Shiro wakes from the dead and finds heaven in a pair of violet eyes.

"Hey," Keith murmurs, blinking once, twice. The corners of his lips twist upwards in a quiet smile. "Welcome back."

For a moment, Shiro's heart shatters, eyes blown wide, and he thinks he's staring into the void of his soul, the space that was sucked out by the black hole. He thinks he's dreaming, thinks he's thrashing about in a hellish Galra nightmare. But then Keith is pulling back, leaning on his haunches, looking over his shoulder and calling across the dusty desert shack towards the partially open door.

Shiro recognizes where he is and, just as soon, doesn't want to.

Heaven collapses.

It's a memory, Shiro thinks, because that's all he can think, and the similarity between this moment and one from ten years in the past is too nauseating to reflect on.

"He's up," Keith calls, voice leveled and betraying no emotion.

Shiro takes a breath, holds it in, drags his eyes across the room.

There's a lizard on the wall, slinking between cracks in the wooden panels and behind the slew of posters that are tacked up in lazy, asymmetric patterns. String connects pins over an expansive regional map, ghosting across the room like Light Bikes from the old Tron arcade game. Old boxes of cup ramen are stacked crookedly in the corner like LEGO. A pair of empty containers sit on the low table between them, accompanied by a nondescript plastic water bottle. It's half empty.

For me, he thinks. Confusion wrings him dry, sends his heart into overdrive.

He bolts upright, looks up at the ceiling, the window-laden wall behind him, the door to his right that cracks open from the outside. He expects at any moment to see the Black Lion there again, all sleek lines and sharp edges, glass and metal, reminding him it was just a dream, just a dream, none of this was real—

"Shiro?" Keith asks, and his voice is small, confused.

The door pushes open, and Hunk steps inside.

He's alive. He's young, and cleanshaven, and a little overweight from his garrison days, and alive.

Shiro's heart seizes in his chest. He lets out a huff of air, draining his lungs.

Hunk steps inside, curiosity bleeding to surprise bleeding to alarm. "I think… he's having a panic attack, Keith—"

"A panic attack?" Lance says, eyes wide, following close behind. Pidge is on his tail, peeking out from behind the shadow of his jacket, arms laden with miscellaneous computer equipment.

They look the same. Intact. Whole. Young.

Not real not real not REAL NOT REAL—

Pidge sighs and drops everything in an unceremonious pile on the table between them, walks over it, leans into Shiro's personal space and taps the side of his face with the back of her hand.

"Hey," she murmurs, looking at him over the frame of her glasses. "Breathe. It's okay. You're alright. Deep breaths. Come on; one, two, three."

Shiro's vision fades to a pinprick. Her hands are blurred and smooth as they reach forward and hold his face between her palms, caught in a slow motion camera. She's mimicking the motions, sucking air through her mouth and letting out in a slow puff from her nose.

Breathe. He can do that.

He does.

The world returns to him in a high-pitched scream; the ringing in his ears fades with each slowing pump of his racing heart, each hasty swallow of a dry mouth. He lets out a shaky, empty cough, reaches across Pidge's scrawny shoulder towards the water.

"Water?" Keith guesses, watching him move. He grabs the bottle and forces it into Shiro's hand, wrapping his fingers around it until he's satisfied Shiro has a decent grip on it himself.

He drinks. It slides down his throat like water bleeding through the cracks in sun-scorched earth, but it helps.

"Shiro," Pidge says, leaning into his space again. "What's going on? Are you okay?"

"I…"

He starts, tries to form words, but fails, heart picking up pace again when a new thought slides through his mind and wreaks havoc on his emotions.

Trap. Galra trap. Galra mind trick. Trap trap trap TRAP—

"No," he breathes, flaring his nostrils, eyes sharp and wide as saucers.

"Get back," Pidge manages. "He's panicking again."

