Archive of Our Own ^beta

To be perfectly honest, Adam had no idea how long any of this had been going on. Sure, it had been a while since he’d arrived on this side, long enough that he was starting to get used to everything and settle back into some semblance of a routine. But there was, after all, a war on. Various nasty things were hitting the fan on the regular, and his and Takashi’s schedules just could not always be made to line up such that they could spend enough time together for Adam to notice anything weird.

It didn’t really register until that day Adam made a point of taking him lunch (because otherwise he would just eat a protein bar and call it good-- if he remembered to eat at all) and noticed the bottle of over-the-counter painkillers on Takashi’s desk.

Just a headache. The normal kind, Takashi had assured him quickly. The kind that a couple of over-the-counter pills and a big glass of water and maybe some food and a power nap would fix. The kind where he could still function more or less normally while he waited for it to go away. Not the kind that left him curled up in a dark, quiet room in agony for two or three days. He didn’t have those anymore, Adam told himself, and kept telling himself, and kept telling himself again.

If it had just been the headaches, that might have been the end of it. But of course it wasn’t just the headaches.

The second thing that quietly freaked Adam out was that about half the time, Takashi skipped lunch. Sometimes breakfast or dinner too.

But this too was different from what had happened before. It wasn’t that Takashi didn’t have an appetite, this time--if someone (usually Adam, sometimes Keith, occasionally Hunk) put food in front of him while he was working--especially if it required no utensils other than his fingers--he would eat it.

Actually, no. He wouldn’t just eat it.

He would eat one bite, and his brain would finally get around to reading that pls send food now memo his stomach had sent up God only knew how long before, and then he would just sort of inhale every last crumb of whatever had been put in front of him.

So… he wasn’t having trouble eating, he was just too busy to notice that he was hungry. He didn’t seem particularly sensitive to anything either and that was another thing Adam had to keep telling himself, because he still had a minor heart attack every time he saw Takashi bite into a greasy cheeseburger or drink a cup of coffee. Still, Adam made a point of cooking dinner whenever he had the time. It wasn’t as often as he would have liked, but at least he could make sure the man ate an actual vegetable a couple times a week.

But there was one more thing going on here, and Adam couldn’t ignore it because a) it too was bringing back some really bad memories, b) it was having some unpleasant side effects (like, say, headaches and that whole “forgetting to eat” thing) and c) it was contagious, at least to anyone he shared a bed with.

Takashi wasn’t sleeping.

It had taken a while for Adam to notice that one, because they’d only just moved back in together a month or so before. And half of that month they spent chasing Sendak’s posthumous fan club away from Earth and dealing with another terrible Altean-powered monstrosity courtesy of Haggar or Honerva or whatever she was calling herself in this reality these days and both Adam and Takashi had had much more important things on their plates than either catching a full eight hours a night or making sure their husbands did.

But when they came home from that most recent mission and finally managed to spend a few nights together, it was impossible not to notice.

They would go to bed at a civilized hour (okay, sure, sometimes they wouldn’t be ready to actually sleep until a slightly less civilized hour but given their circumstances, who could blame them?). Adam would fall asleep like a normal human person, usually without too much trouble. And then he would wake up at two or three in the morning to find Takashi lying there on the other side of the bed on his tablet, messing around with work stuff or watching a movie with the sound off or reading a book or something he had apparently hoped to do without waking Adam up. Or sometimes Takashi would just toss and turn all night and finally give up around four and start the coffee going. He did have nightmares once in a while--they both did, but at least they weren’t a regular occurrence, not regular enough to explain this.

Mostly Takashi just couldn’t fall asleep, or couldn’t stay asleep once he did.

Granted, it didn’t happen every night. There were those rare nights when Takashi fell into bed and didn’t move until his alarm went off the next morning. But they were getting fewer and farther between all the time. Adam was sure there was a perfectly benign explanation for this. It was probably just stress, and there were plenty of things they could try to mitigate that. But, well… if Takashi wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t sleeping, for more reasons than one.

The last straw was the day Adam took Takashi some lunch and found him in his office with his head down on his desk, bottle of over-the-counter painkillers side-by-side with an alarmingly huge and nearly empty coffee cup at his elbow--almost certainly black, almost certainly not decaf, the day after Takashi had been up half the night dicking around with work stuff on his tablet on the other side of the bed.

“Hey.” Adam scooted around behind him and gently shook his shoulder. “You okay?”

“Huh?” Takashi grunted and sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Oh. Hey. Yeah. I just…” He shook his head. “Just feeling kind of crappy today. Nothing major, just… I dunno. Tired, I guess.”

“Well--” Adam took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose to ward off a headache of his own. “I’m just spitballing here but you’re probably feeling crappy because you’re trying to compensate for not sleeping with… whatever the hell was in this.” He picked up the nearly-empty huge coffee cup and wiggled it gently for emphasis. “Did you fill this with full-caf black coffee and chug it with--” He put the cup down and wiggled the bottle. “-- these ?”

“Adam…” Takashi put his head back down and groaned. “I--yes. Okay? Yes. I had three briefings to get through before lunch and I felt like hell, what was I supposed to do?” He sat up, scrubbed his flesh-and-blood hand over his eyes, and huffed out a sigh. “Can we not do this right now? I get it. You’re worried and I don’t blame you but can we please talk about it later?”

Adam clenched his jaw.

He mashed the panel to close the office door, grabbed the chair on the other side of Takashi’s desk, pulled it around next to Takashi’s, turned it backwards, and sat down, crossing his arms over the back and resting his chin on them and pinning Takashi down with a gaze that said, in no uncertain terms, that they were absofuckinglutely going to do this right now.

“That’s a ‘no,’ isn’t it.”

“It is a ‘no.’ Go to the doctor.”

“I’m not--” Takashi shook his head. “I’m just tired. I’m not going to blow off half my shift and and tie Medical up for however long it takes them to check me out because I’m tired. We’re all tired!”

“Yeah, we are,” Adam said. “But most of us aren’t drinking coffee by the pot just to get through the morning. You’re not ‘tired,’ you are sleep-deprived and it’s getting worse.” He picked up the coffee cup again. “How much longer are you going to keep doing this? Until you pass out on the bridge in the middle of a combat zone?”

“I am not going to pass out on the bridge! Look--” Takashi put his head back down on the desk. “Adam… I get it. Okay? I do. But we’ve been over this. You don’t have to worry about that anymore. I’m okay. It’s gone. It’s not going to come back.”

Adam opened his mouth to say but what if it does and stopped himself. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second and then decided to try a different tactic. “You know I’m a good pilot, right?”

“Wh--of course I know that. Why would you think--” Takashi threw up his hands. “What does this even have to do with--”

“You know what the Black Lion can do, even by itself. You’ve flown the other one, Takashi, you know what it’s capable of. But I get out there and it’s like… I sneeze and you’re wanting to send me backup. Why do you keep doing that? Why do you get so nervous every time I fly a mission when you know damn well I can handle it?”

“You know why!”

“Say it.”

“Because every time you fly I remember--” Takashi stopped cold, right there, as if he’d been slapped upside the head by his own brain. “I remember what happened to you on this side and it scares the hell out of me ,” he finished slowly, and sighed.

“Okay.” Adam nodded. “And I remember what happened to you on my side, and right now it’s scaring the hell out of me. Look. I know it’s probably nothing, it’s probably just stress or something but I’d just…” He reached over with his flesh-and-blood hand and took Takashi’s. “I’d feel a lot better if you go get checked out. Humor me? Please?” One corner of his mouth tugged upward. “I’ll let you send the MFEs to babysit me next mission if you do.”

Takashi looked at Adam out of the corner of his eye, with a little half-a-smile of his own. “All the MFEs?”

“All of them.”

“Okay. Okay.” Takashi laughed and squeezed Adam’s hand and nodded. “I’ll go first thing in the morning. Promise.”

He actually kept that promise. And now Adam hoped like hell Takashi knew he was kidding about the MFE thing.

Adam had just landed from a training flight early in the afternoon when his phone rang. Garrison Med., it said. Huh. What was Medical calling him about? Probably just for a follow-up on his arm or something, he figured.

“Hello?”

“Hi, could I speak to Commander Wolf, please?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Dr. Vasquez from Garrison Medical. Do you have a minute?”

“Ah--” Adam ducked into a currently-unused office and shut the door. “Sure, what’s up?”

“I need to talk to you about your husband.”

Adam felt the floor drop out from under him.

He’d gotten this call before. On the other side.

I need to talk to you about your husband.

The memories of those exact words and everything that came after them all came rushing back at once and they hit Adam like a battering ram slamming full force into his stomach and he was not ready for it.

His right hand went cold and numb, and his left washed over with the same tactile-radio-static sensation as when they’d first powered it up. His vision went black around the edges. Somehow he felt his way to the nearest chair and collapsed into it before his legs gave out entirely. He squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, trying to force himself to breathe slowly and deeply instead of just gulping air like a beached fish , trying desperately to bargain with the cold slimy thing he could feel squirming up into his chest and wrapping its long clammy fingers around his heart and his lungs and threatening to squeeze, begging it to wait, please, just wait a minute, if it would just let him hear the doctor out first, once they hung up then he could punch something or scream or vomit or whatever it would take to get the cold slimy thing out of his system if trying to breathe through the panic didn’t work this time but not yet, not now, just wait, please, please just wait one fucking minute…

“Commander? Are you there?”

Adam heard that, and he knew he should probably respond to it somehow, but if he tried to come up with a coherent response that took his attention off trying to breathe and the cold slimy thing tightened its grip. Because he’d gotten this phone call before and heard those words before and he remembered what they had meant on that side, and the more he tried not to think about what came after I need to talk to you about your husband, the more he tried not to think about the hospital room Takashi would never leave, the more he did think about it and those icy fingers tightened around his lungs just a little bit more...

“It’s not,” Adam managed to wheeze. “It’s not back, is it?”

