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Shiro is aware that, as the black paladin, all eyes are on him. He knows it’s his job to make difficult decisions, and he knows the weight of responsibility is heavy on his shoulders. He knows the black paladin is the most capable of slipping across an irredeemable line, and he knows that his predecessor’s past is always a potential future for him, if he’s not careful.
He knows this, but he still wonders if wringing Slav’s neck counts as crossing that line.
The world might be better off, really.
Shiro supposes he has no one to blame but himself. He is the one that decided on the teams for this mission, after all. The fact that he ended up stuck babysitting Slav is his own fault, really. But still, he’d gone over the lineups a dozen times, and no matter how hard he’d tried, he just couldn’t find a reasonable organization for the mission that would leave him comfortably clear of Slav and still keep everyone else’s success and survival chances relatively high.
Hunk or Pidge would be ideal candidates for working with Slav, but due to the nature of the mission, they need to split up their technically savvy team members between groups to cover all their bases. So Hunk is across the occupied city trying to shut down the armory and weapons systems, and Pidge is at the city center and charged with interrupting communications and hacking the prisons systems to liberate the captured citizens. Slav has been wrangled into filling the final technical slot for disrupting the Galra particle barriers and defensive systems, by nature of being the only one left with the skill to do so and no other job at hand. Even Allura and Coran are occupied with providing air support in the Castle, to try and keep Galra forces distracted while the rest of the paladins are on the ground operating with as much stealth as possible.
Of course, none of their technical experts can go without backup, and Shiro had hoped to pawn Slav off on Lance or Keith. But Slav flat-out refuses to go anywhere with Keith whenever he’s operating as a paladin; something about red being an extremely unlucky terahertz capable of raising percentages of near disaster by almost twenty percent. And if he’s honest with himself, Shiro’s not entirely sure Keith won’t get fed up with Slav and throw him out an airlock. Shiro would be lying if he said he hadn’t considered it himself. So he assigns Keith with Hunk, since the two have proven to work exceptionally well together.
Lance is a better option—Slav seems to enjoy Lance’s company entirely because Lance is the blue paladin, and falls within his spectrum of ‘lucky terahertz.’ And while Lance does also get annoyed with Slav’s many, many, many quirks (and really, who doesn’t), he’s also proven to find the scientist at least somewhat amusing or companionable at times. And Lance just seems less inclined to shove Slav off a building if he really gets annoying. But as much as he’d like to push Slav off on Lance, Shiro simply can’t justify it in terms of the overall mission. Pidge needs ranged support for her tasks, especially when it comes to escorting a lot of scared citizens out of a dangerous area. Lance’s rifle and shooting skills are too valuable to sacrifice there over something as petty as ‘but this guy really, really annoys me.’ So Lance goes with Pidge, and Shiro is stuck escorting Slav to the Galra defenses.
Sometimes Shiro really, really hates being the responsible adult.
Shiro manages to pilot one of the Castle’s pods to the building holding the Galra defenses, using the cloaking Pidge has installed in it for the mission, and Slav goes along with only moderate complaining. But when Shiro lands the pod and tucks it away in the shadows of an alleyway just next to the target building, Slav refuses to get out of it.
“We can’t go in there!” Slav exclaims, waving his topmost pair of arms for emphasis. The remaining three pairs of arms are tucked into specialized sleeves down the front of his clothing. They’ve long since found him an outfit that isn’t the standard Galra prison uniform, but the kangaroo pouches had been one of those things Slav had gotten very insistent on, and everyone had gone along with it just to shut him up. Shiro has a feeling even the Galra had done that with the prison uniform just to shut him up.
Shiro sighs, and reminds himself that this mission is very important, and he definitely can’t wring Slav’s neck until they’ve at least turned the stupid defenses off. “And why is that?” he asks, going for a neutral tone. It mostly comes out as grating.
Slav gives him an incredulous look. “There is an eight-five point five seven chance breaking into this building to shut down the defense mechanisms will result in me dying in most realities, and your chances are even worse!”
Shiro grits his teeth. The realities again. Wonderful. “Okay, well, what are the odds of surviving in this reality if we leave the Galra here to get even stronger?”
“There’s a ninety-five percent chance we survive in all realities if we turn around and leave the planet,” Slav counters, gesturing towards the sky with his topmost right arm. “This is definitely the safest option!”
“We’re not turning around, and we’re not leaving,” Shiro says firmly. “These people need us and we have a job to do. And since there’s a zero percent chance of us turning and running, then what are your chances if you don’t help us shut down the defense mechanisms in this reality?”
Slav fidgets for a moment, but when Shiro doesn’t relent, he finally mutters, “Approximately a two percent chance of survival.”
“And?” Shiro presses, not letting up.
Slav fidgets more, and starts tapping his fingers together, not quite able to meet Shiro’s eyes. “…and your plan currently has the highest chance of survival…even if that percentage is not very high.”
“But it’s the best plan,” Shiro stresses, trying to force very ounce of patience into his voice. “So we are going to follow the plan and not do anything like scream or re-arrange things or stall, alright? Just get in, destroy the mechanisms, get out. Nice and simple.”
Slav sighs, but when Shiro turns and begins sneaking down the alleyway, he hears the scientist let out a soft yelp. There’s a scrambling noise, and Slav zips up next to him a moment later, watching anxiously. Whatever he feels about his odds on the mission, it’s just as clear he favors his odds in a hostile city without a paladin for protection even worse.
Well, good. Maybe Shiro can make use of that to actually get him to move.
Getting inside the building actually isn’t as hard as anticipated. Shiro’s prosthetic arm interfaces with most of the security panels, and Pidge has equipped him with extra strings of code to prevent the Galra computers from identifying him by his prison number. And Slav, for all his many, many annoying quirks, is actually quite nimble and quick, meaning he can dart up alleyways and through doors with a surprising degree of stealth if he actually bothers to. They enter undetected, so the mission starts well, at least.
Once actually inside the building, the mission is neither nice nor simple, unfortunately. Pidge has also equipped Shiro with a map of the building, so he knows where he’s aiming for. Unfortunately, he can’t take a direct route to the control center. It’s not so much because of guard sentries or floating drones; those could be avoided with the right timing.
Instead, it’s that Slav flatly refuses to take the direct route. “It’s asymmetrical,” the scientist insists. “Asymmetry creates unstable fluctuations in space-time that mathematically increase the probability for instability in quantum realities! The odds of this mission ending in horrific death increase significantly if we go down those three hallways!”
Shiro grits his teeth, but knows better than to argue. The faster he rolls with it and finds another route, the faster he can actually get Slav to move, and the faster they are done and gone. He finds another route.
Then he finds another other route, because his first alternate route went through a single-digit floor that wasn’t a prime number and something about that was apparently unacceptable in this particular circumstance.
And then a third other alternate route, because some of the tiling along the other other alternate route was improperly installed and looked a little too similar to cracks. Shiro is, by now, an expert in exactly what cracks will do to mothers’ backs, not so much because of a nursery rhyme so much as because of space-time temporal fissures. He didn’t win that fight last time, and he doesn’t have time to try it now.
But they do, eventually, get to the control center. With Slav still rambling about realities and probabilities, and with him draped over Shiro’s shoulders and wrapped around Shiro’s torso again like an obnoxious living scarf, because he’d been scared of some sentries Shiro had disabled and his probability of surviving raises significantly when he’s closer to Shiro’s “robot arm.” But they’d made it. Significantly behind schedule and after the other two teams had made it, but they’d done it.
Shiro really shouldn’t consider just getting to the objective quite as much a victory as he currently is. But really, with a handicap like Slav making things more difficult, even the smallest things are worth celebrating.
“Okay,” Shiro says, as Slav reluctantly slithers down off of his shoulders, “I’ll stand guard, and you get to work. Disable those shields and bring down any Galra defenses. That will let Allura and Coran attack the main base of operations, and it should help the others with their tasks too.”
For once, Slav actually needs no encouragement. He scurries over to the control panels, and the several-story massive glowing cylinders they surround, which are (as Shiro understands it) the power source for everything they’re trying to shut down. Slav studies the panels and screens of output with interest, actually withdrawing several other pairs of hands to work as he investigates the technology. Shiro keeps an eye on him for a minute or two to ensure he actually keeps working—Slav has a curious tendency to forget which reality he’s in sometimes, and stop doing things halfway—but he seems to be concentrating and for once he’s in his element. Shiro lets him be, and keeps an eye on the doors.
