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For as long as she kept moving, Pidge really thought she was ok with everything that had happened - everything she'd done. There were new things to do now that the Castle was theirs again, like taking care of Lance (or, at least, hovering around while people who could more easily carry him took care of Lance), getting their systems back online, and cleaning up the messes Coran sent her toward. Those things were important, and they kept her from having to think too hard.
Lying in bed, trying to sleep, was less good. Much less good. She was used to tortured thoughts, but she was used to them being about her family. She was used to missing them, and worrying about what was happening to them, and feeling guilty that she hadn't already taken her lion and gone to save them. But those were things she could tell herself she wasn't responsible for, mostly.
She and the rest of them had been under direct attack. She hadn't had time to leave. It wasn't her fault her family been taken. It wasn't her fault she hadn't been accepted into the Garrison earlier to get the training to go with them to Kerberos. It wasn't her fault she was too young. It wasn't her fault she was a girl. It wasn't her fault. None of it was her fault.
The mantra didn't fix anything, but it let her squash all those feelings down and out of the way and eventually, if she squashed hard enough, it let her sleep and snatch a little rest around the nightmares.
Now, she had no mantra, and her feelings refused to squash.
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the Galra soldier again. The one she'd killed. She couldn't be sure he was dead, of course. He'd fallen, but she hadn't seen him land. She also hadn't seen Rover come back, and she'd noticed that Coran kept sending her as far away from the power core as he could while they were cleaning up.
She had probably killed before. She realized that, and she'd sort of realized it before, because she'd known, mentally, that when Voltron destroyed a ship full of people it meant many of those people were dead, but that hadn't been her. Not really. Not the way that counted, the way she could feel in her chest as she was lying here, trying to breathe slowly even when her heart was racing.
Haxus was different. He'd spoken to her. He'd had a name, and a face, and his face wouldn't leave her head, his face, first intimidating, then amused, then, in the last moment before he fell too far for her to see, completely terrified. She balled her hands into fists, hoping she could convince herself they weren't shaking.
Nothing she said to herself took away the feeling in her stomach, nauseous and heavy at once. It was him or me. He was the bad guy. If they'd taken the lions, we'd all be dead. The whole universe would be in danger. I had to do it. Nothing. Her stomach felt the same. Her head kept spinning, and her heart kept pumping, louder in her ears, and it was still hard to breathe like she needed to breathe, slow and steady.
I didn't mean it. It was just an accident. He tripped. He could have caught himself, but he didn't. It was an accident. I didn't mean it. It wasn't even me. Rover just wanted to protect me. We didn't mean to kill anyone. It just happened. It happened, and I was sad, and - oh, quiznak, I was sad about Rover. I was sad about a robot, and a real person was dead and I was sad about a robot and-
She tried to shove that stream of thoughts away, too, clenching her fists tighter, until her short nails dug into her palms and started to hurt. Don't think about that. Don't think about that. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Haxus fell in front of her again, just like he had every time she'd closed her eyes, terrified, and with that awful, choking, gargling, scream she couldn't get out of her head, either, the scream and the zapping and the - the zapping. Her eyes snapped open again as she realized it. There had been no zapping. He'd screamed, but it had just been a scream. It hadn't been - this. It hadn't been the sound that was still ringing in her ears and wouldn't leave. That had been-
She tumbled frantically out of bed, hoping she could make it to the bathroom before she threw up. Her feet almost slid out from under her, but she managed to keep upright and stumble down the hall toward the end.
The Altean bathroom had taken some time to get used to, and she didn't quite know how she was supposed to throw up in what passed for an Altean toilet, but the sink had a big enough drain - it would do - it had running water - and it was right there, so close -
She grabbed the edges of the counter as she vomited into the sink, her eyes watering. She was glad she'd already taken off her glasses to go to bed, and even gladder that her hair was short now, out of the way. As the heaving stopped, she realized she hadn't closed the door behind her, but her legs were shaking too hard for her to feel comfortable stepping over toward it.
