Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Adam W. Versus the Universe

Chapter 1: Don’t Blink, I Don’t Block, I’m a Bleeder, All I Do is Hit

“My God. Spock, they’re taking the crew!”

-       Bones, “Star Trek Beyond” (2016)

…

BEFORE

            Adam gets the order and he knows he’s going to die. He knows he’s going to die without seeing Takashi again. Without making sure Keith grew up all right.  Without apologizing for the rabbit hole of grief and desperation he fell into after the Kerberos mission’s disappearance. Without making anything right with the tiny, scrappy family Takashi pulled together out of sheer force of will all those years before.

            Admiral Sanda is sending him and his pilots to their deaths and he can’t or won’t stop her because if there is even the tiniest sliver of a possibility he and his crew can take out even one of those invading ships, can save even part of earth from an unspeakable fate… he’ll go. He’ll march into hell with his eye wide open.

            The Griffin kid is in his way as he walks to the hanger. He’s frowning the petulant frown that graced his face every time Keith so much as breathed in class and it would be funny if Keith wasn’t lost somewhere out in space and Adam wasn’t about to die.

            “You know you’re going to die, right? They should be sending us out there. We deserve to go out.” Griffin blurts out when Adam is within hearing range.

            Super, Adam can get in one last teachable moment before the end. Takashi is probably laughing at him somewhere in the void of space.

            “Griffin,” Adam looks down at this kid and questions Iverson’s judgment for the ten-millionth time.  Picking kids to pilot Holt’s experimental new ships. Jesus Christ. “You’re going to have to grow the fuck up after we’re gone.”

            Griffin goes impossibly paler.

            “Because defending this planet will be on you. We are outgunned, outmanned, and at an impossible disadvantage. Fighting this fight isn’t a privilege; it’s a necessity. So you had better stop treating this opportunity like a prize at the bottom of a cereal box. It’s not about deservinganything. It’s about doing the right thing because somebody has to do it. You’re not a special snowflake; you’re a commander in the field. These kids are your responsibility. Take care of them and take care of earth.”

            Griffin nods once, tight, lips pressed together as he salutes. “Yes, sir.”

            “Good man,” Adam nods to him and speeds up. He needs to get to the hanger. They’re losing precious seconds.

…

INTERLUDE

            Takashi had atrocious taste in music. Absolutely awful. Adam vividly remembers one night when Takashi was blasting trashy early 2000s pop in the kitchen, singing along to “Seek Amy” by Brittany Spears (purposely out of tune, the brat) in the kitchen while washing lettuce for salad (the only food item Adam let him anywhere near after the Microwave Debacle their first year dating). In the next room, Keith, apparently finally losing his patience with Takashi’s musical stylings, shrieked and flung himself around the corner, tackling his mentor to the ground and trying to smother him with a pillow.

            “What the fuck – ADAM SAVE ME!”           

            “IF YOU WON’T SHUT HIM UP, I WILL!”

            Adam opted to stay out of it and left them rolling around on the floor. “No blood in the kitchen, please, it’s a biohazard,” he told them, watching unimpressed as his boyfriend tried to shake off the snarling pre-teen.

            “Adaaaaam,” Takashi whined as Keith clung like a violent limpet.

            “You brought him home,” Adam reminded him, popping a cherry tomato in his mouth and snickering, “It’s your job to feed him and water him and make sure he gets enough exercise.”

            Takashi’s music haunted him in the weeks and months and fucking years after Kerberos. Adam couldn’t listen to anything else for so long. He’d curl up in their too-big bed and plug in Takashi’s iPod and cry over Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

            Takashi’s iPod is heavy in his uniform pocket now as Adam climbs into his ship. His dog tags clink against the ring he was going to give Takashi before everything went wrong. His eyes are strangely dry. He wonders distantly if he doesn’t deserve this on some level. He told Takashi he might not be waiting for him when he came back.  Look at Admiral Sanda making those words he said in anger come terribly, horribly true. It’s almost poetic.

            His ship seals with a mechanical hiss and he numbly moves through the pre-flight checklist.

            Time to save the world or die trying.

…

NOW

            Adam didn’t expect dying to hurt quite so much.

