Chapter Text
Keith didn’t sleep much. It wasn’t that he couldn’t. He was lucky enough, perhaps luckier than the rest of them, to not be plagued most nights with dreams wrought by their collective traumas. So he could sleep. But he never felt the need to sleep as often as the average person. He only felt the need every three or so days, when fatigue would come on hard, itching at his eyes and his skin and the walls of his mind until sleep claimed him.
At some point, when he was young, he’d realized that he wasn’t normal. He’d also learned about the same age to keep his head down and not cause trouble. That last one never really stuck but he never mentioned his odd sleeping patterns all the same.
He never dreamed, either. He had never dreamed and he didn’t know what it was like to dream beyond stories, beyond drawn out explanations that only confused him all the more. A dream was like a movie, someone had told him once. A dream was like being alive in a story you had no control over, one being played out inside your mind, one that was weird and strange and left you just as you woke, leaving you to grasp frantically at the tendrils of it as it fled.
He was already alive in a story he had no control over, Keith had thought.
Dreams were just dreams. You couldn’t understand them if you had never experienced one.
But Keith, for the first time in his life, was dreaming.
And he understood. Dreaming was fear given life in the helplessness of sleep. Dreaming was terror, was sheer and gut wrenching horror that bled itself across his consciousness. It was his back pressed to a wall that was so cold it leeched all warmth from his skin, it was a purple, clawed hand around his neck, it was struggling helplessly against an enemy he was powerless to escape from.
It was waking in a cold sweat with a strangled cry.
His hands flew to his neck, clawing at it, panicked, seeking out the hand that had just been there, cutting off his air. But there was nothing there save for a thin line of beading blood from where his own nails had caught the skin, no sound but his own frantic breathing where in his dream it had been choked off gasps, a struggle for air against the hand pressing his airway closed.
He didn’t go back to sleep, tired as he was, and he went down to breakfast the next morning with a steady tremor in his hand, heavy bags under his eyes and a queasy feeling in his stomach that he couldn’t quite shake off.
That first time, he didn’t read too much into it. Space, the lives they led now, it touched them in different ways. Maybe this was the way it hit him. Maybe he dreamed now, and slept even less often. Maybe that was just the way things were going.
The third time it happened he questioned it, because when he went down to breakfast, they all looked as tired as he did, eyes ringed heavy, groggy silence looming over the usually energetic table. Even Hunk looked exhausted, and he was a morning person, as far as you could call the start of the artificial days on the ship a ‘morning.’
They were all tired and flinchy. Words escaped them, not for lack of anything to say, but for lack of any energy to say it. Even Lance was listless.
In all their quiet gloom, Shiro, who sat at the head of the table, face white as a ghost, went more or less unnoticed. He was shaking, hunched over his bowl, slowly stirring his semi edible food so that no one would notice he wasn’t actually eating any of it. He didn’t meet anyone’s eyes and no one but Keith thought to seek them out.
Allura, though, looked his way as he finally stepped into the room, a tight smile hiding her worried look. She knew something. He knew she knew something.
The pieces came together slowly.
Keith was in the mess, sullenly looking down at his morning bowl of goop surrounded by the white noise of the other paladins, livelier than usual for so early in the morning.
Early was relative. Time on the ship was only a simulation of Earth time, programmed by Pidge. It was only early insofar as the clock read seven am. His odd sleeping habits had always made it difficult for him to tell time just from a feeling, but to the others, maybe it actually felt early. Maybe the clock was nothing more than a comfort and they didn’t really need it.
To Keith, time just went by and never felt like anything in particular. It had been maybe two days since he’d last slept. To his great relief, because he couldn’t dream if he didn’t sleep.
He tuned out the others, though, because his head hurt, a faint throb made painful only from it’s sheer constance, made worse by the chatter around him. Lance was across from him, the loudest in the room, and every word that left his mouth set Keith’s teeth to rattling, drove the wedge of his headache deeper into his skull. It was as if his mind couldn’t stop; the dull ache in his head bouncing around, suddenly, with too much frantic thinking that couldn’t be his own because he didn’t think like that.
It felt as if his thoughts were suddenly trying to beat a path from his skull and outwards and—
It slowed to an abrupt stop a moment before a frustrated scream was about to escape him and in its place was a strange warmth, tickling its way up his chest, spreading into his neck. He frowned and jerked his head upwards. Lance was looking at him and met his eyes for only a moment before looking away.
The stream of consciousness returned as Lance resumed his conversation with Hunk.
They weren’t his own thoughts and feelings, Keith thought. They couldn’t be. They were Lance’s, maybe. Warm and fluttery and too fast and—the edge of hysteria returned and he stood abruptly, food only half eaten, and stumbled from the room, ignoring Shiro as he called after him, concerned.
He wasn’t concerned enough to come after him, though.
