unwell

It was their third day back in the barracks, the third day Keith hadn't emerged from his room since he'd locked the door exactly one hour after debriefing, and Pidge hadn't meant to be noticing things like that, but he couldn't help it, it was in his nature. He knew that noticing what Keith was doing would be construed the same way as staring at the other grunts in the shower for a half-a-beat too long. It just wasn't done, at least not overtly, even in their motley, mixed up company of G.I. killers, who were never given leave, only bunks in barracks because it was dollars to donuts that they'd be redeployed within two weeks.

"Is this." Pidge scuffed the floor with his boot, but didn't take his eyes off the door to Keith's private room. "Does he do this a lot?"

"What?" Lance looked up from the brass he was polishing, a little confused. Then he followed Pidge's gaze, and he shrugged. "Yeah. Every mission."

"What does he do in there?"

"Who knows. Just leave him alone; he'll come out in a day or two." Lance held his sharpshooters' medal up to the light, eyeing it critically. He spat on it and rubbed it again.

"Maybe . . . Maybe I should take him so food."

"Pidge, you're what? Twelve?"

"Eighteen!" Pidge bristled, but Lance could kick his ass six ways to Sunday, despite being only a Sergeant while Pidge, technically, outranked him even at ensign level, so Pidge didn't do much more than try to make himself look larger.

"Right. Anyway, this was your first mission out of the Academy, yes?" Lance didn't even need to wait for Pidge's nod. "And you're a specialist, a--what do they call you guys nowadays? Or are you still a sapper?"

"Still a sapper." Which was true, even though the only 'fortifications' Pidge tunneled under were of the cybernetic kind, hacking his way through the enemy's computer, instead of under their support structure.

"Whatever. You're not getting the full brunt of the attack, back on the carrier, but you still have to unwind after a battle, don't you? Well, this is just Keith's way of unwinding." Lance put down the medal and started to pack away his cleaning gear. "Just. Leave him alone, okay? You're a good kid, but he's been doing this longer than you have and he knows what works for him."

"I guess." Pidge looked at the closed door again, and frowned. He looked away, down at his boots. Maybe he should polish them.

"S'up, Short Stack?" Pidge's bunk dipped when Hunk sat down on it and Pidge smiled at the big man. He looked around for the XO because if Hunk was here, then Sven was somewhere nearby.

Not that anybody ever said anything about this fact. Pidge learned that little rule the easy way--he hadn't had to get his nose broken for making a smartass comment like one of the other newbies had.

"I'm thinking about polishing my boots."

"Whoa. Better slow down there, kid. Don't want to go overboard on the excitement." Hunk put a big friendly hand on Pidge's back and leaned forward to talk to Lance. "Hey, we're going over to the canteen, get a coupla beers and pick a fight with those army jerkoffs. Want to come?"

"Where's Sven?"

"'Requisitioning' a jeep."

"What'd they do this time?" Lance was already pulling his boots on when he said this, his voice muffled by his body.

"Do we really need a reason?"

Lance laughed and shook his head, eyes bright with mischief and lust. Pidge thought that it was precisely this attitude that had ruled Lance out of officer's training even though he was every bit as smart and capable as Keith. Lance liked his booze and his brawls too much to ever be anything other than an extremely capable Noncom. He thought the scars on his body impressed the ladies; Pidge thought Lance was a little scary--not as scary Sven, but still not exactly a 'take home to mother' kind of a guy. Not that he was going to say anything, of course. He would have thought Lance's scars were cool too, if he didn't know that there had been blood and pain and a death or two attached to every one of them.

"You coming, Pidge?"

"Nah. I'm just. I'm going to read a little." Pidge picked up a manual--he wasn't sure if it was for a new security system, or a new missile prototype--and pretended to be engrossed until he was the only one left in the barracks; it didn't take long, as his fellow soldiers were just as eager for the boozing and brawling as their sergeant and nobody backed away from a fight with the army grunts. Special Ops might not have a mascot, or a football team, but they had their pride. He even waited for a good twenty (well, fifteen anyway) minutes to make sure nobody came back for anything.

Then he stood up and used the skills he had picked up during the course of his colorful and misspent youth and let himself into his commanding officer's room.

The first thing he noticed was that it was very, very dark.

The second thing that he noticed was that there was an absence of sound, as though a noise had suddenly ceased when he had entered. Then he could hear the slow, steady breathing of a calm, awake person and the irrational fear that Keith had died in the night (well, in one of them anyway) disappeared and the realization that he had just broken into his commanding officer's room sank in with a dull dread.

"Sir? I, uh. I just wanted to know if you're hungry."

"Who's there?" There was a rustling of bed sheets and Pidge's slowly adjusting eyes managed to pick out Keith's form in the gloom. His captain sat with his legs over the edge of the bed, and he smelled stale, like the room.

"It's, uh, Pidge, sir. Uh, Lieutenant Kelly." Pidge straightened up, still too fresh from his Academy days to stand completely at ease in the presence of a commanding officer. "I'm sorry for intruding, sir."

Keith laughed, low and whispering and without humor. "At ease, boy, before you hemorrhage something." He reached over and turned on the lamp by his bed and Pidge blinked more from the sight of Keith than from the sudden light. His captain was rumpled and unshaven, with dark bags under his blood shot eyes. "Well. What can I do for you Pidge?"

