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He isn’t really sure how he missed what was happening. Everything was so in tune: Keith and Pidge back to back, one kicking while the other hit; Lance and Hunk barking orders to each other between every blast and gunshot. All five paladins working in sync to fight off the Galra. And then-
A bomb, he thinks. Maybe. An explosion of some sort nonetheless. It blows them all back; Bayard’s flung out of their hands and pieces of metal sentries flying through the room.
It takes Shiro a moment to collect himself from his place on the ground, and another to take in the destruction. The figures of the Galra sentries float through his vision alongside a fire burning somewhere to his right. There isn’t many left, but enough to still be a threat to a potentially injured team. His head swims, but he knows that there’s no time to waste being unconscious, especially now.
“Uh guys?” Lance’s voice breaks through his helmet. “What was that?”
“A distraction. Is everyone okay?” Keith responds, the voices floating through Shiro’s head.
He struggles to get up, taking a deep breath while on his knees. His voice cracks when he directs the team,
“Everyone do a head count, and keep a look out for any more surprise attacks.”
There are a number of affirmative grunts, then the audio cuts out. Shiro takes a minute to survey the mess, trying to find each of the other paladins. When his count gets up to three, the communication cuts through again.
“I’ve got Lance with me and Hunk is fine.” Keith tells him. “Where’s Pidge?”
He glances across the room again and finds her body crumpled on the floor, her Bayard still resting in her hand, but no signs of her moving. He rushes to her, a limp in his left leg that he makes a mental note of getting fixed if they make it out of here alive.
“I’ve got Pidge; someone cover me. I think she’s injured.”
He stops at her arm, picking up her Bayard in case she wakes, panics, and tries to electrocute the closest thing with a pulse.
Shiro kneels down to remove her helmet.
“Pidge? Hey, you alright?” He shakes her shoulder lightly, hoping for the best. She flinches just slightly at his voice and starts to groan.
“Pidge, c’mon, get up” He urges. They can’t afford to have a teammate down.
She whines when he grabs her again, and he looks down to inspect her. Maybe she’s more injured than he thought. Slowly her eyes open, and she mutters a sharp ouch. Shiro tries to stop her from moving too quickly, but Pidge fights against him, trying to place a hand beneath her for support. It’s then that he sees the damage done to her. His heart races as he looks her over another time.
“Oh no. No no nononono.” Shiro whispers to himself. Blood covers the floor beneath her, visibly seeping through her armor. Behind him, something burns and casts an orange glow across them. Shrapnel litters the ground and he thinks maybe a piece caught her just right to puncture through her armor.
“Where are you hurt? Do you think it can be removed? Maybe cauterized?” He’s speaking a mile a minute, panic starting to gather in his lungs.
Pidge coughs once, her eyes trying to focus on his.
“The Galra-with the sword.” Her breathing is shallow and labored. “Keith has him.”
He glances over his shoulder to see Keith having the upper hand in a heated battle with one of the Galra commanders.
“How? What happened? Is it bad?” Of course it’s bad, he knows, but tries to ignore his gut feeling.
“He just came and- I don’t know. There was the explosion and then he attacked. It’s nothing.” He doesn’t believe her for a second.
Shiro tries to pick her up, get her out of here as quickly as he can but she stops him, placing a hand against his chest. He looks down at her, confused, one arm looped behind her back, the other ready to grab her legs.
“Pidge, we’ve got to get you back to castle.” He urges her. He’s not losing her, not losing her, not losi-
“No, keep me here. I’m fine.”
Shiro ignores her while gathering her helmet. He readjusts Pidge to carry her out of the chaotic room, blood smearing down his armor. He doesn’t know how he makes it out safely without someone trying to attack them but he decides not to question his luck and continues further, until Pidge puts her hand on his chest and tells him,
“No, no. If I die, I die here.” Shiro freezes, his blood running ice cold through his body. In all his panic, he hadn’t thought of her actually dying at all. This had never happened before, how else was he supposed to think? They had run missions exactly like this hundreds of times, and compared to the other four paladins, Pidge was always the one to return to the Castle without a single scratch or cut on her.
