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Pidge was having a lot of nightmares lately. Some of them were stupid and illogical, like about a peanut butter monster imprisoning them to shove peanut butter into their mouth for all eternity. (Was that a nightmare? They didn't know since they also thought it sounded wonderful if not done against their will.)
A lot of them felt too real. Too personal. And the focus wasn't always on their brother or their father, to the surprise of anyone who doesn't know them.
He woke up once in the middle of the night, sweating and silently crying as his body refused to cooperate. His room was dark save for the soft glowing Altean blue light, and something about it made him feel like an experiment held in captivity and a distant thought slipped through his mind to whisper Matt feels this every day.
The door opened and Pidge whimpered like some kind of coward, unable to turn their head towards the door. "Pidge...Pidge, it's me. Shiro."
Just hearing his name helped the chains binding him to lessen, helped the weight on his chest ease off until he could breathe again. Shiro came closer until he sat on the side of Pidge's bed that they couldn't occupy due to being so much smaller, and when they locked eyes the last of the sleep paralysis faded away.
"...Nightmare," their voice choked out. Shiro's expression hardened but his eyes were sympathetic.
"Yeah. You're preaching to the choir on that one."
Shiro always came to Pidge when his night terrors got bad. It was a commonality they realized early on, though it isn't the most happy thing to bond over. They both dreamed about losing Matt the most often, but Shiro had dreams that he couldn't recall as soon as he was freed from them and Pidge had dreams that he could remember every second of, every minor detail and seemingly trivial tidbit of information.
It had always been a joke that Pidge had a thing for the technicalities.
But they fit together perfectly whenever they cuddled, and their warmth was like their own dimensional pocket that kept them suspended in their own universe.
Pidge moved over. Shiro crawled in not long after.
He was saying something but Pidge didn't feel like listening. Instead they buried their face into Shiro's civilian shirt, reveling in the warmth of another human being. His heartbeat was strong, steadying, steadfast just like the man it belonged to. It reminded Pidge too much of what it felt like to cuddle with his brother when things felt particularly awful, and he even rubbed circles into the small of Pidge's back in the same rhythm as Matt always did.
When he fell back to sleep he didn't even realize it.