Work Text:
electric indigo
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and i call on the water to clean
the remains of the dirt that it leaves.
to be brave and alert and pristine;
there’s a stain in the heart of me.
- letter by the water // the japanese house
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“There are so many things I want to ask you,” Pidge says, eyes to the sky, “but I don’t know if it’d be a good idea. For you, I mean.”
Shiro’s massaging his wrist. He’s always massaging his wrist these days, rubbing against the cold metal; the itching and stinging of a phantom limb never quite leaves him, but that’s his own cross to bear, not Pidge’s. She doesn’t need to carry that weight. “I appreciate the concern,” he says with a sage nod. “But you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be alright, really.”
Pidge lets out a light snort, her own type of laughter. “I can always tell when people are lying, y'know. I’m pretty good at it.”
Shiro rolls his metal wrist and offers a smile as an apology. He almost feels imaginary bones cracking with relief. “Oh, man. Looks like I’m in deep trouble, huh?”
Pidge’s smile says the opposite, but there’s a sorrow lingering at the borders of it, and Shiro thinks, You’re too young to look this worn out. She turns her eyes back up at the cloudless sky. A breeze rustles her hair, sighs through it until her bangs puff back and away from her forehead. “You don’t need to pretend around me,” she murmurs. “Just like I don’t need to pretend around you, right?”
The words spiral gently around Shiro’s ears before settling in to make themselves understood. All at once, he feels his body go watery and weak as his posture slips from pristine and statuesque to exactly how tired he plays make-believe at not being. His voice is little more than a hoarse sigh when he says, “Right…you’re right.”
“You don’t lie like other people lie, though,” she says, swinging her legs. “It’s different with you. You’re not deceptive.”
“Then what kind of liar am I?”
“A tired one.” Pidge’s legs stop swinging. “Like you’re trying so hard to be okay that the only way to do it is to lie about it.”
Shiro stares at her profile, watching her expression carefully. Another breeze blows and sends her bangs billowing over her forehead again, soft like duck fluff. After a few beats, she says, “No one would think badly of you if you told them the truth.”
“What’s my truth? In your words.”
Pidge lets out another one of those little snorts, shoulders bobbing. “C'mon, Shiro.”
“No, really. I want to hear what you think. Sometimes it’s easier to parse hearing it from someone else.” Shiro gives her a gentle nudge against her shoulder. “Especially from someone perceptive like you.”
That pulls another smile out of her, small but still there. She turns her eyes away as Shiro watches her fall into a stream of thought, brow furrowing as the colored wires of her brain work in tandem to circuit her words together in the ways that click. “Well, obviously I can’t say for sure what your truth is. That’s up to you. But if I took an honest swing at it…” She snaps her fingers, the circuits linking together just as she wanted them. “Okay, let’s say you’re neck-deep in water. On a good day, you can keep your head above it just fine. Nothing’s pulling you down lower into it. You can see clearly beyond it.”
“I can see the land.”
“Right. And you’re not afraid of it, the water or the land. You see things just as they are.”
“My eyes play no tricks on me.”
“Exactly.”
Shiro lies back in the grass and lets his hand – his flesh-and-bone hand, the one that never aches that ghostly ache – drape over his eyes. “I can see the land,” he murmurs to himself.
“But on a bad day,” Pidge goes on, “you can’t keep your head up above that water. Something invisible keeps dragging you down. Before you know it, the rest of you is going under little by little.”
“My legs keep giving out.”
“And the whole time, we’re reaching down into the water trying to grab hold of you to pull you out. But somehow you’re able to lift up a hand.”
“I wave you all off.”
“You tell us you’re just fine.”
“But I can’t see the land anymore,” Shiro says, eyes opening. He finds himself at the bottom of an ocean, everything teal and soundless. Ah, this. He knew this would happen. There’s almost a calmness in it, this expectancy of his mind betraying him yet again, something that’s almost come to feel intimate and familiar lately. How easily I step out of myself, he says, and the water fills his mouth but he doesn’t drown even as the sea sweeps into his human lungs. He breathes out more ocean, breathes more in. With a glance down at his metal arm, he finds nothing there, no steel or brackets or phantoms. How easily my body says goodbye toits own machinery.