It was subtle. A feeling buried in his stomach that couldn’t be his, that wasn’t quite familiar enough a feeling to be his. A nervous tick manifesting in his idle moments, one familiar only in that it belonged to Hunk.
A dream here, a dream there that couldn’t be his. They weren’t his. He didn’t dream, and he wasn’t dreaming still. They were someone else’s dreams, bleeding into his consciousness while he slept. They were Shiro’s , he realized one night, curled up in his bed, shivering in a cold sweat, heart pounding too fast.
They were Shiro’s dreams. The realization drove him to his feet and to the bathroom. He dry heaved until he was weak, and he wondered, as he lay his head against the toilet seat, if Shiro was in his room doing the same.
Rubbing at his eyes, Keith took just enough time to rinse his mouth and clean himself up before heading from his room. Shiro had the room furthest from the rest of theirs, and they all knew why; they all knew about his nightmares and trouble sleeping and all of the shitty shit he had going on. This, though, was knowing on a different level.
He found Hunk lingering outside of Shiro’s room, looking nervous. One of his hands twitched as he pressed his thumb nail against the pad of his index finger. Keith took a deep breath, idly mimicking the motion. He stopped as soon as he realized it.
“Hey,” Hunk murmured softly. Somewhere within Shiro’s room, there was movement. It felt invasive to be there, but he and Hunk had been drawn to his door for the same reason. Keith nodded to him in greeting, unsure of what to say. Hunk found words where Keith’s own died in his throat. “It’s happening to you too, isn’t it?”
Keith nodded slowly, eyes glued to Shiro’s bedroom door. His tongue felt thick as he mumbled out, “Yes.”
They stood and they dwelled on it, the hallway silent save for the faint whoosh of the air units; the thunder of Keith’s heart in his chest, which he could feel in his ears; the distant rush of water pumping through the ship; and Shiro, in his room, his footsteps quiet enough they were almost drowned out.
“Should we—” Hunk stopped, swallowed, and tried again. “Should we do something, or—”
Keith didn’t know. He’d known Shiro longer than any of them by far, but he didn’t know . He shook his head. He wasn’t sure why he had come here and he was sure Hunk was thinking the same. Keith grit his teeth. “Nothing,” he said at last. “We do nothing, we should just—”
The door whirred open and Shiro stood looking at them and Keith’s heart jumped so bad he thought for certain he might die. The moment passed and Shiro furrowed his brows, looking between the two of them. “You two having a party?” he asked, the edge of a smirk playing across his lips. For all of the pain of his dream, his face didn’t show it nearly so much as Keith was certain his own did.
How fair was that? Keith letting a dream that Shiro had every night push him so close to the edge. Shiro had to live with it; Keith was only a temporary visitor to his trauma. He didn’t belong there.
Hunk hesitated but Keith met Shiro’s eyes and decided to be honest about it. “We’re having your dreams.”
Shiro’s smile dropped and now he looked like the haunted man he was. He knew; he’d noticed the changes just like Keith had. Like Hunk had. Like the rest of them probably had. “You two should go back to bed,” he murmured. Keith could hear the lingering scream in his voice that had torn Keith awake.
Keith didn’t protest. He’d decided on ‘nothing’ when Hunk had asked. It only seemed right he should follow through on that. Shiro would talk to him if he wanted to.
Then it came together quickly; it was no longer a subtle whisper into his mind but a scream. It was no longer just dreams that weren’t his, little behaviors that weren’t his, but thoughts and feelings and actions.
It was a pain in his left arm, a slow burn along the spot where his shoulder met his arm, a stiffness in the joint there that ran from it and into his collarbone. A phantom pain, he realized, because there was no other reason for it to be there. Shiro stood across from him in the training room, his forehead lined with beads of sweat, favoring the opposite arm.
It was a strange calm when he was around Hunk, who talked with him casually, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, Keith calm and smiling as well. It was Lance, and the strange heat he exuded, the frantic ramble of his thoughts that set Keith on edge if he wasn’t careful enough to be mindful of it. It was Pidge and her manic eyes and wild grins that made Keith’s heart race with excitement that wasn’t his own.
It was Shiro that broke the awkward silence.
Their attention was on him the moment he cleared his throat. They were all on the bridge, milling about in the final moments of a strategy meeting. Usually this was the part where Shiro dismissed them and they went their own ways, or the same way, but Shiro had other plans.
“We need to talk about what’s happening,” he said. No one said a word. They all knew what he was talking about. He looked to Allura and gestured to the rest of the paladins. “What’s happening to us?”
Allura tensed and Shiro’s eyes found hers. Slowly, they all swiveled their gazes her way until she was shrinking beneath the weight of them. She knew. Keith knew she knew. Shiro knew she knew. But she didn’t say anything. Coran did.
