Archive of Our Own ^beta

They win.

In the aftermath, Shiro can’t quite wrap his mind around it. The war consumed every thought he had and every bit of his energy for so long that its sudden absence leaves behind a gaping hole. He expects to wake up, to find that Zarkon and Haggar are still out there and that the victory was just some cruel trick executed by his mind.

Their success does not feel real even during the first celebration, a raucous affair that occurs without planning or forethought in the Castle, as all of their surviving allies flood the halls. Some are crying, even as they laugh and embrace one another. Shiro moves through the crowd, jostled, slapped on his shoulders, hugged, wept on.

He finds Allura in the madness, or, rather, she finds him. She is carried on the shoulders of the surviving members of the Blade and deposited, laughing through her protests, in front of him. She looks tired. Her hair is pulled out of its bun. Her uniform is charred in places. Her hands are both heavily bandaged from where she caught the energy Haggar threw at him, redirecting it, saving his life, and—

“We did it,” she says, smiling at him, so wide that it blinds him to all else in the room. She takes a step forward and then her arms are around his neck and her voice is thick with tears when she repeats, “We did it.”

It is only then, with her in his arms, that their victory feels real. He holds onto her, once more finding his anchor in the suddenly unbalanced world, and presses his face down against her hair.

“We did it,” he echoes, laughing shakily. They did it.

They won.

#

Their spur of the moment celebration turns out to be the first of many such occasions. It seems that every world that they ever so much as set foot upon wishes to throw them a parade, to erect statues in their honor, and to make merry. Shiro supposes they cannot be blamed. The universe suffered for ten thousand years. Its inhabitants are entitled to a few days of unbridled joy.

That does not make the experience any less wearying.

By the end of the final celebration that Coran has arranged for them to participate in, the sides of Shiro’s face hurt from the smiles he’s had to flash. They have dedicated so many statues of themselves, shaken so many hands or tentacles or claws, and shared so many encouraging words of advice.

Allura gets the worst of that final task. The Paladins are all expected to put in a few words at every planet they visit, but the populaces expect more from the Princess of Altea, and she delivers it. She stands on podiums in fine buildings packed wall to wall with people, or out on open hills, or on the bridge of any number of indistinguishable spaceships. She talks about the dawn of a new age, she talks about freedom from fear, and she talks about the monumental task of rebuilding. Of healing.

Shiro finds her speeches easy to listen to, even after hearing some variation of them over and over again, but they drain her. She looks even more worn out than he feels by the last time she steps away from a crowd. Shiro finds her, as the party winds down, standing outside of the temple where they gathered. She stares up at the tremendously huge statue of them hurriedly erected in the city center, her expression wiped blank.

The statue is not bad, as these things go. The local craftspeople decided to celebrate Voltron, not the individual Paladins, which Shiro prefers. When artisans try to recreate the likenesses of the Paladins, their visages are often… adjusted to better fit the look of a planet’s native race. They maintain only a few distinguishing characteristics. Shiro dislikes that most of the artists decided that his scar was sufficient to identify him.

“Getting some fresh air?” Shiro asks. The moon glows off of Allura’s hair, casting her in otherworldly light. Sometime he looks at her and forgets how to breathe, but he is used to that, by now. He’s long ago learned how to bundle those reactions up, to tuck them away where they won’t interfere with the mission, with their friendship.

She stares up at the statue for another moment before looking at him, and with her guard down he can see how tired she is. Her eyes are dark shadows. She manages a small smile, nonetheless. It dims when a burst of laughter and shouting rushes out of the temple at their backs. She says, “I am, yes.”

Shiro offers his arm, trying to think of some way he might spare both of them the rest of the party. “I could use some, too,” he says. “Walk with me?”

“That sounds wonderful.” She fits her hand into the curve of his elbow. Bandages still cover her palms, but they are smaller now, delicate gauze instead of heavy pads. It’s his fault they’re there, but he can do nothing about it. He cannot turn back time and fix his mistakes. “I think I saw some gardens this way.”

He can’t go back to the battle and kill Haggar before her final attack. He can’t spare Allura the wounds he knows are under her sleeves. But he can walk with her through the moon-dappled gardens, looking over plants with names he does not know and smelling strange, night-blooming blossoms with petals of purple and darkest red. They do not make another appearance in the temple. When she grows tired, he escorts her back to the Castle and watches her enter her room, shivering when she glances back over her shoulder at him.

#

The day after that final celebration is strange. It is as though all of them go stir crazy at once. Shiro wakes in the small hours of the morning, his mind replaying the images of their last battle with Zarkon and Haggar, and goes for a run around the Castle. He does not expect the others to be awake by the time he gets back to the common room, but they are.

“Shiro,” Pidge says, smiling at him, “there you are.” There is a bag over her shoulder. One of her space gerbils floats near her head. Another perches on her shoulder. Matt stands beside her, looking young and unnerved. Someone cut his hair, in the night. It’s been awkwardly wetted down. And he’s wearing new clothes, ones that almost resemble Earth fashions.

Shiro looks them over and says, “Here I am. What’s going on?”

“We’re going home. Allura’s going to be opening a wormhole for us in a few minutes,” Pidge says, still smiling. “It’s safe to do it, now. And Mom must be… well.” Her smile fades and she looks down, shifting her feet. She clears her throat. “It’s time for us to go check on her.”

“I’m sure she’ll be relieved to see you,” Shiro says, because he does not know quite what else to say. There was a part of him that always knew they’d want to go back. They have family. A mother who worries about them. It is just strange to be faced with the goodbye.

“Yeah,” Matt says, scrubbing at the back of his neck. “We wanted to see if, you know, you wanted to come along? We asked everyone else, too, even Allura,” he adds, hurriedly, after taking a look at Shiro’s face. “They’ve all got their own plans.”

Shiro swallows. The last time he was on Earth, he got strapped to a table. Drugged. He sets his mouth into a smile and says, “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’m going to stick around here for a while.”

“Are you sure?” Pidge asks, cracking her knuckles and then twisting at her fingers. “The more the merrier, after all. I know Mom would be thrilled to see you again.”

Shiro got Pidge’s father killed. He wonders how happy her mother would actually be if he showed up on her doorstep. “I’m sure,” he says, maintaining his smile through sheer force of will. “Make sure you stay in contact, okay? Let us know when you make it.”

“We will,” Pidge says, and then she darts forward and hugs him. “This isn’t goodbye,” she says, “alright? I’m coming back out here. There’s so much to see. I just… need to see my mom, first. You know?”

“I get it,” Shiro assures her. She nods, sniffs a little, and pulls away to grab her stuff. Shiro nods at Matt; they’ve never really gotten truly comfortable with one another again. How could they, after everything? He says, “Fly safe.”

Matt surprises him by stepping forward and hugging him as well. “Be careful out here,” Matt says. And then they are gone.

#

The others leave one after another. Hunk is the next to pack up his things and head down to the hangar bay. “I told Shay I would come visit as soon as I could,” he says, smiling even as he blushes heavily. “So we could, um, catch up. And so that I could help them. There’s been a lot of infrastructure damage to their cities on the Balmera, and I think with my engineering experience I could really be an asset there, so….”

“I am sure you will be a great boon to their cause,” Allura says, smiling at him fondly and then lifting one eyebrow. “Would you like us to accompany you? We might be able to offer aid as well.”

Hunk goes wide-eyed and hunches his shoulders up and in, the way he does when he’s trying to get out of something. “No, no,” he says, waving a hand, “you guys have done enough. I got this. And I don’t even know how long I’m going to stay. I have to go see my family, soon.” And just like that, he leaves them.

The hanger feels strangely empty with two of the Lions gone. Shiro stares at the empty berths for a moment, and Allura places a hand on his shoulder. They are still standing there when Lance bustles into the room. He is wearing his Paladin uniform, and Shiro frowns, nerves prickling down his spine. “Is something wrong?”

“What?” Lance asks, and then he looks down at himself. “Oh, no. Everything is good. Just. You know.” He waggles his eyebrows and grins slyly. “Ladies love a uniform. Don’t they, Princess?”

“I suppose it depends on who is wearing it,” Allura drawls. “Where are you going?”

“Here and there,” Lance says, shrugging and resetting the position of his bag over his shoulder. “I’m not sure, really. I kind of want to just get out there and see stuff when no one is shooting at me, you know? There’s a whole universe waiting for me. I want to see what it’s got.”

“Well, be careful,” Shiro says, because of all the team members to decide they wanted to go tour the universe, Lance might be the one he worries the most about. He looks up at Blue, looming over them all, and repeats, for her benefit, “Be careful.”

“Careful is my middle name,” Lance says. “Anyway, I’ll keep in touch. Maybe I’ll send you post-cards from particularly nice places so you can be jealous.”

“Sure,” Shiro agrees, snorting a laugh when Lance hugs him, before moving on to Allura. “We can track him,” Shiro says, after Lance climbs into Blue. “Right?”

“Oh, yes,” Allura says.

And then there is Keith, who does not leave until that evening, after frowning over a communique for the entirety of the day. He finally approaches with a packed bag, after they’ve finished eating. Shiro nods at him and asks, “Your mother?”

Keith’s mother had introduced herself by saving their lives in the middle of a pitched battle. She’d come and gone, since then, while keeping in contact with Keith. Keith bites at his lip, scrubbing at the back of his neck when he says, “Yeah, she… she says the rest of the family wants to meet me.”

“Oh,” Shiro says. For some reason, the possibility of a ‘rest of the family’ had never occurred to him before. Perhaps there hadn’t been time for it. “Well. I’m sure they’ll love you.”

Keith grimaces and looks sideways. “I don’t know. Do you need me to stick around here? The Castle is in rough shape.” The Castle is, to be honest, close to several major systems failures. They slapped on a fresh coat of paint and shoved broken bits back inside the walls for the celebrations, but the massive ship is in a bad way.

But Keith has never been trained in spaceship repair. And he’s already packed his bag. “We’ve got this,” Shiro tells him, ruffling his hair. “Go on. It’s going to be great.”

Keith draws in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Right,” he says, nodding. “Of course.”

#

The Castle feels gigantic with only three people in it. The halls are eerie, quiet, and Shiro keeps straining his ears to pick up voices that are not there. They discuss where to make repairs the next morning, and the sheer number of empty chairs around the table makes the back of his neck itch.

They decide on a planet with large natural deposits of the metals they’ll need, one with inhabitants who are happy to put up with long-term guests: they are colonists themselves, a group that left the primary planet in their system a few generations ago to tame the wilds of a new world. The prospect of trade pleases them greatly. “Excellent,” Allura says, once they are agreed, lowering the screens that contained their options. “I will bring us to Exrerta immediately. The life-support systems will not last much longer.”

“Princess,” Coran says, before Allura can leave the room. His food is uneaten, though he has thoroughly moved it from one side of his bowl to the other. “I—I was wondering if I could request some time to handle a… personal matter.”

Allura blinks, reaching out to hold the back of her chair. “A personal matter?” she asks.

Coran nods. “Yes. I know that the Castle is in need of repairs, and I would not ask if it were not important to me, but, I have not even begun the v’vailreas—”

“You may have all the time you need,” Allura interrupts, reaching out and squeezing Coran’s shoulder. Coran looks up at her, his eyes shining. “You need not ask my permission for that, Coran. Not after all you have done.”

“Princess…” Coran says and then he stands, and pulls her into an embrace. “I won’t leave if you need me,” he says.

“I am more than capable of landing the Castle and beginning repairs by myself,” Allura says, drily.

“I know you are,” Coran says, and there is pride and sadness both in his gaze. He sighs. “I’m just not sure you should be alone….”

