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I. Fireflies
Shiro watches from the deck of the Atlas as Voltron pushes the Robeast into the upper atmosphere. Here, earthbound, small and helpless, watching is all he can do.
The flash of light covers the sky, bright and blinding, and in the wake of it he sees only blurs and shadows as the Lions are torn apart.
He watches them streak through the sky like meteors, glowing hot from re-entry, not slowing down. He watches them crash with a resounding cacophony of noise and debris, the impact strong enough that they can feel it here, on the bridge of the Atlas. He watches the static on the screen, accompanied by a long pause of silence that hangs heavy in the room.
He can do nothing but watch them fall.
Shiro’s earliest memory was of summer.
He remembered the sweet sweat and humidity clinging to his skin as he explored the tangle of woods behind his grandparents’ house outside Kyoto; he remembered the scent of dirt and clean air, remembered his hands and feet dirty, grubby child fingers pawing through sticks and leaves while the sun began its downward journey into dusk. The essence of summer laid there at the edge of twilight, with the dim light of fireflies rising up like an army to meet him.
He remembered this, too:
He must have been no older than four when he begged his grandfather for a small jar, and set out on his mission. By the time night fell Shiro had collected at least a dozen fireflies, pulses of miniature lightning trapped behind the smooth glass wall. He carried his prize with him to bed, lying on the tatami next to the open window, listening to the distant sound of chirping insects and lulled to sleep by the erratic, gentle pulsing of green light.
When he woke in the morning, the light was gone.
Shiro shook the jar, the husks of the insects’ bodies clattering against each other in a dry rattle, the gleam gone from their dry, dessicated carapaces. He took it, urgently, to his grandmother.
“Grandma,” he asked, plaintive, “Why don’t the fireflies work anymore?”
His grandmother looked at the jar, pursed her lips, and said,
“Because you killed them.”
Shocked to tears, he looked down at the jar, at the tiny bodies that used to glow. His grandmother’s hand smoothed over his hair, and she said,
“Living things can’t survive in jars, Takashi. You have to let them breathe.”
II. Clinic
He starts running and doesn’t stop, even with every muscle in his body protesting, even with his lungs full of fire and his heart straining against his chest. He reaches Black first, the bulk of her sprawled prone across the dusty ground, and scrabbles onto her frame, reaching for the emergency hatch. It’s stuck; he beats at it, prying desperately with his hands. He can feel the heat from re-entry clinging to the metal, threatening to burn his skin, but he doesn’t care - that warmth is like a pulse, like the heartbeat he desperately hopes to find inside.
Certain things lingered in Shiro’s mind when he thought back to the day he heard the news: the astringent smell of cheap disinfectant permeating the clinic, the cookie cutter art framed and hung on the wall - a butterfly on a rose, crystal dew drops on red petals, the inane and absurdly ironic phrase “ Cherish the Day” scrawled in brush script along the bottom right corner. The way the doctor spoke, slow and gentle, as if afraid her words might shatter him, the warmth of Adam’s hand in his own, squeezing so tightly that it hurt: these things lingered in his mind, almost tangible in their clarity, memories so crystalline and clear he could cut himself on their glass-like surface.
But for the life of him, Shiro couldn’t remember how he felt .
Dull. Hollow, maybe. Not angry, not yet - that would come later, in private, little bursts of frustration, in hot tears camouflaged under the spray of a showerhead. But looking back to the exact moment his world began to unravel, Shiro remembered nothing but a great, gaping emptiness, a black hole collapsing in his heart.
He walked out of the clinic in a daze, got into the passenger seat of the car, and sat staring through the windshield at the vast, cloudless afternoon sky. Adam sat in the driver’s seat, both of his hands on the wheel, gripping tight enough that his knuckles turned white. They sat in silence for a long while, the stifling, closed air building up like bricks in a wall between them.
“We’ll get through this together,” Adam said, finally.
But that was the point - they wouldn’t.
III. Arena
Open.
Open.
Open.
‘Living things can’t survive in jars, Takashi.’ He hears the echo of his grandmother’s voice ring in his mind. ‘They need to breathe.’
The hatch finally pops loose with a hiss, and Shiro clambers into the machine; he knows every inch of the Black Lion as intimately as he knows his own body, and so even in the pitch dark he can find his way to the cockpit. The seat is empty, and for one awful, awful moment he knows - this is the toll she takes. This is the legacy he left behind for Keith, for his team, for his family, to fulfill.
