Archive of Our Own ^beta

It began like watching a train wreck unravel. Or at least that's what it feels like now: an unavoidable tragedy cascading just beyond Lance’s ability to control it. And what’s worse, it is happening in slow motion. 

It’s always during the nighttime when everyone’s thoughts – the arcane, irredeemable ones, the ones they don’t let themselves think about during the daylight – seem to slip through the fragmented scars of their shielded mind meld. In the darkness, the familiar dread leaks through the decaying cracks of his mind and infects him from the inside out like a curse, an affliction. It’s become so ordinary that Lance cannot distinguish between whose wrongness is whose anymore, and perhaps it doesn’t even matter.

It’s always the same feeling. Always.

He is sitting, bound to his friend’s bodies and their’s bound to his, as the train carriage they are condemned to exist within shakes from the uncontrollable steering of its conductor trying to hold each damned component of this wreckage together. He feels it lurch, collide and finally derail from the tracks it screams upon against the impossible pressure their conductor cannot harness. He watches Keith’s unsteady, bloodied hands grasp at the controls with bound wrists –

And Lance is stuck, tied to all of his friends' lives at once and none of them can do a thing; they all burn away amongst the undone remains of their promises to the universe and to each other. The seconds drag on for eternity here, and sometimes, when he looks at Shiro during the daytime, he can feel the same embers catching.

He had thought Shiro coming back would solve everything, but it’s worse. Keith is worse. They aren't fighting, there isn’t screaming, and nothing truly really seems like anything has changed at all – but there’s this unforgiving apathy, this nothingness that makes him feel like everything will never be the same again. The air around them both is suffocating and it feels as if he cannot remember how to breathe when they are near. He wants to ask the others if they notice it, too – if Hunk or Pidge or Allura realise the wreckage that they are bound to die in – but he cannot find the voice to talk to them. The pyretic air makes its way into his lungs, filling them with burning ash, and condemning him silent. There is a graveyard, somewhere next to the train’s ruins, buried with all the things he cannot say ever since Shiro came back.

Their old leader merely stands. He is a shadow amongst the ruins of the gallows, scorched embers all but marring the decaying ground he lays on, masquerading upon the earth as a field of snowy flowers that buries the graves beneath. 

Shiro is apathetic towards it all – the incandescent chaos that is the eternal carriage, the derailment of all their bound lives – and so he is letting it all burn away at Keith’s grasp.

He knows of the sins Shiro’s bloodied hands are tainted with because sometimes, they are Lance’s, too; he is them. That faulted, infinite wrongness constricting around his bones when Shiro reaches out, touching his paper skin, staining the flesh, condemning it. Lance tastes it when he sleeps, the bonds of their collective fracturing mind meld fusing together within a realm where all is intangible. Ash and charcoal and acid run down into the back of his throat until he wakes up vomiting. The feeling is harder to ignore than in the daytime, where it’s easier to keep their otherly fragments of colliding brain matter away from infecting his own. It hurts him, an isolating coldness that makes a home in every one of his organs, at having to have the need to keep all of his friends away – but the embers are incinerating. 

It hadn’t always been this way, not until what was dead came back, and the ones who remained became ghosts in his place.

Lance chokes on the words every time he tries to say them aloud, but he cannot help but think Shiro is their undoing, the ruins of the train they lie bound within. He is their igniting descent into cataclysm, condemning them broken, as if they are not everything in his entire universe. He’s unmade the lives he used to fight for and corrupted them into the ruins of these gallows and graves built and dug for children like them. 

Maybe Keith knows this, too. He must. He, too, must taste the blackened coal and feel the wrongness of his brother’s bloodied palms and choke on his own vomit when he sleeps, all the same, but –

Both of them are silent.

Keith buries his own gospels alongside Lance’s and together they ignore the rotting corpses that are their unwords until they can’t anymore. It is tonight, Lance thinks, that will be their undoing.

It’s three o’clock in the morning and he’s tracing those decaying embers back to his ghost of a friend, collecting the smithereens of ash with his fingers like fireflies in the woods. Yet this isn’t Earth, he’s walking amongst the cathedral of hallways that is the Castleship’s artificial nighttime, and only realises he’s in front of Keith’s door until he opens it.