Shiro clears his throat. “She won’t be alone,” he says, shrugging when they both turn to look at him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Allura blinks at him. “But… I thought, I mean, the rest of the Paladins have…” She waves her hand, indicating their dispersal across the universe.

Shiro twists his spoon between his fingers. “Yeah, I just, I thought I’d stick around here. At least until the repairs are completed.” His mind has been running in circles since the others began leaving, since they made it obvious that leaving was even a possibility. The question of what to do after the war was something he’d been avoiding for a long time, because every time he considered it, he came up blank.

He’s a soldier. It’s all he remembers how to be. He has nowhere else to go, no location that calls to him. The war gave him purpose. Something to shape his life around. Now it’s over, and that’s obviously a good thing, but….

He is glad the repairs are necessary, relieved there’s a task to fill the void stretching before him. And he is sure that, once the repairs are finished, there will be something else he can work on, something that will keep him around the Castle, around Allura. That surety is the only thing keeping down the anxiety creeping up his spine.

He clears his throat, aware that they’re both watching him. “Unless you don’t… unless you’d rather I go?”

“No,” Allura says quickly, flushing a little when he blinks at her. “I mean, your company would be welcome, for as long as you would like to stay.” Relief makes his breath catch, for a moment. He relaxes his grip on the spoon.

“Alright,” Shiro says, smiling at her, and she smiles back, until Coran clears his throat.

“Right,” Allura says, then, the tips of her ears staining red. “Just tell me where you would like to go, and I will open you a wormhole. Make sure you take a well-stocked shuttle.”

#

They see Coran off from the bridge, watching his shuttle disappear through the wormhole Allura opened. And then she opens one last passage and takes them through it, to the planet where they can begin their repairs. The landing is uneventful, though the Castle shakes and groans fitfully as they move through the atmosphere.

“There,” Allura says, stepping back from the controls with a relieved smile. “We made it. And now I suppose we should go introduce ourselves to our new neighbors.”

#

The Exrertans who live closest to the location where Allura set down the Castle are a friendly, curious bunch. They appear to be, well… they look like humans would look, if humans were most closely related to grizzly bears. They are tall and heavy-set, with long arms and short legs. Their faces are broad, with round, dark eyes. They are furless, though they are hairy, especially on their arms. Their hair grows down from theie heads to their necks and over their shoulders. They all have deep voices that are quite pleasant to listen to.

They appear to have an agricultural community, living in an area set up as a series of villages full of round buildings with patterned walls. A younger man who introduces himself as Kulan brings Shiro and Allura before something called the Council of Leaders, which turns out to be five Exrertans, all of them white haired and stooped with age.

Introductions are exchanged. Shiro smiles and says the generally accepted things in the correct places—he has gotten used to intergalactic diplomacy.

He nods along when one of the elders says, “We are honored you chose our planet to repair your great ship. If there is any way in which we may assist you, please, inform us. We welcome you to visit our villages whenever you like, though we must warn you that a mated pair of snowbirds has been spotted north of the lake where you chose to land.”

Shiro glances at Allura, and she shakes her head slightly. He asks, “Snow birds?”

“A species native to this planet. They are rare, so we try not to interfere with them. But they are also large and territorial. They have been known to carry off livestock and to attack travelers, especially as winter approaches.”

Shiro turns that over in his head and sighs. “We’ll keep an eye out for them.” The last thing they need is to be attacked by angry wildlife. Hopefully they’ll be able to avoid that situation altogether.

“Mm,” the elder says, making a terrible sucking sound with her teeth. “Ensure that you do. Now, we must insist that you join us for the evening meal. After your journey, you must be hungry. And we can discuss the raw materials you need from our land.”

In truth, Shiro is weary of state dinners. He would rather go back to the Castle and eat some of the leftovers that Hunk packed into the space fridge. He would rather eat nothing. But they could be here for months; it wouldn’t do to scorn their new neighbors during their first meeting. So he smiles when Allura says, “We would be delighted to join you.”

#

The Exrertans put out a fine spread, full of roasted meats and vegetables that Shiro can’t identify. They dishes taste good, in any case. The food makes it easier to put up with the inevitable questions about the war, to a point.

“We have heard,” says one of the white-haired elders, towards the end of the meal, after they are done finalizing the last lingering concerns regarding the trade agreements, after the plates have been cleared away, and after everyone has been given a ceramic mug filled with something that smells of spices and alcohol, “that it was the two of you who stood against Zarkon and his Queen, in the end.” There is a question there, hidden in the statement, prodding them to expand on the event.

Shiro’s hand clenches around his mug. His jaw throbs, sharp and sudden, and he has to work to relax it. He does not want to discuss this again. He saw Allura’s scars, that morning, as she adjusted her uniform. The pale marks completely cover both of her palms and extend up her wrists, a reminder of the last spell Haggar ever concocted.

Beside him, Allura says, “Yes. We faced them together.” They had not intended it to be just the two of them. That was just how the battle played out, after they were trapped in the collapsing throne room of Zarkon’s ship, heat rising as the ship’s engines went critical, knowing that not all of them were going to walk out of the room alive….

Shiro blinks away memories when the Exrertan elder asks, “It is true you killed the Emperor?” The elder is looking directly at Shiro, his dark eyes curious. Everyone else at the table ceases to make a pretense of not listening.

Shiro swallows. “I did,” he says, though at the time he had not been thinking about killing Zarkon. His sole focus had been on saving Allura, on stopping Zarkon from—

The elder nods. He says, “Word about the battle is scarce. We wondered—”

“I apologize,” Allura says, standing and touching Shiro’s shoulder, as though he needed the encouragement to join her. “We have not fully recovered from the battle and our day has been long. Perhaps we could share the story another time?”

As excuses go, it must be sufficiently gracious, because the Exrertans accept it without a fuss. They press boxed food into Shiro’s arms and the two of them are hugged vigorously before finally being freed from the meal. Shiro stands outside in the night air and takes a breath. There’s a headache building in the back of his head. He says, “Thank you.”

Allura shrugs, leading the way towards the Castle. She says, “It was not their business. They are not entitled to everything we experienced.”

Something kicks in his chest. He feels as though he should thank her again, but he cannot find the words around his stubborn tongue. Then again, he’s never been able to thank her properly, or to even articulate all the things he needs to thank her for, so at least the frustration that kicks around his gut is familiar.

#

Shiro ends up in the hangar, his mind too busy to facilitate sleep. The room seems so much larger when it is empty, or mostly empty. Black rests in her berth, her eyes lighting up the darkness when he enters the room. “Hey,” he says, when she turns her head to look at him as he approaches. “It looks like we’re going to be here for a while,” he tells her. “Do you mind taking a little break?”

The Lions do not feel in the same way their Paladins do, but he does get feedback from her. She understands that the Castle is in bad shape. She spent more time in it than any of the others. It is… home to her, in a way. She is pleased they are repairing it.

Still, he feels strange about leaving her down here, all alone. The others are all out, prowling the universe, so he stays with her for a while, though he gets the impression that she is enjoying the peace, on some deep level.

He wanders off to find his bed only after his eyes grow too heavy to keep open.

#

Shiro has nightmares that night; he has nightmares most nights, he can’t blame these on dinner conversation. He gives up on sleep early, rolling from his bed and scrubbing at his face, jitters still climbing up his back and down his arms on spider’s legs.

He needs something to keep his mind busy. The Castle is happy to oblige. He goes looking for a repair he can work on quietly—there’s no reason to wake Allura up in the small hours of the morning—and finds her stepping out of the common room. For a moment they stare at one another. She’s wearing her jumpsuit with her hair pinned up and out of the way. There’s a steaming cup of tea in her hand. There are dark circles under her eyes.

And his chest aches. He forgets, sometimes, that she has as much reason for nightmares as he does. “Good morning,” she says, frowning a little. “I apologize if I woke you.”

He shakes his head. “You didn’t. I just thought I’d get an early start.” He does not want to talk about what he saw in his dream, about the crackling energy bearing down on him, or the sound she made when she stretched her hand out to it and caught it.

Allura does not challenge his explanation. She only nods and says, “I had the same thought. We should remove all of the damaged components, first. That way we can see if anything can be salvaged.”

#

They spend the day removing damaged panels and circuity from the Castle’s main section, after discussing where they should begin. The towers are in worse shape—the northern tower is structurally unsound to such a degree that Shiro is not even sure how they will get into it to repair it—but most of the vital systems are in the main area. The work is physically demanding, but this part of it requires little thought.

The Castle’s systems are all shut down, so there’s no risk of grabbing an exposed wire. They just lift and carry and haul, gutting the great ship of all its damaged pieces. They speak a little, at first, but soon fall to companionable silence. They’ve always been comfortable being quiet around one another. They say almost nothing for hours, until she sets a bottle of nourishment goo by his head and, through a grimace, he says, “Thanks, Princess.”

He hears her footsteps pause; there’s too much silence not to pick up on every sound she makes. She says, after a moment that stretches so long that it makes the bottom of Shiro’s stomach twist, “You should call me Allura.”

He is grateful that his shoulders and head are presently hidden by the console he’s gutting. He stares upward into tangled wires and broken control chips, his hands freezing. She continues, “Surely we no longer need to stand on ceremony around one another. We are friends, are we not?”

“Right,” Shiro says. His tongue feels like its three sizes too big for his mouth. He hasn’t—he’s been calling her ‘princess’ for so long that even the thought of changing it makes something tighten in his stomach. He’s spoken her name before, but usually on the battlefield. He yelled it when she stepped in front of him, her hands outstretched….

He shakes his head to clear that memory away, back into the darkened corners where it lurks, waiting to smother him. He can call her by her name. It is… all of the others do. And he knows she does not mean anything by it, or, at least, that she means no more than she says. They are friends. He’s her friend. That’s—that’s more than he should have. More than he deserves. He clears his throat. “Yes, of course. Thank you, Allura.”

She stays where she is, standing by his head, for a long moment, before she says, “You are welcome.” He thunks his head back against the ground once she moves off. He does it a second time, for good measure. His heart beats uncomfortably fast inside his ribs. It doesn’t slow for a long time. He whispers her name, softly, to the broken pieces of the ship in front of his face.

#

By the end of the day, Shiro’s entire body feels sore. He worked harder than he needed to, trying not to think about his conversation with Allura and their new level of… familiarity. He hisses, sinking down onto one of the couches in the common room and wincing.

Allura asks, quietly, “Your back?”

He nods. The muscles down his back, healed imperfectly from wounds he still barely remembers, pull and burn. He ignores the pain when necessary, he can function through it, but it always comes back around to bite at his heels once he has a chance to slow down. She makes a quiet sound and stands, probably to go to bed. It is late and they have both been up since early.

He leans forward, gingerly, so that he can rest his elbows on his knees. His tries to take deep breathes, but each inhale is short, each exhale punched out. He can feel sweat drying on his skin. He should go take a hot shower, but the thought of standing back up keeps him where he is.

“I need to lift your shirt,” Allura says, startling him. He glances sideways and finds her standing by his knees. He did not even hear her approaching. She is the only person who slips under his defenses like that. He does not know… how to deal with that. So he doesn’t.

He asks, instead, “What?”

She holds out a fluted glass vial. It is full of a faintly glowing golden liquid. He recognizes it. It’s an Altean medicine that relieves pain and relaxes muscles when applied topically. He’s used more than his fair share of it, to the point that he worried they would run out of the supplies in the infirmary. That was before Allura informed him that it was easy enough for her to make more.

“Oh, thanks,” Shiro says, holding a hand out for it, carefully. “I can take care of it.”

Allura arches one eyebrow. She says, “I don’t believe you can even reach your back.” She might be right. “Now, I need to lift your shirt. This will only take a moment, alright?”

