#maireep

Keith thought back to yesterday, in the house with Lance, Pidge, and Artax. Then, being upstairs with Lance. They’d been so close. He’d wanted to say—

The bandit with the sewn mouth raised the rusty pipe and took a step toward Lance, where the other male was still holding him in a headlock.

Keith’s vision tinted red.

He moved before he realized it, launching himself down the stairs at the ugly bandit and thrusting his sword directly through the man’s chest. Keith yanked the sword out of the bandit’s chest and pushed the body to the ground. Blood sprayed his jacket.

“Give him to me and leave us alone,” Keith said, voice nothing short of a growl low in his chest.

“Or what, cowboy?” the woman giggled, twirling the gun in one hand and the machete in her other. She took a step closer. The leader was stepping around him too, trying to circle him. Killing one of their men had done nothing to affect them it seemed.

“I’ll fucking end you,” Keith said, gripping his sword in his hands. He was shaking.

There was a pause, and it was enough time for Keith to feel the leader step up behind him, weapon presumably raised, but Keith dodged the attack and spun, swinging his katana directly toward the man’s neck with every bit of strength he had.

The head hit the ground with a thud and rolled. Blood was everywhere, and the corpse collapsed onto the ground, buckets of gore draining from it and pooling onto the ground of the already disgusting subway.

The other two bandits, the man that was still holding Lance and the woman were staring at him now. He’d taken out half of their group with just two swings of his sword.

The woman hissed at him, like a feral cat, and raised her gun toward his chest, “You’ll die for this.”

Keith was moving before anyone else could. The gun fired, but the bullet missed him. He jumped forward, grabbing the gun and slinging it away, just to get it out of the picture. She swung the machete at him instead, but Keith dodged the blade and shoved her away. Then, he lunged toward the last man and grabbed Lance around the waist. The other man was struggling to keep his grip on Lance as well, but Keith wasn’t going to be the one to lose this fight. He wouldn’t do it.

Keith kept an arm locked around Lance’s waist, and with his other arm, he grabbed the small knife from his pocket and sliced the man’s face. He was too slow this time, and the bandit turned his head and bit Keith’s wrist hard enough to make him bleed. He jerked his arm back, skin tearing from the bandit’s mouth, and then, he raised the knife again.

This time, the bandit was too slow. Keith plunged it into his neck, and finally, finally, the bandit let go of Lance and fell to the ground.

Keith stumbled back, struggling to keep him and Lance both upright. Lance had already passed out, eyes closed, body limp. Keith collected him into his arms and turned to run, but before he could get to the stairs, something jumped up onto his back and he fell.

He pushed Lance as far as he could, trying to at least get him away from the crazy bitch on top of him, and Keith rolled.

Suddenly, the ground disappeared, and they toppled down off the platform and back into the tunnel. Keith fell face first into the rocks, and the bandit woman forced him down further. He felt the gravel digging into his skin, stinging him sharply, and Keith grunted, trying to get her off him before she grabbed a weapon.

The woman was laughing, a hysterical high-pitched trill that was fucking with his head. The sound was horrible; Keith struggled against her, but his limbs were so heavy. He was so tired.

Get up, some part of him whispered. He realized that it sounded like Lance’s voice.

Keith kicked his legs wildly and managed to roll over onto his back, shoving her off when his hands were free. He struggled to get to his feet, but before he could, she tackled him again. They went down in a pile of struggling limbs right next to the tracks.

“Not so fast,” she sang, grabbing for his shoulders and pinning him down face first into the gravel. He was pretty sure he was already bleeding from the cut on his face.

He didn’t have a weapon. He’d left his knife embedded in the male bandit’s neck, and the body was too far for him to get it now. His sword was on his back behind him, but there was no way for him to reach it; the woman was frantically grappling for his neck, trying to get a steady hold on him. Between the grip she had on his shoulder and the one on his neck, she shoved him forward, pulling him through the disgusting gravel toward the track.

Keith’s eyes widened, and he panicked as he realized what she was trying to do, when he felt the heat coming off the track that must have somehow managed to keep its electric charge despite the end of the world.

He struggled harder, kicking at her and grabbing for her hands, but he couldn’t reach her. Her grip was too tight, and the way that she was squeezing his neck made it hard to breath.

The track loomed in front of him. They crept closer. Less than a step to it now.

“The end, cowboy,” the woman laughed, dragging him forward until he was right above the track. She took her hand off his neck and shoved his head down until the right side, the already injured side, of his face connected with the burning metal.

He started screaming. The pain was blinding as she held him to the track, and he could smell the way that the heated metal was burning his flesh.

Think, think, think! Get it together, Keith! Do something! The voice in his head that sounded a lot like Lance was begging him to focus, to do something, but Keith could hardly hear it over his own screaming.

He tried to focus. He had to get them out of here. He had to beat this.

Keith gasped hard through his scream, fighting to take a breath.

He thought about Lance, all alone up there on the platform, bleeding out. If he didn’t make it back to get him, Lance would either die of his injuries or the walkers would catch up eventually. They had to be getting close by now.

The image was enough to make Keith move despite the agony he was in. The woman was still pressing him down, hands on his neck and shoulder, knees on his back.

Keith reached backward, struggling to grab her wrist. His shoulder strained uncomfortably, but he hooked his fingers around her arm, squeezed, and twisted downward with all the strength he had left.

The bones splintered and cracked under his grip, and the woman started screaming. She tumbled off him, and Keith surged up, pushing himself away from the track and to his feet. She was scrambling backwards, still in the gravel, and Keith stalked her.

As he reached up to draw his sword, another weapon appeared.

A walker stumbled out of the dark tunnel.

It had probably been prompted by the noise they were making during the fight. The undead body was so grotesque that Keith couldn’t tell what it had been before this, but it didn’t matter. It was hobbling toward them, reaching out for them, and Keith didn’t know what it made him, but he smiled when he saw it.

Before he could really think about it, Keith lunged forward and grabbed the woman by the shoulders. Her arm was mangled; Keith hadn’t realized how much damage he did to it, but he didn’t care. He forced the woman to her feet and shoved her back.

“Where are you taking—”

The walker behind them let out a steady moan, and the woman’s eyes filled with rage.

“Your friend won’t make it anyway, cowboy,” she spit. “He’ll die before you can get back to him. You’ll go to hell for what you’ve done.”

She was clawing at his arms now, gripping onto him as they struggled. He pushed forward, and the walker was right behind them. One of her hands caught the end of Keith’s hair.

The walker’s hand gripped her shoulder beside Keith’s. As it started to lean in, he growled, “Then I’ll see you there,” and shoved her forward into its arms.

She screamed in agony as the walker bit down on her neck. Blood sprayed, but Keith was already moving. She screamed and screamed and screamed as Keith sprinted back for the platform, boosted himself up, and rolled to his feet, already running.

