Archive of Our Own ^beta

I.

In second grade, Shiro wrote: I want to be an astronomer when I grow up. Jeanne (she’s my second cousin but she says I can just call her cousin) took us on a camping trip to the park with the big weird trees and I saw how shiny the night sky can be away from the city. I couldn’t finish counting them even though I stayed up all night, but she said that astronomers get to learn everything about them which sounds cool even if we haven’t found any aliens living on them. She said the best part is that the stars and planets won’t make me sad, because she doesn’t want me to have a job like hers (that was a joke).

Also, my mom says this means I need to learn math really good so please don’t make it too hard. I’m okay with a little hard.

“Park with the big trees?” his teacher asked. “We’re doing a project on that this semester, Shiro, so if you have any pictures from your trip I’d love for you to bring them in. You can share them with the class!”

“Okay, Ms. Lopez,” replied Shiro, wondering only if she’d remember what he had said about math. He had no idea where his mother had saved their pictures.

“You want to be an astronomer?” his new best friend said later, as they puzzled over a thousand-piece image of an octopus on the floor of the cramped apartment that Shiro shared with his mother and grandmother. Marshall had dark curly hair and often wore a scowl on his face, but he’d trusted Shiro to bury him in sand at Oxnard Beach several times over, which was as good a handshake of eternal friendship as any. For the first time, Shiro saw him look crestfallen. “But I want to be a lawyer! How are we gonna be in the same classes when we’re bigger?”

Shiro shrugged. “Then let’s take them all together anyway. Like partners,” he said. “Want strawberries? There’s some in the fridge.”

After a few weeks, he and Ms. Lopez realized with sheepish embarrassment that they hadn’t been thinking of the same big trees. Sequoias couldn’t possibly be surpassed in height by Joshua trees, of course; but to a boy seven years old, freshly uprooted from Japan and ferried over an ocean to be replanted in a new country, who was still learning to iron his words into a more perfectly starched diction and train his tongue in the invisible difference between l and r, that distinction had mattered little. With leaves sharp as spears and flowers proffered in creamy white clusters, the twisting, spiky trees had stretched up to the sky in prayer—far beyond the reach of his own skinny arms. That had been grand enough for him.

He’d held his breath, and learned then to summon the sound of silence like a magic trick.

Shiro could no longer live with silence so easily in his head. Sitting on Keith’s ramshackle bed with his back against the wall, he couldn’t crush the thoughts that crawled around in his mind and stumbled over each other like spiders trapped in a pit. How did I get onto the escape ship? Does she think I was the first to go, or did—did I lose like she wanted me to? If I’m already declared dead, can I still even pull a Glenn like we planned? Where did they send Matt and Dr. Holt? What did they mean by Voltron? Are the Galra coming after me?

The desert wind sang through the crevices between wall and window frame with a faint, eerie whistle that lingered in Shiro’s ears like a ghost, long after the displaced air streamed over his skin, and left little opportunity for him to listen without distraction to the tinkering that was happening one room over. Hunk was hard at work on his mystery energy detector, while Pidge assisted and Lance cheered them on, so Shiro had taken his leave with rest as an excuse. In truth, he needed time to adjust. When the three cadets had introduced themselves, Shiro had been startled at the nervous but frank warmth in Hunk’s eyes, the oddly familiar curiosity in Pidge’s words, the disbelieving amazement in Lance’s handshake—and then was startled that this should surprise him at all, and felt sick with relief. He knew there were details buried beneath the muddled surface of his memory, but a disorienting chill had settled behind his temples and stirred itself to menace him whenever he tried to piece together his experience.

Shiro had spent too long in an environment that considered him worth nothing but a tool.

The stars and planets won’t make you sad, his cousin had said once upon a distant time, her eyes shadowed. Well, Shiro thought, she wasn’t exactly wrong. Neither of them could’ve expected the Galra. Neither of them would’ve imagined one could learn to be so familiar with pain.

He heard the door scuff against the floor as it swung open, and instinctively tensed as he looked up. On the threshold, Keith hesitated—a thinner, more windswept figure than Shiro had preserved in his memory, caught by disquiet in the empty space between them. Then he tapped the door back against its frame with his heel, came closer to the bed, and held out a glass of water to Shiro. “I have food too,” he said in a low voice. “I brought some out to the others while they’re working on that detector. Wasn’t sure if your stomach’s up for that much yet. But here.”

Shiro had never heard Keith speak so softly before, as if he were afraid that the slightest disturbance might dissolve the sight before his eyes: a waking dream, a glimmering mirage in the desert. So Shiro reached out with his left hand, now his only flesh hand, to cover Keith’s fingers with his own, and tilted the glass against his lips. “Thanks,” he said; downed the water, and then let go. “Thanks,” he repeated on autopilot. How hard was it to kill a pit of spiders, he wondered wearily, for the questions crawling in his head wouldn’t die. Far easier to seize upon the mundane, and pretend at some sort of normality. “So… you even have plumbing for this shack? A miracle well?”

Perhaps not so normal.

Keith was staring down at the empty glass in his hand. At his hand, where Shiro had touched him. “Sometimes I go into town for supplies.” He flicked his eyes back up to Shiro’s face. “But, uh, I can leave if you want to rest.”

“It’s fine.” It would be fine. Some nice company, whispered Marshall’s voice in his head. How he’d longed for someone to speak with, if only to pretend for a snatched moment that he wasn’t an imprisoned thing. “Just how long have you been living here? On your own? You said you got kicked out of the Garrison…” He frowned. “How’d that happen?”

“I left months ago. The Garrison didn’t like me asking questions,” Keith said bluntly; and explained no further, as though one’s expulsion from a government military-affiliated institution to go on a mysterious treasure hunt, guided by strange energies and lion drawings, was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs.

“… Okay. Months,” Shiro echoed doubtfully. “What did they say it was?”

“Your pilot error, obviously.” The words that slipped from Keith’s mouth were bitter with incredulity. He sat down next to Shiro, the mattress squeaking in protest.

Shiro had meant Keith’s expulsion, but he let the conversation change its course. He’d have other chances to push for details, when Keith was in a chattier mood about himself, and at any rate he could imagine all the ways Keith could choose to be insubordinate when he cared. “Huh. I never did guarantee one hundred percent success.”

“Shiro. We—I knew it was bullshit.”

“Sure it was. They received our data for the early samples we took from the Kerberos surface, and they knew we weren’t preparing for the ascent stage yet. But they wouldn’t have any transmission from us about—aliens. I’m not surprised.” Shiro sighed. “It’s like the Psyche orbiter investigation. The government aren’t going to publicly acknowledge that kind of talk, even if they know it wasn’t pilot error.”

“It was bullshit,” Keith repeated.

“Keith,” said Shiro, slowly, deliberately, “I knew what I was signing up for when I came to the Garrison to become a pilot. If I got angry about that—well, there are too many things I’d be angry about.” His right arm was a disturbingly comfortable weight at his side. His face carried the scar of a slash that had just missed blinding him. His mind had a year’s worth of memories buried six feet under. And even before the Galra, any one ordinary person’s life couldn’t be forgotten. He had long since learned to transform anger and grief into a more patient determination, to offer himself up as the reliable even keel, but that was not a lesson so easily taught or remembered—or wanted. “It’s not like you could steal a spacecraft on your own and fly off to Kerberos to look for us, right?”

The mulish look on his face seemed to indicate that Keith had indeed, at one point in time, entertained such an impossibility.

“Now that I think about it, don’t answer that question,” Shiro muttered. “But to be looking for who-knows-what because you felt something”—what the hell were you thinking?—“I don’t understand, did you start sensing the energy before or after the Garrison booted you?”

“It sounds strange, whichever way I explain it,” Keith grumbled. “And I know I’m strange. Does that really matter?”

Shiro raised his eyebrows. “Well, I see you’ve mellowed out after all,” he said, and found himself unable to suppress a smile.

Keith let out a long sigh, but the line of his mouth curved to mirror Shiro’s own. “If you say so,” he said. He hadn’t looked away from Shiro since he’d sat down, and Shiro felt as though Keith’s close gaze laid him bare like some unworldly specimen opened up on a table. What had changed within him, what had remained the same—

Just look at his eyes! Jeanne might have joked. As the greats would say, let me count the ways…

But still: he was no longer alone. Shiro shifted his weight, and pressed his shoulder to Keith’s in wordless thanks.

“I was thinking,” Keith began haltingly. “Before Hunk finishes the detector and we head out. Did you want to send a message, or…?”

The temptation of Keith’s words was smothered by a sudden wave of numb terror that flooded Shiro, turning to ice in his heart, ice in his mind. Aliens are coming! he’d shouted to the Garrison guards. But they hadn’t come yet, he reminded himself. Not here.

“… I don’t know,” he replied, trying to keep his breathing even. He couldn’t allow his voice to tremble—not now, not here. “The Garrison knows I’m back, so it’ll be keeping tabs on anyone I might contact. I’m surprised it hasn’t found us on an area sweep yet. It’s not that we’re hiding from the Garrison, but we don’t have the time, and if the aliens are heading this way—“

He didn’t remember how he’d escaped, how he’d made it to the pod, how long he’d traveled, but one truth he knew: the cosmic distance between Kerberos and Earth would seem laughably trivial to the Galra. With their resources, they could find him. Through him, they’d discover other entities of interest to them, or of no interest at all—a spacecraft, a planet, or a human, to be used or discarded. They’d kept him because he’d proven himself, and the Holts… Shiro stared at the opposite wall, but his focus had wandered elsewhere and his eyes didn’t take in the cracks that spidered out across flaking plaster. “If we want to track this energy to find Voltron, we’ll have to move quickly,” he bit out at last.

