Chapter Text
“Coran, what’s happening!?”
“The integrity of the wormhole has been compromised! It’s breaking down!”
“What does that mean!?”
"It means we have no control over where we’re headed!”
Keith felt like he had been thrown around by a tornado—a very angry, spiteful tornado. He groaned from his position splayed across the cold metal floor of his lion and tried to push himself up—not good. His head swirled and he squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to fight off the overwhelming dizziness. He thought he might be sick. In the end he opted to lay back down and stare blankly at the ceiling until everything stopped spinning around him. His chest ached and it hurt to breathe.
What had happened? Somehow they had managed to escape from Zarkon. Whatever barrier that had been surrounding the ship had fallen and they managed to jump through a wormhole, but it had destabilized and the next thing Keith knew, he was thrown from the ship and falling through space. That must have been how he had received his injuries… But then, where was he now? And what happened to everyone else?
Despite the painful ache in his chest and his less than steady limbs, Keith finally pushed himself up to look around at the state of the cabin. His arms and legs shook with the effort, and he paused to clutch at his side as he let out a rattling cough, but he still managed to fumble his way to the control panel. All of the lights were off. The usual familiar hum of the lion’s energy was absent, leaving the cabin eerily quiet. Experimentally, Keith pressed a button on the panel to activate the comms system.
“Coran? Allura? Are you there?” Keith called out hoarsely into the silence. Nothing. Not even static. Keith pushed the button again, harder. “Shiro? Anyone? Hello?” Silence.
Keith’s hands curled into fists and he turned away from the control panel a little too quickly. He staggered to keep his flimsy balance before he spotted his paladin helmet lying on the floor a short distance away. Almost desperately, he picked it up and saw that there was a large crack running from the temple to the back. With a strangled cry of frustration, he tossed it to the side. Useless.
What was he supposed to do now? Without a means of communication, Keith was left in the dark over the fates of the rest of team Voltron. More immediately, he was alone and injured on an unknown planet, and his connection with Red was faint at best. Something was seriously wrong with his lion, so leaving whatever planet he was on was a distinct impossibility. He wasn’t sure how long it would be before he could get in contact with the others—not like they had the time to spare anyways, with Zarkon and the Galra Empire looming over their heads. Keith’s blood ran cold at the mere thought.
Something about his fight with Zarkon had left Keith extremely unsettled. However, when Keith thought about it, it wasn’t Zarkon’s power that worried him. It was what Zarkon had said that made Keith nervous. You fight like a Galra soldier… Zarkon had practically smirked at him when he said it, like he knew something that Keith did not. A small part of him didn’t even want to know, because he was afraid of what that would mean. Keith stared down at his hands, at the fawny skin stretched over his fingers, and frowned. It looked like it always had, before his fight with the druid. But now he wondered… was it really his?
The smell of burning metal put a halt to his wandering thoughts. Quickly, Keith rushed out from the cockpit of his lion and out onto the barren surface of the unfamiliar planet he had crashed on. He could see faint tendrils of steam coiling up from the dented hull of Red. Even just standing near the hull Keith could feel the heat radiating from it in incessant waves. They must have fallen all the way through the atmosphere. With Red’s systems offline and a hull hot enough to cook on, Keith figured he would have to find a different place to take shelter, at least until Red cooled off and he could set to work figuring out how he was supposed to repair everything.
The barren wasteland that was the planet’s visible surface did not offer much in the way of shelter. At least, not anywhere nearby. Red had a few rations on board—snacks, curtesy of Hunk when he had worried about getting hungry whilst away on a mission—so Keith had some time to figure things out before his situation became dire, but eventually he would have to find food and water as well. That is, if the planet even had any of that. It looked pretty empty from Keith’s perspective. At least the air wasn’t poisonous.
Keith took a deep breath. He told himself it would be all right—he had survived on his own before, after all. He could take care of himself, though what he figured were bruised ribs and a mild concussion would certainly provide an extra challenge. However, his first priority was to escape the barren wasteland he had landed in. With any luck, it was simply a small desert and he would be out of it soon enough.
Easier said than done. When Keith looked around to try and figure out which way to go, nothing he saw gave him even the slightest indication of what lay beyond the horizon. If he chose incorrectly, he could walk for days and never reach the end, having walked exactly the opposite of where he was meant to go. Still, when he gazed past the heap of Red laying on the ground, something in his chest stirred. He would have easily mistook it for his own nerves, except something about it was off. It felt almost foreign, like a pair of calloused hands that were not his own were gripping at his heart and squeezing. It was hardly a firm grip. It was more of an announcement than anything else—I’m here, I’ve got you and I’m not letting go—that’s what Keith felt like it was saying. Anyone else would have ignored it, chalked it up to his concussion-addled brain, but Keith felt compelled to listen to it. Feelings like this had led him down the right path before, like when he had found Lance’s lion. Besides, what else did he have to go on?
Keith retrieved his helmet, bayard, and rations from his lion before climbing out and setting his gaze on the horizon that beckoned to him. The orange-tinted haze of the sky shrouded the faint light that shone from above, dusting the ground a tawny blur. It was more than a long shot, but Keith still gripped at his chest and mumbled to the empty air: “I’m coming.”