Chapter Text
Ping.
Keith ducks behind a pillar and frowns.
Ping.
A quick scan around the room shows nothing out of the ordinary. He flexes his hands and takes a deep breath. The noise isn’t coming from the Galra outpost he’s in, which means it’s—
Ping, his comm announces cheerfully once again, chiming directly into his ear.
Right, okay. All communications should be automatically silenced unless it’s an emergency. He takes another glance around the room before pulling up the holographic menu screen from the bracelet at his wrist.
The alert wiggles, signaling a new video message. He taps on the icon and holds his breath. Few things are important enough to interrupt a mission, and none of them are good.
Keith forgets how air works for a second when he sees the message is from Shiro. Frantic, he waits for it to load, a data packet too big and too compressed to pop up immediately. But before it begins to play, a text message pops up.
It takes him three tries to read it, to process words and what they mean, but once he does, Keith lets his head thunk back on the pillar behind him and breathes in until his lungs ache with the stretch.
Hey Keith, sorry about sending you a priority message. Hope it didn’t interrupt anything. It’s not urgent, just an update. Watch when you have a few minutes. Stay safe.
| | |
Shiro is hardly one to sugarcoat the truth, so Keith forgets about the mysterious video until he’s back on his jet, a newly defected Galran general in the cramped second row of seating behind him.
He taps out a quick message to Lorin, the Blade who will be taking the general to a safehouse on a neutral planet, to let them know that the package has been acquired and is in route. And then he waits.
And waits.
The general reads during the journey, watches the stars, taps out mindless rhythms on the walls of the ship. A small mercy: he doesn’t try to make small talk.
Keith tries to keep himself entertained, thinking about what he’ll eat for dinner (cold space goo, straight from the tube) or if he’ll run into space turbulence on the way back to base (definitely, but probably the fun kind) and what the video might be (maybe Shiro figured out a way to make the Lions groom each other like real cats and caught it on video like he’s been threatening to do for ages, now).
After minutes or hours but probably not days (no matter that it feels like days), they break atmosphere on an out of the way planet and set down for the fastest drop off they can wrangle.
And finally, finally, Keith puts his route into the autopilot for the first leg of his journey back to base, settles back in his seat, and pulls up the video.
Shiro’s face lights up the cockpit, a little pixelated, a little worn. But he’s got that crooked grin that feels like slipping into a warm bath, and Keith can’t help the way his shoulders relax at the sight.
It’s been too long.
“Keith ,” he says, voice rumbling with affection. “ I hope you’re doing okay.” He clears his throat.
“Maybe this isn’t news to you, but if it is, I’ll just rip the bandaid off: if you’re getting this video, I’m dead .”
In the video, Shiro’s still smiling. A joke, maybe?
But Shiro doesn’t sugarcoat, and he doesn’t joke about things like this.
“I mean, you probably knew that ,” Shiro continues, unaware of the bile rising in Keith’s throat, the way his vision is tunneling and his breaths coming in short and shallow. “ But this wouldn’t make a lot of sense to you if you didn’t know, somehow. And anyway, I wanted to be the one to tell you. That’s probably weird, sorry.”
Shiro waves a dismissive hand in the air, like none of what he’s said so far has been important. Like he hasn’t just destroyed Keith’s life.
“I know you’re busy. If this caught you at a time where you’re not with us, you can ignore this. I’ve already asked Allura and Coran to bury me planetside. You’ll have to ask them where they put my body if you want to find out, though. I told them I wasn’t picky, just wherever is closest.”
Keith can’t bring himself to tear his eyes away from the video, where Shiro is leaning back in his seat. It must be at his desk in his quarters, on the Castle of Lions, he thinks distantly. He can’t bring himself to do anything but whine, high and long, in the back of his throat. Keening as his best friend talks to him so gently, voice soft and eyes shining with sincerity.
“Hah, sorry. I’ve done this video a couple times over the years, and it never gets less weird. But I wanted you to know, in case it’s … in case it’s important to you. To know. To hear me say it.
“So I want you to know: I love you. I’m so proud of you. Of your independence, and your tenacity, and the way you chase what you want. I’ve seen more of the stars than anyone else from Earth, except for you now, and you’re still the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Your life is my life’s best part.”
