Chapter Text
Keith doesn’t know how he managed to stand up let alone drag himself back to his room without collapsing. He must’ve mentally blacked out for most of the journey when the pain became too much because the next thing he knew he was sprawling onto the cold tiles of his bathroom floor and everything in his body that could possibly hurt did.
He struggled to slide the medkit out from under his sink with how stiff his back had become, like the skin there had been pulled as taut as it would go. The slick of his bloodied hand made it almost impossible to snag a solid enough grip on the handle, and the effort of reaching that far over was starting to reignite several quelled hurts.
“Come on,” he grimaced through teeth clenched much too tightly, finally managing to pull it into reach only after he tried with the still gloved one.
He rummaged through the contents like a mad man, fighting to find what he was looking for before the blur clouding his eyes made it impossible to identify anything at all, his limbs buzzing with a prickly heat as his body tried to come down from the overwhelming daze. He yanked at the clasps on his armor, moving on to the next piece before he’d even let the previous fall away, scared that if he slowed for even a second he would never get his leaden arms to finish the job.
The same resolve had him tearing a pack of pressure gauze open with his teeth while thumbing the cap off a bottle of wound wash and breathing as deeply as his diaphragm allowed before drenching the grizzly site that wrapped around his thigh. The solution was cold and felt heavenly against the burn but the brutal sting soon overpowered the relief, making his vision waver for the umpteenth time.
Once he’d blinked away the last of the colorful static, he pitched his knee up to chance a look at the wound now that nothing was obstructing it. The sterile liquid cleared away enough tacky red to reveal the bubbling skin at the center of the blast mark, the sight of where undersuit mixed with flesh making him dangerously nauseous.
He twisted away from the mess violently, so consumed with the prospect of sucking in desperate lungfuls of air to stave off what was threatening to come up from his stomach that he didn’t notice the successive knocks.
“Hey man, don’t you want to see Pidge before she goes into the pod?” Keith hears Hunk ask through a silk screen of white noise, his mind spinning in dizzying circles trying to figure out how he could have gotten into his room in the first place, the mental aerobics doing nothing to help his already panicked breathing.
Hunk was knocking on the bathroom door now, “Keith…?” The last barrier separating the two, and apparently the only thing Keith remembered to shut and lock behind him, was a sliding slab of metal. “You, uh, you in there bud?”
Keith found himself holding his breath like it would somehow absolve him of having to respond until he couldn’t go another second more, the sharp, shuddering exhale he finally let out tailed by a faint ‘yeah’ the only answer he could will his constricting throat to produce.
He didn’t have to be able to see Hunk to know he was frowning. “Uh, everything okay?”
“Couldn’t be better,” he croaked after a small eternity, his voice small and strained like he was trying to keep himself contained of something, the vice on his chest shortening the band it had around his lungs further with each unwanted question.
“Are you sure about that?”
He pressed his lips together hard enough for the teeth digging into them to draw blood. “Mhm,” he mumbled, choking back any noises of pain that tried to escape like bad medicine.
“Kay, then why are you… ya know, holed up in there and not coming to see Pidge?”
“Have to change first,” he spat quickly, “my armor is trashed.” It wasn’t an outright lie, not when half of it hadn’t even made it in the black lion with him, the rest soiled with an acrid mixture of flaking blood and dusty soot.
“Look,” Hunk paused, sighing like he was gearing up to say something he knew Keith was not going to like hearing. “I know we’re not the closest but if you uh, need someone to talk to about what happened back there or something, I’m all ears.”
His answer was immediate and he didn’t even try to make it sound less scathing. “Thanks, but I’m alright.”
“Come on, dude, I know that’s bull.”
“I said I’m good Hunk,” he reaffirmed flatly, willing his heart rate to slow back down with deep, controlled breaths. “Can you just leave?”
“No, Keith. I really don’t think—”
“I can take care of myself!” he finally exploded, the bite of the volume dampened by metal but startling Hunk all the same. “D’you forget? I’ve had a lot of practice.”
Hunk recoiled back like the tragedy of Keith’s childhood could actually hurt him, the only thing stirring him from his stun the muffled groaning coming from behind the other side of the door.