They aren’t interrupted by enemy soldiers, but Shiro starts to get worried while he listens to the chatter over the paladin communications. Hunk and Keith have been discovered, and appear to be under serious fire. They’re holding, with Keith doing his best to keep the heat off of Hunk until the latter can disable the armaments, but it’s not going as cleanly as they’d hoped. Pidge and Lance may have been discovered as well; Galra activity in their area is increasing, and they’re concerned with how they might get the citizens out. Backup from Allura and Coran would be helpful in either case, but they can’t provide much assistance until the defenses are disabled, otherwise the Castle of Lions will be blown out of the sky before they can ever get close. Things are getting hectic, and Shiro is doing what he can to talk the team through it, but he’d feel infinitely better if he was out there giving somebody backup.
“Oh, this is not good at all,” Slav mutters to himself. Shiro glances up, and barely bites back a curse. Slav is definitely not messing with the computers and controls anymore. Instead, his three bottom pairs of hands are wringing anxiously, while his topmost pair are tapping the counter in a curious, repetitive rhythm that Shiro recognizes as something Slav does when he’s particularly nervous.
“What isn’t good,” Shiro says, tone flat, more of a statement more than a question.
“This was very inexpertly handled,” Slav says, sounding both condescending and nervous at the same time, something Shiro has never heard anyone else quite manage the way Slav can. “These Galra have simply no concept of proper maintenance! The energy conduits have been completely overclocked. The chance of causing a power instability with this kind of modification is nearly fifty percent!” His little tapping rhythm halts as his topmost hands bring up a computer screen that he gestures to repeatedly. “And this is just asking for a probable increase in an overcharge for certain! Letting the power amplifiers overheat increases the odds of a malfunction by sixty-five percent!” He points at another screen with another set of hands. “And then the connectors—“
“Slav,” Shiro interrupts, snapping the name, “I don’t need a breakdown. Can you turn it off, or not?”
Slav’s eyes widen slightly at the tone, and he cringes a little. “It is technically possible,” he says after a moment, “but it would be extremely dangerous to do so! When you combine all the factors, the chances of creating a horrific explosion in this reality are ninety-three point six two five eight percent! And the chances of us surviving that explosion in this reality are less than five point six three percent! And the chances of surviving the destruction after the explosion in this reality are—“
And Shiro’s had enough. He can hear Keith yelling in pain in the comms, and Pidge and Lance trying to protect the prisoners they’ve freed, and Coran and Allura frantically trying to survive a midair dogfight, and he does not have time for Slav’s ridiculous predictions anymore.
“Enough!” he snaps. “We do not have time for this, Slav. Turn the defenses off now, and I don’t care what you think could happen in this reality!”
“But—“
“If you don’t act now, my friends are going to die in this reality!” Shiro says. There’s more of a threatening snarl to his voice than he’d like, and it irks him deeply that he can lose control on a mission so easily like this. But his friends are in danger. He doesn’t have time for Slav’s garbage. “So turn. Off. The. Defenses. Now. Or I swear I will leave you here so I can go rescue them myself!”
Slav looks alarmed, and cowers back a little, long serpentine body twisting into more of a knot. Shiro feels a bit like he maybe just kicked a puppy, except Slav is hardly innocent. He’s a self-centered, obnoxious genius who cares more about his own interests then protecting the universe or the team, and Shiro is not going to let this slide when his friends are in danger. He refuses to let himself feel guilty.
Shiro glares, and Slav finally unfolds enough to start typing on the control panels, giving Shiro an occasional anxious look out of the corner of his eyes. He still doesn’t seem enthusiastic about turning off the defenses, but he seems less enthusiastic about the prospect of being left behind in a Galra infested building to fend for himself. Shiro wouldn’t actually leave him behind—Slav is too valuable to allow him to be re-captured by the Galra, not after all the damage the inventions stolen from his mind have already caused. But at this point he’s not above letting Slav believe it.
Even so, it seems to take forever for Slav to actually shut down the systems. Shiro watches while listening to the sounds of battle and yells of panic over the comms on his helmet. He doesn’t understand much of what he’s seeing at first—everything is all in Galra, and Shiro doesn’t have a grasp of the systems. But he realizes after a little while that he’s seen some of these screens before. Slav brings up a screen, reviews it, clicks through several points of input, and moves on to the next. Then he does it again, and then he does it again. On the fifth cycle Shiro realizes Slav is stuck in some kind of endless loop, constantly checking and re-checking things that haven’t changed at all. Hunk and Pidge have both reported it’s a thing Slav does with coding and engineering, too—double, triple, and quadruple checking that everything is just right, even when it was just right the first four times. That’s fine when they’re safe on the Castle, but here it’s just wasting time—time that the rest of Shiro’s crew doesn’t have.
“Enough!” Shiro snaps in frustration. “It’s fine, it’s been fine the last three times you checked, nothing is going to change! Hurry, we need to go!”
“I must make sure the calibrations are correct,” Slav insists, looking anxious. “To raise our probability of surviving everything must be perfect—“
“Have you changed anything since you started?” Shiro presses.
“No, but it still might—“
“Nothing’s changed. It’s fine. Hurry and turn it off so we can go,” Shiro says. In his ear, Pidge yelps in alarm, and Lance shouts for her to go and he’ll cover her. Nobody has time for this.
Slav looks very anxious, but he seems to wilt under Shiro’s glare, and after a moment he clicks through two more screens, turns a couple of knobs, and flips a few switches. “It’s done,” he says after a moment, “but just so you know, I’ve run the numbers, and our chances are not very good.”
Shiro doesn’t care. Slav’s numbers are always ‘not very good’ and they’ve never had any issue before. “Defenses should be down,” he yells over the comms. “Allura, Coran, you’re clear to attack. I’m coming in for backup, hold on!”
Allura yells her acknowledgement over the comms even as Shiro turns to bolt. Slav scurries after him, for once appearing to be on the same page as Shiro. They both want out of this place, and fast.
They make it about three hallways and one floor away before the explosion rocks the entire building.
It comes from back the way they came, and the noise and heat are suddenly deafening as the structure behind them tears to pieces. The whole building shudders, and Shiro stumbles as the floor seems to shift beneath his feet. He can hear metal screeching and clattering as the support structure of the building begins to cave in behind them, and can feel the hallway they’re in starting to list wildly. Cracks start running up the walls and over the floor, causing Slav to screech to a halt in alarm, and even Shiro has to pause and slap his metal arm against the closest wall to try and regain his balance. The rumbling and booming grows louder, and dust starts to fill the air, causing them both to cough.
“I told you!” Slav screeches loudly, scampering in panicked little circles and waving his topmost arms wildly. “I told you, I told you, the chances of a horrific explosion were too high and now it’s happened in this reality and our probability of surviving is less than three percent—“
Shiro is actually a little bewildered by this. Slav has never been right before. All his rambling about realities and probabilities has all been shot in the dark, ridiculous scenarios, and Shiro has long since learned to just tune out the negative predictions. It’s a little alarming to see one of those predictions actually come true.
It’s a bit eye-opening, but Shiro doesn’t have time to dwell on it. The destruction is getting worse, and the building is clearly coming down around their ears. The hallway behind them is already starting to splinter, spitting debris and broken pieces of building at them like shrapnel. “Move!” Shiro yells, starting to bolt forward again. If he can get them to a window, he can use his jetpack to launch them free of the destruction and they can escape in one piece—
But Slav, unbelievably, hasn’t moved. He dithers on the edge of one of the newly-made tiny chasms where the hallway has started to crack in half and the floor is falling away, hands wringing anxiously and looking terrified. And Shiro cannot believe that he’s still dealing with the crack fear now of all times when they’re about thirty seconds from being crushed to death. What the hell is wrong with this guy?
Shiro skids to a halt, and twists around to run back for Slav. “Come on!” he yells. “You don’t have a choice, we need to go over the cracks so we can escape! You’ll be fine!”
