Chapter Text
Shiro stirs to the feeling of a cool hand against his forehead. He knows he’s been sedated, he can feel the weight of it in his shoulders and chest, and there’s a brief flash of panic before he manages to blearily open his eyes.
“…Mom?”
The blurry shape hovering over him freezes. “It’s Colleen, sweetheart. How are you feeling?”
Oh. Oh. Shiro tries to think back, parsing through weeks and months and years of stored and backlogged memories. Voltron. He’s on Earth now. Home. His mom is dead. He’s staying with the Holts. He hears a gentle, rhythmic beeping. The room is a bright white. Hospital, his mind supplies.
He’d just gotten out of surgery.
“Did they…? S’it gone?”
“It’s gone.”
It’s weird. Shiro expected to feel different. Stronger or freer or safer. Instead, he just feels… tired. Sick. His mouth is kind of dry, his throat is sore. “Oh.” His eyes droop back closed.
“It’s fine.” Colleen says, but her voice feels further away now. “Just sleep.” The hand returns to his forehead, her thumb gently rubbing against his brow. He remembers something like that, a long time ago. He was sick, it was raining. He could hear the drops against the trees outside his window. The world outside was dark and muffled by the glass of his windowpanes.
Mom?
When he wakes up again, it’s with a gasp and his eyes snapping open. He can’t remember if he was dreaming, but he feels the tension in his shoulders that says he was. The room is quiet and dark, and when he turns his head the window is dark and shuttered. He must’ve slept a while— he remembers waking up in the afternoon.
He takes the moment to take stock of his surroundings. The drugs are still working through his system, he feels groggy but more alert than earlier. He’s hooked up to an IV, and he’s not sure if it’s fluids or drugs or what, but he has to swallow the panicked feeling he gets at seeing the needle stuck into his arm. There’s a lamp on his bedside table, casting the whole room in a warm glow that does very little for the feeling in his chest.
It’s no big deal. It’s just a hospital. One window, two doors— one to the hall, one to a bathroom. Chairs along the walls, flowers on the bedside table, and—
Sam.
Dr. Holt is snoozing away in one of the chairs, and Shiro hadn’t realized how lonely or frightened he felt until he saw the familiar face. His glasses are slightly askew, a book face-down on his lap and one of his hands laying on Shiro’s covers.
Shiro’s breath hitches, and he hates it. But he’s still drugged, he tells himself. It’s why he’s feeling this way, weak and vulnerable and inexplicably a little scared. He wants Sam to wake up, he doesn’t want to wake him up, he wants to be alone and he wants to be comforted.
Sam stirs and Shiro debates, for a split second, closing his eyes and pretending to be asleep, but then Sam’s eyes open and a smile spreads across his face and Shiro’s face crumples.
Sam’s still smiling when he reaches out for Shiro, and it looks almost sad before the blur of tears takes over and Shiro’s taking little hitching breaths and hating that the only arm he has now has needles stuck in it and he can’t wipes his cheeks or cover his eyes. Shiro screws his face up against it, shutting his eyes and gritting his teeth.
“How are you feeling?” Sam asks. Shiro flinches a bit when Sam’s hand makes contact with his forehead, but it’s warm and dry and he uses it to push Shiro’s hair out of his eyes. He leans into the touch, because he wants to be touched, because he wants to say something but his mouth feels dry and his brain is fuzzy and he can’t quite get the words together.
“…Tired.” Is eventually what he lands on, although there’s a whole mess of other words that are bouncing around in his head right now. He can feel it clicking around inside his head, a jumble of sentences that don’t quite make sense, and it’s hard to have the energy to think of them, and even harder to say them. So he settles on tired, because it’s the first thing at the front of his mind. There’s a lot more there, and he sorts through some of them. Achy, distant. His mouth is dry and his throat is sore and his eyes feel like there are weights attached to the lids. He’s confused, he knows that. The room is spinning slowly on it’s axis but he’s not nauseous. He wants to sleep more but there’s too much input and he hurts too much to sleep, and his arm (stump?) is itchy.
