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The sand is manageable in the morning, as long as you’re careful—wear a mask outdoors, walk slowly, bend your head down. The radio says it’s nothing to call off classes over, so Keith makes his way to school as he always does, crossing the dunes outside his house on foot as the sun rises on a dirty yellow, wind-whipped world.
His father can only ever walk him as far as the door before he has to head in the opposite direction, toward the shed where their speeder bike is parked, and then to the water mine over the hills. That’s okay. Keith’s only eight, but he knows the way, and he makes it to the highway's edge just in time to catch the bus into town.
You can never tell, though, with the winds in the desert, and by noon the sand has infected everything. It collects in a crust on the window-frames of Keith’s classroom. It stings at his skin when he crosses the quad for recess. Soon the bell rings, and a sour voice over the PA announces that in light of today's inclement weather, the school will be sending them home, and in no more than twenty minutes the front lobby floods with children, waiting for mothers or fathers to come and walk them through the storm.
Except Keith, who has no mother, only a father who works the water mines in the daytime, and at night only has eyes for the sky—but this isn’t a sad thing, for the most part. All it means is that no one else will fix his mask for him, make sure it fits snug over his mouth and nose, or help him shade his eyes with an outstretched hand.
He knows the way home, too. When he arrives at the otherwise desolate bus stop, brushing stray grains from his sleeves, he finds the noon bus waiting.
It’s weird at first for the fastest and most fiery of the lions to be so quiet. It takes a while for Keith to understand—not saying anything is just another way to resist, and Red resists the whole way through their first encounter, with a stubborn, persistent silence that endures through all his calls. He can yell, she seems to say, until his voice rasps like barbed wire in his throat. See how much difference it makes.
He’ll think later, maybe this was the only right way to meet; he knows what it’s like, after all, for every meeting to be a battle somehow. Frustrating though Red’s unresponsiveness is in the thick of another, noisier firefight, with enemy soldiers aiming their blasters at his heels and deep space yawning dark outside the windows of the Galra ship, maybe that’s as sure a sign as any that they’re meant for one another.
There’s this thing that happens to Lance, sometimes, where his nightmares attack him. Some nights Keith hears Lance screaming through the wall by his head, jolting him out of his own quiet catatonia. Some nights he goes to the kitchen for water and Lance is there kneeling on the floor with his head down the garbage chute, being sick.
The first time Keith ever saw it happen was a garbage chute night. He’s not sure if that was the first time it ever happened. It could have been the first time; it could also have been the tenth, the twentieth, and no one would have known.
Keith had studied basic first aid at the Garrison. Of course he’d proceeded to forget most of it—the knots on his tourniquets had been clumsy and his rescue breaths too shallow, and he’d done his best to make his peace with the idea that some people were just better at causing pain than fixing it, whatever that might have meant—only to have it come back at the one time he’d ever needed it, approximately thirty million light-years from Earth, because there was no one else.
So he’d helped Lance wipe his mouth. Back against the wall, head between your knees, deep breaths, Lance. He hadn’t known then that Lance had been thinking of the Galra ship on fire, and explosions in the sky, and how people die when they’re killed. Keith hadn’t thought to ask What’s wrong—had thought it too complex a question for someone who could barely remember how to breathe. He’d asked, instead, What are your siblings’ names? Can you say them for me?
Tonight is another garbage chute night. They’re sitting on the kitchen floor, and Lance’s head is on his knees again, and Keith’s hand on his neck to keep it down. He’s breathing now between each name, rattling, harsh: Jaime. Bettina. Lorenzo. Isabel. Jaime Bettina Lorenzo Isabel.
“Again,” Keith says, the word almost gentle, two soft syllables on an outgoing breath. But he knows he’s pushing him, no matter how it sounds. Lance, again.
Jaime, Bettina, Lorenzo, Isabel. Keith, pushing: Again, Lance. To name a thing is to keep it alive, and in some distant corner of the universe there are still-living people to whom those names belong. People whose faces Lance remembers. And as long as he remembers, he’ll know how to come back.
