The panic does not set in when Keith wakes up in the dirt.
Waking up in the desert happened far too often to seem unusual. He and his father lived under the beating sun, spent hours upon hours tirelessly fixing cars and motorcycles in the front yard of their shack, or preparing the house for a sandstorm. Desert was in their blood. The soles of their feet were always blackened, their skin peeling and red from sunburn. Some nights, Keith and his father would lay out sleeping bags and sleep under the stars. That was something that the two of them had always shared, their love of the night sky. In the morning, Keith would find his father protectively curled around him, and they would go inside the shack to make breakfast. Waking up in the desert does not make him panic. The ropes bound around his torso and ankles, however, do.
The ropes dig into his skin, burning whenever he contorts his body. Darkened clouds ooze inky rain, which creates a black haze around him. His white t-shirt is stained with soot. His teeth and limbs chatter as he shakily lifts his torso up to sit on his bottom. The sound of wild dogs growling in the distance makes his already racing heart jolt. Keith squints, and in the distance, he sees the outline of a wall of flames. He does not know how a fire can burn so violently during a desert storm, but somehow the flames flourish here. He knows that screaming is useless, even dangerous in a desolate area crawling with wild animals, but it is all he knows how to do without his body to find his way home.
So he screams.
He screams and screams and screams until his vocal cords are calloused and his shrieks become shriveled coughs. The fire is coming closer, and no one can hear him dear God dear God dear God why can't anyone hear him? He attempts to let out one more scream, but it is that of a child. Thirst licks at his pained throat, and smoke is starting to make his eyes burn, and he falls to the earth in exhaustion.
Keith jolts up when he awakens and lets out a hoarse scream. His heart beats with an urgency that it usually reserves for battle. When Keith lifts up his blankets, he sees that he's wet himself. His crotch and a huge portion of his sheets are soaked with piss. This has not happened since after his father died, and it leaves him shaken. The unpleasant, wet warmth is still familiar to him, and he hates it.
He hates everything that reminds him of sleeping alone in the desert and having to wash his sheets every day. He hates everything that reminds him of the authorities finally finding him in that desert shack and sending him to a group home. He hates everything that reminds him of waking up early so he would have enough time to clean up before the other kids could see what he'd done in his sleep (eventually the other kids found out. They always found out). He hates everything that reminds him of his life before he found Shiro, before he found flying, before he found freedom in the stars and planets, freedom in even the idea of escaping the planet that he always knew he didn't fully belong to.
Keith wipes tears from his eyes (when did I start crying?), grabs a change of clothing from his dresser, and walks to the showers to clean himself. At this point, he does not give a fuck about his pee-stained sheets. He's not going to sleep tonight anyway.
All he wants to do is focus on the hot stream of water cascading down his back. Training today physically destroyed everyone on the team, and the heat from the shower relaxes his aching muscles.
Without consciously realizing it, Keith scrubs and scrubs and scrubs at his skin. He is trying to remove dirt from all of the crevices of his body.
His skin turns red and irritated, and he stops when he remembers that the dream wasn't real. It's almost as if he can still smell the soot, and the smoke still burns his eyes, and the cold from the rain is still pounding against his back and soon his hands and feet are going to lose circulation and turn blue and the fire is still coming toward him and-
It's not real.
Remember that it's not real.
...
The training room is Keith's home away from home at the castle. Every night, he practices with the training dummy until he can't anymore. The aching muscles, and the tiredness that comes after hours of exertion calm him down. Training makes his overactive brain shut up.
But after the nightmare, it doesn't work. He battles with the bot for half an hour, completing level after level, yet peace won't come. The rapid heartbeat, and the sweat dripping down his sides, and the heat rising to his chest and shoulders usually comfort him. He experiences all of the physical sensations, but not the relief that usually accompanies them.
Suddenly, someone bursts in through the door of the training room, and Keith turns to find Lance in his pajamas, though they don't look like they've been slept in.
"Hey Keith, what's up?" Lance asks through a mouthful of food. In his hand is what looks like a lilac-colored pear with dark-blue flesh.
"Lance, it's three in the morning, why are you awake?"
"Oh, sometimes I have trouble sleeping. I spent the last hour trying to beat all of the levels on Killbot Phantasm I. The hour before that I spent staring at a wall trying to understand if life actually has a purpose." He bounces on the balls of his feet. "It's an ADHD thing."
Despite it being three a.m., Lance doesn't look tired. In fact, he looks more energetic than he does during the day, which is saying a lot. Keith notices that Lance rambles, even more, when he's "wired," as Lance put it. A dribble of dark blue fruit juice slides down Lance's chin, and he wipes it with the back of his hand.
"Why are you up sparring with the robot? Allura's training fucked us all up today. I still can't feel my arms."
"I guess I couldn't sleep either. Training helps me clear my head."
