Keith was in a forest. It was so beautiful and peaceful. The trees were tall and had different hues of brown and green and the sun was shining through the light green leaves. The wind blew his hair from side to side and he looked around and saw his friends standing in a circle with him but they were all children. Keith looked down at himself and saw he was one too judging from his shorter and plumber limbs.
"It's going to happen soon," Coran told all of them with a high pitched but still recognizable voice and Keith found it weird that he didn't find the mustache on Coran's young face strange in any way.
"What's going to happen?" Keith asked. He felt stupid for asking because everyone else was nodding knowingly to Coran.
"Are you sure?" Hunk asked and to Keith's relief didn't look as calm and collected as the rest of his friends. Hunk was wearing his usual clothes shrunk down to fit his new, younger body just like the rest of them were but Hunk's headband was the same size as when he was an adult and it look enormous on him. Keith put almost all his weight on one leg to see behind Hunk and see if the headband reached the dirt and saw that it didn't just reach the ground, it stretched impossibly long behind Hunk and had somehow wrapped the ends around a tree each and brought a different slash of color among all the earthy colors.
"Yes, Keith will wake up in just a few ticks," Coran informed everyone in the circle and made Keith turn his bemused eyes on him.
Wake up? But Keith was awake right now, wasn't he? Logically Keith knew that they could very well have meant someone else but something in him knew it was about himself.
Keith woke up standing. He didn't know how or why but he woke to the sight of glass moving. An invisible push forced him forwards and he fell as soon as he was out of the pod.
Luckily for Keith, Hunk caught him before he hit his head. That would have been bad.
Keith looked bleary–eyed around the room. Hunk was there, obviously, but Pidge and Lance was there too. Allura was standing far away in the door opening and Coran was a step or two in front of her. Keith didn't even get to wonder why Coran and Allura was so far away when he realized Shiro wasn't there. Keith was an adult, he didn't need Shiro to be there and hold his hand as he exited the cryo pod but he still felt a weight fall from his chest and get caught in his stomach when he realized Shiro wasn't just out of his field of vision. He thought they were friends. Keith felt like they were friends or at least close acquaintances, but apparently not.
Hunk gently rightened Keith with a sympathetic smile. "Not so fast. You've been in there for a while."
Keith looked at him for a moment too long before the words made any sense. Huh, he must really have been in there for a while because he was really out of it. He didn't think he had felt like that before, but he couldn't remember if it had been himself or someone else in the pod the last time. He was almost sure it had been him but it could have been Lance or Hunk. Maybe it had even been Coran. Keith wanted to shake all his doubts out of his head but everything was muddled so he didn't know where to start.
Hunk let go of him and he started swaying. It felt like he had two weights on each side that simultaneously tried to bring him off balance but they somehow didn't sync up and left him awkwardly trying to not fall in either direction.
He tried to ask where Shiro was but his tongue felt heavy in his mouth and he didn't think the others understood him when he said, "Wer Shi'o?"
Was this a normal side effect from being in a cryo pod? He didn't think the others had trouble talking besides maybe being a bit slow because of the fatigue they had suffered after being released from their cryo pods. On the other hand, Hunk had said Keith had been in the pod 'for a while', so maybe that was far longer than the others had been in one.
Keith was still swaying but decided to just find Shiro himself. The others could follow if they were worried but he didn't need anyone to babysit him. He moved one leg and almost twisted his ankle because of the awkward position his foot landed in. Hunk took a hold of Keith again and this time didn't let go when Keith was upright again.
"Wow, Keith, are you okay?" Hunk asked while Pidge and Lance looked anxiously at Keith. He couldn't see Allura and Coran, but he thought they must have looked the same too. At least, if how far away they were didn't indicate anything.
Keith shook his head, because for once he didn't want to lie about how he was feeling, but it ended up with him looking like a bobblehead with the uncontrolled rolling of his neck.
Keith's breath sped up a fraction in his frustration. He hadn't been overly concerned before but this wasn't normal, was it? If it was, he never wanted to enter a cryo pod again.
"Wanna sit," he forced out but the words were slurred and indistinct. The 'w' was almost nonexistent and the 's' sounded more like a hiss than a normal 's'.
The others were quiet for a short while and Keith was worried they hadn't understood him but then Lance gave his best smile. It was clearly fake and looked like it pained him but Keith secretly appreciated the effort he put into it.
"Of course, buddy. In the couch area or the stairs or where do you want to sit?" Lance wasn't speaking fast but he couldn't understand anything he said. He knew that he knew the words but his brain refused to translate the sounds into anything understandable.
