Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It didn't take five years of hurtling through space with a ragtag group of galactic defenders for Shiro to figure out which fires to put out, and which fires to ignore.

Hunk and Coran’s seemingly endless, heated debate over whether the green goo, when frozen, should be considered a dessert, or a side dish? Ignore.

Lance challenging the other paladins to a Lion dance-off in space? Put out.

Pidge slyly teaching Allura Earth profanities and daring her to use them? Ignore, unless within a 10m radius of Coran.

Keith’s tendency, when bored, to insinuate that Lance and Blue would never be able to beat him and Red in a slingshot race around the orbit of whatever planet they were passing closest to? Sound the alarm, ready the extinguisher, and hide the matches.

He’s escaped Galran prisons, piloted one of the most technologically advanced machines known to humankind, and survived Keith’s cooking. After five years of navigating the eccentricities of daily life in the Castle of Lions, there's not much that fazes Shiro anymore.

Which is why it takes him a full day and a half of castle regulated time to notice that Hunk and Pidge are up to something.

It starts with breakfast.

“This isn't green.”

Shiro glances up from the data screen he’d been reading. Keith, situated at the end of the table, is the first to have been served, and prods at one of the goo cubes on his plate. It glistens and wriggles in the dining room’s artificial morning light and, just as Keith had ever-so-expertly assessed, is far from the bright green they've become conditioned to love.

The rich brown of the breakfast goo is reminiscent of coffee beans, or even chocolate, but its glossy surface and gelatinous texture remind Shiro more of-

“No way, José,” Lance says, trying to push the bowl of goo Hunk offers back to him. “There’s a lot of weird alien junk you can feed us, Coran, but I am not eating space poop!”

Coran sniffs, an indignant sound, and for the first time since sitting down with the rest of the team for breakfast, Shiro notices Coran’s pout. Chin propped in his hands, Coran sends Hunk a dark look.

“Can’t take the credit for this one! Hunk and Pidge deserve all the glory for mucking around in the castle's nutrient system,” he says, sounding petulant. His narrowed eyes track Pidge as she sets a bowl in front of him. “Ruined a perfectly good family recipe. Best I can tell, it may be one-trillion times worse than space feces!”

Swinging around to the head of the table, Pidge returns Coran’s beady stare. She sticks out her tongue and, attention diverted by him, puts another bowl in front of Allura with more force than necessary.

“Manners,” comes Allura’s soft reprimand. It's impossible for Shiro to tell if it's directed at Pidge or Coran, but the twitch of a smile at the corner of her lips makes him think it might be both.

Regardless, Pidge acts as if she hadn't heard Allura, though he catches the slightest (defiant) tilt of her chin.

“It’s not poop. Really, Lance, I thought you were the expert on what is and isn’t space poop,” Pidge says airily, “Considering it must occupy somewhere around 93% of the mass in your skull.”

Shiro’s bowl settles in front of him with a dainty clink, accompanied by Lance’s squawk of protest and Hunk’s far-from-hushed “Oooooh, sick burn!”. Keith cackles and dodges the spoon Lance hurls at him.

“Would you all please stop talking about waste at the table!” Allura snaps. Her attempt to be heard over the cacophony is undermined by her own stifled giggle.

Pidge sets down her bowl, drops into the seat next to him, and shoots him a smirk. Warmth prickles at his temples, the faintest manifestation of the mental bond they all shared. Rarely could any of them connect without the aid of their Lions or Coran’s neural enhancers, and even now the psychic bridge between him and Pidge relays only the broadest swaths of sentiment: mirth, and something that feels like a shared secret. It’s impossible to resist smiling back at her.

“Someone try it already,” Hunk insists. “Me’n’Pidge slaved in the nutrient systems all night over this meal!”

“Then you try it!” Lance says. Keith chucks the spoon back at Lance - it hits him square on the forehead, bounces off, and lands in the goo with a wet plop.

Pandemonium takes over the table as Lance lurches up and tackles Keith straight from his chair. Allura is standing in an instant, her shouting drowned out by Coran and Hunk's renewed yelling match over preserving the goo’s integrity.

A wave of amusement, not all his, not all Pidge’s, ripples between them. She folds her legs under her and leans forward to rest her elbows on the table. Her gaze slides away from the drama on the opposite side of the table, to him.

“Well, I guess that's it, then,” she says with a shrug.

“That’s what?” he asks.

“You're the one who’s going to have to try it now, Shiro.”

He glances down at the brown goo. It wiggles violently with each bump of the table.

“I can't try it first,” Pidge continues, countering the argument just forming on his tongue. “I helped make it, so I'm a biased party, and as you know, bias has no place in scientific inquiry.”

“But-”

“Come on, it’s for science.”

Shiro looks from the goo, to Lance’s feet as he
flips backwards over his chair, to Pidge’s little grin, the slight crinkle at the corner of her eyes.

“Fine,” he concedes, “But only because it's for science.”
…

“It was definitively not inedible,” Coran says. Shiro imagines it's as much as his culinary pride will concede, for the moment. No doubt that by tomorrow, Coran would be over it, and sing its praises alongside the rest of the team.

Even Lance had agreed that it was good, albeit not before flinging about half of it at Keith and Hunk. Keith’s retaliation was swift and deadly, his first chucked glob nailing Lance right in the eye. Claiming he couldn't see his newest creation go to such waste, Hunk had crawled under the table and sought asylum on the other side. Lance and Keith hadn't even mustered up a complaint when Shiro had commanded they stay to clean up the mess. He could still hear their bickering as the doors to the dining room slid shut behind the rest of the team.

“Yup, I'd have to say that was a job well done,” Hunk says, placing one meaty hand on the top of Pidge’s head. “You may still have some hope as a chef, Pidge.”

Her nose wrinkles as she tries to swat Hunk’s hand away. Efforts unsuccessful, she ducks out of his reach. A few wild tufts of hair spring up from the crown of her head, escaped from a braid that Lance must have coaxed into shape at least two days ago. There’s no attempt to pat them back into a semblance of neatness as she spins on her heel and begins walking backwards; the brown strands stick out at crazy angles and bounce as she moves.

“I don't know if coding the readjustments to the system counts as cooking,” she says. “Let’s just all be thankful I'm a better programmer than a cook.”

“It was good, Pidge,” Shiro says. “You should both be proud.”

Hunk lets out a joyful whoop and pumps a fist in victory. “Masters of the Goo! Masters of the Goo!” he chants, nudging Pidge to get her to join in. She unleashes an electrifying smile and picks up the chant. Swept up in their own success, Hunk grabs Pidge by the waist and heaves her into a wobbly spin. Their chanting devolves into laughter, and Shiro has to stop short in the hallway to avoid getting a faceful of flailing feet.

“All right, Masters of the Goo,” Shiro says. “You’re going to be the Masters of the Mop if Coran catches you gloating.”

Hunk slams to a stop. “Oh, yeah, good point.”

Without warning, Hunk lets go of Pidge. She lets out a yelp and lands awkwardly on one foot. Pidge stumbles back with dizzy, drunken steps, stopped only when she slams into Shiro’s chest. His hands fly to her shoulders, steadying her.

“What the crow, Hunk?!?” Pidge exclaims, throwing her hands up.

“My bad!”

Despite the exasperated furrow of her brow, Shiro feels, for the second time that morning, another warm tendril of feeling curl between them. With a start, he realizes he’s still holding her by the shoulders. Pidge must have felt him tense, given her curious glance up at him. His hands drop to his sides.

She doesn't look away, and a sudden need to explain, or justify, grows thick behind his teeth. He’d simply been keeping her from falling, had only meant to-

Shiro opens his mouth, but Hunk careens back in, saving him.

“Speaking of bad…” Hunk starts, turning to Pidge. His eyebrows give a dramatic waggle, which he pairs with a suggestive, “Eh, eh?”

Whatever Hunk is insinuating sets Shiro on instant edge, but Pidge just quirks her head, curious.

“Hunk, what are you…?”

“Come on, you know! The thing we were hypothesizing? The thing that's probably being proven or disproven…” Hunk raises his wrist to peer at the thin ticker strapped next to a regular watch. “Right… about… now.”

“Quiznak!-”

“Pidge…”

“Sorry, Shiro,” Pidge says, drawing out the vowels in a decidedly-not-sorry fashion. “I just got so caught up in the goo that I forgot-”

Rather than finish the thought, Pidge whips out a portable data screen generator from the deep pocket of her jumpsuit. She taps the thin metal bar, and the screen slides into being. It lights up with a doodled version of her face - short-haired and swirly-eyed, a remnant of her first days tinkering with Altean tech. Hunk scoots around her until he and Shiro are side-by-side. Hunk lets loose an excited-sounding whine. “Play it, play it, play it!” he urges.

Pidge responds with a huff and begins tapping at the screen with one hand, fingers moving too fast for Shiro to follow.

Shiro looks over Pidge’s shoulder to get a closer view. He doesn't miss the excited look Hunk and Pidge share, a look that sinks down into his stomach and leaves a lingering suspicion that, pretty soon, he’s going to have to be the adult in the room.

The screen flickers to life with a video feed - the dining room, empty now but for Keith and Lance. The angle of the feed comes from up above, in a high corner where Shiro had never, in five years, noticed any sort of camera or monitoring device.

Plans of investigating the nooks and crannies of the dining room are swept away as Lance plants both hands on Keith's chest and bodily shoves him against the table. Shiro's about to sigh, about to turn right back around to the dining room and tell those two to knock it off and stop fighting for once, when their lips collide.

There’s no sound from the video, and Shiro has never been more thankful: there is enough passion in the way Keith breaks the kiss to haul himself onto the edge of the table and drag Lance between his legs. He doesn't need to hear their gasps and soft cries, too.

Pulling his gaze away, Shiro glances at Pidge and Hunk, both staring at the video with rapt attention. Something happens that makes them both let out a “ooooohhh” of appreciation. Without looking away, Hunk raises his hand to high five with Pidge.

“Hypothesis mega-confirmed!” she chirps.

“I think we can chalk this one up as another victory for science,” Hunk replies. “Two in one day is a solid record, if I do say so myself.”

His face feels like it's on fire. Shiro reaches between them and plucks the data screen from Pidge’s grasp.

“Enough.”

The two straighten and still, no doubt conditioned by now to respond to the commanding edge in his voice.

“Turn around.”

With creeping slowness, Pidge and Hunk turn as one. Hunk looks stricken, eyes wide and lips pursed like he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The corners of Pidge’s lips draw taut and her nose wrinkles; it’s obvious to Shiro that she’s fighting back a snarky comment. The sight helps Shiro regain enough composure to form the next sentence.

“Why in the universe would you two be watching that? Is there a reason you felt like violating the trust of your teammates?”

“I don't know why you’re so worried about trust getting violated,” Pidge mutters. “What about that poor table?”

Never before has he felt so fortunate for the years of military protocol drilled into him - it's all that’s kept his head above water so far, given the wave of information overtaking him. Nonetheless, he feels that stern resolve ebbing away. Lance and Keith? The two voyeurs in front of him? Too much. He buries his head in his palms and takes a long, deep breath.

“Pidge,” he starts, voice dampened by his hands, “please try to take this seriously. No one besides Lance and Keith needed to be privy to that, least of all me, so the two of you are going to explain why you felt the need to be streaming them.”

Shiro raises his head, meeting Pidge's side eye with a hard stare. He squares his shoulders, bracing for her next sarcastic comment, but she just gestures to Hunk to start.

“Well… We sorta had this hypothesis…” Hunk trails off, head sinking down as he scuffs at the floor with a foot. “This hypothesis that Lance, and uh, and Keith were…”

Despite how invested Hunk had seemed in the video feed before, he clams up now, a pink flush staining his dark cheeks. He kicks the floor a little harder, chagrined.

“That Keith and Lance were having a torrid sexual affair and were trying to keep it from all of us!” Pidge spits out in a rush. “The signs were all there, but neither of them were yielding on the issue, and Hunk and I couldn't figure out why they'd be keeping it from everyone else - not like the rumor mill is particularly long around here - so we took it upon ourselves to investigate! And we proved it.”

The weight that grows on Shiro’s shoulders must be fatigue - it's morning, but he’s already too tired for this.

“So you're telling me that you two just had this, this feeling, that-”

“Technically not a feeling, a hypothesis! A hypothesis is an educated guess based on prior evidence and existing-”

“I know what a hypothesis is, Hunk, and that's not my point. You two are grown adults, and Paladins of Voltron, but instead of applying your skills to something useful, you just decided to spy on your teammates? You two were perfectly willing to go behind half of your team’s back for a hunch.”

“A hunch and a hypothesis aren't the same-”

“Not the point, Pidge. Look, I know you didn’t mean any harm by it, but that doesn’t mean I can just let it go. Think about how Keith and Lance would feel knowing their personal life was being aired without them knowing. Use that incredible brain of yours for a second and think about how it would feel if your privacy was being invaded, if you were the one being watched.”

Shiro doesn't actually expect his words to work - he anticipates a snort and an eye roll from Pidge, followed by a derisive, 'Like that would ever happen’.

Instead, her mouth clamps shut. Redness creeps out from under the collar of her jumpsuit and stretches over her neck and face before taking hold at the roots of her hair. She ducks her head.

“Yeah, I guess you're right,” Pidge mumbles. “We got excited about the possibility that they might be together, and we didn't think…”

“I figured. Guys, I don't know if they're ready to be so… public with whatever their relationship may be, so until they let us know, please, respect their decisions and don’t go talking about it,” Shiro says. “I, for one, would love to pretend as if this never happened and I didn't see what I just saw. Got it?”

Hunk nods, then nudges Pidge until she nods, too. Her hand shoots out, palm up and open, and makes a grabbing motion. Hunk glances between them, looking like he's about to say something, but he must choose to keep it to himself.

Shiro returns her data screen. Pidge shoves it back in her pocket, mutters an apology, and grabs Hunk by the wrist, all without looking back up at him. Hunk calls his own apology back to Shiro as Pidge drags him towards the lab.

…

There are some things that just need a commanding officer.

This, Shiro decides as he speeds towards the bridge, is one of them.

His attempts to focus were shot after seeing the video stream of Lance and Keith. It’s not as though Shiro hadn’t tried, taking himself immediately down to Kuro’s hangar to take a look at the shocks and stabilizers in place around her knee joints. They’d been a good Earth week and a half out from their last combat encounter with a Galran fleet, and the issues with Kuro’s suspension had been noticeable since. After his third near-frying on the circuitry in her lower leg panel, Shiro had felt the insistent press of Kuro in his mind, and then at his side, as she nosed him out of the hangar. Distracted, he’d almost sensed her say.

“Allura, a word?”

Against the backdrop of the universe, Allura never fails to be striking. Whole galaxies, lit up in white, unfurl behind her like a halo, bright and unfathomably distant. She turns from the massive map projection of stars and systems, and one corner of her mouth quirks up in a grin.

“Just a single word, Shiro, or should I have Coran bring us lunch up here?” she teases.

There aren’t many beings in existence, Shiro thinks, who know him better than Allura. He rubs the back of his neck and says, “It’s at least five words, so I leave it to your discretion.”

Allura turns back to the head of the bridge, but Coran’s already shutting down the program he’d been working on.

“Well, look at the time!” Coran starts. “I got so caught up in these diagnostics that I forgot I needed to make sure the nutrient system was still bug-free after all that interference. Coding bugs, I mean, not real bugs of course, unless anyone is feeling like Balmeran cuisine tonight.”

He waggles his eyebrows in their direction and jets out of the bridge before either of them can respond. Shiro and Allura share a chuckle, then she gestures for Shiro to take his usual seat in the command chair. She leans against the bridge control station and crosses her arms.

“So, what did our paladins do this time?”

Shiro sighs and presses the heel of his palm against one eye. Just thinking about what he saw with Pidge and Hunk is starting to give him a headache.

“Keith and Lance are together.”

“Well, that’s hardly unusual, even for those two. You paladins are almost always together.”

He knows it takes more than five years to flesh out all of the linguistic and cultural intricacies between two different species. But for once, Shiro wishes that he didn’t have to spell out this particular connotative difference.

“I meant together in a more… intimate sense.”

For all of the grace of Allura’s demeanor, he sometimes forgets that, when she was put into cryosleep 10,000 years ago, Allura was probably closer to Pidge’s age now than his. And royalty, to boot. So he can’t help but feel somewhat self-conscious as he watches her dark cheeks flush red the moment she catches on to his meaning.

“Well… well I suppose that isn’t particularly surprising,” she says after a moment. “It’s about time, really.”

Shiro raises an eyebrow. That wasn’t the reaction he was expecting.

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“It was kind of obvious, to everyone I assumed,” she says.

He reflects on what he’s seen of the two over the last five years. Bickering, constant competition, and just in the past few hours, food fights.

“But they’re rivals in every sense,” he argues. “Not a single day in all of this time has passed where someone hasn’t had to defuse or outright stop a fight between those two.”

Allura snorts, clearly thinking back on this morning.

“That’s very true,” she says. “But also true is that the - what would you all call it? - the tension between those two has been palpable for ages.” She pauses, eyes flicking upwards in thought. “It’s obvious that they want to… fuck.” The final word is slow to come off of her tongue, as if she were testing its weight for the first time. He wouldn’t be surprised if this were the first time she’d used it out loud.

She levels her gaze at him, expression somewhere between amused and challenging, as if daring him to call Coran on her. Luckily for her, Shiro’s too swamped with his own embarrassment to comment on what is no doubt Pidge’s terrible influence. His neck feels hot and red, and he ducks down to stare at the floor.

“Obvious, huh?” he finally manages. “Hunk and Pidge said just about the same, but I figured it must have just been the two of them being invasive. Keith and Lance had always been so competitive, so in each other’s faces. I never interpreted that to mean…”

“There are many ways to express affection,” Allura muses. “And, I say this with all of the affection in my heart, but you can be incredibly oblivious sometimes, Shiro.”

“Everyone else knew?”

“Everyone knew. Or at least suspected.”

Groaning, he sinks a bit in his seat.

“Then I suppose I deserve that,” he says. “So then, what do we do from here? With Keith and Lance?”

Her brows furrow, and she sends him a stern look.

“We don’t do anything, at least not for now.”

“But, if they’re romantically involved, doesn’t that put the team, everything we’re working towards, at risk?” he asks, a bit incredulous. “It’s a liability.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” She pauses long enough to wait for the shake of his head. “Of anyone, you should know that caring isn’t a weakness.”

She’s correct, of course. How many times, in that dank Galran cell, had he kept himself from falling off the edge with the deep need to keep the Holts safe? That first time they’d formed Voltron, and every time after, hadn’t he too felt the distinct pulse of love beating between them all?

“But,” Allura continues, “if it’s any reassurance, Lance and Keith are hardly the first paladins to become more than just teammates. It’s a natural progression, given the bonds you all share.”

Allura shrugs along with her words, as if the whole idea were perfectly transparent. Strangely, though, her lips draw tight, and she stares off to the side. There’s more there, something that she’s not sharing, and that he won’t push. Oblivious as he might be most of the time, Shiro has pinned down the dark look that crosses Allura’s face every time she discusses past paladins. The expression passes soon enough, and she continues.

“As it is, the closeness all of you feel from your paladin connection is amplified by your physical proximity. Five paladins in one castle for five years? I’m surprised those two were the first to take their relationship further.”

“...You know something else, don’t you?”

“I’ll have you know I'm quite knowledgeable about a number of things.”

“Oh, come on, Allura.”

“You come on, Shiro.”

Allura really has that sass and shrug combination down - another bad influence of Pidge’s, he’d bet. Funny, how that transfer of traits seems to have been one-directional. The briefest image of Pidge, clad in some elaborate Altean ball gown, entertaining alien diplomats with Allura’s same elegance and suavity, flashes through his mind. It fits about as well as a Galran at a peace conference. He wrinkles his nose. Even with all of the swearing and shrugging, Allura was likely getting the better end of the deal.

Shiro shakes his head, hoping to get his thoughts in order. Lance and Keith.

“I can't believe I didn't see it…”

Leaning back on the bridge control panel, Allura gives a little hum of assent and stares up at the holographic stars splayed above.

“It's easy to miss something you're not looking for,” she says. “Trust me. Alteans learned that the hard way.”

He looks up at her in time to catch that shadowed expression cross her face again. This time, it doesn’t flit away, though perhaps her pinched brow belies more of a sadness this time around.

“History lesson?”

“Physiology,” she says, a hint of a warmth in her voice, “And maybe some philosophy, if you can stand it.”

Slanting forward in his chair, Shiro rests his chin on his intertwined fingers.

“I witnessed Lance shoving his tongue down Keith’s throat,” he says, voice serious. “I am confident I can stand anything.”

Reliving that memory is worth it for the soft smile he summons on Allura’s delicate features. “Alright then,” she starts.

The bridge’s system, by now as attuned to Allura as Kuro was to him, dims the lights that ring the room, bringing the map projection overhead into sharper relief.

“Alteans have a naturally slower metabolism and cell death cycle. It's part of how we’d been able to master shapeshifting, but also how we'd managed to become such a prominent race of explorers. When you live ten times longer than most other bipedal species, you have so much more time to truly live in and learn about the new world you've discovered.”

