We are all made of the same cosmic dust.

Displaced

Light hits him

—and it flings Shiro back. The light crashes straight through him. He rolls several times. When his eyes crackle open, the legs of strangers, bulging sideways from the street, blur closer. Rain oozes, warm, down his face. Sunlight dazzles the sidewalks. Suddenly Shiro is very tired.

It's been a long time (years, in fact (approximately two)) since the last time he's fallen asleep. Each night, he forgets to. Sleep will simply escape his mind like a small errand, and he'll think, I'll do it tomorrow. Then the following night he'll forget and defer the errand for the next night, forgetting all over again. It isn't nighttime, and he isn't in bed or even at home. But finally he remembers what he needs to do, recalling he's almost two years late doing it.

The weight from the past two years begins to collect and pile on his back like five-pound plates, one after the other, and gradually presses him down until he slips from his body, displaced, and floats gently past the street, past the earth, to the blackest shadows of the blackest gulf. A thousand miles of gravity bathe him. All at once. His eyes fall shut.

Sirens oscillate in a steady crescendo.

EMS gust up the highway like dandelion seeds blown in the wind.

Anxiety

It's been seven days. Shiro won't wake up.

A hundred times, Keith has seen the scans, the data, the inconclusive diagnoses. Once again, the hemispheres of Shiro's brain are projected in front of him in three-dimensional neuroimaging. The doctor postulates causes, issuing complicated-sounding medical jargon as he navigates through Shiro's neuroanatomy, resizing the hologram, expanding the image of the prefrontal cortex. Keith simmers, staring at the doctor's meaningless blur of lips, his ashen gums.

"Implication of the prefrontal cortex," the doctor says, using his elaborately sanitized way of explaining things, just metallic words and hollowness, "has led to the dysregulation of stimuli contextualization processes."

"Ah, I see," Curtis says, inflectionless, calm and detached, which only heightens the hair on Keith's neck, stiff.

"What does that mean?" Keith asks. "What does any of that mean?"

The doctor steeples his fingers. His hands are long with thin skin draping from the bones like they're melting. "It means there are many neurological reasons for Mr. Shirogane's coma."

Keith stares at the doctor's face, his arms crossed over his chest. He tracks his own anger inside himself, which he feels building in a boiling wave with the doctor's speaking, the speaking driving the anger, higher and higher.

"What are you going to do about Shiro's brain?" Keith says, trying to tamp down the emotion. "You're not giving me any solutions here. Shiro wasn't hit hard enough to put him out for this long. I just want to know what you're going to do."

"When he wakes up—"

"If he wakes up," Keith says. "According to your neuromap, Shiro should be standing in the room with us right now. But he's not. And you can't even tell me why that is. He's been in stasis for a week."

The doctor and Curtis stare at Keith. They're composed—phlegmatic, even—with the cool dispositions of arithmetic and engineering. They don't know what to make of Keith, who's warm-blooded and hazardous.

When there's no response, no feasible answer or solution, Keith shakes his head, once, and then, pressing his teeth together, he exits. The double doors hiss shut like a shoot of steam.

Outside the office, Keith's boots touch the floor with quiet stealth. He moves down the hall that way, his hands knotted, white-knuckled, as though anticipating a fight. Under the silence, he registers behind him a shadow. It follows and gains on him. Knowing what it is, Keith flicks out his communicator, still hearing the person behind him advancing, growing closer.

"I'm calling Kolivan," Keith says. "I have an idea."

Curtis joins Keith's side, walking down the hall too. "You should listen to the doctor," he says. "He's the professional."

"Shiro's consciousness was transferred into a clone's body with Altean magic. Earth's doctors can't do anything."

Keith pings Kolivan's communication line and waits, still walking down the hall. Each stride is resolute, on track toward progress. He says: "Have Shiro moved to a transport pod."

"Where do you want to have him moved?"

The comm's screen whitens. Kolivan connects. His face appears in miniature. "Keith."

"Kolivan. Are those Mindscape Simulator suits online?"

"Yes, they're operational."

"I'm going to have Shiro transported there. He's still not waking up." Keith has lifted the comm closer to his voice. His voice is confidential, reduced.

"Understood," says Kolivan. "Krolia, Coran, and I will prepare for your arrival."

"Thanks." Keith lowers the comm. "Oh, and prepare a second suit. I'm bringing someone along. He's — Shiro's husband."

"I see. We'll prepare two suits, then."

The screen blackens. Keith pockets the comm. He and Curtis continue down the hall, making two discrete treads. One of ghostly impressions. One of solid connections.

"I'll explain everything on the way there," Keith says. They reach the end of the hall. They stop and Keith signals. "Tell the doctor we're taking Shiro somewhere else, will you?"

Without waiting for a reply, Keith steps through the doorway and is sucked away from Curtis's view.

