"Rest," Allura had told him, and he did.

It was funny, how badly he felt he needed it—on some level he felt as if he had been doing nothing but resting ever since the battle with Zarkon. There was more than that, and the aches and pains of his (relatively) fresh body told that story in short, clipped sentences punctuated by a dull fire that danced across the nerve endings of his right arm, but he could not let go of that thought. He dreamed, but did not remember his dreams. He drifted from deep sleep to a lighter sleep, back and forth, back and forth, and as he drew nearer to wakefulness he wondered how long he would rest before he was allowed to see the world again.

As if to answer one such thought a splash of cold water hit him in the face. He bolted upright with a gasp, his heart feeling as if it were seizing in his chest, and he reached with his hand to—but his hand wasn't there. Right. This again.

"Ah, quiznak. Sorry Shiro! Bit of a slip there, nothing to be alarmed about." Coran's hand was on his shoulder, gently pushing him back down into a reclining position. "Down we go. There you are. No belting ol' Coran across the face, what do you say?"

"Not today," Shiro agreed, his humor automatic as he tried to take in his surroundings. He was on a cot in the middle of what seemed to be a storage room about the size of his sleeping quarters in the Castle of Lions. The storage room was empty except for him, his cot, the chair that Coran was seated in, the washbasin at his feet, and the washcloth that he was using to (try to) dry Shiro's face. "Coran, where are we?"

"Space! Headed to Earth, but couldn't tell you where we are exactly. Funny how much I relied on the castle's navigation systems. And its big windows." He wrung the cloth out into the basin, went back to mopping at Shiro's face, must have correctly interpreted Shiro's disbelief. "Oh! Oh you mean locally? We're in the yellow lion!"

"The yellow lion?" He had recognized the storage room as matching the design of the lions, but it hadn't struck him that he would be in any of them except for the black. I can't feel the black lion at all. Push that down, don't look at it, not now, not yet. "Why the yellow in particular? Coran, how long have I been out?"

Now Coran looked serious, and that probably wasn't good. Judging Shiro's face appropriately cleaned, he wrung out the washcloth and draped it over the side of the basin, twitching his mustache in the way he did when he was trying to figure out what he wanted to say. Shiro thought he'd probably have to wrangle an answer out of him, so he was surprised from multiple angles when he finally said, "About twenty vargas."

"Twenty," he said, stopping to calculate the difference in his head. That was… about 28 hours. "I've been unconscious for more than a day?"

"In and out," Coran said, settling his arms on his knees, leaning forward, looking more serious than he usually did. "You were pretty badly wounded, Shiro, even discounting the whole 'getting dragged back from the great beyond by Princess Allura' business. Your body's been placed under almost completely unique stresses. You've been alternating between unconscious and delirious; this is the first time you've been lucid for the better part of a movement."

A week. It wasn't the longest time he'd been out of commission, but it was close, and he didn't feel like he was in any condition to be walking. "Have you been here the whole time?"

Instantly Coran leaned back, looking at a corner of the ceiling, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Who, me? No, no. No. Absolutely not, I've been too busy, it… yes. Yes I've been taking care of you. I mean I've been taking breaks of course, I have to sleep too after all, but mostly it's been me."

"Don't be embarrassed, Coran." It was a normal reaction, to feel an upwelling of affection for the veteran, but the thought of Coran watching over him and making sure he was safe the whole time he had been out placed a sense of both guilt and endearment firmly on top of his chest. "I'm sorry I've been such a bother, if anything."

"It's not a bother! All indications to the contrary, and despite Princess Allura's powers, I'm actually the only person here who has formal medical training! Granted it's field medicine, but the principle is the same."

"Well, thank you. I do feel much stronger than I did before." Though it would be hard not to. He breathed in, flexed his right hand, realized it wasn't there, made a careful effort not to look at it where Coran would see. "Why are we on the yellow lion in particular?"

"Ah, well, that's related to another thing I have to tell you." Now his face was split by a grin so large that his mustache looked like a fancy hat his teeth were wearing. "I won't be the only one taking care of you from here on out! Now that you're awake, pretty much everyone is going to want to have their turn." A more serious mode, and he reached over and gently touched Shiro's shoulder. "It's been a long time for some of them, Shiro."