Shiro pauses to laugh again and ruffle his hair in a bout of embarrassment. “ Okay, that was cheesy, sorry. But true! And Keith … I didn’t want to go again without telling you that.
“Don’t worry about the ship, or the others. They’ll be fine. If you want to pilot Black, she’d love that. She’s always had a soft spot for you. And if you’d rather stay where you are, that’s okay, too. It’s a big universe. They’ll find someone else to take my place.”
Another pause, shorter but more fraught as the lines on Shiro’s face draw longer, more tense. “ You aren’t alone, Keith. You don’t have to shoulder everything. Just be careful out there, okay? Find the good stuff. Eat some good food for me.”
Blackness. Stars pepper the viewscreen again as the video closes itself, the transmission complete.
Keith screams.
| | |
Time in space is hardly intuitive, but Keith sleeps more than a few times between watching the video and tracking down the Castle of Lions.
He flicks away the notification that the Castle’s defenses have locked onto his ship. A moment later, the warning indicator fades and an incoming hail lights up the top corner of the viewfinder.
“Keith!” Allura exclaims once Keith accepts the transmission. “What are you doing here?”
Her eyebrows are furrowed and she looks haggard. Her hair is falling out of a messy bun and she’s in her paladin armor. The one she’d taken up when Keith left.
A second passes and her expression twists into a grimace that’s probably supposed to be a smile. “I mean to say, it’s good to see you, but this is unexpected.”
And Keith—Keith shudders as he realizes this is the first voice he’s heard since that video. Even his interaction with the Blade was only a quick message to Kolivan saying that he’d be stopping by the Castle of Lions before stopping at base, in a heavily redacted missive.
He clears his throat and blinks hard a few times before nodding. “I got a message from …”
His voice doesn’t peter out. It doesn’t trail off. One second he’s talking, and the next it’s gone, the word is beyond him. Saying it, naming him, makes it true.
Allura seems to understand. She smiles, brittle. “I’ll have someone meet you in the docking bay and escort you in. You’ll have to use the one on the side Blue docks in,” she says, smile dropping. “The other hangars took too much damage for us to open and close them easily just yet.”
“Sure,” he agrees. For the first time, he takes in the Castle with more than vacant recognition.
There are gouges torn down the panels nearest to him. As his ship circles around, the damage decreases, but there’s little that’s left pristine. Burn marks and scuffs and dents litter the walls.
In the end, it’s Hunk who greets him once the hangar is repressurized and Keith hobbles his way out of the ship. He’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and grab extra food kits and nothing else on his mad dash to the Castle. His legs have nearly forgotten how walking in gravity works.
He reaches out to steady Keith once he’s on solid ground again, and Keith bites back the impulse to shove him away or collapse into his arms. Both seem like impossible fantasies.
“Hey buddy, you look, uh, like shit,” Hunk tells him, slinging an arm around Keith’s shoulders. “But we all probably do right now. How’d you hear about the fight? Last we heard, you were on a mission and planned to be dark for a while.”
When Keith stares mutely at him, Hunk just hums in thought before continuing on. Keith is pathetically grateful to not have to say it. “We’ve still got Shiro in medbay. He’s … well, he’ll be there for a while. But you can go see him, if you want. Sit with him a while. Pidge and Lance have been taking turns. Coran and Allura and I are mostly just bringing food down to Lance and Pidge. It’d be good for them to get a break, honestly. C’mon, it’s not far, you can sit down and readjust to being in gravity again once we’re down there. How long were you in that ship, man?”
He doesn’t answer, and Hunk doesn’t push.
Together, they drag themselves to the medbay. At the door, Hunk gives an unhappy huff of breath but opens the doors anyway, soldiering on. Keith feels another rush of gratitude for him, and musters up the ghost of a smile. Hunk returns it, just as forced, before turning to Lance, who’s sitting on a chair surrounded by a nest of blankets, tablet in hand.
Lance’s eyes go wide at seeing Keith, and then he’s bounding up to his feet, all long limbs but with more coordination these days, bounding over to Keith and wrapping him in a bear hug.
