Keith hadn't seen Shiro look this anxious in a very long time. Not that he could blame him. Major medical procedures were a nerve-wracking concept all on their own, and the last time Shiro had gone under the knife had been at the hands of the Druids who had given him the same arm that Matt and a team of the Icebringers' best were about to remove.
The black paladin's joy and excitement from the previous night over the revelation of his bayard's form (and Keith hadn't been the only one to hug him and tell him they couldn't think of anything that suited him better) had been replaced by thinly-veiled terror once he woke up to the impending surgery, and the nerves had only worsened as the morning progressed. By now, sitting and waiting while the operating room was being prepped, the older man was hovering just on the edge of the panic attack, his hand trembling in Keith's grip.
"Takashi? It's time." Matt had appeared from the other room while they were distracted, his gaze gentle as he offered Shiro his hand. The scarred paladin swallowed hard and nodded, allowing the other to help him to his feet and following him, Keith sticking close to his side, into the operating room.
Aside from the scanners and holoscreens that stood where bulky monitors would have been, it could have been any operating theater on Earth, right down to the bright overhead lights and faint chemical smell. Apparently there were only so many ways to construct a sterile, accessible environment that would accommodate various sizes and shapes of patient.
While Matt helped Shiro onto the table, murmuring reassurances too softly for him to hear, Keith moved to stand by the head of the table. Once they put the black paladin under, it would be his job to be ready to reassure him if he started to fight the anesthesia in a subconscious response to the situation's similarities to what he'd been through before. While he hopefully wouldn't be needed, it was a relief to have something useful to do instead of waiting outside with the rest of the team, even if that was just watching Shiro's heartrate and breathing during the surgery.
The anesthesiologist got to work, and within minutes Shiro was out like a light. Keith breathed a sigh of relief that the process had gone smoothly as the technician, the shortest Altean the red paladin had ever seen, turned to Matt and exchanged comments in rapid Galran. It was strange, hearing the actual language being spoken and not being able to understand a word of it, but he and Shiro couldn't wear their armor in the operating room so he had no link to the Castle-ship's translators. All he could hear was hissed consonants and long rolled R's that sounded oddly familiar even if he didn't know what they meant sliding easily off the tongues of Matt and the other doctors as the room became a hive of activity.
The Olkari engineer-medic was already disassembling the upper part of the prosthetic that encased what was left of Shiro's arm, exposing rough white scar tissue that seemed to flow unevenly onto the edge of the metal where the two met, and several lingering trails of white travelled further up the arm hinting at the original injury that had necessitated the replacement. Keith felt a renewed surge of anger toward Haggar for what she and her druids had done to the man who was practically a brother to him in all but blood. Given the opportunity, he would make her pay in full for her crimes.
The surgeon, a Balmeran with long, nimble fingers, stepped forward and began the delicate process of removing the arm once and for all, and Keith's gaze dropped to Shiro's face, slack with unconsciousness under the oxygen mask. Revenge would wait until later. Right now he was needed by his brother's side while they worked to take away any chance of her using what she'd done against him.
000000000
Colleen let out a few choice words as the morning sun finally rose high enough to slide its rays over the windowsill and send them stabbing directly towards her eyeballs. Throwing herself out of the rickety wooden chair she'd been sitting in at the computer all night, she strode across the room and yanked the curtains shut before the offending star could turn the small shack into an oven. Ryou, sprawled across the couch with his face pressed into the seam of the research journal he'd fallen asleep over, never so much as stirred.
The older woman sighed. She considered waking him, but the bags under his eyes were every bit as deep as her own and an uncomfortable sleep was better than no sleep at all. They'd both been pushing themselves trying to solve the mystery of the blue lion cave and figure out what it had to do with a lost space expedition and four missing cadets, and so far they had almost nothing to show for their efforts aside from even more questions than they'd started with.
Ryou had started by tackling the writing they'd found on the wall of the lower cave, comparing it to other archeological sites in the area first and then moving outwards in the hopes of finding other samples that might be used to translate the inscriptions, but had quickly discovered that no such samples existed. The writing, assuming that's actually what it was, he told her, was the only known sample of whatever language it was. Furthermore, it appeared to be a language isolate to boot, without even a passing similarity to any known language alive or dead. There was simply no point of reference he could use as a starting point to interpret the meaning of the symbols.
