Chapter Text
Coming Up For Air
You know just what I've done and what I've seen
And what I will become if I'm cut free
And you are not to blame for what happens to me.
Shiro wakes to darkness and a pressure behind his eyes that makes everything lurch sideways when he tries to sit up.
He has no way to measure how long he has been here, been unconscious, but Shiro knows that it is too long either way. He breathes through his nose in timed doses and forces himself up onto his knees carefully. His muscles throb with renewed sensation as he uncurls his limbs. He lets the ache flow over him as he moves, feeling out slowly until his fingers touch the wall to the left of him. The metal is unwaveringly cold beneath his fingers and he concentrates on this, and not on the fact that his gloves and – and Shiro shifts ever so lightly to confirm – the rest of his Paladin armour with them. He presses his back up against the wall and lets his body heat seep through the thin material of his undersuit, and the tightly woven mesh must have been compromised because it's not supposed to do this. Shiro moves and feels for the break or tear, his left palm skirting over the material, and the fabric scratches at his left palm and the blackness of the room is closing in on him -
A hand presses against his mouth on automatic, and Shiro gasps in his next breath, the sound too-loud in the small room and it echoes back, nearly unrecognisable, and when Shiro fights his eyes open he sees a row of faintly glowing dots growing steadily closer and he can feel the exact moment his chest catches and then he's fighting back against his locked-up diaphragm, everything tunneling down to his heartbeat jack-knifing between his ribs until he's sure he can feel it press against where his fingers lie splayed across his chest.
When he was a child, Shiro had fallen out of the tree that grew in the bottom of his parents' garden. It had only been a short fall, maybe three or four feet at the most, and he had suffered only minor cuts and bruises, but the feeling, though split-second brief and barely perceptible at the time, the feeling of weightless freefall and the air coming in like water, staring up at a too-bright sky through dark branches as his chest heaved against stillness, struggling in and screaming out each little breath he got in and -
The next breath Shiro manages to get past his dry lips and drier tongue does little to still the way his heart throbs against his ribs, but he opens his eyes anyway and squints against the harsh purple light that is now illuminating the cell. It takes a moment before he realises it is coming from his own arm, and he realises it has melted a deep groove into the wall that glows faintly white even after he has moved his hand away. Shiro holds it in front of him, the glow barely flickering, and as his eyes adjust he sees shapes beyond his personal space, unfamiliar, alien, but not Galra.
Shiro feels himself relax just a little. Tucks a knee under himself, though he doesn't quiet trust his legs enough to stand, and holds up his left hand in what he hopes is a fairly universal gesture of surrender.
“Hello.”
He winces at the low rasp of his voice but holds his gaze steady as much as he can, and when the first alien, one with four off-white glowing eyes (or so Shiro assumes), approaches he leans up a little more. They mutter to themselves in a range of clicks and beeps that chokes a tiny giggle out of Shiro's throat because they sound a little or a lot like R2-D2 and, gods, wasn't that some crazy random happenstance?
Before it could fully form, the alien shrank back away, the clicking growing faster and more frantic, and Shiro heard one of the other aliens speak – a mix of a guttural language Shiro didn't understand interspersed with Galran, and one word that had become universal in his time here -
“ Champion. ”
Shiro pressed himself tighter against the wall, his arm glimmering even brighter than before as he watched his cellmates shrink away from the increased field of light until he could no longer see them in the shadows, and Shiro feels cold to his very core. It had been six four Earth months and three Earth days since he had escaped, and there had been Champions before, and there would be again so why...
So why did they remember him so clearly?
Shiro remembered each opponent he had faced in the ring – the memories blurred and barely there, like catching smoke, but he had known the faces of previous cellmates, those he had seen even fleetingly as they lined up in the wings of the arena, and he knew there were hundreds, maybe thousands more, burned deep into the darkest webs of his memory, and Shiro did not know these aliens. He did not know them, and they knew him just from looking, and he had been gone for long enough to be forgotten by the prisoners, if not Haggar and her druids, but here he was, and Shiro clasped his hand over his mouth as the giggle turned to ash on the back of his tongue and he swallowed back bile even as the residual heat in his metal fingers was uncomfortable against his bare skin.
