A/N: Hi! I'm dreampunk! I have many feelings about history and also Voltron! Do people still open and close fics with A/Ns or am I being archaic? Who knows! I haven't actually used this site in two years!

(check the bottom for all the Hecka Cool! History References! I've tried to stay as accurate as possible, which also means I'm going to be pretty frank about the culture of late nineteenth century America, which was a little amazingly racist. By the way, if you want to see this on AO3, where I got to experiment with coding and let you hover over text to get translations - which is so much more fun - it's available under the profile "nivena"! and my tumblr url is "dreampunk". Send me prompts there, or just... talk to me about Indo-Japanese trade relations? I'm not picky!)

It was a fairly ordinary day if one could ignore the man on the raft. It was as sunny as any other day that summer, without a hint of cloud in the sky. No land for miles, so the ocean was simply a still mirror for the uncontrasted blue above. Barely past the horizon, a metal castle of alien origin hovered benignly, the only promise that the water didn't stretch on forever.

It was ordinary. Peaceful. Except for the man on the raft.

Calling it a raft was like calling a tomato a fruit. It was true, but only through the minute technicality of having seeds, and the fact that nobody knew what other category to put it in. Similarly, it was true the man's raft floated and had planks of wood, but other than that, it was mostly just a disaster.

The man himself seemed to be a bit of a disaster as well. He was unconscious, and therefore could not refute this claim, but his appearance said it all. He looked as if he was carved from wood by a drunken nine year old with a kitchen knife, all long flat planes that jangled at sharp angles. His clothes were torn and a faded color that could be classified as "probably used to be black", too thin to be present for any reason other than modesty. They were arranged in layers around his shoulders, and soaked thoroughly through.

The half of the man's face that wasn't pressed into the loosely tied wood told a telling story. One that possibly involved a very large bear. A large pink scar ran across the bridge of his nose, and his cheekbones were covered in angry, red scratches, the kind that probably wasn't helped by being out at sea with no medical aid for who knows how long. Stark white strands spilled over his forehead, contrasting heavily with the rest of his short, inky black hair. He didn't look Western, with his strange dress and unfamiliar hair, and lack of white facial features.

She noticed a glint of what could have been metal, trapped between the raft and the man's torso. It was probably held in his right hand, which got Allura incredibly curious. What could possibly be so important that it would be the only thing you would take with you to the middle of the Pacific? She really wanted to know.

Allura was getting this man on her ship in some way or another.

Coran hovered around her nervously. It was not a figure of speech - the man's head was about to phase through the roof if he didn't get back down to a respectable two feet off the ground.

"Princess," he said, "are you quite sure? You know, your father always said, you can't trust every man you come across on the high tide!"

"I'm sure," she assured, making her way through to the ship's galley. She wasn't, actually, all that sure. She just disliked admitting defeat.

Coran floated doggedly after her, chattering away, which probably should have been irritating after a few hours. Still, Allura never found herself getting tired of Coran's one-sided conversations. His voice had never changed, no matter how long it had been, which was a bit of a blessing, considering he appeared fake if one squinted. A bit like a picture someone had messed with on Instagram, too bright in places, too dull in others. An illusion that almost looked real. It was almost worse this way, like being tricked.

Some days, as hard as it was to admit to even herself, it hurt to look at Coran. But if Allura closed her eyes and just listened to him speak, it was almost as if nobody had died. It was as if she was a young girl again.

"Do we still have those Indian spices?" She asked, rooting through the cupboards. San Francisco was a week's journey away, and she had only planned on her own mouth to feed. Still, Atlantean hospitality was Atlantean hospitality.

"Second cupboard to the right," Coran said. Not to long after she moved out of the way in search of some cinnamon, the drawers next to her flew open. A bag of sugar came flying out, sliding across the countertop like a particularly theatric baseball player approaching home plate. Miraculously, nothing was spilled. Out came the kettle with an accompanying metallic crash, and a few fake silver spoons were yanked out of the cutlery drawer as well, hitting two walls on their way next to the sugar. Coran's ghost telepathy wasn't quite as precise as either of them wished it was.

The kitchen was quiet as the two waited for the water to boil. It was a comfortable silence, settled and calm. Then, softly, Coran asked Allura:

"Do you think-"

Whatever he was going to ask was cut off by the distinct scream of someone falling out of their bed.

Takashi had one of those sleeps. The kind where you close your eyes for a second and wake up the next, eight hours later. Where you blink and suddenly everything around you changes.