“Hey bud, it’s good to see you! If anyone can wake Shiro up, it’s you. We can’t take him out of the tank, every time we do, if it’s not one alarm going off it’s another, but he’s holding his own as long as he’s in the tank. And the nanobots are doing wonders on him, his spine is back together and the reports say that the nerves are coming along nicely, so you can look over that if you want to hang out here for a bit and— oh, ” Lance stops his word vomit with all the grace of a toddler parking a semi truck.
“Are you here for a while? Are you here for Shiro, or just Blade business? You don’t have to stay down here with us,” he tells Keith, glancing between Hunk and Keith. “I’ll be fine, I just got here, and Hunk’s been bringing us food, so it’s all good. Shiro’s in good hands.”
Keith is abstractly aware that his heart rate is above basal in the way the Himalayas are above sea level. His fingertips are tingling. “What,” he rasps.
Lance shifts from foot to foot and looks at Hunk.
Hunk picks at a hangnail and looks at Lance and Keith, and carefully keeps his gaze averted from the tank behind Lance. It’s quite a feat.
Tank is not the technical term for it. Pod might be better, or enclosed bed. It’s a hospital bed in a little tube, where the environment is carefully controlled for bacteria, temperature, chemical composition, and probably a million other things important to recovery and healing. But it also looks like if you took one of the glass-and-metal tanks you’d see in a bad sci-fi movie where they grow clones in amniotic fluid or whatever and put it on its side, and the universal translator had glitched in trying to translate the Altean word for it, so the Pidge had called it the tank, and the name had stuck.
And inside that tank, a mask fitted over the lower half of his face to force air into his lungs at a steady rate, lies Shiro.
Keith’s knees wobble, and he pitches forward, one step, two, hands slapping at the glass over Shiro’s abdomen to catch him before he falls because—
Shiro is breathing .
Alive and in a fucking space fishbowl on life support but alive .
“How?” he asks, swinging back to look at Hunk and Lance.
Their combined looks of pity hit harder than any suckerpunch. Keith lets the looks slide off him though, all the fight drained out of him at Shiro being here, still. Not gone. Not again.
After a few heartbeats, Lance squeezes Hunk’s bicep in a comforting little curl and steps in closer to Keith. “We were in a fight. I mean, obviously, you saw the Castle. A new sort of robot-thing, not Galra tech, but from one of their colonies, definitely. It was big and mean and fast.
“Every time we formed Voltron we got our asses handed to us, so we split up. Shiro came in at the direct line of sight, distracting it. We brought it down, but not before it tore up Black pretty bad. Shiro and Black dropped out of the comms, out of the link. Hunk and I had to haul Black back into her hangar.”
Lance rolls his shoulders, shaking out the tension of the story. “Shiro was unconscious. Black did something, I don’t know. She had hooked into his helmet and suit, it looked like emergency life support. But we had to get him back here for more serious help. He died in the couple minutes it took us to get here. I’ve never seen Hunk move that fast. But the flatline went away pretty fast once we got him in the tank.
“He’s been there for the past, what?” Lance squints at Hunk, who shrugs.
“Week, maybe?”
“Yeah,” Lance agrees, “probably a week. We tried to take him out once, for Allura to check the damage, and another time for Coran to replace some supplies in the tank that Shiro’d used up. Both times something went haywire. We’re keeping him in there until he’s stabilized more,” Lance tells him.
And that’s. That’s not was Keith was asking, but he jealously hoards the information anyway.
Shiro, alive, cared for, is better than any future he’s imagined in the past few years. Since Kerberos.
“I can’t open the tank?” is what ends up coming out of his mouth, quiet and plaintive.
Lance’s hand comes up to rest heavily on his shoulder. “No, bud, not yet.”
Shame curls through him, fast as a viper. “Thank you. Both of you,” he says, and means for this, for taking care of Shiro, for being so kind to me, for keeping him alive for me, for carrying on as paladins when I couldn’t, when I needed something else to keep from going insane .
He’s not sure if Lance and Hunk get all of that, but they both deflect warmly anyway.
“We’re a team,” Hunk tells him. “We’re here for you. Both of you.”
“Here,” Lance cuts in, using the hand on Keith’s shoulder to nudge him toward the chair-and-blanket-nest, “sit for a bit, Hunk’ll get you some food, I’ll check in with Allura and Pidge, check back in on you in a little bit.”
