"I messed up," Keith says, still trying to catch his breath past the explosion and the tightness in his chest where he hit debris and Regris—fuck, Regris. "This is my fault. I—"

"Yes, it is." Kolivan interrupts, staring down at Keith where he's still letting the floor hold him up, and his voice is as cold as the vacuum of space that tried to suck the air out of Keith's suit.

The words steal what's left of his air, and in a final shame, his arms give out. He's left lying on his side, gasping, still, and there's something wrong with that but it's hard to think without air. Kolivan's eyes soften minutely, and then he frowns. "Keith?"

Kolivan kneels beside him and settles his hand over the rent in the side of his suit, and then slides it up over Keith's ribs, where he's heaving. He presses his thumb in against the cramped muscle and it's comforting—almost like he's a child again and his Dad is soothing him through some panic.

The touch gives him something to focus on; Kolivan doesn't say a word, not for minutes. And when he finally does, it's not scolding or worried.

"You can't be everything," he says. He sounds weary. He sounds like he knows he's talking to a brick wall.

Keith doesn't know how to not try.

Shiro lets him go.

It's different from the hologram he saw at the Blade's headquarters, but only because this Shiro has a reason to be disappointed in him. This Shiro lets him go with his blessing.

It hurts as much as it did the first time.

In months absent, he gets used to missing. He spent a year alone in the desert, he reminds himself. It's different, and the Blades are almost like a family.

Kolivan goes with him on every mission, like it's normal for their leader to go on a routine fact finding infiltration. Even after Keith is settled in his place and has enough experience to lead his own missions, he still goes. It's like having a family again. Someone to watch out for him, someone who cares if he comes back safe. Voltron was safer, but it was never a home.

He's learned that about himself. The Galaxy Garrison was a home, until he lost Shiro. The shack was a home, until he left it. The Castleship was a home, until he was needed more somewhere else.

He tries to make a home in places and duty, but he finds it in people.

After a mission that goes better than expected one of the Blades pulls him aside and pulls out a data pad. He doesn't understand what he's watching until he sees Shiro's face under a spotlight.

...with my bare hand, his tinny voice says through the pinhole speakers on the pad. It startles a laugh out of Keith, and then the Blade, and then Kolivan catches wind and it's the first moment of real joy they've had in weeks. The performance is pure agony.

It becomes a tradition. Keith never asks where they get the recordings, but he recognizes that it's at cost and effort—and they do it for him, first and foremost. The recordings fill him up and hollow him out at the same time. The shows are agonizing, the kind of work he could never have done for Voltron, but he watches the team grow and flourish and find their feet without him.

It's as sweet as it is bitter, and maybe more than.

This is better.

When it comes down to it, the decision isn't a conscious one,

It's easy to pilot a fighter in a straight line. That's the first thing they teach you. Hold steady, don't be tricked into a tilt. The Galra fighter is more like his bike than the ship or simulation, anyway—it comes natural. Dodging fire from the cruiser is like swinging around corners and cliffs in the desert; it's second nature.

There's no second option. That's the fact that settles into him as he flies toward the barrier. Maybe the team will make it to the cruiser in time, but the Blades don't operate on risk.

Fear grips him like a vice before the impact, and all he can think about is how much he wants someone there with him, like a child scared, and Shiro is what comes to mind even as the violet of the barrier shines through his closed eyes. Keith wants him there, because he's terrified like he's never been before and Shiro is something to hold on to—

But the impact never comes.

The light beyond his eyes gets brighter and brighter. At first he thinks something went wrong—he's inside the barrier, somehow, and his last and best plan has failed, but then the ship falls away. The grips under his hands, the seat below, fading out of existence.

When he opens his eyes, there's nothing there. Nothing anywhere. Stars above and below and an indistinct horizon, like a pane of glass.

"Shiro?"

No response. The radio isn't static; there's nothing to hear. He's alone, and the only sound is his own voice echoing and the tap of his foot when he takes an involuntary step forward. The echo makes it sound like he's walking on water.

And he realizes: this is what it's like to be dead.

He spends the first day walking, like if he goes far enough he'll find a door, or an edge, or some way out.

But it never changes. The stars are fixed and the horizon looks the same no matter where he turns, no matter how long he walks.