“It is not at all surprising that the bond between Paladins should manifest in such a way.”
It was hardly true. Keith was absolutely surprised, though he was far less surprised that the Lions had something to do with it. He could only speak for himself, but he was fairly certain the others weren’t all that surprised either.
“So, what? We hear each other’s thoughts now?” It was Hunk, face pinched. Keith’s stomach plummeted.
“You can hear our thoughts?” It was Pidge who beat him to it, because they were all suddenly twice as horrified as before. Coran looked them over, curiosity winning out over what should have been concern. They were connected; they were connected in a way that was astounding invasive.
Hunk shrugged, and for all he was as alarmed as the rest of them, he was calm. “Nah, I only mean, like, that’s the potential next step, right? Maybe?” He looked at Allura as if she had all the answers, even though Coran had been the one to speak. “Maybe? We’re feeling each other’s feelings.”
Shiro was quiet and Keith couldn’t find it in himself to speak either. Pidge cleared her throat. “This is like the mind link—the simulator.”
Keith hadn’t given much thought to it but she was right. What was happening to them was hard to put into words, and comparing it to the mind link simulator was an accurate representation.
That’s what was happening. They were linking minds.
Allura cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said at last. “I suppose it is like that.”
“You see,” Coran continued, gesturing to nothing in particular. “Your connection to the Lions is one of considerable importance, of course, and so a connection extending beyond that is also of importance. Your quintessence, the quintessence imbued within you by the Lions, that is what is forging this connection.”
None of them knew what to say. None of them needed to say anything; they could all feel how one another felt about the news.
Coran assured them there was little to be done. Allura quietly looked away and bit her lip.
Allura, Keith decided, was taking it personally. She smiled at them with tight lips and frowned the moment their eyes left hers. It was alright by him. He didn’t care all that much how she felt about it. Did it even matter? She wasn’t a part of their privacy violating web of thoughts and feelings and actions. She was lucky.
Maybe she wanted to be a part of it. Maybe something else was bothering her.
“What’s going on?” he asked her later, when he was able to catch her alone. It was just the two of them on the bridge, her at her controls, and him slouched in his usual seat. They were on watch while the ship traveled through a quadrant known for excessive Galra activity. They were the alarm before the real alarm could sound.
It was boring work and it was the middle of the night, the lights in the room dim. Keith wouldn’t have been asleep anyway, and he couldn’t imagine Allura would have been either. From their year on the ship with the Alteans, he’d come to suspect their sleep schedule was vastly different than that of a human's.
Allura moved about, the controls dropping away as she stepped away from them. She looked anywhere but at him as she dropped into her own chair.
“Allura.”
She spoke but she still didn’t look his way. “My father was a Paladin,” she told him, as if it was a random piece of trivia about herself and not in response to his question. Whatever her intent in telling him, it was something Keith already knew. Her father had created Voltron, it wasn’t a far stretch to realize he had also been a Paladin.
For a time, Keith had believed him to be the original Black Paladin. It had made sense in his mind. Then they’d discovered it had been Zarkon, once upon a time, and Keith hadn’t thought too much into what King Alfor’s role had been. He’d been forgotten to him entirely until now and Keith felt a sudden guilt, looking at Allura. Allura would never forget him.
“Your father was a Paladin,” he echoed, on the verge of something. He chewed his lip, drumming his finger on the arm of the chair. He wondered who he had gotten that from, or if it was his own nervous tick. “Did he and Zarkon have this? And the other—”
She didn’t let him finish. She stood, hair falling messy past her shoulders where it had settled. “It is almost morning,” she told him. “The others will be awake soon.” That was her excuse to leave and she met his eyes for a brief moment. They were soft and sad and he felt guiltier for how little he could understand what she was going through.
He’d lost a father too, and a mother he had never known. But somehow it felt different.
“I’m sorry,” he managed. She shook her head and looked away.
“I will see you at breakfast,” she said, and then she left, gown sweeping behind her.
She wasn’t at breakfast, but he hadn’t really expected her to be.
They didn’t really talk about the new connection. They endured Shiro’s dreams as Shiro endured them; they didn’t talk about them just as Shiro never talked about them. And in other ways, they shared feelings beyond words. It was a blur of emotion, and over time it slotted into normalcy. It became just another thing.
Keith choked it down, as much as he hated it. There was too little to be done.
For all of their anger about it, for how much they despised it yet accepted it, it was a blessing in disguise in battle. Sometimes not a word would be spoken. They were one, as Voltron was one. They were a whole, as Voltron was a whole.
They were five, becoming one, and Keith began to understand what Coran had said. A connection extending beyond the Lions was important. Their connection was something beyond an inconvenience.