Why now, why this time, when they were so close to being done. A few more months-weeks even, if they were successful enough- and Zarkon would be done for. They could go home. And now she was laying in his arms, a wide gash across her abdomen, dying on him.
“Pidge you’re not going to die. I’m not letting you.” He tells himself, more than he tells her. Still, he crouches down, with her still clinging to him. He sits against the corner of a wall, placing her helmet to the side of them. He’s weak against her wishes, and she knows it.
“Shiro, don’t. There’s no way we can get to a pod before my body loses more blood. We’ve had a good run but this isn’t fixable.” She’s set on him, steady and stubborn, as if they were having an argument at the dinner table. Shiro knows there’s no use trying to fight her. She’ll go down in a battle whether he likes it or not.
“Okay.” He says. He readjusts her against his chest “Okay. Tell me if I’m hurting you.”
She nods once and leans her head into him.
“Listen, Shiro, do me a favor, get me my helmet.”
He leans over to it, and watches as she clutches onto it, holding it close to her chest.
“Promise me,” She starts. “Promise me that you’ll stay with them. They need you more than you need me.”
He shakes his head, staying silent. He can hear Keith asking him where he went from inside his own helmet, but his voice feels distant and Shiro tunes him out.
“And when you find Matt, tell him I’m sorry that I stole Pokémon Sun from him, and that Troy Bolton is cool.”
Shiro huffs out a laugh and tells her they’ll find Matt, he promises.
“Tell Allura I love her, and Coran is the best crazy uncle ever.” She’s crying now and Shiro pulls her closer. “And Lance needs to realize that Keith loves him. We all love him so much.”
Shiro doesn’t understand why she’s telling him these things, because he knows them. She’s said them over and over at dinner and during missions and when they would just sit around and relax. After four years together, the paladins were no strangers to blatant affection.
“-idge! Pidge, what’s going on? Where are you guys?” Keith sounds through again, and Shiro realizes that she’s not just telling him, but the other three as well. He adjusts her helmet closer to her mouth so their connections are stronger.
“I’m so glad Hunk got us a way to watch Star Wars, seriously, that was the best night of my life.”
“Katie, you’re breaking my heart.” He tells her, half jokingly because she always hated the prequels, half out of honesty because he can feel her slowly going. He doesn’t know where, because he never believed in god but he knows that he doesn’t have much time left with her. She’ll be gone in just a few minutes.
She cracks him a smile and reaches one hand up to touch his face. He can’t handle this, can’t fucking handle her dying like this; this wasn’t supposed to happen now, wasn’t supposed to happen ever. He loves her too much, wants her too much to let her go. He touches her back, pushing away her hair. She had been trying to grow it out, and he wraps a finger around a shoulder length piece.
“Katie,” Her lids start to lower, and he tells her louder, “Katie, you aren’t leaving me now. You aren’t dying on me.”
“You never call me that. I always loved it when you did.”
He starts to cry, can feel the wetness running down his face, but he can’t make himself take his eyes off her to wipe them away. He wants tell her that he loves her and he wants to marry her someday and they can buy a house and a dog when they go back home, if only she stays alive, but he knows it’s dumb and futile. Why is saying goodbye so hard.
“There’s this poppy field at my house that me and Matt used to pick from for my mom.” Her voice is quieter now, and she struggles to take a full breath. “I just wanted to see her again. Bring me some poppies when you visit.”
He doesn’t understand her exactly, but he nods his head anyway. He brings her even closer, pressing his forehead against hers and tells her the only thing he has left,
“I love you Katie, I love you so much, I love you, I love you, I love you.” He repeats it over and over even after her breathing stops and her hand falls from on top of her helmet, making it roll to the floor, a red handprint staining it. He repeats it and repeats it until finally,
He leans down carefully and kisses her on the mouth. He can’t take it, can’t take her dying on him like this. He can feel the hot tears running down his cheeks as he kisses her again and again, hoping that this is just some bad fairytale nightmare. If he kisses her enough, she’ll wake up. It never works.