“It looks like chicken,” his lab partner whispers, over his shoulder.
He can see her reflection dimly in the door of the glass cabinet across from their station in Biology Laboratory B, masked and gloved in a shapeless laboratory gown. He looks much the same, bent over the tray where their frog lies sprawled on its back, out cold now from having inhaled so much formalin.
The pen is in her hand, the scalpel in Keith’s. They’d agreed in the beginning that they were going to take turns skinning the frog, but she had gone faint and shaky just from holding the chemical-soaked cotton ball up to the frog's nose and watching its head roll back and its limbs go slack, and Keith had made her sit down.
She’d apologized, of course, for being so sensitive. She apologizes two more times as she watches him work, but really, it’s not too much of a hassle to recalibrate. She can take notes for them instead. He’ll cut, and he’ll do it clean, with the precision of a surgeon, and it’ll get them extra points from their teacher when she wanders by the table.
It’s nothing to Keith; he’s always had steady hands. The first incision begins at the base of the throat, and proceeds straight down the frog's midsection. It’s barely breathing. Its legs don’t so much as twitch.
It doesn’t look like a living thing, in the beginning. From the air the rock looks like rock, the dirt like dirt, no different from the dust of the desert back on Earth, and no more alive. But it must be, from the way Lance is always yelling about it over the comm, so much panic in his voice over badly aimed shots and falling debris that you’d almost think he was the one they were hurting.
What did they call it at the Garrison? Collateral damage. Deaths, injuries, or other damage inflicted on an unintended target. Something you could minimize but never eradicate, an inevitable part of doing what needed to be done. Keith aims, and shoots; the fire that issues forth is more orange than bloody red.
That’s the thing about stuff you learn at school. You’ll probably forget most of it, remember only mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Then one day you find you need some other part of it, and it comes back, unbidden, from some dark inaccessible part of your brain you didn’t even know you had. Collateral damage.
(It’s only later, underground with Lance beside him, that Keith looks at the caverns and the outcroppings of rock that surround them and suddenly finds himself able to imagine the chambers of an enormous heart, feels a pulse in the air like the planet’s blood beating.)
Of the five of them, Lance is probably the worst at sparring.
This isn’t a dig at Lance so much as it is the honest truth. It says nothing about his physical abilities either, because Lance is fast, and nimble, and about as strong as you can rightly expect someone with noodle-arms to be. He’s got a steady hand and a good eye too, that can see clearly across great distances; two things that make him an excellent shot, even under pressure.
Not that Keith would ever tell him these things to his face, of course, lest his head swell up to the size of a minor moon. But he can say with confidence that from where he stands, leaning against the wall next to Hunk on the far side of the training room, he knows exactly what Lance’s biggest problem is.
“Time,” Shiro calls, once it’s firmly established that Pidge has Lance pinned on the floor in an arm-bar so firm he has exactly zero hope of breaking out of it and keeping the arm. “That’s enough, Pidge. Up now, both of you.”
They’re barely on their feet half a tick before she calls it—forceful not so much because she’s angry as because she’s cross, and maybe a little disbelieving. “You were holding back!”
“Was not!” Lance snaps, rotating his smarting wrist and cradling it defensively in his free hand. For his part it’s almost as though he’s forgotten his loss entirely, in the face of something new to be peevish about. “I never hold back. You blindsided me fair and square.”
Liar. Keith presses his lips together tight to keep from blurting the word out. They look about to start another bout on their own as it is. But he trades sideways glances with Hunk and knows he saw it too—every pulled punch, thrown just that little bit too wide, and too slow, and too transparent. That split second of hesitation that had allowed Pidge to slip under his guard and throw him. You were trying not to hurt her.
“I’m heading to the Garrison on Sunday, Dad.”
It’s not a question, or a request for permission, and they both know it. Just clean fact, sure as the fact of their presence in this room together.
His father’s relaxed this evening, and present in a way that’s rare for him these days, head inclined toward Keith even as he starts brewing coffee on the far side of the room, standing the kettle up between the Geiger counter and the seismograph.