It was deja vu: him, kneeling amidst rows and rows of vats of pure quintessence, the ghastly amber glow of them drowning out all other color. Somewhere nearby was Pidge, tucked away in her own corner, cursing a download speed. He could hear her frustrated breaths every so often over the comm, could feel the edge of her nerves drifting through the connection.
Outside of the ship they were on, a battle was waging. Every so often a shudder ripped through it, slowing Pidge’s progress, threatening to throw Keith from his precarious hiding place, knelt between a crate and the ominous hue of the quintessence.
He took a deep breath and held it in his chest. One second, two seconds. On the floor above, Keith could hear the echo of footsteps, the metallic clankclank of sentries. Three seconds, four seconds. The footsteps faded and he released the breath.
The ship they were on wasn’t equipped for assaults, was equipped only insofar as it needed to be to move from point A to point B. Instead it was hardy, built for defense and for cargo. On his way into the ship, Keith had snidely remarked that it should be Lance going in instead. Afterall, Lance had been a cargo pilot. Lance had only laughed and the rest of the humor had been lost to the battle.
The sound of footsteps returned, closer than before, close , and before Keith was even done thinking it, it had already registered with Pidge. “Almost done,” she murmured, static in his ears, and he nodded, drawing in another careful breath, eyes fixed on the cargo bay door.
The buzz of the battle outside rattled in his head and he grit his teeth, taking deep breath number three. It didn’t distract him so much as it made him hyper aware. In Lance’s cockpit was the fast beat of a heart, pounding pounding , an excited smirk; in Hunk’s was a steadfast calm, a tight hold on the throttle. It left him breathless, was the reason behind his current carefully thought out pattern of breathing.
Level himself.
This was the result of their connection in battle, in the Lions, as pieces of Voltron. He was all at once a whirlwind of people, and it took effort and intention to ground himself, separate himself from it so he was Keith again.
The footsteps grew closer and his heart beat louder. His heart, Pidge’s heart from where she was around the corner. “ Almost ,” she breathed. Almost wasn’t fast enough.
Druids rounded the corner, two of them. They loomed tall, shadows cast every which way by the incandescent glow of the quintessence all around. Keith braced himself, hand curled tight around his bayard as he launched himself forward. Pidge didn’t need a warning. She knew. He knew that she knew.
He caught the first druid across the chest with his blade, burning a white hot, bloody path through the front of their robe. It reeled back in time for the other to lunge at him, black static spitting out from its gangly fingers. It caught him in the side and he staggered, avoiding a blow by a hair’s breadth.
Two versus one, with unfair odds already stacked against him in their power level. Keith let loose what he thought was a litany of curses, only to realize as he righted himself and ducked beneath a bolt of black energy, that they were Pidge’s swears, spilling into his mind before they could finish leaving her lips over the comm. He grinned and laughed, filled with the rush of the heat of battle.
They’d decided the potential for a Druid being on board was high, given the cargo. Two wasn’t too much of a surprise, but it was hardly ideal. A single druid and a handful of sentries would have been preferable.
The druid who’d struck him lurched forward, followed by the other as if it were a shadow. Maybe it was.
Keith darted forward, dodging a cackle of static that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, missing it by what he was certain could only be inches. Something that might have been black fog wrapped around him, distorting his periphery, clinging heavy to his body—a trick of the Druids, nothing but a trick. He grit his teeth and ignored it and tunnel visioned his way to the closest Druid, who dodged and moved backwards, more and more and more and—
It stopped suddenly and he followed through on his forward momentum, blade out and ready. It sank deep into its chest, accompanied by the soft squish of blood.
There was a moment where everything stopped. The black fog, previously writhing and twisting against him, hung still in the air; the outstretched arms of the druid, only a moment before poised to attack, stalled in the air, the black cackle across the fingers fizzling slowly out; his frantic breathing, laced with his peaking adrenaline, stopped in his chest. Keith looked and he could swear he felt eyes meet his own from behind the mask.
Then everything moved fast. Keith released the breath he had been holding. The Druid’s arms shook and then moved downwards. The fog dropped away in a plummet that left him dizzy. But his blade stayed where it was, buried into torso, through flesh and bone and soft organs. Blood spilled out around it, painting dark robes darker.
Slowly, with an astonishing amount of care, the dying Druid brought its hands down and curled gnarled fingers around the blade. As if the motion might undo the damage. As if—
His eyes went wide a second before it happened, a second after he realized what the Druid was doing. Lightning—black, wild, and violent—spun its way up his blade to where his hand was curled around the handle. It arced through him and he screamed. He could register, somewhere in the distance, the sound of a shout, a tidal wave of panic that wasn't his own.
But the pain was his own.
It died out only as the Druid finally crumpled to the ground, dead. His blade was left hanging in the now vacant air, coated in fluid the consistency of oil, the color of wine. Keith stumbled against the now missing pain, as something resembling feeling returned to his body and he found himself once more able to move.