A number of star systems begin changing from white to blue, starting in a single line, and then branching out in an exponential fashion. Soon, Allura’s face is lit in the gentle, bluish glow.

“But… the more I’ve had time to think on it, the more I've realized that that fact may have contributed to our downfall,” she continues. “Things seemed to change so quickly for us that we struggled to adapt. A revolution twenty years in the making felt like the passing of a heartbeat to an Altean.”

One of the systems, positioned just to the left of her head, flickers to a bright purple. The color spreads across the nearest systems, blue and white succumbing to purple like a canvas repainted with contagion. Allura’s voice holds steady, impassive as she watches the system after system fall, but he notices how her arms tighten around her middle. She takes a deep breath, and tears her eyes away.

“It's like… when the lens is so wide, how do you catch the smallest, most vital detail? One moment I'm waking from a 10,000 year slumber and betting the fate of the universe on five complete strangers, and the next moment, they're a team - a strong team, that’s fought, and grown, and lost, and loved.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Shiro catches one of the purple systems begin to wobble. It retracts, shrinking in size, and then explodes outwards in a burst of blue. It’s one of the furthest possible systems from the center of the map, remote even by his standards, but still, he recognizes the minute Altean script positioned underneath it. System 267-K, Arus. When he turns back to Allura, he finds her staring at the same point.

“Suddenly, five years have passed. Hunk has become a part of Balmeran folklore, celebrated across entire systems. Pidge has invented more improvements and adaptations to Altean tech than some of the planet’s eldest, greatest scientists. Keith and Lance are in love.”

The change happens at a snail’s speed, but happens nonetheless, as the purple points surrounding the Arusian system fade back to blue. An erratic blue line trails all the way up to the small, triangular symbol nestled in one of the systems overhead - their current location. Allura smiles.

“And you… well, you’re still as oblivious as ever.”

“Hey!” Shiro protests. “I’m not that bad. I’m not Lance bad.”

“I suppose that’s true. It took him, what, four years to realize the feelings between him and Keith? There might be some hope for you yet.”

It’s there again, that sense that Allura knows something he doesn’t, is withholding some secret. For as clueless as he apparently was, the two of them were too alike, too much of the same person in so many ways for Shiro to not pick up on that. He narrows his eyes. She laughs.

“What are you trying to say?”

“What I'm trying to say is, even though the changes in your lives since forming Voltron may seem gradual to you, they are huge in the scope of your life,” she says. “Don't miss a big change just because it seems small.”

Allura taps her chin with a finger, looking thoughtful.

“Especially if it seems small.”

He’s about to ask her to clarify, but Coran barges in with lunch.

…

Anpan, he thinks with a start.

The electropulse meter he’d been working with nearly slides from his grip. Kuro rumbles up above. Shiro thinks he can hear her curiosity in the the shift of metal against metal, but perhaps it’s just intuitive, their connection.

He’s alone in the hangar but for Kuro. There's nothing to hide between them, no others to hide from, so he speaks to her out loud as he goes back to adjusting her knee joint plates.

“When Hunk and Pidge changed the breakfast goo, they somehow made it taste a lot like anpan. It’s like a dessert bread, with red beans, and, ah-”

If Kuro could snort, he feels she would now. She’s unmoving above him, but Shiro senses the same gentle exasperation that a mother lion might have towards her fumbling cub.

Nothing in the strange memories Kuro has shared with him indicate that she's been to Earth; if she has, it was well before the rise of humankind, let alone pastries. So he tries again. Shiro’s eyes flutter closed as he pulls up the sweet earthiness of the treat in his mind and translates it the best he knows how. He shows her the long rows of steaming buns behind glass, how the counter loomed above him as he stood at his mother’s side. He gives her the image of his mother, kneeling down with a smile, offering a sweet as soft and warm as her voice. Shiro shares the bite of snowflakes on the line of skin just above his mittens as his mother steers him from the bakery back down the street, to their apartment.

There can be no embarrassment when it’s just the two of them, meaning Shiro doesn't even try to swallow the ragged crack in his voice when he opens his eyes as says, “This morning, it tasted like home.”

…

The goo is still brown the next morning, and no one seems to mind. Shiro studiously avoids staring at Keith and Lance for longer than appropriate, and instead fixes his attention on his nearest neighbor, Pidge.

With one hand, she traces out some complex design on the data screen on the table; she scoops goo into her mouth in an absent-minded fashion with the other. Her hair frizzes around her face and falls down to around her shoulders in uneven waves. She must have spent another night in the braid, gotten tired of it, and pulled it out without trying to brush or tame it.

“You're going to start looking more and more like a lion every day,” he muses.

Pidge is galaxies away from him in her mind: she startles at his voice, head whipping around to both sides before it sinks in that, yes, he had been the one to speak. She was, by far, the brightest being he knew - human or otherwise - which is why he has to laugh when all she can manage is a slow blink and a dazed, “Huh?”

Resting his head in his hand, he shoots her a knowing look.

“You didn’t get much sleep last night, did you?”

Her brain finally catches up, or she fully boots up, or something, because a moment later, Pidge whirs into motion. She switches off her portable data screen and drops her spoon to push a hand through her mass of hair. The data screen spins twice between her fingers before she tucks it behind her ear.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa - I mean, yeah, I kinda passed out down in Green’s hangar last night while I was reworking the weight distribution sensors in her front paws,” she plows on, not stopping to breathe, “- the automatic adjusters were out, and so it was adapting for a planetary gravity force 13 times weaker than the Castle’s! - but that’s besides the point. You were saying something about me and looking like lions?”

With her, and her rambling, it’s always impossible to determine where to start, so Shiro tries to follow her order the best he can.

“That still doesn’t excuse you not getting enough sleep.” It doesn’t matter that he’s been saying it for years, or that his own sleep schedule is just about the furthest thing from his own orders.
“You should ask Hunk if you can look at his Lion and her weight distribution sensors - the sensor adjustments might vary for the weight and necessary mobility of the Lions-”

“Duh-”

“Or at the very least, keep Coran and Allura updated on any major changes you make to Green-”

“Double duh-”

He rolls his eyes (and she rolls hers right back), and continues.

“And I was saying that you’re going to start looking like a lion soon.”

Pidge straightens in her seat and presses both hands to her cheeks. She pats her face, confusion blossoming.

“I’m not growing whiskers, am I?” she asks, voice rising a little as she rubs more vigorously at her cheeks. “I mean, we were told there would be all kinds of side-effects of becoming a paladin and being in space, but I feel like Allura would have mentioned growing fur-”

“Pidge-”

“I don’t want to be furry!-”

“Pidge-”

“How is anyone going to take me seriously as a paladin of Voltron if I’ve I look like a Thundercat? I’m too pretty to be a Thundercat!”

She lets out a wail that goes ignored by everyone else at the table (Pidge theatrics, and really, all theatrics, were commonplace in the mornings) and slumps over her goo. Shiro starts to respond, and is cut off by Pidge once again. She lurches back up and turns to him, eyes a little frantic.

“Not that I think I’m all that pretty,” she continues. Pink highlights her cheeks from her efforts. “I’m just prettier than a Thundercat. If they were real. Probably.”

Shaking his head, Shiro takes both of her hands in his and pulls them from her face. Pidge goes very still.

Allura’s words from yesterday bubble to the top of his brain as he takes Pidge in a long look. His immediate reaction is that she looks just like Pidge always does: petite, messy-haired, face a bit drawn as she stares at him with the slightest squint, her glasses abandoned elsewhere in the castle. But the more he stares, the more he thinks he gets what Allura meant. The Pidge before him is well removed from the Pidge who first helped pull him from the Garrison’s restraints, or even the Katie Holt he’d met well over two years before that.

Her hair, truly mane-like, clouds out around a face grown more shapely with age. The last remnants of baby fat were long gone, leaving behind high cheeks that curved down to a narrower jawline. Her long neck, hidden for years under the high collar of the sweatshirt she’d finally worn out, dips down to her sharp collarbone and strong shoulders. Of all of the castle’s inhabitants, Pidge used the training floor the least, but even then, years of mandatory training under Allura and Shiro show in her arms and back. When she was younger, he used to think she bore a striking resemblance to her older brother. Now, Shiro wonders if Matt would even recognize the woman his sister had become.

“Uh...Shiro?”

It's his turn to find his way back to the conversation from distant wanderings - Shiro follows his thoughts back and dead ends at Pidge’s now scarlet face. Her hands are warm, if not a little sweaty, under his. He feels his face heat up, realizing the awkward weight of his own silence. His stomach twists, as if in anticipation.

“I don't know what a Thundercat is,” he says, willing every ounce of control he has into passing for calm, “But I’m sure you are much, much prettier than that.”

Every inch of Pidge, from her wide eyes and parted lips, to the tautness in her shoulders (was she even breathing?) seems to scream discomfort. So he’s taken by surprise when he begins to let her go, only to have her hand dart out and take one of his back. She entwines her fingers with his and gives his hand a quick squeeze. Shiro’s still registering the sensation as she lets go and shoves both of her hands in her lap.

“T-thanks,” she stammers, voice high and breathless. “I, uh, still don’t get the, um, lion thing though.”

“Oh, ah, your hair,” he says. He gestures at the unruly waves, which were starting to look like they might soon gain sentience. “When it’s down like that, it looks like a lion’s mane.”

Pidge bites her bottom lip, uncertain. “Is that… a good thing? I know my hair can be sort of a mess sometimes, but I've never been compared to another species before because of it.”

She begins dragging her fingers through her hair with the same intensity that she’s scrubbed her face in search of whiskers; she winces as she hits a tangle. The data screen device wedged behind her ear falls to the table with a clatter.

Her fingers pause mid-sweep through her hair, and she looks up at him. Against the redness in her cheeks, her honey-gold eyes look dark. A feeling wells up in him, familiar as of late, of mellow, earthy sweetness.

“Not that I have any issue with lions or lion-related beings,” she continues. “And maybe the connection could be useful for species who haven't heard of the Paladins before, but I’m pretty okay with being human.”

Pidge turns her gaze to a tenacious knot in her hair, but Shiro can tell that she’s awaiting his response. Her agile fingers, so often plucking at intricate circuitry, pull and twist around the snarl.

“Relax, Pidge. I don’t think anyone is going to be mistaking you for anything other than human. I meant that you look fierce. Like a warrior”

And then, unbidden from some foreign corner of his brain, the stray thought: And maybe a bit pettable.

Shiro glances around the table, smothering his alarm at the thought as he attempted to figure out if the thought had drifted in from someone else, or was his own. The mental bond he’d felt before is gone. Rather than dwell on that conclusion, he fixes a smile on his face and reaches out to Pidge, snagging a strand of her hair gently between thumb and forefinger. Totally natural.

“Though perhaps like a fierce warrior who could stand to brush their hair more than once per new system.”

Scowling, she waves his hand away. She goes back to hand-combing her hair, though now with the addition of a glare.

“Allura said the same thing a few days ago. I know a ploy when I see one. You two spend too much time together.”

Pidge looks so put out as she works at a new gnarl that Shiro gives into the impulse to duck in close and say, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Given some of Allura’s interesting word choice yesterday, I'd say it's the two of you who have been spending too much time together.”

His words clear the pout from her face like magic. She turns to face him, putting them almost nose to nose, and grins.

“What did she say?” she hisses.

“Well, it may be too inappropriate to repeat…” he trails off, trying not to laugh at her exasperated huff.

“Come on, Shiro. You’re hardly going to offend my fragile, virgin ears.”

“Considering you've got the worst mouth of us all, and without a doubt taught Allura the word in the first place? I guess you're right.”

She clutches a hand to her chest and lets out a gasp of mock offense. “Me? Besmirch our noble leader? I would never!”

“Right, of course.”

“But really, Shiro, you have to tell me what she said.”

Reclining back in his chair, he pretends to mull over her request. He hums, feigning indecision.

“Shiro!”

“Fine,” he says with a sigh. “Yesterday, I went to Allura to report on your little viewing party yesterday, and she may have had a choice Earth word about the interactions between two of our teammates.”

The transformation in Pidge’s face is incredible, shifting almost to reverent as his meaning sinks in. When she speaks, her voice is soft, awed.

“Allura said fuck.”

Shiro can envision the rosy cherubs flitting over Pidge’s head, can practically see the golden light radiating down from the heavens. Pidge lifts her eyes to the ceiling, emotion swelling in her face, as she whispers again, “Allura said fuck. She’s never said that one before. She did say it, didn’t she?”

“I will neither confirm, nor deny.”

His answer doesn’t appear to matter; Pidge, overcome by her own delight, stands without another word and practically floats over to Hunk. She interrupts the conversation between him and Allura by giving Hunk’s arm an insistent tug. Allura asks her something, but Pidge seems unable to answer, too struck by her new knowledge about the princess. She wraps her arms around Hunk’s and pulls harder.

“Pidge, come on, stop!” Hunk groans, but he nonetheless stands, taking her with him.

For all that Pidge had grown, little of it went to her height - Hunk outright dwarfs her, and it takes no effort on his part to lift his arm and haul her straight off of the floor. Hanging a good foot above the ground, Pidge manages to heave herself far enough up on Hunk’s arm to reach his ear. She whispers something. Hunk’s face lights up, incredulous, and then giddy. He nods along as she continues.

Hunk gathers up his bowl in his free hand and absentmindedly toddles past Shiro to pick up Pidge’s. Shiro tries to shoot Pidge a warning look - seeing those two together sets off every trouble alert in his head - but she’s too occupied to notice. As Hunk walks off, Pidge still swinging from his arm, Shiro swears he hears him say, “Fine, but only because it’s for science.”

...

Two hours later, Shiro is coming up from the training room to the bridge, when he hears it: the metallic clomp of something very large padding down an adjacent hallway up ahead, followed by a whoosh he’s come to associate with something bursting rapidly into flame. A moment later, and perhaps more alarmingly, comes the tinny whinnying of a recording of a horse.

He’s tempted to let it go. He has to track down Coran to ask about alterations to the training simulations. He has repairs to do on Kuro. He has a lot of important things he could be doing, and the Castle’s systems will put out any actual fires that may have been started. Shiro turns towards the bridge-

“Hunk, Pidge, what the fuck?!?” Allura shouts.

-and turns right back around again.

…

“I suppose they can’t help it,” Allura says. She collapses on one of the couches in the common room and lets her head loll back. The blood has drained from her face now, and she seems to be breathing normally. Her voice is still a little raw from the yelling, though.

“I get that they’re all bored,” she continues. “In a system as big and empty as this one, there’s not much for any of us to do, really, but wait. Those two always seem to need more mental stimulation in regular situations, so this has got to be torture.”

Shiro brushes some ash from his shoulder and sighs. “Boredom is one thing, but whatever that was… where did they even find the fuel for the flamethrower?”

He sags into the couch opposite of her, feeling the weariness etched on her face in his own bones. He should have just gone on to find Coran.

“I think it was the pod propellant Pidge has been working on. Remind me not to use any of the pods she’s been modifying. At least they’re cleaning it all up.”

“‘For science’, please. Trust me, they’re going to be on cleaning duty for the next week.”

Allura lets out a tired laugh. “Coran will be pleased to hear that. Now, if only they could find some other, slightly less destructive way to work off their boredom.”

His eyes flutter shut, and he nods in agreement before realizing that she probably can’t see him. They sink into comfortable silence.

He doesn’t think he’s meant to hear Allura’s comment, half-muttered to herself, but it sends a jolt through his frame when he does.

“Lance and Keith certainly did.”

All traces of exhaustion are flung away. He leaps to his feet and feels his heart leap with him.

“I’m going to go supervise. I’m not sure Hunk even knows how to use a mop without using it as a sword first. I wouldn’t put it past them to make a bigger mess first.”

“All right, Shiro. Go supervise.”

Allura’s words sound amused as they trail after him. Whatever is so funny, he doesn’t quite get, but the thought is blown away by relief when he turns the corner to find Pidge and Hunk, mops interlocked in grueling hallway combat.

…

Despite the day’s antics, Shiro is awake well into the late hours of the night. It’s far from the first time. He knows that the hallway outside his bedroom door has dimmed to just the faintest blue glow, and that the temperature of his chamber has lowered enough for the cradle of his blanketed bed to seem tempting. But Shiro also knows the nip of shadows at the back of his eyelids when he starts to drift, knows the tang of a waiting nightmare, and would rather not give in. The paralyzing dreams may have become less frequent, but the passing of time did little to dull the horror.

He pinches a soft spot on the underside of his arm. His mechanized fingers press hard enough to leave two red crescents in his skin. It’s not painful, but it's enough stimulation to get his eyes focusing again. The schematics on the screen in front of him start looking more like ships and less like ancient pictographs. It takes his sluggish brain a few more seconds to translate the ticker in the corner of the screen to an equivalent time - the castle is running at just past Earth’s 1 AM.

“Just a few more hours…” he murmurs. Somewhere in the universe, he’s sure, there's a better solution to his issue, but for now his options are to stay up until morning or wait until the exhaustion wipes him into a dreamless sleep.

And there's nothing more exhausting than the Galran battleship manual Pidge had downloaded during their last on-planet encounter. Waving a hand, Shiro flips back through the last chapter he’d been reviewing. He gives the alien text a hard stare, but the letters keep floating in his vision. Even with the help of his translator screen, his Galran is clunky at best. Part of that is the fault of the Galra, though - when a language has 37 words for blood, and almost all of them are part of their battle vessel naming conventions, something is very likely to get lost in translation. He stares at the image of what looks like a thruster, titled “Blood Blood”, and imagines he’s not picking up on some connotative distinction.

A feather-light touch brushes from his temple down to his jaw.

In an instant, he’s up, Galran arm glowing, human arm poised to strike. Shiro whips around, and finds himself staring at an empty room. He lowers his arms and tries to steady his racing breath. The dose of adrenaline dumped into his veins burns under his skin.

Perhaps he’s even more tired than he thought, wiped out enough to be experiencing phantom sensations. The pounding of his heart ricochets through his ears in uneven whumps. It bodes poorly for the rest of his night. The prospect of a few hours of sleep, a meager glimmer to start, blinks out of existence.

“You’re getting old, Shiro,” he mutters.

Easing back into his chair, he turns back to his reading. Somehow, it’s even harder to read wide-awake than half-asleep. He's too tense, waiting for it to happen again.

It does, but as his skin tingles with the sensation of the touchless touch, it hits him that the feeling is coming from under his skin. The paladin bond. It reaches out a third time, accompanied not by the word, but some impression of Help. It doesn't feel urgent, more like a request. Help?

Shiro is padding barefoot down the hall a second later. He doesn't bother turning right towards Keith’s chamber, and given that he'd glimpsed Keith heading in the opposite direction earlier, skips over Lance’s as well.

He reaches the room of the only other being on the ship whose door would still have dim fingers of light stretching out from underneath it at this hour. Pidge’s door slides open as soon as he approaches it.

“Hey, Shiro,” she grunts. “Thanks for coming over.” Her words come out around the handle of a screwdriver she has clamped between her teeth. He raises an eyebrow.

“Hey, Pidge, you hanging in there okay?”

Her response is a series of frustrated groans and a mix of “What the hell, Shiro, come on!” and “Really? It is too early for that shit.”

Pidge is, quite literally, hanging from one of the high shelves in her bedroom. Based on the papers and bric-a-brac scattered on the floor, she must have climbed onto her desk, hopped from there to the narrow closet unit housing her armor, and then somehow scrambled up until she could reach the shelf. Whatever her end game was, however, she wasn't reaching it.

“You can probably drop down on your own,” he muses. “It's maybe four feet or so, and I can catch you. Or if you swing a little, you can make it back to the closet, then climb down from there.”

She tries to kick out at him, but he’s not standing close enough. In her plain tank top and the close-fitting workout shorts she used more often as pajamas, Pidge looks like a cyclist discovering zero gravity for the first time. His laughter spurs on more wild kicking.

“I can get down just fine on my own, thanks. I need to get up.”

Her chin jerks up towards the ceiling, and he sees the outline of a small panel.

“Now, give me a boost, or I'll have to try to figure out how to wake up Hunk, and that could take a while from this height.”

He sets his hands on his hips and raises an eyebrow. “And… why exactly am I doing this?”

“It’s for science, Shiro! Don’t question it!”

“The last thing you did ‘for science’ left an entire hallway on fire. Why should I help you now?”

She growls and starts swinging her body madly - not to get to the closet, but to reach him with a retaliatory foot to the head.

“Okay, okay,” he concedes. “Just stop flailing. And don’t set anything on fire.”

Still chuckling, Shiro waits for Pidge’s legs to stop moving before he gets any closer. Her feet flatten and come together, and he props them up with his right hand. He circles her bare legs with his left arm, bracing her just above the knees, turns his head, and looks up.
“Ready?”

Pidge nods, and he lifts. Even though she’s compact, mostly muscle, his arms still feel the immediate strain of holding her at the angle above his chest. If anything, it gives him a greater appreciation for Hunk, who’d hoisted her up and swung her around multiple times like she was a doll.

Shiro thinks of Hunk, and Pidge’s comment about waking him. While Shiro was already awake at the time, he had no doubts that the touch he’d felt from Pidge pulling at the paladin mental bond would have woken him up in a flash.

