Chapter Text
Shiro left the mezzanine area, feeling as useless as the medics still milling around with worried faces. Most of the Blades were gone now, either carted away on stretchers or seeming to have vanished before the police showed up. The officers didn’t do much, cataloging the damage and asking few questions of those present.
It was as Pidge had said -- the police didn’t pay the Blades any special attention, instead treating them just like ordinary civilians. It made a nagging doubt blossom in the back of Shiro’s mind; maybe the police had nothing against the gang because they’d never done anything wrong? But all the warnings of the Blades waiting to cut Alices to ribbons... were those no more true than the rest of Allura’s rules?
At the very least, the police’s limited involvement made it easy for Shiro to slip away unnoticed. Pidge, Hunk, and Lance were still working by the fountain and were acting as if they’d forgotten his very existence. It could have been worse; they could have been actively hostile, trying to force him to confront Allura. Even thinking of it put a stone in Shiro’s stomach.
The two Alluras that he’d met were so subtly different. Something was wrong, one of them wasn’t who she said she was. But which one? And how to find out? And what to do when it came to light that one of them was lying? But lying meant that one of them -- or both -- were aberrations. The thought chilled him, lurking in the back of his mind like a stalking predator.
Shiro strode through the halls, not really paying attention where he was going. Sooner or later he’d come across an exit sign and get out. Then it would be a long trek back toward his apartment, but at least this time there wouldn’t be dead silence and fear breathing down his neck. Hopefully.
Out of the corner of his vision, lights flickered and went out. He startled and jumped aside, back pressed flat to the wall and wide eyes staring down the side corridor. There was no dark shape at the far end. There were no dogs in this hospital. Just a power surge, nothing more.
Still, a chill traced down his spine as he turned his back on the darkness and hurried down the echoing hall. Up ahead, there was the cheery red glow of an exit sign and he pushed through the door gladly, breathing in a lungful of the cool outside air.
It was early dusk, the sky just beginning to tint red and purple as the sun’s glare was hidden behind the buildings. Still bright enough to see easily, but enough for the temperature to start falling. Shiro didn’t mind; he still had his jacket, and the air felt good prickling against his skin. Cleansing, almost.
The exit door had opened into a narrow alley between two of the hulking hospital buildings. To the right was a chain link fence, cordoning off the utility systems, and to the left was a paved path that looped around and made a turn down another alley. Even though the outside of the hospital was as much of a maze as the inside, it was still preferable, and Shiro found his posture relaxing the farther he walked. The shadows out here didn’t seem nearly as threatening as the darkness that lurked inside.
That was until he heard a desperate scream, loud and pained and heart-stopping in the silence.
It trailed off into nothing, echoes bouncing off the concrete and dying again.
Shiro was torn between staying right where he was, shielded on two sides by the buildings until he was sure the coast was clear, and running to help. This was the real world, he reminded himself harshly. Someone was clearly hurt.
But what if his treacherous mind kept whispering, even as he forced himself to put one foot in front of the other. What if the Blades didn’t kill all the aberrations that had leaked through. What if what if what if --
Moving cautiously, he approached a corner and peeked around. The voice in his head went silent at the sight of Keith braced against the wall, whimpering and curling in on himself in pain.
“What happened?” Shiro asked, coming closer. He didn’t expect an answer to his question, but it was the easiest way to announce his presence and hopefully avoid a panicked sword swing.
But as he got no answer and came closer, he saw that there would be no swords any time soon. Keith’s knees had all but given out under him and he seemed to be pinned to the wall. His right arm was stretched up, fingers bent limply around a double-edged knife driven into his palm.
“Holy shit.” All fear fled Shiro’s mind as he hurried to wrap an arm around Keith’s waist, holding up his weight and taking the strain off his bleeding hand. “Take it easy. Keith, you with me?”
The Blade only groaned faintly and let his head loll against Shiro’s shoulder. There was a crimson stain growing on the wall, running in thick rivers down the concrete and staining the sidewalk. Shiro shifted so his left side was taking most of the boy’s weight, and reached up with his right hand to tug at the knife. It didn’t budge, feeling like it was part of the wall itself.