“When did you get so, uh …” Keith gestures vaguely at Lance, not quite sure exactly how to phrase it.
Hunk snorts, though. “Old?” he offers, like it’s something he’s been teasing Lance about for a while now. Which is. Fine. Cool.
Keith is a little sorry he missed it, though. Seeing Lance grow up.
Lance just rolls his eyes. “ Responsible ,” he chides without bite. “Responsibility is hot. Being old isn’t. Anyway, Keith, just holler if you need us. Or, you know, use the ship’s intercom.” He drops his hand from Keith’s shoulder and strides out, Hunk on his heels.
And then Keith is alone with Shiro.
Keith has seen Shiro high out of his mind, the moonlight painting him in marble and silver as they laugh so hard their sides pull and stitch. Keith has seen Shiro taut with pain on a gurney, strapped down by the people who put him into space in the first place. Keith has seen Shiro numb to everything but his own terror, trapped inside nightmares made terrible for their truth.
Never has Shiro been like this . For a long, scrabbling moment, Keith tries to find any other way to describe how Shiro looks.
The man in front of him is broken.
Dark bruises bloom under his eyes, swelling making a mess of his scars, his features. His nose looks freshly broken and then reset. There are metallic braces along his limbs, like more than one has been fractured or worse. The mask keeping his breathing steady ides his jaw, but even that must be wrecked.
Scrolling through the tablet attached to the tank, Keith reads over the diagnostics and tests and updates on Shiro’s vitals from the pod.
It’s as bad as he thought.
A broken spine, spiral fracture in his flesh forearm, a relatively clean break in his femur from massive force, organ failure that has since been repaired, a punctured lung, blood loss. And what Keith began to suspect before picking up his chart: major damage to Shiro’s shoulder where it meets the prosthetic, where the metal had jammed up and into Shiro’s skin and bone and muscle, probably from him using it as leverage, stronger than his human arm.
Keith keys in the approval the system needs to cut the arm off at the shoulder once tabbing through the system and finding no options to salvage the arm and no way to remove the arm to work on the shoulder. It needs to come off for Shiro to heal.
He bites back a snarl. If Shiro can feel pain, he’s in a lot of it from the damage to the prosthetic alone. Everyone should know the approval code for medical procedures. Did no one else want to take responsibility for it? Was everyone too afraid of a Shiro without his Galra arm, a Shiro who wasn’t half-weapon?
“Shiro,” he says, as the tank gets to work, scalpels and gauze and tools he doesn’t have a name for melting out of the sides on long thin arms to cut away at Shiro’s arm and stitch the wound together with skin and nanobots. Again: “Shiro.”
Just to say it, to hold his name in his mouth. “Shiro.”
| | |
Pidge finds him kneeling next to the tank deep in meditation.
He comes back to himself at the sound of her steps, the swishing of the medbay door opening.
The Pidge who comes into view in the corner of his eye is a shock. She’s taller, if not tall. Her hair is still short. But her face is more angular, the baby fat dropped away. She holds herself with the confidence of someone who is listened to when she speaks.
“Hey stranger,” she says, flopping into the chair that Keith hadn’t bothered with. “What’re you doing here?”
“Why do people keep asking me that?” HIs voice comes out rough, gruff with disuse and defensiveness. Where else would he be?
Pidge blinks at him. “Because we’re in a war in space and you were out of contact and we didn’t send out a distress signal or any news of our last fight?” Her voice is leading, like she’s trying to get a rowdy middle schooler to complete a simple logic puzzle. “We didn’t exactly broadcast that we’re a paladin down and there’s a new way to hand our ass to us. So we’re a little curious.”
“Y’all were talking about me?”
“It’s a small ship. Lance’s money is on you two have a soul bond, like twins but not incestuous. Hunk thinks you just missed us and got lucky. Allura thinks you’re on a mission and will give us a debrief about what you need once you get over the shock of Shiro being … unconscious, for a bit.”
“And you?”
Pidge snort tiredly and sighs, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “I think the Blades are spying on us, but,” she cuts across Keith’s instinctive protest, “I don’t care if that’s true. Although I would want to know what kind of tech they’re using, because it’d have to be good to get past me, Hunk, and the Castle’s latent anti-spyware.”
“There’s no spying going on, at least that I know of,” Keith tells her duly.