It was all he could do to stay standing. He took a step and stumbled, then another.
Black magic slammed into him, sent him reeling, drove him backwards and he remembered there was another Druid. In his fall he saw it lurch suddenly away, caught in a blur of green and a vicious cry. Pidge, he realized. He could feel her ferocity as she attacked, her rage made fluid and precise from their connection. It reached equilibrium spread across five minds.
There was a perfect storm of events: His back slammed into something hard, a sharp impact followed by a crack that would have been worrisome had he had the time and the faculties to think too much into it. There was a violent shudder of the ship as an attack outside sent it lurching.
Then the shatter of a cascade of glass, a veritable tidal wave of fluorescent, yellow liquid raining down onto him.
The rain of quintessence turned into a downpour and he was doused, drenched in the liquid. It scorched and sizzled on impact with his armor, soaked down to the skin on one arm. It burned.
He gasped out a noise and it echoed back to him: through the comms and through the erupting panic of his teammates, mixing thick into his thoughts. Everything else happened fast, before he could even climb his way from the mess of glass and pain.
The druid, approaching and wavering in and out of his now spotty vision, went from towering and dangerous to staggering and stumbling.
He could feel the thump of it next to him as Pidge killed it and he flinched away. He dared a look at it and the mask had cracked and fallen. He met vacant, dead eyes, set in a sharp, feminine face. Galra, unmistakably Galra, but more like Ulaz, a rarer appearance amongst the alien race. A shock of black-purple hair had fallen across the mouth, tangled in rapidly congealing black-purple blood.
He thought he might be sick and he swallowed down bile and the copper tang of blood.
Pidge’s face came to life in front of him. “Keith,” she started, crouching down. “Can you stand? I really need you to stand.”
He could feel her concern and he wondered how bad he looked, crumpled on the ground. He finally nodded after a moment and she extended her hand and helped haul him to his feet. He wobbled for only a moment as she slipped an arm around his waist to steady him.
She didn’t ask if he was alright. She didn’t reassure him. She made no other move to assess his injuries. He liked that. He liked how the newfound bond lessened the need for those kind of things. He had never been one for comfort or questions or sympathy.
“We need to get off the ship,” she said coolly, quickly. “Can you fight?”
He tested his grip on his bayard and it was weak and shaky. His good arm had been doused and the slightest bit of tension sent fire burning through it. He took a deep breath and shifted the bayard to his off hand. Useable, because he’d trained himself to use both hands, but less coordinated and far less ideal. Either way, a steady tremor ran through that arm.
“Maybe?” He hated admitting it, but lying to himself and to Pidge could very well get them killed.
She made a thoughtful noise and glanced behind them. He followed her gaze and new exactly what she was thinking before she could voice it. The airlock, or fighting their way back to their original entry point. She opened her mouth to speak and he beat her to it.
“Think you’re up for being shot into space?”
She laughed. “I’m always up for being shot out into space.”
Red was there to meet them, and they weren’t shot out into space so much as they were shot directly into her waiting mouth. He landed with a hard thump and Pidge was there to drag him back to his feet.
She was moving before he could orient himself. “Can you pilot?” she asked.
He nodded. “I can manage.” He dropped down into the seat and curled a trembling hand around the throttle lever. He looked at the arm for the first time and had to look away just as fast to keep his stomach down. The skin was dark and peeling, sloughing off at the wrist and forearm, pieces of skin burned to the remnants of his armor.
He very carefully kept his eyes forward.
“Back to the ship,” Shiro buzzed over the comms, and Keith drove Red forward, thankful for how strong their bond was, for how little he had to pilot to direct her.
Pidge stood behind him, one hand curled around the back of the chair. A sick feeling rolled off of her and he knew that she was finally looking him over. He ignored it.
Allura was waiting. In the chaos of their victory, Keith wasn’t sure who had summoned her to help him, but she was there as he stumbled out with Pidge. He about collapsed with the fade of adrenaline. Allura caught him, supporting his weight with her arm.
She offered him a tight smile. Reassuring, he thought sarcastically.
Coran met them at the infirmary. The absence of the other paladins didn’t go unnoticed by Keith, and he realized they likely hadn’t arrived back yet.
“Off with the armor,” Coran quipped, taking him in. “Let’s get a look at you.”
Keith didn’t want to get a look at himself, but he had to anyway. He took a deep breath. His right arm was as bad as his earlier glance had suggested. One large section of the armor across it, all the way down to his wrist, had been eaten away and in places had melted down and burned together against his skin. The absence of the pain from before, which he had written off as a result of adrenaline, was more likely a result of how burned and bad the revealed flesh there was. He was losing feeling.
The rest of his armor was more or less intact. That arm had taken the brunt of the damage and he released the breath he’d been holding.