Shiro readjusted his grip, wrapping numb fingers around the hilt as tightly as he could force his muscles to go, but there was still no change. Keith’s fingers twitched and a new gout of blood ran over his black glove and dripped to the pavement with a hollow sound.
“Help!” Shiro returned both arms to supporting Keith while he looked around. Only the bare walls faced him, gray concrete and brick as dead as the Otherworld. No one was around and the silence felt like it was crawling on him.
“Hang in there,” Shiro muttered, even though Keith looked pale from shock and too dazed to be fully conscious. He grabbed his phone and unlocked it with shaky fingers, leaving dull smudges of blood on the screen that obscured the numbers he tapped.
“911, what is your emergency?”
Shiro’s eyes wandered as he spoke, forcing himself to look at Keith’s hand to assess the damage. “My friend’s hurt. We’re in the alley by the ambulance entrance. It’s not life threatening,” he told the dispatcher, “but please hurry.” There’s no excuse for you not to.
But as the phone line shut itself off, his gaze remained fixed on the broad blade protruding from Keith’s hand. A bright cold light enveloped the hilt before fading and condensing into a very familiar design. A faintly glowing lion, crouching, paw raised.
Shiro ducked his head so he could glimpse Keith’s face, but the younger man had closed his eyes and was breathing shakily. A lion? Why had Keith been chosen? His mind wheeled with questions. Shiro tapped at his phone again and called Pidge almost out of instinct.
“You’ll want to get out here,” he said as soon as she picked up. “Alleyway outside the ER. I just found another lion. He’s been... attacked by someone.”
His blood ran cold at the thought and he lowered the phone despite Pidge’s urgent demands for explanation. Someone had been here, had taken Keith unawares and incapacitated him. What chance would Shiro stand against someone who could do that?
His senses were tuned to high alert but there was no sign of life in the immediate area. Several yards away, an exterior heating unit trailed steam into the air, the vapor drifting in the air before slowly dissipating. Still, nothing out of the ordinary.
That didn’t quell Shiro’s nervousness, his back pressed to the wall and his shoulder aching under Keith’s dead weight. He sighed in relief when two paramedics hurried around the corner with a stretcher. Pidge was trailing not too far behind them, her face set and businesslike.
“We’ll take it from here,” one of the medics said, moving to support Keith. His partner reached up to remove the knife, but despite his best efforts, it remained lodged in the wall. He frowned and tried again, and this time the resulting trickle of blood was dark and sluggish.
Pidge and Shiro were pushed aside as more paramedics arrived and clustered around Keith.
“Did you see it? On the knife?” Shiro asked, turning his eyes away from the scene with a wince.
Pidge nodded and chewed her lip. “Thanks for calling me. This is definitely something important.” She reached for her phone but Shiro held out a hand to stop her.
“I know you need to tell Allura about this, but maybe just wait a moment? Hear me out, please.”
“We’ve been over this already,” Pidge sighed, looking away. “You’re not happy -- I get that -- but this is my job...”
“The Otherworld Allura said that lions are manifestations of ley lines. They’re created for a specific purpose. Maybe this is a sign that we ought to all stick together?”
“You, me, and a Blade? I don’t think so. We have nothing in common.” But she seemed to be wavering, her hand no longer inching toward her back pocket. “Still, what purpose could we all have together? I was only given my lion so I could scout for trouble.”
Shiro took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for asking this, but did you actually get your tattoo? Or was it just there one day?” Like how my pendant was in my hand at the wreck. As if it materialized at the same time as my scars.
“It... I don’t remember how I got it. But after Dad and Matt died, I was pretty messed up and don’t remember a lot anyway, so that’s not proof of anything.”
“I think Allura has been hiding things from us, from you, for a long time. Like the Emperor. If he gets here and finds a rift he can fit through, it’s going to be hell on earth, and she somehow didn’t think that was important enough for you to know?”