"I… yeah. I guess it has." Coran withdrew his hand, and Shiro wrestled with whether to say what he was thinking, decided he had to. "Coran, I'm sorry. About everything. On the bridge, I—"

"Pshaw. You think I haven't taken a couple of good wallops before?" He puffed out his chest, turned his head to the side to present his face in profile. "I daresay I've taken beatings worse than what you dished out, even if it was very impressive. And terrifying!"

"Still. I'm sorry. There aren't any excuses for what happened."

"Shiro, there are excuses, even if you don't want to make them. You were dead and a mind-controlled clone was running around! I don't know how much of that clone's memory is banging around in your head," and it was enough that Shiro could not easily disentangle their thoughts, remembered his other self's actions as his own, "but you should let go of this, and you should let go soon. You're going to continue to be in and out, but when you come to the team needs you to be lucid. The team needs you to be strong. Do you understand?"

Of course they would. Despite everything, despite how much reason they had not to trust him, despite the enormity of the gap he had let come between all of them, he had to be able to make it up to them. If that meant figuring out what each person needed of him and giving it to them, he would do that. He would give them everything, if he could, because they had given him everything over and over and to pay them back would take more than he had.

"I understand."

"Good! Now, to get back to your question, we're in the yellow lion because if the other paladins sit with you then they're going to need to have their lions towed, and Hunk's is the one capable of pulling the rest." The sound of his own heartbeat was growing louder, and Shiro began to drift without realizing it. He wanted to warn Coran, but could not speak. "We're pretty sure that the black lion can tow the yellow, and in fact we'll be testing that out soon, aaaaand there's the thing I mentioned, off you go then, talk to you soon Shiro!"

He slept.

Humming in his ear. The smell of bread and sugar and peanut butter. A light pressure against the stump of his right arm.

He opened his eyes and Hunk was leaning over him, pressing one end of a tape measure against the inside of his left elbow, pressing down into the joint, and holding the other end at his fingertips.

"Hunk?"

"Try not to move, Shiro. These measurements have to be pretty precise."

"Yeah, sure." He made a conscious effort to not move, slackening the muscles in his arm, wondered belatedly if that would count as moving. "What are you doing?"

"Making plans for a new prosthetic." Satisfied with the measurements Hunk retreated, settling back into his chair and making notes on a pad of paper. "You do want one, right?" He looked up, and Shiro nodded, and Hunk went back to his notes. "I thought you probably would. The last one you had was awfully high-performance, but I think it might have been bad for you."

"The mind control thing?" This was meant as a joke but didn't come out that way.

Hunk got it, though. He usually did. "Well, not just that. Our bodies are built around bilateral symmetry, and operate best when both sides perform at identical levels. See, it's like this."

He held up his notepad, and Shiro blinked at the child-like drawing there: himself (complete with white hair) flexing with a normal-sized left arm and an exaggeratedly huge right arm that was on fire. His expression was one of panic, or maybe pain, as the enormous right arm weighed down the rest of his body. Hunk had also drawn himself in the background, with an exaggerated look of concerned horror.

"Basically, the fact that your right arm went for so long doing all these crazy, superhuman things put a lot more stress on the rest of your body, which is OK in the short-term because you're so strong, but eventually the imbalance would get worse and it might hurt you in ways that are hard to predict. What we really want is this."

He flipped to the next page, which had an equally childlike drawing of Shiro flexing two identically sized arms, though one was covered in bolts and screws to indicate it was robotic. Hunk was once more in the background, winking and giving the thumbs up.

"You've put a lot of thought into this."

"Sure have! I was arguing with Pidge earlier about how much tech needs to be crammed inside of it, if a prosthetic needs to be more than an arm, and." He stopped, looked at Shiro. "How are you feeling, man?"

"Like I've been asleep for a week," Shiro said. "Kind of removed from the world around me."

"Yeah. That sounds normal, probably." He reached under Shiro's cot, pulled out a covered tray. "Hey. You hungry?"

The word acted like a trigger, letting his body know that food was a possibility, a necessity it had been missing out on for some time. Coran must have made sure he ate and drank in his delirium, but he felt as if he hadn't had a real meal in who knew how long. The pang in his stomach was so sharp that its vividness was almost a relief. "Very."

