saints and soldiers » klance

33: Too Shy to Scream

I am everywhere,
Everywhere but here.

It was Pidge who finally coaxed him to eat, the day after Lance got back.

She brought a charged iPod back. He still had not gotten out of bed, or spoken a word. But she came back anyway. Though she no longer brought food or water with her when she came, her silent, grim persistence somehow showed more strongly that she would not give up on him. He appreciated it, but wished that she wouldn't waste her passion on someone so useless and undeserving as him.

"I brought you some food," she whispered as she busied her hands switching out the dead iPod for the charged one. No one seemed to speak louder than a whisper within these walls anymore. "It's nothing special. Just a granola bar. But..."

She hesitated. "Look, Keith," she said, and with some shock, he noticed that there was genuine pain in the lines of her face. She cared about his well-being, more than she had let on, and he had had no clue...

He supposed he had assumed that his attachment to his friends was rather one-sided. He knew they harbored some affection for him, but the devotion he had developed... it had never occurred to him that perhaps, in some quiet way he had not seen, it was being returned.

So, not for himself, not for fear of institutionalization, not for Lance, he silently accepted the granola bar. The sudden, shocked smile on her face confirmed what he had thought- that without him realizing it, Shiro, Hunk, Pidge and Lance had grown quite attached to him too.

He took the food for Pidge, and as she sat there switching out the iPods, he unwrapped it and ate.

Before she left she gave him a brief hug, which he hesitantly returned.

He stared at the door for a long time after her departure.

After that, he supposed that Pidge had told the others that he had eaten. She must have, or Allura would have had him institutionalized- through no fault of her own, he supposed, but still. He had not eaten anything more in the few days that followed, but it must have been enough. Gradually, his visitors began to bring food with them again, though he never touched it.

He could not bring himself to even pretend that he was making progress, though it pained him to take away the hope he had seen blossoming in Pidge's eyes when he ate the granola bar. He found his mind, still, torn between the past and the present, between here and there and everywhere. He could still hear the old man's voice echoing sharply in his ears, feel the ache of past abuses. He still could not sleep for fear of what waited for them. He still could not stand to be awake for all the hallucinations that skirted his vision at any given moment.

He had hoped- and the others had thought, too, it seemed- that Lance's return would make things better. That he would be some catch-all solution, somehow fixing what had been broken. Instead, he simply became another of the cherished faces floating intermittently through his vision as he travelled through bleary days of endless, haunted consciousness.

This, he supposed, was something he would have to fix himself. He couldn't rely on anyone to do it for him. Then again, what was new?

The issue lay in the fact that he had no idea where to begin, or if he even wanted to. It would be so much easier to stay here until he succumbed to this monochrome hell of stale sheets and heavy air in a are room. He didn't have much to live for anyway.

Except...

Faces flashed before his mind's eye. Except, somehow, he had acquired friends, people who cared about him- a family of sorts. He couldn't do that to them.

So for them, he supposed, he had to make an effort.

And he would.

That night, Keith sat up in bed and slowly, shakily climbed to his feet, trudging across the room to lean against the window, feet planted firmly against the hardwood.

He looked up to the moon shining above him, and the two of them stared at each other forlornly until his friends found him there in the morning.