Chapter Text
Shiro had always pictured himself living out his days as part and parcel of the Garrison, flying missions until his illness forced him to retire and then spending the rest of his functional life teaching, as most of his colleagues planned to do.
And then, of course, there was Adam—throwing wrenches in all his plans from the day they first ran into each other in the E building’s third hallway, when Shiro was fifteen and five foot six and Adam a skinny fourteen-year-old beanpole already pushing five-ten. Nothing went quite as expected, after they met; Shiro never once even imagined that he might find himself lugging a scruffy middle-schooler back to his apartment before he even hit twenty and becoming the aforementioned child’s primary guardian only six months later, but it happened.
As things just tended to do, when Adam was around.
Voltron and the war that followed seem almost like a dream to him now, though Keith and the rest of the paladins remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. Shiro suspects his hazy memories are the Atlas’s doing; on the last day he spent as its captain it whispered that some things were better left forgotten, and before he disembarked he felt the ache of those two dark years wiped from his mind completely. He’ll never remember his time as Voltron’s black paladin fondly, not when he spent the whole time terrified that something would happen to Keith or Pidge—to say nothing of Lance and Hunk, who were no better prepared to witness war and death than Pidge had been as a three-year-old. But even the war (like all things, as Adam told him once) came to an end in its time, and Shiro was left to breathe freely as if illness and torture and peril had never touched him at all.
He had hoped to go back to his old life, after that...to go back to the little apartment on Klaxon Avenue with his buckwheat pillows and imported rushgrass mats and Adam’s sweet-scented wooden altar in the living room, to the closet where his old clothes still hung between Adam’s long tunics as if neither he nor his husband had ever left the flat in the first place. To Keith’s ridiculous Mothman décor too, though he never told his brother that. To the sweet day-to-day dullness of teaching, which was doubly precious now that his family was whole again. And he did, for a while—but by the first Christmas after the war he found himself yearning again, though he didn’t have even the slightest clue what he was yearning for.
“You’re restless,” Adam observed, clearing away the dishes after Kinkade and Rizavi came over for dinner one night in early January. Kinkade had proposed to her only a few days earlier, and for some reason Nadia decided their former physics teacher should be the first to hear about it. “What’s the matter, love?”
“I don’t know,” said Shiro, puzzled. “I—I keep feeling that there’s something I want, and I don’t even know what it is.”
“Do you want to go back to space?”
“No! After everything—if Keith or Lance needed me for something then of course I’d go, but otherwise—”
“Then what is it?” Adam kissed his forehead, pulling his chopsticks out of his hands and dropping them into the sink. “Is it everyone getting married?”
Shiro blinked.
“I guess I just feel old,” he muttered, tugging Adam down to sit beside him. “I’m only twenty-seven, and the kids who watched me do demos on how to wear a belt in the flight sims are almost as old as I am.”
“You did go three years without aging, moonlight,” Adam pointed out. “And I went two. Of course they caught up a little in the meanwhile.”
“I know,” Shiro sighed. “I just...well, I don’t know. I’ll get over it, sunshine, don’t worry.”
But fate (or rather, Allura, Matt, and Pidge) got in the way of his plans to carry on as usual, and a few weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday Pidge and Matt dragged him into their mother’s lab and past the barrier that separated her confidential work from general research. Shiro protested, of course—though he’d spent the last thirteen years hanging around with Matt and Adam most of their conversations about coding and nanotech had gone straight over his head, and now that he thought about it he was possibly the least qualified person available to help with whatever they were doing.
“Let go, Pidge!” he complained, trying to shake her off as she pulled him through yet another set of doors. “Your mother will kill all three of us if I ruin something, and you know how I am in labs.”
“I don’t think you could do anything to this,” sang Matt. “It’s your wedding present.”
“Matt, Adam and I got married over a year ago.” Shiro lifted an eyebrow. “You do remember that, right?”
“And we didn’t give you anything, because we were working on this, and it wasn’t ready.”
“I thought Keith’s gift was supposed to be from everyone?”
“That’s because Lance thought it would be classy to give you a gift with Keith, Hunk’s gift was the wedding cake, and you completely forgot about me and Allura,” shrugged Pidge. “So she and Matt and I just signed our names on Klance’s card at the last minute, since we didn’t want you to find out what we were really making you.”
“Which is…” Shiro trailed off. There seemed to be something small in the corner that looked like a miniature healing pod, glowing a soft blue-white just like the ones at the Castle. “Is that a pod?”
“Technically it’s an incubator.” Matt raised a hand as if to push up his glasses, a habit he never got out of even after getting laser surgery.
“For…what?”
“The quintessence in Adam’s heart isn’t like most people’s,” said Pidge slowly. “You know that.”
A chill ran through Shiro’s bones, and he took two steps back.