Tired.
He doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until he wakes up again, feeling less groggy and in less of a limbo state. They’re lowering his meds, he’s told. He should be feeling more awake soon, they tell him. He’s still floating through it and winces when the doctors point lights in his eyes, but they seem pleased so he doesn’t care.
As his dosage goes down he can feel old fears and anxieties crawling up his spine where they used to be muffled, and he doesn’t like how heavy he feels. He feels sick and itchy and tired and it’s all on the surface now, and he wants to go back under but he lets them push back his hair and give him ice chips and water, which someone else has to hold for him.
Waking up is a slow, strange agony, but like everything else, he shoves himself through it with gritted teeth.
—————-
Colleen and Matt are the ones that take him back to his apartment. They pack up his things from the hospital— his phone, his wallet, extra clothes, the cookies that Hunk sent, the fuzzy slippers from Lance. They threw out the flowers that had already started wilting, or gifted them to the nurses. Shiro didn’t want the wheelchair, but the hospital staff insisted that he be wheeled off the premises, so Matt carried his stuff while Colleen wheeled him. Something about not trusting Matt to do wheelies with the chair. (Which Shiro isn’t entirely sure he would have minded.)
His surgeons shake his remaining hand before they leave, and then he thanks the nurses, half of which he doesn’t recognize because he was knocked out or high when they were taking care of him. This is a landmark surgery, he was told. The first time doing work on an alien piece of technology, and Shiro already gave them permission to publish a paper on it. They said they’d omit his name, but it really doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like people won’t know who it is.
The arm is going to a lab somewhere in Seattle, where they’ll look at the hardware and use it to start building more advanced prosthesis. He already met with the lab director, who smiled at him and examined his arm so gently that Shiro knew within minutes that her development team was going to get the arm.
It’s weird, he thinks. That he walked into the hospital with two arms, and now he’s being wheeled out with only one. There are paparazzi across the street from the hospital, but Matt stands in front of Shiro until Colleen can bring the car around, and then they load him in, hopefully without the paparazzi getting a glimpse of him looking sick and pale.
He vomits twice on the way home, into a plastic bin that Colleen had thought to bring along.
Matt and Colleen help him up to his apartment, and they go up the elevator and the whole time Shiro thinks about how he wouldn’t mind the wheelchair right about now. Matt doesn’t say anything when Shiro leans heavily against him, and lets Shiro press his head against his shoulder when the elevator makes his stomach drop.
“I wish you would stay with us.” Colleen tells him once they have him sitting down at the kitchen table. Matt is putting away his things, and Shiro hopes that at the very least he’s folding his clothes before stuffing them into his drawers. Probably not.
“It’s fine.” Shiro tells her. “I’m fine.”
She doesn’t look like she believes him for a second, but she smiles halfheartedly anyways. “I’ll send Matt by with food tomorrow. The drugs from the doctor are on your bedside table, make sure you take your antibiotics.” She purses her lips. “And be careful with the painkillers, okay?”
Shiro smiles, but it feels strange on his face. “I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay with us? Even just for a couple of days.”
“Colleen—“
“I know.” She sighs. “I wish you at least had a roommate to keep track of you. Don’t think I won’t be calling every day.”
He smiles again, and this time it feels more natural. He even manages to force a bit of a chuckle. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
It takes energy to do that, and so he slumps further back into his chair and gets comfortable and idly watches her putter around his kitchen. He knows that she’s looking for things to do, that she doesn’t want to leave. She organizes his flatware twice, goes through his dishes and pots and pans and pantry to make sure that he has enough to eat and that he’ll be able to cook. Not that he was ever much of a cook, but the thought is nice. Matt ambles back in and Colleen smacks his hands away from the cookies that Hunk sent.
“Did you fold my stuff?”