But Shiro is already up, reaching past Pidge, grabbing towards Keith, who stands there, surprised, eyebrows knotted across his forehead. He steps to the side at the last moment, and Shiro topples over, crashing into the coffee table and clamoring to the ground, the metal prosthetic of his right arm slamming against a ceramic plate and shattering it into a thousand gravity-defying pieces.

He rolls. The motion is familiar; suddenly, he's back on the flight deck of Zarkon's battleship, ducking through the hole his lion tore through one side and leaping towards the similar-sized gash on the other end, slashing through sentries at the ankles and watching their bodies separate and get sucked into the vacuum of space.

But this time, he's not in his armor. He's not in his lion, and he's not in space.

His fingers – his normal, actual, human fingers wrap around the hilt of Keith's knife. Shiro's memory of it burns into his skin, twists at his mind and tugs until it's sprung tight and let loose on his brain like a rubber band. He ignores it, ignores the pain.

"Hey, whoa, careful!" Lance belts again, leaping away, back colliding with the wall of the shack. Hunk is standing beside him, arms brought up against his chest, spine straight and eyes wide. Pidge is returning to her feet from where Shiro cast her aside in his movement. Keith is spinning around and falling into a comfortable fighting stance.

His eyes widen when he sees what Shiro is carrying, and his hand reaches behind him to the sheath on his belt. It's empty, and he snarls.

"Give that back," he says.

"Keith," Lance tries, looking back and forth, back and forth from Shiro to the rear of Keith's head. "We talked about this. There was a chance this might have happened."

"I'm not leaving him alone like this," he bites out. His eyes are still locked on Shiro's.

"He's in a fight or flight mode right now," Pidge says, a step behind him.

"Then I'll fight him." He curls his hands into a fist around his gloves.

"We need to leave him be until he calms down." She lowers her voice. "Give him space."

Keith narrows his eyes. "Do you really think that'd work?"

"It works for you," Lance says. He side-eyes the shack they're in. "Obviously."

"Not the time, Lance," Pidge bites out. She takes a step forward, but freezes when Keith glares at her.

"Shut up," Shiro mutters. He doesn't mean for it to slip out of his mouth, but it's a thought screamed so loudly within the confines of his head that he can't help it.

"What?" Keith asks, leaning closer.

This time, Shiro lets it out, full-force. "Shut up!"

He jumps to his feet, ignores the feeling of the ceramic shards tearing the skin of his knee underneath his clothing. Keith's knife – the damn knife – switches from one hand to the other. He holds it by the edge, and the synthetic nervous system in the palm of his prosthetic tickles in fake pain.

Keith watches the blade with wide eyes. "Shiro…"

The room is suffocating. It's hot – why is it so hot? – and loud and crowded and claustrophobic. The walls are shrinking in on him, pulled towards him like strings on a marionette. Each heartbeat sends them another inch closer, another inch closer, another inch closer—

Keith is letting out strangled, pained gasp, and rushes towards him the next instant. He takes two steps forward, but suddenly the room is pulling away from them now; he doesn't seem to be moving. Shiro frowns, confused, his mind growing foggy and delirious.

"Shiro, let it go! Stop!"

He blinks once, then twice, looks up and sees Keith scrambling to pry Shiro's hands off his blade.

He blinks again. The rest of the paladins are on him now – Hunk is forcing his other arm to the ground, Lance is helping Keith, and Pidge is bolting around all three of them, disappearing from Shiro's view.

The last thing he sees before Pidge covers his eyes with her arms and starts whispering calming words into his ears is his arm going limp, Keith unwrapping his hand, and the blade, bent and ragged and crushed under the weight of his grip, toppling to the floor in a crumpled heap.

The next time Shiro wakes, it's evening.

He blinks, frowns, groans when his head reminds him he's alive with a dull, throbbing ache that won't go away no matter how many times he slams his eyes shut. He almost would rather be dead, but in a way, he's not entirely convinced he isn't. He saw hell in the eyes of the Galra druids – what was a little more mental trauma?

He tries to run a hand through his hair, wipe some of the grimy sweat from his forehead, but his arms are restrained, tied back with tight rope that wraps underneath the flimsy cot to somewhere he can't quite see.