“So again: why are you here.”
Keith thinks of the cramped seating on his ship, made smaller by his best friend’s voice. The constriction of his heart, the rawness of his throat when he’d run out of air to scream with and had to pause to breathe.
“Shiro sent me a message.”
“A message,” Pidge repeats skeptically.
“To tell me when he—” And again, the words won’t come, his voice paused mid-stride. He clears his throat, tries again, fails again. Pidge waits with a furrowed brow but doesn’t rush him.
Keith gives up on saying it and shrugs instead. “He made a video to tell me. And I couldn’t … I needed to see. If it was true. If it was … if I could say goodbye.”
Pidge’s mouth moves silently for a second before she straightens. “He flatlined. He had a video set up to send to you if he died?” She whistles, half impressed and half appalled. “That’s some shit.”
“Yeah,” Keith says, not sure what else there is to say.
They sit together in contemplative silence for a few minutes before Pidge clears her throat. “Not that I’m complaining, or mad about it, by why did you come back, if you thought he was gone?”
“What?”
When he turns to look, Pidge is frowning and turning her personal tablet over and over in her hands. “Seeing him is one thing, but we all just sort of figured—well, you’re off being an intergalactic James Bond, right? And we missed you, but he,” and here she thrusts her chin toward Shiro, “always told us to knock it off when we joked about figuring out how to kidnap you and bring you back here, or trying to guilt trip you into coming back. We figured he knew something we didn’t.”
He chews on that, pushes through a reflexive hurt at not having known that the team missed him. Tells himself that he did know they cared, even if he doubted from time to time.
“He knew it was important to me,” Keith tells her slowly, considering his words before saying them. One thing the Blades have given him is an instinct for thinking before he speaks, a brain-to-mouth filter he’d never really honed before all this. “He probably just wanted me to have my space.”
“He’s given you a couple thousand lightyears of space, by my count,” Pidge snorts. “For what it’s worth, he always seemed happier after you called. We all were.”
Keith finds he has nothing to say to that.
He nods up at Pidge and goes back to watching Shiro breathe.
| | |
Someone, probably Pidge, has thrown a blanket over his shoulders at some point.
The Castle is always a degree of cold. They’re in the vacuum of space; Keith considers himself lucky to not be covered in a thin sheen of ice at all times.
Keith gets up slowly, taking care to stay wrapped up in the blanket ike an oversized bat, and checks Shiro’s chart on the tank’s tablet. The only update it has for him is that the removal of the arm was a success, and Shiro’s vitals remain stable. Fantastic.
Now if only there was an estimate of when he might wake up.
He sets a rule on the tablet to ping Keith’s comms if there are any changes to Shiro’s condition and sets out to find the rest of the team who seem to be raring to talk with him anyway.
The gang is patching up Red when he finds them, chattering and scraping away at peeling paint, taking measurements and tightening bots.
It’s Hunk who spots him first. “Keith!” he calls, straightening up and lifting his arms in a stretch before bounding over to wrap him up in a hug. “Good to see you. We tried to drop off food, but you were asleep and we didn’t want to wake you up.”
“It’s fine,” he says, glancing around the hangar. “How is everyone? It’s … good to see you all.”
Pidge and Lance wrap up what they’re doing and come over to hug him next, and Keith allows it with enough grace that they give him searching looks, like they’re concerned he’s getting better at being on a team.
“The Blades are pretty tactile,” he says by way of explanation. “What are we working on?
“Red, right now. We finished up with Green and Yellow already,” Pidge tells him. “Blue is up next, and then we’re going to see what we can do about Black.”
“She’s that bad off?”
Lance rubs his hands over his face, smearing oil over the right side in uneven streaks. “The other Lions really only got minor damage. Black got thrown around pretty hard, but the real damage is something we haven’t been able to figure out yet.”
“The diagnostics are all coming up with surface-level damage,” Pidge tells him, “but she isn’t coming online. We’re getting reads by plugging directly into her data ports, not downloading it from her like we usually do.”
Keith frowns. “Is that why Shiro isn’t waking up?”
Allura walks up, head cocked, a mirrored frown on her face. “Perhaps. The swelling in Shiro’s brain has gone down, and while he would be in pain, he is not on the kind of sedatives that would keep him unconscious. But brains sometimes require more rest than science would suggest.”