"Great! Because I made you breakfast." He pulled the lid away, and Shiro was taken aback by the sheer amount of food there: muffins, waffles, scrambled eggs, a peeled orange separated into sections, a baked apple drizzled in cinnamon and butter, and it went on and on like that. "Don't feel like you have to eat it all. I'll take the leftovers."

"Hunk, how did you get—?"

"Ahp ahp ahp! Shiro you know better than to ask a man about his culinary secrets. Now, you need calories to recover, so eat."

Shiro sat up in his cot, crossing his legs under him and setting the tray on his thighs. He took the knife and fork on the tray and started in on the eggs.

"It's delicious, Hunk, thank you." This was true; the taste of it, just the salt on the eggs, hit him like a hammer after all that time without eating (without tasting). He hadn't had anything this good that he could remember.

"Oh, you don't have to praise me," Hunk said in a tone that said he enjoyed it very much. "There's no greater pleasure in a chef's life than seeing someone appreciated their food. Except eating it themselves. But this is a strong second."

Hunk went back to his notes as Shiro ate. All of it was delicious, of course, and he sampled each thing before really starting in on any of it, but even that nibbling told him that despite how hungry his body said he was that he wouldn't be able to eat very much of it. His stomach had shrunk down; a familiar feeling, though not a pleasant one. He resolved to eat slightly more than would make him comfortably full, to try to push back against it.

The silence stretched on for a few minutes, and finally Shiro said, "You seem to be taking everything pretty well."

"Who, me?" Hunk put down his notes, shrugged. "I mean, not really. Pretty freaked out, actually! I watched the Castle of Lions get destroyed, faced down the potential end of the universe. Maybe all universes? It got hairy there for a minute." He reached over, took one of the peanut butter muffins, munched on it absently. "And, I mean, if I'm honest? Can I be honest?"

Shiro nodded.

"OK good because I need to get this off my chest. You were dead! What! How are we supposed to take that? You were dead and we didn't know, we couldn't help, and you tried to reach out to us and we didn't do anything! You died fighting Zarkon the evil emperor of the universe and you basically saved the universe by keeping him from getting the black lion and you died and we repaid you by running around with your evil mind-controlled vat clone!"

A moment of silence stretched out. Shiro took a bite of his waffle, chewed, swallowed. "Feel better?"

"Yeah. I mean, mostly. Somewhat. It's still stuck in there, you know, you can't just work out all of your emotional hang-ups with one concentrated outburst, but it felt good to say it."

Shiro judged he could not physically eat anymore, then held out the tray to Hunk. "Thank you for the food. I'm very full."

"Normally I'd be insulted if somebody tried to pass back food that I'd cooked for them, but for you, Shiro? I'll make an exception." He took the tray back, held it in one hand and the fork in the other, and fell to eating with a gusto, a relish, that Shiro genuinely admired.

Hunk was hurting, but he would be able to handle it. In spite of his vulnerabilities, Hunk had a well of strength that went deeper than was suggested by his mannerisms or even his frame. That was true of all paladins, but Shiro suspected that people underestimated Hunk.

If they do, he'll just keep surprising them.

"Hunk?"

Around a mouthful of orange, "Yeah Shiro?"

"Thanks for sitting with me, too. Talking to you has made me feel better."

"Oh! That's. That's so nice of you to say. Hold on I have to put this down, if I cry into the muffins it'll mess up the taste…"

Some people expressed their strengths differently, after all.

When Shiro next awoke it was to the sound of fingers tapping against a hard-light keyboard. He opened his eyes, looked over to see Pidge leaned in over her laptop. The light from the display made it impossible to see her eyes, but her mouth was twisted into a frown. Not a good sign; when she was coding she was usually neutral-faced, too absorbed in the work to reflect on how she was feeling.

"Hey, Pidge."

"Shiro!" She turned off the display, turned to face him, smiled in that way that told him she was putting on a brave face. "You're awake! I've been so worried. I mean, we've all been so worried, but I've been especially worried. I was just talking to Hunk about your new prosthetic, and…" She looked at him, saw something that froze the smile on her face. "What's wrong?"

Quietly, gently, trying not to be too forceful, "I think it might be better for you to tell me."

"I... I don't know what you're talking about. We've been worried, but mostly we're all just happy to have you back."