            Which is kind of stupid, really. He knows many people don’t get the chance to “go gently into that good night”. He saw cancer tear his mother up from the inside out, he saw his father drink himself into oblivion after she rasped out her last breath in the hospital. One night in the group home, after his parents were gone, after he met Takashi (although he called him Shiro back then), Takashi told him in a soft whisper that his own parents, the Shiroganes, had died in a training accident. They’d come back from space triumphant, having reached farther into the galaxy than any human had ever gone before, only to die on the ground in a routine training sequence due to a mechanical error.

            “I don’t want to go quietly. I want to go out doing something amazing, something no one else has done before,” he’d whispered to Adam, sitting out on the jut of rooftop that extended under their window, above their foster mom’s porch. Nighttime air hung all around them, cool and blue. Shiro’s grey eyes reflected the silver light from the moon and Adam thought they looked like starlight.

            “I’m going to live forever,” Adam had said stubbornly, “And you’re going to live with me.”

            “Forever’s a long time.”

            “Yeah, well you’re the only person I’ll never get sick of so you’re gonna live forever with me,” Adam told him with the complete certainty only a twelve year old can have.

            Adam remembers Takashi’s funeral in fits and starts. It was mostly a grey blur to him. Keith had moved back into his and Takashi’s apartment after the Garrison lost contact with the mission. Neither of them had been sleeping well. Colleen Holt had found him on the couch, numb to the world the day of the funeral. Keith, not knowing what else to do and vibrating with the need to do something,anything to make the world make sense again, had shoved Adam into Shiro’s ratty grey Depression Sweater and just piled on blankets until Adam was an immobile human burrito.

            Adam hadn’t wanted to go to the funeral. Keith refused to go. Just disappeared the morning of.

            Colleen managed to help him crawl out of his burrito, find his uniform, and pin his medals. They didn’t speak, didn’t even make eye contact, two ghosts brushing past each other in an empty room, until she set his beret on his head. And the moment his eyes locked with hers through the fog of his smudged glasses, her hands still hovering over his hair in an achingly maternal way the floodgates opened. He watched as bloodshot amber eyes filled with tears in front of him and between one blink and the next they were on the floor, arms around each other as they fell to pieces all over again.

            Adam really shouldn’t be surprised death feels like take a steel-toed boot to the chest.

            He should probably be a bit surprised when he blinks his eyes open to see a furry purple bat-eared alien sneering down at him.

            His ears are still ringing, one giving him nothing but a high-pitched whine. His glasses must have broken on impact. He can feel bits of glass in his face, grinding against the bones of his eye socket in bright bursts of white-hot pain.

            “So this is the best and brightest Earth has to offer” the purple alien scoffs. One eye burns a nasty mechanical red, the other solid unreadable gold. “Pathetic.”

            Adam does feel a bit pathetic. He’s still a little offended on behalf of the human race, though.

            Behind him someone groans and his heart stutters in his chest. How many of them were here? How many of his pilots had the aliens stolen from their last stand?

            “What are you going to do with us?” Adam rasps.

            A cruel smile twists its way across the Galra’s face. Sendak, Adam remembers through the ringing in his ears and the pain in his head. Sam called him Sendak. Fangs flash over purple lips and Adam is reminded of a trip to the zoo when he was small and his mother was still alive. They stopped by the hyena enclosure at feeding time and he would never forget the sound of those throaty laughs right before they tore into a whole Butterball turkey.

            He imagines he hears the crunch of turkey bones and sees the yellow gleam of feral eyes like a sitcom laugh track over Sendak’s words.

            “You’re useless primitive meat sacks to me,” Sendak says brutally, the purple sphere of light hanging in the place of his elbow joint throwing off tiny bolts of pinkish lightning as he leans down to prod Adam’s face, driving the shards of glass from his ruined spectacles deeper into his skin. “But I hear Haggar’s been hungry for more playthings. She liked your Champion quite a lot before those Marmora – ” he breaks into a guttural snarling epithet of some kind that clearly doesn’t translate, “ – set him free and threw him in the Altean – ” more insults, “- lap.”

            “We aren’t your toys,” snarls a voice and that’s Caroline Davids, she survived. Adam resists the urge to crane his neck to see her – his whole body is vaguely numb with a few spots of dull throbbing pain that promise to hurt like a bitch when the shock wears off.

