doesn’t know Shiro’s own father an avid amateur astronomer, or that his mother is an astrophysicist that likes to send her son space memes in the middle of the night, something Keith also enjoys as a fringe benefit of their friendship. Keith is also a gleeful participant in the pickling and fermentation projects that Shiro constantly runs to provide himself with a taste of home and keep busy, so enthusiastic that after multiple mentions of his help in video calls, Shiro’s grandfather eventually includes a jar of kimchi in a care package just for him.

At twenty-one, Shiro is given his class roster as a junior instructor for some of the pilot flight modules. Still with his own coterm to tackle, he reaches out to the instructor teaching the other batch of pilot modules to sync their material and get tips, which is how he ends up meeting Adam Huaman Yovera. He’s several years older than Shiro, a serious kind of guy with a dry, cutting sort of sarcasm, and does a lot of the local space missions around Venus and Mars, flying engineers and specialists up into space to repair satellites, get field recordings and readings, and swap out space station modules. It turns out he also piloted the first experimental craft to Mercury. They start commiserating about teaching strategies, joint field trips, and how to resolve the simmering tensions among those in their classes, trading mission and post-mission recovery stories in between. Adam has a groundedness to him that’s comforting, a similar outlook on the Garrison’s competitive program that informs the firm but accommodating style he has with his students. Shiro finds himself a little charmed by that, the principled way Adam has about him.

Shiro’s always been a little greedy, so when they start drifting closer with every session, find themselves reluctant to leave each other, he lets their hands brush, their thighs bump together awkwardly, lets himself have the awkward grins and quick glances. When Adam finally asks to meet off campus one day, he doesn’t say no, though he does talk to Matt after the fact.

“It’s definitely a date, dude,” Matt tells him. “And the cadets definitely go out with each other. There aren’t super strict rules on fraternization here, since in a lot of ways Galaxy Garrison’s a bit like a very militarized escalator school program. You’ll just have to disclose the relationship if you end up being serious.” Neither of them mention that Shiro’s still in the middle of his GAIA rotation.

“Just be upfront,” his mother advises, “Make sure he’s on your level. It will be harder to tell him if you wait. If it doesn’t work out, then that’s that.”

“So logical,” Shiro mutters, propping his chin up mulishly with a hand.

“Sometimes even love is an equation,” she murmurs with a pointed glance.

“I know,” he says, chastened, thinking of the first time he had asked his parents what a koseki was and if he could see theirs, only to be sat down for a solemn talk.

He’d thought once he was in no rush, that he wouldn’t turn the right one away. That he’d go with what he felt was natural. It’s that same thought that spurs him to go on the second date, the third. They still talk about lesson plans, tactics to dial down the posturing in class, and how to introduce soft skills, but they talk about other things too – adjusting to living in the desert, secret eats around the town, what they like to do in their down time. Adam likes to journal, take care of plants, work on dialing in his espresso just right. He sends Shiro playlists for fun, for his workouts, for studying, and just to listen to, sometimes titled things like “Grading Hell”, “Shiro No”, and “so you wish you could dance”. He stays in Shiro’s orbit when he can, ankle to ankle under a café or restaurant table, upper arms touching when they review student results together, likes to be in the same room when they read or laze around for an afternoon. Maybe Adam’s been lonely. Maybe this is his version of clingy. Either way, Shiro doesn’t mind, having spent a lot of his time by himself. But he can’t help but feel that deadline looming.    

“It’s nice, he’s nice,” he says, chewing on a piece of sliced tomato. “But…I don’t even know how to start talking about all the other….stuff.”

“Well, you should probably start with your rotation, if he doesn’t know about it already,” Keith says bluntly, dragging his fries through his burger drippings and a fresh mound of ketchup. “You mentioned you might be in the running for a couple missions, right?” He turns his head to take a sip of milkshake, with a concertedly detached air around him. “It’s not like a local space run. You’re gonna be gone for months.”

You’re going to leave, Keith is saying.

“You’re right.” Shiro scoots over his boat of fries, still half full. “I’ll be back, though,” he says gently, makes sure to catch Keith’s eye.

“Yeah,” Keith grunts half-heartedly, accepting the offering anyway.

Keith is right though – Shiro is going to leave. He’s going to go on another mission, he’s going to complete his rotation in Russia, or maybe he’ll die before any of that happens, but undoubtedly, he will go away. His time is limited. He remembers this whenever Keith says something particularly incisive, when Matt makes him laugh, when Adam greets him for a homemade dinner with an expansive, comforting hug, because he’ll wish, just briefly, that he had more time. More time to make mistakes, be silly, be careless. But he is always going to leave. It’s hard to watch Keith under the diner lights and know that neither of them will have this anymore, one day, that maybe he’ll be another person on the list of people that left Keith behind. There’s no sugarcoating any of this.

“I already knew you were in rotation when I asked you to the café the first time,” Adam says, taking his hand. They sit side by side on the small couch in Adam’s apartment, just large enough to fit three, with plenty of pillows and throws to keep things cozy. “I double checked to make sure everything was above board. You did the same right?” He chuckles when Shiro nods. “I thought so. And we’ve both been in space before. I know how it goes. But that’s the sort of thing that made me feel like we had a good chance at making things last. Thinking along the same lines. Same patterns.”

“I don’t mean just the rotation,” Shiro says, gripping Adam’s hand tight, like he could keep hold, and tells him about the rest of it, about the deadline, about the electrostim bracelets that he wears, lays out numbers and probabilities. When he finishes, the room is quiet, but Adam’s hand is still in his. He listens quietly to his breathing, as if he could catch any sort of sign of the response.

“I want to try,” Adam says eventually, biting his lip. “I don’t know if everything’s sunk in yet, but I think I want to try anyway. See where things lead us. I don’t want this to just…stop.”

They carry on as normally as they can for the next couple weeks. Things are a little stilted as Shiro slowly begins to include more mentions of how he’s feeling, as Adam tries to understand how he can support him day to day, but slowly, it levels out, at least until Shiro gets the mission announcement. A return mission to the Galilean moons of Jupiter, with some additional studies to be done on the Amalthea group and the irregular prograde moons. He’s absolutely ecstatic, as are Matt and Keith, and while Adam congratulates him and is similarly excited for him, it’s dampened by an apprehension that they both feel.   

That feeling only grows when Shiro begins training for the mission and goes through his typical adjustment period, the first time Adam really begins to understand the implications of Shiro’s disease. It’s a cycle of pain management, regulated rest and exercise on weekends, daily stretches, and frequent trips to the infirmary to adjust his bracelets and physical therapy as necessary. Adam does what he can, making sure that he has his pain medication, tries to keep him stocked on comfort food and hot water bottles, tracks Shiro’s appointment times to keep him company afterward, is free with his touches and affection, but Shiro can tell he’s still struggling. When Adam tentatively brings up the possibility of moving in together, if it would help Shiro to have someone else there to support him, Shiro meets him in the middle and doesn’t say no. He doesn’t want to stop here. He doesn’t want to give up at the first challenge, even if it is a large one.   

And it does help. To come home to someone every day like he used to as a kid. To have someone ask if he’s okay, to have someone hold him. They argue. They argue about stupid things like picky eating and whose turn it is to do laundry. Serious things, like Adam sometimes feeling neglected, Shiro feeling smothered. But even this feels like an odd sort of nostalgia, like the well worn groove of a story he’s read over a thousand times. A routine, a habit, a grounded, rooted thing, the way Adam felt to him the first time they met.

Even so, the ring box that Adam presses into his hand the week of his departure is surprising.

“Bad timing, maybe,” he says, the two of them sitting together on that couch again. “But I’ve been thinking about it. I’m always thinking about what you said the first time you talked to me about your rotation and disease. I just wanted you to know – I still don’t want to stop.”

The messages Adam sends him while he’s in space read like his journal entries, which tend to be disconnected observations and spontaneous thoughts.

Accidentally played one of your playlists. So much screaming. Why?

Went to the diner. Finally got a waffle special to myself.

Single socks are still all managing to migrate under the bed.

I got pickles at the store but they don’t taste like the ones you made. There were these bright red ginger ones that were really tart and sweet. Don’t you get on me about food coloring Mr. Mac and Cheese. There’s still four boxes of the ready-made stuff in the pantry.  

From Matt: Adam keeps shoving mac and cheese at me and Keith. I think he misses you a lot.

From Keith: If Adam is going to make your food can he at least make the good stuff? Come back soon and show him how it’s done.

To Adam, he writes: The colors are unnatural!!! They’re so weird!! Why would raspberries be blue!! Anyway, Matt and Keith are complaining to me about your mac and cheese, ready-made or not – so aren’t you Mr. Mac and Cheese too?  

Shiro returns to Earth just a couple days after turning twenty-two, stuck in the medbay with a long, grueling recovery ahead of him. Between his disease and the loss of muscle and bone mass, he’s barely able to move and in a lot of pain, only able to rest with the help of a scrupulously controlled morphine drip. The lack of proprioception certainly doesn’t help his motor skills, and they’re expecting him to come down with a virus any day now, but he’ll take what he can get. Being able to taste what he’s eating, even if it’s just shitty hospital food and jello, is really great.

Once the doctors allow him to have visitors, he’s delighted to wake up and find Adam already there, checking in before the start of the day. Adam greets him with miso soup for breakfast, doctor approved, but he’s subdued and quiet. Holds his hand, asks, “How are you feeling, baby?” in a gentle voice, trying to hide the tremor in it. Adam very rarely uses pet names. Despite the excessive cooking attempts Matt and Keith have been complaining to him about, he looks skinnier than when Shiro saw him last. His shadowed eyes keep drifting to the IV and morphine drips, the catheter, the pill bottles lined up on the nightstand, the rise and fall of Shiro’s chest. He’s scared.

“Feeling good, Mr. Mac and Cheese,” Shiro jokes back, reedy, seized by foreboding. “Just getting my Earth legs back.” The pain is a physical pressure covering all parts of him, but he tries to squeeze Adam’s hand back best he can, only managing to produce a slight twitch at the end knuckles of his pinky and ring fingers. The quick beeping of the vital signs monitor is an acute reflection of his stress. His bracelets, swapped out for a new model right after the press conference, chirp as they send a pulse up his arms.

Laughing shakily, Adam presses a feather soft kiss to his cheek. “At this point, Matt and Keith are probably sick of mac and cheese,” he says, sighing, plopping back into his chair. For a few moments, he just stares down at their intertwined hands, before bringing them up to kiss the back of Shiro’s, near his ring finger. “I really missed you.”

“Me too,” Shiro says faintly, but he’s thinking about the location of the kiss, the word engagement, about the frightened look in Adam’s eyes and the months of rehab and medical tests awaiting him. Shiro had never formally replied when Adam gave him the ring box, tucked it away in the bedside drawer, didn’t even try to open the box and see the ring before he flew off to Jupiter. He’d implied acceptance lightyears away in space, but seeing Adam now, talking to him here on Earth, is difficult. Adam worries so much, his shoulders slump with his fears and frustrations, he always asks how Shiro’s feeling but doesn’t ask about what Shiro experienced and saw, doesn’t seem to even want to mention Jupiter at all. He doesn’t bring up the damned ring. Shiro thinks, no rush, meet him in the middle, and I don’t want to stop, thinks about the ring and feels nothing but dread. Sometimes it all crushes him so much he doesn’t want to get out of bed at all. It makes Keith’s visits a welcome distraction, the two of them talking until the nurses chase Keith out, comparing Shiro’s experiences excitedly against the recordings and discoveries of the Calypso mission, imagining what it would be like to crew a mission together. The mission is a big booster to Shiro’s career, dispelling any doubts about his flight and judgment capability, even with the extended recovery time. Occasionally, Matt joins them, and they make enough of a ruckus that a nurse comes in to scold them.

When Shiro finally gets out of the medbay, Adam works with Keith and the Holts to throw him a shabu-shabu party. Keith carts along with him his own contribution – homemade honey mead that he’d squirrelled away at the Holt house when Shiro returned, an alternative to the umeshu Shiro had tucked away the year before. There’s the pickled ginger that Adam told him about and a small pan of the rumored mac and cheese, different from his grandfather’s, but still good. It’s fun and light and everything coming back hasn’t been, until the guests are swept out the door and Adam won’t let him help with the dishes.

They end up screaming at each other.

“You’re always pushing yourself, you never stop! Do you know how hard it is to see you like this?!”

“What do you mean, like this? I’m recovering, not an invalid, Adam! I can wash the damn dishes!”

“I’m not talking about the stupid dishes! You don’t take care of yourself! You don’t slow down!”

“I don’t have time to slow down! There’s still –"

“You do, yes you do! You had time to go to Jupiter, you have time to be with me!”

“Well of course there’s time, you gave me a ring!”

They’re left staring wide-eyed at each other, fingers still white knuckled around the glass casserole pan they were tugging back and forth, stained with mascarpone, the remnants of Colleen’s tiramisu. Adam looks the same as he did when Shiro woke up in the medbay, frightened and hollow.

“Adam,” Shiro says carefully, moving the casserole dish out of lax fingers and resting it on the counter. He slowly grasps Adam’s hands, loosening when he sees Adam twitch like he wants to pull away, an instinctive motion that shoots right into his heart.

“Adam,” he repeats, “You only ever ask about my health. You brush me off whenever I ask how your day was or how you’re doing. Why aren’t you talking to me anymore? It’s not that I don’t like being with you, but…you gave me the ring right when I was about to leave for months.” He blinks to try and stave away the sting in his eyes. “And now when you look at me…you just look scared all the time. It’s like you think I’m already – “

Adam clings onto Shiro’s hands suddenly, like he can’t bear for Shiro to finish the sentence. “I gave you that ring because that’s how I feel,” he says. “I want more time with you. But it’s finally sinking in and I just…I’ve never seen you so still and pale. You were in so much pain and you just smiled at me like everything was normal.” He rubs his hands up and down Shiro’s arms, swallowing. “I’d missed you so much. More than I thought I would. I wanted to see you again. And I know there are things you want. You made that more than clear. But still…when I saw you in that bed I couldn’t help but think about how much time I actually had left with you.”

“You can’t think that way, Adam,” Shiro says curtly, grasping his partner’s upper arms. “I can’t think that way either. There’s no point in it. And I don’t like being in pain either but that was a controlled response. I knew it would happen, the staff knew it would happen, and everything went as expected and I was ready for it. I’m recovering on time, no setbacks. Pain like that…I don’t know what it looks like from the outside, but it’s just part of what I work with everyday. I know how to manage my body, and I know what it can and can’t do. Even if it hurts, if I don’t move around it gets a lot worse. Sometimes I do have to just power through.”

“I know that, you’ve said it before,” Adam hisses, thumping Shiro’s chest, before hugging him close. “I know that,” he repeats, arms tightening around his torso, “I know you have it handled but I’m still – it’s still hard to see you hurt. I just want to see you safe.”

Shiro hugs him back, the two of them cheek to cheek, Adam’s soft hair tickling his ear. He’s so warm. Warm and alive. He begins to rock them quietly in the kitchen, thinking, just shifting foot to foot. Another precious person to leave behind. Greedy. “And thank you for that,” he says, clings close, remembers that first discussion on the couch that’s still in their living room, the impression he’d wanted Adam’s hand to leave, “Thanks for being here with me, Mr. Mac and Cheese.”

Shiro puts on the ring that night, admires the simple, almost dainty band of rose gold on his finger that widens into a flat, rectangular bar in the middle, a flat circular piece of meteorite embedded toward the left side, Adam’s band a match to his. It’s fairly unobtrusive, kind of nerdy, and perfect for them, as far as Shiro’s concerned. But in the end, it’s no panacea for their problems, and they rehash the same argument over and over, even when Shiro finally gets his coterm diploma in the mail, sparking off another fight about his future plans. It’s a fundamental priority mismatch, Shiro thinks dazedly, as what was meant to be a gleeful announcement of Kerberos candidacy spirals into what promises to be another spectacular row.

Adam does love him. Adam does want to keep going. It’s why they’re fighting, because Shiro wants the same thing, but he wants it all – he wants to live out his time with Adam, and he wants to keep exploring. Kerberos would be the last of his three mandated missions in the States, and then it would be Russia after that. Contractual obligation says he’s not close to being over, statistics say he’ll probably be forced into retirement or onto a research team after Kerberos, but he’d planned it that way. He’d planned for his story to have a good ending, and it’s still a good one, just not enough for Adam. Their relationship is limping away, just waiting for the mission verdict. When he calls his parents to talk, Shiro can’t help but fall to pieces a little bit.

“It’s alright, Byeolha,” his father soothes. “You gave it your best shot.”

“You just wanted different things,” his mother says baldly, lips twisted into a bittersweet smile, someone who also completely refused to give anything up in her life, her name, her culture, her career, her marriage, or her family. “That’s okay, too.”