"You're using the word 'we' a lot, Pidge. I wanted to ask how you're doing."

The smile was gone; she angled her face down, so the light caught the lenses of her glasses and hid her eyes. "That's not fair, Shiro." Her voice didn't crack, but he could hear the possibility there, the waver. "You just woke up. It's not fair for you to try to take care of everyone right away, like nothing happened."

Shiro turned this over in his head; talking to Pidge like this was dangerous. She was brilliant, had done and seen things that people ten times her age would never be able to imagine in their entire lives, but the intersection of her brilliance and her youth and her family made her try very hard to seem self-sufficient, not a burden on anyone. Of everyone in the crew, including Keith, she was the most difficult to get to talk about herself, about what she was feeling, about what hurt. She was like a knot that had to be carefully picked apart, because pulling on the wrong strand would only tighten the snare.

But she needed it, too; she hadn't had an outlet for this yet, not really. Everyone else would come to Shiro with their grief (he could feel the conversation with Lance coming) or else work it out on their own, but Pidge would hold it inside of her until it festered and turned into something else.

He turned his thoughts inward, sifted through memories that filled in the blank spaces where his own failed him. Shiro was not brilliant in the way that Pidge was, but he knew her, knew the shape of it, and after a few seconds he had a pretty good idea what had upset her. Careful, Shirogane.

"Pidge." She didn't look up at him, but there was nowhere else for her to turn her attention. "I've been wondering about something. How did you save the Castle of Lions?"

"I didn't save it for long," she said, turning her head away. He saw through the lenses, saw the tears standing in her eyes.

"Pidge…"

And then he waited, watching her. He could see the gears grinding in her head as she unpacked the story, tried to determine how much of it he already knew, figured out that it was enough that if she didn't tell him he would just piece it together himself. That was the balance point—would she decide to talk, or would she decide it was pointless?

"I had been monitoring your arm for a long time, figuring out what it could do." He nodded, though she wasn't looking at him. "It was packed full of Galran tech so advanced that it took months for me to figure out exactly what it was capable of… but eventually I did. A lot of the others just thought of it as a prosthetic, or a weapon… but that wasn't all that it was. It housed a suite of specialized cyberwarfare executables, some of them so destructive and virulent that they probably could have brought down entire fleets."

She paused, and Shiro waited.

"I took the worst of them and built countermeasures for it. Specialized kill programs that would be able to cut off the offensive code, isolate it, and destroy it. If your arm had been plugged into the network when they were activated, it would have been shut down too. Rendered inoperable, burned out."

Gently, "Because you knew this might happen."

"Because I didn't trust you." That should have hurt him, but it didn't, not like it hurt her, sketching lines of pain across her face as she tried to hold it inside of her head. A lump rose in his throat, not for the words but because of the hurt she was feeling now. "What does that say about me, Shiro? You're a hero, an icon. You saved my brother's life. You've been abused by the Galra more than any other living person, and it's all been nothing but pain for you, you fought Zarkon and saved us all and when you came back I saw you and I thought what I would do if you turned against us. I took what the Galra had done to you, and I, and I made it a weapon that I could use on you too. What does that say about me?"

He sat up in his cot, turned and place his feet on the floor. She looked up as he did so, he could see the fear of his reaction on her face. Then he pushed himself to his feet, his legs quaking beneath him, breaking out into a cold sweat at the effort, and she rose too, wide-eyed, hand reaching to him.

"Shiro, you can't—"

"Pidge." He reached out with his left hand, put it on her shoulder. She looked up at him, and she was so young, she should have still been in school, and carried so much weight that it would have broken him at her age. Pain and strength, he said to himself, an old litany to keep away his nightmares that too often felt like a lie… but in her case, it was true. "It's OK."

Then she burst into tears. He squeezed her shoulder a little harder. She leaned in against him, and he put his arm around her as she hid her face against him and wept.

When she had gotten out the worst of it she sat in the chair again, and Shiro resumed his place on his cot. Standing had taken a lot out of him, and sitting was about all he could manage.