“But the temporal fissures—“ Slav protests. The building gives another alarming shudder, and another series of booms flood Shiro’s ears, drowning out the noise over the comms. Slav yelps in fear, and practically curls into a pretzel. “Oooh, the structural integrity is worse now, the probability of surviving in this reality is even lower—“
“Of course it’s lower if you don’t move!” Shiro snaps. He leaps across the space where the floor has now caved out into the hall below and lands next to Slav. He’s just about to tell the scientist to just climb up on his shoulders and Shiro will carry him out of there so he doesn’t have to deal with any cracks, but the building rumbles alarmingly again, and the floor shifts beneath their feet—
—and the ceiling above makes an awful snapping noise as it starts to break loose.
“Look out!” Shiro hollers. Niceties be damned—if they don’t move they’re both going to die. Shiro dives, reaching out to shove Slav out of the way of the collapsing debris. Slav goes flying with a shriek, but as Shiro crouches to leap after him, the building rumbles again. An edge of the ceiling catches Shiro’s side as he jumps, and he yells as it knocks him off balance and he goes crashing through the hole in the floor to the hallway below. He hits on his side with a wince and tries to claw his way back to his feet, but there’s so much noise and movement and everything is shaking now, he can’t seem to figure out what’s up and what’s down, and—
Something smashes into his side and his head, and he gasps as the wind is knocked out of him. He crashes back to the floor, blinking dazedly, and struggles to rise. But something hits him again, harder this time, and he groans as the world goes black.
When Shiro comes to, he almost doesn’t realize it at first. It’s dark, and it takes him a moment to realize his eyes are even open. But his eyes start to adjust after a moment, and he realizes that although it’s mostly pitch black, there’s the faintest of blue glows cast by the indicator lights on his armor. It’s just enough to help him realize he’s awake.
The next thing he registers is pain, and pressure. He’s twisted awkwardly so that his stomach and hips are pressed against the ground, but his shoulders are turned so only his right makes contact with it. The pressure on his spine is unpleasant to say the least, but even worse is the way his prosthetic arm is pinned beneath his chest and stomach. It’s hard, awkward, and painful to lay on, jamming into his ribs uncomfortably, and he thinks his metal fingers are pressed somewhere alongside his stomach. Everything about him is sore, from his head down to his toes. His right leg aches, and even attempting to move it slightly sends shooting pain through him; he gasps at the attempt, and concludes it’s broken. His head throbs from where something cracked him over the head, he’s sure.
All of that is terrible in its own right, worse is that he’s trapped. He can feel an awful, heavy pressure along his back, left side, and legs, and when he tries to shift his spine into a more comfortable position, or slide his prosthetic free, he can’t. There’s something extremely heavy on top of him, and he can feel that pressure weighing down on him like a vice.
What happened? he asks himself, and struggles to fight down the rising panic of can’t move can’t move can’t move long enough to remember.
Explosion. The building had collapsed, while Shiro was still in it. If he tries very hard he can remember something clipping him in mid-jump, dragging him down to a lower level, and then…
Nothing.
I’m trapped underneath some of the debris, Shiro realizes. No wonder the pressure on him his so heavy. It’s not straps or restraints holding him down and that’s something of a relief, but the fact that it’s part of a building isn’t much better. And he doesn’t even know how much of it is above them. He’d fallen to the fourth floor when the building had started collapsing, but there were five more over that. And he can feel them in all that pressure on his skin, in the pains the debris force on him as they dig into his leg and his side, that ever-present weight above him, solid and imposing. He knows he has to be imagining some of it, but he can’t help but hate that weight pressing down on him, oppressive and heavy and cutting off the sky. He’s not meant for places like this, for this kind of buried environment; give him the stars, the clouds, the breeze, but he can’t feel any of that—
No. No, stop that, and don’t think about it. You can’t afford to. Try and stay calm, and find a way out of this, he instructs himself. Breathe. Don’t panic. Patience yields focus. You are not trapped with the Galra, you’re not cut off from the sky and the stars forever, and you’re alive. You can get out of this.
He really hopes he’s not lying to himself.
Shiro forces himself through a few breathing exercises, although it’s difficult. Wherever he is, the air is dusty, and the breathing exercises set him coughing. That hurts, sore as he is everywhere, and he regrets trying it, but it does distract him enough to focus.
He tries to assess his situation a little better. A careful (but somewhat painful) wiggle tells him that although most of his body is trapped beneath the debris, his head and shoulders are free from the rubble that’s collapsed on top of him. With a little work, he’s also able to work his left hand free from where it had been sprawled by his side. He thinks two of his fingers are broken and his wrist might be sprained, and it hurts like hell, but he can at least use it to feel around himself. It feels primarily like metal collapsed on top of him, but he thinks there might be some stonework involved too, to judge by the rougher texture he can feel against his fingers.
He uses his free hand to assess his head injury first. His helmet, he discovers, is gone, and there’s a gash on his temple that’s painful to the touch. He can’t tell if it’s stopped bleeding, but head injuries can often look worse than they really are, bleeding everywhere even when they’re superficial. He might have a concussion, but he doesn’t think that’s the worst of his problems.
He’s definitely stuck, though. And he doesn’t think he’s getting out of this without help. He curses himself in frustration. He was supposed to be heading to the others to give them some backup, not getting stuck under God only knows how much rubble waiting for a rescue after one of Slav’s ridiculous predictions actually came true—
Slav!
“Slav?” Shiro calls, a loudly as he can. It’s not very loud, and comes out more as a choke from all the dust. He doesn’t remember seeing what happened to the scientist; last he recalls he’d pushed Slav out of the way of the collapsing ceiling. But if the building had been coming down—and Slav had completely frozen up on his own—
Shiro feels something hot welling in his gut that is definitely guilt, and this time he actually lets himself feel it. If he’d just listened maybe this wouldn’t have actually happened. Slav is an obnoxious, frustrating guy, and Shiro wants to wring his neck a lot, but he doesn’t deserve to actually die. Especially when he spends most of his waking hours being terrified of dying. If he is lost on this mission Shiro is fairly certain he’s never going to forgive himself for it, especially when his sole job on the mission was to protect the scientist.
He tries to take a better look at his surroundings…what he can make out from his position anyway. He can’t see very far in the gloom, even with the illumination from his armor, but what he does see is not very encouraging. He appears to be stuck in some kind of pocket in all the debris that’s formed a small cave-like area. It’s comforting to know he’s not completely buried in rubble, but the makeshift walls look like they could collapse with the wrong kind of pressure. Shiro feels a pang of fear that he struggles to force down at the thought of this little chamber collapsing, and with him unable to do a damn thing to save himself. If there were any action at all that he could take it would be different, but Shiro loathes feeling helpless.
He forces himself away from that direction of thought. He can’t handle it now. He can’t panic now, not with so much on the line. “Slav?” he calls again, as his gaze darts around the gloomy little area frantically. He spots his helmet about four feet to the right, very occasionally flickering. Probably damaged, and definitely too far away for him to reach. He can’t see much farther than that; the suit only illuminates so far, and he can’t actually see how far away from him the walls of his little collapsed prison extend.
But right at the very edge of the light’s reach, he sees it: a rounded, greenish shape that he thinks, just maybe, might be Slav’s tail.
“Slav!” He calls again, louder now, half coughing. “Slav, if you can hear me, wake up. Slav, wake up. Now.”
No answer. Shiro curses, and tries uselessly again to shift himself free of the debris on top of him. That sends a spark of pain through him everywhere; his leg protests badly, his head throbs, the point where his prosthetic attaches protests at the wrenching feeling, and his metal fingers press into his stomach enough to cause discomfort. Damn it all, if he could just get free…
He needs something else. Slav could be badly hurt—he refuses to think of the alternative—and if that’s the case he needs help now. He casts around frantically for a solution, and his eyes light upon the small scattered bits of stone and debris around his head. Okay. Okay, he can work with this.
The first toss is awkward to say the least. It’s a difficult angle to throw from, on his side and more or less over his head. And his broken fingers and sprained wrist make it difficult to maneuver the chunk of rock successfully. His first shot goes wide, and he winces as it cracks against the nearest wall of debris. There’s an ominous rumble and Shiro winces as dirt and dust rain down on his head from above, but nothing happens.
He dials it back again for the second toss, which gets close to Slav’s tail but doesn’t actually hit. Shots three and four also miss, but get even closer. Shiro just hopes he figures it out before he runs out of things to throw within range.