“Oh? What for, boy?”
Just take the test, Shiro had said, smiling, the last time he’d found Keith in town after school let out. It wasn’t the first time he’d ever said it, and the solid weight of his hand on Keith’s shoulder was more than enough proof that it wouldn’t be the last, either, should Keith ever decide he needed to hear it again a second time. Or a third time. As many times as it took. Do it because you want to. Your flying will speak for itself.
At the time that had silenced all of Keith’s questions—about application essays, grades, tuition. About what wanting things even meant. Now, without Shiro next to him, with the roof of his house over his head instead of the sky, the questions wake inside him and make him fidget, changing his weight from one foot to the other.
“The flying test,” he says, as much for himself as for his dad, so he can’t take it back anymore.
“Ah,” his dad answers. And then nothing else, not for a long time. Just the vast, patient silence of the desert outside their door, and the coffee bubbling in the pot, surrounded by so many machines.
And then, in a murmur, while pouring the coffee out: “Want me to take you? I’m needed at the mine, but I could do another Sunday.”
Keith watches the cup fill nearly to the brim and thinks in the back of his head that that can’t possibly be safe—but then again, that they’ve survived out here this long is probably already enough of a statistical improbability. To put it in simpler words, a miracle.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll take the bus.”
No. The word’s in Keith’s head when they hear the explosion, arrive in the room where the castle’s crystal is kept and find it blown to pieces on the floor. Lance at least is still all in one piece, but somehow no less broken, for all that—unconscious, unmoving, his limbs splayed at sick, crooked angles. And then there’s more, all at once, a salvo of gunfire: Nonononono.
It’s Shiro who goes to him while the rest of them stand paralyzed in the doorway, lifting him up, feeling for a pulse at his neck and wrists. His expression is masklike, careful, giving nothing away, but the tiny furrow that settles between his brows is enough to make Keith’s stomach heave. He looks out of the corner of his eye at Coran and sees his skin stretched all tight across the bones of his face, and then he knows what Lance had been trying to do.
Lance can’t die. Lance shouldn’t die. Keith knows it’s not up to him, but honestly here. Lance is too loud, and too annoying, and the only one of them who has all those dreams about parades and music and sparkling confetti. He’s the one who believes they can be heroes, even so far from home. He’s the one who’d jump in a heartbeat if there was someone that needed saving, without a single thought about who or how or why except that it was right, the way he jumped for Coran, and would probably jump again for them all.
It comes as no surprise, then, later, that the first thing Lance does with the first desperate pulse of life that comes back to his body is save them again. Or at least that’s how it looks to Keith, even if it comes to him all in pieces—Lance sitting up, eyes open, the rifle in his hand, and then the blue-white beam that takes Sendak in the back.
Keith sees the way open up for him, just for a second, clear and true in that light. He hefts the blade in his hand and leaps.
“Tell me something good,” Lance says. He's supine in bed, with his hands over his face, pressing down on his closed eyes.
Keith sits at the foot, knees to his chest. That’s what Lance asks for on especially bad nights, nights he can’t even stay upright, when the noise in his head doesn’t stop: Tell me something good.
"Do you know the one about the rain in the desert?"
“Can’t remember." In a whisper, razors and ribbons. "Tell me again?”
He’s only just started figuring out what something good is. He tries to remember where Lance’s mind wanders when he’s doing the talking—life on Earth, family, water.
Keith figures he can do water a lot better than any of the other things. “Once a year or so, there’d be a big storm. My dad and I’d smell it first on the wind, this kind of... wet smell. Then we’d hear the thunder and know it was time to tape down the windows. Then the rain would come.”
Then the rain would come in torrents, and the ground would drink it all up.
Keith’s never seen the ocean, but he does remember opening the front door in the days after the storm and finding the tall saguaros in bloom—and beyond them swathes of scraggly, stubborn grass going green again, all the desert coming out in seed and flower. And then he thinks he can imagine what being near so much water is like.
