Chapter Text
“Do you know who Tabby is?”
The question comes quick, unexpected, striking Shiro like a gut punch, and he finds himself retracting as if really being hit. The space between him and the blue paladin seems closer than before, no more than a foot now. He straightens up against the pillows, pulling himself up on shaking arms. “What?”
“The name Tabby. Does it sound familiar?” Lance asks.
A face swollen with both grimace and heat replaces Shiro’s usual soft expression. “How do you…?”
How do you know?
The ghost of a scream shudders against his brain, a cold sweat, a parade of tears, a muse of a nightmare, Keith’s shaking form against his terrified own. He chases it away with an involuntary intake of breath that replaces steady exhales as coloring drains from his skin.
Lance seems to understand, face shifting into a creased perplexion. “Keith was-- was saying her name in his sleep. He sounded pretty upset,” he says.
Shiro remembers the way Keith would cling to his shirt, sob into the fabric, dig his fingernails into the older’s flesh and scream until his throat tore raw.
“Oh,” is all Shiro can say. Everything else on his tongue seems so grotesque and vile and wrong.
The wrongness in betraying Keith’s trust; the wrongness of old, buried memories resurfacing; the wrongness of Shiro’s little brother suffering; the wrongness of the black paladin not being able to divert the pain into himself; the wrongness of this whole goddamn situation.
“Shiro…?”
“I… I don’t know who she is,” he answers.
And it’s half true. He’s never seen Tabby a day in his life. He only knows her through fragments of Keith’s nightmares, through shouts of self-hate and guilt that hang from his brother’s tongue, through his sobs and flashbacks and pain.
He’s never met Tabby a day in his life, but he feels like he’s known her a lifetime.
“Are you sure?” Pidge asks, with eyes like broken, exhausted saucers.
Something in his chest twinges, inflates, screams at him that he’s double-crossing the mantra he relentlessly preaches about honesty and trust, but the idea, the horror, of betraying Keith, of breaking that honesty and trust between them, pushes back, a civil war catalyzing in his brain. “What else did he say?” he settles on, a mediator in the midst of a battle.
Lance flashes a look of despair, of dread and guilt and terror, that Shiro resonates with all too well, before saying, “He kept apologizing, again and again, saying that it was his fault. He screamed ‘call 911’ and her-- Tabby’s-- name and-he... he…” he trails off.
Shiro thinks-- knows-- the blue paladin has more to say, it’s painted on the younger’s face in streaks of red and a lip bite, and a certain pang of respect for him courses through Shiro. Lance is honest, protective, and although he may not show it enough, cares for Keith like a brother.
So, Shiro finds himself extending a line of truth. “He used to have nightmares when he was younger. He would scream that stuff, too. He always used to say that it was his fault-- that she was dead because of him.”
Hunk is the first to speak, with a voice that sounds too soft, even for the gentle boy. “Maybe it’s some form of PTSD. If you piece it all together, it’s really not that complicated. He knew someone named Tabby, and there was an accident one day-- that’s why he shouts ‘call 911!’-- something must have happened and she died. He thinks it’s his fault-- most likely because he was there.”
Shiro nods. “I’ve always thought that,” he admits.
“Hunk?” Allura asks from a few feet away.
Shiro nearly jumps from his skin, unaware that the princess was even awake, let alone listening in. Next to her, Coran rubs at tired eyes, a yawn flexing his jaw.
“Yeah?”
“What’s PRSV?”
Hunk’s face softens. “PTSD,” he corrects, gently. “Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. It’s after someone's experiences a traumatic event. Like for some people it’s a car crash, or--”
“I have PTSD, Allura,” Shiro finds himself saying. He’s not sure why, exactly, the words roll off his tongue. It’s become a pattern that each time the disorder is brought up, he slips into an almost automatic state, not fully aware of his surroundings. As if his trauma overrides his mind. “I have it from the prison. It means you get flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety, and it’s like you can never really espace the events. Like they’re always there.” He pauses for a moment, realizing he’s never, truly, sorted through the baggage of his PTSD before. It feels like a disentangled, unsolvable mound in his brain that he pushes away, suffocates beneath the current task at hand.
A look of pity brushes against Allura's features before melting into a frown. “So you think Keith has this… this trauma?”
Shiro nods. “I wish not.”
The sensation of wrongness hits him again all at once and he nearly flinches back, like it’ll ease the unbearable e guilt that piles onto his already weighed shoulders. He feels wrong for talking about Keith behind his back; wrong for crafting accusation about Keith; wrong that he’s healthy and Keith’s not.
A groan sounds from the cushions and Shiro is pulled back to reality with a quick start.
He jumps to his feet, darting across the room and next to Keith.
At the sight of Keith, the heat that radiates off of him, the way he shifts in his sleep, the persistent, merciless word stabs into Shiro’s stomach once again and twists the blade:
Wrong.