The sound of his own steps starts to drive him nuts. Even in the desert he never talked to himself. The bike, sometimes, maybe, but he can't talk to nothing, and that's all he has here.

When there's nowhere left to go, he sits, finally, and tries to come to terms with it. An eternity in solitude, but at least it's beautiful.

"I hope everyone made it," he mutters into his knees where his arms are wrapped around them. That's as far as he can think, because if he focuses on the thought that he'll never see them again, he really will go nuts.

Shiro is what his mind settles on, dully. It's like being a kid again, when he lost a tooth in a bad fall and no matter how much his Dad reminded him not to, he couldn't stop tonguing over the empty spot in his mouth and the tang of blood. That's what this loss feels like—has felt like, for months.

Something broke between them, and he wasn't smart enough to know how to put it back together. That was always Shiro's job. Keith propped Shiro up and kept him safe, but Shiro held them together—until he didn't.

Anyone would get tired of it eventually.

Sleep drags at him, and it's a relief to let it pull him under.

He wakes in fire.

It takes him four days to figure out how to move.

It's like he has to pull the energy out of the air around him, but it's not like breathing in life; it's not like moving or existing. There's some barrier between him and reality that he has to push through before he can be something real, and even then, he can only see.

A ghost, he realizes. That's what he is. Something stuck between, and there's no question why. If ghosts from attachments, from desire, from something unfinished and yearning, that's what he was always destined to become.

The Lion is the easiest place to manifest. He takes to watching Shiro while he's piloting, whispering encouragements and suggestions. He only takes them when he's exhausted, but that's when he needs them most.

And he's always exhausted.

Shiro doesn't acknowledge him, and that's fine. Invisibility is a blessing. It gives him time to observe, like he never could in life. He follows Shiro like a shadow, pulled along in his wake. He was always the most beautiful thing in Keith's life, even gone, when all Keith had were photographs. Even when he came back changed.

Even now, after life.

His hair is longer. The white shock of hair falls over his face when he sleeps, and Keith finds himself reaching down to push it aside before he remembers he can't touch like that anymore. There are shadows under his eyes, and it doesn't make sense. In a dozen nights of watching Shiro sleep, he doesn't wake up once. It's not insomnia, and it's not hunger. Hunk notices what Keith does, and shoves food in his face and in his door and Shiro eats, but it's not enough.

He's cut down—tired and overworked, like Keith has never seen him, and it doesn't make sense. It can't be grief because Keith has been gone for weeks, and it can't be the effort of picking up Keith's spare slack because Keith has been off the team for longer than that.

Shiro sleeps like a dead man in every spare moment he has. Keith stands at the ends of hallways and watches Shiro drag himself to bed, watches him almost fall asleep at the table as he eats, watches him doze off in the lounge after meetings with his face pressed into the cushions of the couch.

And in his lion. Those are the best moments, because Keith can almost touch him. Almost, like he's touching smoke, but Shiro doesn't feel it.

There's one moment he thinks Shiro can see him, but the second Keith says his name, the second he steps forward, he fades—and he still can't touch.

That's his greatest fear. Touch is something special between them. A hand on a shoulder, under an arm, behind a back—holding and pulling and saying, you're worth this.

But Keith can't touch. He tries a hundred times, pours himself into it and focuses and works, but he still can't touch.

Until he can.

Shiro sleeps with his jacket like it's a blanket,

Don't read into it, Keith tells himself, but it's impossible not to. Shiro pulls it to his face and breathes it in, and it's almost terrifying the way his metal hand fists in it and wrinkles the leather. If it were lit up, the jacket would burn.

It takes days and more of watching him to understand what he's seeing. There's no path forward for them, but it's a comfort to think that maybe, despite everything, some part of Shiro wanted him and misses him the same way Keith misses Shiro and life.

Two months in, everything changes. Time is different as a ghost, but Keith marks it because it's the first day he's seen Shiro smile since he became a ghost. He's beautiful with it.

As he watches Shiro sleep that night, it occurs to him that he has nothing left to lose. He feels strong. A kiss is so little, and so simple, and he's got nothing but his longing and the world of stars and glass. If he can have it, Keith wants it at least once before he fades.