“Why not use the mental contact with Hunk to wake him up, like you did with me?”

He can feel her swaying in his grip, adjusting her balance as she begins reaching towards the panel. The backs of her calves graze his cheek.

“For some reason, it’s not as strong. Nothing’s happened whenever I’ve tried under normal circumstances. Dunno why, but Hunk and I can only connect like that when we’re in Voltron.”

The fact is unexpected - Hunk and Pidge were inseparable most days. It’s a surprise, but as it settles in, he realizes, it’s a pleasant surprise.

“You should bring it up to Allura. She may have more insight on how the bonds work.”

“I have.”

“What’d she say?”

Pidge tenses. Shiro changes the grip on her feet until it feels more secure, and slides the arm around her legs a little higher, hopefully closer to her center of gravity. She never struck him as being afraid of falling, but he wasn’t going to be the one who dropped her.

“Allura said a lot of things,” Pidge says. “In fact, sometimes, Allura has a habit of saying too many things.”

Her tone, somewhere between dismissive and defensive, hits him like a door slammed in his face, closing off that path in an instant. It hangs in the air for too long as she starts working in silence. It doesn’t feel natural - there was very little Pidge did quietly - and Shiro decides to restart their conversation well away from whatever nerve he’d hit on accident.

“So, what are you working on that requires scaling to the top of your room in the middle of the night?” he asks.

It takes her a second to reply, as she’s already started fiddling with some wiring behind the panel, but she does, thankfully, respond.

“When we went back through the Solar System to deliver Matt and Dad,” she starts, “I left a probe in the Mars asteroid belt. I was hoping I could use it to pick up communication transmissions and shoot them from there to whenever we were using a line of satellites and communicator beacons on passing ships - kinda like a big-ass game of telephone.”

“Clever, as always. Why didn’t you tell anyone about this before?”

“Because it didn’t work,” she says. He feels her weight pull down on her heels, and she tips back further to look at the panel. As her legs press harder into his face, forcing his left eye and nostril closed, Shiro begins to suspect that she’s forgotten their position. She keeps talking, as if nothing has happened.

“Turns out there’s zero consistency on voice communication frequencies between systems. In order to daisy chain the signals the way I wanted to, I would have had to install a specialized receiver on any vessel I ever wanted to use - including the Galran ones.”

He nods. She must register the motion, and remember how he’s holding her - she moves forward, freeing half of his face, and lets out a stammered apology. He looks up and catches a glimpse of pink on her cheeks before she turns her focus, and her head, back up to her work.

“So the communication didn’t work,” he says. “But…”

“But after fiddling with it for a few months, I realized that I was picking up a signal from Earth… just not one that was still being transmitted.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning that if I was able to make just... a few adjustments…” she trails off, and sticks the screwdriver between her lips to use both hands on something up above.

Although she’s no longer able to speak, Pidge is far from quiet this time. She huffs and hums and grumbles, an incomprehensible commentary on her own work. At some point, it sounds like she’s trying to ask him a question, but she’s too preoccupied in what she’s doing to clear her mouth. Instead, she flaps a hand at him, a gesture he can only assume means to lift her higher.

Shiro obliges, though not without protest from his burning muscles. She wobbles and tips back, and his adjustments under her aren’t enough to keep him from getting a faceful of pale leg for the third time. One of her knees buckles, and for a split second, he’s sure that he’s about to get a faceful of much more than just leg. Pidge’s hands smack against the ceiling and wall, and she’s able to hold herself in place long enough to regain her balance. Embarrassment thrums between them; he can feel it starting in Pidge’s chest and vibrating all the way down his spine. She hums a tone that is clearly a ‘Sorry’.

“You’re fine,” he says. The embarrassment doesn’t dissipate, but it does weaken.

Another minute or two passes before he hears the click of the panel being locked back into place. Pidge spits the screwdriver out to the side, and it hits the ground with a clunk.

“Should be good to go.” She looks down at him, smiling. “Thanks for the lift.”

“No problem. I’m curious, though, what all of this is leading up to. You still haven’t told me.”

“Once I get down, I’ll do even better - I’ll show you.”

Getting down proves its own challenge. Pidge looks over her shoulder at him, and then puts both hands on the shelf he’d found her clinging to before. It looks like she’s reviewing her route, head turning from shelf, to desk, to closet, and back. She lets go of the shelf, and looks at him again.

He looks up at her, expression overly serious, and says, “I could just drop you.”

She narrows her eyes and crosses her arms. “Let go of me without warning, and I’ll be sure to take you down with me.”

Without warning, she pulls one of her legs from his grip and plants her foot directly in his face. Her heel mashes against the bridge of his nose, and her toes curl at his chin. He goes cross-eyed.

“Really, Pidge?”

His arms quiver under the singular weight, no longer spread evenly across her two feet. Of course, he has no intentions of dropping her, even with her foot in his face and that snarky smirk pulled across her lips. His fingers dig into the flesh above her knee, trying to keep her upright.

“Promise you won’t drop me, Shiro.”

“Quit playing around, your foot smells terrible.”

Shiro’s tempted to stick his tongue out in retribution and lick whatever parts of her foot he can reach, but he knows she’d topple them both as soon as he did. He’s not sure if it’s the late night, or the ridiculous situation, but it’s been awhile since he’s felt like being so childish.

“Promise you won’t drop me!” she whines.

“I won’t drop you as long as you get your foot out of my face and stop flapping around up there!”

Pidge lifts her foot and stares down at him.

“Yeesh, that’s all you had to say.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and sighs. A good rub of the temple would complete his portrait of frustration, but his hands are still occupied.

“In a second,” he says, “I’m going to count down from three. When I hit one, I’m going to give you another boost, and then I want you to jump straight up, just enough to clear my hands. I’ll catch you on your way down. Got it?”

“Yup. Just keep in mind that I was never really the cheerleading type in school…”

“You’ll survive.”

Shiro counts down from three, and Pidge springs up. She’s fortunate, he thinks, that her hair has as much volume as it does, providing a cushion as her head comes within millimeters of the ceiling. His hands grasp her waist on her way down, keeping her steady and slowing her descent. She sticks a neat landing, and turns to face him.

“I’ll admit, that wasn’t terrible,” she says. “Maybe I should have been the cheerleading type before the Garrison.”

Pidge must take a moment to envision the idea as well; they shake their heads and “Nah,” in unison.

His lets go of her waist and, suddenly hands lacking, fold his arms over his chest. “Ready to show me what you’ve got?”

Excitement lights up in Pidge’s face. She dances over to her desk, making a shooing gesture when Shiro attempts to follow.

“Go sit on the couch, I’ll be there in a sec. The final calibrations I should be able to do on-screen.”

He does as ordered, settling on the couch that, much like his, is springy and firm from lack of use. He’s walked in on Pidge, flopped over her keyboard and asleep at her desk, enough times to know that it was rare for her bed to see her, let alone the couch.

A holographic screen pops up on her desk, larger than the normal data screen each of them had in their rooms. It looks like a Pidge original, the text onscreen coming up in English, rather than Altean. Bent over her desk, she plucks away at her keyboard, then reaches up to swipe at the screen. She glances back at him, grins, and pushes a button.

The screen goes black at first, but soon small dots of color start emerging. It’s not long before they’re looking at a fuzzy, moving image. An image of humans.

“Ta-da!” Pidge exclaims. She spins around, arms spread wide as she shows off her accomplishment. The image clarifies some, enough for Shiro to see the faces of the people onscreen. There’s talking - or maybe singing - and they appear to be dancing around an automobile.

“I didn’t recognize the signals as coming from Earth at first,” she says as she hops over to the couch. “They were really wonky and super outdated, definitely early last century, if not even older.” Her words pick up speed as she talks, enthusiasm doubling. “We haven’t used these types of broadcast signals in forever, so it’s impossible to know how long they’ve been bouncing around in space, but apparently they move slowly enough for the probe to still be able to pick them up around Mars!”

What she’s saying makes sense: the outfits the men in the image are wearing are beyond outdated, and he’s seen a car like that just once, in an ancient picture at his grandfather’s house. One of them leaps onto the hood of the car and continues dancing.

“The signals were so simple that once the probe picked them up, they were relayed without the need for a receiver in each device from there on out - all I had to do was develop a converter that would turn them back into pictures. It’s a movie, Shiro, a super old movie!”

The whole couch moves as she bounces up and down on the other side. It’s powerful, the delight that fills her form, and it arcs across to him like lightning.

“You’re incredible,” he says, but the force of his words doesn’t feel like they’re enough. The connection between them already alive, Shiro focuses on trying to send specific emotions back along the path to her: pride, awe, his own joy at her success. Her head whips towards him and her smile grows, the message received.

“You think that’s impressive?” she asks. She waggles her eyebrows and throws an arm back behind the couch, searching blindly for something. A remote comes out after a few seconds of feeling around.

“This thing has sound.”

Music blares throughout the room. Shiro slaps his hands over his ears. With a yelp, Pidge stabs at the remote, lowering the volume before it wakes everyone in the hall.

“Greased lightning, lightning, li-ightning-” the men in the movie sing. The dancing comes to an end.

The volume much more reasonable, Shiro uncovers his ears. Pidge looks sheepish as she shrugs and goes, “Oops. Shoulda turned that down after the last dance party with Lance.”

“Huh? What was that?” he asks, raising his voice and cupping his ear with a hand. “I can’t hear you over the ringing!”

Pidge reaches across the couch cushion’s distance between them and swats his hand.
“Stoooop, not funny, Shiro!”

“I’m sure that if I could hear anything right now, it would be you exclaiming how hilarious I am!”

“You’re the worst,” she grumbles. She sags back against the armrest and kicks her feet up on the small table in front of the couch. “Sometimes I wonder why I even… Just be quiet, I want to hear the movie.”

“I remember when I could hear movies,” Shiro muses. He starts to continue, but Pidge cuts him off when she hurls the armrest pillow at his head.

He lets it go, and they both fix their attention on the grainy movie playing. It’s a teenage love story, as far as he can tell, ridiculous in its own right, and made more so with the singing. Not that the music isn’t catchy. It’s just that the whole thing is… well outside his scope of interests. He spent most of his teenage years in flight simulators - a far cry from dating, or even watching movies about dating.

Shiro’s attention makes it about ten more minutes. He glances over to Pidge. She’s still watching, but from the way her jaw works, he can tell she’s fighting the urge to talk, not wanting to break the quiet she’d imposed on him. He turns back to the movie, trying to focus. It’s not as bad as the Galran book, but he thinks the difference may be the company, rather than the content.

So instead, he tries to gauge Pidge’s reactions to the movie with every look he sneaks at her. She’s always had a better poker face than, say, Lance or Hunk, but now, her expression is unguarded. In one look, she’s rolling her eyes at the main couple’s failed date. Next glance, her eyes are near slits as she peers in confusion at the women who dance and sing with piles of rolled up metal on their heads. He hears her sigh when another couple, supposedly dating, show up at a dance with someone else.

The third time he looks over, she’s looking back.

“Enjoying the movie?” he asks.

Pidge’s mouth scrunches up as she contemplates an answer.

“It would be terrible of me to say ‘not really’, wouldn’t it? In terms of the whole experience, I guess it’s pretty rewarding to be able to sit here and watch an old Earth movie from millions of lightyears away, and I like you being here, but the premise of the movie as far as I understand it is… kinda…”

“Ridiculous?” he finishes.

“Really ridiculous,” she affirms. “Like, why would someone act like a total ass in front of the person they were supposedly ‘in love’ with?” Pidge sits up, feet sliding off of the table as her expression grows more annoyed. “Or try and get with someone else to make the other person jealous? Can’t anyone talk about their feelings without worrying about their fragile machismo? It doesn’t make sense!”

Shiro’s out of depth with any analysis of romance in the movie, but Pidge seems so invested, that he gives it a try.

“Maybe that’s the point the movie’s trying to make?” he says. “That love doesn’t make sense?”

Pidge stares at the movie, still playing, and gives a loud harrumph. “This isn’t an accurate representation of what love’s supposed to be like.”

There’s a certainty to her words that captures his attention. The definitiveness of her statement makes him curious, but when he reaches out to their mental bond, he finds the connection has long since faded. Nothing on her face reveals what she must be feeling, either, not a scowl or a pair of rolled eyes. Just like her silence, Shiro finds he dislikes her sudden stoniness. He rests his arms on the back of the couch, then tips his head back, casual.

“I’m just glad I wasn’t alive back then,” he says. “If successful dating were based on singing and dancing, I would be screwed. Or, more accurately, not screwed.”

Pidge looks startled by his words at first, as if disbelieving that he would say that. But soon her shock fades and the giggling starts. He mentally tallies his success.

“You are lucky, Shiro,” she says between snickers. “I’ve heard you in the shower. If successful dating were based on your singing, we would have been lost as a species generations ago.”

“I refuse to dignify that comment with a response.”

They stare at one another, the long pause filled by the sound of the movie in the background. Pidge blinks first. As one, they burst into laughter.

“Bail on this movie?” she asks as she gasps for air.

“End it.”

Pidge loses it again. She fumbles with the remote as giggles wrack her body, but manages to switch off the movie. The screen doesn’t dim, another picture popping up instead, this time with two hexapedal alien figures. One of the aliens uses two limbs to gesture to something offscreen, and the two communicate in a language Shiro doesn’t even recognize.

“When I was calibrating the system to pick up on the Earth signals, I decided to set it up so I could receive even more than just Earth signals,” Pidge says. “I think we get all of the channels now.”

She reclines opposite him on the couch and smiles. “Thanks again for coming to help.”

“Of course. Any time.”

The bottom of her screen reads two-thirty in the morning, Earth time. The hour and a half passed with Pidge feels like nothing. He’s just as awake now as he was when she’d called him, but now that he’s helped her out and seen her project in action, there’s not much reason for him to stay. The dry book of Galran ship blueprints and the bad dreams, prowling in the darkest corners of his room, flash to the front of his mind; he wishes he’d decided to ride out the rest of the movie instead.

He can sense Pidge’s eyes on him. Was she waiting for him to leave? It was possible her thanks was also his dismissal.

Shiro stretches his arms above his head and fakes a yawn.

“It’s late,” he starts, “And we should both try and get a few hours of sleep before breakfast.”

“Yeah,” she replies, voice soft. “Sleep.”

“I’m glad I could help. It’s impressive, what you’ve done with the probe. I’m sure it won’t be much longer before you figure out how to get messages through it, like you planned.”

“Thanks. I’m going to keep playing with it.”

He sits up. Dread at leaving, at returning to his quiet, empty room, bubbles up in his stomach. It seemed like barely any time had passed at all with her. His brain searches for an excuse not to leave, and comes up empty.

“I guess this is goodnight, then,” he says.

Shiro starts to stand, but Pidge stops him halfway up. Her fingers circle his left wrist, and he freezes.

“Shiro, you can stay. If you want.”

She looks a little embarrassed at stopping him, pink tinting her features, but she doesn’t let go.

“I reached out to you first for help because I knew you’d be awake,” she continues.

Shiro eases back down. Wary as he is about how she may continue, it doesn’t outweigh the relief at not having to go back to his room yet.

“You barely ever sleep. You were planning on staying up all night, or at least trying to. Weren’t you?”

“I guess I can’t deny it,” he says. “But it’s nothing unusual for me. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

Pidge’s eyes flick down to where she still holds him. She runs her thumb along the underside of his wrist once, then lets go.

“You can tell me the truth. It’s still bad, isn’t it? Even after all this time. You don’t have to hide it.”

“It’ll be okay Pidge, really,” Shiro says, but he knows he’s condemning himself with his answer.

His chest goes tight, and breathing feels a bit hard, as he watches her process his response. He’d always been under the impression that Allura knew him best, but senses Pidge might prove that belief wrong. Her shoulders rise, then fall, and the half-smile that touches her lips doesn’t make it far up her face.

“I know you know already, but I know how it feels,” she begins. “With the nightmares, and the not sleeping. I thought it might get better, you know? After we found Dad and Matt. But then I started thinking about what might happen if Zarkon got to Earth, if they got recaptured, and what would happen if they got you and-” she cuts off, deflating. Her head sinks, her voice low, bitter even, when she speaks again. “And as soon as I got that in my brain? Sayonara, sleepytime.” Her shoulders shudder as she lets out a long sigh.

“Sorry,” she says, head rising. “I wanted to be helpful, but I ended up rambling about myself.”

As Shiro watches her, he can’t quite believe that someone as big as Pidge could be so small; that someone with as much pain, and passion, and brilliance, and care inside of them didn’t even take up all of the couch cushion next to him. He wraps his arms around her, and pulls her close. Caught off balance, she half falls against him, but doesn’t try to push back or wriggle away.

“You are being helpful,” he says resolutely. “I know I have a talented, dedicated team who will never let me down against Zarkon. But sometimes, it’s nice to know that there’s another battle that I don’t have to fight alone.”

Pidge’s arms snake around him and she buries her face in his chest, returning his embrace. Her voice is muffled when she says, “You’ll never have to be alone, Shiro.”

He’s not sure when they last hugged like this - perhaps right before they stormed the prison ship holding her family, when he’d sworn to her that he would get them out safely or die trying. That must have been a year and a half ago. Too long, if the comforting weight of her body next to his is any indication. His hold on her tightens.

Minutes pass, and neither of them let go. He feels her chest rise and fall against his, slow and regular. Her hair tickles at his nose. It smells singed, like she’d forgotten to pull it back before soldering circuitry, with just the faintest hint of the citrus from the soap they all used on the castle. This time, he’s ready for the sensation of their mental bond re-forming: it flicks once, twice, like the leisurely batting of a cat’s tail against his forehead, and sticks. He feels content, he feels safe, he feels a ball of warmth bloom in his gut, and he knows that she feels it, too.

Pidge’s fingers curl against his back. They splay out a moment later, then begin wiggling. He finds himself leaning into the touch, until he feels the arm tucked behind him tense and relax. She pulls away gently, and he sees her frown.

“My arm’s falling asleep,” Pidge grumbles. “I didn’t want to say anything, but my fingers are starting get that weird prickly feeling.”

Chuckling, Shiro scoots forward, releasing her trapped arm. Pidge gives her hand a few vigorous shakes.

“Stupid arm,” she mutters, clenching and unclenching her fingers. Pidge glares at her arm as if it had personally affronted her.

“I’ve got to admit,” Shiro says, “that’s one advantage to having a robotic replacement.”

He flexes his right arm until she rolls her eyes and goes, “Yeah, yeah, brag away,” and then he reaches for her troublesome limb. She lets him spread her hand flat, but not without a curious glance. With both thumbs, Shiro presses slow circles into her palm and massages up each finger. No more than a minute must go by as Shiro works the circulation back into her hand, but it feels much longer under Pidge’s wide-eyed stare. The hand feels a little clammy by the time he lets her go.

“Better?”

“Yeah,” she says, looking down at her still-spread fingers. “Thanks. I guess this arm isn't so stupid after all.”

She settles back on the couch, nearer this time. The pleasant heat that surges up his chest when she rests her head against his shoulder is all his, he thinks. Pidge lets out a soft sigh.

“I’m still not really all that tired,” she says. “Are you?”

“No, not really. The excitement from all of that fire this afternoon still hasn't worn off,” he jokes.

“You mean it's not repeats of mine and Hunk’s epic mop battle in your head that's keeping you up?”

“Nope,” he says. He plops his head on top of hers. “Definitely the fire.”

“Damn. Well, I guess we’ll have to try harder next time… Wanna stick around and watch some weird alien tv?”

The answer seems obvious - he’s already comfortable, she’s already asked him to stay. Even though she can’t see it, Shiro smiles.

“Sure. It can't be any worse than that movie.”

He’s never sat around and watched TV with Pidge before tonight, never had the chance, but it's exactly how he might have expected. Warm at his side, she talks in low tones through almost all of incomprehensible show playing on the screen. Her voice rises and falls as she tries to piece together a plotline, or asks him questions and then moves on before he can fully answer.

Her words wrap around him, a dreamy surrogate for her embrace, and he drifts to sleep.

Chapter Text

It's not so much wakefulness, as consciousness. His eyelids stay glued shut, but he's aware of the light that flickers and changes from the other side of the room. Soft, alien murmurings fade in and out, sometimes accompanied by music, other times laughter: the late night talk show of the stars.

The room is cool, but the body against his is warm and sticky with sweat. The armrest cuts into his side, and he feels a fraction of the ache to come. He shifts, trying to change positions without disturbing her. The softest of whines rises in her throat, and she curls closer to his chest. He accepts his future sore neck with a sort of hazy resignation, slides his hand up her back to pull her close, and sinks back into sleep.

…

It's early enough when he wakes for the automatic lighting in Pidge's room to still be dark. Shiro blinks once, twice, eyes adjusting to the shadows. The screen on Pidge's desk has shut down, but he’s able to crane his neck back far enough to see the weak glow of the clock above the closet. 6 AM Earth time - his regular waking time, when he managed to sleep. Despite little more than three hours of rest, Shiro feels the most awake and aware he has in months.

It has nothing to do with the time, or the quality of his sleep, or the crick in his neck, and everything to do with the woman nestled in his lap.