She waits, then, instead of just reaching for his shirt. He is grateful for that, though she might be the only person who need not ask to touch him. He says, picking at the seam of his pants, “I’m filthy, you don’t—”

“We are both filthy,” she says, a hint of impatience creeping into her tone. “And you are in pain. Allow me to assist you, please.” Her expression softens, then. “You would like to be able to move tomorrow, would you not?”

He is infinitely familiar with battles he cannot win, by this point in his life. He nods, giving in and swallowing. “Yeah, good point.”

“Just relax,” she says, once she has his approval. She pulls his shirt upwards gently, and he drops his head forward as much as he can with his muscles in spasm. It is… not far. “Breathe,” she says, quietly, before smoothing her palm down the line of his spine. Her hand slides over his skin, coated with the healing gel. She does not comment on the scars, though he knows they are ugly. His skin is bunched in places; there are divots taken out of it in others. The old wounds over his shoulders are the worst, raised and dark even after all this time.

Her touch brings near-instantaneous relief. Shiro bites his tongue to hold in a thick sound and grips his knees. Allura’s hand is soft and warm. She covers his back and then rests her palm over the nape of his neck, and he shivers down his spine at that touch, switches in his head throwing one after another. He leans his head further forward.

“Better?” she asks, her hand still over his neck. She could crush his vertebrae with a thought. But she won’t. She wouldn’t.

He swallows, licks his dry lips, and says, “Much better, thanks.” In fact, he feels well enough to stand, but he decides to wait just a few more minutes. He crosses his legs and tugs his shirt back into place. Allura settles beside him, offering him a smile before she toes off her boots and rolls up her pants, spreading the cream over her calves.

Shiro manages not to offer to help, but it is a near thing.

He is beginning to realize that being here with her, alone, might pose some unanticipated challenges.

#

The next days are full of more of the same work. Shiro can admit, looking at the Castle, that it is more broken than whole. In any other circumstance, the wisest course of action would be scraping it. But it is all Allura has left of her people, of the world she knew.

They’re going to fix it. He won’t accept any other outcome.

Three days into their project, they get a message from Lance. It waits for them, found during the short period of time when they turn on the Castle’s systems to check on news. The message contains a number of pictures; it seems Lance visited a planet with beautiful beaches, covered in pale pink sand, with water of the purest blue Shiro has ever seen.

There is a picture of him lying in a hammock by the tideline and another of him holding up a truly horrific looking fish. There is one of him with his face pressed up against an alien girl with dark eyes and tentacles around her head. In one corner, he has written ‘Wish you were here.’ He seems to be having a good time.

“You could go join him,” Allura says, once they have shut down the Castle’s systems again. She frowns down at the controls as she speaks. “The gods know you deserve a break. And he could use looking after.”

“He’ll be fine,” Shiro says, not sure he is ready to visit a beach of any kind. He does not mind Allura seeing his scars. He’d rather not put them on display for others. “And I’m good here.” He expects Allura to meet his grin, but she just keeps frowning at the dark control panel. He shifts his weight. “Allura?”

She takes a sharp breath and turns to look at him. “I do not require you to stay and look after me, you know. I am more than capable of taking care of myself.”

Shiro sees pure, undistilled power arching towards him. He sees Allura, stepping in front of him, catching it with one hand. He sees the blinding white that came next. He says, his voice rough as he shakes his thoughts back into the present, off of Zarkon’s doomed ship, “I know you are.”

“Then why have you not gone to do what you want?” she asks, scowling and turning to face him fully. She crosses her arms over her chest. She lifts her chin and manages to look down the line of her nose, despite their disparate heights. “The others all have.”

“The Castle needs—”

She snaps, “I can handle the Castle. It is my responsibility.”

Shiro stares at her. He feels adrift, rubbing at the back of his neck. He swallows. “Do you, I mean, do you want me to leave?” He’ll go, if that’s what she wants. This isn’t his Castle, after all. He won’t go far, but he’ll go.

Allura tilts her jaw a little higher. She says, “I want you to do what would make you happy. You deserve that, Shiro. You must have… somewhere you want to go. Family to visit, or, or some beautiful place, or…” She trails off, looking to the side. “Or someone…”

“I…” Shiro’s tongue trips him. He had not anticipated this argument. “This is where I want to be.”

Allura keeps her gaze on the far wall. Her frown grows deeper. “Because you believe it is your duty. Well, I—”

“No,” Shiro interrupts, wishing they were not having this conversation. Wishing she had just let the matter rest. But that is not in her nature. Not if she thinks there is a problem occurring that she can address. “I—that’s not. This isn’t about duty. There’s, look. There’s no one back on Earth for me. And I’ve seen enough of the universe for a while. I don’t want—I don’t want to have to talk about it. The war. What happened.” And he would have to talk about it. He is easy to identify. People look at him and know who he is. And they want to pull him aside, to thank him, to question him.

He doesn’t want any of that. He’s not sure he can deal with it. He swallows and decides not to address her question about someone. Hopefully she will forget about it. “I just want… quiet. And something to do with my hands.” And to be near her. “That’s—this is what I want.”

They stand in silence for a moment, and then Allura shifts. She says, “I—I apologize. I did not realize.”

“It’s…” He waves a hand and scrubs at his face. “I know. You were just trying to do the right thing. Can we just… can we get back to work?” Physical labor settles his thoughts more than anything else, after all, and he doesn’t want to have to think about leaving her. Not yet. He knows the day will come, eventually. But… not yet.

#

They eat through the last of Hunk’s leftovers right around the same time a transport loaded with supplies lands outside the Castle. The crew says that a strange, hyper man with red hair sent them and told them to set up a delivery schedule for foodstuffs. Allura smiles softly, speaking with the leader while Shiro shows the crew where to place the crates they’ve brought.

Afterwards, he asks, “Do you think he’s doing alright?”

Allura looks up from the crate she’s digging through and asks, “Coran?” Her eyes dim and she shrugs. “I suppose he is doing as well as can be expected.”

Shiro frowns. “Is he doing something dangerous?”

“No.” Allura shakes her head and places a bag of something that certainly resembles sugar onto one of the counters. “It’s… there are some Altean mourning rituals that require privacy.”

Shiro stops his work and looks at her, wondering if perhaps there are other reasons she spoke with him about leaving. “Should I, do I need to go, then? Am I, I don’t know, interfering?” Allura has an entire people to mourn.

“No,” she says, resuming her work. “Those specific rituals are for those who lose their life-mate.”

The implications of that turn over in Shiro’s mind and he grimaces. Compared to the genocide of an entire species, the loss of one person should not feel so crushing, but it does, anyway. Shiro wonders how Coran kept going through the war, with that kind of weight dragging at him. He asks, “Will he be alright?”

Allura hesitates and then nods. “I believe so,” she says, and they do not speak of it any further.

#

“We should get out of here for a day,” Shiro says, a few weeks into their work. They have been spending all of their time on the Castle, and there is no doubt it needs the attention, but… They’ve gotten basic life-support pretty much sorted and that feels like an accomplishment that should be celebrated with somethings besides moving on to the next major project. “The leaves are all changing color out there. And my eyes are going to cross if I do any more of this. What do you think?”

Allura frowns. Wires hang out of the ceiling over their head. She’s elbow-deep in one of the Castle’s systems. There’s a smudge of grease over her cheek, partially covering her markings. Her hair is messily twisted back, pulled up solely to be kept out of the way. He wants to tuck a loose strand back, but he resist. “Come on,” he says, clearing his throat, “some fresh air would do us good.”

“Alright,” Allura says, surprising him. She grabs a rag and scrubs at her hands. “That sounds nice.”

“Great,” he says, dumbly, “that’s—great.” She glances at him and smiles, and, for a moment, all he can do is smile back at her. It’s an effect she always has on him.

The world outside the Castle is beautiful. Allura landed them beside a large lake. They are surrounded by forests with trees full of leaves that were all in shades of pale blue when they arrived. Now, the leaves are changing to purples and indigoes as the air grows nippy and the days get shorter.

“We should ask the Exrertans about their winters,” Allura says, as they pick their way around the lake. The waters are calm and stunningly clear. Roots from the trees protrude out of the banks and disappear into the water. Some form of flying animal moves around in the trees, chirping overhead. Shiro doesn’t see any giant birds lurking around anywhere. “If they are harsh, we will need to prepare.”

“Mm,” Shiro agrees. “We could go into the village tomorrow and talk to them. It’s been a while since we visited, anyway. They probably think we’re being antisocial.”

Allura laughs, small but honest. The breeze off of the water catches the loose strands of her hair, lifting them and twirling them into the air. She reaches out and plucks a star-shaped leaf out of the air as it blows past, tilting it to and fro. “The leaves on Altea did not change like this,” she says, after a moment. “At least not that I ever saw.”

“What were your seasons like?” he asks, and she tells him of Altea’s long orbit around the twin suns of its solar system. Each season was lengthy and there was little variation from one to the next. It did not rain there, she tells him. Moisture was a dear resource, apparently. She trails off, after a while, her expression distant and her voice grown thick.

Shiro wonders if he should have asked at all. But she seemed… happy, at first, to be talking about it. Perhaps this is how discussions of Altea will always be for her, sadness mixed with sweet. He touches her shoulder, and she shivers beneath his fingertips. She offers him a small smile and a shrug, before clearing her throat. “What about Earth?” she asks.

The rest of their trip around the lake—it is much larger than Shiro realized, and they do not make it back to the Castle until after the sun has sunk below the horizon—is filled with talk of first Earth and then other planets that Allura visited in happier times.

Their breath fogs in front of their faces by the time they step out of the cold, and Shiro opens his mouth to apologize; he had not meant to keep her out until night. She speaks before he can. “Thank you,” she says, looking up at him with skin reddened by the dropping temperature. Her markings seem to be putting off some kind of glow, perhaps catching the light of the moon overhead. The effect is stunning, whatever the cause. She smiles at him shyly, and looks up through her eyelashes. “This was nice. Walking with you.”

Shiro feels heat rush to his freezing face and can do nothing about it. She doesn’t—she only means that it was nice to have a break. He understands that. Entertaining hopes in regards to anything else would be foolish. He knows that, and he always has. She’s never made any indication she wants the things he does. He’s had an entire war to get used to that. He clears his throat. “Yeah. It—I liked it, too.”

“Good,” she says, reaching out and squeezing his hand. “We should get something to eat.”

#

They cook their meals together now, though Shiro mostly just follows Allura’s directions. He never figured out how to cook, and she spent time in the kitchen with Hunk, learning recipes or, at least, listening as he tried to explain his cooking philosophy. “Why’d you let Hunk teach you all this, anyway?” Shiro asks, because he has always wondered and he is getting used to asking her things.

“I wanted them to trust me,” Allura says, after a moment, as she stirs a bowl full of some kind of oil and spices, a sauce for the meal. It is not the answer Shiro expected. For a moment he is not sure she heard the question properly. “A good leader inspires trust in his or her people. And the foundation for trust is a personal connection. People must know you value them before they will follow you.”

Shiro pauses in chopping the vegetables he was handed. He glances at her. She looks sad and distant. It is the expression she wears when thinking about her parents. He says, quietly, “So you asked Hunk to teach you to cook.”

“Mm,” she says, tilting her head to the side. “It is a useful skill to know, in any case. And he greatly enjoyed having a student. I thought about asking him to explain his mathematical theories, but….”

But that always tangled back to the war, to adjusting the sensors or developing a program to get through Galra shields, or a thousand other things. And Hunk, perhaps out of all the Paladins, needed a break from the fighting and the death. Battle never touched his kitchen. It was… an escape. Shiro nods. “Yeah. I suppose that’s why you agreed to all those video games with Lance.” He’d wondered about that, at the time.