When Adam first appeared before him the image was so startlingly real that for one brief, terrible moment Shiro thought that maybe Adam was there, that he was too late and his worst nightmare of the Galra reaching Earth had come true.
Then Shiro reached for him, and his hand phased right through Adam’s body - an illusion, then, or maybe a dream. It was so hard to tell the difference between reality and the nightmares anymore.
“I wonder why it’s you,” Shiro said, in a mild, conversational tone, as if Adam were really there, and he had nothing better to do than make awkward small talk with his ex. Why not? They’d be there soon to drag him back into the noise and violence of the arena, but until then, what could he do but wait?
“Probably because you know I’d want to say ‘I told you so,’” Not-Adam said.
“Well,” Shiro said, leaning back and closing his eyes. “Here’s your chance.”
Not-Adam reached for him, his fingers brushing Shiro’s forehead, real enough that Shiro could almost imagine the cool touch against his fevered skin. Shiro’s right arm hung limp and useless at his side; he tried to imagine the feel of a sword in his hand and curled his fingers in a loose fist, but even that small action sent sparks of pain coursing through him like fire.
“Why am I still doing this?”
“Because,” Not-Adam said, gently, so gently, “You don’t know how to do anything else.”
And then he was gone, with the robotic marching of the sentries there to take his place. They grabbed Shiro and hauled him to his feet; he walked forward, as much machine as they were. A sword was thrust into his hand, and someone shoved him out into the bright, eager lights of the arena. He didn’t hear it when they announced his name, or his opponent’s; didn’t hear the crowd, or the snarling, hissed insults the alien he was fighting spat at him. Were they scared, too? Fighting for their life?
Maybe it would be easier to just lie down and give up. He was on borrowed time anyway, his failing body long since pushed to its limits. When would it ultimately betray him? Here, now, in this fight? In the next?
But he dodged when the first flurry of attacks came, moving on sheer instinct even as he felt the ground spin beneath him. Shiro was smaller and faster than most of his opponents here - an advantage that had carried him this far, but his movements now felt slow and sluggish, as if gravity itself was working against him. Shiro saw the other prisoner snarl and charge at him, stepped back to distance himself, then cried out as his arm seized up in a muscle spasm that wracked his whole body. His opponent’s sword nearly blinded him, missing only by mere inches, and the crowd cheered wildly at the bright red spray of blood on the sand. Shiro staggered back, vision blurring, reeling from shock and pain. He could see it unfold from there - the terrible end, violent but, if he was lucky, brief.
And then it hit him, a violent mantra pounding in his head:
I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die -
He didn’t know how to explain what happened next.
With a wordless scream he charged forward, desperate and wild, fighting as if he could fend off death itself with his bare hands. When it was over he stood alone in the dust and blood, a weighted silence settled over the arena.
Then the cheers started, quiet at first, but growing into a roar that rocked through the coliseum:
Champion, Champion, Champion
Death would come for him still - he knew that, it's cold hands lingering like a promise on his skin, even as his blood pumped hot with adrenaline and victory. It would come, in time.
Until then, he fought - because he didn’t know how to do anything else.
IV. Black Lion
He can’t move, at first.
He just stands there, staring at the empty place where Keith should have been. Is this what it was like for them, when he disappeared? Did it feel this hollow, this empty? It had never been his choice to leave. If he’d been able to stay, would this have turned out differently?
The questions flood his mind, doubt and fear and a great, great wave of despair all vying for top billing in the ruin of his heart.
But there - white and red, crumpled on the floor. He kneels next to Keith’s broken form, too afraid to touch him, too afraid to even breathe - too afraid to break this moment of uncertainty and sacrifice the one small fragment of hope he has left.
It hurt, dying.
Not just the act of it either, though that in itself was a unique, indescribable kind of pain: searing fire tearing through him, every molecule in his body screaming as it burned away. Shiro had thought he knew what pain was, but until then, he had no idea.
What followed, though, was worse.
Pain was one thing - but the hollow emptiness of the void, the lack of anything , the vague, scattered pieces of his consciousness strung loosely together...he would gladly have taken on any kind of hurt, if it meant he could feel something again.
He drifted without knowing where he was, or even who he was, lost in a great, wheeling expanse of stars. He knew, in some vague and distant way, that he was dead, and he thought that he should be at peace - that was what death was supposed to be, as far as he had known.