She shrugs at Keith and they stare at one another for a few long moments. “It is … good to see you, Keith.”
“Same,” he says. Shrugs. The tension from finding out that he’s part Galra hasn’t faded, not entirely, but she seems willing to make that her own problem, which is all Keith asks. He turns his attention back to Pidge, who’s clearly taking the lead on Lion tune-ups. “How can I help?”
Lance squawks excitedly. “You’re staying? For how long??”
“Uh, I don’t know. I don’t have an end date? We’ll … see how long it takes for Shiro to wake up.”
Pidge hums, clearly biting back something. But in the end, she just puffs up her cheeks, blows out a breath and gestures to Red. “We’re almost done here. Would you go pull the latest diagnostic scan from Blue? It’ll be nice to get that running and see what she’s already repaired herself, what we’ll need to do ourselves. Hunk can go with you and start popping open the panels and you guys can grab supplies for when the rest of us get over there.”
“Sure thing. After you, Hunk.”
| | |
It’s good to work on the Lions again, to be around the paladins and talk and hang out.
It’s also fucking weird.
Outside of his semi-regular calls with Shiro, which included the group half the time anyway, Keith has been running missions with the Blade, doing training with the Blades, or training on his own so he can hold his ground with the Blades. All of that doesn’t leave a ton of time to have casual conversation, much less conversation that Keith can actually keep up with.
There are a lot of jokes Keith sort of vacantly grins through with the Blades, on account of not knowing what a kr’lotinar is and being too afraid to ask.
It’s nice to spend a couple days fixing up Blue, sitting beside Shiro and meditating or napping, eating with the team. The pace is steady, quiet, humming with camaraderie that he’s trying to fall back into step with.
But he’s not in step with them yet, and maybe that’s why he finds himself prowling around the Castle, trying to hunt down traces of his best friend.
Shiro’s room doesn’t offer many clues about the man. His place back on Earth had been cluttered, filled with knickknacks and snacks, pictures of his family and vacations and Keith. This is spartan. Even the dust finds little to cling to. Keith can’t bring himself to break the stillness of the room by digging into his files to see the other recordings Shiro had mentioned in the video.
The training room is a bustling place, so Keith takes to coming at odd times. When everyone is asleep, or running drills in their Lions. He trains, of course. Works out, fights the robots, works out again. At some point, he fiddles with the training deck’s system enough to access recordings of matches against the droids, and he watches Shiro’s late-night bouts for hours.
There are other recordings from during the day, but they only prove what Keith’s suspected: Shiro goes light on his spars during the day, when the other paladins are watching. At night, shadows under his eyes, mouth set in a grim, sleepless line, Shiro is nothing short of devastating. Every movement is precise, deadly, utterly without hesitation. So different from the careful calculation of his pulled punches in front of everyone else, like he’s scared of scaring them.
It makes Keith ache.
And then there’s Black.
Keith scrabbles his way into her jaw on a whim. She’s still not responding to commands or prompts, but her hatch is still open from when the team had to haul Shiro out.
He brings a flashlight as a precaution, but he needn’t have bothered. Her track lights hum to life as he walks, illuminating the paths down to the engines, the life support systems, the two small bunks, the kitchenette and bathroom. He takes his time, and it’s not until the lights start to dim, changing from a warm purple to a strangely thick gray light that he admits that he’s biding his time. Avoiding where he knows he needs to go.
With a sigh, Keith makes his way up to the cockpit.
It smells like all their cockpits smell these days: like adrenalin, sweat, ozone and ash. Like their pilots.
God, it smells like Shiro. He tries not to sink to his knees at the realization and then gives it up as a lost cause when it happens anyway.
The whine is back in his throat, building in pitch. For the first time in days, Keith lets it.
Lets it build, and crest into a long, high keen. He curls into a ball and covers his ears with his hands, his eyes with his knees, and lets himself cry.
For Shiro, his best friend, that stupid, funny, brilliant boy who wanted to see the stars. For Shiro, the man who can decimate whole squads of soldiers but still tells the worst jokes. For himself, lost and alone in space, clawing his way into a family, into a legacy. For himself, alone, a ghost of the boy who wanted to eat the cosmos and who now just wants to rest.