Pidge cut him off. “Maybe she didn’t want to worry us. She has been working to close all the rifts, so you can’t say that she wasn’t aware of the danger.”
“She just didn’t trust you enough to tell you.”
“To be honest, I’d rather not know that the crawling chaos is trying to break into our world,” Pidge said. “Ignorance would certainly help me sleep better at night.”
“But you’re out there on the front lines! Don’t you think you, an Alice, ought to be fully informed about what you might be facing on your Otherworld missions?”
“Whatever you’re driving at, give it up.” She crossed her arms and focused her attention elsewhere.
Shiro ran a hand over his face, letting his fingers brush over scar-roughened skin. Behind him, Keith had finally been freed from the wall and the paramedics were hurrying him into the hospital. “You’re an Alice because you want to help people, right? Save the world, that kind of thing? Maybe you should think whether you’re really doing that, or if you’re blindly doing whatever Allura tells you to. She knows a lot, I’ll give her that, but what are her intentions? She’s never really seemed like the humanitarian type.”
“Fine.” Pidge raised her chin and stared him down. “I’ll talk to her myself, later. I want to know what’s going on with the lions, that’s for sure. Because if she didn’t give you yours, then where did it come from and who’s deciding we belong together? But right now I need to finish up here with Hunk and Lance.”
“Thank you.” Shiro dropped his shoulders and felt a wave of relief come over him. “I just --” I want you to open your mind. I want you to be on my side. I want to be a part of this team, not a weight or a drag or an unwanted part.
But whatever he was going to tell her got cut off by a panicked yell. They looked up to see Hunk standing in the doorway of the ER, hands on his knees as he panted for breath.
“It’s Lance!” he got out between gasps. “I looked away for a moment and he fell into the rift!”
“What?!” Pidge was already halfway to the door, Shiro not a step behind her. “How could he have --”
“I don’t know. I think one of the Blades may have pushed him. Or he slipped. I don’t know, but he’s gone.”
Shiro came to an abrupt halt as it felt like he’d run into a wall of ice. He tried to shake off the feeling but tendrils of fear wrapped around his throat and pulled tighter with every step toward the hospital.
“I knew we should have sealed it sooner,” Pidge muttered, walking fast. “He’s never crossed over before so he won’t know what to do.”
“Think you can get him out?”
“Of course.”
Hunk sped up his steps and Pidge matched the pace without a backward glance. Shiro could feel himself shaking, legs becoming unsteady, and he slowed down. By now the other two were out of sight around a corner, footsteps receding quickly. Once Shiro was alone, he staggered against the wall and braced himself there, trying to calm his frightened heartbeat as his pulse dinned in his ears.
Hunk’s words... how had Pidge not noticed? There was the slightest trace of Allura’s foreign accent in his inflections. And his gaze had felt like a knife, sharp as crystal when he’d glanced back.
Shiro forced himself to take a deep breath, and then another. The last time he’d convinced himself he was imagining things, it had turned out to be all too real -- the Otherworld was no joke, nor were the uncanny things that lived there. He wanted to believe that he was over-stressed and seeing things, hearing things, but his gut advised otherwise. There was still a cold tremor in the air, a half-felt ache that soaked into his bones and swirled inside his mind.
Something wasn’t sitting right, and he grit his teeth and pushed away from the wall. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to leave Pidge to face it on her own. Her life was far more important than any fear that gripped him and wouldn’t let go.
But as he neared the fountain area again, the chill came back. Shiro walked softer, afraid of what was going on ahead. There was only silence, suggesting that the Blades had all finally left; he could only hear the faint splash of water, but even that seemed dull and muted. Like in the Otherworld, came a whisper from the dark corner of his mind.
When he got close enough to see the entire room, Shiro was wordlessly grateful for his caution. Pidge was nowhere in sight -- presumably on the other side of the rift -- but Hunk was busily moving around, his steps jerky with haste as he traced razor-thin lines around the concrete basin of the fountain. He, too, was dead silent as he worked; only the scratching of the metal pen barely whispered through the room.