But peace and oblivion were not quite the same thing..
Ages passed that way, with him floating formless through the emptiness. It must have been that long - or maybe only moments passed, untethered as he was from even the concept of time. He heard whispers floating around him, mutterings that he couldn’t decipher or understand. Were they fragments of himself, or some other voice calling out to him? It sounded so familiar…
The Black Lion.
It got easier, from there.
Once he could separate himself from the Black Lion, he could start to conceptualize himself again. Things came back, in bits and pieces: his name was Takashi Shirogane. He was from Earth. He was the Black Paladin.
He was dead.
That much shouldn’t have come as a surprise - he’d been cheating death for years, scraping by on some miraculous combination of luck and sheer, unrelenting willpower. He’d had plenty of time to reconcile himself to this. At least he hadn’t gone slow, eroded away by disease; at least he hadn’t wasted his death, some no-name slave snuffed out in the arena dirt. He’d made something of himself. He’d made a difference.
He’d seen the stars, and all the terrible and beautiful things they held.
For so long now Death had been chasing him, a wolf with her breath hot on his neck, teeth scraping at his skin. Surrendering at last to those welcoming jaws felt, in a way, like relief. It was a good death, and he’d left nothing behind.
Then why was he still here?
It wasn’t until he heard another voice call his name - faint, distant, pleading in a way that made his nonexistent heart ache - that he finally understood.
Death would have to wait.
V. Earth
Shiro couldn’t sleep.
He wanted to blame it on being planetside again, on having to adjust to Earth’s twenty-four hour cycle after so long in the timeless stretch of space, but he knew that it was more than that. A pulse of anxiety beat in his chest, a rhythm that drummed in time to the noisy cacophony of his jumbled thoughts. This was not the first time they would be going into battle - objectively speaking, this wasn’t even their most high-stakes fight. But it meant more, this time. It meant so much more.
He wandered the quiet halls of the Galaxy Garrison, his footsteps treading a quiet and familiar path. Memories he thought he’d long forgotten flitted past him like ghosts: his first day here as a cadet, all shiny and polished and proud; sneaking out of dorms not even a week later with Adam and Curtis on a secret mission to raid the commissary for ice cream and midnight snacks; the first time he kissed Adam, in the alcove off of the mess hall. He smiled a little at the memory, but the brief warmth quickly faded - grief still hit him sideways, blindsided him in the strangest ways. These were places they shared together, and now there was a hole, person-shaped, in the way he saw it all.
He stopped when he walked out into a wide room, and turned to look at the memorial that stretched along the wide wall. It had always been there, so far as he could remember, though the list of names had been much shorter before - now, the little plaques honoring the dead stretched from floor to ceiling, all the way across the room. Small trinkets littered the floor, memoriams to the lost: paper flowers and photographs, pieces of jewelry and drawings, candles with flickering, tiny flames. Iverson had brought him here earlier, when he’d told him everything that had happened. What brought Shiro back this time, he couldn’t be sure.
No - he knew. At least, his heart did.
He found Adam’s name nestled in between two soldiers Shiro didn’t know. He ran his hand over the plaque, tracing the loops and angles of letters he knew by heart. In the years that separated them, Shiro had often imagined what his reunion with Adam might have been like: in his mind, they sometimes met again as strangers, cool and indifferent to one another, with nothing more to say than well-wishes on their divergent paths. Sometimes he imagined them meeting with fiery anger and indignation, with screaming accusations and broken hearts. Other times he pictured them falling for one another again, whispering each other’s name over and over as they tumbled into a messy, passionate embrace. He had imagined all the things he would say, all the different ways he could say them, all the things that he might hear in return.
But closure, Shiro had long ago realized, was nothing more than a myth sold by fiction: the universe offered no sympathy, no chance at resolution, and the guilt that hung like a stone around Shiro’s heart would not be absolved by any twist of fate.
If he wanted to say something, he should have said it five years ago.
He turned at the soft sound of footsteps approaching.
“I guessed you might be here,” Curtis said, stopping beside him. “Can’t sleep?”
“No,” Shiro said. “You neither, huh?”
“One of those nights.” Curtis follows Shiro’s gaze, locking onto the square of names he stood in front of. “I get it. I spend a lot of time here, too.”
Curtis walks a little farther down the wall, kneels, and runs his hand across a small plaque. There’s something distant in his expression, quiet and unreadable, and it takes Shiro a long moment before he realizes which name he’s looking at.