            Somewhere outside of Adam’s line of sight he hears a violent thud and a muffled cry of pain. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” snarls an invader.

            “Bite me, imperial fuckers,” Caro spits.

            “That kind of spirit will serve you well in the arena. It’s more entertaining when they put up a fight,” Sendak growls.

            “How many of us did you save?” Adam speaks before a guard can take their frustration out on Caroline.

            Sendak has the gall to laugh. “Make no mistake. We didn’t saveyou. We collected you like insects. Like specimens to be put to use in Haggar’s laboratory. That’s all you are to us. Animals to be shipped off.” He turns away, apparently uninterested in them, “Throw them in the brig. No need to be gentle. We’ll send them off to Haggar in the morning.”

To be continued...

Chapter Text

Chapter 2: I Ain’t Your Savior, I Ain’t Your Saint

"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity; I know nothing." 

-       James T. Kirk,  ‘The Wrath of Kahn’

...

BEFORE

            “Takashi, what did you do?” Adam mutters under his breath in his boyfriend’s general direction as Keith wanders through their apartment like a cat scoping out a new environment. He keeps to the edges of the room, never touching anything, hands shoved sullenly into his red hoodie, inspecting everything like he’s casing the place or searching for hidden cameras.

            “I have no idea, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Takashi admits because they swore they’d be honest to each other, and also because he has the shittiest poker face in the history of the world.

            “You brought home a human being.”

            “A small one!” 

            “I could be part alien,” Keith interjects as he squints at their fridge magnets (oh god, those magnetic words are still arranged in the inappropriate haikus Takashi and Matt thought were sooo funny the last time they all got drunk enough to be creative – BET YOU REGRET EVERYTHING NOW, HUH, TAKASHI?) “I don’t remember my mom. Maybe she’s from Mars.”

            Adam gives Takashi a look that he hopes clearly conveys how completely unsurprised that of all the kids his boyfriend could possibly have brought home and asked to keep, it had to be the one who stole his car and made jokes about being from outer space.

            “Mars hasn’t been capable of supporting carbon-based lifeforms for millennia,” Takashi says cheerfully in the face of Adam’s very poignant Look.

            Keith shrugs and doesn’t deign to look their way, “That’s what you think.”

            Adam throws up his hands in defeat. “Fine, whatever, who wants mac n cheese.”

            Takashi beams because he’s a huge child.

            “Just for this it’s going to be white cheese and shell pasta,” Adam says, sticking his finger in Takashi’s face before his boyfriend can think he’s off the hook.

            Takashi’s face falls comically quickly, “But cheddar and elbow noodles!”

            “Did you know ‘macaroni’ used to be slang for the stupid decorations rich guys stuck on their hats in the 1700s,” is Keith’s only contribution. Although after a pause he adds, “I like shell pasta.” 

            Adam grins, “Good, he can stay for now.”

            Takashi looks horribly offended. “Seriously?” 

            Keith, either intentionally misunderstanding or just straight up fucking with Takashi at this point, looks their way and says, “The pasta shells are like little cups for the cheese sauce,” with a completely straight face.

            “See!” Adam says triumphantly in the face of Shiro’s theatrical groan.

…

NOW

            Half of Adam’s face feels like someone has driven white-hot wires into it then cranked up the heat even higher. Blue-hot wires. Blue-hot wires in his face burning with the intensity of newborn stars. He can’t see out of his right eye now, it’s all blurry grey shapes. He realizes with a lurch in his gut that he might actually lose an eye. He might lose an eye and they’re en-route to some kind of psycho laboratory run by purple alien invaders. He’s actually a little offended they’re purple – the alien invaders who are probably going to kill him, that is – he used to really like purple. It’s a good color. Takashi used to have a purple t-shirt that clung to every muscle in his shoulders and showed off his arms and pecs perfectly. It was softer than anything Adam has ever touched, like kittens and clouds and the feeling you get when the sun comes out after it rains. It was too big on Adam, and he’d steal it constantly even though purple wasn’t really his color, just to be wrapped up in softness and the smell of Takashi Shirogane.