By the time Shiro tells Adam about the Kerberos decision, and Adam leaves his ring behind, it’s almost anticlimactic, the two of them reciting the same lines they’ve said hundreds of times before. He’s lucky that Keith hasn’t gotten tired of him and his bullshit yet, relieved that he’s still willing to race him and lend an ear, and he’s a little touched too, that Keith’s so infuriated on his behalf. Thinking along the same lines, Adam had said, but in the end they weren’t thinking quite the same at all. They didn’t really get each other. Being out in the desert, looking at the splash of stars across the sky, reminds him of what he’s here for – in the States, at the Garrison, on Earth. It’s the vacillation of the entire spectrum of emotion, those moments of awe, of astonishment, the sweeping lows of desolation and defeat, the highs of feeling loved and appreciated, even the pain he deals with everyday.

When he moves out, Keith and Matt help him move into a new studio, christen his new place with pizza delivery and a movie marathon. With a mission on the way he doesn’t bother to unpack much, keeps most of his things in the boxes and only uses what he needs. Adam leaves the rings with him, doesn’t take anything back – and it’s only fair, since Shiro keeps them both on a chain stored safely in his nightstand, though he never wears his anymore, naturally. They don’t delete each other’s contacts, don’t completely stay away; three years and an engagement don’t erase all habits. They trade occasional gossip, little tips on what they’ve noticed about the students in their classes, things like, Dust is high today if you’re hoverbiking don’t forget a kerchief and Saw this journal/planner online it’s got that dot paper you like. It’s hard to learn to live alone again, and Shiro is more grateful than anything that Keith’s taken it upon himself to play moral support and keep him company, especially now that Matt is also his coworker and therefore, associated with work. The morning of the launch, Shiro wakes up with a text timestamped to four in the morning already logged in his phone. Fly safe. Come back soon. Shiro doesn’t reply. Twenty-four, he thinks while strapping in and starting the liftoff procedure, a maeyaku year.

Now, Shiro is millions of lightyears away from Earth, further out in space than any other human has traveled before, busy crashing through the deep forest of an unknown planet, running away from some sort of space predator. He should have known better than to hope the day would improve; an episode of phantom limb stopped him from getting any sleep the night before, and the aches and pains lingered into the daytime cycle. Rattled by the constant prickling of his nerves and the muscle tension of a strongly clenched fist that doesn’t exist, he’s been more anxious than usual, causing Keith to check in with him multiple times, the space wolf constantly hovering near his hip. The disorientation is winding up Gorou too, his confusion and unease only contributing to the frustration. Even now, crashing through the local flora and stumbling over roots and trees more frequently than he would like, he can feel tremors overtaking him, the cool, chill sensation of his mind locking down, observing absently as the landscape around him blurs with his speed.  Every expansion of his ribcage seems like energy he can’t afford to lose, and yet he’s worried that somehow, it will stop.   

He’s grateful that they found a weapon for him at least, a terrifying machete-cleaver hybrid liberated from some unfortunate sentry. Before he left Black he sharpened it as best he could and slung it over his back to keep in easy reach, and at least Keith went through his ambidextrous tricks with Shiro back in the Garrison, he’s been practicing them along with his exercise, they’ll sure come in handy –

His feet slip and for a moment he’s sinking in a squelching pit of mud, but he catches himself before he slams face first into what looks like soft red clay, similar to the sodden orange slurry lining the bottoms of Arizona canyons. Sweat from his palm soaks into the binding of his machete and his rapid, shallow breathing whistles in his ears as he keeps running, out of panic or exertion or both, he can’t tell. A scream erupts behind him, three-toned, as his opponent crashes through the undergrowth in pursuit, claws cracking through navy blue bark with a sharp snap and rending large gouges that leak purple sap, the same signs that first hinted the lush forest was not the paradise as it seemed to be. The constant pop of breaking branches and stalks grounds him, as does the odd, savory, pungent smell of the lichens, moss, and globular, fruitlike plants crushed underfoot, reminders that he is not atop the loose dirt and gravel of a cold, sterile ship stadium. Leaves and grasping branches get in his way, scratch small cuts in his face and arm as they snap back from where he’s pushed them, but he can’t afford to slow down.

The wet earth sucks against the soles of his boots like a magnet, the shock of his every step vibrating up the joints of his ankles to jar his knees. The joint of his shoulder aches, throbbing. Time seems to slow, each swell of his lungs a bellows as air pushes stubbornly past his lips again. His mind races while his body bolts on autopilot; the opponent is large, equipped with a carnivore’s snarling teeth, like a white-furred hyena with a hunched back. Three pairs of limbs, one pair with vicious claws to tear and rip, two with stubbier prehensile toes to grip. It dropped down from above; a tree dweller. A long tail, maybe for balance. The abdomen is always a safe place to aim, so is the head, and make any cut deep and long enough and it’s sure to hit something vital or inflict a large amount of damage. For having fought in space so long, he’s faced fewer hydra-ish, spore-like aliens than expected. At the most, some species can regenerate limbs, lose them the way salamanders and snakes do. But the growth here is too thick, he can’t maneuver freely and already he hears the creature clambering up behind him, the crunch of tree trunks splintering under its grip as it maneuvers itself up into the canopy away from the wet clay hindering its steps. A bleating screech blares almost right in his ears as it aims to intimidate and herd. He doesn’t know where the others are, has no way to reach them. Four of those creatures had dropped down on them just as they had split up to go and explore, separating them in a defensive frenzy. No one will be helping him.

He hears water. Through the gaps in the trees, he sees the ground slope down to a lazy river plain, the vegetation leveling out to a bare, sodden flatland ribboned by rushing waters and numerous thin tributaries. It must flood here often. Bracing himself, he flings himself sideways through the narrow gap, tucks himself into a combat roll to absorb the shock and increase momentum, only to tumble into the same thick, red clay that sucks his bracing hand up to the middle of his forearm. There’s another screaming shriek behind him, discordant and wailing, and he wades as fast as he can towards the main river, away from the treeline, wiping the blade of the machete clean against his thigh, trying to preserve the edge. The opposite shore is rockier, dense with shrubbery but absent of the tall trees that provide his opponent with hiding places and good footing.

The creature stumbles after him, scrabbling in the mud, but still determined to come away with a meal. Shiro’s in the middle of the water now – it’s going to be hard to keep his footwork quick with the water tugging at him and mud resisting his every movement, but he’s not covered in fur, and he’s betting that his opponent isn’t used to these environs either. True to form, the creature is slipping, clawing at the ground with loud tritonal screams as it tries to get closer. He continues moving away, but with a piercing yowl, the creature jumps and lands in front of him, struggling for even footing in the soft riverbed, trying to cut him off.

Tepid water splashes over him as he tries to duck out of the way, a rush of mud surging into the river and sloshing through the water around his calves. A claw swipes toward him – he has no way to reinforce a block with only one arm so he dodges again, grunts as he puts his body behind the upward swing of his blade –

enemy is screaming collapsing blood in his mouth on his face on his chest the crowd is loud 

With a liberal spray of iridescent green the creature’s limb falls in the river, splattering all across Shiro’s face and front. A high-pitched whining and wailing fills the air, and on instinct his eyes snap to his right. No, no purple glow, his fist’s clenched but there’s nothing there, no heat, no light, no nothing, and he swipes his arm over his face with a growl to clear his vision, but the whine drones on as the creature flails and surges forward once more, hurt and enraged. Shiro tries to get away but the water bogs him down, the clay clings to his legs like it’s trying to bury him and it’s hard to move, to back up—

back to the wall back to the wall ribs hurt knee busted ankle sprained axe up axe UP

It’s bearing down on him and he rolls through the creature’s two pairs of legs like he did in the arena, barely able to see from the water, blood, and mud churning, splashing, all around him, dirty, gets a knee under himself to spin the other way and slash, putting his back into it –

shrieking burning smoking glowing scorch meat on fire people on fire

Two more limbs and half a tail splash into the river as the creature screams, but all Shiro can hear is the high drone, the siren shrieking of his own arm, bobbing gently up and down as it drifts away on the river, the scream of the saw blade as it flashed in the light and blinded him like the purple glow blinded him like the purple that ate him up burnt up his arm burnt up Keith as he presses the glow and wail to his cheek burnt up the wound in his side because he needs to survive this fucking pit his arm hurts, his arm hurts, the glow is eating him up on the inside his arm hurts and there’s blood on his face and iron in his nose and someone is screaming his arm floats away and he is screaming –

They are screaming while they hack into the creature, jump on its back and stab as it screeches and flails, unbalanced, half its limbs all cut off and unable to flee. There is no finesse because he just wants to survive, wants to get away, and he doesn’t realize how silent it is out here until the droning stops. He’s been screaming so long he can hardly hear himself anymore, and the sound of it naturally peters off as he notices the ache of friction in his throat, looks down where he’s got the machete buried in the frenzied series of stab wounds trailing all down the creature’s back, where he’d dug his knees in and put his weight into the blows, stabbed down and dragged. It looks like he tried to carve its shoulders and back open, like he partially succeeded. Lurid pink-grey meat glistens, hacked open, streaked with green rivulets, the way the contents of alien heads looked when he dashed them open against the arena walls, crushed them across the floor of the pit sands. A foolproof shot. He can see layers of charcoal netting beneath, some of the rigid filaments crushed to dust in the fugue, maybe the equivalent of a bone or cartilage or something else. The rainbow green is stained all over his hand, his front.

Like an oil spill, that iridescent green seeps onto clear waters, swirls away in pretty loops and curlicues. The river reflects the soft sunset mélange of the sky above, a gentle gradient of pastel yellows, oranges, and purples. It’s beautiful out here, the terra cotta floodplain sloping up into dense saturated navy forests and crumbling off into rocky cliffs dotted with shrubbery, the plant life shot through with veins of bright scarlet and coppery pink. A vista marred only by him, and the corpse he’s made.

He uses one last burst of strength to pull the machete out from where it’s lodged deep, catching himself off guard with the force and tumbling from the creature into water and mud. He laughs, exhausted. No waters can purify him now, he’s trudging through the sludge of a riverbed again. Propping himself up on his knees, he looks down reluctantly at his reflection, crystal clear where the particles of mud have settled down. There’s no saving his flight suit, smeared and stained everywhere with dirt and blood, but he can at least rinse off his face and hair, his hand and his blade. There’s no avoiding the absence of symmetry, the void at his right side.

Fingers still bloody and shaking, he traces gently around his shoulder, the remnants of his arm stump. His name is Byeolha, and also Gorou. He is maybe twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven. He has just killed a large, unknown creature that tried to chase down and eat him on an alien planet. His arm is gone, has been for some time. Where his arm was before, there is now an absence. Even before Keith cut off their arm, the absence remained. It was there no matter what was put in its place. He is a one arm amputee; perhaps now he can recognize and accept this.

He looks at the body of the creature, looks and looks, burns it into the back of his mind the way he’d pressed so many other rotting carcasses there before, a butcher’s diary. His shoulder throbs and pulses like the blood has somewhere else it wants to go. After falling unconscious on the surgeon’s table, he’d woken in the waiting cells to the distant roar of the crowd, looked down and seen the sleek metal that had replaced muscle and bone. It moved like his arm, reacted like his arm, still hurt like his arm, though in lessened intensity, but flexing his fingers and rotating his wrist, he had the foreboding sense of looking at something haunted, a ghost of himself, even though he was still alive. His disease had retreated momentarily with the loss of the limb it had affected most, but he wasn’t healed; he could feel it lurking in the twinges of his joints and the weakness of his grip. Its absence only revealed its overwhelming presence. The next time he was sent in the arena they’d refused to give him a weapon and refused every time after.

At first, he’d tried to take his opponent’s weapons, unsure of his own capabilities, but out of self-defense, he had to learn his way around the new arm. The odd extension, the thing that was of him but not him, the useful tool. Oh, that arm had hurt him in the cells late at night, a foreign entity burning up his shoulder with the phantom pain because that hand was not his hand, still locked and clenched in stress. It hurt him with every slash, bludgeon, and jolt received in the arena tearing at the still tender stump, with every scream he caused, the precise cut of the laser blade too deep to be mitigated by the instant cauterization. No longer armed with maces, hammers, and pikes, his kills were oddly cleaner, no more abdomens and trunks pulped open and spread across the arena sands like so much ground meat, fewer eyes gouged out and jaws torn off on impact, less messy dismemberments and accidental bisections. Instead, he severed limbs with a single slash downwards, clamped around necks and turned up the heat until the dermis peeled and blackened, pulled out beating hearts and dug his fingers into dense viscera, as if he could still find something to warm him there, the pound of flesh that could replace what had been taken from him.

It’s the first time he’s killed since Keith cut off their Galra arm. Effective, even without it, not a scrap of power lost. The arm did not make up for anything. Did not improve anything. Did not make him whole, or more complete. Here, there is still only him and his debilitating uniqueness.

Clenching his jaw, he washes his polluted hands and machete off in the river, splashes his face and takes a moment to just squat in the cool water and take a breather. It’s the team’s first time planetside in about a phoeb. Aside from stretching their legs, easing the cabin fever, and generally increasing morale, taking breaks on life-supporting, oxygen-rich planets is a way for them to resupply. Foraging for food and possibly preserving it is always a main objective when arriving somewhere new, and it’s occasionally yielded some big gains, like the weird anaerobic crunch berries that are basically a vitamin C, calcium, and iron supplement all in one, and the microbes from a water planet that they found out could be used to make yogurt. The choice to bring Kaltenecker on Red now seems oddly prescient.

The database and two component scanners Pidge and Hunk created have been indispensable in helping them find human-safe consumables, specifically the foods and nutrients they need to keep their bodies healthy. To cover more ground, they split up into two groups for explorations of new planets, with communication run through the paladins’ helmets. Hunk has been working on making smaller communicators that don’t rely on the paladin armor so that Shiro, Krolia, Romelle, and Coran keep in touch with everyone as well, but with the scarcity of electronic parts in deep space, it’s been slow going. For his part, Shiro hasn’t been able to bring himself to wear the Black Paladin armor again, relegating the suit to Black’s storage. With the flight suit in its current state though, he might have to don it again.    

Without any current means of communication, Shiro has a few choices for what to do next – he could retrace his steps back to their campsite, try to find the others wherever they’ve scattered to in the forest, or maybe wait around like a lost child in a supermarket and see if the space wolf will sniff him out. Between the mud and the frenzied run through the forest, it shouldn’t be too hard to follow his own path and find his way back to camp. His biggest question is whether he should try and drag the carcass back with him, in the event it’s something they can eat. It’s a good portion of meat, enough to feed all of them and have leftovers to make jerky with. Their food stores are meager and Shiro knows better than to waste any opportunity to eat up. But the carcass is a decent size, and carrying it means that he’d be much less able to respond to other attacks, especially if other animals or creatures are attracted to the scent of blood. Wryly, he looks down at the current curling lazily around his calves. His choice of fighting grounds seems to have paid off in more ways than one.

Straightening up with a sigh, he sloshes around the carcass, lips pursed. Every stretch of muscle aches, he feels like his head has been stuffed with cotton, headache beginning to bloom. The constant, stabbing twinges of pain at his shoulder are old friends at this point. The only component scanners are with Pidge and Hunk, and he doesn’t know if any of the other groups took down their creatures. Perhaps if he just takes the main body back, removes the other limbs, it will be a more manageable load. He pats a densely furred side gently, then lifts one of the remaining arms to splay it out and better examine the connecting joints. It’s when he’s straightening out the second arm that a quick flash of bright, familiar blue on the forested bank catches his eye.

“Shiro!”

Lance waves his arms in the distance, squawking a little as he makes his way down to the river, skidding and stumbling in the mud on the bank. As he sloshes his way closer, he plasters on an overlarge smile to distract from the nervous darting of his eyes. For a while now, Lance hasn’t seemed comfortable around Shiro. His reactions are generally sincere, but half-hearted and stiff. He can’t hold Shiro’s gaze for more than a couple seconds before he glances away, sometimes seems to stare intently at Shiro’s nose or forehead instead of meeting him eye to eye the way he used to. Privately, Shiro’s wondered if Lance has been focusing on his scar. On a physical sign of damage, of violence.

“Am I glad to see you,” Shiro says, relieved, tries to relax his face and seem as benign and innocent as he can. “I was starting to think I’d just have to wander my way back to camp. You’re not hurt or anything are you?”

The words are useless. Surveying the scene, Lance’s steps are already faltering, the braggadocio grin draining away. There lies the carcass, the exposed stumps of jagged dismemberment, the open wounds stripped down to the bone. There is the evidence of the deed splashed all over Shiro’s flight suit, still streaking the river water. Color drains from Lance’s face; his widening eyes seem to swallow the rest of his features. In that moment, he seems young. Shiro doesn’t bother trying to keep up the pretense.

“Did you kill yours?” he asks bluntly, voice flat. He doesn’t like the way Lance is looking at him, hand clenched tightly around the grip of his rifle, shoulders square and tense.

“No,” Lance says cautiously. He doesn’t show any signs of injury or pain, movements smooth and unhindered, armor stained only by smears of damp soil and crushed plant matter. The rigid crook of his mouth, the visible white of his eyes give away his alarm, fingers flexing around his rifle, nostrils flaring. Horribly, it makes Shiro want to laugh, mostly at himself, while Gorou squirms, queasy and discomfited.

“We shook it off over a patch of grassland. Hunk and Romelle were with me,” Lance continues. Clearing his throat, he forcibly relaxes his shoulders, finger tapping quietly against the rifle guard, observing proper trigger discipline. “We saw you getting separated from us back at the camp so, you know. We doubled back. Thought there was a good chance you’d be close by.”