"I just wondered if everything was all right. Sir."

"Stop calling me 'sir', Pidge. Make me think my father is somewhere in here. Keith is fine." Keith rubbed his face. "Well. Is that all?"

"Yes." Pidge started to turn, then stopped. "Keith? Do you, do you want some company?" Pidge looked down at his hands. A long silence stretched out and Pidge wondered if maybe he had done the one thing guaranteed to get him kicked out of the unit and transferred to a waste management post. He might be a genius and the latest pet of the Brass but he knew the playing field well enough to know that the Brass would bend over and let Keith fuck them.

Then he heard Keith laughing, low and humorless and tinged with mania. He looked up, saw the expression on Keith's face and he felt fear run down his spin and make his knees tremble. He knew that expression. He'd seen it on his father's face everyday since the accident that'd killed his mother and taken away his father's legs. Haunted and painful and empty and a little crazy. He started to back away and Keith's laughter stopped and his face shut down. Went completely blank and for some reason that was scarier than the crazed laughter had been. So instead of sprinting out the door and finding Hunk and maybe bonding with the crew, Pidge took a step forward and then another, until he had taken enough steps that he could reach out and gently touch Keith's hand with his own. His hand looked small and white against Keith's and he could feel Keith trembling. He sat down on the bed and when he was this close he realized that Keith wasn't even older than Lance.

"Keith?"

Keith sucked in a breath, blinked his eyes a couple of times. "I'm not crazy," he said, suddenly.

"Okay."

"I'm not." He looked at Pidge when he said this and there was a strange urgency in his eyes, as though his life depended upon Pidge believing that his captain wasn't a few beers short of a six-pack.

"You're not crazy," Pidge said.

"It's just. I can't forget." Keith stared at the off-white walls of his room. "I can't forget. And I can hear them and feel the blood and--" Keith broke off, shuddered, wrapped his arms around himself. "There are too many dead."

"Yes."

"I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to save lives." Keith looked down at his hands, dug his nails into the calloused flesh of his palm until he began to bleed. "If I was a doctor then maybe all the blood would make sense, you know? But the Feds decided I had an aptitude for 'leadership' so I came here instead." He sighed, opened his fist, watched the blood slowly stop. "I think I would have made a good doctor."

"You're a good captain."

"No I'm not. If I were any good at this sort of thing then maybe people wouldn't die. If I really could lead, then maybe none of us would have to fight anymore."

"The war isn't your fault."

"But the deaths are." Keith let his body go, sank back onto the bed until he stared up at the shadowed ceiling instead of the plain walls. "I don't like leading people into situations where they'll die. I don't like killing."

"Keith, people die. Soldiers die. We know that's a risk. We're willing to take it. Nobody thinks you're a bad leader because a few of us didn't make it back."

"I do."

Pidge didn't know what to say. He couldn't find the right words to reassure Keith, to tell him that the fact that three of the lads didn't make it back was an acceptable loss, that those three lives were meaningless when compared to the thousand of lives they had saved. He wanted to tell Keith about the secrets he had found in the enemy computers, the lab reports, the pictures of ravaged victims, the corpses of little bodies with extra arms, extra eyes, the first, failed products of genetic manipulation. He wanted to tell Keith about watching his father die, little by little, until the day he'd come home to an empty house and how this had made him think that a quick death in a battle was really the best way to go. The only way to go.

And even though Lance was right and Pidge hadn't ever had to be planetside when the company was skirmishing, he'd done clean up and he knew that sometimes there were civilians mixed in with the enemy's dead. He may have only been eighteen, but eighteen was old enough to know that war wasn't about glory or honor or duty. War was about killing the other guy before he got you. A battle field was no place for a guy like Keith, it was for guys like Lance and Hunk and Pidge, for guys who didn't know how to care anymore, or for guys like Sven who knew that there were just killers dressed up in fancier clothes.

But the words wouldn't come so Pidge just sat there in silence and wondered what thoughts were running through Keith's head.

"Why are you here, Pidge?" Keith asked, suddenly.

"I. I was worried."

Keith shook his head and Pidge felt the movement across the bed. "I mean why are you here. Why are you fighting?"

"Because there's nothing else for me to do. There's no where else for me to be." It's the first time he'd ever said the words aloud and Pidge was surprised at how right they sounded. He shrugged, more for his benefit than Keith's.

Keith sat up and Pidge felt his stare raising hairs on the back of his neck. Keith's hand on his shoulder--gently touching, turning--surprised Pidge. It felt so different from Hunk's.

"I don't have any family," he said, rapidly, trying to explain. He didn't know why he felt he had to, why he wanted to make Keith understand that he was more than a soldier, more than a kid who couldn't think of anything else to do with his life. "And my planet's a hell hole of a terraform. I didn't. I wanted to be something. I mean, I know the G.G isn't exactly the sort of place that welcomes guys like me. I mean, I know what some of the stricter units do to--but it got me off-world and, well, maybe that makes up--"

Keith's finger gently caressing his lip stilled the flood of words and Pidge clenched his hands tight together. He hadn't meant to say all that. He really hadn't meant to say all that.

"Pidge," Keith said, slowly, tasting his name. "Would you mind staying here? For a little while? I think. I'm tired of being alone."

Pidge nodded. He'd had enough of being lonely too.