She coughed, hard, but nothing more came up. That was good, or it would have been, if she'd felt less awful and shaky and like she had a lump in her throat. Her skin felt too tight and too hot, especially across her back, and the only thing about her that felt solid was her grip on the counter, her hands squeezing the edge so hard her knuckles were turning white. She spat into the sink and felt a little better.
She forced herself to let go of the counter with one hand and turn on the tap to run the water. It made her feel lopsided until she could put her hand back and just stand there, breathing, and holding the counter, and listening to the water run, and trying to calm herself down, to ride out the next few bouts of coughing, to calm down, to calm down.
Shiro was too quiet. He was always too quiet, and he was still too quiet, and when he walked all the way into the bathroom and put a hand on her shoulder without her hearing him coming, she was glad he had that shock of white hair at the front, because the contrast of light and dark was enough to tell her who he was even without her glasses.
"Hey, Pidge, you ok?"
She didn't know what to say to that. She wasn't ok. She obviously wasn't ok. But if she were anywhere else, she'd pretend to be, and Shiro might be expecting her to pretend to be here, too, and part of her wanted to.
"I'm - I'm -"
She could tell him she'd just eaten too much at dinner. Coran had really outdone himself trying to feed them all the healing foods he could think of, and most of them had tasted bad enough on the way down, and she could lie. She could lie.
"Do you want me to go get your glasses?" Shiro asked, like not having an answer had been an answer in itself. She still didn't know what to say, so she just nodded, soundlessly, and tried to pretend the motion didn't make her feel a little dizzy.
She could almost hear his footsteps around the sound of the water, if she listened hard enough. He was fine. He was just fine. He was healing already. He was gonna be fine. Even though she'd-
By the time he got back, she was throwing up again, and she knew she wasn't going to be able to lie this away. He set her glasses down on the counter, safely out of the splash zone, and turned to get a cloth out of the cabinet behind her. She got ahold of herself again, pulling herself together until the retching turned into coughing turned into being able to breathe again, and Shiro ran the cloth under the water in front of her and then laid it gently across the back of her neck.
"That better?"
She nodded, this time without getting so dizzy. His other hand touched her shoulder, tentatively, for a moment, and then he started rubbing her back, between her shoulderblades. She let him, trying to calm down, trying to get a grip on herself again. She was going to have to explain this. Somehow, she was going to have to explain. She was going to have to get the words out. She didn't know if she could.
She started counting out the seconds of each breath, timing them against the slow, steady motion of Shiro's hand running softly from shoulder to shoulder and back, and it was almost enough. It was better. She was calm. She might be calm enough.
"Can you hand me my glasses?" she asked.
Shiro did, still not saying anything, and Pidge took another deep breath. She'd spoken. A complete sentence, and everything. She'd managed to get words out without throwing up. Just not the right words. Not the hard words.
"Do you need a glass of water? Do you want to go sit down somewhere?"
Shiro didn't sound demanding, but it still felt like a lot, like she had enough to do just trying to hold everything together, and she shook her head. She did want water, probably, and she did want to sit down, but she didn't want to leave the bathroom yet, not when she had so much she had to say, or not say, or deal with somehow, and she couldn't face the idea of moving so far and taking so much help from Shiro and then saying what she had to say to him. She shook her head a moment longer than she needed to, but Shiro didn't seem to notice.
"No, I'm just - I'm gonna sit down here," she said. "Just in case."
It was a relief turning around and sliding to the floor, off her shaky legs. She let Shiro support her, a hand on her elbow, while she held the washcloth against the back of her neck with her other hand so that it wouldn't fall off. After he turned the water off, she let him situate himself next to her, sitting down with his legs out in front of him while she pulled her knees up to her chest. He raised his hand like he might want to rub her back again, but then he put it back down again. She wasn't sure if he'd changed his mind in general, or if he'd just realized it was his Galra arm instead of the human one.
For a minute they just sat there in silence. Pidge kept one hand on the washcloth on the back of her neck, pressing the cool cloth against her skin where it still felt too hot. Shiro looked periodically over toward her, but seemed to be trying not to stare.
