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Allura seemed to be fascinated by Shiro's mechanical hand, but for the life of him he couldn't understand why. He worried sometimes, that she was put off by it because it was Galra made, because he was well aware of the issues that she had with them. However, she didn’t seem to mind touching it, and would often run her fingers along the grooves and lines in the metal as she sat with him. It was something of an examination, as she watched him for his reactions, testing what he could feel in that hand.
One of the similarities between his two hands was that both of them could feel—though in the prosthetic’s case, the sensations were more muted. He could feel Allura trailing two fingers along the groove on his palm, the warmth from her touch feather light, barely even registering. He had performed similar tests with Pidge before, to check if there were pain receptors in the hand, but if there were any, they were inactive. He missed being able to feel things properly with both of his hands.
“What are your naming systems like on Earth, Shiro?” Allura asked. Her expression gave little away, but she seemed to have noticed how his hand had tensed under her touch.
“It depends on where you’re from,” he said, forcing his hand to relax again. “For instance, my full name is Shirogane Takashi.”
“Oh, so you have more than one name!” Allura said, looking at him in surprise. “It's common in many of the cultures I've encountered to only have one.”
Shiro chuckled. “Well, I suspect you have more names than just Allura.”
“Oh, yes, of course!” she said, returning his smile. “I have nearly half a dozen middle names, as well as the name of my father’s line.”
He had already suspected as much, because of Coran’s name. While Coran wasn’t royalty, he still seemed to be a member of the aristocracy, so it’d stand to reason that the naming conventions of the two classes were similar. He did wonder if it had only been a practice amongst the upper classes, though.
“The royalty on Earth have something like that,” he said.
Allura perked up in interest. “Oh, do they?”
“Yeah. Some of them have multiple middle names,” Shiro explained, “But most people only have one.”
“You don’t have one,” Allura noted, tilting her head to the side. She was silent for a moment before she spoke again, seemingly mulling over her words—Shiro waited, focusing his attention on how her touch had moved to his knuckles as she turned his hand over, palm side down. “You told me once that Shiro is a nickname… so your given name is Shirogane?”
She mucked up the pronunciation just a tad—Shiro wasn’t going to fault her for it, though. However, it turned out that the Altean tongue could pronounce a softer R more easily than the American one. With a little patient teaching, Allura was saying Shiro’s name with a familiar Japanese accent the other Paladins couldn’t quite emulate.
“That’s my last name,” he explained, “My first name is Takashi. Shiro is just a nickname… though, I suppose it’s meaningful now…”
He motioned to the tuft of white hair he had now, after everything that had happened. While Allura looked mildly confused, she waited patiently for him to elaborate.
“Shiro means white in my first language,” he said.
Her fingers stilled at the joint of his thumb and her brows knit together in concern. “Does your hair bother you?” she asked, voice going soft. “I actually like it…”
He was silent for a moment—thinking on what he was going to say. He absently flexed his hand, and the low whirring sound of the joints shifting at the motion was much louder to him now than it had been in a while. At the noise, he glanced down, staring at the back of his hand. There was a tug of anxiety in his chest.
“The hair doesn’t bother me as much as the hand,” he finally admitted, curling his hand into a fist. “It’s a weapon… one that I have little understanding of—”
He cut off abruptly, before he had said too much or made Allura uncomfortable by bringing it up.
Allura was silent for a moment, still resting her hand on the back of his. Slowly, she traced the grooves that ran along the edges of his hand and the joints of his fingers. “I am sorry that you had to go through what you did, Shiro,” she said, averting her eyes. “You have endured things that few would be able to—but I am glad that you managed to escape. I don’t think I could imagine anyone else being the Black Paladin.”
“Thank you, Allura,” Shiro said. The tension left Shiro’s hand at the statement, and he opened his palm again, letting out a breath that he hadn’t realized he had been holding. The anxiety still lingered, but it was negated—somewhat—by the gentle touch of Allura’s fingers on his. She said nothing else, but smiled in acknowledgment of his words, and Shiro allowed himself to focus on the feeling of her fingers tracing along his palm again.