The fifth throw bounces gently off of Slav’s tail, and Shiro is rewarded for his efforts when he hears a soft grunt of surprise. “Slav! Thank goodness,” he says, not bothering to disguise the relief in his voice. At least he hasn’t gotten the scientist killed…yet, anyway. “Slav, c’mon, I need you to wake up.”
Slav doesn’t immediately respond, so Shiro tosses a sixth chunk of rock, which hits on target again. This time Slav’s tail twitches, and there’s another grunt of surprise. The end of the tail slithers into the dark out of Shiro’s range of vision, and he hears the scientist muttering something about alternate realities that he can’t quite make out.
Shiro knows the exact moment Slav figures out where they are, because his muttering turns into sudden panic. “Oh no,” he hears in the darkness. “I knew it! I knew our chances in this reality were too low! I knew we should have left this planet! I knew this as a distinct possibility in two point four six percent of realities! And now it’s happening and—“
“Slav!” Shiro interrupts, as loudly as he can. The scientist’s rambling grinds to a halt. “I need you to calm down, okay?” It's a bit hypocritical, seeing as Shiro himself was too close to panic not even a few minutes ago. But Slav doesn’t need to know that, and they do need to stay calm. More importantly, now that there’s another person there that Shiro is aware of—and somebody looking to him for protection, no less—Shiro can feel more control of himself settling in as he automatically forces himself to assume the roll of a leader, and that helps. A little, at least.
There’s silence in the dark, and Shiro continues. “We need to stay calm, and try to get through this. Are you hurt at all? I can’t see you.”
There’s silence for a moment, and then Slav slips forward into the range of the armor’s illumination. He definitely looks banged up and bruised, and three of his eight arms—those on the lower half of his body—hang a bit awkwardly. Shiro’s not sure if they’re dislocated or broken, but his other arms are cradling them carefully, enough to know there’s an injury. Slav limps when he walks, and his nimbleness appears to have been reduced significantly. But he’s alive, and in one piece. That’s a start.
“I am injured,” Slav says, sounding a little mournful. “I am not supposed to be injured, you know. I am a scientist, not a warrior. Statistically speaking I am supposed to spend my entire life in a laboratory or a research facility. The probability in most realities that I will survive there is exceedingly high, although there are other factors to take into account that could still end in horrible deaths. But none of those probabilities are as high as our probability of dying now in this reality!”
“We are not going to die,” Shiro tells him firmly. There’s actually a fairly high chance that they could, and Slav isn’t wrong about that, but thinking like that will only lead to disaster. “We just need to call for help and the others can come dig us out. Can you bring me my helmet?”
Slav lets out a huff, but limps over to the discarded helmet and brings it back. Shiro winces slightly as he accepts it with his damaged hand and tries to slide it on over the cut in his temple. Maneuvering it on is difficult, but he manages, and tries hailing one of the others on the main frequency. “Team, hello, come in. We need assistance.”
He’s rewarded with a crackle of static, and silence.
“This is Shiro to the Castle of Lions,” he tries again, forcing down the faint edge of desperation trying to work its way into his tone. “We need emergency assistance. Allura? Coran?”
No answer. He tries hailing Pidge next, hoping maybe she has an alternative means of picking up their signals, but gets no response. Then Keith, who would surely answer if he could, but there’s no response there, either. Lance and Hunk are also duds, and that’s about the time Shiro realizes they’re really in this on their own.
“Okay,” Shiro says, trying for optimistic and not doing as well as he’d like. “So we can’t make an immediate connection. That’s fine. A building collapsing isn’t going to go unnoticed, especially when it’s the one everyone knows we were heading into. They’ve probably already realized they can’t contact us and are on their way to dig us out. This will be fine. We just need to wait for a rescue.”
He tries to quell that anxious little voice in the back of his head that reminds him everyone else had been in trouble when he’d first tried to escape the building. It had been the reason for the rush, after all. Sure, the others would come to help—if they were even alive, or in a position where they could. He doesn’t even know how long he’s been unconscious; they could be beyond any point of rescue.
Don’t think like that, he insists. Don’t. It only leads to madness. We’re going to be fine. Just fine.
He wishes he believed himself.
He wishes Slav believed him, too. “We are doomed,” the scientist declares, fists clutched close to his body. “The odds of being discovered in wreckage like this are abnormally low. Less than five percent!”
“Slav—“
“And factoring in additional environmental scenarios makes our probability of surviving in this reality even worse!” the scientist continues, ignoring Shiro. “A further collapse is imminent in eight-five percent of all realities, or the statistical likelihood of running out of air to breathe is at least seventy-five percent in most realities depending upon chemical components and ventilation—“
“Slav—“ Shiro repeats, gritting his teeth. Considering how spot-on Slav’s last prediction had been, and considering his rambling now actually does sound like a list of legitimate problems, it’s starting to make Shiro more anxious than he’d like to admit.
“—and then of course in some realities we starve while waiting for a rescue, assuming we don’t try to eat each other first—“
Now there’s a grim thought. Shiro’s pretty sure he wouldn’t try it in any reality, though. Slav’s likely to make him sick to his stomach.
“—and then of course there are the realities in which we drown while trapped under this rubble—“
“Drown?” Shiro interrupts with a sputter that turns into a cough. “But there’s no water here!”
“But you can hear it dripping!” Slav exclaims. “Listen!”
Shiro does. Actually, now that it’s pointed out, he can hear a faint dripping from somewhere. Presumably it’s from the water system in the building, and the pipes have burst after the collapse. He doubts it will lead to drowning, but this is Slav, after all. Shiro groans. His head’s starting to hurt worse, and he really doesn’t want to deal with this on top of all his injuries and the potential looming threat of actual death.
Slav is still going, unfortunately. “And where there is water, there is a twelve percent chance I could drown, because I’m still not sure if I can swim in this reality! There are simply too many possibilities!”
Shiro promises himself that if they live through this, he’s going to toss Slav in the pool back on the Castle of Lions, just to finally get the answer to that question. Maybe he’ll even rescue Slav afterwards, assuming he really can’t swim.
“And then there is the possibility that—“
“Slav,” Shiro interrupts, more forcefully. He coughs again as the dust coats his throat, and winces at the way it jars his torso and stomach, but presses on. “You need to stop. Just…just stop. We need to stay focused on the here and now, in this reality, okay?”
And he needs Slav to stop because that anxiousness is still catching. The more Slav rambles in a panic about the many things that can go wrong, the more Shiro thinks about what could be going wrong, too. About the way his friends might be dead or dying and he can’t get to them, about how he might be trapped down here and never see the sky again before he dies, about how he might never feel the Black Lion’s presence or the joy of flight again. How this whole city might go down because of him. He thinks about it and stews over it and that anxiousness grows stronger, and he can feel it playing with his head and dredging up more feelings and bad memories, and he cannot afford to spiral right now. He can’t. Slav has to shut up now.
He does, fortunately, going mostly silent, although he’s still muttering under his breath, too low for Shiro to make out.
But that’s better. At least Shiro can work with that. He tries to breathe deeply again, to calm down again, focus. It’s difficult to manage; besides all the dust, he’s finding he’s having a harder time getting deeper breaths now. But he manages to focus enough to say, “Okay. We might need to wait for a rescue, but let’s see if we can do something to help ourselves. Can you see what’s on top of me?”
“A lot of walls,” Slav supplies. “Or perhaps a ceiling? Or floors? It is difficult to tell. The structural design was so similar. Perhaps a combination?”
“Never mind,” Shiro mutters, sorry he’d asked. He tries to free himself again, using his free left arm to try and push some of the debris off of him. But the angle is awkward, and the attempts only cause stabs of agony to run through his broken fingers. He groans, and stops struggling against the debris after a moment, resting his head wearily against the stone beneath him. Even that little exertion makes him feel dizzy.
“Use your robot arm!” Slav suggests. He’s crouching in front of Shiro now, twisted in an odd crouch that makes him look a little like a question mark.
“Robot arm is kind of stuck at the moment,” Shiro admits. It’s annoying, really, because Slav isn’t wrong. The strength of his Galra arm could probably lever most of this debris off of him, or he could cut himself free if he really needed to if he lit up the prosthetic’s ability. But with it pinned beneath his side and stomach he doesn’t have the necessary leverage to actually use it. He can feel it respond to his commands, and the fingers twitch against his stomach with enough force to make him groan in discomfort at the touch, but he can’t wrench it free. Lighting up would only cause him to burn a hole through his own stomach.
