Prompts: Necrosis
"Don't touch it!" Lance warned.
But it was too late. Keith had already dipped two fingers into the strange black syrup one of the local fauna had spewed all over his armor. The rubber of his gloves began to bubble, burning his fingers.
"아이씨!¹" he hissed as the feeling of fire spread, eating, dissolving, deeper and deeper, higher and higher up his fingers until some of the feeling numbed out and died down.
Lance hurriedly unscrewed the cap to his water bottle and poured the contents over Keith's hand. It stopped spreading, but the skin at his fingertips had already been eaten away, leaving bloody nails. What was left of the flesh was blackened and dying.
Lance grabbed at his wrist, trying to assess the damage, but Keith snatched it away. "No! It's dangerous!"
He couldn't afford for any of it to touch Lance.
Lance's voice dipped in the way it did when he put all the fun and games aside and became serious. It was a tone Keith didn't hear often. "We need to get you to a pod."
Keith shook his head. The burning was bearable now. May those nerve endings rest in peace. "What's done is done. The pod will be there waiting after the mission."
Lance looked like he wanted to argue, but they were on a time crunch and they knew it. "Promise me you won't do anything rash?"
"Promise."
* * *
Making promises was easy. Keeping them was harder.
He had just exited the pod. Lance was holding him at arms length, taking in his new face.
Keith might had absentmindedly brushed his hair behind his ear. Whatever leftover residue that clung to his vambraces may have smeared on his cheek. It had burned a hole through to his teeth before he realized what was happening. At least it wasn't his eye.
"How bad is it?"
It was bad. It had to be. He had felt the wind on his gums. It wasn't that he expected to get out of this war unscathed, but he was hoping for more aesthetically cool scars. Like an eyebrow slit, or something more along the lines of the facial scars that Matt and Shiro carried. Not a window for his molars.
Lance placed a finger under his chin, gently tilting Keith's head. "Hold still."
Keith knew Lance liked his looks. But would he still look at him the same now?
"The hole's gone, but it's not pretty," Lance admitted honestly.
Keith touched with his fingers, only to realize those were the ones he lost at the second knuckle.
"This is going to be an adjustment," he relented.
Lance grabbed his hand and lovingly rubbed what what left of the amputated digits. "How do you think I feel? Those were my favorite fingers!"
Keith smacked him, but a smile tugged at his lip.
Lance shied away when Keith reached out again, but this time instead of striking him he snaked a hand around his neck, into the short fringe at the back of his head as he pulled him in for a kiss.
How could he have doubted this man? Sure, he could get distracted my anything shiny, but his depth of love and care for people outweighed anything superficial.
¹ (Eye-Sh) impolite but common exclamation that roughly translates to "dang it!"