The only possible clue they had was the row of drawings etched below the panel of enigmatic script. Eight discrete pictures, incredibly detailed and precise given how old Ryou's tests had suggested they were, with thin lines that had been filled in with some sort of vibrant and long-lasting dyes whose composition baffled not only Ryou but also a chemist friend of his who he'd sent a sample to for study. The only thing the other had been able to tell them was that it didn't match any known substance on Earth, or anything turned up at the Luna domes or Mars base either.
The row of images plainly depicted a story of some sort, although what story that was they had yet to figure out. In the first image, the center was filled by a large humanoid figure that seemed to be made of five smaller figures shaped like lions. The one making up the torso and head was black, the right arm red, the left green, the right leg blue, and the left yellow. Gathered beside the large figure were two groups of five smaller humanoid figures, each member of each group having one of the same colours as the large figure. One set of five, those closer to the large figure, was depicted larger than the other, with a V-shaped symbol on their chests, and Colleen was of the opinion that it denoted some sort of ranking, putting them above the other group. The final component of that image was many small figures gathered around the rest in a loose crowd, some purple and some aquamarine, mixed together in no apparent pattern. She and Ryou both agreed that this was likely the set-up image for the story being told, setting the scene for the images that came after it.
Such as the second. The large multicoloured figure was gone and a deep gash bisected the scene. On one side were the five lion-figures, now separated, and most of the other colourful figures. The larger yellow figure and the smaller blue, red, and green stood beside the lions, while the small black and yellow and the large red and green lay flat with streaks of red across their bodies in unmistakable indication of death. Facing them on the other side of divide were the large black and blue figures, the former carrying a long, thin shape, possibly a weapon of some kind, edged with the same red that marked the fallen figures. And the surrounding crowd was split between the two sides, with nearly all the aquamarine on the side with the lions, and nearly all the purple opposing them.
By comparison to the first two, which were fairly obvious in their depiction of a society suddenly split by internal conflict and treachery, the third image was downright baffling. It depicted only the blue lion and the smaller of the two blue figures, the one without the V-symbol, standing together facing sideways and surrounded by some sort of blue aura. Above the humanoid figure's outstretched hands was a much smaller image of the blue lion inside a circle, with tiny purple figures above that in a pose that suggested, at least to Ryou's eye, that they were walking past. Beyond that he was as confused by it as she was. The fourth wasn't much better, showing a circle containing the yellow and black lions and the remaining yellow figure, while the red, green, and blue lions and their matching humanoids were outside the circle in a pose of running away in pairs and purple figures as well as the large blue and black stared down at the circle from above.
The fifth image showed only the blue lion-figure, inside an outline of a cave inside a mountain inside a large circle. Ryou suspected that the cave and mountain in question were the same ones where they had found all the carvings. Colleen thought so as well, especially given the sixth drawing. In that one the blue lion, still inside the cave, was approached by another set of five figures in the same colours, black, red, green, yellow, and blue, while overhead the same star patterns from before hung over the mountain. The match to the drawings in the upper part of the cave was unmistakeable, and indeed in the seventh drawing the blue lion soared away from a circle again accompanied by the five figures, headed toward a familiar portal image. And in the eighth and final drawing, the five humanoids were joined once more by the multi-coloured figure from the first drawing, standing together with two aquamarine figures opposite the same blue and black figures from before and their entourage of purple and a few aquamarine.
Given the impossibility of translating the actual words, Ryou had been focusing on trying to match the images to events in ancient history, either directly or symbolically, but so far he hadn't had any success. The groups of five, the repeating colours, and the images of lions all had to mean something, but what exactly that was continued to elude him if the puddle of drool on the journal smushed against his face was any indication.
Colleen, for her part, was no historian. She wouldn't have known where to start. So she had turned her efforts in a different direction, dusting off Keith's computers (stolen from the Garrison, she noted approvingly), booting them up, and putting to work everything her daughter had taught her about making online security systems her bitch.
Sam's access codes, never deleted from the database in the two years since that fateful mission, only got her so far. While he had had access to a certain amount of classified materials, it was mostly things relevant to his position as one of the country's leading experts on extraplanetary geology and hydrology. She combed through it all anyway, but nothing seemed unusual, let alone cover-up worthy. Not that she'd expected to find it so easily. And that was where Katie came in.
