#keith going out on missions for the blade and supplying aide and relief to planets harmed by the war

[justaz]

wait. wwwwwait.

allura bringing lance back from the dead by sharing her quintessence with him and changing his dna to be altean and altering his quintessence to give him similar abilities and powers to allura’s. lance who is incredibly self sacrificial and has self worth issues switching places with allura when she was trying to sacrifice herself for the universe.

lance doing it bc he was supposed to die a while ago, allura shouldn’t have brought him back and this was the universe demanding balance. he was brought back without sacrifice and this was the universe correcting itself. lance doing it bc he had nothing left to offer. what was he going to do after the war? return to life as normal? pretend like nothing was wrong and that there was no responsibility on his shoulders? turn his back on those in need or go up into space and turn his back on his family?

this way lance could save everyone and his life would have meaning, this is why he was chosen, he was a lamb raised to be slaughtered. he wasn’t made for war or fighting. his soul always yearned for home and for peace. he’s always been the one taking hits for his friends and family. he’s always been the one to take the ire of his commander instead of his little mouthy friend, to take the brunt of an explosion instead of a man he knew all of two days, to take the force of thousands of volts of electricity coursing through his body rather than his teammate. he should be the one to give his life in exchange for quadrillions of lives he’s never met but who deserve a chance to live.

[corvus--rex]

This is the last of the abandoned wips for now. This one is a (much, much later) continuation of one of the chapters for Julance 2021 that's a rewrite of Crystal Venom with Altean Lance, and can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32307130/chapters/80219737. It's another Omegaverse, so feel free to skip it :)

~*~*~*~

Looking out the window over the city, Keith seriously wondered why exactly this mission required both the Blades and Altean diplomacy. It felt like overkill to him. It was a slightly different kind of aid mission, in that they were going to be escorting a caravan of supply ships from the planet he was currently on, Elara, to their nearby colony on the moon of a gas giant in the next star system. But it didn’t at all need the presence of an Altean diplomat. Not that he really minded seeing his mate at work. And after this mission, he’d be seeing it a lot more often.

Keith was giving up command of the Blade of Marmora to Acxa to “retire” to Altea with Lance. He’d already fought his biology longer than he should have. It had been a major relief to go through his “proper” Galra puberty while in the Quantum Abyss with Krolia there to guide him through it, knowing what to expect and being able to answer whatever questions he had. He’d been through a severely watered-down version of human puberty already, having nominally presented as an Omega at 13. The changes he went through then were, as he put it, “gross and weird”, but it couldn’t hold a candle to Galra presentation.

Part of what that had meant was his Galra genes becoming more active and causing physical changes beyond his secondary sex. As it turned out, Krolia was one-fourth Altean, and that factored into Keith’s transformation as well. He didn’t remember much of the few days when it happened, mostly periods of intense pain and sleeping for hours on end. When it passed and he was finally awake, Krolia said not to be too upset by what had happened. He didn’t know what she meant at first, but then saw the barest hint of lavender in his pale skin. It also didn’t register at first how softly his mother was speaking. But as he listened to the world around him, such as it was on the back of a space whale, he realized that he could hear far more than he had before. His vision was sharper, able to pick out individual strands of fur on Kosmo’s sleeping form on the other side of their firepit. There was a sudden sound and he felt his ears twist toward it. It was an odd, disconcerting sensation, and when his hands went to where the sounds were being received, his fingertips were met with soft fur and not where he expected.

He had run for the small pool of fresh water not far from their camp, and that was where Krolia found him staring at his reflection. His human ears were gone, replaced by the very feline ones much higher on his head with fur as black as his hair. He had noticed by then that his fingers ended in semi-retractable claws, smaller than Krolia’s permanent ones. His violet eyes now had a sharply slitted pupil, and he found that he could control its dilation. The discovery of his claws had come with the discovery of his expressive tail which was covered in smooth, silky, jet black fur. Like his ears, the fur on his tail was fine and short with a texture like velvet. He also had tapered markings in a soft, dusty lavender much like Krolia’s, but horizontally along his cheekbones, the only visual remnant of their Altean heritage. The whole package was a lot to take in.