            He had to hide the shirt after the Kerberos mission because every fucking time he saw it he’d just start sobbing uncontrollably and that’s no way to live when you’re a grown man with a job and responsibilities that don’t care your heart just got transplanted to an icy moon in the middle of nowhere and isn’t coming back.

             “What do you think they’re going to do to us?” Caroline asks into the silence. She’s curled up into a ball in their cell, long legs pulled up against her chest, knees tucked up under her chin.

            Adam is trying to breathe through his mouth, pain is twisting through his face, his nostrils ache with each inhale; his bones throb in time with his heartbeat.

            “Well, they haven’t killed us yet,” Viktor says, voice a dark rumble in the dim purple prison cell. There are three of them here. Three remaining from a whole squadron of the best professional pilots the Garrison had to offer. Adam Wylde, Caroline Davids, and Viktor Ivanoff: Earth’s wanna-be heroes. And here they were, boxed up like veal sent to slaughter.

            Adam focuses on breathing, trying to drown out the lighting bolts of pain flashing through his face and the way the world looks so much dimmer than it did before.

            In, out. In, out. In, out.

            “Fuck,” Caroline groans, “Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” she’s slamming her fist into the metal floor beside her, Adam can feel the vibrations in his shoulder from where he’s lying on his side, trying to remember how to breathe.

            Takashi. Takashi was coming home. Sam Holt had said he was. Takashi, who could always do all the things Adam couldn’t. Takashi, who was so damn bright and beautiful. Adam had spent so many years saying goodbye to Takashi Shirogane, and now in a strange twist of fate Takashi would be the one missing his chance to say goodbye to him.

            Because to the rest of earth, Adam and his pilots were already dead.

            A strange sound is bubbling out of his chest and Adam isn’t sure if it’s laughter or dry sobs that rip their way through his throat but his sides are heaving and his head is spinning and he’s lying on the floor, body seizing with an outpouring of helpless emotion because now Takashi would know exactly how it fucking felt. Takashi would have to live with the knowledge that the man he loved had gone down in a spaceship in the middle of pointless exercise in futility and wasn’t fate just the fucking worst?

            Adam’s insides are shivering jelly as he quakes through his outburst, and as he slowly comes back to himself, back to his battered, broken, open wound of a body, he realizes Viktor’s broad hands are cradling his head and Caroline’s thin fingers are wrapped around his own clenched fists.

            “Takashi is coming,” Adam wheezes; he can’t get anything past his teeth, “Sam Holt said. Takashi is coming. He’s bringing Voltron. He’s coming back to Earth.” He’s coming back to me.

Except not really, not to him, not anymore. He’d driven him away with hard words, and torn his own heart out to do. A pre-emptive strike, really. He’d known that when Kerberos took Takashi away from him, it’d take Adam’s heart too. He’d wanted that pain on his own terms, at his own hands, rather than someone else’s. There was a strange symmetry there. Takashi wanted to take a last stand against his disease on his terms, no one else’s. Adam had wanted to suffer his heartbreak the same way.

“When he gets there we’ll be gone,” Adam murmurs.

They’re all silent for a moment as they absorb this. There will be no rescue for them. Earth will be lucky if they can hold out long enough for Voltron to turn up.

He can hear Caroline’s teeth grind together; he can feel Vitkor’s hands, heavy and hot as they slip from his head.

There is no help on the way.  They might be the last survivors, but to Earth they’re already dead and gone.

Viktor clears his throat, “Ok. What’s the plan, Captain?”

Adam presses his lips together. Caro squeezes his hands. He’s not alone. Not yet. His head throbs, a spiderweb of pain stretching out from his inflamed eye. “We survive. And then we go home and kick some purple imperialist ass.” 

…

BEFORE

            Sam Holt doesn’t so much sleep-walk as not sleep at all. Adam keeps finding him out of bed and wandering the Garrison halls in the middle of the night. Adam always manages to slip away before the older man can catch sight of him, except for this time. This time he’s slow and still a little unsteady from dreams of ice and cold and the vast merciless expanse of space.

            Sam Holt is nursing a mug of coffee in the deserted faculty lounge when he catches sight of Adam, reeling him in with a quiet, “Captain Wylde, a word?” 