"Once a year," Lance whispers, after Keith runs out of words. "Once a year. That's crazy."
"Kinda," Keith admits. "But it was all we had, you know?"
He doesn’t pull away when Lance reaches down for his hand and squeezes it tight.
It’s not that the other kids don't think about life on other planets. It’s that they find the answers to their questions in easy places—on TV screens in their houses, at the cinema in town. It’s okay for aliens to be horrible; it means they’re a success, all purple eye and jelly tentacle, and hard, thorny spininess spiked out of their spines. By the same token, nobody really dies in an interstellar war, because if the ships blow up without you ever seeing a body, it can’t possibly count, can it?
In the end, it’s a game they play, exciting to think about, but not quite real, and therefore also safe, no matter what they might imagine.
Keith is twelve by the time he realizes he doesn’t quite see things the same way, and never has. To him aliens have always been real, even if he’s never seen one, and even if he hasn’t put a lot of thought into imagining what they might look like. All he knows is that his dad spends his evenings with his headset hooked up to the machines that crowd their one-room house, listening for radio chatter from the furthest reaches of the solar system, strums in the dark that to Keith have always been as real as the sound of his own voice.
He’s never told Keith exactly what he's waiting for. Most of the time it’s like he forgets Keith is there at all, in the quiet hours after dinner where there’s nothing to do but listen, but Keith doesn’t mind. He clears the dishes from the low table in the center of the room, and goes out to the porch to be with the stars instead.
If you don’t answer him, he tells them, night after night, someone else will answer.
They record the days in a notebook they keep on a side table in the lounge. It can never be anything more than an approximation, measured by nothing more organic than the brightening and dimming of the castle’s own lights at intervals roughly approaching that of a regular earth day, but it’s something they all agree to do at Pidge’s suggestion. There’s value in remembering where they’ve been, and how far they’ve come, and how long they’ve been away. It’ll be a team effort, one person to each day in dependable rotation.
There aren’t any real rules for the record-keeping, otherwise, so the look and content of each entry varies so widely it’s almost comical. The bluntest, blackest lines are Shiro’s: Day 296. Nothing to report. Then Pidge’s more spidering hand, the details of her day and of her research half in English, half in the ancient Altean Allura teaches her in their off-hours, followed by a list of minor repairs that still need accomplishing in Hunk’s loose, rounded, friendly scrawl.
Keith turns the page. Lance’s writing is chicken-scratch—pointy and crooked, much like Lance himself: Day 297. We passed a planet with an atmosphere today. You could see the clouds from the control room, and the oceans were seafoam-green. I wonder if they’ve got rain. Do you guys ever miss rain? I know I do.
So many different ways to say that sometimes they do nothing but drift through space for days on end.
Day 300, Keith writes, and closes the book.
“We all had ‘em,” Lance says. “Several, actually—one for the family, one for friends, sometimes different ones for different circles of friends.”
They’re at the kitchen counter, drinking water. Lance’s legs swing idly from the high stool. Once in a while his foot will catch the back of Keith’s ankle for a second before disengaging and swinging away again, like one of those little metal balls on the end of a pendulum.
Sometimes when Keith finds Lance in the kitchen it’s like this too—less puking, less shuddering and rocking, more sitting and talking. Or not talking. It depends mostly on Lance. Keith tells himself that whether they talk or not it’s all the same to him.
“My little sister was the worst when we were growing up; every year she’d wanna try something different. Isa, Sabi, Belle. Sabel.”
Tonight’s a talking night. Keith leans forward on his elbows, points out, “All those nicknames make a lot more sense than yours.”
He knows all their real names by now. He knows the names Lance calls them by, too, from other talking nights—Kuya Jim, Ate Bets, Enzo, Belle—along with some other things he never asked to know. Big brother in law school, big sister a nurse. Little brother the striker on the school soccer team. Little sister in the church choir, with a voice like a bell. Belle. And Alejandro, Lance.
Keith, meanwhile, has always just been Keith.
