AAAAAAAAAAA ok so i forgot how to do linebreaks again but I'm back? after more than a month lmao sorry yall. I havent written anything for Ezra or Shiro or really much of anything in a while and I had this baby floating around in my files for a while. Meant to post it a month ago but life got in the way...so if you're still here! Enjoy! Maybe!

He was floating in starlight, cool and rushing. Faint screams breaking the monotony of his blanketed mind in increasing intervals. It was him and then not.

It all fell away and what it left was nothingness. It was dark. Impossibly dark. He tried blinking, but the visions dancing in front of his aching eyes said the same thing. There was something warm at his back, moving slowly, breathing softly.

He turned, and his eyes met a pair he had grown to know intimately. Pale moon-gold stared back; unblinking and bottomless. Most of the Galra he remembered had flat eyes; hundreds of walls put up between themselves and what their bodies were committing. To the end, she remained true. Maybe that was why she had broken so thoroughly.

Ezra was turned in on her side to face him, huge body curling slightly over his.

He spoke, and yet, he did not. There was voice but it was disembodied from him. It came from the pit of his chest and not his throat; not his mouth. It scared him into silence as she continued to stare. Something in her own silence encouraged him to try again.

"What...what happened?" Why did his voice sound so small? So...tremulous?

She blinked slowly, her mouth did not open either. "You left."

He felt no panic, no anxiety in his bones over the statement, like it was something he already knew. Had already accepted.

"Left?"

Her head bowed closer to him. "Yes, left. As all things do, but not."

That should have scared him. Left? Was he dead? But still, nothing. In his belly, there was an emptiness that rolled bitterly. He didn't like it, but still, nothing. The others, he'd left the others alone...

"If I have left, have I left permanently?"

Her voice came from her belly and it curled warmly around him, there was a biting sorrow in its honeyed taste. "If you wish it."

Did he want to stay? He thought, still separate from his old guardian. It wasn't totally dark here as he had first thought. There were lights of soft, deep blues around them, swaying gently with a sweet wind. The ground gave, the scent of rich earth surrounded them. It was calm here...where had he been before?

It didn't seem to matter...

He curled into her broad torso. Ezra had always hated the unforgiving nature of her mandatory armor, preferring the softer knit of civilian clothing. She felt like home. Like a balm to his confusion. "And if I do not wish to leave? If I want to stay?"

Her arms came up around him, "Then stay, but do not forget what you leave behind, heart."

His face felt hot, his throat tight. He didn't want what he left, it was too much. He felt like a kid clinging to his mother's side at his dad's funeral again. He felt so lost. How could he lead, how could he dare to lie to their faces each day with his false smiles and reassurances, muffling his cries in the impenetrable dark of his quarters. Too much. The empire was so vast, and they kept striking like pit vipers at its throat. But the empire consumes even the venomous and revels in the epileptic fits poison brings. Bright, vomitus colors rushing past in crashing ocean tides and- the grip Ezra had on him tightened.

"Peace, heart, and listen to what is around you."

There was...water. The soothing gurgle of a broad stream, the lapping of crimson against a smoothed shore, the rustling of the crisp, black vegetation against the gentle wind, faint music, Ezra's three hearts working in languid tandem.

If she was calm, so was he. All he had to do was listen.

The thrum was there again, that bite of sadness, the choking apathy.

"Are you the sorrow?"

"Just as you are."

"The apathy?"

"What you must never be."

He blinked back the tears in his eyes, sighing deeply to dispel the ache in his chest. "I think I'll go back."

Ezra hummed.

"Not right now", he answered quickly, "but…someday."

"There is always someday, just enjoy the quiet of now." Ezra's claws ran lightly over the stubble of his scalp, cradling him to the hollows of her rib-cage, "Time does not pass here as it does there. Stay as long as you like and return if you wish it. You are always welcome, heart."