Deeper in the tunnel, Keith could hear the signs of the horde they’d been outrunning earlier. The noise of the fight had probably brought them closer, and they didn’t have much time at all. Keith had left three bodies on the platform, and hopefully, they would slow the first of the horde for them to at least get a head start.

Keith sprinted toward Lance and scooped him up into his arms, making a break for the stairs. He spotted Lance’s bag there at the bottom of the flight, and he managed to grab it on his way up, juggling Lance long enough to get the strap in his hand before he took off again. His arms were already shaking, and his legs, lungs, and head ached, but he couldn’t stop now. He hauled ass, taking the stairs three at a time, clutching Lance in his arms and praying that the bodies he’d left at the platform would be enough for the walkers.

The light at the literal end of the tunnel was welcome, and when Keith hit the last step, finally making it to the street, his knees buckled.

“Fuck,” Keith growled, pushing himself back to his feet. The growling and howling from the subway below them were loud. He wasn’t sure how much longer he had before the horde—or any other—would be after them.

He got back to his feet, clutching Lance to him, hands slick with blood. Keith looked down to him, where Lance’s eyes were closed; his face was slack, expressionless, pale. The cut on his neck was still bleeding, and it was deeper than Keith first thought, and his leg—

Just looking at him made Keith’s knees give out again.

He collapsed onto the pavement, cradling Lance in his arms as he fell. He pressed back against the wall, frantically scanning the street for any walkers. Miraculously, there were none. For now.

“What do I do,” Keith muttered, adjusting his hold on Lance. “Lance, what do I do?”

Something dripped down his face.

The street was empty, until the next horde moved through. Keith wasn’t sure where Lance had been taking them when they went down into the subway, and because of it, he had no idea where they were. He didn’t know where anything was, where he might find something, or someone, to help Lance.

He was all alone.

Another tear rolled down his cheek.

It was getting hard to breathe. It felt like something was pressing down onto his chest. He needed to do something right now. Lance was unconscious, probably bleeding out in his arms right now. Keith was holding onto him as he slipped away.

He couldn’t do this alone. He wouldn’t.

“Okay,” Keith grunted, carefully shifting Lance down onto the ground. He was bleeding so much already but—Keith had to do something before they could move. He wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere with this much blood anyway; the walkers would smell them eventually, if they didn’t already.

He grabbed Lance’s bag and dumped out the contents onto the street, praying there would be something in it to work with and help him help Lance. Two beers, a lighter, a handful of pill bottles, a couple of packages of food, two water bottles, a semiautomatic rifle and pistol, and Lance’s jacket scattered across the pavement. No bandages, no extra material, no magic medical device to save the day, nothing.

“Okay, that’s fine, we can still do this,” Keith muttered it to himself, pushing most of the supplies back into the bag. He took everything except the beer because—it was too heavy, and Keith needed every last advantage that he had right now.

Keith ripped his jacket off and pulled his t-shirt over his head, ripping it into strips to tie around Lance’s thigh. The material was already soaked, but he carefully put more and more onto the wound, hoping that it would do until they could get somewhere safer. And until Keith thought of something better, of something that would save Lance.

But this was all he had right now. These t-shirt scraps soaked in blood.

The soundtrack of the apocalypse, the tell-tale moaning and groaning that triggered any sort of ending, came back, louder than before, and Keith looked up to see the first of the walkers stumbling up out of the subway entrance toward them.

Keith cursed and grabbed his sword and Lance’s bag, slipping them over his bare chest so they rested against his back. Then, he slipped his arms around Lance, one under his knees and the other around his back, hoisting the other boy’s body into his arms as he stumbled to his feet.

He rounded the corner, dodged a walker that reached out to grab him, and started running.

;;

When Keith first met Lance, everything had already been so fucked up that he hadn’t expected much of anything anymore.

His entire life up until that point had been a shitshow anyway. His mom left, Shiro left, and his dad all but checked out of his life. He’d had no one and nothing. Then, the world ended, and even though he got his dad back for a little bit, it didn’t matter in the end. Everyone was still gone, and Keith was still alone.

Then, Lance opened the door of an old semi-truck and jumped onto the back of his horse. He’d elbowed his way into Keith’s life more forcefully than anyone had before.

Even Lance left, though. For a minute.

It’d been hell, those few hours between Lance leaving and Keith finding him again. But then he was back, apologizing for leaving, and folding his own life right into Keith’s.

Somewhere along the way, Keith had fallen in love with Lance.

It was of no surprise to him whatsoever. Lance was the most beautiful person Keith had ever seen, apocalypse or not, and he was kind, sarcastic, good with a gun, and a handful sometimes. Lance was the only person in Keith’s life to ever come back for him, to come back to be with him. In any capacity.

The past few weeks had been the best of Keith’s life. He’d prefer running through streets filled with horrible hordes of the walking dead if it meant that Lance would be right there with him. He’d fight monsters every day for as long as he was breathing as long as it meant that Lance wouldn’t go anywhere, as long as it meant that he’d be with him for as long as the universe allowed it.

That bet with the universe must have come to an end though, and it was right at the time that Keith thought something great might have started.

;;

Keith was tired. He’d been running for—he didn’t know how long.

He had started coughing what felt like hours ago. He didn’t think he was getting enough oxygen at this point. He was clutching Lance in his arms, holding onto him, and the only thing he could think about was pushing himself to move faster, hold Lance tighter, keep them alive longer.

Keith didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t have any sort of answers. He’d run out of tears miles back.

He didn’t know if Lance was even still alive, from where he was carrying him in his arms. He figured he’d find out if—when the body woke up and bit him.

That would be the end that he got. He would either get them out of this, save them, keep Lance alive, or he would just wait until Lance came back for him. Keith wasn’t sure if he believed in any sort of afterlife, so if this was the best he got, then fuck, he’d take it. It wouldn’t be Lance, but it would be better than a random walker finally taking him down.

For now, he kept running.

;;

Keith turned the corner of a street and ran straight into a group of walkers.

He turned back, stumbling, but keeping himself upright as he dodged the groaning, reaching hands. He crossed the street and turned down another alley, only to run into another group.

Fuck.

Lance twitched in his arms.

Fuck.

Keith didn’t let himself look down. He promised that he’d keep going. Lance had called him a hero, had said that he always got them out of trouble. He had to do it again. He had to keep going.

He pivoted, turning back and sprinting for the last street, the last option. He made a hard left, spinning around the brick siding of a building and thankfully, the street before him was empty.

But the walkers were still behind him. Keith could hear them, following, catching up to him. They would no doubt attract the sound of a larger horde, one with sprinters and crawlers and the other nightmares that Keith didn’t have a chance of fighting off by himself, not while he was carrying Lance with him.