"Can I join? We could team up, destroy the bot together."
"I thought you said that you couldn't feel your arms?" Keith is surprised when a small, but tired smile manages to leak out of him.
"Yeah, well I still can't sleep, and I've tried everything else, so maybe I should try your way." For the first time since Keith has met him, Lance looks timid, almost shy.
"You'd only slow me down," Keith says with a deadpan tone. He knows that it's not true, that Lance has become a worthy and useful fighter since the team has left Earth. But right now, the familiarity of bickering with Lance is comforting, and Keith needs to be comforted.
"Oh, you are gonna pay for that," Lance screams while gesturing wildly. "Me against you, let's do this." Keith smiles. This so-called "rivalry" used to annoy him, used to leave him feeling cold and distant toward the rest of the team. Now, it brings him comfort. Their relationship almost reminds Keith of the siblings on the TV shows he watched when his dad was at work. Yes, they bickered relentlessly, but under that rough exterior was a relationship built on love, on trust. TV siblings always loved each other, no matter what. The weight of his responsibilities feels lighter when he thinks about that type of love.
Lance joins Keith in the fight deck. Keith goes into fighting stance.
"So, no bayards?" Keith asks with a smirk.
"Nah, I doubt your sword could measure up to my gun."
Keith doesn't respond, only cocks his head from side to side. They put their fists up and start to circle each other. The two, in their own ways, for their own reasons, are exhausted. They are exhausted, but sleep will not come. They are exhausted, but both of their brains are wired for movement, for action, for constantly running toward something that they pray will give them peace. They are exhausted, but sleep will never cure what they have.
So they fight.
...
They fight, and though they bruise each other, no one comes out the winner. Keith is fine with that. If he had won, then Lance would have kept badgering him for a rematch or kept accusing him of cheating. But if Lance had won, he would have bragged about it for days. It was a miracle that they were both too exhausted to continue on.
The two walk back to their rooms in an attempt to get some sleep before Allura wakes them up for drills. As they walk, Keith starts to see the fatigue on Lance. There are dark circles under his eyes, his shoulders droop toward the floor, and his walk just isn't as bouncy as it normally is. Keith knows that he probably doesn't look much better, but it's strange to see Lance in this state. It's usually a bad sign when even Lance is out of energy.
"Well, goodnight," Lance says. "Or technically, good morning, because it's four in the fucking morning."
Keith lets out a small smile.
"Good morning, Lance."
They wave goodbye and walk to their respective rooms. When Keith enters his room, he turns on the lights and immediately sees the pee-stains on his sheets. He lets out a sigh and goes to work.
Keith strips the bed of his sheets and blankets and walks across the palace to the laundry room. The room is covered in white tile, and along the walls are giant tubs. He fills the tub with steaming hot water, adds in the baby blue cleaning crystals, and pushes his sheets under the water. It seems strange to Keith that Alteans, with all of their advanced technology, couldn't make a washing machine.
But he doesn't complain, even though he knows that Pidge could easily make a washing machine. He likes the process of cleaning his clothes. Keith stirs the bathwater with his hand to make sure that the crystals dissolve, and then rubs the darkened area of the sheets for five minutes.
It reminds him of doing laundry with his father. Every Friday, they soaked the few pieces of clothing that they had with some sort of cleaning fluid in their bathtub, and then hung it up on a line to dry. Keith followed his dad with the laundry basket and handed him the pieces of clothing. When his father was alive, he was always too short to reach the wire. If his father had lived long enough, Keith would have outgrown him by at least a few inches. Sometimes he sees himself clipping his clothing to the line with his father, with the clear desert sky above them, and his father laughing at one of his own jokes (he doesn't like to think about this. He hates thinking about this. So when he starts to think about it, he goes to the training deck).
Keith leaves the sheets in the tub to soak. He's not worried about the rest of the team finding them in the morning. After years of wetting the bed, he's learned how to evade people's questions (when Shiro found Keith's sheets in the wash when he first arrived at the Garrison, Keith had told him that he had had a wet dream, and Shiro never asked him another question pertaining to why Keith washed his sheets so often).
He walks back to his room, pulls out the spare sheet and blanket from his closet, and sets his bed up. Though he showered only a few hours ago, he showers again to wash off the sweat. The scalding hot water runs down his back the second time this night, but the urge to scrub himself of desert debris isn't there anymore.
Keith doesn't bother putting on any clothing when he gets into bed. When he was younger, he slept naked because he liked the feeling of his blanket against his skin. He flings his body onto the bed and looks at the ceiling. Keith knows that he probably won't go back to sleep tonight. He'll probably stay awake until Allura wakes them up to run a drill, and he shows up dead on his feet. But at the very least the horrifying thoughts that usually swirl around in his brain after a nightmare have quieted.
For once, Keith thinks that he's experiencing the perfect silence of space.
