Chapter Text
The observable universe was, from a human standpoint, around 93 billion light-years in diameter and filled with and estimate of 200 billion galaxies. The numbers were just that; numerical values that were at its core terribly incomprehensible even to the most diligent students of astrophysics. Shiro had shared those numbers with Allura once, before his first or possibly second death—it was hard to keep track—and all she had for him back then was a thoughtful smile. Not mocking, just the kind that spoke of knowledge he clearly wasn’t privy to. She promised him a discussion on a day when they’d have enough hours in it to talk, hours uninterrupted by war.
Even with all the downtime they managed to scrape, they never got that day, and Shiro had the unpleasant fortune of knowing himself just how less than little their species knew about the universe. Amidst all those numerical values assigned to the size of space, it was no coincidence that there would be a great many places that humans shouldn’t be in, should never have found themselves in. Perhaps the warning was best applied to all organic life, but Shiro could not speak for the rest.
His first list of places began with the Galra gladiator pits, and admittedly that was a rookie mistake on his part, to think such corporeal pain was the be-all end-all.
His next, much better curated list began with the astral plane that had no time or space or physical self to begin with. Trapped in the Lion’s jaw, he had to work with his own malleable memory, had to paint himself into a canvas of vast dimensions just so his self wouldn’t be pulled apart in all directions. It was inexplicable with all the words he knew and he tried hard not to think about it, let it fade like an old nightmare.
His newest list would begin with that white brilliant nothing where time and space began and ended, where their bodies were sluggish and minds drunk on convincing thoughts spilling out of the most powerful person they knew. A friend, a dear one at that, that poisoned herself with something wicked to give her a boon she did not need. A dear friend that once told him he should never thank her for anything. A friend that should have…
That should have…
The span of a blink passed and he was back on the bridge, hands gripping the railing as cold sweat slid down his brow. Confused voices around him echoed the first formations of his thoughts.
“Wh-what happened?”
“Did we win?”
“I-I don’t remember how I got here!”
He had not a single word for any of his crew members, his mind still reeling, tongue like lead as he collected his thoughts. Someone mentioned the Lions attempting to dock and he ran out, racing the puzzle arranging itself in his head down to the hanger as fast as he could. Maybe if he could outrun it, maybe…
He burst through several security clearances, took two-three stairs at a time, but he could already hear it, the wailing, the screaming. It said more than he wanted to admit.
With a heavy breath he reached the Lions and their pilots. Lance was the source of all that inconsolable noise, on his hands and knees, fists slamming away at the harsh metal surface of a Lion’s paw. A garbled name on his lips, slipping in between the cries of anguish. Hunk was trying his best to console his friend, somehow, even when his own face betrayed a sadness he couldn’t deal with. Pidge was sitting on the floor with a vacant stare aimed somewhere at the hangar gate, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. Keith was yet to even leave the Black Lion, seeming willing to spend another eternity in it. Understandable, Shiro thought, because his eyes landed on the Blue Lion, powered down and vacant of life.
“No,” he whispered, the first word he ever said in this fresh new universe they brewed from their actions, or lack thereof. A strong and healthy universe, better in all ways possible considering whose corpse it was born from.
“No,” he said a little louder, shook his head in disbelief as the pressure behind his eyes increased.
Someone followed him down, their footsteps echoing throughout the hangar. “Is everyone alright?”
Coran and his cheerful cadence echoed behind them, standing strong even amidst the weeping. He slipped past Shiro, giving everyone a concerned look. “What’s going on,” he asked, this time with a note of worry. His feet took him towards the Blue Lion. “Where’s the princess?”
Coran didn’t seem to want to admit what Lance’s state so plainly telegraphed, choosing rather to call her name as he moved ever closer to the Blue Lion.
It caused Pidge’s face crumple, a sob slipping past her gritted teeth. She whispered loud enough for him to hear, “We let her die, Shiro.”
*
A lot more than Allura died that day in the hanger. The overwhelming sense of guilt and failure shrouded them like a heavy cloak they couldn’t get rid of, the shame of it overbearing. They couldn’t talk about it, not to Coran and his many questions and not even among each other, but the shroud was there and present for everyone to gander at. A new universe, a new lease on life all theirs to enjoy and they couldn’t even do that. They couldn’t even honor her that much.
Keith hardly meet anyone’s eyes for the entire voyage back and Shiro knew. He knew Keith well, and he knew himself well, and he knew just how hard it could hit when you’d lose someone under your watch, especially a friend. If only he had better words for him than her blood is on all our hands . That was hardly a comfort.
