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Keith’s vision blurs at the edges. A setting sun bores into his view, bright orange and steaming off the last few minutes of the day. The death throes of embers in a campfire. He blinks his eyes slowly, dry and with the colors blown out of them. Trails of smoke rise up, seconds escaping steadily into the atmosphere.
Keith chases after something in the back of his mind. Think , Keith. Something about the smoke.
He looks away, and white dots track ahead of his gaze, like they know better than him what he needs to focus on. They obscure the person in front of him. Even so, he thinks he’s seen this before, almost. The beams of orange sunlight settling themselves into brown hair. The rugged edges of a green jacket. It reminds him of a scene from his daydreams, the ones that kept flitting around at the edges of his mind. The ones that he pushed aside, too surprising and too vulnerable to admit to.
The smoke , Keith.
Now, realized in front of him, the surprise trails off, rising hazily into the atmosphere. Forgotten as soon as it’s spread a bit too thin. It's just so natural. Lance’s face relaxed in front of him, sunken into a deep sleep. His hair brushes across his forehead with an easy breeze. His hands grip softly, fingertips buried into the sand.
Sand.
Keith’s head burns for a second, alight with some kind of warning. Sand. Smoke. A thought tries to push its way through. Past the soft expression of the person in front of him. His own mind screams at him, muted and distant. Something panicked. Something wrong.
The sun is on fire.
Wrong , Keith. Think harder. Sand. Smoke. Lance sleeping.
Sleeping?
Keith’s head slurs with exhaustion. Sleepy. Lance is sleepy. Keith shuts his eyes, and he stares into the deep red darkness behind his eyelids. He could sleep here, in the sand. Warm and comfortable. Side by side with Lance.
He should check something, though, before he slips away.
Check what?
He doesn’t know. His mind won’t give him all the information, only flashes of it. But he just needs to know-- something. The knocking at the back of his brain is telling him. He complies, if only just to quiet it.
His hand reaches out, shaking with sleepiness.
With sleepiness? That can’t be right.
He grips Lance’s wrist under his fingers and presses against the hot skin. Pulls up the unconscious weight of his arm. Drops it.
Thump .
It’s all wrong. Sand. Smoke. Lance’s arm lands heavily. Not heavily. Dead weight.
Lance doesn’t stir.
No, no no no no no—
Sand. Gas . Lance passed out.
Those are the right answers. It’s bad. It’s really bad.
Memories wander back into Keith’s mind, each one dropping in a new level of panic. Keith crossing the sand, choking on toxic gas. It swells up from the ground, only to hang in lazy, suffocating clouds. A bandana covers his face, but it’s not helping much. He had found Lance, in the middle of it all, barely conscious and wheezing. Keith had been dragging him, his hands tucked under his arms, fingers Iocked against Lance’s chest. Dragging him somewhere.
Think, dammit. Dragging him to--
A caw cuts across the desert. The birds. He was dragging him to the birds, because they were closer than their lions. Because, unless they were poison-breathing alien birds (which, they definitely still could be), there had to be an escape, an oasis for them.
Keith shuffles his legs underneath him through the sand. He blinks at Lance through the smoke and his eyes sting. Lance isn’t wheezing anymore. His lips look bluish, especially against the burning sunset. He needs to get him out of this desert. Now .
Keith grips his arms around Lance again. He pauses a moment to focus in on the location of the bird calls before starting to pull. After a few steps his lungs burn. A few more and he’s wheezing . His throat is angry with heat.
The bandana isn’t accomplishing much. Keith tries holding his breath as long as he can, but every time he gives up and wheezes again the burning in his lungs comes back hotter, angrier than before.
The stinging in his eyes builds into a scalding, unbearable itching. He squints and tears streak across his face, condensed with the gas into a tinted brown.
Black spots appear, dragging across his vision. He needs another breath. He frowns, dreads the next part and his lungs recoil in agreement. He glances behind his shoulder to a patch of dark brown silhouettes. Tree-ish, but without the flurry of leaves. From here the rustling of the birds is barely visible, which means one breath, hopefully not two, until he can reach it.