            Adam reluctantly turns and faces the man who he’d always held a tiny bit responsible for taking Takashi away from him. “Sir?” Dr. Holt is a hero and a genius and probably the one who’ll be indirectly responsible for saving their planet when all is said and done, but that doesn’t mean that Adam can’t be a little bitter.

            He insisted on Takashi piloting that mission. He put him on that rocket to nowhere.

            Adam respects the hell out of the Holts, will gladly go to war for them, would take a bullet for Colleen in half a heartbeat, but he really doesn’t want to look Sam in the eye most of the time. All of the time. It’s whatever.

            “Coffee?” Sam offers as Adam falls into parade rest in front of him. Sam’s sitting on the couch in a worn pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that’s both too large and too small for him. It strains against his shoulders and pools around his hips like it’s not quite prepared to deal with Sam’s new alien-invader-induced physique. His feet are bare and steam from his mug fogs the lower half of his glasses slightly.

            “No, sir.” Adam falls back on formality when all else has failed him.

            Sam grimaces slightly, sipping his steaming beverage. “It’s not my first choice either,” he admits, “but needs must.”

            Needs must. What a peculiar phrase. Because whose needs must be fulfilled? A young pilot’s need for adventure? A young commander’s need to keep his too-fragile boyfriend safe from harm? A planet’s need for a hero?

            Once upon a time a brilliant scientist needed a pilot for a groundbreaking expedition into the unknown.

            Once upon a time two young hotshot heroes met and fell in love.        

            Once upon a time a man named Adam and a boy named Keith lost the person that made their apartment something more than four walls to hold them.

            Once upon a time these stories were mutually exclusive.

            “Needs must,” Adam parrots back at him, numb, voice empty of inflection.

            Sam grimaces and sets his coffee aside, scrubbing calloused hands through steel gray hair. He rests his forehead on the heels of his hands for a moment before dropping them and looking back up to where Adam stands, unmoved. He looks tired.

            “You must hate me more than anything in the world.”

            The words fall between them, heavy and a little too real. Sam’s hands look strangely fragile where they hang between his knees, fingers loosely interlaced, the knobs of his wrists and turn of his joints like twigs stripped of their leaves and dried out by the icy bite of winter air. There’s something very vulnerable about bare feet, Adam thinks strangely as he gazes at the man in front of him, wondering where Dr. Holt’s socks and shoes went.

            “That depends on how you define the world, sir.” Adam isn’t so much surprised by the words when they slip out of them as surprised he’s uttered them. “If you mean the planet, then there are others I have less respect for,” an admiral’s name remains unsaid, Iverson’s ghost is likewise un-invoked, “If you mean the universe, then you don’t even make the list.”

            Sam Holt’s lips press together, his beard wrinkling with whatever emotion Adam’s cool assessment has shaken out of him.

            “If you mean this room…” Adam shakes his head, “Then that isn’t your business, is it?” It’s insubordination, but Adam doesn’t care. What are they going to do to him now? He’s the best pilot they have left, and they didn’t even consult him before strapping those cadets into Iverson and Holt’s new pet project. Admiral Sanda can cut the legs out from under his career all she wants, he’ll still be her first call when they need bodies in the trenches. They can’t take anything from him he hasn’t already lost. His parents. Shiro. Keith.

            Sam Holt nods. “For what it is worth, Captain Wylde. I am sorry. For every decision I have made that has directly or indirectly caused you, Shiro, or my family pain. You are perfectly within your rights to hate me.”

            Adam draws in a tight breath through his nose. Inhale. Exhale. Fuck it. He meets Dr. Holt’s eyes.

