Chapter Text
Darkness is the first sensation Keith recognizes. There’s an eerie peace washing over his conscious that’s making him move sluggishly in the void. Every sense seems muddled as he tries to understand the nothingness.
The non-ground underneath him gives way and he free-falls into a blinding light. Strong arms wrap around his body before he can hit the floor, and its hard not to groan out as gravity reintroduces itself.
“Hey, hey, Keith, can you hear me?” A soft voice breaks through all the light and rapidly swirling colors.
“Lance?” He calls out, eyes slowly readjusting to the world. Keith hears some reactions in the room, but no confirmation. He grasps onto the arms holding him and stands to forces his body to find its balance.
“N-no, Keith, it’s me - Shiro.” The voice clarifies. Colors finally start to settle down and he sees the face in front of him is definitely Shiro. He can see the exhaustion and stress in every line and bag on Shiro’s face. Guilt ebbs inside. How long had he been out? What happened that he was back in the Castle instead of the Blade’s infirmary?
Still in Shiro’s arms, he squints as he turns to look at everyone in the room. They all look terrible. Pidge looks like she hasn’t slept in days, Hunk definitely looks thinner, Coran looks like he’s running on his last leg to operate Keith’s pod. Allura stands next to Coran with her hand are folded protectively over her shoulders. Her clothes are rumpled and her hair unkempt, she tries to glance at Keith but keeps falling short.
Now that he thinks about it, no one else is looking at him besides Shiro.
“What happened?” Keith groans at the persistent temple throbbing, “Where…Where’s Lan-”
It all comes back in a flurry of events. Lance being savagely taken from his room. Keith coming back to the Castle to help find him. Butting heads with Shiro. Going to the Central planet to follow their strongest lead. Seeing Lance get dragged out to the Town Square. Hearing him say his goodbyes. Say ‘I love you’. Seeing his body fall. His head roll. The explosion.
Everything seems so heavy again. Keith feels his legs give, and Shiro follows his sinking to the ground. His eyes are wide and unfocused. The only thing he can feel is his heart slamming into his chest. He starts swallowing huge gasps of air, but it’s almost as if it's having the exact opposite.
He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe.
“Keith, Keith, please. Take deep breaths, I’m right here. I'm right here.” Shiro whispers into his ear, he’s rubbing small circles into Keith back, but it feels so wrong.
How is he still here and Lance isn’t? This wasn’t supposed to happen, none of this was supposed to happen.
He’s screaming, he can hear himself screaming. There’s so much guilt, and anger, and sadness eating him alive. These feelings won’t go away no matter how hard he screams and it’s driving him crazy.
He needs to get away.
Keith scratches and puts all of his power in trying to push Shiro off, but Shiro persists and forces a hug on him.
“Lance!” He cried out, “Shiro, Lance!” He succumbs to Shiro’s hold and wraps his arms around him. “God, I saw him, I saw him- he saw me! I tried to get to him, I tried!” Keith sobbed. He’s a blubbering, incoherent mess and much too absorbed in his grief to feel any shame as his teammate watching him crumble.
“I know,” Shiro says, and Keith can feel tears on his shoulder. “I know you did, kiddo.”
Suddenly, warmth spreads over Keith’s back, he turns his face and sees Hunk hugging him from behind, his face buried in the folds of his arms. Other than his shoulders shaking, Hunk doesn’t make a sound. Pidge and Coran quickly join the pile, and while Pidge is letting out the occasional hiccup, Coran is outright bawling. Keith hears the hesitant clacking of Allura’s shoes approaching them and he looks up.
She looks as broken as he feels. Her shoulder’s shake with her sobs and she seems so consumed by her grief that the tears falling from her face are untouched. Allura lets gravity drop her against the pile and Coran shifts his arms to burrow her deeper in.
Keith can’t help but think of how similar this felt to the group hug they shared when he left to the Blade.
Except Lance isn't with him, and Keith honestly, truly, has no idea how to they are going to do without him.