She laughs, soft and abashed. “Yes,” she admits. “Though I tried to connect with him over Kalternecker, first. It did… not go as I expected. Did you know she excretes the milk after digital stimulation?” Allura sounds so aghast that Shiro snorts a laugh.

“I did know that,” he says. “It’s… pretty widely known on Earth. Uh. Most mammals there do, I guess.” And suddenly they are in a strange territory.

“But you do not drink the milk of most mammals,” she says, accusatory. After a second she continues, almost horrified, “Do you?”

“I guess not,” he says, shrugging. “Mostly just cows and a few other animals we’ve domesticated.”

“Alteans do not drink such things, as a rule,” she says. “I suppose I reacted strongly when I found out how it was… harvested. But I assumed it was just an error of translation when you all kept using the word ‘milk.’” Shiro heard second-hand from Lance about how Allura and Coran took that particular revelation. He supposes, looking at it from an outside perspective, that he can understand their feelings.

“It’s alright,” he says, “I’m still not used to the fact that half of what you eat is goo.”

“It is nutritionally balanced!” Allura says, turning on him and waving the spoon. “And it contains enough calories to keep a solider going for—” She narrows her eyes then, cocking her head to one side as a slow smile spreads across her mouth. “You are joking,” she says, slowly. “Teasing me.”

He can feel his ears heating. “Maybe a little,” he admits, and she huffs, bumping her shoulder into his arm, but softly, not hard enough to do more than sway him.

“Just for that,” she says, “I should make you finish this on your own.” But she does not. They finish together and then slide up on the counter to eat. The table feels empty and wrong with just the two of them to fill it. It is much nicer to sit shoulder to shoulder, watching Allura swing her legs back and forth as they eat, until his chest is warm and his stomach is full.

He wonders what action she took to earn his trust, but cannot bring himself to ask.

#

In the end, they do not visit the village the following day. Maybe they’ve both had enough of other people, for a while. They continue their work on the Castle over the coming days, instead, but they do not dedicate themselves to it quite so thoroughly. They walk around the lake and into the surrounding wood, exploring their temporary home as the air grows colder and colder.

They are out on one of their walks a few days later when Allura’s ears twitch and she pauses in the middle of a step, her head snapping to one side. “What?” Shiro asks, his skin prickling immediately as he looks around. “What is it?”

“Someone is yelling for help,” Allura says, all hints of her previous relaxation tucked away. She starts forward again, moving perpendicular to their previous direction, traveling deeper into the woods at a run. “This way!”

Within a few steps, Shiro can hear the panicked screaming, too. He pushes to go faster, Allura keeping pace with him, until they burst out of the trees into a clearing full of a small group of Exrertans. Exrertan children. The tallest of them barely comes up to Shiro’s chest. They are all splotchy-faced, holding onto one another, weeping.

They are screaming at the giant bird in their midst.

What had the Exrertans told them about the snow birds? That there was a nesting pair in the mountain range? That they were dangerous and should be avoided? Those description lacks something, when placed beside the living creature. The snow bird is immense, with wings of downy white that, yes, resemble snow. Its beak is wickedly hooked, a raptor’s beak, and it is among the children.

Shiro thinks, for an instant, that it will snap the beak closed on the shoulder of a little girl, and he yells, charging forward. The bird jerks towards the sound, hopping sideways, prompting more screams from the children. “Get away from them!” Allura yells, bending and grabbing a rock. She throws it overhand, hitting the bird in the neck, hard enough that it flops sideways.

And it must decide, then, that they are too much trouble. It hisses, a strange, deep sound, extends its massive wings—easily as wide as an old-fashioned school bus—and flaps down. The children scream, the force of the stirred wind pushing them down. And they scream again, as the bird rises skyward.

One boy yells, “Gytty! No!”

Shiro raises an arm to shield his face from the wind and debris. He can just make out that something hangs from one of the snow bird’s massive claws, something with pale hair, something limp. One of the children. He jerks forward without thought, jumping for the child, his fingers just brushing one hanging hand, before the bird rises out of his reach.

Allura slides to a stop at his side. The bird rises quickly, its massive wings driving it into the air. It moves fast. If it breaks for the mountains, for wherever its nest is, they will not be able to catch it. The children around them weep. One falls to the ground, sobbing. A child is going to die. A child—

“Throw me,” Shiro snaps, his pulse humming like a livewire under his skin. He keeps his gaze locked on the bird. “Get me up there.”

And Allura does not question. She does not demand an explanation. She just grows quickly, in a blur of movement he catches out of the corner of his eyes. Fabric tears. When she grabs him, her hands are big enough to lift him easily. There is no time for grace or elegance in the throw. She just hurls him upward, the movement fast enough that it hurts.

Humans are not particularly aerodynamic. But Shiro gets there. He wonders, in some small place in the back of his head, how fast she threw him. She could break pitching records. She—

He hits the side of the bird and scrambles for a grip, the breath knocked out of him by the impact. His weight drags the bird downward, at least a dozen feet, as it attempts to adjust. Shiro grabs handfuls of feathers, and they pull out of bird. He slips down and curses, breathlessly. The world spins below. A wing beats at him from above.

His hold fails utterly; he falls and—and he manages to grab one of the bird’s legs, on the way to the hard, unforgiving ground. The child hangs beside him, limp in a way that makes Shiro’s gut ache. He reaches out and grabs the kid’s nearest arm, and then he tightens his grip on the bird’s leg, his mechanical hand whirring, and—

The bird screams, jerking around in the air for a moment before its claws spasm open. The child falls free; Shiro pulls her close and releases his grip on the bird. He does not want to give the bird any chances to carry them further into the sky. Their fall is going to be extreme enough already.

He wraps both arms around the child as the sky flies past, rushing upwards past them. This is, he realizes, probably going to hurt.

And then Allura yells, “I’ve got you!” He hits arms, instead of the ground, Allura barely grunting as his weight comes down on her. It still hurts. The impact of his back against her arm feels like smacking into a steel girder. “I’ve got you,” Allura repeats, as Shiro tries to draw a breath around the pain. She lowers him to the ground, carefully. “I’ve got you.”

#

Shiro gets his breath back. He has to. There is an unconscious child in his grip and a half-dozen conscious children weeping around them. Allura says, “We need to get them back to the village.” He nods agreement, coughing. She helps him stand, shrinking as she does. Her change in size tore the seams of her uniform at her shoulders and hips. The splits in the fabric reveal stripes of dark skin that he can’t help but noticing, even in his present state.

Shiro coughs again, looking to the side and adjusting his grip on the child. “You know the way?” he asks, quietly, in deference to his ringing head.

“I believe so,” Allura says. “Come along, children. We must get you home. Up, up, up.” She gets them all to their feet and moving. “It’s alright now,” she reassures, settling them with soft touches on their heads and shoulders. By the time they get fully underway, most of the tears have stopped.

The weeping starts again, as soon as the village comes into view. The children cry out and break away from them, running for the houses and calling for their parents. It does not take much to draw the attention of everyone in the village. People flood from houses and businesses, the noise level jumping as everyone demands an explanation at once.

For a moment or two, in the madness, Shiro and Allura go unnoticed, until one of the children points at them.

#

The next hour is mostly yelling, thankfully of the relieved variety. An Exrertan who identifies herself as a doctor takes the child from Shiro. Someone else presses a cup of water into his hand. At some point, someone throws a blanket over Allura’s shoulders, and a half-dozen sets of parents approach them, intent on hugging them and slapping their shoulders and thanking them, over and over again.

They are invited to some kind of autumn festival the following day, and told they must come enough times that Shiro figures they’d be committing some kind of social faux paus if they declined. By the time they make it back to the Castle, he feels exhausted, the last of the adrenaline guttering out of his system.

“Let me see to your back,” Allura says, picking at the split seam over her hip. “I know it hurt when I caught you.”

It did. It still does, badly enough that he does not even consider disregarding her offer. “Alright,” he says, and he does not fight her when she gets him to stretch out over the couch, so she can tend the throbbing bruise across his shoulders.

He drifts, a little, under her touch. He doesn’t mean to. But it has been a long day, a long week, a long war. And she touches him so softly. And he has not yet learned how to deal with touches that take pain away.

“Throw me,” she says, finally, snorting a laugh as she trails her fingers back and forth across his shoulders. “What kind of plan was that?”

He settles back into his head. “Hey,” he says, stretching a little and pleased to find that it barely hurts at all. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“Mm,” she says. “I am glad that it did. Come, we should eat something.”

He nods and follows her into the kitchen, though he would have been just as happy to remain, with her softly touching him. He shivers, trying to bury that emotion where it belongs, where it won’t cause any problems for either of them.

#

The next morning they dress and walk down to the village, as planned. They find it bustling with activity. Tents have been erected around the village proper, with banners streaming from poles set up around the entire affair. People wander around the tents, talking to one another. The air buzzes with excitement.

“Princess!” A booming voice calls as they approach. “Paladin!” Shiro turns to find one of the Exrertans they were introduced to during their very first meeting bearing down on them. The man is tall—he has nearly a foot of height on Shiro—and his hair is a deep, burnished copper-red. A beard covers the lower half of his broad face. He’d been in some position of importance in the village, though he had not been on the council of elders. Shiro cannot recall his name at all.

Allura turns to face him and smiles. She says, “Kulan, how wonderful to see you once more. Are we… late for the festivities?”

“No, no, not at all,” Kulan says, reaching them and beaming. He is wearing some kind of vest and little else on his chest, apparently unbothered by the cold. “You are just in time. I am glad you accepted the invitation to join us. I feared that Elder D’nine’s comments had frightened you away from our hospitality.”

“Of course not,” Allura says. “We would never be frightened away by honest curiosity. The work on our ship has simply kept us busy.”

“Well, we are glad you took a break yesterday and that you joined us today. There will be games and food and music. There is even dancing, later on. Come, I will show you around.” He puts his hand on Allura’s back and makes to lead her off, over to the tents. Shiro scowls, and pushes the hot flood of irritation in his gut aside. He has no right it. Still, he feels… better, when Allura shrugs out of Kulan’s space, falling into step behind him, where she walks in line with Shiro.

“I cannot act as a guide for long,” Kulan says, not commenting on Allura’s movement. “We have several competitions planned for the day, and the first will start soon. In fact, we would be pleased if you chose to participate. Though, you, Princess, are not dressed for the occasion.”

Shiro frowns at the way Kulan grins down at Allura. He asks, “What kind of competitions?”

Kulan glances over at him, eyes narrowing slightly. “They are physical tests of skill. I am sure it is not the sort of challenge that a Paladin of Voltron is used to, but our people value them. Your participation would…. Honor us.” He grins. “I know it would please me. I have not had a fresh challenger to my title for some time.”

Allura glances at Shiro, a question in her expression. They aren’t quite being told they have to take part in the events. It feels more like a dare than a decree. But Shiro isn’t entirely sure that’s the case. Inter-species relations are always fraught, and for all he knows if he refuses they’ll be shunned or kicked off the planet.

Shiro shrugs and musters a smile. This isn’t how he wanted to spend the day, but it could be worse. He says, “I’m always up for a challenge.”

#

A log splitting competition is, in fact, not something Shiro is used to. But he’s already agreed to this, and at least he doesn’t have to fight anybody or recite lines that don’t make any sense in front of a crowd. He ends up with an axe that was obviously designed for someone with hands larger than his own, lined up with a half-dozen Exrertans.