The medical bay is empty. A single ominous pod glows. Keith stares up into the chamber, his chin lifted slightly, his arms down at his sides. His hands are loose now. A static body hangs, comatose, submerged under a mysterious gravity. Shiro's face is depressed on his chest, slanted down, positioned such that if his eyes were to open, they'd open upon Keith's face. Keith puts his hand on the glass. The lid hums against his palm.

The head injury Shiro sustained has been repaired. Lacerations and swelling, pelvic bone injury and sacroiliac dislocation—have all been repaired with prolonged stasis. Still, Shiro's eyes won't open. Electrical neural activity produces oscillating waves on a holoscreen display. The waves are lethargic and diminutive. A sleeping mind deep in peace.

"Shiro?"

In the empty room, Keith's voice is quiet and very strange. Not his own. Not any voice he can recall.

The neural activity plods lethargically, up and down, living and then dying.

Scattered

That night, Keith dreams that he's talking to Shiro. You don't want to die, Keith tells him, and he knows it's true. In the dream, they're in the Black Lion. Keith is piloting, and Shiro stands behind him in his otherworldly white outline, the way he's been since he died. His hair white, his skin white, his suit, his smile. He's a degradation of color, a loss of substance. Like a gentle dissolve. One you don't notice until it's gone.

"You want to come back," Keith says. "I know you. You wouldn't just — leave."

Shiro smiles but his lips are closed. So Keith knows it's not a smile. It's an apology.

"You were taking a walk, it was a freak accident. You're just lost somewhere. I'll come find you. I can bring you home."

"You're good at that," says Shiro, still smiling apologetically.

"I'll never give up on you. Right? That's what you said, too."

Shiro smiles wider, his lips opening now. But the sorrow only deepens.

"Keith," he says. "I've always wondered why you go to such great lengths."

"What do you mean?"

"What's so important? Don't you get tired of it?"

Keith looks at Shiro. The Shiro who is only a dream, standing in the background in white outline like a bas-relief shadow, minutes away from fading into a pure white void. "You're my best friend. You're like a brother to me." Keith says this uncertainly, like the pieces don't fit. But he doesn't know why he's so uncertain, so quavery on the inside, like a cup of water about to spill over.

But this dream-Shiro keeps asking the hard questions: "Can you tell me, why does it always have to be you?"

Why does it always have to be me? — Not once. Not twice. But again and again, over and over, like clockwork . . . .

"Well," Keith says, "why do you always have to keep leaving?"

Shiro laughs. His eyes are soft. His scar is smooth and wet, not like flesh. Just glass and pain and timelessness.

Unable to answer the questions of his own dreaming, Keith reaches his arms around Shiro, abruptly, as though the water tension has broken inside him, overflowing the cup. But the disappearing removes Shiro completely, leaving nothing behind but empty light and space.

Intervention

The technology is Galran with Altean inspiration. Kolivan and Krolia explain what the suit does while Coran oversees preparation. Shiro hovers nearby in a medical pod, sleeping, like an embryo. He wears a black bodysuit that makes him look long and sleek and unreal. Keith and Curtis both wear identical suits, with round black nodes at the elbows, chest, and thighs, to which Coran clamps wires, connecting them to a supercomputer.

"These Mindscape Simulator suits enable the wearer to dive into the host's subconscious through this interface." Krolia gestures at a neuroimaging chamber. "You'll be able to physically explore the geography of Shiro's mind and combat any stress markers you encounter along the way. Whatever triggers you eliminate will respawn in time, but this will allow Shiro temporary respite. While you search for him, everyone here will be able to track your relative location on this display." She shows them an empty blue screen. "My guess is Shiro is trapped somewhere, trying to fight off whatever stress marker has been interfering with his natural recovery protocol. But once you find him, you can guide him back to a state of consciousness."

Keith begins to ready himself while Curtis remains motionless.

"Are you sure Takashi will want us prying inside his head?"

"He'll understand," Keith says.

"Surely this violates some sort of privacy law?"

"Shiro would give us his permission."

Curtis and Keith look at one another. Then Curtis looks at Kolivan. "Has this tech been used to treat a coma patient before?"

"It has been used to treat trauma patients, and each host has always awakened, unharmed."

"Trauma patients can give consent. We don't have the permission to invade Takashi's subconscious. This doesn't feel right."

Keith is replying before he knows what he's going to say: "Do you think I'd ever put Shiro in a situation I wasn't one-hundred percent confident in?" Keith looks at Curtis, and Curtis still doesn't know what to make of Keith, puzzled by that warm-bloodedness. "This will work," Keith says.

"That's not the point."

"What's the point, then? Because I thought we both wanted to help Shiro. Me AND you." Keith can feel the wave of emotion building up again, his hair bristling. Everything begins to sink into red.

Whatever it takes.

"Keith," Krolia says. "We all want to help Shiro." Her tone makes the wave of emotion sag down and level out. Then Keith's thoughts come through clearer like a restored signal. He grows self-aware enough to feel sorry—but not enough to tell Curtis about this.