They haunted the Atlas like ghosts, passing through each other when they weren’t hiding behind closed doors and training decks. But Lance was the most elusive one, so it surprised Shiro to find him one night on the observation deck, half way through their journey home. It was the designated middle of the night, most of the crew asleep to the quiet thrumming sound of Atlas’ engines. But the silence was oppressive, mind prone to wandering like it had every single night since the final battle. It kept Shiro awake, kept him come back to the observation deck with a small hope of inner peace. He still loved the sight of stars so much, even after everything they did to him.
Lance, too, probably. But he didn’t look at peace. No better or worse since that day in the hangar when they accepted the consequences of their inactions. The marks on his face glowed, the ones Allura left him with, and Shiro, drunk with sleep-deprived power, asked what he’d usually keep quiet about out of some misplaced form of respect.
Lance gave him a watery smile. “I don’t know why they glow. Maybe it’s a mood thing,” and he chuckled, but it sounded forced. “Maybe I’m a mood ring now.”
Shiro placed an arm around his shoulders, the only kind of comfort he knew how to give anymore. Words were insufficient here, and he didn’t have the right ones anymore. Lance sniffed hard and said, unprompted, “I can’t get our last moment out of my head. I didn't even try to hold on to her hand. She just left, a-and I let her.”
“Don’t torture yourself,” Shiro pleaded. The guilt was of equal burden, but those were the wrong words to say in that moment. No comfort at all.
But Lance couldn’t stop his self-flagellation. “Keith went through hell for you, for his best friend,” a sob wrecked through him as he looked at Shiro, pleading for something no one could give him anymore. “And I couldn’t even hold on the the girl I love.”
It was a good thing then, that Lance didn’t know exactly how right his words really were. Shiro sent him off to bed, walked him to his room with the warmest perfunctory words he had at his disposal. Passing by Keith’s room had him pausing, had him rethinking what he had just heard. On a better day he might have knocked. In a better world, he might have let himself in. Here and now, he dragged himself back to his room and under the covers, exhausted since the day the fighting stopped, and empty. Missing something crucial.
The universes stitched themselves back together, recreated anew, but the five of them were dropped back missing something vital. Someone. The mainframe that made them who they were lost its heart, and no one knew how to deal with it.
*
Lance was the first one to detach as soon as Atlas landed back on Earth. He needed time alone, he said, needed to spend time alone with family far enough away from any Garrisons and any space ships and anything that remotely reminded him of what they’d lost. Not sure how; they walked across her remains daily, everywhere they looked. The Red Lion powered down next to Blue, and Shiro had a sinking feeling that he’d never see either running again.
Coran left for New Altea not long after, trying his best to be as optimistic as he used to, failing twice as hard in front of people that really knew him. Unlike Lance, he was chasing ghosts on the streets of a city he used to know, alone even with all of Altea surrounding him.
Pidge buried herself in the R&D department of the Galaxy Garrison, and very literally, coming out for sun and air only when her mother and father both came in to exercise some form of ranking and parental authority.
Hunk tried to be the glue that held every piece together the only way he knew how—hard-earned diplomacy and enticing food. It worked, somewhat. They had occasional meetups for lunch, Hunk’s cooking being terrible to resist, but rarely did all of them sit at the table together, no matter how much Hunk tried to accommodate their schedules.
Shiro would be lying if he said his approach to coping didn’t somewhat mimic Pidge, but he wasn’t certain what to make of his position anymore. It needed to be reshaped, much like Atlas, into something useful in the post-war world. He had ideas, maybe even the vaguest shape of a plan, but command kept him busy from sitting down and talking it through with the one person he thought would help him. That was his excuse at least, up until Keith threw a wrench in that idea and announced his departure on the same day he was departing. Back to space, to the Blades and the family he found in them. Who was Shiro to tell him otherwise, to stop him from chasing dreams that led him away from his side. Keith deserved more than his selfishness. Shiro saw him off with a hug and a smile he hoped didn’t seem too forced.
“This isn’t a goodbye,” Keith promised him, “just a ‘see you later’.”
It was the first time Shiro felt like Keith had lied to him.
Allura’s death split them apart, but ironically it was also the one thing that managed to force them all together once a year on New Altea. They stuck to that at least, for the sakes of her memory and Hunk’s food, but it was all a performance of happiness with Lance and Coran at the center as the most successful stars.