Shiro nods, lets another meaningless automatic smile spread across his face. He kind of hates that it works, watches Lance perk up tentatively in response. “Good to hear they’re alright. Like I said, glad to see you.” He shakes the creature’s limb still in his grasp, stretching it out before letting it splash back into the water. “I was thinking this could be dinner and a snack, but there’s no way I could have hauled this back by myself. You think Hunk could make it here with the scanner to see if it’s worth it?”

When he looks up, Lance seems nervous again, eyes flicking between Shiro and the deep, uneven cuts ripped into the creature’s back. “Sure, I can ask,” he says faintly, and Shiro can see him shaking out the tension in his shoulders and arms as he turns away, murmuring to Hunk in his helmet.

Irritation curdles in Shiro’s gut, backed by Gorou’s growing anxiousness. Another misalignment. It’s unfair, he knows – Lance’s emotional intelligence and intuition is high, and he has weathered several emotionally turbulent team comp changes. He’s perceptive, and most importantly, able to act on those perceptions. Even as Red’s pilot, he’s undoubtedly a Blue Paladin with his own leadership potential. At the same time, Shiro feels acutely that Lance never really bothered to know him that well, because Shiro the Pilot, Shiro the Paladin was enough for him and he didn’t necessarily want to know any more. This might feel like a single continuity to Lance, but as far as Shiro is concerned, the sudden judgment feels unwarranted and unwanted and is enough to wake up all of his pettiest instincts.

“I’m pretty sure he’s fine, Keith,” Shiro hears Lance hiss, “That thing is definitely dead, and Shiro definitely killed it. Like one hundred percent, deader than dead. Even if he wasn’t alright, do you think he’d tell us?”

“For the record, I am perfectly fine,” Shiro says loudly, just shy of shouting. As if Lance or Keith would ever tell anyone they were hurt or in anything less than top shape. He plays nonchalant when Lance whips around to better boggle at him, but Lance takes the hint and walks back over, speaking at normal volume. Not for the first time, Shiro sorely wishes the helmets had a speakerphone function. It definitely makes him question the Alteans’ technological priorities, confidential communications or not.

“What he said,” Lance says. “Anyway, Pidgeon, did you get a reading on these things? If you did then we can just decide what to do now.”

Stuck waiting for answers, Shiro leans against the carcass with a slow exhale, fingers petting through soft layers of long fur. It feels a little perverse that he would only be able to do this after killing the creature, though he supposes it’s what the fur industry was partially built around, the soothing feeling of touching something soft and giving, the luxury of something gentle and full of luster. How sad, to only afford comfort after death, but he’s not unfamiliar with the concept, unfortunately.

In the arena, he’d learned never to touch what was left of his opponents. For what must have been the first couple months, he did, mostly because he could hardly believe it was a consequence of his own action – he needed to feel to believe. But as he rose through the arena rounds, he’d had to accept that his survival meant he would be killing someone else. Touch meant attachment, to another living person or to the agony of a still body, and after however many deaths, Shiro didn’t want to be attached to anyone or anything anymore. If he couldn’t feel it, it couldn’t exist, and the only thing that he could rely on, the only rule, was that he could trade a death for his life and fight another day, to whatever end would find him. And once Haggar had happened, he couldn’t even believe in that, could no longer ignore the fearful rumors or dark rumblings of what the arena was really for, because he himself was part of that story now. He still dreams of dying on a cold metal gurney, of a surgeon’s light so bright and searing it burns him alive, of the very real way pain curls and eats at his limbs to paralyze him in the isolation cells, finally, finally, alone in mud and filth, until his corpse is retrieved to be split down to component parts, or otherwise revived again. They still dream of puppetry, of horror film storyboards where they are what is to be feared in the dark, the lights of the Castleship flickering and powering down to that purple ultraviolet light, all the better to reveal what is not meant to be seen. His life for a death.

He hates it, but he understands Lance’s hesitation.

“Shiro?”

Lance, concerned, hand outstretched and hovering over his shoulder, like he wants to anchor him, but doesn’t know how. That’s not his job anyway. It’s Shiro’s.

Lips stretch to reveal tombstone teeth. Shiro’s body aches, the anchor point of his shoulder the beating heart of the hurt. He can feel his pulse in his temples. “Hey. What did they say?”

The hand drops down to Lance’s side, but he smiles small, relieved and genuine. Even so, he keeps his distance and doesn’t move closer. “Pidgey wasn’t able to catch a scan, so Hunk says he’ll track us through the armor and come help us out. Looks like everyone else was able to make it back to camp okay, just a couple scrapes and bruises. No big deal.”

“Mm. That’s good,” Shiro offers, watches Lance’s hands tighten and loosen around the rifle grip, the way his weight shifts from leg to leg. His gaze is fixed on that gorgeous horizon line, that picture perfect sunset. A bead of sweat drips down his cheek. Carefully, he doesn’t look at Shiro.

“Lance,” Shiro says pleasantly, props his hand on his knee harmless and palm open, “Are you scared of me?”

Lance starts and stills, laser stare locked on him like a target, lips thinned. His body language always gives him away, no matter how smooth his words are. When he laughs, the sound comes out high and a little hoarse.

“Scared. Of you? Shiro, Shiro my man. There’s no way. You’re….” his voice gets caught in his throat, choking off the thought. His Adam’s apple bobs, a buoy signaling the current below, jaw squared and eyes wide, caught out. They can both fill in what he meant to say: You’re our leader. And isn’t that the crux of it. Head drooping, he lapses into silence.

“I’m not really anything right now, aside from recovering,” Shiro says bluntly, trying to modulate his voice to match the rush of the water around their feet. He wonders if it soothes Lance at all, this superficial aural similarity to the ocean he so often speaks fondly of.

“Shiro, come on,” Lance tries, a little desperate, a little pleading. He still hasn’t moved closer. The rifle is gripped tight in his hand, though it can’t shield him.

“It’s true,” Shiro says, giving no quarter. It’s true and he hates it, not having something to do, to distract himself with. Even now, he feels like he’s wasting time. Squandering it. But time has already moved on without him, gives no care for his life or what he wants or wishes for. He’s not the same person he used to be. Neither is Lance. There’s no returning to that previous self, a notion that is both freeing and terrifying. He’s not anything. Three-quarters a paladin maybe, still a pilot, but right now his only task is to get himself in shape. To think, navel-gaze, contemplate his small, unique self. It’s something he used to take time for, something he would talk to his therapist about. Like everything else, landing on Kerberos chucked that routine out the window.

Given the stricken look on Lance’s face though, he’s taking Shiro’s words a completely different way. “It’s not a bad thing,” Shiro appends. “I mean if this,” he waves his hand around vaguely, “Is any indication, then I’m doing pretty well.”

Lance answers by rubbing his face, shoulders still slumped. “I’m not sure I would call that well,” he mutters, ruffling a frustrated hand through his hair.

Unable to cross his arms disapprovingly, Shiro settles for an annoyed eyebrow raise. “What are you trying to say, Lance?” he asks coolly. “What’s going on?”

The confrontational tone knocks Lance’s jaw loose in surprise. Mouth open, he gives Shiro a disbelieving, beseeching glance. Another habit formed during Gorou’s leadership term, perhaps. Under Haggar’s influence, Gorou hadn’t entertained any unspoken opinions. As far as he had been concerned, unless someone expressed themselves out loud, their discomfort or dissent didn’t exist. When someone did voice their opinions, like Lance had, he’d shut them down. For better or for worse, Lance has always been more open about his opinions when working with Keith. Uncharitably, Shiro thinks Lance should know better. Shiro is a person and can get frustrated too, and he can’t fix anything he doesn’t know about.

Gathering himself, Shiro gentles his voice, tries to relax his face. “I’m the one asking, Lance,” he says, careful to keep his tone even and calm. “So it’s fine if it’s rude, or if you think it will hurt my feelings. We’ve still got a ways left to go and it’s better that we’re all on the same page and get along.”

Lance searches Shiro’s face uncertainly for a few seconds more, before turning his head to the side and rubbing the back of his neck. “We do get along,” he grumbles, and stomps through the water to lean next to Shiro, landing his weight heavily against the carcass, jostling him. His forearms rest over the rifle in his lap, one crossed over the other. “Don’t say it like we’re fighting, or something. We’re still a team, no matter what.” When he looks at Shiro again, his gaze is determined and resolute.

“Thank you, Lance,” Shiro says, sincere and smiling. He makes sure to keep up the smile and the stare.

“…You’re not letting this go are you.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s no wonder you and Keith are friends, you’re both so quiznacking stubborn,” he says, miffed, pointedly jabbing Shiro in the shoulder. Sullen and reluctant, he kicks up a foot and lets it fall back into the water with a loud splash. “I didn’t want to say anything because I don’t really get it myself,” he admits. “It’s all a little jumbled up. I mean, you’re Shiro! You were my hero when we were in the Garrison! And you’re…nothing against Keith, he’s doing his best, but you were the Black Paladin. I can’t tell you how many times I thought, ‘What would Shiro do?’ when I first started out in Red. But…things weren’t right. The way you talked to Keith, or to us, it wasn’t how you normally would. And we all heard you. We all saw you. But we didn’t say anything. Honestly? Thinking back, it was kind of messed up.”

Nervous, Lance’s fingers begin to tap randomly against the barrel of his rifle as he gives Shiro a quick glance, checking for any signs of displeasure. Shiro just smiles encouragingly, trying to project a sense of understanding even through his and Gorou’s own burgeoning apprehension, his fingers stroking through the fur of the carcass again. 

“It was…it was a little scary, how you’d just kind of. Not let anyone get another word get in. Shut us down. You’d say what you wanted to do or what you thought was best and that would be it. You didn’t used to do that.” Lance shrugs listlessly, his mouth twisted in an unhappy line. “Those were all signs, we just weren’t listening. You even tried to tell me. You said you didn’t remember reaching out to me but you tried to contact us in the astral plane, didn’t you? Later you even said, to my face, that you didn’t feel like yourself. Hunk was starting to talk about how weird you were acting. Allura even tried to talk to me about you, when we were heading to the Kral Zera, and I actually told her not to worry. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t listen to any of you.

“Next thing we know you’ve apparently put a virus in the Castleship that will kill us all and Keith’s got this huge scar on his face, and oh yeah! You were a clone all along and you’re actually stuck in the Black Lion!” Lance waves an arm through the air wildly, his exasperation palpable, voice steadily rising. “Then we finally get you out but it turns out you might die anyway. Except Keith saves you, and now you’re alive, but you’re covered in space blood and we’re sitting on the body of some alien that you killed that we might have for dinner! And this is what recovery means to you!”

With a long exhale, Lance slides down and just sits in the muddy water, rifle propped on his knees and elbows stacked on top, miserably cradling his head in a hand. Around him and Shiro’s calves, the flow of the river dissolves the mud patched on their suits in a swirl of orange. “This just….it’s not normal. And I can’t stop thinking about that. If it weren’t for Allura…I would have died out here. Really died. No more Lance. Nothing. Nada. And maybe it’s because I’m stuck in Red all day with just Kaltenecker for company now, but...I mean – look at us, Shiro.” He gestures between them bitterly with his rifle. “We fly giant mecha lions. We’re fighting a space empire that’s a threat to the entire known universe. I go around shooting people, and I’m probably gonna have to shoot even more people. And somehow we’re supposed to be responsible for all of this, even though we’d never even be able to reach this area of space on just Earth tech. Back when I was trying to make fighter pilot class this was totally not the space travel I was thinking about. And if Pidgey’s Dad is really rebuilding the Castleship and alerting the Garrison, then Earth is definitely going to get involved.” He sinks his head into his arms, distorting and muffling his voice. “I’m really happy we’re going home. It’s all I’ve been thinking about since we got out here. But I have no idea what we’re actually going back to.  What are we even supposed to do?”

“We were never going to be uninvolved,” Shiro says quietly. “Given the drawings in that cave, the Earth was probably involved long before we found Blue. Krolia’s arrival on Earth was proof of that. The Galra were already able to reach us, backwater or not.”

There’s a theory Shiro has been nursing for a while, one that’s only continued to sprout large, sharp, and unnerving teeth since he died. The Lions would have found their paladins and dragged them into the war, no matter what they did. Even if any one of them had made different choices, if Hunk or Lance had decided not to apply to the Garrison, if Pidge had stayed on Earth for her mother’s sake, if Keith had dismissed piloting as a pointless pipe dream, if Shiro had chosen to pass on Kerberos and opt for a lower risk mission, somehow they would have been found, called, and claimed.

Shiro doesn’t at all know why they were chosen to be paladins, how permanent the selection is, how flexible the placement of a paladin can be, or what might make a Lion waver in their decision. Even Allura doesn’t know as much as she thought she did about the Lions, something that disconcerts her. But he does know Black, and they are infinite, beautiful and suffocating, and he thinks he’ll remember the howling endlessness of the astral plane for the rest of his life, whatever it’s worth now. Full of conviction and possessiveness, that constricting, gluttonous affection – their loyalty sinks in its many claws and refuses any distraction or deviation. Shiro’s position in what passed for their heart never changed, all future pilots accepted in relation to him, responding in kind. When Shiro grew, gained confidence in himself, their abilities strengthened too. Keith was his pick for successor and had Shiro’s well-being and ethos in mind, so Black accepted him until he’d lost his conviction. Then, Black had let him go and allowed Gorou back in the seat, only to respond to his unintentional half-heartedness and confusion with an equal shambles when trying to form Voltron. Black is capricious in that way, wants it all and has the power to make it so. One way or another, they would have found a way to make him their pilot. To them, it’s less of a picking and choosing, and more collecting every variation in the set. He can still hear their purr starting up in the back of his mind, a rumble that soothes as much as it makes his hair stand on end.

“But why us?” Lance exclaims, echoing Shiro’s old thoughts and throwing out his arms. “Don’t get me wrong, I can’t imagine never meeting Allura, and I wouldn’t give up Red or Blue for anything. But when I think about seeing my mom again, my dad, all my sisters and brothers, my nieces and nephews…what do I even say to them? How do I tell them about everything we’ve done out here, or that I’m gonna have to leave again?”

“Tell them the truth,” Shiro says, taking a page out of Keith’s book, Gorou’s melancholy a weight in his chest. “Tell them what you think. You can’t control other people’s reactions, but you can predict them. Think about how you’re going tell them about what’s happened. Plan how to respond to their questions, organize your thoughts. We don’t have the option of not fighting now. There’s a power vacuum. The Blades are scattered all over, the Coalition doesn’t seem to have any direction without clear leadership, and there’s warlord factions everywhere. Whoever comes at us is going to bring all the firepower they have.”

“Thanks, great, really encouraging, exactly what I wanted to hear,” Lance groans, cradling his head again.

Shiro nudges him with a foot. “It’s why we’re going to Earth, isn’t it? To make sure our families don’t have to go through what we’ve gone through, or experience what we’ve seen. It’s only natural you’d be a little different after everything we’ve experienced. It would be stranger if you weren’t.”

“So I’m supposed to just accept that this is my life?” Lance sweeps a frustrated hand through the water, smacking his hand down and creating a large splash. “Fighting all the time. Never getting to stay home. Being…different.”

“Not so different, Lance, there’s six of us after all. Would you say Hunk and Pidge are different, significantly different, than when you first got to know them?” Shiro replies, bemused at the irony of him talking about the permanency of selfhood. “There’s nothing set in stone about the rest of your life. People and circumstances change. We don’t even know what things are like on Earth yet. There’s no rulebook or checklist for stuff like this.”

Lance huffs at him, resting back against the carcass with a thump, clearly still wanting a more defined answer. “How do you deal with not knowing, Shiro?” He hurriedly waves his hands in front of himself. “I mean! No pressure if it’s too soon or anything! Just…how do you handle this?”

“Well you commented on my definition of recovery before,” Shiro says dryly, chuckles when Lance gives him a nervous grin. “Like I said, I’m not anything but recovering right now. Basics first. It’s important to me for several reasons to keep up physical fitness. I want to be able to protect myself. We’re a team, so when I’m able to protect myself I can help protect you guys too, just like you protect me. To do that I have to make sure that I’m well, and to be well, I need resources, which we don’t have a lot of right now. If I can get us resources, those will go to all of us too, and makes us all stronger collectively. How far am I willing to go to do that? Well,” Shiro taps the carcass, “Obviously, this far. It’s definitely more complicated than that, but taking things step by step helps. Uncertainty will always exist, but you’ll exhaust yourself if you worry over it all the time. And some of these things have already happened. You have changed. You are different, compared to who you were before. But I think all of us would agree that it’s not a bad thing. All of us have changed, too.”

Lance hums as he mulls it over. “Basically, one step at a time, huh?” he murmurs, scanning the bank and fishing up a rock from the riverbed. After turning it over a couple times, he throws it and they watch it skip three, four times.

“Thanks for listening to me, Shiro,” he says eventually, solemn. “Really. We got lucky with you as our Black Paladin. Otherwise? We would’ve been toast on our own, easy.”