“Hey. Keith?” he called, more sheepishly now than he had before. “You’re starting to scare me,” and his knuckles were beginning to smart with how hard he was rapping them. The sinking feeling in Hunk’s gut sunk impossibly further the longer Keith went without responding with actual words.
“That’s it open up,” he demanded when fast and harsh huffs were the only sounds he could make out through the thick division between the two. “Whatever it is I don’t care, just let me help,” he pleaded, raising his hand up to the glowing panel beside the doorframe to test the red lock that was blatantly in place, and almost lost his footing on a wet spot beneath his feet from the shock when it blared green the next moment.
The door was sliding open before Hunk could investigate. “Oh my god.” He had to hold a hand over his mouth to ensure that the contents in his stomach remained where they ought to be.
“Hunk,” Keith blanched, his face twitching with poorly concealed pain.
“Whew, okay. Yeah. Wow,” he spewed nervously before setting his jaw with a gulp and rushing to the corner where his friend sat curled over himself protectively. “This—well I didn’t think it would be great, but this is like a whole new level of not good.”
The sparse med kit that every paladin’s bathroom had been re-fitted with once they arrived at the castle lay open, its contents scattered all over the floor and in various stages of use, though all Hunk could find himself focusing on was the amount of blood mixed into the disarray. It soaked fresh pads of gauze and dotted the spaces between empty tubes of disinfectant, laying smeared where shaking arms held his body away from the wall and pooling beneath one of his legs from a constant drip.
“I know how bad it looks but—”
“Try horrifying.”
“Right,” Keith swallowed thickly. “But it’s just a graze from a blaster—”
“Nope,” Hunk cut in, his face paling several shades when he took a break from his internal freak out to really look at the scene in front of him. His stomach did not appreciate what he saw. “I do not want to hear you say that you are fine, or that this is nothing. With the amount of fucking blood on the floor right now and not in your body, it is very much not nothing.”
He lowered himself to his knees slowly when he was done, like he was approaching a wild animal that was cornered and rearing to either take off sprinting or claw his face off. When Keith didn’t do either, Hunk rose a hesitant hand over the sluggishly bleeding wound on the inside of his thigh, a cautionary request to let him help.
Keith flinched as soon as the hand started to descend, his hands immediately scrabbling for purchase on the bloody tiles as he tried to squirm out of his friend’s reach. “Don’t,” he hissed before Hunk could get any closer.
“Stop, stop, you’re gonna hurt yourself. I’m not going to try and touch it, see?”
Keith followed Hunk’s hands while he moved to hold them up in the air above his head and waited until he stilled completely to relax his arms, the limbs so leaden after the workout of keeping his back from touching the wall for so long that they fell to his sides bonelessly, fingers twitching and useless. He stared at Hunk until he was sure he could speak without his voice shaking.
“It’s a little late for you to play doctor,” he laughed grimly, stopping to spare a glance down at the problem in question. “The bleeding has already stopped.”
“I don’t think your understand what I’m saying,” Hunk challenged, meeting his glare with equal intensity, “bleeding or not, this is still the type of ‘not good’ that warrants a pod.”
He used the heavy silence that fell between them after that to do a quick once over of Keith to make sure there wasn’t anything else he had to worry about. There were two butterfly bandages haphazardly plastered over the cut above his eyes, but it was too wide, and the strips weren’t strong enough to keep the skin together.
“I’m not going to the infirmary.”
“Why not?”
Keith trained his eyes on his subtly trembling leg. “Pidge is there.”
“Yeah,” Hunk agreed incredulously, his eyes bulging like he couldn’t believe he was about to explain such an elementary concept. “She’s there because that is where injured people go, which is why that’s exactly where you need to be—”
“Jesus fuck, Hunk. Did you not listen to a word of what I just said? I’m not going.”
Watching Keith snap while in lunging range was admittedly a lot scarier than when Hunk was behind the protection of altean grade sheet metal.
“Alright, what the hell is taking you guys so long?”
Keith deflated immediately at the interruption. “Great,” he would’ve pinched the bridge of his nose to quell the steady throb at the front of his skull that seemed to double now that Lance was there—a mannerism he’d unknowingly had adopted from Shiro in the last few years—but his arms refused to cooperate.
“Are you aware that you’re like totally sitting in a pool of blood?” he asked curiously, catching himself on the door frame to keep from stepping directly into a small puddle of the stuff.