Or else the Galra would come first. He’d have nothing with which he could defend—and so have nothing left to defend.

“The Garrison’s probably… it’ll contact your family. Do some sniffing around,” Keith said, his voice subdued. “Just from that, they’ll know there’s something strange going on, Shiro. They’d want to know that you’re here. That you’re alive. I—it was hard when you were gone.”

A held breath; a pause.

“… Shiro. Are you okay?”

Shiro sat in silence. He was thinking of home.

II.

The Shirogane family apartment had only ever played host to one bookshelf. His grandmother Yumi’s prized chokin vase, which she insisted was a true antique and no mere reproduction, laid claim to the highest, most exalted shelf. His mother Aki’s used editions of TOEFL study guides and their family photographs occupied the next tier of height and importance, while a disorganized library book collection took up the remaining space. Its selection changed every Sunday when young Shiro and his grandmother visited the public library: he went hunting for the titles that his basketball teammate Jamie proclaimed were her new forever favorites, while Yumi aimed to trounce every other member of the local chess club because she hated to lose at anything—an argument, a game, a bet. She often bemoaned Shiro’s lack of interest in the club, for he was more likely than not to be absent from her side and found curled up in the reading corner with a sci-fi paperback.

“What is that going to teach you?” Yumi would grumble. “So you… are planning to fight sand worms?”

“Grandma,” he’d reply, with all the wide-eyed earnestness he could muster as a boy not far past his first decade, “it’s important. Don’t you want me to be prepared for the unexpected? That’s what Mom always says.”

“Prepared? You should be prepared to find a job to make sure you don’t starve.”

“Jeanne says astronomers are cool!”

“Jeanne is being nice, Takashi. I’m being realistic.”

Yumi didn’t think much of Shiro’s future career. Nor did she think much of the nickname he’d picked for himself once they moved to California. “It’d be absurd if I didn’t get to call my own grandson by his name,” was her only comment, and Shiro had been taught by his mother to know better than fight a losing battle.

Marshall believed that no battle was a lost battle. “Just think about it in a different way,” he’d said to Shiro later, his attention distracted by the ring of the day’s last school bell. He bent down, fiddling the old dial on his locker, and narrowed his eyes at the numbers. Marshall could use glasses, Shiro knew, but had refused to tell his parents: a pair of good glasses wasn’t cheap and his sister Nina needed her medicine more. On the other hand, the occasional squint was free.

Marshall continued, “Maybe later she decides you’re right, or maybe you decide you want to switch back, so don’t you win either way? You just gotta tell me if you do change your mind. But hey, I was gonna ask—want to come to the march next weekend? I’m trying to make my dad let me go with him, and if we’re in a group it might be easier to talk him into it.”

“What’s the plan?”

“The usual sort of thing, you know. Like, ‘how much water is a life worth?’ Or how about… ‘We are not cheap!’”

“I don’t think those slogans sound very catchy,” replied Shiro, and crossed his arms awkwardly. He’d just started a growth spurt, and wasn’t yet used to longer arms, longer legs, a longer torso. “It sounds strange to set a price on ourselves.”

“Better than be worth nothing,” Marshall retorted.

“Look, I’m in. But we still need to make up better phrases. My mom probably already knows from your mom—do you think she’d agree to us going?”

“Dunno,” said Marshall. “But I bet my parents can persuade her!” His locker popped open with a metallic chirp, as if in loud agreement.

Unfortunately, neither Marshall nor his locker would prove themselves to be true prophets. Aki did not agree, and Marshall’s parents had no intention of persuading her or being persuaded to let Marshall and Shiro tag along to the protest. The two boys spent that Saturday under Yumi’s gimlet eye, and chose to unleash their frustration through artistic expression. After unrolling a large topographic world map that Jeanne had gifted to Shiro on his last birthday, they drew cartoons on all the countries which Shiro remembered his cousin visiting.

“How’s she been to so many places again?” asked Marshall, frowning down at the colorfully erupting volcano he’d scribbled over Papua New Guinea. “Seriously, I haven’t even gotten to leave this state yet.”

“Well, we’re twelve,” Shiro pointed out. “Jeanne’s almost thirty, and sometimes she takes off to help people in other countries who need doctors, that’s why. Anyway, I want to go places too.”

“What about the helping people part?”

Shiro gave him a sheepish grin. “I can see the sky best when there aren’t any city lights, so depends on how many people are around then to be helped. But you’re all right in my books, buddy, I like you.”

“You can dream about the stars, but don’t be a hater,” Marshall declared with mock solemnity. “One day you’re gonna be alone in the middle of nowhere and wish you had some nice company like me.”

That much Shiro would remember, later—stripped of his dreams, alone in a Galra cell.

Shiro was distantly aware of the last time he’d worked his old kid’s trick. He’d tilted his chin up, with the spacesuit fabric flexing against the back of his neck, as if he could drink in the cosmos above Kerberos with his open mouth, and seen the countless stars, the jagged formations of rock and ice that stretched up to the sky in prayer. He’d held his breath, thinking of the Joshua trees, and in his mind summoned up the sound of silence.

But here in alien captivity there was no magic trick to survival, and he needed every breath he could take to keep going. In the gladiator arena, how much fear had he kindled? How many lives had he taken? Shiro wouldn’t let himself remember, and clung instead to a deal he wouldn’t let himself forget. Let me be the first one to go. We’re going to make a bet, and I want you to lose.

And beyond those words, other moments that refused to hide in the dark corners of his mind: Keith admiring the gleaming cherry-red finish of Shiro’s new hover bike, his face flushing with embarrassed surprise when Shiro passed him the key card on a whim; Jeanne holding a teacup in her hands, her weary gaze resting upon the world map that had been her gift to him in a more unworried childhood; Marshall talking with Shiro on the phone, his voice cracking from the strain of long legal clinic hours but unwavering in his conviction; his grandmother tending to their old family butsudan; a photograph of his mother.

Emergency simulation failure. Cold sweat on his forehead, gritted teeth in his dry mouth, feigned calm on his face. The smile Dr. Holt gave Shiro before he said, Don’t worry. You weren’t born a perfect Takashi Shirogane, but none of us are ever going to be perfect. Let’s try it again.

But here there were no tries left. The Holts were gone, shipped off to a work camp, and Shiro was alone in a Galra cell.

Dr. Holt’s words were true in more than one sense. Shiro wasn’t born perfect—no one was—and he wasn’t born Shirogane Takashi. His father’s family name was Ito.

He never mentioned this unnecessary information. “Call me Shiro,” he would say. “Like my last name. It’s easier to get right than Takashi.” And whenever some curious soul might gently prod him about his father, he’d tell the truth. “He was in Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force,” he’d say, “but he was killed when his plane went down during the third Senkaku incident. It’s all right—I was young then, and I don’t remember him well.”

Then he would gather up people’s awkward expressions of sympathy, with a sorry for your loss here and a must have been hard for you there, and accept their good intentions with a placid smile. He never told the whole truth—that before the end of all things, they would have left his father behind no matter what. Like he’d said: Shiro didn’t remember him well.

Shirogane Aki, though—Shiro had never doubted that he’d remember everything he loved about his mother. On the weekend, Aki made onigiri as snacks for the coming week; Shiro liked them best with salted salmon, so she filled them all with salted salmon even though she preferred pickled plum. She had a record of all the books Shiro borrowed from the library, and none for herself because she never borrowed any. She kept her hair short and wore long dresses. She thought swiftly but never spoke quickly. She carried herself with an almost preternatural calm that Shiro admired, though she swore to him that she wasn’t born that way and that she too could be angry—and act on it. When Shiro asked her questions, she never failed to look him in the eye.

On Sunday nights, they’d do math.

But the passage of time inevitably wore down the strength of his memory—and eventually, his recall of those casual nights would come to blur and coalesce around a few snatches of conversation. While Yumi headed out to continue her bloodless Sunday conquests by switching from the library chess club to a local mahjong and cards group, Aki boxed up Yumi’s cooked leftovers for the week and began reviewing household expenses and calculations for her tax work side job. “You’re frowning, Shiro,” Aki had said one evening, when Shiro was in ninth grade and wrestling with his homework in silent agony. She was typing at a rapid clip on her notepad, tapped keys going ratatat like the muffled sound of a machine gun. “What’s the issue?”

“You know… linear and quadratic functions were easy,” Shiro muttered. “Systems of equations were easy.” He cupped his chin in his hands and stared at the wall, imagining that he too could wipe his mind of irritation to be as blank as a void. Maybe then he could understand the abstraction of his most recent lesson. “But once Mr. Dalila started on probability… it’s okay, Mom. I’ll figure it out. Maybe.”

Aki raised her gaze from the screen. “Let me see.” Then, once she took a glance at the paper Shiro slid her way: “He didn’t start with combinations and the normal distribution? Mr. Dalila certainly has high ambitions for you and your classmates in the advanced section.”

“He said, ‘We’re going to start with the real basics,’ and looked really excited. He even broke out the color diagrams. I think he wants us all to be as genius as he is,” Shiro grumbled.