While she'd been pregnant with Matthew, Colleen and her husband had read many, many books on parenting, covering everything from during the pregnancy all the way up through the teenage years. The information had been confusing, contradictory, and often generally unhelpful as the years went by. But one piece of advice she'd taken firmly to heart was the importance of participating in your child's interests in order to encourage and bond with them. In Matt's case, the path that led him to looking for primitive life forms on a distant moon had begun with late-night stargazing and aquariums full of frogs, lizards, bugs, and all manner of creepy crawly things, which meant that Katie's early interest in computers had been a welcome relief.
Right up until the 'Mommy, look, I hacked the Pentagon!' incident, anyway.
The end result, though, was that over the last twenty years Colleen Holt had amassed a considerable knowledge base about space, biology, medicine, and the ins and outs of computers, networks, and software. She had taught her daughter the art of protecting her information from even the most determined hacker, with hardcopy and shorthand codes, and in return Katie had taught her all the tips and tricks to getting the information the criminals she prosecuted for a living didn't want her to find.
As she worked, breaking through the Garrison's firewalls and protections layer by layer, she kept hearing Katie's voice in her head explaining how to counter this or circumvent that, how to find the weak points and cut holes invisible unless you knew where to look. It was painful, given that she hadn't heard her in person in a year and a half, but if she did this right, then dammit, she'd hear it again and that was enough to help her keep pushing through.
The computer beeped softly at her, another scan of the Garrison's central database complete, and she quickly crossed the room again to see what her latest search had turned up.
The more she had looked, the less things made sense. She'd found records of the Garrison's efforts to buy the area where the local base was located, a process begun roughly sixteen years earlier, and of the land surveys they'd done. But it looked as though the surveys had come after they'd already started trying to get the land. And the recommendation for contracting an archeologist had been attached to a land survey dated almost two years after the first attempt to purchase. If the cave was the reason they'd bought the land, then why did it look as though they'd only discovered it after they'd begun trying to purchase the area?
And when she tried to find any record of previous Garrison activity in the area, the only thing she'd found was an incident report from a few months before the first move toward buying the land. A group of soldiers on an unspecified exercise had found...something, out in the middle of the desert near here, but there were so many redactions and classified passages in the report that she couldn't for the life of her figure out exactly what had happened. Some sort of confrontation, but with what? Not to mention the clearance levels required for the hidden sections. There couldn't be more than two or three people at the local base who had the necessary codes to read it, and Colleen was hesitant to try to break through herself for fear of giving away her illegal access if she tripped some sort of alarm.
It wasn't what she was after, anyway, so she'd left it alone for the time being, turning her attention back toward the cave and the Garrison's study of it. When she did eventually find the relevant files, she was pleased to see that whoever had been contracted hadn't made much more progress than she and Ryou in their study of the upper cave. Oddly enough, though, much of the analysis of the lower cave seemed to be just as heavily restricted as the incident report, with many of the same clearances required. She'd spent several hours staring at the conspiracy board and trying to divine an explanation for the fact that a mysterious incident in the desert and a cave full of strange writing would be heavily classified by the military's space branch and require the same access permissions for both, and the post-it notes and red thread had stared mockingly back without giving up their secrets.
Sinking back into her chair with a sigh, she pulled up the results of her latest search through the Garrison's files. Frustrated with the lack of progress with the cave, she'd decided to simply call up all files from the night Katie and her classmates had vanished, with a 48 hour window on either side of that night for thoroughness. There would be a lot to comb through, but maybe it would give her some new leads.
An incident report started back at her, and Colleen blinked in surprise. Something about damaged ATVs and injured personnel in pursuit of another vehicle. Failure to intercept and recover the target, who or whatever that was. Three ATVs had been wrecked and almost a dozen people injured, apparently, all upper-ranked officers.
Another file, another report. Three officers, including Iverson, knocked unconscious by an assailant whose name was blacked out, and someone else, name also classified, had been abducted by the attacker and several others.
Video files, locked under the same heavy clearances required as the cave and the incident sixteen years earlier.
Communications transcripts with Luna base. (Redacted) observed on insertion trajectory. Estimated point of impact 0.6 miles south of Arizona Garrison.
Another, Mars station this time. (Redacted) changed course to intercept (redacted) but failed to reach them before (redacted). Last seen moving out of system, thank god.