Pidge’s voice comes from somewhere above, but Shiro can’t find her in the water. Yes, she must be on land, the land Shiro can no longer see. “We keep telling you, ‘Hey, you don’t have to keep sinking. We can help you.’”
But down I go.
“You think it’d be a burden to grab hold of the hands that reach for you.”
The water is cold and sharp against Shiro’s body. Nothing moves within it, no life but his own. It’s getting hard to breathe with all this water closing in on him from all sides, but this, too, is familiar, this tightness of chest and constriction of throat. He observes it and listens to how his heart pounds in his ears, beating blood that doesn’t know how to be anything but heroic even as the sea gets darker and darker, colder and colder.
“Am I making sense?” Pidge asks from the land.
Yeah, Shiro says, half-laughing through the water and his panic. A little too much sense.How do I get myself out of this ocean?
“Oh, god.” Pidge’s voice sounds nervous now, strung up tight with worry and guilt. “Does…does anything help when it comes over you?”
Just breathing, Shiro says as water fills and empties his lungs over and over again. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Pidge.
“I’m sorry. I – I shouldn’t have gotten that detailed.”
Shiro’s eyes scan the sea. Nothing but green and blue down here, green and blue and the empty space where his arm used to be. Where are you, Pidge? I can’t see you.
A familiar hand reaches through the water, all skinny fingers and little wrist. “Right here,” Pidge says, and it’s as if her voice is right beside him now, no longer on faraway land. “I’m right here, Shiro.”
Shiro reaches for her hand, but hesitates just short of her fingertips. A weight larger than ten universes holds him down; he imagines his whole body being crushed beneath it until he’s nothing but the remains of a shipwreck at the bottom of a nameless ocean. But before he disintegrates, Pidge reaches through the space between them and grabs his hand to guide him through this underwater maze. She looks so small leading the way like this, her arm stretched behind her to keep a tight hold of Shiro’s hand. He closes his eyes as they pass through a high wall of water, which ripples against his body in freezing, resistant waves before it breaks with a shudder.
On land, it’s what Shiro thinks is a cool, damp summer night. Soft, marshy grass sinks beneath his feet. Everything smells of rain and forest. Can I open my eyes yet? he asks Pidge, whose hand is still latched steadfastly to his own. Is it safe?
“Yes.” Her voice is soft and wobbly with anxiety. She’s too young to know fear like this, too young to be a soldier who must arm herself in terror and rewrite it as bravery. “You’re safe, Shiro, I promise.”
Shiro opens his eyes. He’s lying in a field of blue, the long stalks of glowing flowers reaching high above him. The sky hangs black and freckled with silver. Pidge, he says, touching a stalk with tender fingertips, look at these flowers. Don’t they look like lanterns?
He thinks he hears Pidge sniffing, her breath a stutter. Is she crying? (My fault, my fault, need to fix, need to make it better, my responsibility, my fault.) “Yeah,” Pidge chokes out from somewhere far away. “They do. They’re pretty.”
I should pick some for everyone. That would raise the group’s morale, don’t you think?
There’s another voice from somewhere, but it’s even farther away than Pidge’s and therefore unintelligible – but it feels familiar, the voice of a woman. Shiro looks around the blue field in search of it. To his left, he sees the wall of the sea he walked out of hovering like something solid, something cube-like and strange, never breaking its form even as its surface ripples and shakes in the night air. Something dawns on him, hissing and terrifying that tells him if he steps through that wall of water once more, no hand will be able to find him, and he’ll never find his way out again.