He feels like he's fading.

Shiro is quiet when he sleeps, even though his lips are parted. Keith leans down and presses in—Shiro burns like a fire against him. It's a private thing, he thinks, but when he pulls back, Shiro's eyes are open and watching and wide with sorrow.

His hand is right there, outstretched and obscuring the middle of Keith's face, like he wanted to touch and is heartbroken to discover he can't.

"You can see me," Keith tries, before he can stop himself, but what he means is, you can feel me. The kiss was nothing, and still, Shiro felt it.

"But you're not real," Shiro whispers, closing his eyes.

He's not.

It hurts, even though it's the truth, because he feels real. For the first time since Naxzela, he can touch. Keith settles his hand over the jacket, fingering the leather, and the heat from Shiro's chest, and the muscle and bone beneath it.

It feels real.

"You kept it," he sighs. That means something. The heartbeat leaping under his hand means something. "You don't think I'm real?" he asks, because he has to know.

Shiro doesn't move or speak, but his breath catches in the air between them. Silence is its own answer, and all the permission he needs. If Shiro doesn't think this is real, then there's no cost to this, and nothing to lose. If Shiro wants him... Maybe there's something to gain, for both of them.

He pulls Shiro into another kiss and straddles Shiro's waist. There's something indulgent about how wide he has to stretch his legs to accommodate Shiro's width. He feels weightless, but Shiro's hands twitch on the bed beside him.

If he tried it in life, would Shiro have pushed him off? Pulled him in?

Is this what he missed? Is this what he could have done to fix them?

It doesn't matter now, he realizes. Nothing does.

There's a list of everything he wants to do, taking form in the back of his mind—a hundred little desires he only ever half realized in life, but Shiro is hot against him, and solid, and he gets it now. There's no strength to him now, but he has to be able to do something—

Shiro breathes against him, and the illusion shatters.

Keith feels it, and feels the air go through him, like he really is nothing but smoke. Shiro is shaking, he realizes. This is what Keith wants, but if Shiro doesn't think he's real, what does Shiro think this is?

After Sendak, after the Galra tried to take the Castleship, Shiro was obsessed with the disquiet of his mind. Anything out of place was his fault—a symptom of his own mind going wrong, and there was a direct line between that and Shiro wanting Keith to take control of Voltron in his place.

If he knows Shiro, he knows this.

His presence is going to drive Shiro mad, or the nearest thing to it.

"I'm sorry," Keith whispers, and brushes his thumbs over Shiro's cheekbones, at the edge of the shadows under his eyes, and then pushes the hair off his face. If Shiro is still conscious enough to notice, there's no indication. No acknowledgment. Maybe it's self defense, Keith thinks.

The moment before the barrier comes back to him—the terror, and wanting Shiro, and nothing else. Maybe that's what the jacket is. Maybe that's all Shiro wants out of this.

Maybe that's all he needs.

Keith settles beside him on the bed, pushing his face into Shiro's neck where he burns, burying his arm under the jacket where it's lying against Shiro's chest. He trails his fingers up and down, trying to be something comforting rather than a burden.

It takes something out of him in the most literal sense. After an hour, Shiro's breathing is settled and his heartbeat is steady and slow, but Keith is running on empty.

It's less like falling asleep than it is like passing out.

When he wakes up, he's back in the other world and he feels like he's been beaten into the floor of the training deck by something bigger and meaner than he could ever hope to be. The crash finally catching up with him, he thinks. It's breaking him down little by little, and maybe there's some fixed amount of him left to spend.

He tries to manifest one more time, but Shiro doesn't want to see him.

Shiro puts a hand through his mirror, and that's all that's left between them.

After that, Shiro won't listen. Won't look. It gets harder to edge into his space. It gets harder to come awake at all. Keith feels less tangible, like a spark at the edge of fading.

The world with the stars is pulling him in and under.

It's quiet and calm, and it takes nothing out of him to be there. Not like reality.

Every moment in Shiro's world is a struggle, like the air around him is trying to tear bits of him off. It reminds him of the mission where they lost Regris—where he lost Regris—the gash in his suit, the vacuum of space sucking the air and warmth out of him.

