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When he first saw Matt and Pidge, arms around each other's backs with the classic Holt crooked grin aimed up at him and their teammates, Shiro's head began to pound like a drum and his eyes hazed over. Of course, Shiro knew that during his time in Galra captivity, the Witch had stolen memories and altered his head in ways he both couldn't remember and couldn't understand. The more thought he gave to it, the more things he noticed he couldn't remember: his father and siblings' faces, what his mother's profession was, and so on, yet then the gaps began to become larger, whole years being robbed of him with not a trace of them left behind in his mind.
But those grins brought a whole slew of memories back.
Once, in the midnight hours of the Castle's night cycle, Pidge had showed him a picture of a younger her and her twin brother. The two's hair was dyed bright colors at the ends, grins tinted from popsicles and clothes sopping wet. Someone's fingers blurred the edges of the picture, and when he asked who took it, she smiled softly and responded, "That was you."
Shiro knew that he knew them. Shiro knew that they lived in the same neighborhood for plenty of years, both of their fathers' being professors at the Garrison, allotting the majority of his teens to hanging around the two geniuses. He knew that when the summers were long and burning and the pool was overcrowded, they'd chase each other with water hoses and drove around for miles doing nothing.
But here, seeing the pair's grins' and embrace, the flood of memories came back to him, of kids laughing and running after each other, of dyeing band T-shirts with Kool-Aid and screeching songs in his father's car, of watching a hoard of fireflies chase after themselves and falling asleep on Katie's shoulder. He smiled to himself, reaching around in his pocket for a holoscreens, and snapping a picture of the two, fingers blurring the edges.