"By blood and water."
He wakes to fire. It crackles through his veins and lights smoldering embers deep within the marrow of his bones. It burns, chars his heart with each pulsing beat, fills his lungs with smoke.
He welcomes it.
"By bone and dust."
The speaker is familiar. He thinks of dark eyes, dark hair, of tattoos that curl and ripple across sun-gilded skin like smoke curling from an open, hungry blaze, and he listens. He follows it, follows the soft lilting syllables, a trail of breadcrumbs leading…
He turns away from the thought. He's not supposed to go back.
"By spirit and soul."
But the voice won't let him halt. It tugs at him, gentle but unyielding; it's a current dragging him to the surface no matter how hard he tries to sink into the black fog.
"Shiro," he hears. "Shiro. Come back."
He fights like a hooked fish, but it's useless, and that's not all – there's something else being pulled with him. It's putrid and cruel that's been dredged from the darkness. He tries to push it away. Its fangs only sink deeper, dripping poison.
So he pushes himself away instead.
He'd awoken to fire, but he opens his eyes to flame. The earth is rough and cold beneath as its leaden weight digs into his spine. It's dark and smoky. He can't make out his surroundings in the flickering light. Shadows dance. He can't find their centers in the twisting, roiling darkness. When his eyes finally focus, his gaze lands on a pale face.
"You're here," murmur thin, cracked lips. "Shiro?"
He gasps. His lungs don't want to remember the steady rhythm of breath, but they don't have a choice. This is wrong. His chest aches as his heart begins to hammer. It beats against his ribs like a caged bird. Trapped. He's trapped.
Then fight, comes a whisper. He did this to you.
Witch.
He rolls onto his side, dizzied, and tries to catch himself, but there's only empty space at his side. The man reaches for him and he jolts back, nearly toppling into the flames. His hand falls on hot metal and he glances down, curls his fingers around the hilt of the knife, ignores the blistering heat that sinks into his skin. When he pulls the blade from the flames, it glows cherry red.
"Stay back," he growls, staggering to his feet.
"Shiro, it's me, it's just me-"
Keith, he thinks, and stumbles as he hears the name echo in his own ears.
"That's right, I'm Keith," says Keith, low and soothing, but his eyes are feverishly bright. "It's okay, Shiro."
"Get out of my way," he snarls, lifting the blade. "Who are you? What did you do to me?"
Keith's eyes widen. "You don't-"
Enemy. The whisper is back, but it's a shout now, a cacophony in his head. Catching you, trapping you.
Destroy him.
Keith is too close, so close that Shiro – I'm Shiro - can see the purplish cast to his grey eyes.
Shiro lashes out. His arm moves of its own accord and he watches the knife's blade cut through the air and hears the hiss of steam as it glances across Keith's cheek, leaving a trail of blood and blistered flesh.
For a moment, a flash of blinding pain scatters his thoughts as if the wound had been reflected upon his own face.
He blinks away the tears and runs into the shapeless night.
The thick underbrush tangles around his ankles. He nearly trips as each thorny rope casts its sharp fingers in his path. Keith calls out behind him, but Shiro can't make out the witch's words over his own ragged breaths and the rush of blood in his ears. He keeps running. He doesn't need to hear. The whisper tells him what sort of sweet, coaxing lies are being used to lure him back: promises of safety, of protection, of love, everything he'd heard so many times before-
When? he thinks, and slows.
The forest is still, but Shiro's thoughts roar and race as he tries to dredge memories from the sludgy depths of his mind. They drift just beyond his reach and brush against his fingertips, taunting him as his jaw clenches in frustration. It's not a void: it's a wall, sleek and impenetrable, stretching into the endless sky.
He'll keep chasing you, insists the slippery murmur. You wanted to kill him. You still do. He deserves it. He'll find you.
Shiro shakes his head to dislodge it. Despite the knife in his hand and violence in the dark, smoky room, he doesn't want to fight.
He can't remember anything, not even his own name – had he been Shiro before? He's not sure. The name feels complete-but-not, a single tree standing where there should have been a forest. Nevertheless, he is Shiro now. It may not be the whole of who he was, but he is not the whole of who he was either.
The only other thing he knows is that he's met the witch before. Keith's name had fallen, unbidden and unprompted, from his lips. Somehow, he'd breached the wall of Shiro's past.
:: :: ::
Keith thinks that he should be numb by now, but the world won't grant him that grace. Even exhaustion's steady ache does nothing to dull the biting pain of loss and its myriad currents of guilt and fear. There had been no time to think, to find help; Keith doubts that the others would have done anything except try to stop him anyway.
Maybe they would have been right, but he can't give up.
