The barrier goes up like a dying star. When the light clears, the shield around the Galra cruiser is gone, along with the Galra fighter. The realization comes in fits and starts, filling in the silence where Keith's voice should be coming over the radio, familiar and rough and dear.
And gone.
That takes time. That comes after. After they land and argue and assign blame and revoke it and mourn, but in that first moment, relief coursing through him, Shiro smiles.
"Nice work, Keith."
He never responds.
"Maybe the explosion knocked out his radio," Pidge says to the silence, but the tone of her voice says what they're all thinking: if the explosion knocked his radio out, it could have done worse. Probably did do worse, but they'll find him, even if his ship is dead in the water and they have to sift through the mass of wreckage from the Galra cruiser that's floating all around them.
The radio crackles, and relief surges for the half second it takes before the voice comes through—it isn't Keith.
"Guys, I'm sorry, I tried to stop him, but he just—" Matt's face pops up on their screens. He's got his head down, hands in his hair. "I'm sorry," he says again. "I'm so sorry."
"Keith?" Shiro tries over the radio again. There's nothing but silence.
Nothing.
"I'm sorry," Matt repeats.
He closes his eyes, the after burn of the explosion playing behind his lids on loop, and he knows what Matt's going to say before he says it, but there's no steeling himself, nothing solid to brace his thoughts against.
"Keith," Matt chokes. "He—"
"He ran his ship into the barrier," Lance whispers, and that's the second time today he's surprised Shiro.
Everything tunnels on those words; something in his mind collapses, pulling everything in with it, and there's not enough room in him suddenly. He can only pick up one thing at a time and look at it: the wetness between Matt's fingers over the video feet, where they're pressed against his face. The breathy sound Allura makes over the radio.
What's left of the Galra cruiser, glittering and spinning outward like a second set of stars against the black.
But he's the leader. "Shiro?" someone asks, and later he won't remember who, but he'll remember his own stillness, like maybe if he didn't breathe or speak or move, time would stop moving against him.
He imagines it: the cruiser's scattered pieces pulling in, piecing itself back together, the net of purple light coalescing, and the Galra fighter there, intact and safe.
"Shiro?" someone asks again.
Voltron falls apart.
That first day is long, and full of the kind of dreary that settles into his bones.
He sees Lance and Hunk when they get back to the ship, hang-dog tired, and Pidge off to the side, face buried in Matt's chest.
Say something, he tells himself. That's his duty; that's what a leader does. But every kind word flees from him the moment he tries to give it life, like he's back on Earth, trying to pick out one star, watching it disappear as he focuses on it. There's no silver lining to this. There's no comfort.
Allura is stoic, but when she asks, "Why didn't he say anything?" That's what nearly undoes him. Shiro steals a moment to lean against the wall, close his eyes, and try not to imagine those last moments again. Radio silence, the Galra fighter hurtling toward the barrier, his imagination drawing the scene in horrific technicolor.
Keith could have said goodbye, but would that make it easier for any of them? Would it have made it easier for Keith to have them screaming in his ear, Shiro ordering him to stand down—
He pushes off the wall, running from that thought. After the attack and the exhaustion of fighting Naxzela's gravity, they're on their last legs, but some things won't wait.
Telling Kolivan is the most immediate concern, and of course, it falls to him. It feels like it should be the other way around. He needs someone to explain this to him before he can explain it to anyone else. Shock and denial are warring for supremacy in his mind; in the neutral ground between them, he can be functional.
Kolivan takes it with the grace he's due.
He's had practice, Shiro thinks, and hates himself for it. Kolivan leads differently, but no worse, and maybe he could teach Shiro how he deals with a loss like this. Knowledge or death is the Blade's creed, but knowledge is nothing but a fancy stand in for victory—they're Galra, through and through. The mission, before all things. That's all this is—that's what Keith was, from the day they met. Without Keith, they would all be dead, but for some reason the weight of that against Keith's life isn't panning out the way it should in his head.
Keith would have died anyway, he thinks, and his mind spins on conditions, like there's a second half to that argument where they all could have gotten out of this whole and unscathed.