The damn thing would be really useful right now. It just figures he would fall on it the one way that would render it virtually useless.
“See, this is why you should have two robot arms,” Slav says. “Right now it would increase your chances from ‘life threatening’ to ‘severely unlikely!’ The numbers—“
“Slav. Not. Now. “ Shiro adds more of a snarl to his voice than intended, but he can’t help it. He’s in pain, they’re in a bad situation, and he is resolutely not in the mood for another one of Slav’s lectures on ‘robot arms’ and why he ought to be replacing half his body with metal. Not when the arm he does have cost him as much as it did to get, and didn’t come willingly. “I don’t have two prosthetics—“
“In this reality—“
“Yes, in this reality, which is where we are, so let’s figure out how those of us in this reality get out of this, alright?” Shiro snaps. Slav shrinks back a little, tapping the fingers of his topmost arms together nervously, and Shiro sighs. Dial it back a notch. Yelling at him isn’t going to help any. “Never mind. Can you see?”
“My night vision is statistically superior to your human eyes,” Slav informs him promptly. “I can see excellently with the light provided from your armor—which is also an excellent frequency! Blue. My favorite terahertz—“
“Okay, that’s great,” Shiro interrupts again, before he can really get going. “Is there a way for you to free me? Can you shift even a little of this stuff off of me?”
Slav does not look particularly confident about this, but he does stand up and limp over towards Shiro. He tries scrabbling at some of the debris with his topmost, uninjured arms, but that doesn’t budge any of the weight on top of Shiro. Slav grumbles, but crawls up on the pile, presumably to try maneuvering things out of Shiro’s line of vision. He can hear the clink of metal and Slav’s continual grumbling, but what catches his attention more is the extra weight as Slav crawls over the debris pressing down on Shiro.
Normally, Slav’s weight isn’t a problem for Shiro; he’s not light as a feather, certainly, but it’s easy enough to cart him around like an oversized scarf without too much trouble. But now he can feel the added pressure acutely. He gasps in pain as his stomach and chest press harder into his prosthetic from the weight and send sparks of pain through him, and as his broken leg protests in agony.
Slav stops immediately and scrambles off of the debris, limping away as he rambles in alarm. “—decreased chances of survival, I did not mean to injure you more, please do not die in this reality! My chances of survival decrease drastically if you die!”
Shiro grits his teeth through the pain and tries to bite back another groan. He hurts worse than before, now, and his head is swimming. His breaths come shallower, and breathing deeply is a chore. After a moment though, he rasps, “It’s…it’s fine. It’s fine. You couldn’t move anything?”
“No,” Slav mutters, clutching his topmost hands together. “Everything is too interconnected, and I do not have any robot arms to increase my strength. Perhaps if I had a pulley system, or a flotation device, or an anti-gravity field, or—“
“Okay,” Shiro interrupts, “But we don’t have those things. Let’s…let’s try something else. Is there any other way for you to get out of here? I can’t…see the end of this chamber very well. How far does it go?”
“I do not know,” Slav says. “I cannot see the far end, even with my superior vision and your armor.”
Shiro waits for a moment, but Slav doesn’t move. Suppressing another groan, Shiro says, “Okay…can you go look?”
Slav is silent for a moment. Shiro waits, and when nothing happens, he prompts, “Can you look now?” just in case.
“I cannot,” Slav says after a moment, fidgeting a little.
Shiro has a terrible feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach, and he knows what’s coming without even needing any further explanation. But he asks tiredly anyway. “Why?”
“Because there are cracks!” Slav says loudly. “Very large cracks! The floor has been completely destroyed! I can’t cross those!”
Shiro can feel his eye tic coming back. He feels like screaming, but he feels a little too dizzy and short of breath to pull it off at the moment. So he more grumbles than yells, “You have got to be kidding me. We don’t have time for this, Slav! I can’t move, so you have to do it. Just go across the cracks and look. You’ll be fine. I promise.”
“That’s what you said last time!” Slav says. And, well, he’s not wrong there, exactly. Shiro grimaces a little at the guilty feeling he gets from that.
“And I can’t go look, because the increased instability of the quantum fissures created by the cracks will also increase the probability that the structure collapses all around us! If I move too far and cross those cracks this entire pocket of space could be completely destroyed with us still in it!”
Shiro groans at the high-pitched edge of panic in Slav’s voice at the end. It cuts right into his already aching head and hurts so bad he’s actually starting to feel a little nauseated. Is it a migraine? He’s never experienced them before, but it would be just his luck he’d get one now. His skin feels like it’s crawling and there are little bolts of panic slipping down his spine at Slav’s continual anxious gestures and panicked words, and it’s too damn much. Shiro doesn’t have it in him to fight it right now. “Fine,” he gasps. “Fine, okay. Don’t move, just stop talking. No more probabilities.”
Besides, Shiro realizes, Slav might have a point. The place they’re in is clearly fairly unstable. Messing around with it too much trying to find a way to slip out might end up getting them both killed. Maybe Slav’s probabilities are right for once and they’re better off waiting to get rescued. Slav had been right before. He could be right again.
Shiro feels like he’s in the twilight zone when he admits to that, but what the hell. The day has gone so off-kilter at this point anyway he doesn’t know how he could possibly make it any worse by admitting that.
Slav huffs at this, but does go quiet, settling down in an awkward crouch-sit next to Shiro, presumably as safely far away from the cracks as he can get. “Am I allowed to talk at all?” he asks, a little sullenly, after a moment or two of fidgety silence.
“No probabilities,” Shiro repeats tiredly. “Nothing about our situation, unless it’s something that’ll help.”
“Your robot arm—“
“Not the arm either,” Shiro says, with as much venom as he can muster when he feels so breathless. It’s not even a thing he likes to discuss on a good day. It’s definitely not something he feels like discussing with Slav of all people.
Slav looks put out by this and lets out a hrm of disagreement, but doesn’t touch on the topic again. “In another reality with an infinitesimally small probability of existence,” he finally offers, “you are the scientist and I am a paladin.”
“Is that so,” Shiro says with a sigh. This is apparently a conversation that is going to happen one way or another. Probabilities and realities seem to be central to Slav’s whole existence. At least this one is moderately more interesting. Shiro could maybe see himself getting into a more scientific path, although he certainly hopes if he went in that direction Slav’s eccentricities wouldn’t come with it. He has more trouble seeing Slav as any kind of fighter, though. Shiro’s met a few others of his race while in the arena, and Slav is by far the scrawniest of the lot.
“Indeed,” Slav agrees. “It is a very small probability though. Less than zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero two percent. And it requires very many difficult factors to make a reality. Lots of improbable scenarios, lots of unstable adjustments to quantum realities. It is statistically unlikely.”
He falls silent, like he’s waiting for an answer. Shiro’s not really sure what he’s supposed to say to that, so he eventually settles on, “But not impossible.”
“No, not impossible,” Slav agrees. He seems somewhat pleased with Shiro’s answer. “Perhaps, if I was a paladin, I would statistically also be stronger. Enough to move this rubble. Or to face things that are dangerous.”
Like cracks, Shiro grouses in his head, but only to himself. He’s pretty sure Slav is trying, even if he’s doing a terrible job of it. It probably counts for something, but Shiro can’t for the life of him think what.
Slav continues to ramble on about varying alternate realities, and the statistical probabilities of them, and the varying skills they might or might not have in the event of a particular quantum reality anomaly. Shiro tries to pay attention at first, mostly for lack of anything better to do. But he finds it harder to focus the scientist’s rambling the longer it goes on, and eventually his responses become one word answers, and then grunts of acknowledgement, and then silence. His breaths feel like they’re getting shallow but quicker, and the nauseated feeling is starting to get stronger. He hurts everywhere, but he’s starting to wonder if he’s hurt worse than he initially realized.
“Shiro?”
Shiro blinks at the sound of his own name, and looks around blearily in confusion. Slav is crouching over him now, staring at him, and Shiro doesn’t actually remember him moving. It’s strange to hear his own name coming out of Slav’s…beak…mouth…thing. The scientist isn’t prone to using names as a general rule. It sounds strange.
Shiro remembers himself enough to let out a low hum of acknowledgement at his name.
Slav frowns. “I just recited the statistical improbability of being found after the first hour has passed, and you did not tell me to stop reciting probabilities. This is statistically unlikely for you.”