 “Anytime, Lance,” Shiro replies, touched by the sincere acknowledgement. “We’re good?”

“Yes! Yes, yes, we’re good,” Lance says, surging upright and trying vainly to scrub away some of the mud stains that splashed up on his torso.

Shiro’s more than happy to put the topic to rest. Lance wouldn’t have wanted to hear his honest opinion when he’d really been looking for guidance and reassurance, and if he’d been projecting that much already, it wouldn’t have been helpful to give it either. The question of why us hits a little too close to home. He used to ask it all the time. Why me, ensconced in the hospital bed, why me, in the depths of the arena cells, why me, in the unceasing twilight between life and death. But there is no reason. There is no control. Just the perfect, random alignment of circumstances. Shiro’s choices have all come with the response to those circumstances, reactive. If, one day, there is nothing left for him to fight, be it an institution, a space empire, or himself, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

There is a mechanical sort of simplicity in violence that the arena taught him, he thinks, as Hunk hollers at them from the river bank and rushes over to join them. The adrenaline, the blood rushing, the activation of muscle memory and reflex, steadiness in allowing a practiced part of his brain to take over. He thinks of what to do and, condition willing, his body complies. Part of him still regards that compliance as necessary towards his survival, towards strength. Without it, he’s an easy mark. Smarts keep it clean but violence brings the win. Brutality brings the win. Even with his deadline ever present in the rearview, he can’t stop himself from choosing to fight and wanting to live, maybe out of spite, his usual. Come up against an obstacle? Fight. See an opponent? Fight. There’s a thrill in it, a euphoria in taking that first breath after the kill, in that intrinsic knowledge, I’m alive, the pride in fighting skill, in always getting back up. And afterwards: swept down in the undertow as the outside rushes in and he recognizes what he’s done, what kind of man he is. There is the guilt and the shame, the study of his many scars by low, flickering light – evidence that he’s survived, often at the expense of others. Someone who is maybe too harsh to fit in the crowd now, a warning, a sign of violence carved right into the middle of his face.

Shiro cuts off a small chunk of carcass as a makeshift biopsy for the scanner to analyze, prompting grimaces from both Hunk and Lance. The scoring jingle from Killbot Phantasm plays when the analysis is complete.

“Well, we can eat it,” Hunk pronounces loudly, both for his comm audience and for Shiro. “But do we want to? This thing almost had us for dinner.” He peers at Shiro hopefully like he thinks it will help.

“Still food,” Shiro says, shrugging, watching Hunk droop as he passes the commentary along. “A lot of food. I’m not sure we can be too choosy.”

Lance relays the incoming votes through a stage whisper. “A yes from Keith and Krolia, of freakin’ course… Allura and Coran too!?” He looks at Hunk in dismay. “I can’t believe this! This is a betrayal! Only Pidgeon and Romelle get us.”

“Kaltenecker needs veg, right?” Hunk sighs, resigned. “Maybe we’ll find something for us too, when we look for something for her. Anyway, does anyone know how to butcher this so we can actually eat it? The roasting and grilling or whatever I can do, but whole animal breakdown is new to me.”

“Keith, maybe,” Shiro says, recalling a vague, years-old speech extolling the virtues of camping in desert national parks when your father is a former NPS employee. “Otherwise, I can try. I’ve taken apart Cornish hens and chickens before, at least.”

After some additional delegation, the three of them haul the carcass back as quickly as they can, eager to be away from the forest and river as the sky darkens to a dull, burnt sienna. When they arrive, there’s a fire already merrily burning away in a cleared patch of soil, sending a resinous scent into the air along with light plumes of smoke. The carcass is left with Shiro a ways away from the camp, officially on butcher duty with Keith, while Lance and Hunk join Romelle and Pidge in picking through the fruits, flowers, and other assorted plant life that they’d gathered and deemed to be edible.

Keith stares at the knife wounds in the carcass for some time. “Everything alright? It’s not like you to be so messy.”

Shiro dips his head, looking at his own handiwork. He kneels and unsheathes the machete. “Perfectly fine, like I said,” he replies, voice low.

There’s a ringing noise as Keith removes his dagger and drops down next to Shiro, grass rustling. The touch of his hand on Shiro’s shoulder is light, barely there, the weight of his gaze even heavier. “I don’t mean just physically.”

Shiro bites his lip when Keith refuses to look away, even after several seconds have passed. “I’m not super great,” he croaks, and Keith’s fingers dig into his shoulder more firmly, as if he could pry Shiro open like an oyster and see what lay within. “But it’ll do.”

His best friend makes a dissatisfied chuffing noise, a new vocalization to add to a growing library. “We’ll just have to work on that,” he says firmly, and begins making the first incision, splitting open the skin from the lowest, deepest cut that Shiro made.

As the air begins to fill up with the earthy, bitter stench of alien blood, offal, and digestive remnants, Shiro’s reminded of the nature documentaries he used to enjoy watching. The Earth is full of wonders too, and he often thinks that if space had not captured his heart so thoroughly, he might have become a marine biologist, or some other natural sciences specialist. Eating, it sometimes seems, is the ultimate show of violence and dominance in the animal world. Killing prey and sometimes rivals precedes ingesting them, initiating the literal breakdown and discorporation of another living being to mine nutrients for oneself. Consumption involves actively denying and removing the existence of what is being consumed.

Morbidly, he assumes that this is part of the disgust that cannibalism invokes – denial of sentience, denial of a mutual acknowledgement of sameness, dehumanization in the act of eating. The fear of violence, of the diminishment of self, of being no different than an animal, all wrapped up in one neat ideological package. But he also appreciates the ethos that embraces eating as part of an active exchange of energy – plants and animals that are harvested and killed nourish humans, and humans in turn bear a responsibility to ensure those lives are given respect by letting nothing go to waste. In turn, when humans die, their remains decompose and fertilize the soil that sustains more plants and animals. Mass-energy equivalence at work, the nerdy side of him wants to say, even though he knows it isn’t quite true, especially with modern production methods at work.

And yet: the meat and sinew glistening in the firelight, the blood coating his and Keith’s hands, will be devoured by the team as they traverse the remaining megaparsecs to their home galaxy. The innards, brains, and other bits not considered safe to eat are happily snapped up by the space wolf, who fears neither parasites nor bacteria. The discarded skin and fur they will bury and return to the forest, away from the camp to prevent being disturbed by wildlife in the night. As the carcass is stripped down to steaks, loins, shanks, ribs, and other precision cuts, the evidence of Shiro’s violence is erased, along with the body. He watches ribbons of melted fat sluice down the sides of the flat, heated rocks they’re using as a grill, as Keith scrunches his nose next to him and asks Shiro to take him to the river again the next morning, grousing about how Lance keeps needling him about the smell. He flips several pieces, notes the dark gray sheen of the cartilage netting, purses his lips as he remembers the way the creature had thrashed and screeched, how he’d cut so deeply they barely needed to slice any further to reach the spine. They’d found most of the fat there, additional pockets cushioning the shoulders and parts of the ribs. The meat reddens as it cooks, the opposite of what one would expect from Earth meats, an illusion of revitalization, plumping with its own juices, raw and rare.

He pops one of the slices into his mouth, a belly cut much leaner than what he’s used to. A little like a cross between duck and beef, tender enough for an improvised, makeshift cookout. He glances around the fire; the team seems content, commenting eagerly on the meal despite their earlier concerns, Hunk and Krolia already laying out the leftovers to smoke and dry overnight. Overhead, the Lions loom, ringing them like sentinels. A faintly sweet and bitter aftertaste lingers in his mouth, near the back of his tongue. Shiro reaches for another piece, the flesh translucent, ruby-red and tempting. He’s been tricked; it’s much too well done, and he chews and chews and chews, stuck worrying a stubborn piece of gristle until Keith takes notice, laughs at him, and convinces him to give up and spit it out.

How far am I willing to go? Is that what he’d said to Lance? Obviously, he’s gone quite far; past tense.

 

***+***

 

After everything that’s happened, or perhaps in spite of it, something about them, Shiro and Keith, is still the same. The nighttime cycle sets in and the lighting dims to a warm eggplant color with a brilliant red at its core, reminiscent of some alien sunset. Black’s inner workings hum all around them like the vibrations of their own universe, the two of them sitting quietly in the relative dark together until someone decides to speak. Like a still shot in a movie, the times that they talk are suspended, the two of them constantly rewriting and recreating the same moment. In the day cycle and on unknown planets, Shiro thinks they can feel the vague hints of Keith’s presence around them, a softly pulsing beacon in their mind’s eye. They’ve known each other for a long time, years now, and through life on Earth and in space, Keith has stayed with him. He’s grateful for it more than ever.

On the night they arrive back in the Milky Way, Shiro joins Keith in the cockpit as the team finishes an unusually stilted check-in, seating himself against the far wall, Keith and the pilot’s chair backlit into silhouettes. It’s a little nostalgic to sit in the cockpit again, even if not in the pilot’s seat, especially with the paladin armor on again. Shiro’s link to the Black Lion has changed, the connection deepened, more salient, the ancient parts of them more willing to show themselves, one shivery pocket of shadow at a time. It frightens Gorou; he’s always been aware that he only has as much control over Black as they allow, but that control is much shallower than he thought. Black is a leviathan, a monolith, sometimes oppressive in their favor, something bigger and wilder than their metallic shell. He wonders if they feel this way to Keith, too. While stuck in the astral plane Shiro had sometimes received flashes of what Keith or Gorou felt in times of high distress or emotion, but the experience had been disorienting, hard to understand until he realized what was happening. Watching Keith’s tense back as he murmurs a terse, “Good work, team,” and abruptly signs off, Shiro wishes that he could tap into that connection at will, to know what sort of thoughts are running through Keith’s head.

Keith sighs and slumps briefly over the controls, drooping. His fingers flex on the dashboard distractedly as panels blink closed and the interior lights dim down to that warm crimson, despite it being hours away from the night cycle. Heaving himself out of the pilot seat to join Shiro on the floor, Keith’s back hits the wall with a thud when he slides down to sit, snugly pressing the two of them together, knocking elbows, poky knees, and thighs. He gives tired grin in response to Shiro’s disapproving hiss.

“You should be more careful with yourself,” Shiro admonishes, only half-serious as he dusts off Keith’s shoulder for show.

“We both know I’m fine,” Keith retorts, and playfully leans into Shiro’s grip with enough force to topple him over.

Shiro snorts, slides his hand across broad shoulders to instead brace Keith’s weight against his chest, squeezing him tight in a one-armed hug. “Hm, if you say so,” he says dryly. “But that conversation just now didn’t really sound fine. Did something happen while you were out there today?”

Keith’s head flops on his shoulder for a moment, boneless and heavy. It’s been a while since he last saw Keith in a mood like this, lethargic and unwilling to move, every motion made as if his limbs are burdened with overlarge weights. His skin prickles with awareness, of proximity, of itself.

“Do you think we’re all friends, Shiro?” he asks, voice small and uncertain. When Shiro looks down at him in surprise, he turns further into Shiro’s shoulder, unwilling to meet his gaze. It’s a proper question to ask, especially now, when Earth seems so close and they’re all thinking of where they first started. It’s the same question Shiro’s been asking himself. He needs time to think on it too.

“…where did this come from, Keith?” Shiro asks again, soft and bruised, thumb rubbing comfortingly along Keith’s bicep.

Voice hoarse and fumbling, Keith tells him about the terror of space, the stillness of being suspended in the imperfect vacuum, the clawing anger and despair as the team fell apart. The others might have felt relief at seeing their home galaxy, but Keith could only feel dread, as if the arguments presaged all the feelings being back on Earth would bring. He could see it in Allura’s face too – unblinded by nostalgia, the irked, stiff line of her mouth suggested that she felt things had been left unresolved. There are old hurts among the team.

Shiro cuddles Keith close once more, humming in thought. “Did you want to tell me what you were thinking?” he says, stroking along Keith’s shoulder and massaging the muscle there before leaving his arm draped around him. “You sound like you have something you want to say.”

Groaning, Keith rubs his hands over his face vigorously before raking them back through his hair, leaning back into Shiro’s casual hold. “I think,” he starts, tentative, “I think I’m angry. That they’re mad at me. That they’re saying I abandoned them. It’s been at least two years since I’ve seen everyone – and I missed them, of course I did. But. I don’t really feel like…it’s not really anything new, for me to miss them. Because I was with the Blade for a really long time. And while I was with them – ” his voice chokes off as he scrubs his bangs off his forehead once more, takes measured breaths in and out, “ – while I was with them,” he continues, strained, “They didn’t really contact me at all. If I heard from them, it was mission-related, or in a group call with other Blades. Or with Kolivan. Or a secondhand message. I mean, I was a liaison between the team and the Blade but it didn’t feel like anyone actually wanted to use the time to really talk to me. They’d ask how I was doing and stuff in the beginning but that all stopped pretty fast.”

Fretfully, his thumb runs over the knuckles of his index finger, again and again. “And no one really wanted me to be the leader. They all thought I would suck. Fuck, they didn’t need to tell me, I knew I wasn’t doing a great job. But for a while I thought I was getting better. Lance…he helped me a lot. Kept the team together when I couldn’t, to be honest. I talked with him before I left because he was worried about changing Lions again and he said this thing about stepping aside for the greater good, and I – by then we’d found you, or I mean, we’d found your clone, and we were working with the Blade and everything was just going wrong and nobody wanted to listen to me or work with me, and you know…I thought…I didn’t think anyone would care.” He rolls his head back on Shiro’s shoulder, blinking rapidly. “I didn’t think anyone would care,” he repeats, voice cracking, “But it doesn’t mean that I wanted to be right. When we first started fighting together I told myself not to get my hopes up. You can be teammates without being friends. But at some point I felt that maybe, maybe we could be…we could be like a real team, you know?”

Shiro lets his arm fall away as Keith curls forward with a sigh, head dropping towards his chest, only to have his hand grasped gently in one of Keith’s, tugged into his lap. His surprised glance is met with a familiar determined stare, Keith’s mouth already hardened into a stubborn line. “The thing is, I don’t really regret going to the Blades either,” he says, back straightening and shoulders squaring, as if the mere mention of the organization reminds him of all the training they instilled. “They work really, really differently, and I know the others think that they’re mission objective all the damn time, but the fact is by being Voltron, we never see what’s actually happening out there.”

Looking down, Keith strokes his thumbs against Shiro’s palms again, splaying his hand wide before tracing curious fingers over smooth, thickened skin. They trail down to his wrist and come to a rest over Shiro’s pulse, a reminder of times gone by. “Some of the shit I saw with the Blades…I’m glad the others didn’t have to see. But I think sometimes the Blades are right. Knowledge or death isn’t about literal knowledge and death, it’s about having the right information at the right time and making the right decision. It’s knowing the playing field. Knowing where you stand.

“We snuck into mines, colonies, warships. Everywhere and anywhere,” Keith murmurs, voice lowering to a rasp, gaze slipping off into the distance. “I saw firing squads, Shiro. They’d line people up and just kill them. Burn the bodies, or if there was a hole nearby, just pile them up and throw the dirt on. If we came after an attack, sometimes the soldiers didn’t check if the bodies were dead before they buried them. They dragged people out of their homes and just took them away. We’d sneak onto transports that had that weird quintessence and we’d find these druid labs and the prisons would be full…” Catching Keith’s wary glance, Shiro squeezes Keith’s hand gently, grateful that he stopped where he did. Shiro knows very well what druids typically do with a ready supply of prisoners; part of the terror of the arena was knowing that at any time, what was happening to others could happen to him, Champion or no. There’s not much space between them but Keith insistently shuffles closer anyway. He enfolds Shiro’s hand between his own and squeezes back.

“We’d go into villages to recover information sometimes and they’d just be razed to the ground,” he continues, clearing his throat. “If we weren’t careful sometimes people would come after us too because they thought we were with the Empire. There were times when the only thing we could do was hide out in the brush for a couple nights in a row so we wouldn’t get caught. Couldn’t rely on anyone except your own squad.” He snorts a little. “I never thought I’d be so glad for space rations, but they really are handy in a pinch.”

His fingers start to tap out a sporadic rhythm on the back of Shiro’s hand, contemplative points of pressure so soft Shiro can barely feel them. “But it all changed me too. I don’t know if for better or for worse. In the beginning, I wanted to save everyone. I would break protocol….and sometimes I got people killed. I used to agree more with the team that the Blades weren’t doing enough or taking enough risks, or that they prioritized the mission too much without considering the collateral. The squads would just hide and watch all of this happening, and I would wonder why we weren’t doing anything. Why we didn’t help them, or free them. But honestly?” He gives a helpless shrug, looks resigned in a way Shiro doesn’t often see. “There just really aren’t that many agents to go around. We’re outnumbered almost every time. An eight-person attack squad can’t take out five warships full of Galra soldiers and sentries without forewarning. So all the missions are based around timing and intel and the mission rosters are lean and strategic. It’s hard to pick up informants too, but agents are even harder.” He gestures towards his and Krolia’s knife where it’s strapped to his waist, in his possession for the day. They swap off every time they meet again. “It’s the luxite that makes the difference, since that’s what can stop a druid. If you don’t pass the Trials, you don’t join the Blade. You join operations or intel or another branch instead.