Gripping his hands tighter around Lance, he goes for it, desperately sucks in more air. His lungs protest, violent and in pain. They cough. Choking, heavy coughs. Reflexively unsettling the gas in his lungs and replacing it tirelessly with more. He can’t stop coughing. And Keith can feel it. Feels the gas. Feels his lungs thickening with it. Feels it layered onto his throat, coating his mouth. It had a taste, at first, like singed plastic, with a trace of sulfur. Now it’s numb. Detectable only by the weight of it and by the way air moves slowly, honey-like, in and out of him.
Keith doesn’t remember reaching the trees. Only remembers that at some point everything stopped getting worse . The black spots in his vision crowd in, and then hang. A warning that anymore activity will send them rushing in to overtake him.
So be it .
He drags Lance one last time, solidly into the clearing, before he collapses, his vision darkened over completely now. His head lands on Lance’s chest.
***
Keith is startled awake by movement underneath him. An earthquake, he thinks, because everything that’s enough to rattle Keith is some kind of natural disaster. He sits up, braces himself for-
It’s not an earthquake. It’s Lance, flopped onto his side, heaving and sputtering like a dying animal. Coughs that had been strong enough to shake Keith awake resound even more violently through Lance.
Keith puts his arms out, wanting to help but not knowing at all where to start. He watches muscles in Lance’s neck tense while his forehead presses against the ground, fingertips dug in Iike it might crack underneath him.
Watching him unsettles Keith. He’s familiar with Lance. All his movements, even the way his elbows close in when he breaks down, hands slowing ever so slightly.
This is Lance taken over. Battling the gaseous sludge on all fronts, toes curling in.
Keith’s hands reach forward, slowly with their own ideas. They land on Lance’s shoulders, grounding him slightly. Keith feels him lean into his palms. The coughs hit at a slower cadence. It’s better, a little better, than before.
“Keith, I’m-“
Keith is startled by Lance’s voice, the few words that he could manage to get out. It’s foreign, low and thick and cracked-sounding. He watches Lance’s eyes flick open, shocked and then weary, as he curls in more tightly. Bracing himself against the fresh onslaught of coughs that come from trying to talk too soon. But he doesn’t need to talk.
Keith can see what he’s trying to say in the way his shoulders fall and in the way he stares forward, stubborn and refusing to make eye contact. He’s seen this before.
He’s sorry.
Sorry that someone had to come save him. Sorry that he got caught in a deadly gas field that nobody had warned him about. It’s stupid, it’s so stupid. And also not stupid because Keith gets it but he just wants- he just wants him to stop coughing .
Keith tightens his grip on Lance’s shoulders and digs his heel into the dirt. In one heave he presses into it, sliding his back against a tree behind him, while dragging Lance into his chest.
Lance sags, his back leaning into Keith. His breathing falls in with the ribs underneath him, and Keith pulls him in further, arms wrapped lightly across his stomach. Lance leaves his arms lying on the ground, his knuckles drug through the dirt.
“ Shut up”
It’s a whisper, choked and raspy. Keith is only slightly better off than Lance, air-wise.
Keith has told Lance to shut up before, when he’s stressed out or frustrated. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s Keith’s reaction when Lance is telling him things he doesn’t want to hear. But this time— this is important .
This time, they're ten feet away from the gas field that tried to suffocate them. This time, Lance is trying to apologize when it’s so clearly not his fault. Keith doesn’t know who made Lance think he was always such a burden for people, but all he knows is that he wants those thoughts to stop.
So.
“ Shut up , and thanks for not dying.”
Lance’s coughs pause. Keith takes the moment to bury his face into Lance’s neck, into the folds of his jacket. He breathes in. Past the smell of singed plastic and sulfur. Past the smell of sweat. Breathes in just enough to catch the light and airy smell that always hangs over Lance. Like a warm summer breeze off a clear, deep lake.