"He looks like he's about to faint. Better just here for now," Pidge suggested through Keith's internal panic and heavy stare at Lance.
Hunk and Lance helped him down so he could sit on the top stair. The cryo pod was too far away to lean up on and the stairs were too small to balance anything. He put his hands right next to his hips and clenched so hard around the edge of the stair that it hurt his hands, but he felt like he didn't know where his hands were if he didn't do it. His arms quickly started to ache because of how rigid and twisted they had to be but he couldn't move them without fearing that he would fall down.
"Keith, you're worrying us a bit here, buddy," Lance said nervously. The words stuck this time and Keith knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to tell Lance that the was acting oddly out of character. When had he started to say stuff like that about or to Keith, especially with that tone of voice and vulnerable expression? He also wanted to ask about Shiro again. Was he on a mission? If so, why wasn't the others with him? Or did Shiro suddenly just not care? He knew Shiro would come and wait for everyone else so what had Keith done to upset him? Something tickled in his brain at the thought of Shiro and something happening between them but he couldn't collect the feelings and flashes to something coherent. Something about fingernails but Keith quickly dismissed that as it made no sense why anyone's nails would play a part in anything.
Keith looked at the others and saw they waited for him to say something but no words came to him. He almost felt like he was deaf with no hands. He knew what he wanted to say and almost knew how but it was like the tools to say it was gone.
He heard footsteps and looked to the door opening hoping to see Shiro but was only greeted by the sight of Allura's receding silhouette disappearing. Coran switched between looking at Keith with furrowed eyebrows and a downturned mouth and down the hall where Coran could probably still see Allura once or twice but eventually slopped his shoulders and looked guilty as he walked after her.
"What's wrong?" Pidge asked when she saw him scowl.
Keith didn't want to try his luck with talking again so he simply pointed, or it used to be simple but one thing was that he felt like he was losing the little balance he had by removing one hand from the stair but another thing was that he was pointing way off and hit Lance in his eye.
"Son of a-" Lance winced as he cursed.
"Sho'ry," Keith apologized clumsily and didn't dare to move beyond moving his hand back to himself again so he wouldn't accidentally hit anyone else.
"It's," Lance said before groaning as he held a hand to his eye. He inhaled and started again, "It's fine."
"At least we know Keith's back and ready to fight anyone trying anything on him," Pidge said half-jokingly and half-seriously.
Lance let his hand fall but kept his eye shut as he glared with the other one. "That's not funny, Pidge."
Pidge looked down at her feet. "Yeah, I know."
Keith was concerned. Something must have happened while he was in the pod and judging from Lance's behavior and Shiro's absence it must have been something serious and very, very bad. He wasn't a stranger to confusion. It was more than expected when he went from living in the middle of the desert by himself to living with six other people and four mice on top of being thrown into the role of defender of the universe in a war he didn't know existed, using a probably magical, giant spaceship-lion. However, he rarely felt as young as he did at that moment.
Keith brought the others attention back on him by asking where Shiro was but the others didn't seem to understand what he was saying. They furrowed their eyebrows and narrowed their eyes as they looked closely at him, but they seemed to almost simultaneously decide to act like Keith wasn't trying to get a message across but just babbling. Keith suddenly didn't feel bad for hitting Lance and wished he had hit Hunk and Pidge too.
Pidge moved uncomfortably close to him and looked him in his eyes. She took a firm hold of his chin when he tried to move his head away from her.
"Hey, does they look really wide to you two?"
"What, Pidge?" Hunk asked as both he and Lance moved to they were all three pressed together and right in front of Keith's face.
"His pupils," Pidge clarified.
"Yeah, they are," Lance answered perplexed.
"Hey, Keith, how's your head," Hunk asked kindly and sounded more like he was talking to a frightened and injured child than someone his own age. Keith didn't even feel like protesting anymore when they all at long last moved their faces out of his.
"I' hur's," Keith slurred even though he was slightly offended that they seemed to talk more over him than to him even though he was right in front of them.
"Coran didn't say anything about a concussion," Lance said as he looked closely at Keith but still acted like Keith wasn't present.
"Lance," Hunk said and brought Lance's eyes on him so he could send the driest look Keith had ever seen on Hunk's face "are you really surprised that he has a concussion?"
Lance looked at the floor for a moment and briefly furrowed his eyebrows before he answered, "I guess not."
Keith wanted to yell at them to look at him and tell him what had happened to both him and everyone else, but he was starting to feel embarrassed by his new speech impediment.