Allura helped him out of the back panel first, careful about jostling him. Every movement reminded him of the pain there. The aching remnant of the lightning bolted into him was reawakened with every breath.
The panel and the weight of the jetpack fell away and he closed his eyes. “Try to stay still,” Allura murmured. She pressed a firm hand to his back and he steadied his posture against it.
Normally, he could be rid of his armor in minutes. It was a simple enough design, panels that could loosened so the armor could be removed as a whole. This was much slower, an excruciatingly nerve wracking process. Every panel had to be wholly detached from the rest, taken apart completely.
“Breathe,” Allura instructed. He choked out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He fumbled his good arm up to help with the chest panel and she gently swatted his wrist away. “ Still .”
Piece by piece it fell away, until only the undersuit and the remnants of the distorted, melted arm piece remained.
Allura guided him forward and to the exam table. His head spun the longer he stood and he was quietly thankful as she helped him onto it. “This is going to hurt,” she said and he blinked at her, confused.
Then Coran stepped into sight with something like a needle and he flinched away hard. Allura caught his chin in her hand, forcing eye contact. “We need to get this off,” she told him, gesturing to the mess of armor on his right arm. He nodded. “Keith, I need you to look at me , alright?” He nodded again and he focused steadfastly on her gaze as the needle was jabbed into his neck.
Keith had always refused the healing pods. He realized the need for them, and how thankful they should be to have them. And he was thankful, for the sake of the other paladins. But he didn’t like to use them.
The feeling that came onto him as he fluttered opened his eyes could only be what Lance had dubbed the ‘post-pod fuzzies.’ Coran had loved that.
Fuzzy was hardly accurate. His stomach was queasy, his head light, his eyes itchy. He drew in a breath of cold air and exhaled, fogging the glass just in front of his face. He was on the faint edge of panic, determined to keep from tipping into it. He disliked small spaces, disliked being trapped, disliked waking to feeling as if his stomach had just dropped out.
He took another deep breath and held the cold air in his lungs for a moment, calming himself.
He still hurt . But of course, the healing pods were hardly miracle workers. His back ached as it had before, and his body was sore and tired and weak. He curled his right hand into a fist, testing the arm, and felt the uncomfortable tug of flesh as the muscles tensed. It was a feeling he couldn’t quite put words to. A bit of a tingle, a bit of pain, a bit numb.
He brought the hand up and pressed it to the glass, looking it over in the blue-white lighting. The back of his hand and just past his wrist were tinged the pink-purple of ugly scar tissue, the flesh newly formed and healed in his duration in the pod; the scar twisted its way up, jagged and violently ugly.
Keith frowned. Healed didn’t seem a good word for it.
He let the hand drop just as the pod whirred open.
He felt the other paladins coming just before they rounded the corner. The tight lines around Shiro’s eyes softened the moment they saw him. Keith was halfway into a stumble from the pod and Shiro caught him by the shoulder. Keith had had more people touching him in the last twenty four hours than he cared for. He did his best not to tense beneath Shiro’s hand and instead let Shiro’s relief wash over him.
They had been worried about him. For all that Keith found it made him uneasy, he also now understood why Shiro had been so skittish about his nightmares, before he’d schooled them into something that no longer spilled across their shared connection. Keith didn’t wanted to be any more vulnerable than he had to be. This connection—it made it complicated. It made his feelings and his thoughts complicated.
He heaved out a breath but managed a smile.
His arm screamed at him.
It was a compulsion. Keith found he couldn’t stop looking at the ruined skin along his arm, couldn’t stop curling and uncurling his fist to flex the muscle there. It itched in a way that only seemed resolved by the repeated motion, by the occasional sweep of fingers across it. Pressure. Pressure helped.
He caught Pidge doing the same, fisting and unfisting her hand. She didn’t even seem to notice she was doing it.
Unlike the other small ticks he occasionally found himself mimicking, this one was distinctively his . His compulsion.
It came on slow. The discoloration of the skin there became more purple as the days passed. It was a change so subtle he himself didn’t notice it at first.
“Dude.” Hunk was seated next to him at the table, doodling what looked to be some sort of schematic onto a pad of paper between bites of his food. His eyes had drifted from the paper, though, and his food. They were fixed on Keith’s hand as he brought his spoon to his mouth. “Your hand.”
Keith glanced down at it, brow furrowed. His sleeve hid the worst of it, but it had ridden up, revealing his healed burns. Now, the scarring that wrapped up around his wrist and his palm had a distinctive, familiar purple tinge to it. He hadn’t noticed .
But now he did.
He swallowed down the green goop he’d just shoveled into his mouth. “Just the scarring,” he told Hunk, once his mouth was no longer full. He shook his arm so that the sleeve fell back around his hand. “New skin’s still coming in.”