That's exactly how it feels, but he's nothing if not a fighter.

The saving grace is that he can go where the Lion goes.

It comes to a head at the end of a fight he wishes he was in. Trapping a Galra fleet sounds like a good idea, until you have to deal with the leftovers and find them twice as fierce as anything you've fought before. They can't disable interfleet communications like they could on Naxzela.

The battles so far have been brutal, but this one is more.

Within minutes, it's a killing field. There's no outpost to fight, nothing to defend. It's a last hurrah—and the Galra know it. They're guarding their flagship with the last of their forces, and they're smart about it. Flagship, they call it, but in name only, because anything else with cannons like that would be a battleship—and the best of them, at that. It's a fighter, through and through, and the rebel forces are nothing before it.

Keith watches it all from the cockpit of the Lion, hovering behind Shiro, not touching. It doesn't matter—he doesn't have enough energy to be felt, but it's the last wall Shiro put up between them, and it's not his place to try.

The Galra are on the defensive. They know what Voltron can do, but Voltron is AWOL, and Keith doesn't understand why until he sees the sweat on Shiro's face and the way he's heaving for breath. It's been minutes since they entered the fight, and there's no reason for him to be exhausted like that, except—

Shiro isn't tired, Keith realizes.

He's sick.

They form Voltron, and it falls apart.

They form it again, and again, it fails. This time, the Galra take the opportunity, and take the shot. The cannon takes out a contingent of rebel ships and the Yellow Lion with it. Hunk's voice comes in through over the radio, but there's nothing they have that can take that on. Shiro has the Bayard, but it's dormant. He can't even form the jawblade, and he's on the edge of passing out.

It's a fight for their lives, Keith realizes halfway through. They've bitten off so much more than they can chew, and it hinges on Shiro and his weakness.

"Shiro?" He tries to pull in enough energy in to become solid, but the moment he does, Shiro gasps and puts a hand to his head like he's in agony—

That's the moment Keith realizes what's going on.

Shiro isn't sick, and Keith isn't a ghost.

The Black Lion saved him.

That place he found himself in isn't death. No—it's a place between. It's a place for him. The Lion is sapping their energy to do it—has been, since he crashed into the barrier. The impact of the Galra fighter saved them, and the Lion saved Keith, and that's why Shiro's eyes are bruises and the Lion is useless—it's him. The Black Lion demands the most energy from its pilot.

How much energy does it take to keep a memory alive? To give it a place to live, and manifest it at will? More than either of them have.

This is his fault again. All of this is his fault.

The next time he manifests, it's in the world the Lion built for him, and the Lion is there and watching him.

There's something beautiful about that much strength in one package, that much engineering and science and raw power—and they built themselves, he remembers Coran saying.

It stands above him like a sentinel.

"We have lions on Earth," he tells it, before he can stop himself. He wants to talk, always, but that reticence keeps at bay, and there's nothing to stop him now.

"They're beautiful," he says, remembering every pictures he wondered at as a child. "You're beautiful."

It's power and strength made metal and there's no pilot that doesn't see something breathtaking in a machine like that. He was lucky to pilot one at all.

Keith lays a hand on its nose, like the first time he piloted it, when Shiro was in danger and in need, and it bows to him.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Thank you for sending me here. Thank you for letting me see him again."

That's all he wanted, he realizes. He wanted to save Shiro, and he wanted to see him. He wanted to be with him. The Lion loves them both, and it exudes in everything it does. "Thank you," he says again, choked.

And: "You have to let me pilot," because that's their only way out of it. If he's been sucking the life out of them to exist, he has to return it, and this is all he's got.

He flares into existence.

Shiro sees him out of the corner of his helmet and shudders, the Lion moving with him, out of formation. A litany of voices blur across the radio but Shiro silences them with a slap to the control panel.

"Fuck," he gasps, ripping his helmet off, "why now?"

Not a question, but a curse. That's what he thinks Keith is now. And he's right.

"Let me help," Keith begs. Shiro can hear him now that they're connected by the Lion—and maybe he always could, because he still doesn't respond.

Head bowed, hands in his hair, radiating exhaustion—this is how Shiro looked his first morning back on earth, war-wounded and changed, words beyond him for that first hour, until keith had to pull him into the bathroom and push him into the shower, soak the hurt off him.

