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There are days, sometimes, when Shiro can think of nothing but Adam.
He remembers being fifteen and stricken dumb by the sight of a boy with copper-bright skin and eyes the color of honey, remembers being sixteen and hopelessly in love and so terribly sure that the Garrison’s crown jewel would never love him back—because Adam was the Garrison’s crown jewel, soaring so far beyond the rest of them that only Shiro could ever match him, and even then only rarely. Adam was the feather in their professors’ cap, brilliant despite his flagrant disobedience and complete lack of self-preservation (was it really necessary to aggravate Admiral Sanda every time he crossed her path and then do some little thing that made it clear that he respected her anyway?) and despite his lukewarm feelings towards success and competition, which the Garrison only discovered after he graduated at the top of the fighter class and then promptly handed his guaranteed spot in the space program to Shiro.
Shiro had a guaranteed place himself, of course—he came in second, and the first ten cadets were admitted to the space program by invitation—but the echoes of their graduation ceremony had hardly faded when Adam went to Iverson’s office and announced that he wanted to get a degree in artificial intelligence instead, with a focus on developing automated spacecrafts and military vehicles.
“Takashi’s going into space, isn’t he?” he laughed, when Shiro and Matt finally asked him about it. “He’ll fly in the ships we make, so it’ll still be all three of us together in the end. Right, moonlight?”
When they were finished with flight school, and after Adam started his degree program, their lives together began to change faster than Shiro could realize it. He fell ill soon after Keith came along in a stolen jeep and a cloud of desert sand, and Adam put his career on hold and focused on taking care of them—devoting himself to Shiro’s health and Keith’s overall well-being until the laughing eighteen-year-old vanished and left a serious young man in his place, a young man who thought in terms of bills and medicine and working hours and what a child who spent three years in an orphanage would need. He encouraged Shiro’s dreams and ambitions, and urged Keith to follow in his footsteps: casting his fiance as role model and himself as the faithful support, which made Shiro so profoundly uncomfortable that he took Adam aside to say so.
“You should be here with me instead,” Shiro told him, after Adam rejected yet another mission offer from Iverson and went back to grading papers instead. “You—this isn’t right, you’re throwing away everything you earned just for—”
“You and Keith are worth it,” Adam said, cutting him off so cleanly that Shiro knew the conversation would go no further. “And I have a degree I’m using with my research, love. Flying isn’t the end-all and be-all for me, you know—it’s just something I was good at, not something I really wanted to do.”
* * *
But in the end the years passed by as they always did, and when they were twenty-two, Adam and the rest of the AI development team produced a new interplanetary vessel, the W. S. P. Theia-Selene: a ship that wasn’t capable of autonomous flight, exactly, but could learn from a skillful pilot to become autonomous in time. Admiral Sanda pitched a mission to Pluto and Kerberos, to teach the Theia-Selene as much as possible and attain the Garrison’s long-standing goal of reaching the border of the solar system, and when she selected the crew—she fought to keep Shiro from the pilot’s seat, but he won it anyway.
Adam had never been so furious at him before, Shiro thought.
And then the Theia-Selene was destroyed, and he and Matt and Professor Holt were kidnapped by the Galra, and Shiro spent the next year and two months without thinking much at all.
* * *
And then , just when Shiro thought the war might be over, he died.
* * *
Shiro’s death (or what little he remembers of it, at least) was nowhere near as painful as Adam’s was, in between the here and the not-here at the end of existence itself. Honerva destroyed each reality that refused to give her what she wanted, and when she found the one she was looking for she destroyed it too—because Lotor, the child she threatened into her service and drove to ruin in their own world, did not want her in that one. Adam had become Lotor’s ally by then, trapped in the Atlas with his body failing and his mind roaming through the so-called astral plane; and he knew the truth of the Altean colony and the mixed-blood daughter Lotor had with a Trysian woman, who doomed her planet to extinction when she ran out in front of her grandparents in an attempt to protect her father.
Honerva had killed the woman, the first and only love of Lotor’s life, and Zarkon killed the little girl—but they held her over Lotor’s head for centuries after that, until he betrayed the very people he had saved in a desperate attempt to reunite with her. Give me your Alteans to serve as my druids, Honerva told him, and I will give back your child— and Lotor, torn by guilt and mind-numbing grief, had agreed, not knowing that she only suspected the truth about his hidden colony. Ten strong Alteans were sent to Zarkon’s central fleet to manipulate quintessence for Honerva, and Lotor was given his daughter’s ashes and a vial of her extracted quintessence. He had raged for months, years, after that; but the damage was done, and when his mother sent the Alteans back for rehabilitation and ordered him to give her ten more, she said give me what I ask of you, Prince Lotor, or I will tell your lord father just what you are hiding here. Either these ten will suffer, or thousands will—make your choice, and tell me.