But no. That was never in the cards. Their luck was always going to run out eventually. Someone was going to lose, and lose all, and Keith might have been their rock, but he was never unbreakable.
This is what it takes to win.
"You should take a break," Hunk tells him, soft-eyed and quiet, when they pass in the kitchen.
They're both still in armor, grabbing food as they can between shifts and plans and trying to figure out what to do with the Galra fleet now that they have it cut off and cornered but have half as many coalition forces to send out against it.
Every hair on him bristles at the suggestion. He doesn't need to be coddled through this. He doesn't deserve to be.
No one will say it, but this is his fault. His plan, and a third of the rebel fleet lost. His plan, and the entire coalition nearly destroyed. His plan, and Keith—
It's a win at the highest cost imaginable, and still, they got off easy.
If they'd had a chance to scout Naxzela before hand, he thinks, and chases it with a hundred thoughts like it. If Keith was still on the team, if they'd left Naxzela at the first sign of danger, if he'd let Keith take on the cruiser before it had a shield up—this is on his shoulders, and he feels that guilt like something sinuous and heavy curled around his neck, cutting off his air breath by breath.
"I'm fine," Shiro says. It's a lie, but Hunk doesn't test him on it. He's been snappy, and they know it. His frustration isn't a symptom of this mess but a cause.
If he'd listened, none of this would have happened, and it would be Keith telling him to take a break. If he'd listened, Keith would still be here.
The thought sneaks up on him and punches the air out of his chest.
If he'd listened—
Hunk frowns, holds out a hand, asks, "Shiro?" That's all the warning either of them have before he's reeling in grief.
This is every string cut, every opportunity lost, and no second chances. Shiro remembers watching Keith go, seeing the frown on his face, and thinking he'd feel better after he had time to cool off—but did he? Is that how Keith died? Thinking that they didn't want him? That he'd disappointed them?
At the edge of his awareness, Hunk tuts and pulls him into a hug.
It dawns all at once. Keith's face hovering above his in the desert shack, that first morning back on Earth. His steady voice over the radio when they were stranded and he was wounded, and there was never any question in Keith's mind that Shiro would make it through. His confidence was infectious, but that was a mistake, he realizes now.
Keith didn't operate on confidence. He was conviction, manifest, and he would do anything—give anything—to do what had to be done. That's all.
There's a heavy hand in his hair, and tears on his face, and that's how they stay until Shiro can breathe again.
"Someone should check his room."
Lance is the first one to say it, where Shiro might have been content to never walk down that hallway again. It's been two weeks, and he's managed so far.
Check, Lance says, like maybe Keith will be back soon and they need to make sure everything is in order for him. It's the most delicate way to put it, by far, but Shiro is too tired to play around with pretty words and phrases.
His headache spikes. "I'll do it," he says. It's impossible to keep his tone on the level, steady cadence he's been cultivating since Naxzela. Snapping won't help, and it's already hurt them in ways that can't be fixed.
"We'll all go," Allura assures him. He wants to argue, but maybe it'll distract him from whatever's waiting inside there. It's the same feeling he used to get before a new sim test: he never had any idea what to expect, but his imagination ran fast and wild on the possibilities. It was never as bad as he imagined.
He reminds himself of that as they make their way to Keith's room—all of them together, Coran bringing up the rear. He's been quiet since the battle, like Matt has. Shiro hasn't had the will to ask them what it was like, or what Keith said, or what he sounded like at the end. His imagination isn't kind, but sometimes reality is worse.
That's his last thought before the door to Keith's room slides open in front of him, and the irony cuts.
Yes, reality is worse, because the room is empty.
He thinks for a moment that it's the wrong one somehow, but then he spots the clothes. They're folded and stacked in a neat pile on the unmade bed, though it barely counts as unmade when the only thing on it is a rumpled blanket. The only thing missing is his jacket, but the strike of red and gold and white on the hook by the door draws his eye, and that's it. His jacket, his pants and shirt and boots.
That's it.
Lance is the first one to speak. "Not very messy, was he?" The words are tight, the barest glint of humor trying to shine through. It almost works.