And Shiro blinks a this, because it tells him a few things. First, that presumably a full hour has passed buried in this destroyed building, which…is not good for their chances. But also, that Slav is actually surprisingly self-aware of his actions and Shiro’s reactions, which…Shiro hadn’t really expected. Slav’s always seemed oblivious to how his actions annoy everyone else. But maybe he isn’t as unaware as he appears.
Slav is still frowning at him, topmost hands clutched together anxiously. Shiro grits his teeth and forces himself to mutter, “S’fine. M’fine. S’all fine. Everything’s good. We just gotta wait.”
It is a lot harder to sound reassuring when one’s head is pounding and one’s stomach aches with an increased feeling of nausea. Shiro vaguely wonders if he’s going to throw up, and really hopes he doesn’t. It’s not like he can move. That would just be unpleasant.
He closes his eyes against the faintness and the nausea and wills it to go away. He’s fine. Completely fine. Everything is fine. It has to be, because he has no other control over the situation.
He starts a little despite himself when he feels a pair of hands start to work his helmet off, and a second pair touch at his skin. For a moment he feels relief, because the others must have arrived, but when he blearily cracks his eyes open again it’s still just Slav. It’s a bewildering sensation until he remembers the guy has multiple pairs of hands. Shiro tries to smother his disappointment. He’s not particularly successful.
Slav works surprisingly quickly though, crouching over Shiro and using his many hands, the ones that aren’t injured, independently of each other. The topmost pair work the helmet free while a third supports Shiro’s head carefully, and lowers it back down to the ground once the helm is gone. A fourth feels carefully at Shiro’s forehead, and a fifth is pressed to his neck, just under his jawline.
Shiro blinks in confusion. “What—“ he begins.
“Shush!” Slav says, and it startles Shiro so much he actually shuts up. “I am counting. Human health is dependent upon a variety of factors and I must calculate all of them.”
And Shiro has absolutely no idea what to say to that. So he doesn’t bother to say anything at all, and instead lets his eyes slip closed again.
He’s not sure how long it lasts. He can hear Slav muttering about numbers and probabilities, and still feel some of Slav’s hands against his neck and forehead, but he’s gotten to the point where he doesn’t even care anymore. He just aches and really wants to not be here anymore. But eventually Slav’s voice gets louder and more direct, and Shiro can feel another hand patting the side of his face, and he wearily slides his eyes open again.
“I have collected the symptoms,” Slav tells him importantly. “Lack of responsiveness and difficulty concentrating, colder body temperatures than is statistically normal for your race, paler skin than usual—I think, it is much more difficult to differentiate terahertz in this environment with primarily blue lighting, but I am reasonably sure!—sweat, rapid pulse, and more rapid breathing.” Slav withdraws his hands, and folds the working ones back into his special sleeves. “Based on these symptoms and cross-referencing with your indexes and entries in the Castle’s database, the most statistically likely probability is blood loss.”
Shiro blinks. Blood loss? That doesn’t make sense, does it? He’d have felt something by now for sure, wouldn’t he? Although…he has felt a bit faint. But did nausea accompany blood loss? He’s not sure.
“Blood loss is not a good diagnosis for our situation,” Slav adds, now looking nervous again as he wrings his topmost hands. “Depending on the location and the severity, your probability for survival will vary significantly. Do you perhaps have an idea of where the bleed is?”
Of course he doesn’t. Most of his body is buried in rubble; he can’t see any of it, and neither can Slav. Shiro groans as his whole body throbs with pain again, and tries to pinpoint the problem area. It could maybe be his leg. It feels like it’s broken, but there could be a laceration, too. It’s not his head; the gash is too superficial for that. His stomach roils with another wave of nausea, and he gasps as it leaves him breathless, and…
…oh. Oh.
Very tentatively, he twitches his metal fingers, still pinned beneath him near his stomach. Even the lightest of movements cause excruciating agony through his abdomen, and he breathes in sharply at the pain. Before it was just discomfort, but in the time that’s passed it’s gotten worse. Before he thought it was just his metal fingers jamming uncomfortably into his stomach, but if Slav’s diagnosis is true…
Damn it. He’s probably bleeding internally.
Slav is still hovering anxiously, and Shiro musters up enough strength to mutter, “Stomach,” in answer to his question. This seems to alarm Slav, but Shiro can’t bring himself to pay attention anymore.
Because he’s not dying like this. If he’s bleeding internally he’s got a time limit, now. And he refuses to die buried in a hole under tons of Galra rubble, away from the sky and the stars and his friends and his Lion. He grits his teeth and uses the last of his flagging strength to try and lever his left hand against one of the pieces of debris and push, with everything he has.
He feels a stab of agony rush through him at the efforts, and the pain settles in his stomach worse than before. He gasps, and he might have screamed; he can’t really remember. He keeps trying even so, pushing more desperation and panic into his movements. He needs to get out. He needs to get out. He needs to get out. He’s not dying like this. Not like this.
To his surprise Slav actually intercedes, grabbing Shiro’s arm in two of his own and pulling it away. His other hands push against Shiro’s head and shoulders to force him to be still. “Stop moving!” the scientist half shrieks. “Are you trying to decrease your probability of surviving? You will injure yourself even further if you struggle and lower your chances of survival by an extremely high percentage! Especially if you are bleeding from an abdominal injury!”
For a moment Shiro tries to fight against Slav anyway. He can’t die down here like this and he doesn’t like being held down at all. It makes him want to fight to free himself and he struggles against Slav’s many hands. But he can tell he’s too weak from his injuries when he can’t even dislodge Slav’s relatively insignificant weight. And that’s when he realizes that Slav is probably right, and maybe it’s not so good an idea for him to keep moving and jarring his injuries when he’s not in any position to try and tend to them.
Slav being right again. That’s going around a lot today. It feels strange.
He settles, going as still as possible. Slav releases him once he seems confident that Shiro won’t try to break himself free again, but instead of sitting back on his haunches like before, he starts to pace, limping back and forth anxiously.
“Your chances of survival are statistically improbable based on our current position in this reality,” Slav mutters, half to himself, half to Shiro. Shiro blinks at him, and wearily watches the scientist pace, unable to bring himself to even respond.
“There is only so much time,” the scientist mutters to himself. “Only so much, yes…calculating the strength of the bleed by measuring the presentation of symptoms against the time of the injury…assuming it continues at this rate…hmm, not very strong chances, but factoring in other probabilities…not a quintent, certainly…perhaps a few vargas? But only if the timing is exactly right…and the odds when factoring in the mass and material quantities for a ten-story building with the dimensions on the x and y axes taking up so much space…ah, the numbers are not very good, not very good at all! I must create some sort of alternate probability in this reality by introducing an unknown factor to increase the likelihood of a successful rescue. But there are not enough variables to work with, other…than…”
Slav pauses, and stares at Shiro for a moment. Shiro stares wearily back, unclear exactly where that little rant is heading. If he’s expecting Shiro to pull a rescue out of nowhere, he’s out of luck. Shiro’s needing a rescue pretty badly himself, at the moment.
He wishes one of the paladins would show up. Any of them. He wishes one of the Lions would come, but he’s not sure Black could fit in the tight city space above, and the others aren’t connected to him. He wishes he wasn’t going to die down here, but his odds are looking pretty bleak at this point.
That’s one thing he and Slav agree on at least.
But Slav keeps pacing, and glancing down at the darkness just outside the glow of Shiro’s armor, farther down in the pocket of space they’re trapped in. And after a moment he crouches in front of Shiro and says, “I think I…may have a way to increase your survival probability. By perhaps twenty-five percent. I hope. But you should remain still and not strain yourself further, to increase your chances as well.”
Shiro frowns at at that. That sounds an awful lot like an instruction, which is weird, because it would imply Slav is going somewhere…right? Shiro doesn’t know. His head hurts so badly by now, and his stomach and leg are throbbing in agony. It’s hard to tell. But he nods wearily in response. He’ll stay still; he hasn’t got much of a choice left at this point, anyway.