Shiro has disappeared into the forest. He's swifter than Keith, whose body is leaden from the effort he'd put into the ritual. Keith pushes forward for a few minutes more, but there's no use – Shiro is gone.
He didn't know me.
Their bond has returned, but it's weak, flickering. Keith tugs at it experimentally and recoils as it writhes in his mind, shuddering and squirming like maggots feasting upon a corpse. It's nothing he wants anchored to his soul, but loosing it – if that's even possible – would mean letting go of the only chance he has of getting Shiro back.
Keith forces himself to stop. His cheek throbs, the burn tight and hot under his skin, with a crust of blood scabbing down his jaw.
"Patience yields focus," he mutters to himself, trying not to hear how his voice cracks. "Patience. Yields. Focus."
He has work to do, and he can't allow himself the luxury of panic or carelessness. Cleaning up his face must be first, Keith decides as he trudges back to his cabin, lest the wound go foul. At least burns were clean. Then he'd rest, if necessary, before…
Before what?
He could track Shiro, find him before more harm befell him, and then - capture him? Imprison him? In Shiro's mind, Keith was the enemy.
He has to figure out what he'd done wrong, and how to fix it.
Keith hopes that they can both survive until then.
:: :: ::
It all comes back to Keith. If Shiro wants answers, he must go back too.
Retracing his steps is easy. Shiro is slightly embarrassed by the trail he'd left as he fled. It should have been a simple matter for Keith to hunt Shiro down like an injured animal. He'd turned back, but why?
Shiro halts at the edge of the small clearing and peers through the misty air. Dawn is breaking, its nascent heat lifting tendrils of mist from the dew-soaked earth. In the weak light, he can just make out the cottage he escaped from, and he sees that it isn't a cottage at all. It appears to be carved directly into the earth; the stone walls must be the bedrock of the foothills that rise and roll into the mountains behind, framed by the brightening sun.
Movement is visible through the open door. Keith steps out a few minutes later, blinking against the sunrise. Shiro understands why Keith hadn't followed him into the depths of the woods: the witch looks terrible. He has hollows under his eyes and his skin is waxy with exhaustion. He'd made a perfunctory attempt to wipe the blood from his cheek, but rusty stains had dried on his neck. The blisters gleam under a layer of oily salve.
Keith closes the door behind him and picks his way along a narrow, rocky trail that leads into the foothills behind his cottage.
Shiro follows him at a safe distance. Keith moves slowly. It gives Shiro too much time to notice the details that form a sickening kaleidoscope of unfamiliar familiarity. He finds his own feet falling into a pattern, synchronized with Keith's pace even when he's far enough away to be no more than a blurry figure on the path ahead. When Shiro draws closer, following the magnetic tug of curiosity, he feels silky strands between his own fingers as Keith binds his hair into a loose knot.
Through it all, the whisper in his head sneers and goads him. Again, Shiro wonders if it's a part of himself that's been locked away, or if he might not be as alone as he feels. It was easy to listen in the claustrophobic, firelit room when it told him to fight, but now…
Keith is vulnerable. He thinks he's alone, unwatched – Shiro can strike now, must strike now. The knife's hilt presses his palm. The metal is cold now, but the edge is just as deadly.
Shiro hears a soft groan and realizes that it's him making the noise. He won't be a weapon, especially not for something he can't see, can't understand.
Patience yields focus. Shiro will wait, and watch, and learn.
The forests are well beneath him. Shiro skirts behind boulders and narrow, spiky evergreens. He's east of Keith, watching his slow ascent from the shadows of a rocky outcrop, when he sees them.
The soldiers are farther down the slope, far enough that their individual forms are indistinguishable within the dark mass of their march, but there's no mistaking the glint of sunlight off of their weapons and armor.
Keith hasn't noticed. His back is to the approaching troops, his head bowed to watch his feet pick along the dusty, rocky path.
It's time to decide who his enemy really is.
:: :: ::
"Stop."
Keith freezes. Shiro's deep, smooth voice is chilly. It tears at the confused bundle of grief that still rests in Keith's gut.
"Okay," he says slowly, not turning around. Shiro had followed him. That's… good, Keith decides. Probably.
"There are soldiers below," Shiro adds. He stalks a wide circle until he's standing in front of Keith, and it's everything Keith can do to stop himself from reaching out. He tries to be content with the reassurance that Shiro is there, standing and speaking, whole if not wholly himself. His hair gleams burnished silver instead of black. The change had been lost to shadows and confusion before, but it's undeniable in the day's light.
That's not the biggest difference, though.
Shiro's face is hard and calculating, his eyes dark with distrust.