“There’s underground distribution networks and markets, but the minute any Marmora informant gets caught by the Empire it’s all over – not just for them, but also for any family or friends, the Empire just hunts any connections down. Any relations within three generations, any suspicious connections branching from the family, is what the senior agents say,” Keith says, grimacing and pained, rubbing over Shiro’s pulse again. “It gets to the point where the best source of information is sometimes the people on diverted gladiator and auction ships or tapped comm chatter, where you can sometimes find agent candidates too. And the medical and tech specialists are constantly getting moved around so they can’t be traced. Some of them have been around a long time, so they’ve just got all that accumulated knowledge. Getting another specialist, especially someone who’s on Hunk or Pidge’s level, is like hitting a gold mine. And if things go wrong…”

Keith’s hands clench tightly around Shiro’s and his mouth twists, wobbling, gaze lowering to the floor again. Shiro slots their fingers together and leans a little more heavily on Keith’s shoulder, trying to lend some comfort. “We saw what happened when things go wrong. The Blade almost got completely wiped out. Kolivan almost died. You know the organization’s been around since the Galra were planetbound? They’ve got a bunch of stashes everywhere to keep people and artifacts safe and we don’t even know how those are doing. Most of us don’t know where they are. I was just part of the legacy attack squads. We’re the Blade of Marmora. We go in for information retrieval and transfer, agent extraction, raid druid bases, and that’s mostly it. It’s pretty complicated but it was kept that way for a reason and we almost lost all of it.”

Keith makes a throaty, frustrated noise, almost a growl, thumps his face into Shiro’s shoulder again and nuzzles aggressively, as if to scrub away any tears that might form and hide himself away. Unsteady breath shudders against Shiro’s neck, and all he can do is clutch Keith close and hope it’s enough to make himself a haven. Gorou trembles, an unbidden vibration in his body like fingers flicking against a tuning fork. Keith’s hair is soft where it nestles against their cheek.

“Three years, Shiro,” Keith says, waterlogged and muffled. “Three years we were missing. How were we supposed to know?”

White knuckled silence stretches out as Keith curls closer, his legs drawing up to his chest, Shiro shifting to mirror his posture. Black is their only witness as they huddle there, small and pained. It’s with a shaky sigh and wavering voice that Keith begins to speak again. “Kolivan actually squared with me early on – he said he wanted me to see everything the average Blade would, so Voltron would know why the Blades were fighting this war, and who they were. And he said he wouldn’t be trying to spare me, but he also needed to keep me alive as an asset because I’m a paladin. He was just really blunt about his intentions. It was kind of funny, for a head of a spy organization.” His eyes are still wet when he huffs out a wry laugh with only the vestiges of amusement. “There were times I thought he was the only one being honest with me, even when he clearly didn’t tell me everything. At least he was direct about it. Back on the Castleship I felt everyone always wanted something from me, but no one would tell me what it was, so I couldn’t give it to them. I…I felt like they kept waiting for me to be someone else.” Keith’s grip is starting to hurt a little bit, but the pressure is grounding. He is still resolute with his set, tense mouth and wrinkled brow, worry writ into the lines there. His eyes are clear, gaze unsparing as ever.

“I think they were waiting for me to be like you.”

Shiro feels the words hit him like a fist to the gut, unexpected and taking all the air with them. His hand clutches Keith’s back just as hard, dread and guilt roiling in his chest, ready to spill messily between them. If it wasn’t for his undersuit, Keith could probably feel the sweat collecting on his palm, damp and disgusting, feel the desperation overtaking him head to toe. Every contraction of his heart feels like too much, the pressure of blood rushing through his arteries and veins, the adrenaline pumping through him, rapids of fight or flight. Gorou’s grim vindication rings in his ears, builds to a deafening cacophony in his head and invites the nausea to settle in.

Keith doesn’t need his empty words, he just barrels on, strong as ever, nervous, but careful to keep Shiro’s eyes on him. “Even when you were leading, I got the feeling no one ever expected anything from me. I didn’t know what or who they wanted me to be. Just that they wanted me to be…not me. To be less Keith. But I don’t know what that looks like.” Idly, he bumps their knees together, stare darting away for a moment. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction – Shiro bumps back on reflex, tries to quell his sudden restlessness. “The Blades…they checked in with each other all the time, even though they’re supposed to be all hush-hush about information. Everyone with a blade usually gets it through family or a personal connection, so they either know a ton about the Blades or they’re still torn up about everything and unsure about not being part of the Empire.”

A corner of Keith’s mouth quirks up, fond. “A bunch of us are part-Galra too, so we were also all trying to sort out culture shocks and clashes and figure out how to not offend each other and get along…and it’s just different. When we were on missions we were supposed to be these disciplined agents. Off-duty, we didn’t always have it together, but neither did anyone else. It was accepted that it was just part of the work and part of being against the Empire. Senior agents especially, they talked about what was bothering them all the time, kind of encouraging through example, since some of the juniors still don’t know what they can and can’t do. We were all just…learning as we went along. Just trying our best. And sometimes…sometimes I felt like I’d been lonelier in the Castleship, than with the Blades.” Keith’s face crumples, running an anxious thumb against Shiro’s index finger, laying his head back down on Shiro’s shoulder. “And now that I’m here, that’s what I miss. And I guess I could’ve been the one to reach out to everyone else back then, but I thought it might be better if I just stayed away. Things had already been bad when I was leading and I wondered if I should just…take the hint.”

“It’s okay to feel that way,” Shiro says after a fraught pause, licking his lips, thumping their twined hands lightly against Keith’s thigh. Keith’s clearly been sitting on these feelings for a long time, to talk so much at once, maybe a product of those two years away in the quantum abyss. But the responsibility, the hurt, is heavy, seeps into his aching eyes and heart. Apprehensive, he takes a bigger breath before he speaks. “You feel what you feel, you shouldn’t ignore that. Different teams will have different interactions. If you say you felt less alone with the Blade…then you felt less alone with the Blade, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about that. Because what you said about no one wanting to work with you, or the expectations everyone had…” Shiro sighs and rubs his cheek against Keith’s hair. Keith has become so much taller now; his neck barely twinges at all. Closing his eyes, Gorou withering inside, he says, “Relationships are a two-way street, Keith. It’s not all on you. And as little as it might be worth, we’re sorry. Him and I. We owe you an apology.”

“…what do you mean, him? We?” Keith asks cautiously. He pushes Shiro away a little to better look him in the eye, but the pressure of his palm on their chest might as well be a brand. He’s still holding fast to Shiro’s hand – to reassure him, or make sure he doesn’t run away?

“The clone and me,” Shiro explains, tries to meet Keith’s stare with the same bravery Keith always brandishes. With some hesitance, he elaborates, “…we’ve named him Gorou.”

Keith stiffens slightly. “Gorou,” he repeats distractedly. “He’s still there?”

Shiro doesn’t contain the slumping of his shoulders, the gesture of Gorou’s hurt. “I thought Allura might have explained,” he says slowly, making sure not to look away, “But of course he’s still here. I think he’ll always be here, and we’re probably always going to be like this. It was his body first. I know everything about him, and he knows everything about me.” He makes to withdraw, but Keith’s hand flies to his thigh, digs his fingers in to keep him there, draws their interwoven hands protectively to his chest.

Clearing his throat, Shiro forges on, trying to speak steadily despite the way his voice wants to waver. “Keith, we weren’t fair to you. I wasn’t fair to you…and we hurt you. Be honest with me, if I hadn’t asked you to, would you ever have thought of leading on your own?”

Keith’s grip is crushing, eyes wide. “Shiro…”

“It’s not an accusation,” Shiro says, shaking his head. “It’s really, really not. But I keep thinking about it and I don’t…I don’t know that I gave you a choice, after what I said to you in that cave. And Gorou….he undermined you and made the team doubt, and made you doubt yourself, and he knows it. That was Haggar’s plan. That was the point. Because I was the first team leader and had sway over the team dynamics. And I…” His eyes are watering, his voice breaking, all his weaknesses and worries swimming to light. He laughs sadly, gasping, clinging onto Keith’s hand like a lifeline, bowing his head. “I don’t know that I kept our promise. I can’t say that I had your back. I always knew you would be great, Keith, always knew you had potential. And I trust you, more than anyone else. But I didn’t ask you what you wanted, I acted like I didn’t hear what you told me. I shouldn’t have put my expectations on you like that. And even after everything I said about having you take over, I didn’t give you any of the tools you needed to succeed, just took you for granted. And it’s not about me, I know that, and I don’t know about the rest of the team…but Gorou and I, we didn’t support you like we should have. We drove you away. We hurt you. I hurt you.”

Keith yanks his hand away and the tears spill over. You’re awful. Shiro cries like that, huddled on the floor of a Lion he used to fly, next to the person who was his best friend, who he came back for, his right hand and everything else besides. He doesn’t know if they’re all friends. He doesn’t know the answer. But there’s a hand on his shoulder and an arm winding around his waist, drawing him close, and he’s grateful for that touch, that presence, this time to do over and over, this space that is just for them. Keith folds him in his arms, clutches him tight enough that it hurts, the way he clung so desperately to Gorou’s arm on that crumbling, lonely space station.

“I won’t lie,” he says, and even trembling his voice is strong, compressed with emotion, and Shiro thinks he can feel the prick of claws beginning to dig into his lower back. Keith’s never lied to him. It’s always Shiro who conceals the truth. “You hurt me. You did. You hurt me when you left to go to Kerberos and didn’t come back. You hurt me whenever you forgot yourself, acted like taking care of yourself wasn’t important because you had to be the team leader. Shiro, do you even understand how much it hurt when you sat there and told me you needed me to replace you?! Like you don’t know how much I care about you?! You aren’t replaceable!!” Shuddering breath blows across Shiro’s neck, a fist twisting into the material of his undersuit, and the only thing he can do is cling tighter, nuzzle closer, his head tucked against Keith’s and his body curling around them, trying to keep together, keep safe.

Keith thumps him in the back, as a sob ripples through him. “How could you do that?!” he whimpers into Shiro’s shoulder. “Talk about your life like it doesn’t matter?! Act like I could just move on, like I wouldn’t care?! Just dump it in my lap and disappear – we didn’t even talk about it! Ever!”

“I’m so sorry,” Shiro whispers, sniffling, butting their heads together again and rubbing Keith’s back.

“…where. Were. You?!” Keith cries into his neck, howling each word like it’s being forced out of him. “Where were you?! I didn’t know what I was doing and I needed you and you just, you just…!”

“I know,” Shiro breathes, and every ounce of Gorou in him sags against Keith, defeated and drained, guilty, guilty, guilty.

“How was I supposed to keep them together,” Keith snarls, wiping his tears and snot furiously against Shiro’s shoulder, “When I was mourning you again? When you questioned everything? When you kept fighting me? Shiro….!”

“I know, I know,” Shiro warbles, condemned, holding onto Keith as tightly as he dares, resting his cheek against the cradle of Keith’s neck and shoulder. He wishes the armor wasn’t in the way, wishes he had something softer and gentler to offer Keith. “I’m sorry, Keith. I know.”

He can feel the pressure of Keith’s fingers as they dig into his armor-clad shoulders and pulls them apart, sliding his hands up to a desperate hold against his neck and jaw, cradling his face and smooshing his cheeks. “I needed you,” he hisses, a low rumble underlining the words, tears coursing down his face, plum-blotchy all over with a yellow tinge to his sclera. They’re both ugly criers, Shiro thinks, as he nods helplessly, turns his face into Keith’s palms as his thumbs rub across Shiro’s cheekbones, swiping at his tears. “How could you do that to me? Sometimes I think I lost my mind in that desert by myself and just stayed that way. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. Why I was doing anything. Kolivan had the entire squad checking in with me all the damn time after I joined the Blade, did you know? I think he thought I was going to…”

“No,” Shiro is gasping, breath whistling in and out of his lungs as he scrabbles at Keith, hand shaking as he runs fingers through Keith’s hair, clutches at his shoulders and clings to his wrist. He can’t get his mind off the long, harrowing nights when everything felt meaningless and he could only stare up at the suffocating ceiling, the nights his grandfather came over and kept him company, listening to him, playing his father’s rakugo tapes and talking him in circles, making sure he wasn’t by himself. Nights when he’d collapsed against his bedroom door, staring at the report cards and lab results littered all over the carpet, scrabbling at his gasping throat and wondering why he ever thought he could accomplish this. “No, don’t say that, Keith, no…don’t tell me – ”

“I almost did,” he says, a confession, like they’re only two young boys at a slumber party, trading innocent secrets and growing pains. His voice is whispering, intimate, when he tells Shiro about Naxzela, his hands on Shiro’s face anchoring him there, forehead-to-forehead and unable to look away when Keith tells him that he was seconds away from never, ever seeing Keith’s face again because Keith would have obliterated himself flying into that shield. He wants to think it’s a lie. That it’s Keith getting back at him. That it’s him being hurt the same way Keith was hurt – but that’s exactly it, that must be how Keith felt all the time, for a year out in that desert, for months looking for Gorou out in the black of space, for the agonizing term of leadership that left him so bereft. And Keith is not Shiro: he is always honest.

“Keith,” Shiro whimpers, shaking his head. He wants to ask how Keith could think that he was an acceptable loss, but he knows exactly how, because they did it. Shiro was the one who thought he was the acceptable, inevitable loss, and then they were the ones who made Keith think he didn’t have a place with them anymore. Gorou cringes, remembering how pale and washed-out Keith had looked in the hangar lights right after the battle, when he’d congratulated him on his good work, an almost suicide. Trembling fingers trace along the scar Gorou left on Keith’s cheek, still a little pink as it heals, and Shiro dares to lay their palm there. “I don’t know if you’ll believe or trust what I say ever again…but I don’t want you to ever think that I don’t want you here. I’ll always want you here.” Keith’s lashes dip as he leans in, hands dropping to Shiro’s chest as he sniffles and Shiro gently brushes away the tears that roll down. He hopes he’s still listening. “Gorou too, even when he couldn’t tell what was happening, he wanted you near. He wanted you safe. I want you safe. You are…you are so, so important to me. I don’t know what I would do if you weren’t here. If you didn’t have my back.” He laughs unsteadily, just a wisp of humor, head dropping down and away towards Keith’s shoulder. “I’d be dead, honestly.”

Keith growls and thumps him again. “I hate you. Your sense of humor fucking sucks.”

“I’m not lying,” Shiro says, rolling his head to look up at Keith. They’re messes, both of them, and him even more so. “I swear it. Keith, everything is better when you’re there. In the Garrison, no one else understood me like you did. I was away on a mission my first couple years there, and I think you were the only real friend I made after that. And those first months in the Castleship when I thought I’d never get it together again, when I couldn’t sleep and didn’t know what to do, you were always willing to listen and talk to me. Keith, I need you, too. I need you to be here. Not because I’m using you as a crutch, or at least, I hope you don’t feel that way, but because you’re you, and I trust you. You know what I’m like and you’ll tell it to me straight. My best friend. My right hand. My partner.”

Shiro raises himself up and Keith’s eyes fix onto him like a laser. He wipes at his eyes hastily, throat clicking when he swallows. “I don’t know that I’m the same person you knew anymore,” he admits, smiling wryly. “And I’m not always sure that you’re the same person that I knew. But when I talk with you, or sit with you, I feel like that doesn’t matter so much. If you…if you don’t want to forgive us, or forgive me, I think that’s your right. And I’m sorry that we treated you like that. I’m sorry…” He fights back another wave of emotion, eyes watering again as Gorou’s regret lights him up, “We’re sorry that we fought you. That we hurt you. Said all those horrible things, because none of them were true.”

Brow furrowed, mouth pursed into a small frown, Keith is still watching Shiro intently, but lets Shiro rub away the last of his tears, fingers brushing lightly over his cheeks, the thin skin under his eyes, tracing along his jaw and the corners of his mouth. “You told Gorou, ‘as many times as it takes,’ once,” Shiro murmurs, cradling Keith’s face again. He can feel the heat that rises along his own cheeks and ears as his heart begins to slow, begins to steady. “That goes for you too. My track record’s not great…but I’ll always come for you whenever you call. I care about you.”

Keith captures his wrist when he begins to pull away, rests a hand on Shiro’s waist to keep him from moving. He’s still a bit plum-red in the face. “You mean a lot to me too,” he says simply, raising his chin in that defiant way of his. “I’ve told you that. And it does make me feel better that you’re admitting that you and Gorou hurt me. But for me this isn’t about forgiveness or, or owing me something.” He worries at his bottom lip, weaves their hands together again. Brave Keith, always looking ahead, vision clear.

Closing his eyes, he holds their entwined hands to his chest with the back of Shiro’s hand right against his sternum. “I think we want the same thing. Shiro, I need you with me. I need you to be here, too, to have my back. I need you to trust me, and talk – really talk – about what you’re thinking. What you want.” The tendons of his hand protrude with his nerves, and he licks his lips as he keeps his gaze on Shiro, eye to eye. “I – I can’t do this on my own. You asked me to be honest – and, yes, Shiro, I led because you asked me to. I would have followed you anywhere, you know that, right? It was hard. There were so many times where I wondered how you did it. And I’m still wondering; it’s still really, really hard. And I need help. Just be here, Shiro. Right here, next to me.” His lip wobbles a little, and he pats their interwoven hands awkwardly, hunching over them protectively. “It...tore me up to fight you. Gorou. And maybe we’d been fighting a little bit before that anyway, we just didn’t talk about it. Hanging there from the station, waiting to fall…everything just came together. That I’d make it out with you or not at all.”