On and on. Incident reports, communication transcripts, security footage, observation files. All of it with massive chunks of information locked behind heavy security clearances that should have made it inaccessible to nearly everyone below Iverson on the chain of command. All of it the same restrictions as the analysis of the blue lion cave and the lone incident from sixteen years ago. Something enormous had happened in the span of roughly sixteen hours, during which three cadets and one former cadet had vanished from a military base and their disappearance covered up, something that the highest reaches of the army didn't want anyone else to know about, even their lower-ranked personnel at that very same facility.
Colleen frowned, staring at the blacked out passages, then made her decision. She hooked up her laptop to Keith's bulky desktop, and started transferring out all the classified files she'd turned up in her various searches. While the computers worked away, she got up and firmly shook Ryou awake. "Get up and start packing up." She ordered as he stared blearily at her in confusion. "I'm going to be trying to break high-level military security codes and I want to be ready to move fast if they come after us." Leaving him staring after her, she headed back to her laptop and set to work.
0000000000
"Easy, buddy, I got you." Hunk easily caught the black paladin as he stumbled forward out of the healing pod, giving him a reassuring smile as the older man blinked up at him in bleary confusion.
The surgery to remove the Galran prosthetic had gone off without a hitch. Just two hours after Shiro had been put under for the procedure, a smiling Matt had emerged and announced they were ready to proceed with the next stage. A short flight in Yellow later, the unconscious paladin was being placed in a healing pod while the entire team clustered around protectively and waited for him to wake up.
It was strange, looking into the pod and not seeing the familiar grey metal of the Galra prosthetic. Instead Shiro's arm ended a few inches above where the elbow would have been, old pale scar tissue covering the end of it and trailing upward over his bicep. Once the healing pod finished its work, the line where the stump had been closed after the removal of the old arm would be impossible to find amid the old scars from the grafting of Haggar's enhancement. It didn't matter, though, since the new prosthetic would cover the scars whenever it was being worn.
Shiro groaned, trying to push himself upright from Hunk's arms, and nearly toppled sideways with a yelp as the absence of his right arm to push with caught him by surprise. Hunk quickly caught him, letting out a small laugh at the embarrassed blush coating the other man's cheeks. "Don't worry, Matt warned us that would probably happen. Let's get you sitting down, okay?" He guided Shiro over to a chair beside the worktable where his new arm was waiting.
As they approached, the yellow paladin felt a flicker of tension in his teammate's body at the sight of the prosthetic laying on the table, a momentary hesitation in his movement that had Hunk glancing sideways in concern. There was a trace of fear in the lines around Shiro's eyes as he stared at the arm on the worktable, and after a moment the large teen realized the problem. The last time he would have seen an unattached prosthetic arm like this would have been just before Haggar grafted the old one to his flesh.
"Easy, Shiro. It's okay. This one is like Alejandro's, remember? He showed you his." The black paladin nodded stiffly, but seemed to uncoil a little as they moved toward the table. Keith and Kurogane stepped forward to meet them, both wearing identical expressions of protective concern as they helped the still-unsteady man into his seat. Their presence seemed to relax him further, and by the time Matt and the Olkari technician who'd come over with them stepped forward to examine the remainder of his right arm, his anxiety seemed to have dissipated.
Matt gave Shiro a brief one-armed hug as he ran the scanner over the arm and made a pleased sound at the results. "Looks good. Everything healed up properly, and the transmitter chip is connected properly. Ready to try on the new arm?"
"Ready as I'll ever be." The paladin gave a weak, shaky smile and took a deep breath, looking around the room as if to remind himself that it wasn't a druid laboratory. Keith quickly took Shiro's other hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze while Hunk set his hand on the man's shoulder. They were all there, they'd help their friend feel safe when he was at his most vulnerable.
With help from the tech and Pidge, Matt positioned the arm so Shiro would be able to easily slide his stump into the socket. "On your own time." He said gently. "Remember, you're the one in control here."
It was a necessary reminder. Hunk could feel a slight tremble in the man's body under his hand, but he was clearly determined to push through the anxiety. Another deep breath, a slight shift in position, and he was pushing his arm into place almost before they realized it. Matt's eyes widened in surprise, but he gave Shiro a smile beaming with pride and affection as the Olkari leaned in to make the final adjustments to the fit of the device.
"There we go. And we have power." She made the final connection and stepped back, gesturing expectantly at the black paladin. "You're all set. Try it out."