"Pidge, listen to me and listen very carefully." She nodded. "When we have to do things, things that are really and genuinely necessary but seem terrible because of what they might mean for people we love, we… we tell ourselves stories." A blade in his hand, blood on the floor outside of the arena, eyes like hers looking up at him in terror and pain and betrayal. "The stories we tell ourselves… usually they're not true. We paint ourselves in a light that makes our actions easier to compartmentalize. The." He stopped, his hand shaking, pressed it to his face, breathed through his nose, counted to ten, repeated it until the white and the ringing faded. She waited, her patience was unbelievable and she waited. "Sometimes the stories we tell justify our actions, make us into heroes when that isn't what we were. Sometimes the stories we tell try to fill in the gaps about why we would hurt somebody we love. Even if it's really, really necessary, we tell ourselves it's something we did out of fear, or jealousy, or hate."

"Or distrust." Her voice was hoarse, now.

"Pidge, you did what you did because you need those tools to keep everyone alive. You knew I had been compromised in the past, and I'm sure you saw signs of it before everything broke. Maybe… maybe everyone did, but you were the only one to act on it. You had to protect yourself, protect everyone, even if it meant acting against me. You made that choice because it had to be made and no one else was capable of making it. Do you understand?"

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

"Good. Because I need you to understand that if anything like this happens again, I want you to do the same thing. I'm relying on it." She looked up at him, her eyes wide and confused and unbelieving. "I may not have a Galran arm anymore, but my weaknesses are all still there, Pidge. We don't know what extra vulnerabilities are built into this body, what Allura might have missed. I'm still dangerous." He slowed down; if he kept going at this pace he would lose himself, he couldn't afford to do that, this was important. "I need you to protect the team, Pidge. Not just from me, but from everything. You can see a problem coming and formulate an answer to it before anyone else knows it's even there. Don't be ashamed of that; use it, and be ready for it."

"I'll… try." Another croak.

"Please. I'm counting on you. Be their shield, because no one else can be. Plan for things because you can imagine them happening, not because you expect them." He reached out to her, palm turned up, fingers open. "If something goes wrong, and I do… anything like that again, I have to be stopped. Hurting you or any of the others would be worse than dying. I'm asking you to be ready, to protect everyone, not because you don't trust me but because you love me."

She took his hand.

They sat together, in silence, until Shiro had stopped shaking.

He was not awake just yet, but he knew Lance by the sound of his heel tapping against the flooring, a nervous habit that he probably didn't even remember picking up.

He opened one eye. Lance was looking away from him, staring at a wall, impatient and nervous, ready to explode. Shiro closed his eye again, gathered himself up.

"It wasn't your fault, you know."

"AGH!" He allowed himself a smile—just a small one—at the sound of Lance's chair hitting the floor, the heavy crash of the blue paladin falling onto his back. He had managed to wipe it away by the time Lance was getting up. "Come on, Shiro! You can't just dispense wisdom at somebody while they're thinking!"

Shiro sat up. "What were you thinking about?"

The moment of resistance before he gave in to the obvious, then, "That it was my fault that we didn't know about you." He got back into his chair, leaned his chin on his palm, looked away. "Look, I get it. You tried to reach out to everyone, and everyone missed the signal. I was in the right place at the wrong time to get an incomplete message."

"And when I came to your room…"

Lance winced. "That one I don't blame myself for as much."

"Good." It wasn't the first episode of the kind Shiro had had; him not knowing where he was or who was around him or what day it was wasn't a common occurrence, but they'd all lived together long enough that the paladins had had time to learn how to deal with it, to help him. "You shouldn't."

"I know I shouldn't. There isn't really anywhere in there I can blame myself, you know, not if I really think about it. But sometimes it helps!"

"It helps?" People tended to think of Lance as the least intelligent of the group, but that wasn't true; his intelligence was just aligned in a different direction, and once it got going on that track it could motor along at a speed to water the eyes. Shiro was watching that happen now, and Lance didn't realize he was doing it. Did any of the rest of them? Keith, maybe, or Allura.

"Of course it helps. When I blame myself it makes me think that I could have changed things, that I could have had some effect rather than being… helpless." He crossed his arms, and the look he gave Shiro was only very mildly reproachful. "Helpless is the last thing I want to be, after all we've been through."

That stunned him; on some level he had expected Lance to be broken up, even worse than Pidge. Maybe he still is. But if he was, he wasn't showing it, and he had apparently spent a lot of his energy in the past week addressing this problem for himself.