Shiro pressed himself closer to the doorframe, watching in confusion as Hunk made a full circuit and finished his nearly invisible inscription with a flourish.
There was a muttering underfoot, some great power shifting, and the noise from the fountain returned full force. Shiro’s eyes widened at the changed atmosphere in the room. For the first time since he’d set foot in there, the hospital felt safe. The only twinge he got was from Hunk’s presence, but the rest of the room was clean and alive again.
It took him a moment to realize what he had just seen. By that point, Hunk picked up the duffel bag he and Lance had brought and he was starting to walk toward the exit on the far side of the room.
The rift was sealed.
There was no way for Pidge and Lance to return.
And it was all Hunk’s doing.
----
It took Shiro a long time to think of what to do next.
There weren’t many options that he could think of, short of running home and burying himself under the blankets until he could convince himself this wasn’t real. Only wait, that wasn’t an option either, as he remembered the destroyed state of his apartment.
There was absolutely no way he was going back to Allura’s house, not to sleep, not to talk, not to do anything. He was going to stay far away from her, and even farther from Hunk’s new terrifying aura as well. It was clear that whatever was going on with Allura had touched Hunk too, or at least that was how Shiro interpreted the nausea whenever he glanced out at the fountain.
The hospital was still quiet and homey-feeling. With no link to the Otherworld, things were returning to the way they should be.
Shiro sat on the floor and considered his options. Hunk and Allura were out of the question, and Pidge and Lance were unreachable. What could he do on his own? Searching out a rift and trying to rescue them could result in him getting trapped as well. Pidge could use her tattoo to escape, but there was no way she would leave Lance behind.
He really wanted to talk to the other Allura now and ask her for help, but crossing over was impossible. For a brief moment Shiro contemplated falling asleep there in the hallway and hoping he would sleepwalk his way into the Otherworld. Other than that, his friend list was woefully short, and there were even fewer people who knew of the Otherworld and whom he felt were at all trustworthy at the moment.
Maybe he could break the seal on the rift and re-open it. With Hunk long gone, that was probably the easiest option to try, although Shiro felt trepidatious about possibly releasing more horrors into the real world.
There was always the option of waiting for Pidge to find an elevator that would help her and Lance cross over. But not just any elevator would do; as far as Shiro knew, the only one that worked that way was in the apartment building near campus. It would take hours for Pidge to reach that with Lance in tow, and he didn’t want to think of what could happen if they got attacked by aberrations on the way. Better to open the fountain rift again and give them a quick way home.
He hurried to the fountain, keeping his steps light just in case. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in this wing of the hospital for now, but he couldn’t shake the fear of eyes watching from the shadows. Up close, he could see the wavy line scratched into the concrete and he set about defacing it. But although he used a metal chair to scrape off part of the design, the water didn’t change back to the oily sheen. The air stayed clean and fresh and he gave up at last, putting down the chair and slumping into it.
It looked like once a rift was sealed, it was sealed for good. Or maybe he just didn’t have the knowledge of how to break it open again.
His eyes roved over the fountain and down to the patterned tiles on the floor. There were scratches there too, long gouges that had bitten into the faux marble. Marks of the battle between aberrations and the star-forged swords. The Blades! Shiro doubted he could count them as friends, but maybe one of them wouldn’t kill him outright if he asked for help. Keith was his only recourse right now.
Luckily Keith was already out of surgery by the time Shiro got directions to his recovery room. Shiro knocked lightly on the open door and Keith looked up from where he was sitting on the bed staring at the lion knife. His right hand was heavily bandaged, his arm in a sling.
“Hello,” Keith said as Shiro pushed the door mostly closed.
“Hey. I hope you’re going to be okay.”
“I’ll be fine. Just another scar for the collection.” He shrugged and put down the knife, touch lingering on the lion emblem.
“Sorry,” Shiro started, but didn’t know what more to say.
