Keith's soul was shaped by what he loved: the harsh desert wind that promised nothing and took everything, the purr of the lion beneath his palms, by the thrill of his heart when he murmured I can do it and passed through the flames, forged and tempered and new.
The tear lay before him. It curled around his edges, tickling, teasing, tasting.
Keith's soul was shaped by what he'd lost: the heavy ache of memories that had been written to the final word, the final page, before the book was closed and placed carefully on its shelf. Those memories were nothing more than precious stories, and he already knew the ending. He didn't need to remember the soft rumble of his father's laugh. There was no point to picturing the steady, warm darkness of Shiro's eyes.
The ragged edges of their universe rippled and flickered like a mirage, promising everything and giving nothing. Keith could sense the Black Lion's unease, its excitement. He tried not to feel his own, tried to ignore the budding fear that welled in his lungs. The lion's claws had torn through his reality as if it were nothing more than tissue paper, than unshielded skin, just as the comet it was made of had painted a rift across Daibazaal. The lions were the essence of what had begun this unending war.
Keith didn't believe in souls: they were the promise of a sequel, of an epilogue, that there was something more than here-and-then-gone, that the emptiness of loss was merely holding a space until what was missing could be replaced.
The world around him went gold, then white, and a dark sheet of unfamiliar stars rolled out across the horizon.
He was through.
He wasn't alone.
Keith's boots hit the ground, an impactless impact, without raising so much as a speck of dust from the featureless white plane. His pulse made up for the soft landing – it hammered against his ribs, his throat, his rejected, emptied soul.
"Shiro," he murmured, and the word fell gently, without an echo, without an impact.
The sitting figure shrugged his shoulders as if shaking off the mantle of silence, and then turned slowly. Shiro's eyes found Keith, and the gold of quintessence turned his gaze as bright as sunlight.
The distance between them disappeared. At that moment, Keith could have outrun light itself, and maybe he had; after all, no stars of his had ever shone through this sky.
"Shiro," he whispered once more, and Shiro blinked with the same dazed confusion that had lain across his brow the day he fell back to Earth from the desert sky. His presence forced itself into Keith's heart, alongside the holes he'd left, and Keith thought that maybe even loss had hurt less than this clean, sharp pain that cut through him.
"You're saving me again, Keith," Shiro replied softly, looking around as if it was the first time he'd opened his eyes to this empty world. "What is this?"
"A rift, Pidge says." Keith heard his voice from a distance, from another universe. "Black opened it and sent you here, we don't know- the lions, they're made from the comet, they can- or Black can, at least-"
He was kneeling, tearing off his glove, reaching out to Shiro. Please be real, he thought desperately, please be Shiro, as if he hadn't been taken in by months. As if he hadn't stopped looking. Keith's hand found Shiro's cheek, fingers tracing the line of his jaw, and Shiro turned into his touch. The warmth of his breath ghosted across Keith's knuckles.
"It's been that long, then?"
Keith nodded silently. He didn't trust himself to speak. He didn't trust language to hold his emotions without crushing them, without pinning them behind glass like butterflies until the glimmer had dulled from their motionless wings.
"Everyone's okay?"
"Yeah," said Keith, swallowing the lump in his throat. "They're… fine." He thought of Shiro who wasn't Shiro, whose eyes were dark with fear and confusion instead of quiet warmth. "We found a, um, a clone. Of you. Or he found us. I think you'll like him."
"A clone." Shiro's mouth twisted. "I always wanted a brother."
Keith laughed. It came out as a harsh bark, as if he'd forgotten how.
Don't leave me again, he wanted to shout, to beg. A part of himself had vanished with Shiro every time, and it never came back – Keith was being broken down piece by piece, filling the gaps with memories locked up between dusty covers. Stay with me.
"Let's go home," he whispered instead, because Shiro didn't make promises he couldn't keep.
It was so easy to die for someone. It was impossible to live for them.