“Hell no.” Matt grins. “I’m not your maid.”
Shiro has to talk Colleen out of going into his room and re-folding his clothes. She checks and re-checks his temperature, makes sure his bandages are properly wrapped, all the things the hospital told him he’d been to do. Before they leave, Shiro lets her pour him a glass of water and give him something so he won’t feel nauseous. She plants a kiss on his forehead and Matt hugs him and promises to stop by to check on him.
After they left, Shiro was planning on doing some cleaning, but he’s feeling woozy and crappy and that’s clearly not in the cards. He hauls himself out of the chair and bites past the tunnel vision and crawls into bed. The sun is shining right onto his bed, and he would get up and draw the curtains but he’s so tired, and the sheer white probably wouldn’t do much at all. He buries his head into his pillow and thinks about how he wishes that there were someone to adjust the blanket over him, but he can’t because he only has one arm and it’s pinned under him and he’s too tired, anyways. He kicks his feet aimlessly, trying to pull down the sheet, but his legs just end up getting twisted up and there are frustrated tears in his eyes and this is such a fucking stupid thing to be upset about. He jerks his leg and hears a quiet tearing noise and wishes he’d taken Colleen up on her offer. He could just imagine being laid out on their couch with BaeBae, hearing Colleen and Sam speaking quietly in the kitchen, the sound of Pidge playing video games from her room, the scratch of the couch arm against his cheek.
He falls asleep to the thought of their home, and to the imaginary noises of a family around him.
—————————
They made him practice before they removed the arm. He’d been talking about it on and off since they got to Earth. It was heavy, and without the regular maintenance from the Alteans, it could break down or malfunction in a dangerous way. Shiro was nervous about the way it would interact with the different aspects of Earth life— older technology, extended exposure to weird electromagnetic fields, any number of things that it was not built to handle.
Besides. He doesn’t need it anymore.
He’s not fighting a war anymore, he’s not piloting a lion. He’s not a Paladin or a leader or a prisoner anymore, and it’s a massive weight off his shoulders and he wanted it to be a literal weight off his shoulders. He could feel the pull and unnatural ache of his muscles from having metal grafted to himself for so long. For the first time in a long time, his body doesn’t belong to anyone but himself. There’s no empire to perform for, no cause to fight for. He was ready to shed the last shackle.
But they made him practice.
Functioning without two arms is easier said than done, they told him. He can be fitted for a prosthesis, but it won’t be as advanced as his original. So he learned different things— putting on shirts, and pants, and brushing his teeth, and his hair, and showering, all while keeping his prosthetic arm hanging like dead weight. They went through his apartment, making sure that everything was accessible for someone with one arm.
Not everyone gets that practice. He imagined what it must be like to lose a limb— really lose it, not on purpose, not with a fancy tech prosthesis. He imagined a soldier getting ready to go off to war, somehow knowing in the future that he will lose a limb. He imagined that soldier going through his home with his family, fixing things in anticipation of future trauma. The heavy weight of knowing what’s coming, and that it is unavoidable.
But he did it on purpose.
He didn’t expect everyone to understand. Those that did almost always looked at him with sad, pitiful eyes, as though this whole thing is just further evidence of his awful, public trauma. He had to do a psych evaluation, and the psychiatrist kept asking him about his time with the Galra, and the whole time he wanted to scream ‘it’s MY body!’, but he didn’t. He smiled and lied and told her what she wanted to hear. She listened and checked off some boxes and told him he should really be seeing someone, and he nodded and said something about the Garrison psychiatrist he’d been assigned (who he only really sees when he needs a refill on meds.) She said something about group therapy with the rest of the Paladins, and smiled like she was offering, and he hated her for it.
“I think we’re fine.” He’d told her, and then she said she’d let them know he was cleared on removing his prosthesis.
He had to fight tooth and nail to get the arm removed, even though it’s his body, and it belongs to him, and if anyone— if anyone—
He doesn’t let himself think about things like that anymore. All it does is make him so angry that he wants to break something.