Shiro is certain that when he fell asleep, they were shoulder to shoulder. He even has the vaguest sense that, at some point, Pidge may have been slumped against his chest. But now, Pidge has somehow slid down so that she’s half-splayed over him, head resting on his stomach, her ribs flush with the tops of his thighs. One leg is drawn up as close to her chest as it can get, while the other stretches out, taking up much of the rest of the couch. The position looks far from comfortable, yet he can feel the slow regularity of her breathing, her sleep deep and seemingly untroubled. Her hand dangles off the side of the couch. His, however, rests low on her hip. The placement is such that, were Pidge awake, Shiro is certain he wouldn't be in possession of said hand for long. The stretchy fabric of her shorts is smooth under his fingers as he slides them away.

Pidge stirs ever-so-slightly.

This is how he dies. Not in the Galran colosseum in the claws of some mutated beast, not on some deadly, alien planet, not in Kuro, defending his team from an inescapable attack. No, Takashi Shirogane, 29, Paladin of Voltron, dies the moment Pidge awakens to find him millimeters from accidentally groping her and decides to dismember him on the spot. Or, he dies the moment Pidge tells Allura. He's not sure which is the more terrifying prospect.

She turns over in his lap, now on her back instead of her side, leaving him thankful that he moved his hand when he did. Her eyes remain shut. He may be able to escape with his life yet.

By now, Shiro can see more than just the darkest outlines of the room. His survival instincts kick in as he scans the room. Years of training as soldier, pilot, and tactician never quite prepared him for this type of situation, but he's never been one to shy away from improvisation. A second look down at the foot of the couch gives him hope: the pillow Pidge had chucked at him before. He reaches over the armrest the best he can without turning his body. His fingers skim over the corner of the pillow, and a moment later he's able to snag it. His other hand nears the crown of her head as he readies himself for the delicate lift necessary to transfer her from him, to the pillow.

In sleep, Pidge's sharp features are relaxed, no challenge to wrinkle her brow or scathing wit to pinch at the corners of her mouth. A thin trail of drool gleams down the side of her chin. It's a rare moment of peace that he’s been permitted to witness, and if he’s careful enough, he won't be the one to break it. A single thought - he could stay a bit longer with her, what a shame it would be to leave, and maybe wake her - sneaks in and sticks around long enough for him to consider, then quash it. With all the delicacy he can muster, Shiro brushes away a strand of hair tacked to the side of her cheek, then slides his hand under her head.

Her eyes flutter open. He freezes. Her eyes track to him in an instant, but even after a few slow blinks, her glassy gaze doesn't seem to focus.

“Shiro? Where are you going?”

She doesn’t seem upset at his presence; he wonders if she’s even all that conscious. Laced with sleep, her voice is softer, lower, than usual. It's a pleasant timbre that his brain, far-from-helpful, determines he'd like to hear again.

But just because she’s unbothered by the way she rests against him, or how his fingers thread through her hair as he cradles her head, doesn't mean that he should stay.

“Go back to sleep, Pidge,” he whispers. “You've got another hour before you have to be up.”

She gives him an indolent shake of her head. “Stay,” she murmurs. “I need help… reaching the… circuit board…”

Pidge's eyes slide back shut, all the confirmation he needs that she's still drifting through that thick haze of sleep. He waits a few long heartbeats, until her face smooths back to the same serenity as before, and then lifts her head. Slipping the pillow under her, he’s able to extricate himself before she stirs again.

He stands in a clatter of popping joints and creaking bones, adding his right shoulder to the growing list of body parts gone sore from his unusual sleeping arrangement. A groan rises in the air, but it isn’t his. Pidge's hand reaches up from the couch and comes to rest on his thigh. It must be colder in her room than he’d thought, for as hot as her touch feels through his thin sleep pants.

“You're really leaving?” she asks. She looks up at him through heavy eyelids and thick lashes.

“Yeah. I helped you with the panel earlier, remember?”

Whatever Pidge mumbles in response is almost all incomprehensible; besides the groggy 'lame’ he thinks he hears, he's not even sure if the rest is any real language.

“I can't stay here,” he adds. “The others will be waking up soon.”

“Who cares?” she says, sounding the most cogent she has since first stirring. For the briefest moment, Shiro feels the soft nudge of the paladin bond. He’s seconds from being able to taste the emotion coming through when the connection falls away and her eyes fall back shut. It leaves him with a strange tinge of loss.

“Fine,” she grumbles. “I'll fix the occipital compressor myself.”

A chorus of little grunts and huffs rises from the couch as Pidge wiggles over onto her side and nestles her face in the back cushion. It takes less than a minute for her breathing to even out. He’s safe to leave, and he’s even still got all of his remaining body parts. A sigh of relief trickles past his lips.

Shiro pads over to the door. It opens with a low hiss.

The hallway, while not at its maximum ‘daytime’ brightness, is blinding after the cool dark of Pidge’s room. Shiro squints against the light and turns in the direction of his room.

On the opposite side of the hall and just a few meters down, Lance’s door is wide open. Lance himself leans on the door frame, one leg propped up, and stares down at Keith with a look that is, without a doubt, sheer adulation. Keith, tucked between Lance’s legs, murmurs something soft around his smile and reaches up to flick at an errant strand of Lance’s hair, stuck straight up after a night of sleep. Lance catches Keith’s hand and presses a kiss to his palm. Even amidst the intimacy of the action, Shiro can see the slightest air of challenge in Lance’s expression, as if daring Keith to pull away. Keith doesn't, but he does make a show of rubbing his hand on his shirt the moment Lance releases it.

They're so immersed in each other that Shiro thinks he may have a chance. He could go the other way down the hall, head up to the training deck, and come back down the other way. If he were quiet enough, they would never even notice him. Shiro nods to himself, and takes his first shuffling step.

Which is, of course, the exact moment that Pidge’s door slides shut and locks with a heavy click. He freezes. Two heads jerk in the direction of the sound. As he watches twin pairs of eyes go wide, Shiro thinks that he might have been better off with dismemberment.

Lance reacts first, but it's Keith who gets out the first word. Over Lance’s shrill, rising squeal, Keith furrows his brow and lets out a confused sounding, “Shiro? That's not your room.”

Shiro scrambles for a reply. The briefest consideration of trying to turn the surprise on them flickers out when he sees how casually they remain almost chest-to-chest, even as they turn to face him. There’s no scuffle to separate, no desperate attempt at a denial of what's happening between the two of them - Keith's hand rests as firmly on Lance’s waist as it did the moment before they noticed Shiro. Neither of them were hiding anything. Two things dawn on Shiro at once: he was just as unobservant as Allura had said, and there was no way he was going to avoid this conversation.

Lance’s protracted squawking fills the uncomfortable silence. Keith, staring, waits for Shiro’s answer. It’s the most awkward standoff Shiro has ever been a part of.

“That is correct,” Shiro says, trying to keep his voice even. The words come out flat instead.

“What were you doing in Pidge's room?” Keith asks. “And where's Pidge?”

One glance at Lance, and Shiro knows he’s going to have to be careful with his answer. Excitable under normal circumstances, Lance looks, and sounds, like a helium balloon with a leak that, if let go, would whiz and bounce around their heads until empty. He may be oblivious, but he’s not stupid: Shiro knows exactly what this must look like. Simple truth is the one choice Shiro has for keeping Lance contained.

“I just woke up,” he says. “Pidge is still sleeping.” He fixes his gaze on Lance and continues, in his firmest tone, “And nothing happened.”

Shiro may as well have been speaking Galran for all Lance seems to understand the meaning of “nothing happened.” Lance’s mouth stretches into an ‘o’ as he begins repeatedly hitting Keith on the shoulder and looking from Shiro to Pidge’s door.

“Keith. Keith, Keith, Keith,” he chants, each repetition more insistent than the last.

“Stop that,” Keith grouses, trying to whack Lance’s hand away, but Lance persists.

“Keith, Pidge is a girl.”

Shiro’s stomach sinks.

“And Shiro is a boy.”

“And you say I’m always stating the obvious-” Keith cuts in.

“A boy who fell asleep with Pidge,” Lance continues. “In Pidge’s room.”

A look of understanding dawns on Keith’s face. For the first time since Shiro stepped into the hallway, he sees Keith pull away from Lance. Keith faces Shiro, eyes narrowed as if he’s never quite seen him before.

“You and Pidge are-?”

But however Keith had planned on finishing (Shiro’s mind lists a number of ways that sentence could have ended, each more damning than the last), he is interrupted by Lance, who pushes past him, crosses the hall, and grabs Shiro by the shoulders. The expression on Lance’s face is all-too-pleased, like a cat who’s just been given the last sardine.

“And all this time, we’ve been letting you two dilly-dally around the castle unchaperoned! I didn’t even get a chance to give you the talk first,” Lance says with a smirk.

“That’s enough,” Shiro snaps, but Lance barrels on.

“I had it all planned out, too: You see, Shiro, when two sentient beings love each other very much... Of course it’s a lot easier to explain when it’s two humans, I’m still not totally sure how the talk is going to go down with Hunk-”

Keith yanks on the back of Lance’s collar, tugging him away from Shiro and cutting him off.

“Lance, you’re being more of an idiot than usual,” Keith says, “and that’s saying a lot. Shiro's a grown man. He doesn't need ‘the talk’.”

“Oh come on,” Lance protests. “The chances of getting to tease Shiro like this are, like, one in a trillion! I can’t pass this up!” He struggles against Keith’s hold on his collar for a second more before giving up and slumping against Keith’s chest.

Shiro crosses his arms; it’s just about the only way he can keep himself from grabbing Lance by the shoulders and shaking him. But the last thing he needs is for Lance to start making an even bigger, louder fuss and wake Hunk or Pidge. He’s never been more thankful that Allura and Coran’s rooms are a floor above.

“Well, it looks like you wasted your opportunity,” he says, “because nothing happened. I was up late last night, and Pidge needed another set of hands with an experiment she was working on. Pidge was able to pick up transmission signals from another planet, and I fell asleep watching space TV on her couch. That. Is all. That happened.”

Lance heaves a mock sigh, not even the vaguest look of contrition on his face. “Well, if you insist… nothing happened.”

“Thank you. Now, I’m going back to my room-”

“But,” Lance drawls, “should you ever decide that something is happening…”

“Lance…” Keith starts, tone low in warning.

“Just know that you can always come to me with any questions you might have. I care about the two of you, so I just want you to be safe.” Lance’s look grows sly, and he raises his eyebrows. “Besides, I don’t think the Castle is quite ready for cubs yet, do you? Not that Keith and I wouldn’t make amazing uncles, or, well, I would at least-”

Shiro wants to sink through the floor, down to the belly of the ship, and be ejected out into space. He hadn’t even felt the heat surging to his face before, but as Lance goes on, he grows more aware of just how red his cheeks must be. He throws up his hands, hoping his exasperation will cover his embarrassment.

“I’m done here,” he says, turning on his heel. “I don’t want to hear another word about this.”

His footsteps echo in the hallway as he marches towards his room. The sound is joined moments later by whispers.

“Are you trying to get yourself a month of kitchen duty?” Keith hisses.

Lance’s voice follows Shiro down the hall.

“I was helping!” he insists. “How am I supposed to know what quality of health education Shiro’s got? I’m pretty sure the Garrison raised him in a flight simulator and then shot him into space straight after that, which means that I have to make sure that he has all of the knowledge he needs to make responsible choices!”

Shiro doesn’t even turn around as he calls back: “Not another word!”

...

It’s a fool’s errand, hoping that Lance will have dropped the early morning’s events by breakfast. Not that he says anything to Shiro - in fact, Lance doesn’t even make direct eye contact with him. No, what Lance does do is worse.

“Mornin’, Pidge!”

Pidge’s tired groan is all the invitation Lance needs to plop down in the empty seat next to her. Seated on her other side, Shiro watches her out of the corner of his eye, trying his hardest to keep up with whatever Hunk is telling him. Pidge, never much for conversation most mornings, looks more put out than usual by Lance’s cheery presence. She stabs at her goo, back to green, with her spork and raises her eyes to the ceiling, as if imploring the cosmos to help. No help comes, and Lance props his chin on his hand and grins at Pidge before continuing.

“You’re looking pretty tired today. Up late last night?”

“I always look like this,” she deadpans, “and I’m always up late.”

“Uh huh, uh huh, and what exactly was keeping you up at all hours?”

Shiro looks away just as Lance’s gaze slides past Pidge to him. He won’t give Lance the satisfaction of a reaction, so instead he asks Hunk something innocuous about the training simulation he and Coran were designing. It isn’t just Lance that Shiro knows is watching - next to Hunk, Keith scowls openly at Lance as his eyes flick between him, Pidge, and Shiro.

“Project,” Pidge says. She shovels a heap of goo into her mouth, a clear sign of a conversation over.

“Project, huh? So that's what you're calling it?”

He doesn’t see Pidge’s realization, but he feels it as the paladin connection jolts to life between them: a spark of understanding, a wobble of worry, and then a spike of annoyance all flow from her in quick succession. Unable to resist the pull, Shiro looks to her. She’s turned from Lance to him, and he feels another burst of her exasperation. She must have connected Lance’s probing to Shiro’s morning escape. For the second time in two hours, his stomach lurches as he wonders how long he’ll get to keep the rest of his body parts. He offers her a shrug and as much penitence as he can through the bond.

Behind Pidge, Lance watches their silent exchange and just about topples from his seat in uninhibited excitement. Shiro shrugs again, this time with a weak smile, but Pidge just rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

“Yeah, Lance,” she says. “I’m working on inventing a mandibular monitoring device that attaches to a paladin’s helmet and picks up on their brain waves. Any time it detects an especially stupid thought about to form, it clamps in on the upper and lower jaw, silencing the paladin before the idiotic idea comes out.”

Lance’s eyes narrow, looking suspicious as Pidge goes on with her casual tone.

“I should be thanking you, actually. I was struggling over what to call it before you came and sat down, but you’ve inspired me. My first thought was to call it ‘The Lance Muzzle’, but I think ‘The Lance Leash’ sounds a bit better.”

Lance’s sputtered protests start even before the beatific smile raises on Pidge’s face. Still complaining in choked up half-phrases and huffs, Lance stands and stomps over to the empty seat next to Keith. By now, everyone else at the table is watching. Keith’s gaze stays fixed on Pidge as Lance drops down in the chair.

“I think ‘Lance Leash’ is a great idea, Pidge,” Keith says. “Let me know if you need any help down in the lab. I may not know much about tech, but I’ve heard plenty of dumb ideas you might want to program into the device to start with.”

“Really, you too?” Lance yelps. He’s back up in an instant, and a moment later, plunks down in the only other unoccupied chair - next to Hunk. Arms cross and lips pull into a hard pout, which grows deeper as Hunk attempts to swallow his own laughter.

“I- I don’t know,” he says as the giggles start to bubble up. “I feel like ‘Lance Muzzle’ is probably more accurate of a term. ‘Lance Leash’ seems like you’re just leading them around.”

Lance’s glare switches from Keith, to Hunk, then back to Keith again. “Rude,” Shiro hears him hiss.

“So we’ve got one vote for Leash and one for Muzzle,” Pidge says, voice light. She cups her cheek in her hand, still smiling, and looks back to Shiro. Her peaceful expression stops at her eyes, which grow sharp as she asks, “What do you think, Shiro?”

His chest tightens - in fear, or something else, he can’t be sure. His ever-helpful brain suggests that perhaps he’d like to see that look again, anywhere else but over the dining room table. “I think I will remember not to piss you off before you’ve finished breakfast.”

“Damn straight,” she says. Lance’s griping drops to a mutter, point taken. Both smile and sharpness drop from Pidge’s face, and she spoons at her goo. “Though, for you, I might let it slide. At least the first time.”

…

Much of the day proceeds with greater calm than the one before. Their team and individual trainings go without a hitch, their patrols around the closest planets to the castle reveal nothing more interesting than a moon with an atmosphere composed of something “genetically comparable to tomato soup”, according to Coran, and lunch is its usual silly, sarcastic affair. Lance glares at Pidge and Keith the exact expected amount, and Keith and Pidge ignore him the to the standard level required to needle him into a tizzy.

It puts Shiro on edge. The past two days have flung brown goo, voyeurism, and literal fire in his path, and so the Castle of Lions’ version of calm seems too incredible to believe. He brings it up to Allura and Coran during their daily system review, to which Coran responds with an enthusiastic, “Don’t jinx it ‘til you’re worth two in a bush! That’s something humans say, right?” Not that that helps.

So it’s almost reassuring when Pidge’s voice crackles over the Castle’s intercom with a frantic sounding, “Attention, Team Voltron! Attention, Team Voltron! All team members report to the hangar bay immediately!”

Shiro’s moving in an instant. There’s neither time to hesitate, nor look back; the pounding of feet from behind tell him that Coran and Allura are close behind. Keith peels out from an intersecting hallway ahead and, as a pack, they charge down to the hangar.

The massive doors to the hangar are wide open, but Shiro and Keith still slide past them as their speed carries them well beyond their sudden, attempted stop. They double back around and meet Coran and Allura at the entrance.

His eyes dart first to the lions he can see. From the main castle entrance, the high-vaulted halls leading Red and Blue’s hangars are visible, as are the lions themselves. Greenie, as the smallest (and, no doubt, as a close match in temperament to her paladin), tended to wander the hangars whenever Pidge was present, and now rests on her haunches in the main hangar. She looks to be as at ease as a giant, alien robot could. Shiro gets no sense of urgency from Kuro; if anything, she seems peeved to have been awoken by whatever is going on.

At the center of the hangars, Hunk leans over one of the control stations, making adjustments. Pidge is on the other side of the station, hands flying around her head as she talks to Lance with her regular rapidity. Lance, expression intent, nods every couple of words.

Now that he thinks about it, Shiro can’t remember the wail of alarms or the flashing of warning lights throughout the castle that are so commonplace when they are under attack. Nothing more than Pidge’s announcement.

Everything seems… fine.

Fine, that is, until a moment later, when Pidge wraps her hand around Lance’s wrist, and flings him 20 feet straight up.

“Get WRECKED!” Pidge screeches.

Lance hurtles through the air, head over ass, howling in laughter the entire time. The further up the goes, the more he slows, until his back hits the ceiling with a soft thump. He laughs as he bounces off and floats downwards at a new angle. Now that he’s been slowed, Lance wafts and spins through the air. He looks like he's doing a bad impression of someone trying to swim through goo.

Everyone on the ground turns to Allura. Shiro tries to gauge her upcoming reaction from the color in her face and the twitch of her eyebrows: low on both counts, putting her in the range of “less infuriated than yesterday's flamethrower incident” but “more peeved than when Lance and Hunk perform duets during emergency simulations”.

Lance lets out a well-timed “Wheee!” a moment before Allura gives a resigned, “So what did you two do this time?”

“Hold that thought, Allura,” Pidge says, raising a hand in pause. “We have a requisite 30 seconds of celebration before you start scolding.”

“I'm not-” Allura starts, “Who said thirty-”

Pidge has to lift up on tiptoe to high five Hunk over the control station. As effortlessly as she'd hurled Lance moments before, it's obvious she had been hard at work with...whatever it was she and Hunk were trying to accomplish. The hair that had escaped her messy bun is plastered to the back of her neck, and she’s undone the top half of her jumpsuit, tying the long sleeves around her waist, as she often did when working with any sort of machinery. Something dark purple and reminiscent of grease stains her white tank top in large smears. He thinks he spots a smudge of it on her brow.

“We are on a roll, buddy!” Hunk exclaims. His bright eyes track from Pidge to Lance, and he slides his fingers down one of the screens on the control panel.

Lance begins a slow descent, and nails a pristine landing on one pointed toe. Given Keith’s scowl and Allura’s shaking head, Lance’s showy “Ta-daaa!” is poorly received.

The pulse pounding in Shiro’s throat slows, and the fist he’d clenched in subconscious readiness relaxes. There is no emergency, only - as Allura had predicted - more shenanigans borne of boredom. It would be a miracle if both castle and paladins made it out of the system with all parts fully functioning. Keith, for one, looks ready to tear an arm off of someone, though it’s unclear if he’s gunning for Lance, or Pidge. It’s clear his ire from the morning had yet to wear off. His jaw works for a few seconds, readying to spit out his frustrations.

For better or for worse, it’s Coran who cuts them down with a cheerful, “So you two figured out how to vary the castle's gravitational force for isolated biological signatures!”

Pidge slumps over the back of the control station, and Hunk’s jaw drops.

“You mean you already knew we could do this?” Pidge groans.

Oftentimes, Shiro found himself wondering who grew more frustrated with the paladins’ antics - Allura, or Coran. As commander of them all, Allura was likelier to wear her irritation front and center, for everyone to know just how badly they’d messed up. But Coran was unpredictable: while friendly was his default, he lived and breathed the Castle of Lions, and any disruption to its equilibrium could be met with his own special breed of displeasure. It tended to come right after a pleasant-sounding quip with a sharp edge and the stroke of his mustache. Coran twirls one side of his mustache around the tip of his pinky, then lets it uncoil.

“Back in my grandfather’s day we bandied the idea about more than once, but we never moved beyond the hypothetical,” he says. “Once we realized there were no practical applications to doing it if we couldn’t extend the effects beyond the Castle, we carried onto bigger projects.” The So quit messing with my ship rings loud and clear from his bright smile.