He can see a few Exrertans whispering to one another out in the crowd, nudging each other and nodding at him, but, more importantly, he spots Allura. She’d been conversing with Kulan, a thoughtful expression on her face, but now she moves forward to sit in the front row, watching him with a little frown. He nods at her, and she smiles, encouraging.

And it is then that a group—event staff, Shiro supposes—bring out the logs to be chopped.

They are… huge and thick. The wood looks almost petrified. There is a stack deposited by each competitor. Shiro eyes the logs, spins the axe he holds, and shrugs. He might be better served by his hand, but, then again, using it might be a violation of the rules. He can make the axe work. When the whistle blows, he grabs the first log, places it, lifts the axe, and puts every bit of strength he has behind the blow.

The log splits in two, each side falling over in a way that is strangely satisfying. He hears a murmur, but ignores it. He did not get a straight answer about how long this competition was going to last for. So he grabs the next log and splits it, and the next, and the next, until there are none left.

A drum pounds at that moment, loud and deep, startling Shiro out of the haze of effort. He blinks, taking in the pile of split wood around his feet. His shoulders ache. He’s sweating, under his shirt, down his spine and beneath his hair. He whacks the axe down into the stand and turns when Allura calls his name. A second later, she throws her arms around him, laughing.

“Congratulations,” she says, a moment before one of the Exrertans slaps him on the shoulder, beaming at him over Allura’s head. “I believe you beat them all soundly.”

“That was very impressive,” Kulan says, approaching them with an expression more sour than sweet. Allura releases him, and Shiro tries to remember how to think straight after having an armful of her so unexpectedly. They don’t really… embrace. Kulan eyes him up and down and continues, “I admit, I did not think you’d be able to do… so well. Come! Now I must see how you do on the axe-throw.”

#

Shiro does well at axe-throwing. He succeeds at something they call the trunk-climb. He saws through a tree trunk with, apparently, aplomb. By some point near the middle of the second task, he realizes he is enjoying the activities. It is fun, this pointless exertion. There is nothing on the line, as near as he can tell. And he’s already done better than anyone expected. No one will die if he fails. No one will be hurt. Nothing bad will happen.

Though he could, perhaps, disappoint Allura, who has taken to cheering loudly.

“This is the last event,” Kulan says, finally, giving Shiro a dour look. He’s grown increasingly polite throughout the day; there’s been a definite uptick in surliness as his joviality decreases. “Though we understand you may not wish to participate.”

Shiro privately thinks that Kulan would rather he not participate. No one likes their thunder stolen. Shiro drags his wrist across his forehead, wiping away the sweat, and asks, “Why?”

“It is a team competition,” Kulan says, glancing over as Allura approaches, carrying a mug full of water. “You carry your partner for the first part of the race, then you navigate obstacles together, and then your partner must carry you. It is difficult, especially for someone as delicate—”

“Where do we start?” Allura asks, pressing the mug into Shiro’s hands and beaming up at Kulan.

#

The Exrertans carry their partners on their backs for the race; Shiro follows their lead. Allura’s skirts get in the way, bunching around her thighs. She presses up against his back, her arms curled around his neck, and he swallows hard. It is… something of a relief when the race starts. Running takes his mind off of her closeness, and the way her legs feel under his hands.

He barely remembers the running portion of the race, afterwards, and the obstacles are laughable, compared to what they dealt with during the war. They complete the first two portions of the race with an impressive lead, but Shiro hears a burst of laughter when Allura turns to him. The Exrertans are, apparently, not aware of how strong she is.

Allura flashes him a single, sharp grin, and he wonders if she knew about this, if being able to surprise them was the entire reason she waved off participating in the earlier games. It wouldn’t shock him. She’s always had a mind for strategy, and she did speak for some time with Kulan earlier. She says, “Climb on.” She doesn’t even have to kneel. Shiro wraps his arms over her shoulders, and she reaches back and grabs his legs, taking his weight easily.

Allura crosses the finish line at a dead run, laughing. Shiro grins, releasing her. She beams up at him, and he thinks, for a confusing moment, that her markings are putting off a glow, but before he can be sure the next pair crosses the finish line.

Kulan stares at them before snorting. “You are both full of surprises,” he says with a grin. “Come! Perhaps we shall find some more of them over dinner!”

#

Mainly what they find out over dinner is the limit of how much Shiro can eat. It is not an insignificant undertaking.

Allura also manages to get information about the planet’s seasons—they sound survivable, if long—and about a trade fair that will be held in the village after the harvest is completed. They are, apparently, expected to make some kind of appearance due to their performance in the day’s events.

They leave after dinner with full stomachs, declining the offer to stay the night as politely as they can. They cannot get away without accepting a pair of heavy coats for the cold snap in the air, as the Exrertans will not accept that his uniform and her dress will provide them with adequate warmth.

“I could carry you back to the Castle,” Allura offers, as they bundle into the coats pressed upon them. Her coat—pale gold—suits her well, and she smiles easily. He cannot remember her ever smiling so much as she has over the course of the day.

“I am kind of tired,” he says back, and she laughs, swaying into him as they make their way from the village. The stars overhead are bright and unfamiliar. The air around them is cold. Shiro’s back is well on the way to aching from the exertions of the day. But Allura’s hand brushes his as they walk—an accident, he is sure—and he feels warm enough. More than warm enough.

#

Their work progresses. They fall into a comfortable rhythm, splitting their time between repairing the Castle and exploring the world around them. Regular messages from the others punctuate their days. Pidge and Matt report that their mother has forgiven them for running off to save the universe and leaving her in the dark. Hunk sends reports about the Balmera and Shay. Lance provides them with a tour of the universe’s most beautiful beaches in picture form. Keith sends more reserved messages. Coran is radio silent; Shiro assumes it is a necessity of his mourning rituals.

They end up carrying out a load of debris, after reading over the messages one day, and Shiro glances skyward. The stars stretch overhead, beautiful and bright. There is limited light pollution on this world. He asks, “Where do you think they all are?”

“Oh,” Allura says, moving to stand by his shoulder and looking upward. “Well, Earth should be…” She points upward, her finger sliding past dozens of stars before she stops. “Right around here. See? Past this group of stars that looks like an eye.”

Shiro follows the line of her arm, trying to identify the constellation she’s speaking of. “What do you think the constellations are, here?” he asks, as he looks, thinking about memorizing all of the constellations that littered Earth’s night sky. He’d spent so many hours doing that, as a child. Now he wonders if he will ever see them from that perspective again.

“We could ask,” Allura says, letting her arm fall. “I am sure they would tell us.”

“Mm.” The night air is cold and he is very aware of Allura’s warmth, where she stands beside him. He does not want to think about other people, right at that moment.

Allura shrugs. “Or we could make up our own. What do you see?”

They end up sitting on the cold ground, leaning against one another and picking out groups of stars, until the cold is too much to bear. There is a part of Shiro that worries that they are wasting time, but that inner voice is easy enough to quiet, for once. They are not wasting time. Or, if they are, it is theirs to waste. Shiro sprawls in bed that night, staring up at the ceiling and imaging the stars, remembering the way Allura’s hand brushed his on the ground, and the pinkish light from her cheeks. He is sure now that he is not imagining it, he just doesn’t know what’s causing it.

The glow is beautiful, in any case.

#

The market day arrives before Shiro is ready. It brings with it the first snow fall of the year. They’re walking into the village when the softly swirling flakes start to fall. The flakes seem larger than they would be on Earth—but it has been a long time since Shiro saw a snowfall on his home planet. And his memories of the time before the Galra are blurry and untrustworthy at the best of times.

Allura holds her hands out to the snow, gazing upwards at the clouds with a look of wonder mixed with suspicion. A flake lands on the tip of her nose, and she startles. Shiro smiles at her, warm throughout his chest despite the bite in the air. He asks, “Never seen snow before?”

“No,” she says, blinking over at him. “I mean, obviously, we visited planets that were covered with it, but it had already fallen. I have never…” She trails off, looking upward, her breath fogging in front of her mouth.

“You can catch it on your tongue,” he tells her, and she shoots him a look, her cheeks pinking when he tilts his face to the sky and sticks out his tongue. She imitates him and then laughs, a moment later, when a flake lands and melts on her tongue.

“I’ve never known anything to fall from the sky so softly,” she says, turning in a slow circle. Her expression dims, then, losing some of its joy. “Except ash.” She crosses her arms over her chest, the first time she has given any indication that she notices the cold at all, and Shiro reaches out, touching her shoulder.

She surprises him by making a soft sound and curling into him, pressing her face against his collarbone. He wraps an arm around her, because maybe this—embracing—is something they do now, something she needs that he can give her, and they stand there, for a while, saying nothing. “We should go,” she says, eventually. “They will be expecting us.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, tightening his arm once and lifting his face away from her hair. He’s pleased she trusts him enough to look to him for comfort. He doesn’t want to abuse that by holding too tight or too long, no matter the sudden ache in his chest. “I guess we should.”

#

The village is, somehow, even livelier than it was during the harvest celebration. There are dozens of tents set up around the buildings, all of them brightly colored and small, all of them full of wares from the surrounding area that have been brought to market. Shiro and Allura are recognized and greeted warmly by the villagers, directed to one stall or another. Someone presses something very much like hot chocolate into Shiro’s hands and he takes a grateful sip before passing it to Allura.

There is a stall containing strange animals that chitter and chatter at them. They find a tent full of little folded pastries that smell delicious and that have eight-pointed stars cut into the top crust. They each eat one; the crust is flakey and buttery, the filling burns Shiro’s tongue, and the sweetness makes his teeth ache. Allura licks a smear of purple-red out of the corner of her mouth, and Shiro shivers down his spine, looking hurriedly away.

There is also a stall full of gems and jewelry. Allura leans over the wares with wide eyes, and he wonders how long it’s been since she got to run her fingers over bracelets, necklaces, or earrings. She hesitates over a pair of drop earrings that end with teardrop shaped gems that appear clear at a first glance. Looking at them longer reveals that they have some kind of strange glow to them, now purple, now blue, now pink.

“You have fine taste,” the shop’s proprietor says. He’s an older man with a missing eye that is covered by a jeweled patch. His hair is downy white and he still has a mass of it, gathered back into a tail at the nape of his neck. “My son-in-law mined the stones himself. Found a whole cache. Kept the prettiest for my daughter, of course, but I made those with the next best.”

“They are very beautiful,” Allura says, smiling and drawing her hand back. “You do fine work.”

“They would look even more beautiful on you,” the jeweler says, obviously a man who knows his work.

Allura laughs, shaking her head. “Oh, no, I could not possibly—”

“What would you take for them?” Shiro asks, taken in by the laughter on the air and the way the falling snow catches on Allura’s eyelashes.

The jeweler looks at him with a grin that reminds Shiro more of pirates than anything else. But they have money—the universe was very grateful in that regard—and tradable goods to spare, and he wants to see Allura wearing the earrings. He wants to look at them and remember the way she’d trailed her fingers across the gems.

“Shiro,” she says, once the transaction is completed, “you didn’t have to purchase these.”

“I know,” he says, opening the little box he was given; apparently jewelers around the universe prefer little black boxes for storing their creations. The earrings gleam, their glow faint and perfect. She takes them from his hand and stares down at them. “Do you want to wear them now?”

She smiles up at him, the glow in her cheeks far outstripping the earrings. She makes quick work of changing them out; the new jewels hanging just slightly lower than her old pair. They sway a little, when she walks, and they cast shifting hues of light across the mass of her hair. “What do you think?” she asks, lifting her chin a little and turning her head, displaying them.

“Looks beautiful,” he says, and clears his throat too late to disguise the roughness of his tone. Her eyes widen. He swears her markings glow even brighter. Her lips part, and he wants to kiss her, there under the snow and the lights of the candles. But.