If he was going to do something, it had to be done right now.

Keith made another turn, this time onto a bigger, four lane road. It was full of trash and debris, random cars that were pushed off to the side, like someone from after all this had moved them. About a hundred yards away, a Humvee sat that hadn’t been ruined, that looked like it might still run.

Keith nodded to himself. This was it. Last chance. He had to make this work.

He dug in, found some last pocket of strength that he hadn’t know about as he clutched Lance and kept running. He sprinted past open alleys, past walkers that stumbled out toward him, past bodies that littered the ground already, both burned and eaten.

He was within just a few yards of the Humvee when he was stopped.

“Stop right there!”

Keith slowed, spinning toward the voice.

It was a man. In military fatigues.

Keith blinked, hard. Again.

“Keith?”

He shook his head. He didn’t understand what was happening.

The man took a few steps closer, and Keith stepped back. None of this made any sense. None of this was real. This wasn’t—couldn’t be happening.

Lance moved in his arms again, and this time, Keith couldn’t help it. He looked.

His eyes were open. Keith could barely see the blue slits, but he was awake. Lance was alive.

A loud, distant roar was building. It was familiar. The sound of a horde, complete with screamers and runners, and if they were in the middle of the city like Keith expected, there was no telling exactly how many it would be. There would be no way to fight out of this.

“Get in the Humvee.”

Keith looked back up. Shook his head again.

“If you want to stay alive,” Shiro said, this Shiro with white hair and a scarred nose, “get in the fucking Humvee, Keith.”

;;

He couldn’t breathe.

The Shiro in front of him was different than the last one he had seen. It had been years though, and Keith guessed that people changed.

He wasn’t sure this was real.

“Let’s go!” Shiro shouted, making his way toward the Humvee. The street was already filling with walkers, and the longer they waited, the closer the hordes came.

Even if this wasn’t real, Keith was out of options.

He nodded and ran to the other side of the Humvee, where Shiro had already thrown the door open for him and was waiting to pull him in. Keith wasn’t sure how he got inside with Lance still in his arms, but the next second he was in the Humvee, Shiro was closing the door, and cranking the engine just as a walker pounded on the glass of the door.

The Humvee lurched as Shiro pressed it forward, and Keith tightened his grip on Lance, who’s eyes had closed again. He was pale, and the makeshift bandages that he’d wrapped around the wound were dripping with blood. Keith rearranged him, pressing him further into his body so he could reach for Lance’s neck, to feel the faint, but still-there pulse.

He brushed his hand over Lance’s hair, and when he pulled away, he was covered in blood. Keith hadn’t seen him hit his head but—everything had happened so fast, and the blood must be coming from somewhere.

Dread cinched his chest.

“I need you to help me,” Keith choked. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to.

“Who is that?” Shiro asked, glancing over to him, frowning. “What the hell is happening? How did you get here? And what happened to your face?”

“He can’t die, okay?” Keith said, voice wrecked. He felt ruined. “He just—he can’t die. Please, Shiro, please.”

“I’m not going to let him die. I—I’m going to get us there as fast as I can.”

Keith wanted to ask where it was that Shiro was taking them, but he wasn’t sure that any of this was real in the first place. He wasn’t sure that he and Lance had made it out of the subway together now that he thought about it. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that he’d been close to DC weeks ago, when he’d first seen Lance at all.

How had he made it off the ranch again? There had been so many walkers that day.

Was this really happening? Why couldn’t he remember anything?

“Hey,” Shiro snapped, looking over to him quickly from where he was still driving. “Get it together, Keith. You’re going into shock. Breathe. You have to keep breathing.”

Keith shook his head. Was any of this real?

“Talk to me,” Shiro pleaded. “C’mon. It’s me. We’re going to save your friend, but you have to talk to me. You have to stay focused.”

Focused on what? Keith thought. Lance was the only thing worth focusing on.

He’d come so close to telling Lance earlier, when they were in that shitty, run down grocery store where they’d stopped to take a break. Keith had been looking for anything that might be useful when Lance had started the music, and he’d been looking at Keith with those big blue eyes already, saying all of these things that he wasn’t saying aloud, and when it ended, he’d seemed sad. Keith honestly hadn’t been able to help it when they’d been in the alley together. Realistically, he could remember thinking that he should stop, that it was no place for him to tell Lance what he was thinking, about how much he loved him, but Keith had never been one to stop his impulses. The apocalypse hadn’t helped that situation at all.

But he didn’t get the chance. Instead, he and Lance had been forced to run, and then, the subway.

And now, this.

“Where are we going?” Keith choked the question out. He kept staring at Lance.

“Back to base,” Shiro answered. “We have a doctor there. They can help.”

The ride was long, but Keith’s sense of time was fucked anyway. He didn’t know how much time had passed since all of this started; he just knew that the more of it that went by, the less likely Lance would be to survive.

The Humvee slowed, and Keith looked up from Lance to see them nearing a fence. Beyond the fence, there was a large set of buildings, like some sort of old military base or compound. It was big, and it looked like it was still operational even now. The fence was pulled open by two people, and Shiro drove the Humvee through the gap and up into an open garage, yards behind another fence that was already open.

Shiro opened the door of the Humvee as soon as it was parked, yelling, “Get a fucking stretcher! Get Coran! Hurry!”

Keith didn’t know what to do.

His door opened a second later, and he jumped down, legs and arms trembling, but still holding onto Lance tightly. Shiro was there then, guiding him over to where two people, a man and a woman, brought a stretcher into the garage.

Keith hesitated.

“Put him down, Keith,” Shiro said. “We need to get him to Coran.”

Keith looked down at Lance again, an utter mess in his arms.

He took a step and leaned forward, carefully placing Lance onto the stretcher.

It rolled away as soon as Keith let go, and he panicked, grabbing his katana from the sheath on his back and pulling it up to—

“No, Keith!” Shiro yelled, jumping forward and grabbing him, forcing his arms back down so he couldn’t get his weapon out. “They’re taking him to Coran. They can help him, okay?”

“I can’t leave him,” Keith said, staring after the stretcher, where Lance disappeared deeper into this unknown building with these strange people.

“Okay,” Shiro nodded frantically, still gripping his arms. “Okay, we can go with them, but you can’t have your weapon out. You have to stay calm.”

Keith wasn’t sure that calm was a word in his vocabulary at all.

Shiro must have decided it was okay because after a few seconds, he turned and jogged after the people with the stretcher, motioning for Keith to follow.

He did, and they jogged through a door and then down a long hallway. It was empty, all blank white walls that looked like they hadn’t been disturbed at all. Shiro turned left, took them through a gate, then another, and Keith really tried to keep up with where he was going and how to get out of here, but he wasn’t sure that he would be able to even find his way out now.