"I'm sorry." It was all he could think to say.

"Yeah, well." Then he leaned forward and smirked. "Try not to get killed again, huh? I don't know if everybody could handle losing you for a twentieth time." The sheer brazenness, the audacity, slipped past his defenses and pulled loose a laugh, and Lance's smirk turned to a genuine grin as he leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. "Yeah I thought you'd like that one. Workshopped it for a little while, no biggie."

"You know, Lance, you surprise me." The laughter had died down to a chuckle, enough for him to talk. "I thought you'd take all of this hard, but you're holding it together better than I am."

Instead of being offended, Lance looked flattered. "Mom did always say that I was full of surprises."

A light went on in Shiro's head. "Speaking of. We're headed back to Earth; are you going to go see your family?"

It was possible, up until that moment, that Lance had been acting, burying the part of himself that would spread his sorrows to the people around him. Some change had come over Lance in the past few months, and Shiro didn't know what it was but it was a source of strength to him that hadn't been there before, a sense of purpose and oneness that was deeper than the simple role of being the guy who was good at shooting from long range. Still, all of that could have been an act, every moment leading up to this one a charade, and in his darkest and most secret heart Shiro had feared for Lance because of all the paladins Lance's weaknesses were given the freest rein.

But he spoke of his family, then, and he was so openly happy it made Shiro ashamed to have doubted him. His mother, his siblings, his home town, the girls whose hearts he had broken in school (and to hear him tell it there were many) were all trotted out, an avalanche of lives lived in his absence, and it could be heard in his voice how very badly he wanted to see them again.

Shiro listened to him talk, and he talked for a long time.

"Shiro." A voice, calling him out into wakefulness, as it had called to him before. How many times, now?

"Keith," he said, and came awake, sat up, swung his feet out from off the cot. Keith was seated in the chair, directly across from him, his expression worried and warm and anxious and hopeful and happy, deeply happy.

Shiro didn't say anything; neither did Keith. They rose together and embraced, Shiro's left arm pulling duty for his right. They had given all their words to each other before, and what existed between them now was something quieter, more profound, than that. It made Shiro glad not to talk, just like it made him glad that Keith was here, that he'd reached across the universe to bring him home.

After what seemed a very long time they let go and took their seats. Shiro was feeling stronger—very little vertigo, even after standing for all that time, which was probably thanks to Hunk. He was grateful for that, grateful for the return of his strength not just because it made him more comfortable (but it did, did it ever) but because it made him feel ready to act, to change things, to help the people around him.

He didn't think Keith needed that help. Looking at him, it was almost impossible to believe that he was the same person that Shiro had watched grow up; he was stronger now, larger not just in frame but in his personhood, in the authority he exuded. He was strong, so strong it almost defied belief, and looking at him made Shiro's eyes sting.

"I'm going to have to apologize to your mother."

"What? Nah, she's fine. She doesn't understand," because who could, really, "but she gets that it's not your fault. And she knows who you are, what you did for me. I think she'll want to talk to you, but… not until you're better."

Better was such a heavy word; if it were an object it would have dropped to the floor and cracked the metal, maybe punched through the yellow lion and broken out into the vacuum of space. There were many dimensions by which Shiro would never really be better, and he had accepted that a long time ago. He would never stop having nightmares, probably, and if he did then it would only be because he had managed to put them adjacent to something stronger than they were. And nothing's that strong yet. He never really thought about his right arm as being lost, or something that needed healing, but that wouldn't get better.

But better from Keith's mouth meant something very different; the two of them had a shared perspective that was almost wholly unique, their only other contemporary being a dead man who had reigned for ten thousand years.

"I can't hear the black lion anymore." There; now it was out. Surprisingly, he felt no reaction in himself. That would change, but for now he was relieved.

Keith nodded, but his nod was an acknowledgement, not a signal of understanding. "Not at all?"

"Nothing. I'm…" He mulled this over in his head. "It's funny, but I don't think I've ever felt this particular way before? My memory is strange, but the black lion was a low-level hum in the back of my head, and I feel like some part of it had always been there, even when I was a child."

