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He can't sleep, tonight.
Her breathing beside him is deep, soft, brushes over his skin. Her head is pillowed on his shoulder, her breasts soft against his side, her knee across his thigh. Usually, her presence is enough to allow him to sleep, but tonight... tonight sleep refuses to come.
He lifts his hand – his remaining hand, he muses darkly – and weaves it into her hair. Her hair is always so thick and soft, it reminds him of clouds, it's good to just sink his fingers into, comb through, play with. It does have a nasty habit of getting everywhere, though, since there's just so much of it... He's kind of glad the showers here on the castleship have self-cleaning drains. If they were on Earth, she'd be the one cleaning the shower.
The thought makes him roll his eyes at himself, there in the dark where no one can see. He's been catching himself getting sappier and sappier, lately, about... what they have. It doesn't have any definitions, and Shiro has a dark feeling that's going to come back and bite them in the ass sometime in the future, maybe sooner than he'd be comfortable with. He has a lot of dark feelings he tries very hard to ignore.
He pushes the tar-like, greasy feeling down where it can't do much more damage and turns his thoughts to more cheerful things.
Once this is over, he'll take Allura back to Earth. He'll introduce her to his mother, and his grandmother, and they'll love her immediately. They'll sit on the porch of his grandmother's old traditional house in Onagawa, watch summer fireworks, she'll probably completely murder him at spitting watermelon seeds. He imagines what she'd look like in a yukata, pale against her warm skin, and it's a breathtaking image.
Another dark feeling emerges, unbidden, unwanted. It whispers that he's tempting fate, entertaining these absurd little fantasies like this. It turns his stomach upside down, makes him nauseous . He shakes his head, tries to clear it, but these dark feelings aren't like flies, they're like an oil slick on the inside of his skull, polluting his mind. The witch-claws hook in his brain and he can't be free of them, no matter how hard he tries.
“Please,” he mutters desperately, “just let me have this.”
Every time he swims for waters where the light is brighter, the thoughts follow him, bobbing to the surface with him like bloated corpses.
Allura makes a noise against his skin, her eyes fluttering open. “Shiro?” she mumbles, raising her head, blinking at him fuzzily.
He caresses her cheek, fighting to not jerk away from her flesh because it is not worthy of touching her (God, how he hates his right hand) but she hums and presses against it, smiling softly, as if it's just another part of him.
“It's nothing, go back to sleep,” he says. Her eyes open wider, lit with their usual barely-there glow in the darkness, her eyebrows drawing low in reproach.
“You haven't slept, have you?” she says.
He wants to lie. He's desperate to lie, because he doesn't want her to worry, she doesn't need another burden, as unhealthy as it is to keep it all bottled tightly, but... he can't help but look sheepish under her gaze.
“Oh, Shiro...” she murmurs. She leans up, above him, brushes his hair away and kisses his forehead, his scar, his cheekbone. “Arlnath, would that I could carry this burden with you.”
He looks away. “I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy,” he says, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. It's at times like these, when their rooms are dark and the rest of the ship sleeps peacefully, that he allows himself to be tired. Because he is tired: he is weary of life and the constant flashes of horror behind his eyelids. He has to be strong, and he will be, but if he were to be strong all the time, he would break.
“It's not a case of wishing it,” she says, gently forcing him to look at her again. “It's a case of accepting help.”
Her eyes are so otherworldly and beautiful, turquoise and lilac and shimmering. Those eyes have seen him awaken, teeth clenched to hold in screams, unable to see anything except purple light and arcane instruments poised over his strapped-down body. These slender, unfathomably powerful fingers have soothed him, when the seam between flesh and metal has been burning in agony and the memories of a hood and a sharp-toothed smirk tear at him from the inside out. That voice has whispered and called his name, dragged him back from the abyss countless times, hummed Altean lullabies so he can finally, mercifully sleep.
“You're not alone, you know,” she adds pointedly, and he can read between the lines.
Shiro isn't the only one dealing with ghosts. Sometimes, things are the other way round. It's not often, and Shiro trembles to think of her inner poise, but sometimes...
Sometimes she wakes, drenched in sweat, tears rolling down her cheeks, calling for her father. Sometimes she is distant, 10,000 years and a million miles away, reliving the death of a planet and the genocide of eighteen billion people. Sometimes, the Altean lullabies are sobbed more than sung, and all she can do is curl up and long for something that cannot ever come back.
Earth, he thinks, is still there, waiting for him, waiting for all of them. They can all console themselves with the knowledge that there are seven billion people still there, and just like them. He can't even begin to imagine what it must be like, to be one of the last two of your entire kind.
He tucks her hair back,behind her pointed ear, caresses her cheek, holds her close.
“I know,” he replies. She smiles at that, leans down to kiss him, and he yields without a moment's hesitation. Finally the clamour in his mind dies down, allowing him some modicum of peace.
Her touch makes him shudder, his makes her gasp. Their hips move together, attuned to each other, a perfect counterpoint. She tosses her head back, his name on her lips, and she tightens around him, hot and everything he needs, the ripples of her orgasm driving him to his own. He stills, arched up, deep inside her, and she kisses him through it, their fingers laced together.
He'd be lying if he said sex with Allura isn't the best he's ever had. He'd also be lying if he said that seeing her like this, face flushed, sated, trailing her fingers down his chest, didn't fill him with something so much deeper than attraction, and so much more profound than gratitude.
“Sleep, now,” she murmurs, kissing him again, warm next to him, their legs tangled beneath rumpled sheets. He closes his eyes with a deep, relieved sigh.
Though, he muses as he finally drifts off, he still doesn't know exactly what “arlnath” means.