The biggest load of bullshit ever, but it seemed to satisfy Hunk enough that he nodded and returned to his pad of paper. Keith’s heart raced but it didn’t seem to reach Hunk, distracted as he was with what he was doing.
He chanced a glance at Lance, where he sat engaged deep in a conversation with Coran, further down the table. About Earth television, it seemed. He was the only other paladin in the room and he didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at Keith’s panic.
Keith paid attention to it after that. The knotted scar tissue looked less like scar tissue and more like normal skin by the day. Every morning he carefully dragged a finger across it, prodded it with his thumb nail. The skin was rough to the touch where the discoloration was darkest. It was a pale shade of lavender, purple like a skin color, a far different shade than that of a scar.
It felt like a cat tongue. Just on the soft side of fine sandpaper, rougher when stroked in one direction than in the other.
Then he woke up one morning and it had spread, far past where the initial scar had been. It crept down to his fingertips, spilled up towards his elbow. It hurt differently, now. A slow burn, a deep itch. He felt on the verge of tearing at the flesh, so bad was the itch. He curled his hand into a fist and the muscle beneath the flesh burned.
Then —He woke one morning, fresh from a dream where he’d been dressed in Galra armor, back to the wall, blade brandished in a clawed hand. Keith couldn’t pretend it wasn’t his own dream.
He looked down at his hand. It was purple, like the rest of his arm. The fingers itched and burned where his nails met the nail bed.
His skin was the color of Galra skin. The texture of Galra skin.
He found gloves that weren’t fingerless with the training equipment. He found bandages in the infirmary and he hid it from sight as if hiding it would make it go away.
Shiro pulled him aside after a training session, the worry evident in the lines of his brow. Keith’s growing panic was becoming hysteria and it was seeping slowly out of him. Soon enough they would all be feeling it. He chanced a glance towards Pidge and Lance and Hunk, set up on the other side of the room. Lance was walking the other two through what looked to be yoga.
Pidge seemed to notice his gaze and dropped from vrksasana . Tree pose, Keith had heard Lance instructing them. Her mouth crinkled into a frown, eyes widening just so. Then Hunk tumbled from his pose and into her. The two went down laughing and whatever epiphany she was on the edge of having left her.
Keith swallowed and forced himself to look at Shiro. He hated Shiro’s worry.
“Are you okay?” Shiro asked. “You’ve been—” Acting strange, Keith thought. He bit his lip. “Quiet,” Shiro decided on. “You’ve been quiet lately.”
He found Allura on the bridge, near the controls, the hazy hologram of the universe mapped across her face. He didn’t know what had drawn him to seek her out, but he was there, sliding into the room quietly so as not to startle her. It hardly mattered. She was already aware he was there, Keith could tell by the way the lines of her shoulders moved just so as she tensed.
“Keith,” she said. She didn’t look up from the map, fingers moving lazily across it. Keith remembered her telling them early on that it was grossly incomplete, over ten thousand years old and filled with ten thousand years of holes. I don’t have the skills to update it , she had told them. But Pidge did, and Keith found the two of them here often enough: Pidge on the floor, leaning back against the controls, laptop plugged into it, typing away. Allura, standing, spinning the map around and out with her fingers, walking Pidge through coordinates and numbers.
But Pidge wasn’t there now. It was just her and him.
She turned to look at him, at last, when he found himself completely lost for words. He didn’t know what had drawn him here but he knew what it might have been. “Did you need something?” she asked. He had her full attention now and it only made it all the harder to have the conversation he had come to have.
“I, uhh,” Keith swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. “I wanted to talk to you. In private.” He darted his eyes to and fro, half expecting Pidge to pop up or Coran to walk in. Allura gave him a curious look.
“There’s no one else here,” she said quietly.
No, there wasn’t. And that had been Keith’s final out. He took a deep breath. “I think I might be part Galra,” he blurted out and she stared at him, her brows pinching together. He expected anger but what he got was some mixture of pity and concern.
She started to step forward but then seemed to reconsider it. She still didn’t speak which set Keith into rambling, desperate to fill the awkward silence.
“I mean—On that Galra ship, a while back, I was doused with that stuff .”
“The pure quintessence,” she supplied softly and he nodded.
“Yeah and, I—Ever since—” He fumbled, pulling at the bandages on his right hand, tearing them off as if it burned him. What was beneath burned him more and he shook as he held his hand out, now bare, skin mottled purple from the tips of his now partially clawed fingertips, to where it disappeared beneath his sleeve.
Allura’s breath caught in her throat and she pressed a hand to her mouth, eyes wide. “Keith,” she said at last, voice steady and careful. “This doesn’t mean anything. Quintessence—” Her eyes flickered from him to his hand. “It’s not properly understood, this could just be a side effect.” She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself as Keith had been trying to convince himself since it had first happened. There was barely disguised horror beneath her cautious expression and Keith felt suddenly sick.