Eventually, a humming starts at the nape of his neck. Half-sensation, half-anticipation. Like nails scratching softly through his hair. Keith sniffles and tries to wipe the snot and tears off of his face, tilting his head like he can listen hard enough to resolve the feeling into something that makes sense.
It takes him a few more stupid blinks before he realizes—oh. It’s Black.
Black is humming under his skin, a rumbling counterpoint to his own pitched breaths.
A spark flares. Pain and worse, pain and better. Opening his eyes in a dark room, a bright room, Shiro’s room back on base. Keith curled up on the bed, napping, while Shiro has his bi-weekly phone call with his mom in the background. Cheeto crumbs on the bed and sludgy coffee on the nightstand. The stars.
Oh, the stars.
He falls up, up, up, into the sky. And the stars tumble over his fingertips. Red dwarfs, luminous giants, nebulae, planets, things humans have yet to name.
At the end of it—at the start of it—there is a roar.
No, not a roar; the sound of the universe. The hinge of every orbit, the hiss and spit of every sun. Rumbling, grinding. Entropy in a single note.
Black-and-not-Black prowls at the heart of it all, watching, pacing. Her head swings toward Keith in a predatory slide. He is beheld.
“Shiro?” he asks. Something tells him that she is not here to entertain his sightseeing or philosophizing. Just as well; that’s always been more Shiro’s thing, anyway.
Black-and-not-Black prowls closer. And closer. And closer still.
He’d suspected she was massive, but this is a classification beyond that. Black, here, is a titan. An old god and an aspect of a god older still. Keith shivers but does not falter. “I just want him back,” he calls. “Please, I just want to know how to keep him safe.”
Something ripples. His entire being, maybe.
Keith sees Shiro on the training deck at the Castle, laying low a swathe of robots.
Shiro, on his knees in the shower, cradling his head in both hands, eyes blank and lungs the mechanical bellow of a hummingbird.
Shiro, in Keith’s old quarters, flesh hand clawing at his metal arm.
Shiro in the arena, blood matted in his hair, dripping from his chin, mouth smeared with it, eyes burning, not human. A fissure between Shiro now and Shiro before.
Shiro, dead on the table, the Galra witch shouting to get his heart beating again, forcing him alive again through quintessence and sheer hubris.
Shiro, dead in the cockpit of Black, blood seeping out of his suit while Lance hyperventilates and tidies his limbs over Hunk’s back, and they take off running, getting Shiro to the medbay with their last reserves, still too late.
“No,” Keith chokes out. No time has passed, but he’s lived the minutes and hours beyond himself. “No, I don’t want to bring him back to that.”
Shiro, smiling wanly over what passes for breakfast on the ship as the others talk and laugh.
Shiro, one hand on Lance’s shoulder and the other on Pidge’s as Keith’s ship fades into the distance, headed for the Marmora base with no immediate plans to return. Lance’s mouth is set in a thin line. Pidge knocks her head against Shiro’s shoulder. Shiro offers Hunk a comforting smile.
Shiro, offering tips to Hunk as he dances back from the thwak of Allura’s bo staff as they spar on the training mat.
Shiro, listening to Matt recount the time he and his father had spent on a backwater planet controlled by the Galra, not offering any of his own war stories in return.
“That’s not … then what do you want for him?”
The stars shift, reform. Light, thick as silk, shifts until it’s sand whipping across the desert. A galaxy reforms itself into a house with a wraparound porch. Keith walks toward it, every step eating up too much ground.
Inside, there’s a small living area, a tiny kitchen. Down the hall, the bedroom door swings open. Starlight glimmers inside.
On the bed, Shiro is dreaming. One arm is flung out toward Keith. His face is still scarred, his other arm still gone, but he looks younger than he has in a decade. There are no lines bracketing his mouth. Crows feet are beginning to fan out from the corners of his eyes.
Handsome. He’s so handsome, here in this crowded room. Keith can’t make out the shape of any one thing, but he knows instinctively that there is art covering the walls, tchotchkes tucked into every nook and cranny, clothes spilling out from the closet. He’s handsome here in his home, safe and warm and looked after.
“Shiro,” Keith whispers.
