Posted for Shiro Week, Day 4 Prompt: Friends/Relationships
Happy Thanksgiving to my readers in the U.S.A.!
"Faces"
"The Moon" by Jorge Luis Borges
There is such solitude in that gold.
The moon of these nights is not the moon
The First Adam saw. Long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her with
An old lament. See. She is your mirror.
Upon waking from the sedative and assessing his situation, Shiro didn't know whether to consider himself a success or a failure.
He had succeeded in one thing, escaping the Galra and returning to Earth. He did appreciate that, being able to walk free, even watch the sunrise. He had even succeeded in navigating well enough to land quite close to the Galaxy Garrison, close enough for Keith and the three other students to find him.
On the other hand, he hadn't been able to prevent Sam and Matt from being captured. He didn't even remember what had happened to them. For all he knew, whatever fate they had met might have been his fault. And he had failed to get the military to understand the danger Earth was in. He had fought and evaded aliens more dangerous than they could imagine, yet all it took was a simple injection to render him helpless in their hands.
He had lost parts of himself, most notably his arm and a year's worth of memories. He had gained new parts of himself, which he did not know how to handle. His prosthetic arm was a mystery to him. He had no idea if he had lost his arm in an accident or from deliberate action. Probably the latter. It seemed harmless, but the Garrison medics had probably been right to treat it with apprehension. He couldn't trust anything made by the Galra. Yet he did not know whether it was possible to remove it without injuring himself, and in the meantime it would be easier to function with two hands.
Shiro was unspeakably relieved to see Keith's familiar face when he woke up. He was someone Shiro knew personally, who he could trust, who cared about him as a person. Keith brought him up to speed on the situation, breaking the news that a year had passed since his disappearance.
Shiro was both saddened and strangely relieved to learn that Keith had been expelled from the Garrison. He had been the most promising student in his class; Shiro had expected him to go far, and it seemed a shame to let his talent as a pilot go to waste. But from what Keith described, the Garrison had done a dismal job of handling the Kerberos crew's disappearance. Keith had not been able to stand the way they pretended to know everything and pinned the blame on the pilot rather than admit their ignorance.
They were both deserters now, rogue astronauts, failures in the eyes of the world.
Shiro wanted to find a way to contact his relatives, to let them know he was alive, but could not think of a way to do that without alerting the Garrison of his whereabouts. He did not think he would be able to handle being treated like a prisoner again.
Keith scrounged up some (probably stolen) clothes and shaving supplies and let Shiro clean up in the bathroom. Maybe that would help him feel like his old self again. It seemed that the Galra had trimmed his facial hair, at least enough to keep his youth evident and his face recognizable, but he still preferred a clean shave.
When Shiro looked in the dirty mirror, the first time he could remember seeing his reflection in a year, he was startled by the changes in his appearance. His cheeks were thin, his bangs were white, and there was a scar across his nose. When he undressed and changed into the fresh clothes, he found more scars on his body that he could not remember receiving.
He had always been tall, thin, and strong, but he could see that he had lost a lot of weight, yet also built up his muscle. What had they done to him? Starved him while also putting him in a bodybuilding program? Maybe they had used him for physical labor of some kind. It frightened him to imagine what they may have used him for.
With an unknown past and a body he did not recognize, Shiro felt like a stranger to himself.
The next familiar face he saw startled him, because it looked so similar to Matt Holt's. Yet he knew at once it was not his: this Garrison student was shorter and younger, and went by the name Pidge, though that sounded like a nickname if he had ever heard one.
Shiro saw a little bit of himself in the young astronaut-in-training, while listening to Pidge ramble during their search for the green lion. He had felt a similar mixture of hope and doubt during his own training, and right now they were both uncertain about their abilities and the roles they were supposed to play.
Shiro realized Pidge's true identity as soon as she admitted that the Holts were her father and brother. He remembered glimpsing Katie on visits to the Holt household and on the day of the Kerberos mission launch. He did not mention it, first because they were in the middle of a mission, and later because they usually had more important things to talk about.
He understood, now, why Pidge had conducted so much research in the desert, and why she had been so willing to desert the Garrison when she had only just begun her astronaut training. Even though she had always wanted to be a pilot, she was no longer concerned with advancing her career. Everything she did was to find her family.
Shiro saw Pidge's look of sadness after they successfully formed Voltron. He knew what Pidge must be thinking: though being part of this team was amazing, this new goal of "defending the universe" would slow down the more focused mission of finding Sam and Matt. So he reassured Pidge that they would continue to look for the missing Holts. Shiro saw it as a chance to remedy his previous failure. He had not been able to protect Sam and Matt or bring them back to Earth, but he could protect Pidge and help reunite the Holt family. He owed it to them to do so.
It was a wonder that she treated him so civilly, not blaming him for having lost Sam and Matt, or for escaping while they stayed missing. If anything, their pasts and their relationships seemed to bond them in a unique way.
He felt a certain protectiveness toward her, though he could not say exactly why that was. It might have been her age, her size, her gender (not that it made her less capable than the boys, but that he wanted to help her keep her secret), his relationships with her family, or simply the fact that she was his friend and teammate.
It was somewhat ironic that the youngest paladin connected most with the oldest paladin. Shiro was ten years older than Pidge, yet somehow they worked as equals. She did not see him as an infallible hero. He did not see her as a nuisance or an amateur. They regarded each other with mutual respect.
In addition to their connections with Sam and Matt, they had one other thing in common: they both had to wrestle with two disparate identities, carrying and hiding parts of themselves that they did not want others to know.
When they learned that Shiro had been a gladiator, and even attacked Matt, Pidge looked at him with outrage, suspicion, and something like betrayal. Shiro wondered if he deserved that look, those emotions. What kind of person had he become during his captivity?
He was supposed to be the decisive head of Voltron. He wanted to be a worthy leader. But his clouded past made him wonder if it was right for the others to look up to him, to count on him to be their moral center and level-headed decision-maker.
When the full memory of his first fight returned to him, he did not feel relief, even though he now understood why he had injured Matt. He was not innocent: he now knew that he had killed people as well as cyborg animals and mutant monsters. But he wanted Pidge to know that he remembered the last time he saw Matt, and what had most likely happened to him and Sam.
Shiro had not expected the hug. He did not think he deserved it: he had lost track of both his crewmates, and just admitted that he had deliberately hurt her brother. But Pidge threw her arms around the body that had hurt her brother and killed so many aliens.
The last hugs Shiro remembered receiving were from friends and relatives just before the Kerberos mission launch. Sam and Matt had not been that affectionate with him, nor even Keith when they were reunited. Shiro had almost forgotten how they felt.
He wondered if Pidge had hugged anyone in a while. She had been away from her family for months, and had not been very close to anyone at the Garrison, not even Hunk and Lance. Plus, the shape of her upper body almost gave away her secret.
Shiro did not like touching his friends with his Galra hand, but Pidge didn't flinch from it as he put his arms around her in return. She probably needed the physical support as much as he did.
Since they had learned more about his identity as Champion, it felt like the right moment to tell her that he knew her real identity, Katie. He knew how powerful names were, and what it was like to go without hearing one's given name for a long time. Shiro felt her tense against him, startled by the sound of it, but he reassured her that no one else would know, unless she willed it. He thought it would be better for her and for the team if she told them who and what she truly was, but he also respected her privacy and her right to define herself.
Sharing the secret brought them closer, even though they never spoke of it. She had to trust him, something Shiro suspected was not easy for her to do after operating alone for so long. Keith probably felt similarly, after being on his own and then being thrown into this team; but he was less vulnerable, because he had less to lose.