“We’re not doing anything with Adam’s quintessence.” A brief flash of blackened limbs and a glass panel glazed over to hide his husband’s still body burned behind his eyelids, and he shook his head at Pidge and Matt like a donkey shaking off flies. “I don’t care what—I won’t let you put him through that again, I won’t—”
“Adam’s heart can create new souls without putting him at risk,” murmured Matt, laying a hand on his arm. “Just like he created the Atlas. Come on, Shiro. You have to understand what we’re getting at here. Souls, but not bodies. He can make a soul, and this can make a body.”
“You mean—”
“You kind of liked being space dad,” said Pidge, nudging his shoulder. “Do you maybe wanna be dad-dad?”
Shiro burst into tears.
* * *
The ten months that followed were a mixed bag in every way—full of such heartbreaking joy that Shiro found himself on the verge of crying when he first saw his daughter sucking her thumb on a sonogram, and riddled with fear that had him leaping awake in the middle of the night whenever Adam moved in his sleep, or running to the medbay in a panic when emergency sent a notice to tell him that Adam’s blood pressure had spiked dangerously high. But the year went from winter to autumn without much stress on Adam’s part (except for insatiable cravings and a full nine months of nausea, since their little girl took advantage of the quintessence link to reject every food she disliked) and on the fourteenth of November Sonia Shirogane was born during the wildest thunderstorm Arizona had seen in decades.
He’d lived through almost twenty-nine years and the span of a thousand realities, and the moment he saw her flailing in Dr. Castile’s arms he knew without question that not even the farthest reaches of the universe had ever been half so beautiful. She had his hair exactly, long and black and straight—and when she opened her eyes he saw they were a clear dark grey, shaped like Adam’s and slanted at the corners like his own. He wept when Adam first held her, watching his husband cradle the tiny bundle to the heart that had given her life—watching her forget the confusion of leaving her warm dark home at the sound of Adam’s pulse, which still ran shallow and quick from the shock of regaining the quintessence it had grown used to doing without.
“Hi, moonbeam,” Adam whispered, kissing the tiny forehead before clutching her even tighter. “Happy birthday, soniye. ”
And Shiro had taken them both into his arms, crying in earnest into Adam’s limp hair as Sonia’s small fist closed around his finger.
* * *
Two years and eight months have gone by since, and now Shiro stands on a weathered grey porch watching the moon glint off the endless expanse of green that makes up the Ahluwalia estate. It rained that afternoon, and the strawberry leaves still sparkle in the dark like diamonds; under the cover of evening the fruits look twice as bewitching as they did during the day, and so when Sonia gets up in the middle of the night and shows no signs of going to sleep again Adam bundles her out of bed and takes her for a walk between the tended runners. He’s careful when he leaves, tucking the blankets close around Shiro so he can sleep in peace, but he feels their absence almost the second Adam shuts the door—and so he follows them, smiling in the shadows of the veranda as Adam points Polaris out to the small bundle of quilts squirming on his shoulder.
“And that one?” chirps Sonia, gesturing somewhere between Hydra and the Big Dipper. “Wo kon ho, Papa?”
It never fails to amaze Shiro just how smart she is; he doesn’t know much about children besides his own, unless you count his vague memories of a toddler Pidge sticking a plastic fork into a socket and being disappointed that she didn’t get to see sparks. But he’s pretty sure most toddlers of two and a half can’t read particularly fluently, or keep up with conversations without even blinking. Her doctors at the Garrison concluded that her intelligence and personality are probably due to Adam’s modified DNA, altered years before Sonia was born by the dose of Altean quintessence that brought him back from the dead.
Neither Adam nor Shiro know quite what to expect, as she grows older; she’s human, half of both of them, and already as sharp as a child of six or seven even though she still prefers being carried to walking on her own. But she’s theirs, whatever she might grow up to be—precious and bumbling and soft and sweet, and entirely too curious about bugs for Adam’s aunt Uma’s liking.
“That’s Kaikaus, moonbeam,” Shiro hears, followed by a tiny giggle from Sonia. “And that cluster over there is called Ashlesha, though I don’t know what it is in English.”
“What about their tou-chan names?” says Sonia sleepily, nuzzling into Adam’s neck. “Do they have any?”
“Mm-hm, they do. That dim one is the one I was born under, Cancer, but in Japanese they call it kani. It means the same thing, too, a kekada. ”
“I know that one!” Sonia lights up like a star, catching the glow of the moon in her eyes as she lifts her face to Adam’s. “He’s a crab! But Papa, he doesn’t look like a kekada. ”
“What does he look like, then?”
“A wishing bone.”
“Hmm,” whispers Adam, rocking her softly as she drops her head back on his shoulder. “Maybe you can make a wish on it, baby. Do you want to?”