“Lance was for the Garrison. I decided on it when I flew out, because it was cool, you know? An action-hero name.” The admission is weird coming from Lance himself. Almost ironic in how weirdly self-aware it is. It’s weirder still when he adds, after a pause, in a soft, longing murmur that sounds nothing like him at all, “Ando was for home.”
On a Wednesday morning at school, they talk about what it takes to build a family. Their teacher draws them on the board: father, mother, brother, sister. Stick people with circles for heads and lines for arms, and triangle bodies for the girls.
She tells them sometimes it doesn’t always have to be this way, you can make a family with different sets of parts. A dad and a mom, sometimes two dads, sometimes two moms. More children, or none at all. Grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. Keith can copy the drawings in his notebook just fine, but when they’re asked to draw their own families, he hesitates before putting his pencil to paper—a big stick person, then a smaller one. Then a cloud of question marks, one arm crooked across the desk to hide the page from view.
Their teacher tells them to raise their hand if they have any questions, but Keith doesn’t know how to ask, what if it's just him and his dad? Is it still a family then, or is it somehow incomplete? And what does that mean if it is?
He's not the only kid in class without a mom. The girl next to him lost hers over the summer, to some sickness with a name so long her five-year-old tongue tripped over it when she tried to say it for the rest of the class, and so raises her hand and asks, “Can I still draw her?”
“Of course,” his teacher says. It’s meant to make them feel safe. “Your mom’s in Heaven, but she'll always be with you. Does anyone else have family in Heaven?”
She's not in Heaven, Keith thinks. She's in outer space.
Keith doesn’t always understand what he sees when he’s fighting. He needs to take his hand off the throttle, blink twice before he recognizes the fleet of Galra ships, five hundred strong or more, burning. In the beginning it looks like the planets themselves are dying, exploding into bloom like a fireworks show. A field of white-hot flowers opening for the sun, all at once.
Part of him thinks it’s wrong that anything should die beautifully, or at least in a way that someone watching might possibly perceive as beautiful, but he feels this as a twisty feeling in his gut before he knows it in his head.
Somehow, bizarrely, his first real thought—the first thought that makes any sense, the first one that uses words, as humans do—is Why is it all so loud?
Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Keith hasn’t told anyone this, but it’s why he finds Lance as often as he does, when no one else is around.
It’s not because of any dreams he can remember. He doesn’t dream the way Lance does—he can imagine the kinds of dreams Lance has, even if they never talk about them directly—or the way he imagines Shiro might, or Hunk, or Pidge, from the times he puts his ear to the doors of their rooms and hears, in the silence, a shuffling, a scuffling. Some disturbance none of them can quite name, or don’t feel they should.
For Keith it’s different. His sleep is black and dreamless, but he wakes sometimes with a feeling like metal beams pressing down against his chest, slow and relentless and threatening to crush bone. Easier to just lie there and wait for it to pass. Easier to just lift one hand above his head and touch the stretch of wall on the other side of which he imagines Lance’s head rests, and pray it’s quiet over there tonight.
He knows it never is, though. In the day they ride out and take down another ship, and then another fleet, and then another, and another, so many he just stops counting—the days and the ships, and the fleet of stars that scorches the sky above and below and all around them, and it never is quiet again.
The bus has long since pulled away from the front gate, rounding the corner with a guttural growl, and the dust-clouds it left in its wake have only just settled when Keith hears a sound like a throat being cleared over his shoulder, subtle and pointed and amused. He jerks his head away from the window, out of which he tells himself he hasn't been staring.
“You could go with them next time, you know," Shiro says, mildly. His arms are folded across his chest, lips schooled into a thin line that signals instantly that he's trying not to smile. “It’s Sunday. We technically can't keep you.”
Which is another way of asking, surely he doesn’t intend to spend the whole day doing inventory for the Kerberos mission of his own free will? Keith, caught, peers at him dourly out of the corner of one eye before taking the pen from behind his ear and attacking the list on his clipboard with it. “There's nothing I need to do in town.”
“And there's nothing you want to do? See a movie? Get a drink? Meet some nice girls?”