“I think he wants you to learn and work as much as he has,” Aki said. “Although this is a lot to bite off at once. What did your classmates say?”

“Adam said we might as well sign up for an extra foreign language class instead. After switching from numbers to letters, now we have fancy letters in space?” But he watched his mother’s unruffled face, as if he trusted that he’d glean some secret from her, and learn to pull a rabbit out of a hat. A magic trick.

Aki shook her head and rested her hands on the keyboard. “No,” she replied, and left the word shivering alone in the air for several heartbeats. Then she said, “Don’t let yourself be distracted by that. When you started to work with letters in algebra, was it a new language? They’re simply tools to talk about the concept. If you had a different name, Shiro, would I love you any less?”

His mother had never been one to speak with great fervor, but when she turned to him Shiro could see in her eyes the gauntlet-run truth. “Of course not,” she said clearly. “So forget about the letters. Think—how would you visualize the sample space? And go on from there. Think of all the possibilities, all the ways to choose sets of possibilities. How these outcomes could occur, how likely they’ll be fulfilled.”

“Got it, Mom,” said Shiro, though he wasn’t sure he did. He retrieved his paper, the sheet almost tauntingly flimsy between his fingers; he’d gained a clue, but not a trick. The problem, he realized, was that he assumed one always existed at all. “Um, let me think about it again before I ask.”

Aki resumed her typing, numbers blinking to life on her notepad screen. “At least,” she added, her voice low, “that’s how I learned it when I was young. So I hope it’s the same for you.”

All the possibilities! Shiro had no trouble imagining possibilities fulfilled. Sunny weekends at the beach with Marshall, heat purring lazily against their skin before one pushed the other into cold ocean water and punctured the air with a shriek; pickup basketball games with Jamie in the late muggy afternoons, taking breaks to share rationed water and trade barbs about their claims to superior height; evenings spent listening to wild tales that Jeanne spun on her return home while Yumi did her best to poke holes in them, their conversation degenerating to good-natured squabbling. The limitless laughter that bubbled up from the depths of the heart; the liminal beauty of silence in the desert. This was the gift Aki had granted to them both when they’d broken away and left behind that unkind, unloved memory named Ito: to dream, and live freely in an imperfect world.

He paid her what daily tribute he could, though Yumi never realized and Aki never asked; and as the years passed, it became merely second nature to him. “Call me Shiro,” he would say, when introducing himself. “Like my last name.”

“Shirogane!” Iverson had bellowed over the phone line. “Well done, pilot. You’ve got the honor.”

The bulletin headline read: Astronauts Announced for Groundbreaking Kerberos Mission. And below that: Samuel Holt, Matthew Holt, and Takashi Shirogane…

Yumi said, “That’s excellent, Takashi, but how long will you be gone?” Marshall messaged him: YESSS 1 STEP CLOSER TO WORLD DOMINATION Mister f.SenJG also hi from Nina! So did Jamie: congrats! you are such a hardcore weed. I don’t even regret losing our stupid height competition. His old roommate Harriet sent him a two-thumbs-up picture from the ISS where she was conducting long-term botany experiments. Keith tracked him down outside the tiny temporary office used by off-mission personnel assigned on rotation to the Garrison, looking almost comically stunned, and said, “I—this is great, Shiro! I guess—it’ll be boring without you around for so long. But congratulations. Really.”

“Chin up, you’re not so boring yourself,” Shiro said, giddy and bright with delight. He slung an arm over Keith’s shoulders and herded him down the hallway. “Hey, if you break my record on the belt in the simulator I’ll even lend you my bike while I’m gone—”

“Deal,” Keith said.

His simulator belt record went unbroken that afternoon, but Shiro gave Keith his key card anyway. “Just for the rest of the day,” he said. “Take the bike out and celebrate for me!”

Keith hesitated. “… By myself?” he said, his smile fading.

“I can’t resist the call of duty any longer,” replied Shiro. He couldn’t stop grinning—is it even possible to be drunk on happiness? he wondered. His joy was infectious enough that Keith relented and dropped his disgruntlement, resigned to Shiro’s departure. “My rotation responsibilities aren’t going to disappear now, and the launch isn’t happening until next year,” Shiro continued. “Iverson likes me in spite of himself, but he doesn’t cut corners for anyone. I also have to get together with the Holts and prep for the great horror that you’ll deal with too once you graduate and start missions. At least, if you’re like me and gunning for deep space instead of meso-carrier work. You wouldn’t enjoy it at all.”

Keith gave him a quizzical glance. Shiro leaned down, his hand on Keith’s left shoulder, and with mock secrecy whispered into Keith’s ear, “You know… the dreaded press conference? Then you’d have to play nice.”

“… Uh,” Keith said dazedly. He flushed. “Okay. Uh. Got it. Thanks for the warning.”

As quickly as the press might spread the news, others couldn’t always receive it so promptly. Later that week, in the early hours of the morning, Shiro heard the sound of an incoming video call. That has to be Jeanne, he thought; rolled out of bed, and flipped on the lights.

“Hello? Almighty Shirogane! My newest expeditionary hero. You there?”

Shiro marveled that humanity could send regular manned missions into space but still had trouble ensuring video connection across the globe that was both stable and secure, no thanks to an absurdly bogged down satellite infrastructure replacement process. He tapped the side of his notepad with mild frustration, useless gesture though it was. Who knew what his cousin did on the darknet to scramble her traces when she was in the field? But his ignorance was a kind of protection, however fragile and illusory it might be.

“I already picked up on my end, of course I’m here,” he said—and, batting at his instinct to grouch about godforsaken time zone differences, let his hidden worry drain away to be replaced by hidden relief. “Hi, Jeanne. Now wait a minute. What do you mean by newest? You’re saying I wasn’t always?”

“Fine then, eternal expeditionary hero,” Jeanne allowed, amused at the old joke. “Our network’s been terribly finicky—we had to shunt all electricity to our equipment—so I only just saw your message. Congrats on Kerberos! How does it feel? And to think you told me months ago you weren’t sure you’d make the short list for the mission. I doubt the other pilots looked at your pretty face and rolled over belly-up.”

“Thanks! Well. Between you and me, I don’t think they’d agree to a prettiness poll,” Shiro said, and rubbed his eyes. He had learned over the past few days to compress his reaction into a more measured acknowledgment of the honor, but the thrill of Kerberos hadn’t faded in his heart. “I didn’t want to turn it into a big deal in case it didn’t pan out, but everything’s been really great. The decision didn’t come out of nowhere, though obviously the other candidates were qualified too. You know I specialize in the slingshot, right?”

“You know that’s astropilot gibberish to me, right?”

He adjusted the video screen to get a clearer image of his cousin. The animated tone of her voice belied her pale, dusty face. The lighting in her room was poor. A smudge of blood graced the side of her jaw. She resembled nothing more than an ink wash sketch, with wisps dislodged from her ponytail like shed brush hairs. Shiro could only guess that she’d just finished up at her most recent interim operating table before placing the call—or she’d neglected to wash her face because she couldn’t spare the energy to care.

He kept smiling. He could tell from her resolutely upbeat tone that she wanted to relish his good news first, so he’d at least grant her that as a respite. To know that humanity could send regular manned missions into space, but still wreak havoc on itself… It was easier, sometimes, to just forget—and forget too that if not for his own hard-won specialty, he could’ve been a fighter pilot in the fullest sense of the name.

“Sorry, I thought I told you before,” he said patiently. “The gravitational slingshot? We also call it the merry-go-round leap.”

“Hmm,” said Jeanne. “Oh, you mean the whirligig move by that engineer Kondy-something who you used to fanboy?”

“… Right. Sure,” Shiro said. “That’s it. The others’ experiences were weighted toward transfer orbits and straight skips like the Mars and lunar supply runs. I hold the record for consecutive slingshots in simulation, so that plus the emergency triple I carried out during the Herculina mission were good enough for the higher-ups. When we launch next year, Kerberos will need a whole series for us to get there and back as efficiently as we can. We’re going to be moon-hopping across the solar system for a while.”

He paused, cataloguing the glaringly obvious signs of strain on his screen. He felt his joy turning bittersweet, the dream of glorious discovery in space shadowed by inglorious strife on Earth. He thought of Ito, killed in a skirmish over an island standoff; of his mother—

Think of all the possibilities, Aki had said, and let his imagination run wild. But Shiro in his youth had dreamed of the best and rarely accounted for the worst, believing that the worst had already come and gone. He was wiser, now.

Shiro couldn’t not ask. “Bad day?”

Jeanne snorted. “Not a bad day. Just a normal day—the usual shitshow, thanks to fucking death storks. No idea when they’re coming till after the fact, once they squawk and drop their baby bomb loads. Then we get the people.” Her voice carried just a tinge of bitterness. Her face had turned blank. “But let’s not start talking about this situation,” she added levelly. “I’m not kidding. At least I have the luxury of rotating out to volunteer elsewhere, or not volunteering at all. My patients call this home.”

“We can keep it short,” Shiro said. “Are you sure now—”

“I needed a quick breather. Who else to talk to if not my cute kid cousin who’s on the rise? And I wanted to congratulate you too. I—I really do mean it, Shiro. Your superiors already know you’ve got a smart steady head on your shoulders. You worked for this and you deserve every goddamn bit of it. But sorry. I woke you up, huh.”

“No, I’m up early to prep for a survival exercise I’m helping with at the Garrison.”

