Keith woke up to pain. Blinding pain, even; pain so hot and so intense his eyes shot open and his entire body jolted. The fight - he must still be fighting Sendak, he must be being STABBED right now, again, because he was pretty sure a sword running through his abdomen was the last thing Keith currently remembered happening to him. He felt hands on his body and thrashed violently, only to be pushed back to the ground by his shoulder by cool hands he couldn't force his swimming eyes to focus on.
"Lie down, damn it!" The voice that broke through Keith's panic was familiar, enough so to bring Keith down back to reality and out of the battle he was pretty sure must be over by now. When he managed to force his eyes to focus he confirmed that the voice had indeed belonged to Lance, and it seemed like the hands trying to convince him to lie down must belong to him, too, though the idea was baffling. He should really be dead right now, and if he wasn't then why was he looking at Lance? Keith was no stranger to being injured, but usually what he woke up to was Coran carefully waterbending his wounds closed or the stark white of a hospital. Seeing Lance right now really didn't bode well for anything, other than maybe it meant that the younger watertribesman had survived the attack, which Keith wasn't even sure he could say for himself at the moment. "For fuck's sake, hold still, man! I can't do anything with you squirming like that!"
Lance's voice sounded panicked, and it was probably ridiculous that that fact made Keith calm down enough to lie back and not aggravate his injuries. Lance's distress meant that Keith wasn't hallucinating, and Keith decided that even losing that fight was okay with him for the moment because it meant his head was not once again in danger of being crushed into the floor by Sendak's boot. Even being stabbed again was preferable to that humiliation, and he'd take Lance's company over that any day of the week.
He felt something pleasantly cool wash over the anguished wound gouged into his torso, and in his hazy pain-high mindset wondered if it was the first stage of numbness as he died. But even with the ringing persisting in his ears it wasn't hard to realize he already knew this feeling; it was water. The healing light of someone waterbending his injuries, and Keith's eyebrows furrowed for a moment as he forced his eyes back open.
Above him was still only Lance, face aglow in the soft blue-white light of the water he was running over Keith's stomach and eyes tight in concentration. And before Keith could help it he was practically shouting in a hoarse, surprised bark "Are you trying to heal me?!"
Lance's eye twitched as he fought not to look at Keith's face, spitting back "Shut UP, I am trying to CONCENTRATE!"
"You can't heal me! You can't even waterbend!"
"You've SEEN me waterbend! A ton of times!"
"Not WELL!" Keith didn't mean to sound ungrateful for his efforts, but… Lance couldn't even manage to hold a water whip long enough to even lash it into an attack. There was no way he was going to be able to undo a wound Keith doubted even Coran could have dealt with.
Lance's face was twisted into a scowl, and he tore his eyes away from Keith's injury long enough to look him in the eye that he might properly tell Keith the fuck off. "I know what I'm doing, damn it! Now for Spirit's sake, shut the fuck up and let me heal you before you bleed to death on the ground like a freaking idiot !" His tone had started out angry, but by the end the traces of panic and distress were easy to hear in his shaking voice, cracking on the last word. And Keith then noticed the small shine of unshed tears watering Lance's eyes and remembered he was probably dying right now, so he supposed Lance was just doing whatever he could because there was nothing else he could do for Keith at this moment.
He closed his eyes again, trying to focus on holding still while not thinking of his various and grave injuries or how much they hurt. So he opened his eyes to look at Lance instead, because as far as people to die with went Keith supposed he could do worse, even if the guy could be an annoying twat at times. He wasn't annoying now, concentrating too hard on Keith's body to have time to say anything snide about how badly Keith had just gotten his ass kicked. Which, right now, Keith actually would have preferred, because while Lance's face was sort of handsome during his rare moments of focus the worry clearly etched all over his features was really not helping Keith pretend he wasn't dying right now.
"What happened, anyway? Where are the others?"
Lance's eyebrow twitched in annoyance, but he kept his face and voice level as he answered. "The Galra didn't just hit where we were staying, it was a raid on the whole town. Hunk and Shiro are taking care of the townsfolk and keeping them safe, but the other three haven't finished driving them out of town yet and now both of us are stuck here instead of helping because you tried to fucking take down Sendak by yourself like some kind of -" He cut himself off, voice tight with strain. "Sendak figured he had killed you and started to leave to hunt down the others, but I was with Allura and he found me when I found you, but he didn't have time to kil- to try to fight me because Allura surprised the shit out of him with one of her taser bomb thingies. Last I saw he was on the ground and she was using another guy's own rifle to smash him in the face, so I dragged your corpse over here now can we stop talking before I lose my shit and you end up with an ice spike shooting out of your kidneys!"