Hunk eyed Keith for any signs of protest before giving a quick debrief of the situation, the indignant scowl he sported the entire time making it clear how thoroughly perturbed he was by the growing audience gathering in the already less than spacious bathroom.
“Thanks for visiting,” he spit venomously, “but it would be really kind of you both to fuck off now.”
Lance just smiled back at him, wholly unfazed. “I think I’ll stay actually,” he determined and then looked to Hunk, the two carrying out a silent conversation without having to utter a single word before switching places.
“Please fuck off,” Keith gritted, the blood that had the pleasure of staying in his body nearing a boil now that Lance was on babysitting duty while Hunk looked to see if any usable medical supplies remained.
“Oh boy, a missing ‘please’ is definitely not what was wrong with that statement.”
“I’ve taken care of worse before,” Keith contested, ignoring Lance’s reprimand entirely.
“Good for you man,” he rebuked cheerily like he was getting a kick out of the fact that Keith was seriously trying to convince them to leave him like this.
“So you don’t really need to be here,” he growled, irritation roiling off his skin like sheets of blood and sweat.
“Tough shit. I don’t remember the bouncer at the door asking for proof of invitation.”
Hunk let the med kit slam shut with a hollow clack before Keith could make his injuries worse by attempting to throttle Lance. “No dice. There’s nothing left that I can work with, not for a burn at least.”
The thready thump of his rising pulse in his ears beat heavy and damning like the hands of a ticking clock, except instead of keeping the time he had left before he would be blown to shit, they were counting down the seconds until all of the hard work he’d put into taking care of this without bothering anybody else went to crap.
“Looks like it’s walk of shame time! Come on Hunk, grab an arm.”
The groan Keith let out was guttural and came from deep in his chest as he tried to shoo away their grabbing hands with his noodle arms, but he was so fatigued that catching the combative limbs was easy. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, we’re just trying to help,” Lance leveled after releasing the skin he’d been gnawing on at the bottom of his lip.
He shared another knowing look with Hunk before they hoisted him up to his feet, the hands that weren’t clasped around his forearms falling to his back and pressing down on the bits of armor that had broken off and melted into the undersuit, digging the jagged edges further into his singed skin with a sickening squelch. The pain that followed was blinding, his injured leg shaking viciously before promptly giving out and leaving him to be held up solely by Lance and Hunk.
“Jesus Keith.” Lance was twisting him all kinds of ways to examine the wound on his back. Hunk had to look away.
“I can’t,” he blurted, considerably greener than he had just moments ago. “You gotta take him dude.”
“Please do not puke right now,” Lance pleaded as he rushed to get under each of Keith’s arms before they both took a header trying to keep him upright.
“Huh? S’wrong with the blast on my back?” He grounded each of his words out between agonized wheezes.
Lance blinked at him owlishly. “Blasts dude. Like plural,” he finally offered when he’d had enough of Keith looking so doe eyed with fear and pain that he almost forgot about the rocky mix of hatred and admiration he had for the guy.
“Hey Hunk, do think you’re gonna be done anytime soon?” he asked quickly, trying to keep the rising concern out of the inflection in his voice as he watched the confusion on Keith’s face spiral into disbelief, like what Lance told him was somehow implausible, which was seriously concerning considering that meant he hadn’t noticed when any of those shots had landed.
“Need another minute,” Hunk groaned from over the toilet.
Keith was still stuck on wrapping his mind around the knowledge himself, but the physical consequences of the last hour were rapidly catching up with him, making it difficult to hold on to a specific thought before he could make any progress so he stopped trying and let his head hang forward when even bracing himself against Lance’s arms was beginning to sap his energy.
“Hellooo?” Lance called, his voice sounding too far away for his hands to be so fiercely squeezed around his forearms. Keith hummed, but didn’t open his eyes and didn’t pick up his head. “I asked how you were holding up mullet head.”
Answering Lance was hard when there were so many different things that were wrong. He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to tell Lance that he was still worrying over whether he’d been quick enough with Pidge, that if he’d been even a minute faster she might not have had to go in a pod at all.
And then there was his colossal screw up in general, a plan he had to come up with on the fly and make all kinds of promises about just to watch it fail, a special pit in his stomach reserved for Shiro’s looming disappointment over letting himself get injured like this, especially since his false confidence ended up hurting another teammate.