It shouldn’t be possible for Pidge to slide down any further without winding sprawled out on the floor, but somehow she manages. She wraps her arms the best she can around the control station (they don’t even stretch around to the other side) and clutches to it to stay upright.

“So this was… all for nothing…?”

Her eyes grow wide. She’s the very picture of despondence, the level of dramatics in her quivering bottom lip matching that of Lance’s.

“Sure seems like!” Coran chirps, unfazed.

Shiro knows better. He’s watched every single person on this ship stage some kind of theatrical tantrum or meltdown when something didn’t go their way. Even he was far from blameless, when the pressure of leadership boiled over into a petty fuss after some hiccup in their routine. As such, watching Pidge’s over-the-top reaction to Coran shouldn’t send such sharp pangs to that tender space just below his ribs. Rational thought tells him that Pidge is lightyears from actual upset; that this disappointment won’t lead to overflowing tears and breathy sobs (that was more Hunk’s department). But this hard fact isn’t enough to keep Shiro from going over to Pidge and laying a hand on her shoulder.

“Aw, come on, Coran,” he says, “give them a break. Not everything has to have a tactical purpose. Sometimes you’ve just got to do something for science. Right?”

It’s obvious to him why Lance erupts into high-pitched squawking, and Shiro can feel the moment Allura fixes her gaze on the back of his head. He’d be willing to bet that, if he turned around right now, she’d be sending him that half-smile that always crossed her lips when she knew some secret thing. Shiro may be a contender for the King of Clueless crown, but he now knows exactly what the two are thinking.

He doesn’t care, though, because Pidge alights with such incandescent joy that any pointed looks or teasing he may get later is worth it. He’ll put up with all of the conclusions Lance is warping to, he’ll put up with one thousand of Allura’s knowing glances, for the way Pidge looks up at him now: shoulders straight and grin toothy, cheeks flushed and smeared with grime, bright eyes locked on him. The jubilation that look builds in him bubbles up with such force that it takes him a heartbeat and a half to realize that their paladin bond has sparked to life. For the first time, it’s impossible to tell where her feelings end and his start.

“Shit yeah,” she breathes. “For science.”

“For science!” comes Hunk’s echoing shout.

Pidge moves out from under his touch, but any sense of loss at lack of contact is swamped by the whirlwind of excitement that whips up along the connection between them. He’s laid bare to the brunt of her enthusiasm, and smiles as it courses under his skin and raises goosebumps.

“Stay there,” she says, voice matching her movements in gusto. She swings around to the other side of the control station and shoves Hunk out of the way with a hip. Her fingers fly across the screen. Coran, curiosity obviously winning out over annoyance, crowds in to watch her work. Hunk tries to wriggle his way back to the head of the control station, but Pidge waves, then elbows, him away.

“I can do it!” she hisses. “Gimme some space.”

Hunk crosses his arms over his chest and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, of course, sorry, not like I was the one who figured out how to adjust the force generators to account for the gravitational displacement - machines that, I might add, can be highly temperamental on the best of days - just so that you could show off for your-”

There may be a foot of space between Pidge’s head and Hunk’s, but her hand whacks his face perfectly as she flings out her arms and exclaims, “We’re ready!”

“Is it mathematically possible for you to get any ruder?” Hunk grumbles, rubbing his cheek.

“Do you really want the answer to that?” she shoots back.

Pidge ducks under Hunk’s lazy, retaliatory punch, scoots around the control station, and sticks out her tongue. She turns, smiling, back to Shiro.

The flurry of anticipation cycling between them is heady, a positive feedback loop that grows his grin to the point that it might be painful if he weren’t so happy in her happiness.

“I think you’ll like this,” she says.

She reaches out and rests her hands on his hips. Like a habit he’s unaware he’d formed, his body mirrors hers, and he leans forward and lets his fingers fan out on either side of her waist. He can feel her slightest jump under his touch, but the surge of warm feeling reassures him that all is well.

“Hit it, Hunk!”

Whatever Hunk does, Shiro feels it in his bones. His insides stretch upward, ever-so-slightly, as if there were a fraction more space between each joint. Startled, he looks down at Pidge, question at his lips. She just laughs. Her fingers flex, tightening their grip on him, and she lifts.

Shiro shouldn’t be surprised - he’d seen the very same thing happen to Lance minutes earlier - but a yelp slips from him as Pidge picks him off the floor with ease. He lets go of her, arms spinning in a futile attempt to keep a sense of balance. Pidge keeps going until he’s elevated over her head; she cranes her neck back to watch him.

“Pretty cool, huh?” she whispers.

He nods, unable to summon words as he adjusts to the change in gravity. There’s a twinge behind his eyes as his brain tries to establish equilibrium, tries to comprehend how Pidge could be solid on the ground while he floats around, tethered by her two hands. But Pidge’s smile, grown soft as she watches his reaction, soothes the small pain. A balm for any ailment. Shiro settles into comfort at the new sensation, and his body relaxes.

“You’re not going to throw me across the room, are you?” he teases.

“Not unless you pull some kind of shit like Lance. Nah, I think I’m just going to enjoy this while it lasts. My arms will give out eventually.”

Shiro snorts. “If you came to training more often, we could do something about those tiny noodle arms of yours.”

“Well, that didn’t last long,” she deadpans. The glare she shoots him from narrowed eyes holds no real venom. “Letting go now.”

Her hands slide away, and Shiro feels himself starting to rise up. He scrambles to reach down and secure himself to something, and barely manages to plant him palms on the sides of her face. His fingers curl loosely around her ears, and he stops drifting away.

“I have to second Hunk on the rude comment,” he says, smiling despite her betrayal.

She scoffs, and places one of her hands over his. “I just give back what I get. A minute ago, I was just minding my own business, innocently enjoying myself, and then you had to go and insult my arms. Not my fault.”

Later on, Shiro’s going to wonder what the crow he was thinking, but caught up in the moment as he is, there’s no filter to stop him from saying, “Like you’re not enjoying this right now.”

Pidge starts to say something, looks down at the ground, glances up at him, then looks away again. He can feel the heat growing in her cheeks, can feel that same heat stretching out between their paladin bond. In some not-all-that-distant elsewhere, Shiro thinks he hears Lance and Hunk harmonize in a chorus of “Ooooooohhh!”s.

“I’m seriously going to let you go and leave you stranded on the ceiling,” she mutters.

“Too bad, because I’m not letting go anytime soon.”

She doesn’t let go, and neither does he. If anything, she eases further into his touch as she tilts her head.

“I think you’re suffering from headrush,” is all she says.

“My head feels fine.” It’s not quite true, though. His head feels like it’s been consumed by their bond, like everything is feeling and fire and every crystal clear mystery that bounces back and forth between them.

“Pidge, I know you’re going to hate me for this, but it’s for your own good,” Hunk calls.

She whips around to Hunk, spinning Shiro along with her. She takes a step forward, but instead of hitting the ground, her foot hits air.

“What the-”

And like that, she’s floating, no longer bound by gravity’s tenuous pull. They rise together, Shiro still holding onto her face.

“Hunk!” she shouts, arms flailing as they float. The motions give them some momentum, pushing them further from the ground. “I’m going to murder you!”

“Sorry!” he yells back. “Can’t hear you from all the way down here.”

Which, given their height of maybe two meters up, is utter nonsense. Hunk’s expression is one of smug satisfaction as he fiddles with the control station. Lance doubles over in laughter, and even Keith, off to the side, cracks a grin. Pidge grumbles and grabs Shiro’s upper arms, using them as leverage to haul herself “up”. Rather than resting above her, he’s now parallel to her, inches of space between their suspended bodies. They continue to float up at a strange angle.

“Don’t tell anyone I said this,” Pidge murmurs, “but I probably did something to deserve that.”

She slides her grip down from his arms back to his waist. What he knows of the principles of gravity suggests that she could let go, and they would continue drifting in the same direction together until an opposing force interrupted their ascent. But perhaps, like him, Pidge isn’t thinking with her usual clarity. He removes his hands from her face, but then wraps them around her hips.

It’s not long until they are actually too far to hear more than the buzz of conversation going on down below. From what he can see over Pidge’s shoulder, it appears as though Coran has given up his protective reluctance and is now quite intent on asking Hunk as many questions about their experiment as possible. Not far off, Lance is tugging at Keith’s wrist, no doubt trying to convince him to try out this new anti-gravity.

When the sounds fade away, it’s just the two of them.

“Pidge?”

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

Her face is red, and she hasn’t quite looked at him since they righted themselves midair. The emotions coming across the connection - and it’s been minutes now that they’ve been in sync, the longest time yet - are subdued, maybe hesitant. He feels for the first time that she’s keeping something off the line.

“Just a little dizzy,” she says. “Being up this high is way different when you’re in a lion.”

Though they’re at no risk of falling, Shiro tugs her a little closer, strengthening his hold.

“We’ll be fine,” he reassures her. “This is partly your invention, and I know you got it right.”

“Assuming stupid Hunk doesn’t go and mess everything up even more,” she grumbles.

They’re straying closer and closer to curved top of the high, vaulted ceiling - from his vantage point, the rest of the team look like ants. Shiro looks around them, able to see into each lion’s hangar. Their size is scarcely diminished, even as Shiro and Pidge rise above the level of their heads. When was the last time he’d seen all five lions together, from outside of Kuro? It’s breathtaking. He gestures for Pidge to look.

“It’s not so bad being stuck up here, is it?” he asks. The With me? at the end keeps quiet.

His question hangs unanswered a few heartbeats longer than he’d hoped. Across the bond, he can feel her emotions churning, and once more he gets the sense she’s holding something back. He’s been able to channel feelings through their connection before, and tries again now: tentative but friendly, a probing question. From her sudden change in expression, it must work. Her blush reignites, but she looks at him now, brown eyes crinkling at the edges.

“No, it’s not,” she says. After a moment, she continues. “Can’t say I mind the company.”

This morning, and the night before, come to the forefront of his mind: the softness of her sleeping form against his, her funny chatter as they watched broadcasts from the far-flung corners of space together. Impulse tells him to respond with a simple, sure, “Same”, but what trickles up from his throat is something very different: “You mean you wouldn’t rather have Lance up here with you?”

Pidge wrinkles her nose with an “Ew, no.” Although nowhere near what he’d intended, his words seem to have the desired effect. Pidge relaxes, both in his hands and along the paladin bond.

“Head’s up,” she says. “We’re almost to the ceiling. I think if you stick your hand out and push off from the top, we can start making our way back down. Maybe Hunk will adjust the gravity for us.”

He nods and twists around enough to see the ceiling as they creep towards it. Reaching out, he makes contact with the smooth, metal surface, and pushes off of it. The change in direction affects him first, and Pidge’s momentum carries her right into him. She hits his chest with a soft ‘oof’. It’s fortunate that they’re still close enough to the ceiling for him to launch off of it again - otherwise their collision might have left them stranded mid-space. She braces herself against his chest. He wraps his arm securely around her waist and pushes.

By now, Lance must have persuaded - or forced - Keith to let Hunk change the gravitational force on him. The two of them rocket upwards, nearing Pidge and Shiro in their slow descent. Halfway up, Keith shoves Lance’s chest, and the two spiral off in opposite directions, each consumed in uproarious laughter.

“I think our trajectory is a little off,” Pidge muses. The loose strands of her hair swim around her face, as though they were pushed by a slow, invisible wind. “We’re starting to curve.”

She’s right: rather than heading straight towards the ground, they were spinning, slow but certain, off towards the left and heels over head.

“Coran, Allura, you know you can’t pass this up.” They’re near enough now to hear talk from the ground, and Hunk’s voice is the first to ring out.

“All right, fine,” Allura concedes. “It does look like fun.”

They’ve turned too much by the time Allura pushes off from the ground for Shiro to see, but the rising whoops of Hunk from below and Lance from above tell him all he needs to know. Pidge shakes her head and smiles at him. “Amateurs.”

Their heads are aimed at the floor, and Shiro has to look down, no, up towards his feet to see Lance and Keith bouncing off the ceiling and jetting towards each other. They collide with a loud thwack and more laughter. As disorienting as it all is, it feels right when he looks back down and meets Pidge’s eyes.

“Who needs practical applications,” Hunk shouts, “when you can just do stuff for science?”

Under normal circumstances, he thinks, Pidge would pipe up, perhaps leading a two-person cheer between her and Hunk with that phrase they keep throwing around. But they're still floating, swinging off to the left and slowly turning upside-down. Her gaze is fixed on him, and the connection between them has sinks back into a pleasant thrum.

Allura’s visage, rightside up, floats by behind Pidge. She arches an eyebrow at him, smile devious.

“I have to admit, you humans have a very unusual definition of the term 'science’.”

…

Every member of Team Voltron sparred differently. It hadn’t taken long for Shiro to figure it out: he may have been trained as a pilot, but a year in the Galra pits would turn anyone into a warrior. Tactics, strategy, noticing the little things - they were the skills that kept him alive when brute force wasn’t an option (and oftentimes, it wasn’t). After Pidge’s revelation in their first year that she’d been keeping a detailed dossier on each of their fighting styles, Shiro had felt a rush of pride that their separate observations were such close matches. However, Shiro’s assessment of his team went a little deeper than Pidge’s analytics; it wasn’t just that he’d been keeping track of how each of them fought, but what they did when they fought as well.

Pidge tried to avoid training and sparring as much as possible, but when she was on deck, her fights were accompanied by a low, often garbled stream of chatter to herself, not unlike her regular talking when she worked. The only words that tended to make sense were the curses - just as often directed at herself as her partner.

Lance was all talk, too, though it was loud, proud, and rowdy. He used banter as a distraction to the point that he’d even named his “strategies”: ‘Charm and Disarm’, and ‘Nettle and Settle’. Charm and Disarm worked best on Hunk, and worst on Pidge, though Shiro had seen Keith tripped up more than once by some of Lance’s better compliments. Nettle and Settle had taken Shiro down when he’d had too many nights without sleep. He’d start to snap at Lance, and moments later find himself on his back, Lance leering gleefully over him. Those were the nights that Lance took extra cleaning duty with a grin and a whistled tune, and it was almost worse than being beaten by him on the training deck.

Hunk was quiet and, even after all this time, edgy about fighting. He’d bounce from foot to foot, bayard clutched a hair too close to his body, and wait for his opponent to make the first move. For such a hulking figure, he was quick to react, and would be halfway across the deck by the time the person he was sparring lunged towards him. Every time he landed a hit was accompanied by a surprised, though hearty, cheer.

Allura hummed when she fought, a trait, he later learned from Coran, that she’d picked up from her mother. It was disquieting, first to feel the crack of her fist across his cheek, then to hear some cheery, lilting tune trickle through his ringing ears.

Keith, as a rule, didn’t talk during one-on-one sparring sessions (unless provoked by Lance). He stayed silent through his small victories, and would let out little more than a frustrated huff at his failures. Perhaps that’s why Shiro liked training with him best.

There were days when his patience stretched thin and his frustrations mounted, when he’d spent hours listening, and listening, and listening to reports, and complaints, and manic chanting, and shrieking laughter, and felt as though he might snap if he heard another voice. Keith had been that way since their time at the Garrison, and understood better than Shiro the value of silence and exertion.

Needless to say, Shiro is surprised when, seconds after Keith sweeps his legs out from under him, he goes, “Do you remember what it felt like, the first time you flew in space?”

Winded from the impact, Shiro holds a hand up and sucks in a few deep breaths. Keith nods and, rather than offering him a hand up, sits down on the ground next to him. Shiro doesn’t need a connection through a paladin bond to sense the shift in Keith out of fighting mode.

“Yeah,” Shiro finally pants. “Second year at the Garrison, I must have been… nineteen? We barely scratched the upper limits of Earth’s atmosphere, but it was space enough for all of us.”

“The simulators don’t prepare you for it,” Keith says. His voice is low, contemplative - a tone Shiro’s heard no more than a handful of times.

“They don’t, but then again, the first, second, and third flights out don’t prepare you for it either.”

Keith laughs. “True. I don’t know how I didn’t puke those first few rounds.”

Shiro sits up and wraps his arms around his knees. “Lucky,” he says. “They had me as mock commander every time we went up, which meant waiting until we were on the ground and cleared before I could run off and lose my lunch. I never understood why they put the cadet bathrooms so far from the hangars.”

“Because they were all a bunch of dicks,” Keith says with a snort. “But they’re down there, and we’re up here, so you see how far that got them.”

“Not in the middle of an intergalactic war?”

“Not in the middle of saving the universe.”

They’ve had this conversation more than once, though never mid-practice. It was a chat in the lounge while Hunk and Lance argued over the rules of some Altean game they were playing, or when Keith and Shiro were on patrol duty together. But Keith’s words now lack their usual acidity. Shiro glances over at him, and meets his second surprise of the evening: the softest hint of a smile on Keith’s lips. He’s not sure how to respond, so he doesn’t.

“But you remember what it felt like, right?” Keith asks, breaking the lull.

“The first time in space? It’s been about a decade and hundreds of space flights since.” Still, the question has Shiro reflecting back through the years, trying to pin down more than just the facts he could remember. He has a fuzzy sense of feeling terrified, and then exhilarated.

“I still remember,” Keith says earnestly. “Like it was just this morning. I was so nervous at first, like I was going to crawl out of my skin, and my heart wouldn’t stop pounding. But then, we went up, high enough to break Earth’s lower atmosphere. They shut the engines off and we kept going up, and suddenly I felt weightless. Like everything I’d left behind down there had been lifted.”

It’s the closest to poetry he’s ever heard from Keith’s lips, and it moves Shiro to utter stillness. In an instant, Shiro feels it all rush back: the lurch, the lift, the brilliant out-of-body sensation, the surge of awareness of every nerve’s wild pinging, every tight contraction of his heart. He feels hot and cold at the same time all over again, fear and adrenaline intermingling into a potion so potent he’d been addicted since first sip. It’s why he kept flying, kept fighting.

“Yeah,” Shiro whispers, unable to hide the tremor in his voice.

“That’s how I feel when I’m with Lance.”

Shiro draws a sharp breath. He turns to Keith, stunned. Under the harsh, bright lights of the training deck, Keith’s blush is set in sharp relief. But there’s an unmistakable softness there, and as unexpected as it might be for Shiro to see, it does not look out of place on the man’s face. The seriousness of his voice with his next words sits in complete contrast to his gentle smile.

“Is that how you feel when you’re with Pidge?”

And like that, Shiro can find no air in his lungs. It’s not that he’s been hit in the gut, so much as struck straight under his ribs from within. All of the sensations of first flight pummel into him again, but this time, they come with the thought of Pidge. And like the inescapable thrill of being strapped into that pilot’s seat, every inch of him awake and aware of the roaring engines and the heavy pressure of gravity right before it releases its hold, Shiro cannot push her from his mind. Had his heart soared to the limits of his chest every time she grinned at him? Had his skin grown hot and his insides an anxious cold whenever he reached out for a touch he swore to himself was casual, nothing?

Keith’s hummed “Mm-hm” drags Shiro from the spiraling orbit of his thoughts. It’s his turn to go red with the suggestion.

“I- I don’t know,” Shiro stammers.

With the knife-edge look Keith gives him, the “Cut your shit” no doubt on the tip of his tongue is unnecessary.

“You don’t know, or you’re not ready to know?” Keith asks. “Because I spent every day for two years agonizing over the man I fell in love with because I wasn’t ready to know. And I’m not saying you’re in love with her,” he continues, taking in the shock Shiro feels creeping over his expression, “but it’s obvious your feelings go beyond just teammates. The sooner you acknowledge that, the sooner you can stop wasting time trying to tiptoe around the potential. Also, it’s seriously gross trying to watch you pretend like nothing’s happening when you can’t take your eyes off her.”

The words ring through his ears, high and harsh. It leaves his head spinning, mind grasping at tendrils of coherent thought that slip away before he can weave something plausible together. Denial doesn’t seem like it will work on Keith, so Shiro’s only move is avoidance.

“Did Lance put you up to this?”

Keith’s sigh is that of a man burdened with one-thousand sufferings. He runs a hand through dark hair and scowls.

“No! Well, yes, but I was curious enough on my own to want to know. He wanted to just come up and ask you out in the open. I told the risk of you strangling him for it was pretty high and… I was sort of hoping you might be a little more… comfortable talking about it with me.”

Guilt and embarrassment duke it out behind his eyes. Shiro wants to bury his head in his hands, or maybe even get zapped into oblivion by an errant Galra laser beam. But no, the defenses Pidge had improved in the Castle’s system would prevent anything like that from happening. She would never let him get injured, not like that. He lets out a long groan, and settles for squeezing his eyes shut.

“So...if you’re right, and I do… have feelings…”

“Come on, Shiro.”

He doesn’t have to look to know Keith is glaring at him.

“Okay, so, what am I supposed to do about it?”

The breathless laugh Keith lets out is far from reassuring. Shiro cracks an eye open to see Keith staring at him in disbelief.

“Lance was totally right,” he says. “You were raised by the Garrison in a test tube.”

“Hey!”

