Based off of my headcanon for events in Season 3. I do not own Voltron Legendary Defender.
POV character is Paladin!Shiro.
It's like looking in a mirror. Sort of, anyway. Looking at the man across from him, it's easy to see the differences. Thinner nose, slighter frame. His scar has healed more cleanly too, vanishing under the light whenever he tilts his head.
Shiro leans back against the couch, watching as Shiro does the same. It's going to get annoying, he thinks, using the same nickname. (Even if it's completely valid, since both of them decided to keep the surname Shirogane)
Almost unconciously, he flexes the wrist on his Galra arm. In the end, with all of the memory-swapping that the freaky scientists did to them, the only way for them to tell the difference was for Pidge to datamine the thing and check the timestamps and file transfer sizes.
Lucky him, drawing the short straw.
So Shiro looks across the room, at his older brother/father/original. Wonders how the other is coping with the influx of memories that he never experienced, with the knowledge that he was never the one who became a Paladin, and that the honour belongs instead to the younger brother/son/clone sitting across from him.
Probably about as well as Shiro is handling the news that he's really said younger brother/son/clone. That kind of thing ends up wreaking havoc on your sense of identity.
It's the elder who speaks first. He glances at the door pointedly, drawing Shiro's attention. "Are they ever going to let us out of here?"
Shiro shrugs. Slow. Deliberate. "Eventually. We were sort of avoiding each other, though."
His counterpart nods. "I'd still rather not be locked in."
Shiro can see why the others locked the door. The two Shiroganes have been avoiding each other for nearly a month, ever since that first awkward moment of the Paladins breaking down a door in a Galra base and coming face-to-face with Matt and Shiro.
Katie chewed him out for wrecking her reunion.
Shiro gets up to look at the door. He'd rather not break the lock if he doesn't have to – they don't really have the resources to waste on such a pointless repair. Behind him, he can hear Shirogane's footsteps as the other silently hovers over his shoulder.
"Can't pick the lock?"
Shiro shakes his head. "It's digital. And in Altean."
The other Shiro shakes his head ruefully. "And it's pointless to break the door."
Shiro takes a moment to rock on his heels. "They know us. Know you. We would never break down the door unless it's an emergency."
The other stops to loop at him for a long moment. "It's strange." The other finally admits. "There are tons of books and movies about cloning, but they're all kind of useless when you're face to face with the real thing."
Shiro's gut churns. "With a real clone?" There's something unnerving, dehumanizing about the word. He has quickly come to hate it.
The other Shiro shakes his head. "No. With someone who's a near-exact copy of yourself. In movies, things like doppelgangers and parallel realities and clones are all shown to be not the original. To be inferior. And that's really not the case at all."
The other Shiro walks back to the couch and sits down, burying his head in his hands. "I guess in the end, you're kind of too real, too normal. And it's freaking me out."
Shiro doesn't really have a response. But he knows how the other feels. Knows that a week ago, before they knew who was who, he couldn't help but see the other man as a copy of him, and how strange that felt.
"We'll work this out." He tells the other. It's what he would want to hear, after all. "But first, we might want to figure out something with names before Lance does."
From what I've seen, people are sort of insistent about declaring the S3 Shiro to be Not Real, or the Shiro we've gotten to know to really be a Fake. And that kind of bugged me, because you don't declare one twin or triplet or multiple sibling to be real, and the other(s) not to be.
Add on the fact that I read Homestuck recently, which had a character dealing with versions of himself and accepting that they were all real and valid, and the recent Voltron really struck a chord.