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When Keith goes through the wormhole, his lion’s already damaged. Because he was stupid and selfish and reckless and tried to fight Zarkon on his own. He knew it was a bad idea, but he couldn’t help himself. The chance was there, it could have been over. And now he’s separated from everyone with his barely functional lion, sirens blaring, lights flashing.
He’s being pulled into the orbit of an unknown planet, and he can’t even see what it looks like. Fog or gas or something he can’t see through covers the entire thing and he’s falling straight down into it.
“Come on, come on,” he tries everything he can. Pulls at the levers, hits all the buttons, and their decent slows a little, but not by much. He’s not panicking, he’s not he’s not, but he is.
They hit something hard, he still can’t see outside. Things are flying around the cockpit, he’s bleeding from somewhere, everything hurts, and they still haven’t landed.
Landing is an interesting way to put it when they finally do make it to the ground. Crashing is more accurate, slamming into something solid before they stop moving.
He doesn’t move, nerves fried. His hands can’t stop shaking, and he stares down at them.
He’s not sure how long it is until the adrenaline wears off, but it wears off hard. His head pounds behind his eyes and his ribs ache. Something sharp sits in his leg that he can definitely feel, and it hurts.
He realizes that he can’t feel his lion, the steady stream of consciousness in the back of his mind is gone.
He’s alone.
There’s nothing from his helmet, nothing from his lion. He’s injured on a strange planet with no way to get off.
He refuses to feel afraid, sets his jaw and stands. It hurts and he almost falls over. He switches to one foot, biting his lip and holding the wall and hopping over to a panel on the wall.
It takes a minute of hitting the button because the systems are down, but it opens. He pulls out the first aid kit and sits on the floor.
Pulling out the piece of metal from his leg is difficult and painful and he has to stop a couple times to breathe, but he gets it out.
It’s bleeding less than he expected, but it’s deep.
He doesn’t want to give himself stitches, he really does not. But if he leaves it like this, he risks infection or worse. They’re not even, and he’s pretty sure he does it wrong, but for stabbing a stab wound multiple times and pulling thread through it himself with no anesthetic he thinks he’s done a pretty good job.
Keith hops his way back to the controls. A few stray lights litter the controls, but for the most part, there’s nothing. He doesn’t even know if the atmosphere is breathable.
So he sits, and waits, and sits some more.
He thinks about what he did wrong in their battle, how it’s his fault he’s in this mess. He hopes everyone’s okay, and knows that if they aren’t, he’ll blame himself.
It’s his own selfish, stupid fault.
---
Keith has to go outside eventually. To scope out his surroundings, see if the fog is cleared anywhere. Maybe there’s water? He has no clue.
He closes the visor on his helmet, not ready to risk air exposure quite yet. He activates his bayard just in case, and leaves his lion.
The fog’s less dense down on the ground. He can’t see up at all, the fog is still too thick above. He can see the hazy outlines of what look like trees surrounding him. The ground is squishy beneath his feet. He rests his weight on his uninjured leg as much as he can, limping as he walks a little farther away.
He remembers something from elementary school about fog being thicker by a body of water, and if that logic is true here, the water’s all in the sky. Which would suck for him.
A lot.
There’s no animals that he’s seen, no water, just trees and fog. He wonders if he could harness the fog as water. What would that even take? Could he do that even if his lion was up and running?
It’s getting thicker as he goes on, and just as he’s thinking of turning back, something catches his eye.
“Shiro?”
He’s standing beside a tree, looking not quite there, but Keith is desperate and he starts walking towards him. He all but melts into the fog and Keith stops.
“Shiro?!”
He spins around because he feels something, but all it is is flashes, short little flickers of his friends, his teammates, his family.
He realizes, as he sucks in his breaths, that his visor is, somehow, open. No one is there. He’s alone. The fog is making him hallucinate. He shuts it immediately, tearing himself away from where he’s standing. It takes him a few minutes to find his lion, the fog lowering the visibility yet again.
When he gets inside, the first thing he does is check to make sure life support is running. When it comes back with a yes, he is in fact breathing actual, normal, breathable air, he wrenches the helmet off. Everything feels too tight and close and his head is pounding again. He pulls off the armor, wincing as it goes over the stitches in his leg. He checks what rations he has, hopes they’ll find him before they run out.
He covers his face with his hands, repeats his self-blame, and tries not to panic.