Then the Lions left as well on the first anniversary with a morose sense of finality. But it managed to spark the briefest flash of hope in just one of them. Pidge tried tracking them, doing her best impression of a cavedweller that survived on nothing but caffeine and takeout Shiro diligently brought her each day for a full week. It went unspoken between them what it was that she really looked for, and for the better because the results were disappointing. Shiro would have called it good enough but she was having none of that.
“They have a unique signature, but they’re very fast and its half-life is incredibly brief. There’s just no way to latch onto it with any sensor we have available, not in this galaxy or the other,” she said after another week worth of effort. There were still dark circles fading from under her eyes but at least Shiro managed to convince her to replace the coffee cup with tea. “The closest I can get is tracking high quantities of gamma radiation and cross-referencing it with their unique signature, but that would take...”
She paused for a solid minute, then shook her head after that brief attempt at calculation. She looked at Shiro who leaned against her desk absorbing every word, looked at him like he had the answers, not her. “That would take so long, Shiro. I can’t even give you an estimate. And the data centers we’d need to process all that information and extract the relevant details,” she whistled for emphasis, arms spreading wide.
Shiro considered their clout for a moment, and how much they could get without too many questions. “I think the Coalition can handle something as simple as data centers. Consider it done on my part. But the real question is, can you make it happen?”
She gave him a look that said she needed exactly the kind of hope he was trying to sell her. They were young, they had time. They could play a waiting game. The objective gave Pidge a new spark, brought a smile back to her face just a little, and that in itself was worth it. They made a promise to keep it between the two of them; no need to disappoint everyone twice over if the end result was little more than a collection of static noise.
And Shiro? He had motivation to give but none for himself to keep. Leading Voltron and being the Admiral of Earth’s largest vessel was incomparable in scope, a scope he felt was too much for his appetite. He missed the small things; a smaller team, a smaller conference room, the nonexisting paperwork, the lack of formality, the training drills he could participate in, the fun and games, the flying! God, he missed the flying; a small cockpit, the view of his team on the dashboard, their voices in his comms, the little family he made along the way. It was broken now, scattered like stars on the night’s sky that circle back once a year before dispersing again.
No one stuck for long on New Altea after the gatherings, the celebration its denizens had too fresh to stomach, and it became increasingly more disappointing to watch them all leave in different directions. And who was Shiro to stop anyone from doing what they want, when he himself was in a hurry to leave the ghosts of guilt that gathered with them.
But there was a name to the person in their group he cared to hear from the most but didn’t, and that smarted the worst. It felt like another mistake he was guilty of, another relationship gone to shit except this time he couldn’t even trace the origin of his failure.
So he looked for that instead, a replacement family, a different version, something to patch up all the emptiness of infrequent messaging and staticky video calls. And he found it, maybe a little to quickly, but he found it right there on the Atlas where he had almost decided to permanently bury himself in work. Almost. He took a page from his earlier days and proceeded to dunked all the responsibility off his shoulders, a preemptive measure so he wouldn't be tempted again to put his career ahead of his relationship. Family was important, it was worth fighting for, worth preserving. He knew that now, he’d learned.
Matt didn’t seem convinced.
Thirty minutes before the main reception on his wedding day and both he and Matt were struggling with that stupid bow tie in a far too small bathroom. Shiro stared at the ceiling, counting down the minutes, hoping Matt had more luck with his fingers around the bow tie than he did.
“Tell me something,” Matt asked as he struggled with the accessory, “do you really think you’ll be able to keep your feet on the ground?”
“Of course,” his answer was instant. “I’m marrying the man. I’d call that serious enough.”
“Yeah, I dunno,” Matt stuck his tongue out as he pulled the bow in a semblance of harmony and stepped back to admire his handiwork, dusting off Shiro’s shoulders as a final touch. He beamed and gave him a thumbs up, and Shiro turned to inspect his reflection. A not bad out of ten, should have gone with a clip-on to begin with.
“I give you two years tops.”
“What,” Shiro raised a brow as he stared at Matt through the mirror, going for one last fix for his hair.
“Two years before you crawl back to the Garrison, citing lazy Sunday mornings and pancake breakfasts as cause for restlessness.”
He had to turn and look his friend in the eyes. “So little faith in me, huh?”
“Not at all,” Matt shook his head with the sweets Holt trademark smile that spoke of knowing more than he let on. “I just know you.”
“Well, you’re wrong about that.”
And Shiro was right, technically, because it took him three years to crawl back to the Garrison, and he had more than lazy Sundays and pancake breakfasts to cite as cause for restlessness.
For starters, he was haunted by the stars.