But—he was. He was messy back at the Garrison, back at the shack: half finished projects and open books and brief obsessions filling in the corners of his bunk. When did that change? He wonders, and with pain: why didn't you notice?
The others seem frozen. No one really wants to walk in and confront it. He wonders, briefly, what he would have done if he'd sat down in the cockpit of the simulator and found an hour of open space. Nothing unexpected, nothing to avoid, nothing to fear—nothing. It would have driven him nuts.
That's exactly what this is.
"I'll handle it," he hears himself say, still staring at the jacket by the door, and his tone gets across what he can't put into words: there's exactly enough space in the room for one person. The pain behind his eyes has been building with the dull thudding in his chest, and the piercing white of the overhead lights has it peaking. Someone starts to object, but he can't make himself care who. They go quiet at the soft sound of an elbow smacking cloth, and the door slides shut behind their shuffling feet, leaving him alone with—nothing.
He's so still for so long that the motion activated lights power off, and when he finally makes himself move, only the soft blue track lighting around the floor goes on. It's enough to see by, but eerie, like he's walking in a tomb.
The jacket is what draws him first. There's not a memory he has of Keith that doesn't include that jacket. Even back at the Garrison, though it was too large for him then: the sleeves stretched over his hands, even cuffed, and the collar hid his face. It was barely a crop jacket then, and Shiro's hands are just barely brushing the hem of it when he remembers seeing Keith, that first morning after Kerberos and captivity.
It's his first clear memory of Earth—the edge of that jacket, right in front of his eyes, and a hand on his neck; Keith leaning over him, checking his pulse. And Shiro remembers lying on his side, looking at the red and white and the thin black cloth of his t-shirt stretching over his ribs, and thinking: this can't be real.
It's not. Not anymore. But the jacket still smells like him.
He makes a space for himself on the bed and pulls it to his face. Something in him spares a moment to wonder what he's doing, but this is it. This is all he has. It smells like sweat, and something he can convince himself is uniquely keith, like the desert after a storm, but though the rational part of him says it's old leather and nothing more.
It feels like more.
The collar is ridiculous. It always was, and he can't look at it without seeing Keith's neck like a double-image. Pale skin over muscle, veins like wires below his skin, pulse fluttering. It's so clear, and something he hadn't realized he'd noticed at all, but his mind pulls it up like he recorded in high definition. This is years away from simple observation, he realizes. You don't memorize the line of someone's collar bone if you don't want them.
This is desire. This is obsession.
That realization is an unveiling; everything else falls into place. He's lying in Keith's bed, holding Keith's clothes, picturing his bare skin with high definition precision, trying to part out his smell from the clean static of the ship. There's only one word for what this is.
It's a truth he buried, a stone he kicked down the road to deal with some day when he had time and space. He's too tired to deny it.
You gave up what you loved , he thinks, and lets sleep pull him under.
There's no single, purposeful blow the Galra could have struck that would have done so much damage.
"We're stretched thin," Kolivan says over the map of their sector that proves it in clear numbers: a third of the Empire is theirs, but they don't have the means to keep it. Kolivan presents it like simple fact, but what he means is that he's lost too many men.
The Blades' missions are run solo more often than not. Infiltration requires a scalpel touch, not blunt force, and Shiro realizes there was something more to Keith's offhand mention that Kolivan accompanied him on almost every one.
He tunes out the conversation by accident, lost in watching Kolivan's heavy expression and the familiar hang of his shoulders. Shiro knows that weight. It's made a home on his back since Naxzela.
Keith's name brings him crashing back to the conversation at hand. Allura being diplomatic, seeing what Shiro sees, trying to commiserate in mourning.
But Kolivan's lips turn down at the reminder. "He was a good soldier. We mourn his loss with you."
Shiro knows that tone of voice like the ache behind his eyes. It's pablum. It's what you say to keep an ally—it's what you say because you have to, and it doesn't leave room for discussion. That's the point. Kolivan lets his words settle and then nods to them, dismissing himself.
Shiro follows him out, like there's a rope knotted between his ribs, pulling him after any connection, any spare scrap of what he's lost, since they have none. Nothing. He has nothing, like Keith was always ready to disappear, or never there at all.
