**I do not own Voltron: Legendary Defender!
"Wow," Pidge breathed as the memory faded and was slow to change to the next one. "That was…"
"Intense?" Keith muttered.
"Apples and bananas crazy?!" Lance provided.
"Terrifying?!" Hunk barely squeaked.
Shiro was silent, unsure of what disturbed him more: the fact that he had witnessed Mari almost dying for the second time that day, or that he had just seen himself get hit by a car.
"Shiro? Are you all right?" Allura asked gently, her eyebrows furrowed in concern as she watched him. "You don't look so well. We can stop if you'd like."
"N-No, I'm fine," he shook his head weakly, struggling to regain his composure. "I'm just shocked, that's all."
"You said you don't remember any of this happening," the princess prompted and he nodded grimly in confirmation.
"I remember waking up and taking Mari to the observatory that day, but what we did there, the walk home…it's all missing. It's like a blank spot in my memory," Shiro admitted grimly. "When I woke up in the hospital, the doctors told me I was lucky to be alive. They wouldn't go into details and simply said I'd been hit by a car while we were walking home. No one ever mentioned that Mari had almost gotten hit or that I had saved her.
"Neither of your parents told you?" Pidge asked and Shiro shook his head.
"I…I didn't know until now."
"And Mari didn't say anything to you on the matter?" Allura asked.
"Not a word," Shiro replied. "She just avoided me a lot after that. I don't even think she visited while I was in the hospital."
"Look! Another one's starting everybody!" Coran suddenly exclaimed, and everyone diverted their attention back to the image appearing on the wall.
The young Takashi Shirogane was laying on a hospital bed, donned in a gown and with all sorts of wires attached to him along with an IV drip. His face was bruised and scratched on one side and a thick thing of gauze had been wrapped around his head. A cast encased his right arm while his left was in a sling. Standing next to him were a doctor and his parents while Mari sat quietly in the solitary chair next to the head of the bed, clutching her Garrison baseball cap tightly in one hand. Several bandages had been placed on her legs and arms, Mari most likely having scrapped them against the pavement when her brother had pushed her.
"We've sedated him for now to help with the pain," the doctor was explaining to the Shirogane couple. "I want to keep him overnight for observation for the next few days, just to be safe. But he should be able to go home by the end of the week. He's incredibly lucky."
"You call this lucky?" Mrs. Shirogane almost growled, angrily gesturing to her unconscious son.
"Unlike other less fortunate car accident victims I've had to treat in the past, Takashi's condition is stable and he will wake up to see his family again. So yes, I do in fact consider him to be very lucky," the doctor replied coolly. "And considering that you could have completely lost your daughter today if not for your son's quick actions, I'd think you'd be a bit more grateful, Mrs. Shirogane."
Mrs. Shirogane had turned red in the face with anger, but before she could snap back at the doctor, he excused himself from the room.
"Oooohhhh he told her," Pidge snickered and Shiro suppressed the urge to roll his eyes.
"My dad should be here in a few minutes," Mr. Shirogane sighed, glancing briefly at his watch before kneeling down in front of his daughter. His expression was kind yet sad, and he gently brushed a strand of loose hair out of his daughter's face before softly continuing, "Mommy and I are going to stay here with Takashi tonight, so ojiisan is coming to take you home, okay Mariko? You'll be good for him, right?"
Mari stiffly nodded and her father smiled slightly. "Good," he said. "Now, where'd you leave your jacket and bag of gift shop goodies?"
"The check up room," she barely mumbled, but somehow her father had still heard her.
"Ah. I'll go get them for you, so stay here with mommy and Takashi until I come back, okay?"
Then he disappeared through the door, leaving his daughter and wife alone with their unconscious son. The girls were both quiet for several minutes, the only noise in the room the steady beep of Takashi's heart monitor. Finally, Mrs. Shirogane turned to Mari, giving her the coldest look of contempt Shiro had ever seen his mother make. Her eyes were rimmed with red from crying and her jaw was clenched as her face flushed, indicating that she was on the verge of blowing her top.
"What were you doing in the street?" she asked, her voice chillingly low and even.
Mari looked up at her mother, a hint of fear in her eyes. "W-What?"
"That IDIOTIC driver said you jumped out into the street first before Takashi pushed you out of the way," she said. "WHAT were you doing in the street, Mariko?"
