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“That’s what hurts so much, sometimes,” Shiro whispered into the dark. “There’s—I don’t think I can imagine what it’s going to feel like when the dystropy gets bad, not until it happens. I try to imagine being too sick to live by myself, and being a burden on you, but it hasn’t happened yet, so I can’t.”
Adam reached out to run a hand through his hair. “Then what are you afraid of, moonlight?”
“Not having anything to look forward to,” he confessed, after a brief spell of quiet. “Of my life being over, before it actually ends.”
“I won’t let that happen,” his boyfriend soothed. “Never, Takashi. Now go to sleep.”
* * *
What do I look forward to?
That question, trite though it was, never really left Shiro’s mind, even after the war and everything that followed it. Once, long ago, he looked forward to the thrill of the unknown, of his own skill and accomplishment carrying him into the stars—and when that dream was stripped away from him, as he believed when he first heard that he would have to give up flying for good before he was even thirty years old, it felt as if his life had been stripped from him, too.
What was he supposed to look forward to, after that?
But after he and Adam were married, the answer seemed much clearer; and he realized as much one rainy Saturday afternoon when the two of them were busy painting a cheerful forest scene on the walls of the room that had once been Keith’s.
(The reason why they were repainting the room in the first place was so very precious that Shiro could still scarcely believe it, even though the proof of the enormous change awaiting him and the husband he loved more than life itself was everywhere, lately.)
“If Keith had better taste, we wouldn’t have had to do this in the first place,” Adam lamented, carefully positioning his stencil a few inches closer to the window and painting a tiny yellow butterfly right beside it. “Why did we let him paint his room red and cover the walls with Mothman posters?”
“You encouraged him,” Shiro laughed, unrolling the enormous grass stencil across the base of the opposite wall before opening a can of green paint. “And you admired every single one of those posters, darling. Don’t forget that.”
“I know!” his husband complained. “I just—I don’t want to paint over his walls, I guess. It feels terrible, like we’re saying this isn’t his room anymore.”
“Keith has a husband and a son of his own,” Shiro reminded him. “He also has a house, and knows that we live in the same tiny two-bedroom Garrison apartment we raised him in. He’s not going to care about the walls being painted over for the baby, especially since you decided to put all his posters up in the living room instead—they almost blinded Iverson the last time he visited, remember?”
“They are good posters, aren’t they?”
“They’re very good posters, if your name happens to be Keith Kogane.”
Adam squinted at him and burst into laughter, lifting his beautiful face to the dying sunlight as he threw back his head and giggled like the chaos-loving teenager he was only a decade ago—back at the Garrison in a tiny dorm with three narrow loft beds squeezed into it, when he and Shiro and Matt had nothing to worry about but Iverson’s latest flight exam and whether anyone would catch them on their latest after-hours excursion down to the kitchens to make oyakodon and Mrs. Holt’s tomato risotto.
“Those were the days I looked forward to most,” Shiro said quietly, startling Adam so much he nearly dropped the pen he was using to detail the butterfly’s wings. “Days just like this, even if I didn’t know it then. With you, with Keith, and now everyone else, too.”
“Like this?” Adam wondered, looking adorably confused as he turned to face Shiro with dots of red and purple paint splattered across his cheeks. “You mean...painting walls?”
“No, love. Just being with you, and being happy with you, even if it was just handing you screwdrivers when you tried to fix whatever new robot Katie brought home, or staring at you while you made Keith’s favorite onion pancakes, or huddling up next to you at night when the central heating broke in the winter and Iverson couldn’t get a handyman out in time.
“I never knew how much I would miss it until we found the Castle of Lions, I guess.” Shiro mused, brushing a lock of white hair off his forehead as he remembered those six long months before the battle that destroyed his body and left his spirit trapped inside the Black Lion for the better part of a year. “I missed you so much it hurt to breathe, sometimes.”
Adam chose that moment to drop his paintbrush onto the carpet and then fall straight off the step-ladder he was standing on, tumbling down against Shiro’s chest as he jumped forward to catch him. “Takashi!” he cried, slightly winded by his rapid descent. “Look what you’ve done to me, moonlight. I’ve fallen for you, all over again.”
Shiro sank to the floor with Adam in his lap, wondering how he could have ever been blind enough to forget all that this man was to him for the sake of a childhood dream, and how his determination to set his name in the heavens forever had driven him to turn his back on a devoted fiance and their adoptive little brother. The home they built together long ago—when they were eighteen and fresh out of school and freshly in love, too—only ever became home because Adam lived in it with him, helping him choose tatami mats to put in the living room and waking him up with coffee and rolled omelets in the morning...and Shiro had nearly lost the heart of his very existence for good without even knowing it, when Adam went into the Atlas two years before the war’s end expecting that he would never leave it again.
“This is enough,” he whispered into his husband’s ear, before Adam wriggled around to face him and drew Shiro’s head down onto his shoulder instead. “As long as I live and breathe, this—you’re more than enough, Adam Ahluwalia. You’re everything. ”