“Doesn’t matter.” Keith pulled himself more upright and gestured to the chair by the bed. “Have a seat if you want. Or did you just come to check on me? I thought you were with me earlier but I’m not sure.”
“I was there. I found you pinned to the wall. What happened?”
“Thanks for helping me,” Keith said. His eyes were sharp on Shiro, shrewd and careful. “I’m not really sure who stabbed me; they came up from behind. I don’t recognize this knife, either, but it feels... significant.”
“I might be able to shed some light on that. But in return I would like your help. I’m in a very bad place and you’re the only one I can think of who might know something useful.”
Keith gingerly shifted his arm in the sling. “I’m the only one who can help?” But aside from looking surprised, he seemed open to the idea, and listened intently as Shiro explained everything.
Everything from his car wreck and the mysterious pendant, to his sleepwalking, to him meeting Pidge and Allura and joining their team. He gave minimal explanation to his missions as an Alice, hoping that Keith would assume he’d only crossed over by accident, but he needn’t have feared. Even when Shiro mentioned meeting the other Allura in the Otherworld, Keith’s expression didn’t change from one of curiosity and mild concern.
If any of Allura’s words had been false, Shiro was intensely glad that she’d lied about the Blades’ bloodthirst.
Keith only interrupted a few times, asking for Shiro to repeat a point or clarify details; for the most part he listened in silence, nodding his head at certain points. When Shiro ended with a desperate plea to do something about breaking open the nearby rift, the Blade rubbed his good hand over his face and took a breath.
“This is some really heavy stuff. I’ve been on the outskirts of the supernatural before, but now, if I’m a lion, I’m right in the thick of it.”
Shiro gave a halfhearted chuckle. “I’ve always known I was in over my head too. But I thought I had a fighting chance until now. All I wanted was to figure out my sleepwalking, not get dragged into... whatever this is.”
“A battle several decades in the making.”
“What?”
“I don’t know all the details because I’ve never been on the front lines before, but this fight has been going on since I was a child. It’s old news that the Emperor is coming. The Blades were formed years ago to make sure that the day never came when he would break through into our world. We’ve been working in secret for a long time, mainly because the Blades’ early ranks were infiltrated by an Otherworld spy.
“It was before Kolivan adopted me, but from what I know, a lot of people died. Both Blades and civilians. Someone managed to turn the public against us and we were run out of town in fear for our lives. Since then, things have calmed down over the years, but we suspect whoever massacred us before is still around. It could very well be linked to what you’ve seen and experienced.”
“Who could possibly want the Emperor to succeed?” Shiro had to admit that it made too much sense to dismiss. Why kill the Blades, who were working to seal the rifts, unless the end goal was to keep a rift open for the Emperor to bring the apocalypse? But as the thought crossed his mind, Shiro shuddered. Even something as malevolent as the Emperor was bound to have followers, worshippers, people who wanted to watch the world burn.
“It could be someone from the Otherworld,” Keith said. “There are ‘people’ over there too, not just hellhounds and formless aberrations. They’re smart enough to cross over through any open rifts, and imagine what it would be for them if the Emperor came -- their world would dominate the humans. They wouldn’t be exiled to that empty hellscape any longer.”
“The other Allura I met. There’s a chance she was one of the Emperor’s minions?”
Keith groaned and put his head back. “There’s a chance for anything. I don’t have any kind of special sight so I can’t judge people, but I’m willing to bet my sword that one version of her is fishy. Which one, I have no idea.”
“I could go confront her,” Shiro said, sounding reluctant, but Keith was already shaking his head.
“And if it turned out she was the bad version, she’d be more than a match for you. For both of us, with me in my current state.”
Shiro looked up, brow creased in surprise. “I wouldn’t ask you to come with me.”
“I’m volunteering.” Keith swung his bare feet off the bed and stood up. “As a Blade, it’s my duty to keep this world safe. And like you pointed out, I now possess a lion so I’m part of whatever is linking you and your team together. I’ll do what I can to help.”