He was wheezing, lungs aching. His body didn’t feel right.

Finally, they turned into a room off one of the long hallways.

There were four people in the room already, gathered around the stretcher that Lance was on. The man and woman from before, who had rolled him away, and then another man and woman as well. The man was wearing a white coat and a pair of gloves, and he had a large mustache from where he was already looking at the cut on Lance’s neck. The woman was undoing the t-shirt bandages Keith had haphazardly fixed around the gunshot wound on Lance’s thigh. Her silver hair was tied into a tight ponytail, and her eyes were sharp when she looked up to see them.

“Shiro,” her voice was strong too, “what have you done?”

“It’s my brother,” Shiro replied, and hearing the words come out of Shiro’s mouth was weird. “This is Keith. I found him on the street with—carrying whoever this is.”

“What happened to him?” the woman asked, shifting her gaze to Keith.

He made his voice steady, “Bandits. We were in the subway. They grabbed him before I could do anything. I got us out but—you can save him, right?”

“We can try, my friend,” the man with the mustache, and a thick Aussie accent, said. “Do you know his blood type?”

Keith shook his head.

“Alright, we’ll need to use some of our universal stock then,” the man said. “We’ll do a transfusion and get started on stitching his leg up. We need to start an IV now and prepare for surgery.”

It was a long while before there was any news. Thankfully, Shiro and the others didn’t make him leave. Instead, he stood there, in that room, watching as these strangers worked over Lance. They removed most of his clothes, since they were covered in guts and blood anyway, and cleaned up his skin after they had removed the bullet and stitched up his thigh. Finally, they seemed to pull away from Lance, after they had finished, after it had been hours.

Keith never moved.

They had hooked Lance up to several different machines. One that was beeping with his heart rate, which honestly made Keith feel better just hearing it. Then, there was an oxygen mask sitting on his nose and over his mouth. He still had an IV in one of his arms, and they were giving him blood in his other and—

He looked so still. Keith wanted to be sick.

“Alright, my boy,” the accented, mustached man started, “it looks like your friend is going to be just fine. We’ve got a steady heartbeat on him now, and his leg should heal right up in the next few weeks. From what we can tell, the head injury isn’t as bad as it could have been. We put in a couple of stitches to stop the bleeding, and there doesn’t seem to be any swelling. You’re lucky you got here when you did. Any longer, and we might be having a different conversation.”

Keith felt like he might collapse into himself with the news. He brought his hands up to his face and just swayed there, wondering if he would be next to pass out. The wound on his face was stinging, Keith thought absently. It had been the first time he’d felt it since he’d been back in the subway.

“Thank you,” he finally choked the phrase out, bringing his hands back down to his sides. “Thank you. I can never repay you for this.”

“No worries, lad,” the man said cheerfully. “Any friend of Shiro’s is a friend of ours.”

“Yes,” the woman said, coming around to stand in front of them. “And you said he’s your brother, Shiro?”

Shiro nodded, gesturing to him, “Yes. This is Keith.”

“Keith,” the woman repeated, looking him up and down. “I’m Allura, and this is my uncle, Coran. How did you find Shiro?”

“I didn’t,” Keith cleared his throat. “He found me.”

“What are you doing all the way up here?” Shiro asked, tone turned frantic again. “What happened to the ranch? And Dad?”

Keith really didn’t want to do this right now, but there wasn’t much choice. These people had just saved Lance. Keith owed them everything he had.

“The ranch was overrun, and Dad didn’t make it,” Keith said it as flat as he could. “I came all this way, and a few weeks ago, I was probably 50 miles from here, when I ran into—when Lance found me. I was looking for you, but he told me that DC was a mess, so we headed West then, looking for his friend. We ran into a girl named Pidge who was looking for her brother, and we volunteered to help her, which is how we ended up in the city—”

“Hold up,” Shiro interrupted, and his eyes were wide. “Did you say a girl named Pidge?”

“Yeah,” Keith nodded. “She wanted help trying to find her brother. Said that he might still be alive as of five days ago. Lance and I volunteered to go look for him.”

“Where is she now?”

Keith frowned, “Why does it matter?”

“Her brother’s name is Matt, right?”

“How did you know—”

“Because he’s here, and he’s been looking for her too.”

;;

“Keith, you need to let Allura and Coran check on you.”

He pulled the shirt over his head and grabbed his new black jacket, shoving his arms through it and adjusting the collar before putting his sword back over his chest. They’d given him new clothes since his had been wrecked. He mourned the loss of his jacket, left back on whatever street he’d abandoned it on, and his red, camel boots, which were too disgusting for him to keep. Now, looking in the mirror that hung in the bathroom where Keith was changing, you couldn’t even tell that he’d come up from Texas. Lance was always teasing him about being a cowboy, but now, Keith looked like the exact opposite. He was fitted completely in black, black pants, t-shirt, combat boots, and a black jacket. He wasn’t sure where these clothes had come from, but it was better than nothing.

He looked like a completely different person. The scar that stretched across the right side of his face didn’t help.

Fuck, he even felt like a completely different person. Something was changing, but he wasn’t sure what it was just yet.

“I’m fine,” Keith said, frowning at Shiro in the mirror. “We need to get Pidge.”

“You’re exhausted. You looked like you were going to die when I found you and—”

Keith didn’t think he could stand hearing Lance’s name come from Shiro’s mouth.

“I said that I’m fine,” Keith repeated. “Pidge is out there waiting. I’m going to get her. You can come if you want.”

“I’m not letting you go alone.”

Keith turned to face him. “Then why are we still standing here?”

;;

The ride with Shiro was awkward and confusing. They left immediately, as soon as Keith had finished getting dressed. They had seen Allura again, who had nodded to them and given Keith two guns—a handgun and a semiautomatic rifle—before nodding them off and asking them to be safe. She seemed stern. Even though she couldn’t be much older than Keith himself, she seemed like she was years older, like she’d seen things that made her into the leader she acted like.

Keith and Shiro left in the same Humvee. Now that he knew Lance was safe and that everything was going to be okay, he was able to pay more attention to what was happening. The compound that they must have taken over was obviously military. It had the gear and the resources that only the U.S. government would have had by the time everything in DC went to hell. There were also a lot of extra people at the base that he’d seen so far, and Keith assumed that most of them were originally military, maybe a few stragglers from the road like him and Lance, but not many.

“You said that you met, um, Lance on the road? Somewhere close to here?”

Shiro broke the silence with the question, and Keith had been right earlier. He didn’t like hearing Lance’s name come out of Shiro’s mouth.

This was all—so crazy. Weeks ago, he’d been so close to here. He’d been looking for Shiro, and there hadn’t been any signs. And now? He just runs into him on the fucking street in the middle of the end of the world?

