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It all started when Pidge’s older brother, Matt, dropped out of school to join a cult. Pidge had to drop all of her summer plans – including their shared lease and her internship with Altea BioMed – to go with her family and convince her brother to stop being a fucking idiot and come back home. That meant all of the work she was supposed to be doing got dumped on the one intern left in the office: Lance. Who wasn’t here to survey customers about their prostheses. He was here to shadow R&D and learn how to engineer prostheses. But nope. Pidge had to leave and saddle him with this shit.
Or, maybe, it all started on a dusty road in the Middle East where an IED was waiting under an innocuous pillow of earth for an armored vehicle full of American soldiers. Little did it know that, in the armored vehicle, a young man, handsome when he smiled, was telling his comrades about the time his younger step-brother tried to jump the fire hydrant in front of their house with his new mountain bike. Shiro doesn’t remember much after the front tire collided with his forehead, but he did wake up in the hospital later that day with a very cool scar on his forehead. Ever since, the hair over that scar has grown in white.
Or maybe, it starts with a robotics challenge for high school students in the Miami area. First prize was a $10,000 college scholarship and that, Lance thought, was it. That was his ticket into college. So he went to work: building a circuit board from the old desktop his uncle was “just going to throw away, anyway”, learning how to carve finger tips from vulcanized rubber scraped off of the old tires from his grandfather’s auto shop, using fishing line his cousins had “accidentally” left at his house to simulate tendons in the hand. His mom would bring him dinner in the garage and throw a blanket over him when he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore. His dad would come home from a late night at the restaurant and listen to Lance throw out idea after idea after idea, verbally pulling apart the puzzle knot he had caught himself in, and giving the robotic hand a high-five before ushering himself and his son to bed. In the end, Lance’s robotic hand wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it worked. His family celebrated at the restaurant after the event, cheering and yelling and clapping Lance on the back. His trophy was given its own spot of honor while everyone took pictures with the business card for Garrison University’s School of Engineering’s Academic Director.
Or maybe it began in a hospital bed surrounded by VA doctors. They were explaining the situation to Shiro – his comrades' unfortunate fates, the number of days he had been kept in a medical coma, the endless list of surgeries they did to keep him alive – but the world was a slurry of color and noise. Painkillers and a concussion made the room feel tipped left of center. Doctors spoke furrier gibberish than they normally do. Nurses ran at less than one thousandth of their regular speed. Only two words managed to seep through Shiro’s fog shell: “amputation” and “home.” The implications didn’t sink in until a week later, when the fog had lifted enough for him to recognize the tingling sensation in his right hand wasn’t real and that, as far as the Army was concerned, he was no longer a good fit for them. He thought -- he was told -- that this was his new life, that the difference in weight and the difference in his mind was something he just had to get used to. This limp, this awkward sway and hunch in his shoulders, this was him now. He didn’t question it until he was hugging Keith in the airport that the world finally righted itself and he knew that it didn't. That didn't have to be his life.
Really, it all began one warm summer night within earshot of a beach party. It had been Lance’s first teenager party, hosted by his cousins and more wild and exciting than he could have ever hoped. Shiro had been invited by the cute blond girl who worked reception at the hotel his family was staying at. It was their last night in Miami, his last weekend of freedom, before he went to basic. The moon and stars blessed the pair of young lovers with a silver hue that erased their scars and masked their birthmarks. Hands traced wildly over muscles and skin. Hips moved fervently and haphazardly while messy lips careened into each other and teeth clashed against teeth. Lance moaned and pawed and sought the rush of this new feeling. Shiro pressed forward and tried to remember every last inch of this stranger with the golden smile. At the end of the night, Lance pulled him into the sea to rinse the sand off their bodies with the gently lapping waves. Lance asked for Shiro’s Facebook. Shiro explained that he was joining the Army soon and wouldn’t be able to talk to him. Lance rolled his eyes and said, “A likely story.”
They didn’t remember who the other person was that night. So, for them, this story starts with an acceptance letter. A job offer. An advertisement to a physical therapist’s office. A clinical trial that brought Lance and Shiro into the same room together long enough for Lance to ask, “So what’s up with your hair?”