“Don’t lie. I’m not dumb, I saw you rubbing your eyes.”

“… Okay, so I was,” Shiro conceded. “About sleeping. But you called.”

“I’m touched.” Jeanne cocked her head to the side, and gave him a small smile that broke through the weariness on her face like the first light of dawn. “To be honest,” she said, “I should’ve been patient and just sent a message. I’ll be back soon, beginning of December.”

“You told me already.”

“I did? You’ll have to forgive me my memory as I get older.”

“That’s dangerous territory, to put it all on age,” Shiro replied. “Grandma’s memory is still sharp as a knife.”

“True. When I think about all the winnings from her house-busting game nights, I guess I have hope after all,” Jeanne said dryly. “But… don’t let me be the downer here. It’s good to see someone who isn’t in the middle of this mess. You were always a responsible kid, Shiro, but you’re a dreamer too, you know? Even if you didn’t originally plan to be a pilot, you’re getting to study a bit of space like you wanted. No meso-targeting, no asteroid posturing, just straight-up deep space exploration. You’ll freeze your ass off on Kerberos and that still won’t be enough to wipe the grin off your face—Shiro. Why the hell are you giggling over your future frozen ass? But—I’m really happy for you.”

Shiro was quietly laughing. It was easier than crying. “I’m happy that you’re happy I’m happy,” he said. “It goes around, that’s all.”

“That’s all I need,” Jeanne said. “Joy. I told my team and they were so glad for you too. Even though there’s evil in this world, we can’t give in to despair.” The tension had drained from her face; she seemed more settled, relieved briefly of her pain and the pain of others. “Once I’m done, Eleanor’s coming to town with me, so Marshall can bug her instead about our work if he wants. Look, Shiro, I adore your old bestie, but I simply cannot keep running on an empty tank like he does. I’ll see you then, right?”

“Definitely,” Shiro answered, and took his conversational cue from Jeanne. “I was thinking—I might ask a friend of mine to come along too. The Garrison kicks everyone out for winter leave, so he bunked down in town last year and ran errands just to eat and didn’t even tell me till I pried the fact out of him. Which is a shame, because he’s really talented—and a great guy too, once you get to know him.”

“Is it that cadet you were hanging out with? Yeah, you’ve lightened up a bit over the past two years. But oh god, more space talk to battle for air time with Marshall’s politics talk.”

“Well… I don’t know about that,” Shiro replied, his eyebrows raised. “He might say nothing and just try to flee from Marshall’s speechifying. Keith’s not a people person.”

“Just who do you think you are, a saint? If he can put up with you, he can put up with the rest of us.”

“I don’t think I’m that awful,” said Shiro. He clutched at his chest and pretended to swoon from heartbreak. Jeanne laughed; and from her dusty, disordered corner on the other side of the world, the sound raced along their shared connection to emerge in Shiro’s own room, singing with pure and unrestrained mirth.

Later that day, Shiro said again, “But really, Keith—I don’t think I’m that awful.”

Unlike Jeanne, Keith didn’t laugh at his sparkling wit.

The survival exercise for the third class had wrapped up: cadets piled their gear back onto their respective Garrison-issue rovers and started navigating the drive back to the complex, while personnel sat with some of them to act as both info-gatherer and deliberate distraction (“The exercise has not ended! If they lose focus, they’ve messed up!” Montgomery had said).

Shiro had picked Keith. Sitting in the passenger seat—and figuring this line of conversation could serve well enough as a distraction, with silent cheers to Montgomery—Shiro went on, “You don’t need to get by on random jobs in town over winter leave, and there’s room for you to bunk down in the apartment. We’d be glad to have you. What’s with the look on your face?”

“There’s nothing wrong with the look on my face,” Keith said, then shut his mouth and kept his eyes on the road ahead as he steered the rover. Strictly speaking, Keith was correct; he had neither a frown nor a scowl, only a pall of uncertainty that surrounded him like a cage.

Stalling for time, Shiro guessed—but the drive to the Garrison would take a while. They had plenty of time, and Shiro had plenty of patience; Keith, less so.

Finally, a question that utterly failed to surprise Shiro: “Is this because they know I’m an orphan?”

“No. We’re not running an orphanage,” Shiro said baldly. He’d learned how to defuse Keith in his warier moods. “Sure, they know you’re on your own. More importantly, they also know you’re my friend. Are you coming?”

“I don’t need them to pity me,” Keith said.

“Maybe they do,” Shiro said. “But I know them and I would say they don’t. You know I don’t—I’d be a hypocrite if I did. So will you come?”

Keith tore his gaze away from the road and fixed it on Shiro. “Do you want me to go?”

Shiro let out an exaggerated sigh. “Keith, I’ve already asked you twice.” He leaned forward to rest his elbows on the dashboard and smiled in spite of himself, his heart as light as gossamer. “I’m a patient guy, but I prefer when others are dealing with me in good faith. Come on, don’t play hard to get. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

Keith blinked at him; and then, with a grin creeping across his face that seemed to surprise even himself, said, “I’ve heard that third time’s the charm, sir.”

“Keith—hey, watch out! You just went off the path.”

III.

Just as a missing year had reached deep down into Shiro’s heart and rooted out all his carefully tended levity as best as it could, he thought that desperation in solitude might have tried the same for what little had been nurtured within Keith over the years they’d known each other. Neither now seemed inclined to joke as they sat in an isolated shack in the desert, shoulder to shoulder.

Keith said, “Shiro?”

“… I’m fine,” Shiro said, the reply slow to come to his tongue. “Don’t worry. I was just thinking… Keith. When you said ‘they,’ you mean both my grandma and cousin?”

“Yeah,” said Keith, still staring at him. “Who else would I be talking about?”

“Oh, not like that,” Shiro said. “I… just wanted to know that they’re both still around. It’s been more than a year, after all. A long time.” And his grandmother wouldn’t be any younger. He breathed in deeply and thought: So our bet is still on, after all.

“I saw them once, before I left the Garrison,” Keith added. “Once everyone on the mission was—declared legally dead. The whole—last will and testament. I think… I think Jeanne would’ve told me, otherwise. If you want confirmation, Pidge looks like he could hack communications and pull up records.” He shifted off the bed, his warmth vanishing from Shiro’s side like a snuffed flame. Shiro startled, moving forward on instinct and following Keith as he got to his feet.

“You don’t have to stand, I’ll grab more water,” Keith said. “If you want food, or your own space for a bit longer—“

“No. I think I’d like to talk with the others,” Shiro said quietly.

In the main room, Hunk had transformed one corner into his new makeshift workshop before briskly sorting through all the scavenged tools and scrap parts that Keith had brought in. He was sitting cross-legged with his head bent low over a small black box, a thin length of wire in each hand, but looked up as Shiro and Keith came in. “Uh, hi, hope you had a good nap!” he said, beaming. “Just give me a bit more time and I think I can get this tricky thing up and humming soon. I mean, when we’re looking for Voltron I don’t want my counter to stop working in the middle of nowhere and just strand us by a pile of rocks. A rock’s just a rock, it can’t help us find Voltron. If this breaks, we can’t track it, can’t find it—and it’s not a person, right? If it’s a weapon? Nothing’s going to answer if we start calling out its name. Well, I guess we might hear the echoes. Or,” his expression grew a little more anxious, “the aliens might hear and find us first instead.”

Shiro returned Hunk’s smile. “Thanks, the nap was good,” he said, though he’d only pretended to sleep. He didn’t correct Hunk’s misconception. Shiro had learned that a person could be turned into a weapon, but it wasn’t so bad to know that Hunk had lived a life which primed him to assume otherwise. “Don’t let me distract you,” he added. “You definitely know what you’re doing.” Slowly, slowly, he was feeling better equipped to approach the blithe normality of the cadets, and talk with them as he would have in the days before the Kerberos mission. Here on Earth, no one was coming at him with the will to kill—and he had no need to return it tenfold with his own. Unless the Galra find me.

“It’s not a big deal, you can talk to me while I work. I like to talk while I work,” Hunk said. “I was doing that earlier, only I tried to be quiet because I didn’t want to wake you up. Pidge is just busy spying on the Garrison comms so he’s not saying much anyway.”

Pidge was perched on the couch with his own customized tech setup taking up most of the cushion space. “Good evasive maneuvers last night,” he commented, and nodded to Keith. “I think the Garrison’s at a loss because the higher-ups are busy barking up the wrong tree about how there might’ve been an earlier alien infiltrator ready to go after the pod, instead of us.”

Keith frowned. “Where’s Lance?”

“Near the shed, checking out that hover bike of yours,” Hunk replied. “Not the kind of thing I personally go gaga about, but it’s in pretty nice condition with its paint job and all even if you’ve been lugging it around in the sand for a while—“

“What,” Keith said flatly, and headed for the door. Shiro watched him go, and forced down a laugh.

“Well,” Hunk said, “I guess he would be annoyed. He obviously loves it way more than this place, since he actually takes care of it—just look at this, who would choose to live here if they cared? Unless they didn’t care anyway.”

“… Yeah. It is a nice bike,” Shiro said, his face warm, and found an empty spot on the floor to sit near Hunk. He should care about where he lives, Shiro thought. But that was Keith for you. He hadn’t cared even when he was living lean in town his first year over winter leave, and Shiro could guess he hadn’t had much choice when he was younger.

Hunk grinned at him. “You too, huh? Pilots and their fancy rides. At least I’ve got Pidge—the engies and comms folks stick together!”