Keith is here and –

Keith is crying. He’s crying, really crying, and – holy fuck – Keith doesn’t cry, and Lance – Lance doesn’t do anything because he’s looking at the fucking bedroom wall, of all things –

In an all-consuming, unbelievably intimate moment, Lance drags his feet into the doorway’s threshold and bears witness to perhaps the entirety that is Keith Kogane, and it’s his fucking titanium wall that makes Lance think the fright train has already wreaked its havoc. 

Lance counts the metal scarring within Keith’s wall: the angry, marred indentations from his broken, bloodied fists that have torn against the metal seemingly a hundred times over as each new mark was engraved. It has become something of a sickening masterpiece, Lance thinks, the castle’s wall of a hundred watercolour-red fists, smeared with unforgivable streaks of crimson from Keith’s shaking, curled hands.

Keith is crying and yet –

His clenched hands are raw, the knuckles inside the flesh fragmented into so many insignificant little pieces of cartilage that, if they were to belong to anyone else, would be agony. If they were Lance’s, he wouldn’t know how to pray with them. 

He doesn’t think he’s supposed to see this, isn’t sure that any of them are. It feels wrong, bearing witness to the state of Keith and his bedroom and all the things he has condemned it – himself – to. It’s like standing in the middle of the carriage, the tracks below begging to be undone, unmade, as if they know that they are unsalvageable. 

“What’s going on?” Lance asks after a second too long, wanting to move closer, wanting to wrap Keith’s bloodied, graveyard palms in amendable bandages, wanting to trace over the scars and rewrite them all away, if only to give his own trembling hands something to do. Instead, he counts all the fingernails Keith doesn’t have, then all the titanium scars, and then all the embers that bleed from them.

“I don’t –“ Keith says, his words strange. He barely reacts to Lance’s presence at all, and it makes him doubt if Keith even knows he is here. Keith chooses to instead stare at the watercolour-red wall in front of him, and then to Lance if only just for a moment before turning back. He had looked at him as if Lance were somehow made of the same embers that built the ruins that stand behind them both, and Lance doesn’t know that he isn’t. This doesn’t feel like something he can fix. All he knows is that he can’t keep his eyes away from Keith’s hands if he tries, and Keith can’t stare at anything but the sadistic artwork that is now his bedroom wall. His eyes are wild, red and raw. 

One step. Lance walks into his bedroom, approaching as if he is now the ghost, unable to do anything tangible, anything that matters. He had always thought that he was good at helping people, cheering them up and making them smile, but this is Keith and his wall of bloodied, open scars. Keith, who he can barely talk to on a good day – before the imminent tragedy of the collision – no matter how much he desperately wants to.

(He would talk about anything, everything with Keith, if he could. He would talk about it all.)

“You okay?” He asks, the words feeling empty. Not enough. They taste like ash turned to molten stone, and somewhere, the feeling of embers are alighting his skin for a whole different reason.

“It’s… it’s h-happening again,” Keith replies, the words are spilling out of him like all the things he wants to say. His words are too fast, being pushed out from lungs that don’t seem to work the way he wants them to. It’s as if they cannot remember. 

A panic attack. Keith is having a panic attack, Lance realises. It should have been obvious, and it probably is. He isn’t sure why that revelation makes him freeze, but it does and suddenly Lance is all the way back into the carriage car ruins, wasting away deep, deep within the earth next to the person he could have been if he were someone who could save them all from this fucking tragedy of a wreckage. 

And then he gets an idea. 

Lance should get Shiro. 

It’s a terrible idea that tastes of aflamed charcoal and smells the way the gasoline embers do, when he lets it metastate itself around in his head until he is suffocating on it. He chooses not to know it, but he’s falling back on old, empty habits, since it’s always been easier for someone else to fix Keith so he’d never have to. Not because he hadn’t wanted to, but he’d always thought that Keith would rather anyone else but him. 