“You’re both adults. Just talk to her about it,” Keith says, shaking his head.

His stomach roils at the thought. “Oh, sure, simple.”

The smile on Keith’s lips seems utterly inappropriate given the situation. Shiro almost feels betrayed.

“How funny is it that I’m the one telling you to use your words and actually talk about your feelings?” Keith muses.

It isn’t funny to Shiro at all. Not one bit.

Chapter Text

Keith tells Shiro to talk to Pidge. Shiro doesn’t.

For three long days, Shiro skirts around the issue, always finding something urgent to do when Keith attempts to ask him about it. Even Lance tries to approach him a few times, but that shit-eating grin of his gives him away, and Shiro is long gone before Lance can corner him.

It’s not that he’s avoiding Pidge - he couldn’t, even if he tried, and as the days crawl forward, it hits him harder and deeper that he really doesn’t want to. As much of their time as before, if not more, is spent together. Every morning Pidge slides into the seat next to him and across their bond shares her amusement at whatever new drama has taken over the breakfast table. Coran alerts them to the fact that they’re nearing the edge of the system, and that the Castle’s information on the next system over is thousands of years out of date. So, the two of them spend hours pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, hunched over a system map and strategizing. Pidge interprets the data relayed from sensors Lance and Keith had taken out in their lions while Shiro begins analyzing potential hazards and plotting the safest means for them to approach the system. The satisfied thrum of the connection between them holds until they part after dinner. For two nights straight, he watches Pidge walk away from him, either to her room or down to the labs, and take the remnants of their psychic link with her.

And for two nights straight, the nightmares yank him from sleep hard enough to send him careening off the bed. Shaking and on all fours, he dry heaves in between gasps for breath that aren't deep enough. Once pulse and stomach settle, minutes later, Shiro knows he's up until breakfast. Even then, the air doesn't really sit right in his lungs until he sees the brown thatch of hair stumble into the dining room and slump over the table with sleepy, murmured greetings.

Shiro doesn't think he's being all that obvious about his lack of sleep - it's been a consistent problem for years. Midway through the third day of system plotting, though, Pidge bumps his shoulder with hers and says, “You wanna go rest for a bit? I can come get you when Lance and Keith are done with the data transmission.”

She scoffs at his reassurances that he's fine, but doesn't bring it up again. The rest of the day’s work is quiet, but companionable, even as they exchange strains of worry and soothing through their bond.

It’s nearing evening when Hunk pages Pidge from down in the hangar. Like a blade, the crackle of noise from the PA cleaves straight through their bond.

“Hey, uh, Pidge, Coran an’ I have some smoking circuitry down in the gravity adjusters and could totally use some backup. Or maybe a fire extinguisher. Both?”

“Both is good!” Coran’s voice echoes from further back.

A slight grunt escapes her as she unfolds from over the system map and presses her hands into the small of her back. She sends him a long, impassive look. He stares back, unable to quite decipher the meaning behind her neutral gaze. Her eyes squeeze into a squint, and then widen.

“Sorry,” she murmurs, “I thought we were still connected. I was trying to feel out if you’d be all right finishing up without me.”

He blinks. Her words are slow to process over the shouting going on between his temples. The thing is, it’s not just lack of sleep and the long hours transforming numbers into action that’s had him feeling out of sorts these past few days.

It’s also the voice in his head, the one he swears used to be much quieter and used to sound a lot less like Lance, that leaps to attention like an overeager puppy any time Pidge so much as looks at him too long. At the moment, it’s insisting that he let Pidge know in no uncertain terms that he will not be all right finishing up without her, and that rather than leaving she should, in fact, come closer.

“Oh, of course, sure,” Shiro says instead.

“Thanks. I’ll try and get back up, but if you finish before I do, maybe at least try and get some rest, okay?”

“I will,” he says with full certainty that he will not.

Pidge, who had already started turning to leave, stops short. She leans in and elbows him in the arm. His “Hey!” of protest lacks teeth; she had, after all, fulfilled his silent hope that she might come nearer.

“You’re so full of shit,” she says, unapologetic.

As exhausted as he is, and as much as he doesn’t want her to go, she succeeds in making him smile. The grin she shoots back is all teeth and mischief. He’d like her smile to overlap with his. They’re close enough that they could, if he bent down, if she rocked forward on her toes.

The thought is dangerous, wholly inappropriate, and impossible to undo. It races around in his brain, getting louder and more Lance-like with every pass.

“Get your filthy mouth off of my bridge and go help Coran and Hunk,” he orders.

Pidge gives him the most lackadaisical salute possible, not much more than a flick of her wrist, and trots off.

“Go take a nap, Shiro!” she calls as the doors to the bridge begin to close.
A good twenty ticks pass before he moves. He knows he’s alone on the bridge, but that doesn’t stop him from looking left and right before burying his head in his hands and letting out the longest groan.

This was not going to be easy.

“That bad, huh?”

Shiro’s head snaps up, his body jerking into a defensive stance.

“Wow, I did not mean to startle you.”

His roving eyes, looking for danger, dart to the bridge’s primary holoscreen. It’s Keith, projected larger-than-life above him. He’s suited up in his armor and surrounded by the flickering lights of his lion’s cockpit. Shiro’s arms drop.

“I didn’t hear you open the comm channel,” Shiro says. He’s unable to keep the defensiveness out of his voice, as if it’s Keith’s fault that Shiro has been caught in an awkward situation.

“That’s because you were too busy flirting to notice.”

Keith’s voice is the slightest bit tinny over the bridge speakers, but the humor in his tone isn’t lost.

“We- we weren’t flirting,” Shiro says. His denial sounds weak even in his own ears.

Keith purses his lips and raises an eyebrow. “Be glad it’s me and not Lance, because you know he’d take a pot shot at the whole ‘get your filthy mouth off my bridge’ line.”

It’s a desperate hope that Keith can’t see how red Shiro flushes, but also a foolish one.

“Anyway, I connected to get an update on the mission, not your love life, but since it’s obvious that you still haven’t told her-”

Like the aforementioned conversation with Pidge that he keeps putting off, Shiro avoids Keith’s with immediate redirection.

“Have you and Lance finished the last system scans?”

“Yeah, but-”

“Great. I’ve almost completed the system entry protocol, and Coran, Hunk, and Pidge are dealing with the adjusters so that we’ll be ready for the heightened gravity, since our target planet is circumtrinary. Allura should be about done with the maintenance on the crystal, too, so you two can head on back.”

“We’re already on our way,” Keith says, face pinching in annoyance. It’s obvious what Shiro is doing, and Shiro is happy to keep it that way.

“Got it, we’ll see you soon then.”

“Shiro, stop being an ass, this isn’t difficult--”

Shiro cuts the comm, reburies his face in his hands, and lets out an even longer, even more desperate groan.

Because the truth of it is, nothing about this decision is as easy as Keith claims. Caring wasn’t a weakness, no, but the agonizing he’s done the past handful of days has revealed a long list of problems that wouldn’t exist were it not for his ridiculous feelings.

They would all return to Earth one day. Sooner rather than later, if they used their heads and fought hard. And what was waiting back on Earth for them? Pidge would want to finish school. She’d become a doctor, and no doubt surpass her father. Katie Holt would be known planetwide and beyond. But him?

Maybe he’d have a legacy when they got back; maybe he’d be celebrated for helping rescue the Holts and getting back to Earth. When the praise died down, though, there was no telling what he’d have left. He’d be an old and broken soldier with a fistful of medals and a meaningless rank. Part of him had already considered offering to stay on with Coran and Allura, to continue protecting the universe after the war ended. Dragging Pidge into that was not part of the plan.

And even if she did choose to stay with him after the war, that didn’t mean things would be all right before they defeated Zarkon. Lance and Keith were fine by Allura, Shiro knew that, but this relationship would be different. He was the Black Paladin, the one looked to to call the shots, and when victory was dependent on the seamless mind-meld of five independent individuals, there was no room for perceived favoritism. If he and Pidge were together, would the other paladins question every time he gave her a mission or a special task?

Shaking his head, Shiro drags his hands down his cheeks and lets them go limp at his sides. His team isn’t like that, nor is the Princess. He’s had a half-decade of proof to go by. The fact doesn’t soothe the churning in his abdomen, or keep him from imagining all of the other terrible possibilities. Zarkon or one of his agents could discover their relationship, and go for Pidge under the impression that they could use her as leverage, to make him surrender Kuro.

And what if it didn’t work out? A warzone was no place for heartbreak. Back at the Garrison, he’d watched cadets fall in and out of love as fast as they did formation. It was never pretty to watch the strain it put on the affected units. That was part of why he’d avoided anything more serious than a few off-base flings. The feeling welling up inside of him had been little more than an abstraction until Pidge, and the uncharted territory of what might come next sets him on edge.

His fears go on, and his brain gives him no reprieve from enumerating them, one by one, over and over again. But there was no worry worse than the one that first surfaced when Keith drew out his confession: that she might not return his feelings.

…

The tension in his gut refuses to subside even as it approaches dinner time. He books it from the bridge to the dining room, eager for some regularly scheduled dinner chaos to distract him.
Of course, the cosmos has it out for him; the doors to the dining room slide open, and only Lance and Keith are at the table. He has one tick to be thankful that they’re seated and chatting, as opposed to the alternative, before they both turn to him with matching innocent expressions. Shiro has never been so certain that he was the topic of conversation up until he entered.

Never one to dance around a subject, Lance opens with a blatant, “So, how’s Pidge?”

Shiro frowns at Keith and goes over to the goo dispenser. Keith has the decency to look a little uncomfortable.

“He wouldn’t stop bugging me about it,” he says. “And he’s obnoxiously persistent.”

“Yup,” Lance replies, a note of pride in his voice. “Though it’s not like Keith had to tell me anything. It was all pretty obvious after we found you leaving her room. Early in the morning. After spending the night.”

“I didn’t- you know it wasn’t like that!” Shiro snaps. The lever on the goo machine gets the brunt of his frustration as he yanks it down.

“But it could be, if you ever said anything to her,” Keith says.

Instead of responding, Shiro watches as the green, gelatinous goop fills his tray. This exact same conversation has been playing itself out in his head all day, and that paired with his incessant worrying about the whole situation is doing little to soothe his fraying nerves. He forces himself to take a deep breath, grabs a spork, and heads back to the table. From the twitch at the corner of his lips, it’s clear that Lance is fighting a grin, and Keith is starting to get the same pinched look from earlier. There’s not much that Shiro wants more than to give up on dinner and retreat to his room, but he knows Keith and Lance, and he knows that the longer he tries to dodge, the more they’ll pursue.

“I know that you two are trying to help me,” he starts, “and I’m even willing to admit that you’re right.”

Triumph springs up on Lance’s face. Keith, however, doesn’t react, like he knows that Shiro isn’t done.

“But I need you to let this go. At least for a few days, until I can finish wrapping my head around the situation.”

Lance’s protest is immediate. “But why wait? Everyone can tell that Pidge-”

“It’s just going to be harder the more you put it off,” Keith interjects. For once, Lance doesn’t look all that miffed at being interrupted. He nods along vigorously to Keith’s words. “I know from experience that confessions are difficult, but it will be worth getting it all off of your chest. And we can help.” Keith glances at Lance. “Or, I can help.”

“I can help!” Lance insists. “I’m the best at helping!”

He backs down under two sets of dubious stares. Muttering under his breath, Lance turns his attention to pushing the goo on his tray into different shapes.

Under different circumstances, Shiro might feel fortunate to have such caring teammates. The way the Paladins of Voltron look out for one another has been the core of their strength for years. But right now it feels more like an unwelcome intrusion, and he’s reminded of the fact that he is pretty much stuck on a giant castle hurtling through space with limited options for escape.

“I appreciate it,” he says. “I do. But I will do this when I’m ready, and not a minute sooner.”

“Shiro-”

“And I promise that it won’t take me two years.”

Keith’s teeth click when his mouth snaps shut. From the mottling red of his cheeks to the growing scowl, Keith appears to be figuring out if he should be chastened or offended. Lance, still playing with his food, lets out a whistle.

“Low blow, bro, low blow. We’re just trying to help,” he says.

For once, Lance looks less perturbed than Keith at what was by all accounts a pretty petty accusation. By no means was Lance a paradigm of maturity, but he was showing himself to be the bigger person in the room now. Shiro cringes. Lashing out at his friends wasn't the way to solve any of his hangups.

“That was uncalled for,” he says. “I'm sorry. I… haven't been handling this whole revelation very well.”

Keith’s frown flattens a little; he looks somewhat mollified by Shiro’s apology.

“We get it, Shiro, promise,” Lance says. “You’ve got to handle this in your own way. Me? I handled it for a year by trying to flirt with every attractive biped we encountered. Keith? He handled it by buying knives. A lot of knives.”

How Lance manages to bend far enough in his seat to avoid Keith’s elbow in the side without breaking eye contact with Shiro is a mystery. Maybe it was that thing called couple’s ESP that Hunk often joked about. Maybe that was something he and Pidge could have, if he ever got over his own nerves.

“The important thing,” Lance continues, “is that you do eventually do something about it… And that you remember you have people who are here for you when you feel like you can't handle everything on your own.”

Lance sounds so serious, so genuine and assured, that it throws Shiro a bit off balance. Suspicious, he glances around the dining room, looking for any indication that this was a setup. He spots the camera, unnoticed for years, that Hunk and Pidge hacked into in order to spy on Keith and Lance. He wouldn't put it past someone like Lance or Hunk to, in the name of helping, have staged this whole thing reality television style and have Pidge out in the hallway, watching Shiro’s painfully obtuse stumbling through all of this feelings business.

But despite Keith’s frustration with him, Shiro knows Keith wouldn't agree to a stunt like that. His feelings are likely still safe.

“Thanks,” he says, and he tries to put as much appreciation into the word as he can. Lance gives him a thumbs up.

Any further conversation is derailed a tick later, when the doors slide open and Allura joins them. She starts in with questions for Lance and Keith about what they picked up on their system scans during the last flight, and Shiro is left with a few blissful minutes between himself and his food goo.

“Now, if you recall, I did instruct you not to try and reposition the density lifters without the proper equipment.”

Coran appears through door ahead of Hunk and Pidge, chattering away. Draped over Hunk’s arm even as she walks, Pidge sucks at her index finger.

“Hands are proper equipment,” she whines, words obscured by her finger.

All of the tight, tangled knots in his chest go lax. As much of a relief as her presence is, it makes him feel all the more foolish for his earlier melodrama. Reason tells him that if a crush was going to turn him into a mess of a man, then maybe he’d be better off stepping back, trying to return to the easy dynamic they’d had before Keith had wrenched forward all of those concealed feelings.

He doesn't want to. Especially not when her finger pops from her mouth and beams at him.

“Looks like your girlfriend is here.”

The words slide low and quiet across the table, but they gain enough momentum to hit Shiro with the force of a fist to the jaw. His spork hits his tray with a squish, and his head snaps in Lance's direction. Given the way Allura and Keith carry on with their conversation, Shiro must the only one who heard Lance’s comment. The grin on Lance’s face reads clearer than any data screen readout: A low blow for a low blow, buddy.

What's worse is that Lance knows as well as Shiro that there's nothing he can say or do without drawing attention to what Lance just said. Pidge sits down next to him, and Shiro swallows his agitation at Lance. He did kind of deserve it.

“Looks like that whole nap thing really worked out for you,” she says, gesturing to his lost spork. She rests her head on a fist and smiles at him again. “Your dexterity is astonishing.”

“My dexterity is fine,” he says, hoping to cover one embarrassment with another, “You startled me, is all.”

Tearing his eyes from her and turning them to the spork in the goo is the right way to keep himself from getting called out; lying has never been his strong suit, but his bluff seems to work well enough to keep her from questioning why his words came out so high and rushed.

“I’d make some joke about you being a total space case,” Pidge says, watching in amusement as he tries to pluck the spork from his plate without goo-ing his fingers, “but I think we all technically qualify as space cases, so the joke would be kinda moot.”

She slides some goo onto her spork, shoves it in her mouth, and continues talking even as she chews at it. “Also, I guess I’m not really one to lecture when it comes to sleep. Since, you know. I don’t get much of it.”

“No, you?” he asks, voice dripping in mock disbelief.

“Surprising, right?” Pidge sets her spork down and starts fluffing up her already voluminous hair. “You’d think it’d take hours of beauty sleep to look this good.”

Her tone of voice is teasing, like it's obvious she doesn't believe a word of what she's saying. She bats her eyelashes at him, or, at least, attempts to: the end result is a mechanical sort of blinking that sends them both into a giggling fit.

“Hey, that's my line!” Lance protests from across the table.

“What, you have some kind of space patent on stupid pickup lines?” Pidge asks. “If I owe you royalties, consider this the first installment of my payment.”

She sticks out her tongue. Lance returns the gesture, so Pidge ups the ante by crossing her eyes. Shiro’s pulse momentarily forgets itself at the phrase ‘pickup line’.

Stars, when viewed in isolation from the ground, are little more than distant specks of light. On their own, they make for poor navigation; on their own, they carry no story.

And so, the decision Shiro makes does not come just from Keith’s constant encouragement or Lance’s prying. It does not come from sleepless nights or hours spent connected at mind and hip. No, in this moment it is Pidge's face, reddened from laughter and contorted as she tries to match Lance's ridiculous expressions, that becomes his blazing North Star. With it, everything joins.

He wants her. He wants to be with the genius of a woman who pulls faces at her friends and faces off with her enemies. The woman who spends hours creating flamethrowers for fun and then dismantles entire Galra fleets with a few keystrokes. The one to literally sweep him off his feet.

The picture comes together as a whole, a constellation bright against the black, pointing him in the right direction. He just has to take the first step.

“If you look this good without beauty sleep,” Shiro declares, “then I want to be around the first time you get a full eight hours of shut eye.”

The table falls quiet. Keith and Lance share slack-jawed stares, like they can't believe that, after all of his protesting, Shiro up and did the thing he’d said he wasn't ready to do. He can't believe it either, really. Even spoken under his breath, Hunk’s “Oh, that was smooth” is audible.

Pidge, in the middle of pushing up her nose like a pig’s, turns from Lance to him with aching slowness. She lets go of her nose. Her eyes dart from Shiro, to each side of her, and back again to him. Panic clenches around his neck: he can’t breathe, he can’t look away. What on Earth or in space compelled him to say that?

“Weeeelllp, delicious goo as always,” Lance says in a rush, “but you know, there’s nothing like a good round on the training deck before bed, so I’m just going to go.” His chair scrapes across the floor noisily as he pushes back from the table. “Keith, come spar with me.”

Sounding shocked, Keith gets out a “But you never want to train after-” before Lance cuts him short by hauling him out of his chair and towards the door. Shiro can hear Lance hiss something to Keith in a whisper, which is followed by a loud “Ooohh,” from Keith.

“Uh, yeah, you know, that reminds me, I still have a ton of stuff to do in the lab, ship stuff and… stuff that I need Coran’s help with,” Hunk says, scrambling to balance his two goo-stacked trays and drink as he stands. Coran continues eating, appearing nonplussed by Hunk’s volunteering of his time. “So I’m going to go ahead and go,” Hunk continues, “and Coran is going to come with me to help me out.”

There’s a beat of silence before Coran erupts from his seat. “Right, righto! Helping! Down in the lab. Away from here. In the lab. I’m on it!”

Coran and Hunk make a beeline for the door. Allura is on their heels, leaving with little more than, “I wasn’t all that hungry anyway.” Her voice sounds downright gleeful.

And then it’s him and Pidge.

“Well…” Pidge hedges, “that was weird.”

When Shiro breathes in, it feels like he’s swimming in food goo: everything around him thick, unclear, and impossible to tell if pleasant or not. He likes being with Pidge. He’s not so sure he likes the strange look she’s giving him.

“Yeah. I’ve never seen Hunk leave a dining room so fast.”

“Yeah.”

They stare at each other like it's their first time meeting. Nerves win out against the temptation of probing their bond; he not sure he wants to know what she's feeling. Shiro scrapes the remnants of his goo from the corners of his tray. When he swallows the meager bite, he pictures swallowing the anxious lump in his throat down as well. It works, but barely.

“I meant it,” he says as he puts his spork down. “You look good. Even without much sleep.”

Pidge's smile rises rosy like dawn: gradual and hesitant at first, as if it might peek back down under the horizon. But as it strengthens, he feels light fingers of warmth assuage his misgivings.

“I hope you're not holding out for a night of good sleep from me,” she says, “because the chances of that happening are less likely than Coran shaving his moustache.”

“That's okay,” he says. “Unlike Coran, you don't need it.”

On some level, he's aware of how ridiculous he sounds. For better or for worse (mostly for worse), the most exposure he's had to the art of flirting is through Lance, whose over-the-top methods of “seduction” often ended up with him being rejected, ridiculed or, in a significant number of cases, both. Somehow, despite all of that, Lance had attracted stolid, serious Keith. Somehow, despite all of that, Pidge responds to his flirtations in the best of ways. She blushes, rolls her eyes, and goes, “I think Coran was born with that thing. It's probably some sort of bizarro Altean lifesource.”