“You know what, Sam? Can I call you Sam? It’s two in the morning, our planet is bracing itself for an invasion, my ex-boyfriend is an MIA semi-resurrected defender of the universe, our commanding officers have spent the last few years passively or actively ruining my life, and the lives of the handful of people I still give a shit about, my adopted son/brother/whatever-Keith-is has been missing for years due in no small part to Admiral Sanda and Commander Iverson’s casual disregard for human life, and you have the gall to assume you even make the list of people I hate? Considering everyone who’s contributed to the shitstorm my life has become, it’s a miracle I have the energy to keep up with all of you. There’s just too many people to hold a grudge against. I can’t do it, it’s not fucking possible, you can’t make yet another demand on my emotional energy, you’ve drained enough already. I don’t have the energy to waste on hating you. You were downgraded to mild resentment tempered with my own self-disgust the minute I heard there were purple aliens out there who tortured Takashi and kidnapped Matt. Yes, Matt, he may be your son but he was my friend too, don’t forget. So sorry if giving me permission to hate you would have helped you feel like you’d balanced the scales or whatever, it’s not my job to clear your conscience. It’s my job to do my best to keep everyone on this planet alive long enough for you to come up with some miracle machine to save us all. I’m a footsoldier in this war; you’re the man who ends it. I’ve learned to live with my relevance. You need to figure our how to carry the burden of yours.” 

Dr. Holt stares at him with wide eyes. Adam’s breathing hard, like he’s run a mile but he doesn’t think he even raised his voice. He’s chilled from the outside in, his skin’s numb with it, but his insides are like the center of a burning star.

Adam clears his throat in the silence. “I apologize for my outburst, sir. Please give my regards to Colleen. For what it’s worth, I’m glad she got you back. Losing all of you was very hard on her.” 

And then he leaves, too afraid to hear what Dr. Holt might have to say in response to his outburst.

            They don’t speak again for a long time, but a few days later Commander Iverson gives him both a formal and personal apology completely unprompted. He also promises to apologize to Kogane as soon as Keith returns to Earth.

…

NOW

            Adam comes to without realizing he’d fallen asleep in the first place. His head is throbbing but the sharp spikes of pain have faded.

            “Hold still,” a disembodied voice says somewhere above him. Adam doesn’t recognize the speaker and that’s enough to throw every instinct on high alert. He thrashes, trying to jerk away from the blurry hands he sees hovering somewhere on his periphery. The fingers are too long, he thinks, the shape not quite right. Alien.

            His right eye has gone nearly dark now, muzzy gray blurs and the occasional burst of white light the only thing his damaged retina picks up. His left is better, but everything from it is a washed-out colored smear. He’s reminded strangely of when he and Takashi were young and they’d snuck off Garrison grounds to the carnival and jumped on faster and faster rides until the world around them was reduced to a blur of color and sound.

            The voice sighs, “Did I not say ‘hold still’?” Large hands force him back down onto his back and Adam kicks blindly, lashing out with all his limbs and limited might until he topples from whatever bunk or table he’s been dumped on. One wild strike connects, the voice lets out an ‘oof’ of pain and surprise. Adam’s knees and shins ache from where he’s slammed them into the floor but he staggers to his feet and lunges forward, fumbling for a weapon.

            “Davids, Ivanoff, sound off,” he croaks, his voice a strange rasp.

            Hands fall on his upper arms, dragging him back again. He loses his footing, the world tilting wildly.  He slams his head back. On a human it would most likely have broken his captor’s nose or hit a windpipe. On whatever this creature is, his skull simply thuds against a solid, albeit bony, chest.

            “You will hurt yourself worse, human,” the voice warns him.

            “DAVIDS, IVANOFF, SOUND OFF,” Adam’s voice creaks with the strain.

            “Your companions are not here,” the creature man-handles him back onto whatever smooth surface he had been lying on previously. Adam’s head spins and his stomach twists as he continues to struggle. “Do not make me sedate you!” his captor snaps.

Adam simply snarls at him, “Haven’t you done enough already? Davids, Ivanoff – ”

            His captor interrupts him, “I haven’t done anything at all, you won’t let me.” The voice sounds exasperated, but Adam doesn’t care, he doesn’t want to be here, he wants to be with his crew, where he belongs. He needs to know Viktor and Caroline are still alive and as whole as they were when he last saw them.

            “My crew, where is my crew?” Adam rasps, his voice is fading with his strength. He can feel the fever rising under his skin, his stomach twists and bile burns at the back of his throat.

            “They are in the holding cells.”

            “What’s happening to them?”

            “Nothing at present, they have to be in prime condition to be placed in the arena, just like you.”

            “What are you doing to me?”

            The voice sighs again, a weary drag of breath, “What I must.”

            “You swear they are alive?”

            “On my Blade.”