But this is the happiest he has seen her, perhaps ever. He doesn’t—he can’t throw his unwanted attentions all over that. He won’t spoil this moment for her. So he clears his throat and looks away, pushing down all the noisy wants inside his chest. “Look,” he says, pointing at another little tent. “Sweaters.”

They both end up with new coats and hats and mittens; the Castle contains many things, but warm winter clothing is hard to come by. Shiro buys a quilt as well, something heavy and warm. The Castle has been getting cold at night, with the environmental systems off.

Their arms are full by the time they decide to make their way towards home. “We should have a snowball fight tomorrow,” Shiro says, before thinking about how hard Allura can throw and wincing.

#

They do not have a snowball fight the following day; it doesn’t snow enough to allow it. The air just gets cold, oppressively so, with a wind that cuts right through every layer of their clothes every time they step outside. Allura has to turn some of the environmental controls back on, just to keep temperatures in the Castle at a livable level.

They spend the next handful of days inside, roaming the halls, working, and holding long conversations in the common room when they run out of energy for the day. It has been almost a week of bitter, biting cold when Allura pulls her feet up onto the cushion, her hands curled around a cup of hot tea. She asks, “Do you have winters like this on Earth?”

Shiro shrugs, expecting thoughts of Earth to settle heavy under his ribs; they usually do. But he feels… distant from it, at the moment. Earth is far away; Allura is right here. He says, “In some parts of the planet. There’s a lot of different climates.”

“Mm.” She swirls her cup and asks, “Do you miss it?”

Shiro stares forward, surprised by the lack of tension in his bones. Perhaps he would have felt differently if one of the others asked; conversations with them always came with the understanding that they missed Earth, that if he did not, he would be somehow… outside of the norm. He shrugs, “I… not really.”

“Because you feel there is nothing there for you?” she asks, staring down into her cup.

Even a few weeks ago, he would have balked at the question. But he has gotten used to talking to her. Nothing bad happens when he shares things with her. She does not look at him differently the next day. She does not push when he cannot give her the information she asks for. And it is hard not to feel willing to share when she has her toes tucked under his thigh, when he’s absently rubbing her ankle. So he thinks about it for a moment and then sighs. “Yeah. That’s some of it.”

Allura hums. “Do you… do you have no family?”

He swallows, circling his thumb around her ankle, over the pink markings there. Her skin is so warm and soft. Comforting. “I have some,” he says. “Aunts and uncles. Cousins, too, I guess. But. My father died when I was young. And my mom remarried, and, I don’t know. I never got along with him. My step-father. He wasn’t terrible, or anything. We just didn’t…” Shiro shrugs.

Allura makes a soft, encouraging sound. He tilts his face up to ceiling and closes his eyes, picturing faces he hasn’t imagined in a long, long time. So many of them are blurry, indistinct. “Anyway,” he says. “Mom got sick. She died. And then it was just me and her new husband and…” He grimaces. It wasn’t that they hated one another. They hadn’t cared about one another enough for there to be hatred. They’d been little more than strangers, tied together by a dead woman. “And I got accepted into the Garrison, and that was that.”

“I am sorry about your mother,” Allura says. “I—my mother died, too. When I was young.”

Shiro turns his head to look at her; he’d assumed that her mother died during the war, perhaps even during the destruction of Altea. He asks, giving her ankle a squeeze for comfort, “What happened?”

She shrugs against the couch. Her gaze is far away and her mouth pinches tight. “I do not remember it all. I was a child. Barely talking.” Something cold and hard stirs in Shiro’s gut. He lifts his head off of the couch. “Father told me afterwards that it was a kidnapping, but all I knew was that some strange men took me away.” Shiro’s breath catches in the back of his throat and stays there, pressure building up behind it. “Mother tried to stop them. But there were… too many of them.”

She closes her eyes and turns her face away. “Hey,” Shiro says, wishing he could kill people ten thousand years in the grave, “it’s—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It is alright,” she says, roughly. “I must speak about it sooner or later, to someone. I—at least I know she loved me. I saw…” She trails off and clears her throat. “In any case, my father found me. He and the other Paladins of Voltron. I… Zarkon discovered me first, you know. I was hiding in a closet and he found me. He carried me out to my father. And we killed him, Shiro, we killed him, we—”

“Sh, sh, hey,” Shiro says, shifting so he can pull her close as the first tears fall, her voice breaking. The images of that final battle will never leave him. He’ll always be able to close his eyes and see the way Zarkon slammed Allura into the ground, over and over again, spitting hatred down at her, distracted enough to buy Shiro the time to reach him, to separate his— “We did what we had to do,” he says.

Allura nods, her head tucked beneath his chin. “I know,” she says, her voice wet and cracking. “I know that. But he—he found me. Honerva treated my injuries.” Shiro shoves down the hot flare of anger that tries to climb his spine. It has no conceivable use. He can do absolutely nothing about what happened. “They were good once. They were kind. And we killed them. We did.”

“I know,” Shiro says, stroking her back. It is hard for him to imagine that they were good at any point, but he has heard the stories about Zarkon’s days as the Black Paladin; he understands what Zarkon did to save his wife, misguided as the action may have been. Put in the same position, given the same information, Shiro isn’t sure… Well. He thinks that perhaps Black prefers a certain type of personality in her Paladins, with certain unavoidable flaws. “I know.”

Her tears stop, eventually. She makes no effort to move away, and he does nothing to encourage such a choice. They sit on the couch, curled together, while the wind whips outside the Castle. She says, quiet, against his throat, “I am glad you are here with me.”

He rubs his hand down her back and closes his eyes. “Nowhere else I’d rather be.”

#

Nearly a month passes in the winter before they get enough snow to do anything with. By the time it finally snows in earnest, it has been cold for so long that the lake outside of the Castle has frozen over completely, though Shiro does not know how strong the ice is. He isn’t sure he’d risk skating on it, if they had skates.

But the snow is harmless, thick and damp and perfect for snowballs and snowmen. Allura is delighted when they step outside one morning and find that it comes up nearly to her hips. They make a frankly gigantic snowman, Allura laughing loudly as she stretches her legs to place the creature’s head on top of all eight feet of its body.

“We should make it a snow Lion, as well,” Allura decides, after stepping back to look at their creation, so they do, pushing and piling the snow until it forms a shape that roughly resembles Black. “Now you must climb atop it,” Allure says, which is how he ends up sitting astride a snow Lion while she sticks her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and takes pictures.

“If I’m going to have a Lion,” Shiro says, sliding down, “you’re going to need a Castle.”

They spend hours constructing a scale model of the Castle. By the time they finish, the tip of Shiro’s nose is frozen and his cheeks are numb from the cold. He does not even mind.

Allura steps back from their project, her hands on her hips, beaming. The marks on her cheeks are flush with color, and Shiro is dying to know why, but, at this point, it has happened often enough that he does not know how to ask without it being awkward. She’s grinning, her hair tumbled all across her shoulders, escaping from under her knitted hat. The weak winter sun glows around her, and for a moment, the sight knocks the breath out of him.

He is not prepared for it when she bends, scoops up some snow, pats it quickly into a ball, and throws it at his chest.

The snowball impacts in the middle of his coat; it doesn’t hurt, she pulled her strength. Shiro blinks down and sputters, “What?”

And a second snowball joins the first. He looks back up at her, and she laughs at whatever she sees in his expression, bending hurriedly. “Is that how it is?” he asks, reaching down to create his own arsenal. She laughs again, louder, throws a snowball over her shoulder, and bolts.

He chases her, his laughter joining hers. They churn up the snow around the Castle and knock down their snowman by accident. They pelt one another, dodging around, until they are breathless with laughter and Shiro manages to catch Allura as she tries to run by.

He slips on a slushy spot in that exact moment, and they go down, landing hard in a snow drift. He catches himself with one arm, so his weight down not come down on her, though he knows she could take it. As it is, she blinks up at him, wide-eyed. Her hair fans out across the snow. There are snowflakes caught on her eyelashes. The markings on her cheeks cast pink light across her features. Her lips are parted, just a little.

One of her thighs rests against his hips. He can feel her other leg, caught between his. She’s breathing fast, her hands curled around his arms. He stares down at her, stunned senseless, knowing that he should scramble to his feet and not quite able to manage it.

Her gaze shifts, he thinks for a mad moment that she is looking at his mouth, and his pulse jumps higher. He should move. He needs to move. But Allura slides one of her hands up his arm, towards his shoulder. She wets her bottom lip. He says, strained, “Allura…”

Her fingers tighten in his coat. She lifts her head off the snow, and he—

“There you are!” A voice booms, familiar. Kulan. “The lake has frozen over!” He continues, as though this is news that must be delivered right now. “And you know what that means?”

Shiro grits his jaw, pushing to his feet and offering Allura a hand up. He manages to smile through his teeth, though really, he should be grateful to Kulan. He almost made a mistake. He almost forgot himself. Living so long with Allura is making him sloppy. He asks, “What’s it mean?”

#

It means, apparently, that it is time for some kind of winter game that reminds Shiro vaguely of hockey, a sport he has seen played for maybe two minutes over the entire course of this life. In this game, there are multiple teams, and each player is given a long stick that ends in a small flattened portion. The aim seems to be smacking a ball roughly the size of Shiro’s fist into a one of a series of small nets held up off of the ice around the lake. They are given skates that come close to fitting them—“Children’s skates,” Kulan says, but with good-natured humor—and conscripted to play on a team with Kulan and one other Exrertan.

Allura listens to the rules intently; Shiro is not sure she’s ever met a challenge she didn’t want to take. They are given a few moments to practice and warm up. Allura spins the stick in her hands and cautiously tries to skate a few steps. “It’s easier to stay up if you move faster,” Kulan says, and Shiro can see the moment Allura takes that to heart.

Shiro laughs, relearning the movements needed to skate effectively, practicing his turns, flipping around and skating backwards. A thump draws his attention back to Allura, who sprawls across the ice, staring at him with her cheeks pinked and her eyes wide. He grins back at her, skating over to help her up, and her blush deepens.

“You are quite good at this,” she says, as he braces his legs and pulls her up.

“You’ll catch on quick,” he says, because he knows her, knows she has excellent balance, knows how strong she is. She brushes ice off of her thigh, still holding onto his hand for balance, and for a moment he forgets the rest of the crowd is there. That lasts until they are told that the game is going to start.

#

Their team takes a moment to catch on. The game moves fast, players smacking the ball around the ice to one another and the nets. The ball is very hard. Shiro would not want to catch it in the head. Players jostle one another freely, bumping into each other and intentionally knocking others down, as Shiro discovers when someone shoves into his side, tripping up his feet and dumping him down to the ice.

He shakes his head—his teeth knocked together, hard, when he fell—and pushes back up in time to see a blur of gray that resolves itself into Allura. She reaches the man who bumped Shiro in seconds, having mastered going fast, but not stopping. Fortuitously, she does not seem worried about stopping. She runs into the man, and he goes sliding across the ice, landing in a snow drift with a whump of sound, twenty feet away.

“It’s alright,” Shiro says, catching a look at Allura’s face—lightning bore down on him, blinding retribution, and he had no way to stop it, no way to avoid it, and Allura stepped in front of him, her hand out—and touching her shoulder. “It’s—he was just playing. It’s part of the game.”

He can feel how hard Allura is breathing. She turns her face towards him, but keeps her gaze on the man she threw across the ice. “You are alright?”

“I’m fine.” He squeezes her shoulder. “He didn’t—it wasn’t malicious.”

