It's not a major mission.

It's so minor, actually, that there's only Keith assigned to set the charges in the data room and Antok meant to stay outside on standby as backup. Even that's less because they necessarily need the big guns and more because they don't send newer Blades into the field without an experienced partner, and Keith is apparently no exception.

Voltron probably would've just destroyed the whole ship, but the Blades don't have the same capacity to take heavy fire. Even manned with a skeleton crew, these ships hit hard when they detect incoming fire. So, infiltration mission it is.

Still, it should be simple, with Keith in and out before they know what hit them, taking advantage of their intelligence that this ship is understaffed with many of the live soldiers temporarily off-board for some sort of training event. Nestled so firmly in Galra-controlled territory, they'll never see an attack coming now.

Nothing tips him off that things have changed on the way in, with their equipment easily confirming their intel. There are less than ten biosignatures onboard, and those are unlikely to be trained soldiers based on the Blade's most recent profile of the empire's crews.

Antok lays his bet down then and there, putting the breakout at five grunts on permanent cleaning duty, two engineers, one pilot, and one cook. Keith's not enough of a betting man to take him up on it, especially when he still hasn't grasped how much the hundred GAC Antok wants to put on the line actually is. As far as he knows, that could be anywhere between a soda's worth or a brand new ship.

Antok doesn't push it, instead motioning for Keith to continue the mission at his leisure. There's no value in sending the both of them in where one will do, so Keith's on his own now.

The inside of the ship confirms what they scanned from the outside: deserted, at least along the path he's traveling toward the data room.

It's only after he's activated the charges and is turning to head back out that the hoard of robotic sentries appears carrying well beyond the typical numbers he sees on an entire ship, all swarming into the one room and blocking off his exit.

"Gonna need that backup," he murmurs into the comm before leaping into action.

There are too many for him to take on in the little time he has. That much is clear, but the solution is not. The best he can do is try to clear just enough of them to create a direct path out, but each swing of his bayard seems to take down one sentry and beckon two or three more into its previous place.

Somewhere in the fray, he recognizes Antok's affirmation filtering through his headset, but he can't focus on that with the way the sentries are forcing him backward, closer to the explosives.

The explosives whose countdown he's now lost track of in his rush to hold off the sentries. Aware as he is of this little snag, it still happens too fast for him to see it coming, to understand how much time has already passed.

It's louder than anything he's ever heard, on a league of its own, stopping him from drawing any sort of comparison.

That is, if he were in the state of mind to focus on making a comparison for those few seconds. He's not. His mind is still locked on to the sentries rather than keeping pace with the new development, and only after it stops does it begin to sink in what happened.

By then, it's too late.

Everything hurts, so overwhelmingly that he can't narrow down the sensation to individual body parts. He can't see, can't hear over a ringing that's taken over his brain, can't even make sense of the position he landed in. It takes an unfathomable amount of time to even understand that he's no longer standing upright and charging the hoard of sentries.

He can't hear his own whimpers, but he can feel them in his throat, is just aware enough to feel the shame that he can't make them stop, isn't there enough to control his own reactions. It's quickly becoming secondary to the pain easing in the more his brain catches up to his body.

Then it happens fast again.

One second, he's still too out of it to even comprehend where his body is in space, not prepared to even think of his next steps after surviving an explosion. The next, he's dragged the rest of the way back into sensation and fully aware of being dangled in the air by his throat, eyes shooting open to see a live Galra soldier sneering up at him.

Whatever pain was easing in before is nothing compared to now, and the vagueness quickly resolves itself until he swears he can feel the exact nature and location of every pain. This is beyond anything he's trained for, beyond the Trials, beyond even anything that happened in all his time with Voltron.

Whatever the Galra is saying doesn't reach through the ringing in Keith's ears, but it's no doubt a generic taunt he's heard dozens of times, a poor attempt to throw him off his game on a typical mission. Someone should tell him Keith's already down and out, no taunts needed.

What's more concerning is the way his vision is blackening along the edges while the pressure around his neck stays steady.