Kolivan pauses once they're out of listening distance of the bridge, half turning back to Shiro. He doesn't say anything, and that's the moment Shiro realizes he doesn't know what he wants to say.
Kolivan spares him the awkward silence. "I know how close he was to you. I am sorry, Shiro."
A consolation, not a comfort, and there's an edge to it. It's not what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to know. He can't let Kolivan walk away without getting something, and there has to be something better than the sour tang in the back of his mouth that Kolivan's words leave.
How close he was to you. How close, and he didn't say goodbye.
Shiro's mouth opens on a question and stalls, and what comes out instead is nothing like what he intended. "Was he happy?" he asks, and suddenly that's it. That's the question he needs answered most, because Kolivan is the last one of them who saw him in person, the last one who knew him well enough to tell, and if Keith was happy, that's something at least.
Kolivan's eyes go wide, and then narrow, the lines at the corners of his eyes and over his brow showing his age.
"No," he says, and the floor drops out. "Keith was many things, but he was never happy with us." He says it like an apology, but it's still got that edge, and this time it cuts.
It's disappointment, Shiro realizes. Kolivan is disappointed, but it's not clear who with. Himself, or Shiro—Keith, maybe.
When he speaks again, he sounds tired. "But don't make light of his choice. That's not why he did it. It was never about him."
Shiro already knew that. Of course it wasn't about Keith. It never was. Nothing in Keith's life was about him.
The thought is crippling. Kolivan starts walking again and gets half way down the hallway before Shiro can think past it and gather himself. "Wait—did he leave anything with you?"
"Everything he had he left on this ship," Kolivan says, half-turning. "Unless you want his spare clothes. They're too small to be reused."
Yes, Shiro thinks, headache blinding him. If that's all they have, there's nothing he wants more. It's something.
Kolivan must notice the look on his face, and Shiro can't imagine what it is he sees, but he nods. "I'll send them along."
It's not until later, when he's lying in bed sleepless and aching, fingering the edges of Keith's jacket where it's spread across his chest that Kolivan's words come back to him:
Everything he had, he left on the ship.
He had no possessions beyond the clothes on his back and the knife on his belt, but that's not what Kolivan was referring to, Shiro realizes.
There was a moment. A last moment. Keith in front of him, saying he was leaving the team, voice hoarse the way it always got when he couldn't contain his emotions—and he never could, not for long. The light on Olkarion was half-past sunset, and it sets his eyes and hair glowing. He was pale from months under the hood and mask of a Marmora agent—and something more. Fear, or something like it, casting a pall over him, and Shiro remembers it because the moment he set his hand on Keith's shoulder his eyes went wide and bright and his face lost all its blood.
He remembers it because it's the first time he saw Keith scared. He remembers it because it's the first time he saw Keith scared of him.
In a month of sleepless nights, fighting the ache in his head, he couldn't figure out why. Not until now, and the thought comes to him fresh and raw, cutting right through the center of him: if he'd asked Keith to stay, he would have, but Keith didn't want to.
He didn't want to stay on the team. Not if Shiro was going to push him away.
The only thing Keith was ever selfish about was him.
His heart breaks on it.
The Blades come through. They burn his spare suit and it's so small when it's not stretched over muscle and bone.
The irony isn't lost on him. Why burn something twice? This is what Keith was wearing when he died, he thinks, watching the flames leap on the makeshift pyre in the perpetual Olkarion sunset. The black cloth and hard synthetic of the armor take time to burn; it's built to survive a perfect vacuum. Fire is something different; something worse. It takes everything.
The explosion didn't leave them a scrap. They looked, searched, pulled bodies from the cruiser's detritus. Burnt, mangled, frozen in space, almost beyond recognition. But there was nothing pale enough under the char, nothing small enough.
Shiro had to call it off eventually, because no one else would say what they were thinking: all of Keith's remains were scattered in the dust around them.