"I felt the same about Red. And Black, now." Keith rubbed his hands together. "I think it's some change they cause in our minds. I'm pretty sure, objectively, that I never heard them when I was growing up, or even back at the Garrison…but it feels like I did. Like the color of my memories is a little bit brighter, more vivid, than the actual events."

Shiro nodded. "You should ask Allura about that. Or Hunk and Pidge." He sighed through his nose. "But you know what that means, Keith. I don't know what caused it—maybe my connection was used up in the black lion carrying my consciousness for so long. Maybe it's what allowed Allura to bring me back. Maybe it's just that I've… been through too much." Died, and had it broken utterly. "But I can't hear the black lion."

Keith's grimace was an expression of pain and disappointment that Shiro would have had trouble taking apart; a wiser man, more experienced, might have told him it was the look of someone who had watched their hero fall. "Which means I'm the real leader of Voltron, now."

"Yes. For as long as you can be." He looked it, now; looking at Keith, it was hard for Shiro to believe that he had ever been in the younger man's place, had ever been able to issue commands to him. Should he tell Keith he was proud of him?

No. It's not praise he wants. Keith has never wanted praise, not in the way others do. He wants responsibility, and duty, and faith.

Well. He had them all. But if he needed to hear them:

"Keith, listen to me." And he snapped to attention, as if they were small again and he still hung on every word out of Shiro's mouth. He still does. "I know that all of this has been hard. You've been through trials and saved lives, saved my life, and done things that no one else in history has ever done. Whatever you were before you piloted the black lion, you're different now. Stronger, sure, but more than that—more than a person, because you have to be. The universe isn't safe yet, Keith. It needs Voltron."

"Which means it needs me." Keith folded his hands, sat in thought, then nodded to himself. "Shiro, if you don't feel your connection to the black lion and no one else can pilot it, I'll have to devote myself to this utterly. I think I'm going to have to leave the Blades of Marmora."

Ah, there it was, and before he had thought it himself. He hoped the pride he felt was showing on his face, and the sorrow. He couldn't tell; Keith's expression revealed almost nothing. "I know that's not a decision made lightly. That's your heritage; it's where your mother is. It's where you've devoted your life for years, now. Even if they lose a great agent, I hope you know—because they do—that they are gaining a powerful ally, which can be even better. Take that perspective, Keith, everything you've learned from them, everything you want out of helping them, and pour it into Voltron. The team will be looking to you, now, for direction and for their courage. You'll need to provide it." Because I can't.

Keith sighed, but when he nodded he was sure, and there was no trembling. "I'll do it, Shiro. I'll be more than they're expecting; I'll finish the work we started together."

"I'm so proud of you," he said, because he had to, because his heart was breaking in his chest.

There is a song that echoes across the universe, the background of everything, the word and arbiter of the law. As he dreamed, Shiro remembered hearing it, the heartbeat of creation that echoed across the expanse as he died. He remembered hearing it in that place where the Black Lion carried him. He remembered hearing it as he looked through the black lion's eyes, seeing across the spaces between spaces as no other person had done in thousands of years, or maybe ever. And more, more than each of these, more than all of these he remembered hearing it as he was carried across the dust of a quiet world like a promise of futures that had yet to pass.

He heard it again, a gentle hum that sang in his bones, clearing the refuse of his mind, leaving his thoughts clear as warm, gentle hands rested against his cheeks.

"Princess," he said, reaching up and touching her hand with his. The humming stopped as the light faded from her hands, but he could still hear it.

"Shiro. You're awake." Her smile was all relief, and exhaustion, and need fulfilled. "I was just…"

"Double-checking your work?" He smiled at her; another jest, but he wasn't sure if it landed until she smiled back at him. "I'm feeling much better. You know, you really should have gone into medicine. You'd go far."

She was seated next to him, the chair pulled right up next to the cot. When he moved to sit up she helped him, and he let her because she was so strong that it really was easier than just trying to do it himself. When he was settled she returned to a more neutral position, back straight, hands folded on her lap. From any of the other paladins this would have been at odds with the intimacy of their physical proximity; with Allura it felt right, and natural.

Here is the secret that Allura and Shiro kept together: that in those brief moments when she carried him, they had shared much. Not experiences, not thoughts, but a sense of place and of being and of purpose. He had spent some time wondering if the memories he had were left over from the clone's experiences or if they were her memories, passed to him in the gentle meeting of their minds.