“Right,” Pidge said, a little snide. “By reading each other’s journals?”

Shiro valiantly kept a straight face.

Keith stalked back in a few minutes later with Lance in tow. “Seriously,” Lance was saying to the empty space occupied seconds earlier by Keith, as he threw his hands in the air, “I was being nice! Just asking where you got it so I can start saving for one too. It’s not like the Garrison gave you any money when you flunked out.”

Keith said, “Maybe the Garrison would pay you to leave—”

“Keith. Please,” Shiro cut in. “And Lance, I’m familiar with this model so I can tell you later. But first I have some questions for you guys, if you could sit down. The Garrison’s still on lockdown from last night—right, Pidge? Assuming no change in standard protocol while I was gone.”

Keith hesitated, then sat down on the floor to Shiro’s left. Lance discreetly shifted some tech to make room, earning him a look of ire from Pidge, before he claimed a corner of the couch. Hunk didn’t stop fiddling with the detector taking shape under his hands. A motley crew, but Shiro had seen stranger ones—somewhere, with the Galra.

Pidge flicked his eyes across them and said, “I can tell you right now that they’ve knocked it up another level. They’re running surveillance circles about ten klicks farther out than the usual, but luckily for us they don’t have a great idea of where to begin searching. Keith took us off the beaten path, and I managed to corrupt the video footage before we got out, so…”

“They won’t know it was us, then?” asked Hunk. He looked up again; his voice was threaded with mild panic, his hands tensing over his work. “They have to know we’re missing if the place is on lockdown, but we wouldn’t be—like, prosecuted for destruction of government property or anything like that, if we’re not recognized?”

Realistic, Shiro decided. Grandma would like Hunk. She would appreciate that at least Hunk had half a mind on the mundane issues. Lance had apparently been gung-ho about joining the impromptu rescue mission, while Pidge had already been scanning for alien noise all on his own, and Keith—Shiro wasn’t going to start on Keith, because he knew that would take forever. He hadn’t asked how Keith had gotten the explosives he used as a decoy according to Hunk’s effusive storytelling a few hours earlier; he didn’t expect to ever know why Keith would decide the feeling of a strange energy was worth pursuing.

Hunk thought the whole situation was absurd, and Shiro agreed. Sadly, the absurd was all too real, and worse than a nightmare.

“Yeah, no. That’s not happening,” said Pidge, furrowing his brow. “Unless they’ve developed a way to extract information from self-destructing corrupted files. Otherwise…” He raised his right hand, fingers splayed. “Boom!”

“Nice, Pidge,” Lance said. He whistled. “I gotta say, you’re pretty thorough when you’re mean.”

“I’m always thorough,” said Pidge, looking like the cat that had gotten the cream. Several bowls of cream, even.

“I was about to get to this. The fact is that the Garrison doesn’t know you’re definitely involved,” Shiro said. “They might think that you were unlucky. That you chose the wrong night to sneak off to town and got stuck there when everything went haywire. So—Pidge. Hunk. Lance.” He looked each of them in the eye. “I’m really thankful that you helped get me out of there. I don’t know if Keith could have managed it on his own”—he ignored Keith’s barely audible snort—“and to track Voltron down, we need your help. But once we figure out where it is and find it before the aliens…”

Champion! the audience roared in his ears. Fight! His right hand folded its thumb to palm into the shape of a crude blade, as intimately linked to his body as his own flesh.

Shiro could feel Keith’s silent presence next to him. He forced himself to shake off the ghost, and the tension in his hand. “Look,” he said. “You three are cadets. I don’t want you to get caught up in a huge mess and put too much on the line. I… my memories of what happened after Kerberos are muddled, but it wasn’t great. The Garrison must know you’re absent, and I don’t want your families to worry—”

“Thanks for asking, Shiro,” Pidge broke in. The crisp tone of his voice brooked no opposition to his words. “But that’s not for you to worry about. We can make our own decisions. I’m coming with you. I’m the one who’s been tracking this signal noise about Voltron, and I’m not going to turn and backtrack at the last second.”

“Whoa, touchy much,” Lance said, pretending to back away from Pidge further into his corner of the couch. “Relax, Shiro isn’t saying he’s booting us out, just checking we’re all cool with this. Right?”

Pidge’s eyes had turned hard behind the lens of his glasses, and for a second Shiro couldn’t help but think: Wherever Matt went, would he end up looking like this? Pidge bore a distorted resemblance to Matt, but also a steelier demeanor—less like a curious scientist, more like an agent on a mission. More like a soldier, Shiro realized. Then again, the Garrison was a military school; Shiro had known that going in, and done his best to game the system for the sake of his own dreams. Yet none of them could be completely immune to its influence.

“Yeah,” he said, turning from Pidge to look at the other two and gauge their thoughts. “I wanted to make sure everyone understood the situation. You’re here because you helped me, but all I’m saying is that it’s okay if you decide to head back now. We’re here on Earth, the Garrison’s close by—after this, there’s no knowing what might happen.”

“No way I’m backing out!” Lance said. His excitement was tinged by only the barest apprehension—and to his own surprise, Shiro felt deeply envious of the thrill showing on Lance’s face. He’d been like that once, with Kerberos.

“Besides,” added Lance, “you’re in a tight spot, Shiro, and I’m not going to stop just because something bad could happen. Maybe happen. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll even be in class tomorrow! You can count me in.”

“… All right,” Shiro said. What might happen? He closed his eyes. On the backs of his eyelids he could imagine the countless stars in the sky, blotted out by the Galra spaceship. The Holts at his side, frozen in shock. The sound of silence, broken. No, he thought, not this time.

He opened his eyes. “Hunk,” he said, and looked to his right. Hunk was snapping a piece into one side of the detector, but he was moving more slowly, sunk in thought. He wasn’t talking as he worked.

Shiro said, “I’m not expecting a package of three-in-one, you know.” And, parroting Pidge’s words, because they were true: “It’s your choice.”

Hunk lifted the detector and turned it around in his hands. “Um. Let me think about it,” he said, biting his lower lip. “I’m going to do a few test runs but I think this is full on ready. I’m definitely coming with you to find Voltron because if this fails while we’re out, it’s my work and I’ll need to do a field strip to get it running again. After that…”

“Okay, I understand,” Shiro said, and gave Hunk a reassuring smile. “Let me know when you decide.”

“What?” Lance leaned forward, his previous glee overwritten by dismay. “Seriously?”

“Lance, you know why, I’ve told you before. And this is serious AWOL with aliens, not our usual principal’s office talk. I could make something up and fake like I was skipping class and get buried in a pile of demerits, but whatever, I can dig myself out. If the Garrison’s okay with tossing out a fighter-class pilot like Keith—uh, sorry, no offense, Keith—there’s no way they wouldn’t be okay with doing the same to me. I’m here under the Compact and if it doesn’t get renewed in the future—“

“What? Don’t be paranoid, that’s like a point zero zero one chance! Hunk—“ Lance cut himself off. They stared at each other in a silent battle of wills: Lance almost pleading, Hunk for once utterly unmoved. Shiro eyed them both; he remembered Marshall’s outrage over the anti-Compact movement, but he’d missed more than a year on Earth and knew nothing of the changing political scene. This wasn’t for him to mediate.

“… Fine,” Lance said, deflating. “I get it, I get it. It’s on me. If you decide to sneak back in—if we get caught I’ll say it was my idea, ‘cause at least I was born here—“

“I can rig up the Garrison’s surveillance,” Pidge added. Apparently, there was nothing at the Garrison that Pidge hadn’t bugged. Shiro’s own comms had never ignored the rules so much, not that his team had been in situations where they’d care enough to break them.

Naturally, Keith then chose to say, “And I still have explosives left. If you want a distraction—“

“Argh. No explosions. Not now. Let’s figure that out after we find Voltron, maybe?” Hunk groaned and looked back down at his hands. “One at a time, all right? Aliens? Weird weapons? What if something happens and then, bam, there’s no problem left to solve, or there’s a brand-new problem to solve? Let’s focus on what’s in front of us right now, and right now what’s in front of me is my cute new detector.” Hunk wiped the uneasiness off his face, and grinned. He lifted his creation up and gazed at it with affection like a parent doting on a newborn. “Let me run a few to check the diagram output, and then we are set.”

“Just so you know, my offer to adopt your family is still open,” Lance said breezily, sliding off the couch onto the ground. “Together we’d have the best food, best music, best style…”

“No, no, no, we are not moving to a flood zone.”

“No flooding! Just a tiny bit of water damage.”

Pidge said, “You’re always so loose with your language, Lance.”

“Great,” Keith muttered to Shiro. “If they’re all coming along to find Voltron, it’s a lost cause to hope for quiet.”

“It’s better than you wandering around on your own, right?” Shiro gave Keith a sober look. “I wish you hadn’t. It doesn’t sound fun.”

“… No,” Keith said, returning his gaze. “It wasn’t.”

Shiro reached out to touch Keith’s shoulder, poor comfort that it was. What did you do? he wanted to ask. Beyond the wall of evidence obsessively covered in marker and string, what else had Keith done to eat, to sleep, to live alone? He didn’t want Keith to be some wraith driven by anger, or loss, or the bare minimum for survival. But if Keith were to turn to him and ask the same question, Shiro knew he couldn’t answer. He didn’t remember. He didn’t want to remember.