“Excellent. Perhaps we can raise your chances from ‘totally doomed’ to ‘mostly doomed,’ “ Slav says. He raises from his crouch and goes back to pacing, edging a little further towards the darkness every time. And Shiro is confused, because surely he’s imagining this. Slav wouldn’t move towards the cracks that Shiro knows are there. He wouldn’t even move towards cracks when his own life was on the line when the building was first collapsing. There’s no way—
But Slav wrings his topmost hands together one last time, and then with a shrill scream, he turns and jumps into the darkness at the edge of the armor’s reach.
And Shiro is stunned, because…because he can’t see it, but…did Slav just jump the cracks? But no. Impossible. There’s no way it could happen. He’s imagining things. He’s lost his damn mind on top of everything else.
He can’t see Slav now, in the darkness, but he can still hear him. Slav is muttering to himself about probabilities and realities, and his voice sounds more distressed than usual. He can hear the soft shuffle and scrape of feet on metal and stone as the scientist limps around. Then there’s a scratching noise, and a low thud, and the world around Shiro seems to rumble ominously. He feels more dust and dirt rain down on his face and shoulders, and coughs in response, groaning softly when it jars his stomach painfully.
“That was me!” Slav calls from the darkness. “I knew there was a possibility that there would be a weakness in the structural integrity of this pocket of space. At least it is only a small one!”
Shiro can only grunt in response.
“I believe I may have found a point of exit,” Slav continues from the dark. “There is an eighty percent chance it will lead nowhere, of course, and in some realities I might even become trapped in the debris and die in the shifting material or starve to death or never be discovered or—“ He cuts himself off with a yelp, and Shiro can hear heavy, panicked breathing. But then Slav says with obvious forced positivity, “But in this reality I hope to find an exit to the surface, and there is at least some probability that it can occur. And if I can reach the surface alive, then statistically, my chances of finding another paladin and indicating your location are very probable! So I will go now and attempt it. Remember to not move to increase your chances of survival!”
Shiro blinks. “Wh…what? Slav, wait—“
But it’s too late. There’s another frightened yell and scurrying noise, and the sound of several stones being dislodged, and a soft muttering. Then the noises fade, until Shiro is only left with silence.
Silence, in the dark, with only his own head and his own injuries for company.
Shiro groans, and does what he can to stay conscious, and aware. It doesn’t go as well as he’d like. Without anyone speaking to him it’s even harder to stay focused, and his brain will start playing tricks on him, making him see things that aren’t there, dredging up memories he’d rather leave forgotten. He can feel the pressure of that whole building, the tons of rock and metal, pressing down on him and trapping him and cutting him off from anything that was ever important to him, and it’s so heavy on his body and mind both and he can’t breathe. He aches everywhere and he feels panic because he can’t go out like this, not down here, not like this. He tries to escape again, and struggles to remember to stay still. Someone had told him to. That it was important.
Slav. Right. Slav had said that.
Had Slav ever really been here? It doesn’t make sense that he’d been here. Slav is the last one that would ever participate in a mission like this. Or take risks like…like crossing cracks, or crawling through debris to escape. Slav doesn’t do things like that. But he’s not here now. Which means it’s more likely he was never here.
He must have hallucinated all of it, right? That’s the only thing that makes sense. But if he’s hallucinating, that means he must be in more trouble than he thought.
He’s not sure how long he’s there, in the dark, with his own mind playing tricks on him. He almost misses the alternate realities chatter, even if it’s something his own head made up to distract him. At least it kept him grounded. He doesn’t like being alone with the nastier parts of his head. Nothing good happens then.
He’s not sure how long he’s there, but he knows eventually his eyes flutter closed, and he struggles with staying awake. He’s so tired. So dizzy. Feels so sick. There’s so much pain in him everywhere. So much panic. Maybe if he sleeps it will go away. All of it.
But just when he’s really starting to slide under, he feels it. Rumbling. Feels it reverberating up through the ground beneath him in his cheek and through his metal arm. Groans at the way it jostles his stomach and his leg. It feels ominous, and he thinks maybe this is it—this is the moment when it all shifts and he’s crushed. But at least that will be faster then how he’s currently dying.
Except then he feels cool air against his face, just a trickle, but enough to know something has changed. And the distant darkness in the little chamber grows slightly less dark, and then there’s movement a something squeezes through the cracks in the rubble, and…
“Shiro!” he hears, and he blinks as a blur of white and glowing blue and green bolts towards him. Pidge, he realizes distantly.
“Guys, I’ve got him in here,” he hears Pidge saying into the comms, even as she crouches down next to him. “He’s not looking good—no, definitely blood loss like Slav said—yes, definitely get a pod prepped. I’ll stay with him, just keep digging and be careful, it’s pretty unstable in here.” She presses a hand to the side of Shiro’s face, and he starts at the touch. Is this another thing his mind is conjuring up? It feels so real.
“Hang on, Shiro,” Pidge says. She sounds urgent. “Just hang on a little longer and we’ll get you out of here, promise. Everyone’s working on it now.”
Everything passes in a blur after that. Shiro is aware of continual rumblings, and eventually groans in surprise when half the ceiling disappears above him, clenched in the Yellow Lion’s jaws and letting in night air and starlight. He catches glimpses of the Yellow and Blue Lions carefully digging away the rubble to let him out while Pidge keeps talking to him, keeping him conscious. The Blue Lion carefully dislodges some of the debris keeping Shiro pinned, and he groans in pain as it’s moved, but at the same time not having that weight on him is a relief. Hunk appears in the wreckage to help lift Shiro, and Keith appears on his other side. They carry him to the Red Lion, jaw hatch already open and waiting, the fastest transport back to help. He has flashes of memory from the trip, curled up behind the Red Lion’s pilot seat with his head in Hunk’s lap as he and Keith encourage Shiro to stay awake just a little longer. Allura meets them in the Red Lion’s bay and carries Shiro to the infirmary, where Coran is waiting, and they help him into one of the cryo-pods.
He remembers all of these things in vague, brief flashes. But then the induced sleep of the cryo-pod hits him, and he doesn’t remember much of anything after that.
Shiro’s not sure how long he’s in the cryo-pod. All he knows is he doesn’t learn anything useful from it this time. It doesn’t unlock any useful new memories, just rehashes muddled versions of memories he’s already rediscovered. None of them are pleasant, and he’s relieved when he finally wakes in the pod and stumbles out into the waiting arms of his equally relieved looking friends.
“Don’t ever do that to us again,” Lance says insistently, once Shiro is dressed in his casual outfit again and sitting at the dining table, surrounded by the team as Hunk serves him lunch. “You scared us half to death.”
Keith nods in agreement, and Pidge adds, “Yeah, the disappearing off the grid thing is getting a little old, Shiro. You need to give it a rest.”
“Sorry,” Shiro says, and he really does mean it. He hadn’t intended to worry anybody, but he also hadn’t actually planned on getting buried by a collapsing building, either. “Fill me in on what happened?”
They do while he eats. The teams had been in trouble at first—everyone had been discovered and had been trying to hold their positions and complete their objectives, but it had been difficult without backup. Shiro and Slav shutting down the Galra particle barriers and anti-spacecraft defenses had been a game-changer, though, letting Allura and Coran swoop in to provide support to Pidge and Lance as they escorted prisoners and civilians out of Galra confinement. That in turn had given Lance a chance to break off, get his Lion, and blast in to provide Hunk and Keith with support, which let them destroy Galra armaments and turn the tide of the battle. After that, it had just been a matter of getting the rest of the Lions and cleaning up the remaining Galra ground and air forces.
“So we won,” Pidge finishes summing up, “but we lost connection with you shortly after the defenses went down, and nobody could raise you on the communications.”
“I couldn’t get a bead on your location either, even using the Castle’s tracing systems,” Allura adds. “We think something about the rubble interfered with the sensors in the suit, but we didn’t know what had caused the problem at the time.”
“Not that it was hard to figure out what happened once we checked out your last location,” Keith adds, scowling. “The entire building being gone was a pretty big clue.”
“We weren’t even sure where to look in all the rubble,” Hunk adds, frowning. “We were looking, but there was…there was a lot of collapsed building to sift through, and all the metal and stone interfered with our sensors. Even the Yellow Lion had trouble with it, and he’s built for working with stone. If Slav hadn’t come scrambling out of one section I’m not sure we would have known where to focus our efforts, but—“
“Hold up,” Shiro says, raising his hand in a ‘halt’ motion. “Slav? Slav’s the reason you found me in time?”
“Sure,” Lance says. “He was with you, remember?”