There was only one choice left to make, and so Lotor had made it.
Adam learned all this as he lay dying in the Atlas’s power hold, reaching feebly towards the bits of broken spirit still left in the wreck of the Sincline, and so he gave Lotor the only gift he could—the gift of his own blessed youth and childhood, which Lotor consumed like a starving dog as he delved through Adam’s mind. He drank in the memories of Adam’s family and the village he grew up in, the festivals and birthday parties and the boundless, priceless adoration of three sisters and two loving parents; Lotor saw and experienced them all from Adam’s point of view, soothing ten thousand years’ worth of agony with twenty-five summers of tenderness. He tasted the fruit of Adam’s strawberry fields, felt Keith’s small arms go around him after an hour of playing poker with homemade cookies, heard Matt and Shiro screaming with laughter when the eagle chicks they raised in secret nestled into Adam’s lap and refused to leave—and at the end Lotor was whole again, having learned comfort and safety and love through someone else’s heart.
It was for this reason, perhaps, that when they knew what would have to be done to restore all of creation, Adam would not agree.
“Nothing good could come from anything revived with your spirit,” he spat, standing between Honerva and Lotor so that she could see nothing but the top of her son’s head. “And Allura has suffered enough. If anyone deserves to live through all you’ve done, she does!”
“What else can we do?” Allura had shouted. She was not afraid, even then, but Adam’s resolve was still stronger than hers, and so he only shook his head at her and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I powered the ship that brought down seventy thousand Galra cruisers and claimed a hundred of Honerva’s wasps for Voltron,” Adam shot back. “There’s no future for me, Allura. I’ll die the second I leave the Atlas, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But I have enough left in me for this, and I will not let her remake even a bit of earth that Keith and Takashi walked on!”
And so, instead of Honerva and Allura, the Garrison’s pride surrendered himself for the universe’s sake, along with Shiro’s heart—but just before Keith could pull him away, Lotor remembered a loyal friend and the kindness of a dead man who once wore Shiro’s face, and followed Adam into the abyss without so much as a backwards glance at his parents.
“You treated me kindly back then, Black Paladin,” he called, as the shadow closed in around him. “Rest assured in this, at least. He will not go alone.”
There wasn’t supposed to be a body, when they returned. Adam and Lotor should both have vanished, their souls and bodies all made one with suns and moons and planets—but Adam was still there in the hold of the Atlas, lying in the vault with a bullet through his knee and another lodged in his heart, and nothing but a dried boot-print on his cheek to explain what could have happened to him.
Shiro mourned for three days and nights, and then he reached into the void between realities and dragged Adam back to life.
* * *
Now, ten years after the war, everything is different. The universe itself is gentler and stronger, thrumming in sync with Adam’s heart and spirit, and everyone he meets seems blessed by fate in some way or other—because there is hardly anyone Adam does not love, and hardly anyone who can keep from loving him; least of all Shiro, who adores him more with every passing day, and so much that even thinking about him feels like a kind of torture. But of course he can hardly stop thinking, even for a second; Adam was his flight partner and his dearest friend, his partner in arms against grief and illness and his strength while raising Keith, the reason Shiro survived the arena and the reason he still had a home to return to after everything was over—how can he not spend every waking moment worshipping him in the comfort of his own mind?
Especially since Adam had married him, and given him four beautiful children to hold and cherish and care for.
“Adam, sweetheart,” he murmurs now, leaning over to kiss his husband’s pale cheek and the crest of his dark-brown eyebrows. “They’re the most perfect babies I’ve ever seen.”
“You said that with Hime-chan, my love,” Adam smiles back, lying back against Shiro’s shoulder as the two little pink-and-white bundles in their arms blink themselves to sleep. “And with Sonia, remember?”
“Well, it was true,” Shiro reminds him. “All of our babies are perfect, sunshine.”
“I’m not actually a baby anymore, Tou-chan. Auntie Pidge told me that seven is almost grown up,” Sonia complains, looking up from the foot of Adam’s bed. “But thank you! You and Papa are perfect too.”
“And onee-chan!” Himeko crows, snuggling blissfully into Sonia’s side as Adam and Shiro try—and fail, quite miserably—to keep themselves from crying. “And Hime-chan. We’re all perfect.”
“That we are, my darling,” Shiro whispers, gathering his family into his arms and marveling for the thousandth time that he gets to have this. “And your Papa most of all.”