Wide-eyed, Shiro turns his attention away from that floating ocean and looks back at the glowing flowers. They remind me of Allura, he whispers, trying to think of something beautiful to keep his breathing calm. A cool mist falls over him at the thought; he breathes in deep, the scent of wild heather filling his lungs where once there was only sea. Reaching out, he touches the warm blue petals of a flower and lets his eyes fall to a close. I’ll definitely pick some for her. She should always have flowers.
“I’m not in any immediate need,” says Allura, “but it’s a kind thought.”
Shiro opens his eyes once more, this time to his own sleeping quarters. His right arm remains outstretched in the midst of reaching for flowers that aren’t there. When he turns his head, he finds Allura sitting at his bedside, one leg crossed over the other, her eyes concerned in a hard, alien sort of way; but there’s no impatience in her expression, no anger, not even confusion in how Shiro grasps at nothingness in the air before him. His arm slowly lowers onto the bed as he blinks at her, clarity returning to his dizzy brain in slow trickles. His voice comes out as a deep sigh. “I did it again.”
“You have to stop blaming yourself,” Allura says, her voice low and quiet.
But that’s what I’m best at.
“That being said,” Allura continues, “you haven’t been resting. At all. You’ve been working yourself to death even while your teammates sleep.”
“I’m trying my best.” Shiro’s hands clench into fists atop the blanket. “No – no, harder than my best.”
“And I appreciate that. But not at the expense of your own mind, Shiro.”
“If it’s my mind, how can I not blame myself for the things it does?” Nauseous, Shiro rubs his palm against his aching forehead as if to scrub out the sickness beneath his skull. When he moves his legs beneath the covers, his toes touch something soft and warm: a sleeping Pidge atop the blankets at the foot of the bed, curled around his legs like a little cat. Shiro stares at her for a beat before turning his eyes to the ceiling. “I did it in front of Pidge,” he says, his voice dull and deadened. “I lost it in front of her.”
“And she thinks no less of you for it.” Allura’s voice is gentler now, though it shakes in fine tremors at its perimeters. Shiro feels her stare pinned hot and tense against his cheek. “She just wants you to be okay. She worries so much for you.”
“I know.” Shiro rubs hard at his eyes with the flats of his palms until stars burst behind his eyelids. “And being okay is an expectation I’m trying to live up to. I’m trying for everyone, believe me.”
“I do.”
The softness in Allura’s voice makes Shiro turn to find her eyes piercing through the half-light. Her hair hangs loose and uncombed around her shoulders, her face more tired than he’s ever seen it. “I do believe you,” she repeats, firmer now, and Shiro wants to shrink down into himself again at the look in her eyes. So headstrong, so determined. More expectations. Slender blue rivulets of water start gathering in the seams of her nightclothes, leaking out as if beneath her silks and laces, her body holds the entirety of the ocean. When Shiro blinks, the water evaporates.
“How long was I out?” he asks her, anything to fill the silence. “Did I miss anything important?”
Allura doesn’t answer, just stares at him with a harder brand of sadness than Pidge had given him. Fractured shards of light fall over her, but this room has no windows; where does this light come from?
“When’s our next training session?” Shiro asks, frantic now as he struggles to sit upright. “I can’t miss it-”
Allura is on him faster than he expects her to move, a strong hand clamped upon his shoulder to keep him stationary. Shiro lies back down slowly, his eyes wide and fixed up at her. The silver tangle of her hair looms over him like a cloud. There’s a fierceness in her gaze that he likens not to anger, but to a soundless, trembling panic. I know that panic well,he thinks, going limp within her hold to show her he yields to it. Fearing for another person. Do you ever feel like it’s all we can do?
Something flashes in Allura’s eyes, something like understanding.
Defeated, Shiro gives a faint touch to her wrist where her pulse thrums hot and fast. “What do I do now?”
Allura remains motionless for a breath before releasing his shoulder and touching his forehead. “Now,” she murmurs, “you rest.” Her touch traces deftly to his eyelids, whereupon they close. A gesture for dead men, Shiro thinks – and then, all too easily, the green sea swallows him into sleep.