They spend the rest of dinner together discussing everything from the possibility of a Samson-like connection between Alteans and their hair ('Allura’s hair is way too voluptuous to be purely decorative’) to the absolute boredom created by their travel through the current system ('Zarkon came through this system once, and it was so uninteresting that he decided that even he couldn't make it worse’). It doesn't matter that they both finished eating ages ago, or that they stay at the table way longer than even Hunk and Coran would.

When they eventually part, it's with flimsy excuses and an unspoken understanding that it wouldn't be all that long until they're together again.

…

And as much as Shiro knew it wouldn't be long until he was back with Pidge, he'd rather it were under better circumstances. He can't sleep. He already knows that trying now will lead to misery.

Shiro doesn't naturally have violent tendencies, but if he did, he thinks he might punch Keith. It's not actually Keith’s fault, he knows this, but their conversation splits wide a sort of Pandora’s Box that he guesses had been lying dormant at the base of his skull now for years. For two nights straight, every latent fear he'd never acknowledged he had is shoved to the forefront, and the nightmares that, with time, had become more formless in their details if not their terror, refocus to painful clarity.

Almost all of them feature Pidge. Whether it’s the Green Lion being dragged down by the inescapable gravity of a powerful sun, or Pidge taking Matt’s place in the Galra prison camps, his dreams always rip her away from him. They only feed his growing need to see her as much as possible.

So this time, when the hot breath of waiting nightmares huffs down his spine, he doesn’t hesitate. Shiro rises from his desk, detaches his data screen from its keyboard, and leaves. He swears he hears the fury of the dodged dreams in the hiss of his closing bedroom door.

This time, Pidge's door is wide open. Light from her room cuts through the dim hallway. It draws him straight to his destination, part tractor beam, part invitation. He sidles up to the entrance and gives the doorframe a quiet rap.

Pidge's lithe frame is silhouetted in the bright glow of the screen at her desk. As expected, she's plucking away at her work. It's not much past eleven - just an hour after the Castle’s lights dim, and early into Pidge's night. She doesn't turn when he knocks, though the sharp clatter of fingers flying across a keyboard pauses.

“You know you can come in without knocking.”

Their bond has already snapped into place, the process so seamless and natural that he hadn't noticed until now. It's been getting easier and easier to connect after the recent days spent in such close contact. Given the twist of emotions he's been battling all day, Shiro should feel nervous standing at her door. But all he feels are impressions of his thoughts mingling with Pidge’s, and all of them tell him that he's right where he ought to be.

“I know, but old habits die hard,” he says. “I didn't want to invite myself in unannounced. You don't like surprises.”

She spins in her chair to face him. She’s back in her standard loungewear, and lounge she does, slinging her arm around the back of her chair and stretching her legs out. Without the thick lenses of her glasses in the way, her eyes seem all the more gold as she heaves them upwards and shakes her head.

“I don’t like bad surprises,” she clarifies. “Coran’s 'surprise’ vacation to that moon that was inhabited by semi-sentient spiders was a bad surprise. Keith’s birthday gift last year was a really bad surprise.”

Shiro grimaces at that, even as she chuckles. Where Keith had gotten the idea that Pidge loved being ambushed in the hall by training droids in homemade party hats would be a good gift for her, he doesn't know. Probably Lance. Pidge had sliced all of the sleeves off of Keith’s jackets for that.

“But I have nothing wrong with good surprises,” she continues. A smile rising to her lips, Pidge cocks her head and rests it on her fist.

The words are as welcoming as the tug he feels on their link. Without hesitation, he crosses over to the small living side of the room and props his elbows on the back of her couch. The doors shut behind him, and her room becomes a bubble, bright and detached from its surroundings.

“Am I a good surprise?” he asks.

If his attention hadn’t been fixated on her, he would miss the flash of teeth as they sink into her bottom lip. The couch makes for a solid barrier between the two, an unexpected blessing the moment after she stops worrying at her lip to say, “Technically, you’re not a surprise, since I sensed you on your way and all… but you don’t have to be unexpected to be good.”

While her words may wind around the point, the sentiments zip straight across their bond, unimpeded. He leans more heavily against the couch, unsure if he’s glad or frustrated for how it holds him back from her.

“You have a strange way of giving a guy a compliment,” he says, grin curling at his lips. Giving in, he circles the couch and drops down.

Pidge shrugs. “Pot, kettle, Shiro. I’m not good with people, or compliments, or probably even being nice. You, on the other hand, are good at people and being nice, but terrible at compliments.”

He couldn't act offended if he tried. It’s all too pleasant: her teasing smirk, the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes as she watches and waits for his response.

“Terrible? Care to explain?”

She snorts. “I'm sure you were just warming up with, ‘Unlike Coran, you don’t need it’”. A smug look crosses her face, but it doesn’t undo the splash of pink across her nose and cheeks.

He frowns and glances away. Had it sounded that awkward when he'd said it? At the time, he'd been going for genuine and heartfelt, not 'blindly grasping at straws’. Pidge seemed to react well to it, though, and she looks pretty pleased now. Shiro’s mind backs up its last sentence by two words and sticks firmly there.

Her hair, swept back into a low ponytail, falls over one shoulder, leaving the other bare. The light from her desk basks her in a bluish glow, highlighting the curve of her shoulder and the slope and shadow of her collarbone. His eyes follow the line of her arm, down to the desk and back up to where her head sits on a hand. Wisps of scars, gathered through years of fighting and fiddling, peek out from under soft arm hair. The skin stretched across her knuckles is cracked from hard use, and while he's not close enough to see them, Shiro knows she must feel the scrape of thick callous she absentmindedly strokes at her cheek with a finger.

Perhaps she had a point about his compliment technique. It was getting difficult to find enough words for the ever-growing list of traits of hers that he found captivating.

“Maybe not my finest,” he concedes. “So, give me some pointers. What kinds of compliments would you like to hear?”

He watches her reaction. At first, there is none: she peers at him and offers nothing more than a slow blink. Rationally, he knows it is impossible, but to him it is as though the whole world constricts to a single point. Every molecule of air has been compacted into such a small space; his lungs ache. There is no more to the universe than Pidge, who holds him captive in her sudden quiet.

A wordless Pidge has, and always will, put him on edge. It makes him wonder just how fast her brain must be spinning, just what the roiling twister of her thoughts will spit out first. It makes him feel millions of miles away from her, the only star in the sky he can see, but cannot reach. She bites her bottom lip again.

“Only the ones that you really mean,” she says.

He holds back a sigh of relief. “Easy enough. I always mean them.”

She leans forward in her chair and smiles. Genuine pleasure drips across their bond. This time when she looks him up and down, the gap between desk and couch seems to dwindle. She further narrows the distance when she scoots her chair forward, settles a hand on his knee, and says, “Then I guess the real challenge will be coming up with a compliment that doesn't involve Coran.”

Letting out a low whistle, Shiro shakes his head. “That… might be a little more difficult,” he teases. He strokes at his chin, pretending to think, while he lets his other hand slide over to rest atop hers.

“You’re as brilliant as Coran’s moustache is thick.”

She snorts and shakes her head. “You're terrible,” she says. Nonetheless, she turns the hand under his over, so that they press palm to palm. He takes it as encouragement to curl his fingers around hers until he's loosely holding her hand.

“I admire you more than Coran admires the Balmera.”

“Okay, that's pretty good, even for a Coran compliment.”

The color surging to her cheeks is reward enough, but then she squeezes his hand tight. The sensation travels from hand, to chest, to stomach.

“What else have you got?” she asks. Her voice wavers, missing the nonchalance he thinks they've both been aiming for. She's back to not-quite-looking at him.

Shiro grins. He’s been saving the best of the ones he'd come up with.

“Eating next to you every day makes Coran's paladin lunch more tolerable.”

“Holycrowstoooop!,” she whines. Pidge drops his hand and pushes off his knee, spinning herself back around in her chair. She hides her face in her hands, and the emotions that come across their connection are a thick and knotted jumble. It would take him ages to untangle, should he try, but for a tick he thinks he can tease out a few familiar in himself: excitement, worry, hope, affection, and something deeper, something he might know, but that trembles and retreats when his mind reaches out to investigate.

“You're supposed to give compliments you mean,” Pidge says through her fingers, “and there's no way Coran's paladins lunch is ever tolerable.”

“But it's true,” he says simply.

Pidge makes a strange sound, somewhere between a groan and a gurgle. He understands: he, too, feels a bit like drowning.

“I guess you're not that terrible at compliments,” she admits. She peels her hands from her face, but she's still facing the large data screen at her desk.

“I could use some more practice,” he says. “Would you be willing to be my test subject again some time?”

Shiro envisions the desired effect: the broad strokes of red painting cheeks and neck; the hitch of breath; perhaps, if he were lucky, her hand back in his. Instead, Pidge makes that funny gurgle-groan again. It may be different from what he was expecting, but her reaction doesn't dampen the way his pulse picks up, not in the slightest.

“I'll take that as a yes?”

“Yeah,” Pidge mumbles. “Please. But no more now. There are only so many Coran references I can handle, and I need to get through the rest of this system data tonight.”

Disappointment pecks at his chest, until she follows up with a quiet, “Besides, I think I may go into A-fib if you keep it up like this.”

He wishes she would turn around so she could see the open, awestruck look he feels molded into his face - more honest than all of his words - but he takes solace in the pluck of warmth that glides between their bond.

“Sure,” he says, just as quiet. “Will I be bothering you if I stay here while you work?”

“Of course not. Be forewarned though, I'm kinda breaking my usual schedule and staying up pretty late tonight.”

“Bold,” he says with a chuckle. “I like it.”

She doesn't reply, but it takes a long moment for her fingers to start up at her keyboard. Smiling, Shiro reclines on the couch and pulls out his data screen to continue his own work.

A satisfied semi-silence nestles between them, accented by the steady churn of Pidge’s keyboard and her occasional comments. Sometimes she's simply thinking out loud, an acknowledging hum all she requires to get back on track, but at other times she'll direct a question his way. Most of her inquiries come as sentence fragments, bits of thought that got lost at some point and found their way to her mouth. He answers when he can and probes when he can't, and they maintain that same easy flow they've had going for days. They happen without effort.

“Come take a look at this?” she asks maybe an hour later.

Having somehow made themselves one with the inflexible couch, his neck and back bristle at the prospect of moving, and it's no easy task to coerce his muscles into behaving. He rubs at his neck as he leans over Pidge's shoulder to check out what's on her screen.

The readouts are from the data they'd compiled earlier that day and reworked to begin developing a flight plan. With three stars cozied up at the center of over seventy inhabited planets, half of which were, as far as they could tell, embroiled in a Galra backed inter-planatary trade dispute, the new system promised to be far more interesting than the expanses of empty space that made up the current one. He and Pidge look over the new route the Castle’s computer plotted, weighing out the risks before ultimately agreeing to scrap the coordinates and start over.

Pidge inputs the adjusted route requirements with a few definitive strokes of her keyboard, and Shiro slides back onto the couch with a grunt.

“You can read on the bed if you want,” she says. “The couch is mega-uncomfortable.”

“I’m fine,” he replies. He shoves aside the needling Lance-voice in his head that suggests he should only accept her offer under the condition that she join him. The voice can no longer be called intrusive given its constancy, but at least Shiro has gotten better at resisting every temptation mind-Lance proposes.

“You sure? You've been groaning and rubbing at your shoulder for the last few minutes, old man style.”

His hand freezes and slips from where he'd been absently kneading at his shoulder. The crick in his neck throbs from the angle his head had been propped up at. No surprise he's feeling achy after a short time on the couch - he hadn't felt all that different after falling asleep there a few nights ago.

“I wouldn't want to impose,” he says. He rolls his head, stretching his neck, without thinking, and Pidge gives a disapproving cluck.

“One, quit fretting over whether you're being polite or not. We’ve all spent the last five years squished into alien mechanical lions that magically combine into some kind of hivemind giant punchbot. We’re well beyond formality.”

And you and I have basically been in each other’s heads for three days straight, he adds on. Words don’t cross the bond, but ideas and feelings do, and Pidge must pick up on his. She smiles.

“Two,” she continues. “All of your elderly joint popping and huffing aren’t conducive to either of us being productive. Use the bed. You'll be more comfortable.”

Just standing up again leads to a discovery of fresh aches. Pidge’s “I told you so” look follows on the heels of his uncontrolled groan. She may have a point.

“I suppose I can't argue with that logic,” he says, winding around the couch and approaching her bed.

Each of the paladin’s living quarters looked identical, and the small bed is no exception. Like his, it’s narrow but long, with a few shelves and adjustable lights inset along the wall it abuts. Unlike his, the bed is haphazardly made, sheets tossed rather than spread out across it. He's impressed she'd even bothered that much, though there's a chance she’d fallen asleep on top of the covers a few nights ago and flattened them into some sense of order then. Despite Coran's occasional threats of “inspection”, there was really no impetus for any of them to make their beds in the middle of space. Even so, as mussed as it already is, Shiro hesitates to sit. Like everything else in the past week, sitting on a bed seems much more like diving headfirst into a black hole.

With the kind of caution reserved for espionage missions on Galra destroyers, Shiro lowers himself into the bed. His eyes snap over to Pidge the moment he sits, but her attention has already flipped back to her work. He reclines against her pillows. No automated warning alarms go off; no pre-programmed robot comes to chase him away. It's a perfectly normal bed, and he's doing something perfectly normal on it. He's glad Pidge isn't paying him any mind right now. No doubt she'd be amused over his indecision.

He resumes reading on his data screen, in a position far more comfortable than the one he'd been in on the couch. Pidge plugs on.

It's just a bed. Tension slowly seeps from Shiro's body. There's nothing wrong with him being there. It’s fine. They're fine.

He drifts to sleep.
…

As before, he doesn't realize he's fallen asleep until he wakes up. The room is brighter this time, and when he recognizes the walls surrounding him as Pidge’s, he's flooded not with shock, but an almost gluttonous contentment. Pidge is still at her desk.

Sleep, even though it couldn't have been much, changes his entire outlook regarding her bed, and him being on it. Childish delight overtakes him, that sensation of knowing he shouldn't, but being unable to resist the heady pull of gratification. Shiro buries his face in Pidge's pillow and sucks in a deep breath. Of course she almost never used her bed; Pidge has occupied the room for five years and yet there remains the lingering scent of plasticy newness to the pillow and linens. Undeterred, he inhales again and catches a pleasant whiff: oranges, sweat musk, wisp of burnt plastic. Even the faintest trace of her is a comfort. It’s not much of a stretch for his sleep-laced brain to suggest he drift back to into unconsciousness as is, burrowed in her pillow and close enough to hear her tapping away her work.

Or, at least, he should hear her working. When he’d passed out, it had been to the soft clatter of her fingers on keys. It is silence that overtakes the room now.

Shiro rolls onto his side, then freezes. Pidge stands at the side of the bed, arms stretched over her head, mouth wide in silent yawn. She’s pulled her hair down. Her eyes flutter closed as her yawn trails off, and it seems like an effort for her to peel them back open again to look down at him. Even bathed in the harsh light from her desk, everything about her looks soft, from the hunch of her shoulders to the loose tangles of hair.

She scratches the back of one calf with her foot and murmurs, “Oh good, you’re awake. I was starting to think I’d have to sleep at my desk.” Her lips quirk into a smile. “I don’t know if you know this about yourself, but you’re kind of a bed hog. And a pillow hog.” Her gaze fixes on her pillow, and his arm wrapped around it.

He lets go of the pillow as if it were molten hot, sits up, and scoots back from the edge of the bed. Logic kicks back in a moment later and starts shouting about the fact that he fell asleep in Pidge’s room again, this time in her bed, and that he should probably stop doing that before he found himself in major trouble.

“I’m so sorry,” he stammers. “You should have woken me up and kicked me out.”

Pidge dismisses him with a lazy wave, and plops down on the bed next to him. “But then you would have left,” she says. Her voice is gentle but sure.

He doesn’t have an answer for that. Shiro wishes he felt as at ease as she seems lifting her comforter and wiggling to get under it. Unlike him, she doesn’t look as though her heart is about to pound through her chest.

The bed is small, not designed for more than one body. He’d fallen asleep on top of the covers, and doesn’t dare get under them now, but the bit of separation between them feels thin when her foot brushes his leg.

“It’s okay?” he chokes out. It’s different from what he’d told his mouth to say, which was Well, I should head back to my room.

Pidge turns from rearranging her pillow to stare at him. She looks unimpressed.

“Duh. Now budge over.”

Her tone permits no protest, nor does he think he could offer one even if he tried. Wouldn't want to, his mind confesses feebly. Easing over until his back hits the wall, Shiro tries to leave as much space between them as he can. It's not more than a few meager inches, but as Pidge finishes twisting and adjusting, he becomes convinced that the sliver of distance might just be the final remnants of his sanity. He rests his head on one arm to keep it from acting of its own accord and reaching towards her. In place of the glue or restraints he wishes he had, he lays his other arm flat across the line of his body and curls his hand into a fist.

“That looks uncomfortable.”

Pidge wrinkles her nose and fluffs one side of her pillow. She lies on her back, watching him from under heavy eyelids.

“It's fine.” I'm just trying not to invade your space. Or make you feel uncomfortable. Or cross a line. Or assume something I have no right to assume.

“Whatever,” she sighs. He imagines she'd roll her eyes if they hadn't already slipped closed. Raising her voice, she continues, “System, shut off lights and dim data screen, but continue running background trajectory calculations.”

Whatever voice activated system she'd installed chirps twice in confirmation. The room goes black.

He’s felt less anxious while in the cockpit of Kuro while facing down an entire Galra blockade. If it were at all appropriate, he might laugh at how painfully accurate to his character the situation was turning out to be. Star-pilot-turned-tireless-soldier afraid to sleep in a bed with a girl he has feelings for.

But the tension isn't all his; he can feel that much. If the wall he hits when he tentatively reaches out with his bond weren't enough of an indicator, the shallow breaths she takes and then holds, as if waiting, are. Perhaps he wasn't alone in experiencing the vertigo that came along with staring down a very high figurative cliff.

Minutes pass in silence. He’s left to wonder if Pidge is lying in bed just as he is: eyes wide open, body ramrod straight. She'd seemed unusually close to sleep minutes ago, but that was before they'd been drenched in the room’s darkness. Those slim inches between them turn intangible now that he can no longer see. They may as well not exist. And since they no longer exist, he may as well reach across them.

Shiro tries. He really does. His hand hovers above the space between them for a good five ticks before he loses his resolve. It's dark, after all, and Pidge has no idea about how he feels, and she's trusting him enough to let him sleep in her bed. She's allowing him to stay. He won't mess this up.

“Shiro?”

As suspected, all of the sleep has vacated her voice. She sounds as awake and aware as he feels.

“Yeah, Pidge?”

“Relax.”

Her command catches him off guard; he lets out a laugh and tenses, the opposite of what she'd ordered.

“I am relaxing,” he lies. From her snort, she sees right through him.

“For real, though. I know you were trying not to bring it up, but you already know it's okay to stay when your nightmares get to be too much.”

He does already know that, which makes it worse when he admits to himself that it's not the only reason he's there. He wants to say as much, owes it to her to say as much, but even in the anonymity of the dark, he can't find the nerve.

“Thanks,” is all he says instead.

The rustling sound of sheets and the shifting weight on the mattress aren't enough for Shiro to anticipate what happens next: a hand whacks him in the face. Pidge’s fingers roam blind along the bridge of his nose and feel down to his lips. Each light touch feels like the prick of distant stars on his skin: close enough to burn, too far to explore. His breath quavers.

“Is this your face?” Pidge asks.

Shiro nods, and she chuckles.

“Sorry,” she murmurs. “Guess that should have been obvious.”

Her hand lifts from his face and settles on his chest. She pats along his chest until she reaches his right arm, the one he'd extended towards her but a minute ago. That must have been what she was searching for: she gives a content hum, slides her hand down to his, and takes it.

“Relax,” she says again.

Which is the most painfully funny thing he's heard all night. It doesn't matter that his sense of feel is muted in his Galran arm, that the pressure and heat from her touch are but a fraction of what they'd be had she grabbed for his left hand. Straight fire still rockets up his nerves, quickening his pulse with dizzying intensity. Shiro can't tell if he's experiencing all of the symptoms of fight-or-flight, or something else, but he's certainly not experiencing relaxation.

Her fingers contract around his, hand-holding equivalent of a nervous twitch. Every part of him, from bare feet to breath, is so still that he can hear Pidge's quiet cacophony: soft thumps as her free hand adjusts and readjusts her pillow; the whisper-slide of moving fabric as her legs swim through the sheets; each long, forced exhalation. Her restlessness begs for some sort of harmony, something he'll try to provide despite his own discordant feelings.

“Are you relaxing?” he asks. He runs his thumb up and down the side of her hand.

“No. Are you?”

“No, but that's not unusual.”

They share a choked laugh. He wishes he could see her through the dark, wishes he had more to go off of than her voice, her fingers, and the flecks of feeling that manage to escape her end of the bond. There's a nudge behind his forehead. Like him, Pidge is sending out tentative feelers, trying to gauge what's happening on his end; like her, he’s constricted the passage, letting only the barest of friendly emotions by.

Which is no doubt why she turns to lay on her side facing him and asks, “Shiro, are you nervous?”