Allura takes a breath and holds it, blows it out slow. Her expression defrosts, comes back from months ago. She blinks a few times and meets Shiro’s eyes. There is something thoughtful in her expression. “It is part of the game? This is true?”

“Indeed it is. You are allowed to knock whoever has the ball,” Kulan says, watching the two of them. He adds, rueful, “Though I doubt anyone else will try it with your Paladin.”

“Very well,” Allura says, shoving her hair back and nodding. “I am sorry for the misunderstanding. Shall we resume?”

Passing gets faster after that, as Allura seems ever ready to knock a hip into other players with the ball and no one wants to risk her attention. She is fast and she may not have fully developed the ability to stop, but she seems perfectly happy roaming ceaselessly around the ice. They yell to one another, skate and scramble, and, somehow, Shiro manages to hurl the ball into one of the nets.

Allura cries out, yelling in victory, and that is all the warning he gets before she jumps at him. He catches her, her momentum spinning them while she screams near his ear. He laughs back, setting her down after a moment, his face aching from the width of his smile.

#

They play until the sun sets. Allura invites the entire group in for a hot drink, afterwards, but they are declined—there are families to see, back in the village, meals to eat, beds to get to. The lake is criss-crossed with marks from their skates. It is beautiful, and Shiro stares out across it for a moment, before Allura calls for him, and he joins her inside.

#

The nights get progressively longer over the coming weeks, and Shiro cannot decide if that correlates or not with his increasing desire to just sleep. He has been tired a long time, after all. The first time he sleeps in until mid-morning, he wakes disoriented and with a headache, the previous night’s dreams clawing through his chest. He hurries out of the room, driven by a creeping sense that something is wrong, undone, that he has leaving a duty unfulfilled.

He finds Allura reading in the common room. She smiles at him and says, “There you are. Sleep well?”

He grips the side of the doorframe and rubs his face. “I—pretty well, yeah,” he says, because his sleep is always relative. There are always nightmares, of one sort or another. But the ones the previous night did not wake him up. He yawns and shuffles over to the couch to sit beside her, his heartrate slowing in increments. “Everything okay?”

“Mm? Yes.” Allura stretches, showing him the screen she’s reading. “I have been meaning to read this for ten thousand years. I thought perhaps I should.”

“Is it good?” Shiro asks. He feels warm and his mind is not up to speed yet. It is nice to sit beside her, especially when she shifts again and stretches her legs over his lap. His hand falls to her calf automatically. She makes a pleased little sound at the attention.

“It is.” She pauses, and then adds, “I could read some to you?”

Shiro leans his head back against the couch. “That sounds nice.” He likes to listen to her voice. And if it means he gets to sit here with her for longer, well, all the better. It takes him a moment to realize it is a fiction book, or, perhaps, a mythology, detailing the story of a family that lived in the days when the gods of Altea roamed around freely amongst the people.

He listens and something in his chest goes warm and stays that way for the rest of the day.

#

The winter is long and cold and it cannot be entirely slept through. There is still work to be done on the Castle, though it looks better, day by day. They exchanges messages with their star-flung compatriots. They make their trips to the village and they join the games when the Exrertans come out to the lake. And they skate on their own, some nights, when the sky is so cloudless that it makes Shiro feel as though he will fall upwards into the stars.

They are out on the lake one night, after winter has dragged on for so long that Shiro has nearly forgotten what the warm sun felt like and Allura has begun claiming that it is not so cold as it used to be, when Allura spins to a stop, turning her face up to the sky, her expression wide with wonder. “Look!” she exclaims, pointing upwards. “A meteor shower!”

Shiro follows the line of her arm, looking upward into the stars they have named and sucking in a breath. Lights streak across the sky, burning in white and red through the atmosphere. They disappear over the horizon, leaving afterimages on Shiro’s eyelids. There are so many of them, dozens or maybe hundreds.

“Make a wish,” Shiro says, repeating the advice his first roommate at the Garrison gave him.

“What?” Allura asks, her fingers curled into his coat. She adds, without waiting for an explanation, “Alright.” They watch the meteors for a moment longer, before she shifts. “Why did I make a wish?”

Shiro shrugs, his own automatic, impossible wish lingering in his thoughts. “Some people on my planet call those shooting stars. They think if you wish on one, you’ll get what you want.”

“Oh.” Allura sounds strange. She glances up at him, and the glow from her markings rivals that of the stars. “Is it true?”

Shiro swallows. She is right there. Her mouth is right there. He wished— But. But he can’t ruin this. He won’t. So he chuffs a laugh and scrubs at the back of his neck. “That probably depends on how hard you work to make the wish come true.”

She makes a soft sound, considering. She glances down at her hand on his chest, and then up into his face. The wind blows her curls around. Her eyes search his for something. She wets her bottom lip and reaches up with her other hand. Her mitten brushes his jaw. Electricity races down his spine. He says, roughly, “Allura…”

She can’t be doing what he thinks she’s doing. There’s probably something stuck to his face. There’s probably—

Her eyes fall half-lidded and she pushes up onto the toes of her skates, balancing on the thin little blades. He stops breathing, steadying her waist, his mind going to white-noise, and something cracks underfoot, dropping him almost an inch. His mouth bumps into Allura’s forehead—her skin is chilled from the cold and so, so soft, but he cannot think of that now.

“The ice,” he says, his brain still not functioning at speed.

“I know,” Allura snaps back, grabbing him by the arm and hauling him forward. There is another crack, louder, from behind them, and a wet whisper of sound. Shiro doesn’t look back. They skate hard for the shore, not stopping until they’re up on snow.

The cracks did not follow them all the way to shore. They did not extend that far at all, really. But there is a dark, black patch near the middle of the lake. Open water.

“You didn’t wish for that, did you?” Allura asks, still holding onto his arm.

Shiro glances down at her, thinking about the flutter of her eyelashes across her cheeks, the softness of her mouth, and the glow from her cheeks. “No,” he says, rougher than he intends. He clears his throat. “No, I didn’t.”

#

The temperatures increases rapidly over the coming days. Seasons here are long, but they do not linger, once they end. The ice breaks apart in jagged chunks and the snow surrounding the Castle begins the long process of melting. Water drips down on Shiro’s head every time he steps outside, and his nightmares resume waking him up in the middle of the night.

The first time he fails to sleep through until morning in a month, he wakes up breathing hard, his hand glowing brightly in the dark of the room. He smells burnt flesh in his nose and he gags, just once, before he manages to master himself. He can never decide if he hates the dreams that deviate from his memories more than the ones that hew closely to what he actually lived through.

He rolls out of the bed, dismissing such thoughts, and wanders down to the kitchen to pour a glass of water. He sinks down on the couch, afterwards, and presses the cool glass against his forehead. His leg bounces up and down, all the unused panic from the dream trying to work its way through his system.

He is not surprised when the door slides open a moment later. “Shiro?” Allura asks, from the doorway. “I heard your door open. Is everything alright?” Both of them are still sensitive to deviations from the norm, to sounds when there should be quiet. Shiro wonders if that ever goes away. He wonders if he wants it to. Maybe it keeps them safe.

He sighs, lowering the glass. “Yeah, it’s—I just had a bad dream, that’s all.”

“Mm.” Allura walks over and sinks down beside him. She’s wearing her sleeping robe. She tucks her legs up and knuckles at her eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?” She always asks. They have had this conversation, oh… so many times. Next she will tell him that she has heard that it helps. He taps his fingers on the glass and closes his eyes.

There is a part of him that never wants to discuss the things he sees when he sleeps. But maybe it will help, however unlikely that seems. And he can think of no one else in the universe who he would be willing to even consider discussing it with. He swallows. “It was—I was back where I grew up. But there were Galra soldiers everywhere. Everything was on fire. And I was small. I couldn’t—I couldn’t fight them.” He grits his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Allura says, leaning against him. She squeezes his arm, and he reaches over, covering her hand. It is a comfort when she threads their fingers together.

“It’s…” He tries to gather his thoughts. “The thing is, I can’t even clearly remember what that house looked like, when I’m awake. My memories are all—they’re scrambled. I guess they’re always going to be.” If they still are by now, he doesn’t see how they’re going to improve. “But it all seems so clear when I dream about it.”

Allura nods against his shoulder. Her hair brushes his neck. She says, quietly, “I sometimes dream that I am on Altean, as it is destroyed.”

Shiro thinks about that, because he cannot stop the process. He imagines Allura, standing amongst her people as they face a death inevitable and terrible. He shudders and manages to set his cup aside before it shatters in his grip.

“What a pair we are,” Allura says, huffing a tired laugh into the dark room.

“Yeah,” Shiro says, shifting them around so he can hold her against his chest, stroking his hand up and down her back, reminding himself that she’s here, that she survived, that she was not atomized before he ever had the chance to meet her. That is over. That threat is past. It ended by their hands.

And something unclenches around Shiro’s heart, like a bear-trap being pried open. It’s over. Zarkon and Haggar are dead, and it’s not the kind of dead you come back from. He breathes in the smell of her hair, feeling her relax within his arms, and discovers that she was right. He does feel better after talking about it.

#

During their next visit to the village, they are informed that they are approaching an annual dance celebrating the spring. Everyone seems abuzz with it, though Shiro has never been much of a dancer. The prospect certainly enthralls Allura, who sets about discovering the exact date and the dress code and what kind of dances will be performed.

He catches her humming as she works, over the next few days, as the dance approaches. By the time the day arrives, she seems fit to skip down the well-worn path to the village. Shiro grins, following her, her excitement contagious.

A wide space has been cleared away outside of the village. Poles were driven into the ground in a large circle; streamers in dozens of colors and strings of small, silver bells trail from the top of each one. A large fire has been set up in the middle of the circle. It has not yet been lit. The air smells of new grass and the rain they had yesterday. The sun overhead is beginning to sink down, and they are close enough to winter that there is still a bite to the air.

“There you are!” Kulan shouts, sweeping up to them with a grin. “Come, we must prepare you. My sister will assist you, Princess.”

“What?” Shiro says, startled and resisting when Kulan tries to lead him away by the arm. “Allura—”

“It’s alright,” Kulan says, patting Shiro’s shoulder. “You’ll see her again in a moment.” Allura nods, and Shiro swallows. It is—they have not been separated for so long, now. He expects a weight to settle in his gut, but, aside from some slight tension, the worry does not gnaw at him. She will be fine. He will be fine.

Or, perhaps not, he thinks, as he is led into one of the houses—full of other men and a few women—and he gets a look at what Kulan wants him to change into.

“Maybe I’ll just keep what I have,” Shiro says, frowning down at the, well… britches? The white pants look like they’ll barely cover his knees. Shiro picks them up and looks under them, wondering where the rest of the outfit got to.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kulan says. “You need to be able to move. And your skin needs a chance to feel the air. Put it on, and I’ll help you with the rest.”

“The rest,” Shiro says, doubtfully.

“Come out when you’re done,” Kulan says, and shuts Shiro into a little changing room. Shiro almost continues his protest. But Allura was so excited about this entire affair. He doesn’t want to be the reason it goes sideways. So he sighs and peels off his shirt. The britches fit well enough. They don’t pinch anywhere they ought not, anyway. Shiro wiggles his bare toes and spares a moment to consider that this might be some kind of prank.

If it is, he’ll just have to deal with that.

He opens the door and finds the Exrertans still busy in the main room. They’re tying strings of bells around their wrists and ankles, their biceps and thighs. They’re all wearing the same style of britches. “There you are!” Kulan says, bustling up in a storm of chiming bells. “Come on, we don’t have much time.”

He does not comment on Shiro’s scars. Some of the tension building in Shiro’s spine eases when Kulan just huffily begins tying one of the leather bracers around Shiro’s wrist. “What are these for?” Shiro asks, shaking the bells a little. They make a soft sound, sweet.