"I'm sorry."

Shiro freezes. He whips his head around, surprised, but he can't find it in himself to care anymore. His panicked response earlier in the day was the last ounce of energy he had left.

His shoulders sink when he sees Pidge sitting backwards on a flimsy wooden chair, arms propped up on the back and legs tucked up underneath herself.

He tries to speak, realizes it's not happening when his dry throat seizes up and leaves him coughing and gasping for breath. He looks around for a bottle of water, sees the same one from earlier sitting on the dented tabletop, and stares at it, panting.

Rather than help like before, Pidge just watches.

Shiro licks his lips, waits a moment for his mouth to unwind. "Why?" he manages.

"Why am I sorry? Because of all this," she says, waving her hand at the restraints. "But I'm sure you understand why they were necessary."

Shiro pauses, bites his lip, shrugs. "Yeah," he says. "You should have done it the first time, too."

Pidge gives him a sad, knowing smile. "Can you really fault us for having hope?"

Shiro sighs, falls back onto the cot, lets his head burrow into the soft fabric of whatever his makeshift pillow was. He turns his head and sees a strip of olive green – Lance's jacket.

"I haven't seen this thing in years," he murmurs, frowning. "Convincing, too. Although it doesn't smell enough like B.O. and interstellar body wash."

If Pidge has a response, she doesn't say it.

He lays there, still, and watches the fluttering of a curtain down by his feet. The window is open, pulled up and ignored. The stars outside are bright and vibrant; they cast dull shadows of light over his bed and onto the dusty, unswept floor.

"Keith doesn't think you're the real Shiro."

He freezes.

"He what?" Shiro asks, rolling over so he's facing Pidge again. Her eyes aren't on him anymore; instead, they're burrowing a hole into the leg of the couch just underneath his face.

"He thinks you're an impostor," Pidge shrugs, her mouth burrowing into the sleeve of her jacket. "He's really mad, you know."

"I don't see why he wouldn't be," Shiro mutters. "I'm mad, too."

"Why are you mad?" she asks, raising an eyebrow.

He turns, looks at her, passes along his most serious stare. "Because I just want to die. Not play any of these games."

Pidge winces and looks away. "That's… harsh."

Shiro sighs and looks back up at the ceiling again. "It's the truth. I'm tired. I'm tired of all of this, and I'm tired of being helpless."

"Now I know you're not the real Shiro," Pidge mutters. "Everything I've heard about the real Shiro tells me he wouldn't give up so easily."

"I'm the real Shiro," he says, closing his eyes. "I'm just not the one you may know."

The same way you're not the real Pidge.

They sit in silence. Shiro dozes, content with not being probed or tortured or any number of the… other colorful things the Galra could be doing to him at that moment. He appreciates the rest, regardless of how short-lived it may be, and lets himself relax.

His Galra imprisoners seemed to be feeling kind at the moment, and Shiro wasn't in any mood to test his luck.

He wakes to the sound of more voices, speaking quietly just above him. He listens, careful not to change his breathing or move more than necessary.

"Should we really be doing this?"

"What, holding him down like this? You saw what he tried to do earlier. We can't take any chances, Hunk."

"Yeah, but Lance… this is the Takashi Shirogane. Like, the biggest, baddest pilot the Garrison ever managed to produce." A pause. "I don't know, man. Seeing him so… broken like this is just sad. And demoralizing."

Something in Shiro's heart cracks. He ignores it. This was the torture, it seemed. Not the physical pain but the emotional.

Pidge's voice breaks in. "He's still in there somewhere. I know it. But I don't know how far deep."

"I don't blame him, honestly," Lance mutters, sighing, letting himself settle down on the table toward Shiro's feet. "I mean, look at his arm. Have you ever seen a prosthetic that advanced before? And all those scars, and the hair…"

Shiro fought back the urge to frown. What?

"What are you trying to say, Lance?" Hunk asked.

"I mean… isn't it obvious?"

