The Best Klance Fanfictions

Love and Other Questions

It was still early—he’d set out as soon as it was light enough to see, intending to spend the hottest part of the day in the caves, then return home at dusk—but he hadn’t counted on the journey being quite so difficult. The canyons widened again ahead, but even if Keith could get there, he would have to cut the day’s investigations short. There was no way he was coming back this way in the dark. A broken leg out here was as good as a death sentence.

He couldn’t do that to Shiro.

Shifting his stance on the uneven outcrop, Keith pulled a bottle out of his largest belt pouch. He tugged down the black bandana covering his nose and mouth against the blowing sand, and took a long drink of tepid water. Two hours in and he was already tired. More tired than he should have been, thanks to the ache deep in his hip that told him Shiro had had another bad day.

There was nothing physically wrong with Keith’s leg; the bond he shared with Shiro carried only pain and scars. Still, it was hard to hike the canyons when it felt like someone had tried to pull his leg out of its socket.

Keith sighed, rubbing the stark black Mark that cut across his nose—a platonic Mark, like the many black and green scars tattooed across his body (more black than green, nowadays.) He’d had the Mark on his nose for close to a year now, long enough that he no longer flinched when he caught sight of himself in a mirror. It matched a new scar on Shiro’s face—and it was all the proof Keith needed that the Garrison was lying about the fate of the Persephone’s crew.

Recapping the bottle, Keith forced himself to move on. Standing around wasn’t going to bring Shiro home.

He stepped across a ten inch fissure in the ground onto a level shelf of reddish stone. An ominous wobble was his only warning before the shelf gave way, and then Keith was falling, his palms scrapping against stone as he scrambled to catch himself.

It was over in an instant, leaving Keith flat on his back at the bottom of a narrow canyon. Pieces of the shelf littered the ground around him—not stone, as he’d thought, but clay, soft and crumbly. The canyon, he now saw, was wider than it had appeared from above. Not exactly spacious, but there was enough room for Keith to fall clear to the bottom, collecting new bruises along the way.

Groaning, Keith uncurled slowly, cataloging his pains. Sorry, Shiro, he thought, grimacing. At least he hadn’t broken anything.

The sky was a vibrant blue ribbon ten feet above him, squished between the red-streaked canyon walls, which bowed out like a three-dimensional Rorschach test. Climbing back up would be difficult.

Well, fine. At least down here Keith was out of the sun, and he might find a new entrance to the caverns with the lion carvings. He might as well see where it took him.

That was easier said than done. The canyons were still impossibly narrow here. Keith had happened to fall in one of the wider sections, but as he walked onward the walls pressed in on either side, sometimes wide enough to walk normally, often so narrow he had to turn sideways and shimmy through several turns before he could breathe again.

He stopped just after nine to rest, rehydrate, and eat a ration bar he’d stolen from a Garrison transport last week. He’d long since given up feeling bad about the thefts. When you were a seventeen-year-old with no cash living in a shack in the desert, you did what you had to. Besides, they’d already stolen something far more valuable from him.