Sundays are the only free days they get at the Garrison, and those are the kinds of things the group that's always taking off on the bus goes into town to do, if the intelligence Keith’s been able to gather from one Commander Takashi Shirogane is to be believed.
Things to waste time on, then.
“Shiro.”
“A joke only, I promise." He laughs. Sobers. Gives Keith that familiar look that says Level with me, here.“I’m just worried about you, is all.”
Shiro is always worried about him. Never mind that there are more than a few matters toward which he’d be better off channeling that concern. Like the fact that he’s going up into space in a week. "What’s there to worry about?”
“That, I don’t know. You’re working too hard. Isolating yourself.” When Keith frowns harder, he lifts and lowers his shoulders in a placating shrug. “Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I just want to make sure you don’t forget to eat while I’m in the Plutonian system, and I can’t do that if I don’t have concrete, observable evidence that you have at least one other friend before we launch.”
Keith doesn’t even know anyone in the Sunday group. Except this one guy, maybe from the Cargo class. Tall skinny guy, who laughs too loud, and runs his mouth a lot, and for some reason can’t not call out to Keith when they pass each other in the hallways—Hey, Mullet, you coming? Which is the furthest thing from friendly, but he doesn’t quite have the heart to tell Shiro that what he wants is impossible.
“You don’t have to worry. I won’t starve until you come back.”
Shiro cocks an eyebrow at him. Keith stares back like it’s a call to arms. They stand for no more than a beat or two before Shiro sighs, and lets the matter drop.
A second later he scuffs the hair at the crown of Keith’s head with one hand, so Keith figures he’s forgiven.
The way Allura told them it works is that the lions choose their paladins. The pieces of the puzzle find each other. That’s how heroes are made; that’s what Voltron is—a kind of synthesis, a coming-together.
Inside the machine Keith can feel them all around him, close to him, can feel himself suddenly a part of something, and somehow he finds that’s scarier than dying. It’s scarier than anything.
“Why do you fight like that?” Lance asks him.
On nights that they can, they wake each other up and walk together. They go to the kitchen, or the training room, or up to the observation deck, where they can lie on the floor in the low light without fear of Allura's scolding, and look up out of the dome at all the unfamiliar stars.
“Like what?”
“You know, like that.” Eloquent, Lance. But Keith holds his tongue and waits for him to piece together what he means. “You go so hard, and you never let up. Like, ever. Even when they’re dead.” He pauses, hands behind his head. “I don't think anyone goes as hard as you.”
Keith would say that’s debatable, but after chewing on it a little more he thinks he can see what Lance means. It’s not about strength. It’s about what they do—Lance shoots, Shiro commands, Hunk defends, Pidge analyzes. Only Keith charges, like a demon, like a flame, burning fast and fierce and unrelenting through all resistance until everyone and everything that would stand in his way is dead.
He can’t even count all the times he’s pushed a little too far, emptied his clip into a ship already wingless and broken and burning, just to be sure, because you could never be too sure—and then it’d be Shiro's voice, calling him to anchor over the comm. Keith. Come back, Keith. Come back.
“I don’t know.” He thinks he might hear glass shattering in his ears, when really it’s just his voice cracking. “It’s just what I know how to do. It doesn't make me—”
He knows the things Lance is always saying about him. They’re the same things Lance has always said, since they met at the Garrison on orientation day, four hundred-something days and as many lives ago. Keith’s not normal. Keith’s too good for the rest of us. Keith’s a golden boy, a hotshot, a monster. A total beast, man. And where before he would have walked away without knowing how to answer, he's almost tempted to say, like a confession: You know what, you might be on to something there.
Except he can’t say it, and that hesitation is wrong for him too. Always he pushes ahead and doesn’t look back, even if he can’t see, even if he’s alone, and there aren’t supposed to be any what if’s for him to regret. Keith searches the stars on the other side of the dome and wonders if this is what being immersed in deep water feels like, everything gone quiet and shimmering and slow-moving all around you, until you don’t know your left hand from your right, or up from down, or the way you’re headed from the way you came.