“Is what b--oh. Oh! Oh no!” Dr. Vasquez cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Commander, I didn’t mean to alarm you--I know his history and I should have known better. I’m sorry.” A long sigh. “Let me start over. Overall, he’s fine. Nothing serious at all. No sign of a relapse. Maybe some minor nutritional deficiencies but nothing some extra fruit and vegetables a couple times a day or a decent multivitamin won’t fix.”

“Oh.” Little by little, Adam got his breathing under control as this sunk in. Fruit. Vegetables. A vitamin. That was it. It was okay. It was going to be okay. Takashi wasn’t sick. He wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t. He was okay. It was going to be okay. Slowly, the cold thing in Adam’s chest released its grip and shrunk away, scurrying back to wherever it hid, at least for now. “That’s… that’s good. Then why did you need to, uh...”

“Well… there’s one other thing I’m concerned about--again, it’s not too serious at this point but it’s definitely something we need to try and take care of while things are quiet. And, well... he kind of fought me on it, so I was hoping you could reason with him.”

“Well… I’ll try.”

“Let me ask you something… how much sleep would you say he’s getting?” Dr. Vasquez asked this in an odd tone of voice. As if he’d been given an answer, but an answer he was inclined to take with a grain of salt. Or maybe several grains. Or even, perhaps, the whole damn shaker.

Oh boy, Adam thought, here we go. “How much did he tell you he’s getting?” he asked.

“About six hours a night, on average. Would you say that’s a fair estimate?”

Adam’s eye twitched. “I would say that’s an... extremely generous estimate,” he said. “Maybe six on a good night. Usually more like four. Sometimes less.”

A dry chuckle. “That’s what I figured. He’s showing some signs of sleep deprivation. I understand what he does and what kind of hours he has to put in, but when things are quiet like they are now, he needs to take advantage of that. I offered to prescribe him some mild sleeping pills, but… well… that didn’t go over very well, let’s just leave it at that.”

Adam winced. Yeah. Anything that would knock him out that he couldn’t shake off was going to be a hard no. A very hard no. Hard enough that Takashi might very well have been fighting back his own long-fingered cold slimy thing during that conversation with the doctor, for reasons Adam understood all too well.

“So I have a few other things you might suggest to him, but if nothing else works, please consider trying to talk him into the sedative?”

Adam rubbed his eyes. “Okay. Let’s start with those other things...”

It took a few minutes for Adam to trust his legs again after he hung up. In the meantime, he called to see if his therapist could squeeze him in for half an hour, if for no other reason than to warn her that their next regular appointment was probably going to be a “fun” one.

“Hey,” Takashi said to him when he got home that evening with a bag of takeout. “You okay? I saw you going into Dr. Sung’s office today. Don’t you usually go on Tuesdays?”

“I saw you coming out,” Adam replied. “You usually go on Thursdays.”

“Yeah.” Takashi set the bag down on the kitchen counter and wrapped his arms tight around Adam. “Rough day for both of us, huh?”

“Guess so.” Adam buried his face in the side of Takashi’s neck and took a deep breath, letting the scent of soap and aftershave and Takashi soothe his still-turbulent mind. “You first?”

“The doctor said something that almost set me off. It’s nothing serious,” Takashi said quickly, tightening his arms around Adam as he did. “I’m fine. He just suggested something and he couldn’t have known it was going to--to bring some bad stuff back, but… what about you?”

“Your doctor said something that almost set me off,” Adam sighed and snuggled into Takashi’s shoulder. “And...same. Just… the way he started, it was just--it was the same way your doctor on my side started when you--” He shook his head. Takashi held him tighter to let him know he didn’t have to finish that sentence.

“Shit. I’m sorry.” After a long pause, Takashi picked his head up off Adam’s shoulder. “Wait. What was he calling you for? Did he… ah, shit.” He let out a deep sigh. “He wanted you to try and talk me into the damn sleeping pills, didn’t he?”

“He asked me to think about it,” Adam said, rubbing Takashi’s back, wincing a little as he felt the muscles under his hand tensing up in spite of that. “But I’m not going to do that unless--look. Takashi. I know.” He held up his left hand where Takashi could see it. His new arm was an Altean-tech refurb of the previous one, which had been the same kind of Galra arm Takashi once had. “Believe me. I know . I know why.” He wrapped both arms around Takashi’s shoulders again. “You don’t have to. Your doctor gave me a list of a lot of other stuff we can try. Okay?”

Takashi let out a shaky breath and dropped his forehead back onto Adam’s shoulder. “Okay,” he said, arms tight around Adam’s waist. “Yeah, actually… Dr. Sung gave me a list of a lot of other stuff too.”

“Well, that’s good.” He patted Takashi’s back. “You want to talk about it over dinner? We probably ought to start eating that before it gets cold.”

First thing on the new combined list: melatonin. And even though both of the medical professionals involved had explained what it was and more importantly, what it wasn’t, Adam suspected it was probably going to also be a pretty hard sell . Because at least in his mind, the gap between pill that might maybe help you sleep if you want to and pill that will make you sleep whether you want to or not was entirely too narrow for comfort. And generally, it appeared to come in pill form.

But not always. After a little searching, he found that it came in gummy form too. Well… Takashi loved Swedish Fish and those were gummies so… maybe he’d eat a melatonin gummy?

“No,” Takashi said firmly. “No sleeping pills.”

Yeah, Adam was afraid this was going to happen. “It’s not a sedative,” he explained gently. “It doesn’t make you go to sleep, it’s just--it’s the same stuff your brain makes to tell you it’s time to go to bed, is all.”

“Well, it sounds like a sleeping pill.”

“It’s not. It’s just--”

“How do you know? Have you ever taken it?” Takashi snapped--and immediately hung his head. “I’m sorry. That was out of line.”

“No it wasn’t.” Adam sighed. “You’re right. I haven’t so… no, I don’t really know for sure how it works or what it feels like. But I can.” He nodded and looked up, right into Takashi’s eyes. “I’ll try it first.”

Oh God! he thought as soon as the words were out of his mouth, what the hell am I saying?

“Adam! You-” Takashi’s eyes went wide. “You don’t have to do that!”

“Well, I’m going to,” Adam continued, even as some little voice in the back of his head said excuse me what no what are you doing stop it, “Because from what the doctor said, it sounds like it shouldn’t be… a problem. I’ll get a bottle of gummies tomorrow and eat one, if it freaks me out we’ll just throw it away and try something else. And if it doesn’t... would that convince you to try one?”

Takashi sighed and squeezed Adam’s shoulder. “Okay. Yeah. That’s… that’s fair.”

Outside of its bottle, the little gummy in Adam’s hand looked absolutely no different from the kind that came from the candy aisle. It was purple, about the size of his thumbnail, and shaped like a heart. It was even coated with the same dusting of fine sparkly sugar as a plain old gummy candy. Nothing whatsoever about it struck him as the least bit sinister.

It’s just a little gummy heart that’s a hop, skip, and jump away from a literal goddamn sleeping pill! Adam’s mind babbled, and he told it gently but firmly to shut up.

Takashi sat on the other side of the kitchen table, a worried gaze Adam would have found kind of cute under other circumstances flicking back and forth from his face to his gummy-holding hand to the bottle on the table and back again.

“You sure about this?” Takashi said.

Adam answered that by steeling his nerves and popping the little heart into his mouth. Just a gummy, he told himself firmly as he chewed. It’s just candy. That’s all. Just a gummy. And it did chew and taste just like any old candy-aisle gummy, sugary crunch and all, and that helped. It helped a lot.

He swallowed. It went down and stayed down.

Well, that wasn’t so bad.

The look on Takashi’s face shifted a little toward morbid fascination. “What did it taste like?”

“Grape.”

“Just grape? Not, y’know… medicine-y or anything?”

“Nope.” Adam shrugged. “Just grape. Pretty good, actually.”

“Huh. That sounds okay.”

They left the bottle on the kitchen table and retired to the living room then. Takashi turned the TV on and flipped around until he found something worth watching, and Adam snuggled up against his side.

Takashi asked him if he was okay every once in a while, and Adam kept answering that in the affirmative. Truth be told, he really didn’t feel… anything. He certainly didn’t feel drugged, that was a positive, but if he didn’t feel anything then maybe this wasn’t going to work anyw…

At first, Adam chalked what began to happen next up to him being nice and relaxed in a nice dark room with a nice warm husband to lean on, especially considering how mentally exhausting the last two days had been. There was that call from the doctor and near miss with a full-on panic attack the day before, followed by a crappy night’s sleep, and that followed by a hard day of training flights with the MFE team and having to have the “your fighters are not Lions, they’re not going to just magically turn into Lions, that’s not how this works, stop trying to make Voltron-2 happen, it’s not going to happen, no Cadet Rizavi I’m sorry but you are not going to be a leg” talk with them yet again...

Suddenly, he found himself just sort of tuning out the movie and nodding off, his head sliding down Takashi’s chest, and man the bed would feel good right about now, wouldn’t it? Not that Takashi’s chest wasn’t comfy but the pillow, yeah, that’s what he was talking abo--

YOU TOOK A SLEEPING PILL, YOU IDIOT!!! Adam’s mind screamed at him.

He snapped back upright, eyes open wide, heart racing, breath a little ragged, and… and just like that… he was awake. Completely awake. Totally lucid. Clear-headed. Awake.

Takashi watched him carefully. “Is it working?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Are you... are you okay with it working?”

Adam thought about that. He still didn’t feel drugged at all . Still a little like bed would be a good idea. But awake. So it was just like getting sleepy on his own, and he could shake it off if he really wanted to. And once that registered, his fight-or-flight response settled down, leaving him feeling pretty much normal.

“Yeah,” Adam said. “‘M okay. Just…” A huge yawn caught him off-guard, and he laughed a little. “Think I’m gonna go to bed.”

Takashi turned their movie off and got up, offering Adam a hand up off the couch.

He fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, and as far as he could remember he didn’t wake up until the alarm went off the next morning, when his eyes opened right up and he sat up feeling pretty okay. No, not just okay… he felt great. Physically energetic. Mentally sharp. Unusually well-rested all around. He still didn’t feel like he’d been drugged, no residual brain fog or missing time or any sort of hangover at all. Weird dreams, though. Not bad weird, just… really vivid and if his brain did decide to up and throw a nightmare at him when he’d taken this stuff that could be a potential problem, but overall Adam found the whole experience to be a net positive.