The Galra is strong, or maybe Keith is weak. No amount of attempted squirming gets him any closer to freeing himself, so it's a surprise when he falls back to the floor, barely catching himself on aching hands and knees before he hacks with the renewed flow of air to his lungs.

They don't give him the time he needs to recover before binding his wrists so that his hands are forced against one another no matter how he tries to move. When they pull him to his feet, he realizes they must've already gotten to his legs without him noticing. The restraints have enough give to walk, but barely and only at slow speeds given the stride he's limited to. The one guiding him via a tight grip around his forearm seems to take pleasure in pushing him to the brink of those limits, looking back and grinning with every stumble that Keith is forced into as he tries to keep up to avoid being dragged completely.

There's no adjusting to the shove against his back when they arrive at what is clearly his intended prison cell, and he falls to the ground, barely managing to spare his nose from a violent collision with the ground by rolling at the last moment. The way the maneuver stabs at his ribs—definitely not okay—and leaves him gasping uselessly long past when the Galra seem to leave almost makes him think a broken nose might've been a better experience.

They leave him there seemingly completely unguarded but thoroughly restricted regardless by the remaining restraints and the door which, on first inspection, sends a painful jolt of electricity through his skin at the slightest touch. An experimental toss of one of his shoes proves that even if he can overcome the pain of touching the barrier, there's some other component to it that will physically block him from leaving.

It's a bitch to wrestle the boot back onto his foot once it bounces back his way without full use of his arms too, so all in all, it's a failure of a venture. If Pidge were here, she would insist it was worthwhile by simple virtue of giving concrete evidence…

…but Pidge isn't here, so Keith's allowed to admit the truth: that it was a stupid and pointless experiment.

In the quiet of his cell—or at least, he thinks it's quiet, though that may be the temporary hearing loss speaking—there's suddenly nothing but time, and it leaves him too free to categorize everything going wrong.

His injuries aren't as bad as they could be, but they're not minor, and with or without the restraints, he's not going to have speed on his side when it comes time to escape. Probably not strength either depending on how well he can push through the pain when it comes time. His vision seems to have recovered in full, but his hearing's definitely off, so it'll be tough to avoid detection as he makes his escape.

So that leaves, what? Mind games? Those are more Lance's forte, but… worse comes to worst, he's witnessed enough of that to try to improvise something himself. Maybe.

Besides the ribs that seem intent on keeping him upright and propped against the wall at just the right angle to not continually feel them protesting his very existence, everything else is manageable. There are burns scattered haphazardly, but nowhere particularly limiting. His arms and legs are okay enough to get through a full range of motion barring what the ribs will probably veto once he brings standing upright into the mix, and his hands are still capable of fine movement.

The most important thing is that he completed the mission. While he hadn't intended to be a part of the explosion, at least he'd witnessed it and knows for sure he took out the database.

…but since the mission is completed and the minutes have been steadily ticking by with no update from Antok, he's not counting on outside help for an extraction. If it were coming, it would've happened before they'd had time to lock him up. Regris's fate had solidified that knowledge back in one of his early missions.

The mission before the individual.

It aligns with a long-held worldview of his. It shouldn't bother him the way it now does, which is maybe selfish as far as timing goes. He'd had no issue with policies like this back on Earth. If someone couldn't keep up on their own merit, it'd seemed best to leave them behind. Those people dragged everyone else down. Keith took care of himself, so it made no sense why everyone else couldn't do the same. It's not that it's just coming up now on the day of his capture, but if he's honest with himself, it only became a concern after he became a paladin and started routinely putting himself in mortal danger. Even on the early end of that, he'd still clung to every man for himself.

Maybe this is karma for the time he suggested leaving Allura behind.

Maybe he just has shit luck.

They don't leave him to ponder for much longer. The cell door faintly fizzles as it fades away—Keith sighs in relief at first at the realization that sounds are back and then cringes when the sigh aggravates his ribs—but Keith doesn't see it coming and can't take the chance to rush them while they're off-guard.

It's the same two that led him to the cell in the first place, and now they hoist him up by the handcuffs again before they're walking somewhere new, pushing the limits of his leg restraints once more. They march him to…

…their break room?

