#and I’ve seen people mention how Keith might’ve felt it through his and red’s bond

[lumieveeeldee]

Keith isn’t doing anything special when it hit him. He’s seated next to Krolia, peeling some strange alien fruit when his insides catch fire.

It starts in his fingers and travels up his arms, boiling his blood in his veins and freezing him over all at the same time. A presence in his head, one so familiar, a scarlet feline yowling in pain, in mourning.

Krolia is in front of him. Her mouth is moving but Keith can’t hear her, he’s deafened by the ringing in his ears and the pained caterwauling of Red throbbing behind his eyes, and his vision blurs—

Keith pitches forward, and the world goes dark.

~

He’s underwater, and he’s not alone. There’s someone else just up ahead. Their lips are blue and their face is slack. Their eyes are closed, and Keith can tell they’re not just sleeping. They are someone Keith knows, someone he loves.

Bubbles erupt from Keith’s mouth as he kicks his feet desperately, hands outstretched, reaching for the body suspended in front of him.

As soon as his fingers graze their wrist, they dissolve, and the world he finds himself submerged in shakes with a grief-stricken roar.

~

Keith shoots up with a strangled gasp, nearly slamming his head into Krolia’s. He’s back in the cave, he realizes, on the space whale, the Paladins light years away.

Red’s guilt and grief form a steady pulse in his head, and the realization crashes into him with all the force of a plummeting meteor.

He scrambles to his feet, ignoring Krolia’s worried exclamation of his name. The blood rushes to his head and threatens to throw him off balance, but Keith sprints out of the cave anyways, eyes burning.

Ever since his father’s death, Keith has rarely cried. He cried the first night in foster care, and he cried when Shiro was declared dead on the Kerberos mission.

That was it. He hadn’t even cried the second time Shiro went missing, because he knew he’d find him again.

Now, though, the tears burn grooves down his face as he runs through the foliage, not stopping until he trips at the edge of the riverbed where they get their water.

A sob rips its way out of his throat as he pinches himself, certain this must be a dream, because Lance wasn’t—Lance couldn’t be—

But the mournful wails of Red in his mind forced him to see the truth.

Lance was gone. Lance was gone, Lance was gone, Lance was gone.

~

He’s too exhausted and devastated to acknowledge Krolia when she approaches.

He’s on his side at the riverbed when she finds him, having long cried himself out. His eyes burn and his throat stings and none of it compares to the gaping wound that has been torn into his heart.

She doesn’t try to talk to him, just hooks her arms under his knees and shoulders and hoists him up.

Where there should be embarrassment and anger, there is only cold, endless nothing. She presses his head to her shoulder, and Keith barely registers that it’s happening.

She’s humming something as she walks, a tune that’s painfully familiar, but the memory is too far away for him to grasp.

His mother is cradling him. He hasn’t allowed himself to think of her as anything more than Krolia until this point, but he’s too hurt to further deny himself the comfort of his mother.

He thinks he knows why Lance missed his own mom so dearly, now, as he falls into a fitful sleep.

~

Red mourns for days, and Keith feels like a hollow shell that only has room for grief.

His days are filled with repeated movements and silence. He doesn’t talk. He wouldn’t know what to say if he did.

His dreams are filled with crooked smirks and freckles skin, and the image of hands gripping Red’s controls as electricity shoots from the dashboard into Red’s pilot, stopping his heart.

Keith can’t tell where his own anguish ends and Red’s begins. He can hardly tell that time is passing at all, each aching moment just an echo of Lance.

There’s an emptiness in Red’s presence, and Keith can feel it in himself.

Lance is gone.

Krolia doesn’t push him about it, and if Keith were anything more than an empty husk, he’d be grateful.

It isn’t until the eighth day of being stuck in his sorry state that Red’s mournful cries turn hopeful.

Keith freezes, and Krolia tenses beside him, hands hovering around him like she’s scared he might topple again. Keith holds his breath, feels the way the empty presence of Red suddenly becomes full again.

The energy is familiar, playful like the morning tide and comforting like the feeling of warm water sinking into aching muscles after a long day.

The energy is Lance.

Lance is alive.

Keith collapses backwards into Krolia with the force of his joy and shock, a tearful laugh slipping past his lips.

“Lance is alive.” Speaking the words into existence makes it feel all the more real, and Keith sags with relief, the wound in his chest stitching itself closed.

“Lance is alive.”