But now, as he sat in the honored guests’ suite in the Elaran capitol, it was like his body had never been any different. He didn’t move, only one ear twisting to listen when he heard the door open. He was expecting Lance to be coming back from his meeting with the Elaran Chancellor. But it wasn’t his Alpha coming in. The unexpected guest was Elaran. Like the rest of their feline race, the Beta that walked in was covered in a fine coat of fur, this one a dark rusty brown. Their hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and Keith could not figure out how they fit into the Elaran governmental hierarchy.

When they approached, their steps were crisp and quiet, their hands clasped behind their back. Their uniform was a form-fitting deep charcoal grey bodysuit with no distinguishing markings. “I apologize for the intrusion, Blade Commander. I am Commander Dysserra of the Shadow Blades. I expect you’ve been wondering about the escort mission and Altea’s involvement. The truth is that our request for Altean involvement was only for appearances. Something to show our people that we are dedicated to the Alliance. However, we find ourselves with a situation that you may be able to assist us with.”

“What kind of situation?” Keith asked cautiously.

“One that has arisen overnight. Our planet may be unified under the Chancellorship, but many of our former nations retain their royal houses even without any political power. A matter or tradition, you understand. There has been some unrest in one of those nations, and family infighting erupted in the night. The heads of the family were killed and their infant daughter abducted. We can only wait for the dust to settle before we know which branch of the family will attempt to claim the throne, but we need to find the princess. As the sole heir to her parents’ line, she could be used as a bargaining chip between the different branches of the family, or possibly killed to completely end the line.”

He wasn’t sure how much the Elarans knew about him, but this information fed directly into why Keith was leaving the Blade for Altea and living permanently with Lance. After their first heat, Galra Omegas had an intense drive to procreate beyond the usual need of a heat. It was a physical need, and one that could cause damage to their reproductive system if left for too long. Keith was reaching the limits of his body and needed to be with Lance for his next heat, and they needed to take every precaution to ensure he got pregnant if they wanted the possibility of kits in the future. Hearing that a helpless, innocent infant was in the hands of people who didn’t care about her at best and wanted her dead at worst made his already sensitive Omega instincts flare.

“Do you have any leads as to where she might be?”

~*~*~*~

Links to the rest of the series:

1 | 2 | 3* | 4 | 5* | 6* | 7 | 8 | 9* | 10 | 11 | 12* | 13 | 14 | 15* | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19* | 20* | 21* | 22* | 23*

[justheretobreakthings]

Desperate Measures

As well as being my first new fic in way too long, this also is a very, very, very late gift for @zolanort as a thank-you for writing an ace Keith fic (my sincerest apologies for the super long wait!) I hope the amount of pain I put Keith through here will help make up for it.

Word Count: 5,408 Content warning for mild gore. Read on AO3

The first thing Keith saw when he opened his eyes was red.

And for a moment, that had given him some odd inkling of comfort. He had crashed, yes, and he was woozy and exhausted and in pain, but he was in Red. And Red would keep him safe.

It took a few seconds to remember that, no, Red wasn’t here. It was a Blade cruiser that he had been piloting, that had been shot down over Nuqel as he and the others Kolivan assigned to the mission had descended toward the base hidden amongst the foliage of the forest in an attempted ambush, a mission that, clearly, had gone belly-up. Not Red.

He hadn’t flown Red in… a long time. He hadn’t been keeping track.

Wearily, he squinted, trying to bring the world around him into focus. It wasn’t easy. He tried to pick just one thing to look at, to orient himself, and went with the center of a spider web of cracks on the cruiser’s windshield.

He would have to get that fixed. Hell, there were probably a lot of things he would have to fix after a crash landing like that.