From around the corner, Shiro can hear the voices of the others, calling out to him in panicked shouts. A hand grabs his shoulder, and asks him what happened. He can’t tell who it is really, maybe Lance or even Keith, but it doesn’t matter to him anymore. The questions get louder and more frantic the longer he ignores them. Eventually someone removes Pidge from his legs, and his world lurches forward, back into reality.
“Shiro? Shiro, are you alright?” Keith is crouched in front of him, blood and dirt smeared across his face.
He disregards Keith’s concern, instead slowly standing up and pushing himself past the other three paladins. His hands grab at something, but the motion is slowly registered in his mind. He doesn’t quite know what it is, but he clutches onto it desperately anyway.
“Where are you going? You need to get to a pod! Shiro!” Keith’s voice grows distant as he makes his way through the halls of the Galra base, out to his lion.
He doesn’t remember getting into the cockpit, or launching the black lion millions of miles away from the base or when he thrashed the room. When he comes to his senses, he’s sitting in a pile of emergency blankets and first aid kits, shaking and crying, Katie’s green helmet resting in his lap.
~
When he returns, the castle is in an uproar, with all fingers pointing to him. He’s first greeted with a clearly distressed Keith in his hangar. Before Shiro can speak, Keith lifts a had to stop him,
“Listen, I don’t know what you did, but we have a dead paladin and a very pissed off Lance. Be prepared to fix it.”
Shiro stops, stunned.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry she’s gone.” Shiro tries to apologize over and over to Keith, but the words don’t seem to some out right. Keith gives him a side glance, and Shiro notices the redness of his eyes, the tear streaks stained down his face.
“Yeah well, tell that to the others.”
Shiro says nothing but slowly reaches out and gives the green helmet to Keith. He knows that it doesn’t make anything better, but Keith accepts it and maybe they’re one step closer to being mended.
-
“Why didn’t you save her?” Lance is fuming, hands clenched tight into fists. Shiro is ready for whatever blow comes his way. “You had her, and you let her die!”
“I couldn’t, okay? She wouldn’t let me, and I wasn’t going to let her suffer while I tried to get her back here.”
Lance’s eyes narrow before his fist lands straight against Shiro’s jaw. He stumbles back, ready for another hit. It never comes.
“You had the most important person on this team with you and you let her die.” Lance repeats, jabbing a finger into Shiro’s chest. “You think you’re so fucking special because you’re in love with her, but I just lost part of my family. Keith lost part of his family, and so did Hunk and Allura and Coran because of what you chose to do. You didn’t even think of us.”
With one last look, Lance spins around and walks out of the foyer.
“No one talk to me unless the Galra come back.” His last words fade out into the hallway. No one objects.
Within minutes, Shiro is alone in the dark foyer, left to think about what he’s done.
-
Later in the evening, Shiro helps decorate an elaborate casket with Keith and Allura to place Pidge in before they all say goodbye for the last time. It’s white with engravings on the sides, words in Altean that only she would’ve known, and it forces Allura to sit down and cry.
“She was my best friend,” She says to no one. “You know there aren’t any other girls here. She’s all I had. What are we going to do without her?”
Slowly, Shiro and Keith stop arranging flowers, and move towards Allura. Keith is the first to reach out to her, pulling her into a side hug.
“We’ll manage.” He says. “We always do when someone is gone. We’ll just have to manage longer, this time.”
For half a second, Shiro hates himself. Lance was right; everyone in the castle is missing someone that he could’ve saved. It was his fault, he could’ve ignored her, gotten her to safety, but instead he let her slip through his fingers. Pidge was nothing now, but a small body placed in a silk lined box, and it was because of him.
“We can go through a hundred new green paladins, I don’t care. It’s not about who’s in the lion,” Allura shakes Shiro from his thoughts.
“Allura, I’m sorry,” Shiro tells her, kneeling in front of the other two. He’s apologized so much, already. She looks up, startled.
“For what?”
“For letting her go. I should’ve never listened to her.”