Maybe he’d been a wraith, too.

So Shiro didn’t ask. He couldn’t let everyone down: he had to focus on the necessities for the team, not his own curious dread. “All right,” he said. “Keith, can you pack essentials for us on the go? Water, some basic food, anything else you think is useful. Put it in the front under-seat compartment, where I used to keep the shock batteries.”

“Yessir,” said Keith, getting to his feet. He added, “I’ll give you the key card after—“

“No,” Shiro said. “It’s yours now. Last will and testament, remember?”

The line of Keith’s mouth drew taut. “It’s still a loan,” he muttered. “Since you’re not dead, Shiro.” The old Keith might have turned on his heel, content to toss off his last snippy words like salt over his shoulder, but this new Keith was slower to leave. Taller, softer, graver, he looked down at Shiro for a heartbeat longer. “Shiro,” Keith said again, as if he’d never tire of saying his name—a wondrous word, still. “You being here… It really is good to have you back.”

“Yeah,” said Shiro, and nearly smiled. “It does feel good.”

He watched Keith walk away; listened to the cadets’ chatter; breathed in the dusty air. The smell of the desert sand. The sound of friendly voices. The sight of a familiar face.

He was almost home. He was almost human again. What a nice dream, he thought, and didn’t let himself cry.

IV.

In eleventh grade, Shiro watched his grandmother cry in front of him as they both cleaned up the kitchen. Yumi was checking over the rice porridge that cooled on the counter; then she snapped on its container lid and carefully placed it in a bag, looking down with her face half-hidden by her hunched shoulders. But Shiro had seen, in spite of her best efforts. He passed her a fistful of paper napkins, and watched as she stuffed them all in next to the tupperware. Her eyes were red.

“Grandma,” he said. “Do you need help?”

“I have everything besides your bento,” Yumi said shortly. She had always been free with her acerbic comments and her rich delight, and much less so with her sorrow. “If you’re done—are you ready, Takashi?”

No. I’m not ready. You’re not ready. Jeanne can’t even make it back in time. But if they waited for Jeanne, they’d have to spend several more agonizing, hopeless weeks in limbo, precious time that could save the lives of others. Jeanne had told them not to wait. “Yeah,” he said, and closed his bento box. He’d made onigiri in flattened round shapes and decorated them with pieces of nori so they resembled smiley faces, simple and blissful in their inanimate cheer. The filling was pickled plum. “Let’s go.”

Yumi turned to him, then fished several tissues out and gently wiped his face—for he had been crying all the while. “Put some more in your pocket,” she said. “No. Grab the whole box of tissues. You know you don’t need to hold back—your mother wouldn’t mind. Now put the bento in—it can fit here.”

That was the last time they went to see his mother in the hospital. They sat by Aki’s bed and ate the food they had made, as if they could pretend they were eating with her like any other normal meal. Then they said their goodbyes, and let her go.

Aki had signed up to be an organ donor. In death, as in life, she became someone’s hero, almost superhuman.

Shiro had never doubted that he’d remember everything he loved about his mother, but it was only with the passage of time that he would come to realize the one whom he’d loved had been his mother the hero. He remembered much less of Shirogane Aki, who had always been as human as he. All the possibilities she had grasped in her youth, the dreams she had spun into reality—or, perhaps, had been forced to abandon—had gone unmentioned. She had never told him, and he in his ignorance had never thought to ask.

Yet he couldn’t bear to ask Yumi about her dead daughter—not when she couldn’t bear the burden of answering, and tearing open her own wounds. She already danced around the topic so gingerly herself. “Takashi,” his grandmother had said, afterward. “I… I should make a living will. It’s better if you don’t have to decide for someone like I did. And I’d better not be making that decision again. The young shouldn’t go before the old—right, Takashi?”

Shiro hadn’t been able to reply. The universe was so blurry to him through his tears that he might as well have been blind. He’d give up his sight, he thought, he’d even hold the knife himself—if only he could have his mother back in return.

But the universe didn’t deal in impossibilities, and Shiro could only dream so far. He knew he could sacrifice any piece of himself to try and save a living life, but nothing could bring back the dead.

“When I said make sure you don’t starve, I also meant make sure you don’t die.”

His application to the Galaxy Garrison had not gone unchallenged, all those years ago. “I didn’t think you were one for the military,” Yumi had said, despite Shiro’s dutiful summary of the benefits of fully covered tuition, family health insurance, close proximity to home, and a guaranteed post-graduation job—factors that for any other occupation would have attracted Yumi’s undying favor. “You’re content to play guard dog to the mines? Everyone knows they send those asteroid missions out to watch over the resources. Private mines, they say, so why is the military so nice about watching their territory? There’ll be trouble sooner or later. Takashi—you could learn to be a good enough engineer—they could assign you to the moon or Mars. You may be more sensible now that you’re older, but you haven’t thrown away your dreams. Why not a normal college if you want to go around with your eyes glued to the sky?”

“… The Garrison’s giving me a chance I can’t pass up, Grandma,” Shiro had said. He was already thinking of the vast unknown above them, strewn with cosmic matter, for he well knew that any one lifetime was finite: he only had so much time to spare, and an opportunity that couldn’t be overlooked. “If someone’s a fighter-class pilot, their current flight assignments are all base runs, asteroid gigs, mesosphere rotations—but deep space exploration is already off the ground. Manned deep space exploration, Grandma—don’t you remember the announcement a few months ago? The Vega program’s moving into full gear. Lots of people can be good, solid pilots for missions in the inner system neighborhood. But if you excel in the kind of maneuvers that could take a spacecraft out to the edge of the solar system… The timing’s right. I just have to show that I’m at the top.”

“And if you aren’t? I didn’t… I didn’t help your mother raise you to be fodder and die in a fight. Even I can’t win a bet with the shinigami.”

“The commitment’s eight years. But I know I’m better than fodder. I can make myself indispensable—they’ll have no choice but to put me to the best use.”

“Takashi,” his grandmother had said. “Don’t talk like you’re nothing but a tool.”

Marshall believed that no person couldn’t be turned into a tool. “That’s the history of humanity for you,” he said to Shiro much later, his attention distracted by the steam rising from a mug barely visible on Shiro’s video screen. It was the second week of Shiro’s last year at the Garrison—and as three o’clock in the morning waltzed ever closer to reality, Marshall had begun to wax poetic about life rather than his history paper, while Shiro fought the growing suspicion he’d misplaced some variables in his physics problems.

Marshall continued, “But the point is—we have to aim for better than that. Better than the sovcits, the fearmongers over the Compact, the ostriches with their heads in the sand. Me, the bad cop lawyer who strikes with legal representation in the name of justice. You, the good cop astropilot who wields your reputation in the name of righteousness. The hero of space, where none have gone before!”

“Hey, I did say maybe I’ll pull a John Glenn once I retire,” replied Shiro as he stretched in his seat. “Run for Senator. Take all your calls and say, ‘You’re absolutely one hundred percent right, good old Mr. Marshall Ashe.’ Go law-pushing. Though you could be good cop yourself if you wanted.”

“Come on, I told you about the time I went to court early to sit in as observer—and the judge asked me if I was the defendant. So what if I actually tried playing good cop? It doesn’t matter if I say it or act it—they’re quick to think I’m a bad egg anyway. I don’t have the patience for that in the spotlight. But bad cop’s better than bad egg, so I’ll take what I can get, and then fight for the rest. You know. The arc of the moral universe is fucking long, man, but there’s no looking back. I propose… uh, I propose a toast, that’s right. To the vanishing point!” He raised his mug with a dramatic flourish.

“Marshall,” Shiro said. “How about you give me your beer?”

“This is coffee, and I’m not drunk, I’m sleep deprived. How dare you imply I drink beer out of a mug. Anyway, is your work even due tomorrow? It’s a Sunday—I know Sundays are your off-days.”

“I’m practicing sleep deprivation,” Shiro said, and flashed a sheepish grin at Marshall. “I got special dispensation from Iverson to pilot local missions next semester while I’m still a student, but that means I’m going through the wringer for my scheduled fast-track sims this year. They don’t care if I’m ranked top—they’ll run me sleepless in the sim till I catch gimbal lock, then go over everything with a fine-toothed comb to tell me what I got wrong. I can’t afford to be complacent.”

“… Don’t tell me you schedule sleep deprivation for yourself?”

Shiro shrugged, his shoulders tense, and let the question slip by unanswered. “I’m glad you called. At least I’m in good company.” He threw a mock salute at Marshall’s image on the screen, then pushed his physics work to one side and shifted over a stack of written sim reports from the fourth class. He had been granted the dubious honor of a teaching assistant position; he and the others called themselves the Garrison troop of grading monkeys.

“Shiro, your regimen is fucked up. You… you don’t even sound like you enjoy it. Tell me you’re giving yourself a breather.”

“I had an astronomy club meeting earlier tonight,” Shiro said lightly. “I went to commune with the telescopes and the stars. Besides, I could ask you the same—aren’t you the one who’s actually surviving on coffee grounds?”

“Don’t avoid with the pot and kettle decoy,” Marshall retorted, but he gave Shiro a wry smile. “Always asking about each other but not asking the same of ourselves… Shiro?”

Shiro had leaned down, folding his body in his chair, and pressed his forehead to the desk. He could feel the wood grain running in clean thin lines against his skin. “It’s nothing. I just started grading these sim reports. This student wrote three sentences total.”