At first the red that had flooded his vision when first he had regained consciousness had looked like it was surrounding him, as if his blood had splattered in thick puddles around the cockpit, but thankfully, as he realized with more certainty once he was able to steady his vision, this wasn’t the case. The blood was just in his eyes, dripped down from a wound in his forehead which, now that Keith was aware of it, was starting to throb incessantly. That, no doubt, explained how he had been knocked out. He’d probably knocked his head against the yoke or something during the crash.

With a hint of a groan, he brought one of his arms up to wipe away the blood in his eyes, and discovered that the limb felt bizarrely heavy, as if the bones had been replaced with lead while he was unconscious. It was a chore to lift the arm, and a relief to drop it back down again once his vision was clearer and he could take stock of himself and his surroundings.

As for his body, he was sore. He wasn’t quite sure where he was injured, or how badly, but instead felt an all-over hurt. Like his whole body from head to foot was just one big bruise. He closed his eyes again to try to focus, try to identify any particular sources of pain. There was a more distinct throbbing from his head injury, and now that he thought about it, the pain from his right calf seemed to be pulsing harder than anywhere else.

He looked down, opening his eyes again, to see that his leg was under the dashboard where it had caved inward. Hesitantly he tried to wiggle his toes, and he let out a breath of relief when he succeeded. No nerve damage, then, and he didn’t detect any unusual numbness anywhere else either. That was good.

He tested his head next, rolling his neck and immediately having to shut his eyes against the wave of dizziness that came over him and the increased intensity of the hammering in his skull. Definitely concussed at the very least, he figured, which wasn’t a comforting realization, but hopefully the damage wasn’t anything permanent. His vision was still working, he knew, and his thoughts clear. His hearing - he paused as he realized just how silent the world around him was. He felt his heart rate quicken, and a possibly imagined ringing started up in his ears. Not good, not good.

Dread crawling up his throat, he hesitantly opened his mouth. “Hello?” he managed to call out.

To his immense relief, he heard his own voice echo throughout the cockpit, the sound perfectly clear despite the strain and croakiness. His hearing was fine, then; it was simply just that quiet. Which, now that he thought about it, was unsettling on its own. All the sounds that the cruiser normally made - the hum of the engine, the beeps and tones of various meters and monitors, the crackling of his comm link - were absent, as were the noises of his fellow agents’ vehicles alongside him and the attacking forces from Nuqel.

Didn’t exactly bode well for the state of the cruiser. He lifted his head up to peer through the cracks of the windshield and into the thick foliage around him, and all he saw were trees. No other signs of his fellow Blades or of the Nuqelites.

“Hello?” he called out again, and only silence answered him.

With a sigh he dropped his head back down. At least this meant that the coast was probably clear - if the Nuqelites knew he had survived being shot down and where he’d crashed, he doubted they would have waited to finish the job. As for the other Blades, well… it either meant they had made a clean getaway, or had been shot down too. He had no way of knowing which.

If they’d made it, though, that still didn’t mean they’d be coming back for him. He was more than aware of the Blade’s policy. For now, he was on his own.

He looked to the side - slowly, as to not aggravate his headache - and to his relief it appeared that the hatch into the cockpit seemed to be undamaged, or at least, any damage it had incurred hadn’t bent it out of shape. As best he could tell, the cruiser had maintained its equilibrium fairly well even while crashing; it was currently tilted too far toward the nose, but otherwise had stayed more or less upright. He’d be able to leave.

Keith reached around to unclip the safety belt that held him in place, grimacing as the upper half of his body tipped forward before he managed to balance again. Once he was steady, he started to turn toward the hatch and swing his legs around.

Only to discover that he couldn’t.

A hot, flat pain spread over his thigh as he tried to move it, and it didn’t take more than a moment to realize that he had overestimated how well the dashboard had held up in the crash. It was difficult to angle himself in order to see what might be holding his leg in place; as far as he could see, a few inches above the knee, his leg simply seemed to disappear into the caved-in metal.

A few experimental tugs only yielded more sharp twinges, and Keith grimaces as he felt the trickle of blood ooze from wherever he was being pinned and down his calf. Whatever was holding him in place seemed reluctant to give.