—
After a few moments, everyone stands up and helps walk Keith to the dining hall. They spend a bit trying to convince him to eat at least a few spoons of food goo before he concedes.
“Where,” he clears his hoarse throat, “are we?” he asks.
“Near the blue star the Blade resides by.” Coran answers. “We left for it the moment the Blade delivered you.”
Hunk spoke from across the table, “You had a metal shard the size of a fist in your back. We didn’t, um, we didn’t know how you were gonna come out of that pod.”
“Oh.” Keith’s gaze drops to his hand. He stretches them out and clenches them into a fist. “How long was I out for?”
How long has it been since Lance died? Was the underlying tone.
“Two quintants.” Pidge offers, sitting next to Hunk. They are clustered towards the middle of the table and are very careful to leave Lance’s seat untouched.
Shiro offered his arm as a mean for Keith to get up from his seat, which he gratefully took. “We’re going to have a briefing in the Bridge with the Blade soon, we should get going.”
Keith nodded and followed the team out.
When they leave the room, Keith is very aware of the fact that Allura has yet to say a word to him.
Pidge pulls up the transmission feed and they find Kolivan is already present.
“Paladins.”
Allura steps towards the screen and looks up at the leader of the Blade with a barely controlled anger. “Kolivan.” She says curtly.
“I apologize for the mission failure - I understand how close you all are to each other an-”
“You ‘apologize’?” Allura cuts him off. “Apologize? Our teammate, my brother, is dead, because of your failure.” Shiro moves to try to calm her down, but she catches his movement from her peripherals and whips her arm out to stop him with an open palm. She stares Kolivan down, who has thinned his lips to a line. “I don’t want your apology, I want an explanation.”
Kolivan nods, seeming unperturbed by her words. “Our mission directives were to gather information, secure a location, and once we confirmed the captive’s identity, create a diversion to seize the target and meet at the extraction point for retrieval.”
“The two Blades that stopped me from getting closer,” Keith recalls, and quickly fills the blanks. “It was to avoid the blast radius. The other agents must have been placing the bombs on the corners the stage and around the plaza.”
Allura briefly looks to Keith, then back to Kolivan. “The bomb was from the Blade? Why weren’t we informed of this part of the plan, and why did it go off so late?”
“If we shared the plan with you, the Red Paladin would have never agreed to it. He would have put himself and the mission in danger.”
“Of course, I would have!” Keith shouts. “If I was closer, if I could have made it to the stage-”
“You would have got yourself killed, kit. You wouldn't have been able to control yourself if you were any closer and you would have put yourself in danger.”
“Getting killed is what the Blade is all about!” He snarls. “I would have done anything to save him, why would you waste two agents on babysitting me?”
“Knowledge over death is what we strive for, yes. But you are not a Blade, you explicitly chose not to be once you left during your training. Your life is in infinitely more valuable as a Paladin than a Blade.”
Keith opens his mouth to rebuttal, when Allura repeats herself. “But why did the bomb go off after-” She looks away with a pained expression, and takes a deep breath before continuing, “after Lance died?”
The Galra on their screen opened his mouth, then closed it. He sighs, rubbing his nose, and admits, “It wasn’t our bomb.”
“…What?”
“Our planted bombs were made of Ruibidite - which is three times as explosive as the bomb that went off. We had multiple placed around the stage and should have been triggered during Lance’s speech.”
“Sleeper cells in the area report that the bombs we planted were found and defused. It is more than likely that whoever planted the bomb that went off, found and defused our bombs as well.”
Allura rubbed her fingers together to calm her anger. “I’ll assume you have yet to discover their identity, do you at least have his body in your base? We deserve our right to lay him to rest.”
“Even though our agents moved to the stage moments after the explosion, they were unable to recover his body.
“You don’t even know where his body is?” She cries out with a hand over her mouth.