There’s a lump in Shiro’s throat that he can’t swallow. Keith’s still looking at him; he can’t make himself turn away to hide his face even when the tears heed artificial gravity and drip down his face again. He must meet Keith, head up, back straight, eyes wide open. The salt on his tongue is cleansing, and when he laughs it’s in Gorou’s voice. “‘How many times are you going to save me?’” he asks rhetorically, leans into the tentative fingers that wipe his face for him, returning the favor, the wary eyes reacting to the change in intonation. “You just keep bringing me back, Keith. You don’t….you don’t hate me?”

Keith’s index finger taps against Gorou’s jaw in thought. “If I had found out before I knew what happened to Shiro, I would’ve been angry, I think. Not exactly at you, maybe. More because that you were here and Shiro wasn’t, and that would mean he was still out there, all alone. I probably would have thought you were in on it. But knowing what I know now…I can’t be. Because it wasn’t your fault. If you had a choice, we probably wouldn’t have fought.” He grins suddenly, just a small quirk of the mouth. “Well, we’d probably still a fight a little. Didn’t always see eye to eye, after all.”

“Thank you, Keith,” they say together, Gorou’s relief and gratefulness permeating every syllable, “For believing in us. It might not be about forgiveness to you but…it matters to me that we’re okay. I was only able to be a lead because you were there. You weren’t just my right hand, you were my confidant too, my anchor.” In a mimic of Keith’s earlier actions, Shiro lets go of his hand to trace down to his wrist, hovers patiently over the delicate lines of veins and arteries, the rush of blood beating there. Ruefully, he smiles; he never intended to articulate these thoughts to anyone. “Back then…I don’t think the team understood how real this war was, especially to me. What the stakes were and are. Not until the Balmera and Sendak. And I felt like I had to be on all the time because I didn’t feel like we were ready. So to answer your original question…no, I wasn’t sure I could be good friends with any of the team, except maybe Allura, because they always wanted me to be the leader. Good teammates, but maybe not friends. I wasn’t sure if they knew how serious things were. That I could just relax with you, tell you what I was thinking or worrying about and know you would respond to me sincerely, Keith, that was huge for me. I could just be honest with you. And hearing you now, I think we really need to reconsider our team organization and leadership strategy because it wasn’t working for us. Either of us, or for the team.” He rubs Keith’s pulse with his thumb, runs careful fingers over his weathered palm. “But we can work on it together, all of us. And we’ll make it out together. Keith, I’m here now. We’re here now. You’ve got us. And I’ll be here. I’ll be your co-pilot.”

Finally, Keith smiles, wide enough to show off the sharp edges of his fangs, turns his hand over so he can lace their fingers together once more. “Thanks, Shiro. I’ll always need you,” he says, heartfelt. “I’m really glad you’re here. Both of you.”

“I’m glad to be by your side,” Shiro replies and boldly scoots in close again, to rest his head against Keith’s in the closest approximation to a hug that he can offer. “Thank you for trusting me. And for the record…” He turns his head so his lips rest against Keith’s hairline, and hopes that Keith can’t feel the warmth flushing his cheeks. “I know we can’t always control what happens out here,” he says, and by the saying he wants it to be true, wants it to be a promise, a real one, sealed against Keith’s skin, “But I will never leave you willingly. I’ll always come back. For you.” By the stretch over his shoulders he can feel that Keith’s got a hand wound tight in his undersuit again. They’re close enough that he can feel the steady rhythm of Keith’s breathing, the expansion of ribs into his space. Rigid bone to protect the soft tissue beneath.

“Keith,” he murmurs, sighs really, presses his lips hard against Keith’s forehead, as hard as he can to imprint himself there. He doesn’t miss the slight tensing of Keith’s form, but it’s time for Shiro to be brave and honest. Shall the speaking make it so. “When you fought Gorou, you said…that you loved us. Do you still feel that way now?”

Again, Keith pushes him away gently. Meet him again, eyes up, ears open, and ready to listen. This time is for them to do again and again. “Yeah,” he says, eyes searching Shiro’s face, lips pressed together nervously.

“Like a brother?” Shiro asks, eyebrows raised.

Keith is the one to try and slip away this time, but Shiro locks their hands palm to palm, anticipation and dread twin storms spreading through his body. “Please,” he says, begs, fingers tightening briefly, “Because…I think we really might want the same thing.”

The wonder that crests in Keith’s eyes is something new to explore, as his stare darts down to their hands, held tight together. “Not…like a brother,” he says, voice raspy, almost guttural, a lighter vibration lining the words and growing louder as he speaks. “Not like a brother,” he repeats with more confidence, as the headstrong spark returns to his gaze. “More than that. To me…you’re a lot of things. Everything. And I like all of it.”

Shiro couldn’t stop himself from beaming if he tried. Gorou feels like surprise, like wispy clouds on a bright day, the clinking of ema in a strong breeze, like windchimes. “I like all of you too, Keith,” he says, the words blessedly easy and sweet. “I really want you to know that. I might be…slow, still, right now. I can’t…I can’t tell you the same thing back because I…I don’t feel ready. But…I want the same thing you do. I want to make it out, together. With you.”

Keith flings out his arms and drags Shiro in about the shoulders, falling back against the wall. Buoyant with relief and the lightness that only Keith can inspire, Shiro relaxes into his arms easily, laughing and draping his arm casually over Keith’s hip. He feels protected and cherished like this, cradled against Keith’s chest. He’s been a lot of things, but now he’ll be Keith’s too, and the thought is reassuring. Quick and shy, he feels Keith brush his lips across Shiro’s forehead, then buss him lightning fast on the cheek, rousing in him a round of hearty laughter that feels ancient, root deep. 

***+***

The story goes like this: Shirogane Ryuusei, amateur astronomer, meets Baek Haneul, aspiring professional astrophysics geek, at an astronomical society meetup event for a meteor shower in Kyoto, and they hit it off. Baek tracks galaxies, stars, asteroids, and other space objects that are being studied by her classmates and friends, sometimes combing open source photo sets for rare phenomena. Shirogane, prospective structural building engineer, likes to stargaze and follow the movements of star clusters and nebulae, using astrophotography as an avenue to explore different imaging techniques. Those techniques then get leveraged in his side job as a freelance architectural and urban photographer.

They’re both graduate students finishing out their masters. Squeezed close on the stools of a crowded oden cart, Shirogane talks about his interest in mass timber buildings and façade engineering, his plan to enter an international architecture and structural design firm so he can explore both. His first choice is in Toronto. In turn, Baek reveals that she has relatives who moved there six months ago and has been eyeing the doctoral program at the University of Toronto since, interested in the affiliated research center for theoretical astrophysics. They commiserate about their respective application processes, consoling themselves with cheap, hot sake.

“Ah, give me your number, Shirogane-kun,” Baek says, waving her phone, “We can be miserable together. If we both end up in Canada, you should buy me a bottle of maple syrup.”

“You’re only eight months older than me, Baek-san,” Shirogane grumbles, pulling out his phone anyway, exchanging it for hers. “If you get maple syrup, what do I get?”

“If we both get to Toronto, you’ll see,” she cackles, with the jaunty waggle of an eyebrow. She lets out a sudden giggle when she looks down at her new contact entry. “Look,” she says, shoving the screen in his face. “Our names are kind of similar, don’t you think?”

“Now that you mention it…” he says, squinting at his own phone. “You’re right. Meeting tonight of all nights, too.”

She smiles brightly at him. When it comes to pay the bill, they split it fifty-fifty, and make their meandering way to the subway station together, arms brushing.

“It will be nice try living outside of Japan,” Shirogane says, hands in his pockets. “I’ve barely been out of Kyoto, living in the dowa projects my entire life.”

“Ah, I can relate, we live right at the border of a dowa district,” Baek replies, tilting her head and pointing at him. “My mom actually owns a shop near there too! Paper and fabrics and stuff. If you ever need formal invitations for anything, you should let me know. I’ve been helping with stock ever since I was a teenager, if anything I should get an automatic doctorate in that.”

Shirogane looks at her quietly for a moment, before breaking into a small, puckish grin. “You know, Baek-san, we really do have a lot in common.”

“Right? You better text me.”

“Haha, I will.”

Haneul’s story goes like this: it’s because Shirogane-kun didn’t react at all to the discrepancies between her written name and the name she introduced herself with, and because he saw the connection between them and their meeting, that she decided to give him a chance.

Ryuusei’s story goes like this: it’s because Baek-san not only didn’t shy away from someone from a dowa district but also invited him into her life, and all the other coincidences they’ve uncovered in the night, that he thinks this is too good a chance to get away.

He texts her that night. They keep up a flurry of correspondence, right up until they leave for Toronto, where they move into the same apartment together. After four years, they exchange rings on winter solstice, a holiday they’ve claimed as their own, celebrating with a scrumptious unmori-nabe and patjuk for dessert, extra portions ready to be placed in each room. They wait several months before traveling to Kyoto during spring break to get married, nothing big, just filing the paperwork and having a dinner at a nice restaurant with all their family and friends to celebrate. As if to punish them for being happy, just weeks later they suffer through the sudden deaths of Ryuusei’s parents, victims of a car crash, and Haneul’s mother, from a stroke. Stumbling through a several-months-long haze of grief and coping, life hits them with another bout of whiplash.

“Should have known then you’d always want to go fast,” Shiro’s father says when they tell him the story, scratching through his beard and reaching for another slice of muskmelon, tasty spoils from Shiro’s current hospital visit. The nurses might talk behind their backs, but they have a soft spot for sweet Takashi, who is always polite and never unreasonable, asks them how their days are and how their families are doing. 

“I just wanted to have my kid in Canada so I could give him a bunch of names,” Shiro’s mother says, pinching her son’s cheek and simpering at him.    

“Maybe we should have named you Shirogane Baek Shiro after all, Takkun,” Shiro’s father muses thoughtfully, cutting off a cube to feed to his son.

“Ew, no, that’s so weird,” Takashi complains, but accepts the mollifying bribe of melon anyway. “At least read it as haku, or something. And I like my name.”  

“Hear that, Ryuusei-kun? We did a good job,” Shiro’s mother says, biting into a melon slice with relish.

“We did a good job,” Shiro’s father agrees, offering his son some more melon. “Don’t you think so, Shiro?”

And so the story goes: the stars, the sky, and a certain fluidity of word are a part of Shiro’s family mythos. After transitioning to more civilian employ as an aviation mechanic, his maternal grandfather had met his wife on the job, where she had been a ticket counter agent for the same airline. His paternal grandmother eked out a living as a fortune teller online, not just doing birth charts and compatibility assessments, but also writing columns for local papers, niche magazines, and artsy quarterlies under a penname. She met her future husband, the foreman of a construction company specializing in traditional building methods, on the observation deck of Kyoto Tower.

Shiro’s seen his baby mobile, a set of cutely rounded planets, rockets, and stars with plenty of squish, set to revolve slowly to a quiet lullaby. His big boy sheet sets had stylized constellations scribbled all over them. Up until the end of middle school, his bedroom walls were plastered with Earth images taken from the International Space Station, pictures of storms swirling on the surfaces of planets, prints of his favorite star clusters, and a poster depicting a stylized timeline of the most important space missions undertaken in the last three centuries, complete with illustrations of the spacecrafts. The omnipresent go bag that rested at the foot of his bed in Tokyo was a worn memento of Toronto; when accidentally kicked into the shadows beneath, the glow-in-the-dark swirls of galaxies still showed up just fine. It was left behind when he went to the States, but a photo of the Veil Nebula taken by his father took pride of place on his apartment wall, where the vivid colors made everything just a little brighter. It helped that his family’s ringtone was set to a catchy synthpop remix of converted radar echoes from Saturn and vibrations from Earth’s magnetic drum.

He has no such keepsakes with him now, but surrounded by stars and interstellar medium in all directions, there’s no need. Gingerly, he eases himself out from under Keith and leaves him the rest of the cot to take over, sprawler that he is. With Krolia keeping Pidge company in Green tonight, the space wolf is left to keep a solo watch. The wolf’s head raises as he walks by, tail thumping twice. When Shiro raises his index finger to his lips, he gets a purring chuff in return, and the wolf rests its head back on its paws, eyes alert and a single ear flicking as it watches him go further down the hallway. The running lights seem to increase in intensity the closer he gets to the cockpit, or perhaps his surroundings get darker, shadows deepening into pools of nothing. Knowing Black, it could be both. A toneless vibration rolls into his ears, a rapid crescendo heralding a reverberation so loud and so deep he feels like his bones are being shaken into jelly, a formless hand reaching into his chest to bruise his heart with every squeeze, intentionally off-beat. The smooth metal of the hull is cool beneath his unsteady fingertips.

Ahead, the cockpit interface activates abruptly, completely unattended. A line of bright light etches itself on the viewport, piercing, a deeper purple than normal. His purple. Bursts of light flash as the interface opens, illuminating, bathing everything in a cascade of crimson light. HUD up, all gauge settings open for a systems check, and a navigational map in the corner marking the locations of the other lions, the display settings that he prefers. The entire setup blinks twice, beckoning.

He’s frozen there, right on the cusp, even though he’s been in this cockpit so many times. Despite the conversation he had with Keith, he hasn’t thought about piloting Black again. He’s been trying not to, unsure what it would mean for them, for the team. Thinking about it is inevitable; there’s going to be a conversation sooner or later about what leadership is going to look like, how Voltron is going to operate. It’s time to set aside all their preconceptions and build the team properly.

Even though he knows that, all he can think about is sitting in that seat and burning. A blast atomized him there. He died right here, in this cockpit. Slow enough that he had the air to scream for an agonizing second and feel his skin peel and come apart with his muscles and bones and every blood vessel, blood vaporizing, deconstructed to the point where not even ash was left. When you’re dead no one can expect anything from you. When you’re dead, you don’t have to do anything except disappear and rest, and maybe other people will have to deal with what you left behind, but he’s honestly not sure that it’s any different from dealing with the effects of people’s actions when they’re alive.

Gorou’s frustrated with him of course, with Shiro’s tendency to hold back and block what he needs to think about. Gorou always wants to fly. But Shiro doesn’t know if he wants to resurrect this. He likes having what he has with Keith, something they can cultivate and nurture together, gentle and growing. He’s happy he met this team, went on this space adventure despite the torment that preceded it. It’s more exploration than he ever expected, it’s deep space and vistas and all sort of star clusters and extrasolar planets that he’s constantly trying to map to what he knows, and it blows his mind when he thinks of how far from Earth they’ve gone. They’ve traveled beyond the bounds of the observable universe, places human instruments cannot even see. In this return journey they are being brought back down to Earth, he is being brought back down, and as much as he wants to see his family, needs to see this journey through, a part of him is still out in the black, forever obscured and lost there, so far away that seen from the ground, he might as well be suspended in time, transmitting messages from the past.

The vibration that shakes him is morphing into a growling chirp that oscillates between his ears, the right and left soundstage, pacing. The ship trembles and rocks lightly, like the low grade earthquakes he used to experience all the time in Japan. Gorou’s excitement is taking on a sulky tinge, as if pouting. Heart pounding, breath short, he leans against the hull, but behind his closed eyes waits a split open sky. The feeble range of light his eyes can see paint everything prismatic and shining, a binary star system suspended and twirling around their barycenter like dancers, the surrounding clouds of helium, hydrogen, and other space matter expanding ever outwards. A blink, and he sees only the cockpit and the chair again, the interface flashing intermittently.

“Get in the robot, Shiro,” he mutters to himself, pushing away and taking a steady step forward, breathing on a five-count.

As he gets closer to the pilot’s chair, the luminosity of the interface steadily intensifies, filling the entire cockpit with light and chasing away all shadows. The synthetic material is soft under his fingers, sinks readily as he runs a hand over the head cushion. It’s completely clean, devoid of dust, stray hairs, or any bloodstains. The interface blinks again. A distant roar resounds in his ears as he sits down slowly, running his hands over the chair arms, reaching forward to flex fingers around the pilot controls. The screens before him dim down to a more manageable intensity, and he looks at the blinking, multicolored icons marking the other Lions’ positions, currently drifting in a small cluster, locked on their course and on autopilot.

A thrill buzzes under his skin, courtesy of Gorou, who missed this seat. Shiro missed it too, now that he’s here. It’s comfortable and worn in, a cornerstone with a little wear and tear. Stars all around him, in him too. Still a paladin after all. Funny to think of constellations when everyone is putting their own objects and stories in the sky.

“Could you bring up a star map, Black?” A stylized copy of the current view overlays itself on the HUD, zooming out and changing to an xy plane orientation to display a more extensive skyscape, with an icon to show where the Black is now. “Thanks.”