Some of it, at least.

Keith got soaked too, and that's always been it. Shiro is a creature of excellence, beyond compare. He wanted the stars, and he made keith want them too, but Keith isn't Shiro. He doesn't have Shiro's grace.

But he can pilot. and he can get them out of this.

"Shiro." He sets a hand on his shoulder and there's enough to him that he can feel it, but Shiro can't, not through the armor. There's sweat in his bangs and beading on his forehead from the helmet and the fight, weariness manifest. Keith hesitates, but there's more to gain from touching him than there is to lose, so he presses his fingers to the side of his face, right against his temple, at the edge of his undercut. "I don't have much time. Please let me help?"

He lets his fingers slide along Shiro's cheek bone until they're at the edge of the shadow under his eye. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse to his own ears. "Shiro. Please."

And that's what does it. That's what breaks him, finally. Shock, almost like fear, freezes Shiro's face under the bruise-eyed exhaustion and he whispers, "You're real?"

Is he?

Focus, focus. "I can pilot us out of here. Do you trust me?" The confession is on the tip of his tongue: I'm the reason you can't pilot it yourself, it's not you, it's never been you. But they don't have time, and the best apology is to fix what you've hurt and never do it again.

"I don't understand—how are you here? Keith?" His name sounds like it never has: high and pleading, the sound of something scared.

He deserves an honest answer, and Keith tries.

"I don't know. I think it was the Lion. Maybe it wanted to give me more time." He swallows, and whispers, "I think it took part of you to do it. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Shiro grits his teeth, eyes turned down.

"It took me to this place..." Keith looks off out the window of the cockpit where there's fire and fighting, but also stars, trying to think of how to describe it. "It's—it's nice, actually. Like the sky at night."

There's nothing else to say. The fight won't wait, and Shiro is still staring at the floor, like it has more to say.

"Do you trust me?" Keith asks. Shiro closes his eyes, and nods, and stands up.

It's more of a relief than he expects it to be—back in the pilot's chair, and Voltron might be beyond his strength, but winning this isn't.

Keith closes his hands around the controls, still warm with Shiro's heat. He hasn't got any substance, but the Lion knows what he wants to do, and he can feel the line of energy that's been keeping him alive. It runs between him and Shiro and the Lion like a livewire.

The moment he punches the thrusters forward, the power flows in reverse. He's pouring himself into the fight in the most literal sense, and he burns with it in the best way. It's all he has to give, and all he wants to give it all.

"I've got this," Keith says, and Shiro burns.

Keith looks like a star about to die.

Bright as the sun, hard to look at head on, his edges flickering like the aurora Shiro saw once. It was an orbit mission before Kerberos, and he held on to that memory through months of empty space and a year of captivity—and he held on to this. Keith's shape, and the shadows in his hair, and in retrospect, he should have known.

In retrospect, he did. You don't cleave yourself to the color of the sunset you saw in someone's eyes once without being in love.

Watching him pilot was always a revelation. No matter what it is: a simulated ship or a Galra fighter or a desert bike—he makes it a part of himself, an extension of his own limbs, made of metal and power. Set him loose and watch him burn. Patience was the only thing he ever lacked—once Shiro helped him find it, that was it. Best of the best and unbeatable, even by Shiro, even then.

He's only going to get better.

The old thought sneaks in past the adrenaline and exhaustion, and the pride in it almost cuts his legs out from under him. It was true, once, but not anymore. The thing in front of him is cut from a flame and twice as ephemeral.

Keith burns through the Galra ships like they're paper, leaving a trail of fire in their wake that Shiro can catch out the corner of the window when they turn and head back for a second pass, and a third. When the flagship is all that's left, Keith streaks for it without pausing for a breath. Maybe he doesn't need to breathe. Shiro does, though, and he's left clinging to the back of the seat to hold himself up.

Keith glances up at him, grinning through his light—grinning like he knows a secret, and that secret is that he's going to win. "Almost there."

"Watch the cannon," Shiro says, mostly to himself, like they're back in the Garrison simulator, because he has to, but the cannon is gone before his mouth is closed. Gone—obliterated, like it was never there. The thing that took out forty rebel ships, and Keith destroys it on a whim.

