Chapter Text
Night creeps in on him slowly as Keith lays awake in bed, struggling even to simply keep his eyes closed. His eyelids keep fluttering against his will with murmurs of anxiety that won’t let him keep the light out. The air within the castle is temperate and peaceful, nearly scentless, nearly soundless, and, unless Allura and Coran’s elaborate weapons systems diagnostics had all been a ruse, he’s more than nearly secure. Within the spacious chambers they’ve all been provided, the beds are almost alarmingly soft, outfitted with sheets of something that feels like expensive, with pads made of an odd material that seems to mold perfectly to any body it touches, readjusting its position the moment you did. The other furnishings are equally ostentatious to Keith: end tables with clawed feet and accents forged of some odd, glittering alien alloy, tapestries in intricately woven designs, a washroom outfitted with a tub large enough to fit a small family of bears.
Stylistically, it’s odd and completely unplaceable, and there’s aspects of everything that stand out as reminders of how far they are from Earth - a colour he’s never seen before somehow here, an odd design he doesn’t recognize there. They’d all been provided with appropriate sleeping attire, as well, even given the option for either a nightgown, or a sort of tunic and pants. If there had been expenses to tend to, then the impression given was that none had been spared. Keith had rejected it in favour of what he was already wearing: his own clothing was a comforting weight and texture in an otherwise foreign world of unfamiliar and overwhelming stimuli. He had even kept his boots on, just in case he needed to be out of bed in a hurry. It had been several days now, since they’d left Earth, but he’s not like Lance or Hunk, just easing into things and enjoying the ride. It’s going to be a while before he lets any of his guard down. The castle can keep its fancy pyjamas for now.
Keith lays in the him-shaped depression in his mattress, and shifts back and forth restlessly, trying not to think about anything too much. Objectively, the bed is amazing, but it feels too unlike the way he’s used to sleeping for him to enjoy it. He fidgets and turns, cramming himself up against the headboard, tearing off his blankets, tossing his pillows onto the floor, first turning off every light in the room, then putting them all on at once instead. It’s no use. He just isn’t used to soft beds and high ceilings and huge, spa-like personal bathrooms. Part of him isn’t really interested in getting used to them, either. It’s been hours since they’d all turned in for the night, following a rigorous training session, and an even more rigorous dinner, courtesy of the combined efforts of Hunk and Coran. That part, he could handle. Training made sense. Food, even bizarre alien food, made sense.
Sure, when he’s on his own, he forgets to eat sometimes. If he’s being honest, scheduled meal times were one of the things he’d most missed about the Garrison after his expulsion. Keith knows Shiro’s been checking up on him again, has caught him watching to make sure he’s eating. He can tell that he knows he hadn’t been as much when he’d been living on his own, out in the desert. Sometimes, it’s nice, the way Shiro looks out for him. Other times, it just gets on his nerves. He knows how to take care of himself, it’s just… getting food had been hard enough to begin with, and he’d been wrapped up in his hunt for what had turned out to be the Blue Lion. It just wasn’t a priority. For that matter, neither was sleep. When Keith finds something to focus on, everything else fades away into background noise, which is exactly how he likes it. He never really got why Shiro acted so concerned if he told him he hadn’t slept in two or three days from time to time. Frankly, Keith never really got how Shiro could manage to sleep a full eight hours every single night. He can’t imagine keeping his eyes closed for that long.
Glancing around at the rumpled blankets and scattered pillows, Keith gives up on trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. His head is full of static, amplifying every soft sound the castle makes and making it echo through him until it’s almost overwhelming. He decides to take a walk to clear his head, maybe hit up the training room and see if he can get it to work for him solo, so he’s not wasting time. He always feels better when he has something he can do with his hands. He grips his bayard, testing the weight of it and the feeling of the handle in his hand as he leaves his room. Of all the things that have been handed to him to deal with over the last week or so, this one might be his favourite. He likes the weight of it, likes the feeling of whatever strange material the weapon is constructed from, the way it’s slightly cool to the touch and seems to hum almost imperceptibly when he holds onto it firmly.
