Chapter Text
Shiro dreamt their course.
He woke in the night with the hot spark-splatter of blood against his cheek, and the hoots and bellows of the arena ringing in his ears. The ship hummed in discordant mimicry—he could feel its phantom workings in his teeth. For a moment, in the dark, Shiro thought he was in another Galra transport, and in that in-between space where dream braided with reality, he remembered a prisoner with a pelt that felt like grains of sand packed tightly together, who saw Shiro’s fear and smiled.
Do not feel ashamed to be afraid, it said to him. All beings are afraid. All creatures remember recoiling as their first act of life.
His sheets were soaked through and gnarled beneath his thighs and back. Shiro clawed through his hair and panted in the aftershocks of the dream, hating, in that static tick-tock sense that never fully went away, the whirr of his arm. The memories were already fading, but the prisoner remained a clear form in the distortion. It had no discernable eyes and wore six iron bands around its throat and belly like misplaced garters.
We carry this imprint from our ancestors, it had said. Across galaxies and generations, from some pale universal seed that took root in a hard and black place. Calling back to us, and forward.
Shiro’s pulse juddered and slowed. He exhaled. He couldn’t recall what he’d said to the prisoner, but it must have been doubtful, or maybe wistful—he could remember glancing at the Galra officers stationed at their cell block, keeping the dangerous host of gladiators at bay. Looking bored while Shiro’s world continued to disintegrate.
The prisoner had leaned forward into the light. The iron bands moved as if breathing, metallic gills gone to rust.
I know what the Galra fear, it said.
Shiro looked blindly at the wall of the ship, seeing a skipping stone set of stars beyond it, and somewhere in the distant space a nebula breaking against the dead husks of planets. He looked, and remembered, and knew the way.
“Coalberse,” he said.
“Sounds creepy,” said Lance.
“Coalberse,” Allura repeated, doubtfully. She bent her head and covered her mouth, thinking. “I don’t know the name…”
“I can’t say that I’ve heard of it,” said Coran, “but it is in our database.” He pecked at the ship’s control panel, bringing up the revolving star map. The eerie blue backwash of light fell across the paladins, making their eyes lamplights. “Now let’s see…”
“And you’re certain it was a memory?” Allura asked, with a delicacy that Shiro both was embarrassed by and appreciated. “Not simply—a fragment of the dream?”
Shiro crossed his arms. He wished he had a better answer, and something that would wipe the barely concealed worry off of everyone’s faces. “It could be either. But do we want to take that chance?”
Hunk raised his hand. “Can I ask a question?”
“You’re not in the academy,” said Pidge, without looking up from a laptop that appeared slightly worse for wear.
“Okay, but—doesn’t this sound dangerous?”
Lance nodded sagely. “We should stick to safe activities. Like piloting robot lions into battle against a legion of murderous purple aliens.”
“Please shut up,” said Keith, with a strained patience that Shiro was certain would only last as long as it took Lance to open his mouth again. They were sitting side by side but separated by a calculated foot of space. Each remained on their flank of the invisible line in a tense, unhappy ceasefire with no end in sight. Shiro didn’t know what had happened between them in the last few weeks, but he was tired of guessing.
“I’m just saying,” Lance said.
Coran was spinning the star map, muttering to himself as he paused on this system or that, cupping a smattering of stars affectionately in his hand before releasing it to move on. Allura looked between him and Shiro, and raised an eyebrow, undeterred. “Well? Hunk has made a good point. We’re unprepared for what we might find on this planet.”
“It all sounds kind of dodgy,” added Pidge, glancing up at Shiro, apologetic. “I mean, some stranger told you—once—that the Galra were forced to abandon his planet because its defenses overcame them? But what, those same defenses weren’t enough to stop the Galra from enslaving his people? It doesn’t exactly make sense. Shiro, he might’ve just been… trying to make you feel better about your situation.”
“There was no feeling better about my situation,” said Shiro, and they all shut up.
He counted to five and rubbed his forehead. “Sorry.”
“No biggie,” said Lance. “If you say there’s a planet out there with something we can use against the big bad space aliens, I say we find it.”
Keith, always loyal, made a face. “I don’t want to say it… But I agree.”
“Be still my heart,” Lance said.