The ship is almost as massive as the fleet hub they met Zarkon on that first time when Allura was captured and they were ally-less and out of options, and this is almost the same. There's a rawness to a fight like this. You fight with everything you've got because winning is your only option.

And finally, Shiro thinks they might. Keith was always their clutch. He's thrown himself into every fight. Zarkon has the Black Lion? Throw yourself at it and wrestle him for it until he takes you down. A Galra cruiser is about to take down the entire solar system? Throw yourself at that, too.

Shiro has no idea how he's going to win this, but he's sure he will, and that smile is still tugging at the edges of his lips where Shiro can glimpse it between the flicker-glow obscuring his edges. He's not moving now though. He's sizing up the ship with a tension that stretches from him to the Lion, like something about to strike for the kill. Shiro can feel it in his spine.

"Tell everyone to clear out."

Shiro doesn't hesitate. When the rebels and Paladins are safe, there's a dull pause that Shiro can count by the thud of his heartbeat, and then without any preamble, Keith shoots straight for the heart of the ship.

A knee jerk yell is on the tip of his tongue but he reins it in—his trust is absolute, in the Lion and in Keith, and Keith's determination is visible.

Keith goes like a comet. The light overflowing his edges coalesces and pulls inward, and that's what draws his eye more than anything outside.

And then they're through and back to facing open space, before Shiro fully comprehends what's happened. They've teleported, he realizes, right through the middle of it, and whatever Keith did in the millisecond they were inside was spectacular and ruinous.

The ship goes up in flame behind them. Shock gives way to awe; the radio silence gives way to gasps and hoots and praise—one dull roar of elation that Shiro has to pull his helmet off too escape.

"You did it." The awe comes out like disbelief. "You got it to teleport, but how did you—"

Keith is looking at him, and there's fear in his eyes.

He's not a star anymore but a candle guttering in its own wax, about to go out. His light is watery, and the look he turns on Shiro is on the edge of panic.

Keith's voice shakes when he whispers, "I think that's all I've got."

And that's it. To his grief, in that moment, Shiro can't muster a word. He watches Keith go out in terror and silence, and when he's gone, there's nothing to mark his absence.

"No, Keith, wait—" he says to himself.

The silence is absolute.

This is it. The second loss he warned himself against. There's no mirror to punch this time, nowhere to run, no way to hide from it. He ends up back in the seat, head bowed, trying to find his way past it. The helmet is still on the floor, yelling up at him, and for the first time he doesn't have an ounce of will to answer it.

"I just want him back," he whispers to the silence of the cockpit. "Just for a second, please."

But nothing. He gets nothing.

Duty dogs at his heels. There's clean up and negotiations and then they'll celebrate and make plans to do it all over again. Over and over, until the Galra drop or they do, and for the first time he's not sure he can do it. He flies back to the hangar on autopilot and sits there in the dark and silence while the other Lions land around him, his head bowed over his knees, running over everything he wanted to say.

Even if it wasn't really Keith at all, it was something. It was real. It deserved more—more than nothing, at least.

Some part of it doesn't fit together, and Shiro can't let it go.

Denial, supplies the meanest part of him. You're in denial.

But why would a glitch in the Lion's system take energy to keep alive? How could a memory be that powerful? How could a memory be that real?

Whatever it was, it knew Shiro, and maybe the Lion did too, but not like that.

The Lion powers down, but it flickers and stutters as it does, just like Keith did that first time in the Lion.

Exactly like Keith did.

He pleads, one more time.

This time the Lion hears him.

When he opens his eyes the world is built of stars and glass, like Keith said it would be, and this is a place Shiro knows. Shiro has been here before,

The beauty of it missed him the first time—Zarkon, and the heat of a fight he wasn't sure he could win blocked out all the finer details, but it's beautiful.

All the more so for what he sees lying in the middle of it. Keith, shaded in faintest violet—like he was in the real world, and like Shiro is now.

Even as Shiro kneels next to him, he doesn't want to touch. If he does, if his fingers go right through, that's it. There's nothing beyond that. He'll lie down right there, stretch out beside what he's lost, memorize what's left of his lines until he's gone. There's no energy left in him to do more.