“All right,” Takashi sighed after Adam gave him a full report of this, “all right, I’ll try it.”

And he did try. He really did, and Adam was proud of him for trying, but...

After the previous night’s experiment laid his concerns to rest (or so they both thought), Takashi seemed pretty okay with the idea of trying a melatonin gummy himself. And an hour after dinner, he opened up the bottle, tipped an orange sugar-crusted heart into his hand, popped it into his mouth, and chewed for a bit.

“How is it?” Adam asked while he chewed, and Takashi raised an eyebrow and went “mmm!” in a tone that suggested pleasant surprise that the thing did in fact taste just like a normal orange gummy.

But then he tried to swallow. Key word: tried.

He glanced at Adam out of the corner of his eye. Uh-oh, that look said.

“You okay?” Adam asked, hoping Takashi couldn’t tell he was mentally running drills for everything from the Heimlich maneuver to making good and sure he wasn’t standing between Takashi and the kitchen sink.

Takashi nodded, tried to swallow again, and still couldn’t.

And he was trying, Adam could see that, but… it was as if actually swallowing the gummy was the point where all the emotional scar tissue around the whole idea of sleeping pills and anything remotely like them slammed on the brakes and went NOPE NOT DOING THAT.

“Okay,” Adam said, laying his flesh-and-blood hand on Takashi’s back. “It’s okay. You don’t have to.”

Takashi shook his head and held up a hand-- I can do it. Just give me a minute.

“Do you need some water?”

Takashi shook his head again and tried again to force the damn gummy down while Adam rubbed his back and he still couldn’t, and finally he took a deep breath in through his nose, shut his eyes tight, and gulped .

“Ugh,” he said once he was reasonably sure it was down, with a little sheepish laugh. “That, uh… could have gone worse, I guess?”

“Hey, you did great.” Adam patted his shoulder and steered him towards the living room to finish the previous night's movie.

But after all that, it didn’t work nearly as well on Takashi as it had on Adam. He got sleepy in a way he later said felt perfectly natural, and he fell asleep reasonably quickly once they were in bed, but he just couldn’t stay asleep. He even tried two of them the next night, bless him, but the results were about the same… and he still had trouble convincing himself to swallow them. In the end, he decided they just weren’t worth it, and Adam agreed.

He kept the bottle of gummies anyway, figuring maybe he could get some use out of them once in a while.

Adam did find some melatonin-fortified beverages a couple of days later and again offered to be Takashi’s guinea pig, but he took one sip and knew immediately that it wasn’t going to fly. It was foul. It was a one-two punch to his tongue: the chemical sickly-sweetness of fake sugar followed up by an artificial generic “fruit” flavoring that tasted like it had been synthesized by someone who had never tasted a fruit and had only the vaguest idea of what a fruit even was.

He spat the stuff into the kitchen sink, chugged a glass of water to clear the Godawful medicine-y aftertaste off his tongue (and the ghost of the drink’s flavor still haunted his taste buds for two days), and poured the rest out. So much for that.

After that, Adam figured pretty much anything else on the list that sounded, looked, smelled, or tasted anything like medicine and had to be eaten, drunk, or otherwise swallowed was a no-go.

Normal food, though? That was okay. Turkey casserole for dinner? A mug of warm milk and honey half an hour before bed? That was fine.

But they didn’t do a damn thing.

Adam ran into Coran the next day on his way to Black-2’s hangar and figured what the hell, maybe there’s some Altean ...something that might help. And as luck would have it, Coran did have an old family recipe for a perfectly safe, normal-food-based insomnia remedy!

Well… “normal” to Coran, which, uh…

...oh God.

Oh dear God, no.

Halfway through a list of ingredients that included two fingers of lukewarm nunvill and the bile sac of a Taranian blood louse, Adam started to wish he’d never asked.

They laid down a few new rules--for both of them, because Adam wasn’t going to ask Takashi to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself. They implemented a strict “no caffeine after lunch” rule. They implemented an even stricter “no screens, no work, no exercise, nothing but official bedroom business i.e. sleep and/or sex” rule in the bedroom. They set a firm 22:00 bedtime (with exceptions for deployment situations and some wiggle room for that other official bedroom business).

They tried adjusting the thermostat, both ways. They tried more blankets. Fewer blankets. Two pillows. Three pillows. They tried a fan. A white noise generator app. Assorted soft music. Boring podcasts. Guided meditation. Getting up and going for a run or to the gym or whatever to burn excess energy off instead of lying there tossing and turning ( thanks, Keith ) which more often than not turned into Takashi getting up at three in the morning to go for a run and just staying up after he got back. Silently reciting as many prime numbers as he could ( thanks, Matt ). Silently reciting pi to as many digits as he could remember ( thanks, Pidge ). A warm bath right before bedtime ( thanks, Allura ). A really good back rub that did technically go quite well but instead led to the other kind of official bedroom business.

None of it worked for more than a night or two, if it worked at all.

But Adam wasn’t ready to give up and have the sleeping pill talk with Takashi just yet. There had to be something else they could try before it came to that.

It would be another two weeks before he got a chance to, though.

Space pirates again. At least, that’s what it looked like--random attacks on mining outposts and such, by a mishmash of Galra fighter craft of various ages and states of repair and the occasional banged-up warship. But some of them had more firepower than a banged-up pirate fighter or warship should have had, and some of it looked suspiciously fresh and new, and a whole hell of a lot of it looked like it had come from Sendak’s posthumous fan club. There was no way in hell a pack of space pirates, however well organized and disciplined, could have taken a fleet of Sendak’s loyalists by force, which likely meant someone was dealing guns out here and that wasn’t good for anyone.

Between the Atlas itself, the Voltron team, and Black-2 and the MFE team, they’d managed to destroy most of the warships right away. A fair few stray fighters got loose though, and the ones whose pilots didn’t just decide to leave their days of space piracy behind them and run like hell to start a new life somewhere else were likely to be trying to meet up with other pirate warships.

So for the last couple of days, they’d been patrolling all around the Milky Way, looking for any sign of stray fighters or their new motherships or whoever was supplying them with weapons, and that was what Adam and Black-2 were doing now.

Adam didn’t mind the patrol missions. They were kind of dull if whatever they were patrolling for wasn’t showing itself, and there was something weirdly hypnotic about the ambient noise inside Black-2 that made it hard to stay focused on long patrols like this without some music playing. But at least he was allowed to do that--or, more accurately, nobody whose opinion mattered gave him any shit about blasting some music to stay alert while he was out on patrol.

And besides--he’d missed a lot of new releases on his side, and he’d been finding some interesting differences in lyrics and arrangements between stuff he knew from his side and the version of the same track that came out on this side, and the long patrols gave him time to listen to all this interesting stuff that he otherwise wouldn’t really get to sit down and listen to.

He was halfway through a nine-hour-long playlist of energetic electronic music he’d entitled “No Sleep Til Kepler-22b” when he heard Takashi hailing him on their private channel.

“Hey,” Takashi said. “How’s it going out there?”

Adam turned his music down and snorted out a laugh. “Quiet,” he replied.

“Good quiet or bad quiet?”

“Dunno but I’m leaning ‘bad’ because there are a whole bunch of free-floating space pirate fighters with mad weaponry out here somewhere and I don’t have eyes on any of them. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to check with you on something.” Takashi cleared his throat. “The, uh… the ‘no work in the bedroom’ rule--”

“Wait.” What was that? Did something move out there? Adam shut off the music altogether and squinted into the dark space off his port side. Black-2 didn’t seem to register a threat, but…

“What’s going on?”

“I thought I saw… it’s nothing. Never mind. Anyway. The ‘no work in the bedroom’ rule.”

“Yeah, I was wondering, our cabin’s just… y’know, pretty much the whole room’s a bedroom, so…” Takashi laughed sheepishly. “What’s the protocol here?”

“You’re asking me?” No, Adam definitely saw something move out there, and he silently asked Black-2 to take a closer look off their port side, for every definition of “look” it knew how to do. “You’re the captain, you make that call.”

“Oh hell no,” Takashi said, and they both laughed. “Not without asking you, I’m not.”

“Well…” Yeah. Something was definitely moving out there, but Adam couldn’t tell quite what it was and neither could Black-2 with any more specificity than multiple small anomalous energy signatures, port side . Adam’s grip on Black-2’s control sticks tightened, just a little, ready to… well, he didn’t know exactly, but he had a feeling he was about to. “I guess… do what you have to do? Seeing as how we’re deployed in a combat zone and--ah, fuck!”

Thanks to Adam’s reflexes, or Black-2’s, or a little of both, almost none of the volley of shots that appeared to come out of vaguely shimmering empty black space off to Adam’s port side found their target, and the two that did barely grazed Black-2’s shoulder and wing. The damage self-repaired almost before Adam could acknowledge it.

But there they were, right on top of him now: Galra fighters, somewhere between ten and fifteen of them shimmering into visibility right off his port side, same pirate insignia as the ones that’d gotten away a couple days ago. They’d been cloaked. And really well, too--this was new stuff, it hadn’t even shown up on Black-2’s scanners until just before they decloaked. And it wasn’t the kind of thing Sendak’s fan club did-- Lotor’s faction was the one that liked the sneaky shit. So the space pirates were getting dangerous new toys from more than one faction. How the hell were they getting their hands on this stuff!?

Obviously this bunch couldn’t cloak and attack at the same time, though, and Adam probably had at least a solid two or three minutes before they could cloak again. He decided to take advantage of that. Help me get some breathing room, he told Black-2, and Black-2 did.

“Adam!?” There was a rough edge in Takashi’s voice all of a sudden that made Adam wince. “What’s happening?”

“Small formation of pirate fighters just dropped cloak and asked me to dance. I told them I’m a married man but they won’t take no for an answer.”

“Okay. I’ve got your location and--wait, did you say they were cloaked!?”

“Yep.”

“Shit. I’m sending in some--” A long pause. Then a sigh. “Do you need backup?”