“They’re supposed to be at least a page long, aren’t they? You had me proofreading three-pagers in your first year!”

Shiro sat back up and carefully smoothed out the paper before him. “To sum up his report, it’s basically—ahem. ‘I flew in an orbit. I did an engine burn. I completed the sim mission.’ There’s nothing connected to the counter-intuition lecture, which was the whole purpose of the assignment.”

“Wait. This is a freshman and he says he aced the sim, no details? Is he trying to be cheeky? Just mark him down as zero.”

“… No, I can’t do that. It’s not right. If he really did complete the sim, it counts as full marks regardless. I usually assume cadet’s honor, but…” Shiro pinched the bridge of his nose, the localized pressure of his thumb and index finger pushing back against the ache that had started up at his temples. “I’ll just look up the vid records that the students log when they book sim time for homework and find out.”

That night Shiro slept three hours. It was an old habit. He remembered his first year at the Garrison—he’d shone in basic and then field training; displayed punctual diligence and competence in his class work; failed to accrue any punishment hours; proved himself no easy opponent in advanced combatives. On Sunday mornings, he’d always woken up early to review old sim video records, or else booked time to be creative with the sim settings and throw himself into fake but deadly situations. By the end of his first semester, his simulation success rate had been top of the class. He had never been overtaken, not that first year or in the years thereafter.

He was friendly, but not close, with most of his classmates. He wasn’t sure if everyone truly liked him—but no one had ever said he wasn’t nice. No one had ever said he wasn’t the best. That, he thought, was all he needed.

At the simulation center, he logged in under his restricted admin account, and typed into the search field: KEITH KOGANE. He hit enter, and saw a solitary record appear in search results.

“He only ran it once?” Shiro muttered to himself. He frowned.

He watched the simulation video record.

He watched it five more times. Then he went looking for Kogane.

Shiro found him in the main gym that night, three hours before lights out. If it weren’t for the two of them, the area would’ve been utterly deserted; most cadets had other activities planned in the last remaining moments before the free time of Sunday came to an end and the weekday schedule kicked back into full gear. Kogane, on the other hand, had in some mysterious way liberated a foil from storage, and was busy putting himself through moves that didn’t line up with fencing forms at all.

Shiro lingered at the door, admiring the efficiency of movement despite the mismatched tool—then he thought of the simulation; walked a few paces into the gym, and politely cleared his throat. “Cadet Kogane?”

Kogane froze in the middle of a lunge, which threw him off balance and forced a hasty recovery of his footing. Then the tension in his muscles melted and rippled away from head to toe as he turned and threw Shiro a vaguely irritated glance. “Yeah? Can I help you?” he said, his words perfunctory.

A held breath; a pause.

“Sir,” Kogane tacked on belatedly, and straightened to attention as he tried to subdue the sound of his breathing. His hair was long enough that it barely skirted regulation, but he lacked a deliberately mutinous air in the way he carried himself. He seemed less rebellious than he was uncaring—though the latter was, in its own way, nearly as insubordinate an attitude as the former. Shiro wondered how many times Kogane had been told to correct his speech in the two weeks since the start of the school year.

“I’m Shiro, from first class,” he said. “I was reviewing some of the recent sim video records and came across yours from the Maneuvers I class. Since you’re here—do you have a moment?”

He saw no sign of apparent recognition in Kogane’s eyes, and then scoffed at himself for assuming that a new cadet absolutely would. An inattentive student could’ve easily missed a mention of his name as teaching assistant in Maneuvers I or as the top-ranked first class cadet; or, perhaps, Kogane didn’t care. The latter possibility bothered Shiro less than he’d thought.

“All right,” said Kogane, though confusion lurked in his face. “What do you want to know?”

This… is definitely the guy who wrote that report, Shiro thought, but what little exasperation he had still carried with him gave way, and vanished like sunstruck dew. “About—“

“Sir,” Kogane added.

Shiro felt his corners of his mouth twitch upward. “At ease. Seriously, you can just call me Shiro. If you don’t mind me calling you Keith,” he said easily. “I don’t bite. It’s a Sunday, and I’m not in the habit of handing out orders when they’re not necessary.”

“… Keith’s fine,” said Kogane—Keith, as he stretched and wandered away with his back to Shiro. He set the foil down under the nearest bench and turned to look over his shoulder. “What about the simulation? It wasn’t a big problem.”

“That’s what I noticed,” Shiro said, as he followed him and took a seat on the bench. Keith didn’t sit. “You didn’t have any trouble picking up on the opening for the powered flyby. I’m almost certain everyone misses that on the first go—I only wrangled it on my fourth try when I was in the class. But not you.”

“Well, yeah,” said Keith. He blinked down at Shiro. “The opening was there, so I took it.”

Shiro waited for further detail. None came.

“Uh, what was your question, exactly?” Keith said. “I don’t think you asked anything other than about time.”

“… So it—it wasn’t boring,” Shiro said. “Was it too easy?”

Keith had taken up a relaxed slouch, muscles loose and hair disheveled, but at this line of questioning his eyes shuttered—like the windows of a house abandoned by all but its one wary, lonely resident. “Is that a problem?” he said, his brow furrowed. “It was easy, but it wasn’t boring. I don’t think it’s possible for the sim to be boring. But I only needed to run it once, and I got it right.”

Then again, Keith had written three sentences as if it could obviously sum up the entirety of his sim experience. Shiro silently concluded that he wouldn’t be able to get much more out of him, not in a first meeting. “Not a problem,” he replied. “I was just impressed, that’s all. Don’t worry about it.”

“Thanks,” said Keith. His gaze had already returned to the foil tucked neatly under the bench. “Anything else, sir?”

“… Shiro’s fine, like I said. Sorry to take up your time. You… don’t really fence, do you? You don’t move like you do.”

“It’d be nice to have something heavier, with a proper blade,” Keith said under his breath, picking the foil up and giving it an idle twirl. Then he thrust it forward, as if he was actually aiming to injure an imaginary opponent. As if it wasn’t just for show.

Shiro bit back the urge to comment further. They both understood that if Keith was caught misusing equipment, the ire of the fencing coach would fall fully upon him. “You know we’ve got bo staffs too,” he said instead. “No blade, obviously, but some of them might be heavier.”

“Maybe.” Keith looked at him with guarded eyes. “I’ll try those next time.”

That night Shiro dreamed of the old days, when he was a young boy in the desert. He discovered to his delight that he was running on air, stepping into the open space on scattered stairs plucked out of his mind, far above the Joshua trees and the cooling sand and his family in slumber. When he glanced down he saw the view as a still painting, its denizens trapped in a more unworried memory—and thought that perhaps down there lay his own doppelganger, his dreams still lacquered with a thin film of ice: frozen in time, fragile, and not yet fractured. But the Shiro who ran was young at heart too, who had admired the trees reaching up to the sky in prayer—and so he reached out with his own skinny arms and brushed his fingers lightly across the fabric of spacetime. Before his eyes, it rippled like the surface of a lake, its depths unfathomable, full of possibilities.

That’s how I learned it when I was young, he heard his mother say. So I hope it’s the same for you. And as the wind whipped away her words, the surface shattered into nothingness, and a torrent of water roared down upon him and drowned him. He was both pilot and passenger, hurtling along an invisible orbit with nothing but the sound of silence in his ears as he gave himself over to the pull of gravity and the blurred glory of stardust, and at the split second of his fastest velocity—

Then came an unfamiliar sound, a sharp bright bark like the crack of a whip—a stranger was laughing. Unfettered joy, crackling over the audio feed from a simulation record.

And Shiro woke; and he found that in his sleep, he had been crying.

That day he went to talk to Geringas, who taught Maneuvers I, and Choi, who taught Maneuvers II. And a week afterward, Keith tracked him down while he was strolling from the simulation center back to his room. “Were you the one who told Geringas my report was shit?” Keith said without fanfare. “… Sir.”

Shiro paused, then motioned for Keith to step to the side of the hallway with him so they wouldn’t block any foot traffic. “It’s Shiro, Keith. I told Geringas your report was short, not that it was shit,” he said; tried, and failed, to keep a straight face. Geringas was exactly the sort of teacher whose bark was worse than his bite. “You should definitely credit him for his own original language.”

Keith shifted his weight from foot to foot, his gaze fixed unblinkingly on Shiro. “All right,” he said, more quietly. “Shiro. I, uh, forgot you were the assistant for Geringas. Anyway, he told me you were the one who flagged me for validation, so. Thanks. A word from—the top of the Garrison class is a big deal.”

“Don’t prove me wrong, okay?” Shiro said. He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms. “They don’t do this often, especially not for simulation. Choi won’t go easy on you just because you’re fourth class and not third—he’s never gone easy on anyone. And I ought to warn you that you’d better turn in proper written reports from now on. I just thought… you’re really good in the sim, and it’s only sensible to have you pass the first level and skip to advanced earlier than the usual.”

It wasn’t a lie: Keith had shown indisputable talent in the sim, a magnificent sort of spatial intuition. Geringas had seen it. Choi had seen it. But what had made Shiro play the video record again, and again, and again… In the years since his mother’s death, Shiro had learned to transform anger and grief into a more patient determination, because he had believed he needed it, that if he didn’t he wouldn’t be able to gather up the pieces of himself, but—

Shiro had almost forgotten what it felt like, to be in love with something as simple as a dream made a real illusion. Even if it was only a simulation.