So maybe Shiro could unbury whoever he used to be before he wasn’t. Maybe they all could exist outside of the graveyard gallows and the wreckage ruins they condemned themselves to.

Shiro would stop Keith from breaking his hands again and again and again. Shiro was the one who held them together. This is his brother – the one from Before the end of all things, who had kind eyes and gentle hands and whispered the word otouto that made Keith weep, sometimes. And Lance cannot bury his gospels anymore, even though this doesn’t feel like digging them back up. 

“I’m gonna get Shiro,” he says against everything that’s screaming at him not to. It’s a warning Lance doesn’t want to decipher, and if he hadn’t buried himself so deep – if he were able to take Keith’s fucking hand and piece the pieces of him back together – Lance would’ve told Keith anything else.

(He would’ve talked about the best ways to make sandcastles and all the meanings behind his siblings’ names and why November is his favourite, if only they were the people who they are not – if Lance was someone who could save Keith in maybe the way he could have before.)

Because suddenly the room is nothing but a pyre of burning charcoal embers flickering alive upon the condemned titanium wall that bears Keith’s scars, his knuckles, his fragmented childlike hands and bones. The smears of fevered scarlet remains fuse with the intangible alit cinders of the train’s gallows, fusing this wall into a fucking masterpiece of all that is wrong, and Lance doesn’t ever want to look at it again.

He wants to ask Keith if he knows about the train, too.

But –

Keith is a ghost in the ruins. Face devoid of colour, a sickening bloodless hue drowning his skin lifeless at the mention of his brother’s name, and that look that stares back at Lance is enough to make a dagger feel as if it's been plunged into his chest. It’s terror, snaking around the bindings upon the fright car, wrapping around their entangled limbs until they are bloodless and bound forevermore, not even to be burned by the embers or cut by the collision. That feeling taking ahold of Lance at night has been Keith’s and he stands stuck within the centre of storm, unable to ignore it any longer.

Keith makes a strangled noise, a twisted plea of the syllable ‘no’ again and again and again. He can only stare upon the tragedy that they are trapped within, smelling the embers eat them alive and Lance watches it all, bearing witness to the Red Paladin of Fire forget how to breathe against the smoke.

“O-okay–” Lance finally makes his mouth move, the feeling of charcoal lacing his tongue while the awful kind of fire flickers up the walls. Keith, seemingly knowing this too, backs away from them; from the bloodied artistry he made, from the mural of titanium scars. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I... I won't get him.”

And it’s just them, one ghost of a friend who cannot move to save the other, and the second who stands as a conductor of the wreckage, a ghost haunting his own room and body to make it so. Lance had thought that it was anger, at first – a reason as to why Keith’s hands are bloodied and broken in a thousand different places, but it’s not. It’s desperation, like a child scratching against wood, shredding flesh and fingernails against a locked closet they may as well spend eternity within; like banging his bones raw after the airlock sealed, threatening to suffocate him into the frozen abyss.

And it’s just them until it isn’t.

No, wait – how?!

The shadow is here, bearing each catalyst remnant of the dreams that make Lance suffocate. He watches from the doorway, a witness to the castleship’s bedroom amongst all its other ghosts that he’s condemned to die alongside. The silent, unbroken air between them rings like bullets cascading against titanium, against the wall mosaic of Keith's blood and bone fragment, and the sound of oxygen-deprived lungs breathing nothing within the atmosphere of the alit ash flickers.

Shiro stands amongst the ruins as if he made them; as if he is them, and Lance feels the cold of the airlock suddenly all over, all at once. 

“What happened now?” Shiro says, refusing to cross over the threshold into the space of whatever remains now of all of them. He must hear the sharp inhales of suffocated breathing, the stray sobs from cold dead lips, but he doesn’t move. He looks, ever so briefly, at the too-human-but-not-quite-enough amethyst vermilion artistry scarring the bedroom wall, and then doesn’t anymore. He’s watching them both without looking at anything at all, and it’s like looking back at a corpse, and Lance tries to look back as if he isn’t one himself. 