---
A few days later, the fog clears up. He can see outside, and decides to test it again. Maybe just the fog was toxic? He closes his visor again, double checks it, and goes outside.
He feels disgusting. He hasn’t bathed in days.
He can hear things scurrying around him, and looks up in the trees. They’re not… squirrels exactly, but that’s the only thing that fits their description. They jump between the trees, chattering to each other, and Keith feels a little less wary.
A little farther down, he realizes they’re on the top of a hill. When he looks down, he can see little streams emptying into a lake. The water? The water looks green, and he doesn’t know if that’s because of the surroundings or if it’s actually that color.
The trip down isn’t that bad, after he turns back and grabs a couple things from his lion. There’s actually a whole water kit, which he did not expect, including a canteen and something to test if the water’s drinkable, and how to make it drinkable if it isn’t.
The tests results are good, and he hopes the Alteans didn’t have different water standards than humans. He pulls of his helmet cautiously, takes a drink, and while it tastes a little off, it isn’t bad, so he fills the canteen.
Then he pulls off what clothing he has left and jumps in. The water feels cool and refreshing and he feels good for the first time since he crashed. He isn’t seeing any of his teammates this time, so he’s assuming that just the fog is toxic. He doesn’t have any soap, but that doesn’t matter because just this is fantastic.
When he leaves, he feels calmer, more relaxed. He can survive on this planet. He’ll be okay.
---
The nightmares start that night. Not only about himself, but his teammates, his family. What could’ve happened, what could be happening. Sometimes the fog comes into play, sucking him away from everyone. He can’t leave, he’s alone, surrounded by thick, unmovable air.
He stops sleeping so much, focuses his time on trying to fix his lion. There’s no instruction manual for this, and he doesn’t know where any of these wires go. He tries his best, fits together what he can, and the tracking signal comes back on. It’s weak, he knows it, but now they can find him. Maybe.
Maybe he’ll be alone on this planet forever.
As his leg gets better, he explores more, follows a green stream to a small waterfall, water trickling down from a hill. The trees are tall and thin, with no discernable leaves that he can see. The branches are spindly, and he wonders how they can handle the weight of the not-squirrels.
He finds sticks on the ground, broken and fallen over trees, and collects the wood. The fire helps things. Makes everything a little more real. He’s got a makeshift calendar set up on a flat piece of wood that he found, scratching a mark in every day. He hums to himself, songs he can’t remember fully from earth, an old Altean song Coran played once. He has no reason to talk, no one around to listen.
There’s fish in the lake, long and flat. They stay more towards the middle, the deeper parts, and they don’t engage him. When some of the smaller, less fortunate ones come close to the shore, he catches them, cooks them.
The not-squirrels are too hard to catch, so he settles for the fish.
He gets ansty when a month passes and there’s no sign of the others. Strays further from his lion, always bringing his helmet with him, just in case a voice comes through.
After three months he doesn’t even do that.
His lion still isn’t responding and it’s frustrating. He needs something, someone with him, and not even his giant mecha magically sentient lion is there for him.
Five months and he’s starting to forget whether or not he marked the calendar. The days are blurring together, and he’s still nowhere closer to fixing Red.
At seven months, he stops counting the days, stops humming to himself, doesn’t talk at all. He’s fixed Red as best he can, the heating works now, it’s not so cold at night.
After nine months pass, he sleeps even less. The nightmares aren’t so much scary as they are unsettling. He’s starting to forget their faces. He’s terrified, but he’s resigned himself to never seeing them again. He sleeps a few hours every couple of days, and the rest of the time he spends outside, walking as far as he feels comfortable before turning back and remaking the fire.
Eleven months in, or what he thinks is eleven months, the not protein rations are gone. He goes to find some sort of fruit, something that isn’t just meat. He hopes that whatever he finds isn’t poisonous to humans.
He ventures down a different stream today, and the scenery begins to change. Different trees, lower, closer to the ground. There’s leaves on these. He realizes that not only are there leaves, but fruit. Or something that looks like fruit. It looks edible, so he picks a few of them, puts them in the bag he found.
Everything’s looking grayer, a little more difficult to see, and he wonders when the last time he slept was. He turns to pick more of the fruit from a different tree and realizes he can’t really see any other trees. Everything’s hazy.
The fog is back.
He turns back around, goes back to the stream, and starts running. He has to get back to the lion. He’s been stupid, not taking his helmet with him. Now he’s out, defenseless in the hallucination fog. He knows whatever he sees right now isn’t real. Nothing is real. The people surrounding him aren’t real.