“Why didn’t you come to the ranch?” Keith asked instead, because now that he was thinking about it, he was really fucking pissed at Shiro. “You had to have known that things were going bad. You could have come in time.”

Shiro grit his teeth and gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I wanted to. I tried, but they assigned me to a mission.”

“So a mission was more important than me?”

“Of course not, Keith, but I couldn’t just blow it off. It was—Coran and Allura were sent here after the virus hit Europe because they’d heard rumors about creating a vaccine. The president put me and the rest of my unit on security detail at the compound, and then the virus hit North America,” he explained.

“Fuck the president,” Keith growled, “and fuck you. You just left me there.”

“Goddammit, Keith!” Shiro shouted, pounding the Humvee’s steering wheel, but keeping his eyes on the road in front of them. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you know how fucking guilty I feel about it? I thought of you every fucking day, leaving you there with him and after Mom… I was stupid. I took that job and just left you there when you were a kid and I didn’t think about anything else and I’m fucking sorry.”

Keith was silent. Shiro was breathing hard.

“I’ve been thinking about it for years,” Shiro continued, voice rough but quiet at the same time. “I wanted to come back and get you. I should have. I was wrong, and I left you there. I’m sorry.”

There was a long pause. The Humvee roared underneath them. Keith didn’t know what he was thinking.

They travelled in silence for a few miles.

Outside the Humvee, the road grew rougher. There was more debris and trash on the route they had chosen to get around the city to the side where Pidge was supposed to be waiting with Artax. Shiro was driving slower to accommodate the burned and wrecked cars that littered the roads, and Keith spotted the occasional walker stumbling among the wreckage.

“Things were bad, when you left,” Keith said, voice quiet too. “I was alone. I had Artax and that was all. You’d call, and I’d pretend everything was fine, but when I hung up the phone, everything was a lie. Dad was a mess. And then the whole fucking world ended and you weren’t there.”

“I’m sorry,” Shiro said again.

“Dad did get better, right at the end,” Keith said it because he thought Shiro should know that it hadn’t been all bad. “He stopped drinking and—it was like when we were really little, remember? Things were good until the ranch was overrun. That’s when I left to find you.”

Shiro was quiet too, for a minute. Then he said, “By yourself?”

“Me and Artax.”

“You rode all the way to Virginia on Artax?”

“Who do you think Pidge is waiting with?” Keith cracked a smile, and the expression felt weird on his face. It pulled at the wound uncomfortably.

Shiro actually laughed, “Holy shit.”

The silence between them shifted from the tense, guilt-ridden conversation they were having to a softer, easier place. Keith stared out the window, trying to figure out how any of this was happening. Lance was okay. Shiro had found him.

How was his life real?

“I’m glad you found me,” Keith said exactly what he was thinking because who knew how much time he’d have left anyway? “If you hadn’t helped me, Lance would—we’d be dead. So. Thank you.”

Shiro nodded carefully, “I just—still can’t believe it honestly. I guess it was the universe working in our favor for once, huh?”

“I guess so.”

The Humvee roared underneath them as they continued down the road.

“But seriously,” Shiro said suddenly, “who’s Lance?”

“He’s… I met him on the road.”

Shiro didn’t answer, but when Keith looked over to him, there was a small smile biting at his lips.

“Shut up, Shiro.”

“I didn’t say anything,” he laughed, turning the wheel of the Humvee up onto another highway and avoiding the wreckage on the ramp. “This is going to be fun though.”

“What is?”

“Watching you deal with whatever it is you have going with Lance.”

Keith rolled his eyes, even though his face heated and his heart sped up. He didn’t want to tell Shiro how right he was but—well, he was right.

They had probably made it half an hour from the compound now. Pidge was supposed to be waiting on the other side of DC from where the compound was situated since he, Lance, and Pidge had come from the opposite direction. But, according to Shiro’s directions, they should be getting closer to her location.

“Oh fuck,” Shiro cursed, pumping the brakes on the Humvee. Keith looked up to find the road blocked by two different cars and an overturned bus.

Shiro slowed the Humvee and stopped, cutting the engine. He pulled the map out, and Keith leaned over to look as well. They were only about a mile from where the rendezvous point with Pidge was supposed to be, and they were probably far enough outside of the city to avoid the hordes and most of the bigger crowds of walkers. Plus, they had weapons and supplies this time. From what Keith had just done, this seemed easy.

“Alright, c’mon,” he finally said, reaching down and grabbing the backpack Allura had given him. “We can walk the rest of the way and get Pidge.”

Shiro hesitated, looking around them carefully. He said, “We don’t know what’s ahead. If we double back and cut off the highway—”

“We don’t know what’s that way either,” Keith replied. “It could be worse, but we do know that it’s only a mile from here to Pidge and then a mile back. We’ve got weapons, we’ve got the map, and we’ve got supplies. It’s our best chance.”

“We should be careful,” Shiro argued. “We should try to get the Humvee as close as possible. We need to make it back to the compound in one piece.”

“Obviously,” Keith said, rolling his eyes. “Lance is there. I almost fucking died trying to get him there, and I’m not planning on dying now before I get to see him again.”

“Aww.”

Keith huffed, opening his door, “Jesus, shut up. Let’s go.”

He jumped out of the Humvee and landed on the pavement, shifting his katana to his back and pulling the rifle forward, easing off the safety. There weren’t any walkers that he could see, so he carefully shut his door and moved around to the front of the Humvee.

Shiro met him at the front, and he had his gun out as well. He motioned forward, and Keith took point, walking toward the wreckage in front of them.

They moved quickly and quietly through the overturned cars and debris on the highway. It was quiet around them, almost to the point of it being stifling, but Keith would take the quiet over anything else that could happen at this point. Trash littered the street, and it blew in the soft wind that overtook the edge of the city. In the distance, Keith would see plumes of smoke coming from the skyline that was downtown. Keith winced at the thought of more bandits and hoped that Pidge had enough sense to wait for them at the rendezvous point they had agreed on. If she wasn’t there, Keith didn’t know what they would do.

Few walkers lingered on the streets, but Keith dealt with them silently. The quieter they could be, the faster and easier they could get this done.

It took about fifteen minutes for them to get a mile down the highway. Keith remembered leaving Pidge here this morning. He couldn’t believe it’d only been a few hours when it seemed like a fucking lifetime ago.

“This is the place,” Shiro murmured, reaching for the map he’d folded in his pocket.

“She probably found somewhere to hunker down and wait,” Keith replied, looking around. There weren’t many buildings very close to them now, but Pidge wouldn’t have just waited out in the open. She would have found a place to wait and watch—

“There,” Keith nodded and pointed to a building a few hundred yards off the highway. It was a few stories high, so it would be easy to find a place and keep watch for when they came back.