Lance swallows bile. When he speaks again, he thinks he hears his own voice shake. “He’s having a panic attack. He needs you.”

Shiro blinks. There’s nothing. Unconditional apathy. “Keith, you’re fine.”

“Aren’t you gonna help him?”

And Keith falters, “no, no – I…” His knees give out from underneath him, dropping into a feeble crouch upon the floor. Keith’s hands claw at the ground, crescent moon fingernails leaving mental scar indications in their wake, the embers alighting – spreading like some unstoppable infection that will consume them all, maybe more than others, maybe because of others.

Instinctively, without even having the thought to, Lance reaches out his own hand.  

“Can I come closer?”

“I – I can’t breathe.” The smoke is everywhere, everywhere except where it is not, and perhaps the ground deems itself worthy of oxygen. That would make sense in some real tragedy in which the castle burned, but inside the space of their fragmented intangible mindscape of graveyard gallows and abandoned railroad ruins, the same laws of reality do not apply. Keith chokes on the air anyway, gasping for breath between noises that sound like sobs, as he clutches his chest with those smithereens of childish hand bones.

Behind them, Shiro glares and the cold comes in to claim them. There it is, that funny feeling that smothers him with insomnia until he cannot remember how to sleep. It possesses him like a fire, seeping underneath his fingernails like unclean earth until the bones inside are rotting through his carcass. It feels awful. 

“Hey, yes you can,” Lance says, ignoring the way it feels like a lie the way he has suppressed everything else. Keith can’t look at him and Lance can’t look at anything but. This is how it’s always been, but everything is upside down. “Here, I’ve got you.”

“No, no – I can’t – I can’t breathe,” he chokes, teeth gritting together like the words were being pulled from his chest, and Lance wonders where all the oxygen had gone. Keith could be right, they all could be dying right here in the derailed chaos they made for themselves.

“You’re okay, I promise.”

“No, no, no – it won’t stop.”

Keith looks terrified. He looks like a stranger and Shiro does, too. Both Keith and Lance’s eyes drift back towards the ghost in the doorway, ember filtering around him like little pieces of stardust and old ruins. 

“Shiro, we gotta help him.”

Keith looks at his brother, just once, and it is as if he wants nothing more than for this person he barely knows anymore (but perhaps does in every way) to pick him up in all his little mosaic shards of bone and sweep him away from his fucking bloodied bedroom that reeks of ash – lay him in the earth or the sand or the constellated spacetime where it is warm and clean and smells of posies.

– but holy fucking God, Shiro isn’t moving. 

“Leave him, Lance. He’s fine.” He looks at Keith like he thinks this is poetic, in some fucked-up, deranged way, that Lance doesn’t think he will ever understand. It’s like he wants this – for the fragments of their lives to come apart and undone, and so they die in the trainyard gallows just as he had, only to come back as something they are not. And God, does that feel terrifying. It feels like the end, and Lance can see it now.

“But he needs you,” is what comes out of Lance’s mouth. He doesn’t think he can do this anymore. He has his hand against Keith’s back, stoking his arched spine and feeling every indentation of his bone as if it is his own. It’s been a minute or it’s been his whole life – Lance doesn’t know anymore – but he’s become familiar with the cartilage, with the marrow inside. 

Keith shakes underneath his touch, pressing his forehead to the floor and sinking as low to the ground as he can, finding oxygen in the bloodied palms of his hands where it shouldn’t be. “I can’t breathe,” he says again, a third time.

And then –

“God, yes, you fucking can!”

This isn’t Shiro. Lance sees it now. 

“I’m not gonna do this with you night after night. You’re fine, Keith, you can fucking breathe just fine. You’ve always been fine. I’m not going to hold your hand, and I’m not going to watch over you until you fall asleep because I want to sleep, too. I’m done fixing you. I’m not doing this anymore.”