For example, he fell asleep while he was hurtling down to earth from a distance of 5,000 feet in the air. He woke up in a bed that was moving slightly. Therefore, it was understandable that he fell out of bed. He was confused and disoriented. He was allowed to fall out of a bed.

He lay with his face pressed against the wood-paneled floors, rocked from side to side from what must have been waves outside of a ship, because if he focused he could smell salt-water, so this must have been a ship.

"Hello, there!"

Also, a disembodied head was peering at him from the floor.

Shiro did not yelp, but he did make a noise that many would consider undignified. In his defense, it looked like Coran had clipped through the floor and spoke to him, like something out of Hamlet or a badly rendered videogame.

"What the fuck," Shiro said.

Shiro also wasn't in his normal clothes. He was pretty sure what he was wearing was called a button-up, and he had no idea what adjective would precede pants, but he was wearing strange pants. His sword was gone, and he had a metal hand. Which was, you know, weird. Not weirder than the talking head, but just enough to register.

Then a lady burst through the door and everything made even less sense. "Hello," she said, "I'm Allura. You're on my ship."

That wasn't the part that didn't make sense. Shiro wasn't, like, a misogynist or anything. It made perfect sense that a woman could be the captain of a ship. It had just been a very strange series of events, and she was a very strange woman in a way that was completely different from the inherent strangeness of having a conversation with what amounted to only 12% of a human, and the clashing strangeness had formed its own brand of strange, and it was all beginning to give Shiro a headache.

She was very tall, and probably not just because he was looking up at her from the floor. It seemed that if Shiro stood up, she would clear his height by an inch or two, and he was a pretty tall guy. Her skin was dark, and her hair was white, and it probably should have looked incongruous and somehow it didn't. That seemed to be the major theme of her entire being. Instead of a normal brown, she had bright lavender eyes, and her ears were pointed in a distinctly unnatural manner, and she had anomalous pink markings around her weird eyes.

She dressed even more unusually. It reminded Shiro of the Dutch traders he used to watch when he was younger, with her baggy clothes tucked into each other. They looked like they were nice clothes once, but years of wear and tear had taken their toll, and now they evolved into 'well-worn and comfortable'. He realised that the clothes were the same kind that he was wearing, and wondered faintly as to who dressed him.

The odd woman was still talking. Belatedly, Shiro looked up at her just as she finished saying, "Would you care for some tea?"

"Who are you?"

If the lady was strange, she was at the very least hospitable. She at least served tea, even if it was a bit weird, made with Tenjiku spices, and burned a little going down.

Shiro found himself a bit ridiculously homesick for good matcha, but that was an unproductive emotion and he decided he would try not feeling it. Yes, the tea was unusual, but it was just one more strange thing on an entire ship full of strange things, and right now, the floating head was taking precedent.

There was a man in the kitchen, with the exact face of the dismembered head he had seen before, and he was hovering a few inches off the ground. Shiro tried not to look at him too much. Honestly, who knew if he was going crazy or something, but the last thing he wanted was for a very nice woman captain of a ship hundreds of miles off land to know he was crazy. That would be a uniquely terrible situation.

"So, do you remember what happened before you were, you know, floating in the middle of the Pacific?" She asked. She was British, as it turned out. Nothing about her appearance or living quarters indicated that to Shiro, who admittedly didn't know all that much about the British. It was strange. Aside from the way her accent curled her words, she almost seemed otherworldly, like she didn't come from or belong to anywhere.

"No," Shiro lied. He realised with a bit of a jolt that he was mirroring Allura's posture. Unlike her, his shoulders were just a fraction hunched over, his stance just the slightest bit defensive. He straightened up as inconspicuously as he could.

"Are you sure?" She pressed. Whenever Allura asked a question, she always tilted her head a bit off to the side. Not too much, and she righted it each time, but it gave the impression that she was always in motion. She talked with her hands too, small vague gestures, just twitches of the fingers. It was pretty admirable how expressive her hands were, considering her crossed arms.

"Yes."

"Princess," said the floating man, "perhaps you should show him to his room?"

Allura didn't show any signs of hearing the man, so that was strike one against his sanity. Though, the more he looked at the… ghost(?), the more strange similarities to Allura he saw. They had the same markings and elf-ears, odd eyes and light hair. The ghost looked almost like a white person if Shiro's memory of them was to be trusted.