He moves the map to a new holoscreen right in front of him, so he can still see out the viewport. And like he did as a child, as a middle schooler, he starts to look for shapes. The lines and formations that he knows, the brightest stars, the most obvious groupings and absences. In a way, they’re back in familiar skies, and Shiro plans to use the time wisely.

The biggest clue is the bright, diffuse cloud hovering ahead, slightly to the right. A pronounced, curved center bar dense with a patchwork of vibrant blue, white, and violet, with a prominent arm of blue and magenta spiraling off one end, and a smattering of clusters arranged on the other. Above that center bar, a brilliant gas cloud flowers out from its luminous center, tinged with pinks, oranges, and blues, and lit from within, reflecting the glow from the stars inside.

Suddenly, a message window pops up on the HUD.

“Yo K – Shiro??” It’s Hunk, rubbing at the dark circles under his eyes.

“Hey Hunk,” Shiro says, grinning wryly, waving. “Late night for you, too?”

Hunk groans, raises a hand back. “Ugh, tell me about it. Long day. Long month. Long year.”

“Sounds familiar,” Shiro replies. “…are you having trouble sleeping?”

“Oh!” Startling, Hunk waves his hands in front of him rapidly, shaking his head. “I’m not having nightmares or anything! Not that it would be weird to have nightmares after everything we’ve done, I’ve definitely had them too, but I’ve been okay these past couple weeks! Maybe it’s weird but I think I’ve actually had fewer nightmares since we decided to head back to Earth. I think I was always worrying about everyone back home, even though I know we’re fighting the good fight out here. Home is where the heart is, you know? No, I’m just thinking about stuff. Romelle’s really high energy and has questions about everything which is only natural, and kind of good for my anxiety because then I won’t just spiral? But it also means I don’t really have time for myself. So these days…I kind of don’t settle until I get to think through all the stuff I’ve been holding onto throughout the day.”

“I used to have a log for the same reason,” Shiro says, thinking of the medical logs he used to keep, which were also partially encouraged by his therapist. He and Adam weren’t so different that way. “It’s a good way to process. Just have quiet time to think through things. Figure out goals, next steps.” Hunk stares at him. “What?”

“No…you just don’t talk about yourself a lot, that’s all,” Hunk says, shifting a little and looking off to the side. “By the time we met you in Keith’s shack it was just like….it’s Takashi Shirogane. And he’s alive. And now we’re in space. And that just kind of stuck around. I figured you had stuff to sort out on your own, leaderly things.” He rubs at his cheek, where he missed a bit of stubble. “But I mean, I’m glad to hear it and learn more about you. There’s a lot of things I’ve missed out here, and I think getting to know everyone better was definitely one of them. So.”

Shiro can’t stop himself from smiling, buoyed by the glimmer of pride bubbling from Gorou. “Thanks Hunk,” he says warmly. “I won’t deny that I was and still am working through a lot of things, but I’m trying to be more open.”

“You always were pretty open, Shiro,” Hunk says, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s what makes you so great to work with. You’re really good with listening to what people say at letting them feel heard. But being open personally is a whole different kettle of fish. I like hearing more about you, I think it’s safe to say we all do, but there’s no point in rushing or forcing yourself to be uncomfortable. You could decide to never tell us anything and that would still be valid. Being open doesn’t mean you don’t get privacy.”

A delighted grin stretches itself ear to ear. “…the world could use a lot more people like you, Hunk,” Shiro says, chuckling at the flustered response. “No wonder Keith likes you so much.”

“Thanks, Shiro!” he says, beaming. “And yeah, I like to think we’ve been getting along pretty well! Actually, that’s why I called; I’d been meaning to chat with him about something. Is he awake?”

Given his evasiveness, Shiro suspects he wants to talk about what happened in the black after the storm a couple days ago, the same fight that Keith had told him about. “Sorry, he was still sleeping when I came out here.”

“Oh okay,” Hunk replies, put-out, crossing his arms. “Darn it. Somehow it feels harder to catch people to talk even though we’re all stuck in the Lions. Lance keeps giving me the slip, too.” Blinking, he refocuses on Shiro. “Actually, hey. What are you doing up this late, Shiro? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Shiro says, appreciative, “Thanks for your concern, Hunk. My sleep cycle’s been irregular. I’ve been sleeping pretty early since I got out of the pod, but since I’m mostly back to form now, I’m starting go back to my regular hours. I keep waking up in the middle of the night or getting up early.” He shares his star map with Hunk. “Since I’m up I thought I’d try to figure out where we are right now.”

“Whoa,” Hunk breathes, tilting his head. “Can you actually tell where we are from this? I mean, as engineering track we’d started working on propulsion systems, flight dynamics and the like in third year, but this is something else. I liked the idea of helping to explore a new frontier, but I didn’t really know anything about space.”

Amused, Shiro glances at him briefly before tracing shapes onto his screen. “I’m an engineer, too, you know. But yeah, I think I know where we are. This shape here…the constellation Mensa. And over here…the constellation Dorado. Then there’s this guy, Volans. Can you see that white, pink, and blue cloud from your viewport?” Hunk nods. “That bright, spidering spot near the central bar. I’m pretty sure that’s the Tarantula Nebula, so we’re close to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy. We’ve still got a ways to go before we get to our solar system, but we’re on the right side of the Milky Way.”

“I…am learning so much about you today,” Hunk murmurs dazedly. He looks up, off camera, likely taking another look outside the viewport. “Our part of the universe is really beautiful, huh?”

“It’s why we explore,” Shiro says softly. “To learn and wonder. These constellations are all visible from Earth too. Isn’t it funny to think that someone could be looking at us right now, wondering what we are?”

An arm suddenly drapes itself over the chair back. “Twinkle twinkle little star, or whatever,” Keith quips, leaning a hip against the chair arm, nonchalant. He smirks when Shiro starts in surprise, winking at him. “Hey Hunk.”

“Have a care for my heart, Keith,” Hunk wheezes, hand splayed over his chest.

Keith is busy eyeing Shiro in the chair, observing how his back molds to the seat, sweeping over the annotated star map and the changed interface color scheme. “Good to see you back, Shiro,” he says, tender and nostalgic.

“Good to be back,” Shiro returns grinning, “Not like Black would let me rest.”

“She woke me up,” Keith complains, and yelps when the chair arm begins to shift. The chair shudders on its track and Shiro bolts to his feet, just in time to see the chair folding in on itself, different components and features tucking in until all that remains is a rectangular block. An approving chuff rolls through his mind as the top layer flips and ejects out, revealing two headrests as the remainder of the remodeled chair is revealed, snapping in place piece by piece. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Hunk marvels as Shiro and Keith test the cushions, look at each other uncertainly. “I’ve never seen the interior of a Lion change. At least, Yellow doesn’t do that.”

“Black hasn’t done this before either,” Keith says, frowning as he flops down and gets comfortable. “Actually…Shiro, don’t you think….”

“Yeah, I think Black modeled this on my couch, in shape at least,” Shiro sighs, and sits next to Keith on the new two-seater. He taps the side of his head in explanation. 

“I suppose it’s not entirely without precedent, since the Lions shift in battle all the time,” Hunk muses, then scrubs his hands roughly through his hair. “Augh, sometimes I wish Allura’s dad left some notes or something. I really want to know how the Lions can keep breaking physics.”

“Well these aren’t exactly flight-ready seats, so I hope Black changes them back eventually. I doubt they could take any Gs,” Keith says, leaning over to examine Shiro’s star map. “Hm. We’re in the southern sky, huh?”

“Mmhm. At least we weren’t dropped near Galactic Center, that might have been tricky. We can get some cool infrared photos though,” Shiro says thoughtfully. “We’ll probably pass the Carina Nebula, maybe the Skull and Crossbones Nebula. Too bad there isn’t extra time to just go around and see what we want.”

“Cat’s Paw Nebula,” Keith says immediately.

“Scorpio to the last, aren’t you,” Shiro counters, receiving a sharp grin for his trouble. “What about you, Hunk? Anything you’d want to see?”

“Like I said, astronomy’s not my strong suit,” Hunk says, smiling sheepishly. “But my uncle’s a researcher and works with a navigational society. Sometimes he does these fundraising trips canoeing to Tahiti, then Aoteoroa, then back to American Samoa using traditional wayfinding. Amonga, Matali’i, and Sumu; Orion’s Belt, the Pleiades, and the Southern Cross. They’re some of the most important navigation stars and constellations, so I guess I’d like to see those. How about you, Shiro? You probably have lots you want to see.”

As the seconds stretch and he does not answer, index finger tapping slowly against the arm of the pilot’s chair and still considering how honest he should be, the growing silence becomes distinctly ominous. A deep wrinkle forms in Keith’s brow, and Hunk eyes dart between them as if he’s waiting for the start of an intense volley in a Wimbledon match. Distinct waves of annoyance poke and prod him from Gorou’s direction.

“…Kepler-64,” Shiro says eventually, controlled. “A quadruple star system with an eclipsing binary pair and an extrasolar planet discovered by amateur astronomers? That’s exactly the kind of thing I would have loved as a kid.” He pauses, eyes sinking down to the star map and mouth pinching down into a frown. “Though I think about going back to Kerberos sometimes.”

“Oh.” Stunned but recovering quickly, Hunk stumbles on, still looking anxiously between Keith and Shiro. “Well…if you really want to, we’re heading home anyway so we can probably make a quick stop. Not too long though, so we can stay on schedule. Right, Keith?”

“Right,” Keith agrees reluctantly, arms crossed, brow still furrowed. His mouth is skewed to one side and turned down in one corner, like all the words he’s keeping in are souring on his tongue.

In prolonged, uncomfortable silence, they collectively watch the conversation sink like a rock until Hunk breaks in with a sudden, strained laugh, high and fast like a hummingbird. “Well, I originally called to talk to you, Keith, but it’s getting late. Or early, I guess. You guys should get some sleep, I’ll ring you again in the day cycle. Bye!!”

He hangs up so fast, Keith and Shiro don’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

“Well, damn,” Shiro mutters, resigned. Despite the encouragement to be more open, which topics are actually game for conversation or joking seem to be more of a crapshoot than anything.

Keith takes the opportunity to slouch, knees wide and hands folded over his stomach. “Kepler-64 I get,” he says, rolling his head over to look at Shiro, “But why Kerberos?”

Flopping his head back, Shiro likewise sprawls into an undignified stretch, dropping his extended arm over the armrest and letting his knees splay wider than is generally polite. “Closure, maybe?” he says, drums his heels. “Morbid curiosity? Pick one. Pick both.” He looks back at Keith. “It’s where it all started. For me at least.”

“Kind of like the desert for me, huh?” Keith murmurs, reaching over and cupping his face affectionately, thumb caressing his cheek. “Well, Hunk was right, we can’t go off schedule. Let’s check it with the rest of the team and see if we can get you your pilgrimage.”

What is it about Kerberos? A starting point, yes, and significant, but not holy by any means. He doesn’t dream about it, like he does everything else, he doesn’t really regret it either, in the way that you can’t regret something that happens to you. Kerberos simply haunts him like a thin shadow, dogging his steps. This is where and when your life changed. An absence defined and given form, a missed opportunity, a door to another timeline, one perhaps sadder and more torturous than he could imagine, rose-colored as his hindsight is. Ignorance is bliss.

Kerberos was supposed to be his swan song. A suicide mission, he’d been told, by Adam, with whom he’d had screaming rows, by the higher-ups, who were still doubting him after all that time. When he’d called his parents, they didn’t tell him to refuse the mission, all they said was that he should consider all the factors carefully before making their decision. His mother’s proud posture was slumped, his father was sitting next to her arm-to-arm, like he needed to be there to prop her up. They looked unhappy.

“Byeolha,” his father had said, when his mother darted off to the bathroom, possibly to cry in private, “When you were born, our only hope for you was that you would be happy. And once we learned of your sickness, that wish only became stronger.” His voice is urgent, entreating, but even as he talks, a tear drips down his face. “Byeolha, you should choose whatever leaves you with less regrets. We are all adults, and what’s more, we’re family. We will understand your decision.”   

And he’d chosen to be selfish. To do what he wanted, with the little time he had. It’s not bad to be selfish, but it had felt that way – it made him realize that no matter how much he always wanted to have it all, it wasn’t possible. His dreams or his family. His dreams or his fiancé. Succumbing to his limits or shooting past them, and wrecking everything else. The curse at work, flooding riverbanks, poisoning all things, he would find himself thinking fancifully, just the kind of unhelpful, scripted thought that fueled his self-annoyance. Staying on the ground – rooted, or pinned down? Five years since he last went home.

He was allowed only one line of contact for the journey given how publicized it was, which he routed to his parents. They’d sent him messages all throughout the trip to Kerberos, asking after him, sending him little updates on their own lives. He’d sent them little musings in return, new things he noticed in the skies, how nice it was to work with Dr. Holt again, like a little reunion, his hopes and dreams for the mission. Eubuleus, their ship was called, the torchbearer.

Fighting, Byeolha! We are cheering for you here at home. Your father has a difficult client who just asked for the top of their tower to have an illuminated installation of the major constellations of the four houses. It’s good that we still have some of his mother’s old books. We thought you’d get a kick out of that. I sure did!  

We found an old tape of you reciting Jugemu today, Shiroshiro. You were very cute and did your best but you still stumbled on a lot of the last name recitations. It’s alright, I still do that too. I can’t even remember that last chain of names, it’s too long! Your mother is still working right now, so it’s just me, finishing up some work at home. We’ve got the gear and we’re going to see if we can find Pluto this weekend. Where will you be by then?

Shiro couldn’t bring himself to admit it to anyone but himself, but this was, symbolically, a one way trip. Not an end – he still needed to bring the Eubuleus back and make sure Sam and Matt returned safe and sound, but this was him, knocking on the doors of the underworld, asking the three-headed guard dog to let him in. This was him accepting the rest of his life, the end of a long sleep, the final dream. Once he’d made it out of the underworld, he couldn’t look back. Those were the rules.

And he had made it past Kerberos. He’d landed the Eubuleus successfully. He, Sam, and Matt had all stood on a layer of coarse ice, clean and crystalline, taking in the vista all around them. Breathlessly, he’d pointed out the other underworld denizens to Matt and Sam: Nix, Charon, Styx, and Hydra. Explaining the subtle dig at Pluto’s planetary status in Hydra’s naming, he’d even cracked a joke.

“As far as I’m concerned, if it’s a Sailor Scout, it’s legit,” he’d said.

They’d been taking samples and completing mission objectives for three days by the time the Galran troops had swooped in and abducted them. By then, Shiro had already sent several messages home.

It’s so quiet out here. It always is in space, so maybe it’s just the psychological effect between all the Greek mythology names and being at the end of the solar system, but whenever I’m out here, I’m surprised by the dark. Looking up at the sky at home, everything feels bright. But when I’m looking out over Kerberos, there aren’t many stars. I guess it’s all about scale. The human eye is nothing compared to the Seimei Telescope after all. I’ll be preparing for landing soon. Wish me luck!

 We landed on the larger lobe, so we’re able to see across the whole of the moon. It’s so small! Not just small, mini. Chibi. Chibi-Keru. In dimensions, Sam tells me its length is even less than a half-marathon. Just 19 km! It’s very icy so I’m very happy our suits are so insulated, not that we could walk around unprotected in space anyway. We’ve started taking samples. The ice is so clean here, like how they look in the documentaries about the poles. It reminded me of that time we went to the Sapporo Ice Festival. We’re setting up some cameras too to get views of the other moons. The rotation is so chaotic we’re getting different perspectives all the time.

Yes, I get to drive the rover, too! Matt got footage of me doing taking us around, but as usual I can’t share anything until it gets cleared by GAIA and the Garrison. Bureaucracy is so annoying. I can already hear mom yelling in the background again, haha. Aren’t you glad I didn’t join academia? More ice samples today – there’s an incredible ice shelf near the end of this lobe that just drops straight down into a valley before rising and meeting the other lobe. There aren’t any solar winds this far out, but the ice has settled in such an interesting pattern, maybe because of the rotational momentum. In any case, no sign of fluid water. Maybe it’s like Europa and has a warm conductive layer of ice underneath.

He’d gotten all his affairs in order. No assets aside from his own savings accounts. Life insurance payouts allocated. His birth certificate, visa, passports, and other identification papers were all placed neatly in a box under his desk, easily found if he kicked it during the mission or at re-entry. His will had been written and notarized. For the most part, the people in his life were prepared for the worst, and knew what they were in for if he returned. His yakudoshi year is here.

He hasn’t returned yet though, hasn’t finished dreaming. Torchbearer led him to the guard, guard let him in, and then what? The story’s thrown itself off the rails onto a course he could have never imagined, and he is not a hero. There is no path to tread, no trope to fulfill, no gods to aid him or test him. His mythos is this: the stars, the sky, a certain fluidity of word, and reinvention, the ever unpredictable process of changing into something new.  

He pings Pidge the next morning. “Hey Pidge. I have a question for you.”

“Shiro,” they say in greeting, sitting cross-legged on the floor, hair mussed and sucking on two hydration pouches simultaneously, one with the orange tab that identifies what the team has deemed to be fruit punch flavor. They’re wearing pajamas and their eyes are clear, no bags, clear signs of Krolia’s effective leadership. An unexpected help in Shiro’s ever-evolving mission to get everyone to sleep properly, her way is to state requests in a tone at once undemanding, and yet so firm and immovable that no one would think to say no.  