There was nothing left to convince himself otherwise. “I—Allura, no, this isn’t just a—” He avoided her gaze, fumbling suddenly to his side, for the blade he had hanging there. “You don’t understand this is a—” He raised his head, blade in hand, and only had barely a moment to blink before he was on the floor, Allura on him, one knee to his chest, one arm pressed to his neck. The other pinned his Galra arm to the floor, forcing the blade from his hand.
Keith struggled, desperately trying to choke down air, but her arm against his throat was hard and he barely managed a wheeze. She was strong. He had always known she was, they all had, but this was it, made real. Allura, once a Princess, now a warrior. Her face was twisted into one of fear and anger and she met his eyes and he pleaded with her through them, frantically clutching at her arm with his free hand.
“I wasn’t—” he choked out, spots dancing in front of his eyes, “I wasn’t—attacking—”
She eased up slightly, allowing him to gulp down air, her expression softening. He let his eyes plead with her and, after a moment, she pulled away from him. She extended a hand and he flinched but finally took it with his own, the purple one. He tried not to read too much into the way her cool hand lingered against the burning flesh there.
Allura’s eyes were sharp. She was waiting for an explanation, and where before he had been tripping over himself to give it to her, to make sense of it for both her and himself, he was now hesitant. Keith looked down at the blade and the purple gleam of the surface as it caught the light.
“It was my mother’s,” Keith whispered. “Or, that’s what my father told me. When he gave it to me.”
“It’s a Galra blade,” Allura noted. He was aware, he was very aware. He had spent the last few nights staring at it, the sleepless nights after, when sleep would usually come to him but refused to now, turning it over and over in his hands. It was his last piece of Earth, carried with him all the way to the far reaches of the universe. And it wasn’t even of Earth.
It was a metaphor. The last thing he held dear was tainted by the Galra. Just as he was tainted by them. Just as his life and the lives of the other Paladins had been tainted by them. And Allura, whose life had been the most tainted.
“This isn’t just a side effect of the—”
“Pure quintessence.”
“Yeah the—” Keith drew in a ragged breath, looking down at his hand where it was curled around the hilt. The purple bled darker around his knuckles, the sharp nails a light lavender. If he looked closely, he could see the faint spread of darker purple veins winding along the inside of his wrist. “This is me, this is—I’m part Galra.” He lifted his eyes to meet hers and Allura looked astonishingly sad.
“You are,” she agreed. Keith’s stomach sank. He wasn’t sure what he had wanted from her but deep down he had clung to the hope that she would assure him he was wrong and there was nothing to worry about.
It was the first time he had said it out loud and saying it out loud solidified it. It was real, before, but now it was more real, now it was a truth he couldn't escape. Now he wanted to tear at his skin until it wasn't true, until every inch of purple was gone.
“Can you fix it?” He asked. He knew the answer already but he had to ask because there was some small chance the answer might be yes. But it wouldn't be. And it wasn't.
She looked at him with pity. She didn't even try to disguise it and it made the answer easier. She wasn't hiding it like Shiro, like all the others, who shot him worried glances when they thought he wasn't looking. He'd taken to avoiding them altogether.
He was ruining the team.
“I'm sorry,” Allura said quietly. She couldn't fix him, and all of the sorry in the world wouldn't make it better. She looked down at his hand. There was a long silence and then she reached for him.
He flinched away but she drew him back in with a soft look and he relaxed. “Your run in with the quintessence is drawing the Galra part of you out,” she explained and he allowed her to catch his wrist. Carefully she pried the blade from his hand, letting it fall to the floor once more. “This part of you was always there, waiting for the catalyst that would bring it out.”
He took a deep breath.
“Your mother was probably a druid.”
He blinked. “A what?”
Allura made a soft noise, drawing her fingers up the inside of his wrist and down into his palm, considering. It tickled and his hand twitched at the touch. “Druids can control quintessence, like myself.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “Like those who fight with Zarkon.”
“The cloaked ones.”
She nodded. “How far has it spread?”
He looked down at where her dark hand met his purple one. It had spread, slowly, tearing a swath of purple up his arm and his chest. He reached up and tugged at the neck of his shirt, pulling it down enough to reveal the purple now creeping higher in his chest. It had been a little over a month, so not a fast spread, but not slow, either. He dreaded the moment it would spread too high up his neck for him to hide it.
Allura sucked in a breath. “I can slow it,” she murmured.
A rush of relief went through him. “Please,” he begged. “Please.”
Her expression changed and suddenly Keith wished she shared in the connection with all the rest of them just so he could know what she was feeling. “ Maybe ,” she amended. His stomach sank. “Come by my room later,” she told him softly. “I would like to take a closer look.”