—————-
Healing is slow-going, so Shiro keeps himself busy. He cleans as much as he’s able, and calls it physical therapy. He sorts through his old clothes, dividing them up into piles according to what still fits him. A lot of it’s too small, and so he puts it into a separate pile for Lance or Keith or whoever calls it first. He saves one of the hoodies for Pidge, because it’s soft and still big enough that she can fit her whole body in it the way she likes. He gets tired partway through, because putting on clothes and then taking them off has somehow gotten exhausting. His remaining arm aches from the constant movement, and he calls it a day, ignoring the clothes still waiting to be sorted. He sends Keith a text to let him know that he has some extra clothes, if he wants them.
Keith answers right away with a ‘k’. Shiro sends him a thumbs up emoji back. Keith doesn’t respond.
He’s probably busy. Keith has been withdrawing a lot lately, and it makes him nervous. Keith’s never really been much of a people-person anyways, but Shiro knows what it’s like when the days start running together from not seeing anyone or doing anything. Shiro can feel himself going a little stir-crazy in his apartment, as the doctor-imposed ‘relaxation’ slowly drives him up the wall. He’d briefly considered going over to the Holts, but he’s already been enough of a burden on their family. Besides, he doesn’t really want to see people. As much as his apartment is driving him crazy, he doesn’t want to have to deal with talking or going out. Colleen still calls constantly, making sure that he’s feeling okay, that he’s taking his meds and he’s sleeping enough.
He lies to her every time.
Sleep has been a… weird problem lately. He knows that it was a stupid fantasy, but part of him wanted removing the arm to just… fix things. To make everything better. Removing such a massive piece of evidence of the Galra was supposed to make him better. No matter how many times he told himself that that’s not actually how PTSD works, part of him still hoped so badly it ached. But instead the nightmares returned full-force, melting together human doctors and Haggar and Ulaz until it’s just hands, grabbing at him, taking limb after limb.
The nightmares will pass, he tells himself. He just got back to Earth. Things are going to be weird for a while.
He knows some of it is from having to sleep alone. Even without seeing them, it felt good to have the other Paladins just down the hall from him. Knowing that they’re there, that he can check on them, that they’ll come if he really, really needs them. Near the end of the war, as enemies and nightmares got worse, they’d even started sleeping in each other’s bed. He wants to be able to wake from a nightmare and curl his hand around Hunk’s or roll over into Keith’s arms.
And as much as he hates to admit it, some of it is from being back on Earth. Somewhere along the line, the Castleship had become home. The swooping curved metal of his room, the glowing blue lights had become incredibly comforting. It was the first real bed he’d slept in since the Galra. It was the place he’d return to and regroup after every battle.
The wires just got crossed. His apartment is going to feel like home soon. Things will start fitting back together, having only one arm will feel natural. He’s going to get better. Things are going to get better.
He repeats it to himself like a mantra.
—————-
“I think these are still too big on me.” Keith says, turning around in the mirror to look at the fit of the waistband. Shiro can see himself behind Keith in their reflection, so he rolls over out of view. He studies Keith.
“Do you think Lance will fit into them?”
“He’s smaller than I am. I don’t think anyone is going to be able to take these.”
“Put them in the donation pile, then.”
Keith nods and shucks off the jeans, tossing them into the ever-growing pile before tugging out the next pair of pants. They’re standard-issue Garrison sweats, and Keith pulls a face.
“What? They’re comfortable.” Shiro says, although he’s not particularly attached to them either, and doesn’t mind when Keith flings them into the pile too. He watches as Keith roots through his old clothes, all either discarded because they don’t fit anymore, or because they’re too worn, or because Shiro doesn’t like them. He’s thrown in some button-downs as well, all the ones with too-small holes that make it hard for him to do one-handed. Keith doesn’t seem interested in the button-downs, though.