Shiro nodded, “Good eye. Lead the way.”

They moved toward the building, pushing past the rotten cars and over the side railing into the grass. A few bodies littered the ground, but they looked old, like they’d been killed long ago. Keith scanned the area as they approached the building. Everything was all quiet.

It only took a few minutes to cross the empty space and get to the building. Shiro waved him off and went first, opening the door and stepping in with his rifle ready.

Keith wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t the utter silence that echoed through the building as they stepped inside. It was completely empty, save for the destroyed furniture and blood and gore covered walls. It was a lot like most other buildings; something horrible had happened here to someone else. It was an interesting and terrifying thing to think about. Everywhere they went, everywhere they looked, every walker that they killed had been someone else that was just trying to get through this world too.

He didn’t want to think about it. He just wanted to find Pidge and Artax and get back to Lance.

Together, he and Shiro made it through the building. They crossed the floors one by one, going up the staircases carefully and quietly. They didn’t encounter anyone on the first, second, or third floor. They found one walker on the fourth that had been trapped in a closet, and the fifth was their last hope. If Pidge wasn’t here, they’d have to start over.

Shiro glanced at him and nodded before opening the door to the fifth floor.

It looked much like the others. It had obviously been an office building before the apocalypse, and this floor had the same overturned furniture covered in the same gore that coated the rest of the surfaces in the building. Papers and trash littered the floor, and when Keith and Shiro moved into the main floor, they heard a door close somewhere on the floor.

Keith frowned, and they moved forward.

It was quiet, but it was the kind of quiet that took up too much space. Keith knew they were walking toward something, and he desperately hoped it was Pidge. Even still, he couldn’t make himself call her name to see.

Shiro turned down the hallway, where all of the doors were open except for the corner office. He jerked his head, and Keith followed.

When they got to the closed door, Keith raised his gun, and Shiro gripped the doorknob, pausing for a second before throwing it open.

A shotgun cocked, breaking the overwhelming silence, and all Keith could see was the cold metal of the barrel he was suddenly staring down.

Then, “Keith?”

He looked farther, and there was Pidge.

He smiled, dropping his gun, “Hey.”

She dropped the shotgun and threw herself forward, right into his arms. Keith swept his arms around her, holding her close, feeling relieved that he’d found her and terrified that they’d left her by herself all at once.

Pidge pushed back, still gripping Keith’s arms in her hands, “Where’s Lance? And who’s that? What happened to your face?”

Keith nodded, “We got into some trouble and—Lance got really hurt. It was bad. I didn’t think we’d make it. We’d run out of options when Shiro found me. He took us back to the military compound that he’s from, and the doctor saved Lance from dying. Lance is there now, but I had to come back and get you.”

Pidge’s eyes were wide. “But he’s going to be okay?”

Shiro interrupted, “Lance is going to be fine. He’s resting now. We came to get you as soon as we could.”

“Is Artax okay?” Keith asked, glancing around the room. He didn’t see her.

“Oh!” Pidge stepped behind the door and pulled Artax out, and Keith smiled, stepping further into the room.

Artax rushed for him, nickering softly and pushing her nose against his face. He laughed, reaching up to grab her face. Something inside him settled. Lance was going to be fine. Pidge and Artax were alive. They were together. He even had Shiro back.

Shiro appeared at his side, brushing his hand over Artax’s side. He said, “I can’t believe you brought her all the way here.”

“She kept me alive most of the time,” Keith replied.

“How does this guy know Artax?”

“Oh,” Keith glanced back over to Pidge. “He’s my brother.”

Pidge stared.

“Yeah,” Keith agreed. “It’s been crazy.”

A few seconds of silence passed. Pidge was biting her lip and shifting uneasily when she asked, voice shaking, “So you didn’t find Matt?”

Keith nodded again, “I found him, yeah. He’s at the military compound that Shiro took us too. He’s there right now.”

Tears pooled in Pidge’s eyes, “He is?”

“Yes,” Shiro replied. “He’s been looking for you. He was getting ready to leave to try and find you. I was going to go with him to help. That’s actually what I was doing when I found Keith and Lance, scouting parts of the city before we moved the search wider. Matt’s at the compound waiting on us to get back.”

Pidge was crying now, holding her hands to her face and sobbing, her entire body shaking with it. Keith reached out and set a hand on her shoulder, trying to be comforting but not overwhelming. He hadn’t even been looking for Shiro this time but—he understood.

Finally, Pidge looked up, eyes red, and said, “Can we go now?”

“Hell yeah we can,” Keith replied, reaching up for Artax’s reins.

;;

The following days were so different than the ones he had experienced since the apocalypse that it made his head spin. He wasn’t sure if it was good or bad.

For one thing, it was a living hell because Lance hadn’t woken up yet. Every day that he remained asleep was fucking torture to Keith. Even though Coran, Allura, Shiro, and plenty of others had assured him that the longer Lance slept the better, he still didn’t like it. Something felt unfinished without Lance here. Something felt incomplete, wrong, ruined without Lance being awake.

Naturally, Keith (being the masochist that he was) remained seated by Lance’s bedside for two days. On the third, much like the others, Shiro came into the room, followed closely by Pidge, and asked him to help out around the compound. Keith stared at Lance, imagined him frowning at him, teasing him for sitting here pouting, and got to his feet.

He’d been gripping his katana in his hands the entire two days, so he might as well check to make sure this place was secure before Lance woke up. He’d need to know what it was like, if it was going to be safe for them to stay here. Hopefully it would last long enough for Lance to recover safely.

Pidge smiled at him as he agreed. He had been seeing a lot of her smiles lately, it seemed like. After he and Shiro brought her back to the compound, she had been reunited with her brother, Matt, another scientist that had worked for the government before everything fell. Even Keith had gotten a little choked at the scene, especially the way that Pidge had hugged Matt and didn’t let go.

Shiro had set his hand on his shoulder and smiled at him, and Keith couldn’t wait for Lance to wake up.

It had been a good day around the compound when they’d brought Pidge back safe and sound. Shiro had introduced him around, in the few minutes between them getting back and Keith storming off to start his vigil at Lance’s side. He would admit that he hadn’t been paying the most attention to it; he really had no idea who anyone was. The few people he’d spoken to were people he vaguely recognized that came in to check on Lance, including Coran and Allura, and  then Shiro and Pidge who would alternate in sitting with him and Lance for a while. The company was nice, but it put him on edge more often than not.

Shiro put him and Pidge on duty to take stock and sort weapons. It was a good afternoon. Pidge talked to him quietly, telling him about life around the compound and what Matt had been up to while he was looking for her. She seemed happy here, and a strange pang of sadness swept through his chest at the thought of Lance not knowing they’d found Pidge’s brother.