“A simple ‘doing fine’ or ‘feel like I’m dying’ would suffice.”
Keith sincerely wished it was that simple, but it wasn’t. He was so emotionally wrung out that he felt sick, like skin was too warm for his hands to be so cold and the muscles in his good leg to be cramping from merely holding his body up, which all did sort of make him feel like he was dying. That and the ball of dread taking up precious real estate in his lungs over going to the infirmary because Shiro was there. But he’s pretty sure pure anxiety is what had his breath coming in ragged pants, not outstanding blood loss, and he was certain that he could never put any of that into actual words. Not any that he would let Lance hear anyway.
“I feel weird,” he finally croaked, the inside of his throat grating like sandpaper when he spoke.
“Like something other than excruciating pain kind of weird?”
Keith wouldn’t use the word excruciating, he’s endured snake bites out in the dry heat of the dessert that burned worse, it was more so just very disorienting to have his entire body feel weighted down with exhaustion but also strangely detached, like he was outside of it somehow, or he’d never moved from the throne of red he’d made for himself on his bathroom floor.
A part of him worried he might’ve never even made it out of the galra base. That this was some horrible side effect of dying that forced him to live out a reality in which he had made it as some sort of cosmic karma for being so reckless. Though he was also pretty sure that if he was dead he wouldn’t be hurting so badly still.
“M’really fucking tired,” is what he finally relented on. It was a truth that best summarized all of his ailments.
“I know buddy, but you did good back there.” Lance gave his bicep an affirming squeeze and didn’t say anything about how fiercely it was quivering. “Really. I would’ve shit myself if I had to do that,” the other boy continued, sounding entirely serious which managed to somewhat convince Keith he most likely wasn’t dead and hallucinating. He wasn’t sure he’d have enough memory of such a tone from Lance to fabricate something like that in his head.
“Okay,” he agreed breathily, his own voice muddled down with cotton now as he fought against the black steadily encroaching on the boarder of his vision, making the window smaller and smaller until with another broken sigh he was swaying sideways, his body apparently not willing to ignore the damage it’d suffered any longer.
Lance followed him down to the floor in a controlled fall that allowed him to keep Keith from slipping further out of his grasp. The side of his face not covered in blood was now deathly pale and pressed against Lance’s shoulder as he took in large, shuddering breaths to try remain conscious.
He wasn’t aware that he’d closed his eyes until the toilet flushing startled him into opening them again, the harsh light above them making him sorry he had. “I’m done,” Hunk declared hoarsely, coughing harshly against his stinging throat when he saw that Keith was back on the ground. “Oh fuck, okay. We’re gonna get you some help buddy, come on, up we go,” he muttered soothingly before his hand was snaking around his waist so Lance could right himself for when they brought him back onto unsteady legs, the good one unwilling to withstand much pressure before buckling now too.
Hunk ducked under Keith’s arm with a grunt, eliciting a quiet whine when he pulled on it to get a better grip. Lance was doing the same before he could apologize and had to slip his free hand through an empty slot on his utility belt to keep Keith up through the violent shudders that racked his frame after he was done.
“Let’s make this quick.”
“Uh huh,” Lance nodded. “Let’s.”
The three paladins made it down to the med bay in record time because at one point Keith decided to stop trying to keep up, and allowing himself to be dragged along proved to be surprisingly faster. Shiro spared the group a partial glance and brief wave once the whooshing doors closed after them in favor of continuing to pour over Pidge who was wide awake and fighting Coran’s helping hands. No one seemed to notice Keith’s prone form being held up entirely by his friends who remained frozen in the doorway.
“I think I’m fine guys,” they heard her pout. “Seriously. All that’s left is already half healed and not nearly deep enough to warrant a freaking pod!”
“Maybe, but you still lost a lot of blood that will need to be repelenished,” Coran pointed, his mustache twitching as he attempted to convey the necessity of the precaution and failing miserably when it only made her laugh.
Keith’s legs hadn’t been contributing much to the effort of keeping him standing but admittedly had some part in it because the longer the three remained where they stood the more they seemed to dissolve into jelly, the adrenaline his body’s survival instinct had initially supplied was also almost entirely gone, leaving his whole body thrumming and the pain slowly intensifying.
