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“Good night, Shiro,” Keith says, from across Black's cargo hold.
Shiro has no illusions about being able to fall asleep any time soon, and even less desire to actually sleep; the last time he went to sleep in this body, he almost didn’t wake up.
He says, “Good night, Keith,” anyways.
The change in Keith's breathing that means he's fallen asleep happens quickly. Quicker than it used to, Shiro thinks, back when Keith shared sleeping areas first at the children's home and then at the Garrison. Shiro wonders if this is because Keith feels safer here, in Black's belly, with Shiro nearby, than he did back on earth. Or maybe Keith’s just exhausted after the emotional wringer he’s been through the last few days. Maybe he even got used to falling asleep in weird locations when he was traveling through the quantum abyss with his mom.
Two years of that. Shiro has been dead and incorporeal for months and he still has a hard time wrapping his head around Keith being gone two years, even if the evidence is right in front of Shiro’s eyes every time he looks at Keith’s newly broad shoulders.
Shiro rolls over onto his back, the movement using more of his core muscles than he’s used to without the aid of his right arm. He grunts and stares up at the metal of the ceiling.
He doesn't feel... right.
And probably that's to be expected, what with the whole dying and having his consciousness transplanted into the body of a clone thing. But then, does anyone know what to expect here? There's no rulebook for this, only a living ship with attachment issues and space magic and a boy who keeps saving Shiro against all odds, over and over and over again.
As many times at it takes, Keith’s voice says, and Shiro twists around to look across the cargo hold at him.
But no, Keith’s still sleeping.
Shiro closes his eyes, trying to suss out how he can hear that exact phrase in Keith’s voice, tangible and memorable, down to the warmth of Keith’s inflection, a rarity from him, and yet…
“How many times are you gonna have to save me before this is over?”
Shiro remembers asking that, although his voice is pitched wrong somehow and the ghost of phantom hair brushes his neck and shoulders in the memory, when Shiro has never had hair that long in his life.
The other him did, though. The clone. Shiro remembers Black’s jaw opening wide to let Keith out, and Keith coming back in from space with a body. He’d watched Keith pull the helmet off that body, this body, right here in this cargo hold, watched long white and black hair spill out around a face that was Shiro’s and yet not Shiro’s. Keith had whispered, “I’ve got you, Shiro,” to that imposter, and the sight of tears on Keith’s cheeks for the sake of the wrong Shiro had horrified Shiro so much that he’d promptly lost all strength to connect with the physical world outside of Black’s quintessence field for about three days.
The clone had asked that of Keith, while Shiro had been trapped in a void, disembodied and powerless, screaming at Black to let him out, to send him back, to let him die rather than make him watch someone else take over his life. And Keith, thinking he had the right Shiro, the only Shiro, right in front of him, had promised, “As many times as it takes.”
Shiro clenches his remaining hand into a fist and presses it against his mouth.
Keith had promised, and despite more than two years away from either Shiro, he’d followed the clone through a wormhole to save him as soon as he’d returned to Voltron, and then followed the clone to a cloning facility on a deserted asteroid, and when none of that was enough, Keith had willingly fallen into the emptiness of open space just to keep from letting Shiro go.
There isn’t room inside Shiro for two sets of memories of Keith relentlessly, endlessly, unerringly saving him from everything the universe throws at him. He tries to reconcile the other Shiro’s memories with his own but they’re piecemeal at best, just glimpses of everything the clone experienced while Shiro was dead. He remembers watching Keith descend from Black’s cockpit and get in some kind of elevator at the top of the asteroid but being powerless to stop Keith or keep him safe from his other self. He remembers... the screaming in his head finally, blessedly silent now that he had a mission to carry out, even if that mission was to kill Keith, because he was going to take his own arm and put it through his own chest when that was done, and everything would be quiet forever then, and Keith would only be alone in the dark for a moment before Shiro joined him.
Shiro gasps, shocked by the bleakness of that thought, and shocked even more by how much of a relief it had been for the clone to think it, how much he had welcomed death knowing now what he was.
Keith rolls over, and Shiro stills, afraid to wake him. Keith would turn on the lights and see the dampness in Shiro’s eyes and ask about it, and that’s the last thing Shiro wants right now. He wants to stop remembering the emptiness this body had felt believing these hands were not merely capable of but doomed to end Keith’s life, but it’s like Shiro’s horror makes the flashes of memory keep coming, disjointed and raw and agonizing. He remembers the smell of seared human flesh as Keith’s face burned under the quintessence sword from Shiro’s galra arm. He remembers Haggar’s voice in his head. What it was like to die the first time, bright hot unending pain and then nothingness, so much faster than what it was like to die the second time, which was a brief flash of clarity and then horror and the sudden certainty that even though he could breathe again it was too late. The asteroid was coming down around them and his strength was slipping away like Keith had cut through an artery when he’d cut off the galra arm. But oh, what a way to die it was, the glow of the explosions around them and starlight in Keith’s eyes, Keith’s name on Shiro’s lips and the knowledge of what Keith had just told him something Shiro could cling to like a prayer as he fell, and fell, knowing he was free and loved.
Loved? What Keith had told him…
Shiro tries to remember it, back only a few minutes from the memory of falling and dying, but Keith’s words, whatever he’d said to the clone to make him feel that way, were just out of reach.