“No rain tomorrow,” Sonia yawns. “Want to play with Leela in the pond. Please no rain, kani-hone-san. ”
“You think you’re ready to go back to bed now, soniye? ”
Sonia only mumbles in reply, and after giving her a feather-light kiss on her nose Adam hoists her up closer and begins the short walk back to the house, still unaware of Shiro sitting alone on the swing. When he comes up the steps Shiro gets up and greets him with a hug, wrapping his arms around Adam’s slender waist until Sonia wriggles from Adam’s embrace to his own.
“I’m sorry I woke you, love,” murmurs Adam, taking Shiro’s hand after giving him a moment to adjust Sonia and her blankets on his chest. “But she wouldn’t sleep, and she would have been jumping around until morning if I didn’t take her out for a walk.”
“You know she didn’t walk, sunshine,” Shiro chuckles. “She didn’t even let you leave her quilt in the bed.”
“Of course she didn’t,” says Adam softly. “You made it for her, moonlight.”
They go back to their bedroom (only the one, since Sonia has made it very plain that the idea of sleeping alone is one she hates immensely) and settle their daughter down on the mattress between them, stretching out under the covers as Shiro shuts the drapes with the help of his prosthetic arm. Sonia’s already fast asleep, curled in a ball with her cheek against Shiro’s shirt and her feet on Adam’s knees, and Adam looks down on her small round face with a strange soft look in his eyes. It means something, Shiro knows—but enthralled as he is by the starlight glinting on Adam’s forehead he can’t tell exactly what.
“Takashi?” he breathes at last. “Takashi, janu, are you awake?”
Shiro feels the wind go out of him at the sound of his name, which always rings so tenderly whenever Adam says it. For a second or two he can only lie there and gape like he does when he finds his husband sleeping, watching dumbly as Adam’s smooth brow wrinkles up in worry.
“Yeah, I am,” he says hastily. “What’s wrong, love?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Adam laughs, leaning over to kiss him. “It’s just...well, I’ve been thinking. Hey, are you listening?”
“Devotedly, sunshine.”
“Do you want to have another baby?”
His jaw drops open, and his dream from that last night on the Atlas comes back to him like an ocean washing him clean—of Sonia, not yet born or conceived at the time, leading a stumbling baby with soft brown hair and brown eyes, fair-skinned where Sonia was dark and not quite as steady on her feet as Sonia was at that age. But then he remembers sitting by Adam’s bedside in the medbay with his hand on his flagging heart, frightened not only for his husband’s sake but for the child he was sustaining, still too small and weak and young to come safely into the world.
“Is it safe?” he whispers, clutching Adam tighter. “It was dangerous for you, with Sonia. I know the doctors said there was nothing much to worry about, that I was overreacting, but—”
“You weren’t overreacting,” says Adam firmly, grasping his hands. “And we didn’t know my heart wasn’t—that it wasn’t strong enough. My body didn’t put as much of a strain on my heart after I got revived, so it’s no wonder the doctors didn’t have a clue that Sonia would be difficult. But the last time I had a physical I asked Juliana to check, just in case, and she said it seemed healthier than it was before they hooked me up to Sonia’s pod.”
“You mean—”
“Sonia fixed nearly seventy-five percent of the damage with her stem cells,” Adam smiles, running a hand through Shiro’s hair. “Which kind of makes sense, since she came from mine.”
“So if we have another baby…”
“There’s a good chance I’ll be totally fine. Better, actually.” He kisses Shiro’s nose. “And you’ve wanted another little girl for years, haven’t you?”
“How did you know?” He’s crying now, or laughing. Probably both. He can’t really tell, not with Adam’s lips brushing every inch of his face and tears running into his ears. “A little sister for Sonia. Oh, she’d be perfect.”
“Wanna break the news to Keith?” says Adam slyly, wiggling his eyebrows. “That he’s going to be an uncle again?”
“Oh, he’s going to be so jealous,” Shiro giggles. Keith and Lance’s three sons might look like tiny balls of adorable purple fluff, but they’re just as energetic as Galra children should be, and run their poor parents ragged unless Kolivan and Krolia happen to be visiting with their own small daughter, Kara. “I’ll tell him tomorrow, sweetheart. Let’s go to sleep, and then we can talk to Team Kogane in the morning.”
“Mmm, sounds good.” Adam’s already halfway to dreamland, eyes falling shut as he lies on Shiro’s shoulder. “Oyasumi, soniye.”
* * *
Late the following June, Himeko arrives on a soft spring morning scented with desert flowers. She’s named after Shiro’s late mother, and looks uncannily like her—chubby and pink-cheeked with Adam's flyaway hair, sweet-tempered and smiling and happily content to sleep through the night like a baby many months older—
—and just like her sister, perfect.