He sees Pidge and Hunk and Lance and Shiro. Allura and Coran are yet to show their faces. Their features are blurred, not quite clear. He can hear them now, muffled words that don’t quite make sense, don’t reach his ears all the way.
It’s not real, he says to himself. He knows it’s not real, these people aren’t real. It’s just the fog, it’s not them.
But it feels real, and he’s never been good at differentiating the two.
The screaming starts, and all logic goes out the window. He runs in the direction it comes from, but it’s everywhere, he can’t tell who, all the voices muffling together. He’s spinning, his head is full of noises and he can’t handle it, sinking to the ground and covering his ears with his hands. His throat feels raw, and he thinks he’s screaming right along with them.
He can’t move, frozen in place as he’s forced to listen to their screams, his own screams. Things are moving around him now and he vaguely wonders if he’s dying.
“Keith!”
He looks up to see the glass covered face of Shiro, worried and relieved at the same time. Keith scrambles back, kicking himself away. He’s not real he’s not there he’s alone.
The screaming kicks back up, and he covers his ears again, shutting his eyes. He can hear mumbled voices over all of it and lets himself hope. Something is pushed onto his head, and cool air surrounds him. He can hear them talking to him now, directly in his ears.
The screaming of his friends stops. His throat is raw and he closes his mouth, licking his lips. He reopens his eyes. Shiro’s still there, looking at him through two layers of glass. He brings a hand up and feels his helmet.
“Shiro?” It’s rough and doesn’t come out quite right, but he gets it, his face softening.
“Yeah, I’m right here.”
His arms come out, and Keith feels a hug for the first time in months. He grips him tightly, eyes stinging. The others are miraculously quiet, allowing them this moment.
He’s choking out apologies for getting them into this mess and he’s maybe crying and it’s a huge mess all the way back to the castle. Coran takes a few blood samples, makes sure the toxin won’t stay in his system, but he’s home.
He’s home.
---
It’s difficult, getting used to living in the castle again. Everyone’s incredibly attached and that’s so much that he doesn’t know whether it’s good or bad. He’s practically never alone, even when they sleep it’s in a common room, piling on top of each other.
He pulls himself away at night, after all of them have gone to sleep, trains until his energy’s drained, until he collapses into his bed.
Sometimes he doesn’t quite make it, leaning against a wall and falling asleep after days of being awake. Someone finds him occasionally, pulls him back to the pile. He tries to refuse, doesn’t want to wake up from a nightmare in a pile of his friends, but they insist.
He still doesn’t talk much, out of practice for almost a year. He does, however, force himself to apologize to everyone, individually. It’s his fault it took so long.
He starts with Allura. She tries to assure him it isn’t his fault, that Haggar would have compromised the wormhole anyway. Coran says the same, chides him for attacking Zarkon against his judgment, but pulls him into a hug nonetheless.
Hunk pulls him into a hug before he even finishes apologizing, saying he’s just happy to have him back safe.
Pidge gets him best, he thinks, their brains more similar than the others. They accept his apology, doesn’t try to convince him that it wasn’t his fault, and he’s grateful They do say that they’re glad he’s safe, glad that he’s back, even if it took so long. They nudge his shoulder with theirs and go back to what they were doing.
Lance gives him a funny look when he apologizes. “You know we don’t blame you, right? There was a lot of shit that happened and just one person isn’t responsible.”
“I mean, I know, but if I hadn’t decided to try and fight Zarkon, we would’ve had more time, and things would have gone smoother and—“
Lance cuts him off with a finger to his mouth and he recoils.
“The barrier didn’t even go down until after Shiro grabbed you and Red, so we wouldn’t have had more time. You’re fine, Keith. Everything’s okay.”
“But—“
“Everyone’s fine, and we’re all together. Stop blaming yourself for things that aren’t your fault.”
He sighs and accepts it, still blaming himself because he knows, he knows it’s his fault.
Shiro’s the hardest. He’s afraid of what he’ll say, how he’ll react.
“I’m sorry,” he says one day in the training room. It’s just them, hand to hand. Shiro stops.
“What for?”
“For getting everyone sucked into the wormhole.”
“How is that your fault?”
“I tried to fight Zarkon, it was stupid and selfish and it cost us time. It got us split apart.”
“That’s not… how is that your fault? It didn’t cost us time. We got split apart and it’s no one’s fault.”