So he hovers his hand over Keith's body, right at the edge of the light they're both made of. Keith's is fainter; he doesn't look the way he did on the video feed before Naxzela. He looks—dead. His cheeks are palled and thin, like a corpse that hasn't been allowed to decay, and the thought stills him.

"Hey, Keith," he whispers, and traces up his chest and over his neck where his collar bone juts out under the black fabric and the hood is pooled under his dark hair. The Marmora suit made him look small, but this is something else. This is what months sustained on Shiro's scraps have left him, and it occurs to Shiro for the first time—

"Why didn't you tell me he was here?"

He glances upward, but the Lion is quiet above him, still as a statue, like it's carved from the glass Keith is lying on. Even in his mind, there's not a whisper or hint of what the Lion wants him to do or know or say—and maybe that's its own answer. They've both been weakened by this, and their bond wasn't what it was. They don't mesh like they once did, but more than that, the Lion loved Keith, he realizes, and it's hard to trust the ones you love those you don't.

The thought bites. Keith, between worlds, for days on end—alone, even when Shiro was right there. The Lion isn't cruel though. It wouldn't do this without reason, without cause—

And that's when he feels it.

There's breath against his hand where it's hovering over Keith's cheek. Impossible, and faint, and perfect.

"Keith?" He forgets not to touch when he rolls Keith's face toward his, but his jaw is solid under Shiro's metal hand. His body is solid, and cold, and he's breathing. Shiro feels for a pulse and finds it, faint and slow, but there.

He's alive.

In this world at least, he's alive. Zarkon's words come rushing back to him:

When you die in this realm, your body dies as well.

Does it go both ways? Can you drag something back from the edge of death? He gathers Keith's body into his arms—too light, too frail—and wonders what it would take. Wonders what he could exchange for something this valuable, but there's nothing he has that stands equal to this: an entire life, writ large enough to rival everything else in his mind's eye. He knows it's hopeless, like he knows the old exhaustion pulsing behind his eyes and settling into his bones. This isn't something he can have, no matter how much he wants it.

If wanting were enough, he thinks. If only.

"Please let me have this," he says, to himself as much as anything else. It's worth a try, and a try is all he has. He let's his head fall, pulling Keith's head up so he can rest against the edge of his hair, resigned to stay that way. He feels Keith's breath on the inhale.

"Please let me have him," he begs again.

When he opens his eyes, he's sitting on the floor of the Lion, and there's a weight in his arms that's unmistakable.

Keith is shaking like he's half frozen to death, the skin of his neck almost that cold under Shiro's hand, and it's somehow no surprise at all that the first thing he does is tear himself away from Shiro's chest and throw up.

Shiro is the only thing holding him up, hands around his ribs. The armor is hanging loose where he's lost muscle and weight, but he's alive. He stinks of ozone and old sweat and bile, and the ribs under Shiro's hands are expanding and contracting as he fights for air, and he's alive.

When he's done, Shiro heaves him up and pulls him in so tight that his feet are almost off the floor and his face is buried against Shiro's shoulder, both of them heedless of the mess down his front. It's secondary. Everything is secondary to the press of his body and the arms looped around his neck, hanging on to him like a Shiro's the only thing tethering him to life.

He's cold and bony and stinking, and perfect.

"I've got you." Shiro repositions them with a hand under Keith butt, boosting him up, securing him against the hard crush of his armor. He's shaking still, hair clammy with sweat cold sweat. "I've got you."

Shiro holds him there.

It's an indulgence. Keith needs care, but for a moment he lets them stay like that, reveling in a feeling that's miles beyond relief. He wonders if that's how Keith felt getting him back after Kerberos, and again, after his second capture—but in this, too, Shiro isn't Keith. He's not good at losing.

After this, he'll take any inch Keith lets him.

"You were in there for hours," Matt says, before the hatch swings all the way open and he sees what Shiro is carrying.

And screams.

It's piercing and uncalled for, but at least it breaks the ice as the worst possible reaction. The rest is a haze. Someone calls Coran, and they all crowd in around him and the precious thing he's carrying.