For a couple of minutes he tried lifting the dented dashboard up and off of his knee so he could get a look at what was pinning him, but the Blade hadn’t shirked on the durability of their vehicles; he couldn’t get the dashboard to budge so much as a hair’s width.

Well, fine. If the dashboard wasn’t going to move, Keith was just going to have to try harder to pull the leg out. Perhaps get it done in one quick move, like ripping off a bandaid.

Taking a deep breath, he grit his teeth and gave his leg a good hard yank, a move that he instantly regretted as his vision went stark white and pain from his leg flooded him, fire shooting up the limb and seeming to envelop his every nerve. Something rang in his ears, a sudden surge of noise deafening in the prior silence, and after a moment the raw feeling in his throat told him that it was his own shouting.

He was panting by the time his vision had cleared again, and his eyes stung with tears. Clearly, the bandaid technique was not going to work. His leg was well and truly stuck.

He tried to ignore the coppery scent of blood that had surged into the cockpit as he cast his mind about for some other solution, but it wasn’t easy. His headache was making the air in here so thick, not helped by the fact that the dents and torn openings in the cruiser only let so much air into the vehicle. He needed a fan, maybe some water…

Water. Water and food were in the emergency kit, as were first-aid supplies and a portable radio. The radio, of course, he would save for a last-ditch effort - the most likely ones to pick up the distress signal were the Nuqelites, and he doubted they’d be eager to help him out. Everything else, though, he would definitely need.

He leaned back and reached for the overhead compartment where the emergency kit was stored.

And when his hand couldn’t reach it, he strained harder, stretching as far as his body would allow, the throbbing pain in both his leg and his head starting up again as his fingertips came within an inch of brushing against the compartment door but not quite touching it.

His heart sank with the realization of what this meant, and he wasn’t sure if the blood he felt suddenly surging with increased vigor was due to his injuries or his nerves. These cruisers were designed to be flown by Galra pilots, the emergency supplies placed to be within reach of a Galra arm. He’d been able to adjust his seat to accommodate his small stature before flying it, back when the cruiser was still in working order, but now that the ship was dead, he was stuck just out of reach of the emergency kit.

Which meant no first-aid supplies. No radio. No food. No water.

Keith groaned as he dropped his arm and collapsed back into the seat. There was nothing he could do. He was pinned within the wreckage of his ship, and all that was left for him was to wait for help. The realization hit him with nauseating force.

“Hey!” he yelled out, and normally the desperation in his voice would have embarrassed the hell out of him, but now was no time for pride. “Hey, is anyone out there?! Is anyone nearby?! I need help!”

No answer. He hadn’t really expected one.

“Help me! Hey! Is there anybody there?! Help!”

He wasn’t quite sure how long he kept up the shouting, only that eventually a part of him realized that not only was it fruitless, but he was quickly starting to dry out his throat. His shouts tapered off and he was left with just the quiet of the planet around him. It was growing dark out, too, he noticed. The planet was approaching its night cycle. He didn’t know how long the days were on Nuqel, or what time, relatively, it had been when he and the Blade had set off toward the planet’s surface, or how long he’d been unconscious, so any time passage meant little to him. Except that it would make it that much harder for any potential rescuers to find him once it grew dark.

Not that anyone was looking for him anyhow.

That thought was hurriedly pushed away. It wasn’t a matter of being abandoned, of his teammates not caring about his state. The other Blade members had probably been taken down too, and if they hadn’t, they had no way to know that he himself had lived through that crash landing. He wasn’t being rejected. Wasn’t being forgotten. Wasn’t being abandoned.

Didn’t change the fact that he was trapped in here, alone, bereft of supplies and contact with anyone outside the cockpit.

He squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself not to think about that. To think about anything else but the tiny, darkening cockpit and his trapped leg…

How he managed to fall asleep soon after, he would never know. Perhaps it wasn’t so much falling asleep as it was passing out again. What he did know was that when his eyes drifted open again, the cockpit was pink with sunrise, his mouth was cottony and throat scratchy from lack of water, and he was just as stuck as he had been before.