“Guys,” Keith whispered weakly, waiting until both heads more or less turned to him to make sure they had a chance of hearing him. “Need to sit. Like now,” is all he managed before his legs were wobbling dangerously again, suddenly devoid of all strength required to keep them locked in place in order to be even remotely helpful.
Hunk blinked several times before finally shaking his head, like he was shaking himself back into action. “Right,” he winced and transferred even more of the burden onto his hip to make up the difference. “Over there, Lance.”
There was still no acknowledgment from the others in the room, not so much as a second or sideways glance. “Hey uhm, how much longer are you guys gonna be with Pidge?” Lance questioned nervously after they’d settled Keith down into the nearest chair, eyeing how grey his face had gotten.
He of course waited until after Hunk had shot across the room to start tearing apart medicine cabinet and cart alike before finding it increasingly difficult to support himself without resting his back against the chair. He nearly tilted out of it altogether before Lance realized what was wrong.
“Woah,” he narrowly manages to right him before he could, but it didn’t seem like he was able sit upright without swaying so as to avoid a collision into the chair the next time he lost a war with his skewed sense of balance. “Here,” he eventually offered, guiding Keith’s shoulders until his forehead came to lean against his hip.
“We’ll be done as soon as Pidge stops being difficult,” Shiro answered casually, his eyes still scanning the partially mended slash across the smaller girl’s stomach. “Why?”
“Uhm,” Lance completely blanked, unable to fathom where he should even start when they’d already been brushed off twice. “Well Keith is sort of not doing so hot…” His quip from earlier on the mission sat bitter on his tongue as soon as he finished saying it. Understatement of the century, you massive asshole.
The blasts on his back were bad enough for the single-handedly most stubborn human Lance has ever met to be in so much pain he was forced to accept his friend’s help. He also figured the haunting glaze of exhaustion in his eyes and purple bruises beneath them had a great deal to do with lowering his defenses, the realization of just how tired he was sending another jab to his chest.
“He just needs to take it easy like I told him, can’t you see we’ve got our hands full at the moment?”
Lance shivered at the indifference in Shiro’s voice because the burns looked so deep, like little caverns carved into his skin that must have zapped several dozen nerves for him to have ignored being injured this severely.
“No Shiro,” he sputtered dryly, “I can’t.”
The material of his suit looked like it had melted into his skin, lining the edges of the puffy burns with a smokey black. Some were larger than others but there were at least a dozen and they were all bleeding steadily, the constant rise and fall of his chest making it impossible for any of them to clot.
“Excuse me?”
He drags his eyes from the quivering body pressed against him with great difficultly, needing to look at Shiro when he spoke next.
“Shouldn't you know better than anyone that when Keith admits he’s not okay it’s because he fucking means it?” The words had definitely come from his mouth but he isn’t quite sure he authorized them, his voice low and cutting, a stark derision from his usually charming vibrato.
He watches Shiro go rigid all over, his flesh and blood shoulder dropping first and the prosthetic following with a mechanical flex that he could only hear because the room had grown uncomfortably quiet, but Lance couldn’t find it within himself to worry about getting told off for his tone, his unchecked rage justifying itself when Keith’s ongoing struggle to breathe devolving into helplessly erratic gasps was the only thing filling the tense silence.
It got Shiro to finally look their way, to look at Keith slumped against Lance and panting, his shoulders drawn up in muted anguish as blood dripped steadily from several somewheres and collected in a sizeable puddle between the legs of the chair. The apathetic mask fell, shattering the stillness of the moment when several things happened at once: Pidge surging up to see what was wrong and keening until Allura gently forced her back down, Hunk gagging at the sight of another widening breadth of crimson, and Shiro racing Coran across the room in a matter of seconds.
Shiro reached them first, cursing when he saw the mess of his back and then again when the fingers that landed on Keith’s arms made him flinch. “He was fine when we landed, what the fuck could’ve happened between then and now?” he clipped, his eyes stoney pinpoints that bored into Lance with a silent sort of accusation until the older man reached the pair. “Talk to me Coran.”
“Looks like plasma blast burns,” he readily supplied, his eyes flicking wildly over the burnt and bloodied skin. “Most of them appear to be second degree.”