Adam managed a bit of a smile. He actually asked that time. That was progress. “Don’t think so. Fifteen fighters max, newer models but no sign of a warship and I can probably take them before they can recloak. No sense pulling anyone else off their patrol for this yet, I’ll let you know if that changes. I’ll try and bring back some big enough pieces for the engineers to get a better look at their cloaking tech but no promises.”

“Got it.” Takashi let out a long breath, a little shaky at the end. “Give ‘em hell, baby.”

“Call you back soon as it’s clear.” Adam said, and grinned. You heard the captain, he thought, and he felt Black-2 send back something like a grin of its own. One with lots of very sharp teeth.

For a ship designed as one of a set of five, Black-2 was adapting to its new life as a solo fighter remarkably well. True to Adam’s word, he took out all of the fighters before they could recharge their cloaking devices. And he did save a few choice bits of them, plus one terrified space pirate who managed to eject just before his fighter went up in smoke, who then found himself floating in space with little hope of rescue by his fellow pirates, and who was so grateful to be scooped up alive in Black-2’s mouth that he cheerfully allowed Adam to put him in restraints and then sat peacefully and quietly in the cargo hold all the way back to the Atlas... where he then proceeded to sing like a canary. He spent the next few hours in his brig cell enthusiastically spilling everything he knew about how those cloaking devices worked and where they’d come from and how they’d found their way into a bunch of pirate fighters. He didn’t know much in the way of specifics beyond the name of the star system they’d visited to have the stuff installed and the name of a planet that housed a skeevier version of the Space Mall where their captain had fenced some stuff to pay for their black-market upgrades, but it was more than they’d had before.

They had some new leads to chase, and Pidge had some cloaking tech to play with and help develop countermeasures for, and overall it had been… well, not the best day but at least not the worst.

The most annoying thing about these deployments, Adam figured, was that his and Takashi’s shifts rarely lined up such that they were both off duty at the same time. But today, at least, they had a few precious hours in their cabin together, even if those hours were technically in the middle of the night.

Takashi was still up when Adam got out of debrief and came shuffling in, and didn’t even wait for Adam to get out of his Paladin armor before folding him into a big, tight hug.

“You okay?” Takashi asked, and Adam nodded and sighed into Takashi’s shoulder. God, Takashi gave the best hugs, and the very best were the post-mission hugs even though it broke Adam’s heart a little to think about why Takashi insisted on them. Adam was the taller of the pair by a couple of inches, but those post-mission hugs made him feel... small, somehow. Not in a bad way. Just warm and safe and loved and home, even when home was half a universe away.

“Yeah,” Adam mumbled into Takashi’s shoulder. “‘M okay. How about you?”

“Better now.”

“Good.”

They stayed there like that for a while, and then Takashi finally let Adam go long enough for him to get out of his armor and into some sweatpants and a T-shirt. He turned the lights off and crawled into bed next to Takashi and cuddled up against his side, and Takashi draped an arm over his shoulders.

After the better part of an hour of lying there staring at the wall in the dark because his eyes just wouldn’t stay closed, Adam realized he still had some adrenaline flowing and he thought about maybe heading up to the training deck to burn it off.

Yeah. That was a good idea. No sense in lying there tired-but-wired half the night and keeping Takashi awake, it was hard enough for the poor guy to get a decent night’s sleep as it was. “Hey,” he said, patting Takashi’s stomach. “Lemme up. I can’t sleep.”

No response.

“Takashi?”

Still no response. Except… was that a snore?

Adam carefully wriggled out from under Takashi’s arm and stood up.

He didn’t move.

Adam stood there dumbfounded, watching him for a while. He still didn’t move. His chest rose and fell in a slow, easy rhythm. He even snored a little, very softly, once in a while.

He was out.

“...Takashi, what the hell.”

It wasn’t a fluke, either. It wasn’t just one of those rare nights when Takashi was just too tired to not sleep. It happened again. And again. On the rare occasions when they did end up with a few off-duty night hours together, Takashi would lie down, kiss Adam goodnight and maybe mumble “night, babe” and boom. Out. And he wouldn’t wake up until either his alarm or Adam’s went off or they got rattled out of bed to go deal with more space pirates.

Adam guesstimated that Takashi had slept more in the last two days the Atlas was out than he had in the entire week before they deployed.

He wasn’t complaining, absolutely not, obviously Takashi needed the sleep because even after just these few days and even with tension and adrenaline running high Adam could see a change for the better in his mood and energy level and it was great that he was finally getting some good rest but… but no, seriously, Takashi--what the hell!?

Well, maybe whatever was keeping him awake at night had passed and now they didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

Or so Adam thought until the first night after they got back to Earth, when Adam woke up at four in the morning to find Takashi’s side of the bed empty and his running shoes gone.

Dammit. Back to the drawing board.

Maybe, Adam thought at some point, taking a little time here and there to dink around with some sort of hobby once in a while would help Takashi unwind a little. Well, it would help both of them, but...

It also occurred to Adam that neither he nor Takashi had much in the way of hobbies these days. Actually… that wasn’t entirely true. Adam did have one, but the music stores were still recovering from the Galra invasion and didn’t have much in the way of inventory yet, and there was only so much he could do with his laptop and a piano in the Garrison rec center that desperately needed tuned. He wasn’t feeling very creative lately anyway, and the few times he sat down at the piano all he did was halfheartedly plunk out scales for a while.

It was a little harder to find a good fit for Takashi. He liked going to the gym and the training deck, but didn’t really count that as a proper hobby. He wasn’t musically or artistically inclined. He didn’t particularly enjoy cooking, which was a mixed blessing because the man could burn cornflakes. He’d had a hoverbike he liked to tinker with at some point, but that had been missing and presumed dead since the invasion and the hoverbike dealers were in about the same pickle as the music stores and nobody was selling their used ones. And it wasn’t as if Takashi could load the damn thing on the Atlas and take it with him to go joyriding around on alien planets.

While they were chewing this over, Adam realized that all this time, something had been missing from their house.

He had not seen any of the paraphernalia here that Takashi had collected on the other side. None of the rule books. None of the little figurines. And none of the dice.

God, the dice.

The dice were practically a hobby in and of themselves. Takashi had so many damn dice, all shapes and sizes and colors and materials, plastic ones and glass ones and metal ones and wooden ones and even some stone ones and crystal ones and they were all over the house, stray dice turning up in every drawer and box and bag and in the bottom of the washing machine and no matter how many dice he had it was never enough, never, he was always coming home with yet another set of fancy dice...

Also missing: the occasional group of rowdy cadets in the rec center, which as they got older turned into a group of rowdy pilots and instructors in the rec center and sometimes in someone’s house, occasionally their house, and they all brought their own books and figurines and bags of dice…

“Hey,” Takashi said when Adam described all of this to him, “that sounds kind of like Monsters and Mana! That’s a great idea!”

Unfortunately, tabletop gaming wasn’t really a thing one could just sit down and do without some wrangling of gaming buddies, and Takashi’s potential gaming buddies would be Coran and the Paladins, and, well… there were scheduling issues.

It was something to think about, at least…

A couple of people had suggested aromatherapy, and at first Adam thought that was all a bunch of woo but then he did some research. Actually, what he did was bend that no-screens-in-the-bedroom rule and crawl the Net at three in the morning while Takashi did whatever he was doing on his tablet in the living room. The general consensus appeared to be something like “won’t hurt, might help.” So he figured it was worth a try.

He made a quick stop after his shift the next evening and came home with a little round thing and several small bottles.

Water went into the round thing. A few drops of scented oil went into the water. The top of the round thing went on, he turned the round thing on, and the round thing began to gently release a stream of scented vapor into the bedroom. And immediately, Adam knew deep down in his heart that this was a mistake that would come back to haunt him somehow.

Lavender had been at the top of the “smells that make you sleepy” list. Maybe that effect took longer to kick in, because all it was doing right now was making the bedroom smell like a grandma.

He let the round thing run anyway. Wouldn’t hurt, might help... right?

Right.

Lavender didn’t have any discernible impact on Takashi’s sleeping patterns. Neither did any of the other scents Adam had brought home and worse, they all smelled like grandmas. Or vape shops. Or grandmas in vape shops. The one that actually smelled pleasant and not at all like a grandma or a vape shop or any combination thereof? That one made Adam sneeze violently until he shut off the round thing and opened the windows for a few minutes.

But the last straw was that one morning after the round thing had spent the night burping vetiver, whatever the hell a vetiver was, into the bedroom. That one morning when Adam woke up to the pleasant surprise of a warm husband in the bed with him, one of those rare mornings when Takashi had actually come back to bed AND managed to sneak back in without waking Adam up. That one morning when they were actually in bed, together and awake yet pleasantly drowsy, with plenty of time to spare before they had to get up and get ready for their shifts, that one morning when things started getting a little cuddly, and then a little frisky, and then a little beyond frisky, and then…

And then…

And then Takashi plunked his forehead down on Adam’s shoulder and just… stopped.

“Hey.” Adam petted the back of his head. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry. It’s just… I can’t.” Takashi rolled over and huffed out a sigh. “It smells like a grandma in here.”

Two hours later, on his way out the door to work, Adam threw the round thing and every single bottle of oil into the recycling bin as hard as he could.

Later that afternoon Adam did what he figured he should have done instead of asking Coran--he chased Hunk down and asked him about the sleepy food thing. He’d gotten a limited list from the doctor, but figured maybe asking someone who actually knew normal Earth human food would get him a little more to go on. It did get him a much more appetizing list of stuff to try--bananas, almonds, dark chocolate, fatty fish, and so on.

None of that worked either, but at least it was tasty and more importantly, did not involve bile sacs.

They briefly revisited the sleep-inducing sound idea when Lance brought them a neat little crystal tabletop fountain thing he’d impulse-bought from the offworlders’ market and then decided he didn’t really want after all.

Of course that was only half the story, and the rest of it came out with just a little gentle prodding. He’d gotten it for Allura. And… well… look, in Lance’s defense, he couldn’t have known that someone could be allergic to a hunk of crystal, that just wasn’t a concept this poor Earth human boy had ever really encountered, and he was very sorry and managed to keep his mouth shut and not comment on the swelling and immediately whisked the damn thing away from her as fast as he could.