“Do you think Sam or Matt would ever return to Kerberos? Would you ever go?”

They almost choke, hastily swallowing down their mouthful and wiping their mouth. “Okay, not the thing I thought you’d ask me this early in the morning,” they grit out.

“I thought this was late for you,” Shiro says dryly.

“Time is a construct. As we’ve found,” they reply with a scoff, pushing their glasses up their nose. “Fight me about it.”

“I could but I’d win,” Shiro says, deadpan. Underneath, Gorou is laughing. “Blam! Blam!”

“Not if it was a hacking fight,” Pidge retorts. “Pa-choo! Pa-choo!”

“I’m hit,” Shiro deadpans. “As my last request, please, almighty Pidge, won’t you answer my plea?”

“Save it for the next Monsters & Mana session,” Pidge sighs. “At least you aren’t dying all the time anymore. Symbolically! Not literally. Crap.” Water and juice spray over the floor as Pidge’s grip on the pouches tightens. “Dammit!! Ugh, words.” They hastily grab a cloth from an oil-stained stash of Allura’s handkerchiefs and mop at the spill.

Studiously not looking at the feed, their voice lowers, confessional. “Look, I’m really bad at saying the right thing, but I’m glad you’re here, Shiro. You’ve been an honorary Holt for ages, and when we came out here you were always looking out for us. When the clone ran off with Lotor…I totally froze. I’m not exactly proud of it, but it was one of those moments you know? When I was smaller I would wonder what about this Shiro guy Matt and Dad liked so much and now I get it.” They smile dryly, tossing the handkerchief off to corners unknown. “Keith would be the first to get in front of me to say this, but I don’t want to ever fight you again.”

“I definitely feel the same way,” Shiro says, smiling encouragingly. “Thanks, Pidge. I’m proud to be an honorary Holt. And honestly, I think you guys are taking the dying jokes harder than I am. I mean…that’s what happened. I died. Can’t tiptoe around it. And I think I deserve to crack jokes about my death if I want to. I’m the one who died.”

Pidge lets out a loud groan, dragging their hands down their face. “Ugh! See Shiro, this is the actual worst thing about you. Your jokes. They’re awful.”

“Not my weird questions?” Shiro asks.

“Definitely your jokes. You’re so obvious,” Pidge says with a flat look. They prop their elbow up on a knee, resting their cheek against a hand. “I’m not personally interested in Kerberos. I’ll maybe hold a grudge towards Kerberos until I die anyway, even though it didn’t really do anything wrong. And honestly, at this point, who cares about Kerberos? We’ve basically exploded humankind’s current understanding of science on so many levels. There’s so many more interesting things for us to study just in the tech alone! Forget Kerberos, we won’t miss it.”

Shiro winces, imagining his mother’s reaction to the complete upending of astronomy and astrophysics as they know it. That said, he can’t disagree. Kerberos has really been just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to everything else they’ve seen. “I mean, you’ve got a point. Though if just for our understanding of the solar system…”

“Whatever, Shiro,” they say, waving a dismissive hand. “We’re parsecs beyond that now. Matty, he’s still got the chops for cutting edge research, but he likes to innovate on a foundation, get mileage out of his projects and research. He’s been working with the rebels so long now that he really prefers his work to fill a need. Dad though….I think Dad wouldn’t mind going back to Kerberos. He’s been in the Garrison for so much of his life that he’d probably want to go back to check out the Eubuleus and the rover, to bring them back if nothing else. It should be easy enough to do now. He’s never really liked that we just leave stuff out in space.”

“I can’t say I’m fond of that either,” Shiro admits. “Especially now that we know for sure that we’re not alone.”

“All our space knowledge and tech given away just like that,” Pidge says, snapping their fingers, “Except that we’re apparently super backwater. I’m so mad, Shiro. There is just so much tech that is way too cool out here. We need to get on this level.”

“Intergalactic patenting and intellectual property law,” Shiro intones. “Just imagine it, Pidge.”

“Stop it, I just wanna make things,” they complain. “Anyway, that’s what I think. You could always ask Dad and Matt once we’re back yourself. Why’re you asking anyway? Are you thinking of going back?”

“Well, I have been thinking about Kerberos a lot lately, and what the reaction to the mission must have been like back then,” Shiro admits. “Like pilot error, sure, but there must have been some type of blowback, given how public the mission was. We should prioritize getting back to Earth anyway, but I thought I’d ask you for a second opinion.”

“Oh, was there blowback,” Pidge says, rubbing their hands together impishly. “It’s like the Garrison didn’t even try, it was the most immature coverup ever. My mom had messages from Dad and Matt talking about taking samples on Kerberos, proving that you guys had gotten there fine. She reached out to your parents and found out they’d been getting similar messages from you, but they’re all bound by NDA and can’t say anything about it. Obviously, the Garrison had to know that the Eubuleus made it to Kerberos safely. Then, it turns out your parents had gotten the national amateur astronomy society all fired up about the mission into deep space and they’d been tracking it with radio telescopes. At the same time, there were those two projects that spurred the Kerberos mission right, the Kuiper telescope project in the States that also had amateur astronomers helping project data analysis and New Horizons V out there doing its recon thing. And they all start tweeting about how they have data showing that the pilot error explanation is obviously not the full picture.

“The Japanese amateur astronomers post about this weird burst in the radio readings they received during the dates of projected Kerberos landing, sounds that don’t make any sense and aren’t anything anyone would expect. Out of nowhere, a NIROSETI scientist corroborates this – apparently a colleague of your mom’s? – and says there was a burst of near-infrared activity during the landing period, releasing the data set as proof. And then the scientists behind the US Kuiper telescope project said that the amateur astronomers analyzing the project data had been reporting readings that seem to indicate the sudden appearance and departure of some object, without any supernova or formation event, no build up, nothing. In hindsight, that must have been the Galra warship that came after you guys.

“SERENDIP piggybacks on and publishes their collected data for the dates when you were supposed to have landed and been on Kerberos. Finally, somebody points out that one of the recently published New Horizons V photos has a speck near one of the valleys that looks like it could be the Eubuleus rover, with a lump on the larger lobe that could be the Eubuleus. Generally, people don’t really know what happened but there is a lot of suspicion. You guys ended up being part of an alien abduction conspiracy theory in the span of a week! It got an ungodly amount of traction because there didn’t seem to be any explanation for any of this. The Galaxy Garrison never withdrew its statement, but it took a big reputation hit. Rumor in the halls was that after all that bad PR, a lot of the deep space projects that were in development went on hold. GAIA also withdrew something like 45% of the funding it was giving to the Garrison though, so that might have been a factor – but that withdrawal also made a lot of people think that the Garrison was definitely lying about what happened to the mission crew.”

“Holy shit.” The hand covering Shiro’s mouth is trembling. “Holy shit.”

“Right? It was kind of amazing. That’s why I joined the Garrison in the end.” Pidge grips their ankles where they’re crossed. “Mom and I, your parents, we knew for sure that it wasn’t pilot error. Something definitely happened to you guys on Kerberos. And alien abduction…it’s not impossible for aliens to exist, with the universe being as large as it is, and always expanding. So, why not?”

“You know, I kind of hate that we gave a boost to conspiracy theorists,” Shiro says with a wobbly smile, eyes a little teary. “But I guess once we get back we’re all going to give them a gold sticker for this one.”

“They probably freaked when Dad got back. Wish I could’ve see that,” Pidge says with relish. Sighing, they flop back, out of view. “It’s definitely going to be interesting to be back.”

“Now I’m even less sure what to expect,” Shiro admits on a weak laugh. “You’ve definitely given me a lot to think about. Wow. I’ve never been Twitter famous before. Did we get a hashtag or something?”

Pidge raises themself up on their elbows with a smirk. “Oh hell yeah. There were a couple. It started on Japanese Twitter first, so I think the topic started trending as #ShikkariShiro, which was picked up in the States too, but with the telescope data and New Horizons photo we also got #FreeKerb and #KerbtheGarrison.”

“Huh, that’s a good one, actually,” Shiro says, surprised.

“Apparently, your Dad coined it, that’s what your mom said anyway,” they reply with a large grin. “Your parents are pretty awesome.”

Shiro sniffs, tears beginning to bead at the corners of his eyes again while his lips split into an uncontrollable grin. “Oh man, he really did that. Heh. Yeah, my parents are really cool.”

A ghastly series of pops sound as Pidge stretches their arms, twists at the waist. “Urgh. Not to be rude, but I really need to change. And actually eat. Was that all?”

“Oh yeah, I’ll let you go, Pidge. Chat later.”

“See you, Shiro.”

He walks back to Black’s living quarters in a daze, still processing all the information Pidge gave him. Not forgotten. Not left behind. Searched for in the night sky, as if one could send a missing child poster there, as if humans could respond to the interstellar light and waves that reached them, messages sent through space and time. How amusing to realize the truth of a saying on several levels – I want to believe; we are not alone. To grasp for a truth, and actually find it, one tucked within another. Shikkarishiro. Get a grip. Shikkari Shiro. Dependable Shiro.

We did a good job. We’re family.

“Did you know,” he says, sitting down next to Keith and letting his head drop down onto his shoulder, “That I’ve apparently become, not an alien abduction conspiracy theory, but a conclusive alien abduction?”

Keith, love of his life, best friend, stares at him with a food goo pop tart hanging out of his mouth. It’s from a massive, dehydrated stash Coran had managed to stuff into Blue before the Castleship entered the rift. Wordlessly, he unwraps and offers Shiro his own pop tart, which he accepts miserably, chewing. The dried food goo is extremely flexible and gamey; every time Shiro eats them, he imagines it’s what being a ruminant must be like.

“I kind of thought that was a given,” Keith says, with a consoling pat to Shiro’s head. He’s in just his undersuit, same as Shiro. “But technically, it was Blue the second time. What is that – mecha abduction? Paladinapping? I don’t even know.” He folds up the rest of his pop tart and stuffs it in his mouth, chewing furiously. “Sounds like you and Pidge had an interesting discussion.”

“Yeah. I’m starting wonder if my mom is head of some sort of astronomy or astrophysics secret organization. She should meet your mom,” Shiro says, sitting up properly. Keith shuffles over to him before he can move any further, so close that their arms press together, and throws a proprietary leg over his lap. Cheered by his presence, Shiro laughs and stretches his legs out too, so he can wind one under Keith’s. “Pidge told me about all the Kerberos fallout. I suppose you know about most of it?”

“Some of it, yeah,” Keith says, nods and rips open some of the creature jerky that Shiro had personally procured. “Didn’t have a great signal out in the shack, so I caught up when I could. Your parents were actually at the will reading, and we’d swapped hellos on video calls with you a couple times, so we traded contacts. They told me about your messages, NDA or no NDA, and maybe they told Adam too. All four of us got invites to the official funeral held by the Garrison, but none of us went, so it was kind of a PR disaster for them.”

He bites off half a strip of jerky in one go, gnashing away like he can vent his irritation through chewing. “The teachers put on the pressure after that, kept trying to use you as emotional blackmail to make me more of a so-called model pilot…but they really didn’t understand you at all. I sent your parents a message that I was leaving the Garrison and coverage would be spotty, and fucked off. As far as I was concerned, you were probably alive, something had happened to you, and the Garrison was just trying to use you as a scapegoat.” The disgusted grimace says everything about his feelings on that, not that he hasn’t been vocal about his opinions on the Garrison already.

He wraps an arm around Shiro’s hip comfortingly. “Honestly, your mom seems really well connected, but I don’t think that’s why people spoke up. She might have reached out to her colleagues to see what kind of data they recorded when you landed, but if they didn’t have anything to report, that would’ve been it. But there were multiple sources that did show something, so it seemed more like science checking science. If any of those data sets had been published it would have gotten out eventually and everyone would have looked bad for assisting in a coverup. Any of the amateur astronomists could have decided to leak something on their own too.”

Shiro wiggles away a couple strips of jerky away to eat and accepts the hydration pouch Keith offers him. A green tab – blackberry flavor. “I kind of…didn’t think about the public Earth reaction that much. I thought about my family a lot in the first couple months of getting on the arena ship, and what I would say to Colleen, what I would say to you, things like that. But I didn’t think about Earth in general. Not the Garrison or GAIA either.

“Accepting the Kerberos mission meant accepting that I didn’t know how I would be, getting back. So I didn’t spend time thinking about it,” he says, sucking at a piece of gristle stuck in his back molars. He takes a swig of the flavored water to dislodge it. “And I didn’t spend time thinking about the Earth either. It was a nonstarter. I didn’t know how the return trip would go, or re-entry. So hearing this...defense I guess, for my integrity? It’s kind of amazing. I always thought I was alone in the arena, up in space. I thought I was by myself.”

“You’re not alone,” Keith says gently, leans in to run his nose along Shiro’s in the barest, tender shiver of a touch. The hand on his hip runs up splays itself possessively over his neck, the vulnerable knob of his spine. The touch is warm, the heat of the intimacy in it sinking into his very bones. Shiro’s breath hitches, he turns his head so he can brush his lips over Keith’s cheek, no pressure, featherlight, just reveling in the contact.

“Neither are you,” he whispers, mouth moving against the corner of Keith’s lips, leaves a tender kiss there.

In this body, their heart flutters.

“It’s fine if we don’t go to Kerberos,” he says, warm and syrup-slow, feeling his way to Keith’s hand, where he can run a thumb across the sword callouses on his palm. The signs of wear, signs of choosing, second by second, to live. “I can figure things out without it.”

Keith studies his face, sucking noisily at his hydration pouch, trying to get out every speck of water. That’s Keith to the last, getting everything he can out of what he has. “You sure? I thought you wanted closure, or something.”

“I’m sure,” Shiro says, lacing their fingers together and pecking Keith’s forehead. “I know I said it’s where things started, but now, I don’t think that’s true.”

Kerberos was not a destination, a milestone, or an end like he originally thought. Instead: a catalyst, a turning point. A revelation, but still just one point on the map. Kerberos, for the guard, knocking on the door to frontiers frightening and wondrous to humankind, such that they would rather turn their eyes away than look ahead. Eubuleus for the torchbearer, illuminating the way to new discoveries and unchanging truths – time will pass, all things will end. 

Shiro closes his eyes, and a galactic vista lives there, will maybe always live there, Keith burning bright like a red supergiant beside him. Outer layers blowing away, they may explode and collapse, they may shed their molecules to become even brighter, still fusing atoms at their cores. To be a wreck and be magnificent. To lose your mass, and still shed light. Under the skin of him, there is still more: an eldritch but inviting entity that purrs and loves him, in a way he is still yet to understand; a person who he would like to get to know better.

Four symbols, twenty-eight lunar mansions, the orbit cycle of Jupiter, ten suns, an entirely different way of looking at the sky with new constellations, new mythology, new interpretations of life. Star sky, star river, flowing through the emptiness, the void, and the black. Space is not a vacuum, at any time filled with intangible, invisible units of the universe with the capability of becoming greater. To be simultaneously nothing and everything, to feel possibility dancing on his skin, energy and the potential of all things, just as nebulas, planets, and stars form out of swirling aether. The ever unpredictable process of changing into something new.

Anchored in stars and sky, all around him, the heavens do move. May he help himself; he is alive.

May nothing stand still.

Notes:

Thank you very much for reading until the end! This honestly started out as a strong desire for NoRepression!Shiro also because East Asian characters kind of have this story cycle revolving around repression or being "saved" from repression, but I think it gradually acquired flavors of "let Shiro say fuck" and "nobody puts Shiro in a corner". I really wanted to write a full picture of Shiro, though in the end I don't know if I really succeeded in doing so properly without sensationalizing anything. I didn't have a sensitivity reader and have no personal experience with any of the locations, cultures, conditions or illnesses portrayed in the fic, so if I got something really, awfully wrong, please please let me know so I can do what I can to fix it!!

The working draft was named "one hundred tongues" after the song that first sparked this idea in winter last year, and it's been an uphill climb since then. The formal fic title was chosen based on a song from the same album, "He Will Close Your Eyes".

Here is a link to a galactic chart that will show you where the paladins are oriented in the last scene! Galactic Center is Sagittarius. There's a supermassive black hole there, Sagittarius A*. Interestingly, white holes are posited to be at the end of every black hole. For the Samoan names of constellations I looked at the sources here and here.

The planet sounds Shiro mentions are here under "Radar Echoes From Titan's Surface" and "Sounds of Earth's Magnetic Drum in Space". Just imagine those as some kinda synthwave remix. It would be a bop.

At this point I'd like to direct you to the Giant Notes List that discusses all the details of Shiro's family, naming, and general canon divergence items that provides fuller context and might ameliorate some confusion. There is honestly no way I could describe anything in the end notes without completely reducing the scope and maxing out the word count limit. If you have additional questions though feel free to ask!

The link between identity and the ability to move freely among boundaries and set new storylines and narratives has always been a salient one, so it's important to listen to what people have to say, and let them share their lives when they want, in the way they want. Use your powers to be kind. Hope you are all staying safe and healthy out there!