It becomes a fist and Allura stomps over to Pidge, slamming her finger on the button to end the call. “Useless,” she seethes. “Utterly useless.”
“Princess…” Shiro calls out while reaching for her. He lightly touches her forearm, but she yanks it from his reach and storms out of the room.
“I’ll, I’ll try to talk to her.” Keith offers and walks out after her.
—
It’s hard to chase someone down so soon after coming out of a pod. So, instead, he goes to the one place he imagines she’d go. The one place he would want to go.
Lance’s room.
Sure enough, when he walks in, he sees Allura standing in the room, looking at the Altean Mice who are chittering at her in a worried tone. She whips her body around, ready to yell at whoever walked through the door. Once she sees its Keith, she falters and sits on the bed instead.
He walks over to her and sits in the same spot he was when he was comforting Hunk. When they promised they would make pernil for Lance.
His chest aches with another round of pain.
They sit in silence, Keith providing Allura as much time as she needs to gather herself.
“I don’t hate you.” She says softly.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
Allura shakes her head. “I want to blame you, I want to blame Kolivan, blame the Lions, myself. But the only ones that really deserve that fury are light spans away.” She reaches into the folds of her skirt and takes out a black cloth. Keith watches her caress it with the back of her hand. “I’m just at a complete loss. I never thought, never dreamed, I’d see another Altean again. Lo and behold, not only is it my brother, but I've spent over a deca-pheob with him by my side.” She clicks her tongue and opens the cloth up. In it, are two locks of silver hair, both locks have a neat royal blue ribbon tied to keep the strands of hair in place. Keith’s heart drops as he sees specks of blood on the bottom portion of the strand. Keith stares with wide eyes.
“Is that…”
She nods. “Lance’s hair. The Galra that brought you back, Po’luz, he was one of the Blades that made it to the platform.” She rubs one of the bands gently and the mice gather around to peer at the hair. “He hands this to me and said ‘I wish we could have done more.’” Allura picks up one of the bundles of hair and hands it to Keith. He starts to protest, but she shakes her head again. “I- I don’t know what happened between you and Lance, but I feel it is only right for you to have a piece of him to carry with you as I intend to.”
Keith gulps and takes the tress. He stares at the hair, not realizing how much it means to him until the moment he feels how soft it is. Until the moment he realizes that it could have been his hand running through such softness while it was on Lance - not like this. Emotions are flooding his senses again, and tears gather once more. “I never told him.” He croaks out, “I never got to say ‘I love you’ back”.
A soft hand covers his own, and he snaps his head up. Allura is leaning in and has such a sorrowful smile on her face.
“Lance knew, you know he did.”
He bits his lip and nods, “Thank you, Allura.”
They sit in Lance’s room for a bit longer, and as Allura begins to leave for the night, Keith stops her with a question.
“His name.”
“Hmm?” Allura quirks her head to him and raises an eyebrow.
“What was Lance’s name?”
The princess looks at the hair still in her hand and closes it gently.
“His name was Loras.”
“Loras…” he repeats. Keith mulls the name over. “I think I prefer Lance.”
Allura can’t help the chuckle she gets from his comment. “You know? I think he did too.”
After she leaves, Keith adjusts himself to Lance’s bed. It’s probably not good for him to do this, but he doubts anyone will yell at him for it. Lying in Lance’s bed, Keith thinks back to what Allura said about those who deserved her fury.
Zarkon, Haggar, Lotor.
He grips the hair in his hand.
Even with Lance gone, they still had a universe to save.
Zarkon, Haggar, Lotor.
He closes his eyes before he has a chance to cry again.
Zarkon, Haggar, Lotor.
Voltron is going to win, and he is going to make sure that all three of them die by his hands.
“Zarkon, Haggar, Lotor.”
He wasn’t able to keep his promise with Hunk, but he knows he can keep this promise to himself.
When he sleeps, he dreams of a boy who held a galaxy of stars in his eyes. Love was shining through, even with death creeping at his throat.