It should have been a source of awkwardness between them, a barrier put up by an unexpected intimacy that would change two people's relationship forever, but it was not so. He had never felt more comfortable with her in all the time he had known her, and he believed that she felt the same. She was the heart of Voltron, linked to the heart of the universe itself, and on some level he knew what her perspective was like.

So it was that he knew, without either speaking, what pained her. He also knew that she did not want to speak of it yet, and that despite this she needed to.

"This probably isn't the kind of welcome back you were expecting," she said.

"Which part? The bit where I marathon heart-to-hearts with every paladin of Voltron, plus Coran?" Or the part where I'm no longer a paladin? Where my purpose is lost to me, more profoundly than my arm and my sense of quiet? Ah, that was raw. Did she feel that?

She looked at him and he understood, not for the first time, why the universe could rally around her: the clarity of her eyes, the openness of her face and her expressions, communicated a focus and purpose and absolute sense of duty that would shame the greatest leaders in history.

"You are still a paladin," she said, and she drew herself up (may have actually grown incrementally larger) when she saw that she had intuited his thoughts correctly. "It does not matter that the black lion is no longer in your mind, or that you might not pilot Voltron again. You were the first of my paladins, Shiro, and you will remain first among them even if you can no longer lead."

Ah, that shared knowledge between them also meant vulnerability. He wasn't used to someone being able to see to the heart of him like this; even Keith, burdened with new leadership and new responsibilities, hadn't seen it this clearly. "Piloting a lion is kind of part of the job description."

"Then I will change the description!" This with so much force that he flinched. "You died for the universe, Shiro, whether we were able to bring you back or not." She, too, used we, not to dodge the fact of her responsibility but because that was how she saw the world, how she saw even things that she did with her own hands. "You died for me. There is a saying on Altea that the only true heroes are martyrs, and you… you qualify! So."

He said nothing, watched her face, wondered at her.

"So you will still be a paladin. Even if Keith leads the others, even if no lion ever connects with you again, even if the empire falls and peace if restored to the universe, you are still a paladin. The others still need you, and so do I."

He tried to grin for her, wondered how it looked. "You're the heart of Voltron, Allura. I think they need you more than they need me." I'm not needed here.

"They are lost without you," she said. "If Keith is the head, and the rest of you insist on calling me the heart, then…" She stopped short, frowning. "What other vital organs do humans have?"

"A few, but none of them make for metaphors that are quite as pretty."

"Well. You understand what I mean, regardless." She leaned forward then, her expression candid and earnest and open. "I only meant to speed your healing just now, Shiro, but… I can still feel this inside of you, this sense of loss. It's about more than your arm." She reached forward, laid a gentle hand on his left forearm, and though the humming did not start again he thought he could hear it in some distant place in his memory. "I know what it's like to feel useless, Shiro. To feel helpless. But you are not, even if your role must change. Please. I need you to understand. For me. For all of us."

It was a fact of this feeling of loss that it came from a small, quiet place, and that at its heart it was very selfish. The pain, or lack of pain, was rooted in his ego, his image of himself as a leader and a protector and someone vitally necessary to the workings of the universe. He didn't like to admit it, but it was true. He was mourning the loss of who he was, affected by it more than the fact of his own death and his return, more than his captivity by the Galra, more than anything. That feeling wasn't wrong.

But the universe needed Voltron. And if Allura said Voltron needed him, if she put out the call to him, specifically, amidst his nightmares and his loss and his weakness, who was he to gainsay her?

"I'll trust you," he said. She beamed, and was radiant.

For a time, they settled back into a comfortable silence, and Shiro was grateful for the rest afforded to him. He was grateful to her, for letting him experience it. Still, something itched at him, an awareness of her akin to her awareness of him, a wrinkle in the face of her happiness and her duty that went deeper than the conversation they were having.

"Allura," he said, and she could see it coming because she closed her eyes as if to shut out the world. He closed his eyes, too, and it was only their voices in the room. "I believed him, too."

"Oh," she said, and he had never heard a more pained sound in all his life. Failure, there, and loss, and the beginning of something that died when brought out into the light.

They sat together, eyes closed, savoring the quiet of each other's company.