In the hall outside, he can see the doors to the other paladins rooms, and wonders if any of the rest of them have been having the same troubles sleeping he has. Probably not, he figures, recalling Lance’s lazy appearances meandering into breakfast, often with his castle-issued pyjamas still half or entirely on. He briefly wonders how many jokes Lance would try to squeeze out of finding out that not only has Keith not touched the pyjamas yet, but that he still hasn’t spent a night in bed without his boots on.
He’s about to round a corner, turning out of hall all their rooms open out to, when he notices one of the doors cracked open, just shy of halfway: it’s Shiro’s room. It’s not his open door that really grabs hold of Keith’s attention though, it’s the glimpse of Shiro he can’t help but catch through it. Keith can barely see him - the only light on in the room appears to be coming from the bathroom - and might have missed him entirely if he hadn’t been moving, ever so slightly. Shiro is sitting on the floor, in the middle of his room, one hand (his human one, Keith notes), gripping the opposite shoulder. Every few moments, he seems to rock back and forth slightly. Keith knows Shiro wouldn’t hesitate to try and comfort him, if their roles were reversed, so he scraps the training room walk, and cautiously pushes through the door.
Shiro doesn’t look up as Keith walks over to him. He doesn’t seem to be looking at much of anything at all, really; his eyes are a little bit unfocused, almost vacant. Keith’s not as good at this kind of thing as Shiro is, but he has to try. He crouches down next to him, careful not to move too fast and startle him. In a lot of situations, Keith struggles with reading people, at figuring out what nuances of speech or expression mean, but he’s pretty sure he knows what’s going through Shiro’s head right now, and he knows he has to be gentle. It’s not the same, of course, because they haven’t lived the same lives, and Keith has certainly never been held prisoner by evil aliens and forced to fight in gladiatorial combat, but he still knows what a panic attack looks like. Or, one of the things it can look like, anyway. It isn’t always the same.
Judging from the discarded bedclothes that form a haphazard path from where Shiro’s sitting back to his bed, Keith guesses a nightmare is responsible for the way Shiro is now. Part of him doesn’t want to know any more than that, but this is Shiro he’s dealing with, so it’s a small part, and easily overrun. He’s never had anyone matter to him like Shiro does, so he’s never been willing to fight for anyone like he is for Shiro. It isn’t that he doesn’t care about other people, because he does, he just cares in an abstract and unrequited way: the universe has never taken care of him, but he’ll take care of it anyway, because it needs him to. Shiro is different. He stayed, kept trying, careful but not coddling, until he had earned Keith’s trust. When he fights against Zarkon, he’s fighting for everyone else’s homes, but here, gently reaching out to touch Shiro’s shoulder, he’ll fight for his own.
Shiro startles suddenly, raising his arm, his Galra arm, like he’s on autopilot. Keith’s reflexes are good, though, and he blocks it. The arm is strong, and crackling slightly with an inhuman energy that makes Keith’s own arm feel a little numb where he’d made contact to block Shiro’s attack. “Hey,” he says, keeping his voice soft, but firm. “C’mon, I know you’re in there. It’s me, Keith. I’m here. You’re safe.”
It takes him a few moments more, but Shiro’s eyes blink slowly with growing recognition. He still looks dazed, though, which doesn’t surprise Keith at all. Neither does the fact that he doesn’t seem to be able to talk yet.
“You wanna sit somewhere else?” Keith asks him. There’s the bed, of course, though Shiro definitely isn’t ready to go back to sleep just yet, and a sort of couch-like thing over on the other side of the room.
Shiro shakes his head slowly, like it takes a lot of effort to move it. “Floor’s good,” he manages, and Keith smiles back at him softly.
“The floor is good,” he agrees. It always helps him to feel grounded after the awful weightless spinning that often overwhelms him in his own attacks. He’s pretty sure Shiro was farther away than he tends to go, but he hopes the same things might help him back anyway. It’s all he’s got. “I’m not going anywhere,” he adds, and then, after a moment of thought, “Is touching okay?”