“I knew I escorted him into the building,” Shiro says. “I didn’t think…” He pinches the bridge of his nose with his natural hand, groaning internally as he cuts himself off before he can confuse anyone. Shit, he’d thought he’d been hallucinating Slav when he’d been trapped, not that any of that had been real. Though, in retrospect, if his brain was going to play tricks on him like that, he’s not sure why it would pick Slav. Maybe to torture him, but if he’d wanted comfort or grounding he would have picked literally anyone else.
Still, it doesn’t make sense. If Slav really had been there, why would he have left? “But there were cracks,” he says weakly, when everyone gives him bemused stares. “And there was dripping water. Dripping water. He can’t stand it because he might drown. In like, twelve percent of realities. And he can’t remember if he can swim? There’s no way he would have left.”
“It’s weird, but he really did do it,” Hunk says. “You know how he can squeeze through a lot of tight spaces? He just did that and crawled his way all the way to the surface. And because he remembers stuff really well he was able to calculate exactly where you were based on his position. And then he kept insisting we had to act right away because your numbers were really, really bad.”
“Which they were,” Pidge adds. “He wasn’t wrong about that. A couple more vargas and we’d have definitely been too late. We might not have found you in time without his input.”
“But we were able to get to you in time and rush you back to a pod,” Keith finishes.
And Shiro is just stunned because, incredibly, he owes his life to Slav of all people. And he’s really not sure how to take that.
“Where is Slav?” he asks finally, as he finishes off his late lunch. He hasn’t seen the scientist since they parted ways in the rubble, now that he thinks about it.
“He’s been messing around all over the Castle for the past day,” Hunk supplies. “It’s driving everybody a little crazy, actually. He rearranged half the storerooms and reconfigured half of the Castle’s systems. Coran’s still putting it right.”
“He tried to paint my armor blue,” Keith mutters sullenly. “And my jacket. And my shoes. He tried with Red too, but she threw her particle barrier up.” Lance snickers.
“He tried to adjust your cryopod settings while you were getting healed, too,” Pidge adds. “Coran had to chase him off, and we’ve just kind of had somebody guarding the console until you woke up.”
“Basically he’s been even worse than usual since we dug you out of that building,” Hunk concludes. “I think right now he’s in one of the storerooms again.”
“I’m going to go talk to him,” Shiro decides, pushing to his feet. Nobody argues.
He does, in fact, find Slav in one of the storerooms. What had been a neatly packed and organized room is now a system of chaos. Everything appears to be organized by color, and things are stacked and arranged in odd ways that make no sense to Shiro. Some fabrics that look like bed coverings or old clothes are carefully folded, wrinkled, and arranged over boxes, shelves, and furniture in what Shiro can only assume are very specific ways. Slav himself is at the heart of the chaos, carefully folding three scarves into a very specific and intricate pattern with a great deal of concentration.
Shiro decides to not interrupt and announce his presence until Slav is actually completed. Interrupting Slav in the middle of one of his arrangements generally leads to him needing to do it again, with more intensity than the first time. He waits until Slav backs away from the knot of scarves and studies it intently before knocking on the doorframe lightly. “Hey.”
Slav starts and whips around, but seems pleased when he sees Shiro. “Ah! You are awake! Excellent. I estimated an eight-five percent chance of full recovery even with the Altean using the wrong input on their cryogenic healing chambers.” He looks momentarily irritated by this. “They would not listen to my perfectly reasonable numbers!”
Shiro winces. “Yeah, Slav, I appreciate the concern, but let’s not mess with the cryopod settings. Coran knows them best.”
Slav scowls at this, and starts roaming around the storeroom again, presumably looking for something else to rearrange.
Shiro cuts in before he can get too distracted. “Hey. Slav. I, ah…” He sighs, and bites the bullet. “I owe you an apology.”
Slav pauses, and turns to regard him in confusion. “A what?” he repeats.
“An apology,” Shiro repeats, because it sounds like Slav is legitimately confused over it, and not dragging it out on purpose. “You gave me a legitimate warning about the likelihood of danger by shutting down those defenses, and I didn’t listen. Because of that, I almost got the both of us killed. And that’s not acceptable when it was my job to escort you safely through that mission. So I’m sorry that I didn’t listen.”
Slav looks bewildered.
“And I also owe you a thank you,” Shiro adds. Because if he’s going to do this he may as well do the damn thing properly. “The only reason the team got to me in time was because of your help. I know it wasn’t easy to actually go get help, though. I know how you feel about certain things, and it probably really put you out of your comfort zone. But you did it anyway, and I appreciate that. So thanks.”
Slav still looks bewildered. It occurs to Shiro rather suddenly that the scientist doesn’t seem to know how to take either the apology or the thank you, and he wonders if Slav has ever actually gotten a genuine form of either before. His inventions have been partly responsible for protecting the Blades of Marmora and saving the universe, but he was coerced into both each time, and both actions were viewed as a necessity. He wonders if anyone has ever bothered to acknowledge him for it.
Slav dithers awkwardly, and then after a moment waves one of his hands in a dismissive gesture, and turns back to the piles of stored goods. Shiro feels mildly irritated at his words being so easily disregarded, but bites it back. He’s pretty sure Slav doesn’t mean anything by it.
There is one more important thing to address, though. “Can you answer a question, and then I’ll let you get back to…whatever you’re doing?”
“Counter-acting temporal anomalies created by the space time fissures created from when I crossed the cracks,” Slav answers promptly. “There is a very high chance that a mother’s back may have been broken in a new reality, but I am running the numbers and attempting to alter the probability of that reality coming into fruition. It is very difficult work with a high number of variables. But I am capable of answering questions in many realities. I have many answers.”
Shiro can only conclude all of this means ‘yes.’
But that ramble is sort of a lead in to his own question, and he rolls with it. “Yeah. About the cracks. I know that’s a big risk for you, and…it sounds like you’ve been going into overdrive for the past day trying to fix it. So if it’s that important to you, why did you even take that risk?”
Slav goes still in the middle of searching for his next temporal anomaly fixer, and turns to stare at Shiro like he’s lost his head. “It was important,” he says, in his condescending, I-am-a-genius-and-obviously-I-am-right voice, as if this was obvious.
Shiro raises an eyebrow at that. “Important enough to take risks? You hate them.”
“It was a very big risk,” Slav agrees. “There was an eighty percent chance of failure ending in a horrific death for me, and that was not even taking into account the fissures created by the cracks!”
His topmost hands gesture wildly, but then clutch into fists close to his chest. “But if I did not introduce an alternative variable, the probability of you dying in this reality was one hundred percent. And even if you had approximately a fifteen percent chance of surviving in other realities, you are in this reality, and that was not an acceptable probability!”
And Shiro is stunned by the answer. Because it’s roundabout and buried in Slav’s eccentricities, but ultimately Slav had just admitted that he didn’t want Shiro to die, and he felt strongly enough about it to fight his own fears and compulsions to try and save him. And that’s crazy, because Shiro has never seen anything matter more to Slav than his probabilities and realities. He didn’t even care about saving the universe. But he did want to save Shiro.
And coming from Slav, that…actually means quite a lot. Maybe he’s not the kind of person to think big picture or want to save the world. But maybe those he considers close to him still matter. Enough to take massive personal risks to protect them.
And Shiro can kind of relate to that, in a way. So maybe Slav’s not so bad, after all.
“Well,” Shiro finally manages to answer, “as the me still alive in this reality, thanks.”
Slav makes another dismissive gesture. When Shiro turns to leave and let him go about his business, though, Slav screeches, “Wait!”
Shiro freezes.
“Those boxes,” Slav commands, gesturing to a number of items on a high shelf. “Get them with your robot arm! I am not strong enough to lift them down. They are too asymmetrical. One needs to be moved over there—“ he gestures to a location across the room, “—and I must go through the contents of the second to nullify the temporal anomalies—“
Shiro sighs as Slav continues to ramble. But the guy had driven himself into overdrive for Shiro’s sake. The least Shiro can do is help him calm down a little after the fact. He lifts the boxes down with only mild irritation as Slav goes on, and places them where instructed without complaint. At least he doesn’t want to wring Slav’s neck anymore.
“No! Not there! More to the right, that’s much too left, it’s not symmetrical enough!”
Shiro grits his teeth.
Well. Mostly.