“I’m not disagreeing,” said Hunk, clearly disagreeing, “but we need to consider this from all the angles. If the planet scared off the Galra, there’s no reason it wouldn’t try to do the same thing to us. And what’s the weapon? Can it be harnessed? Are we talking fortifications—or is it biological? What kind of traps are we going to trip just wandering into its atmosphere?” He held his circuit-burnt hands up and apart, speaking in an effortlessness that Shiro often admired: unknown quantities within a known parameter.
“Well,” said Pidge, turning the laptop so its screen faced most of the paladins and Allura’s curiosity, “I think it’s safe to say we need the boost, whatever the risk. The Galra have a vast empire. We’re a team of seven—oh, sorry, Rover II—eight against a gazillion. A gazillion equipped with multiple colonies and endless resources backing its soldiers.”
“A gazillion isn’t a number,” Hunk said, helpfully.
“A gazillion,” emphasized Pidge, hitting a key. The graph on the screen, which previously depicted a bulbous purple mass and a tiny Pac-man icon nibbling at its tail, ballooned as the purple mass took over. The Pac-man didn’t even come close to catching up. “Look, we can save a planet a day and we’d still be fighting a losing battle in the long run. It’s not a question of power—Voltron has that. What Voltron doesn’t have is the speed to catch up to thousands of years of colonization and overcome the tide. We need a big win, and we need it bad.”
They all stared at the graph, repeating its cycle over and over. Shiro felt his stomach sink into his bones. It was Lance who said, morosely, “We’re never getting home.”
“What is this angry yellow wheel?” asked Allura, peering close.
“That’s us,” said Pidge, and it wasn’t actually funny anymore. “That’s us, biting off more than we could ever possibly chew.”
“Pidge,” Shiro said, quietly.
“Someone had to say it. This just seems like a good time to own up. This planet of yours might end up being a whole lot of nothing, but if there’s even the smallest chance…” Pidge shrugged, fist-rubbed eyes the unhealthy shade of pink that came with too little sleep for too long. “It’s been almost a year, guys.”
Keith leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He studied the graph.
“Oh, here we are,” said Coran, stalling the map. He enlarged it, and Shiro felt an odd dread draw its starved body up his back at the sight of the small, murky planet and its gaseous atmosphere. “Coalberse. Not very large, but it used to have a thriving mining population. A little primitive, and well-regarded by its larger cousins in the system. It fell to the Galra after our time, Princess.”
“Coalberse,” said Allura, thumb nicking at her lip. She looked through the hologram to the open plains of space before them, as if picturing its proximity. “Shiro…”
“Yes?”
“Are you certain this is the path you want to take?”
Shiro stared down at his feet. He didn’t want to look them in the face while he judged his own mental stability. He was the only one to know he still woke up swinging at invisible murderers wearing his own despair—that a scent could lock him in the past—that the Black Lion remained distant from him, even as it sat like a persistent knell in the back of his skull. He tugged at the memory from all sides, and was unsure of its source.
Perhaps one day, you will be free of this place, the prisoner had said. If you live, and you are brave, you might find my home. Tell its walkways that their son dreams of them. Ask it to burn its fuel on my fire.
Most of all, Shiro remembered the Galra and how they had cheered at the terror in their champions as they fought to survive.
He looked up at the only family left to him. “One thing I’m sure of,” he said, “the Galra deserve a taste of their own medicine.”
Shiro wasn’t confident whether he’d passed a test or failed it. But Keith nodded at him, solemn and full of faith, and Hunk shrugged with a nervous grin.
“Can I get a hell yeah,” said Lance enthusiastically, folding his arms back behind his head.
To everyone’s surprise, and perhaps in a good omen, it was Keith who did exactly that.
It wasn’t until the paladins had emptied out and left Shiro and Allura alone with the ship’s display and the mulberry light of the crystal that Shiro let his body sag, writing a story of all of his reservations. Coran shuffled around him, patting his back in silent commiseration, and then followed the others.
Allura paced toward him, her dress following with a barely heard shiver. The set of her mouth seemed pensive. “You’re very pale, Shiro.”
“I haven’t slept well,” he said.
“I know you’re trying your best.” She approached and molded her palm to the back of his neck, spindly fingers a welcome chill. The smallest touch was an anvil to his spine; he staggered and sat where Hunk had been, stealing some of his leftover heat. Allura followed him, only removing contact long enough to cup her hands around one of his own with a strength they so often forgot.
Shiro didn’t forget, though. She’d thrown him across a bay—it was the sort of thing that stuck in one’s mind.
He didn’t mean to take any of it from her. But he couldn’t help himself, drawing in and breaking on a shuddering sigh that only found ground with her presence. “The flashbacks are getting worse.”