Then Lance turns himself, reaching out with one arm to grasp Keith's far shoulder and turn him onto his side, so they face each other on the floor. The starlight still trickling down through the glass makes his eyes shine like they’re wet.
“Hey, man,” he says. “I didn't mean it like—”
“I know.” Keith cuts him off before he can continue. The floor’s cold under his head, and so is Lance's hand through the fabric of his jacket. His skin goes cold when he’s scared, and clammy and kind of grey. Keith knows this, now.
Lance does not let go of his shoulder.
The Garrison officials who escort him to the edge of the compound tell him he can go anywhere he wants to now that he’s free. Keith shrugs, and chooses the house.
It’s empty now, but his key still turns in the lock. The books lean together on their shelves; the peeling wallpaper curls upward in the places he remembers. His father’s machines are quiet—everything at rest in its place, covered over with a thin layer of dust that falls away without resistance when he touches it.
Out the window he can see the sun setting over the dunes and finds he hasn’t forgotten that exact shade of rose the sand turns in the last light.
He doesn’t tell the house I’m home. There’s no need. Instead he steps back into the desert’s silence, and waits for the stars to come out.
The vision of the car, he’s gotten used to—the highway that goes on forever, studded with signs pointing north to San Felipe. The wiggly heat lines in the air. Even the sea, unfurling like a glittering blue flag out the window to his left, doesn’t cut at him so closely anymore, though the first time Lance showed it to them Keith had found himself shaking and short of breath. But the house—it’s always the sight of the house that dismantles him, sends him reeling away from that quiet imaginary space where their five minds meet and touch, throwing the walls protectively up around himself.
Keith feels the guilt sting at him as the link pulls taut and snaps. He knows how it hurts the others, hears Hunk’s sharp gasp and out of the corner of his eye sees Pidge’s hands fly to the sides of her head. Lance is looking straight at him now from the other side of the room, but Keith can’t read his face.
Please. He seeks Shiro out with his eyes. Please get it. I know you saw it too.
Almost as though he’s been cued, Shiro says, “Maybe we should stop.” He’s looking at Keith now, too, that long searching look that always splits Keith in half. “I think we’re all tired.”
Shiro always reads him right. Keith only hopes Shiro can still read him right enough to know that he shouldn’t go after him once he leaves. Sometimes talking helps. Sometimes. He doesn’t know that he can talk about what he sees when they’re in Lance’s head, why the images make it so hard to breathe, why they follow him as he stumbles splintered from the meditation chamber and locks himself in his room.
The long drive. At the end of a bumpy dirt road, a sprawling bungalow. Pale yellow walls, pink flowers like bunches of tiny stars on the bushes in the front garden. A dog running out of the garage to meet the family Keith knows isn’t his and the car door, opening.
Keith hasn’t told anyone this, either, but sometimes he wakes in the morning not knowing where he is. Or who he is, his head all in a fog, the ceiling above it just this arch of shadows that extends upward and ends nowhere.
Then close by—beside him, or sometimes half on top of him, even, head wedged against his chest and one arm curled across his ribcage—Lance will shift in his sleep, will mutter something shapeless into the fabric of Keith's shirt, and then he’ll feel that matchless ache that can’t be anything but someone else squeezing his bones together. Then he’ll focus, and remember. Before the lights change, before Lance even opens his eyes and realizes that he’s holding Keith, again, against every pretense of opposite sides, Keith knows he’ll have come back to himself.
They’ve still never talked about the nightmares, but it’s enough to hear Lance say that all he wants is to be able to sleep through the night. Possibly Keith wants the same thing. The other particulars aren’t important—whose room, whose bed, how they lie. How to save each other, if they even can. If anyone can save anyone, in the end.
Next to him, Lance moves again, his head on Keith’s heart like he’s listening. Keith wonders what he hears, in these static hours where they wait together for the rest of their world to come back to itself, figures it’s the same answer either way, no matter the question: Whatever works. Whatever works. Whatever works.