Masks

Shiro 2

This one takes place over the period of at LEAST a month.

It starts with Hunk and a blanket.

Apparently he had not been joking when it comes to Caregivers and blankets, of which there seem to be a lot more scattered around the Castle Ship than there previously were, a multitude of bright colours and different textures of soft. He's pretty sure Pidge and Lance have both squirreled away the ones they like best, Lance in his room and Pidge... he's not actually sure where Pidge hid hers, but no one's been able to find the one with the gear pattern anymore.

In any case, Shiro is suddenly finding himself wrapped in blankets as often as not when he's starting on a mental downwards spiral and they aren't in the middle of a mission or something equally important. In fact, everyone is finding themselves wrapped in blankets these days when they're looking down, and it's getting to the point where Hunk isn't the only one doing it, either. During the debriefing on their last mission, Lance had actually gotten up from the table at one point, wandered to the corner, wandered back, draped a particularly vivid one over Keith's shoulders, and then gone back to his seat like nothing had happened. The look on Keith's face had been amazing.

It could be condescending. It could be smothering. It could be insulting.

It feels like the team is drawing closer together than before, learning to have each others' backs in situations other than battle. It feels okay to accept these offers of support, and to offer them in turn.

Someone makes a blanket patterned with images of Coran's mustache on it. No one will admit to doing it, but everyone agrees that it is the best blanket.

It continues with Coran and stories.

One day Coran just sits down beside him and begins to talk about the war back at the beginning – not the battles or the strategies or the alliances, but the bits that came in between. The moments there was time to breathe and the reality of the situation and their actions would strike home, the moments there was no time and it struck anyway, all accompanied by that quirky manner that keeps things... not exactly light, but reassuring. A thousand stories with the underlying message, 'It's okay, what you're going through is normal, others have trodden this path before.' An oddly comforting concept, for all that it means others have had to suffer like this, because it means that this state has the potential to be something he walks through – it does not have to be the end of his journey, even if the path is long and hard.

But it's Allura who takes him to the room where the stored memories of her father once were and reveals that Alfor was not the only one to leave a copy of himself behind.

"My father understood the importance of these things," she says softly, hands not grasping her skirt as they enter the chamber, "He understood... perhaps better than I do, that our soldiers were also people, and the complexities that result from this."

The Castle has over a dozen memory-based AIs whose sole purpose is to function as therapists, half of them of species other than Altean. One is Galran, an odd reminder that once the two species must once have been close allies (and it's strange to see one not dressed in some sort of uniform). Allura teaches him how to call the mind healers up on the display.

Now he has guides to assist him in navigating his path. It helps.

Pidge thinks the whole AI chamber, while seriously cool, is inefficient.

Shiro finds this out the day she plunks a round disk the size of a tablet and the thickness of a good novel in front of him with a triumphant expression. "It's a personal interface with the Castle's AI library," she announces, "So that you can pick your location to talk to them without having to worry about a repeat of the Crystal Venom incident."