“Can you do this?” Allura squeezed his wrist. “There’s no shame if you can’t—I only need an answer, Shiro.”
“Kind of want one of those myself,” said Shiro. He tried for a wry smile.
She mimed it, and it was much more perfect. There were times, these long lonely days, when Shiro had moments like these, when he saw her and—
And couldn’t.
“Just…” He bent his face close to their conjoined hands. “Where am I leading them?”
“It’s sweet, how you think you get more than a paltry say in that,” Allura said, and he felt her shift so that their knees clicked together as if searching to fit. She was laughing at him and that was perfect, too.
What he wouldn’t give to sleep dreamless and painless and long—but how could he possibly say that to her? To Allura, who had slept through an age with a plea to her father turning sour in her esophagus, who still haunted the ship all hours, her footsteps passing Shiro’s door as she fought to remain awake and alive.
(On his worst nights, Shiro listened to her shuffle back and forth until his eyelids grew heavy and his body became a stone pinning his thoughts in place. Everything in him, his organs and ligaments, his hydraulics and wires, sunk through the bed and the floor and found a place where he felt quiet.)
Getting to Coalberse took time—even after passing through a worm hole, they found themselves amidst a nasty asteroid belt dotted with hurtling debris—and Shiro gratefully hoarded it, solidifying his spirit. He spent as much time with the other paladins as he could, staving off the sliding pitch of anxiety, which picked at his skin as if insisting there were invisible scabs he just couldn’t see. He developed a shiny patch of flesh between his thumb and index finger, which he worried with his teeth and nails and whatever sharp edges would silence its needling.
But he was better. He was sleeping through at least half of the night, and dreamt about empty shoeboxes lost at sea instead of bloodletting. The smell of Hunk charring iron-rich sweet roots from the last planet they’d freed didn’t make him gag.
When the planet finally loomed into view, Shiro caught sight of it through one of the viewing panes in the common corridor. Keith, who was walking with him, sweat-soaked from a workout, stopped to take in the sight, too.
“There’s not even a sentry,” said Keith.
“It’s been completely abandoned,” Shiro said, and even though he’d been told as much, he was shocked. “I can’t make out much on the surface, but I’m not even seeing fortifications or… civilizations, or anything.”
Coalberse was muddled and obscure, but Shiro could make out a craggy surface and patches of unspoiled earth. Once close, the gassy cloud cover was balding, watery and thin. Shiro pushed his nose close to the viewing pane, trying to make out more. Ocean covered almost the entire lower hemisphere of the planet.
Keith mopped the perspiration from his face with the shirt he’d changed out of after training. “Does this seem too easy to you?”
“Honestly, until we’re down there? I’m not going to tempt fate by assuming anything.”
“I guess I should grab the others,” said Keith, nose wrinkling.
Shiro smiled at him. “You know you’re going to have to talk to him sooner or later. Sooner might be better, in this case?”
“Who?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Shiro, and then, “Lance.”
“Why would I have to talk to Lance?” Keith spat. He looked down at his sweat-daubed shirt as if it offended him.
Shiro waited him out. He knew Keith well enough now to do that.
“He keeps trying to get on my last nerve,” Keith said, finally, grinding his teeth on his reticence. “I don’t know what his problem is, but it shouldn’t be my problem, too.”
“Okay.”
“He drives me up the wall. He literally drives me up the wall.”
“Does he have no redeemable features?” Shiro asked. He began walking them again down the hallway, taking his time until Keith haltingly followed.
Keith’s expression was troubled. “He does,” he said.
“But not enough?”
“I would probably die for him,” said Keith. “Doesn’t mean I have to like him.”
Shiro tried not to laugh. He felt unexpectedly better about the mission in front of them. “Is that how it works?”
“You have terrible questions,” Keith said, and shoved his damp smelly shirt in Shiro’s face. Shiro sputtered and grappled with him, trying to force him into a headlock, and added another good memory to his expanding collection.
(What Shiro didn’t remember until after it was too late to turn back:
What’s your planet’s name? he had asked the prisoner.
It sucked in juices from its tattered mouth. Coalberse. Or, this is what you will find on any registry.
It was then—as the passing guard’s light spun above them and filled their sad world with a margin more sight—that Shiro saw its stomach, and the wriggling, nail-bitten fingers squeezing between the iron bands.
In our native language, it said, it was born the Many Eater.)