The others mourn together, leaving emblems in the fire, little sacrifices that honor Keith's. If he were any kind of man, he'd leave something, too. Something precious, something invaluable, but when he leaves his room that afternoon and sees the pile of Keith's clothes sitting by his bed, the thought of burning them is horrific. Imagining it sends his head thudding in pain and panic.
He can't lose that.
"You don't have to put on a brave face. I mean, I remember you two back at the Garrison. I'm so sorry." Matt tells him, when they're the only ones left.
Keith was a star then—the kind that was going to burn out, fall from the sky, leave scorched earth and ruin where he landed. And Shiro followed him. That's the difference. Even then, everyone thought it was the other way, like he was the one dragging Keith around and propping him up, but it was never that. Shiro grounded him, maybe, or gave him something earthbound to cling to, but he was bright enough on his own. Too bright. He always had an air about him like he could disappear if you looked away for too long.
That's exactly what he did, in the end.
The flames consume the last of the suit in a slow smolder that Shiro couldn't tear his eyes from if he wanted to. It's hypnotic. For a moment there's a hue to the fire that seems out of place—a fluorescent violet hiding around the last distinguishable edges of the pile of cloth and armor. That color is for the Galra; everything else on Olkarion is hued in in gold and yellow and warmth, but the violet persists, drawing in his eyes. Something in the make up of the suit, he thinks, as it gets more distinct, some strange element.
What burns violet?
It changes as he watches, and he can almost imagine it's forming the outline of something new.
"What happened?" Matt asks, startling him out of it. When he glances back, the violet is gone.
Matt's question sounds rhetorical, like a question he doesn't need or want answered. He doesn't mean why did he do it. They all know why, and it wasn't about any of them. It wasn't wrong. It was the right thing to do, but painful. A win, at the most dire cost.
Shiro rolls answers around until he settles on, "I let him go."
It's an admittance of guilt. This was Keith's choice, from start to finish, but there was something inevitable about it. The Blades' missions demand absolute sacrifice, and always have. At some point he was going to take a dangerous mission, a fatal mission. It's one thing to risk your life when you have 120 tons of robotic lion to back you up, but it's another to take on the Galra face-first wearing what the Blades wear.
Being a Paladin is like taking on the enemy in a tank. Keith was out there in cardboard and silk by comparison, and Shiro didn't try to stop it. This is a self inflicted wound—in more way than one.
He pushed Keith to the edge of duty and asked him to step over. And Keith did, but not in the direction he was hoping for.
Matt is watching him, another question in his eyes. He's smart like Pidge is. It's rare to find someone who understands people almost as well as they do tech.
"He was the pilot of the Black Lion," Shiro confesses.
Matt looks taken aback. "But—"
"I asked him to be. I told him if anything happened, that's what I wanted. But he didn't want it."
What did Keith want? he wonders suddenly. Was finding a cause worth dying for enough?
It's a bizarre thought, and rings false. Keith was young, and human, and scared. He wasn't some ethereal avatar of duty. He had a code, but he loved bikes and the thrill of being in the pilot's seat and good food and—
Shiro gasps and presses a hand to his eyes. "He saved me after Kerberos, and he saved me after—" There's something tight in his throat, burning over his cheeks. "And I just couldn't get my head on straight. I took it out on him. He tried to talk to me and I ordered him to leave. I actually said that's an order."
You did this.
"Hey," Matt says softly, "we all say things we regret. I know he didn't blame you."
He's right. Keith never blamed him for anything. It was a liberty he took, but only when it counted. Only when he thought he had to—only when Keith would feel it the most.
That's enough. He leaves Matt with the last of the pyre and not a word. He doesn't understand, and doesn't spare a glance to be offended as Shiro walks away.
When he gets to his room, Keith's jacket is where he left it on his bed. The smell of him is fading. It's testament to his obsession that he can tell. He lies with the collar pressed to his face, his arms wrapped around it in a parody of a hug.
There's almost nothing he wouldn't give, he thinks.
There isn't time to mourn in a war.
There's time to plan, time to gather their forces and give a nice speech. And there's time to fight.
Lotor is gone, but the Galra have rallied. The attack on Naxzela was successful in the most technical terms: a third of rebel forces are gone, and the Blades are spread too thin. All the pretty shows in the universe can't make up for what they've lost.