"Do you think that's why he has no balance?" Pidge asked and didn't even blink when Hunk and Lance looked sharply at her sharp tone. At least Keith knew that they were aware of his presence.
"I don't know," Hunk answered when Pidge had ignored his and Lance's looks for a few seconds. "I mean, he didn't act like this the other times he had a concussion."
"Why does everything has to be so difficult with you two?" Lance asked before he turned his gaze to Keith, "Do you feel concussed?"
Keith thought for a moment. He was disorientated like he had been every time he had had a concussion but that had mostly been the first twelve hours after the more severe concussions and he guessed being in a cryo pod for a while was at least a day. He was nauseated and dizzy which he had felt throughout his former concussions. He couldn't remember ever having any amnesia about events, but he had heard that a concussion could trigger memory loss surrounding the incident causing the concussion and he defiantly had some memory loss about what had happened to him.
The answer was clear just under two seconds after Lance had asked and Keith nodded.
Lance brought his hands together in a loud clap that made Keith wince. "Great, now that's settled, can we get Coran?"
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Hunk and Keith spent a long 3 minutes alone while Pidge and Lance ran up after Coran. They must have run the whole way because Keith was sure that it took a lot longer than 3 minutes to run up and down the castle. He of course didn't know exactly where in the castle Coran was located but he had a few guesses.
Finally, after those long minutes, Lance appeared with Coran who looked Keith over and confirmed that yes, Keith had a concussion, but it wasn't a big deal and the concussion would just have to heal on its own. He also denied that, no the dilated pupils where not from the concussion, it but instead the cryo pod's lingering effects that would leave Keith's system on its own.
He however became worried when he noticed just how uncoordinated Keith was. It was normal to be more sluggish and clumsy with a concussion and from barely being out of a cryo pod but Keith stumbled over almost every step even while looking at his feet and having an arm around Lance's and Hunk's shoulders respectively.
Coran seemed like he had wanted to find out what was wrong with Keith instead of letting them leave but there was only so much flickering a light in someone's face could do. Coran rambled something about samples but that he had already got some from collecting skin. Keith would have thought a cheek swab would have been sufficient, but then again, Keith didn't know too much about medicine.
Coran close to ordered Hunk and Lance to bring Keith to the dinning hall after giving up on instantly finding out what was ailing Keith now, and perhaps he too had a naïve hope that it was just because of Keith's new malnourishment that caused his lack of balance and general loss of control of where his limps went. Keith hoped that too but he wasn't gullible enough to think his speech impediment was just because he was hungry. Which he actually wasn't, hungry, but all three men, and Pidge when she finally arrived back to the medical bay after not having found Coran for a few additional minutes, escorted him towards the dinning hall.
Eating was... weird. Keith found himself to be a decently calm person most of the time when they weren't in battle or someone did anything to slightly agitate him between Shiro's disappearance and Keith getting kicked out of the Garrison or when Lance was teasing him now. Okay, Keith wasn't always a calm guy but he hadn't had any problems with eating in front of others before, but even he found it really awkward how everyone looked intensely at him and Shiro appeared in the door opening after Keith had been seated for a minute. Keith had thought that Shiro would ask him how he was or command that the others let Keith eat his green goo in peace since eating while feeling full and slightly nauseated was hard enough by itself. Instead, Shiro just lingered awkwardly in the door opening and looked more like an insecure child than a man in his twenties who had seen more than a man on his deathbed should have.
Keith also found out that the technique of eating was lost on him. It wasn't that he didn't know that he was supposed to bring the spork to his mouth with some food goo on it, but his grip on the spork was awkward and he literally didn't know how to aim it as soon as he couldn't see it. Which ended up with him ungainly moving the spork as he looked intensely at it and did his best to ignore the 5 pair of eyes looking at him but all the effort was for naught as soon as he couldn't see the spork's tip anymore and it hit around his mouth more than in it.
The first time that happened had been embarrassing but almost already forgotten by all as soon as Keith had cleaned his face with his sleeve. Second time had been concerning to both Keith and everyone else. Third time had extremely worrying and the attempts, even the more successful ones, after that brought more and more anxiety to all of them.
Just the cherry on top to make the whole experience unpleasant, both of Keith's sleeves couldn't keep up and he eventually had to let himself look like a baby trying, and failing, to feed itself.
And still Shiro lingered. Keith could feel the man's eyes try to look deep into Keith's soul but Shiro never made any movement to go into the room.