"Once you enter the psychic plane, your energy will touch Shiro, deeply. Raw emotions feed off one another: the positive and the negative. Any negative feelings or thoughts that may confront you, you must curb. If you allow them to escape, they'll spill into Shiro's psyche like a poison and infect his mind."

"Perhaps," Curtis says, "I should go alone."

"No," Keith says. "I can do this. I'm just —" Keith shuts his eyes. He takes a deep breath through the nose. Patience . . .His heart is a tranquil pool. He envisions it, cool and clear and clean. "Don't worry," he says, and opens his eyes again. "I won't let myself get out of hand."

Coran fluffs a pillow on one of two cots. Then he fluffs the second pillow on the second cot, sweeping into it a breath of buoyancy and air. "As you work your way through the levels of Shiro's subconscious, your bodies will be lying here on these cots. Once you make it back, everything you experienced in the psychic plane will feel like a long dream. However, everything you experience as you experience it won't feel any less real than reality feels right now." Coran moves around the cot to pinch Keith on the cheek demonstratively. "On a scale from one to five, how real does this feel?"

"We haven't entered Shiro's subconscious yet," Keith says, and removes Coran's hand. A welt like a pink rouge sticks to Keith's cheek.

"Good point," Coran says, "but when you do, it'll feel like that!"

Krolia smiles. "We will look after things here, Keith," she says, and he believes her.

Each sitting on a cot, parallel to each other, Keith and Curtis lay their heads on the fluffed pillows, their suits connected to the computer where Shiro is also connected. In a moment, they will touch souls and blend like paint.

"The mind is a landscape, and each landscape is shaped by the fears and hopes of the host," Kolivan says. "I don't know what kind of world you'll find once you arrive. So you must stick together."

Kolivan enters the program key. The hologram display brightens, pulses, and pauses on a blank screen. Keith and Curtis relax from their bodies while their bodies prepare to wait, vacant, for their return.

"Shiro's location will be at the deepest level of his unconscious," Coran says. "The computer can't teleport you past the first level, so you will have to work your way there."

The world begins to fade and diminish. It grows small like a dying candle.

"Good luck."

Then the voices plunge down a long long tube and drop out of range. Sound and sensation fall away. Weight lifts from Keith's body, and then he's floating or shedding matter, sublimating. He turns into mist. And then he turns into nothingness.

Somewhere Keith thinks he can hear a new voice. It's far away. He thinks it sounds like his own.

Waking

Weight and matter re-attach them to themselves and they're drawn back into shape. Keith and Curtis open their eyes, still lying flat on their backs. But the open sky alerts them: They are somewhere new. They rise to their feet and examine one another.

"You look—" Curtis narrows his eyes, "younger," he says.

"You look the same."

Keith's hair stops at the nape. The facial scar is gone. He lifts his hands and studies them; they've been lurched two or three years backward. The old red paladin suit armors him. But it's not as if body and armor have reacquainted. It's as if they've never been separated at all.

Curtis says, "Your time as Voltron paladins shaped much of who Takashi is."

"Yeah." Keith's hands flex. His knuckles stretch, familiarly, into the gloves again. "He's not the only one."

They ascertain the world they've entered. The earth diverges into two extreme terrains, two irreconcilable continents. In the east, a snow-barren ice desert roars with wind, a full moon towering overhead. In the west, a withering gold African veldt wavers beneath a red sun, the land parched and bleached-boned.

"Takashi will be deep inside this world," Curtis says. "If we keep moving forward, we should find him."

Keith lifts a foot. He positions it west. He follows it with a second step, headed toward the dreadful red sun. "This way."

Curtis doesn't move. "How do you know?"

"It's a gut-feeling."

"What if Takashi's that way?" Curtis points to the east where the moon is big and bright like a scream. "We can't waste time. We need to choose carefully."

"You're right," Keith says. "We should split up. We'll cover more ground that way."

"Or," Curtis says, "we can listen to Kolivan and stick together. Neither of us knows what's out there. Going off alone could lead us both awry."

"Look," Keith says. "I'm going in this direction. You can follow me or not. I don't really care. But I'm going to find Shiro." Keith's boots hit hot, dead land. Dust billows up around his ankles and envelops him like a fog.

Exasperated, Curtis lets out a breath that feels tensed like a fist, surprising him with a thump of pressure. Then he looks east. A howling wind blows a wall of whirling snow across the horizon and the moon never relents, gushing its white luminous blood everywhere. For a moment, Curtis thinks he sees, in the moonlight, a trail of black retrograding imprints moving away from him—Takashi?—and in the next moment, he sees himself putting one foot inside the first imprint, following with the next imprint, watching himself take the track of imprints all the way deeper into the white storm, without ever lifting a foot to move forward.

The snow mounts. The shadows blow away. There's nothing but snow. There's never been anything but snow.

Curtis turns west to follow Keith's lead.