Shiro sits up and swings his legs to the side, pushing the blankets off him. He remembers losing the arm again well enough, the pain of it, the relief of realizing that Haggar’s compulsion was gone when the arm was. But before that, only flashes of fighting, hurting Keith, scarring him.
He closes his eyes and breathes deeply and tries to think of something, anything, else.
Hoverbike rides in the canyons outside the Garrison.
At the launch, his hand on the rough cotton of Keith's cadet uniform, desert dust kicking up around them as Keith looked up, and up, and up, at the rocket Shiro would pilot into space.
His hands on the controls during the Kerberos mission. A successful landing, the first manned mission that far out in the solar system.
Keith’s hand on Shiro’s shoulder outside Keith’s shack that morning, the first friendly touch Shiro had known in a year.
There are thousands of things Shiro has done with his hands that are good, a hundred different hugs and shoulder touches and hand clasps he and Keith have shared, and Shiro could be thinking about any one of those things instead of this body trying to kill Keith on a witch’s orders.
But all those moments were before Shiro died the first time, weren’t they? The arms that held Keith before Keith and Hunk had gone off to harvest scaultrite from the weblum, the handshe’d used to pilot Garrison ships and wipe earth’s dust from his face before all of this -- they didn’t exist anymore. That body had been vaporized. This hand, the one hand he has left, Shiro can move it and control it, but it isn’t his hand, not the one he was born with.
Probably Shiro should be grateful -- he’s not sick anymore, he knows that. Even the muscles of his old body had somehow stopped degrading by the time Shiro made it back to earth. And this body -- this body undoubtedly never even had a disease to begin with. Haggar has wiped Shiro’s illness from his genes quite thoroughly.
But the body Shiro lives in now was never born, only grown, and almost every memory he has are from when he lived in a different skin. This body was only ever made to be a weapon, and Shiro may have hidden as an ordinary human among the other Paladins for a time, but the clone had been engineered to obey and to destroy, and in the end he had done just that. This hand has attacked the people Shiro cares about most, and nearly succeeded in killing them all, and this is the body Shiro lives in, is trapped in, now.
After so much time spent incorporeal, it’s been strange to feel hemmed in by flesh and blood since Shiro woke up in a body again, but now his very skin feels suffocating, like the weight of all the things this body has done and been created to do is pressing down on him all at once.
Shiro doesn’t realize how fast he’s breathing or how tightly his fingers are grasping on to the edge of the metal shelf that makes his bed until Keith’s sleepy voice interrupts him.
“Shiro?” Keith is kneeling in front of him, quiet and concerned.
“Keith,” Shiro gasps, and Keith seems to take this as an invitation because he gets up to clamber into Shiro’s lap and draws Shiro’s head down rest on his shoulder.
Keith rubs Shiro’s back and takes slow, steady breaths that Shiro finds himself mimicking automatically until his heartbeat steadies and he no longer feels like clawing his own skin off.
“I know it’s a lot,” Keith says softly.
Shiro turns his face into Keith’s neck and closes his eyes.
“The things he did…I know it wasn’t me, but he is me, now, and I just…” Shiro inhales deeply. “I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’m wearing a body genetically engineered to be a weapon. Or that I’ve got an extra set of memories rattling around in my head now.”
Keith is silent for a moment.
“Whatever Haggar designed this body for originally,” Keith says, at last, “it’s yours now, and it can be anything you want it to be. I think -- I think he would’ve wanted you to have it. The other Shiro. He didn’t want to be Haggar’s weapon, either. He just wanted to be you.”
Shiro blinks back the wetness in his eyes and fists a hand in the back of Keith’s shirt.
“I’m sorry we hurt you,” Shiro says, thinking of the raw red edges of the burn on Keith’s face, but not lifting his head to look at it again. “I know he didn’t want to.”
Keith snorts. “You saved us,” he corrects. “We both would be dead if you and Black hadn’t been there. And I know he didn’t.” Keith’s voice softens, and he adds, “I didn’t want to hurt you either.”
Shiro pulls back to look Keith in the face, and Keith’s hands tense on Shiro’s back like he’s prepared to keep Shiro from going anywhere.
“You, uh, you said something. To him. Right before I caught you both. I don’t know -- I can’t remember what you said, but he was thinking about it when he fell, like he was at peace with dying because of whatever you said.”
Keith stares at him for a long moment, brow furrowed.
“I’d like it if every version of you would stop making peace with your own death, thanks,” Keith finally says, frowning blackly.
“Yeahh, well. You’ve got me in a fancy clone body now. I think I’m going to be good for a while,” Shiro says, trying to make a joke, or think of the silver lining here, or both.
“Good,” Keith says. He doesn’t smile, exactly, but he does stop frowning.
“Think anybody’s going to recognize me when we get back to earth, or is it going to be all, new body, who dis?” Shiro tries, letting go of Keith to comb his newly white hair back from his face with his fingers.
“Oh my god,” Keith groans, dropping his forehead to the center of Shiro’s chest and shaking his head.
Shiro chuckles.
Keith smacks his shoulder.
“Hey, Shiro?” Keith asks, a little while later, yet to move off Shiro’s lap or stop rubbing Shiro’s back. “Tell me when you remember what I said, okay?”
Shiro frowns, the memory so close and yet completely out of his reach. But maybe it will come back later. It’s only been a couple of days, after all.
“Sure, Keith.”