Well, it was small and attractive and it made a pleasant burbling noise so into the bedroom it went.

The burbling noise was indeed very pleasant. Very relaxing.

Until about an hour after Adam and Takashi went to bed.

And then they had a problem. No allergies to rocks here, though… no, this was just good old fashioned power of suggestion.

Adam opened his eyes, suddenly extremely aware of how long it had been since he’d last been to the bathroom. He got up, took care of that, came back to bed, and fell asleep thinking that was the end of it. He woke up again barely an hour later from one of those dreams where he desperately needed to pee and every toilet and urinal he came across was either occupied or out of order or meant for aliens with not-even-remotely-humanoid pants parts. And then he finally got back to sleep again … only to be awakened when Takashi grumbled and got up to pee and came back for all of half an hour before he gave up and got up again, picking up his running shoes on his way out of the bedroom. It was almost four in the morning, Adam had slept for maybe an hour and a half, and he wasn’t even the one with the insomnia problem.

He got up, picked up the fountain, carried it into their bathroom, and went back to bed.

At this point, they had tried everything.

Well… almost everything.

There was one last trick up Adam’s sleeve: that other kind of official bedroom business. Oh, they’d sort of gone into that territory with the back rub thing but no, Adam wasn’t thinking of the lazy backrub kind of other official bedroom business, not this time. He was thinking about the kind that would leave them both absolutely, totally, completely physically and mentally drained and ready to just pass out quietly and already conveniently in a bed.

If that didn’t work, he didn’t know what the hell else to do other than ask Takashi to please try half a sleeping pill. And dammit, Adam did not want to do that to him, he understood why that was such a hard no, he understood it better than anyone, he had the exact same issue for the exact same reasons, and he really, really didn’t want to have to go that route. But he was running out of ideas, and the lack of decent sleep was starting to catch up to Takashi again despite those two inexplicable weeks of eight-hour nights on the Atlas.

It was time.

“Hey,” he said an hour or so after dinner, “I thought maybe we’d turn in early tonight.”

“Adam--” Takashi put down whatever administrative crap he’d brought home with him and rubbed his eyes. “Please don’t start with the sleep thing right now, okay--”

Adam said nothing to that. Not until he pulled Takashi’s chair back a couple of feet, slid between it and the desk, and sat down astride Takashi’s lap, hands on his shoulders.

“I didn’t say ‘sleep,’” he whispered, right into Takashi’s ear, and communicated an idea or two about which kind of official bedroom business he meant with a quick flick of his tongue and a slow slide of his hands down Takashi’s chest.

The reaction was instant, and exactly the one Adam was going for--a sharp hiss. a shiver, and both of Takashi’s hands going straight to his hips. “Mm- hmm, ” he purred against the side of Adam’s neck. “I still owe you from the other day, don’t I?”

“I wasn’t keeping score but…” He cupped Takashi’s face in his hands and kissed him, slow and deep and hungry, just the way Adam knew he liked it best . “I’m not going to argue with that.”

Takashi laughed softly, just warm breath against Adam’s lips, and then he leaned forward and stood up and that floaty arm of his went right under Adam’s ass and lifted him clean up off the floor with his legs wrapped tight around Takashi’s waist and oh God, Adam thought as Takashi carried him off to the bedroom, both of them laughing like teenagers, if this didn’t work he didn’t know what the hell else to do but at least they’d have fun trying…

After three rounds of deliriously athletic sex that more than made up for the Smells Like Grandmas Incident, a change of sheets, and a joint shower that set off a fourth round, Adam pushed up on one elbow and smiled over at the fruits of the evening’s labor: Takashi, out cold, even snoring a little once in a while.

It was just after eleven. A little past their bedtime, but at least Takashi was asleep before midnight.

Adam grinned and settled in next to him, pressing a soft and very careful kiss onto his bare shoulder. Didn’t want to wake him up, after all.

The sound of the front door opening and closing woke Adam up some time later. The other side of the bed was empty. He glanced over at the alarm clock.

0513, it read.

He squinted at the bit of floor next to Takashi’s side of the bed, and noticed his running shoes were absent from the lineup.

So. That was… what, six hours? Six hours was a good start. Less than Adam had hoped for, but five in the morning was not a completely ridiculous time for a more or less normal human person to get up and go for a run. He’d probably be back around seven, still plenty of time to eat a decent breakfast and get ready for work--

Adam heard another noise then.

The cheerful beep! of the coffee machine starting up.

Okay. There was a good explanation for this. Of course there was. There had to be. Maybe Takashi had set the timer on the way out? For it to… start brewing right after he left? For, uh… reasons?

Denial is a hell of a drug, but even the level of denial Adam was currently wallowing in wasn’t deep enough to explain away the sounds of human hands (or, more likely, a human hand and/or a floating cyborg hand) opening the kitchen cabinets and drawers and the fridge and removing dishes and silverware and instant food, and gradually Adam came to the grim realization that Takashi was not, in fact, going out for a run at five in the morning.

He was getting back from a run at five in the morning.

As the sounds of coffee-and-instant-breakfast-making continued in the kitchen Adam felt a little bit of his soul leave his body, turning a little more of his hair white on its way out.

“So,” Keith asked him the next day in the chow hall, “any luck with Shiro’s sleeping problem?”

Adam took a deep breath and opened his mouth to answer that, and instead just dropped his forehead into his hands and groaned.

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah.” Adam sighed as Keith sat down across from him with his lunch. “I think I’m gonna need your help.”

“Sure. What do you need me to do?”

“Come over for dinner sometime this week and we’ll both sit him down and ask him to try half a sleeping pill.”

“Oh hell no,” Keith snorted, and Adam threw up his hands.

“Come on, man! You and I are the only people he’ll listen to and believe me, I don’t like it either, but we have tried literally everything else! ”

“Did he try the getting up and going for a run thing?”

“About three or four nights a week.”

“Oof. What about working out before he goes to bed, y’know, to wear him out--”

“Um... “ Well, technically… “Yes.”

“Turkey? Warm milk?”

“Yes.”

“Uh… meditating?”

“Yes.”

“What about some scented--”

“Yes,” Adam said through clenched teeth.

“Maybe Coran knows some kind of--”

“He does. Hard no.”

“How hard?”

“Nunvill and bile sacs and stuff hard.”

Keith shuddered. “Should have known better than to ask while I’m eating. Okay, so… yeah. This isn’t going to be easy and no promises but I’ll try. It’s weird, though,” he said. “He never had any trouble sleeping in space. I mean… yeah, he had nightmares sometimes, but we’d find him passed out on the couch in the lounge or on the training deck or whatever all the time, even in his armor and everything, he’d just lay down for a minute and boom.”

Adam blinked at him. “You’re kidding me.”

“No! I mean, it’s not like any of us got a solid eight hours in all that often…” Keith paused and made a face. “Well, except Lance but never mind that… but yeah, Shiro probably came the closest, he could take a nap pretty much anywhere in space if he wanted to.”

In space, Adam’s brain echoed. Right. In space… those weeks they spent on the Atlas chasing space pirates around, even with all the stress and adrenaline, when they did get a chance to rest, as soon as Takashi’s head hit the pillow he was out cold for eight solid hours or until rattled out of bed to deal with another pack of space pirates, whichever came first …

And then they came home, and back to tossing and turning…

Clearly there was some key difference between space sleeping and Earth sleeping Adam was missing here, but… what?

It nagged at him for the rest of the day.

What was different? The temperature? No, they kept the thermostats at home and in their cabin on the Atlas at the exact same temperature--a nice, round, just-cool-enough-for-a-nice-thick-blanket twenty degrees Celsius. Was it the humidity? The smell? Should Adam have maybe kept the round thing and seen if someone could synthesize some sort of Essence of Spaceship oil, whatever the hell that might be? Was it the gravity? Sure, natural Earth gravity and artificial gravity were supposed to be the same, but what if there was just the tiniest variance one way or the other, just enough to make all the difference in the world to someone more used to sleeping in one than the other? And if there was, how could that be compensated for on Earth?

It continued to nag at him while he chopped up stuff to turn into a pot of soup. What about the bedding? Did they need new pillows? A new mattress? No, that couldn’t be it, Keith had said Takashi could fall asleep anywhere on the Castle of Lions he had a good mind to, that he’d slept on a crate with a thin emergency blanket over him and no pillow in Black’s cargo bay on the way back to Earth for crying out loud, it couldn’t be the mattress--

A sudden short, soft, but jarring metal-on-metal screech and some unexpected friction against one of his fingertips derailed Adam’s train of thought. He looked down and not for the first time and likely not for the last, he was deeply grateful that his left hand was not the one he’d been born with. Because if that had been his good old flesh-and-blood left hand, tonight’s soup would have had a little slice of fingertip in it.

“Shit, ” he wheezed, and laughed a little. “Okay. Come on, Wolf. Focus.”

Adam dumped the vegetables into a pot, washed his hands, and scrubbed at his eyes. That was the whole problem right now, wasn’t it? He couldn’t focus. And he’d almost ruined his favorite knife by accidentally trying to slice off the tip of one of his Altean space magic metal fingers because he couldn’t focus. Part of that was from worrying about Takashi, and a good part of that was from his own trouble sleeping these last couple weeks, and part of it was…

Well, of course he couldn’t focus, he’d been so preoccupied with trying to figure this out that he’d forgotten to turn his music on. He’d just come straight to the kitchen on autopilot and started dinner and his brain needed some pleasant noise in the place in order to work at maximum capacity , without some music or the TV or something going this house was always just too damn--

He stopped. As if he’d just been slapped upside the head by his own brain.

He let that thought finish itself.

Thought it again.

And again.

“Son of a bitch,” he finally said.

He washed his knife and put it away. Added everything else to the pot that needed to be there, put the lid on, and set the timer. And then sat down to do some Net searches.

That was it. That was the difference.

The house.

Was too.

Damn.

Quiet.