“Oh, Shiro. None of this is your fault.” Allura’s eyes water again, and she slides down to his level. She wraps her arms around him, and Keith follows suit until they’re all holding each other, crying.
-
Shiro starts to think none of them will ever stop crying. The funeral is nothing fancy, just Pidge in her casket, with a bundle of flowers laid over her. No one speaks of her, remembering the food fights and arguments and the conversations of new technology and Earth. No one hardly looks at her, but everyone is crying. They cry when Coran shuts down the castle lights as a sign of respect. They cry when Hunk finally lends out a few words of how she made everyone laugh and that he’ll never stop missing her. They cry and cry and cry when Lance decides he’s had enough and kisses her forehead before closing the lid and going back to his room.
Keith is the first to speak afterwards, directed at no one,
“She wanted to go home.” He says it softer than Shiro’s ever heard him speak. “She wanted to be buried there.”
“How do you know?” Hunk asks.
“She told me about a year ago. She should be returned there anyways, it’s where she’s from.”
They all stand awkwardly for a minute, waiting for someone new to break the silence.
“I’ll take her.” Shiro is surprised that it’s his voice he hears. But once it’s out he can’t take it back.
“Tomorrow morning then,” Allura tells him. “I’ll open a wormhole for you.”
-
It’s bright and early when Allura gathers the paladins to send Shiro off. There are quick, curt goodbyes before Shiro is thrown through a wormhole and is on his way to Earth.
Locating the planet is easy, and he takes a deep breath before breaking through the atmosphere and starts to locate the United States.
Before any of the shitstorm they call Voltron happened, visiting the Holt home was second nature for Shiro. They lived on the border of northwest Texas, conveniently only an hour away from where Keith was, and the drive to the Garrison wasn’t too far off from there; a few hours’ drive east to Dallas. Life was so easy before. He had friends and family and a future all right there in the same state. He tries not to think about it as he finds the Holt property.
Shiro lands a block down from the Holt’s house, in a wide field that Matt and he used to camp in when they first met. He shuts his eyes tight, trying to fight against the stinging of tears and nostalgia. He starts to think that this was all a mistake; that he should’ve never left the castle, and he should go back now. Instead he turns the lion’s cloaking ability on and leaves. He goes on autopilot, one foot in front of the other, never looking back, but not quite looking forward either, until he is standing on the Holt’s porch, one hand raised to knock on the door. With a deep breath, he taps twice on it, and then steps back to wait for Colleen Holt to answer the door.
The lock jiggles, and a second later, Colleen is standing in front of Shiro, a confused look on her face. They stand face to face for a minute, both of them trying to take in what they’re seeing. Colleen’s eyes water and she steps forward, onto the porch. Shiro freezes.
“My god.” She lifts a hand to her mouth and whispers, “I thought you’d never come back.”
He can’t breathe, can’t move; he can’t do this. It isn’t until something cold pushes against his hand-the real one- that he breaks out of the trance. He looks down to see Gunther, the family’s dog, licking his wrist, tail wagging happily.
“Where have you been? Are Sam and Matt with you? Have you told anyone you’re here?
He flinches against her rapid fire questions. His head hurts, and the tears threaten to return when she mentions Matt.
“You’ve been gone for years, Katie would be so excited to know you’re here, but oh, Katie-she went missi-”
“Katie she, uh” Shiro cuts her off. “She was with us.”
“Who’s us? Shiro, what happened?”
He tries to explain the past four years to her, of him being captured by the Galra; escaping and finding Katie and the others, trying to protect all of them so they could finally go home. Colleen listens to all of it, not quite understanding, but trying to. When he gets to the end, he chokes up.
“There was an attack the other day and uh,” He clenches his fists. “There was an accident.”
Colleen seems to understand what he’s saying because her face scrunches up and she covers her mouth with both hands.
“I’m so sorry.” He whispers.
“No, not my Katie.” She moves to the porch swing and places her head in her hands. “Not my Katie. I’ve lost everyone else, not her.”