Shiro wanted to protest more; Keith wasn’t up to fighting in his condition, but nevertheless it made him feel much better to know there was someone competent at his side. Together, their chances of survival should be at least a little bit higher.
“Thank you,” Shiro said. He stood and reached forward as Keith picked up his jacket and sword belt, but the Blade waved him off.
“I can do this,” Keith muttered, and Shiro backed up. He needed to give Keith space and trust him, if they were going to survive the Otherworld together.
“Any ideas how to break the seal?” Shiro asked at last as Keith checked over the last of his belongings.
“We don’t. I mean, we could, given the right equipment and time, but your story gave me a better idea.” Keith fished in his jeans pocket and tossed over a key ring. “You any good at driving a motorcycle?”
Shiro caught the keys and bounced them in his left hand. “You might have to give me a few pointers. Where do you have in mind?” Please don’t say what I think you’re going to.
“The forest rift. Where you had your accident.”
----
Keith’s bike was long and sleek, black and chrome with thin red stripes gracing the body. But for all its size, it handled like a dream, needing only a light touch to guide it around curves and down side streets toward the warehouse district. Even Keith’s weight clinging to Shiro’s back didn’t throw them off balance as much as Shiro had feared. It was something of a confidence boost, a thrill of fun adrenaline, that overrode some of the growing apprehension.
But all that enjoyment fell away as Shiro cut the bike’s speed to a crawl as they entered the forest shadow. It was even darker under the trees than before, now that nightfall was imminent. Closing the rift may have dissipated some of the fear, but Shiro’s own memory supplied more than enough to make up for it.
“You okay?” Keith asked, raising his voice above the purr of the engine.
Shiro nodded jerkily and gave the motorcycle a bit more gas, lurching it forward in fits and starts. Simply being on this road was one thing, but driving it again was a nightmare.
Still, Pidge and Lance needed him. If he and Keith couldn’t make it in time, then their lives could be lost and it would all be his fault. For as much as Shiro was terrified of what could happen to himself, he was more scared for his friends, and this was the closest rift to the hospital. So he kept the bike moving as fast as he dared, braking hard on the curves and straining his eyes for the sign post.
There it was, up ahead, the edges of it white against the dusk.
He pulled up short several yards back and took the keys from the ignition. Keith let go of his one-armed grip around Shiro’s waist and swung off the bike.
“I’m gonna need your hands again,” he said, injured hand tucked in its sling inside his jacket. At the base of the signpost was a small patch of fresh dirt, loose topsoil that had been dug up recently.
“That’s the seal?”
“Every rift has to be sealed in a different way. That’s what Elves are for.” Keith crouched down and scooped out a handful of dirt. “Dig up whatever’s buried here, and that should be enough to break open a rift as small as this one.”
“Great. I get to be the one to re-open this can of nightmare fuel.”
“It’s far better than the alternative,” Keith pointed out, wiping his fingers on his pants.
Shiro set to work, moving the dirt aside and trying not to think too hard about what kind of stuff might need to be buried to seal a rift. Just because Hunk and Pidge had been the ones to create this seal not too long ago didn’t mean anything when it came to occult ingredients...
“Oh.” He pulled out a small glass marble, shiny red despite the dirt.
“There should be four more,” Keith commented. He reached down and poked around, pulling out a blue and a green marble. “We need to get them all out to make sure the rift is as open as possible.”
Shiro lined up the marbles along the edge of the hole: red and blue, green and yellow, and a sparkling black.
“You sure this is all of them?” He looked down into the small hole and picked at the dirt under his nails.
“Yeah. Five is the magic number for a lot of things. Besides, can’t you feel it?”
Sitting more upright, Shiro paused as the underbrush around them rustled and then went still. The shadows were almost black now, Keith’s face dim in the fading light, the motorcycle nothing more than a faint gleam of silver. There was definitely a more sinister tinge to the air now, the same as it had been before the seal. The same as it had been in the Otherworld hospital. Stale, cardboard, dead.
The rift was open.