The worst part was, they’d almost figured it out weeks ago.

It had occurred to them that maybe the house was too quiet for sleeping, but they never hit on exactly what sound was the missing piece of the puzzle. They’d tried a fan. They’d tried soft music of a variety of genres. They’d tried ocean sounds. Rain sounds. White noise. Boring spoken word stuff. That damn fountain (which still sat in the master bathroom burbling away and Adam made a mental note to warn Allura not to use that one if Monsters and Mana night ever happened). None of them quite worked, so they figured the ambient noise or lack thereof wasn’t the issue and moved on. It had never occurred to either Adam or Takashi to maybe try space sounds, and now Adam felt like an idiot because hello, the man had just spent several years in space, of course it’d feel weird trying to sleep without the space sounds now. Hell, if he’d just taken a few seconds to think about why he himself needed that energetic music playing in Black-2’s cockpit on those long patrols...

Well, anyway, he finally had a good solid lead on a fix for this whole damn problem and that, at least, was something.

But after half an hour of fruitless Net searches while dinner cooked, and another three hours after dinner, Adam gave up on trying to hunt down suitable ready-made space sounds.

Oh, he found plenty of results for spaceship ambience and spaceship background sfx and every other phrase he searched for but not a single one of the files that came up would work for this. None of them sounded anything like the inside of the Atlas or the Castle of Lions or the lions themselves. The ones that were even remotely close to real spaceship noises were too damn short--some of them barely a whole minute long. The ones that were anywhere near long enough were terrible. Half of them weren’t even real spaceship sounds, just crappy overprocessed white noise with a few random beeps thrown in for flavor.

Well, Adam thought, if you want something done right, do it yourself.

The good news: he knew how to do it himself. He knew exactly how to do it himself. Everyone needs a hobby, and Adam’s happened to be one that cultivated the exact skill set he would need to pull this off.

The bad news: doing it himself would require a hell of a lot of highly specialized equipment… none of which he currently owned.

...or did he?

“Weird question,” Adam began as he slid into bed next to Takashi. “Was I really into music stuff on this side?”

“Mm? Oh yeah. Big time.”

“Like… ‘turn the basement into a whole studio’ big time?”

“You too, huh?” Takashi laughed and turned his lamp off. “Yeah, you had a whole setup down there. It was wild.”

“Any idea what happened to that stuff?”

“Huh… it was all still in the house when I uh, left but… no idea after that.” He was quiet for a minute. “You getting back into it?”

“Yeah, I had an idea, kinda wanted to play with it a little.”

“That’s great!” Takashi snuggled him close. “Gotta get some hobby time in when you can, especially when it starts getting crazy out there...”

“Uh huh,” Adam said, a slow wicked little grin creeping across his face. “Haven’t seen much Monsters and Mana getting played around here.”

“Hey.” Takashi gently poked Adam in the ribs, right in the ticklish spot, and Adam squirmed and rewarded him with a yelp and a laugh. “I’m trying. I’ve been talking to Coran and the Paladins trying to figure out a night of the week when everyone’s free. But in the meantime…” He leaned over and kissed Adam goodnight. “Can’t wait to hear what you’re working on. I’m your biggest fan, y’know.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Adam grinned. “You’ll be the first.”

They lay there in silence for a few minutes.

“Hey,” Takashi said, “what about your classroom storage?”

He hadn’t checked his classroom storage. Truth be told, he’d completely forgotten about that.

Adam was an instructor after all, even though his other duties were a much higher priority lately. But he did sometimes teach, and that meant he was allocated a small on-base storage room that went along with that. It wasn’t supposed to be used for personal storage, it was supposed to be for classroom supplies and equipment only, but instructors stashed their personal stuff in them all the time and honestly as long as it wasn’t illegal or dangerous nobody gave a shit.

Adam thought about what Takashi had kept in his on the other side--a neat stack of boxes in the corner marked team building, full of rulebooks and little figurines and dice that wouldn’t fit in the house, and he grinned a little and wondered if he’d find the same on this side in a few months.

But Adam just hadn’t even thought to check it at all since he’d arrived on this side. In his defense, between figuring out just what the hell happened to bring him here and dealing with the emotional fallout from that and from being reunited with so many people he thought he would never see again and getting a new robot arm installed and getting married, not to mention the whole “defending this reality from at least five different factions of hostile aliens” thing, he’d been a little overwhelmed and he just… completely forgot about his storage room.

He opened it up and right there, right there in the back corner, were stacks of boxes labelled studio in his own handwriting.

Jackpot.

There it was. A whole studio’s worth of recording equipment. Surround mics, handheld, mixer, the works. His counterpart must have stowed it all in here after moving out of the house he and Takashi shared, and just… never gotten the chance to move it anywhere else.

Adam tried not to follow that train of thought too far, because it was liable to lead somewhere he really didn’t want to go right now.

There was some other stuff of interest, too. A couple of guitars--one he’d had an exact copy of on the other side, one he’d never seen--and a keyboard. Adam loaded up the familiar guitar and the keyboard. He found a couple of boxes of clothes, some of which he remembered having, some of which he didn’t, but decided to leave them. And some pictures of him--the other him-- and Takashi. Some of them he remembered taking on the other side. Some of them he didn’t. He left those too. There was a journal that looked exactly like the one he’d kept on the other side and as soon as he uncovered it he shoved it back into the box, unread and unopened. He wanted to know what was different about its contents. He absolutely did not want to know what was different about its contents.

There’s a lot to unpack here, Adam thought, and he did not mean the boxes. Yeah. Next Tuesday’s appointment was going to be another “fun” one, wasn’t it?

He loaded up the last of the stuff he’d need and locked the storage room back up. Maybe he’d come pick through the rest of it later. Maybe not. Going through this stuff made him feel weird.

Like he was robbing his own grave.

Once he got out of the storage level and back outside into the sun, he felt a little less weird. It was his stuff, after all, and it was just gathering dust in there.

All of his equipment still appeared to be in good working order and despite being packed away for a couple of years, even the power supply still had a decent charge. The storage drive was empty--kind of a shame, Adam thought, it would have been interesting to hear what kind of unfinished stuff his counterpart had been working on, but the upside to that was twenty hours’ worth of storage. And that was twenty hours at maximum quality, in full surround. More than enough for a few hours of soundbed and whatever interesting incidental beeps and boops and whizzes Adam could catch with the handheld recorder.

As he worked on setting all of the surround mics up in Black-2’s cargo bay, he felt a gentle, questioning, almost amused poke at his mind, and he laughed a little. Black-2 was well aware of the ongoing situation with its counterpart’s previous Paladin--how could it not be, even when Adam wasn’t actively thinking about it, it was still a constant hum in the background noise of his mind--so all he needed to say was that he had an idea. But he would need Black-2’s help with that…

He thought of the sounds Black-2 made in flight--all of the little UI sounds the computer made, the mechanical sounds, and under all that the ambient otherworldly hum of Altean propulsion tech he still didn’t even begin to understand. Can you do that on the ground? he asked silently. Can you just… make the flying noises without actually flying?

The lions didn’t communicate with their Paladins in words, that wasn’t how it worked, but Adam got the feeling that if that was how it worked Black-2’s answer to that would have been along the lines of can you make the breathing noises without actually breathing? Well, there you go.

Fair enough, he thought back, and Black-2 sent back something that felt like a chuckle. Yeah… that’s what he was afraid of. Well, there was no way around this. He pulled out his phone and told it to call Takashi.

“Hey, I was just about to call you,” Takashi said. “Got anything in mind for dinner, or do you want me to just pick something up on the way home?”

“I, uh...” Adam cleared his throat. “I’m actually going to be kinda late tonight, so… go ahead and get whatever without me.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah, I just need to take Black-2 out for a few hours. Nothing serious,” he said quickly before Takashi could think about that enough to get nervous. “Just checking up on some stuff.”

“Well...okay then. Be careful, huh? Don’t go too far out.”

“I’ll keep it in the solar system. Promise.”

“And don’t go charging into anything crazy, call in for reinforcements if you see--” Takashi shut up for a moment and then laughed softly. “Sorry. I just snapped at you the other night to quit nagging me about the sleep thing and now I’m --”

“It’s okay. I know. See you tonight?”

“Yeah. Stay safe. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

They hung up.

He didn’t anticipate running into trouble that close to home, but figured he’d probably better armor up anyway. Just in case.

“Okay,” he said a few minutes later, settling into the pilot seat, “three hours or so ought to do it. What do you think? Nice Sunday drive to Titan and back a couple times?”

Black-2 probably didn’t understand the phrase “Sunday drive” on its face, but it caught the meaning and set the course and speed, and sent Adam a reply that felt a bit like a bemused sigh and eye roll as it took off.

Once Black-2 was well on its way to Titan, Adam scooted down to the cargo bay and got to work. He went around with the handheld first, grabbing a sample of a coolant pump here and a life support module there and the gravity generator over there. He’d have plenty of time to collect samples from the cockpit, but he needed to get these little bits out of the way before he started recording all that lovely background noise so he wouldn’t have to edit his own footsteps out of it.

That done, he started the main unit up, let it record a quick test for a few minutes, stopped it, and played it back through the headphones to see if anything needed tweaked. After a couple of minor microphone adjustments, he started it recording for real and headed back up to the cockpit. He spent a few minutes pulling up various navigation displays and sensor sweeps and such just for the noises, and Black-2 even graced him with a few pleasant sound effects that didn’t come up in normal use.

But then it made a noise that was not pleasant, not at all, and Adam knew exactly what that noise meant.

It meant he had company, and not the friendly kind.

He slid back into the pilot seat and took a careful look around with the help of Black-2’s scanners, and--there, cruising just past Mars, lazily headed Earthward--two Galra fighters flanking a larger ship.

Shit. Shit.

A formation that small and that slow probably wouldn’t show up on the Garrison’s long-range scanners and might not even be registered as a threat if it did, which would explain why nobody had warned him about it. And unless there was one of Haggar’s (or Honerva’s or whatever) little surprises on board the bigger ship, Adam could handle this on his own. But this was absolutely the last thing he wanted to have to deal with today… and if it had backup that could be trouble...