"I'll say it," Pidge butts in bluntly. "Aliens. Aliens got to Shiro."

Shiro lets in a confused breath before he can catch himself, and he holds still, expecting one of them to slap him awake and string him to the wall, but instead, the wood in the door creaks open and he can hear the three impostors at his bedside turn and look away.

"What's going on?"

Shiro's gut clenches again.

"We're just trying to figure out what to do with Cyborg here," Hunk says.

Keith lets the door slam behind him, takes a few steps into the room, begins to pace along the far wall.

"Uhh, buddy?" Lance asks. "You ever going to explain what's going on? Why you knew Shiro was going to show up in the first place?"

Silence. Keith sighed, clicked his tongue and grunted. "See that?"

Lance moved across the room towards the sound of Keith's voice. "I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at, but alright."

"Looks like the X-Files in here," Hunk mutters.

Keith rustles a series of papers on the table in front of him, and launches into a complicated story of sleepless nights, bizarre feelings at the back of his mind, and a pull – a tug towards a hole in the ground half a mile to the west.

"I keep seeing this word," Keith says. "'Voltron'."

Shiro sits perfectly still.

This was it. He knew it.

"That's what I kept hearing on my sensors!" Pidge says, excited. "Voltron. What does it mean?"

It's bait, Shiro. They captured you, have the Black Lion, and now they're using your memories to find where the others went.

He lets a small vindictive smile grace his lips. It's a shame they haven't realized Voltron's dead.

"Wait," Hunk says, and Shiro lets his expression drop again, careful not to move. But when the sound of Hunk's heavy footsteps trend away from him rather than in his direction, he relaxes into the cot again. "What are those?"

"Data readings," Keith says. "It's the pattern I picked up when I scanned the area. Have no idea what it means, though."

"Fraunhofer lines," Hunk mutters, and Shiro's mind melts.

What.

"What?" Lance seems to say for him.

"They look like Fraunhofer lines," Hunk says again. "You know, the way they found out what the sun was made out of back in the day? It tells you the chemical composition of something based on its emissions spectrum."

Silence.

"I bet this is what this Voltron thing is made of. If we use your radio, Pidge, I might be able to set something up so we can look for it." He sounds proud of himself. "Kind of like a Voltron Geiger counter."

"Huh," Pidge says. "I never thought of that. Way to go, Hunk."

"Yeah, well, I try."

It was as if a memory was playing out from just beyond Shiro's closed eyelids. Everything – down to Hunk's bizarre method of detection – was the way he remembered it.

A test. There was no other explanation. The Galra were running his mind through its paces. They'd exhausted everything else, torn through his body and ripped him apart on the operating table far more times than he was comfortable admitting.

But his mind? His mind was still his. And he was satisfied he had died with it intact when he flew his lion into the heart of a black hole.

He resists the urge to groan. Nothing was as simple as it should have been.

"We need to get going," Keith says, and he turns towards the door. Shiro remembers where he is, who he's with, and winces.

Then there's a body above him. He can feel the air shift, can feel the way the light on his eyelids dips and disappears.

Something's tugging at his restraints.

"Whoa, Keith," Hunk says, "what are you doing? He's dangerous."

"He's not the Shiro you remember, Keith," Pidge says.

Keith huffs above him, reaching over Shiro's chest to cut at the knot. "You don't know him," he murmurs.

"He destroyed your knife," Lance demands, voice high and absurd. "You cared more about that thing than most people! Why are you letting him off the hook so easily?"

"Because he's not a threat," Keith states, as if it's not the first time he's had to make this argument, and Shiro remembers, vaguely, that it's not.

He also remembers that these aren't his teammates. Don't get attached. Don't let them get you, Shiro.

The knot snaps, and Shiro's eyes blast open.

He's moving before Keith can react. Keith grunts in surprise when Shiro catches him by his waist, flings him across the room, and pins him against the wall. His synthetic arm pries the bent and battered Marmora knife from Keith's hand, brings it up to his neck, and holds it there, letting the skin around Keith's Adam's apple dip against the metal with each of his shaky breaths.