"Approaching?" Keith asks. The lump in his throat tightens, threatening to choke him, and he sees Shiro lying pale and still under drying blood. It's almost more real than the Shiro standing in front of him. Keith focuses on where Shiro gestures with a jerk of his head.
It's the Empire's army – perhaps the very detachment that had attacked Shiro, Keith realizes. Rage prickles over his skin. Foot soldiers, yes, but there would be druids too. Perhaps even Haggar herself was lurking in their midst.
This had been planned. The guardians stood in the way of the Galra's relentless, all-consuming expansion, and so Haggar would never cease her attempts to wipe them out. She'd picked out Keith as the crack in their defenses. She knew what he would do. He hadn't made a mistake in the ritual. Merely attempting it was a trap he'd stumbled into.
She thinks that Shiro is Keith's weakness. She's wrong. He grits his teeth. Haggar will pay for every ounce of pain she's caused, every second of fear, every death.
But not yet.
"We should leave the path and skirt around them," Shiro says stiffly. "I don't trust you, but you have answers I need. And I trust them-" Shiro tilts his head once more in the direction of the yet-distant soldiers- "even less."
"Oh." Keith bites off the word, but he can't stop himself from adding, "You don't- how did you know I'm not one of them?"
I don't, he expects to hear, because he knows from the set of Shiro's jaw that he still didn't remember Keith, doesn't remember anything, but they're both surprised when he instead replies, "You don't seem like someone who follows orders."
Keith huffs a half-laugh. It's a start, he supposes, and a better one than the cherry-hot knife biting into his face.
"Let's go." Keith glances up the mountain. He'd been on his way to Allura's cottage, which was settled just under the peak, but there's no way they can make it there now without leading the soldiers directly to her door. He has to trust that she'll see the approaching threat and gather their forces by herself – she'll recognize that something is wrong, if Shiro and Keith had failed to alert her or stop the troops themselves. "The west is too open. East, there are cliffs. We can climb, but…"
He hesitates. Shiro didn't seem to remember anything, including his own magic. The cliffs were the best way to make their escape without being seen, but now Keith was asking Shiro to trust him with his life – and his track record recently isn't exactly stellar.
Keith bites his lip. Shiro has always had more faith in him than Keith has in himself. Even now, even with their bond withered and sick between them, even caught in a web of Haggar's magic he can't yet identify, Shiro is Shiro.
He waits.
"Fine."
Keith exhales. There's one more thing he has to do. He reaches into his bag – Shiro's shoulders tense, ready to jump into action – and digs out a thin, braided leather cord strung with a series of jet beads. He holds it out.
Shiro does not take it. Instead, he asks, "What is it?"
"Protection," Keith tells him. "From Haggar."
He hopes it's enough to ward him for the time being. Not many spells could pierce a jet charm's barrier, and anyway, they need all the help they can get.
There's no flicker of recognition; the name means nothing to Shiro now, but Keith spat it like a curse and that's enough to get his attention. He takes the talisman. His hand brushes Keith's palm, warm and calloused, and Keith shudders with the effort it takes not to let their fingers intertwine.
"If you have questions," Keith says quietly, "I'll answer them. Anything. Everything I know. I swear."
It's all he can offer.
It's not enough.
:: :: ::
The climb isn't as bad as he expects. The rocks are large and craggy, slick with moss where water seeps through, but their jagged faces are full of handholds and ledges wide enough to stand on.
Shiro braces himself against Keith for balance as his feet find purchase. Keith grunts, but takes Shiro's weight without stumbling.
"Who are we running from?" Shiro pants as they pause to catch their breath at the base of the cliff. It's not what he wants to ask, but the more important questions fizzle on his tongue and silence is wearing on him. He wants to drown out the whisper in his mind, which is now calling to him from a distance, too quiet to make out but all the more disturbing for its softness.
"The soldiers?" Keith wipes a sheen of sweat from his forehead. His sleeve rides up, revealing the edge of an intricate tattoo that twists like smoke. He seems surprised by the question for a moment, confirming Shiro's guess that this is something he should already know, but Keith leaves it be. "The Galra Empire. We've been holding them off for a long time."
Shiro wonders if he's included in that we, but the words freeze in his mouth as a shower of pebbles burst from the rock above them. It's quickly followed by the rattle of metal on metal and curt, shouted orders.
The soldiers aren't trying to be stealthy.
He grabs Keith and pushes them both against the rocks, hoping that the shadowy overhangs are enough to shield them from view. Keith is pale and shaking from their climb. Shiro's knees tremble beneath him. They threaten to give out as he hears the Galra hammer heavy anchors into the ground. It had taken the two of them close to an hour; with ropes and equipment, the soldiers would be on top of them in mere minutes.