"I-I was just…" She swallowed nervously before murmuring, "I was…getting my hat."
"Your hat?" her mother hissed. "You put yourself in harms way for a dumb hat?!"
"It's not dumb!" Mari insisted, standing up defensively. "Ojiisan gave it to me for my birthday last year!"
"Because of your reckless behavior, you've pulled your father out of work, wasted my one free afternoon, and Takashi is here!" Mrs. Shirogane snapped back, furiously gesturing to the hospital room. "You'd better hope he doesn't sustain any permanent damage from this. Dear God, all the therapy, the medication…his spot at the Garrison would given away too! If you've ruined his future, so help me Mariko—"
"Takashi, Takashi, Takashi! Why is everything always about Takashi?!" Mari suddenly screamed, her fear giving way to anger, and her mother stiffened in shock. "Why is it never about me or how I'm feeling?"
"Stop being selfish! Your brother could have died because of you!"
"I could have died too!" Mari shrieked, tears beginning to stream down her reddening cheeks. "You never care about me or what I wanna do; you just sit around with your ugly friends and make fun of me! I matter too, mom! I'M JUST AS IMPORTANT AS TAKASH—!"
She was abruptly cut off by a slap to the face, and everyone flinched at the sickening sound it made, the noise reverberating off the walls of the chamber. Shiro's jaw had fallen open in complete horror, and he sat there numbly, his heart and mind racing as he tried to process what the hell his mother had just said and done to her own child.
In the scene, his mom was shaking with rage, and Mari had one hand cupped to her cheek as she stared at her mother in utter shock. "I am fed up with your nonsense!" Mrs. Shirogane seethed, her voice quivering. "You've already caused this family enough trouble today! Why can't you just…Ugh!"
She broke down crying just as the projection changed again. Time had passed; Takashi was fully healed out and of the hospital, and he and Mari were now dressed in black and standing in front of the Shirogane family grave. They both looked a bit older now and Takashi held his sister close as their tears flowed.
"This was the day of our grandfather's funeral," Shiro realized, his heart clenching painfully even more now. He had been fifteen and Mari seven when their grandfather had passed away due to illness, and the funeral had been one of the roughest days of his life.
"Geez, are all her memories this depressing?" Lance muttered miserably. "No wonder she's so moody and closed off all the time."
"She was emotional and mentally traumatized as a kid," Keith said quietly. "Do you really expect her to be all sunshine and rainbows like you?"
"Hey! I am not 'all sunshine and rainbows', you know!" Lance snapped. "I may not look it, but I am a super deep, incredibly handsome, and very sensitive guy."
"You're a goofball, that's what you are," Pidge stated bluntly and he made a rather offended sound.
"Okay, okay, so yeah some of Mari's memories are pretty dark. I mean, it seems like she's had a rough past. But hey, that first memory we saw wasn't bad," Hunk tried to remain optimistic. "She's got to have other strong positive memories, right? Maybe the next one will be good?"
Shiro hoped to God it was; he wasn't sure he could handle anymore heartbreaking revelations.
The next few memories were mere pictures that appeared on the wall for no longer than a few seconds—the cut-offs and snippets that Coran had mentioned. From what Shiro could tell, most of them were fairly positive recollections of other relatively significant events in Mari's life: her first karate and judo lessons; meeting her friends for the first time; playing video games and watching anime; even that night they spent together after her Snow White rehearsal incident. There was Shiro's graduation from the Garrison; his moving out of the house; that one time she had called him to come bail her out after she'd been caught at a drift race (that one wasn't very positive, but it did make Shiro smile as he recalled the event); him telling her that he was chosen for the Kerberos misson; him leaving for said mission; the day she received her acceptance into the Garrison; her orientation and her first day of classes.
The fragmented memories only went downhill from there. Mari was told that the Kerberos crew had disappeared and that her brother and his crew were presumed dead. She was being removed from the Space Exploration program, and Shiro watched with a heavy heart as their father and several other officers had to remove her from campus. She was kicking and screaming and crying, begging for someone, anyone, to tell her that it wasn't true, that Takashi was fine and that she could continue studying at the Garrison.