For lack of anything better to do, he tried again to reach for the emergency kit, an endeavor he gave up on before too long. It was useless, and the strain left him aching. Not to mention sweaty. He was sweating quite a bit. Too much. He couldn’t afford to lose the hydration. But he couldn’t help it; it was so ungodly warm in the cockpit, and somehow it seemed to be growing warmer by the minute.

As the light grew in the cockpit, his vision slowly faded in and out, as if he were constantly falling half-asleep and waking up again. Might have been a side effect from the head injury. Hard to be certain. It might also have been due to the sheer boredom that came with having nothing to do, nothing to occupy his thoughts but blood and his trapped leg and the way the cockpit was so much smaller when the dashboard was caved in that way -

Don’t think about that. Don’t think about that.

He needed to keep his mind occupied to get through this, to make it through this awful waiting. Had to think about anything else.

The first thing his mind went to was the Castle, but he had to shake that memory away, try to replace it with thoughts of the Blade headquarters, but it didn’t hold. He didn’t want to think about the Blade right now, and he definitely couldn’t stand to think about the paladins.

So he decided on spacecraft. Tried to keep his mind on the sensation of piloting, and when that kept pulling back toward thoughts of the destroyed cruiser he was currently trapped inside, he grasped for something else. History. He knew spacecraft history. Not just what he was taught at the Garrison; he learned plenty on his own time.

He went through and mentally recited missions to the moon, in order, just as he’d learned them. No thoughts of his injuries, no thoughts of his isolation, just names of spacecraft. Pioneer 0. Luna E-1 number 1. Pioneer 1. Luna E-1 number 2. Pioneer 2. Luna E-1 number 3. Pioneer 3. Mechta. Pioneer 4.

He made it to Kosmos 305 before he forgot what came next. So he switched to constellations. And when he ran out of constellations, he moved on to state capitals. Then periodic elements. Then song lyrics. Anything to keep himself occupied.

All the while he faded. In and out, in and out. It was almost peaceful, in a way. Just him, in the quiet of the cockpit, trying to remember words from songs he hadn’t heard since his days in the desert as he tried to ignore the ever-growing headache and the stomach cramps and the heat.

That last bit wasn’t peaceful, but they did seem to make the parts where he faded out come faster.

Eventually the cockpit seemed to be growing dark again due not to his own fading consciousness, but to the sun outside setting once more. Keith watched the dashboard’s shadow as it grew longer along the cockpit’s floor until he finally couldn’t see it anymore, then closed his eyes, hoping for sleep. Sure, he had been half-asleep all day, but he didn’t really count that. He’d still been just as tired as he would have been if he’d spent the day training, not to mention just as sweaty. His hair was sticky with it, his back chafing against the pilot’s seat from the leftover dampness.

Although, he hadn’t actually tasted the salt of sweat on his lip for some time now. The sweat that was there seemed to have dried, crusted over.

He was familiar with dehydration. You don’t live in a desert for a year without getting some good hands-on knowledge on the subject. And the fact that he had stopped sweating was definitely a bad sign.

It was frustrating, and a little bit confusing. Just sitting in a cockpit for so long shouldn’t have dried him out this badly; without moving much, he should have been able to survive about a week without water. Something was wrong.

Something besides the obvious, that is.

Keith shivered as he tried to huddle further into the seat as best he could. He shouldn’t dwell on what was going wrong, not while there was nothing he could do about it. All he was supposed to focus on right now was passing time until, by some miracle, help arrived. And if it didn’t… well, he decided he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

He came to it by daybreak.

He had been woken by the arrival of light in the cockpit, although it was the last of several times he’d woken throughout the night. The others were from muscles seizing up and spasming, his body finally having had enough of being stuck in this position and rebelling against him.

The throbbing of his pinned leg had been present all throughout the night, growing just slowly enough that it was hard to notice the difference from hour to hour. But now in the daylight, he finally got a hint of just what sort of state the injury was in.