Shiro just stares at the wood panels of the porch. His silence confirms that he’s not lying, this isn’t some sick joke, and Colleen sobs harder into her hands. He doesn’t know what to tell her, or how to make it better and he eventually settles with the fact that he can’t make it any better.
They sit together for at least ten minutes, Colleen sobbing and Shiro trying to think about nothing before he finally starts to explain why he’s actually there.
“I know it’s- not really- kind of creepy, really-” He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to tell her that he has her dead daughter in the back of his magic robot lion. He heaves out a sigh,
“Would you like to see her?” Except he blows it all out as one word and it sounds more like wuldyaliketos’her.
Colleen chokes back a sob, but nods her head anyway. Shiro leads her out to the field where the black lion sits, her head turned down almost ceremoniously. The lion opens her mouth without command, and they walk in, Shiro lingering a step behind. He doesn’t want to see her again, doesn’t want to remember that she’s dead, dead, dead, but he knows he has to. He has to see her one last time, before her mother eventually calls a coroner and starts to prepare a funeral that only she will attend. Before she’s gone forever.
Colleen immediately goes to Pidge’s casket, not waiting for Shiro as she lifts the lid. Her hands shake as she reaches out for her face, rubbing her thumb across Pidge’s cheek.
“My little bird.” Colleen’s eyes water and she uses the back of her free hand to wipe them. “She loved Lady and the Tramp, thought the cutest thing is the world was how Tramp called her-”
“Pidge.” Shiro’s eyes catch Colleens and they share a silent conversation that somehow he understands.
“She was so young then. Did you take care of her?”
Shiro is caught off guard by her question, and his cheeks flush because he knows that she knows that he loves Katie (he blames it on a mother’s intuition), but doesn’t miss a beat to tell her,
“Always.”
Colleen raises an eyebrow at him, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and he realizes she’s trying to add some type of humor to such a mournful moment. Shiro remembers how much he loves Colleen Holt, how much he wishes he could’ve had a mother like her, and decides to try to play along.
“The other boys never had a chance.” His face burns red.
She laughs through her tears, and continues to tell him stories about Katie before everything went to shit.
-
Forty five minutes later, Colleen shakily exits the black lion and makes her way back to the house to make phone calls to the rest of her family. Shiro lingers behind her, his helmet still in his hands, reluctant to leave, reluctant to stay. By the time he makes it to the front gate, Colleen is already on the porch, the phone in her hand, dialing her sister’s number. Shiro stands at the gate, not sure where to go from here.
“I can bring um-” He hesitates while waiting for Colleen to notice he’s talking to her. “Bring her down here.”
She slowly nods to him before clicking the call button and lifting the phone to her face.
Shiro makes his way to the lion again, and carefully maneuvers the casket down to the pavement. Allura had made sure there was easy transportation to remove the casket so no one on Earth would have to see the lion, so the chunk of wood sits on a thin piece of metal, programmed to hover with the control of a remote. Shiro feels awkward and childish directing it down the dirt road, like he’s steering a toy car instead, like the ones he used to play with when he was younger. This shouldn’t be childish, shouldn’t be happening right now. Pidge should’ve been able to come home and grow old and die from something stupid like age. She should’ve been able to live. He feels again for the millionth time that this is all wrong before sucking it up and turning down the driveway, and placing her down gently next to the porch.
From the porch swing he can hear Colleen telling her family the same lines over and over; They found Katie’s body. Yes, this weekend, I think. Matt is still out there, I can feel it.
He decides to leave then, silently, to allow Katie and her mother have peace. The walk back to his lion is short, and before he knows it he’s standing in front of the black lion, ready to enter. He lands on the first step of her mouth before something bright catches his eye. He turns to see what it is and freezes, realizing that this whole time he had landed in a field of flowers; familiar, with bright, soft petals. He picks one carefully before heading back inside the lion. He digs out a roll of Scotch from inside a shelf and tapes the flower carefully to the console, next to a picture of Katie and him taken during another trip to a space mall. He runs his fingers across a petal, then past their smiling faces in the photo, thinking of how much he loved- loves- her and if she ever loved him back. The flower sits there forever,
A red poppy, just for her.