The Dead Don't Bleed

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Word Count: 2,171

The silence between them was starting to get infuriating.

Well, to be more exact, the silence between him and Shiro was what was bothering him. Lance, on the other hand, wouldn't shut up.

"- you're gonna love Hunk. He's a natural at cooking, there was this one time I told him about my mama's garlic knots and how good they were before this stupid apocalypse got in the way of everything. Anyway, during dinner, he came in with a whole plate of them as a surprise and they were so good. I'm willing to bet he'd be able to start his own restaurant and make millions, now Coran, on the other hand-"

"Coran can cook," Shiro interrupted, and Keith could see Lance pretend to gag behind his back. He watched with an interested smirk as Shiro raised a defiant brow. "I'm serious!"

"Yeah, yeah, serious about death, everything Coran makes is just barely edible, what makes you think he's any good at cooking?"

"Well, for one-"

Keith tuned them out again, and instead looked at where they were headed with mild curiosity.

Over the span of roughly two to three hours, the buildings surrounding them slowly shrunk in size as they moved further and further out of the city. Sky-high skyscrapers fell to small apartment buildings which then morphed into small shops and businesses, and Keith was surprised to find the sky wasn't limited to the New York City skyline.

It's almost ironic how they suffered through on the ground, and yet, the sky never seemed to change.

The short girl, Pidge, if Keith remembered right, traveled silently beside him, Keith noticed that she was more on the quiet side, she would occasionally reply to a question Lance would shoot off, or add her two-sense at a bubbling argument, but other than that she didn't talk much, and Keith liked the comfortable silence between them.

He looked ahead again as Shiro and Lance taunted each other from time to time, occasionally giving each other a playful shove as they made their way along. Each time he spoke, Keith could feel a new knot in his chest tighten. Shiro clapped a hand on Lance's shoulder triggered a memory of the man doing the same to him what felt like a lifetime ago.

Too bad he didn't remember any of it now.

At the dark thought, he shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, hunching his shoulders when a stray breeze chilled his neck, he looked to his shoes and kicked a stray piece of gravel, watching at it flew ahead before hitting the back of Lance's leg.

The teen didn't pay attention, he was too busy talking to Shiro. Again.

Blowing a piece of hair out of his face, Keith couldn't help but wonder if it was his fault that night, now that he knew Shiro was alive. Maybe if he had moved a little faster, or he didn't go back to retrieve the bat from his room (which he had lost within the first week on his own), or maybe it would have been better for both of them if Shiro had never even met Keith to begin with, if he had never been found trying to hijack Shiro's car... if he'd never been adopted at all. Shiro would've had a better chance of living when the apocalypse hit, and Keith might've been the one to die instead, or, at the very least, forget who he was.

But of course, life didn't work that way, and instead he was stuck walking down the side of New York he's never been in with a group of people he knew nothing about, a man he thought had died three years ago, walking to some destination that was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, which all happened less than twenty-four hours after he held his best friend dying in his arms, on the street, in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.