Lance isn't Keith, and neither is Shiro. There's an element of fire missing, and Allura's raw power is their saving grace. The Black Lion goes in flickers and starts—not like it's unwilling, but like half its energy is dedicated to something else.
To mourning, he thinks once, and then crushes it. The Black Lion takes the most energy to pilot on a good day, and those are long behind him. Thinking like that isn't going to help.
And the fighting is brutal. The Galra fleet they trapped behind the line of planets he drew with Naxzela is cornered, and they know it—they fight like it. Like something wounded, trapped, and dangerous. It's the kind of fighting Keith would have loved. His energy and speed and pragmatism were ready made for it.
Voltron, as it is now, isn't. The fighting doesn't end, and that much killing takes something out of them. He ends up spending more time in the Lion than not, until he's at the edge of the kind of exhaustion that leaves him too tired to sleep. He ends up sitting in the Lion in the hangar, trying to find the energy to drag himself out.
It's like he's back at the Garrison, trying to find his way out of bed after his alarm and a late night in the desert on Keith's bike.
That's the first time it happens.
The cockpit of the Black Lion powers down, the purple glow of the control stuttering out and leaving him in the dark with his own weariness. Fatigue settles over his limbs like a shroud, and he can't move under that much weight. Not even the arena took so much out of him, and now there's a hollowness behind his ribs that feels like a greater loss than his arm. There isn't time to sleep, though he imagines it for a moment.
The peripheral and self-indulgent thought whispers into his mind: this is a place where Keith has been. In this seat, his hands wrapped around the controls where Shiro's are now in the mockery of a handhold he can almost feel.
He doesn't realize his eyes are closed until he registers the play of light across his lids—light that shouldn't be there. When he blinks awake, it's to the sight of a body, drawn in lines of violet.
Keith, sitting on the control panel in front of him, arms folded, eyeing shiro with something fond at the edges of his lips and corners of his eyes, and he's made of light. He's wearing the Marmora armor, hood up, exactly like the last time Shiro saw him on the feed, but paler. He rises as Shiro stares, breathless and uncomprehending, the violet huing white where it trails after him, spiking and flickering around his edges.
It's beautiful. He's beautiful.
And then he seems to see Shiro like Shiro sees him, and his expression flickers and changes like a corrupted video file. All the grace he had in life is gone—he jerks forward a step, mouth open on a yell.
"Shiro."
It comes across half-static and echoing, too distant to recognize as Keith's voice—but he's the only one that said Shiro's name like that, and Shiro would recognize it at the end of the world. The ghost's mouth flickers, closes and opens like he's skipping frames, and before he can say anything else, before Shiro can step forward or say a word or understand what's going on, he disappears.
He goes like a candle blown out, and leaves his after image burned into Shiro's eyes.
It's minutes before he remembers how to breathe. Minutes, and longer, some interminable amount of time before his eyes adjust to the new dark, and he remembers how to move, too. And the only thing he knows for certain, the only thing he can say without a doubt even through the panic and the terror is that he's not asleep.
It was real.
That's the first time it happens, and it only gets worse.
It's a haunting. He wakes up at night, at there's Keith, sitting on the edge of his bed, drawn in violet and glowing softly. Standing at the end of the hallway when no one else is around. Sitting across from him at the table during a midnight snack, head resting on his hand, smiling. And his voice, like something insidious, always there.
Nine o'clock, it whispers in his ear at the end of a battle, coming through like the sound of a television turned out too loud down a corridor. He turns the Lion without thinking, and sure enough, there's a Galra fighter coming in fast.
The voice is always right. Fire there, turn like this, stop and breathe—it knows what he needs to do, and it's a handicap he needs like never before. The Lion's functionality is crippled in some essential way that he doesn't have the time or will to get to the bottom of. The Bayard doesn't work and there's a lumbering slowness to the Lion that grows day by day—forming Voltron is like running a marathon. Sometimes it's all he can do to drag himself out of the Lion afterward and collapse in his room. Sometimes he doesn't make it that far.
