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Sometimes, Keith has nightmares. Not the normal ones that come with fighting a war against Space Hitler (Lance coined that one of course); they all woke screaming and or sobbing from those. Sometimes Keith dreams he's back in his shack, with Shiro missing, no future, no human interaction. Just him and a weird pulsing energy that he could feel in his chest. From those, he always awoke with his knife clutched to his chest, like how he slept in some of the worst foster homes. Sometimes he cried. More often he went to the training deck and punched drones and thought.
"Why do I always have to be the different one? Who would I be if my life had been different?"
What the other Paladins didn't know wouldn't hurt them. They didn't need to know that Shiro wasn't the only one with PTSD and that Keith had dealt with it since he was the ripe old age of nine. They really didn't need to know that if he lost them he would die; that Blue had saved his life after Shiro disappeared. He smiled in spite of himself. Lance's lion would talk at him, knowing full well that he didn't understand, until he nearly drove himself crazy trying to figure out the sound right on the edge of his consciousness.
They already knew Keith was fiercely loyal and protective. Knowing why would just make them pity him. He could remember being eight or so in a room with three other boys and how they would huddle together on one of the beds when the screaming started. How they had dragged him to church twice a week and tried to forbid he read anything not church sanctioned. How "whoopins" were a common punishment for literally anything and sitting was damn near impossible for days afterward but complaining would earn you another one.He learned a lot in that house. He learned how to cover for the younger boys and redirect the anger towards himself if he needed to. He learned how to argue scripture because apparently in that place it was a sin to be mixed and a bigger one to be gay. He learned to walk quietly, how to be nearly invisible, and how to hide a book on his person at all times.
During the three years he was there, he had one friend. Keith would've followed him to the ends of the earth. In retrospect, Keith knew he had loved that boy. But after a year Chris decided he was too cool to hang out with the loner orphan and moved on to cooler friends. He was ten. He decided never to make friends again. After that he bounced from one foster home to another until his grades got him a Garrison scholarship. He knew this was the closest thing he'd ever had to a family and he knew that when this was over and the threat was defeated, they'd go back to their real families and he'd be alone again. At that thought, he gave up the entire pretense of training and just sobbed for a while, clutching his knife.