That's where the similarities ended, he supposed. Allura certainly didn't look white, with her distinctly not-white skin. She did dress European, unlike the ghost. He was in something pastel, and it looked strange and formfitting and… strange. The man was strange. Shiro was glad he'd sorted that out.

Allura held the steaming mug up to her face, still not drinking out of it. She asked, carefully, "Do you know who you are?" Delicately. Like she was trying not to offend.

"My name is Shirogane Takashi," he said mechanically. "I served the Tokugawa Shogunate as a samurai on the shihaisho. We lost the Boshin War. I do not have a right hand."

He looked down at the mass of metal and wire where his right hand used to be. "I do not know where this came from," he lied.

The day passed quietly. Allura informed him that it was a week until they got to the earliest port, and that yes , the clothes he was wearing were hers, and she dressed him, since she was the only other person on the ship.

Which, weird. That didn't seem physically possible. The ship was very gigantic, and very clearly meant for a crew of at least fifty. Also, strike two against Shiro's sanity, because the ghost was definitely hovering there, right in the corner of his vision. That probably wasn't good.

He idly wondered exactly what kind of ghost the man was. He wasn't solid: Shiro accidentally stepped on one of his toes, and his foot went right through. So far, he didn't seem particularly angry, so he was most likely not an onryo. He wasn't bearing any candy, and he probably hadn't died delivering a child (though, Shiro added, you never knew), but ubume were probably out of the question.

Seeing as this was a ship, it wasn't too hard to say he may have died at sea. Shiro didn't remember much more of the legends. He supposed his childhood was lacking, a conclusion he'd come to far too often.

But yeah, ghost. Ghost man. Shiro almost wanted to say he wasn't a yurei, but that would mean he was hallucinating, which wasn't really a conclusion he wanted to come to.

He didn't look like a ghost at first, but then you saw that there weren't any shadows.

He didn't seem angry or sad, and aside from his one esoteric comment, he hadn't spoken. "Princess," he called Allura. What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Was his subconscious trying to tell him that he had a crush on her? There were more subtle ways of doing that.

"Shiro, would you mind taking first watch?" asked Allura. The ghost hovered behind her.

"Not at all," he responded, very carefully looking directly at her. Allura sat down across from him. It struck Shiro as odd that a one-man ship would have such a large dining table, before he decided that a one-person table would look even weirder. It was still a little strange, sitting at a table for nine with only one other person for company.

"Do you ever get lonely?" he found himself asking the woman across from him. Then his mind caught up to him and he retroactively felt embarrassed. Allura thankfully took it in stride.

"Not really," she said, "but it is a pretty big ship. It was my father's."

"What happened?" Shiro asked again, because he had forgotten every single manner he had left.

She said simply, "He died."

For a few seconds, it was quiet. Shiro knew he should apologise, but the silence was thick and intimidating. Finally, after what felt like too long, he said, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was long ago."

"So, you've been sailing alone for a long time?"

"Mm," Allura hummed nondescriptly. She turned her head slightly to the side, looking out the window and the uniform waves. She really was very pretty, once Shiro had a while to look at her. She looked… clean. Like if a single person could embody an entity, she would be clean. Perfectly symmetrical, even down to her stray hairs. Even the little marks under her eyes, the ones the ghost had, were painted evenly over her cheekbones.

"Those marks," Shiro said unsubtly. "What do they mean?"

She tapped the marks in question. "Oh," she smiled. "I was born with them. Birthmarks."

Okay. Not strange makeup. Just… birthmarks. Well, if she humoured that question -

"Are you Japanese? Pardon the question, it's just, you speak it well and you don't look-" Shiro cut himself off before he said something too insensitive.

"Oh! I, no. I've, ah, I've traded with Japanese sailors. Picked it up from there." She laughed nervously.

"Really? You don't look that old! Not, not that you are old, it's just-"

Allura laughed, so Shiro just decided to quit while he was ahead and stop talking. He found himself reexamining her with a more critical eye. She looked ageless, sure, but to trade with Japanese sailors? That had been a very long time ago. She was lying.

Then again, he was too.

Night fell slowly, the summer sun reluctant to go. One by one, the stars winked into existence. Shiro had always loved the sky, how fluid and dynamic it was. It was reliable, too. It had a repertoire of colours, and a set of events, and he knew for certain that the sky could turn red, but never green, that it could rain down ice, but never fire. Certainties were hard to come by, and were never as pretty as this one. Death was certain, but it was ugly. The sky though, that was the most beautiful thing humanity had ever been given. Birds didn't know how lucky they were.