There, on his Blade uniform where it covered the leg, just before the swollen knee disappeared under the dashboard. There had been a dark bloodstained there for a while, but now something else was mixed in, a pale yellow that had seeped out, drying over the bloodstain. Pus.

Keith’s breath hitched as he focused on it, the only point holding steady in his swimming vision. Pus meant infection. Infection explained the fever - the heat and the sweat and the muscle cramps and the dizziness.

And it also meant that he wouldn’t make it much longer if it wasn’t dealt with, and dealt with fast.

Once more he tried reaching for the emergency kit, despite his every instinct screaming that it was pointless. If he could just get to the kit, he could fix this. He could clean out the wound, get antibiotics from the first aid kit and stave off the gangrene that was surely well on its way.

If he could reach it, he wouldn’t have to - wouldn’t have to -

He was going to have to do it, he realized with a sinking heart as he let his arm fall.

For a long moment he sat still except for his heaving breaths, ones that probably would have been frustrated sobs if he’d been hydrated enough to allow for that.

With nausea bubbling up his throat, Keith slowly reached around to his hip, where his Marmora blade was strapped into place as usual. He removed it, lifting it to the light and trying to steady his grip as he watched the light reflect off its surface. The luxite surface had been cleaned before this mission. Not to the level of pristine sanitation that would typically be required of surgical tools, but enough that it should be okay for this task. It was certainly sharp and sturdy enough.

He brought the tip of the blade to his arm first, ripping off the sleeve from the seam where it attached to his glove and all the way up to his shoulder, and he brought the length of fabric down to tie around his leg as tightly as he could right above the spot where the limb disappeared into the wreckage of the dashboard.

Then, swallowing down the nausea, he moved his blade down toward the trapped leg.

His hand hovered over the skin below his knee, and he tried to convince himself that the shakiness was due more to blood loss and fever than apprehension, because perhaps if he didn’t think about how terrifying this was, it would somehow become less so. Still he hesitated.

He adjusted his grip on the knife and leaned back, taking the blade to the seatbelt that dangled beside him. He had to press the seatbelt down with his elbow to get it to hold steady, but soon he was able to slice a length of it away.

Already starting to feel worn from the energy spent on just that task, he took the length of seatbelt in his free hand, folded it over, and placed it in his mouth, holding it between his teeth. Something a little sturdier to keep him from biting his tongue, and to muffle his screams a bit as he didn’t know what sort of wildlife a sound like that may attract.

And he was definitely going to wind up screaming, he knew.

A fog settled at the borders of his vision as he returned his blade to the leg, the edge easily slicing through the threads of his uniform and coming to rest on the skin - skin that was now visible through the tear, and that he could now see was blazing red from infection.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. The only thing between him and getting free of the wreckage now was a bit of slicing. He could do it.

He had once been a paladin of Voltron. If Shiro could handle being down one limb, so could he.

He would have liked to be able to look away, or close his, but of course, that was hardly an option when he was the one holding the knife.

So he didn’t so much as blink as the blade pressed into his skin, the scarlet of blood welling up over the edges of the cut at once. His vision swam, and he was certain that if he hadn’t gone the last couple of days without eating, anything in his stomach would be coming up now as he pressed the knife further, soon needing to saw the blade back and forth as whatever he was hitting grew thicker and more durable than the skin he’d gone through first - tendons or muscles or something, he wasn’t sure; anatomy had never been a strong subject for him in school.

The sound of blood dripping onto the floor of the cockpit was almost drowned out by the growing buzzing in his ears, and he was biting down so hard onto the length of seatbelt that he was honestly surprised his teeth weren’t ripping straight through it. He didn’t even think he was actually screaming; his throat was too raw, or perhaps the scream just had gotten lost somewhere on the way out, the way it did in nightmares.

This probably fit the criteria of one.

Every ounce of focus, every bit of energy he had went into that knife in his leg, everything else in the cockpit fading as blood flooded his vision, pouring from the ever-growing wound and over his hand, slick and warm as he felt the blade hit bone and it was getting harder and harder to hold onto the hilt of the blade, harder to keep his eyes open.