Keith was still staring at him.

Shiro silently pulled his thoughts back together. “What’s the matter?” he said.

“… You didn’t have to, you know,” Keith replied; he drew down his eyebrows, his mouth twisting into a frown. “Take it up with the teachers. Maneuvers I is easy, but it’s not like I couldn’t have survived that. You’re… too nice.” The last few words he bit out, grudgingly.

Too nice? No one had ever said this to him like an insult, like an accusation. Shiro hated to consider what Keith had encountered in his life which would make him suspicious of niceness. “Oh, that was nothing much. I just try my best to be nice. When’s that ever a bad thing? The world doesn’t need any more cruelty.” Shiro smiled faintly at Keith. “I’ve always disagreed with The Prince, you know. It’s better to be loved than feared.”

Keith rewarded him with a puzzled stare. “What prince?” he said flatly. “And who cares about royalty?”

Then Keith startled, and took a step back—for Shiro, unable to deny himself the sudden impulse, had broken out into laughter that bubbled up from the depths of his heart: light, wild, free.

The only laughter Shiro ever heard in the arena was from the Galra, never his own. “What are they looking for now?” he’d asked. “Is there a trick to entertaining them, so we can both stay alive?”

And his opponent had answered, her mouth set with grim purpose: “At this combat level in the arena? It’s better to be feared. Strength. Power. The will to kill in a fight. Don’t think about the ‘we.’ No hard feelings, kid—we all deserved more than this. But we’re here thanks to the Galra, and that’s just the way it is.”

So there it was. No hard feelings. He couldn’t die. Not here, not now, he told himself, and kindled fear in the arena like an arsonist would a flame. In his heart there could be no room for joy. Champion! the audience roared. How curious, the druid murmured. “Shiro?” a distant voice said, in disbelief.

Shiro. His name—Shirogane, like his mother’s before him. His mother before him, sitting at the table, who looked him in the eye: If you had a different name, Shiro, would I love you any less?

Champion! the audience roared.

“… I don’t know,” said the boy, his heart empty. “What’s been done to me, what I’ve done—how would I even love myself?”

I used to ask myself the same question, his imaginary hero said, and gave him a brilliant smile.

His sight blurred. He might as well have been blind. “Shiro,” he heard someone say; felt the press of gentle fingers to his forehead, his temple, his jaw, the touch impossibly kind. “Shiro.” So he blinked back the tears in his waking dream—and then he could see, at last: pale light falling through a window. A barless window. A rosy sky at dawn, like a magic trick. “Shiro. It’s me. Keith. You’re—you’re back on Earth, you’re safe. I’m here with you.”

What a nice dream, he thought. He almost laughed in bitter delight. He had been losing so many of them to the Galra, lately; he hoped he would remember this one.

Some he forgot, but some he remembered—of course, there was that long last night he had spent in quarantine before the launch of the Kerberos mission. Marshall had called him on the phone line, incoherent with drunken glee—drunk on beer, Shiro was sure, and not sleep deprivation. Jeanne had sent him a video, vowing that she’d be ready at launch time with a live stream, or at least watch it with her patients later if she missed it due to an emergency. Keith had sent a message: I’ll take good care of your hover bike. Thanks for lending it to me while you’re away. I don’t think I need to wish you good luck, because you’re fine as you are. All the celebratory send-offs from old friends, old roommates, old teachers, old acquaintances… they piled up in his communications queue and left him more overwhelmed than he could’ve imagined. In the next room over, he guessed that Sam and Matt Holt must be in a similar situation.

And of course, he couldn’t let himself forget the deal he’d made with his grandmother, on that long last night, the bright night of the soul.

“I’ll be very angry with you if you die,” Yumi had said, in the video call. “The young shouldn’t go before the old, but you—you’re too much like your mother.”

Shiro decided he’d take that as a compliment. “Hey, have faith in my abilities, Grandma—I wasn’t ranked top for nothing. I’ll come back, and even sneak you a space rock if you want.”

“Useless! Ability doesn’t make up for luck, and I don’t have faith in chance,” said the inveterate bettor, with complete disregard for her own spoken contradiction. “Let me be the first one to go. We’re going to make a bet, and I want you to lose.”

“What—“

“Who dies first,” she cut in. “The first one to go. Now you and I understand each other very well, so be nice and let me have my last win.” The line of her mouth curved into a sharp, humorless smile.

Shiro sighed. “If I told the technicians about this they’d be running out to knock wood on all the nearby trees,” he muttered. “All right. You better not have won before we get back to Earth. You know you could’ve just asked for a space rock instead.”

“Useless and ugly,” Yumi retorted. “Won’t you need to return to make sure I haven’t won yet? And my dear grandson could at least give me something interesting. Something unexpected.”

“Sand worms?” Shiro asked, his grin almost sly.

Yumi gave him the evil eye. “Aren’t those also useless and ugly?” she replied.

“Fine, fine. I’ll find a souvenir that’s neither, then.”

“You should know what I like by now. But remember… Shiro.” Shiro, not Takashi—as if to show, by granting him victory in their old battle over his name, that his grandmother had put her trust in quid pro quo for this new bet worth a life. “You’ll need to show me in person when you come back.”

V.

Shiro had come back in the end after all, worn thin like the faded ghost of a dust devil—though his return would only be for a night and a day. He had come back, but not to his home.

“Pidge,” he asked, sidling around Hunk and Lance as they began to clean up the tools and parts scattered on the floor, “can your tech access the darknet?”

Predictably, it could.

He decided to write to Jeanne at one of her various burner accounts, and hope for her to pass his message on to all the others. He thought of Marshall, who believed that no battle was a lost battle; and Yumi, who still lived and hated to lose. Even if the Garrison was canny enough to intercept his words, his superiors would only understand the vague warning and nothing deeper. Words on a screen. Words in his memories, and those of the people who loved him and whom he loved. You were right, he wanted to tell them all. The arc of the moral universe is long. There’s evil in this world, but we can’t give in to despair. And I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.

Shiro typed: Hello, this is your eternal expeditionary hero. Please tell the game master that our bet is not over. I’m fighting sand worms in space to bring back something that’s not useless or ugly. Also, myself. Hope you’re all doing well.

And sent the message.

Shiro thanked Pidge, and carefully glanced away as Pidge began to type again; he didn’t ask Pidge if he’d been compiling all the Garrison video footage and comms audio since the escape pod crash last night. What Pidge chose to do with that information was his own business. Shiro couldn’t find it in himself to care.

Pidge soon packed up his tech; Hunk, his detector; Lance, the evidence of the search for Voltron strung up on the wall; and Keith, the water and food as Shiro had asked. Shiro sat on the couch, but none of them disturbed him save Keith. When Keith went past him again, he stopped; reached out slowly, in silence, and touched Shiro’s new right hand: the warmth of his grasp sank through the surface of the alien tech, warmth Shiro could feel.

Shiro looked at him; said nothing. Keith let go, and walked on.

After what seemed only several breaths later, he heard his name. “Shiro,” Keith said. “Looks like we’ve got everything we need. Are you ready?” He and the other three cadets were gathered at the creaky door, peering over their shoulders at him.

No, he thought. I’m not ready. We aren’t ready. His new companions looked more curious than scared. Their ignorance was a kind of protection for them—and, perhaps, for himself, however fragile and illusory it was. But he couldn’t refuse the call to arms. The uncertain future was creeping toward him, whether he wished it or not, and all Shiro could do was see this through to the end.

“Yeah,” Shiro said, his voice steady with false confidence, and stood up to join them. “Let’s go.”

They crossed the threshold together.

In second grade, Shiro wrote: I want to be an astronomer when I grow up.

He had said as much to Jeanne that night in the park. Above them the sky stretched out like shimmering fabric, and near them the Joshua trees cast shadows upon the ground like shattered looms. In the tent behind them, Yumi and Aki were already slumbering, lulled by the soft breath of the wind.

“Astronomer, huh? I like that idea,” Jeanne murmured. “The stars and planets won’t make you sad. Yeah… I like it. Learning for learning’s sake. Expanding our knowledge of the universe. Maybe you could go into space yourself as an astronaut. Shiro the expeditionary hero.” Her eyes held the reflections of stars, the scattered points of silver needles. “Besides, then you won’t have a job like mine.”

Shiro could see the smile on Jeanne’s lips, but no mirth in the rest of her face. He knew only that she worked at the hospital; he wondered if her job was difficult, or miserable, or simply numbing. Perhaps that was why she traveled often, to see so much of the world. “If it’s hard and it makes you sad, why do you do it?”

“Hmm? Oh—Shiro, you shouldn’t have to be so serious. I was… only joking,” said Jeanne. She laughed dully, a shallow flutter of air that escaped from her throat and then transformed into a lower, deeper yawn. “It’s not all bad, really. Sometimes I get to see the best of people. And I’m not on my own—I’m part of a team, and glad for it.” Her words were growing softer as she slipped closer to the realm of sleep. “It’s work that has to be done… and we’re going to do it no matter what, so others like you have a world that’s just a little better. Doing whatever makes people happy. Whatever keeps them safe.”

“… But what about you?” said Shiro. “Are you okay? It doesn’t sound like a joke to me.”

And lying beneath the boundless sky, beneath a dark shroud that threatened to swallow them whole, his cousin told him a lie and a truth.

“I’m fine, Shiro. There’s no need to worry,” she said. “You’ll understand, one day.”