“The dance,” Kulan says, in a tone that implies Shiro is being a bit dim by asking. He ties a final sting of bells around Shiro’s arm. “You can handle the ones on your legs. I’ve got to make sure the others are finishing up.” And then he is gone, bustling off to check on someone else.

Shiro holds the strings of bells dropped into his hands and then shrugs. He bends and ties them into place. He chimes, a little, with each movement. The weight of the bells around his ankles is annoying. He tries to resettle them, but then they are being hustled out, into the cool air, down the road in the middle of the village at a run, back to the area cleared for the dance. The sun sank quickly, while they were changing, but the fire has been lit in the center of the circle, and it puts off impressive amounts of both heat and light.

There are smaller light sources outside of the circle, torches shoved into the ground. There is a group of what can only be musicians gathered just beyond the circle, tuning instruments that only distantly resemble drums and guitars. The smoke smells sweet, almost. The ground is soft and a little damp under his bare feet. He turns in a circle, looking for Allura as the Exrertans spread out.

He doesn’t see her—he doesn’t see any of the group she left with—and then the Exrertans cheer and whoop, and Shiro turns in the direction they’re focusing on in time to see another crowd running down from the village. He takes a step forward, looking for Allura, and—

And she is near the front of the crowd. Her hair is unbound, falling free around her shoulders. They’ve tied ribbons of every color into her curls. She wears a white dress with a full skirt that falls to right below her knees; it leaves her arms bare. Her scars show, too. It is the first time Shiro has seen them in their entirety. There are more ribbons, tied around her arms and wrists, her knees and ankles.

Shiro stares, the buzz of his thoughts falling silent. She lopes up to him, looking him up and down as she gets closer, and he struggles to unglue his tongue from the top of his mouth as she comes to a stop in front of him. She smiles and says, “We are to find dance partners. I was wondering, if you would….” She trails off, the tips of her ears staining red.

That unsticks his tongue. He offers out a hand and warns, “I’ve never danced much.”

Her smile widens. She takes his hand, her fingers slim and cool, soft. The scar on her palm feels warmer than the rest of her skin, as it always does, and burn-smooth. With her bare arms, he can see the rest of the scars, pale lines up the underside of her wrists that curl around her elbow, sweeping up to her shoulders. For a moment, he almost falls back into that battle, months ago, but the wind stirs her hair, and she says, glancing up at him, “I have danced enough for both of us. Just follow what they do. I was told the dances start very simple.” It calls him back to the present.

Shiro can handle simple, or so he believes until one of the musicians starts pounding a steady, deep beat on her drum. Someone bumps into Allura as they hurry by, and he steadies her, his hand settling on the swell of her hip, and before he can apologize or find a better place to touch, she says, “Perfect, like this.” And she puts a hand on his shoulder and grins up at him.

The music starts in earnest a moment later. Shiro shakes his head, trying to kick his thoughts into gear. The crowd around them moves, and he imitates the steps they take as best he can. It is… easier than he anticipated. He’s always been good at adapting to physical challenges. Mimicking dance steps proves easy enough.

Or it would be, if Allura’s presence in his arms did not keep distracting him. Her hair and the ribbons tied into it fly out every time they spin. Her skin grows warm under his hands, exertion heating her from the inside out. And she smiles. And she laughs, kicking her heels up and not even pausing when the music changes to a deeper, faster rhythm. Her hips move beneath his hand, jingling the bells around his wrist, in a way that makes him lose a step.

His cheeks heat and he has to fight the clench of his hands, the urge down his spine to draw her closer. They spin and spin and spin with the rest of the crowd, and Shiro takes comfort in the fact that everyone else seems as distracted as he is. No one is paying them any attention.

At some point—all the songs blend together, Shiro feels half-drunk on touching her—Allura shifts her grip on his hand and tugs him out of the dancing crowd. There are tables set off to one side, beyond the circle of poles, opposite the musicians. Each holds a barrel of something and stacks of mugs. Allura fills a mug and hands it back to him, calling, over the music, “You look thirsty.”

Shiro nods and drains the mug in one go. It tastes fruity and sweet, cold. Allura downs a glass of her own, tipping it back, and he watches her swallow for a moment before looking hurriedly away. The air, now that they aren’t moving, chills him quickly. His skin is covered with a sheen of sweat. His blood is still racing from the exertion.

Allura wipes the back of her hand across her mouth and sets her mug down hard enough to rattle all the rest, turning back to Shiro. Her cheeks are flushed and, with the dress she wears, he can see that all of her markings glow, not just the ones on her face. She puts off rosy light that gleams off his skin and britches when she takes his hand. “Are you ready to go back?” she asks. “Or do you need a break?”

Shiro never wanted to dance before in his life. He can’t think of very little else he wants to do, right at that moment. He tugs her back towards the crowd.

#

They dance. And maybe it’s the glow off of Allura’s skin, or the time they’ve spent around the villagers, or whatever was in that cider, but Shiro finds the steps when he needs them. The music beats down his spine, leading him along, and even if he doesn’t match the crowd exactly, he gets them in the place they should be. He doesn’t trip over his feet, or Allura’s.

He feels he’s got a handle on things.

And that is when the music swells and the crowd cheers and everyone lifts their partners up into the air, turns, and sets them down again. Shiro blinks, not expecting that, and Allura laughs, he’s not sure at what. He barely has time to process what happened before the music picks back up again; this time he can see the dancers preparing for the lift.

He glances at Allura and finds her staring up at him, her eyes wide and hopeful, and, well. He is helpless in the face of that. He drops his other hand to her waist, and she breaks into a huge smile. The crowd cheers, and when he lifts her all the ribbons in her hair and around her arms fly out. The bells he wears all chime, as though in exultation. He sets her back down softly, listening to her delighted laughter. Pink light shines off of her; she gleams like a beacon in the middle of the crowd.

The music changes tempo, getting faster. The dancers adjust their pace to meet it, and there is laughter on every face Shiro sees. He reads the next lift coming in the music, but the others do not just lift, this time. Instead, they toss their partners upwards, spinning them so they twirl for a moment, before catching them once more.

Allura grins up at him, all the permission he needs to attempt the same when the music winds around again.

He calls out, the same nonsense word the Exrertans have been yelling with every lift, and throws her, spinning her with the movement. The ribbons tied in her hair, around her arms, and around her waist fly out, like rainbows tethered to her body. Her hair whips around. And above the music, above the voices around them, above everything else, she laughs, clear and beautiful and loud. The sound settles in his chest and spreads down his limbs as warmth.

He catches her when gravity pulls her back to him. Someone elbows him in the shoulder as his hands close around her waist, and he almost loses his grip. She slides down his arms, instead of staying in his hands, bumping into his chest, her arms thrown around his neck at the last moment. Her hair is wild around her face. Her eyes shine, and her smile stops his breath. Her markings bathe him in pink light.

He holds her close, not even thinking to set her back on the ground. The music goes on around them, but it is a soft tune, now. The dancers slow down, his hindbrain notices, the part of him that just can’t turn off.

The rest of his being focuses on her, on the way her smile softens as she cocks her head to the side. Her eyes are unbearably warm. She is so close. He shouldn’t hold her like this. He shouldn’t—

Her gaze dips towards his mouth, and she leans in, slow, slow. She kisses him, still smiling, and he cannot believe it. His thoughts shut down. He freezes, all over, and, a moment later, she pulls back, her cheeks reddening even as the pink glow from her markings fades. She squirms and murmurs something he does not hear, and he sets her down.

“Excuse me,” she says, and she slips away, through the crowd.

He stands there, surrounded by gently swaying dancers, his lips tingling, trying to figure out what just happened. Perhaps this is a dream. This would make sense as a dream.

Kulan slaps him on the shoulder. The huge man leans in, shaking his head and smiling ruefully. “You’re supposed to kiss them back, when they do that,” he advises, and then he pushes a mug of cider into Shiro’s hands and turns back to his partner, still chuckling.

#

Shiro ignores the cider, his senses returning at least enough for him to realize that he screwed that situation up royally. He threads his way through the crowd, looking for the shock of Allura’s hair. He catches sight of her right before she steps out of the lighted circle. He slides the mug onto the nearest table, hurrying to catch her.

She’s saying something to herself when he gets far enough away from the music to hear other things. “Allura!” he calls, jogging to catch up with her. She’s moving towards the Castle quickly. She hesitates, looking over her shoulder, and then draws to a stop. “Hey,” he says, inanely, stopping by her side.

She nods, looking to the side. Her cheeks are still red. The colored ribbons hang from her hair and her arms. She must be freezing. Shiro certainly is.

“I apologize,” she says, before he can remember how to string at least two words together. “I was caught up in the moment, and I did not think through my actions.”

Shiro takes a half-step closer, reaching out and touching her arm. He cannot bear to hear her apologizing for kissing him. He says, “That’s not—you don’t have to—”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. She’s gripping her arms too hard, leaving behind indents in her skin. “I do not want you to feel uncomfortable here. I want you to feel free to stay in the Castle and you should know that, that I am not expecting anything from you, or—”

“I didn’t stay here for the Castle,” Shiro interrupts, because he’s beginning to think that there have been some serious misunderstandings between them. She jerks her head up to look at him, and he stumbles on with his useless tongue, “Or—or the scenery. I—”

“I know,” she interrupts, “you had nowhere else to go, I—”

“No! I stayed because this is where you are, Allura. Because I—I want to be where you are.” He had not meant to say those words, but they escape into the air, unable to be called back, a piece of honesty he should have swallowed. He’s gotten too used to telling her things.

They stand there, staring at one another. He’s breathing too hard. She seems not to be breathing at all. He can hear the music in the distance, and the night air is cold. And she isn’t blinking. She says, quietly, “Why? I don’t—I don’t understand.”

He looks to the side, choking on half a laugh. He has a thousand reasons why, but none of them are eloquent. None of them make sense. He scrubs at his face and says, “Because you’re—you gave me a purpose. Beyond being the Galra’s weapon. You trusted me, when I don’t think—when I didn’t even trust myself, and you—you saved me. And your friendship, it means so much to me. It—I’d never risk that, but I, you have to know that I’d, that I, that the way I feel about you… I mean. You never have to apologize for kissing me.”

She stares up at him as he trails off, the rest of his words too tangled to be spoken in any coherent way. Pink light flushes over her skin. She unknots her arms. “You…” She sways a little closer. “Why did you never say anything? About any of this?”

He shrugs. It seems so obvious to him. “You’re—you’re amazing, you know? You’re strong and beautiful and smart and—you’re all these things. And a princess, on top of that. And I’m, well. I’m nobody on Earth. I’m a soldier, but we’ve ended our war. I’m just.” He shrugs again, sure that this is where she comes to her senses and pulls away from him. “Me.”

Her eyes blaze. “You are brave and loyal and brilliant,” she says, her voice shaking with what might be conviction as her cheeks redden once more. “And very attractive. And—and I am a princess without a people. I am just me. And I—I would like to kiss you again.”

He shivers, his heart beating a wild tattoo against his ribs. He’s half-sure this is a dream, but the visions that visit him in the night are never as sweet as this. He reaches out and tucks some of her hair back behind her ear. He says, “I’d like that.”

She shivers and tilts her face up, and he thinks it would be cruel to make her stretch up, to make her initiate once more. So he leans down, slowly, carefully, until her breath catches and his mouth brushes hers. She makes a hungry, eager sound, and he winds an arm around her, pulling her close, kissing her as the wind stirs the ribbons in her hair, as music pours out of the village, as the stars burn overhead, as his heart beats in his chest, each pound for her.

END