"God damn it—" Lance yelps, flying across the room. The others move in tandem, bolting through the tiny shack, Hunk already reaching out to grab Shiro's prosthetic and Lance moving towards his neck.

"Stop!"

They freeze.

"Keith?" Lance says, quiet.

"Just… let me handle this," Keith grits out. The edge of the knife cuts into his neck, and he winces.

"Who are you," Shiro bites, "and who do you work for?"

Keith's eyes fall open, turn to stare at him from where his head is smashed against the wall. "What?"

"Are you Marmora?" he says. "Zarkon? Some sort of Galra mercenary?"

"Did you just say Galra?" Pidge asks. "I heard that on the radio too."

"Shiro," Keith murmurs, color draining from his face, "do you not remember me?"

Shiro's eyes are fading again, prickling on the edges like the shattering of dying suns. He lets out a shaky breath, holds his lungs empty, relishes in the feeling of drowning among the stars.

"He's panicking again," Pidge says. "Keith…"

Keith's face steels, and he burrows a glare into Shiro's eyes. He sucks in a careful breath, winces when the twisted edges of his knife draw blood from a sliver in his skin.

"Do it," he says.

Shiro falters. "What?"

"Keith!" Lance says from behind them. Hunk pulls him aside.

Keith leans into the blade. Blood trickles down the edge. It runs across the handle, pools in a tiny puddle around Shiro's white knuckles.

"Do it," Keith repeats, and there's a fire in his eyes.

Shiro sees red, and it's not from the blood, and it's not from the stare. The red lion is there, zooming past him, eclipsing the black lion's cockpit from the light of the nearby star. A Galra fleet twenty times larger than any they had ever encountered looms ahead, and it's just him and Keith and Lance, careening through space, a helpless planet behind them.

The red lion disappears.

Shiro opens his eyes.

The world is blurry; he blinks, forcing aside the haze. Keith is still there, pressed against the wall, staring at him, eyes wide. He looks afraid, but not for himself.

"Do it," he mutters again, but it holds no fire, no emotion. Just a statement. Just a plea. It hits him like dull roar, and it isn't the first time static has taken the place of Keith's voice.

Shiro's hand shakes. The blade slips from Keith's throat, just a bit, and he lets out a breath.

"No," Shiro says. It's quiet, but there, allowed to fester in the air between them.

He can handle losing an arm. He can handle the gash on his face, can handle the ghostly glow of his white hair late at night when the stars are all that's left. He can handle the pain.

He can't handle losing Keith.

The knife slips from his fingers, handle catching on the fabric of his torn, tattered clothing. It clatters to the ground with a dull thud.

Shiro turns his eyes away, steps back, can't bring himself to look up. This was where the torture would begin; the Galra pretending to be Keith would shift back into a druid, and it would stretch out its long, spindly, pale arms towards his throat and do the job he couldn't bear to do himself.

So he sits and waits. Stands there, quiet, not bothering to put up a fight. The Galra won, but he wasn't going to make it any more embarrassing for himself.

"Keith," Lance murmurs.

Shiro turns, just barely, and looks – the boy's face is as pale as moonlight, eyes saucers and nostrils flaring with each heavy pant of anxious breath.

Hunk stands next to him, eyebrows knotted across his forehead, mouth a fine line. He takes a step forward, stops, bites his lip.

Pidge is off to the side. Her arms are crossed, but her face is stoic and emotionless; a mask of faux indifference.

They're normal. They're human. They're afraid.

A thought crosses through Shiro's mind, and his gut responds by twisting around his spine and spiraling up his throat. It's the one thing he's kept himself from thinking since he woke up here, the one thing he can't bear to put into words until he has no other choice.

Maybe they're real.

Shiro staggers, takes a shaky step to the side, barely manages to keep his knees from buckling. The couch is right next to him, but it may as well be miles. He stumbles, falls onto it, lets the connection beat the air out of his lungs. His face presses into the faded upholstery.