He meets Lance’s eyes after bearing at Keith, and for the first time in weeks they aren’t just empty, they are otherly – inhumane. He takes one step backwards from the ungodly mess of the condemned bedroom he made from his scars that all of them bleed from, and doesn’t react to Keith’s now completely frozen composure. Lance doesn’t recognise the thing that is looking back at him, but it knows him, and somehow, Lance knows that they – Keith and Pidge and Hunk and Allura and himself – are wanted here as the condemned of the universe they cannot save, and God, does that feel terrifying. It feels like the end, and Lance knows it now. 

These are the sins their hands are tainted with from that of a universe they cannot save, and it just so happened that Shiro fell as it did. Lance wonders if Shiro really is dead. 

“Shiro, what happened to you?”

Truthful, Lance doesn’t want to know. Maybe he’s afraid he already does.

Maybe Shiro fell in too many ways for too many things, burdened to love them all until he couldn’t, and this is just the fallout. Maybe some things fell before, or perhaps not at all, and it just isn’t his role to catch them as they do, anymore. Maybe it is his infinite condemnation to orchestrate the train from the rail before anyone else even had a chance to save it, and decide for himself whether the simple action is that of love or suicide; whether it is both or perhaps neither at all. Lance wonders if that is worse. If such insane indifference condemned Shiro to whatever it is that he is now, when what is to happen to the rest of them?

“Clean up your hands, Keith,” the Shiro Who Came Back says, voice strange but still his own in all the worst ways. He takes his eyes away from them and refuses to look anywhere else but the wall, perhaps in a way once would take in a masterpiece. Lance finds that he can’t look away either, and wonders if they are thinking about the same things. 

And then he leaves.

The carriage collides with the earth and everything derails. 

“I–I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Keith gasps, breathing in awful, deprived breathes that now seem to flood his barren lungs, sick on oxygen. Lance traces his fingers on Keith’s aching back, up and down up and down, as if he were somehow painting, creating an entirely different masterpiece of his own. “I–I didn’t want this,”

“No, hey,” Lance tells him, “this isn’t your fault.” He’s kneeling on the ground with Keith now, closer than they’ve probably ever been to each other, and Lance can see the way Keith’s eyes are more violet than they are brown.

“You didn’t do anything. Ignore him. I don’t know what’s wrong but – we’ll fix it. Just breathe with me, okay? We’ll do it together.” Lance says, breathing, all the same, his throat trying to forget that the smoke and all of it’s embers were not truly real. He thinks he would be having a panic attack as well, if not for forcing himself to breathe like this with Keith, all the same. “Good. You’re doing so well, okay? That’s it, Keith.”

And Keith does breathe, after however long it had been since he stopped. 

“You can leave, too, you know. You don’t have to stay with me. You can go back to sleep. I’m sorry,” Keith says, and Lance doesn’t think he’s ever heard Keith’s voice speak so much as it does now. He sounds like a child, and it takes Lance a moment to remember he is one. They’re children and they’re soldiers and they’re galaxies away from where they should be. Their problems revolve around the shared metaphysical connection to each other’s minds breaking away into stardust and sand smithereens, and a friend who came back from dying but maybe not all of him, maybe just all the all parts of him that shouldn’t have, and maybe Lance wishes he could’ve just stayed that way. 

“You don’t need to say that, Keith. I’m not gonna leave you. I’ll stay up with you anytime you need me. I want to. I’m gonna fix your hands, you’re gonna let me, and – we’ll work this out okay? Together.” Lance tells him, bringing his hands to Keith’s from where it lays beside him, slowly bleeding flesh and broken marrow from the bone’s inside like ruined watercolour paint and ash honey against a canvas. It feels awful against Lance’s own fingers, and may Keith knows this, but he doesn’t let go. It feels like the pieces of Keith’s mind are shattering off into his own palms, only to fray apart like flower petals in the river; but then it also feels as if Lance can catch the fragments all the same. 

“Okay.”

“Okay, okay, good,” he says, voice quiet and a little startled as if Lance isn’t so sure that he’d actually ended up right where he wanted to be; isn’t so sure he’d even known he’d wanted this. But he had, he does. “I’m gonna also tell you something.”

“What?” Keith asks.

Anything. Everything. He wants to tell Keith it all.

“Why November is my favourite,” he whispers, and it’s a start.