“Christ, Keith. You told me you were tired.”
“He’s exhausted,” Lance corrected, turning his eyes back to Keith’s shaking shoulders, the trembles seeming more like spasms then, each jerk prompting a fresh gush of red from the wounds. “And yet he came off that shit show of a mission ready to try and patch this up himself because he didn’t want to tell anyone he was hurt,” he continued on only after watching Coran walk away in search of proper supplies. “At first I didn’t get why, but I think I’m starting to understand now.”
Lance didn’t have time to take his fill of pleasure in watching Shiro work his jaw because Keith’s chest was hitching up, strangling the words he was trying to get out. “Really thought it was just one,” he tried to explain, but was Shiro already shushing him and lowering himself down into a crouch so he could run his hand through his hair even though it was slightly damp with sweat. His eyes weren’t open so he tensed when the hand first fell into place but soon softened under Shiro’s touch, the cold weight of the galra metal oddly comforting on his overheated skin.
“This is not on you bud. You were probably already in shock once you got to Black, I should’ve made time to check you over myself. ”
“Damn right you sh—“
“What’s that?” Shiro entreated, cutting him off and lifting his head to face the younger boy with something so fierce in his eyes that Lance had to force himself to look elsewhere. As much as he wanted to tell Shiro how royally he’d fuck up he knew it wouldn’t be productive, that the last thing anyone needed then was more chaos, but before Lance had to take actual precautions to contain his anger Keith made a noise as if he wanted to respond. All that actually came out though was a defeated whine as his chest stuttered, pulling even more at the mess on his back and sending him into a fit of flinching and hissing.
“Easy. Take it easy, mullet, you’re alright,” Lance cooed, the additional hand on Keith’s neck centering him while he tried to ride out the sudden flood of pain without causing more.
He tried to take even, measured breaths like the voices above his told him to, but it had been over a minute and he still couldn’t calm his breathing in time to avoid the waves of agony that followed the aggressive heaves his chest was commanding out of him, eventually becoming desperate enough to clamp his lips shut and hold his breath until his heart let up with its incessant pounding.
This admittedly made the general haze clouding his mind much worse, black dots blurring the red speckled floor he’d fixed his gaze on. There were countless hands on him but he couldn’t feel much of anything other than the heat on his back and strain in his lungs as he continued to restrict his breathing. He hadn’t realized when his hands had traveled up to clutch at Lance’s stomach but they were there now, clawing at the unwavering material for something solid to root himself to now that his body felt feather light, but it was stuck to his torso like glue.
“-ith!” It wasn’t until someone was knelt down next to him and nearly screaming in his ear that he could understand anything. “Stop doing that, you have to take deeper breaths or you’ll pass out.”
But Keith didn’t really care if he passed out, he couldn’t manage anything other than short, rapid inhales that weren’t nearly enough and that wouldn’t hurt half as bad if he were unconscious. His hearing abandoned him again not long after that, reducing the conversations going on around him to unintelligible murmurs drowned out by the rumbling in his eardrums.
It felt like there were literal flames licking up at even the slightest movements and marring deep enough to scorch bone. The entire expanse of his upper body had gone numb with it, his arms slack at his sides and his neck weak under the weight of his head as he put all of his concentration into slowing his breathing and keeping it as controlled as possible. He didn’t feel the hands slipping under his armpits and tugging at his supply belt, only the scorching stretch of his body straightening as he was pulled to his feet.
Lance shifted around him with great care, Shiro guiding his head to rest on his shoulder when it rolled limply, the rest hovering anxiously as the two put aside their differences in favor of lifting Keith to his feet without jarring his injuries.
Keith really tried to hold his own weight this time, but as soon as he was upright, his back lit with a new fury that had his vision whiting. Soon he couldn’t even be certain his feet were still on the ground as his body went lax and the darkness that had been teasing him descended quicker than he could process.
He assumed he had screamed bloody murder since his stinging throat was the only pain he could pinpoint as he lost consciousness, but by then he wouldn’t have been able to hear his own voice if he tried to speak, the only thing he knew for sure that he’d pitched into a tangle of arms like his bones had spontaneously emulsified, blissfully unaware as to how the whole room seemed to cry out in unison when he did.