Oh. So Allura had saved him, huh? That made sense. She was the only non-bender among their little party, and all the more terrifying for that fact. No one thought outside the box in the name of making men suffer like their princess. But, Lance may have been a shit waterbender but he usually made up for it by being a fair shot with his little crossbow - why hadn't he gone to fetch Coran and take his place in the fight? Keith couldn't be so bad off that he didn't have time to find him, not when his vision was already clearing up and the bleeding - Oh dear spirits, that was because of Lance. He was actually healing Keith right now.
"Holy shit," he mumbled accidentally. "You're really pulling this off."
Lance didn't bother to look at him, just absently muttered back. "Yeah, yeah, s'what I'm here for," as he concentrated.
That's what he was there for? That was a weird thing to say. That's not what Lance was here for - Lance as here because he was the Avatar's best friend. Because he was the only one smooth-talking enough to be able to convince anyone of Hunk's cowardly hare-brained scheme to pretend Shiro was the Avatar and not him, and because he was the only person in the world crazy enough to encourage this plan instead of telling his friend the very obvious truth that you can't just HIDE the fact that you're the goddamned Avatar, no matter how terrified you are or how badly you'll fail to live up to Korra and Aang's great legacies. Lance was here because Hunk didn't have enough guts to stand up and do the right thing by himself, couldn't be the Avatar without the support of his best friend by his side. Or at least, that's what Keith had come to understand. Honestly, he hadn't given that much thought to Lance until now. Possibly tried to actively avoid wondering about him, too annoyed that he'd swindled Shiro into going along with this mess and dragging Keith in by proxy.
But the pain in Keith's wound right now was the agony of flesh stitching itself back together, and everything else was feeling light and cool and pleasantly numb. Even Keith's headache was clearing up, which was ridiculous because he'd had his face in the pavement ten minutes ago and Lance didn't have the spare energy to focus on anything but the gaping stab wound, and yet there was no pain and his ears had stopped ringing and stars above, Lance wasn't just pulling this off, he was fucking healing the shit out of Keith right now. Who'd have thought. Lance was a genius and Keith wasn't going to die.
"Why are you good at this?" Keith felt himself ask as his eyes slid shut, finally relaxing even through the pain.
Lance didn't sound like he was listening. "Practice," he muttered absently, and Keith suddenly remembered stories of all the little siblings Lance was supposed to have back in Republic City. It would have been hard to find a waterbending master of any kind in a city like that, which led Keith to imagine Lance picking up his skills by healing the various maladies and broken bones of his family.
'What I'm here for.' Did that mean Lance had come with the Avatar… to be his healer? Keith supposed they didn't pick up Coran, their actual master waterbender, until they had reached the south pole, which meant all that time they'd spent wandering around the Earth Kingdom until Keith had seen Shiro on the news and come to find his errant airbending brother… Lance would have been the one doing it.
Son of a bitch. Lance hadn't just come to support his friend, he'd come along to... take care of him. Take care of all of them, the way he was used to doing with his siblings. Like a family… Come to think of it, hadn't all those times he had said something ridiculous at the absolute worst moment always managed to alleviate a bit of the tension? It had always pissed Keith off to no end at the time, but looking back on it now Keith could remember how after those awful jokes Hunk always managed to look a little less worried than he had before.
Keith opened his eyes again, though it was a fight now as the heavy embrace of unconsciousness was grappling with his brain. Looked at Lance, from the sharp concentration narrowing his eyes to the angular cut of his jaw, tight with a scowl Down to his hands, tan and long and awash with the light of the water they were currently using to save Keith's life.
He closed his eyes again, and became unaware of how much time passed. The last thing he know for sure happened before he went under was Shiro's voice, breaking through the tense near-silence with a worried cry of Keith's name, because he remembered thinking that if Shiro were here then everything outside was probably alright now.
The next day, Keith woke up in a proper hotel bed, relieved to find out that between Lance and Coran he'd been fixed enough not to need to be dragged to a hospital.
And when Keith thanked Lance for healing him the other boy had grinned haughtily and waved it off, and even though he inevitably said something douchey and claimed that saving Keith's worthless life was no problem for a master waterbender like him, the way Lance's smile was directed just at Keith made his heart stutter in his chest and his face heat up and oh, shit. Keith was so pathetic.
Keith ignored Hunk's worried protest as he fell back against his bed with a hard thud, dragging his pillow over his face to hide under. If there was one way to make this stupid journey to protect the Avatar from the Galra worse, it was definitely goddamned Lance .
Keith wa so screwed. Lance asked if he was sure Keith's head was okay of that needed to be healed, too. The pillow sizzled and started to smoke in his hands.