The ghost never lasts long. A few seconds, a few words, and sometimes he looks as tired as Shiro feels.
You're projecting on it, he tells himself. But no. It's not real, and this is so much worse than projecting.
He wakes up in the middle of the night, after a day without fighting, when they've all had a chance to catch their breath and rest. It's a month after Naxzela and Keith's absence is still striking, but only to him. The others have settled into the new rhythm, and it's not much different from the old—Keith's been gone longer.
His grief is a private thing now, and he tries to keep it that way. When Lance jokes and the others laugh, he musters a smile and laughs with them. By bed he's distracted enough that when he lies in bed and pulls the jacket over his chest, he forgets what it means.
But the ghost doesn't.
He wakes up because there's light against his face, and when he opens his eyes, that's all he sees: violet, like he's caught in the blast range of a Galra cannon, but then he registers the fall of hair against his cheek and a hand against his hair.
And lips against his, dry and cold and dear.
It should be a shock, but if this is a creation of his own mind, this was inevitable. He's reaching up a hand to pull Keith in closer before he's even awake. His hand settles on—nothing.
There's nothing there.
The ghost can touch him, but he can't touch it, he realizes. It pulls away, and its eyes go wide when they open and see him staring back, see his hand in mid-air, displacing the light of its cheek. "You can see me," it says, and the voice comes through like a bell. Keith, through and through.
Shiro closes his eyes. "But you're not real."
It's quiet for a moment, and then Shiro feels the weight of a hand against his chest, over the jacket that's spread there. "You kept it." And then, softer: "You don't think I'm real?"
Rough voiced and sweet, and with his eyes closed, it's almost like he is real. When he's silent for too long, the ghost takes his head in its hands and kisses him again, deeper, and he can feel its weight settle over his hips and its fingers in his hair.
By the time it fades, he's ruined.
In the morning, when he wakes up, he doesn't remember falling asleep, but his body burns from everywhere it touched. It leaves him riled and shaking. Lance catches his eye when he walks on the bridge, concern twisting his face, and that's when Shiro realizes that it's gone too far.
There's no good way to mention this slow collapse in casual conversation, and no one he trusts enough to tell—not anymore, at least. Not after what he's lost.
It chips away at him all day, and he can't close his eyes without seeing that phantom light playing over his lids. By the time he gets back to his room, he's shaking with it, a subconscious quiver in his arms where they're holding him up over the sink.
Dead is dead. He's gotten Keith back twice; there's no third time coming. Whatever he saw, whatever he felt—it was a hallucination. He needs sleep, and he needs to stop thinking about it, and he needs to get rid of the jacket. He should have burned it with the Marmora armor when he had the chance.
He wants, for the first time, to stop. There's no way through this. They'll win this war, but there's nothing waiting on the other side for him.
Keith saw made his choice and chose what was right, but he's not Keith.
The phantom hand settles against his back again, right there where he's standing. It's unwelcome. Whatever it is, it doesn't have a place in his grief. You don't get to mourn something you gave up—not like this.
It's not real, he tells himself. It's not real.
But when he opens his eyes, Keith's face is in the mirror, right over his shoulder, limned in violet, and the hand on his back is moving—
He doesn't register what he's done until his fist is halfway in the wall, the mirror in pieces on the floor, and his hand is the only thing light in the room now, reflected up at him from the shards of glass on the floor, specks of light playing across the ceiling. The ghost is gone.
Coran knows loss better than any of them, and Shiro doesn't know how to clean up the glass alone.
The group treats Shiro like the adult in the room, and he is, but only as much as Keith was. Coran is it. And it means something that he can be the way he is even after all he's lost. Shiro wants an ounce of whatever he has that lets him carry on.
He takes one look at the ruined mirror on the floor and doesn't even blink, conjures something that might be a vacuum almost out of thin air, and has it squared away like there's not a thing wrong. But when he's done, he stays, wordless and waiting, like this is something Shiro will want to talk about.