Keith is half conscious, still shuddering against him, and there's a limit to what he can comprehend about this. It's like learning Keith was gone in reverse—he can only pick up one thing at a time and look at it. The ribs sticking out under his gloved hands, the old sweat crusting Keith's hair, and the smell of him, which should be repulsive, but something in him is broken from this loss and nothing about Keith is unbeautiful.

His arms are closed around Shiro's neck, and his legs are wrapped around Shiro's waist, and he's everything.

Shiro wants to pull him down in a shower like Keith did with him, and soak his loss away, taste the skin stretched over his bones, see him happy again.

For once, duty eludes him. The team needs guidance, wants answers, but his world is narrowed down to one presence.

He takes Keith back to his room, because that's as far as he can think. Matt assigns everyone little tasks in absence of Shiro's ability to think about anything other than the body in his arms.

You can only lose something so many times—once, as it turns out, is his limit.

He's a mess.

It takes Coran and him both to get his clothes off and bundled into the shower. It's easier with two people, and Keith is still shaking, but so is Shiro.

"You had us worried, you know," Coran mentions, offhand, like Keith is a runaway pet. He's got his hands under Keith's arms, holding him up from behind while Shiro dries him off.

Keith croaks out a, "Sorry," eyes fastened to the floor where his sopping bangs are still dripping between them. Shiro is still firing on one cylinder, and all he can think is, get him dry warm, get him warm, get him food, don't let this happen again.

Coran is a grounding presence. He prattles off on a tangent about the Lions and Alfor's theories, and Shiro is grateful for it, right down to his bones as he wipes the towel over Keith in a way that can't be mistaken for anything less intimate than it is. It feels important. It feels like something Keith should know.

This is what he means to Shiro, and he can do what he wants with that knowledge.

But Keith presses against his touch full-body, seeking comfort. His head falls forward against Shiro's shoulder—not languid, but tired in the same way Shiro is. Coran releases him slowly and excuses himself, and that's it.

You can't lose something and miss something like that and still play at pretending you don't want it. There's no line on him that Shiro doesn't want to follow, no jut of bone and muscle he doesn't want to trace.

He lets himself.

When Keith is clean and clothed and fed as much as he can take without throwing up again, and when Matt's herded everyone away, Shiro pulls Keith back into his arms under the double layer of blankets and presses a kiss to the corner of his jaw.

Keith finds his voice first.

"I'm sorry," he says into the silence, hoarse. That's the second time. "It's good to have you back."

The blow takes a second to hit home, but when it does, it's fatal. It doesn't make sense—Shiro isn't the one that left, but Shiro let him go, and Shiro lost him. That's not how Keith means it, but it's more true than it isn't. The body in his arms is still shaking.

There's nothing he can say, he realizes. Nothing that will fix this the way it needs to be. The reality of it steals over him. Mourning Keith, pulling him out of the Lion, touching him—that doesn't make up for what went wrong in the first place.

"It's good to be back," Shiro whispers against his hair, and then, softer, "Turn over."

Keith does, at effort and without question. He leaves space between them, but Shiro pulls him in with an arm around his hip. He was always too thin, but he was never delicate like this.

Months, Shiro thinks. Months sustained on nothing but the residual energy of him and the Lion, and that's not the kind of luck you get a second shot at. When they're flush, Keith jerks his hips back on instinct, but Shiro holds him there.

"I'm so sorry," Shiro whispers against his lips.

He can't see Keith's frown, but he feels it. "What? Why would you—"

Shiro silences him. It's too deep right off for a first kiss—a second, maybe—but the thing in him that's been putting him back together brick by brick is solidifying on this singular desire.

Every inch Keith gives him. Every inch, he wants.

Keith gives up trying to ask questions when Shiro settles over him. He's too small, too valuable, and Shiro's never been greedy like this before. It's going to be a problem, he realizes distantly, but that's for tomorrow.

They're both exhausted beyond reason, but this at least he has energy for. He pushes Keith back into the pillows until they're surging against each other weakly, and when Keith pulls up his arms and pulls him in, it's perfect.

He wakes the next morning with dark hair in his mouth and a long leg between his and warm breath against his neck and thinks:

I could wake up like this every day, for the rest of my life.