Shiro made a small sound of surprise that Hunk would have found hilarious if it wasn't so upsetting that he'd clearly anticipated the process being painful. Alejandro had reassured all of them that he couldn't even feel his prosthetics gripping onto his legs unless he actually tried to notice them, and they were far more comfortable than anything Earth could have produced, but feeling was clearly believing in this case.
Tentatively, he started by curling the fingers, watching his hand as he bent them in toward the palm in ones and twos. Gaining confidence from the responsiveness of the limb, he started working the wrist and elbow before cautiously lifting the arm off the table entirely. His eyebrows shot up instantly. "It's lighter than the other one." he noted.
"Different materials." The Olkari explained, looking pleased. "Just as sturdy, however. And the load distribution is different, obviously, so it there should be less strain on the remaining natural limb, especially the bone."
Shiro nodded in confirmation, curling and uncurling the arm experimentally. "The old one made my arm ache all the way to the shoulder sometimes." he admitted, reddening and pretending not to hear Matt's exasperated noise at the after-the-fact admission. "This one doesn't hurt at all."
"If it did it would mean we'd done our job wrong."
Hunk grinned, clapping Shiro on the shoulder. "Ready to put your arm through its paces with me and Pidge while everyone else gets your party ready?" he asked cheerfully, and was pleased to see the older man's comfortable nod. While not technically necessary to establish that the arm was functioning properly-the Olkari had looked distinctly affronted at the very idea that such a thing might be necessary-testing the motion of each part of the arm would help Shiro adjust to the differences from the old one and establish a baseline to help them recognize if there was a problem.
With the exception of Hunk, Pidge, Keith, and Alejandro, the rest of the team cleared out to get the Castle ready for a celebration in honour of the big step Shiro had taken today. Not only had he gotten rid of part of Haggar's influence on him, but he had also looked some of his worst traumas in the eye and pushed through the fear. Hunk could feel Yellow purring in loud approval of the head of Voltron's determination and strength, and had no doubt the others were hearing the same. He chuckled as he heard the black paladin mutter out loud for Black to hush, that it wasn't that big a deal.
"The Lions are right, Shiro, you did great today." He said proudly, and smiled as the man blushed at having been overheard. "That can't have been easy after everything you've been through."
Shiro sighed, taking the prosthetic through movements as Pidge demonstrated them. The green paladin was perched on the edge of a table so she could move her legs as well, demonstrating movements for Alejandro's baseline now that Hunk had had a chance to give his legs a badly-needed tune-up. "No, it wasn't. But it's done now."
"And you handled it like a boss." Pidge declared firmly, extending one leg and rotating her ankle before holding her arm out to the side and flexing. "I don't know how many of us could have done the same thing."
Alejandro nodded in agreement as he extended his own leg in mimicry. "I know I couldn't. First time I had a power outage in Blue after I lost these," he tapped his outstretched left thigh, "I broke down crying and had to be hauled back to the Castle by Black in the middle of the battle." He grimaced. "Still hate being in a dark cockpit."
Shiro frowned in concern at the older blue paladin. "Well that's understandable. Being trapped in the dark in a wrecked lion with a life-threatening injury had to be an incredibly traumatic experience-"
"Almost as traumatic as having your arm ripped to shreds in a to-the-death battle and the remains cut off and replaced with a weaponized prosthetic fused to your flesh, Shiro." Alejandro shot back, giving the black paladin a frankly disapproving stare for the blatant attempt to downplay his own experiences. Shiro looked so startled by the expressìon that Hunk burst out laughing. He'd run the numbers with Kurogane, and although the two time travellers had lost track of the exact time intervals between events as things had gone downhill in their own timeline, he had managed to determine that Kurogane and Alejandro were around the same age as Shiro or possibly slightly older, enabling them to use the disapproving-older-brother stare on a man who was not at all used to being on the receiving end of those looks.
"Boys, boys, you're both traumatized." Pidge muttered, making Hunk snort again and Alejandro laugh. "Although our point stands, Shiro. You were really brave today, and you should be proud of yourself."
The black paladin allowed himself a small smile at her words as he continued with the motions to get a feel for his arm. With a final glance to make sure everything was under control Hunk slipped out of the room, heading for the kitchen. With the addition of class 1 and 2 rations to his kitchen, he thought he might finally be able to craft reasonably authentic-tasting katsudon for their friend.