Eventually, she felt like she had to say something. She just wasn't sure what.
Shiro beat her to it, "Are you feeling any better?"
Was she? Her stomach was, but her heart still felt like it was being squeezed inside her chest and she was still afraid that if she couldn't stop thinking about everything, she was going to lose it again.
"A little," she answered. It was mostly true. She focused on breathing for a second, because if she focused hard enough on it she could distract herself completely with the tight feeling in her chest and the shakiness through her arms, and she didn't have to think about why she felt that way.
"Think it's something you ate?"
She didn't. She considered lying, again. Then she didn't. "Uh-uh." She shook her head, not ready for words yet, and tucked her face into her knees so she didn't have to look at Shiro.
"Yeah," Shiro answered calmly, "I was afraid of that. You had a rough day."
Pidge looked up, startled, "No, I didn't! I mean, Lance is in the infirmary and y-" She cut herself off, because there might be a decent chance that there was nothing left in her stomach, but that didn't mean she wasn't still going to throw up if she had to say out loud that Shiro had been tortured because of her.
She switched tracks. "And those Galra soldiers - we have Sendak locked up, but the rest of them are-" There was more she couldn't say there, too. She clamped her mouth shut, breathing through her nose and trying to fight the sudden ringing in her ears. She buried her face back in her knees and shook her head at Shiro again, hoping he'd leave well enough alone.
"The rest of them are dead," he finished for her, bluntly but gently, "The rest of them are dead, and you feel responsible. I'd say that counts as a rough day. Rougher than the rest of us."
She shook her head again, but she didn't know what words should go with it. She didn't know what words she'd be strong enough to say, even if she did know.
Shiro put a hand on top of hers, where it was wrapped around her knee, "Pidge, I mean it. The first time you - the first time somebody dies and it's because of you, it's awful. It's supposed to be awful. It's - I'd be worried if it wasn't affecting you. Lance is gonna be fine. He's gonna come out of that pod tomorrow and he's gonna be just fine. He probably won't even be much different. But you will be."
She thought she might already be different, but she wasn't sure 'suddenly having a complete meltdown' was what he meant. She turned her head to look at him, still propping her cheek on her knee. "What kind of different?"
Shiro smiled, but it was weak and only mostly reassuring, "You'll have to carry what happened." Maybe he did mean 'suddenly having a total meltdown.' "It doesn't have to mean you're a different person, though," he continued, "It doesn't mean you'll love your family less or care less about saving people, or that you'll have to be something totally different. But it's heavy and sometimes you'll feel that a lot, and sometimes you'll feel it a little, but you'll still feel it, like you didn't before."
She wanted to ask him how much weight he was carrying, but that was too close to acknowledging the other thing she couldn't afford to talk about yet. She wanted to ask how she was supposed to carry something like this when she couldn't just shove it off to the side and pretend it wasn't there, but that seemed like too much. Finally, she asked, "Am I gonna keep throwing up? Because I am not a big fan of that."
Shiro thought for a moment. "Probably not. Or... not about this. I mean, yeah, you might. And you probably will if you have to kill somebody else. But you definitely won't forever."
Pidge rolled her eyes, "Reassuring."
Shiro snorted and leaned over to shove her gently with his shoulder. "For the record, I threw up the first 3 times I killed somebody in the ring, and then I stopped. So probably just a couple more times. Or we can hope you don't have to kill anybody again, and then maybe never."
Suddenly, it wasn't reassuring at all. The nausea crawled back into her stomach again, as she thought about Shiro. She'd chosen to be here, more or less. She hadn't wanted to kill, but she'd accepted the role of Paladin. She'd stayed instead of running, and put off running, and she'd gotten here herself. Shiro hadn't chosen to be captured by the Galra. He hadn't chosen to be somewhere he'd have to kill. He'd felt like this and worse, and he hadn't even chosen it. He'd felt like this and he'd gotten away and now he was back into the thick of it all over again and instead of helping him she'd -
She couldn't keep thinking about that. She couldn't keep holding it in. She was going to throw up again, if she didn't cut off this feeling, the nausea rising in her again.