“But it is,” he insists. “We could’ve, I don’t know. Figured something out. Had more time. Anything. I cost us everything and wasn’t even able to help find anyone. I stayed on that planet not being able to fix my lion alone and stupid and—“
He stops talking, divulging too much. Shiro comes over and pulls him into a hug.
“You’re my brother,” he starts, and Keith is trying his best to keep it together. “I’m gonna love you unconditionally, but I know for a fact the others don’t blame you. Everyone was worried, not angry. We care about you, idiot, nothing’s gonna change that.”
He mumbles an okay and they sit there for a little, talking about what their experiences were in the months they were apart. It feels good.
His exhaustion catches up to him in front of the team for the first time during group training. Lance lands a hit, and he falls face down on the floor. Lance is whooping about being better than him, but all he can focus on is how comfortable the floor is. He hasn’t slept in four days and-
He’s out within seconds.
Lance is still celebrating until he realizes Keith isn’t getting up. All the others are occupied with their partners, and he crouches next to him.
“Hey mullet, you okay?”
He doesn’t get a response, so he pulls him up by the shoulder. Nothing. He’s completely asleep.
It takes Lance a second to realize that he’s not out from the hit, but out from exhaustion. He notes the dark bag under his eyes, and wants to let him sleep. He looks so tired. But if he doesn’t wake him up, everyone will get worried.
“Keith,” he shakes him a little. “Buddy, you gotta wake up.” Keith’s eyebrows furrow and Lance shakes him again.
“Keeeeith get up.”
He jerks awake, eyes wide, arms flailing. He still looks a little asleep, shoving his hands on Lance’s face.
“Lance?”
He pulls his face back. “That’s me, your resident waker-upper.”
Keith is still trying to feel him, putting his hands on his shoulder, and Lance realizes he’s making sure he’s real.
“I’m real, Keith, look at me.” He locks eyes and breathes deeply. “I’m right here.”
“You’re… right here.”
They vaguely realize the rest of the room is silent, staring at them. It doesn’t matter.
“I’m right here.”
Keith is breathing normally again, eyes clear. He hangs his head a little and laughs, apologizing under his breath.
“You’re fine, It’s good. I would ask if you wanted to keep training, but you need to sleep.”
Keith feels a little betrayed by his body, falling asleep in the middle of training. “Lance, it’s fine.”
“I can see your eyebags, when’s the last time you slept?”
He draws a blank, not exactly sure what Lance would consider sleeping. He must look stupid, sitting there, trying to remember when he slept, brain muddling.
“Exactly. Come on, we’re going to bed.”
“We?”
“Well, you’re clearly incapable of taking yourself to bed, so someone has to make sure you sleep. So, it’s time for bed.”
Lance half drags him out of the training room towards the room everyone’s been sleeping in. There’s cushions and blankets piled everywhere and Lance flops the both of them onto one of the bed couches. He pulls up a blanket around the both of them and Keith feels a little awkward. Is Lance okay with this? Does he actually want to sleep there with him? Is he-
“Stop thinking so hard and sleep, mullet-head. I know you’re dead tired. Sleep on my shoulder, sleep on a pillow, I don’t care, just sleep.”
He settles himself next to Lance, tentatively puts his head on his shoulder, and tries to relax. The door opens and he forces himself not to turn and see who it is, the answer coming to him in the form of Pidge climbing up next to them, curling up on the other side of Keith. The others trickle in after, surrounding him on the bed couches with warmth and safety.
“You’re okay, Keith,” Lance mumbles, already tired. “We all got you.”
He lets himself sleep, surrounded by warmth.
The nightmares come, him in the fog, the others are there, he just can’t find them. They’re saying things, but he can’t understand, he’s alone, he’s afraid, he can feel the panic in his chest.
They scream and he wakes up.
He bites back his own yelling, disoriented by the people around him. They’re all… there? Everyone’s there.
Lance shifts, waking up slowly. “Mmn, Keith? You okay?”
He can’t find his voice, hands shaking as he allows himself to grab at Lance’s hand. He wakes up a little more, leaning up.
“We’re right here,” he says, pulling Keith closer to him. “We’re real, it’s okay.”
He relaxes in his arms, fatigue resting in the back of his mind.
“Let’s go back to sleep, okay?” Lance mumbles. “We’re not letting anything bad happen.”
He nods, sinking back into their blankets, comfortable with the bodies surrounding him.
He falls into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.