Here, back in Galra prison garb and aching all over, it's too-familiar a tableau and Shiro wonders, the thought skirting around the edge of his brain as he tries and fails to keep it peripheral, and as he cascades into the forefront of his mind Shiro feels the floor shift under him and he lands heavily on one side. The cold metal feels good against his cheek and he presses further into it as if the pressure alone might drive out the singular thought that blares across every fibre of his consciousness. One single red alert and so much like pilot error that it turns his stomach and Shiro is objectively aware that he is strangling himself around suppressed retches as he gapes around the words in his head, circling still as consciousness slips from him once more.
Voltron isn't real.
* * *
The human body can go three days without sleep before it begins to turn against itself; before hallucinations and reduction of the senses.
When Shiro was first declared missing – presumed dead – Keith counted five days without sleep. Five days he barely remembers aside a thick fog in his mind. Snatches of time lost to unconsciousness. He scraped his knee falling down the bottom step on a stairwell he didn't remember even approaching to begin with. When he finally slept it was fitful, punctuated with gasping wakefulness like clock-work every few minutes until dawn light spilling over him from the open curtains was felt like a tangible pain, sharp against his dulled mind and senses.
The periods of unconsciousness were called 'microsleeps', Wikipedia had told him, and Keith believed it as he lost more and more time to them, the hours between passing in a daze. He fell asleep in a class, falling clean out of his chair, and woke up in the nurses's office to be sent back to his dorm room with a prescription for sleeping tablets.
Keith takes two on that first night and sleeps for fifteen hours.
He takes them with him when he leaves the Garrison for the last time, but they don't last long in the desert. The land is sickeningly flat, all the way to the dunes and rocky mountains that rise in the distance, and it fills Keith with a chest-deep, broad-shoulder-wide longing that keeps his eyes on those far-off shapes long after the sun sets and they have ceased to be visible.The pharmacy in the nearby town won't refill the prescription when it runs out, and Keith isn't going back to the Garrison, so he returns with a weaker version that can be purchased over the counter, and he bunks down when it grows dark and it begins anew until Keith knows each of his nightmares like old friends.
Shiro dies in each of them.
Sometimes the ship, the Trista III, doesn't make the landing onto the moon, and the crew is killed instantly. Sometimes there is a malfunction and Keith watches Shiro's last moments pass like hours in frightening technicolour. Once or twice the crew is abducted by aliens, and Shiro is killed protecting the Holts, trying to escape, the scenario in these dreams rarely stays the same, but Keith wakes after each one inexplicably angry, filled with impotent frustration and on the third time he breaks a knuckle punching the walls. And sometimes – the dreams not beginning until Keith hears of a memorial service being held at the Galaxy Garrison some six months after the Trista III's signal was last seen – sometimes Shiro dies by Keith's hand.
Keith isn't sure when the dreams turned inwards, but he goes from desperately trying to stop Shiro bleeding out, to being the one holding the knife.
Sometimes it's an accident; they slip, or he's trying to remove it from the wound too soon. Shiro doesn't remember him in some dreams and Keith wakes with screams ringing in his ears and the image of himself reaching for the dagger he wears and plunging it deep into Shiro's abdomen – a technique Shiro himself had taught him, the moment now seeming almost unreachably far in the past – burned into his retinas. Sometimes Shiro mortally wounds him first, but mostly Keith wakes with the memory of only phantom cuts and bruises and his hands itching with blood that isn't there.
Every single time he wakes he wakes to a cold bed and the suffocating knowledge that Shiro is dead, and that he might never know how or why, but always that Shiro is dead and he isn't coming home, and Keith doesn't even have a body to bury and somehow that's the worst and best part because Shiro loved Earth, but he loved space more, and Keith thinks this as he listens to the Garrison memorial on his shitty old radio, the first time he sees the gravestones marked out in the desert, and he feels sick, he feels sick, and the grief burns through him like anger as he claws at the sand. Shiro would never have been content to be grounded, this Keith knows, knows it like he knows that Shiro isn't coming home, and that after three days without sleep you can be declared legally insane. That sleep deprivation is a form of torture, and that he is doing this to himself.