But that was all there was. Those two fighters and that one larger ship--larger, but way too small to be a warship. No, this looked more like a cargo ship with a piece of ground artillery half-assedly bolted onto it. They were uncloaked, and if they were running around uncloaked out here in the open this close to Earth and heading closer, it was probably safe to say it was because they couldn’t cloak. All three ships had some kind of sloppy insignia painted on them in a putrid shade of yellowish-green. It wasn’t the Galra Empire insignia, or any other that Adam recognized. It definitely wasn’t the same one as the space pirates from a few weeks back. It was hard to tell, but it looked a little like an unintentionally lopsided Galra skull with a tumor on the top of it and two floppy bones crossed under it.

Probably space pirates, then.

Okay. Could be worse. Could be a lot better, but could be a whole hell of a lot worse.

And upon closer inspection, it appeared that the fighters and the cargo ship that wanted to be a warship when it grew up were being held together by the Galra equivalent of duct tape and bailing wire.

Adam rolled his eyes. Definitely space pirates… and not even the ones that were good at space piracy, these were the crap pirates, the wannabe pirates, the kind of space pirates other space pirates beat up, the little pesky ones that kept popping up here and there and letting their mouths write a lot of checks their butts couldn’t cash.

They didn’t seem to be aware of his presence yet. Adam hoped like hell they would be reasonable about this once he showed himself, because as dangerous as some of the better-organized space pirates could be, these space pirates wouldn’t stand a chance against him and Black-2 and he really, really did not want to have to fight them.

A Black Lion against a dozen or so reasonably well-maintained fighters with reasonably skilled pilots and new and improved cloaking tech? That was almost a fair fight. A Black Lion against this outfit? The thought of it made Adam feel a little sick, honestly. It would be like beating up a toddler.

But. Toddlers or no, they were still space pirates, they were still pointed at Earth, and they still needed to leave.

He thought about calling back to the Garrison and letting them know there were wannabe pirates on Earth’s lawn again, but… was that necessary? Really? Nah. He’d save it for debrief, because no matter which way this went it would probably take longer for him to report it than it would to actually deal with the problem.

Adam hailed the flagship and once it accepted the connection, he didn’t bother waiting for whoever fancied themselves the captain of that rickety ship to say anything. “Listen up, pirates,” he began in a tone of voice that said more than any words ever could that he was in absolutely no mood to take any crap from anyone today, “I know what you think you’re doing. You think you’re going to Earth to start some trouble, and for your own safety I would strongly advise you to not do that. Get out of this system. Now.”

“You dare address the great Captain Orkoth in that tone? Your puny Earth will crumble at my feet!” came the response.

Wrong answer, Adam mouthed, and Black-2 snorted in agreement in his mind. But Orkoth wasn’t done yet, was he? Of course he wasn’t.

“You coward, you spleenless dregworm, you tepid fool, show yourself! Or would you rather we smoke you out of your hiding place like the vermin you are?”

Adam sighed. Well, he asked for it… he maneuvered Black-2 right up in front of the formation and hung there, staring the flagship down. Black-2, clearly much more amused by all of this than Adam was, made a big show out of leaning right into the flagship’s proverbial face and letting loose a roar that even startled Adam a little.

The fighters scooted around behind the flagship and stayed there. Well, there appeared to be at least two functioning brain cells somewhere in that group...

There was a long silence, and then, very softly, very shakily: “oh quiznak.”

“So. Judging by that ‘oh quiznak’ I’m going to guess that you know who I am, or you can at least narrow it down to a field of three people whose bad side you know you don’t want to be on. You know what I’m flying, you know what kind of firepower it’s packing, and you know what it can do to an actual Galra warship by itself, never mind two rickety fighters and a cargo ship with a crappy little gun strapped on it. And if, IF you somehow by some miracle manage to get past me, which I promise you is not going to happen but just for giggles let’s say you do --if you do, you’re going to find way worse than me waiting for you on Earth. Now I am going to ask you nicely, one more time , to get the hell out of this system right now. If you engage me, you are going to have a very bad time and none of us want that.” His eyes narrowed. “Do we, Captain? ”

Silence from the pirate flagship for a moment.

“S-sorry, uh, did you say--we-we’re on a course for Earth , you said? Ha ha! Silly us! We must have, uh... misread our navigation charts! We meant to go and conquer, uh… um… Yurth.  Th--that’s it. Yurth.”

Muffled, in the background: “But Cap’n, you told us if we could conquer Earth the other pirates’d stop knockin’ us around--you just said ‘his puny Ear--’”

“I NEVER! I am QUITE sure I said Yurth for zug’s sake man SHUT UP before you get us all vaporized--”

“Yurth.” Adam bit his tongue to keep from laughing. “Really. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a ‘Planet Yurth.’   What system would that be in, Captain? Maybe I could give you directions. ”

“Why, it’s uh… In the, uh… the, uhhhh… Sal system? Yes, of course, the Sal system, and--oh, this must be th-the Sol system instead! Ha ha, imagine that, instead of Yarth--”

Someone in the background, muffled: “ Yurth, Cap’n...”

“ Yurth! I mean--Yurth in the Sal system, yes, we’ve--we’ve ended up heading for Earth in the Sol system! Ha ha! What an--an amusing coincidence!” came Orkoth’s response in a terrified squeak. “Isn’t that amusing, Sir Paladin?”

“Hilarious,” Adam deadpanned back.

“W-well then! This has all been a huge mistake--”

“It sure has.”

“We’ll just… be leaving now.”

“You sure will.”

“U-unless you’d be interested in purchasing some genuine Solthasti artifacts we’ve, uh... acquired?” Nervous laughter. “We’re asking thirty-five thousand GAC but we’re willing to negotia--”

Black-2 roared again and lunged at the flagship, teeth snapping on empty space as close to the shitty little gun bolted onto the flagship’s bow as Adam could manage without actually taking a bite out of the poor decrepit thing.

“YES, SIR PALADIN! OF COURSE, SIR PALADIN! WE’LL BE ON OUR WAY NOW THANK YOU AND VREPIT SA!”

And with that, the flagship cut off communications and puttered off as fast as it could, flanked by its two little fighter friends, in the general direction of “extremely away from Earth.”

Adam watched them, with his own eyes first and then through Black-2’s when they were too far away for that, until he was sure they were gone and weren’t coming back with better-armed friends.

He huffed out a sigh. And then he laughed. “Yeah, okay,” he said to Black-2, “that was kind of funny.” As encounters with space pirates went, that one was fairly amusing and nobody got hurt. So that wasn’t so bad. Except…

He picked up the handheld. It had been recording this whole time.

Oof.

Adam made a mental note to delete that bit before he got home and recorded a few more samples. Then he turned his music on and settled in to enjoy the rest of the ride.

Orkoth’s ragtag fleet, such as it was, was nowhere to be seen when Black-2 came cruising back from Titan the first time. It wasn’t there on the second lap either. Or the third. Other than that one little hiccup, everything was going exactly as Adam hoped it would.  He guesstimated that after he cut out the unplanned lion roars, he’d still have about four hours’ worth of soundbed to work with, plus all the extras.

That should do it. Time to head home.

Though he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he’d forgotten something...

Adam got home an hour or so later, dragging a cartload of equipment and musical instruments in the door behind him. Well, it was out of storage now, might as well set it all up in the basement again, right?

Takashi was still up, of course. “Hey,” he said, and once he released Adam from the customary post-mission hug he looked back at the cart of stuff. “Oh, hey. You found it! I, uh… don’t know what half of this stuff is, but--classroom storage?”

“Yep. There’s some, uh… other stuff in there too but…” Adam waved a hand. “Anyway, sorry if you had any immediate plans for the basement, but it’s mine now.” He grinned and started pulling stuff off the cart.

“Nah.” Takashi laughed. “I figured you’d probably want to take it over sooner or later. You need some help with that?”

“No, I’ll just leave most of it here for now, I just need this… and this…and uh… where the hell is--oh, here it is.” He pulled the storage drive and handheld and a bunch of cable and some headphones out of the pile. “And my laptop.”

Takashi looked over the cart again. “So uh… you didn’t run into any trouble?”

“Nope.” He frowned at the pile, and then at all the stuff in his hands. “Um. Hey, I changed my mind, can you carry the MIDI controller?”

“I can if you point at it. ...oh, that . Got it. What were you doing out there, anyway?”

“I told you, you’ll be the first to hear it.”

Takashi looked at the equipment on the cart and in Adam’s hands and in his own hands for a second. “Uh huh,” he finally said. “This is going to be interesting.”

Adam knew if he got started on this right then like he was kind of itching to do, he’d be up all night screwing with it. So he left it, popped a melatonin gummy to help shush his brain so he could sleep, and went to bed.

At some point during the night he woke up alone in the bed, but by now he was pretty used to that. So he just rolled over and went back to sleep.

If he’d stayed up another hour, and if he’d tiptoed into the kitchen, he would have heard, ever so faintly from down the basement stairs, sounds of life support modules and UI noises playing back from the handheld.

Adam knew he was in the doghouse when his alarm went off and Takashi met him at the bedroom door, floaty hand hidden behind his back, eyebrow raised. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he knew he was definitely about to catch hell.

“Morning,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I asked you if you ran into any trouble last night,” Takashi said. “And you said you didn’t.”

Adam shrugged. “Well, I didn’t. ”

Takashi brought his floaty hand out from behind his back to reveal the handheld and suddenly, Adam realized why he’d had that nagging feeling that he’d forgotten something.

Oh shit, he thought as Takashi hit the playback button and sure enough...

“--ward, you spleenless dregworm, you tepid fool, show yourself! Or would you rather we--”

He hit the stop button. And waited for Adam to explain himself.

“I, uh, meant to delete that,” Adam said. Takashi stared at him. “Wait, you were listening to my-”

“It’s not like that, I wasn’t trying to check up on you or anything, I just thought it’d be cool to hear what you caught out there but-- Adam! Space pirates!”