Keith is staring back at him. "Shit."
"We should split up," Shiro declares, his mind racing. He can move more quickly alone than with Keith, who looks nearly dead on his feet. It would be-
He catches himself, aghast, and tears out the cold, creeping worm that had snuck into his thoughts. No. That wasn't him. It really wasn't, he realizes – the voice is back, the slithering whisper, ringing clear where it had been muffled and indistinct. It's digging into his mind once more, but he can feel it now. It may speak. He doesn't have to listen.
Whoever Keith is, even if every word that had fallen from his lips thus far had been a lie, Shiro can't leave him behind. He doesn't quite understand why. It's too soon to call it trust, and he's scattered into too many pieces of himself to know if he can label it as morality. Doubt, perhaps. Doubt would do for now.
"You should hide," he tells Keith. "I'll lead them away. I can outpace them – I'll run and circle back."
Keith starts to shake his head before Shiro finishes speaking. "No, that's- no." His eyes widen. "The stone. Let me see it."
They both flinch as Shiro pulls the pendant out from under the fabric of his tunic. The jet is no longer sleek and black, but cracked, ashy. It leaves shadowy smears on Shiro's fingers.
Haggar, Keith had said.
The stone splits and falls apart in his palm.
"She's watching." Keith looks nauseated. "That's how they found us."
It's an infection under his skin. Haggar's name smells of putrefaction and disease, and Shiro wants nothing more than to burn it out through whatever means necessary, but he can't. He stands, frozen, shivering with an unnamable disgust. He can feel it now, the voice inside his head – it had never been just a voice. It was her.
"We need to find the others," Keith continues. "They- they'll be able to help. I can't hold them off by myself for long."
The army is closer now, almost on top of them – not that it matters, because whoever and whatever Haggar is, she can track Shiro as easily as a hound scenting blood. "We can't run," Shiro says sharply. "I can't run from her."
"I'm not leaving you," snaps Keith, squaring his shoulders as he prepares to fight.
There's another way. There's always another way. Shiro looks inside his mind, beyond the impenetrable clouds fogging his memory, beyond the voice. A blinding pain slams into his skull, but he keeps pushing until light begins to flash behind his eyes, because he knows now: Keith hadn't made him forget. Haggar hadn't made him forget, because every strand of information she could tear from him would be a weapon in her hands.
That only leaves Shiro himself.
But why? And how had Haggar crept inside his mind, his soul?
"Keith," he forces through gritted teeth, "what did you do?"
"You died," Keith whispers after a moment of frozen hesitation, his expression wild. "They- the soldiers, the druids, Haggar, I don't know- they killed you."
Shiro's heart skips a beat; his head pounds with the effort of pressing forward, of holding Haggar back. "You brought me back." It shouldn't have been possible, unless- "How?" he demands.
"Our soulbond." Dust is falling from the sky like snow as the soldiers descend. They don't have long. Keith is wavering, trembling. The blistered cut is weeping where the salve has rubbed away. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. She- I- she knew I'd-"
Shiro doesn't know the man standing before him. They'd met in darkness and smoke and blood, and it looks like that was how their journey will soon end.
Shiro doesn't know Keith, but he knows that he loves him. Suddenly, he understands.
"Finish the ritual," Shiro commands. That was her opening, that was where Haggar had hidden herself. They have to renew the bond. They have to force her out. "Keith, do it."
"Are you sure?"
It will be dangerous, if it works at all. They need time and preparation and so much more, and they don't have any of it. It's an impossible task.
"I trust you, Keith. You can do this."
Keith closes his eyes. Shiro sees his chest rise as he inhales, gathering what's left of his strength, and then Keith is kissing him.
The world tilts, stretches, snaps back into place.
"Not strictly necessary," Shiro murmurs into Keith's hair, "but I'll take it."
"Shiro," Keith mumbles blearily. He sinks to his knees. "Shiro?"
"You did it, Keith."
The soldiers are almost on top of them. Keith can't run. He can barely stand. Shiro smiles. He doesn't have to win this fight.
"How long do you reckon we have until the others show?" he asks, glancing between Keith and the approaching troops. He can make out the shadowy forms of druids above them. Keith blinks up at him. He doesn't expect the cavalry to ride up in the nick of time. He never does. Shiro raises an eyebrow.
"I think it's time to tell them we're soulbonded," he adds, and snaps his fingers. Wind curls and whips around them. He has some scores to settle. "Though it might be too late for wedding presents. Give me a spark, Keith."
Then the sky is made of fire.