A shattered mirror has to be the first sign of something bad, and he's no stranger to the disquiet of his own mind, but this seems like something worse, something deeper. He wants to ask Coran if Alfor ever haunts him, or Altea. Does he miss it like this? Is this a normal level of bereaved, or should they start finding a new pilot for the Black Lion? It's a question worth asking, but not the one he asks.
"Why don't you—" Why don't you mourn them is too cruel, and it's not true. "How did you move on?" he settles on.
Coran looks over from where he's inspecting the remnants of the mirror still stuck to the wall. "I haven't," he says with something earnest. "I don't suppose I ever will. I still remember them every day."
Them. That's what Altea was to him. Not just a planet, but his entire world lost. Everyone.
Keith is one man. One precious thing, in a universe of things worth fighting for, and Shiro still can't make that math work out in his head like it needs to.
"Did you ever see them? After?" he asks, because he has to, from where he's propped against the far wall.
"See them?" Coran frowns.
"Did you have ghosts on Altea?" It hadn't occurred to him that superstition on that level might be unique to humans, but that's a place to start.
Coran's frown gets deeper. "Are you seeing him?" There's true concern in his voice, and Shiro realizes, he can't keep this a secret. Someone needs to know if he's losing his mind. He needs to know.
Shiro describes it, point by point. The first time in the Lion, and Keith's face in the mirror, and all the places in between. He leaves out what's private. That's too indulgent for anyone else to know about.
The frown on Coran's face morphs into confusion. "That doesn't sound like a ghost."
Like ghosts are a real thing to be analyzed. Like this isn't Shiro on the verge of a mental break. It's been days since his headaches had teeth, but the one that spikes through his temple at Coran's words is so bad he has to put a hand to the wall to stop himself from doubling over.
When it subsides, Coran is hovering beside him. "I'm fine," Shiro says, at the same moment the Castle starts powering down for the night cycle.
The lights in the room fade, and that's when he sees it, the now familiar purple haze of Keith's ghost, sitting on his bed. He's lit up like dust motes, like headlights against fog. He looks so real, it steals Shiro's breath.
He's watching them, and Coran—
Coran doesn't see him. His eyes are still focused on Shiro, concern molding his face despite the violet light casting it in shadows.
That's a confirmation of his worst fear: this is all inside his head, and he's not fit to lead. Not like this.
Shiro lets himself curse, and slides down the wall to sit on the floor, right there, next to Coran. It's too much—to see this, day in and day out, to lose this. Keith is dead and some essential part of him can't accept it. There's some fatal flaw in him now, and maybe his second round of captivity was what pushed him over that line.
Coran leans on the wall above his head and sighs. It's a sound Shiro has never heard him make.
"He looked for you," Coran tells him. "For months."
It's news to him, and unwelcome.
"Maybe... It could be the Lion," Coran says, like that makes sense.
Shiro is too tired to respond. Coran lays a hand on his shoulder. He wonders, suddenly, how much younger he is than Coran. Years or decades? Millennia, more than technically?
"We never understood what they were. They built themselves as much Alfor did. They have their own thoughts. You remember how the Red Lion went after Keith?"
Shiro doesn't nod. Of course he does. He remembers everything about Keith, like he's collecting facts. Limited edition, discontinued, priceless.
"The Lions were always partial to him," Coran mutters, with the smallest thread of jealousy.
He explains it in short words. Shiro isn't an engineer, isn't anything close to that, and he still can't meet Coran's eyes. If he looks, if he talks about what's been happening, he'll lose some part of himself. Better to pretend he's as cool and calm as everyone wants him to be. Coran lets him.
The lions are as much science as they are arcane, he explains. They still have a code. Alfor's ghost was intentional. That was something Alfor left behind on purpose, but this is an accident. This is some error in the Lion's code, coalescing and expanding, making a home for itself.
It's a lie, Shiro realizes. It's a story Coran is spinning for him, because they only have one person who can pilot the Black Lion now, and it can't be someone who's dead on their feet, conjuring ghosts, going mad.
When he feels something tapping on his shoulder in bed that night, he doesn't roll over to look at it. When he closes his eyes and feels the light play across his lids, he doesn't open them.
This too shall pass, he reminds himself. Everything does.