They'd had a funeral for Shiro, burying an empty casket along with any hope of his return. While her parents and friends wept, Mari had just stood there numbly, staring at the grave with an unnervingly blank expression. There was a haunting silence to the whole scene, as if it had been muted or the sounds of that day had been forgotten, but Mrs. Shirogane's voice broke the silence, uttering one awful sentence that sent a chill down Shiro's spine.
"It should have been Mari instead."
Hunk and Lance gasped quietly in horror and Coran frowned sadly. Allura, Pidge, and Keith scowled in dismay, and Shiro just stood there, shocked beyond words.
"Whoa, that was uncalled for," Lance glared at the projection on the wall.
"I agree," Allura nodded. "Your mother is a most unpleasant woman, Shiro."
"Yeah, I'm sorry, but your mom is not a nice lady," Hunk cautiously pitched in. "Moms are supposed to be warm and kind and they make you yummy food—like my mom. Man, I miss her…But yeah, your mom is not like that."
Shiro wanted so badly to disagree with them, but he couldn't, not after what he'd just witnessed. He didn't want to believe those words had come from his own mother's mouth—she couldn't have said something so horrible, not about her own child! He wanted to believe it was her overwhelming grief talking, but after seeing the way she had treated Mari when he was hospitalized, he couldn't know for sure. She couldn't have a grudge towards her own daughter, could she? No, Shiro refused to believe that. Yes, it was extremely evident that she played favorites when it came to her children, but she couldn't completely hate Mari. Their mother was just in agony, worn out from mourning and not really meaning what she said.
When the scene changed, Mari was standing alone in front of the family's grave. It was night time and she was breathing raggedly as she glared at the tombstone, her hands curling into angry fists. Then out of nowhere, she viciously punched the spot on the stone where Shiro's name had been recently engraved into it. The skin of her knuckles broke and began to bleed and a slew of swears escaped her lips.
"Dammit…Dammit, dammit, dammit!" she cursed, her voice rising to a shout in mere seconds. "Why do you always screw up everything for me? Mom hates me because of you, everyone looks down on me because of you! I was pulled from the Garrison because of you! All that hard work I did to get there and now I'm stuck here in this stupid town on this stupid planet all because of you, dammit! You destroyed everything! You're an asshole and I hate you! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!"
Mari was bawling now, sinking to her knees as the hurtful words hung in the air. She cupped her reddened face in her hands, her whole body shaking.
"I'm sorry…I'm so sorry!" she choked out between sobs. "Please come back. Please be alive! You're not dead—you can't be dead! I miss you and I need you! Everything hurts, it hurts so badly…Please don't leave me alone here, Takashi!"
Shiro couldn't stand it anymore. Seeing Mari curled up in a ball on the ground, so broken and alone and in so much agony as her body was racked by a mixture of grief-driven and guilty sobs, was the breaking point for him. His heart aching and his eyes already stinging from unshed tears, he briskly turned away from the already fading projection and headed towards the exit. As soon as he had slipped through the doors, he leaned heavily against the wall and let out a shaky sigh before forcing himself to take several calming breaths.
Not a minute later, Allura was at his side, having followed after him. He furiously brushed the pooling tears away in mild embarrassment, and she put a comforting hand on his shoulder to help ground him.
"Will you be all right, Shiro?" she asked gently.
"Y-Yeah," he managed. "I'm just a bit overwhelmed, that's all."
"Mari said some rather harsh things to you, but I'm sure she didn't really mean any of it."
"I know she didn't," Shiro sighed. "She was just in so much pain…and she's still hurting. She's lonely and scared and she feels guilty. She still thinks she has to do everything herself. I have to help her before it's too late."
Despite the discomfort peeking at Mari's memories had caused, Shiro was relieved he finally knew what was wrong with her, why she had been acting so defensive and closed off to everyone, especially to him. Now it was his job to as the older brother to comfort and reassure her, remind her that she was loved and wanted and that he was here for her. Mari didn't have to struggle through the burdens of life alone and she needed to know that; she needed to trust her new teammates and her brother.
A new sense of purpose motivating him, Shiro straightened and gave the princess a tired yet reassuring smile. "If anyone needs me, I'll be in the healing chamber," he said. "I know Mari's not due to come out for a while, but I just want to make sure I'm there for her when she wakes up."
**Author's note: I keep forgetting to say this, but feel free to drop a comment/review down below. They're always appreciated, and I'll try my best to respond to each one :)