Keith is gone from the grave site by the time the sun's first rays crests the horizon, leaving just a hole in the sand and shards of stone. A wind picks up, and by the time the sun has climbed over the dunes the ground is flat once more; like nothing was ever there at all.
That night Keith goes to bed when the first stars appear and he sleeps like the dead.
*
When Keith wakes again, it is to bright lights that bathe everything in purple hues, and a headache that makes him squeeze his eyes shut against them.
He uncurls as much as he can from his position on his side, and he is surprised to feel that he is able to do so. Opens his eyes again and takes in the room around him. He is lying on a stretcher, or the Galra equivalent, he supposes, and when he looks around, the room itself is all clean metal surfaces and locked cabinets, small pill bottles peering at Keith from behind the glass doors. He sits up slowly and when he realises nothing is restraining him, he moves to the edge of the stretches and lowers himself to the floor.
Keith's legs wobble at the first hint of weight, but they hold and he crosses the room at an uneven pace, stumbling forwards and to the side now and then as he reaches out for handholds. He skins both palms when he falls, feels his knees bruise from the impact, pulls himself up in the same movement and staggers for the door. It's in this moment, exposed to the cooler air in the corridor, that he is entirely naked..
This doesn't bother Keith as much as he had thought it might have, and he sweeps the room once more for clothes, finding an array of dark clothing in various sizes in a bin in the far corner of the room. It takes some rummaging, but he finds some trousers and a shirt that are close enough to his size not to fall off when he walks.
He isn't sure where he is heading when he finally leaves the little room, but his feet don't falter and Keith lets himself run on autopilot just this once. He meets no resistance, no patrols, but suspicion escapes him; there, but when he reaches for that part of his mind it vanishes, smoke through his fingers, and Keith can't bring himself to care too much after that. He loses track of direction somewhere around the fourth corner he takes, but Keith is calm, and there is a warm static in the back of his mind that beckons him closer and closer until, teetering on the edge, he lets himself free-fall into the void beyond.
*
One by one, the other prisoners are lead out of the cell.
Shiro watches as the door opens, closes, and opens again, the intervals irregular. Not that he's counting. He could be the only one left, or there could still be others, huddling in the far corner, but Shiro hears nothing over his own breathing, the beating of his heart, and he lets the silence come over him. When he thinks, he sees a spectrum of colours, of red up close and personal, blue-grey smokey galaxies, and it hurts, and it hurt, it hurts, and so Shiro blanks his mind and he doesn't think at all.
The cell door opens again. Shiro doesn't move, and doesn't look up.
He is aware of someone approaching, coming to stand in front of him, and when he inclines his head upwards he meets golden yellow eyes as the back of his head touches the wall.
He is aware of someone approaching, coming to stand in front of him, and when he inclines his head upwards he meets golden yellow eyes as the back of his head touches the wall.
A hand breaches his personal space and Shiro lets it happen; if it's his own mind that breaks him then so be it. Better than the Druids, better than Haggar, or anything else Galran. Shiro has spent the last year letting someone else dictate his life but no more, no more, and he will choose this time, once more, and-
The hand closes on his upper arm, and it's smaller than Shiro is used to, lacks claws, and when Shiro jerks out of the grip, he breaks it.
Shiro chances a look up, meets the umber of the other's eyes and looks beyond to see pupil and iris defined in saffron and sand, and he knows that Galra eyes have none of this, he knows this for a fact, though the memory of this knowledge escapes him. Sometimes speaks, the sound low and soft, and Shiro is aware they are speaking English, but he can't make out the words themselves. It seems unimportant.
The person shakes him. It's not important.
Then one word breaks the surface and sinks down deep to seat itself beside Shiro and on the repeat he clutches at it. Three syllables and a lifetime almost forgotten, overlooked, and Shiro wants, the feeling strange, alien to his body now, but his skin burns for it, and he feels his heart press up against his ribs like a caged animal.
“Takashi,”
There is only one person in this universe that says his name like that; the pronunciation about right but the accent all wrong, and his throat aches with recognition.
“ Keith ,”
And everything will somehow be alright, and Shiro knows this for a fact.