“Wannabe space pirates. Not the ones with the cloaking tech. I gave a full report in debrief, you can check it yourself if you want but... did you listen to the whole thing?”

“No, I--you ran into space pirates!”

“Space pirates flying on duct tape and bailing wire. Please listen to the whole thing.”

“ Space pirates! I told you to--”

“Takashi--” Adam pinched the bridge of his nose to ward off the headache he could already feel brewing. It was way too early for this. “I’m going to need you to listen to the whole thing before you say one more word.”

Takashi sighed and hit the playback button again.

He tried to hold that stern look, Adam could tell he was honestly trying, but it didn’t last long and that little tiny squeaky oh quiznak killed it for good.

Adam could see the tension leak out of Takashi’s shoulders all at once when the recording got to the part where Adam specifically said two rickety fighters and a cargo ship with a crappy little gun strapped on it. And more than once during the Yurth bit Takashi turned away to hide silent laughter, like he honestly thought Adam wouldn’t see his shoulders shaking.

“Okay,” he finally said, stopping the playback after the thrilling space pirates exeunt, pursued by a lion conclusion of this comedy of errors, “okay.”

“Did you notice you didn’t hear a single shot fired on either side?” Adam asked gently, and Takashi nodded.

“I did.”

“Did I make the right call in handling this myself without bothering anyone else?”

“You did.”

“And would you say this really doesn’t count as ‘trouble,’ then?”

“I would. I’m sorry.” Takashi huffed out a sigh, handed the recorder to Adam, and swept him into one of those amazing hugs. “You’re a brilliant pilot and you know better than anyone when you’re in over your head and when you’re not. I should trust your judgment on this stuff and I know that. I’m sorry. I just--I can’t help it.”

“I know.” Adam snuggled close against him and sighed. “I know. I can’t help it either.”

“Yeah.” Takashi stood up on his tiptoes and kissed Adam’s forehead. He laughed softly, warm breath ruffling Adam’s hair. “We’ve… we’ve both got some issues to work through, huh?”

“No kidding.” Adam reluctantly untangled himself from the hug--they were going to have to start getting ready for work soon. “Glad we’re getting the chance to, though.”

Takashi ruffled his hair and grinned. “Yeah. Me too.”

It took a few evenings to actually get it ready. It was going to be a very long track, after all, and Adam needed to go through and edit out the roars and add the incidental sound effects and do some audio wizardry to make the cockpit samples sound like they were coming from farther away and through a couple of walls, and to make sure everything looped smoothly and didn’t fade in or out too abruptly.

And, well, there were a few times he got distracted by a particularly interesting sample and spent a few minutes noodling around with it in another window before getting back to work on his main project. He’d even hooked the keyboard up and sketched out a few things to build on later. It felt good to play with music again, to just have a couple of hours a night when he could shut his pilot brain and his Paladin brain off for a little while and just make cool stuff out of sound again.

He still wasn’t quite sure this was going to work, though… until the evening he spent in the basement checking over the last couple hours of the track. And then he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a minute and the next thing he knew, the track had looped back to the beginning and been running for an hour and he had a crick in his neck and Takashi was gently shaking his shoulder.

“Hey. You coming to bed?”

Adam took off his headphones, craned his head back, and squinted up at Takashi. “Mm. Sorry, didn’t mean to pass out down here… what time is it?”

“Way past bedtime.” Takashi leaned down and rested his chin on Adam’s shoulder. He didn’t know a lot about audio production, but he knew just enough to be able to look at the waveform on Adam’s screen and guesstimate a few things about this project. “Doesn’t look like it’s got much of a beat to it,” he said.

“Yeah, I uh... thought I’d dip my toes into some ambient stuff.”

“And it’s… wow. That’s a long one.”

“It sure is.” Adam poked some stuff on his laptop and set the monster track rendering. “I think you’ll like it.”

He checked on it in the morning. It was done.

Adam grinned, sent the massive file to the house’s media server, and went off to work.

“So,” Takashi said as they crawled into bed that night, “when do I get to hear this monster project you’ve been working on?”

“Just wait,” Adam said. He kissed Takashi good night, turned off the lamp, and settled into bed. Then he quietly reached over to his nightstand and gently bent that no-screens rule to start his masterpiece playing through the surround speakers in the.bedroom.

There was nothing audible at first. But over the course of a good two whole minutes, the volume ever so gradually crept up, so slowly that the sound just sort of snuck into listening range, almost like some kind of subliminal suggestion. That was easily the longest fade-in Adam had ever done. And it worked--Takashi didn’t even seem to consciously notice there was anything playing. But he must have noticed it on some level.

Because fifteen minutes into the track, Takashi was out.

Adam snuggled in next to him. He didn’t move, except to flop an arm over Adam’s shoulders.

Mission accomplished.

Takashi didn’t wake up until the alarm went off the next morning.

“Hey,” Adam said, leaning over to kiss his forehead. “How’d you sleep?”

Takashi sat up,rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and thought about that for a while. “Great,” he finally said. “Man… I must have been tired if, uh…”

And then he finally noticed it.

He squinted up at the surround speakers in the corners of the room like he knew what he was listening to but couldn’t quite place it. “Hey…That sounds like--” He stopped and listened some more. And then it hit him. “It’s the Black Lion. We’re listening to Black Lion noises. Adam, what the hell. ”

Adam grinned.

Of course this wouldn’t be the first freak incident where Takashi just up and slept through the night once only to spend the next tossing and turning, so Adam wasn’t quite ready to declare the case closed just yet.

But then he did sleep through the next night. And the next. And the one after that. No more tossing and turning. No more getting up for a run in the middle of the night. No more reaching across an empty spot in the bed to shut the alarm off in the morning.

And after a few days of this, Adam noticed some other things had changed for the better. He hadn’t seen that bottle of painkillers on Takashi’s desk in a while. Or that mutant giant coffee cup--a normal-sized coffee mug and a bottle of water sat there in its place the next time Adam took him lunch. His mood was better. He looked better. And the missing meals thing--of course Takashi still got busy and forgot to eat sometimes, and that couldn’t be helped. But it didn’t happen quite as often now. And, of course, when Takashi slept through the night, so did Adam.

Takashi did have a nightmare a week or so later, and it brought a panic attack with it. But the lion noise helped him get back to sleep after it passed. And then a few weeks after that when Adam bolted awake in the middle of the night with that cold slimy thing squirming up into his chest it helped him calm down and get back to sleep too.

It was a Friday evening, in a week that was about as quiet as they came during a space war, and the living room was full of Paladins squeezing in a game night as best they could. And Adam was busy in his newly-taken-over basement studio, fleshing out a few of those ideas he’d doodled on the keyboard while he worked on the Black Lion track. He wasn’t avoiding their guests, of course not--it was just that playing with the Black Lion track had unblocked something in his brain, and right now he wanted to see what he could make out of all this creative energy.

But there was a bit of the current project that just didn’t seem to be working out, and he was stuck. So he took off his headphones, wandered up out of the basement, grabbed a drink and a snack, and hung around to listen in on the campaign for a while.

“Hey, Adam!” Keith called--wow, they’d actually gotten him on board with this. “You want to come roll a character?”

“I’m good,” Adam replied. “Just taking a break. Looks like fun, though. I might join you once I get done with this little project. How’s it going?”

Lance’s eyes lit up. “We just found a big fat treasure chest,” he said, grinning. “So uh… yeah, I’m going to check it for traps before I open it this time,” he said, and rolled a skill check.

Well, at least someone in that party learned from their mistakes. Adam snorted a laugh and glanced at Takashi. He’d already had to roll at least one new character that evening.

“The treasure chest doesn’t appear to be boobytrapped in any way,” Coran said. “You open the chest and find it empty… except for a rather sinister-looking black silk hood, with a blood red lining and some trim along the bottom edge that looks like very long, very sharp teeth…”

Keith perked up at that. “Whoa. Assassin gear? I could use… wait. Did you say ‘teeth?’”

“He said ‘teeth,’” Pidge said. “No thanks.”

“Yeah…” Keith pulled a face. “Never mind. Anyone else want it?”

“Nope,” Hunk said. “Not touching that.”

“No way,” Lance said.

“Absolutely not,” Allura said.

There was a long, tense silence.

“Well,” Takashi finally said, “if nobody else wants it… I’ll try it on.”

The words were barely out of his mouth before the rest of the group exploded into a chorus of “Shiro, NO!”   Coran raised one eyebrow.

“Are you quite sure about that?” he asked.

Adam groaned and shook his head. He’d listened in on enough of Takashi’s gaming sessions on the other side to know that when even the GM asked if you were really sure you wanted to do something, it was probably a spectacularly bad idea… and he knew enough about Takashi’s playstyle to know he was going to do it anyway.

“What?  Yeah, I’m sure.” Takashi shrugged. “Guys, it’s a hood . What’s it gonna do? Bite my head o--”

“The ‘hood’ comes to life and bites your head off!” Coran beamed, and the Paladins lost it. “Well, I can’t say I’ve ever had a player just up and put a live monster on their head before! Anyone want to break for a snack while Shiro rolls a new character?”

“RIP in peace, babe,” Adam sighed. He waved and headed back down to the basement, the sounds of hysterical laughter and Takashi wailing “oh, COME ON!” somewhere in the middle of it floating down the stairs after him.

He grinned, put his headphones back on, and got back to work.

He came back up a little while later as the evening was wrapping up, said goodnight to their guests, put away the remaining snacks and such, and then sat down next to Takashi on the couch and snuggled up against his side. “So,” he said, “that looked like it went pretty well.”

Takashi let out a little sheepish laugh and wrapped an arm around Adam’s shoulders. “It was fun, that’s what counts.”

“Mmm-hm. And how many times did you have to roll a new character?”

“Well…” He cleared his throat. “Hey, wow, look at the time. We really ought to get to bed soon, huh?”

“Nice try.” Adam squinted over at the nearest clock. It was barely half past nine. “We eased off on the bedtime thing, remember? Since you’re sleeping through the night now.”

Takashi leaned down and nipped, ever so gently, at the edge of Adam’s ear.

“I didn’t say ‘sleep,’” he whispered.