Yet, Keith reminded himself. Lance would be awake any minute now. Coran had assured him of it.

“I think Lance is going to like it here,” Pidge said suddenly, when the conversation lulled between them. It was like she had been reading his mind.

“Yeah?” Keith asked because honestly, he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

She nodded, “He’s going to wake up soon. I know it.”

Keith nodded too, praying she was right.

;;

The noise in the compound was probably the thing that Keith disliked the most. On the road, he always had to be silent. Noise equaled walkers, and any wrong move could bring a flood of walkers to come kill you. That was why the compound unsettled him so much, he thought; it was louder than he was used to. People talked loudly, laughed together. Some people even played music inside the concrete walls. Keith was always looking over his shoulder any time he heard a loud noise like that, and most of the time, he already had his sword out too.

Lance had been sleeping for four days now, but Coran said that he had been coming in and out of consciousness for the past few hours. When Keith heard that he’d wanted to stay put right beside Lance, but Coran had talked him out of it, saying that Lance needed the rest and it wouldn’t do Keith any good to stand and wait for him to wake up.

Shiro had noticed Keith’s nervousness at the sounds around the compound, and to make up for it, he’d asked that Keith be put on guard duty on one of the farther walls. He’d been annoyed about it at first because of how far it was from Lance and how long it’d take him to get back to his side if something happened, but when he climbed up the ladder to the guard tower, it was completely silent.

He must have had some sort of reaction because Shiro smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. He said, “I thought you’d like this better.”

Keith nodded, sighing in relief, “Yeah. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

They stood in silence. Keith had a rifle with him, and even though Shiro said there wasn’t much to worry about on this side, Keith planned to keep his eyes cut for groups of walkers. A few wouldn’t bring the fences down but any more than that could pose serious problems if it wasn’t dealt with.

It was a few minutes before Shiro broke the silence. “Hey, Keith?”

“Yeah?”

“How did you get that scar?”

Keith was quiet. He wasn’t sure that he could tell the story.

Instead of answering, he said, “How did you get yours?”

Shiro sighed, and it was a sound straight from his childhood, the one that Shiro made every time Keith was being an annoying little shit. The memory made one side of Keith’s face lift up into a small smile.

“It was when D.C. fell and the evacuations began,” Shiro started, and Keith hadn’t expected him to really tell the story. “The government had already been gone at that point. In fact, the President had taken Air Force one out to Montana to a bunker, and pretty much everyone else fled the city when they’d gotten the leaked information about the virus hitting Europe.

“So the President’s office left my squadron here, at this compound, to protect Coran and his niece, Allura. Coran had been getting close to finding something for a vaccine, he’d thought, so we were told to stay put, to wait it out and keep him alive at all costs,” Shiro explained. “But then, the city evacuations started, and citizens were being encouraged to get out of the District as fast as they could, but it was too late. The virus hit the population fast, and everything went dark within two days. We watched people evacuate, and some made it out in time, but the walkers were just—swarming everything. We put up the second and third fences pretty close to that, and we were talking about digging a trench around the compound just to up security.”

“Did anyone ever make it this far from the city?” Keith asked.

Shiro nodded, “A lot did, yeah. They begged us to take them in but—we couldn’t. We didn’t have the room to take in the amount of people that were showing up at the gates. We couldn’t even spare the food or water we had to help them out. It was terrible, having to turn them away, but we had been assigned to keep Coran alive so he could find the cure and we’d been briefed that our mission was more important than any number of survivors that showed up asking for help.”

“That’s…” Keith trailed off, unsure what it was.

“Yeah,” Shiro nodded again. “So we sent people away. They were angry too. We lost a few guys before we figured out that we needed to be more careful and get serious about what was going on.”

“So what happened?”

“I went outside the gates with three other men to run a full perimeter check on the fence and see what needed to be improved. It had been really quiet that day, and we had weapons on us, so we didn’t think it would be a big deal,” Shiro’s voice wavered the smallest bit. Keith knew he wouldn’t have been able to tell if he didn’t know Shiro so well. He continued, “We didn’t know we were being watched. A group of survivors grabbed us, thinking they could offer us up for ransom to take over the compound. They shot down the other three men. The leader of the group had a whip, and it caught me across the nose.”

Keith frowned, “How did you get out of it?”

Shiro leaned forward against the rail on the guard tower, looking out across the field. The city was in the distance, far enough that they couldn’t hear anything from it. There were a few walkers at the far edges of the field, up toward the road, but Keith guessed it was far enough for the sounds to be too muffled for them to hear the compound.

“I had a Glock in my waistband, and I convinced them to untie my hands. When they did, I grabbed my gun and shot the leader in the head. He went down, and the others ran,” Shiro said. “We thought they would come back for revenge or something but—I never saw any of them again.”

Keith remained silent at Shiro’s side. The scar on his nose was one thing, but it still didn’t explain what had happened to his hair. Keith supposed that would be a story for another time.

Shiro nudged him, a few moments later, “I told you my story. Your turn, little brother.”

Keith huffed, “It’s—nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” Shiro argued, leaning around him to look at it better. Keith turned his face away, ashamed.

God, what was Lance going to think when he woke up? When he saw what Keith looked like now?

“Oh,” Shiro said, and something must have made him realize why Keith was so hesitant about it. In that moment, he hated that Shiro knew him so well. “It just happened then? When you and Lance were in the city.”

Keith nodded.

A few long moments passed. Keith shuffled in place uncomfortably but—if he couldn’t tell Shiro about it, then what was he going to do when Lance woke up and asked too?

Finally, he started, “We’d gone down into the subway to avoid a horde of walkers. We were heading for the CDC, I think, and when we went down into the subway, I got turned around, but Lance was leading the way. He was being slower than normal, off, I guess. Something must have been wrong, but I didn’t get to ask him about it before we started looking for Matt. By the time we got to the subway, I was already tired from picking up the slack to watch where we were going, but everything was okay until… something went wrong.

“We were laughing, right before it happened, I think. My memory is a little fuzzy honestly, but I can remember smiling about something Lance had said, I think he called me a hero? He was making fun of me for something, maybe, I don’t know,” Keith shook his head. He’d tried to avoid thinking about this whole story. He continued, “We got back up onto the platform and we were heading up the stairs. I was following him, and Lance had been talking one second and the next it was—silent.”

“What was it?” Shiro asked, voice low.

Keith took a breath, “Bandits. One had grabbed Lance and put a knife to his throat. There were four of them, three men and a woman. They were fighting with each other when Lance tried to get out of the bandit’s arms. They just shot him, right there. He was losing blood fast, and I knew I needed to do something before it was too late, so I—I killed two of them. Put my sword through one’s chest when they tried to attack me and then took off the leader’s head, threatened the others. I thought they’d give me Lance back and leave us alone.”