"Shiro?" Keith asks. One question carries on its back a thousand others, and Shiro can't. He can't think about it.

He assumed that when he fell into the black hole, Zarkon's ship framed by the wide windows of the black lion's cockpit, he would wake up dead or wouldn't wake up at all. The black lion was better destroyed than in the enemy's hands, and so Shiro had made the ultimate sacrifice, pulling back the joysticks and letting the tug of gravity finish the job.

He'd closed his eyes, relished in the feeling of rage he felt through his lion's shared connection with Zarkon, and smiled.

And woke up here.

"You're all dead," Shiro says, finally, voice cracking mid-sentence and coming out in a whisper instead. "Or missing. Or both."

Silence. Keith is settling against the wall, rubbing his neck with a gloved hand and letting his head droop, hair covering his eyes like the veil of a bride.

"Shiro, whatever happened to you out there," Pidge says, "it's over now. You're safe. Please."

He shakes his head, lets it fall backwards. "If you really are Galra," he says, "then just end it."

"We're not…" Pidge sighs, growls through her clenched teeth. "Would you two stop trying to get yourselves killed for one second and actually use your brains?"

The room falls quiet again. Shiro doesn't move. He can feel the starlight on his shoulders, feel the weight it presses into his skin.

A roar cuts through his mind.

Hunk yelps. Lance jumps. Keith winces. Pidge blinks, eyes wide behind the frames of her glasses, and frowns.

"Was I the only one that heard that?" Hunk mutters. "Please tell me I wasn't the only one that heard that."

The blue lion. Shiro's heart stops, starts, stammers along at the beat of a stalling engine.

"It sounded like a cat," Lance murmurs.

Pidge moves a hand to her face, scratches an itch on her cheek, eyebrows pressed past her hairline. "What was that?"

The blue lion. It was on Earth. That wasn't possible – unless…

"That," Keith says, dusting off his pants and walking toward the door, "is what I've been trying to figure out."

Shiro leans forward, stares at Lance, and doesn't care that he's being obvious.

"It called to all of us," Lance says, frowning. He freezes, turns, looks at Shiro for a split second from past the bridge of his nose. "At least, I think it called out to all of us?"

Shiro takes a deep breath, tries not to let it out in a shaky mess. "Yeah. I heard it, too."

There was no way – no way – the Galra could replicate the mental connection of the lions. It wasn't possible; the Alteans were quite proud of that.

The door clamors shut, and Shiro realizes that Keith's gone, disappeared into the cool darkness of the desert.

"Well, we may as well get this over with," Hunk says, sighing and pulling on his coat. "And to think I almost said today's been weird enough."

Lance follows, hasty but all smiles, and Shiro knows when he's projecting – when he's trying to keep the peace with his grin alone. The thought from before, the wound coil of terror, tightens when he realizes that all the tension between them was caused by him.

It wasn't like this before. Not the first time.

Shiro winces, and thinks different thoughts. It doesn't work.

"Are you coming?"

And that's when he realizes he's alone now, sitting in the dark with Pidge in the doorway, holding it open in invitation.

He stands before he understands why, lets his feet walk him towards Pidge's outstretched fingertips.

Somewhere, somehow, a part of his mind accepts that maybe this wasn't a Galra trap, and that maybe this wasn't Hell. Maybe it was real, and maybe he was living a dream of could-have-beens. Despite it all, the admission is soothing, because at least it's an answer – something to latch on to and gnaw on like a teething child.

He relaxes, steps into the unknown, feels his shoulders slide back.

Maybe this wasn't the first time. Maybe this was a repeat of the past.

But, Shiro thinks, as he follows his team towards the hills, a second time's only a second time if there was always a first.

Author's Note:

Thanks for reading!

Many thanks to the fantastic MaethoMixup for being my beta for this project!

The cover photo was drawn by - and used with permission from - the fantastic v-0-3 on Tumblr! Links are on my profile page.