His eyes flutter open, a line creasing his brow. “Keith?”
“Hey, hey.” Keith goes to his knees at Shiro’s side and grabs his hand in both of his own. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Mrmph.”
Keith laughs. “Yeah, I hear you.” He rests his forehead on their twined hands. “I hear you, Takashi.”
He looks up to see Shiro looking back at him. “You’re here. How are you … here?” Shiro looks around with dazed wonder.
“I don’t know. We’re in Black, somehow. And also maybe another dimension?”
“Yeah,” Shiro says, closing his eyes again. “Sounds like her.”
Keith files away all of the questions he has about that for another time and focuses on the present problem. “Hey, uh, there’s no good way to say this, but you know you died?”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
Shiro rolls his head to look over at Keith and smiles. “‘S’nice of Black to let me talk with you one last time. Didn’t think I’d have that. Didn’t think I’d get to see you again. You know, I thought I’d forgotten how gorgeous your eyes were?”
“Uh,” Keith says, very intelligently if he says so himself. What the fuck.
“Am I going to … fade, now? Always sort of thought I’d be reincarnated, but I guess becoming one with the universe is cool, too.”
“Fade? What? No! Shiro, no. You—” Keith starts, only to get cut off with an eye roll from Shiro and a snort. Asshole.
“You said I’m dead. So are you ushering me on? What’s next?”
Keith considers murdering his best friend for a not inconsiderable length of time. “No, dipshit, I’m trying to save you. You died for a minute, and the team got you on life support. It’s time to go back.”
“Back to what?”
“Back to …”
Keith swallows. What is Shiro supposed to be going back to? Back to more of what Black had shown him? Was that what Shiro thought, all that Shiro expected?
No. There’s more. There’s always a chance for more. “Back to me,” he chokes out. “Shiro, come back to me.”
Shiro smiles at him, and it’s a wrung-out, resigned twist of his lips that makes the bottom of Keith’s stomach fall out. “You’ve got bigger things than me to worry about, Keith. It’s okay. It’s my time.”
“Fuck you, there’s no time . You’re not supposed to die on me. I just got you back.”
Shiro squeezes his hand. “Baby, I was always going to die out here. There’s no making it out for me. You know that.”
“No! No, I don’t know that. What are you talking about?”
Shrio blinks, and blinks again. “Are you real?” At Keith’s nod, he swallows and presses on. “Then you know I’ve been planning for this since you found me. I’m not going to make it out of this war, Keith. I … I tried to hang onto Black as long as I could. Tried to be the line, to hold the center.” He laughs: an awful, aching, wet sound. Too much bitter and not enough feeling. “But I’m tired. I’m so goddamn tired. And there’s nowhere left in the galaxy for me after this is over. There’s hardly anywhere left for me now.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Keith …”
“No,” Keith tells him again. “No, you have to hang in there. For me. I’ll find a way for us. Please, just. Trust me, Shiro. Trust me one last time.”
The stars start to blink out around them. One, then three. A line that once was something like a bookshelf. The blanket covering Shiro dims and fades. They’re running out of time.
“I trust you,” Shiro sighs. “I trust you. But do you want to put yourself through this again?”
Keith levers himself until he’s halfway on the bed and can push their foreheads together. “I’d lose you a thousand times if I knew you’d come back to me. But I”m not gonna lose you again. That’s an order, Shiro.”
“Okay. Okay, Keith,” he says, soft, awake . “I’ll try.”
| | |
Keith wakes up to an echo of that rumbling sound of a collapsing galaxy. It takes him a minute to realize it’s not a remnant of the … dream, but something vibrating through the Black Lion in real time.
“Black?” he asks, rubbing at his head. Oh, this is going to leave a migraine.
The vibration kicks up a notch.
He stands on shaky legs and tilts his head up to eye the ceiling for lack of anything better to look at. “Yeah, okay. Well I’m gonna sit until I stop seeing double, and then we can work on what you need me to do,” he tells her and all but collapses in the pilot’s chair.
The lights blink, flashing over from that sickly gray to a deep indigo. The vibration rattles his teeth. The dashboard gleams with readouts, status updates, flight logs.
Keith tilts his head back until it thunks against the pilot’s seat and closes his eyes.
“Sure, good to see you too.”