“But they didn’t,” Shiro guessed.

“No. I ran for Lance. I grabbed him, killed the last man, and was making a run for it when the woman attacked me. All I could think about was getting as far from Lance as we could so, we rolled off the platform and down into the tunnel. She, um, she dragged me over to the track, and it still had the electric charge.”

“Oh fuck,” Shiro breathed, staring at him, eyes wide.

Keith swallowed, hard. He said, “I got out of it, but not before it did this to my face.”

“What ended up happening? How did you get away?”

Keith turned away from Shiro as he said, “I fed her to a walker. I had my sword, and I could have ended it there but—I didn’t. What does that make me, Shiro?”

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and Shiro’s voice was fierce when he said, “It makes you alive. You and Lance are alive because of that. It doesn’t matter what you did to her or those other bandits. They were evil people, fuck, they weren’t even people. It doesn’t matter what happened. It matters that you and Lance are alive and safe now.”

Tears were dangerously close to crawling up his throat and out of his eyes, but he nodded anyway. Shiro was right. If Keith hadn’t done any of it, they wouldn’t be here.

“What happened after that?” Shiro asked the question a while later, after they had been in silence for a moment. “How did you get to the Humvee?”

Keith shrugged, “I just grabbed him and ran. When I got to the street, I used my shirt to make some bandages for his leg as best as I could, and then I heard the walkers coming so I just picked him up and started running. I honestly don’t know how long it was, but it had to have been miles. We’d gotten into the subway pretty close to the CDC I think, and we probably didn’t walk for more than half an hour before we got back up onto the platform and ran into the bandits.”

“Damn, how did you do it? When I found you—you looked like you were going to die too.”

“I don’t know honestly. My chest is still aching from it, and my face—I don’t think there’s anything to even do about it now,” Keith’s voice turned bitter, thinking about the scar that marred the right side of his face. “The only thing I can remember thinking is that I would either find us help and save Lance or wait for him to come back and end it.”

In the distance, a walker stumbled and righted itself mechanically, searching for its next meal without regard to anything else.

A long while passed. Keith wasn’t sure if he would regret telling any of this to Shiro, but he figured it would work out somehow.

“And then you showed up,” Keith said suddenly, breaking the silence between them. “I thought you were a ghost. I didn’t think any of it was real but—there wasn’t anything else I could do. So I got in the Humvee, and when you saved Lance, you saved me.”

Shiro grasped his shoulder, turning Keith around and pulling him into a hug and fuck—it was just like when Keith was a kid. He flung his arms around Shiro, holding on tight, and the few tears he’d been shoving back since this conversation started burst through his walls and dripped down his face.

Neither of them moved for what felt like hours. Keith just stood in his brother’s arms, and for a second, it felt like everything was going to be okay.

When Shiro pushed back from the embrace, the look on his face was soft. He smiled gently and said, “You really love Lance, huh?”

Keith nodded, relieved to share this weight with someone. He loved Lance so much it hurt to breathe.

“He’s going to be okay,” Shiro assured him, and even though he had been listening to everyone else say that for the past four days, he finally felt like it was true now. “And when he wakes up, he’s not going to care about the scar on your face. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You got it because you saved both yourself and Lance. That’s what it represents. Nothing else, alright?”

Keith nodded, unable to say anything.

“Okay,” Shiro nodded too. “When we get finished with guard duty, you’re going to let Coran and Allura look you over. If your chest is aching, we need to get you medical attention.”

Keith started to object, but the second that he opened his mouth, Shiro said, “Do you want to be healthy for Lance when he wakes up?”

He nodded again.

“Good,” Shiro agreed. “And Keith?”

He cleared his throat, “Yeah?”

Shiro grinned and held out his fist, “I’m so glad I found you.”

1. klance au aka jasmine

aka the au i’ve been recently in love with?? i dont want to talk Too Much about it (well, i do i wanna spill evERYTHING) but it’s like, story stuff so. anyway i have a lot of feelings about post-war and post-breakup klance. 

it’s just such a deep and poignant and heartbreaking relationship bc my klance just doesn’t work as a couple but they really do truly love each other and they don’t want to lose each other (this is especially apparent and relevant in this Upcoming Scene and i cant wait to write it) and they want the best for each other. and they’re healing together from themselves and each other and a war

also its a v v v personal story (accidental self projection) and i alwAYS want to talk about that [in relation to this au] but it goes back to that first point of i dont want to say too much and also. no one wants to hear my sad sob story or whatever u wanna call it

2. phone swap au

this is one of my quality shitpost aus. see i either do hardcore, most likely angst aus and then i do shitposts. no in between. 

here’s how it goes. keith + lance have the same kind of phone. lance + hunk like the besties they are casually trade phones. 

so hunk is casually carrying around lance’s phone and then he runs into keith on a train. they accidentally swap phones. now keith has lance’s phone, hunk has keith’s phone, and lance has hunk’s phone.

lance happens to go out of town for fun. so now keith is panicking bc he doesn’t understand what’s happening why is this guy texting him where the what the fuck. shiro also happens to go out of town. lance + shiro meet up and they chill. 

keith decides he’s going to track down his phone. he goes to pidge for help. hunk attempts to track down lance’s phone but can’t find keith. circles, man. it’s hilarious, and meanwhile lance and shiro are just like, on some beach enjoying their mini vacay.

3. 5+1 platonic klance

ok this is real simple. 5 times keith cradles lance in his arms + 1 time lance cradles keith. 

4. rift au

this is an upcoming Big Project and it’s a hot meSS. it’s rlly long and complicated but here we go

set during og paladins’ time. 

so in a different verse, empress allura has just begun her reign and is spreading peace throughout the universe. the former prince lotor has just lost his father and leads a rebel group called the guns of gamara alongside his generals. 

when the original voltron fly into the rift, instead of what happens in canon, they enter the alternate universe. it becomes a 3-way war—empress allura, voltron and the guns of gamara, and (still) zombies zarkon + honerva. 

oops.

5. kerberos hunk au

literally just made this yesterday and today. dont wanna share too much, but hunk goes to kerberos w shiro, matt, and commander holt. when the galra take him, they don’t notice hunk, who is left behind in space. 

6. hunk whump 

no explanation needed. im sorry sunshine

7. laser tag au

here we go w the shitposts. the garrison trio is a competitive laser tag team who just lost a member. keith, shiro, and matt were a rival team. except matt disappeared and shiro broke his fucking arm (good job, shiro), so grudgingly keith joins the garrison trio and they face off a galra squad. 

pew pew.

8. dating by graduation

its like “married by 30″ but “dating by graduation” ft hance