            Darkness is creeping in, Adam is sure the stranger has dosed him with whatever sedative he’d been threatening to earlier. Either that or Adam’s strength is already failing him.

            “That had better be a damn good promise.”

            “The best I can give, heartmate of the Champion.”

            Adam goes under before he can ask what he means.

…

INTERLUDE

            Ulaz saw the Champion’s memories when Haggar was working on him. Editing them before she downloaded them into her pet clone had been risky, but it was the best failsafe he could think of. If he took out something significant, something major, which at least one of the Champion’s friends and allies might know and recognize, then if Haggar ever deployed her creation, they might stand a chance of noticing a difference right away and stopping the clone before it could grow too entrenched.

            This was all assuming, of course, that both Ulaz and Haggar’s plans went off as they should.

            Contingencies upon contingencies, that was the life of a Blade.  

            But what memory to remove from this not-Shiro?

            There. A heartmate. Ulaz’s own heart twisted in his chest as he watched the past through the Champion’s eyes.

            “How much do I mean to you?” A question neither Ulaz nor Thace had ever dared to ask each other. The delicate web of their own relationship was too fragile for blunt-force honesty like that.

            With nimble fingers Ulaz snipped the memory free and set it aside. The clone would have never known an Adam Wylde, while the true Champion would have. A subtle but significant difference. Ulaz could only hope it wouldn’t be relevant.

            Contingencies upon contingencies indeed.

…

NOW

            Adam comes to in drugged haze.

            “Please no more theatrics, I’m too slow to keep up with you after so many hours of surgery,” the voice from earlier tells him wryly.

            Adam blinks, or tries to, but his eyelids feel glued shut. He’s reminded of when Keith caught pink eye and ran into Adam and Shiro’s bedroom at six in the morning screaming “WHAT THE FUCK, WHY CAN’T I OPEN MY EYES, WHAT DID YOU DO???” assuming it was a prank gone wrong.

            “Who are you?” His voice creaks like old hinges, even worse than before.

            “I am Ulaz,” the voice tells him.

            “What’s happening? Where's my crew?”

            “I was – am – a doctor, and a member of a rebel faction known as the Blade of Marmora,” Ulaz continues evenly.

            “Did you rescue us?”

            “No. I am a prisoner here as well. I tend the wounds of those who fight in the Imperial Arena.”

            “My crew. Have they been fighting? Are they dead?”

            “No. They have not been deemed ready for combat.”

            Adam, finding his hands free, brings one up to paw at the bandages over his left eye. His right may have been useless, but his left at least could see a little. A pair of rough, scarred hands stop him and gently peel back the gauze, revealing an angular purple face peppered with raised silver scars like he’d caught a face full of shrapnel in an explosion. Adam wonders if his own scars resemble his new companion’s. 

            Adam’s eye freed, Ulaz backs away, and as he retreats Adam sees what proximity had hidden before. Ulaz, though broad-shouldered and strong from the waist up, sits in a chair that hovers gently above the ground, a pair of thin, withered legs strapped to it in what might be braces or restraints.

            “As you can see, I have my own share of battle wounds,” Ulaz says wryly, “I have a pair of braces which allow me to ‘stand’ for surgery and which allowed me to catch you when you attempted to escape my aid yesterday, but I’m afraid the explosion which landed me in Haggar’s keeping did not spare my limbs.”

            “I’m sorry,” is all Adam can think to say.

            Ulaz makes a dismissive gesture with one hand; “We accept these things when we take up arms against tyranny.”

            “Or at least we tell ourselves we accept it,” Adam wryly points out.

            “True,” Ulaz accedes.

            “What did you do to me?” Adam asks, cutting straight to the point.

            “Your eye was beyond saving,” Ulaz tells him bluntly, “I removed it and replaced it with a bionic alternative.”

            Adam can almost hear Takashi’s voice making some sort of Million Dollar Man joke or humming the Bionic Woman theme song under his breath.

            “How did you know Takashi?” Adam asks the question burning at the back of his mind.

            Ulaz looks at him with deep weariness, “I tried to save him,” he admits.

            Adam is dug-addled, exhausted, probably malnourished, and alone in alien custody. All he can think to say in response is “Yeah, so did I.”