“I guess we need to take this one down now, huh,” Curtis said.
“No,” Shiro said. “Leave it.”
Because the truth was - Shiro died.
He doesn’t even breathe as he reaches for Keith.
“Keith.”
Shiro’s voice sounds small and strange, unfamiliar in his own ears. Keith doesn’t move.
“Keith.”
The sound of static from the comm system fills his ears, a dull roar that wraps around him like a heavy blanket. Strangely, the first place his mind goes is to that wall of names - he can see Keith’s there, printed in neat, block letters right next to Lance, Hunk, Pidge, and Allura. A name and a little picture, all that’s left of any of them.
“Please.” Shiro pulls Keith to him, holds his broken body as if he could somehow pass the beating of his own heart to him. “Please, don’t do this. It should have been me. It was supposed to be me.”
He doesn’t know who he’s pleading to, or why he thinks he might get some kind of answer - even as he whispers that little prayer he knows how stupid it is. Death doesn’t work like that, no matter how convenient it would be to believe otherwise.
And yet - he came back.
Keith brought him back; his team, his friends, his family, they brought him back.
What good was it if he couldn’t return the favor now?
He pulls at the carapace of Keith’s armor, frees him of his helmet, and presses his hands onto his chest. He hears a steady rhythm in his head as he starts compressions, a mantra repeating over and over - breathe, breathe, breathe, come back, come back, come back…
The gasp Keith makes is small, broken and ragged, and it is the sweetest thing that Shiro has ever heard. Beneath his hands he feels a weak pulse start to quicken, steady like the light of fireflies beating against the glass.
A flicker of light; a flicker of life.
VI. Home
They transfer Keith and the other paladins to a hospital a few states over, one still intact after the long, painful devastation wrought by the Galra. It surprises Shiro to find that there are still pockets of normalcy in the world, even after everything that has happened - malls, schools, businesses all opening back up, people getting back to the daily routine of living. He reminds himself that’s what you have to do when you survive, no matter how terrible what you just came through might have been - you have to keep on living.
He’s only just now figuring out how to do that.
There’s no name on the door to any of their rooms, at Shiro’s insistence - privacy is necessary for Earth’s greatest defenders, and an age-old paranoia tells him that there could yet be Galra agents lurking somewhere, waiting to take down Voltron’s paladins at their most vulnerable - but he knows which one belongs to Keith at a glance. It’s late, just past sunset, and the room is dark and quiet when he slips inside.
It gives Shiro an uncomfortable pause to see Keith lying still and bandaged in the bed, reminds him too much of that awful moment when he thought he’d lost him for good. Keith’s eyes open though, dark and alert as his gaze settles on Shiro.
“Hi,” Keith says.
“Hi,” Shiro replies, “It’s good to have you back.”
Keith smiles.
“It’s good to be back.”
Shiro sits in the chair next to Keith’s bed and reaches for his hand, cradling it gently, carefully in his own. There’s so much he needs to say - so much he needs to tell Keith that he doesn’t even know where to start.
“I thought I lost you,” he says, finally.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry,” Shiro says.
Keith frowns, the way he does when he’s trying to figure out a problem that needs solving.
“For what?”
“For a lot,” Shiro says. “For...everything, I guess.”
Keith is quiet for a moment, as if in thought; then, he moves his hand, twining their fingers together in a locking pattern.
“You don’t need to say you’re sorry,” he says. “Just promise me you’ll stay.”
It isn’t a promise either of them can make, not really. He knows that; Keith knows it. Shiro wants to make it anyway.
“Only if you will.”
Maybe this was what it was all for, all that fighting, all that roundabout courtship with death - maybe, in the end, it was just about having something to come back to. Maybe that’s all it took to make it all worth it.
“Deal,” Keith says.
Shiro smiles, and squeezes Keith’s hand.
“I want to show you something. Think you can stand up for a little while?”
He puts an arm around Keith to support him, and helps him hobble over to the window. The manicured grounds of the hospital stretch out beneath them, still and quiet in the serene of twilight. Nothing changes for a moment until, hidden in the grass, tiny pulses of green light flicker to life.
“Are those…?”
“Fireflies,” Shiro says.
“Huh,” Keith says, watching, transfixed. “Never really saw them, growing up out in the desert. They’re beautiful.”
Through the glass, the fireflies rise up, incandescent and free, like stars in the night sky.
“I think so, too.”