Now that she's turned, she brings their joined hands up to rest in the space between them. They are already close to touching, crammed in the tiny bed as they are, but that doesn’t stop Pidge from scooting closer. Her knees knock against his. His heart knocks against his throat.

“I am,” he says, as evenly as he can. “Are you?”

“Yeah. I didn't think I would be, but I am.”

For once, his Lance voice is oddly silent, leaving all of the uncertain, worried parts of his mind to take her words and run with them in eight different directions. What had she anticipated happening? Did she want him gone?

“Am I making you uncomfortable?” he asks. He has to rip the words out of his mouth, a painful process as his heart tries to drag them back in. He doesn't want to hear her answer, but he needs to know that he's not letting his feelings take this too far.

“No,” she says, voice startling in its sharpness. “It’s not you, per se, just-”

Rather than finish, she lets go of his hand. His stomach plummets, then ascends again when she wiggles her other hand between his pillow and neck and wraps her arms around him. She banishes even more of the distance between them.

This close, she looks different without her glasses. This close, he can see how her eyes flick back and forth, scanning his face. It’s too dark to see the flecks of honey-brown that shine out under the light, but he can see the hint of lines crinkling at the corner of her eyes, the promise of handsome wrinkles from too many hours too close to a screen. He can see the rapid flutter of her lashes and feel the puffs of warm breath touch his mouth and cheek.

“It's not you that makes me nervous,” she starts again. “Just being right here, like this-”

She cuts off and stares up at him. He watches her lick her lips. It's a little like tunnel vision, that fixation on what is a right in front of him, the sudden graying out of the world around them. He's experienced it before, those moments right before his ship or his lion spins out: the nothingness beyond his steering controls, the frigid, utter panic that consumes before impact. But instead of ice rising from his gut, it's all taut heat. Her fingers accelerate the burn when they run through the hair at the nape of his neck.

There’s so little still keeping them apart: a blanket, an inch, and his own hesitation. Two of those are eliminated when he finally rests his hand on her waist a pulls her to him. Her lips part in something like surprise, but she does not draw away. It should be awkward, laying on their sides in straight lines, one of her arms trapped under him, but delight and desire are the only things that well up within him. It would take so little to lean in and kiss her. He leans in.

“Can I ask you a question?” he breathes.

“Yeah,” she says. “But can I ask you something first?”

“Of course. Always.”

Pidge regards him in the low light, holding his gaze as her fingers make small circles along his scalp. He ignores the lurch of anticipation below his ribs and occupies himself with mimicking her motion along the small of her back.

“Shiro…” she begins. “From an academic standpoint, how would you define what's going on between us?”

He wishes he could have asked his question first. He wishes he could have kissed out an answer to her inquiry and let her know in no uncertain terms how he would define what he wanted between them. But he has to think about his choice, how best to respond to her. He chews at his bottom lip and flattens his hand against her back.

“From my perspective,” he says, words careful, “there's very little academic about it.”

Her brows dip. Perhaps not his best answer, then.

“Meaning…?” she asks.

There’s no backpedaling from here, no way to pretend this conversation hasn't started. No more evasion or avoidance. Just the two of them, a bed, a bond, and a question. He loosens his mental grip on his end of the bond and braces for the wash of feelings about to come spilling over. Need and happiness and curiosity and anxiety and affection fill him in a flood.

“Meaning I have feelings for you that go beyond that of friend or paladin or peer,” Shiro says, “and I'm hoping that you feel the same.”

Pidge freezes. The warmth from each point of contact between them lingers, but it's otherwise as if she's become a statue. He's not even sure she's breathing. In the dark, he can see nothing of her reaction but the general expression on her face - no blush or paling, no fidget of eye or flare of nose that might give her away. She simply stares at him. He reaches out in his mind to find that she hasn't just obstructed her end of the bond: it's been completely severed. He'd been too deep in releasing his feelings to notice it snap.

Every one of those released emotions bounce back, whip-like and soured by fear. Pidge isn't responding, in word or deed, and it becomes all too possible that Shiro has massively misjudged the situation. Little else could have made her rejection any clearer.

The room is dark and the air unmoving. The hard pounding of his heart is the solitary sound. He's not sure what is more unbearable: Pidge's silence or the fact that his fear may be reality. Both gnaw away at his resilience.

“I'm sorry,” he says, pulling his hand back to him. She blinks, the first sign of life since he'd last spoke. “I'm so sorry.”

“I-” she starts, but it's panic instead of blood that pumps through him now, and he reacts on instinct.

“I-I shouldn't have assumed,” he continues. Shiro sits up, resisting the tug of Pidge's arms around his neck. She lets go of him.

“Please don't think I don't value you as a friend, or a teammate, I wasn't trying to force you into anything you didn't want. I was projecting or seeing something that wasn't- it was irresponsible of me to think-”

“Shiro,” she begins, following him up. “What are you-?” Pidge peers at him, eyes narrowed, like he's speaking a different language. With as fast as his words are dropping now, he may as well be.

Shiro worms his way off the end of the bed past her and stands. “I just- I should go.”

The woosh of her bedroom doors as the open sound like an explosion in his ears; he doesn't know why everyone else isn't startled awake by the boom of it. It’s so loud that he doesn't hear her voice as it trails after him.

Dim and empty hallway greets him, the singular relief in all of this. There are no reflective patches in the halls, but even without a mirror Shiro knows what reads on his face. If he looks even half as distraught as he feels, there'd be no way of keeping what happened from Keith or Lance, or anyone else on the ship, really.

He makes it to his room in record time and activates the lights. All of the waiting nightmares he'd abandoned hours ago for the comfort of Pidge rear up in unison; he sits himself squarely at his desk, reattaches his data screen, and pulls up his reading. There's not going to be any sleep tonight, and he's going to at least go through the motions of attempting to distract himself. He forces a few deep inhales through his nose, but it's not much use.

His heart wails on his ribcage with ugly blows, rattling him from the inside. Although he knows it's not physiologically possible, it feels like the inside of his chest will be bruised from it by morning.

This is what he'd wanted to avoid, now and all those years ago, when he'd sidestepped any sort of serious relationship with anyone. How he'd imagined this all feeling is only a fraction of how hard it actually stings. He clenches his Galra fist until the metal starts to creak. Maybe he should go down to the training deck and work some of that desperation out. There weren't many more hours until breakfast, and Shiro refused to let this keep him from being the leader his team deserved. From being the leader Pidge deserved.

Instead, he sits at his desk. Cradles his head in his hands. Tries to convince himself to read, to be productive, anything.

His door opens. He knows who it is, but turns anyway.

In spite of the way Pidge rests a hip against the door frame and crosses her arms over her chest, her nervousness reads clear on her face. He should have expected that she would follow, would want to clear the air as quickly as possible. Maybe even let him down properly, gently. It’s what he should have done: stayed and discussed it with her, rather than fleeing.

“Can I come in?” she asks.

“Please. I should apologize,” he starts. “Running off like that wasn't right of me.”

Pidge enters and walks straight over. She avoids the couch across from his desk, and instead stands a few feet from where he sits, hands dangling at her sides.

“It wasn't,” she says. “I haven't seen you react like that to something in a long time. The Galra I get, but me? Am I that scary?”

He can hear her try to lighten her tone, but the joke falls flat. The effort helps, though. Maybe they can salvage something, go back to how things were before.

“You're terrifying,” he says earnestly. “A force to be reckoned with.”

She smiles, and oxygen flows back to his brain.

“You may not believe it,” she says, “but you're pretty scary yourself.”

She takes a step closer. While his brain has registered her earlier dismissal, his body has not. His skin seems to crackle with her nearness, and his fingers ache to interlock with hers.

“I think there's been a misunderstanding,” Pidge continues.

This is it. He rubs his palms on his thighs, then grips his knees.

“We should talk. Should have talked instead of me leaving.”

Pidge, of all things, snorts. While the worry has yet to clear her features, a small smile rises on her lips.

“We should talk,” she affirms. “But before we talk, I am going to talk.”

“Right,” he says. His stomach heaves below his rioting chest. “Absolutely, please go ahead.”

“Okay,” she says with an exhale. “Okay, you can do this, Pidge.”

The air between them is so thick, he wouldn't even need his Galra prosthetic to slice through it. Pidge drags a hand through her hair. It musses it further, but she doesn't seem to notice.

“Shiro, you know how you feel when they've just released the newest build on a desktop computer,” she starts, “and the specs on it are amazing, like, flawless integrated graphics, super efficient cooling, crazy processing: everything you could want.” Pidge has gone into full rambling mode now. Most of the time, it's a habit he finds endearing, but her rushed words lack their usual passionate surety, and she looks everywhere around the room but him.

“And everything about it is sleek and powerful and brilliant and gorgeous,” she continues, picking up speed, “and you can't believe that there’s a chance it could be yours? And so you kind of sit there and stare at in disbelief and act like all of your .exe files have stopped working when it asks you if you want it?”

The breaths between her strings of sentences grow sharp as her body struggles to keep up with how fast her brain must be going. To be fair, Shiro's having difficulty keeping up with her steam train of thought, and all he has to do is be the recipient.

Her final sentence is slow to sink in, but it hits him as she scrapes her stare away from some corner of the room and makes eye contact. It happens all at once: their paladin bond flares to life; he finally gets her meaning; a choir of angels springs to life in his head.

“Are you comparing me to a computer?” Shiro asks. His own voice echoes back in his ears, dancing the line between nervous and so, so hopeful.

The pink of her cheeks deepens to red, and her eyes dart back around the room. It's not enough to break their psychic connection though, and underneath the anxious tension that zings from her side of the bond, he can feel the unadulterated rush of-

“Yeah,” Pidge spits out, “yeah, I am.”

Even though she's not looking at him, she takes a step forward. In the already small space around his desk, it finally puts her within reach. Her hand is at just the right height for him to wrap in his, so he does. Her fingers twine with his a moment later.

“Not that I think of you like some kind of fancy machine,” she says. “Well, I mean, I do in a way, but only like, for the sake of analogy, because you know I really like computers and machines, even though machines are probably more Hunk’s thing-”

“Pidge.”

She stops, meets his gaze again, and it's like a warm fist encircles his lungs and squeezes, hard. Never before did he think that joy could hurt; in that moment, Shiro decides that elation is his favorite kind of pain. He has to suck in a long breath before he can continue.

“I understand,” he says.

Relief sweeps over her face, softening the hard lines of her brow. Her shoulders slump forward. He squeezes her hand.

“Thank goodness,” she breathes. “I realized what you must have thought when I froze up, and then I couldn't get my brain back online fast enough and you were gone, so I thought that you thought I didn't feel the same way, when really…” She trails off. “When in reality I have feelings for you that go beyond that of a friend or a paladin or whatever.”

For a long moment, all he can do is stare at her and grin. It's fortunate that that's all she seems capable of too. Fire blooms across his brain and courses through his chest before swinging up through his arm and crossing straight to her. Their bond feels more like a physical connection, pulsing through his entire system and strengthening as the space between them shrinks. He takes her other hand, and a single, shared feeling loops and spirals between them, ecstatic.

“I'm glad you feel the same way,” he says, though the sentiment doesn't even scrape the surface of what surges across their link.

“So am I. Next time, I'll compute and respond rather than go into a system failure.”

Raising an eyebrow, Shiro tugs Pidge close. He parts his knees enough for her to slot between them as she stands.

“Next time?” he asks.

Her eyes dip down, roving over their joined hands. She bounces from foot to foot before murmuring, “I hope you’ll tell me how much you like me again sometime.”

“I like you a lot,” he says immediately. Now that the words are out, he’s not sure he’ll be able to stop them. “I think you’re brilliant, and hilarious, and strong, and very pretty.”

Pidge goes quiet again, but this time, he’s not worried. Instead, he admires the minute shifts of her face: the upward quirk of lips, the crinkle at the corners of her eyes. It takes her a few more ticks before she shakes her head.

“System response time is still laggy,” she says with a laugh. “Will need to run some more tests before troubleshooting.”

“I’d be happy to help at any time.”

Their movement is unconscious but synchronous, either a facet of the bond or a knowing reaction to the other. Pidge raises her hands to rest on his shoulders. His skim her hips. She curves down. He looks up. Her hair tumbles from her shoulders and seems to curtain them both; the inches between them are so few that he hears clearly what she says next.

“In that case, perhaps you’d be willing to assist me now. I’d like to test something.”

“A test?” he asks. He cranes his neck up so that his nose brushes hers.

“Mhm. A test. For science.”

When her lips capture his, they also engulf his laugh. After that, his amusement takes second place to the feel of her against him. Chapped but plush, her lips move slow across his, drawing out kiss after kiss. Shiro holds firm to her hips, though there’s no indication she’ll be leaving soon.

It’s been ages since he's kissed, but with Pidge it's like flying a plane: the mechanics all come back in one exhilarating swoop. Once their mouths find the right rhythm he's free to chart the terrain of her lips, letting tongue and teeth map out new territory. Parted lips give greater freedom to explore. He tallies every gasp drawn out by scraping teeth and moan from sliding tongues, then promptly forgets that and his own name the moment Pidge swings a leg over his and drops into his lap.

No element carries the proper comparison for how it feels to be joined with her in this way; fire doesn't burn hot enough and electricity doesn't spark sharp enough and water can't drown him fast enough. It hits Shiro all at once, and all he can do is cling tighter to her and deepen their kiss.

Pidge is more than happy to oblige, lifting up in his lap to better angle herself against him. Deft and clever, she seems to know the right way to curl her tongue along his to make him shudder. He does his best to return the favor in every way possible. He leans back in the chair and she follows, letting gravity pull them flush. She plants her hands on the back of the chair for stability and dives back to his mouth.

Gravity pulls them closer, and then gravity gives a particularly petulant backwards yank on Shiro’s chair. They jolt apart as the chair tips back. Pidge’s arms flail in haphazard circles as she leans back to counteract the tilt; Shiro smacks a hand against the desk and plants his feet on the ground. The chair tips back forward.

They gaze at one another. Chests rise and stutter and fall, half-gasping, half-laughing as they regain a sense of stability. Brain still hazy from lack of oxygen, Shiro can only take in the sight of Pidge, red and dazed-looking and straddling him.

“Test results?” he manages.

“Inconclusive,” she pants. “As before, outlook is positive, but more testing is necessary.”

“Bed?”

“Bed.”

She hops out of his lap and snags his hand, pulling him up. He follows. While his body balks at the loss of contact, his mind is quick to provide a long list of ways that this change of setting could be much, much better. The voice sounds nothing like Lance, and everything like himself.

Stopping at his bedside, Pidge wrinkles her nose. Shiro comes up behind her, wraps his arms around her waist, and rests his head on her shoulder to see what she’s looking at. Everything, from the standard two pillows to his folded top sheet, looks normal.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“It’s too pristine,” she says, gesturing towards the bed. “No wonder you don’t sleep. I figure that bed’s in its original condition from 10,000 years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a layer of perfectly formed dust that’s molded to the shape of the bed. It’s immaculate.”

While she’s speaking, Shiro learns that their position allows him access to new skin. He nuzzles against her neck and lets his lips find their way to the shell of her ear. She shivers against him. Emboldened, he presses his chest to her back and murmurs, “I know a decently made bed is foreign turf for you, but if it makes you that uncomfortable, maybe we can mess it up so it’s to your standard.”

Pidge exhales hard and cranes her head to look at him. “Damn, the Garrison did a good job designing you,” she says, eyes going wide. “That suave from zero to sixty switch is cutting edge.”

“Is that the only reason you like me?” he says with a chuckle. “Because you think I’m a robot?”

She turns in his arms and pouts. “No, I like you because I think you’re a very handsome and capable robot. I have standards.”

Laughing, Shiro guides them both to the edge of the bed. Pidge lays down first, reclining against one of his pillows, then stretches her arms out to him. He eagerly complies.

Unlike the slow heat of their first kisses, when they meet again it’s with dizzying urgency. Pidge pulls his bottom lip between hers and sucks hard; he moans and takes the next opportunity he can to slip his tongue into her mouth. Hands roam and bodies twist and shift, moving but never parting. They stay joined at the mouth as Shiro rolls her on top of him, then trails his hands down her waist and over the curve of her ass.

If time were measured by the deep, gasping inhales Shiro takes in between kissing, and being kissed, senseless, then no more than three or four ticks seem to have passed. In reality, it has to be closer to half an hour that they spend, pressed chest-to-chest and mouth-to-mouth. Pidge is half-draped over him, one knee wedged between his legs to give her enough support as her hands set their own course.

With time they slow, bodies losing steam even as hearts pump more molten blood through their veins. Touches grow tender and kisses soft. Shiro breaks away first, drawing in a breath and resting back on the pillow. Pidge melts, puddle-like, her face tucked against his collarbone. Her heavy exhales leave a damp patch on his shirt. Next time, perhaps he’d remove it.

“Hunk’s going to lose his shit when he finds out,” Pidge mutters.

He massages up and down her back and processes her words. Being here with her, like this, Shiro hadn’t given much thought to the other members of the team. A big part of him resists taking a moment more to consider them, instead insisting that every ounce of his attention should be focused on the woman before him. As such, his response comes after a long lull.

“Keith and Lance will, too.”

She huffs into his shirt and shakes her head. “I thought they were acting funny. So I guess it’s just Allura and Coran who aren’t aware.”

Shiro thinks back to Coran’s frantic reaction at dinner, and all of Allura’s sly smiles. It should have been obvious even then; Allura was right about him the entire time.

“No, I think they have an idea of what’s going on as well.”

She groans a bit, and finally pushes herself up from his chest. “It was bad enough with Hunk pestering me about it for months. He’s been on such a kick since we entered the system, trying to get us together with all of his experiments and what not. Everyone else giving us a hard time is going to be torture.”

“Are you saying that Hunk planned on nearly setting the ship on fire just to set us up?” he asks. As soon as he says it he knows the answer.

Pidge bites her lip and looks away, expression caught somewhere between sheepish and mischievous. “Yeah. But I may have helped him. And gone along with everything else. You may have noticed this, but he’s way better at people and relationships than me.”

“It was probably for the best,” he assures her. “Word on the ship is I’m pretty oblivious to my own feelings, let alone someone else’s.”

She doesn’t disagree, nor does she expect her too. Instead, she wraps his hand in hers and says, smiling, “I’m glad you figured it out.”

“Me too.”

Without letting go of his hand, she slips off of him and settles down at his side. He tucks his free arm under her and watches as she gets comfortable. He can’t say he’s ever experienced the sensation of his heart fluttering, but it does so now. The emotion that’s sailed across their bond breaks back down into its component parts: affection, safety, happiness, contentment. It gives him the confidence to ask his next question, knowing that she won’t rebuff or reject.

“So, how do you want to approach this?” he asks. “Us? And them?”

She gives a soft hum, thinking. “I’d like to be with you, like this, for however long is right. Hopefully that’s a long time,” she starts. “Titles aren’t really important to me - friend, partner, teammate, girlfriend, whatever - because I feel like whatever we have going on between here,” Pidge taps her temple, then runs a finger from his temple and down his jaw, “makes more sense than anything else.”

He takes her hand and presses a kiss against her knuckles. “I like partner,” he says. “It makes it sound like we could get in trouble together.”

Her eyes narrow, but her smile sticks.

“You’ve never gotten in trouble a day in your life,” she deadpans. “And don’t try to deny it.”

“I’ve gotten into trouble plenty,” he protests. “You just didn’t know me then.”

“I don’t believe it, but I’ll ask Keith. If anyone has dirt on you, it’s him.”

A drop of panic hits his stomach - who knows what Keith, under the influence of Lance, would tell Pidge about Shiro’s Garrison days (which were, admittedly, boring outside of a few extreme exceptions) - but it’s quickly soothed when Pidge arches up and kisses the corner of his lips. Her touch leaves a warm spot on his skin and deep in his chest. There was nothing he wanted, or needed, to hide from her.

“Speaking of Keith,” he says, “How do you want to handle telling everyone?”

Sighing, Pidge rolls her eyes. “They’re going to be so obnoxious.”

“Uh huh.”

“Has Lance been making your life miserable about it?”

“He certainly has.”

“And Keith?”

“Less so, but he’s been more persistent.”

A sly look crosses Pidge’s face. The smile she gives him is like an injection of jetfuel straight to his bloodstream. He draws her in closer. Her eyes focus on a point just beyond him, into some space where she’s no doubt calculating what’s about to come.

“What if…” she starts. “What if we didn’t tell them yet?”

Oh, now that was a curious idea.

“And kept them thinking that we were still unaware of each other’s feelings?” he adds on.

That sly look turns utterly wicked, and when she grins, she bares teeth. “It would eat them all up.”

“They’d lose it,” he says. “It wouldn’t be fair to keep them on edge for so long.”

He can hear his heart hammering away in his ears, and the sensation that charges across their link from Pidge is tinted dark red and tastes like desire. He pushes himself up and over, bracketing her with his body.

“Just for a little while,” Pidge says. She licks her lips. “To see how they react.”

Shiro smirks. “For science?”

Pidge chuckles. He feels her fingernails drag down his back.

“For science,” she confirms. “And for fun.”

Shiro drops down to take possession of her lips. It would be fun.