“You used to be smaller than I remember.” Keith says, pulling out an old black t-shirt and tugging it on. Most of the black has faded, leaving it a soft, worn grey.
Shiro shrugs. “I wore that one pretty tight.”
“Still.” Keith turns in the mirror, examining the way it fits him before putting it in his own pile. Shiro watches him.
“Are those my boxers?”
“What?”
“Those. The ones you’re wearing.”
Keith looks down, as though noticing for the first time. “No. Yours don’t have the hole in them.” He delicately extends his thigh, showing Shiro the small hole along the seam in the right leg.
“Where are mine, then?”
“Maybe you left them on the castle.”
It’s become a throwaway joke for most of them, but it periodically is true. Pidge still mourns a homemade pair of state-of-the-art headphones that are probably tucked away in the castle workshop somewhere, and Lance left behind countless beauty supplies while packing. The Alteans will be back again soon, but until then every lost item has the possibility of being somewhere in deep space.
Shiro flinches when he feels Keith fall onto the bed beside him. “Put some clothes on.” He grumbles, tossing a pillow at Keith. He doesn’t move. When Shiro looks over, Keith is looking at him with the same intensity he does when he’s trying to figure out a particularly complicated problem. Shiro looks away.
“What’s going on?”
“What?”
“You’re being weird.”
“No I’m not.”
“Pidge says you haven’t been answering the phone.”
“I answered the phone when you called, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but I’m me.” Keith sits up. “It’s different.”
Shiro gives a one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t know. I’m tired.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
Shiro shakes his head, but he still doesn’t look at Keith. After a moment, he feels Keith get up off the bed and go back to the pile of clothing. He goes back to picking through it. Shiro rolls over and watches Keith tug on a hoodie that hangs too large on his frame. He examines himself in the mirror, and then tosses it into his pile.
Shiro isn’t sure when he falls asleep, but when he wakes up it’s dusk outside and Keith is laying on his bed, the glow of his phone lighting up his face. He’s wearing the Garrison sweatpants that he’d discarded and one of Shiro’s old button downs.
“Hey.” Shiro says groggily.
“I ordered food.”
“Okay.” Shiro rolls over, turning his back to Keith so he can look out the window. He hears Keith shift behind him.
“Do you want to sleep?”
Shiro shrugs. He feels soft and tired but he knows he won’t be able to sleep through the night. He hates falling asleep during the day. He’s burned the entire day away, all his time with Keith and all the sunlight.
“I’m going to stay the night.” Keith says, and Shiro hears him get up and begin tidying up the clothing piles. He hears Keith pad into the kitchen, and then the sound of dishes being put away, of the fridge opening and closing as Keith puts away takeout containers. He moves, and realizes that a blanket has been tossed over him. Keith must’ve done it while he was sleeping. It’s weird, he thinks. Normally he wakes up when people touch him.
Although it had been a while since he’d slept.
“You don’t have to stay over.” Shiro says when he hears Keith walk back in.
“I want to.”
“Keith—“
“You’re acting weird, okay? I just want to— I don’t know.” Keith makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat.
Shiro thinks about arguing, but his limbs feel heavy and his eyes feel heavy, and he doesn’t like how easy it is for Keith to see exactly what’s going on with him. So instead he stays quiet, and doesn’t move when Keith gets into bed behind him.
“Can I touch you?” Keith asks.
“Yeah.”
Shiro feels Keith slide up behind him, and slide an arm around him, so his back is pressed to Keith’s chest. They’ve slept like this before, although both of them used to be smaller. Keith feels broader now, his arms stronger and heavier. Shiro knows he’s larger too, has the evidence of it strewn into three piles on his bedroom floor.
Shiro isn’t sure when he falls asleep, but he wakes up in the night, screaming.
Keith rubs his back until he calms down. They don’t go back to bed. Instead, they eat the cold takeout and watch the sun rise through the window.