He lost his grip entirely at one point, his hand shaking too hard, and the blade shifted sideways as it split through the skin of his leg in a new deep tear. His vision went white, and he trembled as he waited for it to return to the image of the cockpit.

It didn’t. It just grew darker.

And darker.

And darker.

Until the whole world went black.

There was no easy way to track the time in the darkness and the nothing. All Keith knew for sure was that when he finally started to fade back, it was to the feeling of a chill against his skin and the sound of an electronic hiss, followed by -

“Give him space, we can’t all catch him at once.”

- a voice he hadn’t heard in far too long.

He collapsed forward, partly out of exhaustion, partly relief, and two arms caught him and held him steady. Keith didn’t bother opening his eyes, and instead just let his face drop into the nearest shoulder as if it were the softest pillow he’d ever known.

“Mind that leg, Number Four, it’s still going to be rather tender for a while yet. Shiro, if you don’t mind…?”

“Right, I got it. Keith?” A hand rubbed his back. “Wanna go take a seat, get your weight off that leg?”

Keith didn’t answer, was too focused on breathing in the familiar scent of his older brother, when another hand came, this one tapping his head. 

“Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey, Mullet. Time to cooperate.”

He finally lifted his head and opened his eyes, solely to shoot Lance a glare.

His teammates gradually came into focus, all in their day clothes, all tired-eyed and with varying degrees of worry and relief on their faces. Keith blinked up at them slowly before asking in a dry rasp, “How - how did I - ?”

“How’d you get here?” Shiro finished for him, and Keith nodded.

“You hitched a ride in Green,” Pidge answered.

“What?” Keith said.

“We tracked you down to Nuqel,” Shiro explained as he began leading Keith over to the med bay’s steps, wordlessly lowering him to take a seat and positioning himself right next to him as he continued, “You… weren’t in the best shape when we got to you.”

“How’d you guys find me?” Keith asked. “My ship, it was - ” He was cut off by a cough, and before he’d even finished coughing a water pouch had been placed into his hands, courtesy of Hunk. Keith nodded his thanks and took a sip before continuing, “All the electronics and stuff were down for the count. How did you track me?”

“We didn’t,” Pidge said. “Had to hunt you down the old-fashioned way.”

“Kolivan contacted us a few quintants ago,” Allura spoke up. “To inform us that your ship had been downed on a mission and that you were, er…”

“He said they were guessing you were dead,” said Lance. “Which, you know, didn’t sound right to us. Our samurai’s not exactly the dying sort, you know?”

“So Allura managed to get Kolivan to tell us the details of the mission you went missing on,” said Pidge. She grinned. “You should’ve seen her. Kolivan was being all stubborn about confidentiality, and by the end of it Allura pretty much threatened to march into the Blade headquarters and strangle Kolivan with her own hands if he didn’t give us every last detail and coordinate of your mission.”

Keith raised a brow toward Allura. “Really? You did that?”

“She is somewhat... embellishing the details,” Allura said sheepishly.

“Aww, come on, Allura, you can admit you were upset,” said Hunk. “We all were.” The last bit he addressed to Keith.

“Anyway, we got the general location and I went down to scout in Green,” Pidge continued. “Since she’s the one with the cloaking and apparently Nuqelites aren’t super welcoming to visitors. It, well, it took some time tracking you down. I was scanning for life forms, but apparently whatever that cruiser’s made of was blocking you from being picked up. I know the Blade loves their stealth, but damn, sometimes it can be a real pain. Still, finally managed to find you, and you were, um…” Her face fell to a tense frowned. “You really weren’t looking so hot when I found you. I mean, you were white as a ghost and everything smelled and there was a lot of blood - like, a lot of blood - and I was sure at first that you were - that you had - ”

She swallowed and dropped her gaze, and Keith tried not to imagine the scene Pidge had come across when she’d found him in that cockpit, or how she might have reacted in the moment.