"I'm sorry I let you get tortured!" she blurted out, suddenly, looking down toward the floor.
"Whoa," Shiro sounded surprised, "Wait. Pidge, I- Pidge, look at me."
She didn't want to. She didn't. But he'd asked and he was being so nice, and she owed him after she'd let him get tortured. She forced herself to meet his eyes. They were dead serious, looking straight back into hers.
"Pidge," he said, voice completely steady, "When I told you to not to turn yourself in, I meant it. Ok? I meant it. You did the right thing."
There were a thousand things she wanted to say, a thousand ways she wanted to say that no, she hadn't, but what came out was, "I could hear you screaming."
"I know," he answered gently, "I know, and I'm sorry, Pidge. You shouldn't have had to go through that. But you might have to do it again."
She shook her head, almost on instinct.
"Save yourself first," he said, still deadly serious, "Save yourself and the others. I will be ok. I can take it. Anything they dish out. You and the others might not be able to. And if we all get caught, then we're finished. Voltron is finished. The universe is finished. And I - You made the right call."
She shook her head, more fiercely this time, things falling into place so that she suddenly knew what to say. "No. Don't talk like that. We're a team now. I shouldn't have left you behind."
"You didn't. You rescued me."
"I got caught. And I wasted time doing it. Time you could have spent not getting tortured."
"Time you bought for the others to get there. Time you used to save us from getting killed as soon as he had all of us together."
"He was hurting you!"
Shiro took an unusually deep breath, glancing suddenly out the door and into the hallway.
"Ok," he said, getting up and closing the door, "Ok, let me just - don't tell the others about what I'm gonna show you." He unzipped his vest and shrugged his shoulders out of it. "I can handle the pain, Pidge. I can. I mean it."
Pidge suddenly felt very uncomfortable. She started blushing even before he peeled off the undershirt he wore under everything like a second skin. In an instant, she was very aware of how small the bathroom was and of the fact that he was the only one who knew she was a girl. She didn't want to look, but she wanted to know what he was doing, so she kept glancing up and then away again, feeling awkward.
Once his shirt was off, Shiro didn't meet her eyes. He folded the undershirt and put it on the counter, watching his own hands as he did it and taking several more slow, steady breaths, like was the one who had to force himself to stay calm now. Then he slid down to sit against the wall across from her, staring at the ground.
She felt like she should look away, but she couldn't. He had scars all over his body, criss-crossing his torso and running at random intervals up and down his remaining arm. She'd known about the scar across his nose, but these were different, some smaller and fainter but some even larger or angrier-looking.
He held his arm up in front of him, still not meeting her eyes. "Most of these are from the gladiator ring. They weren't - it wasn't torture, really. The people I fought, they didn't want to be there either, but none of us wanted to die and so we - these aren't anybody's fault."
He pointed suddenly to an ugly burn mark that ran along his side. Around the primary burn were thin, branching offshoots that told her whatever burned him there had been electrical. "This one, they did on purpose. Trying to make me stop fighting them."
He worked his way around his stomach and chest, running his fingers over his scars and providing the scarcest, tiniest bits of information about them. "On purpose. On purpose. Accidental stabbing. On purpose. This one's actually from when I had my appendix out as a kid. This one's from the ring. This one was on purpose."
Pidge felt flushed again, hot through her face and neck and chest, but it wasn't a blush, and she wasn't feeling sick. She didn't usually like feeling angry, because usually when she was angry, she also felt helpless, but this time the anger felt good in spite of the fact that she couldn't do anything about it. It felt clean, or at least cleaner than her guilt from earlier. She reached a hand out to grab Shiro's.
"Shiro, stop."
He finally looked at her, for the first time since he'd started to get undressed. He looked uncomfortable, and a little embarrassed, "Sorry. It's - it's too much, isn't it? I-"
"You shouldn't have had to go through that," she interrupted him, "That's what it is. It shouldn't have happened. But it's not your fault."