Shiro stood up and turned around, peering into the woods. As much as he didn’t want to see the eyes again, he was looking for the oily sheen of the rift. But there seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary, not like back at the fountain.
“You coming?” Keith’s voice came from back at the motorcycle.
“Yeah. Where exactly are we going?” Shiro asked as he tried to slow his powerwalk toward the Blade. Even in Keith’s injured state, he was still probably the better of the two if something attacked from the underbrush.
“Into the rift. I’m guessing you were really close to it when you had your crash, so I need you to steer us there.”
“I uh, ended up pretty far from the road. We’ll have to walk.”
Keith shook his head and Shiro’s stomach dropped. “If we want to get back to the hospital in time to find your friends, we’ll need the bike with us. Don’t worry, it can survive rift travel just fine,” he added, mistaking Shiro’s increasingly worried expression.
“Let me get this straight,” Shiro said, wrapping his fingers around the handlebars but standing off to one side and not getting on the motorcycle. “You want me to drive us off the road, aiming for the exact spot of the accident that almost cost me my life?”
Keith opened his mouth and shut it again, visibly slumping in on himself. “Okay, sorry. I wasn’t thinking of it that way; I’m sorry. Would it be better if I drove?”
Shiro eyed Keith’s hand, half expecting a red tinge to be showing through the bandages. While it would be easier to let Keith take over, so all Shiro had to do was close his eyes and pretend to be elsewhere, he couldn’t just back out of this responsibility too. At some point he had to face the past and beat it. No more letting old fears rule his life.
“No,” Shiro said, surprised at how steady his voice was. “I’ll do it.”
Keith raised an eyebrow at the sudden change, at the note of resolve in Shiro’s voice, and gave him a small smile. “I knew you had it in you. Now let’s go save some people.”
Key back in the ignition, the bike idling under him, Shiro took only a moment to close his eyes and breathe deeply. He hoped Keith knew what he was doing, blindly trusting to drive off the road and into the invisible rift. And once on the other side, who knew what was waiting for them?
But the Blade seemed calm. He loosened his sword in its scabbard at his back, then returned his arm to hold tightly around Shiro’s waist.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Keith said, picking his feet off the ground. Shiro balanced them for a moment before kicking up the stand and letting the bike roll forward.
“Does speed matter?” he had to ask. The engine groaned at being held back.
“We only need to go fast enough to move,” Keith replied. Shiro let out the clutch a bit more but kept the bike in neutral. “Keep it slow and it’ll be fine. The bike’s pretty good on uneven ground so there’s not much to worry about.”
Yeah, except for trees and vultures and cracked windshields. Totally okay.
Shiro held his breath and the motorcycle rolled forward, the slight downward slant of the road providing the only acceleration. They passed the road sign with a snail’s speed. He’d never be ready for this moment again, not in a dozen lifetimes. Still, Pidge and Lance. They needed him.
Once they passed the sign post, Shiro turned the bike to the side, easing off the shoulder of the road with a thump and crashing into the underbrush. Brambles dragged by, thick thorns that caught and ripped at his pants, and still the motorcycle crawled forward. Inexplicable fear washed over Shiro and he reached for the brake, but before he could engage it, a wave of utter cold washed over him. Against his back, Keith shuddered and gripped tighter.
The air was different again, the sounds of the motorcycle muffled even though it was still vibrating under him. Shiro lurched to a stop, trembling. The trunk of a giant tree loomed over them, a yard away but far too close for Shiro’s nerves.
“I think we made it,” Keith said. Instead of raising his voice, he leaned closer to Shiro’s ear and kept his voice as low as he could over the ambient noise. “This doesn’t feel like the real world any more.”
Shiro’s hands were clammy with sweat as he turned the bike around and maneuvered them back to the road. There weren’t any specific signs that indicated they were in the Otherworld now, but Shiro had felt the same crawling sensation on his skin often enough that he knew.
“Yeah,” he said at last, throat dry as the bike coasted toward the tunnel of red sunlight that marked the exit to the forest. “Yeah, we crossed over. Now comes the hard part.”