Shiro takes a moment to turn the idea over in his head, and then he nods. Keith puts his hand back on Shiro’s shoulder gently. Even through the fabric of Shiro’s clothes (he’s not wearing pyjamas either, Keith notices), and the leather of Keith’s glove, he can still feel how tense Shiro is. He’s back in his own head now, back in the room with Keith, but his whole body is still on lockdown, and it’s going to take a little while for him to relax. Not that he’s ever fully relaxed, Keith suspects, but that isn’t the point. They’re never asking for other people’s normal, just their own.
Beyond that, there isn’t much he can do except stay, which he does. It takes maybe an hour or so for Shiro to finally relax enough that he can really talk again, and when he does neither of them really feel like discussing whatever he’d dreamed about that had set him off to begin with. It’s a conversation for another night, maybe, one where they aren’t so worn out. Keith wants to understand what Shiro’s going through, even if he’s a little afraid of knowing. Besides, it gives him a better idea of the enemy they’re up against, and even more reason to fight harder the next time that they are.
“Keith?” Shiro says, his tone soft, and more vulnerable than Keith is used to ever hearing.
It’s not unpleasant, but it catches him off guard, and he feels his cheeks burning ever so slightly. Shiro is leaning into his touch, having eased into him closer over the time they’d been sitting there together, and whatever intimacy they’d had before Shiro had left, it had never been quite like this. Keith can’t remember a moment anywhere else in his life where he’d felt as close to anyone as he feels to Shiro right now. “Yeah?”
“I’m getting tired again,” Shiro says. “I was hoping you might stay.” There’s a little bit of usual confidence starting to move back into his voice, if only a little.
Keith blinks back his initial surprise, but he doesn’t stop long to contemplate. “Yeah,” he says, “of course I’ll stay. Just… those beds weird me out. I haven’t been sleeping very well myself,” he admits. He doesn’t add that there’s more reason to that than the sleeping arrangements. There’s no point in telling Shiro something he can read all over his body language all the time.
Shiro actually smiles at that. “They really do a good job of reminding you you’re on an alien ship, don’t they?” Keith nods, smiling back. “I’ll pull the rest of the blankets and pillows off the bed,” Shiro suggests. “We can try to get a few hours of sleep before breakfast, at least.” He pauses before adding, “No offence, but you look like you could use it.” Keith certainly has no arguments there.
They settle in a few minutes later, nestled up against the edge of the couch. Keith is tentative, uncertain how it is exactly that you sleep with another person, but Shiro is a lot more relaxed, a lot more his usual self now, so he just gently cozies in against him. Keith winds up with his face sort of half pressed into Shiro’s chest, Shiro’s arm (his human one - Keith notices how much he refuses to touch Keith with the Galra one, and he understands) draped over his body. After a few minutes, Keith reaches out, and places an arm over Shiro as well, tucking the other up underneath himself, his hand curled in a loose fist, resting against Shiro’s chest. His hand settles on Shiro’s waist, and Shiro’s hand is on his back, and he feels simultaneously filled with nervous electricity and waves of calm water that somehow seem to be coexisting.
It turns out that sleeping with another person is a little awkward - there are limbs that get in the way, and the strange presence of another’s warm breath on your skin, the way they shift unconsciously closer or fidget in their sleep when they fall asleep before you do, the way Shiro manages to drift off well before Keith does. Keith feels a little bit uncertain of what he’s allowed to look at before he gets his eyes to stay shut. His gaze wanders from the steady rise and fall of Shiro’s chest, to the flutter of his eyelids, to the slight parting of his lips; somehow, seeing Shiro like this makes him feel safer. He thinks back to the last time he saw him unconscious, and shivers slightly despite the warmth spreading through him. This way is much better.
Eventually, Keith falls asleep too. He dreams about lions, real ones, sunning themselves on the rocky savannah, and about coming home, somewhere that really feels like home, and leaving his boots by the door.