He twisted his hand around in hers, squeezing her fingers for a moment. "I know. But it did. We're out here. Zarkon is out here. We have to stop him, and if that means I have to get hurt, then that's what that means. I can take it. But I can't just let the universe get taken over by the Galra. I can't sit by and watch other people get hurt just because I don't want to hurt anymore. I can't. So if I tell you to leave me, I need you to do it."
"I know," she said, and it was finally true. "But it's not just you, Shiro. What about the rest of us? I already lost Dad and Matt. Allura and Coran lost everything. We can't lose you, too. And the rest of us need a leader."
"The rest of the you have Allura." Shiro was looking away again, like he couldn't meet her eyes.
Pidge shook her head, "We need her in the Castle. You know that. We need her for the big picture stuff, the stuff we can't see from the ground. We need you in the middle of the fight. 'Cause all that stuff? You survived that. You made it out. It's not just... you're more than this." She pulled her hand out of his to gesture toward his scars. "You don't have to just take what they throw at you. You don't have to be the one to sacrifice yourself."
He looked back up at her, meeting her eyes again, "But I can. If I have to, I can. And I know that. And now you know that. So you can leave me if you have to, and you can make sure the others do, too. But only if you have to." He cracked a smile, exhausted but real, "And anyway, I came in here to comfort you, not the other way around."
Pidge laughed, surprising herself by the fact that she was laughing and by the fact that it didn't seem to jostle her stomach or make her feel weird. "Well, I'd say we both had rough days."
Shiro snorted in amusement, "Yeah, I guess so."
After another moment of silence, Shiro clambered to his feet and snatched his shirt off the counter, pulling it on quickly. Relief flashed across his face, just for an instant, as soon as he was covered again. As he moved, she'd caught a glimpse of his back, of the scars he hadn't shown her. There were more of them, and they blended into one another, merging into an ugly, tangled pattern she couldn't really make sense of, especially not when it was so quickly covered up. Every instinct she had told her everything on his back had been put there on purpose and she felt another wave of anger.
She'd made the right choice. She'd chosen to stay here and fight Zarkon with the rest of her team. That had been right. She'd chosen to stay out of Sendak's sight instead of turning herself in, and to let Shiro be tortured until she could sneak in to rescue him. It was harder to feel like that had been right, even now, but at least it hadn't left any new scars. At least his only visible new injuries were scrapes and bruises that would fade. But she was never going to let the Galra capture him again. Not if she could help it. And not without attempting a rescue.
Shiro turned awkwardly to look at her once he'd put his shirt back on, like he wasn't sure what to do with himself.
Pidge held a hand out for him to help her up. "How about that drink of water?" she asked, trying to lighten the mood and to escape the conversation she didn't know what else to say in, "I'm feeling a little better, I think."
Shiro smiled as he reached down to haul her to her feet. "I think I can manage that."
Her damp washcloth, not so damp now, fell off her neck as she stood up, so she bent to get it and throw it into the laundry bin they'd kept in the corner ever since Coran got tired of chasing down Lance's socks when he did their laundry. Shiro shrugged his vest back on, but didn't zip it up.
"Actually," she said as he opened the door again, "Let me brush my teeth first. Then water."
He nodded. "We'll check the kitchen in case there's something non-awful to eat."
She snorted, "Yeah, 'cause that's likely."
It felt weird to be talking about nothing after so much something, but it also felt good. Normal. Steadying. They'd talked about it all, and now they didn't have to talk about it. It was good. And even with all of the something they'd been talking about, she was glad Shiro was still here. She didn't want to be alone right now.
She brushed her teeth and rinsed her toothbrush, and then shoved Shiro affectionately with her shoulder on her way past him into the hallway, "So, do you always raid the kitchen for midnight snacks? I thought that was just Hunk."
"Just Hunk? I bet at least half of us have done it..."
As she walked to the kitchen with Shiro, chatting about nothing, she could feel the last of the tension relaxing through her back and shoulders. She didn't know how long it would last, but it felt good to know that even with the tough stuff, she wasn't alone.