First watch apparently entailed "until the stars fill the night", which was a kind of whimsical impreciseness that seemed utterly unbefitting of Allura. But, orders were orders, so Shiro found a chair and settled on the deck, content to watch the sky dot with stars.

He figured that once it became so saturated that the night was half light, he would wake up Allura. It was on its way. The stars always started slow but once that first one appeared, five more rushed to join it. It picked up speed as the night settled around the ocean, tucking itself in the dead stillness of cold air and the puffs of Shiro's white breath. Like exponential growth.

As it got colder, the hurt around his elbow got more pronounced and painful. The ghost had also changed, turning duller, more faded out. He was leaning against the railing, watching Shiro. It almost made him nervous, which was ridiculous, seeing as he was 90% sure the ghost was a figment of his fever dreams. He'd heard of men being driven insane on the sea. This could be it.

The ghost had called Allura "Princess." It was a strange thing to call someone, even in the privacy of his own mind. And what had the man said? "Show him to his rooms?"

Allura had later shown him his room, but he doubted it had anything to do with the hallucination. Right across from his own, though she had very carefully made sure not to open her own door or show him in. The 'Princess' wasn't without her own secrets as well. She lied about how she knew Japanese, and Shiro didn't know anything about her aside from what she told him herself. They were alone out at sea, and all he knew for sure was that she was willing to house him until they got to California.

Shiro sighed and got up. His knees protested, having been locked in their position for far too long, and that just set off his arm again, which mostly just led to a lot of pain across his entire body. He shuffled his way through the hallways, down the memorised path to his room. Stopping, he knocked on Allura's door twice, then waited for the telling noises of someone getting out of bed. Sure enough, he heard a muffled thump and footsteps towards him before the door swung open.

"It's your watch," he said unnecessarily.

Allura smiled, not a trace of sleepy in her face. She was still wearing the clothes she was in that morning. "Thank you, Shiro," she said.

"No problem, Princess."

They both registered exactly what was wrong with that sentence at the very same time. "What did you just call me?" Allura asked to an increasingly embarrassed Shiro.

Then the sky turned green and started raining fire and nothing made sense from that point onwards.

Historical References:

1. Shiro describes Allura's clothes as looking like the Dutch traders he watched as a child. Assuming he is in his mid-20's, his childhood would pretty firmly take place during Japan's sakoku, or policy of isolationism. Interestingly enough, despite the pretty firm tone of "isolation", Japan still traded with many countries, like China and Korea. However, the only European influence allowed was trade with the Netherlands (of all places). It was only allowed at a trading post near Nagasaki, so for the sake of that historical allusion, we're gonna assume that's where Shiro grew up.

2. There's a reason why I chose tea-making as the centre of the action. Tea has an incredibly long and storied history in Asia, and was even the start of tons of conflicts. Like, legit wars over this leaf water stuff. I'm not kidding. And in the 1100's, wealthy samurai began to adopt habits of Chinese high society and tea drinking became the centre of their meetings. The tea ceremony quickly became the main way official business was conducted.

3. On that note, Shiro describes the spices used to make the tea as Tenjiku. This is the historic East Asian name for India! (holy shit do I wish there was an indian character in voltron, JUST to explore indo-japanese relations.) Tenjiku means Heavenly Abode, and it comes from a very long game of cross-language telephone that started with 'Indus River'. The two countries have a history of harboring each other's refugees, and they have an incredibly good relationship, and I will stop right here but if anyone wants to know more about Indo-Japanese relations please ask i have five paragraphs of this stuff.

4. Shihaisho: Land in Japan that the shogunate directly held. This included Nagasaki, so that's where Shiro served. Boshin War: also known as the Japanese Revolution because in the late 1800's revolution was the newest fad. Nagasaki was actually pretty anti-shogunate, but it's all this one scotsman's fault. Again, PLEASE ASK ME ABOUT THIS IM A GIANT NERD AND I CARE SO MUCH ABOUT HISTORY

5. The ghosts Shiro was trying to classify Coran as: okay at this point please just google Japanese ghosts i can't do it justice. they have a fucking CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM.

6. Shiro knows Allura is lying about speaking Japanese because. Isolationism. She couldn't have traded with Japanese sailors if she was British.