“Well, um, the important thing is, you were still alive, and I tried to get you out of that wreckage but you were really wedged in there. Wound up having to fly back up to the castle and then come back with Shiro so he could use his arm. We got you out, eventually. Took you back up in Green. You kinda bled out all over her, actually, it was sort of a mess.”

“Not as much a mess as that leg was, though,” Coran piped up.

“True enough,” Pidge said with a nod. “Yeah, that leg of yours was - it was really messed up. Coran even thought maybe it might have been severed too deep for the cryopod to fix it, that we’d have to amputate it. Luckily it didn’t quite come to that, think we were all kinda freaked out by the notion.”

“Sorry,” Keith mumbled.

Shiro’s hand was moving comfortingly against his back immediately. “Hey, bud, don’t apologize,” he said. “Not your fault you crashed.”

“Yeah, but the leg thing,” he said. “That was, um… that was my doing.”

Hunk let out a strangled sound and Lance yelped, “What the shit, Mullet?!” but Pidge and Shiro just exchanged a silent glance between them. 

“What?” Keith asked.

“We kinda suspected,” Shiro answered.

“Just, on account of the way we found your Marmora knife,” Pidge said.

“I had to,” Keith said. “I mean, I - I thought I did. I was stuck. It was the only way - ”

“We know, Keith,” Shiro said softly.

“I wasn’t trying to - to hurt myself or - ”

“No one thinks you were, Keith,” Allura said. “You were badly trapped. Pidge and Shiro told us as much when we brought you back.”

“I couldn’t do it anyway,” Keith mumbled. “I tried to, but… I couldn’t. I was too - ”

“Hey, dude, it’s a good thing that you couldn’t do it,” Lance interrupted. “Why the hell are you apologizing for not pulling it off?”

“Just… I don’t know. Just sorry you guys had to deal with the, um, the aftermath, I guess? I was - I was close, to getting out on my own. You shouldn’t have had to - ”

“Oh, God, he’s doing that Keith thing,” Pidge groaned.

“Keith thing?” Keith repeated.

“That thing where you try to act like like you’ve got everything under control and didn’t want help and no one else should have gone to the trouble. Didn’t you do the same thing that time you got shot when we were on Uthulea?”

“Ooh, yeah, that was bad,” Hunk said. “You wouldn’t even let me help you walk. Up until you passed out, I mean.”

“The head injury you tried to ‘walk off’ when we were in Yisitov comes to mind,” Coran said, tapping his chin.

“I don’t remember that,” Keith said.

“Yes, I doubt you would have.”

“Point is,” said Pidge, “Don’t even think about trying to pretend like you had things under control, or that we shouldn’t have come to the rescue.”

“That’s not what I was saying, I just - ”

“Or that we had gone to too much trouble for you,” Shiro cut him off, and Keith closed his mouth. He’d got it in one. “We hadn’t gone to nearly as much trouble as you almost did. The idea of you trying to make it on your own with one leg, an infection and fever, and what looked to be a couple days of dehydration and starvation, well… it’s definitely not a pretty picture.”

“... I guess not,” Keith said. “Well, um… thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Mullet,” said Lance. “See, was that so complicated? That’s how these things should go. ‘What happened?’ ‘We saved you.’ ‘Oh, thanks.’ ‘You’re welcome.’ None of this weird guilt stuff. Would save so much time.”

“Shut up, Lance,” Keith grunted over Pidge’s snort.

Lance shrugged. “But seriously, man, good to have you back in one piece.”

“And let’s make sure you stay in one piece,” Coran said. “The damage to your leg was quite severe, lad. Even with the pod it’ll take some recuperation, and there will, unfortunately, be a good bit of scarring, although I’m given to understand you seldom wear short pants, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for you. I’ve done a bit of planning for some physical exercises you’ll want to engage in over the next few movements to get it back into tip-top shape; perhaps you’d benefit from a full written schedule…”

Keith let his head drop back onto Shiro’s shoulder as Coran babbled. He’d think about getting his leg back to normal later. For now, it was enough to just enjoy being home again.