It looks like a break room, at least. A small scattering of round tables, each with four or five chairs bolted in place. They shove him down to sit in one of those chairs, and there's not even anything solid to pin his restraints to. They just… sit him there like they know he's not going to run.

He has half a mind to give it a try immediately, but… patience yields focus. Speed's not on his side. His strength's not going to be there in full. Patience, he still has, at least long enough to lull them into thinking he's relatively docile.

It's apparent they have no idea who he is or what his goals were as soon as they start questioning him there at what probably really is their lunch table, and that's what's really on his side. No way they'd've left a paladin of Voltron so free to make a break for it. No way these guys know what they're doing at all.

Holy shit. He let himself get captured, and there weren't even any battle-trained Galra involved. Antok was right, and now Keith's been captured by engineers.

A detached part of him pats himself on the back for not accepting that bet earlier because it's becoming very clear that Antok knew exactly what he was talking about. If this is still who he's dealing with after they had time to hunt down someone better suited to interrogating, there must be no one aboard who has even the basic skills to deal with an infiltration.

It's the same questions over and over, asked every time like he hasn't just refused to answer them a minute or two before. Clearly, no one ever taught these two how this process goes. They're probably spouting dialogue they heard from whatever the Galra have instead of TV.

"Who are you working with?"

"Where are you based?"

"How many others are there?"

"How did you board?"

They eventually seem to get bored of the original questions that he keeps silent through, mixing in others that can't possibly have any use for them, questions that make no sense to waste their time on.

"Where is the rest of your fur? Your ears?"

"What are you?"

"Where is your home planet?"

As time inches by, the questions get dumber and dumber until he's questioning whether these are even engineers. So, deckhands, maybe?

In the end, he doesn't get the chance to figure that out or try running.

Keith is just as startled as his captors when Antok bursts through the door with two other Blades in tow who definitely had not been on the transport with them earlier, but he recovers faster than they do and takes off as fast as he can without tripping himself up on his restraints.

The others make quick work of their adversaries, and then it's less of a rush to get to safety. He realizes belatedly that they hadn't even fired any blasters, has a moment to wonder if they'd ever even been armed at all.

Rather than take the time to fully free him or allow him to continue at half-speed, one of the Blades he doesn't immediately recognize scoops him over their shoulder despite his pained protests and joins the others in wordlessly breaking out into a near-silent run toward wherever their planned escape is. It's hard to say whether it's more embarrassing to be carried like this or to have them waiting on his slow progress, but they're not giving him a choice in the matter.

In the interest of not getting them caught, he stops complaining, but damn if it doesn't hurt to feel his ribs jostled by every movement of the Blade below him. He only has to put up with it for a few minutes in the end anyway, though it takes countless silent reminders that this feeling is temporary to get him through it.

Then, they're rushing into their escape pod and taking off before everyone can settle in comfortably. As they seem to come down from the adrenaline, Keith is finally, mercifully freed… or at least slung off the Blade's shoulder to be positioned in a seat in the cramped cargo bay where he's finally free to pull his arms awkwardly across the worst of his ribs for whatever little protection they can provide.

Antok, more familiar than any of them with the empire's restraint design, pulls his arms away anyway and manages to disconnect both sets of cuffs within minutes. They land on the floor to the side with a clank, and Keith has to resist rubbing the sensation back into his wrists as he catches sight of the burns still there. It's less awkward when he returns one of his now-freed arms to cradle his ribs again, falling more comfortably into place like this.

"You came back," he says, more like an accusation than the gratitude he thinks he was going for.

"You think we would leave you for dead?"

Involuntarily, his thoughts turn to his first missions, before the training, before understanding exactly what the Blade stood for. He thinks of how easily Regris could've been captured, could've been tortured or killed many times over long before it happened, how easily his dedication to the mission over himself took over all sense of rationality.

He doesn't let himself wonder how much of that was Regris and how much was the Blade's culture infecting him.

"No," he lies, and it's a relatively silent ride the rest of the way back to the base.